Dialoging with Myself: Blogs

Published February 1, 2016 by Nan Mykel

thoughtful

Why Blog?
Originally it was to publicize my books.
How is that going?
December’s profits were $3.18.
Wow, you won’t have to worry about income tax.
I’m spread too thin.
Did you really think people were going to read about Downs?
I guess at the time they need it they dont think of blogs.
And Incest?
At least I had my say. Repeating what’s in my book is dumb.
So, you can abandon two of your pages?
Yeah, and the “My Books” page. I mention them in the profile.
So after all that work you’re going to euthanize 3 pages?
No, just let them hibernate for a decade or two.
Ahem. How old did you say you are?
Eighty…Why?

Our Shadow Selves and Guns

Published January 18, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Carl Jung’s “shadow” concept –the part of us we reject, deny and project onto others–would appear to contain in addition to traits we are ashamed of, also traits and beliefs that are unconscious, leading to mistakenly motivated beliefs and actions. . I know that’s a mouthful, but for example, evolution’s kinship selection seems to underly prejudice which we deny and are unaware of.

Strongly held drives and unconscious emotional beliefs can can result in illogical decisions. One such effect is associated with gun champions. According to Shankar Vedantam, who painstakingly researched and published The Hidden Brain, uivocally is no. “The issue is whether people who live in homes with guns are safer as a result of owning a gun, and the answer is unequivocally no.” (p 235). The combined risk of “accidents, suicide and domestic violence dwarfs the risk of homicide at the hands of a stranger.” (p 236).

“We certainly feel more control when we have a gun in our posession, and it is easy to confuse the feeling of control with safety. Indeed, this is an unconscious bias in the hidden brain….” p 237

Blame It on Chekhov

Published January 18, 2016 by Nan Mykel

For years now, whenever I have cautioned someone not to teach their grandmother to suck eggs they have been stymied, never having heard that phrase before. Even I never knew where it came from, but chekhov tonight I found it, in Anton Chekhov’s “Selected Stories,” newly translated by Ann Dunnigan, p 43, in the short short story “Surgery.” The dentist says, “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs! Oh Lord the ignorance of the people!” Anton Chekhov ———>

A Show-Off’s Dream

Published January 11, 2016 by Nan Mykel

This is about me, of course. A slightly different dream, so I thought I’d share.
I am in front of a room full of people I know and I am reading a poem I have written. While I am still reading they start talking and go on and on so that I lie down. When I waken I realize the voices going on and on are from CNN, which I had left on.

ME, DISSOCIATE?

Published January 10, 2016 by Nan Mykel

I learned a lot while writing FALLOUT: A Survivor Talks to Incest Offenders. I have two points to make in this post.
First, I did an incredible amount of research and am left with a big box full of articles which I Xeroxed. I hate to just throw them away. If anyone thinks they may write on the subject some day or is just curious, please let me know and I’ll send them to you, USA, post-paid.
Second, I learned that I have a slight tendency to dissociate, at least according to John Brier’s definition of dissociation. He and Runtz (1988) questioned sexually abused and non-abused college women and found that the subjects could be discriminated one from the other group by whether they met Briere’s broad criteria for dissociation, which included “reduced responsiveness,” “spacing out,” “derealization” (experiencing things as unreal), “out-of-body experiences” and “lost time.”
Briere describes spacing-out behavior and disengagement as “withdrawal into a state of affective neutrality, where thoughts and awareness of external events are, in a sense, placed on hold.” These periods usually last from seconds to several minutes. The depth of dissociation in these cases is usually shallow. (Briere, 1992, 37-38, Child Abuse Trauma.
I can remember “going inside” myself but never thought of it as dissociation, which perhaps it was.
At the other end of the continuum, of course, are the much more serious examples of DID, or what used to be called “multiple personality disorder.”

lies

Published January 9, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Consilience Quote

Published December 27, 2015 by Nan Mykel

E.O.WILSON

The great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart…For reasons that remain elusive to scientists and philosophers alike, the correspondence of mathematical theory and experimental data in physics in particular is uncannily close. It is so close as to compel the belief that mathematics is in some deep sense the natural language of science. “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the sciences,” Wigner wrote, “is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it. It is not at all natural that ‘laws of nature’ exist, much less that man is able to discover them. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the lawes of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” (Consillience, p 48).

POLITICAL ANGST

Published December 23, 2015 by Nan Mykel

I don’t like to be angry,

I don’t like to be sad.

But those damn congressmen

are making me mad.

What pricks with little dicks

can’t stand the word vagina?

How to Rebuild a Life

Published December 16, 2015 by Nan Mykel

Source: How to Rebuild a Life

I WONDER IF….

Published December 14, 2015 by Nan Mykel

When our dreams go so fluidly from one setting and action to another and back again: can the two hemispheres have different dreams simultaneously? Maybe they morph back and forth from time to time.

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