Sartre and Cat. “The present changes the past.” The right cat also changes the past. Mary: “A cat changes everything.” “Time spent with a cat is never wasted.” ~ Colette*
THE PETRIFIED FOREST
And when it was time
I came to the Petrified Forest,
not of trees but men and women,
and I touched their cold faces.
I still had questions to ask,
and I told them of that grief
when I had lost them, no matter
how, their fault or mine (years
of that worthless emotion).
And I wondered again, aloud,
why we had made of our lives
such a stone hardness,
why so few of us held
to our roots, leafy with praise
one for the other, helping all
of us bear what we must come to.
And after a while I bent to the wind
to speak softly with petrified time.
~ David Ray
*
This is the heart of the poem:
And I wondered again, aloud,
why we had made of our lives
such a stone hardness,
why so few of us held
to our roots, leafy with praise
one for the other, helping all
of us bear what we must come to.
“Leafy with praise” — we are simply not taught how to praise intelligently. Most of us grow up with constant criticism, with put-downs. These are meant to “improve” us, even though deep down everyone knows that the result is going to be the opposite: the person who is criticized will now harbor bitterness against the critic and may even be moved to take revenge. Yet life is hard for everyone, and our first impulse should be to listen and understand, “helping all / of us bear what we must come to.”
COLETTE (THE MOVIE): A STRANGE, SAD, EMPOWERING LOVE STORY
“Colette” is a must-see if you’ve seen “The Wife” — the contrast between the two speaks volumes about the difference between a story that’s obviously made-up and a “”true story” — one based on the actual life of a woman writer of genius. In an interesting parallel, Colette’s characters were not really made-up; they were quite obviously drawn from her life and the lives of the people she knew. You could say that she wrote semi-autobiographical non-fiction (Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar comes to mind as an example of that genre; one of my creative-writing professors remarked, “That’s not a real novel, is it?”).
Keira Knightley plays a complex, daring, exuberant (but see later) Colette coming into her own. But arguably this isn’t a movie dominated by the title character. Equally important is the piggish, shameless husband, Willy, brilliantly played by Dominic West. If you quickly grow to hate Willy that is understandable — but Colette would be the first one to remind you that without Willy, she would not have become a writer. He’s greedy, unscrupulous, manipulative, exploitative — a lecher, a wastrel, a scoundrel— and ruthless enough to lock up his young wife alone in a room to force her write, so that he can enjoy unearned fame and waste the fortune his wife’s novels make.
“We need more spice, less literature” is his how Willy understands literary business. Nevertheless, he did introduce this village girl to a life that expanded her experiences and broadened her mind. We can detest him but we have to acknowledge his peculiar importance in French literary history — a fact made almost farcical by his own lack of writing talent combined with his charlatan’s facility for pretending to be a real writer (he used a “factory” of ghost writers already before marrying Colette).
But to see Willy simply as evil incarnate leaves out something important. The same can be said about the perception of Colette as more than anything an independent modern woman, a free spirit triumphantly coming into her own. This is, strangely enough, a kind of sad love story. The movie makes it clear that when the two met, they truly fell in love. When Colette discovers Willy’s first infidelity, far from being a free-spirited polyamorist, she is heartbroken. It is a shattering of dreams, of the yearning for a true soul connection (nor is Willy entirely free of the same yearning).
And Willy understands that longing for connection and being truly loved at least to some degree. He buys his bride a dog, so she’ll have at least one loyal companion — and I don’t mean it sarcastically. The movie does not imply that Colette’s spirit was broken early — yet I can’t help guessing that the wound never healed completely. And while she soon becomes determined to make the best of it and live and love as she pleases, social conventions be damned — “Since when do you consider scandal to be a bad thing?” she asks Willy, who continues to pose as her “schoolmaster” — there is a shadow of sorrow that subtly darkens the movie.
Yes, this is a luminous movie about a highly spirited and ultimately very successful woman who enjoyed not only popularity with the public but also praise from formidable figures such as Marcel Proust. “Sido,” the story of her mother, is regarded as Colette’s masterpiece (and not the Claudine novels, “spiced up” by Willy); some of her descriptive passages are famous for a marvelous sensuality. Yet the sadness and suffering are undeniable as well. In spite of the cheerful façade, the sadness keeps showing. Perhaps open marriage is too great a violation of human nature — especially for a young woman at a stage of life when the longing for a deep romantic connection is very intense. No woman could be happy being married to a man like Willy, but especially not a sensitive woman with Colette’s depth of feelings.
*
Only Willy can be called a true hedonist. Colette was a real writer, and writing is hard work. Like all creative work, it has its deep pleasures — but a writer’s life is not a life of pleasure. True, it is not without its special joys — that’s why it can compensate for romantic disappointments (but that’s probably true of all dedicated work). But it’s not “fun.” The parties, the glamour, the “beautiful people” one meets (“But aren’t they rather superficial?” asks the young and still naive Colette) all fade next to the endless hours of solitude spent writing and crossing out, writing and crossing out . . .
“No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.” ~ Colette
Of course no movie can accurately portray a writer’s life — it would be much too dull to show those hours of solitude — the plodding struggle as well as the sudden spurts of inspiration that are the real drama. So movies about writers concentrate on their love affairs, on the witty and/or profound things they said in conversation, and on whatever else they may have done or experienced besides writing. Thus, here we have a drama of feminine liberation in addition to a couple of lesbian affairs, and a portrayal of the French society during the Belle Epoque. All this creates a rich, sensual, sumptuous “viewing experience.” But, caught up as we are in these important externals, let’s not forget those streaks of shadow that pass over Colette’s face as if she were traveling down a tree-lined country road — or those stain-like scratched-out words that spoil the neatness of the notebooks in which she wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
**
I say a “love story” but a plural would be more appropriate. Colette’s relationship with Missy was obviously important. Missy was supportive at a time when Colette badly needed an ally — a best friend who wanted what was best for the woman writer who still let her husband take the credit (and payment) for her novels. Colette’s closeness to nature and animals was a love story of sorts as well. But it was her love of writing which proved to be the most enduring and empowering romance. Old age didn’t stop her — she wrote until the end.
Keira Knightley as Colette. **
~ “The night was murmurous and warmer than the day. Three or four lighted windows, the clouded sky patched here and there with stars, the cry of some night bird over this unfamiliar place made my throat tighten with anguish. It was an anguish without depth; a longing to weep which I could master as soon as I felt it rise. I was glad of it because it proved that I could still savor the special taste of loneliness.” ~ Colette, Bella Vista
~ “By leaning over the garden wall, I could scratch with my finger the poultry-house roof. The Upper Garden overlooked the Lower Garden - a warm, confined enclosure reserved for the cultivation of aubergines and pimentos — where the smell of tomato leaves mingled in July with that of the apricots ripening on the walls. In the Upper Garden were two twin firs, a walnut-tree whose intolerant shade killed any flowers beneath it, some rose-bushes, a neglected lawn and a dilapidated arbor. At the bottom, along the Rue des Vignes, a boundary wall reinforced with a strong iron railing ought to have ensured the privacy of the two gardens, but I never knew those railings other than twisted and torn from their cement foundations, and grappling in mid air with the invincible arms of a hundred-year-old wisteria.” ~ Colette, My Mother’s House and Sido
*
~ “Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” ~ Colette, Casual Chance
Colette’s view was that ideal companions “never have fewer than four feet.”
**
“Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters . . . Throw away your ancestors! Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath . . . Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work — learn to choose. You are good enough, you are HUMAN ENOUGH, to choose!” ~ Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
“When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
**
GIFT, GRACE, THE UNCONSCIOUS ~ meditations by Milosz and on Milosz
Milosz: “How is one to cope with beauty and at the same time with the mathematical cruelty of the universe? What is the illusory appearance here and what the real content . . . If God is evil, what is there to justify my prayers?
If one rejects the idea of punishments and rewards after death as indecent (what sort of shallow transaction is that?) and if the history of Christianity raises doubts not only because it has often served as a mask for oppression but also because the first Christians deluded themselves, anticipating the end of the world; if dogma is out of harmony with scientific thought — then one must uncover a different dimension where the contradiction can change form and find a new validity.
. . . I recognized that reality is a good deal more profound than what I might happen to think about it and that it allows for various types of cognition. In this I was loyal to my mother and loyal to Lithuania — a Lithuania haunted by the ghost of Swedenborg. Nothing could stifle my inner certainty that a shining point exists where all lines intersect. . . . I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that anything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” (The Native Realm)
In my first years as an atheist, still in my teens, I completely rejected the idea that it’s all a gift — too close to “grace.” But later I realized that I could say neither “all can be achieved by systematic effort” nor “all is a gift.” Obviously it’s a mix of both. Anyone who’s practiced the piano or another instrument can shrug his shoulders at my making such a big deal of this “effort plus gift” phenomenon. You make the first clumsy efforts, and then the “gift” part takes over — but let’s not forget that concert pianists practice for at least six hours a day, and up to twelve hours a day before a concert. And that persistence, isn’t that genetic and thus a gift?
Some matters are such a complex tangle of causes and effects that we’ll never know. Life has shattered my youthful optimism that anything can be accomplished if only one has an “iron will.” But I have a strong feeling that it’s not “either-or” but both. Life is an intricate interweave of both gift and effort (some wouldn’t hesitate to call the effort “agony”). Some days are mostly effort, while other days seem mostly “gift.” I don’t go with “90% perspiration, 10 percent inspiration.” It varies.
Artists can, and do, work insanely hard. But circumstances certainly do enter the creative process, all kinds of random factors not under our conscious control. I don’t speak of grace, but I do speak of circumstances beyond control and the astonishing behind-the-scenes work of the unconscious. Just the unconscious is a gift — the brain on automatic able to make the best the the circumstances, and find beauty even in what others might toss into the refuse bin.
In summary: There are days when “all is a gift.” There are other days, when effort is the dominant theme . . . It's a complex interweave.
It’s interesting to compare Milosz to Colette — the nature-loving Milosz, that is, to whom the Lithuanian estate of his grandparents was what Sido’s house and garden were to Colette. But Milosz, a hunter rather than a gardener, did not see nature as quite as lyrical and idyllic. He saw it as permeated with death and suffering.
(A shameless digression: It’s interesting how often Milosz mentions Swedenborg — in fact he has a whole essay devoted to this particular “heretic,” obviously Milosz’s favorite. I have recently read about the history of Unitarianism. It turns out that there are other non-trinitarian varieties of Christianity — a handful of them claim that while god is is just one person rather than three, that one person is Christ and not Yahweh. To Swedenborg, the only deity was Christ.)
I'm not sure if Milosz was familiar with Universalism, i.e. the idea of universal salvation [Universalists later merged with the Unitarians] and a loving god. It's not a question of evidence -- Milosz saw mostly an evil god — but then Milosz would say that religion has nothing to do with reason, only with feelings, and is indeed a matter of choice. To be sure, this raises a question of whether a thinking person can really just choose anything that seems pleasant to believe, e.g. the Second Coming rather than a climate catastrophe.
Another point can use some clarification: Milosz didn't ascribe *intentional* cruelty to the universe. He was an educated (even an erudite) man who spent quite a bit of his adulthood as an atheist — then returned to the Catholic church possibly chiefly because of it was a political (anti-Communist) statement. And then he kept wrestling with the idea that if god did exist, and if the order of nature included so much suffering (let's consider just the natural suffering, not the man-made sort; Milosz was supremely aware of both), then god was evil.
Milosz said something to the effect that the more humanity's morality evolves, the more cruel the god of our ancestors seems to us (Yahweh; Milosz refused to answer the question whether Yahweh and Jesus were two different deities). Hence Milosz's deep interest in Gnosticism and Swedenborgian mysticism. If you read his essays and his last poems, you can see his agonies and temporary reconciliations. Basically he was forging his own personal religion, with an afterlife that consists of restoration [“the entire personality will be preserved,”], not reward or punishment. He obviously wanted a loving deity, but suspected the opposite. He also speculated that god is simply nature, but rejected this idea precisely because in nature "everything devours everything.”
One of his provocative ideas was that people choose to believe or not to believe — that faith was a matter of choice, of feelings rather than reason. You can start going to church and praying — Rilke saw this as creating god in your mind. But Milosz’s own example shows that for a thinker, doubt is a constant. Desire to believe may be real enough, but the proverbial voice of reason cannot be silenced — except perhaps for those moments of “grace” when you see yourself and others as workers in the vineyards of the Lord, with no extinction ahead, only unconditional acceptance and restoration of all that was loved and lost).
Yet here is Milosz asserting his loyalty to the earth and to his moment in time rather than the afterlife.
NATURE VS PRIDE
~ Of the seven deadly sins, the one with perhaps the most diverse menu of antivenins is the sin of pride. Need a quick infusion of humility? Climb to a scenic overlook in the mountain range of your choice and gaze out over the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently into the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you. Or try the star-spangled bowl of a desert sky at night and consider that, as teeming as the proscenium above may seem to your naked gape, you are seeing only about 2,500 of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way — and that there are maybe 100 billion other star-studded galaxies in our universe besides, beyond your unaided view. ~ Natalie Angier
Here is nature from the point of view of awe rather than the problem of evil. That seems a lot more satisfying. **
ONE EFFECTIVE SOLUTION TO DEPRESSION? GRANDMOTHERS
~ “Globally, more than 300 million people suffer from depression, according to the World Health Organization. Depression is the world’s leading cause of disability and it contributes to 800,000 suicides per year, the majority of which occur in developing countries.
No one knows how many Zimbabweans suffer from kufungisisa, the local word for depression (literally, “thinking too much” in Shona). But Chibanda is certain the number is high.
[In Zimbabwe] those suffering from depression have few options due to a dearth of mental health professionals. Chibanda, who is director of the African Mental Health Research Initiative and an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Zimbabwe and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is one of just 12 psychiatrists practicing in Zimbabwe – a country of over 16 million. Such grim statistics are typical in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the ratio of psychiatrists and psychologists to citizens is one for every 1.5 million. “Some countries don’t even have a single psychiatrist,” Chibanda says.
In brainstorming how to tackle this problem, he arrived at an unlikely solution: grandmothers. Since 2006, Chibanda and his team have trained over 400 of the grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy, which they deliver for free in more than 70 communities in Zimbabwe. In 2017 alone, the Friendship Bench, as the program is called, helped over 30,000 people there. The method has been empirically vetted and have been expanded to countries beyond, including the US.
As Chibanda puts it: “Imagine if we could create a global network of grandmothers in every major city in the world.”
Chibanda always knew he wanted to become a doctor, but dermatology and pediatrics were his original interests. Tragedy awakened him to his calling as a psychiatrist. While in medical school in the Czech Republic, a classmate killed himself. “He was a very cheerful chap – no one expected this guy to harm himself and end his life,” he says. “But apparently he was depressed, and none of us picked up on it.”
Chibanda became a psychiatrist. But it wasn’t until Operation Murambatsvina (“remove the filth”), a 2005 government campaign to forcibly clear slums, which left 700,000 people homeless, that he realized the scale of the problem in Zimbabwe. When he ventured into communities after the campaign, he discovered “extremely high” rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues.
Chibanda was the only psychiatrist in the country working in the public health space, but his supervisors told him that there were no resources they could give him. All of the nurses were too busy with HIV-related issues and maternal and child health care, and all the rooms at the local clinic were full. They could, however, give him 14 grandmothers and provide access to the space outside.
Rather than throw up his hands, though, Chibanda came up with the idea for the friendship bench. “A lot of people think I’m a genius for thinking of this, but it’s not true,” he says. “I just had to work with what was there.”
That’s not to say that Chibanda initially believed it would work, though. The grandmothers, who were community volunteers, had no experience in mental health counseling and most had minimal education. “I was skeptical about using old women,” he admits. Nor was he the only one with misgivings. “A lot of people thought it was a ridiculous idea,” he says. “My colleagues told me, ‘This is nonsense.’”
Lacking any other option, though, Chibanda began training the grandmothers as best he could. At first, he tried to adhere to the medical terminology developed in the West, using words like “depression” and “suicidal ideation”. But the grandmothers told him this wouldn’t work. In order to reach people, they insisted, they needed to communicate through culturally rooted concepts that people can identify with. They needed, in other words, to speak the language of their patients. So in addition to the formal training the received, they worked together to incorporate Shona concepts of opening up the mind, and uplifting and strengthening the spirit.
“The training package itself is rooted in evidence-based therapy, but it’s also equally rooted in indigenous concepts,” Chibanda says. “I think that’s largely one of the reasons it’s been successful, because it’s really managed to bring together these different pieces using local knowledge and wisdom.”
[One of the volunteer grandmothers] Chinhoyi, who is 72, has lost count of the number of people she has treated on an almost daily basis over the past 10-plus years. She regularly meets with HIV-positive individuals, drug addicts, people suffering from poverty and hunger, unhappy married couples, lonely older people and pregnant, unmarried young women. Regardless of their background or circumstances, she begins her sessions the same way: “I introduce myself and I say, ‘What is your problem? Tell me everything, and let me help you with my words.’”
After hearing the individual’s story, Chinhoyi guides her patient until he or she arrives at a solution on their own. Then, until their issue is completely resolved, she follows up with the person every few days to make sure they are sticking to the plan.
Having come from the same communities as their patients, Chinhoyi and the other grandmothers have often lived through the same social traumas. Yet Chibanda and his colleagues have been shocked to find that the grandmothers themselves present surprisingly low rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other common mental health ailments. “What we see in them is this amazing resilience in the face of adversity,” he says.
Nor do the grandmothers seem to get burnt out despite counseling people on the brink of crisis day after day. “We’re exploring why this is, but what seems to be emerging is this concept of altruism, in which the grandmothers really feel that they get something out of actually making a difference in the lives of others,” Chibanda says. “It gives them a lot of great benefits, too.”
In 2016, Chibanda – collaborating with colleagues from Zimbabwe and the UK – published the results of a randomized control trial of the program’s efficacy in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers split 600 people with symptoms of depression into two groups. They found that after six months, the group that had seen the grandmothers had significantly lower symptoms of depression compared to the group that underwent conventional treatment.
The program has also expanded to several countries, and in doing so, Chibanda and his colleagues have found not only that it translates well across cultures but also that grandmothers aren’t the only ones capable of giving effective counseling. In Malawi, the Friendship Bench uses elderly counselors of both genders, while Zanzibar uses younger men and women. New York City’s counselors are the most diverse, including individuals of all ages and races, some of whom come from the LGBTQ community. “We cover all the bases,” says Takeesha White, executive director of the Office of Strategic Planning and Communications at the NYC Department of Health’s Center for Health Equity. “New York City’s population is very broad.”
“When I visited New York, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the issues New Yorkers deal with are very similar to the issues here in Zimbabwe,” Chibanda says. “It’s issues related to loneliness, to access to care, and to just being able to know that what you’re experiencing is treatable.”
“This isn’t just a solution for low-income countries,” Simms says. “This may well be a solution that every country in the world could benefit from.” ~
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181015-how-one-bench-and-a-team-of-grandmothers-can-beat-depression
Oriana:
I love the idea of grandmothers as therapists, and the native word for depression — “thinking too much” — which contains its own solution. One important step in my deciding to end my depression was coming across the book “Eating, Drinking, Overthinking.” The title alone did the work — the “overthinking” part, and putting it in the addiction category.
Regardless, I love the idea of a “friendship bench” where people can confide in a grandmother — a non-threatening, non-judgmental older woman trained in how to gently guide them to figuring out their own solutions.
**
CHARISMATIC ORGANIZATIONS AMD THE HUNGER FOR THE HEROIC IDEAL (THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE “LENINIST EXTINCTION”)
~ “The Catholic church and the Communist party in formal terms are very much alike. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church said outside the church there was no salvation. The Communist party said the exact same thing. In Solidarity you didn't have one group against another group, you had an association of individual citizens, and ironically enough for a Marxist system, they were workers in effect saying, we don't need the tutelage of this group, we don't need you for salvation. And I think that was the undoing of communism, its inability to recognize in moral terms and in political terms the individual.” ~
(Oriana: This reminded me of a self-made Chinese woman billionaire who was used to work in Western high finance, but decided to go back to China: “I missed the idealism.” I also love the way that Jowitt sees an essential similarity between St. Augustine and Stalin, and Aquinas and Khrushchev. The Catholic church is a perfect example of a totalitarian institution that used to be charismatic but then went into decline.)
~ “Ken Jowitt, author of New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, argues that Lenin created a charismatic political party that gave people a heroic ideal. He compared it to monastic orders: the Benedictines and the Jesuits. I think the Marines are another charismatic organization, looking for “superior” men capable of total dedication. No one joins the Marines to get rich. It’s about being a hero.
That’s also why fundamentalist religions that make extreme demands keep attracting followers while the toothless, non-demanding churches lose membership. Charismatic organizations actually negate the individual: the group is everything. Forget your inner life, your individualism. You get your identity from the group to which you give yourself totally: “Totus tuus.” Idealism pushed to an extreme (being willing to die and kill for the cause) results in evil, but I don’t think we can ever rid human nature of the longing to live for a great cause and be a hero.
Renunciation, asceticism, total dedication, the heroic ethos — nothing could be more opposite of consumerism.
Jowitt also makes a point that sooner or later a charismatic organization loses its charisma. This is reflected in attempts to reform the system (Vatican II comes to my mind), but the more you reform, the less you demand of the faithful, the lesser the opportunity to be a hero and the greater the loss of the organization’s charisma. It doesn’t matter if it’s a right-wing or left-wing organization: both kinds feed the emotional hunger for heroism.
Jowitt: “I think in every ideology you'll find an Augustine and an Aquinas. The Augustines are those who argue that they represent the superior and that the rest of the world is inferior; you have to attack the inferior, maintain the cohesiveness and the bounded quality of the superior. The city of God versus the city of man. Now, I'm not arguing Stalin was a Roman Catholic or an Augustinian, but in analogous terms they were the same.
As soon as you dissolve the tension between that superior group and the society, unless the group is willing to allow those people in society to be equal as individuals, there's only one thing that can happen to that group: it becomes corrupt. Aquinas, in effect, tried to revise the church to deal with the fact that the society had become more Christian. Khrushchev was Communism's Aquinas, but neither Aquinas nor Khrushchev allowed for the individual to become the major figure. Rather, the church stayed superior, even under Aquinas; the party stayed superior. What happened in the church? You got a Luther. What happened in the Communist Party? You got a Lech Walesa and an Adam Michnik. And what did they stand for? They stood for the appearance of the individual against the domination of that group.”
There is also a need for an enemy: “You have to have a combat quality, there has to an enemy to sustain your need to convert the world. If you've converted the world, charismatics go out of business.”
Jowitt says that Gorbachev really thought he could reform the system; he didn’t realize he was dismantling the Soviet Union.” ~
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Jowitt/jowitt-con3.html
Oriana:
One can argue that the early communists exhibited a perverted version of heroism, in the wrong cause, but they were heroic nevertheless. Aleksander Watt, a Polish poet and an ex-Communist ("My Century" is his fascinating tale of Soviet prisons, which cured him of both Communism and dadaist poetry) remarked that the most attractive individuals he'd ever met were pre-war Polish Communists, a fairly small and persecuted group. Their courage and devotion were total. When the party was embattled it was not corrupt. It took coming into power to corrupt it. Just one more variation on the eternal theme.
Mary: THE HAMMER AND THE CROSS
The comparison of the Communist party and the Catholic church hit me as stunningly, inarguably true. I have had personal experience with both forms of charismatic idealism, being raised in the church before the “reforms” of Vatican II, and then being caught up in the radical “marxism-leninism-maoism” fringe politics of the early 70's.
To become a hero in the church required dedication and renunciation, the selfless and unwavering belief and dedication of the saint. There was an ecstasy there, in the very intensity of commitment, of “belonging" to something so much bigger than the individual, to something that went beyond time and death, with its own internal structure of meanings, orders, definitions, regulations, procedures and rewards. We had our ceremonies, our books of prayer and catechism, our degrees of sanctification, our mission to fulfill.
Rejecting all that, I gravitated to something similar in structure with the leftist politics of that time — very much influenced by the Maoist version of Revolution, with the charismatic leader and his "little red book", the insistence on renunciation of the individual to the demands of the "masses," and of course the dictates of the leader, the rituals of endless meetings where members practiced “criticism/self-criticism" and worked to eradicate any bourgeois tendencies or thoughts in themselves and in the group.
Very harrowing, as you can imagine, and so like a religion, with saints and sinners as heroes and traitors to the Revolution, with rituals and punishments and penance to endure, and with the ecstatic sweep of being part of the movement of history toward a golden, perfect state all must sacrifice, fight and die for. A people's heaven on earth.
Of course we have seen the suffering these systems have produced — the “bankruptcy” of these ideas and ideals. They may not have disappeared entirely as of yet, but have been modified and “reformed” into much less grand and powerful shapes, and are pretty much on the road to becoming something small and unappealing, powerless and with little hope of a future.
Now we may even shake our heads and wonder how we, or anyone, could ever have been taken in by such ideals, that seem so empty, useless, and even silly. But it is wise to remember how powerful they were, and how much, both good and evil, they accomplished.
Oriana: “TRUE HAPPINESS IS ONLY ON THE CROSS”
I was horrified by Mao and his “Cultural Revolution.” To me that was sheer delusion. Coming from Poland, I realized how vulnerable to corruption the system was, and how quickly corruption took over at the first taste of power — including the power to imprison and kill. It was Catholicism, though, and reading about the saints, that gave me a certain degree of understanding of what it might feel like to have that “totus tuus” feeling — “I am all yours.” You toss your ego aside, and when you suffer, there is bliss even to that — it has a meaning. So when I came across “true happiness is only on the cross,” to me that was no joke.
But the voice of reason can’t be completely stifled, and when it whispers, “There is no one up there,” the truth of that seems so blatantly obvious that there is no mystery about why it prevails. Invisible entities milling about in the clouds? Millions of the dead up there? A city with sidewalks of beaten gold? The Catholic church in rare wisdom never pushed that one — too obviously made-up, a poor man’s fantasy.
How intelligent people can remain believers into adulthood remains a mystery to me. Some explanation has come from the study of cognitive biases, e.g. we are prone to see signs and wonders, pattern and meaning where there are none. And then there is the odious aspect of organized religion — the trail of blood, the misery it imposes through sexual repression and just its anti-life, anti-human attitude of preferring the pie in the sky to the proverbial “glory in the flower.”
And keeping the poor meek, and the women silent and subjugated — though some religions are much worse that way than others — that becomes more and more obvious as the child’s mind matures and perception broadens.
I also had a father who loathed the church precisely as a totalitarian institution, so at some point it was simply a matter of seeing how right he was, and how much the ideals were encased in an ugly shell of worldly power and sadomasochistic pathology from which they could not be divorced. The good and the evil were just too intertwined. And I could see the same thing with the Communist party, down even to some similarities in rituals (e.g. a May Day parade and a church procession) — the music, the “icons,” the flowers. It was almost funny how much overlap there was in flowers — tall showy flowers like red gladioli were the favorite. Ultimately it was all about the theater, impressing the faithful with pomp and circumstance (and, in the case of the Soviet Union, also with nuclear missiles).
The party had the advantage of not selling an invisible product — it could point to something very real like the agricultural reform or health care or education — a specific humanist ideal becoming a reality. It was not a matter to talking to imaginary friends in the sky. True, there was “historical necessity,” and those with most insight and erudition could see how Hegel “Spirit” or “History” became substitutes for god. But at least it was not an archaic god who could walk and talk.
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But the corruption within party ranks — self-enrichment, for instance, or the special stores where party members could buy Western goods, and the special clinics where they could benefit from Western medicine — that was terribly obvious too, so it was difficult to become and remain a true believer. The true believers were a dying generation; they grew up before World War 2, when the party really was charismatic, persecuted, and relatively “pure.” I can perfectly imagine how the singing of the International was once a sacred ritual providing a tremendous uplift.
And I envied that. I loved the feeling of total dedication to a cause — what moments (I think “moments” is probably the most accurate term) of it I experienced. But I could never discard my reason, which kept pointing out that nothing is all good or all bad — and even more important, nothing is an absolute truth. “Once I was lost, and now I'm blind” — past a certain age, I was never sufficiently blind to embrace either religion or political activism.
THE SALVATION OF THE “LITTLE WAY”
Then came dedication to poetry, and for a while that was tremendously satisfying — there was certainly enough crucifixion in being a poet to satisfy the idealist in me, and enough sheer sensual bliss to provide the ecstasy part. But the intellectual part of me was getting starved. I loved learned new things, and past a certain point, poetry couldn’t provide that particular pleasure.
Once I found that fascinating non-fiction gave me more fulfillment than reading poetry — plus a gazillion of other factors, including the hostility and futility of a typical poetry workshop — I was again left in that bereft, lonely place of not belonging to anything larger. Fortunately, I was beginning to embrace the small — small rituals, small accomplishments, modest pleasures of daily beauty and human connection. It was contentment rather than bliss, but that ultimately was just enough to make life worth living even in the absence of a great cause to dedicate myself to. Even the nostalgia for such a cause has become only a vague memory. The awareness that a great cause also means a potential for great harm has never left me.
But can I still understand the “true believers”? Less vividly now than in the past, but I can. But I still wonder at the blindness of someone who can’t see that great harm can come from idealism pushed to the extreme. “Once I was lost, and now I’m blind” — that’s Jeremy Sherman’s description of extremists, religious or political or any other kind.
And I'm perfectly aware that the phrase “Little Way” comes from St. Therese the Little Flower. That just beautifully adds to the ironies and complexities.
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But then most readers of this blog are presumably younger than you and me, with our memories of both pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism (the real thing, not the shabby Protestantized church of today — no, the overwhelming spectacle and splendor of the bygone era) and this or that version of communism (though today it seems that, more than anything, the Soviet Union and Mao’s China were simply super-fascist states, with no human rights as the core principle). Maybe we are not reaching anyone anymore — if so, then let this remain a historical record: that’s how it felt to be a true believer, at least for a time.
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WHY IS STALIN STILL SO POPULAR IN RUSSIA TODAY?
~ “Why is Stalin actually more popular in Russia today than he was during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991?
It's complicated. Make no mistake; most Russians aren't ignorant of Stalin's crimes. In a recent poll conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 65 percent of Russians agreed that "Stalin was a cruel, inhuman tyrant, responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people." Yet in 2011, 45 percent of Russians also had a "generally positive" view of Stalin.
Samuel Rachlin, whose Jewish family was exiled from Lithuania to Siberia by the Soviet government, recalls in The New York Times how some of his family's neighbors might have actually been grateful to Stalin, because Lithuania was later invaded by the Nazis. Sixty percent of Russians are in the "at least he's not Hitler" camp, agreeing with the statement that "for all Stalin's mistakes and misdeeds, the most important thing is that under his leadership the Soviet people won the Great Patriotic War.”
Some celebrate Stalin as one in a long line of strong Russian leaders, extending back from the Tsars to the inexplicably shirtless Vladimir Putin. Others have even more bizarre reasons for admiring him:
A surprisingly large number of Russians even believe that Stalin had mystical powers. As recently as 2003, about 750,000 people voted for a party that aimed to continue what it said was Stalin's attempt to battle the ancient Egyptian priesthood of Ra, which supposedly runs the world from its base in Switzerland. [Associated Press]
In Georgia, they have a more traditional reason for liking Stalin: He was born there. The Carnegie poll found that 68 percent of Georgians agreed that "Stalin was a wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity." According to the BBC, his birthplace of Gori features a Stalin museum and has voted to erect a huge statue of the dictator. One tour guide summed up the country's feelings towards the man:
‘In Georgia, most of the old generation like Stalin. They think he was a great statesman, with his small mistakes. Young people don't like Stalin, of course. Our young people are not interested in history and they don't like Stalin.’ [BBC]
That brings up an important point: Young people in Russia don't really think much of anything about Stalin. The Carnegie poll found that 18- to 24-year-olds were “almost twice as likely not to care about Stalin one way or another” as those who were 55 or older. Lev Kudkov, one of the authors of the study, is troubled by a population that feels increasingly positive or indifferent about Stalin, mainly because another Russian strongman might be learning lessons from him:
Vladimir Putin's Russia needs symbols of authority and national strength, however controversial they may be, to validate the newly authoritarian political order. Stalin, a despotic leader responsible for mass bloodshed but also still identified with wartime victory and national unity, fits this need for symbols that reinforce the current political ideology. [Carnegie]
As another author of the Carnegie report, Maria Lipman, gracefully points out, despite being buried in Moscow, "Stalin is not dead." ~
http://theweek.com/articles/467027/why-many-russians-still-love-stalin
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Let’s detox by reading about Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s a capsule summary, but it contains some details that I didn’t yet know (even after reading Eleanor’s biography):
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: THE “UGLY DUCKLING”
~ “Anna wore frumpy clothes. Her teeth needed straightening, they would say. People would continue to attack her looks and her self-esteem to the point that she was very insecure, she believed what everyone said about her, admitting she was an "ugly duckling."
When she first met him, she could not believe that a man was interested in her. She wanted him to see her world, so instead of going to a fancy, social event, she instead took him to the slums of the Lower East Side, where she did volunteer work, helping young immigrants.
The young man, who had held a rich, sheltered life, saw things he would never forget — sweat shops where women labored long hours for low wages and squalid tenements where children worked for hours until they dropped with exhaustion.
This walking tour profoundly changed the young man, moving him to say, that he “could not believe human beings lived that way.”
The young man's name was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the young woman, who changed his life forever, who would change the world forever, was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
They would eventually marry. On March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt would be inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt would become the First Lady. At first, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt remained shy. She would also continue to be ridiculed by the press, making fun of her stout figure, toothy smile, and way of dress. Even her own mother-in-law, still over-protective of her son, would tell Eleanor's own children that their mother was boring.
But, being First Lady allowed Eleanor Roosevelt to see more of the world, to see how the rest of the nation lived, outside of her privileged surroundings. She started speaking up for women, African-Americans, and children. And she started influencing her husband, telling him what she saw.
She would continue to receive hate mail for her views, but it just made her stronger, more determined.
When the Daughters of the American Revolution boycotted the 1936 concert of African-American singer Marian Anderson, she would resign her membership and helped organize a new concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial that made history.
She flew with black (male) pilots and helped the Tuskegee Airmen in their successful effort to become the first black combat pilots.
She would be nominated three times, during her lifetime, for a Nobel Peace Prize. She became a renowned social and political activist, journalist, educator, and diplomat. Throughout her time as First Lady, and for the remainder of her life, she was a high profile supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, of equal rights for women, and of social reforms to uplift the poor.
Even after her husband's passing, she remained active in politics for the rest of her life. President Truman would appoint her as a U.S. Delegate to the United Nations, where she would receive a standing ovation when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on December 10, 1948.
She would chair President Kennedy's ground-breaking committee which helped start second-wave feminism, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. And, she continued supporting women, even personally assisting in the careers of many women, providing them with guidance, giving them hope.
She would still remember when they called her an ugly duckling when she was growing up, but to the world, she was and continues to be a beautiful swan whose beauty inside helped her speak the truth, making the world a little better for all.” ~ Jon S. Randal
Mary:
I was heartened by the discussion of Eleanor Roosevelt … because it demonstrates what one human being can do in their lifetime as a source of good … that even one person of integrity and goodwill can make positive change a real possibility. We need this now.
Oriana: “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD”
We certainly do. Yet imagine all that hatred and ridicule she drew. How odd it is is that an outstanding, large-souled individual can bring out the worst in some. And then the heroism of carrying on in spite of the nasty things said about you. Since this was a woman, much concerned her looks — how “ugly” she was.
But I remember one anecdote: she came to visit wounded soldiers, asking if she could help in any way, e.g. help write letters to the family. One soldier said that when she walked into the room, he thought Eleanor was ugly — “but after she talked with you and showed how kind she was, it was if as she became the most beautiful girl in the world.”
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“We need this now.” Now that the Democrats seems to have lost their way and sold out to the corporations, will we ever have the likes of FDR, Eleanor, and Frances Perkins — and the many less-known public servants who believed in the common good? I prefer not to think about it — despair is too close.
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CASSAVA IS HIGH IN RESISTANT STARCH
Cassava is high in resistant starch, a type of starch that bypasses digestion and has properties similar to soluble fiber.
Consuming foods that are high in resistant starch may have several benefits for overall health (8).
First of all, resistant starch feeds the beneficial bacteria in your gut, which may help reduce inflammation and promote digestive health.
Resistant starch has also been studied for its ability to contribute to better metabolic health and reduce the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
This is due to its potential to improve blood sugar control, in addition to its role in promoting fullness and reducing appetite.
The benefits of resistant starch are promising, but it is important to note that many processing methods may lower cassava's resistant starch content.
Products made from cassava, such as flour, tend to be lower in resistant starch than cassava root that has been cooked and then cooled in its whole form.” ~
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cassava#section1
Like potatoes, cassava must be cooked to be safe. The peel should be sliced off with a knife. Some sources recommend soaking; I suspect pressure cooking removes that need. Cumin, sliced onions, garlic, etc are nice additions when added to the final step of gently frying the cassava chunks in coconut oil and/or olive oil.
But it’s so much simpler to steam a yam, or boil some ordinary potatoes. By the way, chilling those potatoes afterwards (as in potato salad) changes part of the starch into resistant starch.
Baking potatoes exposes them to excessive temperature, which creates carcinogenic compounds.
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ending on beauty:
Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine
out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green;
the avenues are spread with brittle floods.
~ Geoffrey Hill
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