12/14/233

 Thursday, December 14, 2023

 In bed by 9:30, awake @ 4:55 and up at 5:15 to let Lilly out and load the dishwasher.  33°, Venue visible high in clear SE sky, high of 48°, wind WSW at 11, 7-12/23, WC is 24°.  Sunrise at 7:15, sunset at 4:16, 9+1.   

Treadmill; pain.    30:17 & 0.65 while watching PBS NOVA "Your Brain: Who's in Control?" on YouTube which interested me because of my interest in meditation.

I'm grateful that I am not in Gaza now, or Israel, or Ukraine, or Russia for that matter.  Grateful that I am not in any war zone, combat area, or any area targeted by computers and algorithms for Death and Destruction (except insofar as Milwaukee may be pre-targeted by one or more of Russia's and China's nuclear-armed ICBMs.)  On the other hand, I live in a country where, as of November 30, 2023, a total of 660 people have been killed this year and another 2,320 other people have been injured in 557 mass shootings.  In Milwaukee alone, in 2022, there were more than 1,000 non-fatal shootings and more than 200 homicides.  Grateful, yes, but chastened by America's reality.

One too often ignored reality of warfare.  Years ago, while sitting at his kitchen table in his little cinderblock house in Florida, my father and I had what was really the only talk we ever had about his time on Iwo Jima, even though we were both former Marines, both veterans of a foreign war.  Our conversation wasn't long, quite the contrary, and it was not very descriptive.  He was 24 years old during the battle, considered an 'old man' by his mostly younger Marines.  He lived for another 62 years after the battle and in those 62 years, I believe he never spoke of the battle, except the little bit he shared with me at his kitchen table that morning in Florida.  He said that he and the other Marines weren't worried about dying or being wounded by a gunshot, i.e., from a rifle.  What haunted them was the fear of being dismembered,  that is, blown apart by heavy weapons: mortars, rockets, artillery, and even land mines.  I thought of that discussion while reading a story in this morning's WaPo on the war in Gaza, including this paragraph: "Depictions of the horrors wrought by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza have streamed out for weeks, showing the killing of thousands of people, many blown apart by airstrikes. Some show young people, smiling in happier times before they were dismembered and buried in rubble. Some show child survivors trembling, the shock on tiny faces grimed with blood and ash."  These are the images that we never see: body parts, arms, legs, heads, and headless torsos.  My father saw them, and so have thousands of Gazans.  He never forgot; neither will they.  And as Auden wrote 'those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.'  Hamas did evil to Israelis, Israelis do evil to Hamas, who do evil to Israelis, who do evil to Hamas, and the beat goes on, the beat goes on.  How, if at all, will this circle ever be broken?

Gershwind Syndrome.   In listening to Stanford Professor Sapolsky's lecture on biological underpinnings of religiosity, he discussed how behaviors that are bizarre, maladaptive, and peripheralizing in the wrong context can be accepted and valorized in another context, offering shamans in primitive religions as an example: speaking in tongues, hearing things that no one else hears, etc.  Wrong context, he's a crazy man; right context, he's a holy man.  Sapolsky also discussed behavioral characteristics among some sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy, now called Gerschwind Syndrome or Temporal Lobe Personality.  The characteristics that caught my attention were hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, and a tendency toward solitary pursuits.  Egad! I thought! Do I have a Temporal Lobe Personality?!? 😱 I spend much more time than "normal" people writing in my journal/blog and my old-age hobbies are indeed solitary: reading, writing, drawing, and painting!  I recognized the thought as "Medical Student Syndrome", in which some students may experience hypochondria-related disorders relating to the medical conditions they are studying at the time.  I probably had some of this disorder back in my undergraduate days when I took a course on Abnormal Psychology to fulfill the requirements of my Psych major. OMG, am I OCD?!?  Sometimes I do this or that.  Am I schizoid?!? (And now I know about 'schizotypal' disorders from watching Dr. Sapolsky on YouTube; maybe I'm schizotypal!😨).  My beloved told me years ago that I am "eccentric" and I recall her being displeased during one of our European vacations that I spent so much time writing journal entries in my travel notebook.  Hypergraphia!😳 and my wanting to check out so many ancient churches.  Hyperreligiosity!😩  Egad!  Maybe I am a Temporal Lobe Personality!😱

Drove Geri to Tom Alpren's for an eye exam.  AOK, next visit in 2 years.

Mindfulness Meditation call-in.  I participated by telephone while Geri was with TA.  Good conversation.  Lou, Mary, Bill, Eric.  Left at the 45-minute mark for a pit stop in TA's building.  During the conversation, Bill, who is the most active contriutor, referred to mindfulness helping him to dea with feelings of anger or gult or shame over matters in his history and of course I thought of the remorse I often feel over neglecting my mother once I left home and got married, over my emotional distance from my father despite his perhaps awkward but genuine manifestations of love, even over our first dog Freckles.  I can still get almost overwhelmed with remorse with my mistakes and failures, self-centeredness.  And Yeats, of course: things said or done, or things not done or said, not a day but someting is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.  I'm writing this at night having just read Natasha Trethewey's Graveyard Blues, her poem about her mother's funeral and burial.  "It rained the whole time we were laying her down; /  Rained from church to grave when we put her down. / The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound. ' When the preacher called out I held up my hand; / When he called for a witness I raised my hand - / Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman. / The sun came out when I turned to walk away, / Glared down on me as I turned and walked away - / My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay. / The road going home was pocked with holes, / That home-going road's always full of holes; / Though we slow down, time's wheel still rolls. ' I wander now among name of the dead: / My mother's name, stone pillow for my head."

LTMW at a small herd of 5 young deer munching on berries that have fallen or been dropped by birds from our trees along County Line Road.