Feeling is an interesting thing, for sure. No one knows why we have it, honestly. Some chemicals in your brain cause Feeling, and without them we would have no Feeling. We also wouldn’t have Emotion. What’s the difference, anyway? You feel the Feeling, the Emotion just tags along, I guess. No, that’s a pretty accurate statement. One time, I saw a video about a man who had a stroke. The communication between the amygdala and the frontal cortex was cut off, and so he would have the Feeling, but not the Emotion. I saw him smile, but he didn’t say he was happy.

The Feeling was that pang in my chest after I saw the watery blue eyes sitting above a red nose. I looked down to see two sets of toes trying not to touch each other, and I looked away to find solace in the trees.

pink elephants. think about pink elephants.

Once, I read a study about how men with blue eyes prefer women with blue eyes. It all goes back to paternity certainty, you know – blue eyes appear after you have two recessive genes. So if a man with blue eyes fucked a woman with brown eyes, and she had a baby, he could never really be certain that the child was his because there is always a chance that she cheated on him, no matter how much he trusts her or how much of a virgin she was when they fucked. But if he fucked a woman with blue eyes, he could be exponentially more certain the child was his, so long as the little parasite came out with blue eyes. Unless she cheated on him with a man who also had blue eyes. Evolutionarily speaking, if a blue-eyed man wanted to be certain his genes were to be passed on, his best bet would be to fuck blue-eyed women. The study proved that men with blue eyes prefer women with blue eyes; no other eye color-mating combinations proved to be significant. Since brown eyes are on a dominant gene, brown-eyed men are pretty much screwed in terms of paternity certainty. They have to worry about other things, like guarding their mates when they’re ovulating. Or does that only happen in chimps? Oh well. 98% is pretty high.

The watery blue eyes I saw belonged to a woman. My eyes are hazel. I’m a woman though; I don’t have to worry about paternity certainty, especially considering I hate kids.

That’s all kids are: parasites. They feed off the host for nine months, send the host in excruciating physical pain for a couple of days – sometimes the host could die of pain and blood loss – and then live off the host for the next couple of decades because while they were feeding for nine months, they usually manage to infect the host with something horrible. Scientists don’t know what to call it, really. It has to do with that Feeling thing. People in books and on TV call it Love. The host ends up with this Love thing and actually lets the parasite expend all of its resources for the next two decades. Isn’t that fucked up?

I mean, the host kind of benefits. The host gets to pass on her genes, and so does the blue-eyed man who fucked the host – his genes get passed on, too. That’s all we are, really: genes.

It’s pretty bad for the parasite if the host brings it into the world and then abandons it, though. That abandonment doesn’t happen if the parasite forgets to infect the host with Love, or if the parasite just didn’t know how. Sometimes hosts are just immune to Love, and they can’t feel it toward the parasite at all. Such hosts can do any number of terrible things to the parasites – they tell the parasites that they’re failures, that they could never make it in college as a Psychologist because the parasite is too mean to be a Psychologist, even though the parasite in question never actually speaks to the host and the host wouldn’t even fucking know. So the parasite gets angry and tries to leave, but the host calls the parasite a pathological liar and says the parasite completely fabricated years of abuse. When the parasite tries to fight back, the host gets the blue-eyed man (actually, he has hazel eyes), tells him a couple of stories that aren’t true. So he holds up a frying pan and the parasite leaves home and doesn’t speak to the host or anyone else for a couple of years. The parasite spends the next couple of years after that trying to mend the relationship, and then the host catches the parasite at a very vulnerable time of the parasite’s life, says some more bullshit, and the parasite cries for two days because nothing is going right in her miserable, miserable life.

i wonder what people would say if i carried around a stuffed pink elephant? maybe they’d laugh and call me crazy; and i’d laugh too, and say i actually hate elephants and think cats are much more adorable

The trees were so beautiful that day, I had to memorize the way they looked. It would be wrong not to. You understand, right? There are so few trees these days. They keep getting cut down for paper or for cities. Once, I had a professor say recycling paper was bad because then we wouldn’t have to keep planting forests – so I guess it’s okay to cut down trees for paper, but not so much for cities. Cities are busy, and you have a way of getting lost in the crowd.

Recycling makes me think of the coffee mug made out of recycled materials that I saw in the Hallmark Stores for $16. Why did I think of you when I saw it? I mean, I’ve never bought you anything before. If I bought it for you, you’d probably think I was a crazy stalker and you’d kindly ask that I not buy you anymore coffee mugs made out of recycled materials. Or, you might not say anything at all. That’s the general consensus when I’m around you – nothing gets said at all.

But that’s okay. “Silence is golden.” Sometimes I like to hear myself think; sometimes I don’t. Usually I’m okay with thinking, though. I can think about all kinds of things. I can think about the trees that day. They were outlined so beautifully against the sky. The sky wasn’t blue. It was actually gray. I know how that sounds; you think I’m going to make a terrible metaphor about how the sky represents my Feelings. Well, I’m not. The sky really was gray. The weather is pretty unpredictable around here. One time, lighting struck, thunder clapped, and you jumped. I guess you don’t like storms. I tell myself that’s why the blue eyes I saw that day were watery; maybe you were hoping that if you kept the water in your eyes there wouldn’t be enough left to storm outside.

But maybe not. I think it stormed anyway. There was water in my eyes, too. So if there was water in your eyes and in my eyes, and it still stormed, we’d need a lot more eyes to be able to hold in all of that water.

Can I tell you a secret?

I don’t really remember what the trees looked like that day.

I don’t even think there were trees leaning against the skyline.

I was too busy thinking about how pretty I think blue eyes are, and how the water made that particular pair look especially blue. Then I thought about how pink is sort of on the opposite end of the color spectrum from blue, and I figured that elephants live in Africa anyway, so why should someone in Georgia be wondering about pink elephants?

No es tan bravo el león como lo pintan.

I have had a pain in my right side since I got home about thirty minutes ago.

I had such a hard time coming here over two years ago. I was in a controlling relationship, and then I didn’t know how to make friends. I was driven to therapy. I was afraid to open up, to feel. I somehow met wonderful people who became my best friends over the course of a year and a half. We grew together instead of apart, like some friends have the tendency to do. I learned so much about myself. They watched me overcome debilitating anxiety and get over a horrible relationship. They taught me to appreciate myself for who I am when I wasn’t exactly so sure of who I was.

It started as I was standing there, when I realized this day really came – this inevitable day that would have to come, that I knew would come, had actually come.

The last time I cried like this, I thought I was losing the One and Only love of my life – such a long, long time ago; a whole lifetime ago. Another world, another time, another place. Was that me, with the long hair and the American Eagle jeans?

This pain is different, though. It’s deeper. It’s a scared kind of a pain. It’s a worry about them, and about me, and about the future. Will they make it home alright? Where will we all be in five, ten years?
It’s a regret that I didn’t do enough to show how thankful I am to have had them in my life, a sorrow that I can’t show emotions the way other people can because I’m afraid of being that vulnerable, of opening up that much. Did they understand what I was feeling?
It’s an anger that I cried in front of them when they should have seen me happy to see them go, to move on with their lives. An anger that I got overwhelmed with myself and had to leave quickly. Do they know I was angry at and upset with myself, not them?

It’s a pain deep in my side. It splits across my intestine, under my ribcage, behind my organs. It’s a knife twisting in my muscles, tearing the cartilage. It burns as the raw skin splits. I touch my side expecting blood from the phantom injury; can the mind really produce such intense feeling?

But it’s a good pain, an addicting kind of pain. It means I’m still human. I can still feel.

It means I did something right when I made these friends. I found good people, and I saw that the world isn’t as bad as I usually think it is. For a year and a half, I can say that I was myself – I was who a really was: a mutable organism, changing with the time. A real, thinking, feeling being. I can say that I have created my identity in my experience, and that I have grown to love myself and who I am.

I’m worried about turning this page, though. I don’t know how many chapters are left. I don’t even know if this chapter has ended yet. I don’t even know the title of the book. I’m not really so sure of what I’m reading, and sometimes I feel like I don’t even speak the language.

Passions inevitably lead to suffering. When we are passionate about a cause, we suffer throughout the journey: we suffer if the cause or goal is not achieved, and we suffer when we are distressed in the process of achieving the goal.

When we are passionate about a person, we suffer. We suffer when we do not know their feelings, we suffer when they do not know ours. We suffer when we argue, we suffer when an argument is necessary because a miscommunication – or lack of communication – has occurred.

Desire comes from the Latin desiderare, meaning to long for or to wish for… and also to demand, or to expect.

When we desire something, we long for it – we wish we had it. We demand it. We expect it. We want it in our hands, we want it to be ours.

When we desire a person, we do the same things. We expect them. We want them to be ours. We use suffer through this desire – this desire to control another, this expectation that they will do as we wish.

This causes relationships to fail and hearts to be broken and hopes to be shattered, when we have this desire for someone so badly that the desire becomes an expectation. This desire becomes a desire for control.

Control comes from the Latin contra- and rotulus, meaning “against” and “wheel,” respectively. The wheel, or circle, is noted for its inherent perfection. Wedding rings are in the shape of a circle to denote perfection, or infinity. I challenge you to find the endpoint of a wheel or circle.

Contra rotulus goes against this wheel, this perfection. It seeks to change the perfection to suit its own desires. How can we say that we know perfection greater than that of a circle? How can we say we know what is best for another person, or what is in their best interests?

We cannot. We cannot let our passions control us, or our desires control other people. These things adhere to imperfections – things that we should simply let be.

~

Usually, it’s small talk. “Last night’s reading assignment was harsh, wasn’t it?” – a blatant lie, intended to incite agreement and spark predictable conversation between two strangers. The college equivalent of, “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?”

The reading assignments are never harsh for me. Complicated psychoanalytic theories and existentialism come as naturally to me as breathing. I lie to make friends. Most people do, I have observed. It is how humans relate to each other, with their little white lies: secretly preferring the gloomy cold to the sunny spring, expressing an interest in Real Housewives when you despise televised garbage.

With you, it was different.

The first day, I sat behind you. I listened as you introduced yourself to the class, as per the professor’s first-day-of-class ritual, and I smiled to myself as I realized my assumptions were correct.

I had recognized your face, and I already knew exactly who you were from a previous run-in in a student organization. You were in a leadership position. There was no way you remembered me, a pair of eyes in a sea of faces.

The next day, I sat next to you. I introduced myself. I remembered your name. You half-smiled, somewhat pleased that someone remembered you and approached you.

I didn’t make small talk. I asked what you thought about last night’s reading assignment. “Ask open-ended questions,” they tell counselors, “then listen to what they say and hear their answers. It makes them feel important when you listen.”

I scanned your eyes. I searched your face for microexpressions. I watched your hands, hoping they would betray your secrets.

Your body spoke no language that I could understand. You sat completely still, staring straight ahead and making eye contact exceptionally difficult.

I made sure to hear your words and note your sentence structure instead – much like hearing a book read aloud to me, as though the author had a secret she wanted to share with me indirectly.

Your voice was anything but monotonous, contradicting your total lack of body movement. You hesitated for a moment as you said you were already familiar with the author of one of the books for our reading assignment – Richard Dawkins, esteemed evolutionary biologist and infamous atheist. Perhaps you did not want to appear arrogant, perhaps you hesitated to potentially reveal that you were an atheist to a strange girl in the deep south.

I love Richard Dawkins! I read The God Delusion while I was in high school, I told you. I swear I saw relief in your eyes when you turned your head. You smiled. You looked down quickly. Class began.

He started to lecture. The class reached for notebooks. I turned and caught your gaze as I reached for my bag. Our eyes locked and I smiled. You dropped your pen under your desk, out of my reach. I laughed softly and you muttered something inaudibly.

~

I wake up with sunlight creeping in through the edges of my blackout curtain. I wonder why I could not have slept through the entire night. I wonder why a smile has etched itself onto my lips despite the tired feeling in my temples.

I inhale, exhale.

I open the curtains to greet the day. I sit on the sofa to read a Richard Dawkins book, and I remember.

*Debbienote: Hooray, Existentialist philosophy. This was posted the Saturday after Thanksgiving (we had the entire week off for Thanksgiving break). In class the week before, we started off by reading “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre, and later that week we read some of his actual philosophy. Just pick and choose anything of his to Google if you want to read more; it’s all amazing. I’ve also blogged here before on “No Exit.” I absolutely love the play, and if you have the time, I actually linked you to a PDF of the entire play, hosted on my site, Foonville (look, I’ll even link it again in case you get lost). It’s pretty short (47 small pages) and it’s a very easy read. It’s a play in one act (so even if you’re like me and you don’t really like reading plays, it’s still a great read). If you’re into philosophy at all, you’ll love it – especially if you’re into Existentialism. 

Earlier today, I was trying to get myself to do some classwork that I had been putting off all week. I realized that, among other things, I was planning on writing all of the papers I had due at the end of the week and finishing two books I was trying to read. You know how it goes: you tell yourself you’re going to do all of these things and none of it gets done because you’re doing something that’s completely irrelevant, like browsing tumblr (which is an obnoxiously addicting social network, in case you were wondering).

Someone posted the attached picture.

In any case, on some subconscious level, I think I knew that instead of being on tumblr, I was supposed to be doing something (anything) school-related because this picture totally reminded me of “No Exit.” It seems to epitomize Sartre’s idea that “Hell is Other People,” because the face there seems completely distraught at being misunderstood.

Also, I never thought I would see myself intellectualizing such a stupid picture.

Really though. As a side note, I legitimately enjoyed reading Sartre’s work that particular week, and I legitimately enjoyed the lectures. The whole experience was incredibly nerdy. Here’s another didactic little anecdote:

Today, I was in the car with my parents and my two nephews. I was listening in on the kids’ conversation with each other (ages 8 and 11). The younger of the two was sitting in the car, very quietly and calmly, staring off into the distance with no particular expression on his face. The other said, “You have something on your face.”

Of course, the first responded, “No, I don’t.” They went back and forth for a while before my dad (who is sixty but probably closer to twelve years old on the inside) said to the younger of the two, “You really do. It’s right there!” My nephew then panicked, saying things like, “Where?! Get it off!! What is it?!” He kept rubbing his face, trying to remove the nonexistent object. Of course, his older brother didn’t help. “I told you!! Grandpa sees it, too! It’s on your cheek!!”

Finally, my mother couldn’t take it anymore and said, “They’re both lying to you,” she said as she shot my dad a dirty look. “There is nothing on your face.” By this point, however, my nephew was quite certain that it was, in fact, my mother who was lying and that there was, indeed, something on his face. It was rather unfortunate that he was all the way in the back, and that there were no mirrors so that he could see that there was nothing at all on his face.

And in the midst of all of this, all I could think about was Sartre and his lack of mirrors in Hell and how, at the beginning of the play, Estelle tells Garcin his face is contorted and he just believes her, doubting his own assumption that he doesn’t have a facial expression. Isn’t that nerdy?

*Debbienote: Time for the infamous Karl Marx. I don’t know the author of the book on Sexual Assault that I quoted, but I know the book is titled “Campus Sexual Assault Response Teams.” That particular chapter has an author mentioned, John Wesley Lowery, Ph.D. The Karl Marx works included the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (in part) – on Alienated Labor (or in this document, “Estranged Labor” starting on page 28). The quote at the bottom, however, is taken from Chapter I of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. 

Part of the reason I went into Psychology was to work with victims of abuse and assault. I recently had the opportunity to work with a student organization called the Sexual Assault Student Educators, and have since become the president of the organization. Part of what I personally do involves attending the monthly Sexual Assault Response Team meetings – it’s a group that consists of counselors and advocates at the counseling center, members of the University Police Department, directors of University Housing, and an assorted few other members.

This past Wednesday, the SART had a meeting at 8:00 in the morning. We went over some policy regarding the way sexual assault is treated on campus, and we were given some excerpts from a book that had some research and information on how sexual assault should be dealt with on campus (essentially, how SARTs should be run). One of the chapters is titled “How Federal Law Applies to Cases of Campus Sexual Assault,” and it starts by mentioning some past federal cases about sexual harassment (which is very different from assault, of course). Supreme Court Jusice O’Connor wrote (in Harris v. Forklift Systems, 1993):

A [sexually] discriminatory abusive work environment, even one that does not seriously affect employees’ psychological well-being, can and often will detract from employees’ job performance, discourage employees from remaining on the job, or keep them from advancing in their careers. [emphasis mine]

I read this after I read Marx, which probably accounts for why the word choice here is very interesting to me. For starters, harassment and abuse always affects employees’ psychological well-being (in fact, it can affect anyone’s psychological well-being, regardless of whether the issue takes place in the workplace or elsewhere). But what’s interesting to me is that we can’t leave out the part about job performance being affected. It’s almost like it’s not good enough that someone’s well-being would be affected, or that someone’s mental (and sometimes physical) health is at stake. It has to affect job performance and the ability to make a profit before it’s worth taking legal action. It’s kind of like dealing with a machine: you don’t necessarily care for the aesthetics of the machine, so long as it works and does its job. In fact, depending on the type of machine and how expensive it is, when the machine breaks, you should probably just buy a new machine instead of trying to fix the old one.

As a side note, it seems like making a profit nowadays is infinitely more important than any sort of “humanist” issue. In this article, in which the video is also shown, Senator John Cornyn (R) of Texas says it would cost the country too much money in Social Security, benefits, and income tax losses for everyone in America to have equal rights. – but that particular point, I suppose, is neither here nor there.

All I’m trying to say here is that Marx made some eerie observations with regards to the effects of capitalism on society. Here is where I try to quote some parts of the reading to clarify my point, but after skimming back over, I realize that all of this is probably just an impression I got from the reading without Marx directly saying anything. After all, this isn’t a psychology text (even though I try to make everything into a psychology text). I’ll quote this, anyway (because the analogy I tried to make a couple of paragraphs up wasn’t completely unintentional):

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him.

In fact, the machine analogy kind of reminds me of a point made in passing with Foucault’s philosophy a couple of weeks ago – when you objectify something, it’s easier to observe them and, here, consequently dehumanize them. Any time you objectify something (or, I guess, someone), you suddenly don’t have to worry about how that person feels – if a person is just an “appendage of the machine,” what difference does it make if that appendage has any feelings, so long as it’s doing its job?

At Georgia Southern, we hold the Clothesline Project every year for survivors of different kinds of violence. Survivors can come to our table at the campus Rotunda and make a shirt with their message on it. The message can be empowering or it can be an emotional release. We allow survivors to write whatever they want on the shirts, for free. Each color shirt represents a different kind of violence. Pink represents rape, light blue represents childhood sexual abuse, purple represents violence due to one’s sexual orientation, yellow represents domestic violence, and white is done “in memory of” someone who has died as a result of some violence. There are other colors, but we opted to only use the main ones.

When they are done with the shirts, they hang them up at the Rotunda on-campus. Sometimes they ask us to hang them up for them, but we like to let them do it themselves.

The objective is to help these survivors realize that they are not alone. Further, it is both beautiful and horrifying to see these shirts all over campus. The Project has been done on Georgia Southern’s campus for years - probably close to a decade, if not longer. We hang clotheslines with shirts from years past in residence halls, in the RAC (the campus gym), and in the Student Union.

Monday afternoon, I was tabling for the Clothesline Project. It was a lonely job at first. There wasn’t really anyone working the table with me except for a Psychologist from the Counseling Center, and he mostly kept to himself at a different table with resources from the Counseling Center and the campus Sexual Assault Response Team. I leaned against a pillar and watched people walk by.

When you’re tabling to advertise for something like a fraternity or a sorority or you’re doing a fundraiser for a student organization like Active Minds or the Psychology Club or whatever, or even some other feminist cause (like the Vagina Monologues or a march or something), it’s easy to reel people in to your table. You just walk up to them and you start talking to them. You pick out people who make eye contact. You talk animatedly, you smile, you use big gestures. When the topic is sexual assault, it’s not so easy… especially when you’re essentially asking survivors to tell their stories. You don’t want to force people into talking about it.

Now, we did indeed have tons of people make shirts this past week – these people, however, came up to the table on their own. We have a big colorful sign and the Project isn’t hard to miss. Most people have at least heard of it, and those that haven’t usually stop by the table to ask.

One girl, however, was different. She stood about ten feet away from our table and stared at the sign. Every now and then, she’d glance at the table itself with all of the shirts laid out. Once, I caught her eye and she looked away quickly.

She continued to stand and stare. I was caught in a difficult position. She was clearly interested in the Project, but I didn’t want to force her out of her comfort zone. I decided I would just talk to her. After all, she had been staring at the table for quite a while and to bystanders, she could very well just be wondering.

“Hi, how are you?” I asked her.
“I’m alright,” she said. She shifted uncomfortably and didn’t meet my eyes.
“Have you ever heard of the Clothesline Project?” I asked. I tried to sound excited and talkative, but the more I spoke to her, the more I regretted starting the conversation because of how uncomfortable she seemed.
“No,” she responded. I proceeded to explain the concept to her.

She thought it over for a second before she next spoke.

“So, survivors come up and make shirts?” she asked. She seemed to be choosing her words carefully.
“They do. We’ve had a pretty good turnout today, actually,” I responded. She didn’t say anything for several seconds.

“So… I could make a shirt?” she asked tentatively.
“Absolutely,” I replied softly.
“And it would be free?”
“Completely free. We actually have shirts and markers here.”
“Where would I go to make it?”
“People usually go to the middle of the Rotunda so that they can be alone to make it. Sometimes people want to take the shirts home with them and come back, and that’s okay, too,” I explained.

She started walking towards the table and I followed her with my hands in my pockets. She picked up a light blue shirt and held it up. Eerily, the shirt was a youth small. Since no one actually wears the shirts, we usually get smaller sizes because they’re less expensive. She picked out a couple of markers in the marker box, but she stood at the table, unmoving.

“This is insane,” she told me.
“What?” I said.
“I’ve never told anyone before.”

~

*Debbienote: For this post, the assigned readings were “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill and “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia” by Michel Foucault. Basically, they talked about what it means to be truly free – in speech, and otherwise. Another book that I would recommend, for the sake of background information, is “Discipline and Punishment” by Michel Foucault, which sort of goes into detail about his point of view regarding liberty and how liberty sort of “evolved.” 

Once, I had an ex who told me convinced me that I had Asperger’s. This was well over a year ago, and I have since come to learn that I do not, contrary to popular belief, have Asperger’s. At least, I don’t think I do. Well, my therapist tells me I don’t. He says most Psychology majors are inherently strange, and just because I couldn’t communicate with her (because she was crazy), doesn’t mean I can’t communicate with anyone.

Before I can explain why this has anything to do with Philosophy, I have to clarify some other points. Firstly, Asperger’s is a sort of social impairment. It’s on the autism spectrum – but usually, people with Asperger’s are incredibly intelligent (usually in one particular area, like writing or mathematics); they simply lack social skills. Often, you can identify someone with Asperger’s from a very young age – they usually don’t begin talking at the same time that their peers do (they lag behind perhaps a year or so), but when they do start talking, their diction far surpasses that of their peers. In other words, imagine a five year old telling you the sentence that I just wrote, enunciating very clearly.

That being said, when I say people with Asperger’s lack social skills, I don’t mean  that they’re socially incompetent. It would have been better if I had said that they lack “social finesse.” They just have a tendency to be very blunt. If you ask someone with Asperger’s if “this dress makes me look fat,” they are the ones who are most likely to simply say, “yes.” No sugar coating. No sarcasm. No explanation. Just, “yes.” Then, they won’t understand why you’re upset. You asked a question, didn’t you want an answer?

I want to digress (again) and think about medications for mental health. What my therapist did tell me was that I have anxiety problems. But then again, who doesn’t? At one point, he mentioned anxiety medication, in passing – which I refused, and will continue to refuse. Why can’t I have “anxiety problems?” Why do I need therapy to “fix” the anxiety problems? If I did have Asperger’s, why would I need therapy for that? Why is it even called a disorder? Why can’t someone who is very blunt just be called “someone who is very blunt?” I propose that we simply not ask blunt people if “this dress makes me look fat,” especially if the dress does, indeed, make you look fat.

This point – about bluntness and Asperger’s – makes me wonder about the “real” definition of free speech, as we have come to know it in this class. Today, society seeks to “normalize” everyone. Society doesn’t like it when you are blunt, and your ex doesn’t like it when you call her crazy (even if she is crazy). Well-meaning psychologists who want to see everyone happy want to prescribe pills to alter your brain chemistry to make you happy if you don’t fit their definition of what happy is.

For these roundabout observations, I love Foucault.

As a psychology major, I cannot even begin to explain to you how much it bothers me to see a commercial for anti-depressants. Real depression is easily identifiable, debilitating, and potentially deadly (i.e. suicide), just like cancer is debilitating and potentially deadly. For the former, I understand the use of anti-depressants (just like I understand the use of medications when one is being treated for cancer). But for depression that I hear of most people dealing with (e.g. “my dog died and I’m just so sad”), why can’t we simply be proactive about it and learn to deal with it on a more emotional level, rather than a physical level?

A death in the family or a divorce is terrible – but it doesn’t need to be medicated. That’s what’s normal: pain and suffering. It’s how we relate to each other and it’s how we sympathize with each other, because that’s what everyone deals with. Medicating that pain to make it “go away” without analyzing and understanding it, in my humble opinion, solves absolutely nothing.

And here, I suppose, is where I’ll end my rant.

*Debbienote: The first reading assignment here was the first three chapters of John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” The second reading assignment was Epictetus’ “Handbook (Enchiridion)“, which is a quick and easy read that I highly recommend for everyone. It’s very peaceful, almost zen-like reading. I also mentioned the Handbook in this post.

First and foremost, I want to acknowledge that I understand the purpose of the Handbook being assigned after Mill’s On Liberty is to make the point that, if you are going to be an individual as per Mill’s guidelines, you have to understand that people’s opinions of you are not things that you can control, but what you can control is your reaction to those opinions. This is pretty much the connotation we associate with a “stoic” person, without even thinking about the philosophical connotation (we often think of someone who is “stoic” as someone who does not show his or her emotions).

With that being said, I had a different application for the Handbook than anything to do with reputations or opinions or whatever. Unfortunately, it’s pretty morbid.

In case you couldn’t tell from my previous blog posts, I’m not a particularly religious person. I maintain a certain level of spirituality, but I’m still relatively agnostic. Most of the time, when I explain that to someone for the first time, one of the questions I am eventually asked is, “Well, what do you think happens after we die?” The short answer is, “I don’t know, and since no one has come back to tell us, neither do you.” In theory and on paper, I think my answer is fantastic. In practice, not so much. I learned that the hard way about a week ago, when my grandmother died.

My initial reaction was to try to ignore the question of “life after death” in its entirety, but I couldn’t do that for long. Later that week, I met for lunch with my cousin. At this point, I should mention that most of my family (except for my own parents and my dad’s entire side of the family) are some flavor of Baptist. My grandmother (on my mother’s side) who recently died, while she went to church, was apparently of questionable spiritual status, and my cousin worried about her soul’s state (which is, of course, understandable).

As per my usual routine of dealing with emotionally stressful situations, I pretended nothing was amiss (no, it didn’t work out well for me in other areas of my life). At the funeral on Friday, while the preacher spoke, I continued to ignore all thoughts and worries about the situation – he made a point to skip any mention of an afterlife which, you have to admit, is pretty strange, given that he is a Southern Baptist preacher. Then, I returned to Statesboro and began the process of moving on with my life, which started with catching up on two days of Philosophy + Monday’s reading, Epictetus’ Handbook. Some lines from the Handbook that provided for a better understanding of death (at least, in my mind), sans organized religion, I have decided to keep in my collection of quotes that I stockpile for different occasions.

In our power are opinion, impulse, desire, … and in a word, whatever is our own doing. Things not in our power include our body, possessions, … and in a word, whatever is not our own doing.” // [I]f you seek to avoid only those things contrary to nature amongst the things that are in your power, you will accordingly fall into nothing to which you are averse; but if you seek to avoid sickness, or death… you will be miserable. // Never say of anything, “I have lost it,” but rather “I have given it back [wherever "back" may be].”

And finally, one last line that reminded me of Sextus’ “[f]or the man who opines that anything is by nature good or evil is forever being disquieted:”

It is not circumstances themselves that trouble people, but their judgments about those circumstances… [D]eath is nothing terrible… but having the opinion that death is terrible, this is what is terrible.

As some closing thoughts, it’s kind of eerie how these things played out in my life. Here, I don’t intend on making any sort of judgment as to why that is, other than just that: it is. Epictetus’ point, I think, can be summed up quite simply (and bluntly) as “shit happens,” and there is no point in “crying over spilled milk.” With more sensitivity, of course, with regards to the grieving process and other miscellaneous “unfortunate” events.

*Debbienote: Here, I sort of drew from the Anselm and Aquinas works when I was referencing the works to follow. In this post, while I reference both Anselm and Aquinas (the latter moreso than the former), I am mostly referencing Pascal’s Wager, which is part of his larger Pensees (Section III, part 233) and Nietzsche’s infamous Birth of Tragedy (to which I cannot find a link, only a synopsis) and The Gay Science (Aphorism 125: The madman). In passing, I also mention Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which, if you’ll recall, I blogged on more in depth in my “Definitions of Madness.” If you read none of those, I suggest you read “Aphorism 125: The madman,” or at least the Pensees (Pascal’s Wager is incredibly famous in atheist and Christian discussions alike).

All throughout the Nietzsche writings, I kept returning to re-read The Gay Science, each time more slowly, trying to visualize the scene – which seems like a relatively simple concept, at first, but when I’m struggling to try to do readings for five different classes, sometimes I unintentionally skim, forgetting that certain readings require more concentration and analysis than other readings.

At some point, I realized it was not exactly Nietzsche who was saying “God is Dead” in his narration – it was the madman.

So, does he here consider himself to be a madman? Even “those who did not believe in God” laughed at the madman at first, until they realized he was only ironically seeking God because he knew God to be dead. But still, why does Nietzsche call this person a madman? Maybe he’s referencing what we saw in The Birth of Tragedy, in which Dionysus would be in charge of the madmen and their doings. Maybe we’re all going mad – even the atheists, those whom we would think Nietzsche (of all people) would not call madmen.

Personally, when I think of a madman, I think of St. Augustine in his Confessions. But I digress.

With regards to Pascal’s writing (which is frustrating because he calls for faith at the expense of reason while simultaneously reasoning a wager for belief), I had but one major rebuttal: Why Christianity? We started with Anselm and Aquinas. Aquinas sought to provide proofs for the existence of God without the use of Biblical doctrine (though, this is giving him credit where credit is not necessarily due, as the rest of the Summa Theologica blatantly implies that the proofs are for the Christian God). With these readings, we sought to devise a working definition of God, sans religion – “that of which nothing greater can be conceived.” Why, then, did we jump to wagering in Christianity? Where was the bridge between “God,” a word that has been tossed around by trillions of people for thousands of years, and Christianity, a system of rituals based on a book that is a mere fraction of the age of religion, humanity, or God?

Further, why must we assume that we wager everything to lose or everything to gain? If there is a God, why do we suddenly assume that he cares whether we believe in Him or not? If He is “that of which nothing greater can be conceived,” then shouldn’t we more appropriately call Him ‘It,’ instead? Does such a definition have to care? I can’t wrap my head around why we are so eager to believe that he, she, it, whatever, wants nothing more than for us to believe. This God is more akin to Narcissus (who fell into a pool of water and died, entranced by his own reflection).

These are maddening queries. These are queries that Nietzsche throws out the window by saying, “God is dead.” By Nietzsche’s definition, we’re all mad because God is dead, and we killed him. We killed him when we tried to figure out what he was, and when we came up with rituals of worship that seem ridiculous when you take a step back to look at them. As for the atheists, we’re mad for trying to rationalize the situation. Perhaps that medium, that balance between Apollo and Dionysus, is something akin to Sextus Empiricus’ Skepticism: “For the man who opines that anything is by nature good or bad is forever disquieted.”