Nighthawks

It’s light that tells us how lonely they are,
Bleached yellow and harsh, that light,
Piercing even, turning to white, a pure oblivion
To match their beginnings and ends.
It migrates alive from the corner shop to the shadowed night
Animating blue-green streets, rich red brick,
Corridors of a poor commerce, a corner of time
Revealed in a light more vital than faces.
What are faces in such light but skin and bone?
It’s light that tells us how lonely they are,
That draws them together, that leaves them alone. 

The coffee shop is gone. (Now Phillies are a buck.)
A laundromat maybe, garage or bank, a fake
Has occupied the place, no home to nighthawks.
All four—the woman too, her sultriness, her sex—snuffed out,
All but incidental, caught as they were in the same bright blast
That migrates alive through our lives
From the first cold hour to the last,
Or any hour where you and I are,
Sleepless in our separate selves.
A cruel glare reveals how alike we are
In our caul of skin and bone,
Lets us know how lonely we are,
Draws us together, leaves us alone.

At Dyke Marsh at Dusk in Fall

Walk out a crooked boardwalk, water slapping on the underplanks,
Walk out into this wetland marsh in fall, its gilding grass and cattails
Tall as you or taller, see a careless, autumn moon
Strolling in the nimbus,
Its jangled brace of light is sprawled across
The field of grass. And further out, the river
Idles in the dark and on the other bank
Somewhere north behind the trees
A city’s shrieking in its capitol teeth.
 
One hundred years ago or less
Or more when time was inessential,
As the moon just slipped behind that cloud
So water overcame the bank
And inundated land, and water,
Grass and foliage conspired
To form this wetland marsh
For pickerelweed and Orioles,
Beavers, black duck and Arrow Arum,
Swamp shrub, osprey, wrens,
For pumpkin ash,
Sparrows, spatterdock and cattails
That graze the breeze at night in fall.

You might wish to be wanted there,

For the night to tell you its secrets,  
For the moonlight to gather up into itself
The form of a girl you might once have loved
Who walks into the shallows and
Out of her dress
And waits for you there in the shadows and grasses

But just like that its gone again,

The moon, behind a bank of coming winter sky,
As if she turned her back on you.
Whatever glory there is
In water, reeds, cattails, sky,
Implacable sky,
Conceals itself as in a shawl,
Shuts you out, shares nothing at all
Says nothing to you at the Dyke Marsh at dusk in fall.

Dunkirk: Hemmed In by Sea and Sky...and the Wehrmacht

“What are you doing, son?” the boat master Dawson says, preparing to take his private vessel across the English Channel to Dunkirk, when the teenage dock-hand George hops into the boat. “I’ll be useful,” the boy responds. That’s all—I’ll be useful. It might be the signature line to Christopher Nolan's, Dunkirk, roundly and rightly hailed for its realism and evocation of war, especially war as it is experienced by the side that is getting (for now) soundly and thoroughly beaten.

What has been praised as realism in this movie is, I think, in fact a matter of photography and camera work. Never have I seen in the movies sea and sky that seemed so alive and present, stunningly close, breathtaking in beauty, but also full of menace. In a way, it is sea and sky that are just as much the enemies of the men trapped on Dunkirk’s beach, as the planes and destroyers that are menacing them. They are hemmed in.

The movie is admirably to the point, an hour and fifty minutes. (There was only one Godfather Part II. Any film aiming for longer than two and a half hours should aim to be that good, or start editing.)

The story is a great and worthy one, uncomplicated (so I believe) by the sort of historical complexities that tend to get elided over when Hollywood wants to tell a story. Forty-thousand men were trapped on a beach. England’s leader called for a citizen armada of private vessels to go and rescue them. The armada responded.

Americans love stories of British pluck and self-effacing heroism. Why aren’t we better at emulating it in our own crises? Our politics today seems like the extended tantrum of a spoiled child who has soiled his pants. Which is just why Dunkirk is important today.

But I confess to leaving the theater slightly dissatisfied. I had trouble hearing the dialogue, for one thing, which may have been me, or might have been the acoustics in the theater, or might have been the fact that everyone is a Brit and everyone is talking in hush or in a rush or both. More importantly, though, there isn’t that much dialogue to hear. And that gets to what was bothering me in a way I couldn’t quite identify—there just isn’t a lot of storytelling here. Of the hour and fifty minutes, approximately an hour and at least twenty of it is watching two guys get shot at, nearly bombed, nearly drowned, nearly suffocated, nearly killed a dozen different ways.

After a while, you lose the sense of exactly what is happening—Where are the shots or bombs or torpedos coming from? Where are they trying to get to? I suppose that’s a clever verisimilitude, since life in a warzone does that to you, upends every normal logical sequence and sense of place. Just try to survive the next shock.

But this is a movie, and you hardly even know it’s the German Wehrmacht and Navy—you know, the Nazis, led by that guy Adolf Hitler—that is doing the shooting, bombing and generalized terrorism of the guys on the beach. There’s so little dialogue because there is little or no storytelling, little or no context. Just a lot of cinematically brilliant mayhem. (Richard Cohen, columnist with the Post, brought this to my attention, sharing my sense that something was missing.)

Then, suddenly, three-quarters of the way through all this verisimilitude, the Armada arrives across the Channel and the movie breaks out into full-on Hollywood, milk-the-moment story-telling sentiment, with lush background music and Kenneth Brannagh’s eyes welling, every so very slightly, with tears.  

Next to me in the theater was a young woman who may been, maybe, 25 years old, but might have been as young as 17 or 18. She may be only barely able to recall 9-11. What was she making of what she saw on the screen? What could she have learned from this fine film? Not much about World War II or about why or how those 40,000 men came to be stranded on a beach being picked off by an enemy that introduced to the world the concept of total warfare (in truth, of course, the Allies did their part in that as well).

What had she come to see, anyway? Maybe she was there to see Harry Stiles. (Nothing wrong with that, and if that’s the case she was in luck, because there were a lot of cute English soldier boys to look at, lots and lots of them, boatloads you might say.)

I’ll be useful. As a goal or an ideal, striving to be useful in a good cause seems to have lost out to more individualistic objectives. That’s the way it is when the world seems safe. It may not be safe for long, which is why it’s important remember when—but also, crucially, why--people had to be choose to be useful over being safe.

A Psychoanalyst Thinking About Urban Violence in Chicago

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Mark Moran

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Academic papers on youth violence in America—causes and possible solutions—are legion.

But when a socially committed, psychoanalytically trained senior psychiatrist and an academic psychologist with extensive work “on the ground” at the interface of mental illness and crime team up in the pages of a major publication read by the business community to tackle rampant violence in America’s third largest city—it’s just possible people will sit up and take notice.
Past APA trustee and Chicago-area native Sidney Weissman, M.D., and Arthur Lurigio, Ph.D., associate dean for faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University, cowrote a three-part article on violence in Chicago that appeared in successive issues of Crain’s Chicago Business in May. The articles address how rates of violence have spiraled in the city, while New York and Los Angeles have made some progress, reforming police interactions with minority communities and creating safe neighborhoods. Weissman and Lurigio urge extensive reforms grounded in expertise on the effects of culture on the brain and development.
Weissman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and on the faculty and board of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Lurigio is the senior research advisor to Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities at Loyola and has experience as principal investigator on more than 40 grants with city, county, state, and federal resources.
In an interview with Psychiatric News, Weissman said that he and Lurigio sought out a respected publication in the business community, because the city’s business leaders have a stake in a safe city while Chicago’s civic leaders have been mired in political stagnation.
“Nothing has been meaningfully done, and the basic underlying issues aren’t changing,” Weissman said. “There has been a fundamental failure on the part of the city administration and the business community to act.”
Weissman added that he believes psychiatry needs to regain its voice for addressing social issues, aided now by vastly more advanced knowledge about the brain and the effects of the surrounding culture on brain development over time.
The first article, appearing in print on May 18, looked at the scope of violence in Chicago and how other cities have succeeded where Chicago has failed. “Nearly 20 years ago, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) added 1,000 new officers and shifted its focus from an arrest-heavy to a service-heavy style of enforcement,” they wrote. “Police officers were rewarded for community outreach activities. No such sustained efforts have ever been implemented in Chicago, and the gulf between the police and community grows ever wider.”
They added, “The LAPD used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to charge and convict gang leaders and other members with the crimes of their compatriots, even if they only conspired with the actual perpetrators. Large numbers of gang members were incarcerated with that strategy. Under former Superintendent Jody Weis (2008-2011), the Chicago Police Department (CPD) only threatened to invoke, but never systematically employed, the RICO statute against Chicago gangs. What’s more, today barely a quarter of homicide perpetrators—many of them gang members—is even arrested in Chicago.”
Weissman and Lurigio noted that the LAPD also used civil injunctions or abatement laws to rid the streets of congregations of gang members. “Empty corners provide no one to shoot or no opportunity to be the victim of a shooting. From 1992 to 1999, Chicago tried a similar strategy based on curfew violations and loitering but it was deemed unconstitutional.”
(The use of RICO against alleged gang members is regarded as highly controversial among some in the African-American community.)
The second and third articles, appearing online May 22 and 23, looked more closely at how pervasive societal failures have shaped the lives and coping skills of children and adolescents in Chicago’s African-American communities and at the effects of “the elephant in the room”—race and racial segregation. They especially focused on the effects of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“By the time a young man picks up a gun and pulls the trigger, he has been prepared to do so by deficient parenting, school failure, and repeated trauma—the latter the result of witnessing violence in the home and in the street,” Weissman and Lurigio wrote. “The impact of such trauma throughout a youth’s life can be severe and result in PTSD. Most of the young people with PTSD either have been the direct target of violence or have directly witnessed life-threatening violence. …
“For those who suffer from childhood PTSD, the ability to recognize their own or others’ feelings is impaired. Their apparent toughness obscures this disability and becomes a means to feel safe in their dangerous world. Toughness becomes an essential element of survival, a means to attain respect, for which they are validated from fellow, equally impaired gang members. … The most violent among them earn the highest approval and greatest elevation in status by killing a rival gang member.”
Lurigio and Weissman said that sustained behavioral health care interventions in the city’s neighborhoods are urgently needed. “In particular, strategies to prevent delinquency, which is a precursor to violence, have been created, studied, and established as evidence-based. … For example, among several effective interventions for at-risk youth are the Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring program and the Aggression Replacement Training and First Step to Success programs. Those that are effective for at-risk families include the Functional Family Therapy and the Guiding Good Choices programs. The crime- and violence-reducing benefits of these programs greatly outweigh the costs.”
Weissman and Lurigio acknowledged that their recommendations are “both sweeping in nature and limited in logistical details” and that “abundant resources and greater specificity will be needed to bring these recommendations to fruition.” They are not sanguine about the ease or quickness with which anything can be accomplished—far from it, their articles make for sad reading about the state of one of America’s great cities.
But they do offer a way up and out. “This is a part of what psychiatry is about,” Weissman said. “We have a unique understanding of the psychology of young people and the effects of the surrounding culture on their development. We owe it to those young people to help shape a culture in which they can grow to make healthy choices. It’s not happening in Chicago.” ■