Dali: Marilyn-Mao, 1972, self-portrait with photomontage by Philippe HalsmanTHE GREAT FIRES
We woke in the dusk, the sun
an alien disk of glowing mauve,
the sky bleeding its last blue.
Ashes fell like snowflakes.
In satellite photos, horns of smoke
rose from the burning California coast.
Yet it wasn’t the aerial panorama,
but a single glance that leapt
like a lion at my throat.
I looked out the window, saw
flames like bodies, crimson-gold,
soaring then dipping, dancing
their way up the long hill
seven miles from my house.
As if it were being sung
in triumphant tongues:
a hymn to all the afternoons
a woman looks out the window
on a rose-bush and the hills,
idle dove-like clouds —
then the red dancing
with devouring gold —
As if life were being told
in non-human speech:
a story of how innocence dies
for the sake of a greater story.
~ Oriana
The shock of seeing “live” flames so close to one’s house is beyond words. It was my personal, small-scale 9/11 — you never feel as fully secure afterwards. Real-estate developed hired private fire-fighters who used the city water to wet down the new buildings that were closer to the fire — that caused a certain scandal too. But the people around me didn’t share my indignation: they said the real-estate developers could spend their money any way they saw fit. Furthermore, they said, those private fire-fighters were there to save *only* those buildings they were paid to save, and had no moral obligation to save a building next door, should it catch on fire. Nor were they obliged to turn off the water so that the municipal fire fighters would have adequate water pressure (fortunately no actual show-down occurred).
That poem goes back to October 2003 — our first great fire storm. We thought that was once in a lifetime. Then the following year, approximately on the anniversary, another great fire, though it didn’t come as close to the house. Then a blessed break, at least near my area, until 2007, when the fires consumed an area the size of Rhode Island. And now the fire season is year-round, and no one bothers with comparisons to Rhode Island.
Ah, innocence — back in 2003, we still thought we’d witnessed an exception. Instead, fire storms, or megafires, were about to become the new normal.
fire at Clear Lake, California, 8-1-18; Tricia Bayman
THE PLANET IS BURNING
~ “We have entered the era of the megafire—defined as a wildfire that burns more than 100,000 acres.
In early July 2018, there were twenty-nine large uncontained fires burning across the United States. “We shouldn’t be seeing this type of fire behavior this early in the year,” Chris Anthony, a division chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told The New York Times.
Nonnative species can also be a fire risk when they are deliberately introduced. Portugal has been tormented by wildfires, including an inferno last summer that killed more than sixty people, partly because of the flammability of eucalyptus, which is native to Australia and has become the mainstay of the national wood industry, transforming the Portuguese countryside, according to an environmental engineer who spoke to The New York Times, “from a pretty diverse forest into a big eucalyptus monoculture.”
In the United States, exurban and rural property development in the wildland-urban interface has been, perhaps, the final straw—or at least another lighted match tossed on the pile. Most wildfires that threaten or damage communities are caused by humans. Campfires, barbecues, sparks from chainsaws, lawnmowers, power lines, cars, motorcycles, cigarettes—the modes of inadvertent ignition in a bone-dry landscape are effectively limitless. Let’s say nothing of arson. Houses and other structures become wildfire fuel, and vulnerable communities hugely complicate forest management and disaster planning. In his panoramic 2017 book Megafire, the journalist (and former firefighter) Michael Kodas observes pithily that “during the century in which the nation attempted to exclude fire from forests, they filled with homes.”
. . . The Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the globe. We’ve become accustomed to seeing that tragedy dramatized by starving polar bears, the accelerating retreat of glaciers and sea ice, and the thawing of permafrost. Wildfires driving polar bears from their dens is something new, though, at least to me. But the size, frequency, range, and intensity of wildfires in Alaska and northern Canada have increased far more rapidly than in lower, more populated latitudes. Megafires have become every-year events up north. Soot and ash from these northern fires is blackening glaciers and the Greenland ice cap, causing them to melt at an even faster rate.
Boreal forests store enormous amounts of carbon that megafires release, to the detriment of the global environment. High-latitude peatlands store carbon that is released by tundra fires. Peat also stores vast amounts of mercury, which fire releases into the atmosphere. The lower edge of the stratosphere is significantly lower at high latitudes, and the fire clouds created by northern megafires—known as pyrocumulus, meteorological freaks that create their own weather, pouring lightning and embers back down on the ground—can also propel smoke upward, directly into the stratosphere, “where it becomes a global problem,” Struzik writes. The smoke from Canadian fires has been found to travel around the entire globe more than once. Some major fires burn so hot that the soil is sterilized, and forests cannot even begin to regenerate.
Then there’s Russia, which has the world’s largest boreal forest and is already suffering more tree loss from fire than any other country. The planet’s biggest carbon stores threaten to become carbon sources, supercharging global warming. The deliberate illegal burning of enormous tracts of Amazon rainforest—more than 100,000 fires were detected by satellites in Brazil in September 2017—is the greatest example of this threat. Indonesian peat fires, also illegal and done for agricultural land clearing, cover much of Southeast Asia in toxic haze for several months a year and triple Indonesia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Now we can add boreal forest megafires and increasingly flammable tundra to the list of not-quite-natural disasters darkening our planetary future.” ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/08/16/wildfires-california-burning/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Wildfires%20Rachel%20Cusk%20what%20Trump%20knew&utm_content=NYR%20Wildfires%20Rachel%20Cusk%20what%20Trump%20knew+CID_b56f2c315535575e5d8629ddfda2d68f&utm_source=Newsletter#fn-1
Current California fires from the Space Station Oriana:
The age of innocence lasted as long as we expected the future to be always better than the past — in practically every way. We felt sorry for those who died before seeing the wonders of the Internet and other high-tech magic. I personally felt sorry for myself for having been born too early, with not enough lifetime left to see the many advances that were certain to come. Once the threat of another world war receded, no one thought that humanity’s very survival was at stake again — in a very different manner.
Now I came to appreciate a phrase that was not uncommon in Poland after WW2: “He died just at the right time.” It was spoken of those who died in 1937, 1938, or even in 1939 — as long as it was before September 1. Those were the lucky ones, spared the horror of the Nazi invasion — just as later those who died on the train, during the transport to a concentration camp, were called the lucky ones.
These are heavy-hearted meditations. The age of innocence already seems a distant past.
Is there any hope? Having witnessed how the toxic soup of LA smog got cleaned up gives me *some* hope. Seeing teams of young people clean the beaches of litter is no small thing either — it’s wonderful to see the young empowered to care for the earth. Neighbors installing solar? I'm next.
Too little too late? Perhaps. But better than nothing.
**
TRUMP AND “SYMPATHETIC AUDIENCE CONTROL”
~ “Trump's lies and reversals are not due to mental illness but because he reacts to people and situations in the moment, with no thought of future or past.
When Trump is in the presence of someone he dislikes or distrusts, he attacks and will continue to lash out for a while, but not necessarily forever. When someone he perceives as a threat becomes deferential (Rocket Man, for example), Trump not only stops attacking, he also becomes highly vulnerable to influence.
In general, when Trump is around someone whom he perceives as supportive, or when he gets a phone call from a supportive billionaire, or when he hears a supportive commentator on Fox News, his thinking is rapidly influenced by what that person is saying. This is “sympathetic audience control.” With Trump, the impact is so strong that it persists after the person is gone — maybe even until another sympathetic individual comes along.
When Trump is in front of a large group of cheering people, his thinking is fully controlled by the crowd. It might seem he’s in control, but the opposite is actually the case. The supportive audience completely dominates his thinking, causing him to repeat, over and over, things he believes the audience wants to hear.
We need to add just one more element here to make sense of Trump’s roller coaster mind: Like my 92-year-old mom, Trump lives in a very small window of time, and no, I don’t mean he lives “in the moment” in that healthy, New-Age-y sort of way. I mean he has trouble looking backwards or forwards in time.
Sympathetic audience control and a small time window produce most of the odd cognitive glitches we see in our president. Moment to moment, he either sees a foe and shoots, or he sees a friend and is influenced. In that kind of perceptual world, Trump inevitably — and without shame or even awareness — shifts his views frequently, sometimes multiple times a day.
Not only do his views shift, he also has no trouble denying, entirely without guile, in my view, what he said yesterday. All that’s shiny and real to him is what friends or foes are saying inside those small time windows. Everything else is fuzzy, and that’s why he can so easily tell so many lies. From his perspective, lying has no meaning. Only reacting has meaning. Trump reacts.
Trump is capable of only a minimal level of analytical or critical thinking. Perhaps more alarming, our president doesn’t believe in anything and he rarely, if ever, means anything he says. The impulsive tweets, the conservative court appointments, the unfunded tax cuts, the obsession with a wall, the swipes at immigrants — all are byproducts (dross, if you will) of sympathetic audience control operating in small time windows. There are no principles operating here, just gusts of wind.
And if I’m right, Trump will continue to function this way — blindly, erratically and reactively, without principle or direction — for the rest of his life.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/30/trump-lies-reversals-rudderless-unprincipled-leader-psychologist-column/848728002/
Oriana:
As Epstein points out, we are all influenced by our audience. We speak cautiously and deferentially to a police officer, and relax around a trusted friend. We may tell a story one way to our parents, and a different way to our romantic partner.But for a typical person this “audience control” is only a minor aspect of their daily life. Trump is unusual in that audience control appears to be a dominant factor.
This is just one of the many ways that psychologists have tried to explain Trump’s chaotic behavior. Having watched Trump’s early interviews from the 1990s, I can’t help but note the sharp mental decline and thus am more inclined to see early dementia. But unusual susceptibility to audience control also has considerable explanatory power.
**
“WHATEVER IT IS YOU'RE SEEKING
WON'T COME IN THE FORM YOU'RE EXPECTING.” ~ Haruki Murakami
~ if it comes at all. It seems that nothing in life happens the way we were expecting it to happen. I guess it’s like a writer preparing an elaborate plot of a novel, and then the “characters become alive and take over — start saying and doing things not in the original plan.” And that’s just a novel — and all we need to know is that writing comes from the unconscious — of course we don’t control it! Life comes from everywhere (including “out of the blue”), wild, unpredictable, wonderfully or shockingly surprising.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will come” — never happened to me — unless I start thinking in terms of a “different form.” Then the encounter with the poetry of Rilke could be said to have been that teacher. Otherwise, waiting for a mentor has been in the same category as “one day my Prince will come.”
And now I'm dealing with the knee replacement surgery not having turned out to be the way I expected. This is not minor, since it’s about the ability to walk and the long-awaited freedom from chronic pain — and that “last dance” that life was supposed to become. So, it won’t be a dance — or else it will be something I recognize as a dance only later, musing about the strangeness of it all. At least I finally know better than to try to predict. But the brain never rests, and parallel lives happen inside our head like parallel universes.
So, this constant annihilation of the imagined future . . . with something entirely different emerging instead. This should make Buddhists of us all, free of expectations, living in the present . . . I wonder if we ever achieve such purity.
*
The first half of life is particularly charged with “waiting for life to happen.” Rilke has an unusual poem called “Remembrance.” The first stanza describes this waiting:
And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, the unique and uncommon,
the awakening of sleeping stones —
depths that would reveal you to yourself.
And then the speaker learns that the “one thing” has already happened — but it was several things — love, travel, work — life itself has happened while we were ostensibly living it, but in some depths still waiting for our “real life.”
Henry James has an unforgettable short story, The Beast in the Jungle. Here is the Wiki summary: ~ “John Marcher, the protagonist, is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a "beast in the jungle." May decides to buy a house in London with the money she inherited from a great aunt, and to spend her days with Marcher, curiously awaiting what fate has in store for him. Marcher is a hopeless fatalist, who believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his "spectacular fate".
He takes May to the theater and invites her to an occasional dinner, but does not allow her to get close to him. As he sits idly by and allows the best years of his life to pass, he takes May down as well, until the denouement where he learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman, based upon his preposterous sense of foreboding.
Marcher may appear so eccentric and unrealistic in his obsession that his fate could seem irrelevant and unconvincing. However, many critics and ordinary readers have found that his tragedy only dramatizes, with heightened effect, a common longing for an exalting experience that will redeem an otherwise humdrum existence, although most individuals will not endure anything like Marcher's final revelation at May's graveside.
The story has been read as a confession or parable about James' own life. He never married and possibly never experienced a consummated sexual relationship. Although he did enjoy a thorough experience of aesthetic creativity, it is possible that he still regretted what he called the "essential loneliness" of his life. This biographical relevance adds another level of meaning to "The Beast in the Jungle.” ~
**
Henry James, charcoal, John Singer Sargent, 1913Mary:
We tend to see ourselves always as living a narrative, our lives a journey through time. We have a past because we remember, and a future because we dream. Sometimes we get so caught up in ambition or regret we lose all sense of the present, and miss out on experiencing the richness of life as we are living it.
The story of the Henry James character who wastes his life waiting for some big future calamity, only to realize too late that his waiting was the calamity he feared, reminds me of one of my favorite novels, Dickens’s Great Expectations. The irony is that Pip's vision of his future as a monied “gentleman” is based on his assumptions that future will be a gift from Miss Havisham — who has immured herself in a never-ending single moment of betrayal in her past. She has stopped her clocks, still wears that wedding dress, still has the great “bride cake” waiting to be cut for celebrants long gone. She refuses to recognize time's passing, refuses to imagine a future. In her house, her body and her mind, all is ruin and decay. And because Pip believes in this imagined gift of a future, he does nothing but waste what he has, makes no preparations, works toward nothing, and refuses the good and honest connections he does have, culminating in his embarrassment for the kindest and most loving person he ever knew, Joe the blacksmith, who was his friend and protector from the early days of his youth.
The events that disabuse him of these false expectations, revealing his benefactor was not the mummified Miss Havisham, never full of anything but spite, but Magwitch the criminal he brought food to in the earliest scenes of the novel, come as both a disaster and salvation. A disaster because of the collapse of his dream of a future, salvation because that collapse also returns him to himself, a human being loved and loving, determined to be not cold and selfish but kind and generous. Not a tragedy of waste, like the James' story, but a redemptive story of recovery, of becoming more in a future unexpected, and better, than the one imagined. Pip will not be rich in anything but kindness, compassion, and humanity — still a bad fit for the cold Estella, despite the happy ending Dickens added later.
The lesson seems to be “take care in how you dream your future” — it is sure to be something far stranger than you imagine . . . and, if your focus is always on that undependable prize, you will miss all the joys and riches, and all the lessons, being lived in the present.
We are as bad at seeing the future as we are at accurately remembering the past.
We are our own storytellers and our own myth makers, and in all of that, errors abound.
I have always shied away from thinking about the future. Never had any strong ambitions, never made many plans. And yet I feel I have lived very fully.
**
Oriana:
Ah, Miss Havisham! The first time I ever read a bit of Dickens in English, during my English lessons, was the chapter introducing Miss Havisham sitting in her wedding dress at the table set for the wedding banquet, the cake moldy, everything dusty and decayed. What an unforgettable image of a disappointed bride at a grotesque extreme.
Much later, in college, I did read the entire novel, but neither Pip nor Estella (except for her training to break hearts) interested me — only, again, Miss Havisham. I didn’t yet know that I would to some extent become like her through my depressive brooding. And that had a lot to do with disappointed ambition, the future “stolen from me” — as if I had a right to a certain kind of future! As if life hadn’t already repeatedly and unsubtly shown me that nothing turns out the way we expected, and very few people get what they want — sometimes to their sorrow (“More tears are shed over answered prayers” ~ Teresa of Avila).
And most recently the surgery that “promised” to make me fully able-bodied — as if I never learned a thing. But the advantage now is that I can pull out of the low quickly, and switch the mental tracks to how I can best cope with whatever reality turns out to be. At least I’ve learned that much. I suspect that most people can’t help but form rosy expectations: it’s on automatic. We are wired that way. Sometimes we don’t even know we had those expectations until they crash.
I think you were very lucky not to have had strong ambitions. Unfortunately the whole culture encourages “great expectations.” Our parents form expectations of how we should turn out, adding to the burden. We must forgive them — it’s only human. And we must forgive ourselves for having ignored the red flags, the blatant truths, the constant lessons of the “best-laid plans of mice and men.” Slowly, slowly, we manage to learn “disappointment management.”
And once in a great while, reality turns out better than we expected. That too must be admitted, though I suspect the balance is negative for most people. Fortunately one of the great lessons is to count one’s blessings rather than one’s misfortunes and mistakes. Otherwise we run the risk of turning into Miss Havisham.
“When we fall in love, we feel super-important because we are able to reveal who we really are, giving a glimpse of our soul’s genius. The meeting between lovers is a meeting of images, an exchange of imaginations. You are in love because your imagination is on fire.”
(oops, I lost the source, but it’s probably James Hillman — it’s his typical language: he was a devout Jungian image-imagination person)
Not that I think a “soul’s genius” is a fixed set of images. It’s fluid, different at twenty than at forty. But who hasn’t noticed how each lover brings out an aspect of ourselves we were perhaps hardly even aware of? And who hasn’t felt at least somewhat alarmed by seeing a lover form an image of us that we feel is idealized, slanted toward his or her needs — and yet fascinating? And there are those special moments that become the unforgettable details of the love story. If we happen to be poets and writers, those are the “eternal moments” (as Milosz called them) that we’ll write about. Akhmatova is especially good at recording them, and has justly been called the great poet of love.
Chagall, Three Candles**
“When you're a kid you figure everything is a sin because that's what you're told. As you age, you realize that most of that sin talk was just crazy. The folks who see the world as a sinful landscape haven't grown up.” ~ John Guzlowski
Oriana:
At some point in adulthood — I was well over twenty, possibly already over thirty — I finally realized that I haven’t done anything terribly wicked in my life. I mean yes, of course at times I’ve mis-stepped and hurt others, mostly out of ignorance and immaturity, without meaning to — but anything for which I’d be sentenced in a court of law, no. If I'm forgetting something, then perhaps some deed for which I’d get community service (which in the past I would have welcomed, since I suffered from a sense of not being useful enough). But nothing that would merit a prison sentence, much less the death penalty, and much much less eternal damnation.
And yet the power of early indoctrination is so great that I’d have brief but multiple anxiety attacks over the certainty of going to hell (well, non-belief was supposedly enough, but not having a perfect marriage worried me also) and recurrent nightmare about hell (those at least were interesting).
(I was told that this sign referred to a girl kissing a girl. The funny thing is, when I was growing up, only kissing a boy was a sin — priests and nuns were emphatic about that. Girls were allowed to kiss other girls, mostly on the cheek — but an occasional quick kiss on the mouth didn’t bother anyone. Girls who did that were called “heart friends.”)
**
Ta Prohm, Cambodia; John FischerThe brain works in mysterious ways. After seeing this image, I googled the man who was the great love of my youth. I used to shiver and tremble if I just heard his voice in the hallway, in the distance. A teenage-like intensity, I know, though I was in my late twenties, which used to be known as the "Saturn return" — a time of great suffering, to which he certainly greatly contributed. It seems like another lifetime. I think we go through several lifetimes right in this life.
And whatever happened to the term "Saturn return"? I haven't heard it in ages. I think "shit happens" took over entirely. More accurate, but devoid of poetry.
Malibu Pier, California**
“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
My parents had that kind of marriage. Today (August 4) would be my mother's birthday. Since she liked to celebrate her birthday by climbing Mt. Whitney, here she is in her seventies.
POETIC LANGUAGE AND ENLIGHTENMENT: LI-YOUNG LEE
“Poetic language. The more we practice it, the more we discover how thinking in poetry is actually the closest thing we have to enlightenment. Poetic consciousness is the deepest, fullest form of consciousness there is. The longer we practice it, like a yoga, the more we uncover about ourselves, our identity as children of the cosmos, or of God. Whatever you want to call it.” ~ Li-Young Lee, interview in Los Angeles Review of Books
Whitman’s “cosmic self” is perhaps Exhibit A here. Somehow “all about me” becomes larger than that, huge, all humanity and beyond — all there is, universal. As Whitman says, he’s a “cosmos.” How does it happen that the personal becomes not only the political, but in fact all-embracing, cosmic? Instead of making a direct statement, we find an image — and an image has a multitude of possibilities.
“The longer we practice [using poetic language], the more we uncover about . . . our identity as children of the cosmos.” I was tremendously affected by the statement in Desiderata that said, "You are a child of the Universe . . . you have a right to be here." It was the antidote to the Catholic message of being a wretched sinner, most likely headed for hell (while reason eventually rejects this message, it lingers at the emotional level). Being a child of god didn’t do anything for me because I saw god as evil — an angry, narcissistic (the non-stop need for praise), abusive father. Nature wasn’t kind in the human sense, but it wasn’t malicious — and it was beautiful.
Epidote (a silicate mineral)*
LOCATION, LOCATION! REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS LITERALLY LIVE IN DIFFERENT WORLDS
~ “. . . a future of even greater distance — and antagonism — between a Democratic coalition centered in racially diverse, largely secular, and post-industrial metropolitan centers and a Republican coalition grounded in small-town and rural communities that remain mostly white, Christian and rooted in traditional manufacturing, agriculture and resource extraction.
“I fully expect smaller places to become more conservative and larger places to become more Democratic,” says McGoldrick, a long-time Republican consultant. “If you believe geographic sorting/ arbitrage is happening, then where people live and how they live is increasingly important in predicting their views on politics.”
Since the early 1990s, the two parties' coalitions of support have steadily separated, both demographically and geographically. That process reached a new peak in the bruising 2016 presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Geographically, Clinton dominated the nation's biggest places, winning 87 of the nation's 100 largest counties, while Trump carried over 2,600 of the nation's other 3,000 counties, most of them smaller. (He won more counties than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.)
Demographically, the divides were just as formidable, with Clinton posting big margins among younger and minority voters, Trump romping among blue-collar and older whites, and college-educated whites dividing almost exactly in half between them. The parties' positions in the House of Representatives largely follow these tracks, with Democrats relying mostly on diverse and white-collar urbanized districts, while most of the Republican caucus represents predominantly white and heavily blue-collar seats beyond the metro centers.
One reason small-town and rural areas tilt so much more toward the GOP than urban areas is because their demographic composition leans so much more toward the groups that now most favor Republicans: older, blue-collar and evangelical whites.
But the viewing data that McGoldrick cites point toward another key factor widening the American divide: voters with the same demographic characteristics display very different political and cultural attitudes depending on their geographic location. Each of the electorate's non-college whites almost always expressed more conservative views than did either non-whites or whites with a college degree living in the same kind of geographic area.
When asked, for instance, whether immigrants had a positive impact on their community, in urban areas 62% of college-educated whites and 51% of non-whites, compared to only 36% of non-college whites said yes. In suburban areas, 56% of college-educated whites and 50% of non-whites, compared to just 32% of blue-collar whites, saw a positive impact. In rural areas, about 40% of both college whites and non-whites saw a positive impact, compared to only about one-fourth of non-college whites.
The sole wrinkle in this general pattern is that in urban areas non-whites were slightly less likely than blue-collar whites to express liberal views on abortion and gay marriage — a reflection of the deep culturally conservative strains in many African-American and Hispanic churches.
But, just as important, Pew's survey also found that the share of each major demographic group expressing liberal views was almost always greater, often much greater, in larger than smaller places. three broadest groupings — whites without a college degree, whites with a four-year college degree or more and non-whites — bend steadily toward more conservative views as they move from the most- to the least-populated communities.
In an interview, Teixeira cited three reasons that could explain why voters with the same demographic characteristics are trending toward more conservative positions in smaller geographic areas.
"One is you hang around in an area where certain types of ideas are dominant and you tend to absorb those attitudes," he said. Second, he continued, in small places people are less likely to actually face personal interaction with the sources of so many cultural flashpoints. "There is a well known relationship about ... having certain attitudes about immigration or feminists and not encountering many," he notes.
Finally, he said, these impulses are reinforced by the growing economic gap between thriving larger metropolitan areas and smaller places that are struggling to hold population and jobs. "The fact is that a lot of these white non-college voters who are living in dense areas are living in areas that are working, where economic mobility is feasible, and that takes the edge off of their cultural conservatism," Teixeira says.
McGoldrick likewise sees cultural and economic factors reinforcing each other to deepen the urban/rural split. "The more 'politics' continues to become a series of cultural skirmishes and less about policy, the more the two parties find it advantageous to represent different worldviews," he says. At the same time, he notes, not only are urban centers more welcoming of the nation's propulsive demographic and cultural change, but they are also more likely to consider themselves winners in the economy's ongoing transformation.
“My view is the forces driving politics from the New Deal to the end of the 20th century were largely about the role of government plays in society,” he says. “I believe, whether or not we realize, we have been in the midst of a different debate, which is the role technology plays in society.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/12/politics/republicans-democrats-different-worlds/index.html
Chagall: Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1939**
If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism, 1811
**
MILOSZ’S METAPHYSICAL DESPONDENCY: THE GOD OF NATURE VERSUS THE GOD OF HUMANITY (RABBI KUSHNER)
~ “A sudden and unexpected death is merciful in comparison with slow and — even worse — fully conscious dying. This eternal, unchanging sediment of horror, with that festive noisy spectacle on the surface, provides, for me at least, an argument against the goodness of the Creator. This really eats at me and I return to the point I started from, to my metaphysical despondency as a fifteen-year-old.
. . . Hannah [92, in an old-age home] says she wants only one thing -- to die -- and that she cannot kill herself, how could she, because ‘I never even killed a fly in my entire life’. She tells me of her dream: she was it the Opera and was walking up the stairs, but when she reached the doors, they were locked. And then more stairs and locked doors.
‘How can one exit from life?’ she asks. ‘What can I do to fall asleep and not wake up?’ Who could succeed in convincing this helpless being whose one desire is not to be that she should feel the hope inherent in being alive? Let me note that in calling this arrangement of the world monstrous we enter into a purely human solidarity, we underline our, our species’ uniqueness in the universe, and our consciousness and our moral protests are backed by a bright and weak God against the dark and powerful God of Nature.” ~
Blake: Hecate, 1795Oriana:
Milosz knew that the god he publicly worshiped will not and cannot break the laws of nature. He knew that his desperate wish for a “sign” — that a statue in a church would nod to him or move its stone or wooden hand — would never be satisfied. Thus, it’s not a caring god but the laws of nature that are “in charge.” It’s the laws of nature that govern reality, and not the god of wishful thinking (also known as “The Secret”). That’s the “bright and weak” god projected by the collective human psyche (never mind the assertions of omnipotence, a relatively late development), and that god of humanity is ultimately helpless against “the dark and powerful God of Nature.”
For one thing, the god of humanity is as yet pretty helpless to prevent the ravages of aging. Still, think how early “old” used to start in past centuries. Even in the late 19th century sixty was the beginning of old age — meaning toothless, half-deaf, frail, not infrequently already in a wheelchair. Sixty five was chosen as the age of retirement — with pension, and/or Social Security — precisely because it was regarded as being at death’s door.
At least we’ve managed to delay the worst of it. Not to prevent it, but to delay it — but that is already a great thing, these ten to twenty more years of reasonably healthy, productive life. Even the eighties can be a treasure, a very enjoyable decade — a view stated by Oliver Sacks, whose father regarded those years as a great gift (Oliver himself, alas, succumbed to cancer at only 82, his writing and lecturing still at full powers — another example of how a brilliant mind and having a lot to live for are no guarantee of an exceptionally long life, though these factors do increase the chances — life expectancy strongly correlates with IQ).
But back to Milosz’s “metaphysical despondency.” If god exists, he is either not good or else powerless to do much good. It’s interesting how close Milosz comes here to Rabbi Kushner, who likewise sees god as powerless to prevent “bad things” from happening to good people. In spite of being a “sum of human ideals and aspirations,” it’s not an attractive god, and this lack of appeal may be the reason so many find some consolation in Buddhist attitude of acceptance rather than struggle.
Still, I understand Milosz’s or anyone’s longing for a deity that cares about humanity. I may slip into being a closet mystic now and then — it’s hard not to witness a startling coincidence and not read some human, all too human meaning into it. But I was also a closet naturalist even at the height of my Catholic years (between the ages of ten and twelve). It was great to drop it all and admit that all that time I was praying to empty air — which I couldn't help suspecting — just as I basically thought that yes, god existed, but he didn't give a damn about anyone's suffering — otherwise how would he be able to look into an old woman's face, with so much suffering in it, and just toss her into hell? To toss millions into hell every day? What a relief it was to be done with the evil monster, and see instead that nature acted with malice toward none.
(I suddenly thought of Trumpsters [Trump is surprisingly similar to Yahweh], and how they'd say that the people burning in hell deserve to be in hell. They are criminals! Rapists, drug dealers . . . no absurdity is too much when it comes to explaining away cruelty — just as the Germans thought that the Jews sent to concentration camps were criminals — or, alternatively, they were sent there for their own safety. Humans have always spent much energy trying to justify evil — including finding excuses for god.)
*
Yet there is another dimension to the problem of the ailments of old age, sometimes so severe that people literally want to die: medicine could be farther ahead, making the twilight years more pleasant, if money and human resources were spent in a more rational way. Research on the mechanisms of aging should be our priority, not the defense establishment building bombers and aircraft carriers. “When will they ever learn?” Look, the country can’t even manage to adopt the metric system.
(There is, by the way, the difference in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest regions of the US is now more than twenty years: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/may/08/life-expectancy-gap-rich-poor-us-regions-more-than-20-years).
Lucien Freud, Self-Portrait, 1963*
Lucien Freud, Self-Portrait, 2002*
WHY MOSQUITOES BITE SOME PEOPLE MORE THAN OTHERS
~ “Some people get bitten by mosquitoes more than others. As it turns out, your body could be giving off cues (without your knowledge) that you're an attractive blood meal, according to research from Professor Leslie Vosshall and her colleagues at the Rockefeller University of New York, Technology Networks reported.
"We attract mosquitoes via multiple sensory cues including emitted body odor from lactic acid, heat and carbon dioxide in our breath, and mosquitoes can sense differences between these cues to determine which animal or human to target for blood-feeding," she explained. This means that if your bestie leaves a backyard barbecue bite-free but you leave covered in itchy red welts, mosquitoes might be attracted to your unique body odor.
NBC News reported that Jonathan Day, professor of medical entomology at the University of Florida in Vero Beach, said that 20 percent of people get more mosquito bites than the general population, and people who produce more carbon dioxide, like pregnant women, are more likely to be attractive to mosquitoes.
"Lactic acid (given off while exercising), acetone (a chemical released in your breath), and estradiol [a potent hormone in the estrogen family] can all be released at varying concentrations and lure in mosquitoes. Your body temperature, or warmth, can also make a difference. Mosquitoes may flock to pregnant women because of their extra body heat," Cari Neirenberg reported for NBC News in an interview with Day.
Day also told TIME magazine that drinking alcohol can raise your metabolic rate, which in turns increases the amount of carbon dioxide you emit. This combination makes you attractive to mosquitoes. In addition to smell, the color of your clothes also play a role in whether or not mosquitoes will seek you out for their dinner. If you regularly dress in black, red, or navy blue, you're more attractive to mosquitoes because the pests are better able to see your silhouette and zero in on you.
What's more, a study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology found that people with type O blood are more likely to get bitten by mosquitoes than those with type A or B blood. Basically, a lot of things go into a mosquito's decision to bite you, and some of them — like your blood type — are out of your control.
If all this weren't bad enough, research published in Scientific Reports noted that mosquitoes are more likely to bite you when they're dehydrated. So, if you venture out for a hike in a remote area where mosquitoes haven't been able to find enough water to quench their thirst, you're more likely to become their meal no matter what you're wearing or how you smell.
According to the study, mosquitoes that had been deprived of water for just a few hours were much more likely to bite people than those with consistent access to water. While all of this new research increases our understanding of mosquito behavior, scientists are still no closer to knowing how to prevent you from getting bitten by mosquitoes entirely.
Wearing a bug repellant that contains DEET can help, but if you want to go all-natch, a number of essential oils can reduce your chances of becoming an unwilling target for these insect vampires. Healthline reported that essential oils like lavender, tea tree, Greek catnip, thyme, soybean, citronella, eucalyptus, and neem can help keep those pesky bugs off of your body. Dilute the oil of your choice in water and put the mixture into a little spray bottle you can carry in your bag. You can also opt for light clothing and avoid alcohol and rigorous exercise if you know you're venturing into a mosquito-heavy area. ~
https://www.bustle.com/p/why-do-some-people-get-bitten-by-mosquitoes-more-than-others-science-has-a-surprising-answer-9920597
Oriana:
I’ve tried just about every spray and type of clothing — everything, including mega-doses of B vitamins that were supposed to make you smell bad to mosquitoes. But some areas are so heavily infested that the only remedy is to stay away. When I still went camping, I learned to always carry a tube of hydrocortisone cream with me, to apply as soon as I felt even the tiniest sting. This at least alleviates the misery. (Sure, I carried a spray bottle too, but those essential oils never proved very effective.)
a mosquito's foot magnified 800 times *
ending on beauty:
A broken moon on the cold water,
And wild geese crying high overhead,
The smoke of the campfire rises
Toward the geometry of heaven —
Points of light in the infinite blackness.
I watch across the narrow inlet
Your dark figure comes and goes before the fire.
A loon cries out on the night bound lake.
Then all the world is silent with the
Silence of autumn waiting for
The coming of winter. I enter
The ring of firelight, bringing to you
A string of trout for our dinner.
As we eat by the whispering lake,
I say, “Many years from now we will
Remember this night and talk of it.”
Many years have gone by since then, and
Many years again. I remember
That night as though it was last night,
But you have been dead for thirty years.
~ Kenneth Rexroth, from “Your Birthday in the California Mountains, New Poems" (New Directions, 1974)
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