NAME AND CAREER SUCCESS; MURDERERS: BORN OR MADE? THE BEST HAS ALREADY HAPPENED; THE PRIEST AND THE JESTER; I COULD LOVE GOD IF HE WERE A DOG

Justus Juncker: Pear with Insects, 1765
 
*
BEFORE WISDOM

That last Polish August that glows
in my mind like a ruddy pear,
my mother would point and say,

“Take a good look: you may never
see it again” — a valley kneeling 
in the greenest green,

or a birch tree touched by the wind,
so delicate it seemed
about to tremble away —

while in school we learned by heart
My fatherland, you are like health;
only he knows your worth

who has lost you — but we hadn’t yet
lost fatherland or health, and the scent
of wild mushrooms was a prayer —

What if a prophet, a seer
were to rise from the spilled moon
in a boat on a Baltic bay,

point to everything and say, “Take
a good look: it’s your happiest year.
You will never see it again.”

And I was seventeen
on the stroke of fate.

*

Later, like a good-luck charm,
I carried these words in my mind:
The worst has already happened.
Then I chanced to read the reverse
of my amber amulet:
The best has already happened.
What, no more great love?
Only the bitter sage who taught,
Life is a cruel joke —

no greater lover and seer?
Where are my palaces of clouds?
Where is my will to believe?

*

Now I don’t even care to travel —
I say, too many stairs to climb.
I want to sleep in my own bed.

After the summer when I thought
I chose a larger destiny, no sleep
has seemed deep enough —

not the deepest granite cradle,
the High Tatras’ bluest lake. Dear
wisdom, what I’ve paid for you —

My fatherland, you are like health.
But I sing that gilded August
before wisdom,

before the wasps flew in
to feast on wounded pears.

~ Oriana


That last Polish August, that infinite pear . . .  But I'm no longer grieving over having lost that “fatherland” (an alien word, as in that loathsome phrase, “God and Fatherland”). Unreal country, mostly in my mind, a country that was both like health and like sickness. I didn’t know the name of that sickness until I learned that Joyce referred to Ireland as a “Catholic bog.” But poems glorify; they don’t debunk.

Yet this poem has a theme that’s larger than a lost paradise, half-real, half-imagined. Yesterday again I confirmed the thought I’ve had for a while now, along the lines of “the best has already happened.” Imagine: when I was what I’d call an “active poet” — defined arbitrarily as at least one new poem a month, on average — and steady work on older poems to perfect them — I used to worry that this time devoted to poetry was the wrong use of my life. After all, only the great poets matter — the minor ones are quickly forgotten.

I totally believed that. So I pestered a friend of mine, who happens to be a generation older — a multiple great-grandmother — I kept asking her, “When I'm eighty and look back at my life, will I regret having spent so much time on poetry? Shouldn’t I have been a teacher, or worked with animals at a rescue center, or . . . almost anything else that’s definitely useful?” And she’d firmly reassure me that I would never regret having been a poet. (She was already in her eighties then and writing some hush-inducing poems; she’s now a frail 92, but still manages a haiku every day, and a longer poem now and then — poetry is still her life.)

However, what happened to me next, after all that agonizing over whether I was wasting my life on poetry, is that my Muse departed. It happened a few years after the last poetry conference I attended, but I can’t really blame that brutal conference for it. True, having been told that I was old-fashioned instead of avant-garde, I lost hope for significant publishing — yet perhaps it was a positive development after all, rather than being tormented by false hope (as I recently said, “Hope is the thing with claws”). But less and less inspiration for new poems was its own phenomenon. 2009 was my last good year for new poems, but starting in 2010, I began to experience a deepening drought — almost in parallel with what was happening to California. 

Being abandoned by the Muse was a shock as deep as falling out of love for the first time. No one told me that love could end. Didn’t the songs promise “forever”? This in a way was worse: the talent was still there, and the mastery of the craft — after the years it took to hone it. It wasn’t writing poetry that was a waste — it was not writing it.

This decline in creativity has happened to some other poets around me, especially women — male poets seem to last longer by perhaps a decade, but it hits them too (so much for “once I retire”). I think it’s mainly a change in brain function, in energy, in hormone-fueled drive. In my case it was also a shift toward prose in both reading and writing — somehow I was tired of poetry. I wasn’t learning anymore, discovering, being surprised enough . . . above all, I felt I was repeating myself, always somehow circling back to my main themes, but less well than before. As Milosz foretold, I had run out of nostalgia and the immigrant experience — and out of myth and biography. And I didn’t want to settle on haiku, ekphrastics, or poems about aging and dying.

From nostalgia’s “morphine of beautiful lies” to the literal morphine in poems increasingly mentioning hospice — there was something displeasing about that arc. Though ceasing to write poems itself felt like a kind of dying, I didn’t want to undertake that journey into diminishment — from the magic of the early poems to constantly saying good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

And then, when I reached a point where a new poem became a miraculous exception, an unexpected event, I suddenly understood: The best has indeed already happened. Those years that I thought I was wasting my life being a poet? Those were my glory years. Regretting them now seems like the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever had. I feel an astonished delight that this had ever happened to me — that I really wrote poems like  All Souls or April Snow, Sex and the Gdańsk Express; Crossing the San Andreas (“rocks have consciousness, they are just slow”); Gypsy (“So this is fate. Holding hands, he and I / walk the blossoming boulevards”); Io (“I climbed too close to the gods”); Archaic Penelope (“It’s my waiting that creates you”)

I wasn’t just creating poems; I was creating myself. Sylvia Plath knew the excitement of self-creation — self-enlargement — when she wrote:

Mother, keep out of my barnyard:
I am becoming another.

Something greater starts speaking through you. What is it? The collective wisdom? The genius of  a particular language? The infinite music of images?

Mostly, I was creating my memories — “fairy tale of my life / with wolves in it.” I was singing not with the birds, and certainly not with the angels, but with my inner wolves. I was writing a mythic version of my early landscapes that seemed to unfold into something larger and darker and more mysterious. The same woman poet who told me I’d never regret having been a poet also said, “Your Polish poems go way beyond Poland.”

I am standing still forever
in the amber of late August;
in a rusty seaside landscape
a rooster crowing and crowing —
and a drunken Russian sailor,
weeping: See, you too
don’t know anyone in this town

~ or, writing about Krakow,

where the Vistula embraces
the city like shining laughter,
like a gleaming wheel.

I look at lines like these with astonishment: I wrote this? I, the little woman who shops at Costco and Walmart, cooks, scrubs the sink, the stove and the kitchen tiles; the woman who contemplates the latest travesty of her hopes for becoming able-bodied again — whose highest ambition nowadays often seems simply not to drown in the mundane? I, or perhaps my other self to whom the best once happened, the one who wrote:

So the echoes of us roll
in a widening ring —

of the song we sang,
and thought
that we were not heard.

*

And while the best was happening, I was daily struggling with despair.

*

I feel I can still contribute, but in that more ordinary, prosy way — I can write an insightful movie review, for instance. I can write a decent analysis of a famous or not-so-famous but worthy poem for my Poetry Salon. But — the high flights, like the mountain peaks, are in the past. I can weep, or I can feel gratitude that I’ve been granted those vistas.

There is a poem by Rilke, Remembrance, about how we are always waiting for something great that’s about to happen, and then we discover: it has already happened.

Would I have become a poet if I’d stayed in Poland? A Polish poet I know only from Facebook and a bit of personal correspondence (a good poet, and a very smart woman) answered “Yes — but of course as a completely different person.” She’s probably right — my interest in playing with words was irrepressible, and my lyrical gift was waiting to be awakened if not by nostalgia, then by first loves — but life is indeed too short to ponder the imponderable. That potential self died in a tragic accident, run over by a streetcar that disappeared “into the fog of all the bridges.”

*

I don’t think I'm kidding myself about “the best has already happened” — just as I'm not kidding myself anymore about a full recovery and being able to walk without pain for even a relatively short distance — what for a healthy person would be an easy distance. I’ve stopped waiting for that magical physical therapist. Isn’t it amazing how the Prince transforms into other figures we start longing for, including a publisher who loves the beautiful rather than the “experimental”; a handyman who returns phone calls; and finally a competent physician . . .

I still have more good days than bad days, and I hope this isn’t coming across as a lament. The best is behind me, but at least it has happened.  And I have no regrets over time “wasted” on writing poetry — not even when I remember having missed my exit offramp on the freeway because I suddenly knew the line, the word, the perfect beginning or ending.

Excited over a word — only another poet can understand what I mean, the happiness of it. To an outsider, that must seem ridiculous, but I don’t care. Why on earth did I ever care? True, I was asking if I myself would have this regret over having wasted my life on poetry, but what society values and doesn’t value lay coiled in that question. Never mind: there is no point blaming society for my having struggled with an unreal problem.

How can I be so sure that the best has already happened? Isn’t life a guesswork and constant surprise? Yes and no. Such is the way with all significant truths: the opposite is also true. In this case, stages of life are a huge factor. Both the physiology of aging and life circumstances enter the picture to influence creativity. Yes, there is a one-percent chance that something could rekindle mine, and, like Yeats in his twilight years, I’d write one great poem after another.  No, better make it a one-in-a-million chance. Theoretically, yes, a huge change in my life may happen, and yes, life can be strange. Yet I know the best has already happened the way I know that at present no one can live to be 150. And only if my generation could live many years beyond 100, and in vigorous health, could we regain the future tense.

*

It was Galway Kinnell, then at the height of his fame, who startled me by saying, “A poet knows when his best poems are already behind him.” I didn’t want to believe him. My poems were going to get better and better and better. Now I know that only a minority of people can understand what I'm trying to say and not immediately engage in “positive thinking” about how the best still lies ahead, of course you’ll recover completely, and oh, the fabulous poems you will yet write, the mountains you’ll yet climb, oh, oh, oh!

No, a flat-out no. A time comes when certain kinds of knowledge really do come to us, like a wave to the shore. Nor does one have to be eighty. Kinnell wasn’t yet sixty when he knew. He still went on to write some readable poems — but not great ones. And I shudder when I think of the poets who peaked already in their twenties. But that may be a misplaced shudder: after all, the best did happen to them.

Ignorance is bliss? No, I treasure my new knowing, even if there’s some unavoidable melancholy to it. Why? Gratitude. Gratitude for the best, but not only for the best that’s already in the past — for all the good things — the daily, ordinary blessings. Including, once in a while, a perfect pear.

Mary:

About poetry, and that perfect, golden pear...it has always been my experience that the act of creating, of composing, has been the most intense and pleasurable of all experiences, that the process is itself it's own best reward, and all that follows pales in comparison. Perhaps I am a person without much ambition, but I have never thought much in terms of career, whether in art, writing, or my work in nursing. It is certainly gratifying to be recognized,  to have your work admired, to be congratulated, to be published, to be heard and understood. Yet all those things follow the act of creation and are not central to it.

What sounds most true and most familiar to me is knowing that the essence of the creative process is the discovery and what you call the enlargement of the self. In writing the poet can, as Plath said, "become another." Both the self and the world are made anew. It can be an astonishing and transformative process, one I believe is common to all creative art.

Will it last? Will we be remembered? Is everything we make like that perfect pear — a sweetness intense and fleeting, perfect in the moment, then gone forever? Probably. Even the brightest stars burn out, and time, like the fly on that perfect pear, consumes us all. This is something too common for grief, too large for regret. The joy, the treasure, the true reward, is not in accolades and awards, but in that moment of transport when you find the perfect word, the perfect image, and all else falls away.

Oriana:

I totally agree with you. Alas, I did go through a period of bitterness over disappointed hopes for recognition. And I saw many of my peers suffer from the same bitterness. When we were beginners just starting to attend poetry conferences, our instructors were unquestionably better poets. But as our craft developed, we began to notice that the poems by participants were often as good or better than those of the instructors. We often spoke of “po-biz” and shared our unhappiness over being have-nots who did not have the right connections: “It’s totally about who you know.” I formed a consolation motto: “I’d rather have people ask  me why I'm not famous [this has indeed happened], then be famous and have people wonder how come.”

But I don’t want to rehearse our tiresome rants over the unfairness of “po-biz” — somehow or other I finally managed to drop career ambition and get back to the enjoyment of creative work for its own sake. I think most of us did; many turned to self-publishing and sharing with friends and local groups. Sharing with an audience is also a joy, but the audience can be small — as long as it is responsive. One of my best audience experiences has been reading my poems to a friend whom I visited in a convalescent home after she fell and fractured her hip. Her rapt attention and obvious enjoyment were reward enough; I did not find myself yearning for a packed auditorium.

But the greatest gift is what it always was: writing an inspired line, sustaining the music so that the poem “flows by itself,” finding the surprise ending, or simply the right word. Line breaks — I can spend a happy afternoon just playing with line breaks and stanza size. Prose is less demanding — you generally don’t polish every word — but at its most fulfilling, it also provides the esthetic delight of playing with words, musicality, and discovering insights. Enough of that joy remains that even if “the best has already happened,” that’s no tragedy. I'm grateful that the best has happened, and move on to new projects.

We are of the moment. Let’s live it joyfully, with gratitude for both the past and the present. 

*

I also agree with something else you said so beautifully:

“Sometimes it seems life is so terribly fragile, and losses come so fast they are tripping over each other. We have to remember, truly, not to despair over our losses, our fading powers, and all the failures of the flesh, but to rejoice in the glory of having had such gifts, like the gods themselves.”

Yes. I keep quoting my favorite lines by Hölderlin:

Once I lived as the gods:
More is not needed.

Luis Melendez: Still Life with Pears, c. 1772

You’ve wasted so much of your life
Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you
Do that again? I would, a thousand times.

~ Robert Bly
Oriana: Again, only a poet can understand this.

*

“There are cities outside and cities within, each with its own weather and rubble and stairs descending into darkness.” ~ Ryan Griffith

*
“no point being neurotic . . . I’m too far gone for that.” ~ James Kohn
Oriana: That’s precisely the insight that ended my depression: it’s too late in life to be depressed — even if night, rain, and the city are no longer mine (but once they were, and that is enough). 



“I re-watched Zombieland the other night. Great movie. A rule for killing zombies: Double-tap.

We learned the lesson from WWI: clean it up after you defeat. We double-tapped after WWII with the Marshall plan. But it's amazing how enemies to our democratic republic resurface. Russia, white nationalists. Apparently, surrender is temporary. We're bad at foreseeing inevitable backlashes.” ~ Jeremy Sherman

 Oriana:

Yes, we were supposed to be watching the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, not the deepening dusk lit by the torches of the Neo-Nazis. The hope is still the young — if they don’t get too distracted by video games and Twitter. The young, but especially the educated women of any age.

If I am lucky, I’ll live to see now only the demise of the current far right, but also a renaissance of a vision of a kinder world where everyone recognizes that we are all in it together.

TO SUCCEED, CHANGE YOUR NAME FROM “SUE” TO “CAMERON” — THE ASTONISHING EFFECT OF YOUR NAME ON CAREER SUCCESS
 
~ “A study found that female lawyers with more masculine names—such as Barney, Dale, Leslie, Jan, and Rudell—tend to have better chances of winning judgeships than their more feminine named female peers. All else being equal, changing a candidate’s name from Sue to Cameron tripled a candidate’s likelihood of becoming a judge; a change from Sue to Bruce quintupled it.

Names work hard: They can affect who gets into elite schools, what jobs we apply for, and who gets hired. Our names can even influence what cities we live in, who we befriend, and what products we buy since, we’re attracted to things and places that share similarities to our names.

A name is, after all, perhaps the most important identifier of a person. Most decisions are made in about three to four seconds of meeting someone, and this “thin-slicing” is surprisingly accurate. Something as packed full of clues as a name tends to lead to all sorts of assumptions and expectations about a person, often before any face-to-face interaction has taken place. A first name can imply race, age, socioeconomic status, and sometimes religion, so it’s an easy—or lazy—way to judge someone’s background, character, and intelligence.

These judgments can start as early as primary school. Teachers tend to hold lower expectations for students with typically black-sounding names while they set high expectations for students with typically white- and Asian-sounding names. And this early assessment of students’ abilities could influence students’ expectations for themselves.

On this year’s French baccalaureate, an exam that determines university placement for high school students, test-takers named Thomas (for boys) and Marie (for girls) tended to score highest. These are, you will note, typically white, French, middle- or upper-class names. One could imagine these students were given the advantage of high expectations and self-perception, whether or not they had the money and support that comes with the socioeconomic background associated with those names.

A 2004 study showed that all else being equal, employers selected candidates with names like Emily Walsh and Greg Baker for callbacks almost 50 percent more often than candidates with names like Lakisha Washington and Jamal Jones. Work experience was controlled and the candidates never met face-to-face with the employer so all that was being tested was the effect of the candidate’s name. The researchers concluded that there was a great advantage to having a white-sounding name, so much so that having a white-sounding name is worth about eight years of work experience. “Jamal” would have to work in an industry for eight years longer than “Greg” for them to have equal chances of being hired, even if Jamal came from a privileged background and Greg from an underprivileged one.” ~

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/who-wins-in-the-name-game/374912/?utm_source=SFFB

Oriana:

Women writers submitting under a male pen name know what they are doing — George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontë sisters (at first) — knew that they’d be taken more seriously if both publishers and readers pictured them as male. Colette let her loathsome husband Willy get the credit for her best-selling early novels — the “naughty” Claudine novels which might otherwise be rejected as indecent. And JK Rowlings knew better than to go by “Joanne.”

No, we are not talking about the past. Do you want your work to be called clever and exciting? Lyrical rather than sentimental? Change your name from Jane to Jordan. Fresh and original rather than trite? Change from Martha to Andrew.   

Of course the name isn’t everything. But it is a part of the first impression.

Michelangelo: Andrea Quaratesi , 1532


“The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes.” ~ Martin Luther
 
I know that Luther was in many ways a horrible person, anti-Semitic, obsessed with the devil, possibly even delusional at times. Still, ever since I first learned about him, I intensely admired his courage. Standing up to the totalitarian Catholic church was essentially a death sentence. Whenever I remember that he was willing to risk his life to oppose the corruption of the most powerful institution of his time, it takes my breath away.

But the reason I'm posting this particular quotation is because I admire craftsmanship — I admire excellence. Quality. Self-control and understatement, but without strangling creative impulses. Making good sentences — this sounds like a modest goal, but it’s in fact a challenge that guides me now with particular urgency.

WHY MANY SERIAL KILLERS CLAIM THEY KILLED MORE PEOPLE 
 
~ “Many killers who’ve claimed they had more victims than they were ever charged with, leaving people guessing as to who (or where) those victims might be. Israel Keyes said he had as many as eight more than the three to which he confessed—but he killed himself in prison before revealing where he’d buried them.

It's likely that compassion for families with missing loved ones is low on their list of motives—so why would serial killers admit further culpability? Data suggests that mostly, their reasons are self-serving.

1) Delight in Duping

After the police arrested Glen Rogers in 1995, wanted in connection with five murders, he took credit for seventy, including the brutal double homicide of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. He later said he was only joking. (He was ultimately convicted in two.)

The most infamous trickster-confessor was Henry Lee Lucas, arrested in 1983.  He estimated he’d killed 100 people, but eventually raised that number to over 350 in twenty-seven states. Dozens of law officers came to Texas to close their open cases, providing Lucas with outings and meals. He enjoyed it all, but then suddenly recanted. Then he confused everyone by insisting he’d been forced to recant. Then some of his confessions were proven false. He didn’t care—in fact, that appeared to be part of his goal, according to later testimony. "I set out to break and corrupt any law enforcement officer I could get,” Lucas said. “I think I did a pretty good job.”

2) Impression Management
 
H. H. Holmes was convicted in Philadelphia in 1896 for a fatal insurance fraud. He insisted he was innocent, but for $10,000 he proclaimed himself the world’s most notorious killer, claiming 100 victims before reducing that number to twenty-seven. “The newspaper wanted a sensation,” he said. Before stepping into the noose, he admitted to only two. The truth was somewhere in the middle—but he’d enjoyed his spotlight of fame, which has persisted to this day.

Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit interviewed Gary Ridgway. He’d initially confessed to 71, before settling on the official toll of 48 (now 49). She had this to say: “In my opinion, many of these people have an egotistical need to control and manipulate, and some like to be bigger and badder than the other guy.” Ridgway still insists there are many more than official records state.

3) Enhance Their Own Importance
 
Ted Bundy made several different victim estimates, from 30 to over 100. He told Hugh Aynesworth that for every “publicized” murder there “could be one that was not,” but he assured an attorney that 35 was right. He sought to prove his worth as a “scientific specimen” to Supervisory Special Agent William Hagmaier, from the FBI’s budding Behavioral Science Unit, offering him 30 homicides. Sometimes Bundy would suggest that he had a lot to say, but he’d need more time than his approaching execution date would allow. He pretended he wanted to help close cases, but he doled out information to serve his own ends. (Israel Keyes, who emulated Bundy, did the same thing.) Bundy might also have wanted to project an image of “badness” to other inmates in the prison, which puts him into the category above.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201808/3-reasons-serial-killers-claim-they-have-more-victims

Oriana:

Alas, men will compete in any category, including “Who’s the worst killer of them all?” Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, was trying to outdo Norway’s Anders Breivik. 

Lightning strikes Golden Gate Bridge. Photo: Charles Hall

 

MURDERERS: BORN OR MADE?

~ “There’s no doubt that parenting plays an enormous role in child development. Research has found that abuse, negative parenting, and prolonged malnutrition are linked to a proclivity toward physical violence.

But there is also important research pointing to the role biology plays in predisposing some individuals to psychopathy, including violence. The BBC reported that neuroscientist Adrian Raine discovered a decrease in activity of the pre-frontal cortex in the brains of murderers, suggesting a genetic predisposition.

And research by Elizabeth Cauffman and colleagues from the University of California found that good parenting doesn’t always lead to the outcomes we imagine. In fact, anti-social encouragement by a romantic partner was correlated with the highest level of offending in youth, even when warm relationships endured with parents.

NPR reported that there are additional factors that play into a person’s development, perhaps explaining why not all children raised by the same parents are violent. Children in the same families have distinct personalities and varied interests that elicit different parenting. Plus, children experience independent social environments outside the home.

Perhaps the complexity of the matter is described best by neurobiologist James Fallon, who studies the brains of psychopathic killers. He explained in a TED Talk that an interaction occurs between environment and genetics. When presented with a particular brain image, he noted it was clearly a psychopath’s brain. What was most shocking—it was his own brain. Fallon, though, is not a killer, and had a happy upbringing. But he has a family history of homicide. The first documented murder of a mother by a son was committed by a member of his family, several generations back.

Fallon said that, although some individuals, mostly male, have genes or brain damage that make them more susceptible to becoming murderers, their childhood experiences can make all the difference. For instance, the MAOA gene in particular can give rise to a violent individual if the gene is combined with experiences of brutality.
Where do murderers come from? Like all the big questions in mental health, an either-or perspective leaves little room for complexity. In the great genetics versus environment debate, the making of murderers — indeed, the making of us — requires that we look somewhere in-between.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma/201807/the-making-murderer
Since I'd rather not post a photo of a murderer, let me share this feline beauty instead. There was no caption, but I'm pretty sure it's a snow leopard. The tail is a classic. 

*


“Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.” ~ Bruno Bettelheim

*


THE PRIEST AND THE JESTER (the quest for the absolute and the flight from it)

 
~ “A Dionysian celebration of postmodern ideas is found in the early (1959) work of the Marxist revisionist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. His famous essay “The Priest and the Jester,” published in the early 60s, speaks about “chronic conflict in philosophy which seems to be able to marshal its history: the conflict between the quest for the absolute and a flight from it [dogmatism and skepticism].

In every era the jester’s philosophy exposes as doubtful what seems most unshakable, reveals the contradictions in what appears obvious and incontrovertible, derides common sense and reads sense into the absurd . . . The attitude of the jester consists in constant reflection about whether perhaps the opposite may not be right. . . . There are more priests than jesters in a king’s court.”

The jester, representing this postmodern flight, is puer eternus: a sceptic observer of social order, one who is active, critical, and questioning all that appears self-evident. He stands for imagination, pluralism, individuality, playfulness and points to the tension between ideals.

The priest is the senex, a believer in a harmonious system of values; he guards the absolute, defends orthodoxy, tradition and sanctity. “The priest and the jester both violate the mind: the priest with the garotte of catechism, the jester with the needle of mockery,” Kolakowski concludes.

“The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of truths accepted by tradition as ultimate and unquestionable. The jester is the impertinent upstart who questions everything we accept as self-evident. If he belonged to good society, he could at best be merely a purveyor of dinner-party scandal. In order to point out the unobviousness of its obviousnesses and the nonultimacy of its ultimacies, he must be outside it, observing it from a distance; but if he is to be impertinent to it, and find out what it holds sacred, he must also frequent it.”

The essay asks how we approach the facts and events of our everyday lives: as the absolute and final reality, to be taken at its direct, empirical value, or as sections of a broader path at the end of which lies peace and consolation: pennies in a piggy-bank, saved up toward our (or mankind’s) eternal retirement. In the latter case we run the risk of dismissing present facts and present values as insignificant; in the former, of dismissing those that go beyond the present and require, for their fulfillment, a certain amount of effort and preparation on our part.” ~

~ The Postmodern Challenge: Perspectives East and West
Oriana:

I think we have plenty of jesters. It’s much easier to be a jester. There are secular priests, e.g. those who are really serious about ecology — anyone devoted to a “holy cause.”

And maybe there is a priest inside every jester, though it may or may not work the other way. Some priests — and I include "secular priests" who fanatically serve a cause, ready to die and/or kill for it — seem to have no sense of humor. They are really scary. Jesters can be too much when you want to have a serious conversation, but they aren't scary the way "priests" can be.

By the way, an intelligent jester has to be a philosopher — we are not talking about juvenile humor here. I've met only 2 philosophical former priests, ex-Jesuits both. The church was an intellectual prison, so they left. Interestingly, neither became a jester, and the one I met in America was quite serious about abolishing mass — “let's see if anyone misses it.” (I certainly didn’t, and I never met a lapsed Catholic who did — especially now, that Vatican 2 ruined the liturgy. On the other hand, I’ve met former Protestants who said they missed the music.)
Laughing Jester, circa 1500 (note the prototype of eyeglasses the jester is holding)
 
FAT LITTLE PROFESSOR OR GRANDMOTHER?

~ In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as it happens in dreams, his soul turns into a “fat little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.

Jung says, “I too believe I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”

The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.” ~

(I found this in my notes, without source information.) The soul as a “fat little professor”? Why, this is rather everyone’s grandmother. I can’t imagine a childhood without the benefit of a grandmother setting before you a bowl of barley soup, enriched with sour cream (may grandmother put sour cream in all soups). If a guest happened to drop in, even a stranger, s/he would also be served soup. My grandmother’s motto was that if a guest steps through the door, they must be fed.

But she wasn’t just an archetypal earth-goddess or wise crone. If she woke up during the night (she was an Auschwitz survivor, and sometimes had nightmares), she’d simply reach for a book, e.g. Quo Vadis, about life in Ancient Rome, and read herself to sleep. She had only fourth-grade education, but she was a great reader. Dickens’s “Little Dorrit” was her great favorite, and became mine too.

So how did I turn out? I define myself as a soup-making intellectual.

an image from Jung’s Red Book

FOR ME TO LOVE HIM, GOD WOULD HAVE TO BE A DOG (or a cat)

 
I woke up from a dream about all kinds of practical burdens, including, at least in part, being a caretaker, cooking for a sick woman. I try to be both efficient and gracious, not a word of complaint, doing my duty to another human being in need of help. And then not too far off there is a neighbor’s cat (not any actual cat I know, but in the dream, it’s as if I recognized the animal). I pick up the cat and hold her in my arms, cooing (the owners are standing by), O my queen, how is she doing? Just cuddling her, feeling total love.

In the dream, the explosion of joy and love for the cat was so powerful that I woke up still feeling that love for the kitty I didn’t even truly know — it was simply the softness and beauty of a cat. But to be filled with so much love, so much love . . .

Next I wondered: could I love a child like that? Could I love a dependent, demanding human being the way I love not only cats but animals in general — not seeing them in terms of stress and demands. Their sweet faces. The way we grant them innocence — it would be supremely silly to be judgmental toward a cat, even if it makes a mess. The way we instantly understands when Walt Whitman says he could live among the animals and how none make them sick worrying about their sins. These days it’s other worries, but we get the drift.

And of course I know that yes, I could love a child. Nature takes care of that — bonding takes place, and the more you invest, the greater the bond. And still a little voice remains skeptical: could I really love a human being with such pure love? And I'm reminded of the women I’ve met who talk to their dogs — especially beautiful huskies and German shepherds — in a much more affectionate way than they talk to their husbands or children . . .

And now for something entirely different. The talk about the apocalyptic sects like the Adventists made me ponder that I said "Our Father" a gazillion times and never stopped to think that "Thy Kingdom come" meant praying for the end of the world and the Second Coming. As a child I assumed “the Kingdom” meant a world where everyone was kind, right here on earth — no Armageddon first, no Rapture, none of this — just people becoming kinder.

But this is the prayer that Jesus himself allegedly told his followers to recite, and being an apocalyptic preacher he meant the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, with the earth eventually to be consumed by fire etc. The earth was not seen as beautiful and magnificent — it was seen as sinful, corrupt. Not just humanity was fallen, but all of nature (this goes back to the story of Adam and Eve, and the odd failure of the Flood to correct this general corruption). The church didn't go much into the details of how the world would end, except for the Last Judgment, where Jesus would be the judge (after preaching no judgment, but those contradictions were too many to bother with), and no, there would be no mercy for those who happened to be born in India, the fools. Or, unforgivably, in China. Or even in Sweden for that matter — those heretics (my religion lessons took place before the church started growing toothless, and admitting non-Catholics to heaven).

And yet, in spite of the threat of hell (even if you were a Catholic), the first and supreme commandment was to “love god above all else.”

Perhaps this is my most heretical thought yet: for me to love god, god would have to be a beautiful cat or dog.

I love beautiful furry creatures that respond to nurturing with affection. But even if they are relatively aloof, their beauty can be rewarding enough. As for god, the only relationship the church presented to me was master-slave. I can't love anyone I fear. And constantly flattering god is also a form of fear (think of North Korea). It's not nurturing. The young Rilke had an interesting notion of a "neighbor god" to whom he, the poet, acted as a caretaker, but that's not a true love relationship either. It's quite interesting the way we as a society have become loving to pets as never before.

BIOLOGY: MYTH VERSUS KNOWLEDGE
 
~ “It is not in man’s ‘nature’ to be violent. It is in our nature to have empathy.
Perhaps one of the most persistent stereotypes about the nature of man that the research is constantly challenging is the notion that man is somehow wired for violence or “naturally” inclined towards conflict and warfare. In fact, what the research consistently identifies is that individuals—whether male or female—have to be systematically indoctrinated into a culture of violence before they can effectively engage in killing behaviors. Soldiers are conditioned, not born.

For a compelling and exhaustive account of this reality, I recommend On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War & Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. The research that he presents defies the traditional—and historical—way we are socialized to think about warfare and society.

While we are not naturally inclined towards violence, we are in fact wired for empathy. The discovery of the mirror neuron system in the brain presents some interesting and compelling notions of our capabilities as humans. And in fact, this system is not even exclusive to humans—it was first discovered in monkeys. Mirror neurons are a subset of neurons in the brain that fire not only when an individual is engaging in a given behavior but also when an individual is observing someone else engaging in a behavior. These neurons can’t tell the difference between seeing and doing—they fire either way. This reflects an inherently social system within the brain. The mirror neuron system wires us to connect with others socially, to learn through observation and imitation—and also to empathize with the experience of others.

Men are the more biologically vulnerable of the two sexes. 
 
An XX combination indicates a female; XY indicates a male. The male, from conception, is the more fragile of the two sexes. Estimates are that 160 males are conceived for every 100 females. However, so many males are spontaneously aborted that only 105 males are born for every 100 females. A similar pattern appears in neonatal life and continues throughout development, until women finally outnumber men, reversing the original ratio.

Structurally and functionally, females resist disease better than males; the male is more subject to hereditary disease and defect; Environmental elements expose the male to greater hazards; Females are born with and retain biological superiority over males.

Race is a social construct, not a biological one. 
 
If a perversity of basic facts regarding sex differentiation has been used to promote male dominance across the globe, a similar social hierarchy regarding race has also been rooted in junk science. While there are biological underpinnings to skin color, the notion of race is not in fact rooted in biology.

The body is self-healing.

Dr. Lissa Rankin (2013) author of the revolutionary Mind over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, does an exhaustive review of all the ways the body is equipped to repair itself. Moreover, she traces the significant role that our stress response and psychology play in the infections and diseases that we develop. In offering a summary of her work, she shares that, “the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms fully function when the nervous system is in relaxation response.”

Haters can experience reform.
 
We are living in a dangerous time where we are seeing the rise of hate groups — white supremacists, rebranded as “alt right” but still promoting the same old-fashioned hatreds are re-emerging all across the globe. Despite this, there are also organizations that are attempting to rehabilitate individuals who have been indoctrinated into a culture of hate.

The organization Life After Hate, for instance, attempts to counter hatred and discrimination through compassion and other pro-social techniques. This organization was founded by former violent extremists in 2011, and has reportedly helped more than 100 men and women who were affiliated with hate groups leave these organizations and seek a better life that is not defined by hatred or violence.

Happy people don’t plant bombs, and happy people don’t behead people, and happy people don’t paint swastikas on synagogues. Disenfranchised, lonely, self-loathing people do that. There is something missing from their life, something they didn’t get, whether it was as a child or maybe they were abused or maybe they came from a broken home or something was missing.

In summary, I would like to close with this quote taken from research on mirror neurons. Neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese shares that, “’It seems we’re wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different’” and concludes by identifying that, “’at the root, as humans we identify the person we’re facing as someone like ourselves’.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-first-impression/201807/facts-about-human-behavior-defy-our-assumptions



ending on beauty:
 
Dew-stained bamboo seems like jade,
and blown curtain-shadow like waves.

As I grieve over falling leaves, bright
moons in the courtyard grow countless.

Po-Chu-i, tr David Hinton