The Final Solution: Mourning Becomes Melania

No one talks about how lonely and isolated Melania Trump must be? Yes Jackie had to deal with the scandal about her husband’s affairs with Marilyn Monroe, Judith Exner and others, but she had her Bouviers. Hillary Clinton had Bill, but she had her political ambitions and career and Michele Obama was a force onto herself, and an advocate for many causes. However, Melania seems like a rather sad figure, to quote the title of Robert Heinlein’s famed novel, a Stranger in a Strange Land.  She barely speaks the language and the one time she made a significant speech it turned out to be partially plagiarized from her predecessor (“Was Melania Trump’s speech plagiarized from Michelle Obama," USA Today, 7/19/16) Who are her crew? As a model she must have hung around in all the popular nightspots, but when you become part of the presidency you're by nature like the princess imprisoned in the tower. You’re a figurehead who in this case appears like a mannequin at state functions. Admittedly back in Slovenia, she'd be a big cheese, but she's an inhabitant of Washington, New York and Mar-a-Lago. And now with the Trump presidency teetering dangerously ("Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency," The New Yorker, 4/14/18), she might bear some comparison to Eva Braun inhabiting the bunker with Herr Hitler in the last days of the Third Reich. She’s over the hill as a model and who will hire her when Trump sends her packing? If nothing else the sinking of the Titanic made it clear that even the greatest expenditures of material muscle won’t protect you from the inevitable.

Insomniac Dreams

Yeats's "A Dream of Death" begins, "I dreamt that one had died in a strange place/Near no accustomed land/And they had nailed the boards above her face/The Peasants of that land... ." And Coleridge "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/a pleasure-dome decree" reads like an opium induced dream--which it was. But most dreams are more prosaic and of more of interest to the dreamer than anyone else. That's why dream interpretation is sometimes better left to prophets than practitioners of psychotherapy. In his review of Vladimir Nabokov's Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time (TLS, 2/23/18), compiled and edited with commentary by Gennady Barabtarlo, Eric Naiman describes an undertaking of almost biblical dimensions in which Nabokov, influenced by a work called An Experiment with Time by John W. Dunne (who turned out to be an aviation engineer no less), sought to prove that dreams were prescient. Says Naiman, "The practice of Dunne's experiment had the added advantage of dethroning the reigning Freudian paradigm of dream analysis, though conceivably it might also have led to a new version of psychoanalysis, aimed at discerning future traumas in current symptoms." Naiman employs the word "fatidic" in his review. Considering who was doing the dreaming, the reader will likely find more of universal significance in the dreams of the author of Pale Fire than in the average person's oneiric experience.

Pornosophy: The Joys and Sorrows of Polyamory

There’s nothing wrong with refusing to have an affair under the theory that it may lessen the intimacy with the person on whom you’re cheating. An affair can be an attractive and exciting prospect, since you get to be naked with a person who was previously a friend or stranger. On the other hand while you’re having an affair with somebody else you can’t be close to the person with whom you normally sleep. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments which deals with empathy and of course there’s Flaubert’s Sentimental Education that's one of reasons Woody’s Allen cites for living in Manhattan. Ultimately it’s sensibility that’s at stake. You can’t please all of the people all of the time and anyone who tries to do so is spreading  themselves thin. Some people who are so filled with love and desire that they feel they can’t contain themselves have come up with ingenious solutions. One of them is, of course, the threesome. Instead of sneaking away to get the thrill of undressing in front of someone new, you simply invite them into your marital bed. The beauty of arrangements like this is you get to have your cake and eat it too. You don’t feel deprived of either a new experience or the pleasure of the tried and true. On the other hand while no one is going to complain about having the wool pooled over their eyes, there's always somebody who's going to feel left out, when favoritism rears its ugly head. Imagine a situation starting off with a certain degree of equanimity and then degenerating as one person begins to feel excluded or jealous of a passion in which they're not able to partake.

The Bad Side of Living in the Moment

Buddhists are always telling you to live in the moment, under the theory that neither the past nor future have any real essence. These may influence us but one is gone and the other is comprised of a set of longings and expectations that have yet to be. Unfortunately this  rather unrealistic philosophy is belied by the history of psychiatry. Freud said "neurosis is reminiscence." So much for the past no longer being a player. You may train yourself, but the past is like the mold cast by a sculptor. You make your bed and then have to sleep in it. The future similarly may be defined as the state of protracted wistfulness that characterizes practically all of human existence. The fact is if we all lived in the moment, life would be a pretty dull thing. Romanticism is predicated on  a preference for the imagined over the real. Would it be advantageous to curtail the delectable flights of fancy emanating from over active imaginations like the one possessed by Madame Bovary? Living in the moment is a little like taking an Advil for a headache. You may want to live in the moment to cure yourself from the aches and pains of regret or longing, but anyone who lacked these feelings would be one-dimensional, a bot in human form. Consider the idea of Kierkegaard living in the moment. He would never have written Either/Or in which he says, "The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or the future." You learn this kind of stuff on the job, ie from being unhappy. Imagine Kierkegaard sitting in some Zendo, eating brown rice and freeing his mind from thought. What a loss it would have been for philosophy and humanity!

Unreliable Narrative

"Magenta, Black, Green on Orange by Mark Rothko (1950)

Narratives are part of fiction. They're also what patients often create with their therapists. In The Iceman Cometh, these were the life lies maintained by the crew waiting for Hickey to arrive at the bar. A balance sheet is also a kind of narrative and this metaphor for looking at emotions was employed by Strindberg in the deterministic universe he created in many of his plays. But it’s important to remember that narratives are by definition distillations, titrations of experience that expel seemingly irrelevant material. That's why in fiction authors sometimes use a device called the unreliable narrator. Narratives are like conceits, figures of speech, which are intentionally pregnant with ambiguity to the extent that varying kinds of meaning are meant to emanate from them. It’s hard to create a narrative and admit the presence of chaos at the same time, yet most narratives are totally factitious and can easily be replaced with new versions of  “the truth.” One of the great gifts of abstract expressionism is to present a truly mimetic experience, to the extent that it does justice to the chaos of narrative. Though laws of science comprise narratives, it is easy to see how one theory is neatly supplanted by another, relativity for instance in place of Newtonian physics and how the expansion of the universe will be accompanied by an equally evolutionary understanding of its workings.

One-upmanship

the Knight plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal (1957)

Bridge and chess derive their complexity from the almost infinite permutations and strategies that are available to opponents. They also derive their allure from the fact that they're both metaphors and manuals for human existence and survival. Ultimately they’re a form of life in and of itself and some people spend a good part of their lives devoting themselves to unearthing the mysteries of these pastimes. Hangman, tic tac toe and war are, on the other hand, another kettle of fish. In a game of war you simply slam a card down on the table and if you produce a higher number or level of royalty, you win the duel. There may be an art to war, but there's no art to the card game named after it. In the case of the other two timing is everything, with the advantage going to the person who's able to make the first move. You have grandmasters in chess who earn their stripes by moving up the ranks in tournaments, but games of thoughtlessness like hangman don’t produce legends like Kasparov and Bobby Fischer. However, more primitive board and card games satisfy another urge--the expression of unmitigated aggression. In the Middle Ages, jousting probably satisfied this function. Today two boxers meeting in the ring with the winner achieving a KO is similar, though both of these sports require a kind of training that’s not necessary for a person who’s playing tic tac toe. Very competitive people often don’t like games since they’re also bad losers and the notion that they might have to walk away from even a game of hangman with their tail between their legs is a stigma they find hard to bear.