Welles and Freud

Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles share a birthday of May 6. Of course, even if you believe in astrology, the fact that they were born in 1856 and 1915 respectively would mean different star charts. I saw the birthdays on an almanac site this past week and out of pure curiosity looked at their Taurus description. It said strong work ethics, reliability, and an appreciation of life’s pleasures. Not a bad description of them. My deeper thoughts went to considering if there were any connections they have around psychology, movies, or magic.

From what I read this week, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Welles, a pioneering filmmaker, lived during about the same time. Freud died in 1939, so there was some overlap and certainly Freud’s influence ran through all of Welles’ life. Both were significant cultural figures of their time. They never met and didn’t seem to directly address each other’s work, so I’ll do it for them.

Some people know that Welles was an accomplished magician, and member of both the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians. He often did magic in his later year on TV talk shows. He never let his sleight-of-hand skills get rusty and joked that he might need them one day to make his living.

Freud wrote about magic in his essay “The Uncanny” where he explored the psychological concept of the uncanny. The word meant for him feelings of eeriness or discomfort caused by something familiar yet strange. He discussed how magic, particularly stage magic, can evoke feelings of the uncanny because it challenges our sense of reality and rationality, tapping into our subconscious desires and fears. Freud believed magic exploits our unconscious thoughts and desires, blurring the line between reality and illusion.

Those things are certainly part of all films from the earliest experiments that showed that a series of still images project could give give the illusion of fluid movement. Today’s movie magic involves complex illusions from green screens, CGI to AI-generated people and settings.

Welles was used to creating illusions on stage before his film career. I think of how in Shakespeare’s time they needed to do some stagecraft magic for ghosts and other manifestations of the bicameral mind. Did Hamlet see the ghost of his father? It seems the ghost was real and that others on guard duty also saw something, but maybe this hallucination of Hamlet, and also Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III were pre-Freudian use of psychology by Will.

Freud didn’t write much about movies, as they weren’t prevalent during his lifetime. However, he did write about the concept of “screen memories,” which are vivid but possibly distorted memories from childhood. The use of “screen” because the memories are visual is interesting. Some later scholars have drawn parallels between Freud’s ideas about screen memories and the experience of watching movies, suggesting that both involve a mix of reality and imagination. Additionally, Freud’s theories about the unconscious and dreams have influenced the interpretation of films, especially in the realm of psychoanalytic film theory.

I couldn’t find any direct quotes by Orson Welles about Freud, but several articles said that he expressed admiration for Freud’s work and was fascinated by psychoanalysis. There are certainly Freudian themes and ideas in some of his films. That’s not unusual since Freud’s influence can be seen in all the arts of that time.

Citizen Kane (1941) features complex characters and explores the depths of the human psyche. Its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, is dissected psychologically through flashbacks and multiple perspectives. Kane’s relationships seem to often return to “screen memories” with his mother and his trauma could easily generate a paper on Oedipal conflict and the influence of early experiences on adult behavior.

Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) is film noir and Welles goes dark and deep into themes of obsession, desire, and betrayal. The characters of Michael and Elsa Bannister, involve psychological tensions and power struggles reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalysis.

1958’s Touch of Evil is another noir thriller about corruption, guilt, and the dark corners of the human psyche. Welles’ character, Hank Quinlan, embodies Freudian notions of the id gone out of control, with his unchecked impulses leading to destructive behavior.

What an interesting conversation over scotch and cigars I might have heard if the two of them had met for dinner, watched a movie, and let me join them.

Writing the Same Poem Again

It was now ten years ago that I wrote a poem recently called “Silent Movie” and when I was publishing it on my Writing the Day poems site, the software reminded me that I had already written a poem with that title. I looked and sure enough I not only had used that title but it was a very similar poem. I changed the title of the earlier poem and revised the newer poem.

It’s not just poems. Writing on this blog about Michelangelo, I was reminded by the software that I had already written about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel the previous year. More revision.

Damn, but this trend is disturbing. These gaps in my memory are increasing lately. I remember a routine Woody Allen used in his nightclub years that included a line about him spending a summer writing Great Expectations and then realizing that Charles Dickens had already written it.

That poetry site now has more than 900 poems (a number that surprises even me) so it’s not shocking that I sometimes forget what I had written years before.

I forget names a lot , like the names of actors in films, but also names of people I have known for decades.

My very short-term memory is dreadful. I will open a new tab on the browser and then forget why I did it. I walk down to the basement and then I can’t remember why I went down there.

Are you starting to feel worried for me?

It’s not a relief that one of my sons recently said “Who was the other guy, not Morgan Freeman, in The Shawshank Redemption?” I know a lot about films and could picture his face. Yes, we could look it up on our phones easily, but we wanted to pull it out of memory because we knew that we knew it. We could picture him. He was with Susan Sarandon for years. They met when they were in Bull Durham. He won an Oscar for Mystic River. All those synapses were firing, but no name. Bob? No. *

I write a lot about memory. I know that memory loss with aging is natural. It is normal to experience short-term forgetfulness, such as the inability to remember a person’s name you met recently. Memory loss does not mean dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but you hear so much about those topics that you consider it.

That information stored in long-term memory from events that occurred years ago tends to remain easier to recall. I remember the first day of school, my freshman year dorm room and a girl in a Shakespeare class who I never even spoke to but stared at twice a week all semester.

Aging means a gradual loss of brain cells that affects the way we store and retrieve information. Our short-term memory progressively declines, but I keep reading that memory loss from aging does not typically affect normal functioning, nor does it necessarily get worse over time.

It’s no wonder that we boomers and younger generations have made maintaining memory an industry. I have written about and you have read about exercising your mind with puzzles, mind games, and challenging reading or classes and the need to exercise your body for better mental function, perhaps because of improved circulation.

Eat lots of antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, vegetables and fruits, tea and dark chocolate, cold-water fish, freshly ground flaxseed, walnuts, less alcohol, less stress, practice meditation and yoga, or at least buy some Ginkgo biloba,  DHA, zinc, lutein and zeaxanthin and take it daily.

I think what I really need is more time. More quiet. More opportunities to focus. Less input for better output. I find all kinds of good thoughts and memories come while taking a shower, weeding the garden or raking the leaves.

*Footnote: That Shawshank day, I went outside and just walked around the yard looking at the plants and all of a sudden, I found Tim Robbins, who was there all along.

April Is the Cruelest Month

It is now May and I was looking back at last month in my journal and thinking about the line in “The Waste Land,” when T.S. Eliot said that “April is the cruelest month.” Why?  Because of its
“…breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain”

It is a month when we are thinking about spring, maybe even about summer on some unusually warm days, but it mixes new life and desire with things that have died and passed. Not all of us would agree with Eliot. He continues:

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”

You don’t immediately associate winter with keeping warm, but winter snows do actually keep the soil “warm” in that protective way that snow cover helps plants and gives the bulbs the rest needed to be renewed.

But April might be the cruelest month for other reasons. My wife is one person who associates this month with bad things.

• In 2007, there was the April 16 Virginia Tech mass shooting. My son was a student and his class was involved. His professor was killed and several of his classmates were wounded.
• The Boston Marathon bombing occurred on April 15, 2013.
• April 20, 1999 was the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. It was one of the key reasons my wife retired from teaching soon after.
• The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was on April 19, a date chosen by Timothy McVeigh because it was the anniversary of the bloody end of the FBI siege on a compound in Waco, Texas in 1993.

“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.”

The Columbine tragedy was on Adolph Hitler’s birthday, thought to be symbolic by the young shooters. The FBI wondered if the date of the Boston Marathon, April 15, was significant being that it was Patriots Day, a Massachusetts state holiday commemorating the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War. The Waco and Oklahoma City tragedies were on the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the American Revolution.

So, are the dates symbolic attempts to make a statement, or is there something about the month of April?

For extremists who believe that our federal government is as tyrannical as the British monarchy of our American Revolution, the date is symbolic of a war on a government by its own patriot people.

Of course, every month has its tragedies in modern and older times, but I have seen articles mentioning April as the month for not only the start of our Revolutionary War, but the American Civil War. Add to that the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. in April

I did some reading and April is no more violent statistically than other months. In fact, crime statistics usually go up in summer.

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron wrote a book,  When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, in which she writes that “We live in difficult times. One senses a possibility they may get worse.” Her book is a Tibetan Buddhist view in how Buddhism helps cope with fear, despair, rage and the feeling that we are not in control of our lives.

The Buddhist view that despite any planning or efforts on our part, the only thing we can predict with certainty is change. While most of us rage against the night of all that, the Buddhist surrenders to the reality of impermanence.  We can center and ground ourselves. We can discover our relationship to a higher power that controls our world, no matter what name we may give to that power.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?”

Quotations from The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition) by T.S. Eliot

The Arrow of Time

I had watched The Fabric of the Cosmos on PBS’ NOVA hosted by Brian Greene from his book of the same title. Part 2 of “Time and Experience” deals with something we all think about (perhaps too much) and yet don’t really understand.

I have read a lot about and written quite a bit about time, particularly time travel which has long fascinated me. I have read many versions of the “time as a river” flowing past us (the observer) with the past downstream and the future upstream.

In this program, Greene talks about the “Frozen River” and questions whether time really does “flow.” What is interesting in this approach is that it touches on some ideas that we might once have read as fringe science or new age non-science.

Greene deals with Einstein and special relativity and is a big-time legit scientist, but I think that the first times I read about the idea that time does not flow and that all things simultaneously exist at the same time, was more likely when I was reading Carlos Castaneda rather than Einstein *.

No past, no present, no future. Just now.

As Einstein discussed, we “observers” moving relative to each other have different conceptions of what exists at a given moment, and hence they have different conceptions of reality.

There is also discussion of whether time has an “arrow.”  The arrow of time, or time’s arrow, is a term coined in 1927 by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington to describe the “one-way direction” or “asymmetry” of time.  The arrow appears to move forward from chaos to organization. Or does it? Was the Big Bang origin the most coherent and organized version of the universe, and we have since moved to greater chaos?

The laws of physics apply both moving forward in time and backwards in time – time-reversal symmetry.

Which brings us to entropy. Greene gives many examples (the series is full of animations and green-screen simulations) including broken glasses reassembling and such.  Entropy can be defined as a lack of order or predictability;  a gradual decline into disorder. The beginning of the universe must be the state of minimum entropy.

What always amazes me when I listen to Brian Green explain these unbelievably complicated concepts is that I completely understand them – until he stops talking – at which point my understanding vanishes.

Today I did some searching online to find out more about this arrow. Turns out there are several different arrows.

There is a  causal arrow of time.  A cause precedes its effect.  Birth, for example, follows a successful conception and not vice versa.  Dropping the wine glass is a cause and the glass subsequently shattering and spilling is the effect. It’s never that simple. Add in the thermodynamic arrow of time (see Second law of thermodynamics) and controlling the future, or causing something to happen, creates correlations between the doer and the effect.

How would we explain the pieces of the glass in reverse assembling precisely into the shape of a glass and flying up into the my hand (since the floor cannot throw and my hand can’t move objects without contact) and why would the liquid collect itself entirely within the cup?

Get into the particle physics (weak) arrow of time or the  quantum arrow of time and I am completely lost.

Perhaps, most of us would be comfortable with the psychological/perceptual arrow of time. That at least concerns things we understand – like our cataloging of items of memory from our perception. Things we remember make up the past. The future consists of those events that cannot be remembered.

Our sense of time comes from the perception is that continuous movement from the known (Past) to the unknown (Future).

In that psychological future, there are things (dreams, hopes) that are already a part of memory, but see to be ahead of the observer.

We (Westerners) associate “behind” with the past and “ahead” with the future, but that is a cultural association. According to what I have read, the Chinese and the Aymara people’s association are that ahead = past and behind = future. In Chinese, the term “the day after tomorrow” literally means “behind day” while “the day before yesterday” is referred to as “front day” and in Hindi (an Indian language), the term used for “tomorrow” and “yesterday” is the same.

So where am I right now?

My brief period of Buddhist training told me to be in this moment. No past or future, both of which lead to suffering.  We seem to only be able to live moving forward. We only understand the present by looking back. That doesn’t give us much “time” to spend in the present. And that seems to be a sad reality.

Now I will go for a walk in the woods. Walking forward, ahead, into what I think is the future, while trying to be mindful in the moments.

* Footnote: Born in 1925 in Peru, anthropologist Carlos Castaneda wrote a total of 15 books, which sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and were published in 17 different languages. In his writing, Castaneda describes the teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui sorcerer and shaman. His works helped define the 1960s and usher in the New Age movement. Even after his mysterious death in California in 1998, his books continue to inspire and influence his many devoted fans.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Another traveler on the locavore path is Barbara Kingsolver, probably best known for her novels – particularly The Bean Trees and  The Poisonwood Bible which won the National Book Prize of South Africa and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

I recently read her newest novel, Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize. But the book I’m thinking of today is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I was looking at her booklist and saw this non-fiction book about her family’s experiment to eat only locally grown food for a year. Along with her husband and daughters, she moves to a farm in Virginia. They grow and can tomatoes, learn about roosters, make cheese, and learn to do what it takes to eat what is in season.

Kingsolver’s background is interesting. Born in Maryland with some of her childhood spent in Africa where her father was a medical doctor and some in Kentucky. She attended DePauw University on a music scholarship for classical piano but ended up switching to biology. In the late 1970s, she lived in Greece, France, and Tucson, Arizona, working variously as an archaeological digger, copy editor, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator. She earned a Master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

That doesn’t sound like the typical resume for a novelist or someone writing about being a locavore. “If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread,” says Barbara Kingsolver.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was published in 2007 and is described as a blend of memoir and journalistic investigation. The revised edition is updated with stories of how the family’s original project has been carried forward through the years. The family was concerned about the environmental, social, and physical costs of American food culture. Barbara wants you to consider our nation’s lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production.

The Iceman Murder Mystery

Reconstruction of how Ötzi may have looked when alive
(Museum Bélesta, Ariège, France)

In 1991, a corpse was found frozen in a glacier in the Italian Alps near the Austrian border.  I remember the news because when I saw the map I realized that I had skied near there back in the 1970 and the corpse was there then too. In fact, it was there 5,300 years before that.

It turned out to be the most ancient human being ever found completely intact.

Ötzi the Iceman, as he became known (AKA Similaun Man, and Man from Hauslabjoch), was spotted by two German tourists.  At first, it was thought to be a modern corpse and so it was crudely removed from the glacier by the Austrian authorities using a small jackhammer.  At a morgue in Innsbruck, its true age was determined and the archaeology began.

I find the story of this well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived about 5,300 years ago to be so fascinating. It became very much a detective story. And it did end up being a murder.

His nickname comes from the Ötztal (Ötz valley), the Italian Alps in which he was discovered. He is Europe’s oldest natural human mummy and a Copper Age European.  He has been examined, measured, X-rayed, CAT scanned, and dated and his tissues and intestinal contents have been examined microscopically.

Ötzi was about 1.65 metres (5′ 5″) tall and weighed about 50 kilograms (110 lb.) and was about 45 years of age at his death. By examining the proportions of his tibia, femur and pelvis, it was determined that his lifestyle included long walks over hilly terrain. Perhaps, he was a high-altitude shepherd.

He had a copper axe with a yew handle, a flint-bladed knife with an ash handle and a quiver of 14 arrows with viburnum and dogwood shafts.

His hair was cut. He had several tattoos. He wore a fur robe, whipstitched in a mosaic pattern, a woven grass cape, and size 6 shoes.

He carried several mushrooms that were known to fight infections. But the mushrooms didn’t do him much good because he had an arrowhead in his back. He was apparently murdered.

Ötzi when he was found

I enjoy watching the current TV show Bones and I marvel at how they find stories on bodies. Sometimes those revelations seem a bit far-fetched, but reading about what they have discovered about Ötzi makes it seem quite real.

Looking at the pollen, and dust grains on him and the composition of his tooth enamel told them that he spent his childhood near the present village of Feldthurns and later went to live in valleys about 50 kilometers further north.

Analysis of his intestinal contents showed two meals of chamois (a goat-like animal) and red deer meat eaten with grain as well as roots and fruits. The grain from both meals was a highly processed wheat bran, so it was possibly eaten in the form of bread. Pollen in the first meal was very well preserved, indicating that it had been fresh at the time of Ötzi’s death, which places the event in the spring.

High levels of both copper and arsenic were found in Ötzi’s hair. He carried a a 99.7% pure copper axe. Ötzi was probably involved in some copper smelting. Ötzi lived 5,300 years ago, and humans were not thought to have discovered copper for another 1,000 years, forcing archaeologists to re-date the Copper Age.

X-rays and a CT scan showed that an arrowhead hit his left shoulder (matching a tear on his coat) but the arrow’s shaft had been removed before his death. He also had bruises and cuts to the hands, wrists, and chest.

There was cerebral trauma indicative of a blow to the head and that most likely caused his death. Okay, but was it from a fall, or from being struck with a rock by another person?

DNA analysis found traces of blood from four other people – on his knife, two people on the same arrowhead, and a fourth from his coat.

Did Ötzi kill two people with the same arrow after having retrieved it both times? Did he carry another bleeding body? Were those deaths avenged with the arrow in Ötzi? Before his death and rigor mortis set in, who turned the Iceman onto his stomach to remove the arrow shaft?

There are a number of theories and no one is absolutely sure of the full story. It is still a mystery in some ways.

It is now believed that he died around 3,300 BCE. Forensic examinations indicate that he likely died from an arrow wound to the shoulder, which severed a major artery. This injury would have been fatal, and Ötzi likely died shortly after being wounded. His other injuries suggest that he may have been involved in a conflict or altercation before his death.

Ötzi’s body also showed signs of heart disease, including three cardiac calcifications but that didn’t kill him. The arrow was severe and he probably died from blood loss.

I think Ötzi was on the run. The effort that must have been required to chase Ötzi into those mountains and shoot him with an arrow at a distance, amid blowing snow, suggests that he must have committed some serious offense.

READ MORE
Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier

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NOTE This ancient Iceman should not be confused with a modern-day “Iceman”
who I have also written about on this site.