psychology dector

It is a city on the edge of forever. Endless desert, empty and dead, even on the holiday to resurrection. My family has lived here for generations. My great-grandfather and grandfather built a cabin in Bouquet Canyon in the early 1900s, and we used to go there for long weekends when I was a child. This is where we would go deer hunting and fishing . Here in the sands among the Joshua trees are my roots. Joshua tree: Yucca brevifolia , a monocotyledonous tree given its more Biblical name by Mormons who crossed the Mojave in the mid-1800s. Whenever I travel to Mojave, I am reminded of Jesus’ forty days and nights in the desert, tempted by Satan. It is Easter and we are driving out Highway 14. The temperature is still mild, even for late April, and heavy dark clouds hover in the sky with only patches of blue and thin, wispy strands of white. All of this skyscape indicates a low pressure system moving out to make way for a high pressure system later in the week, where the winds will kick...

Before The Rain (Macedonia, 1994) Dir. Milcho Mancevski Criterion; $39.95, DVD Milcho Mancevski’s Before The Rain , utilizes a circular narrative to uniquely portray the civil strife in Macedonia between the Orthodox Christians and the Muslim Albanians in the 1980s and 1990s. The film is beautifully shot, with a film clarity that appears almost of digital quality, highlighting the rugged and sparse terrain of the Macedonian countryside. The theme, expressed by one of the characters, that “Time never dies. The circle is not round,” recurs frequently in the fragmented story line. Using the motif of tomatoes on the vine, we see a young priest who has taken a vow of silence, picking the fruit in the crystal clear Macedonian sun. This section of the film is entitled, Words , and adds the additional motif of almost the complete absence of words, or in limited occasion, the inability of words to express thoughts and emotions. The priest, upon returning to his Spartan cell, discovers a young...

What the world needs now is Edmund Wilson . There is no cultural criticism, no literary criticism, no historical perspective, at least not in the sense that Wilson created it in his volumes of essays, and in journals like Vanity Fair , The New Republic , The New Yorker , and The New York Review of Books . Wilson came into the world in Red Bank, New Jersey on May 8, 1895. He attended The Hill School, an eastern boarding academy located in Pennsylvania that prepared students for college. His literary aspirations began there when he edited the school’s magazine, The Record . He went on to Princeton University and started on his journalism career at the New York Sun after graduating. Rene Wellek, writing in Comparative Literature Studies (Volume 15, No. 1), says Wilson “disclaimed being a literary critic.” He quotes Wilson in 1959: “I think of myself simply as a writer and a journalist. I am as much interested in history as I am in literature.” The journalist Wilson came to Vanity Fai...

Shambhala Sun: Buddhism Culture Meditation Life Bimonthly; $29.95 per year www.shambhalasun.com Maybe it was the smiling cover photo of Pema Chodron , whom I have written about previously . Maybe it was my ongoing pursuit of peace and tranquility amid an increasingly cacophonous world. In any case, I grabbed the March, 2011 issue of the magazine, Shambhala Sun . The magazine is filled with ads offering retreats, seminars, and lectures on the Buddhist lifestyle. The Dalai Lama will be visiting the University of Arkansas under their Distinguished Lecture series next month. The two sessions sound interesting, but I would not expect him to visit Arkansas. Nothing against the folks from Arkansas; I just didn’t think there would be that many Buddhists there, although Buddhism is a religion where one could follow the philosophy—non-violence, meditation-prayer, and compassion for the world and its people—without actually being a Buddhist. Jesus, in fact, would have made a good Buddhist. Ther...

Here are a few interesting tidbits from Harper’s Magazine , March 2011: “Estimated percentage change since 2000 in the U.S. defense budget, not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: +80.” Can you imagine what our education system would be like if the budget for schools increased eighty percent in ten years? Even though the statistic above does not include the wars, what if we added it all together? What would American education be like if we spent, over the last ten years, the equivalent of what we have spent on defense and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Libya no-fly zone? And if the government had shut down last week, who were the people whose paychecks would be immediately delayed? Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shouldn’t there be some kind of clause in the budget that says no matter what, our men and women in uniform still get paid? I mean they are dodging bullets for this country. Moving on: “Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks la...

East/West (France, 1999) Dir. Regis Wargnier Union Generale Cinematographique (UGC); price varies, DVD The roiling ocean in the opening scenes of Regis Wargnier’s 1999 film, East/West , makes for a powerful symbol of the disturbing upheaval to come. Inside the ocean liner, the atmosphere is warmly lit and exuberant. These White émigré Russians —those who emigrated from Russia during the revolution of 1917—are returning to their motherland. They have been offered Soviet citizenship and amnesty for fleeing. Here, in the midst of the journey home, they dine, sing patriotic songs, and tell stories. One family stands out—Alexei Golovin, his French wife Marie, and his son, Sergey. As the journey ends in a starkly lit dockyard in the new Soviet Union, we see the contrast between the warmth of the scene on the ship and the new reality. Wargnier punctuates the frightening change of scene with gunfire: the newly returned citizens are gunned down in cold blood. The horror begins to dawn on the f...

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