Tiresias or the DSM

In therapeutic sessions, patients often express their fears. If a patient is extremely disturbed, he might believe that there are little men lurking outside his window. He might think these men are talking and that they are telling him to do something, even something rather trite. If the condition is not too severe, the therapist might attempt to help the patient to understand that he is displacing or projecting his own feelings and thoughts onto another person. Hypochondriacs feel they are sick when they are perfectly fine, and parents who suffer from the esoteric syndrome called Münchausen’s syndrome by proxy have very real but illusory feelings about their children being sick. Amongst the neurological symptoms that indicate distorted cognitions is Capgras syndrome, in which the sufferer believes a friend or relative is an imposter, a stranger occupying a familiar-seeming face and body. This last is dramatized by Richard Powers in his novel The Echo Maker. The horror classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is particularly terrifying in that it creates a funhouse view of this very real phenomenon. The reverse neurological symptom is prosopagnosia, in which the afflicted person is no longer able to recognize the faces of those he would otherwise know. Capgras might create paranoia, but prosopagnosia is an adult form of stranger anxiety in which the comfort of familiarity is lost. The DSM, the manual that psychologists and psychiatrists use to categorize and identify illnesses, lists conditions ranging from eating disorders, compulsivity about the search for pleasure (a form of hedonism), and anhedonia (the inability to tolerate pleasure at all), to more far-ranging disorders like psychosis and schizophrenia. Joanne Woodward starred in a movie about multiple personality called The Three Faces of Eve (1957). David and Lisa (1962) elaborated on the theme of schizophrenia and Olivia de Havilland starred in The Snake Pit (1948), a classic about abusive treatment of the mentally ill that foreshadowed the deinstitutionalization of the many severely disturbed patients who would go on to constitute our vast homeless population. But more disturbing than symptoms that are rooted in paranoia and delusion are those that turn out to be rooted in a grim reality. Let’s say a patient had walked into a therapist’s office in Tokyo six months ago and said that he had the feeling that the Northern coast of Japan would be hit by a huge wave that in turn caused a nuclear meltdown? What would we tell to sufferers from pre-9/11 nightmares about terrorists taking over jetliners and flying them into World Trade Center? What would we say to the patient who is obsessed with the idea that it was a genetically engineered double and not Osama bin Laden who was murdered last week?

Deal Book: Abbottabad's Thriving Coop Conversion Market

Insider prices for owners of rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments have reached new highs in Abbottabad, the historic city in Northern Pakistan that Osama Bin Laden had called home for the past few years. Previous to the arrival of the Navy Seals, there had already been a hefty demand for coops that had spurred the market, providing highly advantageous financial rewards for Pakistani families entertaining buyout offers. While the intelligence services are still ferreting through mountains of computer files, some of which may have been encrypted, there is still no word on whether the family that had rented the compound for Bin Laden had actually been planning to take advantage of such a favorable market, or whether Bin Laden himself would perhaps have had a stake in any such transaction. It should be noted that Bin Laden is a major name in Saudi construction and that without a doubt Bin Laden himself would easily have been savvy about these kinds of real estate transactions. In fact, it has been reported that members of his terrorist network had scouted coop conversions, along with other kinds of real estate transactions, on their frequent forays to New York preceding both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attack. Al Qaeda operatives were apparently open minded when it came to real estate, considering many properties as sources of windfall profits as well as potential bombing targets.

Dream Machine

Rivka Galchen is a talented fiction writer and the author of Atmospheric Disturbances, a first novel that won the William Saroyan International Prize in 2010. But she is also a gifted science writer, which is not surprising since some science can read like fiction without being science fiction. In the May 2 New Yorker she writes about quantum computing, which “instead of bits uses qubits” (“Dream Machine,” The New Yorker, 5/2/11). Quantum computing depends on the old 01 binary function, but “a qubit can be zero and one” instead of the classical zero or one. It’s called superposition and Galchen describes how it is comparable to Schrödinger’s cat, who is “dead and alive at the same time.” “Superposition is like Freud’s description of true ambivalence: not feeling unsure, but feeling opposite extremes of conviction at once,” Galchen says in one particularly brilliant display of her ability to navigate between the worlds of interior emotion and natural law. In grammatical terms, qubits are analogous to oxymorons. Read the piece, but don’t try to understand. After all, Galchen says that it’s about ontology more than epistemology. She focuses on the work of an Oxford physicist David Deutsch, who has written books with names like The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity and who, to some, has carried forward the tradition of great computational innovators like Alan Turing. But Hugh Everett’s controversial Many Worlds theory is at the heart of the ontology Galchen is trying to clarify. As Galchen describes it, “Information that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light and along no detectable pathway… can…be understood to move…via the tangencies of abutting universes.”

Shuffle and Breakdown

Cody Walker should be made poet laureate of Saturday Night Live. Go out and buy his book of poems, Shuffle and Breakdown. He’s a really funny fellow. He recently read at McNally Jackson Books on Prince Street. Walker’s a voluble personality who looks bemused by his own utterances, as if the words had just popped out unexpectedly, like a kid with a form of Tourette’s that makes him involuntarily cry out “Mama!” in the classroom. He has turned this element of uncontrollable self-surprise into poems. He read a poem with expletives in front of an audience that included his infant daughter, explaining that he wouldn’t be able to use the same words when she grew up. He read a poem called "Chickenless Pulled Chicken" that a publisher mistakenly thought was about jerking off. Like a lot of poets, he writes about other poets—in this case Kenneth Koch. You don’t have to work when you're listening to Walker read. Not that difficult art is bad, but sometimes there’s a place for play and fun. Cody Walker is perhaps the perfect example of Homo ludens intellectualis—intellectual man at play.

The Banality of Evil

HuffPost News recently posted a piece about White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s correcting and updating of the circumstances of Osama bin Laden’s demise (“White House Revises Account of Bin Laden’s Final Moments,” HuffPost News, 5/3/11). “Carney also retraced the steps by which Bin Laden’s body was buried in the North Arabian Sea,” HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery wrote. “The body was washed, placed in a white sheet and in a weighted bag, at which point a military officer ‘read prepared religious remarks’ that were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. The body was then ‘placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, and the deceased body eased into the sea…’” The famous children’s prayer —“Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, pray the lord my soul to take”—somehow comes to mind in reading Carney’s account, particularly when you come upon the description of Bin Laden’s youth, which David Brooks provided in his op-ed column in Tuesday’s Times (“What Drives History,” NYT, 5/2/11). “He…was sent to an elite school, wearing a blue blazer and being taught by European teachers,” Brooks noted, crediting as his source Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. “As a boy he watched ‘Bonanza’ and became infatuated by another American show called ‘Fury,’ about a troubled orphan boy who goes off to a ranch and tames wild horses.” Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

The Balloon Wars

There is the long-simmering conflict between North and South Korean, with its famed DMZ on the 38th parallel. And then there is the balloon war between once-allies who have now become foes. Such is the nature of human kind that even those who seek the same ends through similar means (in this case 40-foot-high vinyl balloons carrying anti North Korean screeds) often find themselves at odds when the monster Ego raises its ugly head. Friday’s Times reported on the conflict between Park Sang-hak, chairman of Fighters for a Free North Korea, and Lee Min-Bok, an evangelical Christian and leader of the rival group, Campaign for Helping North Korea in a Direct Way (“Balloon-Borne Messages to North Korea Have Detractors on Both Sides of Border,” NYT, 4/26/11). Much of the rivalry takes place in the border town of Imjingak, where residents find that the dispute, which has gotten “confrontational” at times, frightens away busloads of tourists, who prefer their conflicts served up in a more mediated environment. “I’m the original,” the Times quoted Mr. Lee as saying. The Times then quoted Lee calling Park “an ingrate” focused only on “greed and money and fame.” Mr. Park is apparently not one to eat crow. The Times reported him saying Mr. Lee is a “a crazy person” and  “a Christian zealot,” who “even among defectors” is “an outsider.” Is there a lesson to be learned here?

"Bin Laden Killed"

The dramatic Times headline on the morning following Osama bin Laden’s “termination with extreme prejudice,” to use CIA terminology, reads, “Bin Laden Killed by U.S. Forces in Pakistan, Obama Says, Declaring Justice Has Been Done” (NYT, 5/2/11). It’s an interesting choice of words, since the headline might have emphasized the internecine implications of where Bin Laden was found, who exactly performed the attacks, and in what company the now-deceased terrorist leader found himself in his last moments on earth. For instance, Hiroshima conjures the now iconic image of the Enola Gay and its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. Historic actions beg the question of how they were performed and who performed them. Surely the Bin Laden operation, which if nothing else will ensure Obama’s reelection, has implications beyond the fact that “justice has been done,” which is the broadest stroke with which this complicated, world-historical action can be painted. One wonders what would have happened if the generals' plot against Hitler had succeeded—would the tides of war have changed? It was widely thought that the toppling of Saddam Hussein would free Iraq, but the outcome of that maneuver has been far more complex, and tragic. If Qaddafi had been killed in the attack that killed his youngest son, Saif al-Arab, would Libya’s divisive opposition have suddenly become united, mobilized and energized in the common purpose of creating a democratic society? That question may soon be answered, as will the net effects of the destruction of Bin Laden on the terror network he controlled. In the meantime, mercantilism is always a good barometer. Will Toyota now open a dealership in Wajiristan?