Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 2)

GITS is doing Milch, this time on the psychology of the artist:

A psychiatrist will tell you—well, a psychiatrist won’t tell you shit. But in psychiatric terms, the psyche is differentiated into the ego sense of self, the id—which is everything that gets us jammed up—and the super ego, which is the idea of form, or structure, or the accommodation in the world for our behavior. And the super ego is the internalization of the parental voice. Now, it’s obviously an oversimplification. But in particular, a writer—for reasons we will get to in another part of this discussion—stands in a particular kind of doubleness, typically, in his or her emotional makeup, toward experience. Stands both within it comfortably, and, for whatever combination of reasons, stands outside it. That’s the cards you’re dealt. That’s what predisposes you to be a writer as well as predisposes you to be a few other things.

Often, that doubleness is caused by a traumatic association with the idea of form. Here’s a for-instance. The Irish are regarded as a great storytelling people and also as a country full of drunks. There’s a reason for both reputations. It’s a tough country—weather’s tough, they had a lot of problems. One way you learn the doubleness that is typical of the writer is that you are both within the [tavern] and you’re standing outside wondering where the next punch is coming from.

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The second maxim that I can give you, the thing that I always try to communicate to an aspiring writer, is that no one can teach you anything that you don’t already know, and each of you has, in your heart, the capacity, when encouraged by a benign organizing presence, to identify the deepest truths of the human story.

Denial of Death

The New Republic has an article on how the Denial of Death plays into politics. Summary quote:

In The Denial of Death, Becker tried to explain how fear of one's own demise lies at the center of human endeavor. "Man's anxiety," Becker wrote, "results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation." Becker described how human beings defend themselves against this fundamental anxiety by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own.

I don't think the anxiety caused by knowledge of one's own mortality can explain everything, but I think Death must be one of the essential things in the human psyche that motivates us. And clearly in art and literature it is an obsession: from tragedy to war epic to horror story to funeral poem, it sits side by side with romantic love as art's great topic.

The problem with the "Worldview Defense" is that it doesn't explain the red state/blue state divide, nor does it explain why some people are motivated by fear and death, and others by more positive principles. Perhaps it is the difference between "deficiency needs" and "growth needs" as in Maslow's hierarchy. The fear of Death could just as easily be seen as anxiety about safety and security (Crime, jobs, etc.) and the unmet desire for stability and certainty. If there is a difference between how New York and West Virginia responds to 9/11, it is probably rooted in the social and economic anxieties each community is already facing. It may also be that some areas offer more choices and improve your ability to cope with these anxieties by providing greater social mobility and economic diversity.

It would be interesting to see how these sorts of job and safety concerns correlate with voting patterns.

What Autism Can Tell us about the Art of Manipulation

Simon Baron-Cohen's article, "I Cannot Tell a Lie - what people with autism can tell us about honesty" poses many interesting, and I think very serious, questions about the nature of consciousness and human behavior. It's also interesting from the point of view of a writer to think about how characters in a story can be seen to embody different aspects of this rich psychology.

In the article, Baron-Cohen distinguishes between lean interpretations of animal behavior which can understand and learn from rules in an instrumental way, and rich interpretations of behaviors that demonstrate an awareness of other minds and the ability to manipulate others through deception.

He writes:

If what other animals are doing when they appear to be dishonest is not real deception, this begs the question of what counts as real deception. True deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other beings have minds, (2) different beings’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) you can make another mind believe that something false is actually true. Defined in this way, one can see that deception is no trivial achievement! The deceiver needs to have the mental equipment to juggle different representations of reality. No wonder that scholars of animal behavior are wary of elevating a single instance of behavior to genuine deception, and prefer to reduce it to simpler mental processes like learned associations.

In human beings this rich ability to understand and deceive can be seen even in very small children. What's interesting is that people with autism and Asperger's syndrome don't seem to have this capacity at all. They have great awareness of their own experiences and beliefs, and have tremendous talents and mental abilities, but they cannot see into the minds of others.

From one perspective, I would say that this ability to empathize is essential to our core humanity and our ability to tell stories and learn from others. If one definition of storytelling is the lie that tells the truth, then empathy and deception are really at its core. We are fascinated by stories that allow us to see into the minds of others, to understand their motivations, inner conflicts, and desires. Many of our greatest writers, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Henry James to Leo Tolstoy have dramatized this particularly rich capacity by giving us clues into the inner workings of their characters as well as showing how characters manipulate and deceive each other through word and action.

More generously, Baron-Cohen concludes:

The unique qualities of human intelligence are characterized not just by the capacity for mind-reading (and deception), which has enabled humans to work in coordinated activity unusually well, but also by the capacity to systemize, which has enabled humans to understand how things work, and to develop innovative technology par excellence. People with autism, who can perceive patterns better and concentrate better than their peers, are also more honest.

What this distinction really highlights is that the differences in people are complimentary and interrelated. One quality allows us to empathize and understand things passionately, the other quality allows us to organize and see things with cool objectivity. For me, these are important things to remember when trying to understand human nature in general and how to write and understand characters specifically.

Great article and interesting insights.