Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

This hellishly PowerPoint-ish and (I'd say) woefully committee-driven manifesto for social work as part of the medical process was sitting by the elevators on the seventh floor of USC University Hospital this week. It's wonderfully syntax-strangling, but I was particularly taken by the list halfway down the right-hand column. I don't think the last item is quite what they intended.

The Green and the Grey

We drove across to Glendale on a whim yesterday and spent a pleasantly weird couple of hours wandering around Forest Lawn, inspiration for Evelyn Waugh and many others. The air around LA was thick with a low-lying mistiness that flattened the views across the city into planes of grey, but we were in a quiet green fantasyland. It really is Disneyland for the Dead - even Walt is there somewhere.

I'd expected some tack, I think, but not the scale. It's a vast three-hundred acres of hilly eternity. I'd also expected to be part of a company of slightly ghoulish celebrity hunters, but it couldn't have been any less like that. For perhaps the first half hour, we didn't see another (ahem) soul. The immaculate stillness was eerily all ours.

So we aimlessly stepped into the Great Mausoleum, and found ourselves being boomed at by an Imposing Dismbodied Voice from the front of the chapel - if such it is. It was pleasingly like Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion timidly seeking help from the Wizard. Perhaps a couple of hundred chairs in neat rows facing the front, all empty. This chapel had no altar, though - at least no literal altar. At the business end of the chapel was a high curtain, which Imposing Disembodied Voice proceeded to explain covered Forest Lawn's star attraction: a recreation - in stained glass, no less - of The Last Supper. A willingly captive audience, the two of us gobbled up every bathetic word of the Imposingly Disembodied story of the history of the thing, whereupon the curtains slid silently aside and we got our minute's worth of supplication before the fake. It was all wonderful. This wasn't a chapel at all. It was a cinema, albeit one whose moving picture didn't move very much, and whose projection came from natural light behind the screen.

We slunk off to poke around the mortuaries themselves, confounded by locks from poking into some, and by polite restraint from poking into others. I was oddly pleased by the manner in which many of the name-plates use a facsimile signature of the deceased, as if they're signing off on their lives. I found Robert Z. Leonard, not very famous at all by Forest Lawn standards, but that was fine.

More walking outside. It struck me that among the 300 acres there are plenty of roads, but simply no paths for those walking. This is, of course, a cemetery for a car-culture. It's practically a drive-thru graveyard. To this end, the fanciful names of the plots are marked into the sides of the kerbstones: Sunrise Slope; Whispering Pines; Everlasting Love. I looked for Dead Man's Curve, but was disappointed.

The lack of paths must also partly be to deter the grave-gawker, but the very size of the place performs that function quite adequately. Even the hundreds of luminaries are lost amongst a quarter of a million graves. To see more than a handful, one would be faced with a challenging day-long scavenger hunt. Perhaps the determined behave as they would at an art gallery of significance: rather than limiting themselves to only the Rembrandts today, thanks very much, they just go to visit Gable and Lombard, or Burns and Allen.

The drive back towards the gates took us past Forest Lawn's copy of Michaelangelo's David. Of course. Nothing here is real. That's why it's quite authentic.

High culture, low culture

To the Getty Center on Thursday for a calming afternoon away from it all. The gentle funicular that runs from the car park up the hill, alongside the serpentine 405, always reminds me of the trip across the lake at Disney World. The places couldn't be very much more different, but in each case the short journey has the effect of both senses of transportation, an airlock between the real world and something a bit more fantastical. The Getty is every bit the shining castle on the hill.

I loved the current exhibition of the photographs of Roger Fenton. There's something entirely other-worldly about early photography. We're so unused to seeing photographic representations of so long ago that the collision of the immediacy of the medium and the distance of time creates its own little vertigo. Fenton's work is mostly quite artless - at least, exactly the same compositions in a modern setting would seem artless. The captions alongside the images tried to argue for the photographer's skill, but seemed to be protesting a bit too much; at that time, the medium was so new that it was two parts science to one part curious toy. Fenton's images of the Crimean War struck me as the most impressive: huge vistas of tented soldiery; the juxtaposition of a modern military discipline and a romantically primitive logistics; the famous image of the valley of the shadow of death, empty save for a layer of spent cannonballs. And then, in contrast, Fenton's cheesily studio-faked images of Muslim culture. He was just working out what the hell photography was capable of.

And then a wander around a small exhibition of images of violence from mediaeval manuscripts. One in particular, a stunningly-preserved image in blues and greens, set on a still-gaudy gold-leaf background, obviously the star attraction within its hefty volume, brought to mind the gold-coloured stickers which would sometimes appear in the Panini football albums I'd collect when I was a kid. The gold ones were always high-status; they'd be used for images of the trophies, say, or for team insignia. High culture, low culture, same techniques. See, I really have no class.

Narrative music

A. and I saw two films yesterday, and my reactions to each of them probably say a lot about what sort of person I am.

We headed over to Hollywood in the afternoon, got caught in one of those inexplicably snarly patches of LA traffic, missed the start of the film we'd intended to see, but found that Hotel Rwanda was just about to start, so dived in. It did almost exactly nothing for me. Despite the vastness and gut-wrenching horror of the source material, and also despite some technically dead-on performances, the narrative is small, clumsy. Whether for lack of budget, lack of artistic guile, lack of bravery, there's no poetry. I wasn't remotely moved.

And then, in the evening, we stuck The Usual Suspects in the DVD player, I geeked out to a film I adore, which I've seen countless times - even dissected the screenplay for PhD stuff - and at the moment where the narrative comes together in the most beautiful structural ballet, not for the first time I found myself genuinely moved, tears in my eyes. (The moment, for what it's worth, is when Kevin Spacey's leg straightens. It never fails to take my breath away.) It's quite silly, because there's nothing close to sentimental about the film. Hotel Rwanda is about genocide. The Usual Suspects is about noirish crime. And yet it's Suspects that consistently moves me.

Narrative can have music. When it works, it can be like music. It's no longer about discovering the plot. It's about experiencing the structure of the thing as a whole, just as we thrill to a favourite song. I've taken a lot of stick from A. and others about how much I was moved by Titanic. I agree with their criticisms of the film, mostly, but I also can see why we disagree about the film as a whole: I think its narrative structure is entirely magnificent. It's that which moves me, not caring about the characters, or being swept along by the score. Certainly it's not the dialogue. So I find myself profoundly moved most of all by elegance and beauty in the structure of narrative. I suspect that might make me very strange.

Begging the biggest question of all

Tom Burka steps in to take on the, frankly, far-too-easy task of finding the ridiculous in Scalia's ramblings on the Ten Commandments issue. Says the NYT report:

He called the Ten Commandments "a symbol of the fact that government* derives its authority from God," adding, "That seems to me an appropriate symbol to put on government grounds."

Beg pardon? "...the fact that..."? What point is there even discussing the validity of an argument if its premises are so flimsy, yet claimed with such apparent lack of equivocation, from an exalted, ex cathedra self-satisfaction? There's so much that's wrong with this statement that it's hard to know where to start - or perhaps hard to know how far back to go. Obviously Scalia doesn't, and can't, know any such thing. The matter isn't even one of authority. It's a matter of existence. A legal claim of the existence of a god would be laughed out of any honest court, and yet here's one of the handful of ultimate arbiters of law in the world's most powerful country wielding it as an unassailable axiom. It's begging the question, and in this case it's a whopper. Absent the "fact" which Scalia falsely yet axiomatically claims, his system of inference is essentially a religious rather than a logical or legal one. This is, of course, activism, yet, because the cause is one of reactionary dogma, it passes as conservatism. I've been here before.

The issue is indeed one of separation between church and state, but it truly has nothing much to do with whether it's okay to display some blandly vacuous old religious tenets in public buildings. The issue is whether the process of government can perform that separation; whether it can grow the fuck up, join the rest of us in the twenty-first century, and ditch the mediaeval axiom which builds towers upon sand: that a god - any one, feel free to choose - happens to exist. By all means believe in a god, if it makes you happy, blah blah blah, but as an axiom in any context, and a fortiori in any secular or legal context, it's at best deeply flawed, at worst lethal. It doesn't matter what conclusion Scalia might come to, when his system of inference is so totally compromised. He can't apply separation between church and state in his court duties, because there's no separation between church and state in his addled mind.

Also from the NYT piece:

Justice Scalia asked whether the marshal's invocation that begins each Supreme Court session, "God save the United States and this honorable court," was not also "divisive, because there are people who don't believe in God."

I can only growl when the god axiom leads to this. I mean, obviously the answer to Scalia's question is: YES! But that he considers this to be the relevant question to ask shows that the argument is already in deep trouble. Is it so far from people's minds to take that final step back beyond the god axiom, and ask something of the form of:

Is it not quite patently silly to invoke god in legal and governmental systems when the evidence for the existence of a god is so vapourous?

Scalia thinks this is about belief. It's not. It's about existence.

*Aside: Which government/s? I'm reminded of the Pratchett line about the vicissitudes of fate:

Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

Claim divine authority for one government, and you must claim it for all of them: Saddam's, Hitler's, Ceausescu's. Just because it's not a nice government, doesn't mean it's not authorised.

Relevance and irrelevance

I really must apologise.

As of a few minutes ago, a Google search on the phrase "Gricean Maxims", turns up first, of all the documents in all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this post of mine, which isn't even really about Gricean Maxims anyway, but is just a pretentious film review.

I suppose it's a kind of fame, but, watching the hits come in, practically every day I see some poor lost soul from a .edu or a .ac.uk stumble on my Collateral review looking for something about Paul Grice, and can only imagine how much of their collective time I've wasted.

Colour, and Coping

(Apologies in advance for how crappily-written this is. It's late and I'm tired, but I wanted to post it anyway.)

Pretty much the defining characteristic of qualia is that they're unsharable. They keep us in our own little bubble-world of sensations, and we've no idea what the same ostensible feeling feels like for anyone else. 'Do the colours of the rainbow look the same to everyone?' sings Badly Drawn Boy. We can't even rely on another's descriptive account as a measure of sensation, however evocative. We're up in a second-order (at least) stratum, where we're concerned not with feelings, but with how feelings feel. And we'll never know.

This is relevant today because I want to write something about depression, which is as defined in terms of qualia as is the colour red. And, of course, just as unsharable because of that. Sure, descriptions of others' experiences of depression might ring bells here and there, but that first-order stuff isn't expressive enough. I'd learn as little as from someone describing that red is the colour of blood, or of poppies.

And that's relevant today because I'm reluctant to write about depression at all. I'm reluctant to write about it, because I'm reluctant to see myself as someone who experiences depression. Because of being stuck in a feeling of being unable to buy into others' depressive qualia - unable to trust in any parity between my qualia and their descriptions of qualia - all of my reluctances grab hold and tell me that, no, I don't really get depressed, not me.

It's an odd stigma, but it's not the one you might expect. It's not that depression is too hard a thing to propose - indeed not, I'm fucked up enough to think sometimes that there's something appealingly complex and brooding and damaged about the artfully depressed. It's that it's too easy a thing to propose. It feels like proposing that a psychological dog ate my psychological homework. Oh, I'm sorry that I wasted years of my PhD supervisor's time with an aborted thesis, it's just that the psychological dog ate my psychological homework. Oh, I'm sorry that I've been neglecting my friends and family for several years at least. It's just that pesky psychological dog chomping on my homework again. Tsk, tsk. Sorry about that.

See? That's way too easy. It has the ring of excuse, rather than cause. And yet I do know that something's up. And yet I feel that it's not. And yet I know that it is. And yet I feel that it's not.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago, when I was somewhat taken by a realisation - one of those things which probably is too obvious for me to have noticed before. It came as a potential answer to the question of why I've only relatively recently seriously even considered whether I ought to think about applying the d-word to myself, yet haven't felt significantly different in quality. Days that feel the heaviest have definitely been deeper and more frequent during the past three or four years, but only in degree. Things can be a slog sometimes, but I manage okay, as I always have.

Rather than stubbornly proposing that the lack of change in quality of qualia is because this just isn't depression, I started to consider whether things feel the same for me on some underlying level because depression has always been there. It's not a cheery thought, but it has a plausibility to it. The remaining question would then collapse to why things have become somewhat worse during the past few years - joking aside, I do think that depression was at least one of the things that killed my PhD.

So I was thinking about introversion - again, I know - and it occurred to me that introversion might always have been rather more than a positive social and psychological preference. What if the extremities of my introversion have always partly existed as a coping mechanism for dealing with the threat (or presence) of depression - even before I understood what depression was, never mind before I consciously wondered if it might be personally relevant for me? Introversion is always a kind of coping mechanism anyhow, of course - as is extroversion, for that matter - but the specific idea that I might have been using introversion to cope with depression struck me as a good one. If it became instinctive early in childhood - as it probably would have done - then the twin functions of my introversion would have become blurred and blended, and then subsequently hard to tease apart. I'd merely look like a misanthropic hermit to anyone who cared to look.

To be clear: even without depression there'd be plenty of the misanthropic hermit about me - and that's something I'm quite comfortable with. It's who I am, and I mostly like me quite a lot. But add depression to that, and then a coping mechanism based on intensifying the introversion, and what you have is something that's neither healthy nor sustainable.

It's particularly not sustainable when the small, quiet, simple life such introversion inevitably creates is exploded into something much bigger, richer, and more complex, which is how things have developed for me during the last few years. I've sought, and embraced, a much fuller life. I think the old coping mechanisms have struggled to maintain a psychological balance, however, and from time to time they've collapsed, leaving me in an unfamiliar position of emotional exhaustion. Dealing with that has often involved not dealing with it: merely curling into a foetal ball and wishing all the world's complexity away. By the time I was ready to face things, the world's complexity had made quite a mess for me to clear up. Or allow to get even worse, depending.

I'm not entirely sure where this is heading, except that I think I've reached a place where I'm comfortable saying that for several years at least I've been experiencing some increased degree of depression, perhaps at least partly because my old instinctive coping mechanisms based on extreme introversion don't work so well any more. I'm sure I'll come back to it, but I don't intend this blog to become one of those daily emotional barometers: today will be gloomy with occasional breakdowns. It's enough for now to write this, and to resolve that once I've got health insurance back (long story), I'll work to get the ologies on my side too. Coping mechanisms are dandy, but SSRIs are quicker, as Ogden Nash didn't say. The point isn't not to talk about depression. The point is not to settle for it.