Pseudologica Fantastica: Dull and Common

When we were kids we called it "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" but Dr. Sam Vaknin, self-proclaimed narcissist and author of Malignant Self Love, calls it Pseudologica Fantastica - way too pretty a term for such ugly activity.  it is hard for basically honest folks to comprehend people of the lie (a phrase coined by M. Scott Peck in his book by the same name).  Now everyone will lie to keep from being shot in the head, but there is a condition that goes beyond self-protection.  As my Daddy used to say, "He would rather climb a tree and lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth."  And I will never forget Judy W., a girl I knew through junior high and high school.  It was one pathetic attempt after another to illicit awe or pity.  We pitied her, all right, but not for her hard luck, rather how pathetic a liar she was.  

Dr. Vaknin's description might help us understand how controlling liars are:   

 "In 'Streetcar Named Desire', Blanche Dubois, the sister in law of the character played by Marlon Brando, is accused by him of inventing a false biography, replete with exciting events and desperate wealthy suitors. She responds that it is preferable to lead an imaginary but enchanted life - than a real but dreary one.

I exaggerate everything. If a newspapers publishes my articles, I describe it as "the most widely circulated", or "the most influential". If I meet someone, I make him out to be "the most powerful", "most enigmatic", "most something". If I make a promise, I always promise the impossible or undoable.

To put it less gently, I lie. Compulsively and needlessly.

All the time.

About everything. And I often contradict myself.

Why do I need to do this?

To make myself interesting or attractive. In other words, to secure Narcissistic Supply (attention, admiration, adulation, gossip). I refuse to believe that I can be of interest to anyone as I am. My mother was interested in me only when I achieved something. Since then I flaunt my achievements - or invent ones. I feel certain that people are more interested in my fantasies than in me.

This way I also avoid the routine, the mundane, the predictable, the boring.

In my mind, I can be anywhere, do anything and I am good at convincing people to participate in my scripts. It is movie-making. I should have been a director.

Pseudologica Fantastica is the compulsive need to lie consistently and about everything, however inconsequential - even if it yields no benefits to the liar. I am not that bad. But when I want to impress - I lie."

This concept leaves me pondering how a person is a thief of reality when he or she will lie to control another's perception of reality.  It's sad for the deceived and even sad for the liar.  You have to see it for the pathology it is and laugh at it to keep from taking it too seriously.  Ultimately the shock and awe of lies may be covering only a Blanche Dubois dull commonness.

Perfumes of the Spirit

Dr. Paolo Rovesti of Milan University in Italy was an interesting man who was something of a pioneer in the study of the effect of essential oils on the mind.  In Medical Aromatherapy Kurt Schnaubelt described Dr. Rovesti  as a man "traveling around the globe, he researched the role of fragrance in past cultures, such as the many ways fragrance was integrated
into spiritual, magical, and social rituals." 

Dr. Rovesti lamented modern man's loss of olfactory sensibilities through sterile living.  He found tribes in India who had the olfactory capacity of animals who could detect visitors by their smell over 100 yards away.  In Essence and Alchemy, Mandy Aftel quotes Dr. Rovesti from In Search of Perfumes Lost, "We who are immersed in the unnaturalness of modern-day life cannot recall, without nostalgia and sadness, those gifts of nature at man's disposal, now neglected or in disuse.  Among those are paradises of natural perfumes, of the perfumes of the past and of the spirit." 

A particularly charming olfactive story told by Dr. Rovesti was that of a colleague who kept a sample of the perfume of each of the great loves of his life - eight by the end of his life - labeled by name, years of love and places to which the scent and women were associated.  According to Dr. Rovesti "he told me with half-closed eyes, 'I relive in a film of memories the delicious romances of my life, when the whole world rotated around one woman, her name and her face, under the spell of her perfume, which now erases time and brings back in all its beauty what by now, as far as reality is concerned, has turned to ashes.'" 

I have heard that the fragrance Jicky was created by Aime Guerlain to honor a lost, unrequited love for a girl he met while studying in England.  The story is lovely, and the fragrance may be as well, but Dr. Rovesti's scent collecting colleague likely would find such an experiment futile despite its creativity.  Memory is what it is and cannot be created anew.  To déjà vu the ghost of lost love some unextractable molecule of the past must be brought forward embedded in the heart and brain.  Such is the nature of smell.  Such is the nature of love.

Robin's Gift

When I served as a curator for ECVA's Visual Preludes 2006 I selected this powerful image entitled "Gift" for the day when the theme was Gracious Spirit.  I did not know the artist; I only knew that the colors and composition had a tremendous sway on my emotions.  The turquoise in all of its energetic strokes made me want to go back and look at it over and over again.  It turned out to be one of my favorite pieces in all of the Preludes. 

At the time I actually thought that the artist who produced this work was a man.  You can imagine my surprise when I learned that C. Robin Janning is a woman - an incredibly talented one - and fellow Saggitarian at that.  Robin has since become a valued friend of mine and ECVA's Director of Communications.  Like her painting that exudes energy, she gives so many of her gifts to the ministry of ECVA, and she graciously allowed me to use her work here.

To see more of Robin's work, go to Gramery Digital Diary. 

"Gifts" by C. Robin Janning, all rights reserved   

Full Feathers

Feathers

Feathers are a Native American symbol of the Great Spirit and the sun.  There's some kind of magic in a feather, that instrument of delicate strength that allows a bird to travel the sky while I remain bound to the Earth watching in awe.  My arms and legs are strong and brave, but they do not lift me from the Earth to soar in the face of the sun.   

Yesterday I found a bird in my bungalow.  The poor thing must have been accidentally shut in there when the cats were put up for the night.  Here I was dressed for court, letting out Cats Boomer and Randy, when I found this rather large bird who had bled out on the tiles.  He was still soft, and as I lifted him with the empty cat bowls, his head rolled over gently.  I was overtaken by the sadness of what the bird endured overnight as the cats ganged up on him and brought him down.  I'm sure he went higher and higher in an effort to avoid them, and I'll bet they were expert trapeze artists swinging off whatever they could to reach the terror stricken creature.  Alas, there was nothing I could do now to help him, and Boomer and Randy bounded out of the bungalow like children being let out to play.  Little monsters. 

If that bird could have freed himself from the barrier of the roof, he could have flown off into the silvery moon filled air, perched in the limbs of the magnolia and laughed at his tormenters.  But his feathers could not accomplish that for him. 

I can identify with that bird.  People get caught in bungalows, too, with accusers psychologically clawing at them to bring them down.  It has happened since the beginning of time, and it will continue to happen until the end of time.  Usually we do become soft dead things by morning, our heads rolling over gently in defeat.  But that isn't required because humans have an advantage in psychological battle that is better than feathers.  To keep from being a soft dead thing when morning comes a soul has to break out of the barriers of fear and disbelief that keep it in prison.  And that can be done through right thinking with the heart.  Only from the safe limbs of the magnolia tree can the soul choose to laugh or love again. 

As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is.  ~ Proverbs 23:7  

...behold, the kingdom of God is within you.  ~ Jesus (Luke 17:21)

"Learn to think with your heart, and feel with your head."  ~ Native American saying

You Might Be Southern

There's a joke down South.....You might be Southern if  you schedule your life around SEC football.  Since I am, here is my Fall calendar (it isn't enough that I have shortcuts to the Auburn schedule on the desktops of my computer at home and work).  War Eagle!: 

08/30/08	vs. Louisiana-Monroe	Auburn, Ala.	6:00 p.m. CT
09/06/08	vs. Southern Miss	Auburn, Ala.	11:30 a.m. CT
09/13/08	at Mississippi State	Starkville, Miss.	6:00 p.m. CT
09/20/08	vs. LSU	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
09/27/08	vs. Tennessee #	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
10/04/08	at Vanderbilt	Nashville, Tenn.	TBA
10/11/08	vs. Arkansas	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
10/23/08	at West Virginia	Morgantown, W.V.	6:30 p.m. CT
11/01/08	at Mississippi	Oxford, Miss.	TBA
11/08/08	vs. Tennessee-Martin (HC)	Auburn, Ala.	1:30 p.m. CT
11/15/08	vs. Georgia	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
11/29/08	at Alabama #	Tuscaloosa, Ala.	TBA

Country Roads

Somnolent Summer scenes on any Southern road are drenched in color and haze, providing a sense of fantasy and blessing...how could any place be so naturally rich?  How could I have been so blessed to be born and to live my life in such a God given painting?

Unbearable Beauty

A long time ago I ran across a writing that has haunted me for years.  I could not remember who wrote it, but what I took from it touched me.  It spoke of a writer's admonition against needing to capture beauty, or, at least, that is what I took from it.  It touched something primal in me and theretofore unexpressed by anyone I knew or anyone I read.  Over the years the idea expressed in that piece has come to me as I try to photograph something too beautiful to lose; as I commit the beauty of sunsets, plants or creatures to memory for when they can no longer be beheld by my eyes.  In short, when I have tried to own beauty before it passes away.  

I recently found the haunting passage, and the author was (of course) Etty Hillesum:

"It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with the light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting.  And then I knew precisely how I had felt in the past.  Then all that beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart, and I would not have known what to do with the pain...But that night, only just gone, I reacted quite differently.  I felt that God's world was beautiful despite everything, but its beauty now filled me with joy.  I was just as moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow I no longer wanted to own it."

Along a similar line Hillesum painted the following words:

"Last night I felt the almost unbearable beauty of the rose-red sweet peas standing there amidst my books. Had I but the gift of adequate words (and fortunately I have not), then I should have sat myself down to write an aesthetic treatise. And with it I would have cast off the weight under which that beauty had nearly crushed me. But I lacked the words, and so I wrote quite blandly: beauty, too, is something one must be able to bear."

Being a person with inadequate words, all my life I have said of music or images, "it is so beautiful it hurts."  Being a person who has not yet learned to bear the ephemeral nature of beauty, I am only now learning to taste, swallow and release the energy of that which is only a gift and not mine to own.  In the meantime, Hillesum's words make my soul the wiser despite nearly crushing me.

Quotations from Etty. The letter and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans (transl.).

Poor Little Flowers

“Like the blossoming of the hyacinth and tulip – which seems to take place spontaneously, but really is the result of organization which had been going on through the Fall and Winter months – the emergencies of virtue, attainments, mastery over the weaknesses of the flesh and conquests over evil inclinations, will be represented in the moment of general resurrection…The plant of righteousness in many may not have seemed to grow or flourish; but as the poor little flower was exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, yet bloomed upon the mountain side, had accomplished more and was worthier of being prized than the magnificent plants nurtured in the green or hot house, so all who emerged from the terrible difficulties attending gross animal nature and lack of opportunities would be found of greater value in the sight of God than more favored Christians…He likened this process of spiritual resurrection to that which goes on in the development of the plant from the seed. Every time a truth is established either in taste, love gentleness, neatness, or kindness in a Christian he has emerged from the flesh and was getting toward resurrection.”

The New York Times describing a sermon by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher on the Resurrection Applied To Daily Life, published April 6, 1874

Marking Borders

"Mammals mark their territorial borders with their excrement.  Human beings have long done the same thing with that particular form of excrement that we call their scapegoats."

Rene Girard and James G. Williams
I See Satan Fall Like Lightening