Chick Cliches

Let us compare & contrast two iconic chickens: Chicken Little & The Little Red Hen. "Why 'Red,' anyway?" I hear you muse. Perhaps, because she got her start in a Russian folktale. She's the chick who keeps exhorting her deadbeat comrades to lend a hand with the sowing of some grain product (possibly rye in the original version), then with harvesting it, milling it, and baking it into bread. "Nyet," they tell her, at each juncture. Not one Therblig are they prepared to expend. Yet they expect to benefit from the Red Hen's labor and nosh her bread. "Nyet," she answers them back, and feeds her children, instead. I've always felt that the BFD quotient of this story was pretty high; but the Realpolitik motto of The Little Red Hen ("If you want a thing done right, do it yourself.") has made it into the Codex of Sadder-But-Wiser-Truisms.

Chicken Little (who may have started out as a hare in African folklore, several millenia ago) is the one who extrapolates, from one acorn falling on her head, a Doomsday scenario, to wit: "The sky is falling! The King must be informed!" She demagogues a flock of concerned poultry to accompany her on a mission to the king; but they are all schmized by Foxy Loxy into taking a detour to his den, where he has them for lunch, as it were. Nevertheless, her undelivered message ("The sky is falling!") has become synonymous with Reaching-a-Dire-Conclusion-Before-All-the-Data-Are-In.

So, there was I, last Saturday morning around 9 o'clock, when we usually set off for Lili's walk through the acorn-dropping woods, with a light but steady snow a-falling, knowing from 13 years of Michigan winters, that "You'd best keep a path from the garage to the street passable, or the (eventual) municipal snow-plowing of the streets will avail you nought." My heavy hints to this effect were received by my stronger half (who can actually get our rickety old snow blower to start) as the ravings of Chicken Little. So I got all Little Red Hen about it, and set to with my trusty (ergonomic) snow shovel, commencing what turned out to be a 2-day battle with Mother Nature, to be able to get to BWI airport on Sunday evening to collect our Second City daughter. Mind you, 30 minutes into my labors, Chris was out there, coaxing the reluctant snow blower into life; and he did not rest until sunset, when I Chicken Littled him again, this time saying, "A cleared driveway will avail us nought, if you get a heart attack in the process." (This warning has a certain, wry resonance with us, since, back in Detroit, he was once the TV pundit cardiologist, who advised that, "people over 40 should not shovel snow" lest they get a...you know.)

Eerily, we were the only two folks in the cul-de-sac out there toiling on the Saturday. Shades of Aesop's Grasshopper & Ant fable. Gotta tell ya, it was a little bit humiliating, to think of our neighbors, tucked up snugly (maybe even smugly) in their warm houses, watching the two of us Chicken Littles, inflicting pain & suffering on ourselves, in our Sisyphean task. Did they know something we didn't?

On Sunday morning our next-door-neighbor (also Chris) who has a fancy, ride-on snow plow, discovered that he could not get it out of his garage, to begin to tackle the 2 feet of snowfall. He confessed that his wife was "beside herself with him," since they had to get to Dulles that night, to collect their daughter, who was weather-delayed in Amsterdam. It was one of those moral dilemmas. Should we (the Ants) forsake our own driveway project, to help our neighbor (the Grasshopper) begin his? Here is where one learns that social guilt is an uncomfortable mix of intrusion (of others' poor planning into one's own agenda) and humiliation (that one is Not a Good-enough Neighbor, even during the Christmas season). I was half-heartedly offering him the use of my trusty Jeep to get to their airport, when, miraculously, a neighbor from up the road arrived with an industrial-strength snow clearing device, and had him (and all the other driveways in the cul-de-sac, except ours) done within an hour.

No more social guilt, then. Just the humiliation of realizing that, on our road at least, Grasshoppers rule and Ants drool. (Not to mention, ache.) Lili, meanwhile, has not had a walk in the woods since the blizzard began, but gets her aerobic exercise by gazelle-leaping through the snow, to do the needful in her usual spot out front.

"Climb Every (effing) Mountain"

Did you know that the actor who starred in the movie version of The Sound of Music, Christopher Plummer, found it so insufferably mawkish and goody-two-shoes, that he referred to it as "The Sound of Mucus"? Fact. The "mountain" depicted in this picture is really just a hill on our daily woodland walk; but, even though I do 50 minutes of aerobic training at home each morning before tackling this "ascent," it always leaves me dizzy and gasping for air. [Humiliation in addition to a brief bout of pain & suffering.] So, why do I do it? That's an Existential question, for another post. How do I do it? I apply the Premack Principle.

This is one of those robust, game-changing, life-enhancing concepts I learned about in grad school [back in the day], that has been completely watered down, in modern textbooks. Here is Ray Corsini's definition, in The Dictionary of Psychology (2002 edition): "David Premack's contention that given two behaviors with differing likelihoods of occurring, the behavior more likely to occur may be used to reinforce the less likely behavior." [Yawn]

Here's how we learned it: "Faced with two tasks, one of which is short & simple, and the other of which is long & complex, an individual is more likely to choose to do the short, simple task." Our example for teaching this to our Intro Psych students @ USNA was to ask them, "During which two weeks in the academic year are Midshipmen's belt buckles the shiniest?" Answer: "During the Pre-exam Reading Periods of 1st & 2nd semester." Why? Because, faced with the tasks of Brasso-ing one's belt buckle or studying for an Electrical Engineering exam, one will choose the simple but gratifying task of banishing tarnish from a belt buckle (and any other other metal surface) first. (Then, polishing one's shoes...)

So, here's the power of this principle. In order to increase the likelihood of tackling a long & complex task, you should "Premack" it into short(er), simple(r) little steps. If a grown-up says to a kid, "Pick up your room," (and it's not a scene from a Disney movie), the likely result will be...not a picked up room, I'm tellin' ya. If the grown-up says, "First, gather up all the used towels in your room," it will be (more likely to be) done.

When faced with that most onerous and complex of tasks, "Finish your doctoral dissertation," my classmates & I resorted to all manner of short & simple tasks, such as finishing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, or at least filling in all the S's for the plural clues. This was mid-70s, mind you, when a search of the relevant literature meant hunting down journal articles by pawing through tomes of indices, and then reading the articles on microfische...oh, it exhausts me even to tell you. So, I would Premack it: "I'll sit in the library, scribbling on my little index cards, until I have filled 10 of them, and then I'll rest from my labors (for the day). I'll come back tomorrow and do 10 more."

That's how I get up the hill each day. I Premack it: by keeping my eyes steadfastly fixed on each day-glow-orange-painted tree root, like the rungs of a ladder, just a short distance apart; and avoiding looking up the hill, to see how many, many more "rungs" are left ahead of me. [Also, to distract me from the agony of so many expended Therbligs, in my head I "sing" a song of non-lexical vocables, such as "Nana Window" or the "Ying Tong" song.]

So, do ya see, this could be a strategy to keep from being consumed by the Zeigarnik effect. "I'll think of 3 new places to look for those missing forage balls. I'll look, and then I'll rest from my labors." (That is, I'll move on to something completely different, also on my list of self-assigned tasks.) Between the push-me-pull-you of Premack & Zeigarnik, I get a surprising number of things done each day, especially considering that I am a cognitive Kangaroo. Not everything, mind you. But there's always tomorrow...

Task, Interrupted

Remember the line from George Harrison's 1966 song, "I Want to Tell You," (off of Revolver), "I feel hung up but I don't know why"? Well, a psychologist living in Russia at the time, Blyuma Wulfovna Zeigarnik, did. (...know why George Harrison felt hung up.) When she was a graduate student in Berlin in the 20s, her dissertation adviser, Kurt Lewin (father of Field Psychology, as in "If I don't get my way, I'm going to leave the field, possibly taking my football with me") noticed that a waiter who had not yet received payment for a patron's order remembered it more accurately, than the orders for which he had been paid. "BFD," I hear you remark. "Why remember a fait accompli?"

Not the point. Why is it, that we do remember (obsess about, have nightmares about, dump cortisol about) even trivial bits of unfinished business?

Here's an example from last week, that is still intruding on our domestic tranquility, humiliating me for my failure to solve the mystery, and making me fear for my sanity (a bit). A few months ago I read about forage balls for overweight or fast-eating cats. Originally designed for pigs, to simulate rooting about for food in the wild, these plastic globes with adjustable slots must be batted about by the forager, for each ort of food to be released. Zanizbar is fed in a bathroom, which sounds like a bowling alley as he biffs his ball from wall to wall. Napster, however, is fed in a former-bedroom-now-box-room, full of nooks & crannies (as they say in English muffin ads). It's like an Easter egg hunt each morning, trying to find where he's hidden his ball. First an orange one "disappeared." After expending more Therbligs trying to find it than the task deserved, I gave up and substituted a pink ball (that we had bought for Ruth, before realizing that she was too old, blind, and thin, to be required to forage for her supper).

Then the pink ball went missing...along with my skepticism regarding the fairies, who hide objects, just to create chaos. The room, though cluttered, is finite. The door is only shut during feedings, however. Perhaps the balls had made their way to another upstairs room? Believe me, both Chris & I have searched. Maybe they rolled downstairs? Let me check behind the piano, again. We eagerly await the holiday return of our daughters, so we can put them on the case.

Having gone out and spent another $8 on a blue forage ball has not, as hoped, loosened the grip of our compulsion to hunt for the Two That Got Away. We are in thrall to the Zeigarnik Effect.

Serialized books & movies, cliffhanger season-enders on TV, crossword puzzles & that Japanese number game I can't even pronounce, much less get into, all rely on this powerful need for closure. Oddly enough, "difficulty sustaining attention in...or finishing...tasks" is listed as the hallmark symptom of Kangaroo Brain (as I fondly refer to my ADD); but clearly, there is a missing qualifier here: "assigned (tasks)."

For the interrupted tasks that we assign ourselves, there is no "forget-about-it." Just ask Lili, at the window, as she awaits the next sighting of those interloping Goldens, whom a locked front door prevented her from interdicting this morning.

You'll have to excuse me, now. I've just thought of another place to look...

"I'm wild again, beguiled again..."

Lorenz Hart's original lyrics to the hit song of the 1940 musical Pal Joey, "Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered," were so risque that Bowdlerized [watered-down, Disney-fied] phrases are usually substituted, to mollify modern, Tipper Gorean sensibilities. Even if you are familiar with the song, bet you haven't heard this opening gambit, sung by a girl, already: "After one whole quart of brandy, like a daisy I awake, with no Bromo Seltzer handy..." [Talk about "Tried to make me go to rehab, but I said 'no, no, no.'"]

Sportsfans, I tell ya, simply pretending that you have no wolf [no temptation to behave recklessly and regrettably] doesn't stop your wolf from going wild. Beguiled, we'll get to in a moment.

When, in another part of the forest, I used to interview young people whose misuse of alcohol had come to the attention of the authorities, I encouraged them to recapture their [pre-bust] enthusiasm for their beverage of choice. [See the post, "Crazy Like a Fox."] To cut to the chase I would ask a young man, "Tell me what's better about an evening spent with Ethyl." [Young ladies were asked about an evening with Fred. As in Mertz. Nar'mean?] Protestations of "Nothing! Nothing was good about it! It was stupid! I was led astray by my so-called friends," were dismissed as unhelpful stonewalling. Until any of us can look back on our shenanigans from the Crazy Fox's point of view, as "seeming like a good idea, at the time," we are none the wiser about what makes us tick, and no less likely to try it again.

Even when granted amnesty [or confidentiality], though, most of my "drunken sailors" were initially reluctant to "go there": to let the Crazy Fox explain what it was trying to accomplish. The heroine of the Rogers & Hart song goes there. She tells us she is wildly, hopelessly attracted to an off-limits guy, so she spent the night with Fred [a quart of brandy]. Her Crazy Fox beguiled her into believing that Fred would take her mind off Mr. Wrong, at least temporarily. The song is a morning-after lament: "Well, 'going wild' didn't work. I'm still bewitched, bothered & bewildered by this guy, only now I have a hangover, too." I'll let you look up the original lyrics, to find out if she ever wises up, or comes to a bad end.

Trouble is, insight into the Crazy Fox's motive comes at a cost: humiliation. [Sometimes, also pain & suffering.] Not everyone is prepared to pay that price, until all other options have been exhausted. How 'bout a bit of denial? "I'm just not like that." Or rationalization? "I don't have to try to understand this, because it's a one-time-deal, not a pattern." Or projection? "I didn't start this. S/he did provoke [beguile] me."

Recommended reading: the mid-section of DFW's Infinite Jest, featuring the AA meetings.

Imagine what Lili & Zanzibar are saying in this picture. Actually, there were no shenanigans going on here, for once. Peaceable kingdom. But doesn't Lili look guilty of something?

Gingerism Is No Joke

Centuries before those wiseguys, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, wrote Episode 911 of South Park ["Ginger Kids," which was first aired on 9 Nov 05], individuals with red hair were the objects of fear & loathing, as well as assault & murder. The ancient Egyptians used to sacrifice them regularly, "for good luck." In Medieval Europe, red-haired individuals were feared as vampires. In Czarist Russia they were all regarded as insane. Frank McCourt wrote that in the Limerick of his youth, redheads were assumed to be of Protestant [Scottish] descent, and therefore hated. In the UK in 2003 [2 years prior to South Park 911, mind you] a 20-year-old youth was fatally stabbed in the back "for being a Ginger," according to his assailant.

When Rosie received solo-tour orders to Shanghai, 3 months into Myrna's pregnancy with my older sister, they made a red-haired-girl contingency plan, to "give her a name with its own nickname reference to her hair color," to spare her Rosie's fate. In the Chicago of his youth, red-haired children were jeered, "Redhead, gingerbread, 2 cents a loaf." Thus, in the fullness of time, his shipmate ["Blood" Doner, speaking of onerous monickers] handed Rosie a telegram: "Baby Virginia Darling." Rosie wired back, "So it's a red-haired girl; but why the Southern middle name?" [His idea of a little joke.] As often happens with babies, Ginger's flaming red hair fell out, grew back in blonde, and then morphed into a subtle bronze, like an old penny, not a new one. [For rufus boys, the head-'em-off-at-the-pass name was Russell, so they could be called Rusty, ya know. These days, apparently, it's Rufus.]

So, what is up with all this ancient & modern "gingerism" [as the Manchester Guardian dubbed this form of discrimination, in 2003], anyway? I shall now [color]blind you with [some genetic and social] science. The rarest of hair colors, red is the result of a [recessive] mutation in the MC1R gene. Because it is highly correlated with pale/freckled skin, it offers the survival advantage of higher absorption of Vitamin D [a protection against Rickets] It is expressed in 13% of the Scots and 10% of the Irish. [Not all of dem, d'ya see, now.] It is "very common" in Ashkenazi [European] Jews. [Think Woody Allen.] Currently in the US, [natural] red hair is found in "2 to 6% of the population."

Professor Cary Cooper, a British psychologist, opines that redheads are a convenient target of malice, because they are "a visible minority, not protected by law." Without presuming to know their motives, I speculate that Messrs. Parker & Stone chose "Ginger Kids" for their parable about baseless prejudice, because they had no idea [at the time] that "gingerism" was a real problem. They might just as well have chosen sinistrality [left-handedness, with which red hair is significantly correlated]. Nevertheless, their lack of response, so far, in the face of recent Facebook-mediated, South Park inspired "Kick-a-Ginger-Day" assaults among middle-schoolers, is not very Menschlich [stand-up], in my opinion. Their disclaimer, that no one under 17 [unable to discern Poetic Speech reliably] should have watched the episode, misses the point.

Let's do a little wolf-work. [Way] back in the day, aggression against the rufus was prompted by fear: of vampires and lunatics. In Limerick [if McCourt's red-hair-means-you're-a-Prod association is right], the anger stemmed from the intrusion and humiliation that Irish Catholics felt/feel at the hands of their Scots-Irish [British] overlords. The common association of red hair with a short temper may prompt others to dread that a red-haired person is more likely to inflict pain & suffering [although the scientific evidence suggests that they are, themselves, more sensitive to (thermal) pain than others].

What I wanna know is, what about redheads got up the noses of Parker & Stone, and their media outlet, Comedy Central? Their current silence has the whiff of Unacknowledged Wolf.

Gratitude

No doubt, most gatherings of family, friends & invited strangers seated around the table on this Thanksgiving were given an opportunity to express their gratitude, either individually or collectively, either sincerely or flippantly [depending on the group demographics]. Whatever was identified as a cause for giving thanks, the very act of doing so [according to Martin Seligman and other mavens of Positive Psychology] did the "thanks-giver" good.

In fact, the more unfortunate and hard-done by an individual is feeling [like Lili on the Penalty Box Rug], the more beneficial it is, to "Accentuate the Positive" [as the lyrics of a Depression-era song advised]. Irony is almost unavoidable, and totally okay, in this exercise. Such as, in the genre of joke that ends "...unless you consider the alternative." [Usually, being dead.] I wonder if there is, even now, a jolly japester fashioning zombie & vampire jokes in this vein...

As part of my dawn get-ready-to-face-the-day routine, while zoning out for 50 minutes of aerobic exercise [in the convenience & privacy of my basement, for which, I give thanks], my iPod playlist includes at least one tongue-in-cheek [but also sincere] "gratitude" song. For years, it has been a song off of The Holloways' album, So This Is Great Britain? ["Generator"], the refrain of which is, "May I remind you that you don't live in poverty? You got your youth, and you got food in your belly." [Well, c'mon, folks, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, nar'mean?] These days, it tends to be a song off of Paolo Nutini's 2nd album, Sunnyside Up ["Pencil Full of Lead"], which is a Dixeland-meets-Gilbert & Sullivan-patter-song enumerating the things for which the diminutive Glaswegian son-of-a-fishmonger is grateful, featuring the chorus, "I've got food in my belly and a license for my telly." I feel the BBC should be grateful that young Poalo makes the payment of Britain's mandatory TV & radio license fee [of 139 pounds, 50 pence, Sterling] sound so fabuloso, with every refrain.

Beyond any metaphysical benefit daily gratitude bestows upon the thanks-giver, at the corporeal level, it blocks the production of cortisol and encourages the production of endorphins. I find it a helpful antidote to the 4 horsemen of what-gets-up-my-nose, on any given day. "It's 5.15 in the bleedin' morning, and you're alive & able-bodied enough to be down here working up a sweat." [There! Intrusion and pain & suffering neutralized, with one co-ordinate clause.] "While I'm busy here in "the bike room," Lili is having a barkfest at Arnold, her neighboring German shepherd, thereby adding some joyful chaos to the morning." [Boom! Intrusion and humiliation re-framed and diminished.]

I could go on, but you get the idea.

"In hindsight..."

I am somewhat reluctant to pick on her, maybe because of her team's name, but today's quotation in the NYTimes from a suddenly notorious college soccer player is exactly what I am on about, in this blog: "I look at it [the replay of her controversial, but mostly un-carded game] and I'm like, 'That is not me.' I have so much regret. I can't believe I did that."

Remember, way back in one of my earliest posts, I recounted the retrospective musings of two female college applicants, who had been caught doing the same antisocial deed. One made a sincere attempt to understand "what got into her," to provoke her to violate her own [and society's] code of conduct. The other simply offered the Werewolf Defense: in so many words, "I have no idea. That is not me."

To which I would reply, were I speaking to either that long-ago applicant or to today's Girl Gone Wild, "That is, potentially, all of us, kiddo. Especially if we are unwilling to 'do the wolf-work' of reviewing the regrettable event, until we come to understand what got into us [up our nose]." If you look up accounts of that fateful game, you will see several clues, as to what "got up the nose" of this young athlete. In one instance, which led to her most aggressive response, her opponent executed a crafty "crotch grab" [as one sports reporter terms it]. Let's do the wolf-work, shall we? Ya got yer intrusion, possibly yer pain, and I would guess some humiliation goin' on. Three precursors to anger, delivered in one, surreptitious movement, probably not visible to the ref. Maybe not even illegal, if seen. The point of this exercise in wolf-work is not to justify the player's angry reaction, but to understand what prompted it. Not for you or me to understand it, sportsfans. For the suspended player to understand it, herself. So she doesn't have to go through the rest of her life like a werewolf, crying "That is not me."

How many of us find it totemic, that she was playing for the Lobos?

About a Bird

Readers of this blog might have the impression that my mother was only a featured player in our family variety show. That flamboyant Rosie was the star. Indeed, when he was present, he was usually the Top Banana; but he would be the first to declare that my mother was the Class Act.

In telling her story, I shall try to resist the cognitive distortions of Black & White [all or nothing] and catastrophic ["This is awful!"] thinking. But it will be hard. Myrna [Deal with it. She had to.] was a precocious pianist, who began concertizing in Ohio and Washington, DC, in her early teens. She won a national piano contest, the prize for which was a scholarship to The Juilliard School of Music [whence she graduated with a Bachelor of Science (!) degree in 1943]. You are given a main mentor there, and hers was James Friskin [a Bach maven]; but Alexander Siloti [Rachmaninoff's cousin] also taught there during her Juilliard years.

Now, Mumsley [a silly name my sister & I gave her, about the time our English cat got saddled with Ying Tong] was an elfin little creature: 5'2" with very small hands. This is crucial to the absolutely true story I am about to relate [which I have fact-checked with my sister and the Internet]. One day in 1954, when we were living in Tarrytown, NY, our parents piled us into the wallowing Buick for a mystery tour, to a sprawling country house in a not-nearby-enough-for-me town [possibly Mt. Pleasant, near Valhalla, where Rachmaninoff is buried]. Myrna had been invited by "some Cousins of Rachmaninoff" [we figure, Siloti's family], to "show them how she did it." See, Rachmaninoff has been retrospectively diagnosed with Marfans. He was 6'6" with huge paws, and wrote music for big-handed folks like himself. Now, whether they had heard her nifty 15-minute wartime radio show, or read a review of a concert she gave featuring the Russian giant, they wanted to watch her in action.

At 5 years old, and already dreading the drive home, I was morose...until the Cousins let fly the parakeets. Talk about chaos! As Myrna was playing, a bird alighted on the temple of her glasses, and stared her in the eye. Trouper that she was, she just kept on playing. "Open your mouth," invited a Cousin. "He'll check your teeth." Myrna smiled, but kept her jaw clenched. When the command performance was over, a Cousin asked if we had a cat. Rosie piped up, "Yes, but we'll take another, if you're offering." "Actually, we were going to offer you 'Pretty Bird' [the avian dentist]; but you have a cat." "We'll make it work!" assured Rosie; and home we drove, with a blue parakeet, who withstood the aerobatic maneuvers of Chip-Chip the tabby tom [whom you have yet to meet], and later of Alfred the dog, for 6 years, without mishap.

When Myrna was 35 [and I was 10], she got Multiple Sclerosis. The English still call the most rapidly-progressing type [which the cellist Jacqueline du Pre had] "galloping." Mumsley had "cantering" MS. She continued to play publicly for another 10 years, although she required a wheelchair by then. She died 3 months before my first child was born, at 61 [my age now].

Because she was a Goody-Two-Shoes, teetotalling, sweet-natured person, it is tempting to reduce her life to an ironic cliche: "Virtue is its own punishment." My sister's & my fears for her led us to many impatient [angry] outcries of "Oh, Mums-ley!" As if we could shout her back to health. But she never lost patience with us, and not often with herself. She remained the mistress of the deadpan one-liner. The last time I saw her, my in-laws were visiting and she was listening, as always, to the classical music radio station. "Oh, I just love La Traviata!" enthused my mother-in-law. "How 'bout Il Trovatore?" rejoined Mumsley.

A Class Act.

Ciotogach (Kithogue)

I've promised my daughters that one day we will turn the story of "Kithogue, the War Cat" into a proper book; but until then, she's going to illustrate Peckham's point about the value of chaos in uncertain times and situations. Mostly, I'm going to let Rosie's letters, written from his little ship, the USS Vammen (DE 644), during the Korean War, tell the story, with a bit of mise en scene commentary from me.

Written "At Sea, August 11, 1952," the first letter describes how he came to bring a cat aboard, on the last day before sailing from Hawaii to join his battle group in the Pacific. While visiting friends, "I made the acquaintance of a small kitten estimated at about 3 months old, and tentatively identified as a girl. What with one thing and another, she is now living in the cabin with me and eating wardroom mess cooking with no apparent harmful effects. She is not entirely housebroken. I have adopted a wait-and-see (and clean up) attitude. When we are in Midway, I will acquire a lot of sand, the island being entirely composed of this stuff, and see if her efforts cannot be localized. She spends a good part of the day playing in this typewriter. When I press the outer keys she bats at the inner ones as they come up and hit her in the nose. This pastime of ours has been observed by a few of the crew and, presumably, reported to the rest. However, I am still treated with all due respect; and cat (who at the moment is nameless) and I shall probably continue to play this damned fool game."

For awhile he and the crew just called her "Neko-san," (the Japanese for addressing a cat); but he decided the black marking on her back looked like "a lobster's left claw," so named her "Ciotogach" (which is Irish for left-handed). No surprise, I suppose, that this was also one of Rosie's childhood nicknames, since he was a South-paw. By the way, does she remind you of any other cat who has appeared in this blog? [One whom he acquired, thinking it was female?]

"Sasebo, Japan, 22 Sept., 1952" After a spell of off-shore bombardment along the North Korean coastline, the ship was back in its Japanese homeport, making ready to go back out. "I must tell you about the night the cat fell overboard. One of the officers had brought her back a ping pong ball. She had been playing with it in the wardroom, batting it around like a soccer ball and having the time of her life. About the time the movies started, someone opened the wardroom door and she managed to bat the ball out into the forward passageway, she right after it. From there, it went out on the main deck and forward to the foc'sle. She hopped right after it and got so engrossed in her game that she went right over the side between ourselves and the USS Marsh. The bow sentry heard the splash and then heard her yelling in the water. He ran aft along the side, keeping track of her as she drifted aft. She was yelling bloody murder so loudly that she could be heard over all the din of the movies. One of the men got a flashlight and shone it down in the water between the ships. She was swimming furiously and had the sense to swim into the beam of light if she drifted out of it. Another man got a swab [mop] and lowered himself down between the ships, with another man holding him by the feet. He was able to get the mop end of the swab near the cat. She swam to it and hung on for dear life. The swab was passed back up to the deck with the cat still clutching it, and we pulled the two men up. They decided they would have to give her a bath to wash the oil off her. Eventually, three big officers were able to overpower her and get her clean again. They dried her off and got some warm milk in her. She acted a little more demented than usual for an hour or so, but somebody found another ping pong ball, and she went right back to the game. This experience has given the ship a new sense of unity. Everyone aboard is concerned with the cat's welfare now. She plays all over the ship and with everybody. If she gets too close to the side someone will grab her and put her in a safe place. If she walks into wet paint and gets stuck, as she did, someone will rescue her."

"Yellow Sea, 4 Oct., 1952" This time, in the midst of battle, with a typhoon brewing. "Yesterday we nearly lost the cat again. She climbed up some rigging until she was perched in the whaleboat falls near the top of the boat davits, out over the side. About this time we turned into the wind so the carrier could launch planes. She was finally seen clinging to the ropes of the boat falls for dear life, with her fur streaming back in the 35 knot wind and, of course, hollering. One of the stewards climbed up and rescued her. I hope she stays alive until we get back to the States." [She, and the rest of the ship's crew, did.]

There are lots of other "Ciotogach" stories, like when the Rear Admiral visited the ship, and ordered that the "f%#king cat" [who was clinging to the seat of the steward's pants, howling for turkey] be fed first. Talk about the sentimental Muscovites! No one aboard "her" ship, it seems, was able to resist that cat's agenda. Yes, she was often an intrusion, but also a welcome distraction from the fearful experience of fighting in an underfunded [sound familiar?], unpopular, no-win war.

Although they remain "non-reg[ulation]," I am willing to bet that some cats [and even some dogs] are currently serving aboard our Naval vessels deployed in the Gulf, offering their shipmates the gift of chaos.

Man's Rage for Chaos

Morse Peckham's argument, in his 1969 book by this title, is that artists periodically save [their particular] civilization, by introducing chaos into a culture that has become too rule-bound and brittle to survive. To use my current parlance, every now and then, the Kangaroos [with their iconoclastic, outside-the-box, zigging & zagging] save the lock-stepping Clydesdales from collapsing under the burden of their hide-bound rules.

Peckham traces the progression of stylistic changes in music, poetry, painting & architecture; but [for reasons to be revealed in a future post], I'll just recap his musical musings. Let's use J.S. Bach as our exemplar of the Baroque era [1600-1750]. Are ya bored yet? Hang on, there are going to be wild dogs later. Mozart will be our guy from the Classical era [1740-1810]; and Beethoven will represent the Romantic era [1810-1910]. So, Peckham opines that each of these guys broke [some of the] the rules of the preceding era [as did their fellow poets, painters & architects], in ways that helped the people of their era(s) to roll with the changes [brought about by scientific discoveries, political unrest, and such like]. Nar'mean? The melodic line of their tunes got progressively smoother, from Bach, to Mozart, to Beethoven; and the rules of society got progressively looser. [To quote Cole Porter, "In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, anything goes!"]

And now to the subway-riding wild dogs of Moscow. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to look up this story, which appeared in [shock!] the online version of the UK tabloid, The Sun, this week. Under the Soviet system, ownerless dogs sought shelter at factory sites in Moscow, and mooched their food from sentimental Muscovites. After the fall [of the wall, ya know], the factories were relocated to the suburbs; and the dogs trotted after them, for a warm place to sleep. But the food source was still downtown, so the dogs learned to ride the Metro to their old pan-handling spots, like Gorky Park. According to Dr. Andrei Poiarkov, of the Moscow Ecology & Evolution Institute, the dogs travel in packs, and amuse themselves by waiting until the subway doors are just about to close, to jump on. ["Last one in is a sore-tailed mutt."] Now here is the Peckham part of the story. In the still photos and the video, it is apparent [to me, at least] that the human commuters enjoy their canine fellow travelers. They are standing, smiling indulgently, while the dogs sleep on the seats. In the video an old Russian Wolfhound is walking down the escalator, weaving among the standees on the stairs; and someone whistles to him softly, all on one note. Nothing. Then [as I do, to give Lili the "jump" command], he whistles a 3-note melody; and the dog sits down on the escalator stair. [He gets up again pretty quickly, mind you, and resumes his walking.]

So here's my point. Many Russians are having a stressful time, post-wall-fall, especially economically. The old rules of "obey & survive" don't apply anymore, and the new rules are...as yet, unwritten. That's a source of fear for some. The wild dogs provide comic relief. [That old juxtaposition of an animal in an unexpected venue, gets us every time.] Their presence on the Metro seems random [chaotic], yet they move with the precision of a drill team [order]. In fact, thinking back on all the animals in my past and present, I think what they always bring is the gift of chaos.

Here are our 3 cats, in harmonious repose, not in one of our daughters' [frequently] disheveled rooms, but in the Master Suite. [Napster, the black cat, is trying to use a dark pillow as camouflage. Don't be alarmed at his apparent size & shape.] Who cares if it looks like a New Yorker cartoon from the 1920s? It's not a photo shoot for Architectural Digest. Loosen up, will ya?

Bronx Cheer

When my father got back from the Korean War and we moved to New York, I was 5 [and my sister was 6]. In what would be called these days, an effort to "bond" with us, he made up for 3 years of lost parenting time by teaching us to play chess and cribbage, and to use a logarithmic slide rule. [Look it up, you Young Ones; and keep the Internet handy, cuz more historical references will follow.] We also got into [radio broadcasts of] baseball. My mother & sister [both Cleveland natives] were Indians fans, while Rosie & I were all about the Brooklyn Dodgers. My enthusiasm outstripped my accuracy, as I raced around the apartment shouting, "Come quick! It's 'Dike Snooder' at bat!" [Also a big fan of "Pee Wee Weese," I was.] Our parents were fairly ecumenical about whom we could support: Anyone but the Yankees.

My father's motto was: "Rooting for the Yankees is like hoping for King Faroukh to win at roulette." At the time Rosie coined this bon mot, the penultimate King of Egypt [aka "The Thief of Cairo"] was reckoned to be the world's richest man, yet notorious for pilfering valuable artifacts from other heads of state whom he visited [including Winston Churchill]. Thus, our contempt for the Yankees was based, even in the 50s, on the egregiously "uneven playing field" that overpayment of their players created. Baseball, after all, was supposed to be a metaphor for the American Dream: a meritocracy, not a plutocracy.

When we moved to the UK, and the British tried to label me a "Yank[ee]," I would [rather cryptically] respond, "How dare you! I was always a Dodgers fan, until dey left Brooklyn, da bums!" The only part of this they grasped was "bums," which was rather a rude word for a 12-year-old girl to be using, in those days. When I went to Duke, and a "Magnolia Honey" would remark, "Whah, you mus' be a Yankee!" I would give her the same retort, leaving her baffled, as well. Ah, the power of the Poetic Speech function! Keeps 'em guessing.

So, anyway, why do we sports fans [even those of us who don't have a wager on the outcome], get so worked up when our team loses? The Manifest reason is, "Cuz we was robbed!" [The umpire was sight-challenged or corrupt. Add your own conspiracy theory here.] But the Latent reason [as in, "What gets up our nose" about the loss] is often humiliation as the victors litter Broadway with mountains of "ticker tape" [which long-forsaken paper product is as passe as the slide rule]; but also the intrusion of Farouhk-like wealth on one side, to "buy" the outcome. [A casual glance at the jubilant NYTimes headlines this week might have you wondering, were they talking sports or politics?]

There's nothing more infuriating than a fixed contest [especially when it doesn't go in your favor]. Rosie always used to stomp around the house in mock indignation while watching the Miss Universe Pageant. "It's all rigged, I tell you! It always goes to an Earthling!" [Talk about da bums...]

Tame Thing

My parents may have been avant garde, in using Ying Tong [the Wild Thing] as a "therapy pet," to break my cycle of paroxysmal coughing; but earlier still [in 1956] they got Alfred [the Tame Thing], to gently awaken me from my frequent nightmares.

My father's name was Alfred, but his family called him Red, and his Naval Academy moniker was Rosie [by which he was known for the rest of his life]. Bestowing his unused name on our new puppy, he joked that Alfred-the-dog "could sign checks while (Rosie) was at sea"; and thereby hangs a tale. During the Korean War, my father's ship [a Destroyer] was catastrophically damaged [either mined or torpedoed], and the initial news reports listed Rosie among the dead. We found out the next day, via cryptic telegram, that he was alive. In fact, he had been instrumental in saving the ship [he couldn't swim]; and was then given a command of his own [a Destroyer Escort, which, years later, "starred" as the USS Kornblatt in the film Don't Give Up the Ship]. Meanwhile, when Rosie finally got some shore leave in California, between deployments, we went to visit family friends in Hollywood, just in time for an earthquake! Not a huge one, mind you; but it made a lasting impression on my young [3 or 4-year old] psyche.

From then on, I was prone to nightmares [especially when my father was about to deploy] in which earthquakes and explosions at sea were combined to harrowing effect; and I developed a nifty knack for the Hitchcock-victim-scream, thereby waking up the whole household. When I was turning 8, an Academy classmate of Rosie's, stationed with us in Newport, had a purebred Cocker Spaniel who had just had 3 puppies; and we got Alfred, whose job it was to keep watch over me by night, so that the rest of them could get some sleep.

Some years later, when both our family and Alfred's dam's family had moved to Annapolis, we took him to see his mother, who barked with disdain and chased him into the Bay. By then it had become clear that Alfred's sire was not her usual purebred Spaniel mate, but Dusty [a mix of Chow, Spitz, and Husky, who could apparently scale a 6-foot fence]. What a sweet-tempered dog he turned out to be, though. More significantly, he served as a Transitional Object for me [a living teddy], to stand in loco paternis, when his namesake was away at sea. He had hybrid vigor and lived to be 18, spending many of those years interacting with the bellicose Ying Tong, whom he never stopped trying to befriend.

So, this is a second answer to Sendak's question, "How do children survive?" When their parents are physically, emotionally, or otherwise unavailable to protect them, children rely on the comforting presence of animals [imaginary, stuffed, or real] to help them through the rough stuff.

"How do children survive?"

Maurice Sendak's question is quoted at the top of an article about Where the Wild Things Are, in The Psychologist, the journal of The British Psychological Society [of which I have been a member since the 70s], written by an American psychoanalyst, Richard Gottlieb, whose thesis seems to be that Sendak had a rotten childhood, so he writes about children having rotten childhoods, who nevertheless, against all odds, survive.

Predictably, I beg to differ. Some aspects of Sendak's childhood [like yours & mine] were rotten. His genius has been to transform his tough stuff into images [visual and verbal] that kids receive with delighted recognition: "I know just how Max/Mickey/Pierre/Really Rosie feels, cuz sometimes I feel that way, too." In Gottlieb's tone, I detect the whiff of unacknowledged wolf. He even tries to make psychoanalytic hay out of Max's wearing "his wolf-suit" [which, tonight being Halloween, I'm betting we'll see more than one of, at our front door]. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a wolf-suit is just a wolf-suit.

Now, to introduce Ying Tong, the Worst Cat in the World, whom I credit with my childhood survival. Like little Maurice, I was a sickly child [although my parents didn't "make a dog's dinner" of their concerns about my health, unlike the Sendaks]. In the winter of 1961 I developed severe bronchitis, and my constant bouts of phlegmy coughing made it almost impossible to keep food down. When we had moved to the UK the previous summer, we had tearfully left our dog Alfred behind [because of the draconian 6-month quarantine rule], so on Christmas eve my father burst into the house [bleeding and swearing profusely], and pried a black & white, snarling Wild Thing off his neck, saying, "Merry effing Christmas!" My parents had secretly agreed that the family needed a local pet, to ease the loss of Alfred. The cat was a rescue from the RSPCA, supposedly female [and therefore named by my mother "Jingle Belle"]; but later assessed by the vet as Ever So Male: "Perhaps you would like to call him 'Jingle Bill'?" We fell into the habit of calling him Ying Tong, after the Goon Show song, "Ying Tong Iddle I Po." [Another gem of non-lexical vocables, suitable for lowering anxiety.]

The cat was the bane of the street, commando-raiding the neighbor children's outdoor tea table and making off with their Marmite sandwiches; climbing another neighbor's sapling tree and chewing off all the buds. Inside the house, he would lurk under my bed, snarling with menace. I would do the longjump from the hallway to under my bed covers, and he would pounce, trying to bite me through my many layers of duvet. Then [and this is the Beauty Part] he would curl up on my chest and fall asleep. My parents theorized [and I agreed] that the very credible threat of a woken up Ying Tong's wrath would strongly motivate me to resist the urge to cough, thereby keeping my food down and my strength up. And, lo, I survived! And, despite his rotten disposition, I just loved that cat.

The week we were set to move back to the US, a worried neighbor knocked at our door, asking if we owned "that large back & white smooth." My mother said, "Yes. What's he done now?" "Well, I'm afraid, been run down by a lorry. He's in our front garden," said she. Cheer up. He didn't die from his injuries, which were extensive: a broken hind leg, a broken jaw, and a gash in his side. In fact, he became [marginally] sweeter. Because he chewed off his plaster cast on the voyage home, his leg fused in a straight-out position; but that did not affect his agility or speed. When we got to our new duty station, we were [unexpectedly, but joyously] reunited with our beloved dog Alfred, and were also given a gray & white cat [whose markings were identical to Ying Tong's]. That cat had 7 kittens [none of which was going to St. Ives], all of whom learned to sit with one hind leg extended, in apparent emulation of "Uncle Ying Tong," who lived to the age of 18.

So, my answer to Maurice Sendak's question is: Children survive by consorting with fierce creatures [both human and 4-legged; both inside themselves and Out There]. To make the wolf [or a vicious cat] your friend is sometimes the key to making it into adulthood, against all odds.

Timber Wolf

Before we consider the genius of Maurice Sendak [in the next post], let's hear it for the amygdala [which I am usually offering readers tips on subduing, or at least bending to their will]. If you look up "timber wolf," you will see a photo of a black wolf, who looks quite like Lili [except Lili's ears are bigger and shaggier, like an over-the-top stage version of the wolf in a melodrama]. Since she is my totem to represent the amygdala [and I am feeling particularly grateful to her, for alerting me to falling branches in the woods, this rainy season], I shall henceforth regard her as my "Timber! wolf": a niche-market service dog who warns its owner of a very specific [hopefully, rare] hazard, thereby inspiring confidence during woodland walks.

Speaking of (actual) service dogs, this week's New Yorker has an article entitled "Man's Best Friend: Scratch and Sniff," describing the ability of several dogs in the K-9 Unit of the New Jersey Department of Corrections, to detect the presence of contraband cell phones in prisons, by "scent." It's a heartwarming article [unless you are incarcerated in New Jersey, Virginia, or Maryland], but here is my favorite bit. I shall quote, as the article does, K-9 Officer Mitchell: "All our dogs right now are German shepherds or Labs. We did try one golden retriever, but we had to fail him out. That dog was too easy going. He'd come into a room on a search and just lay down. We sent him back to the Seeing Eye dog center in Morristown, where all our cell-phone dogs came from. That golden was a lover, not a fighter."

So, what breed of dog are you? What is the default setting, in your amygdala? Do you tend to "bark" at the first whiff of threat? Do you, instead, high-tail it outta there? Or do you go into the deer-in-the-headlights freeze? And, anyway, which limbic response do we think that golden was displaying, lolling around on the cellblock floor? Is that the laid-back form of freezing? [Gives "Chill out" a whole new meaning.] To use an Australian animal metaphor, in the choice of a K-9 partner to sniff out the dodgy stuff, it's a matter of "horses for courses." [By which a racecourse punter in Oz means to say, if the bobtail nag is a good mudder, and the track is listed as "sloppy" that day, bet your money on her; but if the track is listed as "fast," bet on the bay. No worries, mate.] So, if a dog is limbically wired to bark at a perceived threat, it is a better bet for contraband detection, than one wired to run away or freeze [or loll, even].

In fact, all dogs [and horses, and people] are capable of all 3 limbic responses. It's just that one response is more typical or characteristic of any given individual. Here is where I invoke our acting school aphorism: "Know your type, and love your type." I love Lili for her vigilance [even if she issues many false alarms in the course of a day]; and I know that my limbic wiring is closer to hers, than to the 2 hippy-dippy golden retrievers next door. My goal is not to "change breeds," but to become the best German shepherd [or even Timber wolf] I can, by lowering my incidence of false alarms.

Lumbered

In 1961 our family [and just about everyone else in the UK] went to see Anthony Newley's WestEnd musical, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, which was thrillingly cynical [especially to us Young Ones], about what is euphemized in the US as "a shotgun wedding." Newley wrote & sang the phrase, "I've been lumbered." It sounded like another example of Cockney slang [the meaning evident from the context]; but it's actually ever so old, dating from the 1500s in England, and the 1300s in Continental Europe. It refers to an Italian ethnic group, the Lombardi, who were pawn-brokers and money-lenders. Lombard Street in London was so named for its plethora of pawnshops. [Incidentally, did you know, "Pop goes the weasel" is a euphemism for pawning a fur garment?] The Oxford Concise Dictionary (1911 ed.) defines "to be lumbered" as "to be burdened with something unpleasant" [which pawn-brokers were: namely, the "popped" weasels, used furniture, and other old tat that their clients had exchanged, for enough money to buy more rice & treacle]. Nar'mean?

Last week's exploration of Guthrie's One-Trial Learning theory was prompted by an event in the forest, during Lili's & my morning walk. It had been raining for days, and then it got windy. The beaten path was like a waterslide in the downhill parts, to avoid which, I was detouring right through the trees, for better footing. As I came to the next downhill bit, I heard a tremendous crack, like the detonation of a shotgun, directly in front of me. First, I froze. Then I looked behind me, to see if a deer had been shot [since I, happily, had not]. Then I looked directly ahead, to see if I could spot a hunter and tell him to cease fire. Lili, meanwhile, looked straight up. Following her gaze, I saw a huge branch break off a tree, and fall right on the spot where I had planned to walk. Amazingly, I did not utter my trademark Hitchcock-victim scream, but just calmly followed Lili [my Pack Leader pro tem] along the slippery path, away from the newly fallen lumber.

We used to think Lili was silly, to look up warily at every looming object she passed [such as playing field lampposts, the water tower, and even our ceiling fan, when it first turns on or off]. Now I get her point. I was looking everywhere but up, in the woods; and without Lili's vigilance I would have been well and truly lumbered.

Then I wondered if the next day I would shy away from that specific part of the woods, or if I would be more amygdally aroused in general, especially by any "gunshot" noises. In fact, I was able to cognitively reframe the falling branch as "a lucky escape," rather than a "trauma"; and we have had remarkably serene walks. Today was the first time my husband has been able to come with us in two weeks, and it had been bucketing rain last night, so I remarked, "I hope all the branches have done their falling, by the time we pass through." Several 100 yards past the site of last week's fallen branch, he pointed to an 8-inch-in-diameter, newly fallen tree, lying directly across our path, and said, "Well, there you go." [It's not the one pictured here. No camera today.] Lili glanced up warily at an adjacent, precariously-balanced tree, decided it posed no immediate hazard, and jumped over the fallen lumber.

So, even without a tailor-made X-Box game [Timber!], I have been able to do my own limbic debriefing, and avoid being lumbered with a fear habit about our beloved walks on the wild side. In the thick of the forest, I will trust Lili's big ears and big eyes, to warn me of impending danger from above. Still, I will be the judge of whether the people and animals we encounter on the ground are friends or foes.

Meanwhile, since last week, I have not flinched once while riding shotgun with my husband. See, we can learn to tame our Wild Things [aka howling limbic wolves], of which, more next time.

Virtual Backgammon

Yes, I admit it. I am a Luddite, but not a Troglodyte. Until last Sunday I regarded computer games [especially the one which spends electricity, merely to spare the player the Therbligs it would take to shuffle and lay out an actual deck of cards] as a waste of time and resources. Not any more.

I direct your attention to a BBC on-line [see, I do use my MacBook for more than word processing] article, posted on 18 Oct 09: Virtual Reality Tackles "Shell Shock." In it, the Beeb's medical correspondent, Fergus Walsh, describes the successful treatment of 30 [out of a group of 40] US military personnel diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, following several tours of duty in Iraq. Alas, the 30 who responded well to the treatment were thereafter sent back to Iraq, or on to Afghanistan. But I digress...

The [non-radioactive, non-pharmaceutical] treatment was developed by Albert Rizzo, of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, and is based on the X-Box game, Full Spectrum Warrior. We'll get to the [literally] whiz-bang features of the current treatment soon, but first, back to Vienna.

If you recall my original "Backgammon" post, Freud used that game metaphor to describe the capture and imprisonment of one's "soldiers" at the scene(s) of particularly harrowing "battles" in the course of one's life. Lose too many troops [which he conceptualized as psychic energy], and you become unable to "soldier on." His therapeutic model encouraged the traumatized individual to revisit the distressing events, recalling them in as much detail as s/he could manage, with the goal of "liberating the hostage soldiers" [regaining psychic energy]. In the actual game of backgammon, one has to throw a specific dice score, to move a "soldier" off the bar, and allow him to complete his journey home to safety ["bearing off"]. Why did this psychotherapeutic treatment take so long [or not work at all]? Resistance. Having survived [sometimes, just barely] a traumatic event, who would want to "go there" again? The Jack Nicholson censor in the mind tells the would-be recollector of a trauma, "You can't handle the truth! I'm not going to let you remember what really happened back there."

Let's use the wolf [up-your-nose] model to explain the same thing. By definition, the traumatic event was frightening. If a major injury was sustained, there was pain & suffering. Often, the trauma involved the sudden intrusion of hostile individuals or their devices of destruction. Less obviously, but saliently, there may have been humiliating circumstances [such as a momentary loss of nerve, or loss of continence]. When the amygdala is thus aroused, the hippocampus is deprived of blood. Therefore, the brain's most direct information-processing site is "off-line" during the traumatic event. Victims of violent crime are notoriously bad at picking their assailant out of a line-up. Back in college, I was a very weak witness during my deposition for my roommate's totalled car lawsuit: unable to remember the make of the car that hit us, or even the make of the car we were in! [Luckily, the guy settled out of court, just as our case was called.]

Guthrie's One-Trial Learning model is also relevant here. The complex stimuli of a traumatic event [the cue] may be followed by an evasive movement [as is my case], or by an aggressive movement, or by a catatonic freeze. When I was a VA Psychology Trainee in 1973, working with veterans "fresh out of the jungle" [of Vietnam], the most commonly cued movement in our clientele was aggression. Assaulting a stranger who accidentally brushed up against you from behind would get you arrested in a New York minute, back in the day. The best explanation the assailant could offer the judge was the non-specific, "All-of-a-sudden, I was back in Nam." [Just like, all-of-a-sudden, in that shotgun seat, I am back in Durham.]

In 1999, Rothbaum et al. modified an X-Box wargame to treat a 50-year-old Vietnam vet, who had been suffering flashbacks and other PTSD symptoms since that war. Their hope was that Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy would overcome the patient's resistance [or limbically-induced amnesia], allowing him to re-experience, in a safe and controlled setting, the traumatic events that had held him hostage for 3 decades. Once the memories were recovered, the conventional therapeutic work of processing the information and assisting the patient to "handle the truth" could begin.

As the lead clinician in the current San Diego study says, "Our different senses are very powerful cues to our memory." Therefore, as well as tailoring the sights and sounds to re-enact the individual soldier's traumatic event(s), the Virtual Reality program adds realistic motion [such as vibrations and sudden impacts] and smells: burning rubber, cordite, garbage, smoke, diesel fuel, Iraqui spices and what is euphemized as "body odor" [but was more likely ordure]. The subject's heart rate and galvanic skin response [both measures of anxiety] are constantly monitored during the 30-minute VR sessions, to "keep it real," but not so real that the original [fight/flight/freeze] movement is triggered. Then an hour of debriefing and talk-therapy ensues. The entire treatment consists of only 4 once-weekly sessions.

Just think of all the Therbligs such a treatment method could save the government! More importantly, just think of all the "hostage soldiers" it could "liberate" from their traumatic war experiences.

One-Trial Learning

The American philosopher-turned-behavioral-psychologist, Elwin R. Guthrie (1886-1959), challenged other Behaviorists of his time, by declaring: "A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement." BFD? You're missing the "heaviosity" of his premise. Unlike Pavlov [Big Daddy of Classical Conditioning] or Skinner [BD of Operant Conditioning], Guthrie was the BD of Associative Learning. No reward need be given, said he, for a movement to become "cued" by a stimulus. Forget the all the use of High-Value-Treats to reward the desired response, advocated by dog trainers, or the symbolic reward, the clicker [which betokens to the dog that a treat has been earned, redeemable at a later time]. According to Guthrie, it only takes one coincidence of stimulus and movement, for the two things to become forever paired. Boom! Done! [Pavlov's dogs had to have many pairings of sub-lingual meat powder with a bell, before the bell alone elicited drooling.]

To the extent that Guthrie's theory is true, it is not altogether good news. In college I was riding shotgun in my roommate's car, when a motorist failed to observe the Stop sign at an intersection, and plowed into the side of the car. Having caught a glimpse of his not-slowing-down car in my peripheral vision [the cue], I crouched into the fetal position recommended for airplane crashes [the movement]. Nevermind that my addled hippocampus had applied the wrong transport safety tip [and I consequently suffered gory-looking but superficial facial abrasions that I would have avoided, had I remained sitting upright]. To this day, 4 decades later, when a I see a car approaching an intersection "too fast to stop," I have to fight the reflex to cringe. It doesn't happen when I am driving, mind you, just when I am riding shotgun; but this One-Trial Habit [as Guthrie called it] annoys the hell out of whoever is driving "Miss Crazy."

Let's do the wolf-work. It is humiliating to them, that I appear not to trust their driving skills. Further, my sudden movement is both intrusive (sometimes blocking their view of the other car) and frightening (since it betokens a "clear & present danger," rather than a remembered danger from long ago).

Guthrie's own recommendation, to diminish the power of a problematic cue/movement connection, was called Sidetracking. One must endeavor to discover the initial cue, and then deliberately associate a different [incompatible] movement with it. Alrighty, then. What's incompatible with cringing? Why, sitting upright (as I should have done in the first instance), with my forearms resting on my thighs (rather than covering my face). Unfortunately, whenever I abruptly assume this crash-test-dummy position, it is almost as alarming [therefore, annoying] as the cringe. At least it doesn't obstruct the driver's view. In recent years, I've taken to wearing sunglasses while being driven [avoiding harmful UV rays, you know], behind whose dark lenses I close my eyes when a car rushes up to the Stop sign. I also contrive to sit in the back seat whenever possible, where I am blissfully oblivious to the threat of reckless drivers. I am unflappable in taxis, even in Manhattan.

Not all instances of One-Trial habit formation are as trivial as my intersection cringe, however. The cue/movement nexus might account for the intractability of various substance addictions. Today's New York Times has an article speculating that Adam Goldstein [aka DJ AM], may have relapsed into drug abuse because of filming a documentary in which a young woman injected herself with heroin. An individual's first use of an addictive substance is likely to occur in the presence of others who are using the substance. According to Guthrie's model, the cue [of others shooting/lighting/drinking up] will be forever associated with the movements one made, in connection with the first use of that substance.

Nor need the cue be visual. Even in 1960s Britain, the sound of an air-raid siren sent survivors of the Blitz diving for cover under a table or bed. The whiff of that certain food you ate just before you got sick can, years later, activate your gag reflex. The song you were listening to when that false love in high school broke up with you can still make you cry, a lifetime later.

Yesterday, while making his weekend rounds at two DC hospitals, my husband discovered that his car had [at least temporarily] "died," and he came home in a rental car. Lili, who was awaiting the return of her beloved master, saw the intrusion of a strange white vehicle in the driveway [the cue], which set up a barrage of histrionic barkitude [the movement]. Even when her master emerged from the rental car, she could not stop herself from barking at it. Just now, his arrival in the cue vehicle again sent her into a reflexive barkfest, despite my commands to her to assume a position [presumably] incompatible with barking ["Foo-say!" Lie down!]. When the UPS truck cues Lili to bark, she has learned the incompatible movement of sending herself down to the basement [where she can't see the offending vehicle]; but apparently this weekend's "combination of stimuli" [strange car, beloved master] presents a more difficult cue to Sidetrack.

It was Guthrie's contention that "excitement facilitates associative learning," making the cue/movement connection even stronger. Lili is very excited whenever her master comes home.

To be continued.

What are you laughing at?

Tell you what Arthur Koestler thought. In 1964 he wrote a tome on the subject, The Act of Creation, the burden of whose 751 pages, is that all humor, scientific discoveries, and works of art occur when two worlds collide. He put it rather more ponderously, "when two matrices bisociate." By this he meant, when two frames of reference [each with its own rules of logic] are unexpectedly juxtaposed. Abstract and boring enough for ya, so far?

Consider this visual joke: Penny the Cucamonga cat is "wearing" a [photo-shopped] party hat, looking anything-but-in-a-party-mood, being held by my daughter [most of whose festive facial expression I have discreetly cropped away, to preserve her privacy]. Koestler would say that there are at least two matrices bisociating here. Penny, a cat, is impersonating a human "party animal," which is also a pun; and the obvious photo-shopping of the party hat is my daughter's mockery of the shoddy paparazzi "photo-journalism" ubiquitous in LA, where this picture was taken. Not unlike those ancient philosophers, Koestler believed that in all humor there is an element of defensive-aggression, against the butt of the joke. In this case, the joke is metaphorically on Penny [since we know how much pets detest wearing silly human costumes for gag photos]; but it's actually on the paparazzi. Geddit?

Let's go back to my fave joke, introduced in the "Funny Bone" post. "Horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, 'Why the long face?'" One matrix is the well-worn, formulaic [mostly New York-based] genre of "guy-walks-into-a-bar-bartender-says-why-the-long-face?" joke. This collides with a more obscure joke tradition [mostly in Ireland & the UK], of placing horses in unusual settings. Back in the day, there was a series of print ads for whiskey, using the slogan, "You can take a White Horse anywhere." Near the beginning of the cult Irish flick, Into the West, a [white] horse is taken by lift up to the top floor of a council housing flat in Dublin, and the human passengers on the lift don't bat an eye. [A nod to the whiskey slogan.] That gets the horse into the bar, in my fave joke. The second matrix is a pun: a play on the words, "long face."

But where's the element of defensive-aggression in this oh-so-sophisticated joke? The butt of the joke is the genre of joke, itself. It is what Jon Stewart would call a meta-joke. It is a joke about a type of joke. Probably, it resonates most with those of us who have tried to "be funny," for a living [or for a grade in acting school].

Those of you who remember Jakobsen's six Speech Functions will be raising your hands and "chirping" [@ 50 KHz], "Oooh! Oooh! This is Poetic Speech we're talking about! Designed to Tell the Ugly Truth without Suffering the Ugly Consequences." That is exactly what we are talking about. The teller of the joke [little David] gets to poke fun at big, bad Goliath; and the laughers at the joke get to expend their adrenaline in a non-combative manner. If they laugh until they cry, they even get to purge themselves of some cortisol. Goliath is mocked, but everybody survives. That's what Koestler thought; and his most enduring book is Darkness at Noon, a repudiation of the "Goliath" of Communism, with whom he had previously cast his lot in the 1930s.

Now, back to Jaak's laughing rats and tickling. [I'll leave the cocaine commentary to the Wallabies among you.] Koestler believed that what rats [and little children] find laughable about tickling is that it is a mock attack. It's funny because they know they are not really in danger of pain & suffering. The tickler is only impersonating an attacker. If actual pain results, or even the fear of pain, it's no laughing matter. In fact, Jaak found, if even one cat hair [a signifier of threat from a predator] is in the room where a rat is being tickled, the rat will not "chirp" [@ 50 KHz]; it will bum [@ 22 KHz].

The rough-and-tumble play of all baby mammals produces "chirps" of glee. In developmental psychology, this epitomizes the concept, "This is only pretend." Sigmund's daughter, Anna Freud [she of the German Shepherd "Wolf"], called this Regression in the Service of the Ego one of the most important defenses older humans can use, as a respite from the real [not mock] threats in their lives. When we laugh at Jon Stewart poking fun at Kim Jong Il, we are pretending that the threat that little martinet poses to the world is "only pretend." For that little moment, we are regressing to a childlike belief that Kim is just a joke [and giving our overtaxed limbic system a rest].

So, go ahead and laugh it up, folks. Feels great, doesn't it?

"It would have made a cat laugh..."

"or a dog; I'm bid to crave an audience for a frog!" This first citation of a common British idiom [meaning, "so ridiculous, it would coax a laugh out of an improbable source"], is from The Queen of the Frogs, the last of 176 plays written by James Robinson Planche, in 1879. Besides turning French fairy tales into satirical comedies for the London stage, he was the father of the English costume drama. [Helpful for 19th Century "Kangaroos," don't you know.]

Now, back to what makes a rat laugh [according to Jaak Panksepp and his merry pranksters]. Before I tell you what, I'll tell you how he knows [that a rat is laughing]. He uses the Mini-3 Bat Detector [made by the Ultra Sound Advice company, of London]. Cue the Pied Piper, in historically accurate costume. I'm not making this up. Laughing rats [also cats, dogs, primates, and human children] emit ultrasonic vocalization patterns (USVs) at the frequency of 50 KHz, which Jaak calls "chirping." [This is in contrast to "long-distress" USVs @ 22 KHz, which express negative emotions, such as fear, "social defeat," or anticipation of pain & suffering.] So, how do you make a rat laugh? Tickle him [or let him self-administer cocaine]. Seriously. And how do you bum a rat out? Mix cat fur into his cage bedding [or take away his blow]. Whom shall we call first: the Nobel prize committee, or PETA?

While you're pondering that, you should know that these rats have no personal experience of cats as predators; but even one cat hair in their cage freaks 'em out. Panksepp opines that lab researchers who own cats skew rat-study data all the time, due to this overlooked fear factor on their clothing or person.

But we humans have more degrees of freedom than lab rats, many of us. What other stimuli (besides tickling & coke) might make us laugh? The ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato, thought they had the definitive answer: a feeling of superiority. According to this cynical lot, all human hilarity arises from Schadenfreude: delight at another's humiliation. Hmm. Maybe for grown-ups. Not so much for human babies and other young mammals [who are suckers for the tickling]. Heroditus [484 - 425 BC], used historical vignettes to explain how tears of joy can so quickly turn into tears of sorrow. [How the USVs can drop from 50KHz to 22 KHz, in the blink of an eye.] He tells, for instance, of Xerxes, who is kvelling over his fleet at a regatta at Abydos, then suddenly becomes all verklempt; and when his uncle asks him,"Boychick! Was ist los?" Xerxes says, "In 100 years, all these people will be dead, and no one will know how powerful I am!" Solipsistic, much?

In 1979 psychologists Efram & Spangler posited that all tears [whether of sorrow or joy] occur during the recovery phase of limbic arousal. "All tears are tears of relief." Miss America cries because she was so afraid she would lose. Mourners cry [according to these guys] because they are so glad that the bells are not (pace John Donne) tolling for them.

Back to our putative laureate, Panksepp. He would assume that all tears [whatever the frequency of our USVs] contain cortisol: that the relief we are experiencing [whether we label ourselves "over-the-moon" or "down-in-the-dumps"] is, whatever else, neuro-chemical.

Personally, I'm saving up for a Mini-3 Bat Detector, to find out what makes a dog [like Lili] laugh. And meanwhile, I suggest we all take careful note of what makes us laugh and/or cry. I just know there are more triggers for mirth than tickling, blow & Schadenfreude. Tell you about some of them next time, yah?

Turn On the Waterworks

What's the good of crying? [That's not a rhetorical question.] Sir Henry Maudsley (1859-1944), a neurologist and psychiatrist who took care of shell-shocked Australian soldiers during World War I, knew the answer: "Sorrows which find no vent in tears may soon make other organs weep."

Ancient Greek dramatists knew it, too, staging tragedies so shockingly blood-thirsty [remind you of a current genre?], that audiences were guaranteed to have a good, cathartic cry. Today on the Beeb [BBC radio 1, that is], as Trueblood makes its UK debut, a group of media mavens were asking each other, "What is this current fascination with vampires and such?" One pundit opined that "in times of economic distress, people need an outlet for their own misery and fear, so they give themselves a socially acceptable reason to weep and wail."

Cue the Possibly-Mad-Scientists. My personal fave is Jaak (not-a-typo) Panksepp [originally from Estonia], who coined the term "affective [pertaining to the emotions] neuroscience." He studies the vocalizations of animals, such as rats, and has found that they wail with distress and laugh with delight. [Today's post is no laughing matter. Later for that.] So, guess what familiar substance is found, in significantly elevated levels, in the saliva of wailing rats (inasmuch as they do not shed tears of sorrow)? CORTISOL. It's also found in the tears and saliva of crying humans, folks. Talk about catharsis!

So, when Lili makes that keening noise as she is sent [or, these days, sends herself] to the basement, for the misdemeanor of barking at the UPS guy, an analysis of her saliva would likely show a whole lot o' cortisol, which she cleverly lets "Duck" [her comfort stuffed animal] absorb, as she holds him in her mouth. In a few moments, she regains her composure and is back upstairs, happy as Larry [an Australian idiom, meaning "very happy"]. Very few of Maudsley's wartime patients were Happy as Larry, one gathers.

How lucky for Lili (and Jaak's rats, and human children), that society permits them this low-tech method of ridding the body of toxic cortisol. How unfortunate, that when grown-ups (especially men, or women in non-traditional jobs, such as the military) weep, they are humiliated with labels such as "weak," "manipulative," or "suffering from a Mood Disorder." Recent research purporting to demonstrate that weeping only makes men more distressed [especially studies using my least favorite research tool, the fMRI], have been critiqued as culturally-biased. The subject's (radio-active) brain is registering the anticipated, negative social consequences of crying, not a "hard-wired" neuro-chemical consequence. The brain of a male actor anticipating an Oscar nomination for his convincing on-screen crying [I hypothesize] would look very different in such a study, from his brother, the Marine Corps Drill Sergeant.

Which reminds me of a harrowing but invaluable class in our acting school, in which male & female students alike had to produce real tears on cue, for a grade. In keeping with the school's Method Acting approach, no artificial means of lacrimation [such as onion juice on one's fingertips, or a tack in one's shoe] were permitted. The actor must Prepare: conjure up a powerful, tear-jerking memory, and use it as the spigot, to Turn On the Waterworks. Just imagine the endorphin hit which follows the [male or female] acting student's right-on-cue crying jag. Talk about tears of joy!

Which we will, in the next post.

"Nana Window"

I just finished reading the cover story in this week's NYTimes magazine, which I knew would get my amygdala aroused [and it did]. It's about people whose amygdala gets aroused "too easily." Oh, yeah? Says who? Jerome Kagan has been doing a longitudinal [Bad Fairy at the Christening] study at Harvard, starting with babies in 1989, whom he identified as either highly reactive [to novel stimuli], somewhere in the middle, or "low-reactive." I'm going to let anyone interested look up the article; and instead I shall cut right to the chase. "Mary" was one of his "high-reactive" subjects, and he predicted that she would grow up to be a worrier. And, lo, she did. She's worrying her way through Harvard as I write this. To which I respond, "Oh, come on! If that's ''bad outcome,' whaddaya call 'good outcome,' Jerry?"

Many pages into this up-till-then uncritical review of Kagan's findings, the NYTimes author cites a researcher with a quibble: Dr. Robert Plomin of King's College, London, wonders if, perhaps, subjecting these kids to the daunting fMRI, itself, might not account for much of their amygdalar arousal. Nar'mean?

Towards the end of the article, other dissenting voices are quoted, wondering why all of the "high-reactives" haven't developed clinically significant anxiety [as predicted by Dr. Kagan]. Turns out some of the subjects are schmizing themselves into interpreting their racing pulses and dilated pupils as "being jazzed," which they describe as "vaguely exhilarating or exciting." Others [T.S. Eliot is mentioned] somehow manage to channel their amygdalar arousal into creating works of art [for the amusement & edification of the more laid-back among you, apparently]. Yet, the Bad Fairy gets the final word: "In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold."

If that weren't such an obvious load of old cobblers, I [the Exemplar of "High-Reactive" infants] would find it humiliating. Anyway, for those of you who would like a low-tech coping strategy to deal with anxiety, go to YouTube and look up "Nana Window." On 23 April 2009 [St. George's Day in England], the usual gang on the Chris Moyles [BBC Radio 1] show were joking around with Carrie, who had said, "My Nan always puts one in her window on St. George's day." [Her grandmother displays the Cross of St. George flag, which is England's (red-cross-on-a-white-field) part of the United Kingdom's "Union Jack."] Chris & Comedy Dave chose to find a double-entendre in her innocent remark, and immediately improvised a Reggae song with the following lyric: "Nana Nana window. Nana window." If you can't find it on YouTube and still want to sing it, it's all on one note, except for the "dow," which is a 5th higher. Commence singing at the first sign of anxiety and repeat until you feel better.

In scientific point of fact, singing almost any song will reduce most anxiety symptoms, for the following reasons. Singing regulates breathing [thereby countering hyperventilation]. The sillier the lyric, the more likely you are to laugh [thereby relieving muscle tension]. The louder you sing, the more adrenaline you expend [thereby restoring homeostasis to your body]. Cognitively, you are likely to distract yourself from the alarming stimulus for long enough to get some perspective on it. [Is the irritant really awful or just...you know the mantra by now.]

The lyric "Nana Window" is the latest in the long and worthy tradition of non-lexical vocables [such as "Hey nonny nonny" from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and more recently, "Ob-la-di-ob-la-da" from the Beatles' White Album], which multitask, by fulfilling [at least] two Speech Functions. They are Phatic [imparting no factual information, just keeping the listener listening] and/or Poetic [since they may, indeed, be a secret code for something else[such as "Carrie's Nan is displaying something in her window."]; and they often are also Emotive [expressing a particular feeling]. ["Hey nonny nonny," according to Shakespeare scholars, expresses dismay.]

Here is Lili, displaying herself in the window, while keeping [hypervigilant?] watch for intrusions. The other day, I was upstairs brushing my teeth, when I heard [evidence of] her aroused amygdala: barking. I planned to go down and assert my Pack Leader status over her, by telling her to "Yaka mashie. Asoko." ["Be quiet. Go down to your room in the basement until you can compose yourself."] But before I could even rinse my mouth out, there was silence. I discovered that Lili had piped down and taken herself downstairs, all on her own. Now, that's what I'm talkin' about! So, okay, our amygdala gets aroused easily; but we humans, too, can learn to tell it to "Yaka mashie. Asoko," [perhaps by singing the "Nana Window" song], and thus stand ourselves down from our many alarums.