EXCERPTS FROM PRELUDE TO INTIMACY
BY IRA EINHORN
AVAILABLE AS A HARD COPY OR AN EBOOKWho Am I - Pages 19-20.
Impact of the 60’s - Pages 53-55.
Networking - Page 16.
Healing - Pages 62-63.
American Society - Page 63 - 64.
Culture - Page 75.
Europe and Ghosts - Pages 100-101.
Prison Life - Page 81.
Reading - Page 88.
Creativity - Page 90.
Stress - Page 96-98.
Vulnerability - Pages 107-108.
Computers - Page 172.
End Notes.
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James SorrellsWho Am I - Pages 19-20According to Jungian typology, I am an intuitive/feeling person. I’m not conscious of “thinking” all that much. Rather, most of the time my mind is clear, and I act intuitively without much conscious thought or deliberation. Things emerge for me, often instantly, rather than being mulled over, for I live fully in my body. I also grasp things as a whole. Hence, I am blessed to be able to work on very complex problems, even in areas of human endeavor in which I have little factual knowledge. On the other hand, for me the more factual knowledge the better. I have always literally devoured books and as much high-level information as I could get my hands on. Whereas I love complexity and complex problems, I have always lived simply and love the unencumbered. For me, there is no contradiction between my intellectual interests and how I choose to live my life. In fact, one supports the other.
When the paranoia of my situation would arise, it came from an emotional, visceral response of fear and danger which would then obsessively plague my normally clear mind for a time. Those emotions would play and replay their neuro-endocrinological dance, usually damping out after a day or two. At that point, the incident would be finished, and I could return to my normal, two drinks above par, life, no less enjoyable in Europe than in the U.S., at least on a basic level. But, I have never lived on a basic level.
Impact of the 60’s - Pages 53-55The sixties were still fresh in everyone’s mind, and most of the people I had associated with in Eire had had some taste, however small, of possibilities loosed by the experiences of that time. The smell of change had been in the air, and many had experienced what they considered to be a superior way of living together. A mode of life we associated with a change in consciousness, a sense that the discreet boundaries of the reigning framework somehow limited awareness and the behavior that flows from awareness, i.e., virtually everything. Sounds abstract but it isn’t. Just think of the difference between waking up with a smile on your face or a scowl, the feelings evoked by bright sunlight versus dark, heavy clouds, the way the world looks when you are elated in contrast to the way it looks when you are depressed.
When I worked with business executives to any depth, I would explain these differences with the implication that if they lost their temper during the course of the day, it was best to write off the next couple of hours. Anyone truly in touch with themselves knows that decisions are not a process of the mind, alone. The body is deeply involved in all important decisions, and the increasing denial of this truth in the developed world is part of our increasingly pathological behavior. In spite of the goodies – consumer products – that surround us in ever-larger amounts, it is obvious to more and more people that our way of life is both destructive and without meaning. Disease patterns, drug use, and the utilization of mind-altering prescription drugs are examples, but the escalating, dysfunctional behavior of young people (murder, suicide, drug use, etc.) is the clearest indicator of the problem; the younger you are, the less protection you have against your environment. It takes a while to learn how to suppress what is actually happening; the young are always the best indicators of the future.
The awareness of the importance of the body in decision-making is known to anyone who has studied or practiced eastern philosophies or who has utilized any of the arts emerging from the human potential movement; recent work at the edge of western thought is confirming such ideas. Doubters should turn to Damasio’s
[i] Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994). The mind is a latecomer to the evolutionary process, the neo-cortex in particular, and floats upon a vast pool of embodied knowledge that we are now ignoring at our peril. The brain is a part of a biological system of daunting complexity, a player in a complex game. To think of it – or us – as a whole as merely complex computers is to practice destructive reductionism. The failures of AI (artificial intelligence) to live up to claims and expectations should make us aware of how easy it is to mistake our projections and metaphors for reality. But, let us not throw out the baby with the bath water. Clearly defined logical problems, a very small subset of what human beings face, are best solved by known mental techniques. Deep Blue’s recent victory over Garry Kasparov
[ii] is a perfect example. The problem is the over-reaching of the brain into areas where it is not sovereign – the hubris of thought, not the use of it.
[iii]The issue can be understood under the rubric of context, whether we are dealing with personal mental states manifest as a smile or a scowl or external surrounds like the sun or clouds. We have all had numerous experiences in which changes in context produced dramatic changes in behavior, however temporary.
[iv] Discussions on issues like these led me to form a seminar on the history of the context that presently determines or at least influences life in the western world.
Networking - Page 16My life in England was a very rich mix of different milieus in a heady brew of 60s explosion and English hospitality, a whirl that often began with mid-morning tea and ended with a 3:00 a.m. Chinese dinner with Heathcote Williams
[v], John Michell
[vi], and Francis Huxley
[vii]. Wales (Stafford Beer
[viii], George Andrews
[ix] and others), Cornwall (Colin Wilson
[x]), and Bath (Peter Gabriel
[xi]) were integral parts of the circuit at various times. And, I rarely was in London without seeing Arthur Koestler
[xii] for a long session of drinking and marvelous conversation.
When one’s roots and interconnections are cut away, a black hole can await. I had run a huge network for years that had provided information of all sorts to an international group of scientists, scholars, writers, political activists, and corporate leaders. It was financed - it may surprise some - by Bell of Pennsylvania, and it evolved from my work with Andrija Puharich
[xiii] and Uri Geller
[xiv] on psycho-kinesis and consciousness. The network grew to include people in 25 countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, people with instant planetary recognition among the cognoscenti. Information flowed to me, and I redirected it, aided by Pennsylvania Bell for the duplication and mailing.
[xv] When something happened in many “edge” disciplines, I heard about it, quickly. I was not only in the flow, I was the conduit for much of the flow.
Healing - Pages 62-63All of this aided my adaptation, a process I went through a number of times, and one does learn, painful though it might be. As Nietzsche wrote, “That which does not kill me will make me strong.” A kernel of truth in that statement but one that does not fully cover the situation. I have indeed become very strong, but the fractures lie within and must be healed if the being is to remain whole.
This healing is a slow practice that few understand and that requires the help of another. It is a work of continual repetition, a return to the site of the trauma which is sutured onto those childhood tropisms that dwell deep in the realm of the pre-verbal, the chora, after a term employed by Julie Kristeva, a French psychoanalyst, feminist, and author of many books. It is difficult to describe for it is a process that is ongoing. It became possible for me only when I had a life partner.
American Society - Page 63 - 64How arcane, you might say, how recondite, how beside the point, but think of what is going on in American life and increasingly throughout the world where the market-oriented consumer society is rooting out all the old world patterns and destroying every rhythm that resists. Norman Mailer’s words ring clear: “We live in a time that is interrupting the mood of everything alive.”
Consider this: 90% of American families are described as being dysfunctional; over 50% of marriages fail; the incidence and prevalence of stress-related illnesses are growing exponentially; job security is a dream of the past; sexuality, one of the major forms of release available to contemporary city-dwellers, who are cut off from trees, grass, and bird-song, is now fraught with peril and ringed round with the odor of death; child abuse is endemic; pedophilia is on the rampage; destructive substances are available anywhere and everywhere there is money to pay for them; teenage crime is a growth industry (think on the sad case of Malcolm X’s grandson), and perhaps worst of all, teenage suicide, a devastating response to this spreading illness of infinite consumption, grows by leaps and bounds.
A long list that adds up to total fragmentation and a continually increasing stress on every one of us no matter how rich we may be and how protected we feel. That is the problem that clearly links my struggles to the common experience, extreme though my situation may seem. The problems of stress and the affect of sundering and fragmentation on a system is non-linear; it lives in the world of Thom
[xvi], Prigogine
[xvii], or the Santa Fe Institute
[xviii], i.e., complexity theory, rather than the linear world of Newton or Lagrange. Like the climate, the change can be sudden. The climate in not just going to change in the far-distant future, it is changing before my very eyes as I write. The operative terms are catastrophe (in a mathematical sense)
[xix], strange attractors
[xx], and far-from-equilibrium systems.
The problems I have wrestled with for one-third of my life are increasingly the daily problems faced by everyone, but please do not misunderstand me: this is not a how-to book but rather a report from the frontier, like my fifth novel, a snapshot of an emerging world. This is the world we are all living in, though few are as yet willing to admit the extent of the problem, and most reach for partial, non-achievable, utopian solutions or retreat into “quietism, cynicism or despair,” to quote a letter from Martin Jay
[xxi], professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley to my erstwhile alias, Eugene Mallon.
Culture - Page 75Culture is the organic process of a lived life: it grows us and we grow it. It is not a suit of clothes that one can change at will. Living with a woman who grew up in a totally different culture than mine, whose language of the heart is not English, has only reinforced that awareness for we spent twenty-four hours a day together and did so with short breaks for almost ten years. That is more time together than most marital partners spend in their lifetimes. I know about cultural differences and expectations from the experience we shared as deeply as any two could manage, breaking down walls of difference that separate even the most devoted lovers.
Most of what we do in life is not thought about but is rather a by-product of the culture that creates us. Like mother’s milk, we take it in without thinking yet still find ourselves at times stymied by the small tropisms out of which a life is fashioned. It did not stop Annika and me, but what work it required, what patience! Who today will take the time? Who is allowed the time? It should not come as a surprise that many are beginning to talk about a post-emotional society and that more and more people, who supposedly love each other, treat their loved ones as replaceable throwaways, to be used up and disposed of. Most of the women friends that Annika met in France merely tolerate their mates. No one has spoken of love to her. How very sad.
Europe and Ghosts - Pages 100-101I had finally become a person to talk to rather than a Svengali of sex, for which I was thankful. I knew it was just the beginning, however, for what we had done together, with all its attendant past associations, had to be parsed, worked through, brought out into the light of day. Otherwise, buried memory festers and spreads malignancy throughout the being, a problem that was to become a large part of my life’s work. After a number of years in Europe, I realized that most of Europe was full of hungry ghosts, unresolved memories of the horrors of the Holocaust that weighed heavily on everyone, slowing draining the life away.
The corpse of the Holocaust needs to be disinterred, autopsied, and given a decent burial, an impossible task for over forty years because the trauma was too large to face, and the focus on the Cold War eclipsed all else. Now, it is surfacing slowly, perhaps too little, too late. European leaders are too busy pretending about a United Europe to pay attention to the real problem: unresolved memories of traumatic proportions. They are as out of touch with the problem as was President Chirac in the recent election that brought an extreme rightist to great prominence.
Europe is paralyzed, and American hegemony is not the entire reason for the problem. I spent six years studying the Holocaust and repressed memory. I wrote a novel about it called Cantor Dust. I have also spent ten years with a woman who is wrestling with the same problem on a personal level, so the problem became mine and slowly absorbed all my time, resist though I might. The terrain is relatively unmapped, and the work is the most difficult I’ve ever encountered, but the effects of not dealing with the problem are everywhere in this Europe without a soul. During 1996-97, I spent much time with a Holocaust survivor, a man whose life was an emblem of the problem that few really understand, an awareness that my reading of some of the vast literature made all too clear. I had just begun an intensely focused study of the psychological roots of the problem and had written 40 pages of a new novel when Friday, June 13, 1997 erupted into my life.
Prison Life - Page 81What a metaphor of our times: a TV in virtually every “cell,” but no light to read by! In addition, if I am extradited I will spend the rest of my life in an American prison. I repeat: In spite of these circumstances I am a happy man for I love and am loved at a level I had not thought possible, and I have lived out that love with a wonderful woman in an almost ten-year struggle against our respective backgrounds.
Reading - Page 88Reading is life’s blood for me. It nourishes me like food, extends my range, and allows me to experience emotions in a quiet room that when encountered later, I can better deal with. I am not that concerned with its ontological status for I know how to use it and do. I enjoy a good critical argument, but I prefer a good poem or novel. I find the imaginative act more important than the critical act and know that Melville or Proust or Joyce will still be read when Derrida is a distant memory; it is the lasting I’m concerned with when I teach and when I read: it says something about value and depth.
Creativity - Page 90Yet granted that understanding of limits, I must say that the creative life is always pushing against the limits, exploring the edges, conquering new territory. That seems to be the function of creativity: opening up new possibilities that others will later structure into more coherent wholes. It is a form of a gift to the whole for once the light bulb is imagined, it is the property of all of us – to use and forget that it was invented at a discrete time and place by someone, for that is how we are: very forgetful.
Creativity is a blessing, but it is also a burden for it creates a restlessness that tends to disrupt the smooth surface of ordinary life that the majority seems to settle into whenever the opportunity allows.
Stress - Page 96-98Stress may now be an academic discipline, complete with all the accoutrements that go with it: endowed chairs, journals, conferences, etc. But when I began to study stress, it was still a battle over the work of Hans Seyle
[xxii], whose research led me back to Claude Bernard
[xxiii], Hughlings Jackson
[xxiv], W.B. Cannon
[xxv], Kurt Goldstein’s
[xxvi] work on the organism as a whole, Arthur Koestler’s
[xxvii] brilliant overview in
Insight and Outlook, and a small library of other books. I developed a basic theory that I presented to many audiences, and I often used methods of presentation that induced what I was speaking about, methods based on my study of Artaud and Brecht.
[xxviii] One such talk at a well-known, elite psychiatric institute produced a near riot and led to hours of discussion, much admittance of guilt, and finally to a commitment to run a drug counseling center that was being created in the building in which I lived, just fifty feet from my apartment!
[xxix]Stress is the key concept necessary to the understanding of modern life; it lies at the basis of a whole series of family-related illnesses and is a large factor in alcoholism and drug addiction. Stress is itself addictive as I first noticed when people who spent most of their time in the city visited any of my summer retreats: they couldn’t stand the peace and quiet for it enabled or forced them to listen to themselves (their bodies) as stimulus replacement for the constant drone of the city. What they heard was often devastating. The same effect can often be observed in high-strung people when they receive a massage. Stress is so endemic in contemporary life that its absence may be noted and missed.
Pollution is a form of environmental stress, just as stress is a form of body pollution. Stress can be thought about in terms of information that the body can’t handle while pollution is material the environment can’t reabsorb within the context of its functioning cycles. They both produce pathologies in terms of “normal” functioning. Sufficient overload of either will produce a bodily distress, such as certain types of cancer or a change in the environment, even a climatic change. Most contemporary behavioral pathologies have a high stress component as part of their syndrome.
The fear of stillness and silence that seems to be spreading is an obvious stress response as is the incessant listening to TV news. When you live for a period of years as I have, without media, you became intensely aware of how stressed most people are, how unable to sit quietly or live without noise.
Techniques for stress reduction have become a growth industry.
Embracing stress and using overload consciously is one way of producing psychic breakthroughs, but it is not to be recommended for it is extremely dangerous and rarely successful, yet that was what I was in the midst of with my exquisite nymph. Some deep trauma was playing itself out again and again, obsessively as trauma will, and my willingness, my allowing, had become part of a process that was hard to grasp, like trying to swallow the ocean.
The process continued as before, and the tenderness increased as did the warmth both inside and outside of bed. An opening was occurring, a crack in the mirror that was certainly related to the altered state and the sexual frenzy…but don’t ask me how. Most people will find what I am describing hard to believe, but I am a veteran of the 60s, and I have spent an enormous amount of time exploring the various realms of human consciousness with an armada of tools, including the most powerful psychedelics then available. I am used to daylong excursions into psychic spaces that would frighten most people to death. A group of us worked on and off for a while with DMT, a psychedelic that zips you out of your body in a microsecond. I’ve learned how to sit quietly and observe in the midst of some very strange states. I have also had extensive experience with hypnotism, out of body (OOB) experiences, eidetic imagery, tantric Buddhism, and a number of other esoteric techniques. I worked closely for a number of years with Andrija Puharich who spent his life studying such states and the powers attendant upon them. My local neighborhood in Philadelphia, Powelton Village, was often a dumping ground for very disturbed former psychiatric in-patients, ambulatory schizophrenics, a number of whom I spent much time with.
Vulnerability - Pages 107-108Vulnerability is something that most men of my generation – I was born in 1940 – have a difficult time recognizing, let alone expressing out loud. We were taught to suppress it, present a strong face, tough it out, etc. To change such deeply engrained character traits is not an intellectual decision but the deep emotional work of a decade. Work that involved great struggle for I was opposing a long tradition, reinforced by millennia of the religious tradition from which I issued. To admit deep need and vulnerability to a woman was an emotional experience of great intensity, one that opened up deeper possibilities for both of us and led us into depths that few ever touch for real love and sharing is out of style nowadays. The busy life that most people now lead fosters functional relationships of mutual tolerance rather than love. A sad substitute for the intimate involvement that is possible with another.
But that was the experience of a more mature man. In 1985 I was still leading my American life though I lived in Eire, in reduced circumstances to be sure. The forces of habit run deep for they are burned deep into the physiology, an integral part of the body’s structure. It is as difficult to change a deeply engrained habit as it is to change one’s voice or one’s gait. It can be done, but the work is enormous and few succeed. Think about all those years lying on the psychoanalytic couch with success in some cases to be sure, but rare and after years of intense work. We are creatures of habit! Change is more difficult than the superficial psychobabble of the last thirty years would lead us to imagine. Possible, but very difficult.
Computers - Page 172Then, miracle of miracles, my newfound friend took me to a computer shop in the next town and before I knew it, I was keying in my novel on a small word-processing computer. I got up early every morning with the goal of keying in one chapter. Since I am not a touch typist, it took time, but I had time. In eight weeks it was done. I now had a completed novel, stored on a computer no less, and the rest of my life to live. The writing had been a way forward, a new path to follow. Deep inner work was to replace what I had lost, a focus for my enormous energy and omnivorous reading, but that was only one point of support. I needed two others, a place to live and someone to share it with. I began to formulate a wish on that long train ride back to London, a wish that soon became the beginning of a new reality.
End Notes[i] Antonio Damasio is a distinguished professor of neuroscience whose central thesis is that mind and body are not and cannot be sharply separated. Cartesian dualism is thus fundamentally in error.
[ii] Garry Kasparov was the reigning World Chess Champion when he was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue Supercomputer in 1997.
[iii] Werner Erhard and est taught that the mind is great for analyzing data but lousy for making choices.
[iv] Editor: In communication theory, what Einhorn calls “context” is called “meta-communication,” i.e., communication about the communication. “What are you doing?” takes on an entirely different meaning when barked loudly by a policeman with his gun drawn than when whispered softly by a mother to her small child. Or, face the rear of a crowded elevator, or stand close to the only other occupant in an otherwise empty one. The reaction of the other passenger(s) will tell you that you have violated a rule of context. Quite often it is the “how, where, and who” and not the “what” of the stimulus that determines the response. See Paul Watzlawick (et al.), Pragmatics of Human Communication, 1967.
[v] Heathcote Williams is a popular British cinema and television actor and writer, credited with 31 roles and three motion-picture screenplays since 1970.
[vi] John Michell is arguably the best known New Age thinker in England and the author of many books, including “View Over Atlantis.”
[vii] Francis Huxley, anthropolgist, is the son of Sir Julian Huxley, biologist, and nephew of Aldous Huxley. He did early research on LSD with Humphrey Osmond in Canada and was on the faculty of the International R.D. Laing Institute in Switzerland. Laing was a radical Scottish psychiatrist.
[viii] Stafford Beer (1927-2002) was a world-famous professor of cybernetics (feedback loops in social systems), holistic management, and organizational transformation, a painter, and a poet. His work influenced the social economy of Chile under Allende and contemporary musicians such as Brian Eno.
[ix] George Andrews’ most noted work is “The Book of Grass: An anthology of Indian hemp.” (1967)
[x] Colin Wilson (b. 1930) is a truly renaissance thinker and writer, the founder of New Existentialism, with interests in and works about mysticism (“The Occult”), criminology, split-brain research, “peak experiences,” literary criticism, science fiction, and archaeology.
[xi] Peter Gabriel (b. 1950) is a prominent and popular British musician, founder of the rock group “Genesis,” a collaborator with Indian and Middle-Eastern musicians, and composer of the sound-track for LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. He founded the “Witness” program to provide video camcorders to human rights activists in order to film abuses.
[xii] Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was a novelist, a political activist, social philosopher, and popular writer. His most famous work is “Darkness at Noon,” a novel about purges in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
[xiii] Andrija Puharich (1918-1983) has been called the father of the New Age movement. A physiologist by academic training, he studied the Brazilian healer, Arigo, and worked at the Stanford Research Institute, NYU, and his own research center in Maine with Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, and Uri Geller in attempts to bridge the gap between parapsychology and medicine, including the use of Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) magnetic waves. He claimed to have powered his motor home across the U.S. with a device to split water molecules.
[xiv] Uri Geller (b. 1946) is Hungarian/Austrian, born in Israel. He was studied at the Stanford Research Institute for his putative ability to alter physical properties (bend spoons, influence computers and Geiger counters) using his mental/psychic abilities.
[xv] This network initially began under the aegis of Moses Hallett with the blessing of Bill Cashel, then President of the Pennsylvania Bell Telephone Company and later Vice-Chairman of A.T.&T.
[xvi] “René Thom (1923-2002) was a French professor of mathematics who was known for his development of catastrophe theory, a mathematical treatment of continuous action producing a discontinuous result.” From the website:
http://www.groups.disc.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Thom.html[xvii] Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1977 for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures. He was born in Moscow, Russia on January 25, 1917. From the website: http://order.ph.utexas.edu/people/Prigogine.htm
[xviii] “The Santa Fe Institute is devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, one emphasizing multidisciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems. This unique scientific enterprise attempts to uncover the mechanisms that underlie the deep simplicity present in our complex world.” From
www.santafe.edu[xix] See footnote 7 above.
[xx] “Strange attractors” refer to three-dimensional abstract models that are generated by polynomial equations in the area of physics known as “chaos theory.” Try
http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/~stilti/ for starters. The reader may also be interested in “fractals,” which bear some similarity.
[xxi] Martin Jay wrote The Dialectical Imagination in 1996 about the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1923-1950). He is a leading exponent of Adorno (see Part 9, footnote 7.)
[xxii] Hans Selye (1907-1982) was a Czech-born endocrinologist who devoted his professional career to the study of stress. Selye’s work also demonstrated that illness often occurs in syndromes rather than distinct, unrelated symptoms.
[xxiii] Claude Bernard (1813-1878) was a French physiologist who was one of the first to apply scientific methodology to medicine.
[xxiv] John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) was an English neurologist whose major contribution was the diagnosis and understanding of epilepsy.
[xxv] W.B. Cannon was an American physiologist who advanced an understanding of emotional responses as the response of the sympathetic nervous system to “emergency” situations, “fight or flight.” His The Wisdom of the Body (1938) introduced the notion of homeostasis as regards physiological processes.
[xxvi] Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was a German-Jewish physician and psychiatrist. He advocated an organismic approach to illness in which symptoms are seen as a catastrophic reaction when situational stressors become overwhelming.
[xxvii] See Part 1, footnote 9.
[xxviii] See Part 9, footnotes 1,2, and 3.
[xxix] Ira bombarded the audience with an overload of psychiatric information that resulted in a violent response, directed toward Ira. He then explained what he had deliberately done and asked for their help.
