bearing blog

Treasure-hunting.

My eleven-year-old recently sat for his first set of fill-in-the-bubbles, comprehensive nationally standardized tests.  Till now we've fulfilled our legal obligations with an annual sitting of the PIAT-R or "Peabody" test, which is administered verbally; I like that format for younger children, but of course I'd prefer my older kids to get comfortable with the format they'll be using for college boards and the like.

I'm satisfied with his performance, but I had to point out to him something that amused me about his lowest score.  It was on the topic "Searching for Information" on the "Reference Materials" test.  

Let's just put it this way:  When was the last time you used an almanac?  When was the last time anyone used an almanac?    Isn't the answer to "Where would you find this sort of information?" always "Google it" now?

Don't get me wrong, I'll sit down with him and teach him about the various uses of an almanac, a multivolume alphabetical dead-tree encyclopedia, an atlas -- heck, I'll teach him about the Guinness Book of World Records if I have to.  But I'm afraid it's going to have to be a history lesson.

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The instant availability of searchable information has affected far more academic pursuits than those of schoolchildren writing reports about the annual rainfall in Colorado or the principal exports of Nicaragua.

I had this thought while reading over Melanie's latest installment in her "Blogging T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" series.  

The Waste Land is an exceptionally intricate poem, exceptionally difficult to analyze -- even to read and experience.  Advanced high school students can deal with something like The Hollow Men;  The Waste Land, by contrast, is packed full of so many allusions and references that the person who aspires to read it and understand it with any degree of ease must either possess

(1) a wide-ranging literary background including some facility in several languages  --OR--

(2)  a heavily annotated edition of the poem in which all the literary references are explained to you.

Number one is difficult, and renders the poem inaccessible to almost everyone.   Number two is not so hard to come by, but it is not very fun, and it also ruins the experience of sitting and reading.

That has been what it takes, for many years.

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But now, our information environment is so very different -- the experience of reading something like The Waste Land is more like a treasure hunt.  The reader reads along, comes upon a place that catches the eye:  Here is something intriguing; what can it mean?  

So, for example, in lines 31-34 of the poem, you come to this:

Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu/Mein Irisch Kind/Wo weilest du?

And hey,  I can recognize it as German, but I don't speak or read German.  I can guess at some of this (fresh is the wind? my Irish child?) but not much.  

But it's a simple matter to Google the whole mess and to discover that the passage is a quote from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. 

You could follow the links that are all about The Wasteland, of course, and other people's ideas about why Eliot quoted Tristan und Isolde just here, and why this passage.  That is, you could if you were in a hurry, or if you wanted to cheat, and if you were more interested in hearing what other people think than in thinking about the poem yourself.  (Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want.)

But if you are more interested in the treasure hunt, and coming up with your own ideas, you could instead turn to Googling Tristan und Isolde, in which case you'd discover that there is a British movie version released in 2006, and you'd also find the Wikipedia page with a synopsis, with a synopsis, plus other topics such as the influence of Schopenhauer on the plot of the opera.  

Maybe you would follow the Schopenhauer thread ("Hm, it says here 'The world-view of Schopenhauer dictates that the only way for man to achieve inner peace is to renounce his desires!' Could that be a theme of The Waste Land?") or maybe you would keep searching until you found a translation of just that bit of the passage.  That might lead you to compare different translations, as Melanie has in her latest post.  

We can meet the poem in a sort of middle ground now.  Even people who haven't had a really top-notch literary education can have all the references at their fingertips, and we can follow the rabbit trails of the poem as we will with relative ease.  We can do this now without having to passively listen to a lecturer explaining each line at a time, or passively checking the footnotes of our annotated edition.  Now we can read and enjoy it actively, individually, according to what strikes our fancy; exploring and discovering the poem on our own.  

Something like The Waste Land  is no longer a sealed message from one high-end mind to its fellows, accessible only to those privileged by a lavish education or the luxury of enough leisure time to become self-taught.  It is now almost like a puzzle carefully crafted by Eliot, a puzzle that the ordinary literate person can tease apart bit by bit, independently, or perhaps in a conversation among friends -- like the one unfolding in Melanie's combox.

If you enjoy that sort of thing, it's fun.  A lot more fun for me than it was before the Internet.   And if anyone ever asks me "In what source of information would you look to find out the analysis of a difficult piece of literature?" I'll be filling in the circle that goes with "the blogosphere."

"Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits/Who walked back into burning houses to die with men..."

Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic put up a post today in which he quoted a few lines from a poem by C. S. Lewis that I didn't know -- a poem that appeared to mock the idea that the modern world is falling into "paganism," on the grounds that paganism is much cooler and certainly manlier than whatever it is the modern world is falling into today.   I thought my classics-loving 11-year-old would like it, so I went looking.

Here's the poem, Googled and presented for your enjoyment.

Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

1

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. 
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. 
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before 
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands 
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother 
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour 
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave 
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush 
Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, 
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. 
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, 
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, 
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged 
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die 
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. 
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune 
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; 
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... 
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? 
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, 
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. 
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll 
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; 
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, 
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, 
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope 
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; 
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die 
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong 
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, 
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. 
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits 
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, 
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals 
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. 
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; 
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event 
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

Fun, isn't it?

Homeschooling in the afternoon.

I need a break from the gluttony posts, so I am going to do a homeschooling poll/bleg.

You know how there is this sort of unstated Standard of Good Homeschoolers that we all believe in, where you get up bright and early, start right after breakfast, and finish it all early so the kids have the afternoon to play and relax?

We don't do this. Never have been able to. We often don't finish till 4 or 5. I don't deal well with other people early in the morning, and I need a big break in the middle of the day.

Who else is like me? Who likes afternoon school better than morning school? How do you get everybody going in the afternoon and ready for work?

Securing the food supply.

A phrase in my last gluttony post fairly jumped out at me today as I re-read it over my eggs Benedict.

...[I]t is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  

The phrase is "to secure one's food supply."

It jumped out at me because it so perfectly encapsulates the constant feeling of need I used to have, all the fretting about my next snack or my next meal, before I got better, before the weight came off.  It sums up perfectly the remnants, almost like flashbacks, that I still have once in a while -- the sudden urges that I've learned to dismiss (most of the time), the odd tendencies I still have to fret about whether I've bought enough for the dinner guests.  

Back when I was heavy, I was always trying to secure my food supply.

Never mind that my food supply was not at risk; I had a constant feeling that I had to secure my food supply.

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Once I remember feeling faint at school and being taken to the cafeteria -- I remember sitting there with my saltine crackers and paper cup of juice, feeling naughty and special for being out of class.

That used to happen a lot:  the bottom would fall out of my brain and I couldn't think until I got something to eat.  A strange panic would rise, and I would go looking for food.   Within a few bites of, say, a cheeseburger, I would feel oddly soothed, relieved; but the panicky feeling wouldn't go away until I no longer felt the slightest twinge of anything that resembled hunger.  I would have to eat until I literally felt full before I felt safe.

This would happen between meals.

At meals there was never any question of stopping before I was stuffed. I hated that feeling of "head-hungry," not being able to concentrate; it always hit long before I felt "stomach-hungry."  I tried to prevent it by eating in advance.

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Though this is the first time I've lit upon this phrase, I've known about this problem for a long time.   One of my very first gluttony/weight loss posts on this blog, "What's wrong with me," identified the problem as "an  irrational fear of getting hungry:"

Consider the evidence: 

• I tend to "stock up" at meals by eating extra.  I catch myself explicitly thinking, "I'd better eat more now so I won't get hungry later."  
• There are certain foods that I eat compulsively if they are just sitting around as leftovers, even if they don't taste very good to me. Never sweets, always carbohydrates, great for packing in as many calories as possible in a short period of time.  White rice; plain pasta; tortilla chips; dry cereal; white bread; pizza; saltine crackers.  I can still eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers, no problem.  (No wonder going low carb helped me.  Eliminating these things from my house was a good thing.)  
• I rely on external cues to tell me how much to eat.  If people around me are eating, I do too.  If there's still food on the table, I have another helping.  If something will be thrown out if I don't eat it, I eat some.
• I get very antsy on road trips as mealtime approaches, if we haven't yet planned when and where we're going to stop for the next meal. 
• I get irrationally irritated when I'm over at someone's house for dinner and dinner is delayed for some reason.  I have to squelch the urge to keep asking, "So, when's dinner going to be ready?"   I mean, I know it makes me a terrible guest, so I do my best, but it's really hard!
• My friends who dine with me regularly will tell you that whenever I am responsible for feeding a crowd, I am very preoccupied with there being "enough" food. Either I make too much, or I start apologizing for it the minute people arrive. "Erin!  Chill out!  If we get hungry we'll make some sandwiches!"  Doesn't matter.  Hostess anxiety is my lot in life.
• Oh, and then there's this recurring dream I keep having where someone gives me piles and piles of food and I know that I have to eat it.  The menu, the reason I have to eat the stuff, and the setting varies (buffet restaurant; friend's house; interview luncheon), but the theme is always there.  I have had this dream for as long as I can remember, maybe five or six times a year. 

Ready to psychoanalyze me yet?  Look, you can call it "gluttony" if you want.  I won't shy away from that term.  It is a self-centered way to be, I'm tired of it, and I'd be a better person if I overcame it.

Obviously I long ago "named and claimed" it as gluttony.  But looking at it deeper, what I was trying to do -- the reason I behaved as a glutton -- was "securing my food supply."

Even though, as I said, my food supply was not. ever. at. risk.

It's a little bit crazy.

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I could quite readily believe that the need to secure my food supply originated in my brain or body chemistry, and that it had something to do with the hypoglycemia and the insulin resistance that I pretty clearly experienced.  It's the hormones that drive hunger and cravings, most notably insulin; maybe there are more yet to be discovered (after all, ghrelin and leptin were only discovered in the mid-1990s).  Maybe there's some hormone that drives food-supply-securing behavior, some kind of hunting and gathering and storing away.     Something that drives you to stab people with your salad fork when they try to steal your French fries.  Something that drives you to hide your favorite ice cream in the back of the freezer where no one else can get it.  Something that drives you to eat "so you won't get hungry later" even if you're not hungry.  Something that drives you to fret all the time about whether you made enough food for everyone.

(What should we call this hypothetical hormone?  I vote for "squirrelin.")

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This isn't the only body-brain mismatch I've experienced.  Here's a bit from (believe it or not) a 2009 meditation on Holy Thursday:

Have you ever had a genuine panic attack?  I have.  I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college.  I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again -- I've never had any since.    I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.

It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me.  I recognized the sensation as a panic attack.  I knew I was, in fact, safe.  I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response.  And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger.  My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.  

I suffered.  Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body.  My physical response created an unbearable restlessness -- my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight!  And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight.  And yet my body urged me to do something -- I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night.  But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee.   I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last.   In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.  

 It wasn't very nice of me to wake up my friend's parents, because I knew perfectly well that I had no "real" reason to seek help.  I put it off and put it off and finally my will snapped and I couldn't bear to be alone anymore.

I wonder now if this is a little bit analogous to resisting the cravings for unhelpful food at the wrong times.  I wrote that gluttony comes in once you know when and what you're supposed to eat, and once you've put the plan in place to get rid of all the obvious external barriers to doing "the right thing" by your endocrine system.    Gluttony's what's you're up against when you know what you are supposed to eat and you know why and there's nothing stopping you except your own lack of will.  

But that's sort of like saying that I was up against uncharity, selfishness, that night that I was sweating by the phone, wanting to call, knowing that I wasn't in any true danger, knowing that I would wake my friend's parents up and ruin their sleep if I called.  I knew if I called I would inconvenience several people and if I didn't call until morning the only thing that would happen was I would suffer for a few hours.   Oh, but it was hard, and in the end selfishness won out; I rationalized that I needed to call, and that they would not be so inconvenienced, and that was the end of that.

Yes, I was selfish.  But in part it's because I managed to convince myself "What I'm about to do isn't nearly as bad as what I'm going through now."

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So I wonder about that.  

I can point to my panic attack and say, "Well, I had this ideopathic reaction in my sympathetic nervous system, and it created an illusion that I needed something, and that I could get that thing (another person's voice) only by inconveniencing another person.  Even though I knew rationally I had no real need, ultimately I rationalized that my perceived need superseded another person's real need, and that is why I behaved uncharitably."

Can I point to my bingeing and hoarding and say, "Well, something in my endocrine system created this constant, low-level illusion that my food supply was endangered.   Even though I knew rationally that I would never really go hungry or even miss a meal, I rationalized that this constant need to secure my personal food supply superseded my obligations to my health and to others, and that is why I developed my habit of gluttony."

It is not an excuse.  It is more of a diagnosis.  A "motivation" for gluttony.  And I think that understanding that motivation, understanding that I had a fear of hunger, was something that helped me, finally, tear it out (if incompletely) by the roots.

I think there can be other motivations in other people.  I'll speculate about some possibilities in another post.  

In the meantime, if you think you might be a glutton, but it has nothing to do with securing your food supply, tell your story in the combox.

Why, even if illness causes obesity, you've still got to deal with gluttony to get well.

In my post Untangling the Threads of Gluttony I asserted that none of the prevailing obesity narratives correctly account for the role of gluttony in weight gain and weight loss.  

In a subsequent post, I defended the notion that gluttony isn't typically the cause of obesity, on the grounds that a quite-ordinary, moderate-looking American diet seems, for many, to begin the slide into metabolic syndrome -- frequently, starting in childhood, when moral culpability is low -- and once it starts, it's self-perpetuating because the individual so afflicted supposedly perceives normal hunger signals, but the signals are actually driving abnormal eating.  As Aquinas wrote, "The sin of gluttony is... extenuated... on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable."  Metabolic syndrome destroys the body's ability to discern and regulate what to eat. 

Then I considered whether insulin resistance can cause gluttony.  I proposed that it can, because (even if metabolic syndrome destroys the body's innate ability to discern and regulate what to eat) it is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  The same thing can happen in a person who doesn't suffer from metabolic syndrome, but I suggest that metabolic syndrome can be a trigger.

Now I want to write about gluttony as the barrier to weight loss.

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It almost sounds as if I have come back around to the calorie-is-a-calorie theory.  First I said "No, gluttony isn't why people gain weight."  Now I'm basically saying "Yes, but you have to overcome gluttony in order to lose weight."

(It isn't a contradiction, any more than saying "Nicotine cravings don't cause people to become smokers, but to stop smoking, people have to learn to resist cravings for nicotine.") 

Metabolic syndrome -- insulin resistance -- destroys or severely damages the body's innate means of discerning and regulating what is suitable.  But we do have another means of discerning and regulating what is suitable, and that is our own intellect and willpower.  It's a shoddy substitute for a working endocrine system.  But it is what we have.  And we have to get it working, at least in a rudimentary fashion,  before we run up against our gluttony.

The control-system patch that we jerry-rig from our intellect and willpower is glitchy and buggy.  

Bug #1:  Discernment.  Our intellect can have the wrong theory about what to eat, how much, and when.  Gotta get that right first.

Bug #2:  Regulation.  Our intellect can have the wrong ideas about how to arrange the details (who will shop?  where will I store food?  what will I do if I get hungry?) so that we don't have to rely as much on our willpower.  

But once you can discern what to eat (thanks to a working theory of what to eat, how much, and when) and regulate what to eat (thanks to a working plan of arranging your life so you can, theoretically, easily do what you're supposed to do) you don't get your "extenuating pass" from the sin of gluttony anymore.  

You are now ready to deal with...

...Bug #3:  Willpower is weak. In other words:  Here is where the gluttony comes in.  If you are a glutton, now is when you will discover it.

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 OK.  So, let's suppose that it turns out that the Taubes folks are right, that the answer to "what to eat" is "sharply reduce carbohydrates."  

And let's suppose that you have worked out the most feasible specific diet to do that.   This is going to vary person to person, from "total elimination of all carbs but a few bites of green leafy vegetables a day," through "cut back everything across the board and that will decrease my carb load," all the way up to "fairly normal diet, except I try not to eat a lot of sugar, bread, or pasta."  Because some people have to cut back a little, and others have to cut back a lot, to see results.  It's not fair, but it appears to be true.

And let's suppose that you have some strategies in place to overcome obvious external barriers:  you're planning menus, and you're getting the shopping done, and you've removed unnecessary temptations from your environment, and you have a plan for what to do when you eat out, etc.

You still might have to say no to things you want to have.

And if you find that it's really really hard to do this... you may be dealing with gluttony.

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Back to the definition of gluttony I came up with:

Gluttony is eating behavior that flouts the restraints

of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.

Now that you know that you should avoid (say) sugar for the sake of your health, if you refuse to be bound by this constraint, if you keep saying "Gosh darn it, I don't care about my blood sugar, I want a handful of gummy bears,"  you are dealing with gluttony.

(I'm not talking about the rational decision in advance to allow yourself a portion of chocolate every day because you judge it's a permissible pleasure, or a plan to have small desserts on the weekends so you can learn to enjoy them in moderation.  I'm talking about the decision, in the moment, to ignore the plan you've already set for yourself because you want cake NOW.)

It's understandable that it will be difficult to follow your plan in the face of real hunger signals that urge you to eat, or drive cravings for something that you know you shouldn't have, at least not now.  But if you really know you really should resist them, then it's gluttony that you have to resist.

Disobeying the rules you've set for yourself is probably the biggest problem, but you may discover other depths of gluttony that you didn't know you had.  Take charity, for instance.  If you suddenly become seriously stressed out and scream at everyone because the children ate your special sugar-free breath mints and you have to have those breath mints to keep from eating between meals then you are exhibiting what is basically a gluttony problem.  You are letting your food issues interfere with your generosity and kindness.

And manners.  If you are invited to someone's house for dinner and you have to pointedly scrape all the breading off your chicken, where they can see it, because they are  ruining your diet and they should know better, then you are letting your food issues interfere with your manners.  You may have never been this kind of a dinner guest before.  Having an eating plan that you are trying to stick to may bring this hidden gluttony out.

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The good news is that it's supposed to get easier as you go, because the more you heal your blood sugar problem, the less you'll have to deal with hunger and cravings.  But to start to heal, you have to work to resist the hunger and cravings.  There is not much way around this.  You will want cake, and there will be cake, and you will have to make a lot of individual decisions not to eat the cake that's right there and that you really want.

If you cannot -- will not -- make a lot of those decisions go in the right direction, you won't get better and it won't get physiologically easier.

You also have to deal with the force of habit, which is not so physiological, but still a strong force keeping you in that rut.  This is another thing that gets easier as you go -- provided you are not asking too much of yourself at once.  One step at a time, one small change at a time, may be more effective in the long run for the mind.

There's a certain tension here.  The physiology will react more quickly to a drastic change (the more carb-load you can remove at once, the quicker your blood sugar and insulin resistance will start to heal).  But the psychology, it seems, does not change quickly, and more-incremental changes may be more likely to stick.

Which just reinforces the notion that the path to healing (or redemption, depending on how you look at gluttony) is excruciatingly individual.