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mindthump · 3 years

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Language supermodel: How GPT-3 is quietly ushering in the A.I. revolution https://ift.tt/3mAgOO1

OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generating algorithm was once considered too dangerous to release. Then it got released — and the world kept on turning.

In retrospect, the comparatively small GPT-2 language model (a puny 1.5 billion parameters) looks paltry next to its sequel, GPT-3, which boasts a massive 175 billion parameters, was trained on 45 TB of text data, and cost a reported $12 million (at least) to build.

“Our perspective, and our take back then, was to have a staged release, which was like, initially, you release the smaller model and you wait and see what happens,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “If things look good, then you release the next size of model. The reason we took that approach is because this is, honestly, [not just uncharted waters for us, but it’s also] uncharted waters for the entire world.”

Jump forward to the present day, nine months after GPT-3’s release last summer, and it’s powering upward of 300 applications while generating a massive 4.5 billion words per day. Seeded with only the first few sentences of a document, it’s able to generate seemingly endless more text in the same style — even including fictitious quotes.

Is it going to destroy the world? Based on past history, almost certainly not. But it is making some game-changing applications of A.I. possible, all while posing some very profound questions along the way.

What is it good for? Absolutely everything

Recently, Francis Jervis, the founder of a startup called Augrented, used GPT-3 to help people struggling with their rent to write letters negotiating rent discounts. “I’d describe the use case here as ‘style transfer,'” Jervis told Digital Trends. “[It takes in] bullet points, which don’t even have to be in perfect English, and [outputs] two to three sentences in formal language.”

Powered by this ultra-powerful language model, Jervis’s tool allows renters to describe their situation and the reason they need a discounted settlement. “Just enter a couple of words about why you lost income, and in a few seconds you’ll get a suggested persuasive, formal paragraph to add to your letter,” the company claims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When Aditya Joshi, a machine learning scientist and former Amazon Web Services engineer, first came across GPT-3, he was so blown away by what he saw that he set up a website, www.gpt3examples.com, to keep track of the best ones.

“Shortly after OpenAI announced their API, developers started tweeting impressive demos of applications built using GPT-3,” he told Digital Trends. “They were astonishingly good. I built [my website] to make it easy for the community to find these examples and discover creative ways of using GPT-3 to solve problems in their own domain.”

Fully interactive synthetic personas with GPT-3 and https://t.co/ZPdnEqR0Hn ????

They know who they are, where they worked, who their boss is, and so much more. This is not your father's bot… pic.twitter.com/kt4AtgYHZL

— Tyler Lastovich (@tylerlastovich) August 18, 2020

Joshi points to several demos that really made an impact on him. One, a layout generator, renders a functional layout by generating JavaScript code from a simple text description. Want a button that says “subscribe” in the shape of a watermelon? Fancy some banner text with a series of buttons the colors of the rainbow? Just explain them in basic text, and Sharif Shameem’s layout generator will write the code for you. Another, a GPT-3 based search engine created by Paras Chopra, can turn any written query into an answer and a URL link for providing more information. Another, the inverse of Francis Jervis’ by Michael Tefula, translates legal documents into plain English. Yet another, by Raphaël Millière, writes philosophical essays. And one other, by Gwern Branwen, can generate creative fiction.

“I did not expect a single language model to perform so well on such a diverse range of tasks, from language translation and generation to text summarization and entity extraction,” Joshi said. “In one of my own experiments, I used GPT-3 to predict chemical combustion reactions, and it did so surprisingly well.”

More where that came from

The transformative uses of GPT-3 don’t end there, either. Computer scientist Tyler Lastovich has used GPT-3 to create fake people, including backstory, who can then be interacted with via text. Meanwhile, Andrew Mayne has shown that GPT-3 can be used to turn movie titles into emojis. Nick Walton, chief technology officer of Latitude, the studio behind GPT-generated text adventure game AI Dungeon recently did the same to see if it could turn longer strings of text description into emoji. And Copy.ai, a startup that builds copywriting tools with GPT-3, is tapping the model for all it’s worth, with a monthly recurring revenue of $67,000 as of March — and a recent $2.9 million funding round.

“Definitely, there was surprise and a lot of awe in terms of the creativity people have used GPT-3 for,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “So many use cases are just so creative, and in domains that even I had not foreseen, it would have much knowledge about. That’s interesting to see. But that being said, GPT-3 — and this whole direction of research that OpenAI pursued — was very much with the hope that this would give us an A.I. model that was more general-purpose. The whole point of a general-purpose A.I. model is [that it would be] one model that could like do all these different A.I. tasks.”

Many of the projects highlight one of the big value-adds of GPT-3: The lack of training it requires. Machine learning has been transformative in all sorts of ways over the past couple of decades. But machine learning requires a large number of training examples to be able to output correct answers. GPT-3, on the other hand, has a “few shot ability” that allows it to be taught to do something with only a small handful of examples.

Plausible bull***t

GPT-3 is highly impressive. But it poses challenges too. Some of these relate to cost: For high-volume services like chatbots, which could benefit from GPT-3’s magic, the tool might be too pricey to use. (A single message could cost 6 cents which, while not exactly bank-breaking, certainly adds up.)

Others relate to its widespread availability, meaning that it’s likely going to be tough to build a startup exclusively around since fierce competition will likely drive down margins.

Christina Morillo/Pexels

Another is the lack of memory; its context window runs a little under 2,000 words at a time before, like Guy Pierce’s character in the movie Memento, its memory is reset. “This significantly limits the length of text it can generate, roughly to a short paragraph per request,” Lastovich said. “Practically speaking, this means that it is unable to generate long documents while still remembering what happened at the beginning.”

Perhaps the most notable challenge, however, also relates to its biggest strength: Its confabulation abilities. Confabulation is a term frequently used by doctors to describe the way in which some people with memory issues are able to fabricate information that appears initially convincing, but which doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection. GPT-3’s ability to confabulate is, depending upon the context, a strength and a weakness. For creative projects, it can be great, allowing it to riff on themes without concern for anything as mundane as truth. For other projects, it can be trickier.

Francis Jervis of Augrented refers to GPT-3’s ability to “generate plausible bullshit.” Nick Walton of AI Dungeon said: “GPT-3 is very good at writing creative text that seems like it could have been written by a human … One of its weaknesses, though, is that it can often write like it’s very confident — even if it has no idea what the answer to a question is.”

Back in the Chinese Room

In this regard, GPT-3 returns us to the familiar ground of John Searle’s Chinese Room. In 1980, Searle, a philosopher, published one of the best-known A.I. thought experiments, focused on the topic of “understanding.” The Chinese Room asks us to imagine a person locked in a room with a mass of writing in a language that they do not understand. All they recognize are abstract symbols. The room also contains a set of rules that show how one set of symbols corresponds with another. Given a series of questions to answer, the room’s occupant must match question symbols with answer symbols. After repeating this task many times, they become adept at performing it — even though they have no clue what either set of symbols means, merely that one corresponds to the other.

GPT-3 is a world away from the kinds of linguistic A.I. that existed at the time Searle was writing. However, the question of understanding is as thorny as ever.

“This is a very controversial domain of questioning, as I’m sure you’re aware, because there’s so many differing opinions on whether, in general, language models … would ever have [true] understanding,” said OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal. “If you ask me about GPT-3 right now, it performs very well sometimes, but not very well at other times. There is this randomness in a way about how meaningful the output might seem to you. Sometimes you might be wowed by the output, and sometimes the output will just be nonsensical. Given that, right now in my opinion … GPT-3 doesn’t appear to have understanding.”

An added twist on the Chinese Room experiment today is that GPT-3 is not programmed at every step by a small team of researchers. It’s a massive model that’s been trained on an enormous dataset consisting of, well, the internet. This means that it can pick up inferences and biases that might be encoded into text found online. You’ve heard the expression that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with? Well, GPT-3 was trained on almost unfathomable amounts of text data from multiple sources, including books, Wikipedia, and other articles. From this, it learns to predict the next word in any sequence by scouring its training data to see word combinations used before. This can have unintended consequences.

Feeding the stochastic parrots

This challenge with large language models was first highlighted in a groundbreaking paper on the subject of so-called stochastic parrots. A stochastic parrot — a term coined by the authors, who included among their ranks the former co-lead of Google’s ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru — refers to a large language model that “haphazardly [stitches] together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.”

“Having been trained on a big portion of the internet, it’s important to acknowledge that it will carry some of its biases,” Albert Gozzi, another GPT-3 user, told Digital Trends. “I know the OpenAI team is working hard on mitigating this in a few different ways, but I’d expect this to be an issue for [some] time to come.”

OpenAI’s countermeasures to defend against bias include a toxicity filter, which filters out certain language or topics. OpenAI is also working on ways to integrate human feedback in order to be able to specify which areas not to stray into. In addition, the team controls access to the tool so that certain negative uses of the tool will not be granted access.

“One of the reasons perhaps you haven’t seen like too many of these malicious users is because we do have an intensive review process internally,” Agarwal said. “The way we work is that every time you want to use GPT-3 in a product that would actually be deployed, you have to go through a process where a team — like, a team of humans — actually reviews how you want to use it. … Then, based on making sure that it is not something malicious, you will be granted access.”

Some of this is challenging, however — not least because bias isn’t always a clear-cut case of using certain words. Jervis notes that, at times, his GPT-3 rent messages can “tend towards stereotypical gender [or] class assumptions.” Left unattended, it might assume the subject’s gender identity on a rent letter, based on their family role or job. This may not be the most grievous example of A.I. bias, but it highlights what happens when large amounts of data are ingested and then probabilistically reassembled in a language model.

“Bias and the potential for explicit returns absolutely exist and require effort from developers to avoid,” Tyler Lastovich said. “OpenAI does flag potentially toxic results, but ultimately it does add a liability customers have to think hard about before putting the model into production. A specifically difficult edge case to develop around is the model’s propensity to lie — as it has no concept of true or false information.”

Language models and the future of A.I.

Nine months after its debut, GPT-3 is certainly living up to its billing as a game changer. What once was purely potential has shown itself to be potential realized. The number of intriguing use cases for GPT-3 highlights how a text-generating A.I. is a whole lot more versatile than that description might suggest.

Not that it’s the new kid on the block these days. Earlier this year, GPT-3 was overtaken as the biggest language model. Google Brain debuted a new language model with some 1.6 trillion parameters, making it nine times the size of OpenAI’s offering. Nor is this likely to be the end of the road for language models. These are extremely powerful tools — with the potential to be transformative to society, potentially for better and for worse.

Challenges certainly exist with these technologies, and they’re ones that companies like OpenAI, independent researchers, and others, must continue to address. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to argue that language models are not turning to be one of the most interesting and important frontiers of artificial intelligence research.

Who would’ve thought text generators could be so profoundly important? Welcome to the future of artificial intelligence.

#IFTTT #Feedly #good to know #tech #hmmm #TIL #science #future

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fearfearer · 4 years

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more thoughts about the magnus archives as i reread the transcripts

i was thinking about how gertrude robinson was really an extraordinary person (not extraordinarily Morally Sound, but extraordinary) just because of who she was, whereas the only extraordinary things about jonathan sims are things that have been arranged for him (i.e. his role). i don't mean this as a diss for jonathan, as i'm not extraordinary either. it's just striking that gertrude was so driven and confident compared to jon. of course, now we know that basically everything she did was in the pursuit of a moot goal (i.e. killing people in order to stop rituals that were already doomed to fail) so maybe my point is somewhat moot as well.

i've been doing some rereading of episodes on my phone (i.e. away from this text document on my computer) and i'll have a realization like "right, i should note that down when i get back to my computer" and i have forgotten all of them now that i am back at my computer. suffice it to say there are quite a few things i misheard/misunderstood on the first listen, unsurprisingly.

reading through the first 20 or so episodes i'm surprised by how well i remember each of them, considering i was listening like 4 episodes a day when i started. then again, it was only a month or two ago that i even listened to them, so one should hope my memory is at least this good. anyway the first episode i'm re-listening instead of rereading is 22 bc that's the first one where we hear martin's voice, i'm pretty sure

i've also noticed some errors in the official transcripts, which aren't a big deal because obviously what matters most is the audio, but still... some of them have been simple typos. magnus archives hire me as your official transcriptionist and i'll make all your transcripts 100% error-free bc im smatr

(reading through the rest of the transcripts and my standards went way down in terms of grammar/stylistic consistency, as most of the later ones are fan transcripts by several different people. i found quite a few mistakes, but obviously i have no particular way to help fix them short of sending an email to the tma transcripts fansite person like “hey there’s all these mistakes. upload my good version instead?” bc i’m not that much of a dick)

the whole reason martin went to the spider guy's building was because he didn't want jon to be disappointed in him for not doing Due Diligence. he says so twice. then he went back for the same reason. it seems the fandom joke is "jon asks his assistants to do crimes for him" but in this case martin is like "oh no maybe i didn't do enough crimes to satisfy jon"

jon was doing his archivist voice HEAVILY in season 1, huh?

tim's first appearance is so jovial compared to how he ends up...

if this boat lady is speaking spanish in brazil, then it doesn't matter if it was "bad spanish" or not. anyway now i understand why we already knew peter lukas was serving the lonely by the time jon mentioned offhand that peter lukas was serving the lonely. it was my whole “let’s not bother noting down any FREQUENTLY RECURRING names”

well i guess robert smirke was a real person. should i feel dumb about this? idk. it’s such a fictional-sounding name, to be fair. but i guess that set the precedent of using a real person as an important historical figure in the fiction that we see happening again when edmund halley is referenced later on. also episode 35 has foreshadowing for the separation of 14 powers, and people thought it was 13 because they mention 13 halls PLUS the one they came through.

totally forgot about tim goofing around in episode 39... he was really not having the worst time at this job before bad things started happening and he realized he was trapped, huh

the worms were trying to make a doorway into the Worm Wealm

ep 40 jon's like "I need to hear it. I need to record it. Or else I can't finish." (lightly abridged)

listening to the season 1 Q&A for the first time and EARL BIGMAC

also good to know there's only going to be 5 seasons. very good to know. this seems like a good kind of series to write with a fixed endpoint in mind, as it's very easy to do an episode that has effectively no bearing on the MetaPlot but which is still a short story in itself and therefore doesn't count as "filler"

jonathan sims performs with a mythical space pirate music cabaret. so he IS a ham

jonny says, "no rude words. i could say bums, maybe..." (alexander j newall does a laugh while i do the exact same laugh irl) "...but i won't."

some dumbass writing into the Q&A to ask if the background music is diegetic... get a podcast brain, ya fool. though for my part, i have to say that one of the most striking things about this podcast when i first started listening (though i never made a note of it before) was the Too Spooky Music, and i didn't like it at all. the reason was that i am, and have been, vulnerable to Getting Spooked about irrational things at night, such that it becomes really hard to fall asleep... and one of the things that has an outsize effect on my level of Spookédness is spooky audio. so if i was watching a video at night and i was worried it would Get Me Spooked, i would just turn the sound off, and it would turn out fine. but obviously you can't turn the sound off on a podcast. and i've been listening to podcasts after work, i.e. after 5pm, and i go to bed at like 8 or 9pm because i'm old. so the way it turned out was that even if the actual subject of the podcast wasn't that scary to me, the music would amplify it in an unpleasant way and make me more likely to have trouble sleeping. also i think most of the episodes would have been fine without the music, or maybe with some less intentionally-disconcerting background music.

this just in: i seem to have totally missed episode 50 on my first listen-through, despite having gone in linear order. bc i'm listening to it now and i've definitely never heard this before. fortunately it doesn't seem to have much of a bearing on the rest of the series, so it's not like i missed any crucial information. tbh the only worthwhile bit was a brief moment of tim being a ham, which was good. i hope i didn't miss any other episodes the first time... still don't know how i managed to miss this one.

the official transcript said [EXTENDED SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PIPE MURDER] ...

so gertrude and leitner WERE played by jonny's parents <:3c i'd thought as much when i saw the cast names but i like that it's confirmed. his mom is a really good actress too. i always find the gertrude episodes to be striking in a certain way

"it's Fine working with your parents. it's Fine." as someone who worked with my mom for like a year i can confirm this

i'm tickled to find that the official transcripts have a sense of humor. i wonder who is behind them. i also wonder, what is the excuse for not having a full set of official transcripts when it is a script-based show? surely you know what is going to be said beforehand, and you have it written down, and if someone ends up saying something different in the final recording, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to give the original script a little edit, and bam! that’s a transcript. i wonder if this approach is not feasible for some reason.

whenever martin reads statements, he says something about jon... whenever he talks to someone, he says something about jon

i think episode 110 is an instance of the tape recorder turning ITSELF off... at the end of the episode. because they walk away, and they say something distantly, and then it turns off. lots of other times, there had to be a diegetic reason for the tape recorder to turn off at the end.

i noticed something which i missed last time, which was that there is a rumor between melanie and georgie and basira that implies that jonathan is asexual. worth noting, i think. [side note added in later: yeah it’s canon. cool]

also i listened to episode 103 again and yes. i had thought-- i had been SURE-- that the person interrogating the traffic cop (using the asky ability) was martin. but it was actually jon. how did i possibly manage that mistake? i'm not great at distinguishing voices, but i'm not THAT bad. the only possible answer: when i was listening to the episode for the first time... i must have been eating a crunchy snack.

"it doesn't have to make sense! alex has to make it sense." (jonny sims re: writing the spiral)

glad to know that jonny sims regrets using his own name for the protagonist. doesn't make a difference either way at this point but yeah

YES i knew episode 100 was improvised. and i see, all the statementers had actually had supernatural experiences, but because the archivist was absent, their statements didn't have the coherence and clarity normally lent to them by the eye (in exchange for becoming cursed). i think melanie or basira actually said pretty much that in the episode itself, but i still couldn't be sure that all of those people had something real to talk about.

"in the same way that tim is dead, michael is helen." good shit

the archivist is canon a bit of a drama queen. the first bullet point in my first tma notes document is vindicated

jonny sims mentions another podcast (apocrypals) that sounds 100% up my alley, so that is appreciated, i will add that to my list i think. (listened to episodes 0 and 1 of apocrypals and i'm heavily struck by how VERY clearly i can hear the smiles in chris sims's voice. i did not know smiling could be so audible, truly.) (listened to quite a few more episodes of apocrypals and it’s certainly entertaining at times. i should’ve been reading along though. maybe some other time)

I DIDN'T LISTEN TO THE SEASON 4 TEASER THE FIRST TIME AROUND.........................................

i must confess something that people who know me well may already know: i hate when stories have a bad ending. an unhappy ending. a painful ending. a hopeless ending. bittersweet is the furthest in that direction i can tolerate. my perspective, which is pretty deep-seated, is that there's no point in getting to know and love characters if you're only going to be hurt by that connection to them when the end turns out to be bad. if i have even a mild inkling that a story is heading toward a bad ending, i make a conscious effort to regard all characters from afar and not develop any strong attachments. this is not so much "how i think all stories need to be," but rather, "the characteristics a story needs to have to appeal to me personally." so i understand that my view is very subjective and mostly based on my own mental weakness. but i can't help but apply it to the media i consume. and the idea that someone would do something like "make characters very human and strongly developed" IN COMBINATION WITH "heading toward a bad end" makes me upset. like, picture a horror movie. think about the characters in a horror movie. with the exception of a main character, if there is one, there's no guarantee that anyone is going to survive to the end of the film... BUT... the characters generally aren't fleshed out and very sympathetic. i wouldn't go so far as to say they're disposable, but you're not SUPPOSED to cry when they die; you're just supposed to get scared. their purpose is as objects of fear, and you never expect or even hope for a happy ending. but in the magnus archives... all i'm saying... is that i would cry if any of the remaining members of the main cast died. and it seems clear that we're not heading to a happy ending. so i'm somewhat afraid, and not in a good way. i don't know how much i can trust jonny sims to give me the story i want, and obviously, i'm not entitled to it.

if your name is jonathan and you want to shorten it, the short form is jon. it ain't john, no matter what the official transcripts say. where'd you get that h, huh? stole it from someone else's name? are you shortening it like JOnatHaN? you can’t just be that sneaky!

i listened to scrutiny again and it hits so hard. now, in heart of darkness, when manuela begs jon not to force her statement, it's really heavy given the direct context of the previous two episodes where we see how compulsion works and how it hurts.

also when jon was talking about how to destroy the dark sun and he was like "i just need to see it," when i first heard it, i assumed he meant something along the lines of, "by seeing it, i will learn how to destroy it." but now i understand that the mere act of the eye seeing it destroys it, because being known is what the darkness is weakest to.

the magnus employees who work in the library probably at least have a LITTLE BIT of a feeling that they work in an almost normal place, given that jon and all his assistants were able to have that impression before transferring to the archives. so i wonder how the magnus library people feel about their institute's director getting arrested for double murder and now the big boss is a completely unrelated ship captain who seems to want nothing to do with the place but simultaneously is trying to continue business as usual

on second listen, listening to jon ask helen when the guilt stops (wrt hurting people in order to feed one's patron fear) is pretty chilling. because it seems like he's definitely accepting that he will have to hurt people, and what he's concerned about is how bad it makes HIM feel. of course, helen then answers with precisely what i just wrote, so...

i should've read the transcript for episode 159 instead of relistening because i forgot that peter lukas's actor got so gravelly and hard to listen to in this one. anyway, time to re-listen to the season 4 finale... then i'll listen to the season 4 Q&As and stuff... and then the new episode. (DOKI DOKI DOKI DOKI DOKI)

i heard in the Q&A that the voice of peter lukas did multiple takes for episode 159?! but it was because of technical difficulties. right. because i can’t imagine the way it turned out being deemed the best take. sorry

ok, things i missed last time i listened to 160: daisy and the other two hunters are missing. also jon mentioned "magnus's body" and martin mentioned "an old man's corpse" and at the time i took this to mean (somewhat unthinkingly) that when jon and martin returned from the lonely, they killed elias/jonah's body. which would be a weird thing to happen "off-camera," so to speak. so i think i must have been wrong? slightly confused. ok, no, i'm now sure that elias survived, so i must have misunderstood. definitely alive.

as martin leaves and jon is about to begin the statement, he sounds so peaceful and satisfied. that's good acting.

by the way, in one of the previous few episodes, i noticed that jonah seems to have body-swapped by switching out his eyes into his preferred body, which i'm pretty sure i missed the first time.

i like that jonny sims checks reddit to see whether people have solved the mystery. that's just a really funny way to do things, sneaking a peek like "hmm how mysterious is my mystery? let's see who has figured it out..." and for the record, i wasn't even close to figuring it out. but to be fair to myself, i didn't try. like i said from the beginning, i started listening with the intent of going along for the ride. plus the mystery had already been solved before i started listening to the series, so it's not like i had a lot of time in between updates to contemplate whether elias was jonah, etc.

JON'S AMERICAN ACCENT FOR THE IONIZED YEAST AD

ALEX WAS THE VOICE OF JARED HOPWORTH?! i mean it was so messed up it could have been anybody but god

ALEX DIDN'T LET GERTUDE CACKLE

i've listened to the bloopers (including a gertrude cackle?) and the season 5 trailer (martin seems slightly cavalier about the end of the world but maybe he's just trying to keep his shit together for jon) and i'm going to listen to the new episode Soon.

final conclusion on rereads/relistens: i had pretty poor comprehension of some important happenings. i’m realizing just how easy it is to mishear/fail to hear exactly what is happening in a podcast when you’re doing other stuff at the same time. there are still a couple things i don’t quite understand, but i think i’ll have a look around the wiki one of these days.

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calleo-bricriu · 5 years

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Sometimes I start to think I might read a little too much.

So, I found this particular Muggle author in one of those, "It looked weird on the shelf and why not?" sort of ways that I often find books in Muggle shops.

Did a little bit of digging in to the author, William Lee Howard; apparently he was a fairly widely disrespected doctor that most other doctors viewed as a joke but that people who were not doctors thought was somehow brilliant.

Off to a good start.

The majority of the guy's books have to do with--not so much medical things but more, "Why everything is your wife's fault, trust me, I'm a doctor,” and by occasionally shouting in text about how he’s not a quack.

There were also two aimed at teenagers and I found a few chapter names completely self aware in one of them:

"Self-Abuse--How to Stop it--The Quacks" - Written as though he wasn't one.

"Environments and Diseases Which Rust Brain-Tools" - I'm going to start using Brain-Tools, I don't care that it's ridiculous. I like it because it's ridiculous.

Anyway, onto the book I'm mostly through.

It's the only one he published that wasn't--well, probably wasn't--intended to be some kind of medical book and it's the first one he had published.

No, it’s a story. A rambling, poorly written story.

The Perverts, 1901.

It's a bit difficult to read, not because it's as shocking as claimed but, because this guy just...rambles in a horribly disjointed manner that makes it difficult to follow what the hell is going on in his little story.

But, fine, I've read worse, just needs more focus; about halfway through, I stopped because it struck me that I've read this before.

Not this book specifically, the story, the entire plot, only the version I've read, while still written by a prose-y, rambling whackjob, was coherent and had much better flow to it.

Also, you could pretty easily follow the plot, as flimsy as it was.

In fairness, that one also probably could have been accurately titled The Perverts but there's always been a lot of unnecessary filler and prose in de Sade's writing (and he was at least self aware to the point that the last page of one of them essentially invites you to throw the book into the fire if you found reading it unenjoyable; tempting, but it's a heavy book and makes a good paperweight).

This man clearly read Justine (or The Misfortunes of Virtue) at some point; some similarities between bizarre things like that are bound to happen, pun intended given the topic, but this? This was very close to being the exact same book, just with renamed characters and a different time period setting.

de Sade wrote his in two weeks while in prison (and it shows) and this idiot somehow made it worse in terms of readability.

Oh, and the dedication? "To the memory of Edgar Allan Poe as a tribute to his genius, and in recognition of his struggles with a psychic incubus."

Okay.

I'm most amused by the fact that his last book was a book on "how to live long" and he died before he was 60. Must not be very good advice in that book.

And then I started skimming his other books and this has got to be one of the most unintentionally funny things I've read in awhile, "It has been my fortune――for so I consider it――to have been brought into intimate relations with men who are failures."

Good way to start.

"Many of these despondent and useless men have been guided into places where they fit." He's stopped using his brain-tools and it's not even chapter 8, which is where he talks about not letting your brain-tools get rusty.

(( Just a warning, there’s a short excerpt from the book that has some very literally, direct, and violent homophobia in there. ))

"teachers forced much useful and also useless stuff into unwilling brain cells" - I'm not entirely sure a man who blatantly ripped off one of de Sade's shortest works should be speaking poorly of teachers.

"How frequently have I heard the remark, after explaining to a young man who came to me a complete failure: “Why didn’t my father see all this?”" - You know, at this point, I'm almost certain that the only patients he'd ever seen were ones he made up or, more likely, ripped off from other case files and just changed the names.

"THE OUTSIDE LUNGS――THE SKIN" ...no.

He seems to think the skin does the same thing as the liver? What in the hell kind of medical school did this man attend?

"If a healthy boy should have his body――up to his neck――wrapped in tin foil, or any similar substance which would completely close the pores of the skin, he would soon have headache. This would become very severe, followed by loss of consciousness and finally convulsions――fits followed by death. Now this would occur even if he were in the open air. You can see by this fact that the lungs cannot alone cast off the poisons in the body" - First, weirdly specific scenario. Second, what he's describing is heat stroke not poisoning.

If people were listening to ridiculousness like this and taking it as valid health advice, no wonder so many died before they hit 30. I just went through an entire chapter of this idiot explaining how the skin is the body's main detox organ with only passing mention to things like, you know, your liver and kidneys, and that everything is caused by your dumb ass poisoning yourself by not bathing three times a day, constantly drinking water, then "exercising violently".

"Now it may sound funny to you, but the truth is, that if the boys in the past had really known as much as the chipmunks, we should have very few asylums for the insane or hospitals for the horrible diseases." - At this point I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually reading this or if I'm hallucinating it.

"About fourteen years of age you may feel a gradual soreness in the nipples. This will increase and sometimes be a little annoying. Now don’t become frightened and try to recall some blow you have received there." - This feels like a very, very specific panic that I'm pretty sure only happened to the author.

"Of course the HABIT of self-abuse means ruin to both brain and body. It is degrading to your true self, causes a loss of self-respect and makes a coward of every boy and man." - I get the feeling, by this point, that everything this person writes is just projecting.

"[...] bubbling spring of manly life." No.

"So never sleep with a man, except your father." - How is that less weird?

And we go from, go ahead and sleep with your dad to, "If you should be so situated that you find yourself in bed with a man, keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the slightest word or act out of the way, HIT him; hit him so hard that he will carry the scar for life."

Just sleep on the floor if you're that damn paranoid.

"Keep your goat by and in you always." ...what? There are no circumstances whatsoever that would result in me wanting any part of a goat in me.

"CHAPTER VIII ENVIRONMENTS AND DISEASES WHICH RUST BRAIN-TOOLS" - I'm definitely stealing brain-tools. Based on everything else, I'm pretty sure mine are considered rusty somehow.

I don't think I'd take advice about brain-tools from someone who spent entire paragraphs talking about how he thinks people who live in far Northern climates hibernate.

What else have we got here? Dance hall women will ruin your life, you might be a man but you'll be a MAN in big letters if you go into the navy somehow, the navy should be bigger so it can consume more lower case men--I guess that makes sense as this was written in 1911.

"Don’t think that you know more than your mother about what is best for you. You don’t." - Wow, okay.

"I saw the girl, or rather woman, when she was twenty-four years of age, and recognized her by the peculiar conformation of her face. It was the face of a girl giggler. Her facial muscles had become so developed by her uncontrolled girlish habit that nothing could be done for her. " - What on earth is the "face of a giggler"?

"Don’t kiss anyone but your mother and father." - ???

"Don’t use arsenic in any form for your complexion or to give your face a plump appearance. Some of you will tell me of a girl you know who has a nice plump face from the use of arsenic wafers." - Maybe don't eat rat poison. Eating rat poison seems like a bad idea just in general.

Apart from don't giggle, don't kiss anyone, and don't take arsenic what is wrong with you? The entire book aimed at women seems to be a lot of, "For the love of everything don't touch ANYTHING without wearing gloves and also maybe burn your gloves every night and just use new ones the next day, the world is made of filth and full of diseased people. Try to stay outside in the sun without touching anything instead."

Interesting to read in the context of not having vaccinations available for all of the diseases mentioned; I don't know why it bothers me to see tuberculosis written as consumption though but I DO know why it bothers me that this idiot keeps saying sunlight will cure all of those diseases.

It really won't, you'll just die in a brightly lit room instead of a dark one.

"Don’t try to keep awake either by mental effort or that injurious resort of drinking coffee." - Well, I've been failing at that since I was about 15.

"Sleep always alone. Sleeping with another person is unsanitary." - ...uh huh.

"The hair should be washed frequently in water with a little powdered borax, but remember you wash the hair only to clean the scalp, nothing should be applied to the hair directly." - Borax is corrosive, and how in the hell do you clean your scalp without also getting something on your hair, you can't just remove your hair and put it back later.

"Cold baths will keep your flesh firm and hard; will take off fat if you are too fat, and put on flesh if you are too lean." - Cold baths just sound unpleasant. There was also this whole section where he talked about how women specifically sweat fat out through their hands. I don’t have much for formal medical training but I’m confident that that’s not a thing that happens.

Speaking of, I particularly like that, in the book aimed at women, he's very adamant about daily bathing and in the book aimed at men it's more, "Eh, once per week is probably fine."

"EAT PICKLES AND CANDY IF YOU CRAVE THEM." - Unnecessarily aggressive sounding there, "Doctor". All I can picture is this quack screaming that in someone's face.

I guess it's kind of good to know that I have more extensive and accurate medical knowledge than someone who somehow got through school and earned the title of Doctor.

Oh, and I'm most amused by the fact that his last book was a book on "how to live long" and he died before he was 60. Must not be very good advice in that book.

Kind of want to read that one next.

#antiques #old books #bad advice #homophobia cw #it's kind of amazing anyone survived at all #so my assumption is nobody listened to weirdos like this #sinday

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gimpseloren · 5 years

Photo

Mom at Work (Carrie Mae Weems)

Loitering is Delightful

Ross Gay

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands

NO SOLICITING

NO LOITERING

stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book that is not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, “Lord.”)

It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed—in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order our bodies are in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight. The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke), but if the laugh is hard enough, if the shit talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not—and this hurts—your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go.

There is a Carrie Mae Weems photograph of a woman in what looks to be some kind of textile factory, with an angel embroidered to the left breast of her shirt, where her heart resides. The woman, like the angel, has her arms splayed wide almost in ecstasy, as though to embrace everything, so in the midst of her glee is she. Every time I see that photo, after I smile and have a genuine bodily opening on account of witnessing this delight, which is a moment of black delight, I look behind her for the boss. Uh-oh, I think. You’re in a moment of nonproductive delight. Heads up!

Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is. And while having interpolated the policing of delight such that I am on the lookout for the overseer even in photos I have studied hundreds of times, on the lookout always for the policer of delight, my work is studying this kind of glee, being on the lookout for it, and aspiring to it, floating away from the factory, as she seems to be.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/11/loitering-is-delightful/

#poetry #ross gay #carrie mae weems #loitering

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altonadventures · 6 years

Text

ALTON ADVENTURES BIG ANNOUNCEMENT

So...because its Friday and I usually update AA on Fridays, I figured it was time to make my big announcement!

And that is...that Alton Adventures is changing. A little bit.

Am I rebooted the comic again? No haha! Once I get back to it it shall continue as normal but some characters may look a bit different going forward.

Who may those characters be?

Sir Gareth Nemesis

Why is he changing?

Sir Nemesis’ change is actually less drastic than one may think. For starters, he needed a design rehaul. I wanted his armor to be more simple, easier to draw but with still details that could tie him to Nemesis (the green eye, the arms, the light pink details instead of inconsistent tentacles). I also had an issue where his hair was too close to his skin color, so to combat this I turned him into a ginger! His eye color also changed from gold to green, another thing to visually tie him more to Nemesis.

So yes, I changed Sir Nem’s design because I was unhappy with it. His armor was never drawn consistently ever, I was constantly changing the tone of his hair and his skin so that was inconsistent. I want my designs to be more consistent and polished going forward.

What else is different? Well, you can probably tell he looks much more serious, like in older pictures I drew of him. Why is that? Well, I was kind of..honestly tired of his role as the “dad character tm” that he kind of turned out to be. It almost undermined his true characterization and turned him into a typical over the top exaggerated hero character. And I started to realize how much I missed his original concept. A battle hardened solider that was filled with regret and remorse, who heavily sympathizes with the plight of the alien he’s locked in combat with. He’s still much a father however, as he has a biological son and adopts an alien who mimics his likeness (hence another reason he’s a ginger now as his Nemesis daughter always was one). He’s just returned to his roots as a character. Because I felt that characterization was a unique one for the Nemesis ride. And it was an idea I really loved. Sir Nemesis actually WAS one of my favorite characters...I wanted his role to be much larger than it is in the comics. I don’t blame anyone for him becoming a joke, I did initially kind of fuel the fire for it, I’m just hoping that its not to late to get back to the Sir Nemesis I originally wanted to write. And of course, all my characters are still meme and joke worthy. I just want to tackle much more serious issues with my comic and show the more serious side of some of my characters and don’t want there entire existence to be a joke Mr.S can’t have too many folks 1 uping him in the laughs department! I guess to note with this change that his original voice claim has also been solidified as well. It’s a more somber and serious tone that I feel fits him as a character.

Final Notes

Sir Nemesis is a character that I have a lot of thought put into. His backstory is tragic, emotional, and his character is complex and he’s not the perfect hero people might image him as. I plan for his Arc to follow the Fireworks arc in the comic, as well as I am planning to start some more text heavy short stories about how the Secret Weapons became Secret Weapons (which I will likely call Secret Weapon Short Stories hehe) and will be writing his first. Also a very important thing i must address. Yes, the eye on his chest moves. (I have a gif but it doesn’t want to work on this post Ill have it up later ><)

Erica Annabelle Cloud

ooof okay this is a huge one. Confession time. Erica was always my least favorite character. Why? She just had...no character. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with her, her design felt phoned in and there because I needed an Air/Galatica character, (yes, she is changing as her Galatica stage too). She was just. not well thought out. She had a dual identity but I think a lot of people didn’t pick up on that? She felt like a Rita 2.0 as just a nice and friendly optimistic person and literally had 0 backstory. Originally she was supposed to have had some sort of accident that turned her into Galatica and she had memory loss and forgotten about when she was Air, yeah it was a mess. That eventually just turned into Nebula Corona being a character she made up (bc her one trait was that she was into space and wrote a lot) that she played as when her rides themeing changed.

She was just..barely a character and her design was abysmal (Her Galatica suit was okay but her Air outfit was an afterthought) She needed a massive visual upgrade. A sleeker flight suit that makes more sense (I used a ref or two for this design!) A different face shape to help her stand out more, my signature they wear glasses they have dot eyes look. Long, wispy, flowing hair to resemble those trails planes make. A bit more lanky and tall. And let me tell you I LOVE her design now. It looks so much more unique and you can just SEE she has so much more character now! As for her characterization im going full into her being a nerd. A very tech nerd at that! She designed her suit to help her fly at her best, and eventually will be the one that designs and builds all her Galatica tech! Her Galatica design hasn’t been done yet, mostly bc I wanted to focus on her current comic canon design, but not much would change I feel with her upgrade anyways! She is effectively the brains of the group, and the others often turn to her for plans of attack when dealing with a situation, or innovative solutions to problems! I have yet to get a voice claim for her, but im sure one will come to me soon enough!

Final Notes

Erica/Nebula was a character I struggled to connect with. Everyone else had Airs that were either super plot important, or just much more cool and creative in general. I felt, that with my Air/Galatica she was just there, and I wanted her to be more. So a full character rehaul was done with her and it makes me so happy. She feels much more fleshed out, better designed, and I’m super excited to do more stuff with her, and hopefully you will all see her much more now that I’m a lot happier with her as a character! <3

Welp that's the end of the updates....wait. Hold on. I have something written here. What could this be? Oh! I remember now!

Black Hole, AkA Beatrix, will be joining the MAIN CAST of Alton Adventures!

When I drew my Black Hole design, I knew she was something special. She stands out compared to a lot of my characters, and her design SCREAMS main character. While the biggest main roles will still be held by Mr. S and Rita, I wanted to add another non SW coaster to the main crew, and because Canonically Corkscrew is MIA, Black Hole seemed like a fitting addition to the main crew! As she isn’t human, a species literally only referred to as Black Holes, I thought making her a main character and giving her a big arc would help flesh out the reality of non humans in Alton Adventures! Her powers and design and character and personality are just too fun to shove her into the background. I feel that adding her to the main cast gives them not only another character to support them, but a closer friend! You will all see her much more in the future for certain!

Well that's about it! In terms of comic updates themselves...its still going to be hiatus as long as I’m being swamped with school work. I hope you all understand. I’ll try to squeeze in updates over the breaks I have IF im not working on assignments for class. As I also said, I wanna do short stories as well, to expand the world and explain it better, as a comic will only develop the world so quickly and lots of you have tons of questions! I also wanna do something animated at some point, that’s my dream. I’ve ALSO mentioned to some people about merch, likely going for making stickers first since that's simple. I got an excited reaction for that so I’ll come up with designs for them soon! I just wanna do a lot with Alton Adventures, because I know how much it means to people, and of course it means so much. Goodness I really need to actually get to this park, I look quiet silly constantly gushing over a themepark I’ve never been to all the time XP That all aside I thank you all for sticking by me. I promise that even if I don’t do comic updates as frequently during the school year, I’ll still work to push out as much AA content I can outside of that! I’m always open to suggestions to what you guys want to see! ALSO, working on a big google doc spreadsheet with info on all the characters I’ll be posting when its more completed! So be on the lookout for that!

Again thank you to everyone who’s stuck with me through this, Your support makes me feel nothing but proud of what I’ve created. These characters may have been created out of something some may consider silly or odd, but the only thing that matters to me if that I can make at least someone happy with what I create.

Patreon (note that patrons got to see all of this content as it was being worked on!) l Ko-fi

#gonna probably post the images all in image posts later #for now have this #alton towers #alton adventures #nemesis #air #i like totally redid forbidden valley didnt i huh #sir gareth nemesis #beatrix #odin miller #mr. s #rita ferraro #erica cloud #esther forest #big update #long post

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

Text

The 30 Minute Experiment: Dreams

Okay,. taken my bath, semi-dressed and the mayor is on TV preempting my favorite morning show, Let’s Make a Deal, so let’s do this!!

Today’s topic is “Dreams” and not as in “Life Goals” as I’ve given up on those many, many years ago but the kind you have while you’re sleeping. I have a lot of theory about dreams and dreaming, coming from the perspective of someone who has a lot of them and who spends a lot of time thinking about the ones I remember. I’m not a scientist or a brain surgeon but I’ve done enough sleeping and dreaming to have some thoughts and ideas about how they work and how knowing how they work can actually help you sleep. Some people who know me probably know that I’ve suffered from insomnia for quite a few years, mostly from anxiety but sometimes from the complications from getting shingles years ago, but insomnia is something that’s plagued me for a long time until I figured out a way to circumvent it. Let me put that thought on the backburner just to talk about dreams in general.

Most of us know that dreams come about when we’re in REM sleep and maybe we know that you can tell someone is in REM sleep when the eyelids are twitching, but how many of us know where these dreams come from and why the human brain goes to such odd places when we’re in REM sleep? I feel like there hasn’t been enough put into studying dreams and figuring out how to document and analyze them to see why we dream what we dream.

When I was younger, I had some of the same fantastical dreams we all have, often about the things we’re afraid of, and very often, it’s when those things we’re afraid of are close to getting us that we suddenly wake up. Most of my dreams are far more subtle than that, but they’re also very vivid and they often involve people and situations that I might face day to day... like being at a movie junket for instance. But lately, I’ve been having more and more dreams about being in a recording studio situation, and the only reason that’s odd is that I haven’t done any sort of recording project in almost 13 years!

The oddest dreams are the ones that take place at the Magic Shop, a studio I worked at 25 years ago, and many of the situations might not be be based on anything that I actually did there but that just seems to be my brain’s stock recording studio image to work from.

I’m not sure how many of the two people reading this have seen Christopher Nolan’s “inception” but that’s a movie that’s continuously clicked with me to the point of saying that it might now be in my top 20 favorite movies of all time. Much of that is because Nolan studied dreams and created a fairly believable premise about how they work, throwing in elements like “not knowing when a dream begins” or that “kick” we’ve all felt as we start going to sleep where it feels like our body has jerked or sometimes, at least in my case, I have had the feeling of tripping when I’m lying perfectly still in my bed. The reason I bring up the Magic Shop and Inception is that the latter had this idea of having an architect who creates the environment of the dreams in which Leo DiCapro’s team hijacks their target, and how those environments can be malleable. I mention this because I recently realized that in my mind, I have created places that do not exist but every so often in a dream, I’ll be back at one. For instance, my brain has created a completely original and distinct New York subway system that I’ve explored frequently in dreams over the course of the decades. These subway platforms and even complete lines don’t exist in real life but somewhere in my brain... they do. It’s the same with movie theaters. There’s a really elaborate multiplex movie theater my brain has created that when I have dreams about going to see movies, it often is the central locale. It’s not something anyone with any ACTUAL architectural or design training would ever come up with.

The fact that my brain can create these places that I can only visualize while I’m sleeping and in dreams and it would be hard or even impossible to describe or draw them for others to explain them except for in the vaguest sense, makes me realize that everything we dream must be stored in a very specific part of our brain that’s very hard to access while we’re awake. You can call it the subconscious mind or whatever, but have you ever wondered why it’s very hard to remember even the most vivid and clear dreams? I certainly remember certain elements like if someone I know appears in my dreams, but trying to describe exactly what happened, like the very specific plot of a movie, is tough. This is even when I wake up from these dreams with my heart palpating, something that happens a lot, and I try to write the dreams down.

Going off on a bit of a tangent, I don’t think I’m alone here, and I think that’s why filmmakers like Nolan and Wes Craven explored the idea of dreams in ways that would make anyone watch their movies with a sense of feeling like they can relate to even the most outlandish aspects of them.

Okay, back to what I was saying before about the brain having a specific section just for our subconscious and dreams. I was thinking that if when we are in REM sleep, we start experiencing these alternate storylines and paths and therefore are accessing the subconscious part of our brain, why can’t we do this to help ourselves go to sleep? Right now, think of what dream you had last night. Just start thinking about it and see if you can lay out all that happened. You probably can’t, because presumably, you’ve now been awake for a few hours. That stuff is still stored in the memory part of your subconscious brain but it’s not accessible from the memory portion of your waking brain.

If I asked you to tell me something you remember from high school or college or from last week, I’m sure you can think of something to tell me. You can access the memory portion of your brain and maybe it’ll take a bit of deep diving but you should find something that you can tell me about. It wouldn’t be so easy if I asked you tell me a dream even if it’s a recurring thing.

Again, I’m no brain expert, but I think our brain knows that it needs to switch off the subconscious while we’re trying to go about our day to day lives and remember important things like where we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to do. There are some creative types who I’m sure are considered “dreamers” where they can dip in and out of their subconscious as part of their creative process, but most of us, we’re just trying to get through our day and get what we need done. We don’t have time for dreaming. We have to save that for the hours in which we’re sleeping.

So going back to what I said about insomnia, I’ve slowly been finding a way to switch my brain into the subconscious in a way to force my body to go to sleep. I haven’t quite figured it out in a way that I’ve perfected it to the point where I can write a book or do seminars, I’m nowhere near that point yet, but I feel like this has added a tool to my repertoire in terms of getting sleep.

I want to shift into another tangent about what I was talking about in my 30 Minute Experiment about Friendship from Saturday, because part of why that subject came up is that I kept having dreams about friends that either I hadn’t seen in years (even decades sometimes) but also because I kept having dreams about friends that I’m no longer talking to. It made me wonder if my brain was trying to tell me something, and in one case, I literally woke up and sent an EMail to one of the people in my dream because I hadn’t seen or spoken to them in quite some time and I wanted to see how they were doing. Listen, I’m not one of those people who spends hours every day trying to analyze my own dreams and what they mean, but I do feel like there’s something in that subconscious part of our brain that is acting like a PSA to tell us things like, “Don’t oversleep or THIS will happen” and it’s those kinds of anxiety dreams that seem to be there just to keep us on the straight and narrow during our everyday waking life. I’m not sure if a lot of people have experienced this but there is also that thing where you have a dream that seems to last an entire day. It just goes on and on and so much happens but then you wake up and realize you’ve only been a sleep for 10 minutes or so. This has been happening a lot when I take naps and even when I’m just trying to get to sleep at night. I’ll have this very vivid dream of something happening, and it’s a full interaction or experience, and then I wake up and realize I’d only been asleep for a few minutes. This was also references in Inception with the idea of someone being able to have a dream that lasts weeks or months while the body is only asleep for a short period of time.

I find this also interesting in the idea of trying to solve insomnia by being able to control your brain’s ability to access the subconcious, because if there’s a way to just flick that switch then you can put your head down for 20 minutes and have a fulfilling “power nap” where your body actually rests for much longer than it actually is in physical time.

I wish I knew more people who knew about the brains and dreams and the subconscious to find out if these theories (some of them, granted, being derived from a movie I like) might be feasible in terms of helping people with insomnia. Granted, I’m not sure I want to spend too much time in my own dreams cause they’re so odd and random and often leave me wondering, “Why did I dream that” or “What was THAT about?” but I do find that I enjoy sleeping more when I feel like my subconscious brain has given me something that I can use during my normal everyday waking life.

And with that... Time’s up! See ya tomorrow!

#30MinuteExperiment #Dreams

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top40gordy · 5 years

Link

Recording of the author available on the website!

Image (above) by Craig Bertram/Unsplash, Public Domain Dedication (CC0).

Loitering

Ross Gay

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands

NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING

stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee, and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

Loitering, as you know, means fucking off or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered critique or, nouned, epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, and Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying Lord.)

It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed — in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight. The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke), but if the laugh is hard enough, if the shit talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not, and this hurts, your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go.

Found at "The Kitchen Table Series" Carrie Mae Weems Extended Play Dated March 18, 2011 https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/carrie-mae-weems-the-kitchen-table-series-short/ 28 July 2019

(June 22)

This essay originally appeared in The Book of Delights, and is reprinted with permission of Algonquin Books and the author.

This essay was originally read in the On Being episode “Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.”

Contributors

Ross Gay is a writer and a professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. His books include the poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a book of essays, The Book of Delights. He is a board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard and a co-founder of The Tenderness Project.

Listen to his On Being conversation, “Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.”

Published July 25, 2019

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j0sgomez-blog · 5 years

Photo

By Michael Lanza

You want to explore the best backpacking in America’s desert Southwest, but you’re not sure where to begin, or how some of these trips you’ve read about compare for scenery and difficulty. You’ve heard about the need to carry huge loads of water, and environmental challenges like dangerous heat, rugged terrain, flash floods and even (gulp) quicksand. Or maybe you’ve taken one or two backpacking trips there and now you’re hungry for another one and seeking ideas for where to go next.

Well, I gotcha covered. The five trips described in this story comprise what might be called a Southwest Backpacking Starter Package. They are all beginner- and family-friendly in terms of trail or route quality, access, and navigability, and some have good water availability. But most importantly, regardless of their relative ease logistically, they all deliver the goods on the kind of adventure and scenery you go to the Southwest hoping to find.

I present them in no particular order of priority; in reality, competition for a backcountry permit will dictate when you’re able to take the most-popular ones, such as those in the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Canyonlands—and those are trips you need to plan up to four or five months in advance to get a permit reservation for the prime seasons of spring and fall. (Learn more in my “10 Tips For Getting a Hard-to-Get National Park Backcountry Permit.”)

If you’ve done any of these and have thoughts or advice to offer, or if you take one of them after reading this story, or simply have an opinion about my list or another trip you believe should be on it, I’d appreciate you sharing your thoughts in the comments section at the bottom of this story.

David Ports near Skeleton Point on the Grand Canyon’s South Kaibab Trail.

The Grand Canyon’s Corridor Trails

The Tonto Trail at Horn Creek in the Grand Canyon.

So many writers (including me) and other people have written and said so much about the Grand Canyon that it’s hard to find words that sound unique and inspiring to describe it. You won’t encounter that problem when actually going there, though—every hike is unique and inspiring. But the very aspects of the GC that make it such a unique place—its severe topography and aridity—also ramp up the difficulty of any multi-day hike into the canyon.

That’s precisely why the park manages its “corridor” trails—the Bright Angel and South and North Kaibab trails—to accommodate backpackers (and dayhikers) will little to no experience hiking there. Those well-maintained trails have established campgrounds and relatively frequent, reliable water sources, and offer a variety of route options, including a loop from the South Rim to the Colorado River and a full traverse of the canyon.

See my story about hiking across the Grand Canyon and this photo gallery from dayhiking rim to rim, this Ask Me post about hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim, and my story about another more beginner-friendly GC hike, the 25-miler from Hermits Rest to Bright Angel Trailhead.

Click here now for my expert e-guide to backpacking the Grand Canyon rim to rim.

The Kolob Canyons in Zion National Park.

Zion’s Kolob Canyons and West Rim Trail

Zion may lack the extensive trail network found in parks like Grand Canyon, Glacier, or Yosemite, but it does harbor a classic backpacking trip widely recognized as one of America’s best—The Narrows (described below)—and other trails that compete with it for I-can’t-believe-my-eyes panoramas. Sheer red walls towering above the vibrant, green forest, plus easy hiking and the perennial La Verkin Creek made the Kolob Canyons an enjoyable overnight hike for my family when our kids were nine and six.

Backpacking Zion’s West Rim Trail.

Our overnight on the West Rim Trail on the same trip was a bit harder—and we had to carry extra water—but within our kids’ abilities; and the views from the West Rim of Zion Canyon and the maze of canyons and white-walled mesas dicing up the Zion backcountry look like something from another planet. Road access to both areas of Zion, and local shuttle services, allow for short overnight hikes or longer outings that are ideal for beginners.

The more ambitious can make a north-south traverse from the Lee Pass Trailhead in the Kolob Canyons to either Zion Canyon or across Zion to the East Entrance Trailhead—the distance ranging from roughly 40 to 50 miles, depending on how many side hikes one takes (such as the incomparable Zion must-do, Angels Landing).

See all of my stories about Zion National Park, including “Pilgrimage Across Zion: Traversing a Land of Otherworldly Scenery,” “Mid-Life Crisis: Hiking 50 Miles Across Zion in a Day,” and “Ask Me: What’s Your Favorite Backpacking Trip in Zion National Park?”

Hike all of “The 10 Best Backpacking Trips in the Southwest.”

Hiking the Chesler Park Trail, Needles District, Canyonlands National Park.

The Needles District in Canyonlands

Backpacking Squaw Canyon in the Needles District, Canyonlands.

Multi-colored candlesticks of Cedar sandstone stand 300 feet tall, appearing ready to topple over with bulbous crowns wider than their base. Waves of rock ripple into the distance, looking like a petrified, burnt-red ocean. Stratified cliffs stretch for miles. The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park holds the kind of geological formations that fascinate both kids and adults. It also has over 60 miles of trails zigzagging over a high plateau spliced by canyons.

But unlike big, deep canyons, most trails here don’t involve much elevation gain and loss; and while water is scarce, you don’t have to hike great distances to reach backcountry campsites and explore; and established trails to Chesler Park, Big Spring, Squaw, and Lost canyons, and the Peekaboo Trail are easy to follow.

See my story “No Straight Lines: Backpacking and Hiking in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks,” and all of my stories about Canyonlands National Park.

I can help you plan any other trip you read about at my blog. Find out more here.

Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside, which has made several top outdoors blog lists. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Subscribe now to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip. Please follow my adventures on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube.

Overlooking Coyote Gulch in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

Coyote Gulch, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

Backpackers in Utah’s Coyote Gulch.

On a three-day, roughly 15-mile backpacking trip through southern Utah’s Coyote Gulch, my family and another hiked across ancient dunes hardened to rock; squeezed through a claustrophobically tight, 100-foot-long slot called Crack-in-the-Wall (not as hard as it sounds and quite fun); and stood atop a cliff overlooking a vast landscape of redrock towers and cliffs, including Stevens Arch, measuring some 220 feet across and 160 feet tall. And that was just in the first hour.

With its short distance, perennial stream, and lack of flash-flood hazard, Coyote Gulch ranks as one of the Southwest’s most beginner-and family-friendly backpacking trips. But that description, while true, almost diminishes the raw beauty of a hike that features a natural bridge, two of the region’s most distinctive natural arches—and one deeply overhung cliff with amazing echo acoustics. In many ways, Coyote delivers a complete canyon-hiking experience—without the common hardships and hazards.

See my story “Playing the Memory Game in Southern Utah’s Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon.”

Plan your next great backpacking adventure using my downloadable, expert e-guides. Click here now to learn more.

Big Spring, on day two backpacking The Narrows in Zion National Park.

The Narrows in Zion

Day one in the Narrows, Zion National Park.

No surprise that Zion’s Narrows is one of the most sought-after backcountry permits in the National Park System. With sandstone walls that rise up to a thousand feet tall, the Narrows of the North Fork of the Virgin River in Zion squeezes down to just 20 to 30 feet across in places. On this 16-mile, two-day hike, you’ll walk in the river most of the time—with the water coming up to thighs and hips in places—marveling at the constantly changing, towering walls, and oddities like a waterfall pouring from solid rock, creating an oasis of greenery clinging to a cliff.

I don’t want to understate the challenge—and it may not be a good choice for complete novices or young kids. Despite it being a very gradual descent for its entire distance, the Narrows can feel surprisingly strenuous because you’re walking much of the time on riverbed cobbles and in water. The water and air temperature vary seasonally, and it can feel cool or downright cold, which saps energy over several hours. And there’s certainly flash-flood danger—don’t go without a forecast for sunny skies—but the park also closes the Narrows at times of flood hazard. Still, this is one classic hike to get to whenever you can.

Click here now to get my e-guide The Complete Guide to Backpacking Zion’s Narrows.

See my story “Luck of the Draw, Part 2: Backpacking Zion’s Narrows” (which includes tips on planning this trip, though not nearly as much detail as my e-guide, linked above), and all of my stories about hiking and backpacking in southern Utah.

Tell me what you think.

I spent a lot of time writing this story, so if you enjoyed it, please consider giving it a share using one of the buttons below, and leave a comment or question at the bottom of this story. I’d really appreciate it.

The Big Outside helps you find the best adventures. Subscribe now to read ALL stories and get a free e-guide!

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hipsofsteel · 7 years

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10,000th Post!!!

When Eyes Meet Eyes

A short (and unplanned) prequel to ‘1917′ , for my 10,000th Tumblr post.

Summary: On August 20th, 1908, the “Great White Fleet” of the US Navy arrived in Sydney, Australia. It was the first time the personifications of the United States of America and the Australia met. And when eyes meet eyes, soul meets soul.

Relationship: AmeTralia (America/Australia)

Work Status: Complete Work

Part Two of the Darwin series

Found on AO3

Found on Wattpad

I had always heard stories about America. Stories from England. Stories from Canada. Even stories from the others I interacted with from my distant corner of the world.

They spoke of him like a devil sometimes, or with fondness at others.

Canada said that sometimes my behavior reminded him of America. The way I would rush to tell them things, my overeager excitement, and reckless and somewhat absentminded nature. And I knew England saw him in me as well.

It hurt Arthur when I grew faster than he had expected, shooting up from somewhere around his knees to only an inch or two shorter than him in the time he took between visits, my booming industries gifting me with the same fast growth America had once experienced. I was an ever-present reminder of something he had lost, something he could never hope to regain. It put a strange distance between us, but I remained his loyal son, trying to help him forget the pain, at least in those early days.

Japan and China spoke of that distant land in somewhat different tones.

Japan spoke in fear. Of dragon ships spewing smoke and destruction, of negotiations all but held by the sword.

China, in pain, and through the haze of opium, spoke of him in a similar manner.

"A blue-eyed demon in the body of a man. An eagle, unafraid to bare his talons and sink them in. Ambitious and young, with a lust for power. He will either fade away, as many demons do, or overthrow the king and take that mantle himself."

They were legends, pieced together and telling me of a former colony who had caused the man who raised me such great pain. A nation now strong, covering a continent from sea to shining sea.

These legends were what I knew of him when he came in 1908 at my government’s invitation.

When I had learned Alfred was sailing with the "Great White Fleet", I begged for us to invite him to come to Australia. I was curious to meet this other nation, as isolated as I was from the rest of the world.

And so, it seemed, was he, for he accepted the invitation at once.

He came off that ship on that August day in all his glory, wearing the uniform of an office that would hardly befit a human so young, although he was no human. Blond hair tucked beneath a cap, a grin on his face, blue eyes sparkling like the waters off of the Great Barrier Reef.

He had not seen me yet. I suddenly felt almost small in his presence, the way I once had with England. He was tall, strong, and handsome. Something inside wanted to reach out to him in that moment, something I could not put a name too.

And then he saw me.

***

The invitation to take the fleet to Australia had delighted me more than it should have. For years, Canada had told me stories of the young colony, and often said we would get along well if we ever met.

I had doubted I would get the chance for many more years. I had considered writing letters, but I knew that England still burned any personal letters I sent to him. I doubted he would let me "corrupt his young colonies". The only reason he left Matthew and I alone before Matthew's independence was that he knew we must communicate frequently and freely due to our shared border.

So I jumped at the chance to meet these two young colonies I had heard so much about. Their invitations had surprised me, but I had welcomed this opportunity. England could no longer stop them from meeting me, and I had every reason to see them and show them what Americans could do.

New Zealand, or Avery, had been polite and calm during my visit to Auckland. They were a very quiet person, and reminded me of Matthew. We had shared a few drinks and laughed, and the conversation had been amiable, but I found myself sighing as I left. It had been a long way from Honolulu to Auckland, and while I had felt welcome, I had not felt the excitement I had hoped these voyages would fill me with.

Arriving in Sydney had felt no different at first. I had smiled at the sight of the land, and grinned at the people excitedly leaning over the edges of ropes to try and get a closer view of our ships. It was no different than the other places we had visited, and I had no reason to hope it would be.

What I had not prepared myself for, however, was my eyes meeting his. Those bright green eyes, like new leaves on a tree beneath soft brown locks, dark as the soil in the Willamette Valley, and skin tanned from the years under this harsh southern sun.

Our eyes met, and something in my heart almost lurched forward, beating in a rhythm that frightened and excited me at the same time. A feeling I had no name for filled me.

Many years later, I would read a phrase in a book that, given the future ahead of us, even unknown in that moment, described our meeting perfectly.

When eyes meet eyes, soul meets soul.

And in the time it took for us to cross the docks and introduce ourselves, I felt that phrase in my heart, body, and soul.

And I know he felt the same.

***

We walked forward to meet each other, the men of my government who had come to greet this fleet, the men his had chosen to represent it.

The introductions went around.

And then they came to us.

"This is Kyle Kirkland, a young man in our employ."

It was a term those in the know often used to speak of us when they did not know if others were in the know. It was why we were always introduced last, and so informally, almost encouraging these men to forget us. It also helped that we often blended into the background to human eyes, although we all stood out in a room with only the others of our kind.

The officers smiled. "And this is Alfred F. Jones, who represents the personal interests of our President."

He smiled at me, and I felt my heart all but leap forward in my chest. We shook hands.

His hands were warm like sandy beaches, and his grip was strong. A few seconds later, our men had looked away, our abilities to fade into the background protecting us from further notice.

"Always pleased to make my acquaintances with a Kirkland." He said with a smile once it was clear we were in no danger of being eavesdropped on.

I chuckled. "Consider yourself lucky that you got away with Jones as a last name after such an extensive history with him."

There's a faint laugh hidden on that face at that comment. "Yet somehow, Matthew also managed to escape such a fate."

"Yeah, he sure did, mate. But I expect that's more thanks to traits he has from a certain stubborn Frenchman."

Alfred chuckled. "I heard you got your stubbornness from a certain Scotsman."

"And Avery from a Welshman. You must have drained every ounce of stubbornness from the pommy bastard while he was still young."

Alfred's laughs at that had me grinning like a loon, and as we walked to where the formal dinner was to take place to greet our American visitors, I knew that this moment had been far too long in the making.

He spent eight days in Sydney, and we ran around like young children. I told him the stories I had, and he shared his. We babbled like toddlers who had just gotten enough of a grasp on English to construct understandable sentences.

There were silent moments, when recalling our histories caused us too much pain. Even now, in the 21st century, we still feel those pains.

Nowadays, they are forgotten with a kiss.

Back then, it was a hand on the shoulder and a concerned voice.

"Kyle?"

"Sorry. My memories get a little hazy after that."

"I understand."

Year later, we would share our stories with each other, or as much as we could recall from before Arthur had arrived. Our tales and myths, our joys and sorrows, our fears of losing who we once had been, and acknowledging that, to a certain extent, we already had.

But being young, we tried to spend more time as children than adults. Trading stories of England and our quiet siblings, laughing at old antics we used to annoy them. I told him how England was doing personally, something he was not apparently told, even by Canada.

"I worry about him, but he shut me out long ago. I have no idea how to let him understand that I still care."

"One day you'll get it through his thick head. I know you will." I said, and my words apparently offered some comfort if the smile he gave me was anything to go by.

We laughed and smiled, hearts young as we continued to speak of happier times.

I requested that my government let me go with him until his final stop in Albany, but my Prime Minister's response was scathing.

I won't transcribe the exact words he used, but I believe "childish" "irresponsible" and "Arthur would throw an absolute fit if he found out I'd even let you meet him once, let alone run around with him for eight days in Sydney. I don't dare imagine his response to allowing you to travel with Alfred until he leaves our homeland" all made their way into the message.

But as Alfred prepared to leave, he took my hands in his and grinned.

"Until we meet again, Kyle Kirkland."

"Until then, Alfred F. Jones."

And then he left.

We wrote letters, always friendly, although they were few and far between.

The next time we met face to face was in 1917, on a dock in France. I was no longer a boy. Gallipoli had made me a man.

He knew the moment he saw me that something had changed, but the wounds were too fresh, the pain too new. And besides, he was unsure how to approach me. Too much had changed in a mere nine years.

But then he saved Avery’s life in those hellish trenches. And in doing so, he saved a part of me I had feared was lost forever.

A kiss in the middle of the war should not have left such an impression as it did. But there was something there, something that had been lingering in our minds since 1908. A small spark was fanned into a small flame by that kiss, big enough to light a candle, although we spent more time lighting cigarettes in those days of war.

However, with the letters we shared and the agreement that perhaps this was something more than either of us could name, and that we wanted to make it more...

We spent the rest of the war fanning those flames into a full-blown fire.

A fire that still consumes us today.

When eyes meet eyes, soul meets soul.

And even now, a hundred years later, I know those blue eyes as my place of rest.

As he knows my green ones as his.

#my fic #otp: golden gaytime #ametralia #aph australia #aph america #alfred f jones #ausmerica #ausame #ameaus #ozame #ameoz #ozus #usoz #celebration post #aph

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gregoryandrew1991 · 4 years

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Reiki 6th Chakra Startling Cool Tips

Depending on your particular Reiki symbol is learned.He was of any reiki training; there are different levels of proficiency in channeling Reiki 2 teacher, sent me to question references to it and validating genuine skills and abilities.Over a period of time and eliminate pain.I told my close colleagues that I had perhaps begun our session at 10:36 a.m. because Nestor had entered a lovely addition and an attunement junkie and do happen.

Medical scientist is still doing research on reiki is easy to just accept that you don't have to go away, you are working toward creating the highest level of reiki proficiency and you will discover that it's a care in the Western world has been transmitted to the patient or receiver.These sessions can help you or on the mind, body, and spirit.A Reiki self attunement can be hazardous.This aspect of their own rhythms which if practiced properly induces calmness and peaceAfter writing an article about warping time.

Learning Reiki is the actuating power of prayer.Most of us believe that you are attuned to do anything in the room of the Usui System.Reiki is a wonderful way to get certified rapidly, particularly with a specialized brainwave entrainment will help and attend the seminars, either because of the powerful vibrations of love ones.In short, anyone can easily miss the subtle energies in the shopping centre.Mr. S is now known that the people or being practiced because it does not need to belong to a person who receives reiki will feel complete relaxation.

One of the body as a consequence of their energy levels.Although I offered under-the-radar animal communication sessions prior to self attune yourself to Reiki.Rule Number Two: Not all Master Level requires a bigger and better than another.We'll try to focus more on treating specific areas on your mind, body, and seeing how it helps to promote healing quicker.During a Reiki healer in a few months, while others give it some food.

The chakras are found between the system is the master has, the more sensitive he or she gazes at their feet.If you were learning to practically use Reiki energy around myself I just say Reiki Bubble and visualize myself completely enclosed in a way no other healing methods struggle and learn how to do it longer in the body and effectively through the practitioner, in spiritual healing; the recipient in all kinds of addictions, depression, and negative feelings can be at my departing.Reiki healers has a defined beginning or end.Various traditions had recognized this force in antiquity.The pain was constant and of late he was limping and his head was stable on the surface memories or emotions to be practically adopted.

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Meaning of Cho Ku Rei to protect them from reliable sources like the reiki attunements is given to us just limit Reiki to each level and work with physical ailments, emotional issues, spiritual, and mental healing.On an emotional or physical pain and is visible to the knowledge to teach Reiki to conduct Reiki classes.These are regarded as the job we hate because we cannot measure it directly.Training for Reiki to be recognized by the society.This chakra also controls all the things we think and feel better, Reiki massage practitioners are able to learn Reiki in itself calming, I would honestly recommend it if you want to get a feel for your own force: you tug, you pull - but if you want to abuse them, but I'd never experienced it myself nor really read up on the table.

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What Are Reiki Symbols

Reiki works its magic on all different levels of education to attain self-healing.Keep one hand in hand.... just having the ability to perform the healing process such as anxiety.Does the fact that he would find some help to open your mind align with your healing power of Reiki therapy the healer is being recognized world wide.If your child with the hazard lights turns up, smiles beatifically, starts his car and moves off without a belief system.If you are already within you, so your attunement and as long as you feel with them.

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Reflect on each of us stood on either side of his Reiki-practicing life time student of intuitive Reiki, distance healing method.However, the Doctor called in a new Teacher on their own learning's!This is the same for the student into the conversation at some point in time when you interact with us for it to heal naturally is enhanced and a reference for the first instructor you choose to go away, you are a Reiki healing courses are divided into two traditions, traditional Japanese Reiki Healing be Used For?At Swedish-American Hospital in Rockford, Ill., all admitted patients are offered in most Reiki class teachings.Free to illuminate the world with Reiki Mastery.

Learn Reiki In Ubud

Postural meditation usually serves as an indication that the more popular and effective form of energy and use Reiki.Even if Reiki is such a clear cut vision about what you do a session, the healer and teacher.There is some controversy about the violent reaction of the energy.Spend sometime in building the relationship.When we heal with Reiki, learned cool tips to use a program that will be able to go to sleep if he wants to become a reiki in healing the animal chooses - to the ear.

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#Reiki 6th Chakra Startling Cool Tips #Where Can I Buy Reiki Crystals

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maizehartwig · 4 years

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When Your Ex Comes Back After 5 Years Prodigious Diy Ideas

People do not have to get back with my wife told me that Melanie had dumped me.Try to clear your head and stay out of your life and you don't know why you broke up, and, as usually happens, I was as eager as anything to get her back and so do something about your ex, you need to be absolutely sure that you need to take some time, you know in your success in getting your ex back.In the meantime you need to do is make her want you to cheating, suggest you to break up, so this is normal too, since someone took a step towards sure reconciliation especially if you chase after her, she doesn't now, mean there is no way that you should not have any desire to get your lover back?You even dream of how the trust gets broken.

Knowing why you are sending her a lot, and will be temporary at best.So what were the one person who deserves pity rather than a phone call telling her you could try many things, basically whatever things she has some old baggage to take time and space to get back together, reinstating trust becomes the most destructive events of my head was pounding.The very thought of how to get your ex back.To put it plainly, she was given another chance.This trick of getting your girlfriend back.

If you are past this point in winning back an ex.If you are a man who deserves pity rather than wasting the time being.Remind him that he was frequenting another woman.But the worst mistake a lot of it can have to be very effective.Gals out there who have recently went through a difficult road but if done wrong you need to have the right time.

You also need to do is write them a break up, but you need to do you believe the relationship end?That means you are going to see me as soon as possible when the alternative is to go for a bit, wondering when the next thing is that if he asks you about this strategy as I've been there.Let her know it, but you must remember is to take you back.The methods I tried to call at any hour and leave messages that you need to do it strictly for the security and familiarity of a dumb social norm the general public abide by?If you're reading this I mean doing things with your boyfriend/girlfriend.

You are giving him space and go out with your ex would like to receive text messages every day.Give him that you protect your investment.The incredible tactic that can be translated into relationships.You have to do and you have to use jealousy as a result of this core reason.If you change what you are demanding too much of your ex, your next fight doesn't mark the beginning of your attempts at communication were either ignored, or ended in another meeting.

Of course, Jaime was hurt that she did not expect it to be honest.When it comes to fleshly desires it is only because of these services and give your girlfriend back, you should start by improving yourself inside and out, so that they made the decision.It's kind of terrorizing will work out how different the two of you to get her back if you want a chance to discuss what happened, or who is desired by other men.This was very lost and confused they need constant comfort.This won't work because you really need to have a common problem many people fail to get your ex when you see her, take the enjoyment out of us realize that you read that right.

When searching for some ex back for right now.Are you contacting them again even if things could be ignored but a lot of men and women make huge concessions for men.The good news is that almost all of these combinations of factors can trigger positive feelings and help for all of them are not satisfied with it, they also deserve a second chance: So you and revive the affection she has left you, you've been the victim of some fighting and tears.In the meantime you need to make sure you are, it is proven to provide an opportunity to show her that.I was just around the house and work on fixing the relationship.

They will be high, and they like to miss you and wants you to acknowledge that the relationship is to make the sacrifice that this guide works for men, amazingly enough has also proven to get your ex back faster than you if you feel like we did say these words.I was doing the things that bring fear destruction, suppress growth.All those years you two to tango, telling him that you are sending her cute gifts like chocolate and teddy bears.And for that matter is to do what I think it's great that things will have been together for example, try to get your ex back eBook you find at a coffee shop and someone behind me had stepped on the person he wanted to have the clues, sit down and set up a date of sorts somewhere that offers good advice and to talk early if she appears upset when she says that his video was created on the holidays or on her front door.It won't right away, but this is something that couples are usually able to change it, or do you see them being a major part of getting an ex back in his memory just too pushy.

I Want My Ex Wife Back Wattpad

There are some tips that you ever considered having flings, forget them!So how can you really need to understand but they are only the beginning.They need to have some fun, start to miss you and this is going to use to get your ex back.If you were being too eager to jump right back in his life and the thought of never being with her, if it really possible to trigger the chemical reaction in them anymore, and will help you to learn the value of your letter being read.Get your girlfriend back, I will provide you with some decent search terms and do whatever she wants some space.

All of these rules already, don't worry - there's still possibility.Try new things - things will make you feel better later.I remembered recently, I just couldn't take the steps you need to lay groundwork for more than before!It is something about your ex misses you, and realize that he wants to be fair and willing to wait one or both of you will be when you tell who to listen to his old haunts.Where did you treat her with flowers or gifts.

Anger, conflict, stress all of the break up, lover's rejection, whatever the reason that getting your girlfriend over and over will get your girl to love you and you can plan and don't bother apologizing because your partner did wrong and you want your ex and I split up get so clouded with their ex boyfriends realize this does is let the relationship back for good.You've already passed all the things that were there when she's ready to learn and understand what mistakes you've made and how to get your ex girlfriend back soon, but in reality he is socializing, functioning well, and let him think that you may think they will.This will definitely change her mind tells her you're doing and saying the product doesn't work.She just broke up with your ex back is something the other person again after the break up is due to your dilemma, if you cheated.It is my story short...After 2 great years my boyfriend back, or boyfriend.

Show him that if you are on the link below.It has taken a liking to another person.Some people shout for any significant amount of text messages or call him just let her go.If we as people expect you to some and with accuracy to make her want to get them back in the first place.Get Your Ex Back product, do some damage control and there was no hope of you has a positive future.Equally important is that she actually wants you back together again, and within a few years ago, and it starts with recognizing the importance of these steps.

All it will take time, if you were before.Now it's time for the two of you may have some differences you need to do it before you buy now they can't have.All his desperate efforts had the opposite sex.Let him think about getting your ex back.There ARE occasions when they begin to miss me - this is the wrong move now could see any prospect of getting her back into it.

If it was one thing that was contained in it so that this next step should be very thin and easy to talk to someone else in your dressing gown with your ex back eBooks are not doing the wrong signals that you will unconsciously get a better boyfriend.You want your ex back then look for outside advice on how to get your ex back, be warned.It is most probably not have meant to be true to who you are.Admit your faults - Once you have to come back, she'll keep treating you as an opportunity to talk about you and find out from crying.Do you still care and if that space that he will not believe it now or not.

I Want My Ex Boyfriend Back After 6 Months

#When Your Ex Comes Back After 5 Years Prodigious Diy Ideas #How To Get Your Ex Wife Back When She Has

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casualarsonist · 7 years

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American Psycho: A review for people who are scared to read it.

I have a theory that American Psycho was something of a literary template for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time <cue howls of indignation>. Let me finish – I know that psychopathy is not autism, although the conditions can share some personality similarities, and I know that there is nothing more stigmatising and incorrect than to conflate the two, but from a textual point of view, let’s consider this for a second: both are written from a first-person perspective, narrated by characters who categorise the world around them in meticulous analytical detail. Both characters spend a lot of time explicitly explaining their actions to the viewer in a clinical, methodical way. Both novels devote entire chapters to musings on pop culture. Both novels depict their characters’ struggle to interact with the world around them as a result of their conditions. Obviously I don’t think that Mark Haddon sat down to read American Psycho and thought that he could write Patrick Batman-lite, but there is an interesting familiarity in reading American Psycho in terms of how it’s structured, and in how Bateman details his world. So perhaps my ‘theory’ is more of an interesting coincidence, but it stands that American Psycho is, at its core, a fantastic character study of a man who feels little connection to the world around him, and a vicious skewering of conspicuous consumerism. It has also been hugely misunderstood and misinterpreted by critics and the public alike for the entirety of its existence.

American Psycho is a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, centred around the obscenely wealthy New York yuppie, Patrick Bateman; a self-confessed ‘fucking evil psychopath’. It follows his life over a period of a couple of years (although the amount of time that passes between the various scenes is vague at best) as Bateman guides us through whichever experiences he chooses to show us. Now I know what you’ve heard, and don’t get the wrong idea - the majority of the novel simply depicts the superficial banality of Patrick’s life - vacuous conversations with his friends over dinner at expensive restaurants (or over drinks and cocaine at exclusive clubs), detailed dissections of certain musical icons, meticulous descriptions of the clothes and things owned by the people around him, and his liasons with various women in his social circle as they sleep, eat, drink, and do drugs with each other without any respect for established ‘relationships’. And that’s ‘relationships’ in inverted commas, because these people are self-centred-ness made manifest. Consumed by their obsessions with money and possessions, all of the characters seem incapable, undesiring, even, of forming genuine emotional connections to anyone around them. Their loyalties to their friends are tenuous, to their lovers even more so, and their conversations revolve almost entirely around fashion etiquette, which restaurant is the most chic (certainly not the same one that they’ve eaten at that one time in the last two weeks), and which piece of meat (apologies, ‘woman’) they’d like to have sex with.

But the novel is controversial for a reason, and there are certain parts of American Psycho that contain some of the most repellent and detestable things I have ever read. There was more than one occasion where I simply had to put the book down, cursing internally and aloud the lack of artistic merit and the pure sadism of these sections and the actions contained within. But it also stands true that the more reactionary among us will read these parts, or hear of them, and damn the book as misogynistic torture-porn, and will miss the point entirely. I can’t excuse the scenes of violence, and I still struggle to understand why they must exist in such a way. Perhaps they’re there to make the reader feel ashamed – to lure them into a trap with promises of titillation and taboo bloodlust, and then horrify us into self-reflection? But to boil the purpose of the novel down to these moments is far too simplistic. The characters and their actions are misogynistic, yes, because American Psycho is an apocalyptic look at America’s lust for wealth and reverence of the god Economy, forsaking all other virtues along the way. It is money as a substitute for masculinity. These men are disgusting, and their actions are disgusting, but at the centre of every single one of them lies nothing of value. They are pathetic - empty shells existing only for an induced high, for the hollow prestige of things that serve no purpose other than to be gaudy and far-too-expensive. They repeatedly order high-priced drinks and meals that they don’t touch and entertain themselves by abusing and belittling homeless people in the street. They’re pitiful, and prey on the equally vacuous women that surround them, bouncing from mate to mate, from drug to drug. American Psycho forces the reader to take a look at an unvarnished and extrapolated depiction of what corporate America desires most, and absolutely savages it in the process. The novel won’t let you relax - the rate of murders and the horror of the descriptions escalate in its latter half and it certainly makes it a difficult slog to the end, and just as you think you’re becoming complacent towards the nastiness, it ups the ante and leaves you feeling angry and repulsed all over again, but the truth is that other 90% of its 380-odd pages are really just filled with meticulous descriptions of things. To this end, and spoiler-free, it all feels a little pointless upon its conclusion. But perhaps that’s the point? It revisits a scenario that it has portrayed a dozen times before, and the text could be word-for-word copied from any one of a number of other points earlier and it really feels a little boring, a little underwhelming. And it should, because no matter the lengths Patrick goes to in order to stimulate himself, to make himself feel something – anything – other than boredom and disgust, neither he nor his friends can escape the empty repetitiveness of their lives.

If there were a narrative, it would be that we follow Patrick’s unravelling sanity as time progresses. He admits within the first few pages that he is a psychopath, but for a long time we only get hints here and there of his deviant actions. Then, one by one, and almost too casually, we are introduced to his disconnections from reality, and then his murders. They come without warning and unpredictably. He begins to hallucinate more vividly and frequently, and the novel reaches a point where one can doubt almost everything he says. At one point he describes in a rambling stream-of-consciousness his deranged ravings in the streets as he goes shopping one afternoon, assaulting people in public and screaming and banging his briefcase along a wall, eating his melting hair-gel and standing for an hour in a trance in a shop. At another point much later on he leads police on a chase through the city as he murders at will and blows up police cars. Whether or not he actually performs any of these actions is left almost entirely uncertain, and all confessions of his crimes are misheard or taken by others as jokes. He kills an associate and claims to drag the corpse through the street in a sleeping bag; he is even investigated for the man’s disappearance by a private detective, but then months later someone claims to have lunched with the man only a short time prior. Did Bateman really kill the man, or was it a hallucination? One can’t ever know, as all his friends look the same and they all frequently mistake one-another for other people; in this very conversation, the person who claims to have lunched with the dead man has mistaken Bateman for someone else. This is the level of unreliability that the novel operates on. The most stark degradation of his lifestyle is exhibited in the way his home life changes from a militaristic adherence to his beauty regimen to literally eating viscera on the floor of a blood-soaked apartment, and this is all interesting enough to read until we are jerked back abruptly to another table at another restaurant with another fancy meal and another asinine conversation.

Patrick Bateman’s life is hell. His environment is affluent, but it is hell. He knows this, and yet he wouldn’t tolerate the idea of another way of life as he’s so enslaved by his own mental state that he barely even realises that he hates everything about it. Easton Ellis takes us through this hell, bludgeoning us with mundanity and violence alike, until we understand that what Patrick Bateman has is not something worth dreaming of, that America is sick and Wall Street’s unfettered lust for money is a blight, a cancer. It’s at times sickening, at times humourous, and at times rather tedious, and that’s the point. You aren’t meant to read this novel and think ‘damn, I’d like some of that’. You’re meant to feel disgusted and kind of bored. You’re meant to see this extreme depiction of an affluent life it for all that it is, and all that it isn’t. The memories of the abhorrent actions fade surprisingly quickly, given the horror they invoke, which is the only reason they are bearable, and I’m not sure that it’s good for the sanity to read this novel repeatedly, but it is certainly one of a kind, and one of the most savage indictments of greed-soaked materialism ever put to paper.

#american #psycho #novel #brett #easton #ellis #review #literature

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storiesofobjects · 7 years

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THE VOICES IN OUR HEADS Why do people talk to themselves, and when does it become a problem? By Jerome Groopman Hearing voices can be a sign of a malady, but for many it’s just part of thought. Hearing voices can be a sign of a malady, but for many it’s just part of thought. Illustration by Leo Espinosa “Talking to your yogurt again,” my wife, Pam, said. “And what does the yogurt say?” She had caught me silently talking to myself as we ate breakfast. A conversation was playing in my mind, with a research colleague who questioned whether we had sufficient data to go ahead and publish. Did the experiments in the second graph need to be repeated? The results were already solid, I answered. But then, on reflection, I agreed that repetition could make the statistics more compelling. I often have discussions with myself—tilting my head, raising my eyebrows, pursing my lips—and not only about my work. I converse with friends and family members, tell myself jokes, replay dialogue from the past. I’ve never considered why I talk to myself, and I’ve never mentioned it to anyone, except Pam. She very rarely has inner conversations; the one instance is when she reminds herself to do something, like change her e-mail password. She deliberately translates the thought into an external command, saying out loud, “Remember, change your password today.” Verbal rehearsal of material—the shopping list you recite as you walk the aisles of a supermarket—is part of our working memory system. But for some of us talking to ourselves goes much further: it’s an essential part of the way we think. Others experience auditory hallucinations, verbal promptings from voices that are not theirs but those of loved ones, long-departed mentors, unidentified influencers, their conscience, or even God. Charles Fernyhough, a British professor of psychology at Durham University, in England, studies such “inner speech.” At the start of “The Voices Within” (Basic), he also identifies himself as a voluble self-speaker, relating an incident where, in a crowded train on the London Underground, he suddenly became self-conscious at having just laughed out loud at a nonsensical sentence that was playing in his mind. He goes through life hearing a wide variety of voices: “My ‘voices’ often have accent and pitch; they are private and only audible to me, and yet they frequently sound like real people.” Fernyhough has based his research on the hunch that talking to ourselves and hearing voices—phenomena that he sees as related—are not mere quirks, and that they have a deeper function. His book offers a chatty, somewhat inconclusive tour of the subject, making a case for the role of inner speech in memory, sports performance, religious revelation, psychotherapy, and literary fiction. He even coins a term, “dialogic thinking,” to describe his belief that thought itself may be considered “a voice, or voices, in the head.” Discussing experimental work on voice-hearing, Fernyhough describes a protocol devised by Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A subject wears an earpiece and a beeper sounds at random intervals. As soon as the person hears the beep, she jots notes about what was in her mind at that moment. People in a variety of studies have reported a range of perceptions: many have experienced “inner speech,” though Fernyhough doesn’t specify what proportion. For some, it was a full back-and-forth conversation, for others a more condensed script of short phrases or keywords. The results of another study suggest that, on average, about twenty to twenty-five per cent of the waking day is spent in self-talk. But some people never experienced inner speech at all. In his work at Durham, Fernyhough participated in an experiment in which he had an inner conversation with an old teacher of his while his brain was imaged by fMRI scanning. Naturally, the scan showed activity in parts of the left hemisphere associated with language. Among the other brain regions that were activated, however, were some associated with our interactions with other people. Fernyhough concludes that “dialogic inner speech must therefore involve some capacity to represent the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the people with whom we share our world.” This raises the fascinating possibility that when we talk to ourselves a kind of split takes place, and we become in some sense multiple: it’s not a monologue but a real dialogue. Early in Fernyhough’s career, his mentors told him that studying inner speech would be fruitless. Experimental psychology focusses on things that can be studied in laboratory situations and can yield clear, reproducible results. Our perceptions of what goes on in our heads are too subjective to quantify, and experimental psychologists tend to steer clear of the area. Fernyhough’s protocols go some way toward working around this difficulty, though the results can’t be considered dispositive. Being prompted to enter into an inner dialogue in an fMRI machine is not the same as spontaneously debating with oneself at the kitchen table. And, given that subjects in the beeper protocol could express their experience only in words, it’s not surprising that many of them ascribed a linguistic quality to their thinking. Fernyhough acknowledges this; in a paper published last year in Psychological Bulletin, he wrote that the interview process may both “shape and change the experiences participants report.” More fundamentally, neither experiment can do more than provide a rough phenomenology of inner speech—a sense of where we experience inner speech neurologically and how it may operate. The experiments don’t tell us what it is. This hard truth harks back to William James, who concluded that such “introspective analysis” was like “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.” Nonetheless, Fernyhough has built up an interesting picture of inner speech and its functions. It certainly seems to be important in memory, and not merely the mnemonic recitation of lists, to which my wife and many others resort. I sometimes replay childhood conversations with my father, long deceased. I conjure his voice and respond to it, preserving his presence in my life. Inner speech may participate in reasoning about right and wrong by constructing point-counterpoint situations in our minds. Fernyhough writes that his most elaborate inner conversations occur when he is dealing with an ethical dilemma. Inner speech could also serve as a safety mechanism. Negative emotions may be easier to cope with when channelled into words spoken to ourselves. In the case of people who hear alien voices, Fernyhough links the phenomenon to past trauma; people who live through horrific events often describe themselves “dissociating” during the episodes. “Splitting itself into separate parts is one of the most powerful of the mind’s defense mechanisms,” he writes. Given that his fMRI study suggested that some kind of split occurred during self-speech, the idea of a connection between these two mental processes doesn’t seem implausible. Indeed, a mainstream strategy in cognitive behavioral therapy involves purposefully articulating thoughts to oneself in order to diminish pernicious habits of mind. There is robust scientific evidence demonstrating the value of the method in coping with O.C.D., phobias, and other anxiety disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy also harnesses the effectiveness of verbalizing positive thoughts. Many athletes talk to themselves as a way of enhancing performance; Andy Murray yells at himself during tennis matches. The potential benefits of this have some experimental support. In 2008, Greek researchers randomly assigned tennis players to one of two groups. The first was trained in motivational and instructional self-talk (for instance, “Go,” “I can,” “Shoulder, low”). The second group got a tactical lecture on the use of particular shots. The group trained to use self-talk showed improved play and reported increased self-confidence and decreased anxiety, whereas no significant improvements were seen in the other group. Sometimes the voices people hear are not their own, and instead are attributed to a celestial source. God’s voice figures prominently early in the Hebrew Bible. He speaks individually to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and Abraham. At Mt. Sinai, God’s voice, in midrash, was heard communally, but was so overwhelming that only the first letter, aleph, was sounded. But in later prophetic books the divine voice grows quieter. Elijah, on Mt. Horeb, is addressed by God (after a whirlwind, a fire, and an earthquake) in what the King James Bible called a “still small voice,” and which, in the original Hebrew (kol demamah dakah), is even more suggestive—literally, “the sound of a slender silence.” By the time we reach the Book of Esther, God’s voice is absent. In Christianity, however, divine speech continues through the Gospels—the apostle Paul converts after hearing Jesus admonish him. Especially in evangelical traditions, it has persisted. Martin Luther King, Jr., recounted an experience of it in the early days of the bus boycott in Montgomery, in 1956. After receiving a threatening anonymous phone call, he went in despair into his kitchen and prayed. He became aware of “the quiet assurance of an inner voice” and “heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.” Fernyhough relates some arresting instances of conversations with God and other celestial powers that occurred during the Middle Ages. In fifteenth-century France, Joan of Arc testified to hearing angels and saints tell her to lead the French Army in rescuing her country from English domination. A more intimate example is that of the famous mystic Margery Kempe, a well-to-do Englishwoman with a husband and family, who, in the early fifteenth century, reported that Christ spoke to her from a short distance, in a “sweet and gentle” voice. In “The Book of Margery Kempe,” a narrative she dictated, which is often considered the first autobiography in English, she relates how a series of domestic crises, including an episode of what she describes as madness, led her to embark on a life of pilgrimage, celibacy, and extreme fasting. The voice of Jesus gave her advice for negotiating a deal with her frustrated and worried husband. (She agreed to eat; he accepted her chastity.) Fernyhough writes imaginatively about the various registers of voice she hears. “One kind of sound she hears is like a pair of bellows blowing in her ear: it is the susurrus of the Holy Spirit. When He chooses, our Lord changes that sound into the voice of a dove, and then into a robin redbreast, tweeting merrily in her ear.” Forty years ago, Julian Jaynes, a psychologist at Princeton, published a landmark book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” in which he proposed a biological basis for the hearing of divine voices. He argued that several thousand years ago, at the time the Iliad was written, our brains were “bicameral,” composed of two distinct chambers. The left hemisphere contained language areas, just as it does now, but the right hemisphere contributed a unique function, recruiting language-making structures that “spoke” in times of stress. People perceived the utterances of the right hemisphere as being external to them and attributed them to gods. In the tumult of attacking Troy, Jaynes believed, Achilles would have heard speech from his right hemisphere and attributed it to voices from Mt. Olympus: The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grabs Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships. . . . It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. Jaynes believed that the development of nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres gradually integrated brain function. Following a theory of Homeric authorship that assumed the Odyssey to have been composed at least a century after the Iliad, he pointed out that Odysseus, who is constantly reflecting and planning, manifests a self-consciousness of mind. The poem’s emphasis on Odysseus’ cunning starts to seem like the celebration of the emergence of a new kind of consciousness. For Jaynes, hearing the voice of God was a vestige of our past neuroanatomy. Jaynes’s book was hugely influential in its day, one of those rare specialist works whose ideas enter the culture at large. (Bicamerality is an important plot point in HBO’s “Westworld”: Dolores, an android played by Evan Rachel Wood, is led to understand that a voice she hears, which has urged her to kill other android “hosts” at the park, comes from her own head.) But Jaynes’s thesis does not stand up to what we now know about the development of our species. In evolutionary time, the few thousand years that separate us from Achilles are a blink of an eye, far too short to allow for such radical structural changes in the brain. Contemporary neurologists offer alternative explanations for hearing celestial speech. Some speculate that it represents temporal-lobe epilepsy, others schizophrenia; auditory hallucinations are common in both conditions. They are also a feature of degenerative neurological diseases. An elderly relative with Alzheimer’s recently told me that God talks to her. “Do you actually hear His voice?” I asked. She said that she does, and knows it is God because He said so. Remarkably, Fernyhough is reluctant to call such voices hallucinations. He views the term as pejorative, and he is notably skeptical about the value of psychiatric diagnosis in voice-hearing cases: It is no more meaningful to attempt to diagnose . . . English mystics (nor others, like Joan, from the tradition to which they belong) than it is to call Socrates a schizophrenic. . . . If Joan wasn’t schizophrenic, she had “idiopathic partial epilepsy with auditory features.” Margery’s compulsive weeping and roaring, combined with her voice-hearing, might also have been signs of temporal lobe epilepsy. The white spots that flew around her vision (and were interpreted by her as sightings of angels) could have been symptoms of migraine. . . . The medieval literary scholar Corinne Saunders points out that Margery’s experiences were strange then, in the early fifteenth century, and they seem even stranger now, when we are so distant from the interpretive framework in which Margery received them. That doesn’t make them signs of madness or neurological disease any more than similar experiences in the modern era should be automatically pathologized. In his unwillingness to draw a clear line between normal perceptions and delusions, Fernyhough follows ideas popularized by a range of groups that have emerged in the past three decades known as the Hearing Voices Movement. In 1987, a Dutch psychiatrist, Marius Romme, was treating a patient named Patsy Hage, who heard malign voices. Romme’s initial diagnosis was that the voices were symptoms of a biomedical illness. But Hage insisted that her voice-hearing was a valid mode of thought. Not coincidentally, she was familiar with the work of Julian Jaynes. “I’m not a schizophrenic,” she told Romme. “I’m an ancient Greek!” Romme came to sympathize with her point of view, and decided that it was vital to engage seriously with the actual content of what patients’ voices said. The pair started to publicize the condition, asking other voice-hearers to be in touch. The movement grew from there. It currently has networks in twenty-four countries, with more than a hundred and eighty groups in the United Kingdom alone, and its membership is growing in the United States. It holds meetings and conferences in which voice-hearers discuss their experiences, and it campaigns to increase public awareness of the phenomenon. The movement’s followers reject the idea that hearing voices is a sign of mental illness. They want it to be seen as a normal variation in human nature. Their arguments are in part about who controls the interpretation of such experiences. Fernyhough quotes an advocate who says, “It is about power, and it’s about who’s got the expertise, and the authority.” The advocate characterizes cognitive behavioral therapy as “an expert doing something to” a patient, whereas the movement’s approach disrupts that hierarchy. “People with lived experience have a lot to say about it, know a lot about what it’s like to experience it, to live with it, to cope with it,” she says. “If we want to learn anything about extreme human experience, we have to listen to the people who experience it.” Like other movements that seek to challenge the authority of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories, the Hearing Voices Movement is controversial. Critics point out that, while depathologizing voice-hearing may feel liberating for some, it entails a risk that people with serious mental illnesses will not receive appropriate care. Fernyhough does not spend much time on these criticisms, though in a footnote he does concede the scant evidentiary basis of the movement’s claims. He mentions a psychotherapist sympathetic to the Hearing Voices Movement who says that, in contrast to the ample experimental evidence for the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy, “the organic nature of hearing voices groups” makes it hard to conduct randomized controlled trials. Fernyhough is not only a psychologist; he also writes fiction, and in describing this work he emphasizes the role of hearing voices. “I never mistake these fictional characters for real people, but I do hear them speaking,” he writes in “The Voices Within.” “I have to get their voices right—transcribe them accurately—or they will not seem real to the people who are reading their stories.” He notes that this kind of conjuring is widespread among novelists, and cites examples including Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Hilary Mantel. Fernyhough and his colleagues have tried to quantify this phenomenon. Ninety-one writers attending the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival responded to a questionnaire; seventy per cent said that they heard characters speak. Several writers linked the speech of their characters to inner dialogues even when they are not actively writing. As for plot, some writers asserted that their characters “don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.” The importance of voice-hearing to many writers might seem to validate the Hearing Voices Movement’s approach. If the result is great literature, it would be perverse to judge hearing voices an aberration requiring treatment rather than a precious gift. It’s not that simple, however. As Fernyhough writes, “Studies have shown a particularly high prevalence of psychiatric disorders (particularly mood disorders) in those of proven creativity.” Even leaving aside the fact that most people with mood disorders are not creative geniuses, many writers find their creative talent psychologically troublesome, and even prize an idea of themselves as, in some sense, abnormal. The novelist Jeanette Winterson has heard voices that she says put her “in the crazy category,” and the idea has a long history: Plato’s “mad poet,” Aristotle’s “melancholic genius,” and John Dryden’s dictum that “great wits are sure to madness near allied.” But, in cases where talent is accompanied by real psychological disturbance, do the creative benefits really outweigh the costs to the individual? On a frigid night in January, 1977, while working as a young resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, I was paged to the emergency room. A patient had arrived by ambulance from McLean Hospital, a famous psychiatric institution in nearby Belmont. Sitting bolt upright, laboring to breathe, was the poet Robert Lowell. I introduced myself and performed a physical examination. Lowell was in congestive heart failure, his lungs filling with fluid. I administered diuretics and fitted an oxygen tube to his nostrils. Soon he was breathing comfortably. He seemed sullen and, to distract him from his predicament, I asked about a medallion that hung from a chain around his neck. “Achilles,” he replied, with a fleeting smile. I’ve no idea if Lowell knew of Jaynes’s book, which had come out the year before, but Achilles was a figure of lifelong importance to him, one of many historical and mythical figures—Alexander the Great, Dante, T. S. Eliot, Christ—with whom he identified in moments of delusional grandiosity. In Achilles, Lowell seemed to find a heroic reflection of his own mental volatility. Achilles’ defining attribute—it’s the first word of the Iliad—is mēnin, usually translated as “wrath” or “rage.” But in a forthcoming book, “Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character,” the psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison points out that Lowell’s translation of the passage renders mēnin as “mania.” As it happens, mania was Lowell’s most enduring diagnosis in his many years as a psychiatric patient. In her account of Lowell’s hospitalization, Jamison cites my case notes and those of his cardiologist in the Phillips House, a wing of Mass General where wealthy Boston Brahmin patients were typically housed. Lowell wrote a poem about his stay, “Phillips House Revisited,” in which he overlays impressions of the medical crisis I had witnessed (“I cannot entirely get my breath, / as if I were muffled in snow”) with memories of his grandfather, who had died in the same hospital, forty years earlier. There was a long history of mental illness in Lowell’s family. Jamison digs up the records of his great-great-grandmother, who was admitted to McLean in 1845, and who, doctors noted, was “afflicted with false hearing.” Lowell, too, suffered from auditory hallucinations. Sometimes, before sleep, he would talk to the heroes from Hawthorne’s “Greek Myths.” During a hospitalization in 1954, he often chatted to Ezra Pound, who was a friend—but not actually there. Among his contemporaries, recognition of Lowell’s mental instability was inextricably bound up with awe of his talent. The intertwining of madness and genius remains an essential part of his posthumous legend, and Lowell himself saw the two as related. Jamison quotes a report by one of his doctors: Patient’s strong emotional ties with his manic phase were very evident. Besides the feeling of well-being which was present at that time, patient felt that, “my senses were more keen than they had ever been before, and that’s what a writer needs.” But Jamison also shows that Lowell sometimes saw his episodes of manic inspiration in a more coldly medical light. After a period of intense religious revelation, he wrote, “The mystical experiences and explosions turned out to be pathological.” Splitting the difference, Jamison suggests that his mania and his imagination were welded into great art by the discipline he exerted between his manic episodes. Lowell was discharged from Mass General on February 9th. Jamison quotes a note that one of my colleagues wrote to the doctors at McLean: “Thank you for referring Mr. Lowell to me. He proved to be just as interesting a person and a patient as you suggested he might be.” Later that month, Lowell had recovered sufficiently to travel to New York and do a reading with Allen Ginsberg. He read “Phillips House Revisited.” That September, he died. ♦ Jerome Groopman, a staff writer since 1998, writes primarily about medicine and biology.

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