Memoir & Motif no.2. "Shadowboxing Sensucht."
DEMONS ARE GENEROUS, WITH THEIR TIME AND WITH THEIR COMPLIMENTS. Sat on the waiting path, with three of the most distichous: Cancer, history and futility. The first of these is unsubtle; a disease inexorably fatal if not combatted, often fatal regardless. Whether genetic (the jury is still out at present) sporadic (true in about 60-85% of diagnoses), or some enigma machine combination of psychosomatics, high allostatic load, and epigenetics. Perhaps, of these demons it remains the most easily confronted. It has a tactile effect on the body that can be quantitatively expressed; chemotheraphy and radiation deployed against it in a long war of attrition that can be directly observed. Surgeries may be undertaken, excising the affected tissue and isolating it from the rest of the body's systems. By all conventional metrics, there is no aspect of cancer that exists in other realms of awareness.
History, more insubstantial lies mostly in our perception. Theoretical constructs such as the [Baysian Brain]1 suggest our nervous system maintains internal probabilistic models as a result of the processing of sensory inputs; as adults we know not to put our hand into a fire, likely because as children we attempted it and burned ourselves. By extension, if this is the mechanism by which history is recorded into our bodies, then the probabilistic model for crisis and life trauma resides within. To what degree could it coexist in parallel with those supplementary models? Does it play nicely? Or does it wrest control from them in times where crisis is predicted, becoming a tryant of our perceptions?
The final and most formidible, of these viscerous demons, is Futility. The exact origins of this intrinsic Archfiend remain obscure by my reckoning. The closest conceptual entity, to which I am aware, that encapsulates this demon of Futility is an Alastor, a sort of tormenting spirit. Percy Bysshe Shelly's "Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude" (1816), cautioned the Platonist that, to seek ideal love, exposes one to the world's torments, and dooms them to die a lonely death. It does seem to have an insatiable hunger; feeding on both history and cancer's effects on one's perception of the possible with vampiric frenzy. In my perception, Alastor isn't so much tied to the romantic, but more a hyperreal sense of the possible. In our contemporary, everyday consideration of what is possibe we tend to place it within the context of circumstantial factors, that which can be directly observed or reasonably inferred–predicted in the Baysian sense–based on prior experience. From mid-14th century Old French possible and originally from Latin possibilis, "that can be done," (root: posse "be able,") Taking the strictly functional viewpoint, what is possible arises from Kantian synthetic judgement: it is possible for me to throw a ball for one of my dogs, provided I am in possession of a ball. The thought of throwing a ball at all relies on my having done so in the past or observing others doing so. How my dogs react to the ball being thrown relies on past observation of their behaviour and immediate sense data of their cues: wagging tails, facial expression, posture, readiness to chase and fetch. What of the first human being to ever throw an object for a dog? Without prior experience, or an observation of a dog's chasing behaviours, with only immediate sensory inputs offered by the dog's display of interest in the object, that human has to take a leap of faith, a willingness to test the limits of what's possible. From where does such inspiration strike?
French novelist Georges Bataille formulated a concept of possibility as a function of “atheology," his "science against science, a philosophy against knowledge," an attempt to transcend dialetical discourse and attain an experience of "the instant." In Bataille’s lexicon, “the possible,” refers to “organic life and its development,” by contrast “[t]he impossible is the final death, the necessity of destruction for existence”1–a requisite loss of self. Bataille's impossible is a state of "nonknowledge" encompassing what is beyond the boundaries of the organic and therefore not of the sensory. Similar and yet distinct from Kant's view of a priori (i.e., that which must come before sense observation) modes of understanding, Bataille argues the impossible is a momentary death of consciousness one awakens to through an inner experience of the immediate–eros and sexual climax, art, laughter, tears, sacrifice; all sensory experiences yet our inner experience of them appears intantaneously as a priori understanding.
No dialectic is required to experience the visceral. Considering, for example, Saturn Devouring His Son the oil painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, painted between 1819 and 1823. To look at the work evokes a primal awareness; the taboo of cannibalism, youth devoured by old age, impermanence, the necessity of death in order to maintain life. These epigenetic understandings are of the impossible, the a priori. How to place the painting into an epistemological condition: what might one see behind Goya's brushstrokes? A meditation on the inevitable, time and entropy devouring everything? A metaphor for the autocratic violence and wars gripping Spain? Do Saturn's eyes convey madness or grief? To arrive at an a posteriori (i.e., experiential or empirical) synthetic judgement of the painting's meaning one must return to the possible, drawing from his(her) own experience of the world.
One of the most unforgettable of Goya's "black paintings," Saturn Devouring His Son was painted directly on the inner walls of Goya's La Quinta del sordo, the "Villa of the deaf man," a farmhouse placed on the arid banks of the Manzanares. The Villa became a monument to Goya's growing melancholy in the proximity his advanced age brought him to mortality. His depiction of the Roman god Saturn belies all expectation, possesing none of the majesty one would associate with the devine. Instead we are confronted, even assaulted, with a naked, wild-eyed, madness; a bestial frenzy akin to any experienced by mortal man. Saturn, haunted by a prophecy in which his throne will be usurped by one of his sons, devoured each of them the moment they were born.
Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya
c.1819-1823.
Portrait of Goya by Vicente López Portaña, c. 1826.
Goya presents us with the prospect of catching Saturn in the act, walking in on him in a recondite instance of devouring. For any who know the myth, it is this very act of Filicide that sets in motion the very usurpation that Saturn fears; Jupiter, one of Saturn's sons, horrified by his Father's wanton corruption overthrew him, taking his rightful place as king of Heaven and Earth.
One imagines Goya in the Quinta del sordo, perhaps painting by candelight, these works largely hidden from the world. Were they intended for public consumption? Were they a vessel for his disquiet–a way to relieve himself of apprehension borne of Spain's political turmoil? Until the paintings were removed from the walls and transferred to canvas by Baron Émile d'Erlanger in 1873, who had seen them?
Goya never wrote of these "black paintings," Saturn Devouring His Son included. Their names were decided many years after his death, based entirely upon speculation–the possible–; synthetic judgements rendered by complete strangers drawing from translated, cabalistic myth. Their reading of the painting's subject endures, and yet could be completely wrong, an innocent lie drifting down from the ages.
Mansion of the successors of Goya. Postcard, c. 1907
Alastor, from Dictionnaire Infernal.
With the impossible examined, we return to Shelly's examination of the Alastor:
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
In reading Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude and from the depths of my own momentary lapse into the impossible Two words came to my mind: Saudade, A nostalgic longing for something (someone) that is absent in the face of a world that has moved on; a melancholic "missingness." Essential to Saudade is a willfuly repressed knowledge that the someone or something missed might never return. The "Bittersweet," a nostalgic sadness in an ending of a thing experinced in parallell to the joy of having experienced that thing–trading in your first car for a newer, more reliable one. Graduating High School. Your child's first day at Kindergarten, all common experiences of Saudade.
The second word is: Sensucht, a term which attempts to encapsulate more than a simple longing in one's life; a feeling of unease at the prospect that something may be missing coupled with at yearning for the ideal; a sense that the alternative life one could be leading exists in some tangible fashion and is therefore attainable if one can only crack the code. Sensucht in Psychology is typified by the presence of six markers:2
- utopian conceptions of ideal development;
- sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life;
- conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future;
- ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions;
- reflection and evaluation of one's life; and
- symbolic richness.
When I lost my ability to work on-set, Sensucht came to characterise my every day, a sense of lost time and lost purpose the state of affairs. In the period of Détente, there exists a hesitancy to embark on anything new, partly out of doubt that any new venture will bear any more fruit than previous attempts at self-actualisation. Attempt, fail, re-try; that vicious cycle whose well-worn path I have spent decades rambling, knowing every stone and blade of dead grass. In such a state one must consider a re-revaluation of purpose. What were the narratives that drove me to persue a career as a cinematographer? There were indeed the usual, "love of cinema," and "I saw Through A Glass Darkly at 16 and it changed my life," canned answers, although lurking just beyond the periphery of my awareness in my subjective blind-spot was something else: I was the spurned only-child in a family that used media, movies and television, to medicate away unhappiness. What better way to be seen by those inebriated by media, than to be in the media? If this was true, then my foundational motivations for a 16-year long career were never my own. In the face of such a realisation there is only existential terror.
Taking the six identifying markers of Sensucht, reconciling them with the fictions that existed in my mind throughout the last 15 years, establishes a possible blueprint for my approach to self-actualisation.
Utopian conceptions of ideal development; for me this showed up as total dedication. A commitment to hard-work and skill accumulation. Corey's First Law of actualisation Dynamics: “Merit is the physics by which human enterprise runs.” In a universe run by the physics of merit, these would promise a linear progression from novice to master.
Sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life; Life was simply not worth living if I wasn't "Seen." Popularity and the subjective experience of others' experience of me was irrelevant. If my skills and merits were unacknowledged, there was simply no other path to "mastery"/self-actualisation.
Conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; Lacking any sense of nostalgia or continuity of home, the present and future were all that mattered to me. My current efforts towards "mastery"/self-actualisation were something I saw entirely in my hands, hermetically sealed from past influences.
Ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; Corey's Second Law of actualisation Dynamics: "Achievement carries its own merit." An Academy Award win during first of May period in my professional life should have assured others of my worth and secured future opportunities.
Reflection and evaluation of one's life; Corey's Third Law of actualisation Dynamics: "People love perfection." People recognise value and they reward it. Be vital. Be essential and they will take you along with them to the top.
Symbolic richness. The bargaining phase, saturated with ritual mantras, "I'm doing fine," "I'm working hard, showing my worth. People see and value me," "Keep doing what I'm doing, and I'll get there."
Wherever "there" is.
Existing entirely in my mind, these Laws of actualisation Dynamics reveal an under-developed ability to modulate expectation, even a rigid and simplistic view of the human social ecosystem in which social utility is to be realised. Attempts have been made to axiomatically encapsulate this ecosystem, with a dash of gallows humour drizzled in to sweeten what often seems a sour deal. "It's not what you know, but who you know," chiefest among them. This falls well short of practical understandings required to navigate the professional landscape. How to express it better? "It's not so much what you know, it's that whomever you know must feel kinship with you and not see you as a threat." This is the Heisenberg uncertainty analogue residing in social dynamics, all too often the barriers to self-actualisation are subjective and cannot be reliably predicted: the subjective experience of the individual relative to the social group, and the subjective assessment of the individual by the group's gate-keepers remains an unkown quantity, one with which I had long been wholly obsessed, having identified social utility as necessary but insufficient for inclusion in my target social group, the world of high-end Ad Agencies and production companies. Worse, prior achievement had skewed my expectations; from Social Mobility Mazurka:
More than a decade deep and looking back over the march of time, an Academy Award was in fact a monumental catastrophe for my relationship with expectation. Not only is the unachievable possible, it was possible for me; a shy, lonely kid sans racines. No one should succeed out of the gate; it sours subsequent triumph. The statistical inevitability of failure turns up and I, alone with past glories and present defeats, settle into a Winter of discontentment. I became adapted to loosing. The game had mutated into the ultraviolet; moved to a spectrum I couldn't decipher. I wasn't interested in harvesting 'likes' and 'follows.' There was a sense that I had been exiled from the tribe for my failure to conform to narcissistic protocol.
The experience of having cancer is oft something that is marketed in a particularly short-sighted and narrow fashion. The Cancer JourneyTM is separate and distinct from the actual experience of having cancer. A Frankensteinian abstract produced from focus groups and a synthesis of "trends" and "reportings" provided to Ad Agencies by the medical industry.3, 4 Cancer as it exists as an abstract in the zeitgeist is confined to the realm of the medical. Certinaly this has utility, as the need to universalise The Cancer JourneyTM is essential in the marketing of treatments and care regimes, but what of the philosophical or even metaphysical experience of a cancer diagnosis? Every patient's Cancer JourneyTM is unique to them; informed by their own history; their own mecosystemic matrix. Parallells uncovered in the comparing of notes during treatment 5 are confined to the general–particularly around treatment, an exchange of experiential material as a psychological hedge against one's imaginings.
Ever questing for data with which to place my cancer in epistemological6 certitude, a rough theoretical framework seeking out co-morbidity between high allostatic load and psychological factors–life trauma, personal history and social environment–is taking shape in my mind; a "carcino-situationism," named after The Situationist International, a movement that existed from 1957 to 1972 and amalgamated avant garde art and intellectual disciplines in its critique of mid-century Western society. 7 Can there be a situationist critique of an individual instance of cancer? Among the primary tools situationists would have employed is Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory of the “mecosystem.” I introduced this concept in an earlier writing:
brought forth in the 1970s. Bronfenbrenner proposed five environmental systems that made up the substratum of a human being’s development: microsystem (immediate environment i.e. family, school, immediate social environment and peer relationships), mesosystem (interaction between any two microsystems, the results affect children directly), exosystem (indirect but prominent influences such as socioeconomic status and the costs therein i.e. parents' degree of job prestige, and the school system), macrosystem (cultural heritage, customs, beliefs, and government), and chronosystem (transitional influences that play out over the lifespan, e.g. fighting in World War I, growing up during The Great Depression, exposure to mass media during The Cold War).
Working from a mecosystemic context, indentifying the prevailing patterns, cycles and mindsets of my immediate environment wherein I identified a devaluation of merit, by what methodology could one predict and even circuimvent the whimsical, subjectivity of the creative set? In Social Mobility Mazurka I touched on an aspect of this problem; stereotyping:
The problem with contemporary American socio-understanding, at least as far as I could parse it, was that for all of their openness to experience and general politeness, Americans lacked imagination. They tended to categorize everything—especially people, who were placed in lanes with an attenuated set of group attributes. I didn’t see this is a moral failing so much as an adaptation to a multicultural environment. Human beings are always seeking easy ways to process the world. Synthesizing high-resolution variety to low-resolution blocks for easy processing made sense. Like most things, It wasn’t personal. People ran their lane. America was no place for individuals who didn’t belong squarely in any lane to begin with, and wouldn’t take being relegated to one—except outside the race; something I found to be out of alignment with the storied Hollywood American mythos of freaks carving out a place for themselves.
In the absence of merit, human interactions in the métier ecosystem of careerism and status-seeking, become exclusively transactional. Psychologist Eric Berne argued, in his Transactional Analysis Theory, that such was the essential nature of human beings:
The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other… sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response.8
The "fundamental unit of social action"9 employed in human transaction, in Berne's formulation is the stroke. Defined as a recognition currency, a stroke is given when one person recognises another verbally or non-verbally. The genesis of Berne's stroke lies in Rene Spitz's works on child development, where it was observed that infants who were not handled–not stroked–demonstrated emotional and physical hindrances relative to their stroked peers. Berne extrapolated this to adult social interaction, adding the caveat that adults could cognitively substitute types of recognition beyond the physical; verbal and eye-contact especially. Berne described this requirement of adults to experience recognition from their peers as recognition-hunger. An apt description, as recognition can be the currency by which one eats.
Posessing the education, skill-set and exprience (in summa, merit) that, I felt, warranted me a place in the agency world, yet facing chronic indefference, "ghosting" and exclusion became existentially terrifying. Particularily as it seemed that exclusion stemmed from subjective a priori judgements that were not fielded and therefore couldn't be challenged, only inferred. Deepening my feeling of Sensucht is the unverifiable narrative that the Utopian vision for my life could have been realised if only my social ecosystem had cooperated. Following Berne's reasonsing, the degree to which I did not feel stroked in the year and a half leading up to my diagnosis would have constituted a recognition-deprivation. Berne's transactional analysis reasons that any stroke, positive or negative, is preferable to no stroke at all:10
For example, if you are walking in front of your house and you see your neighbor, you will likely smile and say “Hi.” Your neighbor will likely say “hello” back. This is an example of a positive stroke. Your neighbor could also frown at you and say nothing. This is an example of a negative stroke. But either case is better than no stroke at all, if your neighbor ignored you completely.11
If Berne's transactional analysis is correct, both positive and negative strokes having equal value, then there could be just as many incentives to invite negative strokes as there are reasons to invite positive strokes. It could even be argued that, in the context of a global social ecosystem where one competes not only with their local or regional group, but with the world, being recognised at all is an accomplishment. Utilising shock and outrageous behaviour becomes an effective means of standing out from the competition; the primary way to command influence over an arbitrary subjective selection mechanism.
As I write this Vera, from the art deco waiting room at her acupuncturist's, sends me a photo:
Among the latest in the many synchorinicities that define mine and Vera's relationship, she brings into focus a bodhi kernel the lies at the very core of what I have sensed intuitively about cancer.
Cancer
Deep hurt. Longstanding resentment. Deep secret or grief eating away at the self. Carrying hatreds. "What's the use?"
Vera and I have the same type of cancer, adenocarcinoma. Its assault on our bodies–mine colorectal, hers cervical–in our formulation, align with aspects of our inner traumas and the internecine contracts we have made in our lives. For us, both only children largely unseen by a high-status social ecosystem, self-valuation has been the currency traded for stroking. The page she shared, from Michael J. Lincoln's book Messages from the Body - Their Psychological Meanings is expounded on later, arguing an "Annihilation-anxiety"(p.145) underlying my colorectal ground-zero and a "fuck you all!" powerlessness incarnate in Vera's cervical manifestation (p.122). It was recently proposed to me, by Justine's grandmother12 a two-time cancer survivor, that cancer is, "[not something to be owned as mine] the stranger you need to deal with...the it." This is very philosophically sound advice and worth considering. Proper framing is invaluable in many life challenges. Although, one thing I have learned in this battle is that each person's experience is different. Cancer can absolutely be framed as the univited guest, but in the strictest medical sense it is of your own body. It has been useful to me to think of it as a rebellion;cellular Bolshevism, or in some part a manifestation of my unprocessed traumas and negative cycles; I aim to take ownership of my cancer, not position myself as its victim. Further, I strive to place it in epistemological context, attacking it from the non-medical dimensions; after all, if I identify aspects of my being that facillitated its invasion of my body and I don't confront those aspects, what's to stop it from recurring? In the face of the 80% recurrence rate (within two years) I hold vigil against, why not open as many fronts against my cancer as possible?
Medically, adenocarcinoma, is an aggressive variety of cancer that attacks and mutates the DNA. Having recently undergone genetic testing to determine the degree to which DNA mutations are now present within my body (more on this in a future writing), having data with which to confirm or deny the hereditary componenet were, excitingly, within my grasp. It was determined that, based on the genetic evidence, including the analysis of blood samples and sequencing of my DNA for evidence of mutational load, my cancer is not hereditary, placing its genesis more likely within "lifestyle" and "sporadic" statistical classifications. In light of such evidence, I am conviced that an epistemological line of inquiry will continue to bear fruit.
Vera and I slip back and forth between the possible and the impossible as casually as you pass through a doorway between two rooms. Much of our daily conversations–often lasting four true to life hours if not entire days, detail a sense of grief and I find myself asking, "how can one grieve a state of being that may have contributed to potentially terminal illness?" Is it baked into the nervous system? A Baysian mechanism firing, meeting only dead air along an excised circuit, awaiting new neural pathways to carry meaning and purpose from the mind to the sinew. Survivorship or Saudade, that nostalgic longing for something long gone as a defense against the inevitable; a state of repose that is anything but restful; a transmutation from dreamt-to-dream.
Footnotes & References
Wright, Drew M., "The Impossible Thought of Georges Bataille: A Consciousness That Laughs and Cries." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2017. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/214
Scheibe, S.; Freund, A. M.; Baltes, P. B. (2007). "Toward a developmental psychology of Sehnsucht (life longings): The optimal (utopian) life". Developmental Psychology. 43: 778–795. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.43.3.778. PMID 17484587.
Never forget that is is indeed an industry. According to Investopedia, Health Care is the number one industry propelling (some would argue reanimating) the U.S. Economy. Adding 2.8 million jobs between 2006 and 2016–some seven times quicker than the overall economy. Health Care spending accounted for 17 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2017. Inasmuch as the Health Care industry provides vital and heroic services, one can’t help but consider a vested interest in maintaining disease as vital to the continued health of this growing sector.
Deutsch, Alison L. “The 5 Industries Driving the U.S Economy.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 18 Nov. 2019, www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/5-industries-driving-us-economy.asp.
During chemotherapy especially, I found I had closer bonds with medical staff than with other patients. A social continuity existed between myself, my nurses and specialists. The prickly glares thrown my way form other patients screamed, “don’t talk to me!” and “leave me alone!” It’s a profoundly isolating experience during which I was often pressured by my family to attend Colorectal cancer support groups and make friends with other patients in the infusion ward. Something arising more of our their feelings of helplessness than anything else.
Epistemology in this context being the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of knowledge.
Inasmuch as The Situationists leveled their critiques against mid-century capitalism, the association of the term I wish to posit is limited strictly to the methods utilized; art, literature and intellectual theory–without Marxist implications. Political correlations to The Situationist International need not apply.
Berne, Eric. Games People Play. Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1964. Page 29
Berne, Eric. Games People Play. Page 15.
Stewart, Ian and Joines, Vann. TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis. Lifespace Publishing, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 1987.
Steiner, Claude. “Description of Transactional Analysis and Games by Dr. Eric Berne MD.” Eric Berne M.D., www.ericberne.com/transactional-analysis/.
Considering that Justine, her family and I are no longer in contact, owing to her decision to end our years-long romantic relationship during my cancer treatment, I initially found this an odd occurrence. I do think the advice is sound advice on the basis of its own merit, and do take it in the spirit of kindness with which it was given.