**
TELLING FORTUNES
All lines sink deep into the valley of the palm
into the small cavity where beats the spring of fate
here is the line of life look it flies like an arrow
the horizon of five fingers brightened by a stream
that rushes forward destroying obstacles
there is nothing more beautiful or powerful
than this onward rush
how helpless by comparison the line of fidelity
like a cry in the night like a river in the desert
conceived in the sand and dying in the sand
perhaps deeper under the skin it continues
spreads apart the tissue of muscles enters arteries
so we can meet our dead at night
inside where there is memory and blood
in the mines wells chambers
full of warm names
that hill wasn’t there — I remember well
over there was a nest of tenderness as round as if
a hot tear of lead fell on the hand
I remember well the hair
I remember the shadow of the cheek
fragile fingers and the weight of sleeping head
who has destroyed the nest who has piled
the mountain of indifference that wasn't there
why are you pressing your hand to your eyes
we are telling fortunes who do you ask
~ Zbigniew Herbert, tr Oriana Ivy
Now, there is no “line of fidelity.” There is the “heart line” — but Herbert, with his chronic womanizing (apparently related to his being bipolar — he had affairs during his manic episodes, when libido is notoriously high), invented the “line of fidelity” to have something that applied directly to his situation (which is of course a common human situation, but some people are — how should we put it? — “less monogamous than others”).
One thing I deeply appreciate about this poem is that Herbert is not dismissing his affairs as not really infidelity — unlike Milosz who claimed that all that time he was indeed faithful to “her only.”
*
Romantic love is like cut flowers — it’s not rooted in reality and doomed to end, whether or not one of the partners meets an attractive “other.”
I remember well
over there was a nest of tenderness as round as if
a hot tear of lead fell on the hand
I remember well the hair
I remember the shadow of the cheek
fragile fingers and the weight of sleeping head
who has destroyed the nest who has piled
the mountain of indifference that wasn't there
The question is whether the romance will transform into deep friendship and attachment, with acceptance of the partner’s imperfections, or just keep on withering into deeper disappointment and alienation. But that part lies outside the realm of the poem.
The last line might be interpreted as “who was it this time” — but no. I went back to the Polish text, and the accurate translation would be “whom do you ask.” “Whom” sounds a tad stilted in English, so I decided on “who.” But that’s misleading — the meaning is rather the person you ask, rather than the name of the “other woman” (though I suppose she would be the informant with the most knowledge, except for the emotional discomfort).
And it makes a terrific difference who is telling the fortunes. Usually it’s a total stranger, and that’s just what puts us at ease. It was with glee that I learned that therapists don’t usually go to other therapists — they prefer to go to psychics. It’s so easy to confide in a “psychic.”
I never “believed” in the occult in the sense of being a True Believer, but something about it was very attractive. I’ll never forget how, during a long break in a Jungian lecture, the woman next to me turned out to be an astrologer — and in no time I was telling her things that I’d never told even my closest friends. Her interpretation was of course completely astrological: “He has to do that, he is a Cancer” — and that made me completely forgiving toward that particular man, completely accepting.
And again I experienced the insight that I'm sure I had before, and more than once: people will tell things to their psychic or astrologer that they will not tell to their therapist. The difference is unconditional acceptance. Religion talked about unconditional love, but delivered condemnation instead. It saw people as evil. But here, no matter how nonsensical the basis, you were like a dear child — you are an Aries, what else could you have done? A Scorpio Rising, of course you didn’t tell anyone, except now, confiding in this dubious stranger with her soothing voice — a mother figure who understood all, forgave all.
**
Sex education is very important — but shouldn’t we also teach the older schoolchildren something about love relationships, and how they evolve over time? For me, the shock of falling out of love for the first time was a startling and deeply disquieting experience. Wasn’t love supposed to last forever? Where did that dizzying feeling go? Was there something wrong with me? Was I abnormal, incapable of “true love”? No books or movies prepared me for falling out of love. But that is not something that should be kept a secret from the young.
**
Another life lesson that I learned from my devastating early relationships was that it’s more difficult if you tend to live in your head, without much external life. Then the relationship becomes more important than it should be. It can become a destructive obsession. But having rewarding outward-focus work and activities helps preserve perspective and keeps the brain on a more even keel.
Byron diagnosed this situation correctly when he remarked “Love is of man's life a thing apart/ 'Tis woman's whole existence” (Don Juan, Canto I). Byron of course meant women of leisure, who in his epoch basically “had no life” as we’d say today. Fortunately the world has changed, offering richer options to women as well. The cure is to “get a life.”
This said, I simply have to have the “alone time” to digest what is happening. On the other hand, now I finally understand that having enough “external life” is an absolute necessity as well.
I remember how much emotionally stronger I felt once I began to devote time to poetry. Finally there was a passion in my life more important than romantic love, and what a triumph it was, what a coming into my own! I was no longer tossed by the whirlwinds of infatuation like Dante’s Francesca da Rimini. Or at least less so.
If satisfying work is not available, at least “gaze at the world,” as Larry Levis advised his overly introspective students. The beauty of the world has a healing effect.
For Nature never did betray
a heart that loved her
~ Wordsworth asserts. Only once I felt so shattered that I couldn’t respond to that beauty. Otherwise, even in my lowest moments, just “gazing at the world” has been enough to sustain my will to live. In Milwaukee, it was Lake Michigan, my sole sublime. In California, it’s enough just to look out the window.
~ “There’s an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It’s not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom’s denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump’s policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways. Tom moves like Trump, aggressive and restless, and talks like him, with ponderous pride. He picks personal fights in public, “as though … it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of [his] emotions.” Tom surprises his dinner guests with disjointed political speeches, warning insistently that “civilization’s going to pieces.” His patrician mannerisms are shot through with flashes of anxiety, “as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.”
Tom—the Yale man, the football star, the spender of old money, the scion of what he calls the Nordic race—embodies the peak of social status in his century. Trump—the former Playboy-cover subject, the billionaire celebrity, the most powerful man in America—does the same for his. And their shared personality traits are the product of their shared relationship to power—the casual unreflective certainty that comes from inheritance, and enables its holders to wield its blunt force as both a weapon and a shield. Such power has its own logic; it responds not to social or moral rules, but to what it perceives as danger. It’s for these reasons that in 2018, The Great Gatsby reads like a warning. For as much as it is a story about the American Dream, it is also a story about power under threat, and of how that power, lashing out, can render truth irrelevant.
Fitzgerald draws a connection between class and character from the first pages of the novel, encompassing honor and honesty in Nick’s comfortable middle-class notion of “advantages.” Yet it soon becomes clear that the advantage afforded by wealth is less a natural inclination to honesty than it is the privilege of bending the world to one’s own convenience. Nick sums up this dynamic:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Money is a shield between the careless wealthy and the consequences of their actions, cutting them off from the reality of what they have done and what it means. Thus, although Tom (like Trump) has a reputation for having cheated on his wife, he decries the loss of family values, transforming easily “from libertine to prig.” His actions, however confused, are in his own mind “entirely justified”— so that talking to him feels, in the end, like “talking to a child.” Tom throws the weight of his denials around in tandem with his money, dismissively contradicting a man who sells him a dog on the street. When George Wilson, the mechanic, implies that Tom has been slow to produce the car he’s promised to sell him, all it takes is Tom’s cold “No” to make clear that he’s overstepped his place.
Yet Tom is far from the only character to use his wealth and status as a means for deceit. Jordan, similarly privileged, is “incurably dishonest,” relying on the assumed codes of polite society to protect her reputation just as she relies on drivers more careful than herself to stay out of her way. Gatsby acquires a new identity when he acquires his fortune, the excess of his belongings—shirts and books and oranges and flowers—matched only by the proliferation of stories about his roots. Nick, more subtly, aspires to do the same: He buys a set of financial books with “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer,” seeking amid their “shining secrets” a way out of his old life and out of “that tangle back home” with a woman he’s rumored to be courting.
Even Daisy, idealized as she is, demonstrates the relationship between money and its power to override reality. As Tom’s wife, she personifies the kind of wealth that he possesses and other men can only pursue: In Gatsby’s words, “Her voice is full of money,” which is to say it’s seductive, hard to catch, and compels her listeners to belief, though she rarely says anything she means. At one point, Nick doesn’t notice her insincerity until the moment she stops speaking. When she does, he interprets her smirk “as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged”— signaling the couple’s elite status by flaunting how little they need to care for the truth.
Trump displays a similar carelessness. Amid the cloud of easily disprovable statements that surrounds his administration, he has also, strikingly, used falsehoods to define himself and his office—spinning claims of the largest-ever inauguration crowd and a landslide electoral victory and a record number of Time covers into the mythical biography of a superlatively powerful self. Trump doesn’t appear to care for realism, and maybe that’s the point: Whereas a social climber like Gatsby is meticulous with the details of his self-invention, stocking his library with real books though his guests would not be surprised by cardboard, Trump knows that the secret of power is effortlessness; in his world, as in Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s, wealth means less if you have to work for it. The president inspires loyalty through sheer swagger, telling it like it is even when it isn’t, speaking reality into existence: It is so, because I say so.
What can rouse such complacency into action? Only, perhaps, the notion that what Nick terms the “rather distinguished secret society” of the powerful is under siege. Tom expresses this anxiety early on in The Great Gatsby, when he warns from the head of his own opulent dinner table that “the white race,” having “produced all the things that go to make civilization,” must “watch out or these other races will have control of things.” He wants, above all, to preserve the ease with which he sets the terms of his world—“to ensure,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification.” Tom is motivated by the same reactionism that Coates has documented as one of the forces that crowned Trump the successor to America’s first black president.
Tom’s fears aren’t brought to life, however, until he comes face-to-face with Gatsby—the man who “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” whose smile, which “believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself,” reflects back to all who behold it the reification of their dreams. There’s convincing scholarship to suggest that Fitzgerald may have created Gatsby — with his “tanned skin,” close-cropped hair, and studied diction — as a light-skinned black man passing for white, and this, to the white-supremacist Tom, would have been the ultimate insult. It’s enough, though, that Gatsby acts, and leads Daisy to act, on terms that Tom has not defined — so that Tom finds his wife, and all of the wealth and power she represents, “slipping precipitately from his control.”
The tragedy unfolds from there, and strangely, it parallels Trump’s rise. Tom attacks Gatsby’s origins the way Trump demanded Barack Obama’s birth certificate, denouncing Gatsby as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” There is a scene; Daisy, unable at last to embody Gatsby’s romantic ideal, drives in tears toward home, running Myrtle down with Gatsby’s car. And Tom (after conspiring, the novel suggests, with Daisy) turns Wilson’s need for vengeance to his advantage—just as Trump, with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, played to the previously unspeakable fears of those who felt their country had been taken from them. Tom names Gatsby as the source of Wilson’s grief—his wife’s lover and her killer—and Wilson kills both Gatsby and himself, while Myrtle’s real lover (Tom) and killer (Daisy) retreat unharmed. Nick’s famous condemnation comes here — “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy.” This censure is all the more scathing for the moral emptiness of the Buchanans’ petty sin, and all the more futile: The careless, by definition, pay no attention to whom they hurt.
Like Trump, who ran on promises to ban Muslims and deport Mexicans, Tom scapegoats an outsider as a threat to what his community values. Tom assigns an identity to hazy, formless discontents and fears, just as Trump has declared a national crisis that he alone can fix. The president lives in a widening circle of disgraced former aides and advisers; likewise, Tom leaves behind him the bodies of those who have done, or been blamed for, his dirty work. And like Trump, who’s made numerous unfounded claims to cast himself as a victim, Tom cherishes his own implacable sense of what’s right and wrong and real.
And this, today, may be the most potent warning of Fitzgerald’s novel. Because when Tom and Daisy smash up the things and creatures around them, they don’t just demonstrate their own carelessness about truth and consequences. They also expose the misconceptions of their witnesses, revealing that Gatsby is blinded by his own dreams; that Jordan is naive to trust in other people’s honesty; that Nick has, as he confesses to Jordan, been lying to himself and calling it honor. So too has Trump exposed the gaps in America’s ideal of itself—the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities. He’s forced a reckoning, brought the country’s vision closer to its reality.
Yet it’s difficult, now, to know what a sense of reality is good for, when the disconnect between truth and the truths of power is so stark. In the penultimate scene of The Great Gatsby, Nick confronts Tom about what he told Wilson —and Tom is so certain of the justice of his actions that the only thing Nick can do is shake his hand. “There was nothing I could say,” Nick muses, “except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/how-the-great-gatsby-explains-trump/562673/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-fb-test-407-4-&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social
The Great Gatsby is one of the most amazing novels I've ever read. But at the time I didn't pay all that much attention to Tom Buchanan. It was about Jay and Daisy, right? Tom was a bore. This article showed me Fitzgerald's insights, down to Tom's white supremacist creed.
But the main idea here is that Tom, sheltered by his wealth, simply doesn’t care if he hurts others. Only he counts. His needs come first. Everyone else is a kind of servant, to be sacrificed if they threaten that primacy.
Such people are punished only momentarily, when they glimpse that no one really loves them, just as they have never really loved anyone. But they develop defenses against those moments of realization: everyone loves me! My wife adores me! All my mistresses found me the best and greatest lover ever! And besides, I am a loving husband and father — the best husband and father ever. Denial is so simple . . .
But denial takes energy to maintain, and outbursts of rage when it breaks down make us see a pathetic human being. Narcissism is said to stem from not having been loved (or sufficiently loved, or loved for what one truly is rather than a false persona). Sadly, it perpetuates not being loved — since love for a narcissist soon becomes love-hate, laden with resentment. Un-love breeds un-love. And humans mess up at love so much that we need dogs to show us the way.
**
TRUMP: “THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT”
~ “Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
Trump’s only true skill is the con, his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.” ~ Adam Serwer,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/?utm_medium=social&utm_term=2018-10-03T20%3A43%3A10&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=facebook
“I like to watch Trump, because he just takes my mind off stuff. No matter what happens personally, there’s this much greater disaster taking place.” ~ Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success
“Let's raise children who won't have to recover from their childhoods.” ~ Pam Leo
Wow, what a concept! And besides, I think life automatically throws difficulty and suffering at anyone, starting with childhood — so parents, teachers, coaches, clergy, etc don’t have to pile it on on top the usual dose — and we’ll still get the kind of learning that comes from dealing with difficulties. No need to hit, yell, shame, or otherwise abuse the child — who’s often scared as is, confused about the rules, and assumes everything is his or her fault.
Scott F. Fitzgerald and his daughter Scottie**
THE MYTH OF NARCISSUS AND THE CONCEPT OF ECHOISM
~ “As a child, I struggled to celebrate my achievements. I found reasons to dismiss praise—the test was easy, the teacher likes me—and blamed myself whenever someone hurt me. I was far more comfortable providing care than receiving it.
It was only, many years later, when I was writing Rethinking Narcissism and rereading the myth of Narcissus that I had an aha moment. Like the love-struck nymph in the myth, echoists, like myself, could echo the needs and feeling of others, but we’re at a loss when it comes to “voicing” our own desires. We play Echo to Narcissus, shrinking from the special attention that narcissists thrive on.
I scribbled the term echoism on a piece of paper and shivered with recognition. The myth contained both sides of narcissism—the dangers of an addiction to feeling special and the inability to enjoy feeling special at all. Everyone forgets about Echo in the myth, and that made the term seem all the more apt.
Of all the people we measured, echoists were the most “warm-hearted,” but they were also afraid of becoming a burden, felt unsettled by attention, especially praise, and agreed with statements like, “When people ask me my preferences I’m often at a loss.” Where narcissists are addicted to feeling special, echoists are afraid of it. In the myth of Narcissus, Echo, the nymph who eventually falls madly in love with Narcissus, has been cursed to repeat back the last few words she hears. Like [Echo], echoists definitely struggle to have a voice of their own.
Eechoists are often drawn to narcissists precisely because they’re so afraid of burdening others or seeming “needy” that to have someone who relishes taking up all the room, as narcissists often do, comes as something of a relief; but it's a high price to pay for a respite from their anxieties. When narcissists become abusive, echoists sometimes blame themselves for their mistreatment (“I expect too much; I’m being overly sensitive; I shouldn't have gone back"). No one deserves to be abused, whether they stay in a relationship or not — abuse is 100% the responsibility of the abuser — but echoists can mire themselves in abusive relationships because they feel responsible for their mistreatment.
Echoists appear to be born with more emotional sensitivity than most of us—they feel deeply—and when that temperament is exposed to a parent who shames or punishes them for having any needs at all, they’re apt to grow up high in echoism.
Some echoists develop from echoist parents, who pass on the fear that any special attention—wanting unique clothes, dreaming big, asking for more—is the height of arrogance and selfishness. One of my clients had a mother whose mantra was “don’t get a big head.” She grew up feeling ashamed of normal pride, downplaying her every achievement, because her mother shamed her instead of celebrating her accomplishments.
Whenever temperamentally sensitive children are punished for wanting special attention, they’re apt to become echoists. Most often, it’s narcissistic parents who push their children in this direction.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/romance-redux/201809/are-you-echoist
Oriana:
I find it almost uncanny how “echoist” sounds so similar to “egoist.” It’s of course the other side. But both narcissism and echoism have similar roots — the child’s needs for attention and being loved “as is” not having been met. Both develop as defense mechanisms against the perception “I am not loved,” which is too painful to bear.
I wouldn’t say that Echo is entirely forgotten whenever the myth of Narcissus is retold — but she is certainly not paid attention to and analyzed the way Narcissus has been.
I think Craig Malkin, the author of this article, has discovered something important. And it's such a wonderful example of how myth can keep on giving us insight who knows how many thousands of years later . . .
John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1909**
~ “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, "You please me, happiness! Abide moment!" then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored--oh then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants — eternity.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Oriana:
This could be an aside to all essays on happiness. For me the critical statement is:
“Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored.”
We must be willing to suffer, to trust that suffering will not destroy us. Anyone who’s ever accomplished anything knows the labor, the setbacks, the humiliation of rejection slips (or equivalent). And outside of the creative process, if you want the joy of parenthood, you will also know the stress of parenthood. If you want a beautiful flower garden . . . but I know I don’t have to multiply examples. “All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored.” It’s the “enamored” that makes this sentence poetry.
a fritillary on lantana; Mim EisenbergOriana:
Milosz also had the idea that for the resurrection in flesh to be real, the totality must be resurrected, including all the insects, blades of grass etc. Well, certainly the the gut microflora . . . etc etc. Nothing must be lost, forgotten, every ant and earthworm ad infinitum . . . And I had the impression that Milosz was entirely serious — his tone was perfectly serious.
*
Autumn is the most poetic season of the year. Here is how we know that autumn has arrived:
“In ancient Greece, the navel of the earth was marked by a monolith at Delphi. The navel of my earth is not in Greece (though my heart and mind reside there). My world-navel is the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. This British monument may be comically ugly but, to me, it is reassuringly familiar. I used to play around its steps when I was a tiny child. Its frieze taught me the names of the great poets, artists and thinkers of the past; the groups of figures at four corners put the four continents on the map for me.” ~ Arnold Toynbee, Why I Dislike the Western Civilization
Oriana:
Yes, the Albert Memorial is “comically ugly,” just the Warsaw’s Palace of Culture is a Stalinist-era eyesore. But any talk of demolishing the Palace of Culture breaks the hearts of those who grew up with it, and for whom Warsaw without it wouldn’t really be Warsaw. When such a landmark disappears, those who’d been familiar with it for a long time suffer from a special kind of trauma called “the loss of the familiar.” Their grief is real.
Those who grew up around the memorial will always love it. They'll take up collections for its preservation. So it goes.
Toynbee’s passage made me realize that for me the "navel of the earth" is indeed the Palace of Culture. Not that I don't love California more. Various places right here in San Diego are very dear to me, e.g. the Wind Harp at the Marina. It's indeed embarrassing to think that a ludicrous skyscraper dedicated to Joseph Stalin could have such an important place in my heart. But we get to have only one childhood — no control over that.
Prince Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, London
*
PAST VERSUS PRESENT RUSSIAN ATTEMPTS TO DEFEAT AMERICA FROM WITHIN
~ “In late-seventies, then head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, made a remark to the effect that the Soviet Union had won the Vietnam war in the streets of the American cities. Soviet leadership, via the KGB and Soviet embassy/consulates, invested many millions of dollars in helping to organize anti-war demonstrations in the US. The intended audience for its propagandistic efforts was, therefore, the American college youth and various progressive segments of US society.
Putin and his inner circle of former KGB functionaries-cum-multibillionaire mafia oligarchs, in their turn, in the course of the 2016 presidential campaign (and beyond), had (and continue to have) their countless online trolls and bots and on-site agent-provocateurs concentrating their efforts of fanning the flames of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, anti-Muslim fears, anti-Mexican resentment, etc. within the American society, by creating fictitious political groups and action committees, organizing mass gatherings of right-wing and ultra-reactionary nature in various (predominantly, red and purple) parts of the country, et al.
While the Soviet Politburo and the old KGB targeted mainly the progressive, educated layers of American society, Putin and Co go after the backward, poorly informed, racist, xenophobic, fearful, perennially embittered, past-bound ones.
The Soviet rulers tried to enlist the future of the American society in their efforts to defeat America from within, while Putin is banking on those tied to America's past.” ~ M. Iossel
AMERICA IS BECOMING MORE LIKE RUSSIA ~ Gary Shteyngart
~ “I grew up in an authoritarian country. I thought after the Soviet collapse it would become more like America in many ways. Civil society, rule of law, elections. But everything's going the opposite way. America is becoming more like Russia. Trump looks at someone like Putin and I think the envy is real. The respect is real, because this is a kleptocrat in the same way that Trump wishes to be. This is somebody who has muzzled the media the way Trump wishes to do. It's a perfect world for him. As somebody born in Russia, finding myself here in an election that has been in part determined by Russia, it's very strange.
I think a large part of the population, they want the opposite of truth to be beamed into their home — or more importantly onto their screen. If they can be proven right in their hatred and their racism, they would rather get that news beamed into their device than the hear the truth. I think people aren't that stupid. A lot of people, even people at Trump rallies, know that he was just speaking crap, that none of his stuff really makes sense. That he's lying about everything. We live in a world where people will vote for a lie. What is more '1984' than that?” ~ Gary Shteyngart
https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/09/america-is-becoming-more-like-russia-says-russian-born-novelist-gary-shteyngart.html
“I like to watch Trump, because he just takes my mind off stuff. No matter what happens personally, there’s this much greater disaster taking place.” ~ Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success
St. Petersburg (or "St. Leningrad" as Shteyngart likes to call it), Nevsky Prospect after a storm*
THE INSIGHTS OF A MAVERICK MARXIST
~ “ In the mid-1990s, as he was working on Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis was asked by an Irish historian to pen a chapter on a collection on the Great Famine. His interest in the El Niño effect, which had a chapter to itself in Ecology of Fear, would shape how he approached the topic; in his research he stumbled upon the unnecessary mass starvations in much of the Global South in the 1870s and the 1890s. The result of this intellectual peregrination was the influential Late Victorian Holocausts (2000).
He argued that during the late nineteenth century British control—both direct and indirect—over vast swathes of the world’s peasantry forced the conversion from subsistence farming to growing cash crops. This increased peasants’ vulnerability to poor harvests, especially if the El Niño effect aggravated droughts. New imperial infrastructure of railways and deep ports for steam ships could carry away cash crops to the metropole while being tied to the world market elevated the price of foodstuffs. The result was between 32 and 61 million deaths in Africa, China, Brazil, and South Asia. These natural disasters, inflicted by British capital, created a stunted “third world.” There would be no improvement in people’s living standards for decades, until national liberation.
If famines left the Global South underdeveloped in the nineteenth century, Planet of Slums argued, the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs by the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s was the analog a century later. These “reforms” forced postcolonial countries to remove tariffs on industry and agriculture, so that peasants—ruined by the fall in crop prices and dumping by Northern farmers—flooded into cities where there were no factory jobs (again, due to tariffs) and newly hollowed out welfare states could not help them.
It is capitalism’s constancy of separation that unifies Davis’s oeuvre, which has varied in geographic and temporal scope. Capitalism, as Davis traces its spread and change, separates work from ownership, people from land, metropole from colony, humanity from nature, rich from poor, gated community from slum.” ~
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/troy-vettese-last-man-know-everything?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=18d8f68f49-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_04_07_26_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-18d8f68f49-40729829
Oriana:
This bleak outlook is shared by many. And yet we are not doomed to swing between extremes. It seems that it’s been shown again and again: a mixed system is best. Such a system preserves the best features of capitalism while aiming to reduce its social cost. I, for one, adore the idea of the social safety net — best exemplified in Social Security and Medicare, and the equivalent systems in other countries.
Is Marxism still worth studying and debating as a living ideology? As a cohesive system of thought it’s a historical relic of the Industrial Revolution. Marx was infuriated by the progress made by the trade unions — for me, this almost “says it all.” But some relevant insight still glimmer in the rubble. This will take a separate article in a future blog.
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“In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a lot better.” ~ Woody Allen
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“La Sagrada Familia: like Vatican without god.” ~ John Guzlowski
John Guzlowski:
I've been there. It was wild inside and out. The interesting thing was that the architecture is so overwhelming that all the religious stuff in the church disappears. It was like the Vatican without god.
Oriana:
The same struck me about the Our Lady of the Angels cathedral in downtown LA. You get architecture rather than a church, you get modern art (ugly, even nasty — as if modernity had to be more important than anything else) — and no religious feel to it. Then the basement is a kind of traditional sub-church, and while it seems naive — a lamb, a phony virgin martyr (St. Vibiana), tall candles, votive candles — there is a warmth to it, a welcoming atmosphere.
It’s taken several centuries for the Catholic church to figure out what kind of building works best, what kind of layout, art, music, flowers, ritual . . . In old-style Catholicism, every detail counted — it was theater designed for maximum effect. You mess with it at your peril.
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LYMPHATIC VESSELS MAY PROVE KEY TO PREVENTING ALZHEIMER’S
~ “It turns out that the lymphatic vessels long thought not to exist are essential to the brain’s ability to cleanse itself. The University of Virginia researchers’ new work gives us the most complete picture yet of the role of these vessels – and their tremendous importance for brain function and healthy aging.
Jonathan Kipnis – who chairs UVA’s Department of Neuroscience and directs its Center for Brain Immunology and Glia, or BIG – and his colleagues were able to use a compound to improve the flow of waste from the brain to the lymph nodes in the neck of aged mice. The vessels became larger and drained better, and that had a direct effect on the mice’s ability to learn and remember.
“Here is the first time that we can actually enhance cognitive ability in an old mouse by targeting this lymphatic vasculature around the brain,” Kipnis said. “By itself, it’s super, super exciting, but then we said, ‘Wait a second, if that’s the case, what’s happening in Alzheimer’s?’”
The researchers determined that obstructing the vessels in mice worsens the accumulation of harmful amyloid plaques in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s. This may help explain the buildup of such plaques in people, the cause of which is not well understood.
“In human Alzheimer’s disease, 98 percent of cases are not familial, so it’s really a matter of what is affected by aging that gives rise to this disease,” researcher Sandro Da Mesquita said. “As we did in mice, it will be interesting to try and figure out what specific changes are happening in the old [brain] lymphatics in humans so we can develop specific approaches to treat age-related sickness.”
Kipnis noted that impairing the vessels in mice had a fascinating consequence: “What was really interesting is that with the worsening pathology, it actually looks very similar to what we see in human samples in terms of all this aggregation of amyloid protein in the brain and meninges,” he said. “By impairing lymphatic function, we made the mouse model more similar to human pathology.” The meninges comprise protective layers of tissue around the brain and the rest of the central nervous system.
The researchers now will work to develop a drug to improve the performance of the lymphatic vessels in people. (Kipnis just signed a contract with biopharmaceutical company PureTech Health to explore the potential clinical applications of his discoveries.) Da Mesquita also noted that it would be important to develop a method to determine how well the meningeal lymphatic vasculature is working in people.
The researchers believe that the best way to treat Alzheimer’s might be to combine vasculature repair with other approaches. Improving the flow through the meningeal lymphatic vessels might even overcome some of the obstacles that have doomed previously promising treatments, moving them from the trash heap to the clinic, they said.
It may be, though, that the new discovery offers a way to stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s to the point that treatments are unnecessary — to delay it beyond the length of the current human lifespan.
“It may be very difficult to reverse Alzheimer’s, but maybe we would be able to maintain a very high functionality of this lymphatic vasculature to delay its onset to a very old age,” Kipnis said. “I honestly believe, down the road, we can see real results.” ~
https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-brain-discovery-could-block-agings-terrible-toll-mind
human brain: motor and parietal cortex Oriana:
Alas, based on the past, we know it will take forever before anything comes of this discovery — if it does. But it’s still fascinating to read that those lymphatic vessels were not even supposed to exist. I suppose there is such a thing as knowledge for the pleasure of knowledge.
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ending on beauty:
THE STRANGENESS
The strangeness of others —
Even your sisters and brothers —
Is a responsibility to
Overcome — or some night they will be lying
In a bed dying — and HOW you loved them,
Its quality — will be as unknown
To you as your own mother was
While a living stranger.
~ Stan Rice
Full Harvest Moon over a cranberry bog; Jacob Baker
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