Friday, October 29, 2010

Teasing and "Kidding"

We all know teasing and kidding when we see it. Teasing and kidding in textual form are not so easy to recognize, since they depend for their interpretation on body language, facial expression and voice tone. In writing we might have to append "just kidding"in order to keep from being misunderstood.

Some forms of teasing are really forms of verbal abuse and bullying. I'm not talking about that kind of teasing now. For the purposes of this article, I'm referring to the kinds of things we say and do to people with whom we are friendly.

We want the teasing of friends not to be taken seriously. Frequently the content of a tease is on the edge of meanness or hurtfulness. In fact, it has to have the potential of being hurtful to meet the requirements for a tease. If a tease were totally irrelevant to the person being teased, there would be no point in it. In fact, the person being teased would be perplexed by it. A tease is an apparently hostile statement intended not to be taken seriously.

What are the rules and requirements for teasing, and what purpose does it serve in relationships? I'll start with the last question first. When we tease someone, we expect them to know us well enough to know we mean no harm. We rarely tease strangers.
Generally, the tease could literally be taken to be hurtful; it is the fact that hurtful intent is contradicted by the solidity of our relationship that makes it "funny". It is as if we were saying when we tease "You know I don't mean this because we like each other". In a way, the fact that one of us can tease the other reaffirms that our relationship is a positive one. Teasing is a way of increasing the trust in a relationship by reaffirming that we do not mean to hurt or cause harm. Sometimes teasing is a way of testing a new relationship in order to build it.

When we tease we have to send a duplex message (in the language of Transactional Analysis). The literal content of the tease is a critical statement. The covert content, carried by body language and tone or exaggerated content, is that we do not mean the message to be taken as true. The response, to be appropriate, must acknowledge that the recipient does not take the message to be true and is therefore not offended. The relationship has then survived a minor "test" and is shown to be a positive one.

The content must be relevant to the person teased, in the sense that it has to be a critical statement that could possibly be true. It has to have the potential to be harmful; the teasee affirms his trust in the teaser by not taking it seriously when he easily could do so. The relationship is therefore strengthened to a small degree. A tease that is totally irrelevant to the person being teased is simply meaningless.

Teasing may also be a form of flirtation. Sexual teasing is a way of indicating sexual interest in the other person which is at the same time plausibly deniable. If the person being teased isn't interested in a sexual relationship with the teaser, the teaser can easily retreat into the classic teaser position of "just kidding", or "I didn't really mean it that way". While it shares the overt intention of "strengthening the relationship" with regular teasing, the sexual tease is only aimed at strengthening the sexual aspect of the relationship, and if that is rejected by the person being teased, the relationship may well be weakened.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Some Thoughts About PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an unique disorder in several ways. It can occur in people who are exposed to a highly stressful event, but may not in all those exposed. It takes two forms: the acute form, which develops quickly after the stressful event, and the chronic form, which develops months or years after the event. In my opinion, acute PTSD is a normal reaction to an extreme event. Chronic PTSD, I believe, is the response of a more "neurotic" character structure to an extreme event, and is not a "normal" reaction.

In some ways PTSD can be seen as a response to a sudden exposure to unpleasant reality. The reality is that we live in a very dangerous world, and we manage our appropriate anxiety through the rather primitive defense of denial. We drive on the highway at 70 mph, with cars going the opposite direction at 70 mph only feet or inches away. We have the illusion of safety, even invulnerability, in our air-conditioned and quiet automobiles. We also know, though we avoid thinking about it, that we are a fraction of a second away from a terrible death. We don't want to know how vulnerable we are; in some ways we really can't afford to know how close we are to disaster.

When something happens to shatter our sense of invulnerability, it may shake us deeply. It breaks the wall of denial and suddenly we are forced to be aware of just how near we are to death at almost every second. We lose our illusions of safety. In a sense, acute PTSD is a mental state closer to reality than our "normal" state of comfortable illusion. We want to retreat to our previous state of blissful ignorance, but find that impossible to do easily. We become angry that we have lost our sense of safety. How we adjust to this sudden onslaught of reality determines whether we come to terms with what has happened and the precarious nature of our lives or whether we become chronically terrified. The more protected our lives have been, the more disturbed we are when we suddenly are exposed to the often terrible reality. The story of how Siddhartha Gautama was suddenly exposed to death and illness (which started him on his search for the philosophy that became Buddhism) is especially enlightening.

The events that result in PTSD are life-changing events. However, instead of seeing our reactions to trauma as necessarily pathological, we should consider that our mental state prior to the incident was one of ignorance or deliberate denial, and that our recognition of the potential awfulness of life, as unpleasant as the experience is, is more healthy and realistic. Our reaction to the necessity of changing our belief about reality may be pathological, but react and change we must. Some people bitterly resent the imposition of change and/or the recognition that they are not as safe as they believe they should be. Some become self-pitying or resentful or victimized or helpless. None of those reactions are healthy, but the reactions are not caused by the traumatic event itself. They are the result of the impact of the traumatic event on the dysfunctional attitude and belief system of the individual to whom they belong.

Monday, October 18, 2010

A Critique of Modern Poetry

Poetry has been an interest of mine since high school, and while I have never lost interest, in recent years I have been occupied with other things. Lately, however, I found myself going back and re-reading poets who have kept my interest over the years. In the process, I have been reading some critical books in an attempt to increase my understanding of the poet and the poem.

I am beginning to look at poems in what is for me a new way. The most important thing is that I see that I have only understood poetry in the most superficial way. I have read poems for the beauty of the line, the vividness and economy of its images and its sound. Unless the meaning was obvious, I paid little attention to what the poem was "about". Archibald MacLeish once said "A poem should not mean but be", a thought which was not too far from my somewhat naive initial understanding. I now think that this approach is itself naive, in that it makes the assumption that a writer must make a choice between the "being" of a poem (its sound and images) and the "meaning" of a poem. Clearly a poem can and should have both elements.

However, this debate/argument has been going on for many years. In the early 20th century, the "Imagiste" movement focused only on the image in the poem. Poems in this category have their beauty but have not really achieved the first rank. Pound, for instance, wrote the following poem, tiled "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Why this poem has not been "successful" is probably obvious. It's a simple image, clear and precise, with no meaning other than itself as an image. But there is no depth of meaning, no content to help us relate to it in a personal way, no poignancy. It fails (for me) to stir some more intense experience or emotion. Reading it is like looking at a photograph taken by someone else of a street scene on a rainy day. It might be mildly melancholy, but nothing more than that. It fails some quality of universality and communication beyond the image which should stir an idea or an emotion in me. (The article in Wikipedia on Imagism is excellent and need not be repeated here.)

Some poetry by T. S. Eliot fails me for the opposite reason. He has complex and multi-layered ideas which he attempts to express through his poetry. Some seems successful; some does not. He is also at times a master of the melodic and sonorous line. When the two come together, the poem is marvelous. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an example of the good. "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" is an example of the failure of the union of meaning and image. The "meaning" of a poem should not be a puzzle to solve, nor should it depend on complex intellectual associations that are so unique to the author that no-one outside his head can connect the dots. Poems are not essays on religion or philosophy.

Pound's Cantos are another example of the latter failure. In spite of that failure, however, there are lines and images that are beautiful and powerful. In his earlier Translations Pound was able to translate meaning AND image from another culture and language into English. Perhaps because he could not depend on intensely and uniquely personal associations and recollections, he was forced to make the language simpler, and ultimately incredibly successful.

What are we trying to do when we write poetry? Recently I briefly took part in an on-line web site devoted to unpublished poets showing their work. Most amateur and unskilled poetry is written in the form of blank or free verse. One may presume that this is so that nothing can get in the way of the expression of feeling. But that's mostly what the poems were. They were adolescent outbursts of emotion with no discipline and little skill, though no one could doubt the intensity of the emotion. Each poem was written as if the author had never seen another poem and did not understand that their feelings were non-unique to the point of being trite. The occasional image or beautiful phrase might make itself noticed, but the meaning of all the poems I read was the same: "I and I alone have this FEELING! And it's important because I am the one who has it!" There is no suggestion among them that it is the universality of their feelings that can make it resonate with the reader. They did not want critical comment; they wanted praise and approval for their hothouse plant. They do not understand that the writing of poetry is a highly skilled task, demanding the utmost mastery of the language.

I too still find myself reading poetry in a simple and naive way, for the beautiful phrase and memorable image. The emotions being expressed are merely the context in which the language is placed. However, such a style of reading misses much of the content and simplifies or ignores the meaning. Still, I would rather read in that manner than read a scientific text or a sermon. So while image and sound are necessary for poetry, they are not sufficient for a poem to rise to the highest level.

What kind of “meaning” is appropriate for poetry? Considering that poems are not aimed primarily at the intellect, can we say they are aimed at eliciting emotions only? When Eliot describes the “objective correlative”, he refers to the attempt to elicit in the reader’s mind the same thoughts and emotions that were present in the mind of the author. But which is more important, thought or emotion? While there seems to be no limit as to the kinds of emotions expressed, some kinds of thoughts are clearly inappropriate, in the sense they can’t be easily expressed in such a format because they are non-verbal or abstract or even mathematical. Eliot attempts to express religious concerns and conflicts, and in that he owes much to the metaphysical poets of the 17th and 18th century. Pound tries to focus our thoughts on economics and politics throughout the centuries. In my mind, neither are successful attempts. I would rather find other ways to learn ideas.

Reading such attempts as the amateur in the local Poetry Society as well as the unsuccessful attempts by the famous helps clarify for me what it is that poems should do. An example of a successful attempt to universalize a loss and make it poignant and beautiful at the same time is found in the "Lucy" poems by Wordsworth. It can be done. We should know it when we see it. Wordsworth is not howling at the moon like a love-lorn teen. He is attempting (successfully, in my opinion) to speak to all who have lost someone of the universality of that loss and what it means to us. "A slumber did my spirit seal" is a successful blend of the emotion of loss with economy of line and with images that speak to us as well. I can find many poems who meet this criterion and am interested in those the reader of this essay can bring to my attention.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Why I Think Inheritance Taxes Are Good

The only way to prevent money (=power) from accumulating in the hands of a family, especially a family member who has neither motivation or brains to earn it him/herself, is to impose a confiscatory inheritance tax. The children of a brilliant entrepreneur should have no right to money they have not earned. Do we need more Paris Hiltons?

There are huge problems with doing so, of course. What to do with the money collected is important. It is also important to prevent a profitable company from being forced out of business. People think it is important to be able to provide for their offspring, though this issue is a cultural one rather than a real issue. There is no real reason why adult, competent and educated adults should be "provided for" by wealthy parents. Nonetheless, many parents are strongly (and wrongly) motivated to dd this and will undoubtedly attempt to find clever ways to circumvent any attempt to bring their children "down" to the normal level.

In an egalitarian society, every child shoud have the same opportunities. No society in which parents raise their own children can be truly egalitarian. Wealthy families have richer cultural opportunities. So, while it isn't really possible to start all children off with the same advantages, they can certainly be "evened out" to a great degree. For instance, money collected from taxing inheritances can be earmarked to provide nearly equal educational rights to all. Scholarships can be awarded to children who show intellectual promise and who are economically disadvantaged. Money can be spent to raise the standards of "ghetto" schools. Just because such a system can't be made trick-proof doesn't mean it can't be made to improve the educational system.

The intent is obviously two-fold. It is desirable to prevent families from accuring such wealth that they become oligarchs, potentates of small or large empires. It is desirable to assure that children have a more equal chance at higher levels of education. Such a system may not be perfect, but it can be "good enough" to be a benefit.