Curses

The air is beginning to chill and the leaves are turning orange and brown. It is October, and I am going to do a month of Halloween themed posts, exploring health and bodywork through seasonally spooky tropes. The first of these not really scary pieces explores curses. Enjoy.

Curses, cussing, curse words, hexes, jinks, and all other forms of linguistic weapon, is there anything to these ideas? Is this sort of thinking just an evolutionary holdover from a more superstitious time? A time when if we heard rattling in a bush, it was best to assume a tiger is waiting, and be wrong most times than to once feel safe in proximity to such a threat. A time when for the sake of survival we forged many mental associations in the hope a few would ensure survival. Was it was in this mindset that we developed the belief someone could harm us by mere speech. Maybe, but I think there are more to curses than we can perceive through our accepted modern cultural lens. In fact, I think our world is riddled with curses. I like to think thousands of years from now archaeologists will unearth the remains of our culture and see us for the superstitious people we are. They will find thousands of single-use coffee cups with a “caution hot coffee” label on each one. Of course, translating our dead language may not be exact so they may think it reads “all who drink from this vessel will have their lips melt painfully from their face” or something like that.

Buts that's a mistranslation, not a real curse. How could an actual curse, causing pain in others using only language work? To understand this we need to acknowledge that we are a linguistic animal. What other creature can transmit such precise information, such as “meet me under the oak tree by the courthouse Monday morning at exactly 5: 37. I’ll be wearing a where waldo shirt”, successfully. How are we able to imbue so much meaning into our limited vocal range? Our ability to communicate so many intricate thoughts requires something more than just an extensive vocabulary. To quote ethnobotanist Wade Davis, when discussing the loss of indigenous language, "Every language is an old growth forest of the mind.” Words have meanings, but they also have ever-changing associations with each other. Words connect to our emotions, as much as they connect to our intellect. Carcass, corpse, meat, and the remains mean roughly the same thing but are not really interchangeable.

Words can also take on different significance depending on who is speaking them. Doctors, lawyer, and politicians all use words to align people’s thinking in a certain direction. Advertisers use repetitive slogans to attune our thoughts to their corporate frequencies. This propaganda can be beneficial, inspiring us to create something greater than ourselves. Likewise, this word magic can mislead, weakening, and curse us.

In medicine, a nocebo effect is when the negative expectation of a treatment causes the patient to experience negative effects. A nocebo is the inverse of a placebo. A doctor is backed by hundreds of years of medical tradition. Like theater, all medical (all) institutions , employ props, for the purpose of amplifying their authority. An example of this could be dress. Hospital scrubs may seem routine but are also ceremonial garb signifying our secular society's version of entering into a sacred place. In this space we expect our doctor to be a conduit of a body of medical knowledge that transcends their own personal understanding of our health. Could a doctor within this ritualized space telling us, we have a month to live induce enough stress to kill us in a months time? I think it's possible. No one, doctor or otherwise, knows in any real way how long anyone will live. There are plenty of medical oddities, and I argue there would be more if we were more skeptical of our medical belief system. I am not saying this to be anti-western medicine but to acknowledge it is called a practice for a reason.

Massage therapists are guilty of cursing people as well I'm sad to say. I’ve heard many talented L.M.T.s clumsily tell clients they have tight shoulders. So naturally, people feel self-conscious especially since there is a vulnerability in receiving a massage. Upon hearing this potentially stress-inducing message, anyone might tighten their shoulders, completing the feedback loop. Instead, imagine hearing something such as "when you have stressed your shoulders clench up. This is a completely normal physical response. Stress is the subjective feeling we have to a constellation of adaptation responses to danger. In evolutionary terms, much of our danger was physical threats by intra-species rivals and would be predators. Raising our shoulders makes us look bigger. This could influence a potential adversary back down. A simple Darwinian equation.” What story will lead to a more optimal condition. Instead of internalizing the story of having tight shoulders we could start to notice our shoulders more. As we notice them hike up our neck, we can look around to see if we are in a conflict. If we are in a conflict does it have the potential to become violent. If it does we probably should ignore our tight shoulders and look for potential weapons, and exits. If not let us begin to cultivate another strategy to deal with our stress.

Are these curse? I don’t know. For the most part, I think these spells are performed with ignorance, not malice. Computer programmers say “garbage in garbage out” implying mistakes are not the fault of the computer but of the programmer. If we want to change how a computer performs we need to change its code, its language. Programming software is nuanced, and many mistakes are made, however, humans are far more complicated. We replicate the language we are given communicating both functional and dysfunctional code to people we meet. Like our technology, we are vulnerable to neuro-linguistic malware. Many people are acting out bad scripts they were given by often well-meaning friends, family, school, churches to name a few sources. It is easy to internalize stories of shame, guilt, and sickness not because we are weak but because we are so receptive to learning, to communication, to language. We are also capable of debugging ourselves; reflecting upon whether our ideas are helping or hindering us. Finding time to explore how our thoughts are directing our lives decreases our risk of being infected with language viruses. And if having maladapted thoughts that other people placed in our consciousness whether through carelessness or malevolence isn't being cursed I don't know what is.

Anthony Bruni