maybe i should get a navel piercing to gaze at

ok, first note that i caved in to peer pressure: http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2004_03_14_celesteh_archive.html#107972820218639842

and now i’m going to talk about emotions. i feel like i tore myself down and built myself back up again. and maybe it’s too early to say much about that, cuz i’ve felt like i’ve had my feet under me for all of a week now. sometimes i feel aftershocks, but not so often. and maybe i’m just in a good mood because it’s warm and sunny and if it got cold and dark i’d be sad again, but i dunno, i feel changed. i’ve been looking in the mirror the last few days and thinking “i’m cute.” Which is not something I ever remember thinking before. maybe when i was a child in gradeschool or something. and, well, it’s weird. i feel very weird… will it last? i hope so, but you know, it’s nice right now.
I started drinking coffee again and that is fantastic. If I have a latte, I am the smartest person on earth! I had some tea before giving my Freud presentation in class today and I felt like doing laps around the classroom. Presentation went well, I think. People were taking notes on what I said. These kids are able to understand Foucault, and that’s incredible, but I’ve read a lot more than them, so if I can find something familiar, I can make a connection that they might not. Oh, this case study of a male hysteric sounds like something I read in Faludi’s Stiffed, so maybe I can use what she said to talk about what Freud said. and also, i’m the smartest person on earth! well, only metaphorically
And last night, I was out on a supercollider field trip (geek run) to get pizza in New Haven and I was talking too much, without the benefit of coffee . . .. Many CA folks know me as a really talkative person, but I just haven’t been for a while. So…who knows… maybe CT people will have to get used to me talking a lot … Or maybe I’ll stay quiet. It’s just weird.
And you guys all asked for navel gazing, so if I seem arrogant or something, well, you asked for it.
I have a bunch of old noise music on the web at http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh, from my analog phase. The last real analog thing I wrote was about death, but it’s not on the web. My grandma died not that long before my mom did. My poor dad lost his mother and wife less than a year apart. And all the drama played itself out in minature with my grandma. All the dynamics around my mom’s death were there. All of them. Asshole medical health people. Angry me. Christi angrily explaining that she was attached to my grandma too . . ..
I realized at the funeral, that I didn’t know what kind of music my grandma liked. I didn’t know her favorite singers or her favorite hymns and I asked my dad and he didn’t know either. Something incredibly important that I would never know. So I was upset for several months (and mad at my mom because she was acting so weird. oy vey) and finally understood that my grandma was hella old and tired of being alive and had a pretty good life that had to end sometime. so i wrote a piece of music and it turned out to be about that. it sounds like death. less than a week after i finished it, my mom had brain surgery. it’s the best piece of music that i ever wrote and so prescient, it scares me. I had been exploring an asthetic of openness and “air” in analog electronics and I lost it at that point. I’ve been forced to switch to supercollider, which is nice and portable, but kind of bloodless.
Listening to: Laurie Anderson’s song “Oh Superman.” fxcking fantastic

So you like navel-gazing, eh?

I think I had some lint in there, but then I took a shower….

Talked to my shrink today. “And then this happened and then this happened and this happened….” She nodded and said “wow” a lot. I like her because she does a great empathetic expression. I told her this a while ago and she assured me it was sincere, but I actually don’t care if it is or not. Anyway, she said I should feel proud of myself for all the progress I made. So I’m getting an A in mental health. woo! (this is a metaphorical A…)
I’m trying to write some happy music. This started out as a bid to impress CT chicks with mullets, but I think that might be a lost cause. I see them as Thomas Kinkade fans and they see me as the Unibomber. No TV. Doesn’t like driving. Makes weird Noise Music. Eats weird things like avacadoes… Yeah, I’m an alien. But at least I don’t have a mullet.
People who like my music are mostly geek boys or other composers and other mullet-less types. So I’ve decided I’d most like to have geek girl fans, insofar as I might have groupies . . . as if . . .. But I’m not writing for their benefit. I’m writing to impress my teachers. No, just kidding. I still want to write some avant-happy music, cuz I’m running out of angst to tap in to. I don’t have any real problems right now. I could get angsty about the white stuff settling out of my fridge onto my (tightly sealed) food containers, but I think that will go away shortly… I hope.
I was listening to RadioHead Kid A to get some ideas, because I love their synthpop and it might be cool to write some laptop music and then sing along! but maybe they’re not really all that happy? Is my baseline for happiness skewed, or is this just an asthetic issue? Hrm. Been smiling a lot, so that must count for something.
anyway, Kid A is my most recent pop album. Aside from getting all RadioHead since that album, what CDs should I buy? I have some Amazon.com gift certificates. I like indie rock. I like punk rock. I like noise. I like what Sonic Youth has been up to for the last few years. I just got a CD of Laurie Anderson playing live in NYC Townhall Spetember 19th 2001 and I’m not so into it. Not edgy enough, at least in disk 1. I’m not familiar with her work at all, which is why I got the CD. Reccomend me some music so I can buy it based soley on your suggestion!
Today in class, Alvin was talking about a concert that Ellen gave her a few years ago and said it was the best concert that he ever saw. Pretty cool. And I got CVS set up across my home network, so my laoptop will be in synch with my desktop, which will be helpful. yay.

more faq

  1. Did you do any homework during break?
    ummmm. no. well, a little.
  2. Are you screwed?
    No. My goal for break was to get very ahead of stuff. Now I’m behind, but not very. I still have time to spend some weekends in NYC, which I must do or it will have been very silly for me to come out to the East Coast.
  3. Can I come visit you?
    Sure. Gimme some advance notice. My weekends go from noon thursday till sunday night. (woo!) I can meet up with folks especially in NYC, but also in Boston and I can provide lodging at my abode, which lies in between those two fine cities. I might be able to find you a place to stay in NYC. I managed it for Tiffany. Flying JetBlue from Oakland to JFK airport is cheeeep and it is a direct flight. Flying to Hartford is also cheep, if you book in advance or fly red eye. There are no direct flights from Oakland to Hartford, alas. Do not change planes in Dallas, it’s way the heck out of the way. Both of those fine airports offer car rental. There is a very useful train out of JFK. I can come get you at Hartford. I can come get you at JFK on a weekend, or at the train station in New Haven.
  4. Are you really going to send all of your CDs to Christi?
    No. I’m trying to split them up evenly. It will actually be nice to have fewer CDs, so I can actually listen to the ones I have left and then I have an excuse to get new ones. all of my pop music is about 5 years old.
  5. What is Friendster?
    http://www.friendster.com/info/moreinfo.jsp
  6. How much time do you have left at Wesleyan?
    My semester ends the first week of May, which is looming alarmingly nearby. I have two semesters left after that, so I ought to graduate in May 2005.

Freud Report

Hysteria and my mystics class

Symptoms of hysteria include “anorexia, carried to the pitch of rejection of all nourishment, various forms of disturbance of vision, constantly recurrent visual hallucinations, etc.” (p 4) These are remarkably similar to some of the signs of holiness in mystics. Saint Claire (?) starved herself to death. Hildegard of Bingen had a constant disturbance of vision and frequent visions, which some might term hallucinations. Breuer and Freud were not unfamiliar with these similarities. They claim that hysteria results from repressed reaction to trauma, and hence is common in “saints and nuns” (p 11) as well as others taught to repress their feelings. Thus this paper seeks not only to define hysteria and explain its cause, but also to explain why “saints and nuns” are so often effected. It is not approaching mysticism neutrally, but with the idea of explaining the phenomenon as illness. The writers go so far in making this connection, that they refer to a certain set of symptoms as a “hysterical stigmata.” (p 15)

However, the hidden symptoms they attribute to hysteria do fit extremely well in finding a non-mystical explanation for mystics. They claim that dissociative states, otherwise known as “splitting of consciousness” or multiple personalities, are “present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria . . ..” (p 12) Thus, hysterics have two voices. One is their own voice, and one is the voice of the “hypnoid states” that hysterics enter into during hysterical attacks. “The ideas which emerge [during hysterical attacks or hypnosis] are very intense but are cut off from associative communication with the rest of the content of consciousness.” (p 12) Therefore, the ideas do not exist in an accessible form during the hysterics normal, waking self. They are ideas from an internal other.

Breuer and Freud assert that hysterics enter into hypnoid states for a few reasons. One is excessive daydreaming, “to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone.” (p 13) Thus they continue to define hysteria as female. The case studies where they find the root causes of hysteria include examples of men and women. In all cases though, the victims endured some trauma and were powerless to stop it. The hysterical man was physically attacked by his boss. (p 14) He was thus feminized and made subordinate through physical force. His attacks also stemmed from having been unable to win a case against his boss in court. The hysterical man was thus denied access to power through normal channels. He was thus feminized and responded to that in an affective, feminine manner. This is similar to the condition of female religious who can never rise in power through the church, due to their gender. They also had an affective hysterical response, which at the time allowed some of them to gain power. This powerlessness shows up again when the writers describe the typical hysteric, “They include girls who get out of bed at night so as secretly to carry on some study that their parents have forbidden from fear of their overworking.” (p 240) Girls who are barred from gaining power, in this case knowledge, through normal channels. As the lives of our mystics are not well known, it’s hard to know how much they fall into these patterns. It’s easy, though, to imagine Joan of Arc, the self-proclaimed best spinner in all of Domremy, working and day dreaming about leading soldiers to battle.

The mystic who most closely matches hysteria as defined by Breuer and Freud, is Kempe. Her woes started during a time of trauma surrounding childbirth and lead her to experience hallucinations of demons and other hysterical symptoms for months. Even when that ceased, she continued to have hysterical symptoms, similar to those described by Breuer: “Every pain, however, caused, reaches maximum intensity, every ailment is ‘fearful’ and ‘unbearable’. . . . We find nervous palpitation of the heart, a tendency to fainting, proneness to excessive blushing and turning pale, and so on.” (p 241) It fits perfectly with a Freudian hypothesis that her traumatic event was sexual and her visions and her issues surrounding her husband were of a sexual nature. Breuer goes on to say that auto-hypnosis, such as Kempe’s visions, “develops from reveries that are charged with affect.” (p 248) For example, Kempe’s in depth day dreams about the passion of Christ or of serving the Blessed Virgin while she was pregnant may qualify. Kempe reports crying constantly during these meditations. Perhaps her praying for visions was a form of auto-hypnosis which triggered her hysterical states. Perhaps all successful prayers for visions are auto-hypnosis.

faq

  1. Is it ok that I’m reading your blog?
    If I didn’t want folks to read it, I wouldn’t be posting it where they could see it. (yes)
  2. What’s going on with you and Christi?
    Neither of us wants to reconcile. I am buying her out of the house. I’ll sue for divorce (thus jumping into the gay marriage legal fray) in May when I’m in CA and I have time.

woof

I just got xena back from her dog sitter. she stayed with a music dept secretary for about 2 – 2.5 weeks. I picked her up this afternoon. she was moderately happy to see me, but also bored in the way she is these days. *yawn*. Deb, the sitter, though, was nearly overwrought. She told Xena a bunch of times that she loved her. Told me to bring Xena back for a visit. Told me how great Xena is. Clearly did not wish to be parted from my dog.

which brings me to the problem of this summer. My current plan is to disappear from CT as soon as possible, prolly the first week of May, and head back to CA. There, I’ll hopefully have an internship doing audio programming (in C, C++, Java, Supercollider, MAX/MSP), sound engineering (protools/digital performer), or sound design. (Resume coming very soon. hire me.) And then head back some time in august, possibly heading to the Michigan womyn’s Music Festival and maybe on to the Deep Listening Resteat and then finally to NYC, where I’ll be crashing with Jess. So big questions surround poor little Xena.
If I have an internship, I’m going to need to find a daily afternoon dog walker. And then, what to do with her during august. Even if I skip music festivals, I’m still going to need a place for her while I’m in NY. So I’ve got at least two options of where to put her for the summer. One is to send her where she went for winter break and one to send her to spring break lodging and in both cases, I’d give slightly less than 50% odds that I’d get her back. I barely got her back from winter break. She’s very happy when she goes to see these people. They have space for her to run and other dogs and one has kids and the other has a farm. she’s prolly a lot happier there than she is lurking in my house with no dog contact and insufficient exercise. But she makes me really happy.
I wouldn’t adopt a dog right now. Heck, I wouldn’t adopt a cat right now. when I got her, I had a stable job, I was married, I owned my house. even then she didn’t get walked enough all the time. It’ll be harder to fit her into my swinging urban hipster lifestyle when I come back. My current thought is “I’ll find a way.” and drive her back to CA and then drop her off maybe with her spring break sitter when I get back to the east coast. But maybe I shouldn’t have a dog at all….

Back in CT

Got up at an ungodly early hour to get my 6:00 AM plane, which was, for some reason, routed through Dallas. I think I may go with the second cheapest tickets next time. Mitch says that the Dallas routing was because I flew American. “If you flew American to hell, you’d go through Dallas.” Or would that be the final destination?

Continuing my trend of having angry people sitting next to me on planes, I was roused from my nap by an angry, loud yelling argument. And the person who was yellling… was the stewardess. Apparently a 95 year old non-english-speaking diabled woman had failed to comply with an instruction to get out of the isle (go figure) and this stewardess had done something to the woman and then was yelling at her extremely upset son who thought that elderly, disabled people deserved a bit of consideration. They went back and forth a loooong time. I didn’t see the incident. I don’t know who was right. I do know that the stewardess finally “won” the argument by claiming the guy was calling her stupid and insulting her. The guy was not. She had very very poor conflict resolution skills. And I think it’s possible that most people have terrible conflict resolution skills. My Middletown housemate, Aaron, teaches kids some of these school in public schools, but his techniquies are “think of the color blue” and don’t hit the other kid. I think teaching kids age-appropriate conflict resolution throughout their schooling would be really good for society as a whole. Anyway, there are right ways to win arguments and wrong ways and sometimes winning isn’t a good goal. That’s my thought.
I got home to my humble abode and noticed a slightly weird smell and decided it was cuz the garbage hadn’t been emptied and so I was ignoring it, trying to figure out what was up with two of the power outlets in the living room. Stereo and modem were both dead. Alas. Then my hosuemate suddenly appeared and I was talking to him about stuff and Jess showed up. Aaron popped open the fridge to look for some beers and made a loud exclaimation.
Not only did both of us fail to clean out tupperware, throw out soy milk or do any preperation for being gone two weeks, the mini-power outage also included the fridge. And it had been off for a while. Green fuzz coated the entire inside. when he opened the door, a haze of mold spores filled the kitchen. ack ack ack.
Aaron is currently bleaching the inside of the fridge. I will mop afterwards. We found the tripped breaker and restored it. But what made it trip? Was it just something random, or is our house in danger of burning to the ground? I’m glad I installed smoke detectors.
oy. well, the fridge needed cleaning anyway.

Audium

Went to see the audium last night, a 35-year-old audio installation with many many speakers. It cost $12 to get in. Apparently, they’ve been playing the same piece of music there for the last nine years. The speakers are all 35 years old, it seems and not very sharp, but they are what they are. Despite having hundreds of speakers, they only have 4 tracks of audio. this is actually logical, as i was trying to figure out how anyone could afford hundreds of amplifiers for each speaker and hundreds of tracks of tape or whatever. but 4 tracks means 4 amps and 4 tracks of tape, which is reasonable. It’s all analog, so the lack of crispness could just be from playing the same tape twice a week for nine years. the high pitched audio gradually gets rubbed off of the tape and gets stuck to the tape head. crispness is all pretty high-frequency. This hapens this way because the magnetic material on the tape has some thickness. High frequencies do not have a lot of energy to penetrate the tape, so they end up mostly on the surface. Low frequencies have much higher energy and end up at the “bottom” of the tape. this I think I recall from Maggi Payne’s class in audio engineering.
Anyway, at the Audium, the same guy does this every time. I can’t imagine spending nine years playing the same work twice a week. But he gets audience. There were more than 30 people there. He’s working on a new piece, which will be deployed in a month or two. And there’s talk of opening up the installation for other composers some time after that. But it might be a year or two. Things don’t seem to move quickly at the audium.
the nine year old piece features some tape collage of recordings of birds and ocean sounds and stuff. then there are a bunch of cheesy analog synth sounds. alas, they really are cheesy. they sound like they must be much older than they apparently are. There was a cool Forbidden Planet type vibe around them, tho. (If you have not seen this movie, you must. It has an amazing soundtrack.) The room is darkened completely during the show. Pitch black. And then an intermission of 5 minutes and then pitch black again. I fell asleep during the first half. I don’t think pitch black is the best way to listen to sound. I mean, you do want to concentrate with your ears more than your eyes, but I think senses highten each other more than they compete. Sitting in a dark, still room with no air circulation could tend to de-focus you, rather than steer your focus towards sounds, but I dunno. I know that if/when I go again, I’m going to be more rested. I fidgeted constantly during the second half to be wakeful, which worked, but there’s still some sensory deprivation element that makes it hard for me to pay attention.
It would be cool to combine a million (ok, over a hundred) speakers with something like a planetarium, so you could do audio collage and laser light show at the same time! ok, maybe not…

other stuff

Today is the last non-travel day of my break. The navel gazing has come to an end so I can get some school work done and because it’s undignified to make a spectacle of myself. No really. I have dropped down to my normal, background level of angst. I feel happy. (I just discovered halvah in the fridge that Ellen had been hiding from me, so it wouldn’t all disappear. but then she decided it was safe to leave it in sight again..) I feel kind of transformed, maybe, but I’m not questioning everything anymore. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the over-examined life is a problem too. Yeah, this means I’m going to keep doing things just cuz it’s how I’ve always done it and it seems not to be causing a problem. Maybe it’s stupid to be a vegetarian. I don’t care. I’ve been doing it for 11 years and I’m not stopping now.
As for identity: I am my ideas, experiences and perceptions. I start at the tips of my fingers and end at the bottom of my toes. That’s it. “Finding myself” was my excuse for my 25-year-old driftiness. I am hereby declaring myself found. I’m the person sitting in front of the laptop.
happy happy happy