*
is Yohanana,
rolling on like the vineyards
ripe with noon heat
and the melody of hills.
With a name so vast, I speak slowly.
I weigh my words like Deborah.
It’s as ancient as the Song of Songs —
all is grace, a gift: Yohanana.
My name began on the Euphrates.
It echoes the descending
footsteps of Inanna.
It revolves with the Tree of Life,
the animals that Noah saved,
named by Adam. Many nations dwell
in the curves of its consonants,
as in the womb of Sarah.
My name is a riddle
posed to Solomon.
It weeps with love’s grief
like Bathsheba.
My name has in it
kings and prophets,
Pharaoh’s dreams,
the writing on the wall.
My name is so long
you can travel through it.
It is centuries, millennia
from one omitted vowel to the next.
~ Oriana
Jewish soldiers in the Kaiser’s army celebrating Chanukah on the Eastern Front in 1916. Source: Fromm Family Collection WWI, Leo Baeck Institute, New York. By the way, every single man in this photograph had experienced bigotry — “and yet they persisted.” Oriana:
It could easily be argued that being Jewish, Polish, Catholic, etc — these are not the most important things about a person; rather, they could easily fall into Vonnegut’s “granfaloon” category, especially if overdone. Still, there are lovely things in any tradition, and those are worth preserving. They add to the richness of the world, just as Chagall’s art goes beyond the strictly Jewish elements into the universally human.
Still, art is art, regardless of the subject. It either has magic or it doesn’t. We can enjoy Chagall’s Jeremiah (1968) regardless of what the prophet means to us (if anything).
Mary:
Your wonderful meditation on your name, the poem that opens this week's blog, reflects the particular magic of names, an important subset of the general magic of language. Names have always been seen as words of particular power . . . think of “hidden," "secret" or "real" names, present in many traditional folklore, where it is important those true names remain undiscovered, because they would give one who knows them real power over the named individual.
Think also of the power of familial names, of taking the name of one's husband, of carrying the name of one's father, of family names echoing and repeating down the generations. This is only one way history is carried in our names; another is in the way your poem demonstrates, the layers of history, and pre-history, embedded in the syllables, the letters, the missing vowels, like a golden thread we can trace back to the gods of our earliest times. That in itself is a kind of magic, carrying the old gods with us into the future, their shadows embedded in our names.
Oriana:
I love the way you put it: “layers of history, and pre-history, embedded in the syllables, the letters, the missing vowels, like a golden thread we can trace back to the gods of our earliest times. That in itself is a kind of magic, carrying the old gods with us into the future, their shadows embedded in our names.” Yes, that’s the essence of my poem.
And I admit I'm appalled by various aspects of archaic religions and cultures — but attracted to the mystery of reaching back that far in time. Octavio Paz said this:
Poetry is not truth:
it is the resurrection of presences,
history
transfigured in the truth of undated time.
(from “Nocturno de San Ildefonso”)
And the same can be said of the visual arts: it’s not “truth” but the resurrection of presences.
“A KINDER, GENTLER NATION” ~ GEORGE HERBERT BUSH
~ ““Leave the kid alone,” George Herbert Walker Bush said, when, as a teen-age boy at Andover, he spotted a fellow-student being bullied. As if he were Zorro, performing a casual rescue and then vanishing, Bush left Bruce Gelb, the undersized Jewish kid he’d aided, to ask a witness, “Who was that?” Gelb learned that it was Poppy Bush, “the greatest kid in the school.”
The eulogies for “41,” who died on Friday, will note his underage enlistment in the Navy after Pearl Harbor—how he went from preppy god of the baseball diamond to bomber pilot over the Pacific, with no intermediate step—but the scourge-of-bullies story, told in Jon Meacham’s biography of him, is the essential tale from Bush’s Andover days. It contains the boy who, almost fifty years later, startled the Republican Convention that had just nominated him for President by saying that he wanted a “kinder, gentler nation.” The phrase seemed odd, even candy-assed, to some; it would be mocked, its potential meanings never much pondered. What that night’s audience liked better was “Read my lips,” the signal for a no-new-taxes pledge, a piece of absolutism that didn’t come naturally to a pragmatic moderate. It was those words that, four years later, would do Bush in.
He also directed a just war—Kuwait was being bullied—toward a fast conclusion.
As the “vision thing” goes, kinder and gentler was actually profound. It didn’t take, of course. The nation has become spectacularly meaner, to the point that George H. W. Bush is likely to be remembered as the last President of the republic not to have been intensely despised by a significant portion of its population.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/george-h-w-bush-the-forty-first-president-of-the-united-states-dies-at-ninety-four?mbid=nl
I began to appreciate him only later, when contrast became apparent. He gave the impression of being a decent human being who was deeply dedicated to serving the country — something we used to take for granted when it came to presidents. I miss that.
~ “Thirty years ago, Bush prophetically called for a 'kinder, gentler' conservatism. It's as if he could see what was coming, could see the growing vitriol and hate eating up his party, like worms in its ideological guts. Today, sadly, the call must be for a sane conservatism, less fascistic, and violently exclusive, so Bush's initial plea was chuffed off. That notwithstanding, he had the heart and the foresight to want temper the mean-spirited right-wing politics of his day. He has to be respected for that.” ~ Lamont Palmer
GH Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, July 1991*
~ “Don’t be scared of the dark.
Don’t be scared of solitude.
They are both fear of what we’re left with.
We’re scared of the stark.”
~ Jeremy Sherman
**
HANNAH ARENDT ON AUDEN (long but absolutely worth reading)
~ “We were very good friends but not intimate friends. There was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity. I gladly respected it as the necessary secretiveness of the great poet, one who must have taught himself early not to talk in prose, loosely and at random, of things that he knew how to say much more satisfactorily in the condensed concentration of poetry.
Reticence may be the déformation professionnelle of the poet. In Auden’s case, this seemed all the more likely because much of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of idioms of everyday language—like “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.” This kind of perfection is very rare; we find it in some of the greatest of Goethe’s poems, and it must exist in most of Pushkin’s works, because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable.
The moment poems of this kind are wrenched from their original abode, they disappear in a cloud of banality. Here all depends on the “fluent gestures” in “elevating facts from the prosaic to the poetic”—a point that the critic Clive James stressed in his essay on Auden in Commentary in December, 1973. Where such fluency is achieved, we are magically convinced that everyday speech is latently poetic, and, taught by the poets, our ears open up to the true mysteries of language.
The very untranslatability of one of Auden’s poems is what, many years ago, convinced me of his greatness. Three German translators had tried their luck and killed mercilessly one of my favorite poems, “If I Could Tell You” (“Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957”), which arises naturally from two colloquial idioms—“Time will tell” and “I told you so”:
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so. . . .
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so. . . .
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
I met Auden in the autumn of 1958, but I had seen him before, in the late forties, at a publisher’s party. Although we exchanged not a word on that occasion, I had remembered him quite well — a nice-looking, well-dressed, very English gentleman, friendly and relaxed. I did not recognize him ten years later, for now his face was marked by those famous deep wrinkles, as though life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest “the heart’s invisible furies.”
I finally saw the misery, and somehow realized vaguely his compelling need to hide it behind the “Count your blessings” litany, yet I found it difficult to understand fully why he was so miserable and was unable to do anything about the absurd circumstances that made everyday life so unbearable for him. It certainly could not be lack of recognition. He was reasonably famous, and such ambition could anyhow never have counted for much with him, since he was the least vain of all the authors I have ever met—completely immune to the countless vulnerabilities of ordinary vanity. Not that he was humble; in his case it was self-confidence that protected him against flattery, and this self-confidence existed prior to recognition and fame, prior also to achievement.
(Geoffrey Grigson, in the Times Literary Supplement, reports the following dialogue between the very young Auden and his tutor at Oxford. “Tutor: ‘And what are you going to do, Mr. Auden, when you leave the university?’ Auden: ‘I am going to be a poet.’ Tutor: ‘Well—in that case you should find it very useful to have read English.’ Auden: ‘You don’t understand. I am going to be a great poet.’ ”)
It never left him, because it was not acquired by comparisons with others, or by winning a race in competition; it was natural — interconnected, but not identical, with his enormous ability to do with language, and do quickly, whatever he pleased. (When friends asked him to produce a birthday poem for the next evening at six o’clock, they could be sure of getting it; clearly this is possible only in the absence of self-doubt.)
*
Stephen Spender, the friend who knew him so well, has stressed that “throughout the whole development of [Auden’s] poetry . . . his theme had been love” (had it not occurred to Auden to change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” by defining man as the “bubble-brained creature” that said “I’m loved therefore I am”?), and at the end of the address that Spender gave in memory of his late friend at the Cathedral in Oxford he told of asking Auden about a reading he had given in America: “His face lit up with a smile that altered its lines, and he said: ‘They loved me!’ ”
They did not admire him, they loved him: here, I think, lies the key both to his extraordinary unhappiness and to the extraordinary greatness—intensity—of his poetry. Now, with the sad wisdom of remembrance, I see him as having been an expert in the infinite varieties of unrequited love, among which the infuriating substitution of admiration for love must surely have loomed large. And beneath these emotions there must have been from the beginning a certain animal tristesse that no reason and no faith could overcome:
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.
Auden in New York, St. Marc’s Place, 1960So he wrote in “Death’s Echo,” in “Collected Shorter Poems.” When I knew him, he would not have mentioned the best any longer, so firmly had he opted for the second-best, the “formal order,” and the result was what Chester Kallman has so aptly named “the most dishevelled child of all disciplinarians.” I think it was this tristesse and its “dance while you can” that made Auden feel so much attracted to and almost at home in the famous Berlin of the twenties, where carpe diem was practiced constantly in many variations. He once mentioned as a “disease” his early “addiction to German usages,” but much more prominent than these, and less easy to get rid of, was the obvious influence of Bertolt Brecht, with whom I think he had more in common than he was ever ready to admit. (In the late fifties, with Chester Kallman, he translated Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”—a translation that was never published, presumably because of copyright difficulties. To this day, I know of no other adequate rendering of Brecht into English.)
In the case of Auden, as in the case of Brecht, inverted hypocrisy served to hide an irresistible inclination toward being good and doing good—something that both were ashamed to admit, let alone proclaim. This seems plausible for Auden, because he finally became a Christian, but it may be a shock at first to hear it about Brecht. Yet a close reading of his poems and plays seems to me almost to prove it. Not only are there the plays “Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan” and “Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe” but, perhaps more convincingly, there are these lines right in the midst of the cynicism of “The Threepenny Opera” :
Ein guter Mensch sein! Ja, wer wär’s nicht gern?
Sein Gut den Armen geben, warum nicht?
Wenn alle gut sind, ist Sein Reich nicht fern.
Wer sässe nicht sehr gern in Seinem Licht?
What drove these profoundly apolitical poets into the chaotic political scene of our century was Robespierre’s “zèle compatissant” [compassionate zeal] — the powerful urge toward “les malheureux,” as distinguished from any need for action toward public happiness, or any desire to change the world.
Auden, so much wiser—though by no means smarter—than Brecht, knew early on that “poetry makes nothing happen.” To him, it was sheer nonsense for the poet to claim special privileges or to ask for the indulgences that we are so happy to grant out of sheer gratitude. There was nothing more admirable in Auden than his complete sanity and his firm belief in sanity; in his eyes all kinds of madness were lack of discipline—“Naughty, naughty,” as he used to say.
The main thing was to have no illusions and to accept no thoughts — no theoretical systems — that would blind you to reality. He turned against his early leftist beliefs because events (the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and experiences during the Spanish Civil War) had proved them to be “dishonest”—“shamefully” so, as he said in his foreword to the “Collected Shorter Poems,” telling how he threw out what he had once written:
History to the defeated
may say alas but cannot help nor pardon.
To say this, he noted, was “to equate goodness with success.” He protested that he had never believed in “this wicked doctrine”—a statement that I doubt, not only because the lines are too good, too precise, to have been produced for the sake of being “rhetorically effective” but because this was the doctrine everybody believed in during the twenties and thirties. Then came the time when
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark . . .
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face—
the time when it looked for quite a while as if the worst could happen and sheer evil could become a success. The Hitler-Stalin pact was the turning point for the left; now one had to give up all belief in history as the ultimate judge of human affairs.
In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether.
I don’t know whether Stephen Spender is right in asserting that “prayer corresponded to his deepest need”—I suspect that his deepest need was simply to write verses—but I am reasonably sure that his sanity, the great good sense that illuminated all his prose writings (his essays and book reviews), was due in no small measure to the protective shield of orthodoxy. Its time-honored coherent meaningfulness that could be neither proved nor disproved by reason provided him, as it had provided Chesterton, with an intellectually satisfying and emotionally rather comfortable refuge against the onslaught of what he called “rubbish;” that is, the countless follies of the age.
Rereading Auden’s poems in chronological order and remembering him in the last years of his life, when misery and unhappiness had grown more and more unbearable without, however, in the least touching either the divine gift or the blessed facility of the talent, I have become surer than ever that he was “hurt into poetry” even more than Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”), and that, despite his susceptibility to compassion, public political circumstances were not necessary to hurt him into poetry. What made him a poet was his extraordinary facility with and love for words, but what made him a great poet was the unprotesting willingness with which he yielded to the “curse” of vulnerability to “human _un_success” on all levels of human existence—vulnerability to the crookedness of the desires, to the infidelities of the heart, to the injustices of the world.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Praise is the key word of these lines, not praise of “the best of all possible worlds”—as though it were up to the poet (or the philosopher) to justify God’s creation—but praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its own strength from the wound: somehow convinced, as the bards of ancient Greece were, that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things toward mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
And the triumph of the private person was that the voice of the great poet never silenced the small but penetrating voice of sheer sound common sense whose loss has so often been the price paid for divine gifts. Auden never permitted himself to lose his mind—that is, to lose the “distress” in the “rapture” that rose out of it:
No metaphor, remember, can express
A real historical unhappiness;
Your tears have value if they make us gay;
O Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.
It seems, of course, very unlikely that young Auden, when he decided that he was going to be a great poet, knew the price he would have to pay, and I think it entirely possible that in the end—when not the intensity of his feelings and not the gift of transforming them into praise but the sheer physical strength of the heart to bear them and live with them gradually faded away—he considered the price too high. We, in any event—his audience, readers and listeners—can only be grateful that he paid his price up to the last penny for the everlasting glory of the English language. And his friends may find some consolation in his beautiful joke beyond the grave—that for more than one reason, as Spender said, “his wise unconscious self chose a good day for dying.” The wisdom to know “when to live and when to die” is not given to mortals, but Wystan, one would like to think, may have received it as the supreme reward that the cruel gods of poetry bestowed on the most obedient of their servants.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/01/20/remembering-wystan-h-auden-who-died-in-the-night-of-the-twenty-eighth-of-september-1973?fbclid=IwAR0fMhEC_uqJiVkrf9zl2clofZN9gISU5eOcAeYMHfKXM0_tFdEP1HSL9OQ
Auden’s grave in Kirchstetten, Austria — a village near Vienna where he used to spend his summers. He died during the night after giving his last reading in Vienna. Oriana:
A wonderful article. Auden's willingness to reject Stalinism was especially impressive. Also, so interesting that to him it was “I'm loved, therefore I am” (at least in Arendt's analysis). And his compassion, his wanting to be a good human being. And Brecht’s influence — a surprise to me. I'm so grateful to Arendt for having pointed out that Brecht secretly (or almost secretly) wanted to be a “good man.”
Jeremy Sherman:
What resonated most for me was [Auden’s] no-escape stark stare at the starkness, his tragicomic, romanticynical observation of life.
I'm loved therefore I am is the romantic side. That love is never fully requited is the cynical tragedy. He lived all in, knowing as we all do, though we often deny it, that we will be thrown out eventually.
He's in my pantheon of romanticynics. He doesn't feign bind to pure romance or pure cynicism. He doesn't average to some false win-win harmony. He lives with the eternal tension, forever wanting what he can never fully have. He takes notes on what it's like there.
That's the life for me.
Oriana:
I love the oxymoronic word “romanticynical.” It reminds me of Adam Zagajewski’s definition of poetry as the tension between irony and ecstasy. We long for ecstasy; when we fall in love, there is a deep urge to say, “I will always love you.”
Now, there is a little voice that eventually starts whispering that that’s probably not true since most love ends — and the intense phase of romantic love always ends, for various reasons, one of them being that the brain can operate at that level of intensity (or call it ecstasy) only so long. It simply takes too much energy to sustain it. But unless we go through that intense phase when we are able to say, “I will always love you,” it’s not really love.
To quote someone from the past, “When you fall in love, your lover is god, and you surrender to your god completely.”
And then the first time when you wish you could just flush your god down the toilet. But that moment passes, and we settle for imperfect, human love with all its contradictions. Divine no more . . . but still very dear and utterly necessary.
Yet note that for Auden (according to Arendt), it’s not “I love therefore I am.” It’s “I'm loved therefore I am.” I used to defend the proposition that even unrequited love is still a state of grace. Yet going all the way back to infancy is the need not only to love, but to be loved. Eventually we also need meaningful work, but everything — survival itself — starts with being loved.
Auden and Christopher Isherwood, 1939Mary:
The discussion of Auden's poetry also addresses issues of language and poetry. Perhaps the essence of the best poetry, its test in a way, is that it is untranslatable… that translation destroys it. In this sense poetry is the ultimate realization of its language, belonging only to that language, becoming a lifeless shadow when forced into the approximation of any other. Translators work with these impossibilities all the time, and know each translation is a recreation, a reflection in a mirror that is always less than perfect, a song played on an unfamiliar instrument. Because of this very difficulty, this challenge, it is even possible the translation may be a better work than the original. It is certainly a new thing in its own right.
Oriana:
There is a kind of poetry that is translatable — Herbert, Milosz, Szymborska are highly translatable because the language of most of their poems is sufficiently close to prose, to colloquial speech. It’s still poetry because of its richness of insight, imagery, and compression. And yes, now and then a translated version works better than the original.
Milosz in fact even stated that to become a world poet you can’t be just good — you also have to be translatable. And we enjoy the insights, the content — but miss the beauty of the language, the music, the lyricism that arises out of that music (and out of nature imagery — I miss that in Auden; he relies more on cleverness).
But there is another kind of poetry that, as you aptly note, belongs only to the language in which it was written. That kind depends on music, an element we often miss in modern poetry (that’s one reason it’s so unquotable). Dickinson and Hopkins are the supreme examples of untranslatable poetry. I’d add Yeats, and most of the highly formal poetry of the past.
Auden rhymes and otherwise makes rich use of the play on words. And alas, that makes him pretty untranslatable.
It takes genius to translate Shakespeare in a way that reveals Shakespeare’s genius, which is certainly not in his borrowed plots — and of course you have to forget trying to stay close to the original. You have to connect with the genius of the language you’re translating into. I know of only one example: Baranczak’s vibrant translation of The Winter’s Tale into Polish. I saw it performed in Warsaw, and I was stunned. I was magical — and this is usually regarded as a minor play.
**
“Two possibilities exist:
either we are alone in the Universe
or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying.”
~ Arthur C. Clarke, quoted by Michio Kaku in Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century
Oriana:
For me the idea of being alone is less terrifying — in fact not at all terrifying. But even if intelligent life exists somewhere else, the almost infinite distances protect us from possibly annihilating contact.
Matisse: Lovers~ “The average length of a hug between two people is 3 seconds. But the researchers have discovered something fantastic. When a hug lasts 20 seconds, there is a therapeutic effect on the body and mind. The reason is that a sincere embrace produces a hormone called "oxytocin", also known as the love hormone. This substance has many benefits in our physical and mental health, helps us, among other things, to relax, to feel safe and calm our fears and anxiety. This wonderful tranquilizer is offered free of charge every time we have a person in our arms, who cradled a child, who cherish a dog or a cat, that we are dancing with our partner, the closer we get to someone or simply hold the shoulders of a friend.” ~
**
WHY AMERICA DOESN’T WIN WARS ANYMORE
~ “Dominic Tierney believes the US can still successfully fight the wars of yesteryear — World War-style conflicts — but hasn’t yet mastered how to win wars against insurgents, which are smaller fights against groups within countries. The problem is the US continues to involve itself in those kinds of fights.
“We’re still stuck in this view that war is like the Super Bowl: We meet on the field, both sides have uniforms, we score points, someone wins, and when the game ends you go home,” he told me. “That’s not what war is like now.”
The US military is currently mired in conflicts in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It’s hard to see any end in sight — especially an end where the United States is the victor, however that’s defined.
Since 1945, the United States has very rarely achieved meaningful victory. The United States has fought five major wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan — and only the Gulf War in 1991 can really be classified as a clear success.
There are reasons for that, primarily the shift in the nature of war to civil conflicts, where the United States has struggled. Trump himself recognized this: He said on the campaign trail numerous times that we used to win wars and we don’t win anymore. And he has promised to turn the page on this era of defeat and said that we were going to get sick and tired of winning.
But will he channel that observation into winning wars? I doubt it.
The nature of war continues to be these difficult internal conflicts in places like Afghanistan, where the United States has struggled long before Trump ever dreamed of running for president.
The famous war theorist Carl von Clausewitz argued that war is the continuation of politics by other means. So war is not just about blowing things up — it’s about achieving political goals.
The United States, up until 1945, won virtually all the major wars that it fought. The reason is those wars were overwhelmingly wars between countries. The US has always been very good at that.
But that kind of war has become the exception. If you look around the world today, about 90 percent of wars are civil wars. These are complex insurgencies, sometimes involving different rebel groups, where the government faces a crisis of legitimacy.
The US has found, for various reasons, that it’s far more difficult to achieve its goals in these cases. The three longest wars in US history are Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — all from recent decades, all these complex types of civil wars.
And even more surprising: It’s when the US became a superpower and created the best-trained, strongest military the world has ever seen, around 1945, that the US stopped winning wars.
The answer to the puzzle is that American power turned out to be a double-edged sword.
The US was so powerful after World War II, especially after the Soviet Union disappeared, that Washington was tempted to intervene in distant conflicts around the world in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
We ended up intervening in countries where we had little cultural understanding. To illustrate this, in 2006 — at the height of the Iraq War — there were 1,000 officials in the US embassy in Baghdad, but only six of them spoke Arabic.
In addition, the US military has failed to adapt to this new era of war. The US military has this playbook for success against countries: technology, big-unit warfare, and so on. And when we started fighting insurgents, it was natural that we would turn to that same playbook.
Now, the US military is capable of hitting any target with pinpoint accuracy using the latest hardware. But what if we don’t know where the enemy is? A lot of that technology, which is really impressive, turns out to be irrelevant.
We need better language training, cultural training, more resources for special forces — and that would mean less money spent on nuclear attack submarines, for example.
Second, once we improve America’s ability for stabilization missions, we deploy the US military with greater care and fight fewer wars. That means when we do fight, we have a better plan to win the peace.
We’re still stuck in this view that war is like the Super Bowl: We meet on the field, both sides have uniforms, we score points, someone wins, and when the game ends you go home. That’s not what war is like now. Now there are tons of civilians on the field, the enemy team doesn’t wear a uniform, and the game never ends. We need to know there’s no neat ending.
The costs of this problem have been so catastrophic for the United States, in the form of thousands of military lives and billions of dollars spent. It’s time we fundamentally rethink our vision of what war is.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-america-doesn-t-win-wars-anymore-2145337320
Oriana:
On the other hand, some argue that there has been significant success against ISIS and the Taliban. And the strategy has been changing, with Special Forces taking over most missions. But it’s indeed depressing to think how much good all that war money could accomplish if spent in an intelligent fashion right here at home, for the common good.
Jon Wesick:
This is not exactly true. Gen Petraeus along with books like the marines small war manual talk about counterinsurgency warfare. The classic example of a successful counterinsurgency campaign is England conquering Wales. It took a century of sustained effort. America is not willing to pay that price, nor should it be.
Oriana:
~ “There is no disputing that the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/the-petraeus-doctrine/306964/
I applaud Jon’s statement that “America is not willing to pay that price, nor should it be.”
Let us detox with the image of a bird unfairly linked to war. Here is a red-shouldered hawk.
*
Always a godfather, never a god. ~ Gore Vidal
THE REAL IS FAR MORE INTERESTING THAN THE IDEAL
~ “The one principle Heraclitus did embrace was that of the Logos, which can be variously translated as the Word or the Spirit or the Reason or even the Way — in fact, the parallels between Heraclitus’s Logos and the Chinese Tao are striking. By following the Logos, Heraclitus affirmed, which he saw as a kind of spark or breath (psyche in Greek) that resides in each of us as individuals and also permeates the world, we can achieve peace. For Heraclitus, the discovery that nothing is permanent was meant to be a source not of nihilistic despair but of understanding, as we come to realize that the physical reality around us — buildings, trees, mountains, other people, the entire works — is not actually “real” at all, but merely the playing out of opposites, “an atunement of opposite tensions, like a bow or lyre.” ~ Arthur Herman, “The Cave and the Light”
This takes me back to my twenties and the unforgettable class on comparative religions — and my delight in Taoism. But trying to define either the Tao or the Logos (which I see more as “concept” or “information containing the essence” — or cosmos=order as opposed to chaos, though these interflow) does not seem fruitful. I'm still with “You can’t step into the same river twice” as the greatest gift that Heraclitus has given us. True, again it’s seductive to see that here Heraclitus uses water imagery the way water is the favorite element in the Tao.
I used to think of the Logos as the collective psyche of humanity. Then I started reading more about the Logos and the Tao, and simply gave up. What proved supremely important to me were not the complicated and elusive definitions, but rather than practical angle. Taoism helped me more directly, with the idea of non-doing — which I took to mean not struggling, but rather being peaceful, slow, and patient. Depending on the situation, I’d either let go of the problem on the conscious level and trust that my unconscious brain processing will find the right connections; or, when it came to everyday tasks, the moment I found a task stressful I learned to slow down. This in itself decreases stress. Sometimes the task becomes downright easy.
It may be Aristotelean of me to have shrugged off theory and gone over to “practice.” Maturation has definitely made me more Aristotelean and grounded, more realistic and less Platonic and idealistic — but I don’t really see those labels as useful anymore. By reading Herman’s book I'm playing the game that the author is playing, of trying to divide everything in the world into the Platonic or Aristotelean mentality. But it’s practice that saved me from manic busyness and overdoing: slow down, take small steps (“We manage best when we manage small” ~ Linda Gregg), do less, lie down.
And it’s time to admit that the allegory of the cave is ultimately wrong, wrong, wrong. The real is far more interesting than the ideal, and — surprise! — more exciting and beautiful as well.
There's something wonderfully fractal about this image.*
“No idea has ever been defeated by force . . . To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea.” ~ Amos Oz
*
~ “In the beginning wasn’t the word, but maybe in the end was the word, millions of times already in the universe. Language is a precarious adaptation. I’m guessing that climate change and climate denial have happened millions of times in the universe already.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
iceberg off Antarctica*
LUTHER: ADAM HATED GOD
“God was everywhere and everything. All the more baffling then that when Eve offered him the forbidden fruit, Adam immediately took it and ate. Why? He could scarcely have put it into words, but if compelled, he might have said: An eternity in this condition is unendurable. I hate the contemplation of the One who made me. I hate the overwhelming debt of gratitude. I hate God.” ~ Martin Luther (1483-1546), quoted by Stephen Greenblatt in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
Oriana:
Gee, was it the little devil on Luther's left shoulder that dictated these words to him? (when I was a child, we were told there was a little devil on each person's left shoulder, and a little angel on the right shoulder, each whispering to us).
On the other hand, perhaps an eternity in any condition would be unendurable. As a friend said to me, “Imagine you’re at a party. The food is delicious, the conversation sparkling. There is only one problem: you can never leave.”
Another point: before his insight about sola fide (i.e. he is already saved), Luther admitted he was obsessed with sin, afraid of hell, and hated god. I can attest from personal experience that it was difficult not to hate the traditional Catholic god: he was a monster who multiplied human suffering. He out-Hitlered Hitler.
Projecting this hatred on Adam is interesting. And one could argue that god in Eden was a domineering, utterly suffocating parent. Young men crave independence.
Chagall: Adam and Eve, Mainz, GermanyCharles:
Chagall’s work was more about love than any other painter’s.
Oriana:
Note that Adam and Eve are the eternal newlyweds in Chagall's paintings. He's the one who could say, “I love therefore I exist.”
Charles:
He always remained a newly wed.
*
John Guzlowski:
God liked to watch Adam and Eve fall down, stumble in the weeds. They seemed so needy. Like baby giraffes. Sometimes he would put a string in their way just to watch them cry.
Oriana:
That's an amazing little prose poem, John. I'm familiar with writers saying that god was jealous of Adam and Eve's love for each other, but not this kind of meanness . . .
John:
When I was working on my PhD in America lit, I read Luther and his followers and studied the way they influenced what the American Christians believed. I couldn’t believe the cruelty of God. I remember when I finally started reading Emerson and the transcendentals. Whitman. I thought, here are people who see god and the universe the way I wanted to see it. A loving place. I thought, I have to live as if this is true.
Oriana:
I couldn't believe the cruelty of god when I first heard the story of Adam and Eve and the "Original Sin" (St. Augustine's label). The concept of a loving deity was completely absent for me until a Protestant friend (in America -- I was already in my late twenties) said, "I was taught that god loved me and would help me if I needed help." I felt so envious. The god taught to me was the "god of punishment" (GOP).
**
THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE BIBLE AS MYTHOLOGY
“...the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” ~ Thomas Jefferson, The Adams-Jefferson Letters (594)
I see that day in my mind's eye. Probably not in my lifetime, but perhaps before the end of this century (if humanity makes it until then). The mythological view is simply bound to take over. And then we'll find those tales quite fascinating, and wonder why people were willing to kill in their name. Nobody killed for Zeus (except when we consider animal sacrifice) — one superiority of polytheism. And all those interesting goddesses!
Athenian coin with the owl of AthenaGENES THAT PROMOTE LONGEVITY ARE GAINING DOMINANCE
~ A huge genetic study that sought to pinpoint how the human genome is evolving suggests that natural selection is getting rid of harmful genetic mutations that shorten people’s lives. The work, published in PLoS Biology1, analysed DNA from 215,000 people and is one of the first attempts to probe directly how humans are evolving over one or two generations.
People who carry a harmful genetic variant die at a higher rate, so the variant becomes rarer in the older portion of the population.
Mostafavi and his colleagues tested more than 8 million common mutations, and found two that seemed to become less prevalent with age. A variant of the APOE gene, which is strongly linked to Alzheimer’s disease, was rarely found in women over 70. And a mutation in the CHRNA3 gene associated with heavy smoking in men petered out in the population starting in middle age. People without these mutations have a survival edge and are more likely to live longer, the researchers suggest.
This is not, by itself, evidence of evolution at work. In evolutionary terms, having a long life isn’t as important as having a reproductively fruitful one, with many children who survive into adulthood and birth their own offspring. So harmful mutations that exert their effects after reproductive age could be expected to be ‘neutral’ in the eyes of evolution, and not selected against.
But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still kicking around in the genome, the authors argue. That such a large study found only two strongly suggests that evolution is “weeding” them out, says Mostafavi, and that others have probably already been purged from the population by natural selection.
Why these late-acting mutations might lower a person’s genetic fitness — their ability to reproduce and spread their genes — remains an open question.
The authors suggest that for men, it could be that those who live longer can have more children, but this is unlikely to be the whole story. So scientists are considering two other explanations for why longevity is important. First, parents surviving into old age in good health can care for their children and grandchildren, increasing the later generations’ chances of surviving and reproducing. This is sometimes known as the ‘grandmother hypothesis’, and may explain why humans tend to live long after menopause.
Second, it’s possible that genetic variants that are explicitly bad in old age are also harmful — but more subtly — earlier in life. “You would need extremely large samples to see these small effects,” says Iain Mathieson, a population geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, so that’s why it’s not yet possible to tell whether this is the case.
The researchers also found that certain groups of genetic mutations, which individually would not have a measurable effect but together accounted for health threats, appeared less often in people who were expected to have long lifespans [based on their parents’ age at death] than in those who weren't. These included predispositions to asthma, high body mass index and high cholesterol. Most surprising, however, was the finding that sets of mutations that delay puberty and childbearing are more prevalent in long-lived people.~
https://www.nature.com/news/massive-genetic-study-shows-how-humans-are-evolving-1.22565
ending on beauty:
AUTUMN HAS COME
The nest in the lilac hedge
has been bare all summer
and into autumn. Nearly all the birds gone
to whatever dream they go and come from.
Winter will highlight this —
fallen trees that sleep everywhere
in the forest and across my path.
Broken branches already glistening
derelict in the freezing claws
of the thirsty sun.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
Let’s take delight in these lines again:
Nearly all the birds gone
to whatever dream they go and come from.
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