Tag Archives: Psychology

What Do 20% of Us Have in Common?

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Not long ago, I read a Los Angeles Times article saying 20% of Americans suffered from mental illness in 2010.  The article ended with a warning:  “…we need to continue efforts to monitor levels of mental illness in the United States in order to effectively prevent this important public health problem and its negative impact on total health.”  The story did define what was meant by “mental illness.”  Do I have to keep an eye on every fifth guy in the Post Office line?

Not necessarily.

The Times’ source was a January 19 report by SAMSHA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Services Administration, which said 45.9 million Americans suffered from mental illness in 2010.  Their definition of mental illness is, “a diagnosable mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder (excluding developmental and substance use disorders)” in the DSM-IV, the 4th edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994).

Here’s how the DSM works: there are numerous schools of psychotherapy that differ in their approach to treating different disorders, but all have agreed to agree on the definitions of those disorders.  One of my psych professors insisted that the DSM says more about our cultural “norms” than about the health of the population.  For instance, in 1987, homosexuality was dropped from the list of disorders.  Prior to 1987, gays and lesbians were “mentally ill.”  After that, they were not.

Anyone who visits a psychotherapist and wants to submit an insurance claim will receive one of these diagnoses, most commonly, “Anxiety,” or “Adjustment Disorder.”  This fits the vast numbers of clients who are able to cope with life, but seek help with problems at work or problems at home or issues of self-actualization.  The SAMSHA report gave no mention of efforts to factor in the seriousness of the diagnosis.  There is no way to know how many of the 45.9 million Americans who are “mentally ill” suffer from anxiety vs. schizophrenia.

To the best of my knowledge, the rise of “insanity” coincided with the Industrial Revolution.  The US Census first noted the incidence of “idiocy/insanity” in 1840.  By 1880, there were seven types of insanity:  mania, melancholia, monomania, paresis, dementia, dipsomania, and epilepsy.

According to my psych professor, the DSM grew out of a research collaboration between the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the US military between the world wars.  Soldiers in WWI suffered high rates of shell shock.  The military sought screening methods for those who would hold up in combat.  Although the screens later proved not to have the predictive power hoped for, the DSM came from this research.  In other words, our current definition of sanity is based the attributes of a good combat soldier.

Voices were raised in protest, almost from the start, notably by Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and a 1973 article by David Rosenham, “On Being Sane in Insane Places.”

I am not trying to minimize the suffering of those with mental afflictions that cause them to harm themselves or others.  First, I am questioning a report that excludes all forms of substance abuse from its definition of “mental illness.”  I also question defining “anxiety” as “mental illness,” when anyone who was paying attention in 2010 felt anxious.

I have often been struck, since I studied psychology, that our concept of sanity, modeled on the good soldier, also defines the “productive” member of our consumer culture.  It brings to mind a favorite line from a poem by Theodore Roethke:  What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?:

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. 
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
– Theodore Roethke

Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been Normal?

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When I was a kid, I believed that my family was the standard by which all families should be judged.  In the ’80’s, however, when family psychology met popular culture and some of us went questing for our inner child, the news was not so good.  We learned that 96% of families were dysfunctional; that crazy had become the new normal; that 24 out of 25 of us had grown up with the Griswalds and not the Cleavers!

Who's your daddy?

Just when we thought we had that settled, when I thought my cred as a free thinker and iconoclast was safe, a new book threatens all that: Are You Normal?, by Mark Shulman.  According to a Washington Post article, Shulman’s book has 176 pages of questions for kids, scored against other answers, which allows you rank yourself on a “weird-o-meter.”

With some trepidation, I answered the sample questions in the article, going for the perspective I would have had in grade school.  Feel free to ride along – if you dare:

1) Do you have a brother or sister:  

Yep – one sister, making me one of the 87.5% who have a sibling.  So right of the bat, it’s not looking good for the bohemian persona.

2) Have you ever faked being sick to get out of school?

Well duh, of course I did!  Can we say, “World Series?”  That boosted my weirdness quotient, since only 25% answer yes to this one.

3)  Where do you bite the chocolate bunny first?

The ears of course, along with “more than half”  of those polled.  Interestingly, 1 in 25 go for the bum…now that is strange!

4)  Smooth or Chunky peanut butter?

I started to say “chunky,” but that’s revisionist history.  As a kid, it had to be smooth, lest it tear my Wonder Bread.  “Slightly more than half,” share that predilection.

5) TV in your bedroom?

Not then, not now, though it wasn’t nearly as common when I was a kid as it is now (56% answer “yes”).  My parents had a portable with rabbit-ears, but those were the days when, if the TV “went on the fritz,” you pulled the tubes and carried them down to the tube tester at the local grocery store.

6)  Did you ever bite your fingernails?

Rarely but on certain stressful occasions, yes.  The answer to that was a 50/50 split.

7)  Did you ever bite your toenails?

Ewww!  And that reaction is not unique.  A full 90% say they “could not or would not” do such a thing, so most of us are plain vanilla on that score.

The Washington Post review concludes by saying “the real point of the book is to show that nobody is perfectly normal or perfectly weird.  We’re all unique, and that’s part of what makes us special.”  Not such a bad conclusion to reach.

However, if “special” is now normal,  but normal normal is weird…I guess I better not go down that road, just quit while I’m ahead.

The Wasteland

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One of the books I treasure is a battered old trade paperback with yellowing pages.  I value the book,  Creative Mythology, because of the author’s inscription: “For Morgan with all my good wishes. Joseph Campbell, 3/13/79.”  

joseph_campbell_4

You could say Campbell’s  four day lecture series that spring did much to open the path my imagination has followed ever since.  None of the stories Campbell unpacked in his lectures or books affected me more than Parzifal (or Parsifal) and his quest for the holy grail. The version of the grail story Campbell recounts is by Wolfram Von Eshenbach (1170 – 1220).  Wolfram was a German knight and poet, and his Parzivalis regarded as one of the finest medieval German epics.  Campbell looks to this version because it’s roots reach deeper than later Christianized versions where only the pious and chaste Galahad can attain the grail.  What matters for this post are those echoes we can see in the tale of the ancient legends of sacred kingship, and the ways an unfit or weakened king can blight the land.

Wolfram Von Eshenbach from Codex Manasse

Sometimes in youth we receive a vision or powerful experience that shapes much of the rest of our lives.  So it is with Parzival who finds his way to the mystical Grail Castle and meets its wounded king, Anfortas,  who is also known as The Fisher King.  As a young knight, a spear pierced the Fisher King’s “thighs” – a euphemism for testicles according to Campbell.  In ancient times, the virility of the king and the fertility of the land were one.  In the grail stories, Fisher King could not be healed and couldn’t die.  All the realm was barren.

Robin Williams as the Fisher King in the 1991 movie of that name, a contemporary retelling of the story

While in the castle, during a mysterious ritual, Parzival has a vision of the grail, which is described as a stone, though its shape isn’t fixed, and it brings everyone “what their heart most desires.”  Though he is intensely curious, Parzival does not ask the meaning of what he sees.  In the morning, the castle is empty.  All traces of life are gone.  He rides away, and when he tells his story, listeners turn away in disgust.  If Parzival had asked the right question, he would have healed the king and restored the land.    The young knight wanders the blighted realm for 20 year, enduring hardships and contemplating his failure.  Just like us, he watches time turn his youthful dreams of glory to ashes.

“Parsifal” by Odilon Redon

At last, one cold Christmas Eve, Parzival encounters a hermit, tells his tale, and learns the question he should have asked. After that, he achieves the castle again.  When the ritual ends, Parzival asks, “Whom does the grail serve?”   Everything hinges on asking the right question.  Anfortas is healed, spring returns, and Parzival becomes the new Grail King.

***

Hearing this old tale, we have to ask how the story plays forward.  “Wasteland” clearly describes the state of the world we read about in the papers, and “impotent” seems an apt description of most of the world’s governments.  This perception is not even new, for T.S. Eliot named it ninety years ago in his poem, The Wasteland:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.

Giving mythical weight to our latest headlines, storyteller and mythologist, Michael Meade says: “Like Parsifal, the modern world has awakened from a deep sleep to find that the castle of abundance has disappeared, that the financial markets are in ruins, that blind religious beliefs are once again producing mindless crusades, and that great nature itself threatens to become a barren wilderness. Like Parsifal, we failed to ask the right questions when surrounded by abundance.” From “Parsifal, the Pathless Path, and the Secret of Abundance,” first published in Parabola, Fall 2009.  http://www.mosaicvoices.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=72:essay4parsifal&catid=53:essays&Itemid=68

This has happened before, again and again, Meade reminds us – beginnings and endings, decay and renewal.  The castle of abundance waits for us, individually and collectively, somewhere in the wilderness, but old pathways won’t take us there.  There’s a time to do as Parsifal did – drop the reins and let the horse, an image of our instinctive wisdom, pick its way through the forest. The old stories were told in the winter, when the nights were long and the fires warm.  This winter, I am drawn to look at some of these tales, to see what they are still whispering to our souls, for they are wiser than the daily ephemera that passes for wisdom but is really the source of our confusion.

As Michael Meade puts it: “Despite the current confusions of dogmatic religions and the literalism common to modern attitudes, the earthly world has always been a manifestation of the divine. Call it the Grail Castle, the Kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, the Otherworld; it has many names and each is a representation of the eternal realm that secretly sustains the visible world. When time seems to be running out it is not simply more time that is needed, rather it is the touch of the eternal that can heal all time’s wounds and renew life from its source.”

The 21st Century May Be Bad For Your Mental Health

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To appreciate this post, you need to know a little of how it came about.  Yesterday morning, in my dentist’s waiting room, I started reading an article in  the Nov. 14 Newsweek by Dr. Andrew Weil.  He and others have noted that modern affluence breeds depression.  They have also observed that the Amish, with a 19th century lifestyle centered on simplicity, have only 1/10 the amount of depression of other Americans.  Just as I hit this tantalizing statement, the dentist, who was running ahead of schedule, called me in.  After my appointment, I finished the article.  “Our brains aren’t equipped for the 21st century,” says Weil.

One of the things we are not equipped for is our 24/7, hi-tech, multi-tasking world, a point that made me chuckle as I pulled out my smart phone, photographed the pages, and emailed them to myself.  Just call me a poster boy for the legions of technically savvy neurotics.  It turns out I didn’t need to send the page to myself.  Weil’s article is available online, and I highly recommend it:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/andrew-weil-s-spontaneous-happiness-our-nature-deficit-disorder.html.

The article is taken from his latest book, Spontaneous Happiness, just released this month, where Weil says it’s not just technology that’s the cupric in our epidemic of depression.  Increasing numbers of psychologists and therapists identify one of our key problems as Nature Deficit Disorder.  Weil says:  

“Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.
………………………………………………
“Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed.”

Weil discusses the bad news in detail, but doesn’t end there.  He is firmly in the camp of “positive psychology,” the discipline that concentrates on human wellbeing rather than pathology.  He summarizes positive measures we can take, things he discusses in greater detail in the book.

  • Find a mindfulness practice.  (I was impressed that Weil listed this as suggestion #1.  I’ll follow this up by posting some resources soon).
  • Spend as much time as possible outdoors.
  • Find some form of aerobic exercise.
  • Sleep in total darkness, if possible, and avoid very bothersome noise, even if it means wearing earphones.  Weil discusses why uninterrupted sleep, and freedom from noise pollution are important.
  • Attend to diet – he has written of this in detail in previous books.
  • Cultivate social relationships.
  • Spend some time each day unplugged from all forms of gadgetry.

Finally, Weil, like almost everyone else who writes on wellbeing, cites gratitude as a critical factor.  This morning I ran into an acquaintance who has had a number of physical problems.  He has paid a price, but also found something diamond-solid that is now at the core of his life:  three times he has been clinically dead, and he’s seen and experienced “the light,” that people in that extremity sometimes encounter.  He knows it is waiting for him, and meanwhile, shares his experience with others he thinks will benefit.  He says he intends to do so, “as long as God decides to keep me around.”

Simply encountering him put me in tune with the theme of the season, and reminded me of all I have to be thankful for.  That is my hope for everyone reading this – may you find unshakeable joy in your life just as it is, and may you be able to share it with others.

Notes on Worldly Success

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Yesterday afternoon I sat for a while on the back porch, watching the rain and admiring my neighbor’s and my handiwork.  Over the weekend, we shored up the fence and gate in preparation for winter.  My neighbor knows a lot about carpentry.  I don’t, and because of that, I felt a huge sense of satisfaction, as much or more than I did a few weeks ago, when I finished a pretty good short story for the Writer’s Digest contest.  I guess with that attitude, I’m not likely to get my face on the cover of Time, either for carpentry or for writing, even though both can bring me a great deal of satisfaction.  Sitting on the porch, I started thinking of various examples of success and failure.

***

I’ve been reading a lot about Steve Jobs in recently published tributes.  Viewing the whole sweep of his life, he seems to have had great self-confidence and an unerring instinct for doing the right thing. Much of that impression comes from his 2005 graduation speech, the reflections of a mature man, sobered by a serious brush with mortality.  I found myself wondering how he dealt with setbacks when he was young and first starting to make his way?  Lives written in history books and obituaries often leave out the messiness, the dark nights of the soul, the nights we wake up a 3:00am wondering what to do.

Somehow the story of Jobs’s trek to India leads me to think he connected with his heart and intuition – as he talked about in his speech – at a pretty young age.  You don’t venture to a strange continent, in search of something you aren’t sure of, unless you are confident enough to live with uncertainty and believe you can find the answers.  Unlike many creative people, Jobs’s passion aligned with his livelihood, but that did not prevent the devastation of getting fired at 30 from the company he had founded.   He had enough wealth to retire from active life and never know want again, but failure prodded Jobs to come back and reinvent himself – and animated films while he was at it.

Rule for success:  Find a way to believe in yourself.
Another rule of success:  Never give up.
A useful tip:  Love what you do, if possible.

There are clear parallels in the life of Thomas Edison, 1847-1931, to whom Jobs is often compared.  Edison ran numerous unsuccessful experiments (estimates range from 700 to 10,000) before discovering tungsten as a workable filament for electric lights.  Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”  Did Edison ever come close to giving up?  Did he ever know dark nights of the soul?

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" - Thomas Edison, 1903

Several of the pithy statements he made in maturity sound like things Jobs might have said:  “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.”   Like Jobs, Edison never dreamed of resting on his laurels:  “Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”  Perhaps my favorite Edison quote is this one:  “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”  Might that include a pile 2×4’s and fence boards?

Tip for success:  A sense of humor and a sense of play are marvelous attributes.

***

The list of Abraham Lincoln’s failures is often used to motivate people, because he had so many of them.  Here’s a more balanced chronology of his victories as well as losses.  He won some and lost some, just like everyone else, and like Jobs and Edison, he kept on trying.  http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/failures.htm

Lincoln believed that he was an agent of destiny and spoke of “the chorus of Union” that would sound when touched by “the better angels of our nature.”  This sense of calling may have made his task possible but didn’t make it easy:  I’ve heard that he wept at the casualty counts from the last battles of the Civil War.  Like Jobs, he was aware of his own mortality:  a week before he was shot, Lincoln dreamed of lying in state in Capitol rotunda, but just like the men he ordered into battle, fear of death could not deter him.

Close to Lincoln during the last years of his life was another future president, Ulysses S. Grant, who may have been the only northern general able to win the war, but whose life outside the military reads like a litany of failure.  Born, Hiram Ulysses Grant, he discovered when he entered West Point that he had been registered as, Ulysses Simpson Grant.  He never bothered to change the name, and in a similar vein, gained a reputation as a sloppy cadet.  Though he served with distinction during the Mexican War, afterwards he failed as a businessman and a farmer.

As president, Grant was noted for enforcing civil rights and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, but his administration was was rocked by scandal and inept handling of the Panic of 1873, a world-wide financial crisis.  He left office on a note of failure, went into business with a man who cheated him, and died in debt and in great pain from throat cancer.  By force of will, he finished his memoirs before he died, which saved his wife from bankruptcy.

Like so many before and after, Grant was a poster-boy for another truth:  Worldly success is no guarantee of happiness.  This realization raises the critical question of what we really mean by success.  The purpose of life is finding happiness and sharing it with as many others as we can, according to the Dalai Lama, in The Art of Happiness, a book I will have more to say about later.

In the meantime, I come around again to the thought of fixing fences with my neighbor.  When measured by the creation of and sharing of happiness, it may have been even more important than I imagined.

A Soul Day

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One of my psychology professors once described a presentation he made at business conference. His subject was depression among top executives, a problem serious enough to warrant its own session.  After running through professional interventions like medication and psychotherapy, he told his audience, “There’s a simpler and far less expensive approach, though I don’t expect many of you to adopt it.”

He told them to choose one weekday a month to call in sick or take a vacation.  He insisted on a weekday, since weekends are usually given to errands and chores.  The professor called it a “soul day” and the rule was, do nothing of a goal oriented nature.  No work, no phone meetings, no fiddling with Blackberrys.  This was a day for those little desires at the edge of the mind:  a walk in the park, a family picnic when others are working, trying one’s hand at watercolor.

There were lots of protests.  When a CEO said he was too busy; the professor said that might be one of the reasons he was depressed.  Someone else feared that if he let himself “slack off,” he might not want to get out of bed.  “Then stay in bed,” the professor said.  “Sooner or later you’ll get bored and think of something interesting to do.”

I heard this story 20 years ago and still sometimes put it into practice.  It isn’t just for when you’re feeling blue; it meshes with the biblical concept of a day of rest, but it takes a special resolution, since most of the time, our days of rest are not very restful.

I’ve come back to it now because stepping outside of habitual routines can be a way of stepping outside of habitual ways of thinking, which feel a little stale as the season begins to change.  This practice isn’t as easy as it sounds.  It takes discrimination to separate what I want to do from what I think I should do, or other subtle forms of self-improvement.  But I don’t have to get it right, since being perfect takes an inordinate amount of effort.

I began yesterday with a period of an easy sort of meditation, as opposed to some of the more energetic ones.  Then I took a walk around the track at a nearby school – no problem there, for walking each day is a pleasure and something my body craves.

Later that day it took some effort not to attack a story that isn’t working, but the anxiety that came with the thought was a clue to let it go.  I did allow myself 10 minutes with a tape measure, pencil, and paper to survey which parts of the back yard fence are in need of repair.  Goal oriented, yes, but easy and the dogs needed to run around.

That’s how the day went.  No reading except the Sunday paper and a light mystery novel.  No writing except the opening paragraph of this post which I stopped after 10 minutes because I could feel myself starting to work too hard.  No cooking in the evening – we went out to dinner and brought home a key lime pie, my absolute favorite.

Sometimes I think of old pictures of ancestors – those serious, even dour looking men and women, sitting very still as they peer into the camera.  Often I imagine them frowning at “a slacker like me,” but maybe not.

I have a 4″ thick family bible that belonged to my great-great grandfather.  He inscribed the family name on the cover page in 1856.  I imagine him reading the good book aloud to his wife and eight children every evening after dinner.  For all I know, he observed the sabbath better than I ever have.  His family lived on a farm, and maybe they all took one day a week to rest and give thanks.  And eat pie – if not key lime, then almost certainly, apple or peach.

Maybe they knew something I have forgotten – but it is never too late to learn.

200 Posts!!!

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It’s like one of those birthdays that end in zero.  It’s sort of like any other day – but it’s not.  This is just another post, though it’s something more at the same time.  At a minimum, this is an occasion to step back and reflect.  Here are a few random thoughts about this blog as a work in progress:

I need to update my About page:

This First Gates is no longer about what it was in the beginning.  I started writing about fiction and the process of writing.  Later I included spiritual topics, but from my current perspective, the thread animating all these posts is imagination.  Not only artistic “creative imagination.”  I use the word in the wider sense employed by psychologist, James Hillman, an influential post-Jungian thinker:

“By soul I mean the imaginative possibilities in our natures…that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” – James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 1977.

I ventured into the realms of politics and economics this summer not for the subject matter alone, but because of the passions involved.  People do not get that excited over literal truths.  Along with Hillman, I’m fascinated by the reality in our fantasies and the fantasy in our “realities.”  This understanding is likely to guide my choice of subject matter in the future.

Am I slowing down?

A bit, at least over the last six weeks or so.  Through spring and early summer I was posting three or four times a week.  Lately it has been about twice a week.  Partly it’s the season and a desire to be out and about more, enjoying the warmth and the daylight while they last.  Related to that are a summer’s worth of neglected yard chores I have no excuse to avoid now that the days are growing cooler.  We also tend to travel in the fall (thought that doesn’t necessarily preclude blogging).

Nerdvana - Wifi in the Woods

There’s an ebb and flow to things like this, and I suspect I will pick up steam again as the days grow shorter and colder.

Enjoying the blogosphere:

When I started, I didn’t know other bloggers, and it took me a while to connect.  Lately the number of blogs I follow has exploded.  Sometimes I am reminded of hanging out with kindred spirits in college.  However naive the discussions, the excitement and fervor often came to mind during the years of corporate meetings, where such qualities were notable by their absence.  It’s trendy to criticize connecting online rather than face to face – as if distance and time zones and schedules are easy to overcome.  As a next-best-thing, this is a pretty decent medium for sharing stories and ideas.

Thanks to everyone:

Let me again thank everyone who stops by here to read or leave a comment.  It’s you who keep me going.  Now it’s time to go read a few blogs and mull over possible topics for post #201.

Seven Year Cycles, Part Deux

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While reviewing my previous post on seven-year cycles, two other writings came to mind.  In their own ways, both hint that our concepts of time, and and things like cycles, are just that – concepts.

The first of these writings comes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, The Four Quartets.

T.S. Eliot

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travelers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,

***

Rodney Smith says something similar in Stepping Our of Self-Deception:  The Buddha’s Liberating Teaching of No-Self (2010).   Smith founded the Seattle Insight Meditation Society and is the author of, Lessons from the Dying which grew out of his years of hospice work.

Rodney Smith

He says, “future and past have no reality outside thought…no true authenticity other than the validity we give an idea or image.”   Smith does not deny our experience of past and future, but suggests that it’s not what we usually imagine.  Past and future, he says, are ideas we entertain in the present moment:  how could they be anything else?

His comments remind me of crossing one state into another.  The sign says, “Welcome to Oregon,” but you find no lines on the earth as there are on the map: one instance of the difference between a concept and the experience made visible.