Daniel Pollera: Eye of the Storm, 2017**
ADAM CAST FORTH
The Garden — was it real or was it a dream?
Slow in the hazy light, I have been asking,
Almost as a comfort, if the past
Belonging to this now unhappy Adam
Was nothing but a magic fantasy
Of that God I dreamed. Now it is imprecise
In memory, that lucid paradise,
But I know it exists and will persist
Though not for me. The unforgiving earth
Is my affliction, and the incestuous wars
Of Cains and Abels and their progeny.
Nevertheless, it means much to have loved,
To have been happy, to have touched upon
The living Garden, even for one day.
~ Jorge Luis Borges
**
How strangely complicated it is, that question of paradise and its reality, whether in the past, present, or future . . . And crazily enough, it’s the promised future paradise, least real of them all, that men have killed for, and been willing to suffer hell on earth for the promise of entering through the gates. (Note that the unreal garden in nowhere does have gates! It’s not like a mountain meadow, the real paradise we can experience right here.)
But paradise is not just a garden. For some, it’s the feeling of being loved; for others, it’s the work they love. I knew a woman whose dream job was working at a wildlife refuge center. And, after a soul-killing office job, she was able to start working with animals. Talk about love entering her life. And . . . the metastases of her Stage IV breast cancer (usually a death sentence) retreated. The radiologists stood there with silly expressions on their faces, as she described this to me. That’s the power of paradise, i.e. positive emotions.
And to have experienced that state even for a while is a special experience. “If we have been loved even once, we can never be completely unhappy,” said someone whose name I have forgotten — but not the words. Or if your life was truly fulfilling even once, for months, not even years — that memory stays with you, coming back whenever you ask, “When was I happy?” Even if it can never be again, having experienced great love in any manner is transformative.
“Once I lived as the gods —
more is not needed.”
~ that’s Hölderlin, the ending of “To the Fates.” It’s a strictly subjective state of mind, depending on the richness of that mind more so than the objective circumstances (though those can intrude, like a boom-boxer driving by).
In the past I used to pester Una with the question, “But when I'm eighty, will I not feel that I’ve wasted my life on poetry?” Without hesitation, she always replied “No, you won’t regret it.” I'm coming to the conclusion that she is right: I won’t regret having tried to create beauty, to have lived in that Eden of words, even if only fitfully, sometimes only an hour a week — since everything else claims to be more urgent. Above all, I don’t think I will think that I have wasted my life, quite aside from the question of poetry. I’ve found a way to contribute — in my own small special way, which is a blessing more powerful than I could imagine.
I often ponder the fact that nothing lasts, and my current (very) imperfect paradise too will fade away.
Nevertheless, it means much to have loved,
To have been happy, to have touched upon
The living Garden, even for one day.
**
A shameless digression: It's a bit crazy that the myth is originally Mesopotamian, set in a hot climate where “the cool of the day” is so important — but it's become the foundation of the Western Civilization. It's a great if disturbing story of the "fall" and being cursed and exiled. What if we had a very different myth of origins? As Jeremy Sherman says, “We didn't fall from grace. We rose from slime.”
Two juvenile lesula monkeys*
“I DREAM IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE”: HOW TO ENTER EL ENCANTO
From a year ago: Juno's view of Jupiter, Sept 2017. Recently I saw a movie I Dream in Another Language. While I can't say I recommend it — it's so-so at best, and why use an imaginary language when real tribal languages are becoming extinct — it presented a concept of El Encanto -- a kind of afterlife heaven not based on the praise of any kind of deity, but rather communion with the loved ones, plants, birds, and animals -- a kind of idealized tropical forest. The entry ticket is not any merit but rather speaking the right language. To me that language is beauty. Beauty in any form, both literary and visual. Or rather, beauty and affection — I will speak of affection later.
This blog has developed the tradition of “ending on beauty.” More or less it also tries to open on beauty, on “enchantment.” From now on, I want to make it a more deliberate device. The reader is entering El Encanto. Articles on Trumpland and other negativity (because it’s a moral duty to speak against evil) can go in the middle, with some detox afterwards, again in the form of beauty and/or occasional humor.
Speaking of the right language as the key to heaven, to me Spanish comes close. One of the best things about the movie was the name of the female protagonist: Lluvia, rain. Ironically, Lluvia’s preoccupation is learning English (about which the linguist says, “It’s beautiful. It’s just takes practice”) — which she’ll never find as emotionally expressive. It would take a lot of practice indeed before it can open El Encanto to her.
There are passages in Shakespeare which for me are that. Here is Caliban’s description of his island in The Tempest (Act 3, Scene 2)
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
**
The idea that you enter El Encanto by speaking the right language — rather than believing the “correct” doctrine, or the right observance, e.g. I was taught that not going to church every Sunday was a mortal sin — appeals to me immensely. But wait, you may ask, doesn’t the “right language” sound just as wrong as the “right doctrine” and so forth?
Let me clarify that I don’t mean a specific existing language. Russian isn’t more “right” than French, German more right than Hungarian. Though I am truly fluent in only two languages, I am superficially familiar with several more. I am sufficiently familiar with enough languages to be able to say this: no language is inherently more magical than another. Some languages may seem more musical because they are richer in vowels, making them closer to singing — but slow down German, and the beauty of the umlauts and the long vowels compensates for the pile-up of consonants in certain other words (oddly enough, the words for sorrow and suffering are especially beautiful in German). Likewise, languages with harsh, guttural sounds also have the most kittenish, silkiest endearments.
Here, according to my observation, is the key to the kind of language that lets you enter El Encanto: it’s any language that’s spoken softly and lovingly.
Some years ago I found my way half-way to that insight in this particular poem:
ADAM’S LANGUAGE
I wake and dream: What language am I in?
Dazed with creation, he stares at me
in dawn’s amber twilight. I tell him
like a happy child: I am in Adam’s language.
My voice this morning has a higher pitch —
I recognize my cousin Zula’s voice.
Across the ocean, mountains, graves,
she seems to ask, “Why don’t you trust
the syllables you tasted first,
the tongues of wind over the Baltic dunes?”
But I want Adam, the yet unharmed
man in the Garden before the exile,
tendrils of fingers still divine.
Let’s name again the animals.
Let’s fish in the newborn river
for shiny silver vowels.
But Adam is forbidden —
we are the fruit of Eden,
our first language lost
like the face of the unknown god.
The burning branches of I AM
will never speak to us again.
I grieve that I am homeless.
A greater self replies:
All languages are Adam's.
Beloved, you are home.
~ Oriana
Like Milosz’s “Here and everywhere is my homeland” (Mittelbergheim), this got me to “All languages are Adam’s.” The part that filled itself in only later was this: words spoken with love sound beautiful. If “love” sounds like asking too much, let’s substitute “affection.” Animals respond to it — not to the “meaning” of any particular combination of sounds (though dogs seem to learn to decipher “walk” without trouble), but to the spirit of affection behind words. There are those who insist that plants also respond to affection. As for people, it’s not only infants who become sick and die die if deprived of affectionate talk.
So: the language that allows us to enter El Encanto is any language spoken in a loving way — which makes it beautiful as well. It’s also a personal, intimate language, one without grand abstractions, but alive with experienced truth. So perhaps it was perfect that the magical language in the movie was not any real language, extinct or alive. And not translating that language was also correct — because it’s about the spirit in which the words are spoken.
*
“I Dream in Two Languages” may not work well as a narrative, but it’s a poetic movie that presents the idea that you can enter El Encanto — The Enchantment — if you speak the right language. For a writer, that means finding the right words. Those often come when least expected — if you experience those 3 a.m. insights, I don’t have to explain any further.
Of course this applies to much more than writing. The longer I experience the creative process, the more I learn to trust the unconscious. The less effort, the greater the bliss, the enchantment.
Mary:
When not struggling with depression, I think I was always able to enter Enchantment, often simply with keen observation and attention to the world, the structures of insects for instance, the colors of plant life, the sounds of wind and rain, the moods of light as it illuminates objects. Sometimes this would rise almost to the level of epiphany, of a sort of ecstatic joy, where all things observed seem to fit together in significant harmony, like notes in music, steps in a dance. This could come either out of an alert and open stillness, or as something discovered while in motion, as part of a much larger motion. And these states were not wordless, but accompanied by words, sometimes whole poems rising up like a song both remembered and invented.
Thinking about our longing for El Encanto I cant help but think of that old story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden — so much like the infant's expulsion from that first perfect refuge, the womb. That longing for the lost paradise is so much that infant longing for its first home, for the safe embrace of the mother, for the language first learned, spoken in the mother's loving and beloved voice.
And that infant expelled from its first home is small and helpless and terrified-surrounded by dangers and threats. It wants power and control, safety and order. It attempts to control the world with the power of its infantile fury. Reason, the powers of the intellect, are nascent, puny, undeveloped. Stories, those it can understand — no matter what fantastical shapes they take — as long as they all work out to assuage fears and satisfy the infant’s sense of justice, its dream of power embodied as they are in fables and fairytales, and the old religions with their powerful, vengeful father gods, and sweet forgiving protective mothers.
So much of our present politics is perfect illustration of how this infant operates and sees the world — all in terms of its own fears, needs and desires. And this is an infant with real destructive power.
EL ENCANTO AS EXPERIENCING MORE POSITIVE EMOTION
Oriana:
We all experience the loss of paradise, and multiple times at that. Childhood is in some ways a terrible stage of life because of the smallness and helplessness — but the great thing is, adults are taking care of food and shelter and other necessities, leaving the child free to interact with the wonder of the world. And then, increasingly, we have to take care of all kinds of unpleasant things.
And then comes that final stage of life where a lot of people spend most of their time in doctors’ offices and waiting rooms. To me that’s just too oppressive, and I'm with Barbara Ehrenreich in her view that much of that is unnecessary and it makes perfect sense to refuse to have a torturous test like colonoscopy if you don’t have risk factors for colon cancer, and so forth. She even said she wouldn’t have chemo because “she’s old enough to die,” and she’s not willing to lose one of the precious few remaining years of her life getting chemo and recovering from it. She wants quality rather than mere quantity (and misery, it should be added).
To me, “quality” means precisely more time spent in El Encanto — ideally every day. And you are so right, Mary — perhaps the easiest way to enter El Encanto is by intense focus on the world. It’s almost perverse to consider how often we are urged to “look within” — when the real wonderland — call it “heaven” — is nature, and the entry ticket is focusing on a tree, a bird, a baby goat, a cat purring in your lap.
And the sound of rain — ah, the sound of rain . . .
The wind in the leaves. The rustling of a bird in the bush. The flicker of a lizard on a fence.
And great music, art, poetry. An embarrassment of riches!
There is also much talk about stress reduction. Alas, the way life is, you can’t avoid stress. Most of it simply not under our control. A more productive approach would to try to experience more positive emotion. Paradise is positive emotion. Surprisingly, it takes will — what I call the “will to bliss.” Don’t skip that life-giving walk just because of the initial effort of fixing up a bit (I'm speaking to women now). Chat with the neighbors, pet their dog . . . Beethoven’s Seventh unexpectedly pouring out of a van is unexpected paradise.
photo: Angie Vorhiess**
Mary:
Setting aside the ideological problems (racism, colonialism, romanticism), I think the ideas about language in Hudson's Green Mansions are intriguing. What is it like to be the last speaker of a language? Perhaps the ultimate loneliness. What does it mean when a language is lost? Do some languages define the world more "truly" than others? Is language and culture co- determinate?
Oriana:
Thanks for reminding us of that unusual book. Yes, Green Mansions presents El Encanto.
YUVAL HARARI: SCIENCE FICTION IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT KIND OF LITERATURE
~ “Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling books Sapiens and Homo Deus, is a big fan of science fiction, and includes an entire chapter about it in his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
“Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre,” Harari says in Episode 325 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.”
Because science fiction plays such a key role in shaping public opinion, he would like to see more science fiction that grapples with realistic issues like AI creating a permanent ‘useless class’ of workers. “If you want to raise public awareness of such issues, a good science fiction movie could be worth not one, but a hundred articles in Science or Nature, or even a hundred articles in the New York Times,” he says.
But he thinks that too much science fiction tends to focus on scenarios that are fanciful or outlandish.
“In most science fiction books and movies about artificial intelligence, the main plot revolves around the moment when the computer or the robot gains consciousness and starts having feelings,” he says. “And I think that this diverts the attention of the public from the really important and realistic problems, to things that are unlikely to happen anytime soon.”
AI and biotechnology may be two of the most critical issues facing humanity, but Harari notes that they’re barely a blip on the political radar. He believes that science fiction authors and filmmakers need to do everything they can to change that.
“Technology is certainly not destiny,” he says. “We can still take action and we can still regulate these technologies to prevent the worst-case scenarios, and to use these technologies mainly for good.”
on automation:
“It’s questionable how many times a human being can reinvent himself or herself during your lifetime—and your lifetime is likely to be longer, and your working years are also likely to be longer. So would you be able to reinvent yourself four, five, six times during your life? The psychological stress is immense. So I would like to see a science fiction movie that explores the rather mundane issue of somebody having to reinvent themselves, then at the end of the movie—just as they settle down into this new job, after a difficult transition period—somebody comes and announces, ‘Oh sorry, your new job has just been automated, you have to start from square one and reinvent yourself again.’”
on dystopias:
“The only question left open after you finish reading 1984 is How do we avoid getting there? But with Brave New World, it’s much, much more difficult. Everybody is satisfied and happy and pleased with everything that happens. There are no rebellions, no revolutions, there is no secret police, there is just free sex and rock and roll and drugs and whatever. And nonetheless you have this very uneasy feeling that something is wrong here, and it’s very difficult to put your finger on what’s wrong with a society in which you’ve hacked people in such a way that they’re satisfied all the time. … When it was published, it was obvious to everybody that this was a frightening dystopia, but today, more and more people read Brave New World as a straight-faced utopia. I think this shift is very interesting, and says a lot about the changes in our worldview over the last century.”
“A Nevada nuclear bomb test was set off in 1957 knocking a blimp out of the sky. Fortunately, the blimp was unmanned as it was captured crashing to the ground. It was taken down by the shockwaves of the blast.”on immortality:
“What kind of relations between parents and children would we have when the parents know that they are not going to die someday and leave their children behind? If you live to be 200, and, ‘Yes, when I was 30 I had this kid, and he’s now 170, but that was 170 years ago, this was such a small part of my life.’ What kind of parent-offspring relations do you have in such a society? I think this is another wonderful idea for a science fiction movie—without robot rebellions, without some big apocalypse, without a tyrannical government—just a simple movie about the relationship between a mother and a son when the mother is 200 years old and the son is 170 years old.”
on technology:
“You could have envisioned 50 years ago that we would develop a huge market for organ transplants, with developing countries having these huge body farms in which millions of people are being raised in order to harvest their organs and then sold to rich people in more developed countries. Such a market could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and technologically it is completely feasible—there is absolutely no technical impediment to creating such a market, with these huge body farms. … So there are many of these science fiction scenarios which never materialize because society can take action to protect itself and regulate the dangerous technologies. And this is very important to remember as we look to the future.”
https://www.wired.com/2018/09/geeks-guide-yuval-noah-harari/
Oriana:
“ . . . just a simple movie about the relationship between a mother and a son when the mother is 200 years old and the son is 170 years old.” Why —she still remembers him as a baby, of course, and also as a toddler, a first-grader, and so on. And he probably still calls her Mom, and much follows from that. You can never be on equal terms with Mom. Start calling her Janet or whatever her first name happens to be — people who’ve dared to do that (it does take courage) report an astonishing transformation.
But I digress. There is still no escaping the tremendous fact that this woman gave birth to you. It doesn’t matter that it happened 20, 70, or 170 years ago — she remembers every detail of the day you were born. Actually she remembers the day she learned she was pregnant, and how soon she began to develop a relationship with the new person-to-be inside her. I remember that during my naturalization interview (I was an “alien” and needed to be “naturalized”), the interviewer asked my mother, “How long have you known her?” (not knowing that it was my mother). It was a funny question, but the answer, when pondered, is overwhelming.
My mother on Mt. Whitney, in her late seventies. She liked to celebrate her birthday by climbing the highest peak.**
On the one hand, I believe that the liberal story is flawed, that it does not tell the truth about humanity, and that in order to survive and flourish in the 21st century we need to go beyond it. On the other hand, at present the liberal story is still fundamental to the functioning of the global order. What’s more, liberalism is now attacked by religious and nationalist fanatics who believe in nostalgic fantasies that are far more dangerous and harmful. ~ Yuval Noah Harari
*
LIVE THE QUESTIONS
“I would like to beg you . . . to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~ Ranier Maria-Rilke
This is very much Keats's "negative capability"
Rilke: drawing by Leonid Pasternak
Oriana:
I don't think that we necessarily get to live the answer. The question, of burning importance in one stage of life, may simply become irrelevant later one. We often outgrow problems rather than solve them. But the idea that if you don’t have an answer, “live the question,” can be useful so we don’t fret and thrash around impatiently, thinking we have to have an answer now.
**
Here is a story of how “live the question” influenced the life of a young woman writer.
LIVE THE QUESTION ~ “Amanda Stern: When I was in my twenties, I started to date an alcoholic, which is what you do when you’re in your twenties. And about five or six years in, I was just depleted and miserable and I needed to get out of it. And I ended up going to this therapist.
I kept on asking her what was going to happen. And she said to me during one session, you have to live the questions, and I thought, that’s so brilliant. Like yeah, I guess. Like I have to—you know she kept on saying like, there are no quick answers to anything. Uncertainty is what life is about, and you have to live with uncertainty. You have to live the questions. And anxiety is a fear of uncertainty.
It all sort of meant something to me and in a deeper way and I said, that this is just so smart. And she said, well it’s not mine. And I said, well, whose is it? And she said, it’s Rainer Rilke. And I said, I don’t know who that is. And she said, oh, well, you must read Letters to a Young Poet, that’s where I got it from. And I said, how much time is left in our session? And she was like, 20 minutes. And I said, okay, I’m going to leave early because I’m going to get that book. And I went and I got the book—it’s right here—
Will Schwalbe: Is that your copy? The copy you got?
AS: This is the copy I got. And then I went to a cafe and I read it and I underlined a lot, and it did something. It provided me with so much of what I needed, that that therapist actually couldn’t provide me with.
It was also at the same time when I was realizing that I wanted to choose writing as my profession, and I didn’t know that that was a viable option. I didn’t know if i should. And this book addressed basically all of my questions about what to do with my life, my fear of being alone, my fear of uncertainty. Every single struggle I had was addressed in this book.
It’s just ten letters to this young student who is asking him for writing advice and basically saying here’s this poem I wrote, can you tell me if it’s any good? And the first letter is Rilke writing back and saying never ask anyone whether a work of art is any good. You know, don’t look outside of yourself for the answers, you have to look in. And I was like, yes Rilke, yes! And every, every letter was like that. And then I got to the “live the questions” and I read that and I underlined that. And he was like, you have to, you know, live the questions and one day you’ll live your way into the answer. And I was like, brother, you have it going on. Like he knew everything!
Everything in it gave me permission to go ahead and break up with my boyfriend, become a writer, don’t be afraid of solitude, don’t be afraid of uncertainty, and it just provided me with so much comfort. And every time I floundered or second guessed myself, I read the book, or I would just turn to some of the underlined passages and reread them. And I carried this book with me, in my bag.
The way that I grew up, my mom shielded me from a lot of hardships, or tried to. And I think that that is a mistake that parents make, raising an anxious child. And they do it with absolute love and great intention, but it’s, it’s not—you can’t protect a child from what they’re afraid of. And so I grew up being afraid of reality and wanting answers for it, and no one had ever taught me really the truth about anything and when I read Letters to a Young Poet, I felt like it was this parental figure or like a mentor or a, you know, an older friend, giving it to me straight, but in the most eloquent, beautiful way. And it was everything that I feared, like being alone and being uncertain. I was so afraid of reality, and I guess because no one had ever explained things to me, I thought I would also be afraid of the answers.
And Rilke answered my fears in a way that made me not afraid of reality, and he gave me the truth in a palatable way. So I felt unafraid to take the next steps into adulthood. I felt unafraid—or not unafraid, but less afraid. I was given a confidence that I would survive these episodes of reality. Of breaking up with someone and being alone for the first time since I was like 17. And it gave me an energy and a sort of sense of adventure almost, that I was going to follow the same route as this person who give the best advice I’ve ever heard and that I was sort of under his guidance in some way.
It was my constant comfort and stability that I had never had. And the answers that I want are all right there, and they never change, ever. No one’s going back on their word, no one’s revising. You know, it’s just, it’s all right here.
I had been trying and and trying and trying to write my next book and every, every iteration was sort of ruined by my own personal story creeping in, and I thought, ugh man. You know, I want to use my childhood—I wanted to incorporate it into a novel. But I couldn’t seem to figure out how to do it without writing my own story and so I would stop writing the book I was writing and start a new one. And I just kept on doing that until finally, so many years had passed and, you know, I was like I’m about to be using a walker, like I have to get all of this out, and I realized that I wouldn’t be able to write my next novel if I didn’t get my own story out of the way. So, I thought I would just start writing it to get it out and to do everything that I imagined I would do if I ever wrote a memoir. I wanted to just get it out. And it sort of became the book I had been trying to write. And I realized that I couldn’t write it because it wasn’t a novel, and I had a lot of trepidation about writing a memoir and also about being really honest about, essentially, a mental illness. But I felt like I had no choice. This is what I must do. This is the book I must be writing.” ~
Amanda Stern is the author of a novel, of children’s books, and most recently, of Little Panic, a memoir about her experience living with anxiety and growing up in Manhattan.
https://lithub.com/amanda-stern-on-anxiety-becoming-a-writer-and-rilke/
Oriana:
I don't think that we necessarily get to “live the answer.” The question, of burning importance in one stage of life, may simply become irrelevant later one. We often outgrow problems rather than solve them. This may even be the most frequent scenario.
Saguaro twist; Jack Dykinga
**
LANDING LUST: THE APPEAL OF RELIGION, GANGSTERS, AND “HAPPILY EVER” AFTER HAVE MUCH IN COMMON
Heaven, Nirvana, enlightenment, alignment with God: Throughout human history and today’s cultures, people flock to religions that offer a path to a beatific graduation into a state of perfect peace, joy, and satisfaction.
Happily-ever-after fiction: Most fiction ends with some variation on happily ever after, the hero’s narrow escape from some risky, anxiety-ridden complication. By identifying with such heroes we gain vicarious, virtual-satisfaction of our landing-lust.
Rap, rock, pop anthems: We idolize and identify with pop music gods, often singing their own superhuman praises or singing about falling in love as though they’ve landed on a plateau high above the human fray.
Self-romancing: We fall in love in part for how grand it makes us feel about ourselves. Falling in love feels like landing. Falling out of love feels like freefall. We seek status, either ultimate status, the highest perch from which we imagine we can do no wrong, or at least status which would afford us more moments of feeling above it all, swaggering into more rooms where people treat us as superior.
Spectator-sport triumphalism: Reveling in our team’s victory as though we’re vindicated as members some superhuman campaign.
Appetite for charismatic leadership: Though many are coerced into submission to a powerful overlord, the overlord would not have become powerful without appealing to our landing lust. People feel superhuman by association with religious, political, and cult leaders. Trump cult enthusiasts are a prime example. Trump feigns superhuman infallibility, invincibility, and unassailability through a blend of high-minded purity and its opposite, a low cunning that he is entitled to because he is superhuman. Trump supporters aren’t just supporters. They envy his feigned superhuman status. They’re Trump wannabes. The same is so for followers of any charismatic leader. We aren’t just brainwashed. We invite such leaders to wash our minds of all doubt so we can be like them.
Gangster appeal: Something in many of us roots for all-powerful gangsters, real and fictional, people who can get away with anything as though they’re superhuman.
Anti-intellectualism: The more we think, the more we doubt, the more aware we become of conflicting pressures and reasons to doubt whether we’re on the right path. Throughout history, people have taken up arms against intellectual quests, as though through simple faith they can escape to higher ground above ivory tower intellectuals with their burdensome load of complicating reflections. We find that such anti-intellectualism in spirituality and politics, in Buddhism and Republican anti-intellectuals like Trump and Palin, campaigns that appeal because they make rising above it all look easy.
*
Language distinguishes human consciousness from animal consciousness. In “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” psychologist Robert Sapolsky argued that with language, humans can ruminate about past and future threats in a way other organisms can’t. Given language, our anxieties are more acute and chronic. We can foresee more threats which stay in mind longer, all due to our capacity to put threats into worded thoughts, ruminations about what has been and what will be.
What will be includes our own deaths, foreseeable in detail by means of our capacity to word our way to details about possible deaths. Terror Management Theory demonstrates that when you remind people of their own deaths they become more firm in their faith, in what psychologist Ernest Becker called “immortality campaigns,” campaigns in which we imagine our value living on through our commitments to absolute ideals. In other words, through words we feel greater terror and therefore greater yearning for some kind of superhuman landing, a place where we rise immortal above it all.
We live in two worlds, the real one and our language-networked imaginations. That’s what makes us both more visionary and more delusional than other organisms.
Combining our chronic awareness of threats with our capacity to imagine anything, we’ve ended up with landing lust, the dream that there’s a way to land above all threats.
*
There are two basic ways to deal with landing lust:
“I once was lost but now I’m blind” faith: You ruminate anxiously, feeling profoundly lost until you land on an interpretation of reality that makes you feel superhumanly found. You commit to it through absolute faith, a commitment to your landing story as the one true reality, no need for further evidence since there’s no possibility that you’re wrong. In other words, you take your great epiphany as the last you’ll ever need, often coming across as a know-it-all who will stop at nothing to maintain the high of landed self-certainty.
“I once was lost and may still be though I’m finding my way like everyone”: You ruminate anxiously, profoundly lost until you’re so familiar with it that, less distracted, you look around and notice that we humans are all dealing with the same threats, doubts, and anxieties.
You identify with yourself as learning, not learned, not superhuman, safe and infallible.
You still crave landed superhuman status like everyone, but you do it offline in the world of fiction. That is, you still indulge in those activities listed above. You identify with superhuman heroes, you revel in your team’s success, you get yourself self-romancingly high on delusions of grandeur sometimes, but you never forget that it’s fiction. You know you’re human, and so you get with the human curriculum, reality — the hard knocks school of life.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201809/landing-lust-the-human-drive-behind-many-human-drives
Oriana:
I'm all for enjoying fiction — as long as we remember it’s fiction. I also read the biographies in somewhat the same light: I may be inspired by the subject of the biography, I may even adore them — but I don’t confuse myself with them. Fortunately, these days the trend is against presenting “culture heroes” as invincible and infallible. Rather, we see the huge amount of suffering in the life of any huge achiever, and the price they paid.
Dali, Mirage: from The Trilogy of the Desert, 1946**
~ “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.” ~ Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
*
“It is criminal in China to compare president Xi to Winnie-the-Pooh. He is sensitive about it.” ~ John Bellinger
This face (Miles gloriosus/ the boastful soldier) by Leonardo makes me wonder how he'd draw Trump**
DON’T YELL AT THE KIDS — WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
~ “The use of spanking to discipline children has been in decline for 50 years. But yelling? Almost everybody still yells at their kids sometimes, even the parents who know it doesn’t work. Yelling may be the most widespread parental stupidity around today.
Households with regular shouting incidents tend to have children with lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression. A 2014 study in The Journal of Child Development demonstrated that yelling produces results similar to physical punishment in children: increased levels of anxiety, stress and depression along with an increase in behavioral problems.
It doesn’t make you look authoritative. It makes you look out of control to your kids. It makes you look weak. And you’re yelling, let’s be honest, because you are weak. Yelling, even more than spanking, is the response of a person who doesn’t know what else to do.
But most parents — myself included — find it hard to imagine how to get through the day without yelling. The new research on yelling presents parents with twin problems: What do I do instead? And how do I stop?
Yelling to stop your kids from running into traffic is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about yelling as a form of correction. Yelling for correction is ineffective as a tool and merely imprints the habit of yelling onto the children. We yell at our kids over the same stuff every day, and we yell at them some more because the original yelling doesn’t work. Put your clothes away. Come down for dinner. Don’t ride the dog. Stop hitting your brother.
The mere knowledge that yelling is bad, in itself, won’t help, said Alan Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale. Yelling is not a strategy, it’s a release.
“If the goal of the parent is catharsis, I want to get this out of my system and show you how mad I am, well, yelling is probably perfect,” Dr. Kazdin said. “If the goal here is to change something in the child or develop a positive habit in the child, yelling is not the way to do that.” There are other strategies, and they don’t involve screaming like a maniac.
Many think of positivity as a form of laziness, as if parents who are positive aren’t disciplining their children. But not yelling requires advance planning and discipline for the parents, which yelling doesn’t.
Dr. Kazdin promotes a program called the ABCs, which stands for antecedents, behaviors and consequences. The antecedent is the setup, telling a child, specifically, what you want them to do before you want them to do it. Behaviors are where the behavior is defined and shaped, modeled by the parent. And the consequence involves an expression of approval when that behavior is performed, an over-the top Broadway-style belt-it-to-the-back-row expression of praise with an accompanying physical gesture of approval.
So instead of yelling at your kid every night for the shoes strewn across the floor, ask him in the morning if he can put his shoes away when he comes home. Make sure when you come home that you put your own shoes away. And if your child puts his shoes away, or even puts them closer to where they’re supposed to be, tell him that he did a great job and then hug him.
The ABC method of praise is a highly specific technique. You have to be effusive, so you actually have to put a big dumb smile on your face and even wave your hands in the air. Next thing is you have to say, in a very high, cheerful voice, exactly what you’re praising. And then the third part is you have to touch the child and give him some kind of nonverbal praise. The silliness is a feature, not a bug. It makes the kid notice the praise that accompanies correct behavior. And that’s the point.
“We want to build habits,” Dr. Kazdin said. “The practice actually changes the brain, and in the process of that, the behaviors that you want to get rid of, having all kinds of temper tantrums and all the fights, all that just disappears.” Furthermore, he noted, “as a side effect, when you do these things, the parents’ depression and stress in fact go down and family relations pick up.”
If our kids behave better, then we won’t feel like yelling. And if we don’t yell, our kids will behave better.
The beauty of having a system is that instead of reacting after your kids do something bad, instead of waiting for them to mess up and then getting angry, you have a conscious plan. But planning requires discipline on the part of the parent, and it’s tough. “We know that humans have what’s called a negativity bias,” Dr. Kazdin says. “The technical term for that in psychology is ‘normal.’ This is something in the brain, in which through evolution we are very much sensitive to negative things in the environment.”
We are hard-wired to yell. It’s an evolutionary survival instinct that has turned on those it was meant to protect. It’s hard to abandon yelling, because it gives us the impression that we’re parenting.
In the 1960s, 94 percent of parents used physical punishment. A poll in 2010 found the number had declined to 22 percent. There are probably many reasons, including the influence of a number of childhood development educators. But surely one reason has to be that the reason to spank your kids evaporates if there’s a more effective way to change their behavior that doesn’t involve violence. Why spank if it doesn’t work? The same applies to yelling: Why are you yelling? It isn’t for the kids’ sake.
Ultimately, techniques of discipline have to be about effectiveness, about getting through the day while trying to get your kids to do what you want and not do what you don’t want. Praise works. Punishment doesn’t.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/well/family/why-you-should-stop-yelling-at-your-kids.html
B.F. Skinner; I suspect he'll eventually be recognized as a more important psychologist than Freud and JungReader’s comment:
“So my dog trainer says not to yell at the dog because it shows that I am not the Alpha because I am out of control. He suggests (and it works) long hard stares, calm commands with a voice of expectation. Letting the dog know I am the alpha through other methods and expectations and to give lots of praise when she meets those expectations. This commands respect from the dog. When she does wrong, be bold (but not yell, don't hit, be in control). As he put it, the way you would raise your child. hmm...food for thought here.”
Another reader:
“Read Kazdin's work, which is based on BF Skinner. I learned a lot from his book on parenting defiant children, even though mine are/were not particularly defiant.
Kazdin says we punish because it serves our social need for "justice" but really has little effect on achieving behavior change. In fact, Skinner said, "never punish." What Kazdin describes instead is pure Skinnerian behavior shaping, achieving the behavior you want from your child through rewarding of successive approximation of the desired behavior, followed by fading out the rewards once the behavior is established. It works. (It can even work on spouses).
Yelling now and then is human and at best an occurrence only by accident, followed by an apology for losing one's temper. It should not be a strategy, however, for raising kids — or for having relationships with other adults.”
*
“As someone who was brought up in the 50s and 60s in a household where yelling, hitting, and spanking were common, virtually daily occurrences for myself and/or my siblings, I can attest to the lifelong damage this environment created for the children who grew up in it. From middle age, I refused to participate when my mother still seemed to feel the need to periodically yell at me, like she could not let one of my rare and short visits end without a yelling episode. I feel sad for my mother and my childhood family that could not establish a loving environment, and I fervently hope that today's families find better ways of being, as discussed by the author and many commenters of this piece.”
Perhaps the best comment:
“Really? It's 2018 and this is the best alternative we have to yelling at our children — smarter behavior management? Better to ask, how do I get through the day without yelling at my friends? Co-workers? Boss? Turns out, the only people we yell at are our kids. Why? One, because we can get away with it, and two because we think our job is to control our kids. We can't get away with it with adults, and neither can we control adults. So we don't yell at them. Until we treat our children with as much respect as we do a friend, client, co-worker or boss, there will be no improvement in the emotional environment our children experience. Children are eager to please, eager to cooperate, eager to explore and learn, eager to do pretty much everything that turns them into wonderful adults. Why must we mess with that and try to program behaviors that come naturally? Read Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting for a good guide.”
Auguste Renoir: Bather
**
“LOOSE” VERSUS “TIGHT” CULTURES: PERMISSIVENESS VERSUS REPRESSION
~ “Why, wonders University of Maryland psychology professor Michele Gelfand, are the clocks in Brazil so often wrong, while in Germany the clocks can be counted on? What explains the difference between New Zealand, where prostitution is legal, and Singapore, where chewing gum brings severe sanctions? In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, Gelfand traces all of this, and so much more, to a single variable: the “tightness” of a culture. She explains the origins of tight (or loose) cultures in countries, in states, in companies, even in families—and then takes readers through the myriad implications, from politics to parenting.
Michele Gelfland:
All groups have social norms, or unwritten standards that guide behavior. As children, for example, we learn to not grab things out of other people’s hands; to walk on the right side of the sidewalk (or the left, depending on where you live); to put on clothes each day. These social norms are the glue that keep us together, they give us our identity and help humans to cooperate at such a remarkable degree.
In our study across 33 societies published in Science, we found that cultures vary in the strength of their social norms, with profound consequences for our worldviews, our environments, and our brains. Some cultures are tight, with little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak norms and are highly permissive.
But this distinctions isn’t just relevant for nations. The U.S. 50 states can be classified in terms of their levels of tightness, as can organizations. Our recent research also shows that the working class is tighter than the upper class. Even our own households vary in terms of how strict or permissive we are. It’s a remarkable to see how similar this pattern is across different scales.
~ Why do these differences arise?
That’s a great question. Tight and loose countries aren’t united by obvious qualities. They’re not similar in terms of their location: the tight countries of Japan, Germany, Norway, Singapore, and Pakistan are all scattered around the planet, as are the loose countries of Netherlands, Brazil, Greece, and New Zealand. Groups of tight or loose countries don’t speak the same language. They don’t share any common religion or tradition. Tight countries aren’t all the same age, nor are loose ones. Some, like Sparta and Singapore, or New Zealand and Athens, are separated by over 2,000 years.
But there’s actually an important, yet largely hidden reason for why these differences evolve: countries that have experienced a lot of threat tend to be tighter. The threat can come from many sources: a high level of natural disasters and famine, a scarcity of resources, the potential of invasions, or a high population density (compare Singapore with about 20,000 people per square mile to New Zealand that has about 50 people per square mile!). It makes sense, cultures under threat need rules to coordinate and survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters). Cultures that have it easier can afford to be more permissive.
Threat isn’t the only predictor of a culture’s tightness. Groups that have more mobility and more exposure to other cultures tend to be looser. Take the Netherlands, for example. Its coastal location has promoted extensive travel among its citizens and a high dependency on international trade, giving the Dutch centuries of rich experiences with other cultures. It tends to be loose.
~ Which is better, tight or loose?
Neither! Tight cultures have more order. They are more coordinated, more uniform, and people exhibit more self-control. Loose cultures are comparatively more disorganized and there is less self-control. But loose cultures are much more open—they’re open to new ideas (more creative), to new people (they’re less ethnocentric) and they are more open to change.
This is what I call the tight-loose trade-off; strengths in one group can be liabilities in others.
One problem—the “Goldilock’s principle of tight-loose”—is that groups that get too extreme tend to have problems. They have higher suicide, lower happiness and more instability. Extremely tight groups are very oppressive but extremely loose groups that have little or no way to coordinate human behavior have what sociologists called anomie or total normlessness. It’s best to not be too far in either direction. This applies not only to nations but to organizations and even to our own parenting. I actually am very explicit with my kids about the domains in which the rules need to be tight and where they can be loose!
~ How do you see this playing out in different parts of the United States?
States in the South and parts of the Midwest tend to veer tight and states on the coasts tend to veer loose. Like nations, tight states tend to have experienced more threat (natural disasters, food insecurity, pathogens) than loose states. Tight states have people who have higher conscientiousness and they have more social order and politeness, but they have more discrimination and lower creativity. Loose states are ruder and have less order, but they have people with higher openness and they are much more tolerant and creative. This is the tight-loose trade-off in action again.
Tight-loose overlaps with the red-blue state distinction but it provides a far deeper understanding of how and why states differ beyond their voting behavior.
~ What insights do you think this framework offers for these troubled political times?
Tightness is an important framework to understand the rise of Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, etc. When people perceive threat, whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive. My research has shown that even illusory threats can lead to a remarkably tight psychology. Within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks, and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules, favored their own tribe, and became intolerant of outsiders.
We also found this in studies of Trump and Le Pen. People who felt threatened in our surveys felt the U.S. was too loose and needed stronger rules, and this predicted their support for Trump.
Trump seems to understand this psychology of threat. He continually states that Western civilization faces “dire threats,” that “our country is in serious trouble,” and that “something dangerous is going on.” The goal: To inspire fear, tighten groups, and be perceived as the only person who can deliver safety. Trump’s strategy has been enormously successful because it taps into a deep evolutionary principle that has helped nations survive for millennia. When people think their culture is “on the brink of disaster,” their immediate response is to embrace tight rules and tough leaders.
Societal tightening in response to real threat is adaptive, but tightening in response to manufactured or exaggerated threats can be destructive. Today we face real challenges, but we’re also confronted with unprecedented levels of fake, manufactured, and exaggerated threats that could push our nation toward unnecessary levels of tightness. Now more than ever, we need to work together to separate the illusory threats from the real ones.” ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-powerful-force-that-shapes-all-of-our-decisions/
Leonardo, sketch for the Battle of Anghiari. Note the snail helmet and all the sealife, including the head of the zodiacal Capricorn, the sea-goat! Only Leonardo could make a battle this magical.**
WHY GIANT INSECTS NO LONGER EXIST
~ “Hundreds of millions of years ago, giant insects were common on Earth. Consider Meganeura, a genus of extinct insects from approximately 300 million years ago, related to modern-day dragonflies. One member of this group – M. permiana – was first described by researchers in Kansas in 1937 as having a wingspan of over 2 feet (0.6 meters). It’s still considered one of the largest known insects that ever lived.
While over a million insect species live today, truly giant insects no longer exist. Why did they disappear?
There are two main reasons. The most important is that our atmosphere has changed. Millions of years go, the air surrounding our planet was warmer, moister and contained more oxygen. During the Carboniferous and Permian periods, Earth’s air contained 31-35 percent oxygen, as compared to just 21 percent oxygen in the air today.
Oxygen levels are especially important for insects because they don’t have lungs. Instead, they rely on air flowing through a series of opening across their bodies called spiracles, which connect directly to the tissues that need oxygen.
But there’s another reason giant insects disappeared. As ancient dinosaurs evolved the ability to fly, eventually becoming modern birds, they put a cap on insect size through predation and competition.
The earliest known bird – Archaeopteryx – appeared about 150 million years ago. Birds proved to be faster and more agile than the giant insects. In an article in LiveScience, paleobiologist Matthew Clapham of UC Santa Cruz commented:
The change in insect size is gradual. This gradual change fits quite nicely with the gradual evolution in birds at the time.
http://earthsky.org/earth/why-were-prehistoric-insects-so-huge?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=a9d6affe72-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-a9d6affe72-394935141
fossil of giant dragonfly MeganeuropsisOriana:
Higher oxygen content of the atmosphere was apparently the main factor that made plants and various animal species huge as well. Larger animals benefit from higher oxygen because they have more trouble getting enough oxygen to their tissues.
What causes the oxygen levels in the atmosphere to vary from one geological era to another? We don’t exactly know, but ocean algae appear to play a role.
**
JAMES CARSE: THE RELIGIOUS CASE AGAINST BELIEF
~ “The central thesis of Carse’s book, The Religious Case against Belief, is that there is a distinction that can be made between a religion and a belief system, and it is the distinction that, among other things, accounts for the longevity of religions. Indeed, Carse makes longevity part and parcel of his definition of what a religion is.
Belief systems can be distinguished from religions precisely by their focus on beliefs, on doctrines and dogmas. Belief systems are dependent on there being opposing beliefs against which to define themselves. Belief systems also carefully delineate a border at which thinking stops.
We find “true believers” (as Carse calls adherents to belief systems) struggling against a real or imagined other, but ultimately also struggling against the challenge to their beliefs that comes from within. A striking example of this is presented in the case of Luther, who is understood to have struggled not with the Church or an emperor but more fundamentally with himself.
And it is at this point that we can distinguish belief (understood negatively) from knowledge: “The test is rudimentary: if I am a knower, I am open to correction; if I am a believer, I resist it.”
*
Religions are like poetry, Carse claims, and differ from belief systems precisely in their resistance to definition. The Bible serves a similar function through its diversity, which is a key to its persistent vitality. So too does Jesus, and quests for Jesus show a similar vitality: “He is both the best known and the least known of all human beings. He is that person about whom the most has been said and about whom we are the most ignorant.”
Carse offers reflections on death and immortality, interacting with not only the Biblical tradition but also Emily Dickinson. Carse’s identification not only of the notion of immortality as inherently absurd, but also of any imagined immortality as inevitably boring, is poignant. Reflections on the nature of evil and goodness, and our inability to define them, are also offered.
When he turns to the creation stories and their relationship to the controversies over evolution, his insights are articulated in a striking and helpful way: “Making a protoscientific treatise of this song, thus depriving it of its grand resonance, suggests that a “literalist” reading of the Bible is not reading the Bible at all.” And as he later writes about such approaches to the Bible more generally, “The Bible…provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation. For this reason, a “literal” reading of the Bible is not a reading at all but an arbitrary choice of one passage over another, and a putting it to use of saying what the reader has already decided it should say (although that is also an interpretation, merely unrecognized as one by the reader).”
Carse’s exploration suggests an answer to the question of why religious traditions persist: their provision of central texts and/or figures who stimulate but do not exhaust the exploration of important subjects enables the formation of community, in a way that preserves the balance necessary for life between an identity and a permeable boundary to the self.
He also explains why belief systems regularly arise out of religions: “Far from providing false or unverifiable answers to our questions, the religions provide no answers at all. On this basis, one explanation for the proliferation of belief systems at the edges of the great religions is that they provide a shield against this absolute openness, a protection in advance against what might lie just beyond the horizon and so far unseen, or even imaginable.
Believers, in short, are terrified by genuine expressions of religion, and respond to them by vigorously ignoring them. They take refuge in agreement, solidarity of membership, and the sense that they belong to something that exists independently of their participation in it.”
Carse ends his book with the recognition that his critique applies to his own statements. This, far from being a problem, is as it should be. He is not providing a definitive answer but a voice in an ongoing conversation, one that should provoke further discussion and voices that dissent from his view. The last sentence in the book’s “Coda” sums it up: “And the more clamorous the response the better.” ~
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2008/12/the-religious-case-against-belief.html
from Amazon:
~ “At its core, belief carries within it a strong element of the unknown and therefore requires risk, not certainty. With that in mind, he discusses the line between knowledge and belief, explores the complicated issue of authority, considers the notion of communitas, and declares that religion in its purest form is a type of poetry, relative to which, he interprets a Dickinson poem on death as revealing the thin line between the known and the believed.” ~
THE CASE MAY BE AGAINST INSTITUTIONALISM
~ “Much of what Professor Carse offers has notable relevance to the current state of affairs of the Roman Catholic Church. As the conservative, or more accurately Restorationist, elements, push for control and emphasize the need for orthodoxy and consistency in all practices, they are driving the church itself to a position of becoming a belief system. Once an institution becomes a belief system, it cuts off all dialogue that takes place within a religion. The institution then takes on more elements of the civitas which relies on compliance with the rules more than it does on the embrace of mystery. It is now showing its "early signs of mortality." The result will be a loss of resonance. "Even more perilous, this splintering seems to have tossed aside the centuries of culture that has accumulated around the historic church — its music, literature, architecture, rituals, schools of higher (non-ideological) learning. The grand conversation that provided the unity for the religion as a whole is largely ignored." This is a clear call for all in Christianity to seek to restore the discursive nature of their religion and resist the temptation to decide that all the questions have been answered — and now the poets must be silenced.” ~
Oriana:
On the other hand, Carse sees “longevity” as one of the defining traits of a religion. Thus, he dismisses Mormonism as simply too recent to qualify as a religion. But a religion may survive not necessarily because it embraces poetry and mystery, but through intertia, intimidation, early and severe indoctrination, and/or providing just enough ritual and services (at least weddings and funerals; these days also child care, senior care, and singles meetings) to provide some basic community needs.
Still, maybe I'm just quibbling. Basically I'm all for a more poetic and mystical concept of religion as opposed to a rigid and oppressive system, so I welcome more open-minded thinkers like Carse.
In the light of this article, it might be better to use the phrase "belief system" in place of "faith"
*
Carse’s opposition between belief and religion reminds me of an earlier case made by Alan Watts on the difference between belief and faith:
~ “We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.” ~ Alan Watts
Watts says that faith is the opposite of belief, which he defined as wishful thinking, while faith is openness, a trust in reality. Carse, I think, makes a more convincing case by comparing religion to poetry: there is no single meaning (“religions provide no answers”), but there are images and interesting characters, and of course plenty of stories.
To me that means that religions provide culturally important mythology. Mythology is basically literature: there is no fixed meaning, but rather endless interpretation that changes over time and depends on the recipient of the tales. The tales themselves are both entertaining and full of sorrow — think, for instance, of the Odyssey with its moments of high comedy, but also of Odysseus’s homesickness and his grief over his dead companions.
In order to make his argument, Carse oversimplifies. Religions are also full of prohibitions, often strange and archaic, e.g. not eating pork or wearing garments of mixed fiber, not to mention gathering firewood on the Sabbath (a capital offense). And more — it’s all extremely complex, spanning as it does so many centuries of cultural change. Or are we talking about belief systems here? Can we really make a clean distinction between a belief system (answers) and religion (the embrace of mystery)? But Carse’s thesis is interesting, and I think reflects the growing trend against literalism.
Religion is not about truth or falsehood, Carse claims, but rather about stimulating the game of infinite interpretation. That’s of course just one way of looking at it. In practice, let’s face it, there is no separating religion from a system of beliefs — but for the sake of an interesting “infinite game,” we can play along with the author and reserve our wrath for belief as the enemy of humanity, while religion is about mystery and thus a “good guy.” Historians would have a good laugh over that. I don’t think I’d invest time in reading one of his books, but I’d be willing to attend to attend a lecture.
And I can easily imagine having a pleasant chat with the author afterwards. Let's do lunch! He’s certainly no fanatic, and what he loves about religion (as defined by himself) is its poetic character as an “infinite game” of discourse and interpretation. Whether it’s worthwhile to play this game is another question, and it may depend on individual temperament.
Carse is an engaging speaker. If you take pleasure in a sheer display of intelligence, you’ll enjoy his various youtube lectures, for instance this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00PJQowk-uc
According to Wikipedia, “Although Dr. Carse may not believe in God, he describes himself as religious “in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all.”
Van Gogh: Landscape at Twilight, 1890EATING FULL-FAT DAIRY SEEMS BENEFICIAL (pardon the repeated articles on this, but I know how hard it is to reverse decades of brainwashing)
~ “Eating three servings of dairy products a day could lower the risk of heart disease, a study suggests.
After analyzing the diets of more than 130,000 people in almost two dozen countries, scientists found that eating the equivalent of one serving (244 grams, or 8.6 ounces) of full-fat milk or yogurt, a 15 gram (0.6 ounce) slice of cheese or a teaspoon of butter could benefit health.
The findings, published in The Lancet, contradict dietary recommendations that advise against consuming full-fat dairy products. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s dietary guidelines for 2015 to 2020, for instance, suggest eating fat-free or low-fat dairy in its key recommendations.
Mahshid Dehghan, an investigator at the Nutrition Epidemiology program at the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and lead author of the study, said: "Our findings support that consumption of dairy products might be beneficial for mortality and cardiovascular disease, especially in low-income and middle-income countries where dairy consumption is much lower than in North America or Europe.”
Researchers at McMaster University evaluated information on 136,384 volunteers between the age of 35 to 70 from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study. At the start of the study, the participants filled out questionnaires about their diets. Researchers revisited the participants nine years later. In that time, 6,796 participants had died, and 5,855 had had heart attacks or other cardiovascular events.
The volunteers were divided into four categories: those who ate more than two servings of dairy per day; one to two servings; one serving; and no dairy at all. Most people fell into the one serving group.
Participants in North America and Europe ate the most dairy at 368 grams (about 13 ounces) a day, or more than four servings. In contrast, respondents in Southeast Asia ate as little as 37 grams (about 0.25 ounces) per day.
Those who consumed the most whole-fat dairy, 3.2 servings per day on average, had lower mortality rates at 3.3 percent from the baseline and a 3.7 percent risk of developing cardiovascular disease. But those who ate less than 0.5 servings of dairy had a total mortality rate of 44.4 percent, and a risk of cardiovascular disease at 5 percent.
Because the study was observational, it has its limits. The scientists could only infer that eating dairy might prevent heart disease or lower a person’s risk of early death, and other explanations could account for the results. Further research is needed to answer what made these patterns surface from the data.
Still, the authors said that current attitudes toward dairy products that stem from the belief that saturated fats are wholly harmful to cardiovascular health may need to be revisited. The potential benefits of compounds found in dairy products, such as certain amino acids, vitamins K1 and K2, calcium, magnesium, potassium and some probiotics warrant further investigation.” ~
https://www.newsweek.com/eating-cheese-and-butter-every-day-linked-living-longer-1115213?utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=NewsweekFacebookSF&utm_medium=Social
This is an observational study, but it confirms a pattern that started emerging in the 1980s with the “French paradox.” Note that French adults don’t drink milk, but they do eat fatty cheese. French women have the second highest average life expectancy in the world (Japanese women place first), closely followed by Singapore, Spain, France, and Switzerland — but the numbers for all these countries are very close). It’s probably not cheese per se, or any other single ingredient of the diet, but the interaction of a the usual gazillion factors.
Still, if you enjoy cheese and butter, don’t let out-of-date thinking stop you. Part of longevity may be the amount of pleasure you get from life, including food.
**
FRUCTOSE AND INCREASED RISK OF PANCREATIC CANCER, SMALL INTESTINE CANCER, AND POSSIBLY OTHER CANCERS
Abstract
Curr Opin Endocrinol Diabetes Obes. 2012 Oct;19(5):367-74. doi: 10.1097/MED.0b013e328357f0cb.
Fructose consumption and cancer: is there a connection?
Port AM1, Ruth MR, Istfan NW.
PURPOSE OF REVIEW:
Cancer cell metabolism is characterized by high rates of glucose uptake and anaerobic glycolysis. Sugar consumption has increased dramatically in the industrialized world, with refined fructose intake skyrocketing upwards in the USA over the past 30 years. Fructose provides an alternative carbon source for glycolysis, entering downstream of glucose and bypassing two key rate-limiting steps. Considering that glycolysis is the major pathway which fuels cancer growth, this review will focus on regulation and flux of glucose versus fructose through this pathway, and consider whether epidemiologic and experimental data support a mechanism whereby fructose might potentiate cancer growth in transformed cells.'
RECENT FINDINGS:
Fructose intake is associated with increased risk of pancreatic and small intestinal cancers, and possibly others. Fructose promotes flux through the pentose phosphate, which enhances protein synthesis and may indirectly increase tumor growth. Fructose treatment is associated with more aggressive cancer behavior and may promote metastasis.
SUMMARY:
Whereas glucose favors overall growth kinetics, fructose enhances protein synthesis and appears to promote a more aggressive cancer phenotype. Fructose has become ubiquitous in our food supply, with the highest consumers being teens and young adults. Therefore, understanding the potential health consequences of fructose and its role in chronic disease development is of critical importance.
Oriana:
Remember the strange "fruitarian" diet of Steve Jobs? The link between fructose and pancreatic cancer has by now been confirmed. But Big Food doesn't want you to know about it. Now, you can eat raspberries and other relatively tart fruit without worry (don't mash it into smoothies, please), but fruit juice and anything with added sugar is another matter.
ending on beauty:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path merges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
~ Ernest Dowson, from "Vitae Summa Brevis" (1896)
landscape in an agate; Dean Larson
No comments:
Post a Comment