THE AFTER-WAR; WW1 AND THE RISE OF THE BRA; THE TALE OF TWO BRAINS; MURDER AND PERCEIVED DISRESPECT; MARIJUANA FOR PREVENTING ALZHEIMER’S

Egyptian dancer, 14th century bc. Without the benefit of yoga classes . . . how “modern” we were, in some ways, already that long ago. Now she is eternally young.
 
*
A sudden wind blows
through the new leaves and they are gone;
time blows through your hair,
the river of the dead

whose name’s forgiveness, very
small, a blue vein
in your temple. And the words
for these things are so terribly small;
and the world of those words

only slightly less mortal
than this instant of taking your hand,
of taking care to look both ways,
not to squeeze too hard, or be too aware
that no such mercy will be proffered

by a world that has no need
of words, or us.

~ Franz Wright, from “With a Child”

True, the world — the immense world — has no need of us and our words. But those close to us, not just our literal family but our larger, metaphorical family — including Facebook friends we’ve never met face to face, but who have become friends nevertheless — they need us and our words.

The world doesn’t need us, but we need the beauty of the world. This morning autumn finally arrived: when I opened the blinds, I saw beautiful milky fog. And though I woke up unhappy about a certain practical matter, the fog said “autumn,” and I began to calm down.

We need the poetry of the world and the poetry of words. We need gorgeous lines like these:

time blows through your hair,
the river of the dead

whose name’s forgiveness, very
small, a blue vein
in your temple

Now, Rilke would disagree with the idea that the world doesn’t need our words — he claimed the earth needs us precisely because only we have language, and can change matter into the realm of the mind: “We are the bees of the invisible.” I don’t think we can ever resolve this kind of mystical thinking (which Nietzsche dismissed as “not even shallow”). But we know that other human beings need our words — or at least those words that heal, that bring kindness, forgiveness. And the child that the speaker is walking with, holding his or her hand, needs words — any words that mean: I notice you, I value you, I will protect you.

So I prefer to stay with the personal. One woman whom I knew strictly through Facebook suddenly died (this was some years ago). Though I never met her in person, I was surprised how much I grieved. And this alone shows just how real words can be. Her posts about her guinea pigs — how trivial they seemed at the time  . . . but then there were none.

So never mind the world in general — our personal world needs us, we need one another — and our words are life-giving.

"October" from The Very Rich Hours of the Duke de Berry

JOSEPH CAMPBELL ON THE "MEANING OF LIFE"

~ “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Oriana:

I agree that we want to feel the rapture of being alive (cf Nietzsche: what counts is not eternal life, but eternal vitality), but I also feel we need to feel useful to others. That's how I understand the personal “meaning of life” — it's always within the social context of the interconnected lives of others.

THE AFTER-WAR

~ “In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel focuses on the home front that had seemed so remote to these soldiers during their deployment. For several of the battalion’s survivors, who are struggling with a variety of psychological and physical ailments, home assumes an unrelenting immediacy that proves more baffling and tormenting than the war itself. It is a world dominated by an elemental loneliness. Removed from the bonds of their unit — severed from the love of comrades that Finkel calls ‘the truth of war’ — each soldier navigates the postwar on his own: ‘It is such a lonely life, this life afterward.’

Finkel refuses to pathologize soldiers, even as he concentrates on the 20 to 30 percent who have been psychologically damaged to some degree by their service in Iraq or Afghanistan: ‘Most are O.K.,’ he says, ‘and others are not.’

The book is all the more powerful for its detachment. Finkel champions the cause of those who are not O.K., yet is never partisan: ‘Every war has its after-war,’ its consequences and reminders, he writes, ‘and so it is with the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have created some 500,000 mentally wounded American veterans,’ a number that will have an impact on American social policy, medical care and the overall economy for years to come. Finkel invites his readers to imagine these half million veterans as ‘points on a map of America, all suddenly illuminated at once. The sight would be of a country glowing from coast to coast.’ Yet ‘another way,’ he continues, ‘would be to imagine them one at a time.’ And that’s precisely what he does.

He traces the fitful arcs, and sometimes premature deaths, of several lives connected directly or indirectly with the 2-16: Sgt. Adam Schumann, the central figure of the narrative, who is superb in combat but disintegrating in peace; Amanda Doster, a widow just holding chaos at bay, who for a time drives everywhere with a box of her husband’s ashes strapped in with a seat belt; Patti Walker, an advocate with the Army Wounded Warrior Program at Fort Riley, who ‘is defined by the stress of dealing with the problems of 49 wounded soldiers during the day . . . and then going home at night to the 50th … her husband, Kevin, who was blown up in Iraq’; Tausolo Aieti, a heavily medicated soldier with a perpetually ‘stunned look on his face.’ Despite having received diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, attention deficit and traumatic brain injury, Aieti graduates from a program at the Topeka V.A. to the Warrior Transition Battalion at Riley in the hopes of ultimately rejoining his unit.

Perhaps the chief lesson of Thank You for Your Service is that some people will always break in war, no matter the preparation they receive or the care administered to them when they return. The inevitability of psychological crises does nothing to absolve us of the responsibility of providing that care. But it should figure much more prominently in the reckoning whenever the hawks urge us on to another ill-conceived display of American military might.

Near the end of the book, Patti Walker finds a space for Adam Schumann at a facility called the Pathway Home in Yountville, Calif., where he spends four months. At Pathway, the ‘haunted soldiers’ of Iraq and Afghanistan meet their counterparts from the previous century’s wars: World War II and Vietnam veterans who live on the campus year-round. These men ‘never say hello, or even wave. They just sit there and drink.’ ‘That’s me in 30 years,’ Schumann declares one day. ‘If this doesn’t work out, that’s me.’

http://lithub.com/the-haunted-soldiers-of-david-finkels-thank-you-for-your-service/

 
Oriana:

The concept of the “after-war” is very evocative for me. It reminds me of Kestrel Trael's comment that Hemingway was wrong — we are not stronger in the broken places: “the injury remains.” I am now over 4 months “post-op,” and it's startling to realize that the surgery was so traumatic that in a way I will always be “post-op.” Of course what I’ve been through is utterly minor in comparison to war injuries, esp brain injuries — but the funny thing is, it sometimes takes that relatively minor personal experience to gain a better understanding of “the injury remains.” Do these young people truly understand what they are signing up for? As with serious medical procedures, it's basically impossible to understand what you are signing up for.

Mary:

This is all part of the uncounted damages of war--every war. My dad was a WWII vet, he never wanted to talk about his war experiences, his wounds (he had two purple hearts) or what he had seen. His unit landed on Omaha beach on D day, and went across Europe, ending in Czechoslovakia. The war was the central formative experience of his life. When he was ill, in the last year's of his life, he suffered delirium, and was reliving the war, Trying to get the nurses down out of the line of fire, into the foxhole. When he was out of the delirium (it was related to an infection) they asked if he would talk with a psychiatrist, and he agreed. For 2 hour he talked and wept, revealing he had suffered several nightmares a week re living war experiences for the last 60 years. 60 years! He would, in these dreams, get up and try to pull my mom into the foxhole with him. It wasn't talked about. That's not what you did. You came home, got married, had a family, went to work, and had nightmares--if you were lucky, only at night, allowing a relatively "normal" life. I wonder how much of the fear and horror of those experiences contributed to his problem with violent rages, something that lasted well past middle age.

Oriana:

OMG . . . 60 years of nightmares!!

Yes, the true cost of war . . . and even to civilians (I remember my grandmother waking up with nightmares) — but of course esp to soldiers who've been in combat. Violent rage can be a symptom of brain injury, which we are learning is very common. You don’t have to be hit — it’s enough to be close to explosions.

But in a way, all trauma is brain injury in the sense that it makes the brain function less well. For instance, trauma makes us prone to more extreme emotions. A relatively trivial thing can set off a disproportionate emotional response. It has certainly been true in my life. Studies found that that each heartbreak is harder to take -- this is esp true for women. But these days we use the word "trauma" somewhat casually. When I think of combat -- being shot at, seeing your best friend die in front of you -- I don't know how anyone can just “move on.” And now we know that the damage from that kind of super-stress can be lifelong.

No, it doesn’t make us stronger. Nietzsche was terribly, tragically wrong.

A loving dog can be the best therapist. 

**

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1986 (one year before he died, in large part because of the serious injuries sustained when he was shot by a mentally ill woman)

~ “The bra became widespread in America during the First World War, in part because the metal previously used to make corsets was needed for ammunition at that time.” ~

in Flanders fields

ESTIMATED TWO-THIRDS OF ALL MURDERS ARE THE RESULT OF MEN FEELING THAT THEY HAD BEEN DISRESPECTED AND ACTING TO SAVE FACE
 
~ “The truth is that it is scorned men—not women—who unleash the furies of hell.

From Boston to Baghdad, from Kabul to Korea, from Aurora to Newtown, the world is imperiled by angry men feeling disrespected, their tender sensibilities hurting so bad that their fingers are twitching on gun triggers and bomb timers.

Author and psychologist Steve Taylor recently wrote an article about young men, perceived disrespect and murder. “Even more dangerously—especially with young men—slights can trigger a violent reaction,” he wrote. “Criminologists have noted that many acts of violence stem from a sense of slight … In recent years, in the US there has been a disturbing rise in the number of ‘flashpoint killings’—casual murders triggered by trivial confrontations.

Yes, men have had to cede some control. Wives go to work, women get to pick their mates (in America; apparently the Tsarnaev brothers’ sisters were bartered off by mom and dad in the time-honored old-country tradition), women get to choose whether to bear children (in most U.S. states), and women now make up one-fifth of the U.S. Senate. Oh, and in America, men who beat their girlfriends, like Tamerlan, can get arrested. Small advances for womankind, but for some entitled men, this is all it takes to make the world seem utterly off-kilter.

Curiously, these guys belong to the gender with all the physical strength and most of the well-paying jobs in the world. And yet, some of them still feel so profoundly disrespected that they will go out and kill one or more of their fellow human beings just to get some of that stuff Aretha Franklin spelled out.

Scratch any jihadi and you will find a profound sense of having been disrespected and losing personal power, especially with respect to women. They are obsessed with controlling women, whose presence in their lives is simultaneously regarded as impure. Remember 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta’s will, which demanded that no woman touch his dead body and no pregnant woman come near his grave?

But it’s not just the jihadis.

All over the world, but especially in rifle-butt, no-background-check America, some men grab their easily obtainable weapons at the merest whisper of a diss from another man or a woman. Googling “disrespect” and “murder” gets more than three million results, page after page of headlines in just the English-speaking world alone, describing men—young and old, black, white, red and purple—stabbing, shooting and otherwise killing fellow citizens over perceived “disrespect.”

But why are men so liable to react violently to being disrespected, while women, who are arguably disrespected far more often in society at large, mostly just roll with it?

Women and girls face systemic sexist disrespect from childhood to the grave. There’s all the obvious, blatant stuff, like sexual harassment, videotaped rape and misogynistic rap music, not to mention getting paid three-fourths of what men do for the same work.

Then there’s the endless dissing that is so subtle that, unless we’re students of gender politics or like to walk around gnashing our teeth all the time, we just ignore. In that category, off the top of my head, go things like a television series glamorizing female prostitution, media obsession with female politicians’ clothing, women’s work-life angst, and our own preoccupation with weight, hair, beauty and aging.

I have been trying to get my head around how put-upon some men seem to feel. Whenever I write about things like misogynist bullying, videotaped rape or benevolent sexism, I get attacked for being anti-man by commentators who invariably blame the effects of feminism for any and all bad male behavior.

What can be done about a peculiarly male persecution complex too vast and entrenched for anti-bullying programs? We might simply have to live through this era, as these men—be they homegrown right wingers who feel slighted, angry misfits, dissed gangstas or jihadis enamored of vestigial honor cultures—slowly evolve or die off. If they don’t, pressure-cooker bombs may soon be the least of our woes." ~

http://observer.com/2013/04/diss-diss-bang-bang-welcome-to-the-golden-age-of-male-rage/#ixzz3HUNZv4dI


Oriana:

It’s interesting that toxic masculinity is so closely tied to over-reaction to perceived “disrespect” and thus a tremendous insecurity. This quotation sums it up:

“Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear: The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity, and examples are endless. Donald Trump flipping out when someone teases him about his small fingers. (Or about anything, really.) The ludicrously long and shaggy beards on “Duck Dynasty,” meant to stave off any connection to the dreaded feminine with a thicket of hair. The emergence of the term “cuckservative,” flung around by hardline right-wingers to suggest that insufficient racism is somehow emasculating . . . The emotional selling point of guns is that they feed the cult of toxic masculinity. Being able to stockpile weapons and have ever bigger and scarier-looking guns is straightforward and undeniable overcompensation for insecure men, who are trying to prove what manly men they are.”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/toxic-masculinity-killing-us-many-ways/

Oriana: We badly need to promote positive masculinity, teaching young boys what once seemed obvious: that when men respect women and use their superior physical strength to protect women rather than to harm them, and to be kind in general, they will be rewarded in all sorts of ways — by women, but also by the society at large. We need to spread the idea that a really strong man doesn’t have to impress with “toughness.” On the contrary, he can afford to be gentle. 

Mary:

I have often puzzled over the extreme reactions of men to any perceived “disrespect" — reactions that can go from verbal to physical to lethal in a flash, all seeming way out of proportion to the actual "offense." A deep insecurity, and it seems to me, a constant sense of being threatened, a constant fear of losing one's place, one's "face", one's "honor," (an especially toxic idea)and one's identity. One of the ugliest manifestations of this is the frequently violent and brutal responses of "straight" men to "gay" men, who don't even have to have spoken, or done anything at all, to be perceived as a threat and reacted to with assault — verbal, physical, lethal. And as in "honor" killings, the actor feels perfectly justified in his actions.

None of this makes any sense, except as a perceived threat to insecurity about one's own masculine identity. The roles of men are as proscribed culturally as those of women, denying and disallowing much of what is most human, allowing only a certain range of emotion and action. So men become divided from their own feelings, and any inclinations toward what has been declared "feminine" must be fiercely resisted and repressed. As we move away from these cultural formulations toward a more generous sense of human identity, there has been a countermovement or backlash, coming from those who sense their power, their place in the world, dissolving, shifting, being "stolen" from them.

This is visible everywhere these days, and dangerous still. We can't forget the lessons of history, that societies who felt secure in their cultural progress have found themselves destroyed by fascism, genocide and all the associated evils we cannot afford to ignore.
 



**

The only question ever is what to do here and now. It’s never what to do always everywhere. ~ Jeremy Sherman
 
**
THE TALE OF TWO BRAINS


~ “Take a careful look at the image of two brains on this page. The picture is of the brains of two three-year-old children. It’s obvious that the brain on the left is much bigger than the one on the right. The image on the left also has fewer spots, and far fewer dark “fuzzy” areas.

To neurologists who study the brain, and who have worked out how to interpret the images, the difference between these two brains is both remarkable and shocking. The brain on the right lacks some of the most fundamental areas present in the image on the left. Those deficits make it impossible for that child to develop capacities that the child on the left will have: the child on the right will grow into an adult who is less intelligent, less able to empathize with others, more likely to become addicted to drugs and involved in violent crime than the child on the left. The child on the right is much more likely to be unemployed and to be dependent on welfare, and to develop mental and other serious health problems.

What could possibly cause so radical a divergence in brain development? The obvious answer is that it must have been some illness or terrible accident.

The obvious answer is wrong.

The primary cause of the extraordinary difference between the brains of these two three-year-old children is the way they were treated by their mothers. The child with the much more fully developed brain was cherished by its mother, who was constantly and fully responsive to her baby.

The child with the shriveled brain was neglected and abused. That difference in treatment explains why one child’s brain develops fully, and the other’s does not.

Neurologists are beginning to understand exactly how a baby’s interaction with their mother determines how, and indeed whether, the brain grows in the way that it should.

Professor Allan Schore, of UCLA, who has surveyed the scientific literature and has made significant contributions to it, stresses that the growth of brain cells is a “consequence of an infant’s interaction with the main caregiver [usually the mother]”.

The growth of the baby’s brain “literally requires positive interaction between mother and infant. The development of cerebral circuits depends on it.”

Prof Schore points out that if a baby is not treated properly in the first two years of life, the genes for various aspects of brain function, including intelligence, cannot operate, and may not even come into existence. Nature and nurture cannot be disentangled: the genes a baby has will be profoundly affected by the way it is treated.

The details of how the chemical reactions that are essential to the formation of new brain cells and the connections between them are affected by the way a mother interacts with her baby are extremely technical. Suffice it to say that there is now a very substantial body of evidence that shows that the way a baby is treated in the first two years determines whether or not the resulting adult has a fully functioning brain.

The damage caused by neglect and other forms of abuse comes by degrees: the more severe the neglect, the greater the damage. Eighty per cent of brain cells that a person will ever have are manufactured during the first two years after birth. If the process of building brain cells and connections between them goes wrong, the deficits are permanent.

This discovery has enormous implications for social policy. It explains two very persistent features of our society. One is the way that chronic disadvantage reproduces itself across generations of the same families. There is a cycle of deprivation – lack of educational attainment, persistent unemployment, poverty, addiction, crime – which, once a family is in it, has proved almost impossible to break.

The way that the development of a child’s brain is dependent on the way that the child is treated by its mother explains why this depressing cycle happens. Parents who, because their parents neglected them, do not have fully developed brains, neglect their own children in a similar way: their own children’s brains suffer from the same lack of development that blighted their own lives. They, too, are likely to fail at school, to be liable to get addicted to drugs, to be unable to hold down a job, and to have a propensity to violence.

The second persistent feature is the dismal failure of rehabilitation programs that aim to diminish the rate at which persistent young offenders commit crimes. Many different approaches have been tried, from intensive supervision to taking young offenders on safaris, but none has worked reliably or effectively. Recent research indicates that a large majority – perhaps more than three quarters – of persistent young offenders have brains that have not developed properly.

They have, that is, suffered from neglect in the first two years of life, which prevented their brains from growing. As a consequence, they may be incapable of responding to the same incentives and punishments that will steer those with more fully developed brains away from crime.

That result may lead you to conclude that nothing can be done about the social problems that result from childhood neglect. But that would be wrong. There is a way to break the cycle, and it is not terribly difficult to achieve. It consists in intervening early and showing mothers who neglect their children how to treat them in a way which will lead their babies’ brains to develop fully.

“Early intervention”, as the policy is called, has been tried in parts of the US for more than 15 years. It consists in ensuring that mothers identified as “at risk” of neglecting their babies are given regular visits (at least once every week) by a nurse who instructs them on how to care for the newborn child.

Data from the city of Elmira in New York State, where such programs have been in place longest, show that children whose mothers had received those visits did much better than children from a comparable background whose mothers were not part of the program: they had, for instance, 50 per cent fewer arrests, 80 per cent fewer convictions, and a significantly lower rate of drug abuse.” ~

https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-brains-both-belong-three-120608571.html?.tsrc=fauxdal

Oriana:

Startling. It reminded me again of how much help I received from the hospice workers when I had a “hospice at home” for my dying mother, and my sad realization that a person had to be dying to qualify. What if we provided a similar (not necessarily as intensive) program for new mothers who don't have anyone to help them? Everyone agreed with me, but with the resigned air of "it will never happen."

Of course the “early intervention” should start with pre-natal services. And as with hospice, there should be a nurturing attitude by the providers — no rush, no condescension, no shaming the woman for not knowing how to cook a nutritious meal (especially if she grew up eating mainly junk food — sugary soda and potato chips for lunch). It would never be like having a loving grandmother helping every day — but we can dream, can’t we . . . 

**

THE FAILURE OF PURE SOCIALISM — AND PURE CAPITALISM

~ “The English-speaking world is the new Soviet Union. The best way to understand what has gone wrong with the Anglo world, and America in particular, is simply to think of it as a staggeringly ironic repeat of history. A few short decades ago, the Soviet Union fell, after thirty or so years of stagnation, which its complacent, pampered leaders, utterly divorced from lived reality, vociferously denied could ever be happening to begin with. That steadfast denial opened up the possibility of sudden collapse, and collapse it did: into authoritarianism, extreme inequality, superstition, cults of personality, tribalism, vendetta, violence, corruption, and kleptocracy. That is exactly what is happening to America, from the denial to the pampering to the sudden shock. Falling life expectancy, flat incomes, a shrinking middle class — short of war, or a giant meteor striking the earth, more severe indicators of collapse simply don’t exist. So. What led to the collapse?

The English-speaking world is in an ideological bubble. The fall of the Soviet Union was the failure of pure socialism. Now, ironically, the fall of the Anglo world is its perfect, almost precise, mirror image: the failure of pure capitalism. The simple lesson of the last century is this: either system alone cannot last, endure, or work. Now, the rest of the world knows this. Even Rwanda is building public healthcare — Rwanda, which just three decades ago, was the byword for genocide. Even Pakistan is building public transport and hospitals and schools. The entire rest of the world knows that capitalism is just one tool in the box of building genuinely prosperous societies — and quite often it is precisely the wrong tool. Yet on the Anglo world goes, impotent but still monogamously wedded to capitalism, so now you can get same-day drone delivery of anything at all from Amazon, recommended by your Fakebook friends — but you can die for lack of basic medicine, you don’t have savings, and you’ll never retire, while everyone else knows that trying to use capitalism alone to build, say, working healthcare or educational or financial systems is like trying to water a garden with napalm.

Limited by that childish belief, in America, for example, public investment has become completely verboten, sacrosanct, beyond imagining, to the point that hospitals are closing down. Have you ever heard of a society closing hospitals? Why would a sane society ever do that, if its population is growing (or even if it isn’t, because healthcare is always advancing)? Such insensible, unreasonable, thoughtless, inhumane, grotesquely foolish extremism is the precise mirror image of a few decades ago, when, it was forbidden in the Soviet Union to, say, even set up a little dry cleaning shop. In just this way, the ideological bubble that the Anglo world is in trapped in, like a web holding a fly, condemns it to fall behind the world, and its future resembles that of Russia’s.” ~

https://medium.com/bad-words/why-the-english-speaking-world-is-the-new-soviet-union-255bc385e3f2

** 
“We have achieved a lot in my lifetime. Dr King was not about nothing, Eleanor Roosevelt was not about nothing. I think in the final analysis that we shall overcome.” ~ Harry Belafonte, age 90.
 
Oriana: I think so. The struggle against racism, the struggle for women’s rights — even though we are currently witnessing setbacks, there has been a lot of progress, and no, there is no going back to the 1950s.

**



This immediately reminded me of one interesting response I had when I said I was an atheist. The man said, wistfully, “It must be nice not to have the feeling that you are being constantly watched.” ~ “It’s fantastic,” I replied, remembering my relief at 14 when I realized that no, there was no all-seeing, mind-reading “eye in the sky.”

Here Orwell’s Big Brother inevitably comes to mind. But nothing will match what the nun described to us. When little boy asked, “Does God see you even when you're in the bathroom?” ~ “Of course,” the nun assured him. “There is nowhere you can hide.” This made me nervous about going to the bathroom because you had to pull down your panties, and it might seem like mooning god. (I'm not making this up.) Fortunately this particular phobia passed after several weeks, but those were quite uncomfortable several weeks when I was trying to figure out a way of least exposure, e.g. pulling my skirt down in a certain way.

That was long before my discovery, thanks to Michelangelo, that it was rather god who was mooning us. 

Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel: God Departing to Create Plants
 

**

LOW-DOSE MARIJUANA IN OLDER AGE FOR DEMENTIA PREVENTION
 
~ Can smoking marijuana prevent Alzheimer’s disease? Yes, but there are some things that you need to know first: 1) Do not use marijuana when the brain is young; 2) Smoke only one puff of marijuana each day between the ages of thirty and sixty; 3) Use the kind of marijuana that was popular in the 1960’s, i.e. that has not been genetically altered to enhance the level one or two ingredients; 4) If the signs of dementia have already appeared, it is unlikely that smoking marijuana will be beneficial; doing so might only worsen the symptoms of the dementia.  An explanation for each of these points follows.

Research in my laboratory has demonstrated that stimulating the brain’s marijuana receptors offer protection by reducing brain inflammation and by restoring neurogenesis. Thus, later in life, marijuana might actually help your brain, rather than harm it.  It takes very little marijuana to produce benefits in the older brain. My lab coined the motto “a puff is enough” because it appears as though only a single puff each day is necessary to produce significant benefit.

Does the balance of THC and CBD matter? A recent study (J of Alzheimers Disease, vol 43, p 977, 2015) suggests that both compounds working together reduced brain inflammation far more effectively than either THC or CBD working alone. ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-food/201604/using-marijuana-prevent-alzheimer-s-disease


Radiolarians, a drawing by Ernst Haeckel

ending on beauty: 

 
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

~ Vladimir Nabokov, the opening of Pale Fire (1962)
Dublin, 1966; Evelyn Hofer

HEMINGWAY WRONG: NOT “STRONGER AT BROKEN PLACES”; IS FREUD DEAD?; NEW AGE BULLIES; HOW TO RAISE YOUR GOOD CHOLESTEROL; WHAT WOULD YAHWEH DO?

Jewish Cemetery in Vishkivtsy, Ukraine
 
*
AMALIA FREUD TO HER SON SIGMUND

       A mother is brought unlimited satisfaction only by her relation to a son; that is    altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships.
               ~ Sigmund Freud, Lecture XXXIII: Femininity

My Golden Sigi, those cigars
will be the death of you.
Twenty a day! You take after me —
that excess of life,
an anarchy of excellence
that must be sung to before lying down.
In my youth I was thought a beauty.
A man, not your father, said, “One could fall
into your eyes and keep on falling . . . ”
I don’t blame you if you never
saw me as Amalia.

It seems our dear old Franz Josef
will live forever. You and I
also have that rage for time,
while Vienna’s bric-a-brac
dozes in the fog. I told you the devil’s
grandmother, Baba Yaga,
dropped her tea service in her flight
to a witches’ sabbath —
hence those chimneys like pots and teakettles.

The fountains are turned off,
chrysanthemums bruise brown —
a season of evenings and books.
We sat in one room, the girls
sewing by draft-torn candlelight —
I gave you the other room;
I gave you our only oil lamp.
I ate chicken wings,
saving the breasts for you.
When you said your sister’s music
intruded through the two closed doors,
I sold the piano.

I protected you in secret ways:
threw salt into fire,
hid a mole’s foot under your pillow.
I said, “There will be money for Sigi,
if I have to steal from the rabbi.”

You laugh that I pace like a caged lioness,
running to the landing, the door,
an hour before your visit.
I explained to a childless friend:
“It’s the same as what you feel
for a lover — except more.”
You say you don’t understand women.
A woman is a mother.
You nursed so hard my nipples bled.

Dolfi draws for hours: that hiss
of graphite on my nerves —
then she stacks
the drawings under her bed.
To you I showed how to write
your name on the page of the world.
When you were seven,
at the train station in Breslau,
the gas lights hissed and guttered;
you thought we were in hell —
You held my hand, and were not afraid.

Dolfi says your theories are scandalous —
but also that you wrote what it means
for a man to be his mother’s favorite son:
it’s a life-long feeling of triumph.
Sigi, Sigi, I was Baba Yaga.

I wait Sunday at seven as always. 
Don’t forget your gloves and scarf;
it’s so easy to catch a cold. 


~ Oriana

Sigmund Freud at 16, with his mother Amalia

~ Freud referred to Adolfina in a letter as “the sweetest and best of my sisters”; we know that Adolfina was “mistreated by her mother, that she lived with her parents as an adult and cared for them until their deaths,” and “that she spent her life in loneliness.” ~

Adolfina, or Dolfi, was the “designated spinster” who was expected not to marry so as to be a live-in care-taker of her parents in their old age — in this case with Freud’s formidable mother who long outlived her older husband. This cruel custom of choosing one of the daughters to be a spinster/care-taker was also depicted in “Like Water for Chocolate.”

In my persona poem in the voice of Freud’s mother writing to her beloved son, I single out Dolfi:

Dolfi draws for hours: that hiss
of graphite on my nerves —
then she stacks
the drawings under her bed.
To you I showed how to write
your name on the page of the world.

Indeed, everything was sacrificed for the sake of Sigmund’s education and advancement in the world.

We sat in one room, the girls
sewing by draft-torn candlelight —
I gave you the other room;
I gave you the oil lamp.
I ate chicken wings,
saving the breasts for you.
When you complained that a sister’s music
intruded through the two closed doors,
I sold the piano.

*

When Freud left for England in 1938, he managed to take with him his immediate family, his physician and the physician’s family, and his two housekeepers — and left behind his five sisters, four of whom (like all of Kafka’s sisters) later died in concentration camps. Freud was permitted to submit a list of people he wanted to go with him. His sisters’ names were not on the list, and he is often judged for having failed to save them. But that is hindsight; like so many, Freud did not believe the danger was extreme.

*

Why am I posting about this? Freud’s mother reminded me of my great-grandmother, who sacrificed the education of all the other children for the sake of the first-born son. As a friend summarized it, “The sun rose and set on the behind of the first-born son.”

**

Below: Sigmund Freud with his mother and sisters, including Adolfina (center), at their father's grave, Vienna, 1897


Mary:

Your poem is wonderful — Mother, lover, sacrificing all for the “Golden Son.” Poor Dolfi hiding her drawings under the bed, having her piano taken, eating — what? If Sigi got the breast and Mama the wings — Dolfi got the neck? Gizzards? The watery broth? This kind of division of all good things, food, light, space, time, attention, in the family is ancient and probably still fairly widely practiced in some form, if not so extreme as in cultures that use ultrasounds to weed out and abort undesirable daughters.

Oriana:

And those societies have been finding out the hard way what a social burden and downright peril excess unmarried men are. And I’ve read that daughterless older couples are even advertising, seeking to adopt a young woman as a daughter.

Oddly enough, the US, for all its social conservatism, seems to be a pioneer in recognizing the value of daughters. Couples who plan to have only one child tend to express a strong preference for a daughter. The waiting rooms in fertility clinics tend to be painted pink. And I’ve met more than one set of parents who lament, “God has not blessed us with a daughter.”

Eventually even China and India will catch up.

THE WOOLFS MEET SIGMUND FREUD

London was Freud’s refuge, and friends set him up in Hampstead, in a big house that is now the Freud Museum. On January 28, 1939, Virginia and Leonard Woolf came for tea. The Woolfs, the founders and owners of the Hogarth Press, had been Freud’s British publishers since 1924; Hogarth later published the twenty-four-volume translation of Freud’s works, under the editorship of Anna Freud and James Strachey, that is known as the Standard Edition. This was the Woolfs’ only meeting with Freud.

English was one of Freud’s many languages. (After he settled in Hampstead, the BBC taped him speaking, the only such recording in existence.) But he was eighty-two and suffering from cancer of the jaw, and conversation with the Woolfs was awkward. He “was sitting in a great library with little statues at a large scrupulously tidy shiny table,” Virginia wrote in her diary. “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.” He was formal and courteous in an old-fashioned way, and presented her with a narcissus. The stage had been carefully set.

The Woolfs were not easily impressed by celebrity, and certainly not by stage setting. They understood the transactional nature of the tea. “All refugees are like gulls with their beaks out for possible crumbs,” Virginia coolly noted in the diary. But many years later, in his autobiography, Leonard remembered that Freud had given him a feeling that, he said, “only a very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength. . . . A formidable man.” Freud died in that house on September 23, 1939, three weeks after the start of the Second World War.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/why-freud-survives

Virginia Woolf was notorious for saying nasty things about people — a misuse of her great intelligence. Note Leonard’s sympathetic assessment: “a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength . . . A formidable man.”



IS FREUD DEAD?

Recently we’ve had several books that attack both Freud as a person and his ideas. Traditional psychoanalysis is indeed pretty much dead, but that doesn’t mean that Freud’s historical importance in cultural evolution can ever be ignored.

Freud did have a tremendous influence on our way of thinking, but it wasn’t in the details, e.g. we don’t take the Oedipal Complex all that literally. We clearly see that “The Interpretation of Dreams” is too one-sided, and wish fulfillment, especially of secret erotic wishes, is just one element in dreams. Our idea of the unconscious is not really what most would call “Freudian” (though it was Freud who first suggested that all cognitive activity is unconscious). To be a dogmatic Freudian is rare and out of date — he was in many ways a man of his age. It’s rather his gift of the psychological approach (X had a traumatic childhood) — as opposed to, say, the religious one (X is a sinner). It’s trying to understand rather than condemn.

To understand rather than condemn — that, I think, was the giant impact of the psychological revolution. I wouldn’t call it the Freudian revolution — Freud was only one of the pioneers, though certainly a major figure.

Another part of the impact was something we are beginning to understand better only now: telling the stories of our lives, and how we tell those stories, changes the brain pathways and ultimately changes us so that we need not remain stuck in certain narratives. Simply putting events and feelings into words is a radical cognitive feat — and the words we choose can heal (“words that heal, words that kill”). Freud wasn’t the first one to use the “talking cure,” and the exact way he himself did is not important — the concept is important.

Who knows, maybe in the end Freud’s name will remain with us chiefly in the phrase a “Freudian slip” . . . This is a case of that more anonymous immortality of influence — of a cultural shift. 

Freud between Martha and Minna; Freud's mother in the background
 
**

Mary:

Freud shifted the narrative away from sin, blame and punishment, toward a passion for understanding how the mind works with experience and is shaped by the injuries and traumas encountered in an individual life. His descriptions of the dynamics involved were certainly colored by the world and culture that produced him, and may not be of much relevance to us today, but he redirected our attention, showed us where to look, not to exorcising demons or punishing sinners, but to listening closely to the story of another’s life, finding there the riddle’s answer, and in the shaping of that story as it is told, healing.

Oriana: 

Beautifully put: “He redirected our attention, showed us where to look, not to exorcising demons or punishing sinners, but to listening closely to the story of another’s life.”

Yes. Literature lovers might argue that writers got there long before Freud — in fact Freud himself acknowledged that — and literature has done a lot to expand our empathy and make us listen to the story of another person’s life. But literature could be easily dismissed as “made up.” Freud and others made terms such as repression, projection, and denial part of the everyday vocabulary of an educated person. We began to think differently, with greater openness and tolerance, about the “psychopathology of everyday life.”

I think Freud came just at the right time. Religion was declining, so explaining mental illness in terms of sin, God’s plan, “God sends suffering to those he loves,” etc was becoming terribly insufficient. Not that we have a complete understanding now, but at least we pay attention to trauma, both physical and emotional. We pay attention to early childhood and beyond. And we know that providing empathy changes the neural circuits. Somewhere I read that Freud privately admitted that the healing power behind the “talking cure” was love. This may be apocryphal — still, receiving affection rather than punishment can transform a person.


“But how could you live and have no story to tell?” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights


HEMINGWAY WAS WRONG: WE ARE NOT “STRONGER AT THE BROKEN PLACES”

“When you break a bone, the body immediately sets to mending it, forming new bone as a sort of callus or scab over the break until it heals. You can feel this as a bump at the break. Hemingway misunderstood that callus — which eventually fades away. We are not stronger at the broken places. The injury always remains. The world carves our bones with indifference.” ~ Kestrel Trael

Oriana:

People (and not just Catholics, I’ve noticed) are strangely eager to justify and even glorify suffering, including major trauma. I do understand the drive to endow suffering with meaning, to insist that something good can come from something bad. While this may happen, we have to face the truth: suffering damages us. It does not “toughen” us — that’s an excuse of those (often abusive parents or bullying offspring) who want to inflict suffering on others.

If suffering is so good for us, if it leads to marvelous results — if disease leads to greater health — if an abused childhood leads to superior mental health in adulthood — then of course we shouldn’t do anything to prevent or relieve suffering. But evidence indicates the opposite. No woman is “improved” by getting raped. No one sleeps better after having been in combat — and even those who haven’t been wounded have a shorter life expectancy. Every bit of trauma stays in our body. It’s being loved that makes us healthier and stronger.

We really have to face the ugly fact that suffering doesn't make us stronger. That’s a lie. In most cases, suffering weakens us, damages us, drains our energy and creativity, creates scars that last a lifetime (scar tissue keeps on reproducing itself). Being loved makes us stronger. Why is that kept a secret? (OK, there is an occasional saying, like “Behind every great man, there is a woman” — but that's just not enough.)

I remember a woman doctor commenting on a young boy stricken with cancer. He’ll probably die, she said, because his family, who don’t live close to the hospital, abandoned him to relatives who come visit only once in a while. If he received enough love, he’d survive; this cancer is quite survivable if the patient receives enough loving care. I see so many such cases, the doctor said: people die of survivable diseases because they aren’t given love. The power of touch, of a soft tone of voice — they can make a difference between life and death.

I was raised with the Catholic notion that “suffering is good for you” and it did lead to various degrees of masochism and even self-harm (nor is self-flagellation an extinct practice, though probably less common now). The “nobility of suffering” is a lie we tell ourselves to lessen our grief. And that's OK — whatever helps us live, as long as it doesn't blind us to the ways suffering could be avoided, or make us excuse inflicting suffering on others.

Nevertheless, “the injury always remains.”

To recognize that is not to label yourself a victim forever, making your wound the center of your life. Making the wound a “no-think zone” can work too — I speak from experience. An intense absorption in work instead can work wonders. The present really DOES change the past because we remember according to our present understanding. But the injury always remains — and making peace with the past by recognizing this is the beginning of self-acceptance and self-compassion that will serve us well in what time remains. 

[By the way, it’s bad enough that “the injury always remains.” At this point we know that the parents’ and even grandparents’ trauma gets passed on.]

Nili:

As to your Hemingway's quote, I think that courage is usually manifested in continuing. When the pieces are broken, the pain is there and the healing, when takes place, doesn't bring it back to exactly the same way as it was before. Yet, the mere stepping forward, one foot at a time, is courageous enough.
Oriana:

I agree. Healing takes courage and hope: the trust that we can cope somehow, that “this too shall pass” and we’ll go on and eventually be healthy and happy again, productive again, able to contribute.

Nevertheless, Hemingway was wrong the same way that Nietzsche was wrong when he said, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche no doubt influenced Hemingway, and a lot of others besides — it’s so easy to go into denial about the serious of the harm and how it stays with us, in some ways weakening us. A handful of the children who got polio in the past may have become more resilient because of their ordeal — but at what price! We know that basically no child is “improved” by polio or any other dreadful disease.

Nietzsche’s denial reminds me of the falsehood, conscious or unconscious, told me by my first, benighted UCLA knee surgeons (who unwitting crippled many of UCLA’s athletes, especially football players). They said, “Actually you are lucky. Scar tissue is stronger than cartilage.” This is ridiculous on the face of it — scar tissue is a nasty, inferior substitute for the original. But the surgeons said it with the certainty of priests who give you a cheap wafer announcing, “Body of Christ.”

But you are right: we don’t go back to what we were before. Scar tissue keeps reproducing itself; in the case of cartilage in particular, you never regain the miraculous natural cushioning and shock-absorbing capacity of the original. In cases of emotional injury, it depends. Receiving  affection in a loving relationship can be very healing even if past abuse is not discussed. The brain will automatically adjust its narrative.

Frankly, any kind of love is healing. I’ve seen a miraculous transformation of a bitter woman I knew when she got a beautiful husky! For another woman, it was adopting two kittens. When love enters a person’s life, no therapy can compete with that. If there is anything that’s the opposite of trauma, it’s a large dose of positive emotions. 
amethyst eyes from Uruguay


NEW AGE BULLIES: WORSE THAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS IN BLAMING THE VICTIM
 
~ “Hannah followed New Age thinking for many years. She constructed astrology charts, worked with psychics and thought she knew something about the world. And then her 26-year-old son committed suicide. Prior to that tragedy (most bereavement counselors consider it the hardest loss to face), she believed in the adage: “Everything happens for a reason.” Hannah says, “I no longer believe that, nor do I believe I know anything about why the world works as it does.

“When people said my son died for a reason, or that he was in a better place, or worst of all, that he’d chosen to die,” said Hannah, “I was appalled and furious. It demeaned my son’s death.

Not only did it demean her son’s death, it minimized her loss.

Hannah’s experience reminded me of a friend who underwent a severe bout of chronic fatigue. She went to see the minister of her “new thought” church, hoping to get some short-term help with shopping and housework. The minister provided less practical support: he promised to help her come to grips with the “lessons” she should learn from the illness. My friend dragged herself home and returned to her bed, feeling alone and ashamed.

During my 36 years as a psychotherapist, I’ve seen many clients who have been victims of people like those Hannah and my friend describe. I call them New Age Bullies — those who, sometimes with the best intentions, repeat spiritual movement shibboleths, with little understanding of how hurtful their advice can be. Some of their favorite clichés are:

It happened for a reason.

Nobody can hurt you without your consent.

I wonder why you created this illness (or experience).

It’s just your karma.

There are no accidents.

There are no victims.

There are no mistakes.

A variant of this behavior is found in the self-bullying people who blame themselves for being victims of a crime, accident, or illness and interpret such misfortunes as evidence of their personal defects or spiritual deficiencies.

The belief that we create our own reality can be very self-empowering for some people — the psychological equivalent of moving mountains. My clients with strong beliefs that they are accountable for their own lives do much better in their recovery from psychological problems than those who stay stuck in the shame/blame cycle (of self or others.)

Classic books by holistic physicians, such as Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine and Miracles and Andrew Weil’s Spontaneous Healing, illustrate the value of empowering beliefs in recovering from illness. Neurologist David Perlmutter, author of the forthcoming The Better Brain Book, writes: “It is the belief that predestined reality can be modified that leads to statistically significantly better outcomes.

”Several years ago, Gen Kelsang Lingpur, now a resident teacher at the Tara Mahayana Buddhist Center in Tucson, was diagnosed with leukemia. At the time, she was a business executive from a Catholic background. “My first reaction,” she said, “was grief. I cried a lot and asked, ‘Why me?’ But then I thought, if I have only two years to live, I want them to mean something.

”Her quest for meaning led her to Buddhism, which, in turn, led her to a belief in karma. “I learned that everything comes from the Mind,” she recalled, “but not this [she smiled and pointed to her head] mind.

Everything that happens in this life is a direct result of actions from a previous life.” Once she accepted the belief that her illness was the result of her actions in a previous life, she was able, with help from her physician, to heal through Buddhist practices.

So I asked Gen Lingpur how she applied her belief in karma when working with cancer patients. “I never say to them as a group that their cancer is a result of actions from a previous life,” she said. “I don’t know if that is their belief. That would be inappropriate.” 

Her distinction is important. It is the reason why affirmations so often fail. Coming to a personally held belief is a process. For some, the insight may come in a flash but, for most of us, it takes work and experience to move from a desire to belief. It would be like skipping to the last page of an instruction manual and missing all the necessary intervening steps for proper assembly. If you are in the first chapter of recovery from childhood sexual abuse, for example, an early stage of recovery is to challenge the commonly shared belief that you somehow “caused” the abuse. This belief does not come from a position of power but from one of self-shame or blame. 

In my therapeutic practice, I have never seen anyone able to skip over this first task of realizing they were not to blame. Sometimes the only thing these clients are able to do in this early stage is to see that their abuser was to blame. Some of my fellow therapists express concern that blaming others keeps the client in the victim role. While I don’t want my clients to get stuck there, if that’s what they need to do first, it can be a useful step. To tell a vulnerable client that there are no victims invariably leads them to internalize even more self-blame.

Franz Sedlacek: Storm, 1932

Blaming the Victim

Many people automatically and unconsciously blame themselves for being victims. Counselors who work in a battered women’s shelter or with rape victims know it is a long and arduous process for their clients to reclaim a sense of personal power. It would be utterly cruel to ask an abused woman what she did to create that experience or to suggest that she wasn’t a victim. I assume that most people reading this article would not condone such insensitivity, but there are subtler ways to blame a victim.

A client of mine was in a relationship with a man who shared her spiritual beliefs. At the beginning of our work, she described the relationship in mystical terms. However, she had severe stress symptoms as a direct result of trying to live with his eleven-year-old son who routinely screamed hateful remarks at her.

Her complaints about the boy’s out-of-control behavior and her pleas to her partner to get help for his son were met with disdain. He insisted the problem was her response to the situation. When she told him she was in emotional pain over the child’s behavior, he replied, “No one can hurt you without your permission.” The worst of the stress came from her buying into her partner’s reality — that it was her problem.

I said he sounded like a New Age Bully. He showed no compassion for her pain; he didn’t listen to her complaints or advice; and he shamed her for reacting to the child’s aggressiveness.

Once she stopped blaming herself for being upset and saw that the problem wasn’t her inability to handle whatever the child did, but her partner’s unwillingness to take her complaints seriously or show her any compassion, she ended the relationship. She was now in a place to examine the situation according to her own beliefs.

I encourage clients to carefully examine the belief that one should remain in an abusive relationship or job because of “the lessons to be learned,” as that can be a form of self-bullying.

Why New Age Bullies Do It

New Age Bullies often act from a sincere desire to be helpful. It may also be a defense. Think of a friend who has just suffered a terrible loss or someone who’s been diagnosed with a serious illness to whom you want to say something comforting. Or, someone who seems locked in a destructive pattern and you want to say something to get him to think differently or take charge of his life. The problem is, you can’t know how your words will be received. If they don’t share your beliefs, your advice won’t help. They may feel that you are blaming them or are indifferent to their feelings.

“In blaming or shaming a victim,” Gen Lingpur says of the Buddhist tradition, “you are assuming that the person knew the karma they were creating in a previous life and that they have that knowledge in the present. We don’t know. We can’t know ahead of time what the results of an action will be, nor can we remember what action created the result. It’s sometimes a problem in the Buddhist community when someone says of another’s suffering: ‘It’s just their karma.’ That statement lacks compassion.”
 
Psychologically, there’s another reason people blame victims. Viki Sharp, a victim advocate for 26 years, explains it this way: “People tend to blame victims because it makes them feel less vulnerable and more in control. A woman leaves her window open one night and a man comes through it and rapes her. The thinking is: ‘She was raped because of something she did — she left her window open and, since I don’t do that, I’m safe.’”

As a practice, I don’t give unsolicited advice because I can’t know for certain what another’s beliefs or vulnerabilities are. Of course, I will offer advice in the context of a therapy session or among friends whose beliefs and experiences are familiar to me.

Perhaps we can all learn from what the Buddha purportedly said about belief:

“Believe nothing because a wise person said it. Believe nothing because it is generally held. Believe nothing because it is written. Believe nothing because it is said to be Divine. Believe nothing because someone else believes it. But believe only what you yourself judge to be true.”

http://juliaingram.com/nab/


Sigrid Hjertén: Purple Hat, 1923

Oriana:

For me it was actually liberating to realize that some (a lot of) things are simply luck and circumstances. I could finally stop blaming myself for everything that went wrong. But I know others for whom it's very hard to accept the randomness of many things, the idea that no, they didn't choose the special task in this life before they were born, they didn't choose their parents (true New Age followers believe this!), they didn’t choose to be born male rather than female, in New York rather than Greece or Bangladesh — and those factors have a HUGE influence over your life.

Karma from previous lives? There is no evidence. That’s just an attempt to justify suffering.

It’s much more compassionate and liberating to accept that “life isn’t fair” and move on from there, doing what little we can without the burden of self-blame.

Funny how New Age turned out to be even more “blame-the-victim” than traditional religions.  “Poverty is the result of negative thinking” is just a variation on “poverty is the result of sin” (a Protestant attitude, not a Catholic one). Extreme individualism is that way too — many people come to see themselves as failures.

I've been accused of failing to achieve national recognition as a poet because I don't dare “think big” (never mind that I applied to a gazillion contests, including the biggest ones) — and yes, it must be my negative thinking. If I didn’t win a big contest, it was because I didn’t believe I could win.

(By the way, my thanks again to anyone who ever said, “I love your writing” — that helped me survive probably more than anything else.)

And every time I have a medical problem, someone invariably suggests all kinds of "visualization." In fact any kind of problem — “Why don't you just put it out to the Universe that you need . . .” All you need to do to get what you want is request it! Does that by any chance come from “Ask, and it shall be given to you?” And again, as with prayer, lack of results doesn't seem to discourage anyone.

Do we really create our own reality? Only to a limited extent — and a true determinist would question even that. Say that we persistently exercise and consequently reap health benefits — isn’t persistence our “choice”? But it turns out that persistence is largely a genetic trait, just like intelligence — and not our merit after all. At least one of our parents is likely to have been conspicuously persistent. I was told I was persistent (actually the word “stubborn” was used) already as a toddler. I didn’t want to ride in a stroller — I wanted to PUSH the stroller, even though I couldn’t quite reach the handles. But I tried and tried.

Did we work hard in college? True, but being a compulsive reader, I absorbed all I could — without any wise, selective discrimination — I simply loved to read. It was both soothing and stimulating. Wouldn’t I rather go to a party than study? Are you kidding?? Would that be more fun than learning new things? There was no self-sacrifice.

I work hard because I enjoy working hard. For me the danger is working too hard. It’s not a virtue — it runs in the family, and causes both high achievement and heart attacks.

At the same time, in some context we do experience a sense of choice, and that’s typically stressful. I think it’s because we are not one coherent self, but several. It’s a squabbling committee inside our skull. To put it in more lofty terms, there are competing neural pathways, and at times one gains dominance, then another. On the conscious level, we experience conflict. Give us too much choice, and we are likely to give up altogether to end the stress. Or — that oldest and sometimes best solution — we toss a coin.

**
Mary:


I think the value in suffering is all in how you survive it—how you make your way through, or out, to a place where you have agency—rather than simple passive endurance, an active and creative engagement to live beyond the limits of your pain, to be a creator yourself in the way you live. This is most often talked about in terms of a struggle, or battle, but that doesn’t adequately characterize what is more like a process of learning and enlargement, involving empathy and forgiveness for the self, and beyond the self, a fuller engagement with your own potentials and opportunities.

And thinking of the potential for healing in telling our stories, this is widely evident in the way women have worked to see their own oppression and find their way to resistance. We all suffer from self blame in similar ways — as society has long insisted, blaming the victim, who is responsible for the assaults, harassments, rapes, beatings, even murders, that befall her.

I know I thought it must be something particular to me, a scent, an expression, a secret mark visible to others, that attracted, allowed, even encouraged abuse. Like Red Riding Hood moving through the woods with her Fire Alarm cloak, something about me was signaling—“here she is, the one you want to hurt.”

It was only when I began to hear the stories of other women, when we began to TELL these stories, that I realized my story was her story, and hers, and hers—that it was all very much the same story. Most women do not have one of these stories, but many, an anthology of them, and I’ve never met a woman who didn’t.

*

Oriana:

At one time I was involved with an alcoholic, and read somewhere that alcoholics seeks out women who have low self-esteem. And that was enough: instantly I saw myself as a woman with a low self-esteem, exactly the kind who’d attract an alcoholic. So yes, it was my fault. And there was no point leaving the alcoholic, my source continued, because you’d just attract another one. It took me some years to shake off this crazy thinking (unfortunately reinforced by a friend who was a therapist: “You’re just going to repeat the same pattern”). And of course I’ve met other women, intelligent and attractive, who suffered from the same kind of self-blame: “I know what kind of man I attract.”

As for me, I learned to recognize alcoholics quickly and stay away from them (both male and female; both are destructive crazy-makers) very successfully. The relationship that followed has in many ways been the most fulfilling in my life. 

So in this case I’ve learned something. Nevertheless, would I have not gained more from a happy, empowering relationship? With the greater strength and energy that comes from having a good relationship, would I have not accomplished more, taken more risks? Given a choice between a bad, draining relationship and a happy one, would anyone hesitate?

And yet almost all people I know try to claim that “suffering is good for you.” And I realize that it’s very hard for a person to admit something like, look, those ten years, it’s been just meaningless torment. I am willing to admit it. Decades of chronic pain, and the last years of downright disability — it’s been meaningless torture. I would have been better off without it: happier, stronger, richer in experience. But we can’t live in regret. We make the best of our reality, even if it’s lame and crippled. But it’s not that we’re improved by being lame and crippled. And once more: no woman is ever improved by getting raped. No child is improved by being abused. Let’s stop defending myths and falsehoods.
 
**

One of my moments of enlightenment happened when I thought, "If god allowed Auschwitz, god will allow anything." I was already an atheist, but obviously there was still some "unfinished business" that I was still processing.


“What is truly frightening is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seemed to be secretly waiting for him.” ~ Volker Ullrich, Hitler's biographer



“WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?” VERSUS “WHAT WOULD YAHWEH DO?”

Once I gave outrage by speculating that Yahweh began as an actual person, a Middle Eastern warrior-god. ~ Harold Bloom, “The Daemon Knows”

~ Bloom: All through the Hebrew Bible, the prophets perpetually proclaim that the Jewish people, that Israel, has failed to keep the covenant with Yahweh. Nowhere do they say what is palpably true on the basis of Jewish history and of human history in general, which is that Yahweh has failed to keep his covenant with the people. I say in the book again and again that when Yahweh, which is the name of the high god ultimately in the Hebrew Bible, that when Yahweh is asked by Moses to give Moses his name and in the Hebrew, Yahweh punning on his own name, massively says, ‘Tell them that [words in Hebrew] has sent you,' which is translated in the King James Bible ultimately as ‘I am that I am,’ which I translate in order to get it into an English that will make sense, ‘I will be present wherever and whenever I choose to be present,’ which also implies its rather frightening corollary, 'And I will absent wherever and whenever I choose to be absent.' It seems to me that he has chosen to be absent throughout most of human history, including Jewish history.

NPR: Well, if Jesus is to Hamlet for you, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, comes closest to King Lear, a passionate, impulsive figure.

Prof. BLOOM: I think that Shakespeare probably founds his extraordinary figure of King Lear--irascible, jealous, intense, immensely awesome, angry, bereft, dangerous — on the Geneva Bible's version of — which is essentially not very different from what is now the authorized, the King James...

There are four different layers in the five books of Moses. The original strata of Yahweh as written by the author we call the Yahwist is of a remarkably impish kind of a person. He is not God the Father. He is something of a mischief maker. He conducts on-the-ground inspections all the time to satisfy his curiosity. He is very much a human being. He prefers the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden because evidently he gets hot as human beings get hot. He picnics on the side of Mount Sinai with Moses and 70 elders of Zion, who stare at him silently while he sits there silently and he eats and they eat. He closes the door of Noah's ark with his own hands. With his own hands, he buries his prophet, Moses. And most of all, with his own hands, at the beginning, almost like a child playing with a mud pie, he plays with the moistened Earth and makes there a figurine. And then he breathes life into that figurine, and man becomes, as the Hebrew Bible says, a living soul and this is Adam. That is not what most people, I admit, think of as God.

God the Father is a later invention, on the one hand, of the Talmudical rabbis but primarily of Christian theology when they devise the Trinity, when Jesus of Nazareth, the more or less historical figure, has become an absolutely different figure, a Greek dying and reviving, God, a theological God. Yahweh is not a theological God at all. He is a human, all-too-human God.

The basic argument of this book, "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine," is that we have three very different personages or beings: the more or less historical Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew of the first century of the common era; the Greek theological formulation, or God, Jesus Christ; and the original God of the Hebrews, now greatly shrunken into God the Father, Yahweh, he who will be present wherever and whenever he chooses to be present and will keep himself absent when perhaps we most want him and need him. These three figures are so incompatible with one another that I don't believe it is possible to bring them coherently together in any single statement. They come out of totally different realms of discourse. Trying to think them together is really an act of psychic violence.

The operations of the mind have got to become extremely distorted in order to bring the more or less historical Jesus, the Greek theological God Jesus Christ and the human, all-too-human God, Yahweh, into some coherent relationship. The normal processes of thought are being disturbed, and an act of imposition is taking place.

NPR: Now you write that a Messiah who is God and who dies on the cross as an atonement for sins is irreconcilable with the Hebrew Bible. Why is that?

Prof. BLOOM: Yahweh does not commit suicide. And if one is to take the argument of Christianity, then Yahweh is, in effect, committing suicide through his supposed son. Yahweh also does not, even as a descending dove upon a human female virgin, bring forth a son. This is material that comes to one out of Greek and pagan traditions but has nothing to do with traditional Judaism.

I quote the great scholar of Hebraic matters Jacob Neusner as saying, "Judaism and Christianity are different groups of people talking different languages about different Gods to very different people." There is no Judeo-Christian tradition anymore than there could be, say, a Christian-Islamic tradition.

Whether 50 years from now, there will be of the 14 million now self-identified Jews more than a mere scattering, I would not be prepared to say. What that means about the existence of Yahweh is also a very interesting question. He is, after all, covenanted. Would he survive the disappearance of the Jewish people if that, indeed, is what happens? I do not know. I may, as I say, lack trust in the covenant, but though I keep asking Yahweh to go away, I say so many times in this book, he won't go away. He haunts me.” ~

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5048309

Caravaggio: Conversion of St Paul, 1601. Don't you right away want to stroke this horse's face? A sweet, sensitive animal. The servant looks sympathetic also.
 
Oriana:

Another giveaway of how incompatible Yahweh and Jesus are is that we can indeed ask "What would Jesus do?" and come up with a plausible reply that can indeed serve as guidance. But we better not ask, “What would Yahweh do?” Would he command you to stone your disobedient child? This is not a god who knows what it’s like to be human — or at least you are forbidden to think along those lines. He can't relate to us, nor we to him. People get more out of talking to their pets.

What has turned out to be quite a problem for humanity is the us-them tribalism. Unfortunately monotheistic religion (“our god is the only real god” — or, if it’s the same god, “only our cause is the will of god”) tends to magnify it. Religion tends to turn any war into a holy war, with weapons blessed, verses of scripture selected to justify the cause, “God with us” on belt buckles.

**
That's why you need a back-up god, i.e. Kleenex (here in the US there's typically a box of Kleenex in every bathroom).

HOW TO RAISE YOUR HDL LEVELS (and thus reduce your risk of a heart attack)
~ “The greatest risk for having a heart attack comes not from a high LDL, not from hypertension, diabetes, or even smoking, but rather from a low HDL. A recent study supports the notion that a low HDL contributes more to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) than does a high LDL.

Why, then, do physicians focus most of their discussion and interventions on lowering their patients' LDL and not raising their patients' HDL? The reason is simple: we don't have any drugs that have a significant effect on HDL. Exercise is known to raise HDL, but generally it must be of an intensity that in my own experience few patients are willing or able to maintain on a regular basis.

But recently, with the increasing popularity of low carbohydrate diets, a new, arguably less painful way to raise HDL—sometimes dramatically—has surfaced. It's long been known that another component of total cholesterol—triglycerides—have an inverse relationship to HDL. That is, as triglycerides go up, in general, HDL goes down, and vice versa. And while dietary interventions have little direct effect on HDL, they can have a large direct effect on triglycerides. And when triglycerides go down, HDL often goes up.

How do you reduce your triglycerides? There seem to be two main ways: 1) weight reduction and 2) a reduction in dietary intake of carbohydrates. Especially in people who are overweight or obese, reducing the amount of carbohydrate in the diet (especially sweets—sorry) reduces triglycerides—and in so doing often raises HDL.

HDL over 60 is considered to be protective against a heart attack.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201210/how-raise-your-good-cholesterol


ending on beauty (and humor): 

We’ll Always Have Parents

It isn't what he said in Casablanca
and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless
we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.
They're in our baggage, or perhaps are baggage
of the old-fashioned type, before the wheels,
which we remember when we pack for Paris.
Or don't remember. Paris doesn't know
if you're thinking of it. Neither do your parents . . .
Meanwhile, those lovers, younger every year
(because with every rerun we get older),
persuade us less, for all their cigarettes
and shining unshed tears about the joy
of Paris blurring in their rearview mirror,
that they've surpassed us in sophistication.
Granted, they were born before our parents
but don't they seem by now, Bogart and Bergman,
like our own children? Think how we could help!
We could ban their late nights, keep them home
the whole time, and prevent their ill-starred romance!
Here's looking at us, Kid. You'll thank your parents.

~ Mary Jo Salter, from We’ll Always Have Parents