Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717) Still Life with Pomegranates, Sea Shells and a Beetle*
CUCUMBER SOUP
I know I’ll never meet anyone
who’s had a childhood like mine,
watched over by portraits of Lenin
and Karl Marx, with Engels tossed in
for the sake of the Trinity.
We all knew who God the Father was,
who the Son with slant Siberian eyes,
Engels the long-suffering Ghost.
Winter Palace and the Finland Station,
the first salvo from the battleship
Aurora, Smolny Institute:
those were family names —
it didn’t matter that they stood for
humanity’s shattered dreams.
You love what you grew up with:
not the moronic regime
but the lilacs of ideals,
the enormous width of The International —
when you sang it,
you sang with a million mouths.
Aren’t all poems about forbidden love?
The swooning lilacs instead of suicide?
In summer we ate cucumber salad, in winter
cucumber soup — it was the humble
potato soup with finely chopped pickle.
What can you expect from reality,
that fat woman who every day
opens a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle.
~ Oriana
AMOS OZ ON MEN AND WOMEN, BOOKS, AND MORE
“There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tyrant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.” ~ Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
“Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that’s left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is — the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that’s not at all exciting but that’s rarer than gold: decency.”
“Faith, coming from the lack of faith: as much as the faith in oneself is demolished, as much the intoxicating faith in the salvation becomes strong and the desperate need to be saved grows. The savior is that much greater, as you’re small, insignificant and unworthy. Henri Bergson writes: “It’s not true that faith can move mountains. On the contrary, the main thing in faith is the ability not to notice anything, even the moving of the mountain in front of you. It’s like a hermetic screen, fully impregnable to the facts.”
“Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood.”
“I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.”
“And so I learnt the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues. Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical scores and parallel logics. Each of these parallel logics is consistent and coherent in its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others.”
“Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.”
“Always characters first. I walk around pregnant with the characters for a long time before I write a single sentence.
And when, inside my head or inside my guts, the characters begin to do things to each other, what they do to each other is the plot. And then I can start writing.
What do we do to one another? It's the one and only subject of literature, if you really have to squeeze it in a nutshell.”
“Literature makes us look one more time at some things which we have seen a million times, and we see them afresh. Or, sometimes, it makes us reconsider things that we were sure we knew or we were sure we were convinced of.”
“I think literature is based on the deep human need to hear stories and to tell stories. It doesn't have to serve any other purpose.”
“There are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-paneled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffee-houses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close-up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter’s girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river.”
“If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.”
“When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somewhere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.”
“The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.”
“Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.”
“There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose.”
“A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.”
“All of my novels are democracies.”
“In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller.”
“While it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would never let you down.”
“I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells.” ~ A Tale of Love and Darkness
Rembrandt: Bust of an Old Bearded Man Looking Down, 1631 “I believe that if one person is watching a huge calamity, let’s say a conflagration, a fire, there are always three principle options.
1. Run away, as far away and as fast as you can and let those who cannot run burn.
2. Write a very angry letter to the editor of your paper demanding that the responsible people be removed from office with disgrace. Or, for that matter, launch a demonstration.
3. Bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if you don’t have a bucket, bring a glass, and if you don’t have a glass, use a teaspoon, everyone has a teaspoon. And yes, I know a teaspoon is little and the fire is huge but there are millions of us and each one of us has a teaspoon. Now I would like to establish the Order of the Teaspoon. People who share my attitude, not the run away attitude, or the letter attitude, but the teaspoon attitude – I would like them to walk around wearing a little teaspoon on the lapel of their jackets, so that we know that we are in the same movement, in the same brotherhood, in the same order, The Order of the Teaspoon.”
*
And this particular quotation, more personal: “I promised my wife that there won’t be a day when she doesn’t laugh.”
Oriana:
I love his thoughts on men and women. So much wisdom, and respect for women too.
It's easy to think that writers are all monsters — their marriage to words is a kind of necessary evil — but Oz seemed to be the kind of person who understood a lot about life and the importance of decency and friendship.
My mother used to say that friendship is more important than love — she meant romantic love. This certainly seems like a very wrong statement when you’re in your teens and twenties, and the whirlwind of romance can blot out all else. But after you’ve lived a while, you begin to understand the primacy of friendship. Deep friendship is love — the reliable love that in youth we may have thought too quiet and rather boring. It’s not boring — it’s the nurturing communion that makes us thrive (while a tumultuous love for the wrong person can be destructive).
I think Oz’s sensitivity to his mother's suffering (she committed suicide when he was twelve) made him more aware of suffering in general, and perhaps of women's suffering in particular.
His parents were afraid to let him travel to Europe. They were afraid that once he sees the beauty of European cities — the rivers, the parks, the magnificent buildings and heroic statues, the boulevards, the glittering stores and theaters, and more — that once he sees that beauty, he’ll not care for Israel. But what you grow up with imprints you with an indelible matrix. There was no need to fear that Amos would rather live in France or Italy (many of us imagine we would, and we may even try, but homesickness catches up with us).
He was a national writer, and yet a universal one because he was so attuned to timeless human psychology and to the larger world at the same time.
*
~ “Oz’s masterpiece is his 2004 memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” It was unlike anything he had ever written, telling the story of his own coming of age in Jerusalem with precision and brutal honesty. He captured the mystical air of the city, how it was transformed with the birth of the state, his own bookish youth and his mother’s depression, which led to her suicide when Oz was 12. In the memoir, he remembers his mother telling him: “I think you will grow up to be a sort of prattling puppy dog like your father, and you’ll also be a man who is quiet and full and closed like a well in a village that has been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Like me.” ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/books/amos-oz-appraisal.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Books
Mary:
Love all the quotes from Oz, but particularly his "Order of the Teaspoon." It is in the same spirit as John's poem about what his father believed — that you try to help the crucified man even if you know it won't be enough, even if it only gives the smallest and most temporary relief. As Oz notes, we all have a teaspoon, can all do something, even if only in a very small way. Those teaspoons of water are love and hope and decency, they are the refusal of complacency and despair. They are humanity redeeming itself, and not to be scorned and dismissed as too small and ineffective.
Oriana:
My attitude exactly. I first learned it from St. Therese the Little Flower! Knowing she wasn’t a great mystic like St. Teresa of Avila, she developed her “Little Way” — just little kindnesses, like chatting with an elderly nun whom no one liked. And that is enough. Rather than attempt some great work of goodness at which we are likely to fail, let’s join the order of the teaspoon! Because we always have something to give.
As for the Nobel Prize, A Tale of Love and Darkness is universally acclaimed. It is beautifully written, a masterpiece. But just as Borges didn't get the Nobel, neither did Amos Oz — or, in the past, Rilke. So it goes — the irony has been pointed out many times. What matters is that people love certain authors and continue to read them. It's a kind of "We the readers" committee.
*
COURAGE AND DESPAIR
~ “Courage is the solution to despair. Reason provides no answers. I can't know what the future will bring. We have to choose, despite uncertainty.” ~ Ethan Hawke as the minister in The First Reformed — the 2018 movie that spoke to me most.
Another thing that the minister says, trying to discourage the young eco-activist from pressuring his wife to have an abortion, is “You want to withhold from the world the mystery and wonder that a child is?” A child is a powerful symbol of the future — and we certainly don’t know how the child — the future — will turn out.
2018 has been a year in which I dealt with despair more acutely than in the recent past. For a while, I lost the will to live. The surgery really was my last hope for pain-free walking and thus the kinds of activities that were possible in the past — and new ones as well. “You have no idea what kind of beautiful new life will open to you,” someone said to me. I tried not to hang on to those words, but obviously they did enter my psyche.
Then the crash.
And then the emotional recovery — both due to some physical improvement in the amount of pain, and to the greater clarity about how I can still contribute. Another important idea also helped: that instead of pursuing happiness, we should pursue being useful.
So: courage redefined as simply not committing suicide — trusting that even though at some point life may not seem to be worth living, it is — another perception will emerge. Trust the crafty brain to come up with some solution that replaces the shattered dreams!
“Diminished expectations” may indeed be a strong feature. Rather than the “last dance,” the metaphor shifts to “last stroll.” In any case, every step is precious, every blossom along the way.
And there’s also the mystery stemming from this: we don’t belong just to ourselves, but to those we interact with. And we never fully know how deeply we can touch the life of another. Sometimes (perhaps most often) we remain unaware of it. Sometimes it’s a line in a poem of ours that someone recites back to us ten years later; sometimes it’s a smile given at precisely the right time to the person who needed it — not that we knew it.
The mystery and wonder of that interaction, that often hidden but profound influence — that’s the child we offer to the world.
However, it’s best not to worry to what extent we are truly useful and not to try too hard, risking unintended harm. Instead, we should remember Heidegger’s idea that our great gift to others is simply our being — our unique, unrepeatable being, the lens through which we refract the world, with luck sometimes producing the equivalent of a rainbow.
**
(I can easily agree that a movie like Roma has more artistic merit. It just didn't speak to me at the personal level. So I'm not saying that "First Reformed" was the best movie of 2018 — only the one that most affected me. This can happen even with a mediocre piece of art — one detail that hits on a personal level is all it takes.)
This reminds me again of that scene in The First Reformed when the minister talks about a child being a wonder and a mystery coming into the world. Seeing this made me think that the same applies to an adult. Each person is a wonder and a mystery, a potential for bringing something good into the world that only this particular person can deliver. It doesn't matter if it's just small acts of kindness — or rather, it's perhaps the small acts of kindness that matter most overall.
Mary:
Not with time..but with intention--what an insight here!! I also think of the Japanese tradition of mending cracked pottery with gold, so the broken is mended and more beautiful than ever.
*
“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
Oriana:
Speaking of ancestors: I have a sepia portrait of one set of my great-grandparents (my Babcia Veronika’s parents). On the envelope, my mother’s note that the portrait probably goes back to 1890. Yes, the multitudes who have slipped away . . .
The digitized non-sepia version isn’t quite as striking.
I vaguely remember their names as Antonina and Marceli. After a financial reverse, he became a broken man who spent his days in an armchair, reading the newspapers. Meanwhile the daughters were taken out of school and sent to work in a textile factory (a slow death sentence due to cotton dust destroying the lungs). Their wages served to finance the education of the elder son (the younger one ran away and his name was never spoken).
Antonina belonged to an order of lay nuns. Each evening she asked of family and neighbors if perhaps she committed a trespass against them, and if so, asked their forgiveness. She didn’t go to bed until satisfied that everyone forgave her. This was perhaps the most endearing thing about her (or, depending on one’s point of view, the most annoying — but she meant well). Strong women whose (misguided?) ambition toward elegance was reflected in their hats run in the family . . . The life of each could be an epic novel.
Would I be able to “throw away” my ancestors, as Gary Shteyngart hints might sometimes be necessary? If they happened to be Nazis, sure. But when the time came, they were Nazi-fighters, members of the Resistance, war heroes (both male and female). I might find this or that personality fault, but when you see your family name on the monument to war heroes, that eclipses other matters.
And even looking at Antonina, I can reject her religiosity (though it’s understandable given her life experiences) and her being brainwashed that it’s all right to sacrifice the daughters’ education in order to provide for the education of the firstborn son — but I also see her courage to go on after the family’s financial ruin, and her courage to be eccentric (taking religion seriously enough to become a lay nun was seen as “too much” — “devotka,” meaning more or less a woman religious nut, was a term of contempt).
Speaking of more remote ancestors: Marx and Lenin are certainly not blood relatives (relief), and neither is Trotsky, and yet . . . because of my familiarity with their biographies and photographs, they do feel like family, as my opening poem says. They are ancestors not only because of their enormous impact on history, but precisely because I’ve read those biographies — while even when it comes to the lives of my parents, how much do I know, especially dating back to the period before I was born . . . no, before my brain was developed enough to have coherent perceptions and memories? I shudder to think that I know more about Hitler and Eva Braun than about Marceli and Antonina.
*
“I don’t know whether there are any really pretty novels … All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that’s the novelists’ material. … We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.” ~ Margaret Atwood (photo: writing The Handmaid’s Tale in Berlin, 1984)
Oriana:
That’s a great observation: “We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people.” Now, religion may push us to the opposite extreme — my Catholic scrupulosity was ridiculous, but eventually, sure enough, I came to see myself as a good person . . . Yet truth lies in the middle. As Atwood says, our motives are mixed. And sometimes we simply fail to perceive the suffering of another person.
*
“Human life — indeed all life — is poetry. We live it unconsciously day by day, piece by piece, but in its inviolable wholeness it lives us.” ~ Lou Andreas-Salomé
Oriana:
At first I rebelled at the phrase: inviolable wholeness. My life would have been whole, I felt, if I remained in my homeland. Coming to America (very willingly, I hasten to add, but also in a state of enormous ignorance about what I was doing) violated that wholeness, splitting my life in two, dooming me to be an awkward outsider whose early years prepared her for a life in a different culture. And, mind you, what you absorb first creates a model of reality: this is a real city, a real river, a real tree. Other kinds — e.g. a city consisting largely of suburbs, like Los Angeles — are wrong somehow. A real city needs a great river flowing in the middle of it, with beautiful embankments and great shade trees. Palm trees are not real trees. And a real city needs to be old and mysterious, with legends about its origins, preferably with kings and queens and a virgin princess or two jumping into the river to escape a forced marriage.
But I digress. Yes, perhaps an immigrant’s life is forever torn and wounded, especially at first, but there are still areas of wholeness. For instance, I have remained intensely intellectual, even in an anti-intellectual culture, surrounded not by kindred minds but mostly by people ignorant of history and the larger world, often hostile to science.
I have also remained convinced that the basis of human greatness is cooperation rather than extreme individualism. I take it for granted that the task of the government is to do good things for the people — that society is a cooperative enterprise and we are all in it together. I can’t imagine anyone in Poland saying, in reference to a sick person, “You seem to believe that he has a right to medical treatment.” Or the idea that the right to own assault weapons is more sacred (sacred!!!) than the right of school children not to be shot. I took certain attitudes so much for granted that only coming to know people opposed to the automatic certainties I grew up with made me more fully aware of my values.
However, I’m sure Lou A-S wasn’t thinking specifically of political beliefs and even moral values. She had a more more intuitive feel for life as an organic whole, a great adventure of individual development in response to the collective forces of one’s historical moment. I needed to deal with the wound of being torn between two cultures; others have different wounds. Life remains a strange poetic whole that’s full of paradoxes and contradictions, just as a good poem has multiple meanings, and must hold that tension of opposites.
And yes, I can go along with the idea that life lives us while we constantly try to adjust and even manage to contribute.
*
TINKLE BELLS: the story behind Christmas hits
~ “Seasonal songs became a recording industry commodity in the 1940s, especially when it came to the big kahuna of seasons. The trailblazer was Bing Crosby’s record of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Berlin actually wrote the song before Pearl Harbor. He was in California and the opening verse begins: “The sun is shining, the grass is green / The orange and palm trees sway / There’s never been such a day / In Beverly Hills, L.A.” But Crosby’s performance of it in the film Holiday Inn and recording for Decca both came out in the summer of 1942, minus the verse. The geographical and meteorological nostalgia of the rest of the lyric effortlessly transformed into a wistfulness for Christmases past. Crosby’s record was number one on the charts for 11 consecutive weeks in the fall of ’42, and, by most accounts, is the most successful recording of all time. The Guinness Book of Records estimates that various versions of the song have sold 100 million copies, with Crosby’s record accounting for half of the total.
Other wistful Yuletide songs followed. Crosby released “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” in 1943; the lyrics appear to be transcribed from an overseas soldier’s letter home. He starts: “I’ll be home for Christmas / You can plan on me / Please have snow and mistletoe / And presents on the tree.” But there’s an abrupt kicker at the end of the second chorus, as Crosby sings, “I’ll be home for Christmas / If only in my dreams.” Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin’s wrote “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” for the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. The story is set in 1904, and the character played by Judy Garland sings the song to her little sister, in an attempt to console her about an upcoming move to New York. But no one could mistake the emotional connection to contemporary wartime: “Someday soon, we all will be together / If the fates allow. / Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow…” (In 1957, Frank Sinatra was putting together an album called A Jolly Christmas and asked Martin to provide some more upbeat lyrics. The writer provided some changes, including replacing the “muddle through” line with “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” That became the most commonly performed version.)
Jay Livingstone and Ray Evans they produced a simple but memorable song called “Tinkle Bells,” about the Salvation Army workers on busy city streets. When Jay told his wife about it she said, “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what the word ‘tinkle’ means to most people?’” The boys kept the melody and changed title to “Silver Bells.” Bing Crosby and Carol Richards’s recording, released before the film, was so popular that the studio called Hope co-star Marilyn Maxwell into the studio to reshoot a more elaborate production number. Hope made “Silver Bells” his Christmas theme, performing it every year on his holiday television special.
It turned out that the most successful Christmas records tended to have two common qualities: catchy, upbeat melodies and imagined unlikely scenarios for anthropomorphized yuletide characters. “Frosty the Snowman” was a triumph in 1950 for the cowboy turned mainstream singer Gene Autry, and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” for 13-year-old Jimmy Boyd in 1952. (The song had the distinction of being banned by the Diocese of Boston because it combined sex and religion.) The biggest Christmas song of all was the creation of a tunesmith named Johnny Marks, who put to music a humorous poem written by his brother-in-law, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; Autry’s recording reached number one on December 31, 1949. Despite the fact that Marks—like Berlin, Livingston, Evans, and most other songwriters—was Jewish, he repeatedly returned to this particular well, writing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and other holiday songs. But none reached the heights of his first hit. A 1980 People magazine interview with Marks contained some illuminating statistics. To that point, Autry’s version of “Rudolph” had sold more than 12 million copies, and records by some 500 other performers 130 million more.
https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-the-hit-christmas-song/?fbclid=IwAR2hD6X79yfw90ou8nHQgzVsVzl2rKuxgkYA0jAEYWVmNQoHuNeT2iY7yeo
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~ “When I was a child, my parents told me that, during the priestly benediction that brings the Sabbath service to a close, we all had to bow our heads and keep out eyes down until the rabbi’s solemn words came to an end. It was extremely important to do so, they said, because in these moments God passed above our heads, and no one who saw God face-to-face could live.
I brooded on the prohibition. To look into the face of the Lord, I reasoned, must be the most wonderful thing any human being could experience. Nothing that I would ever see or do in all the years that lay ahead of me would even approach this one supreme vision. I reached a momentous decision: I would raise my eyes and see God for myself. It would be fatal, I understood, but the cost was surely not too high.
I did not dare tell my parents of my determination, for I knew that they would be distraught and try to dissuade me. I did not even tell my older brother Marty, since I feared he would reveal my secret. I would have to act alone.
Several Saturdays passed before i could muster the courage. But finally one morning, standing with my head bowed, I conquered my fear of death. Slowly, slowly, while the rabbi intoned the ancient blessings, I raised my eyes. The air above my head was completely empty. And I found that I was by no means alone in looking about the sanctuary. Many of the worshipers were glancing around, staring out the windows, or even gesturing to friends and mouthing greetings. I was filled with outrage: “I have been lied to.”
Many years have gone by since this moment, and I have never recovered the naive faith that led me to prepare to sacrifice my life for a vision of God. But something lives in me on the other side of lost illusions. I have been fascinated throughout my life by the stories that we humans invent in an attempt to make sense of our existence, and I have come to understand that the term “lie” is a woefully inadequate description of either the motive or the content of these stories, even at their most fantastical.
Humans cannot live without stories. We surround ourselves with them; we make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them told to us. Some of us create them professionally. And a few of us — myself included — spend our entire adult lives trying to understand their beauty, power, and influence.” ~ Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
Oriana:
This reminds me of the first time I dared to look up during the blessing with the monstrance. You are supposed to bow your head in reverence and not lift your eyes until the shrill small bells have stopped ringing — yes, because allegedly god is present in the consecrated wafer inside the monstrance. But, somewhat like Lot’s wife, I did look up. The monstrance was very ornate — a traditional solar monstrance, with sharp gold rays radiating from the disk housing the eucharist. The priest was slowly making a large sign of the cross over the bent heads of the “flock.” The rays struck me as very spiky, wounding the dense, incense-choked air. There really was nothing unusual here — just a blessing by making the sign of the cross, using a monstrance rather than the hand or two fingers.
I too saw that it was a human performance, with nothing mysterious or divine about it. The drama of the loud ringing of the bells and the idea that you should bend your head and not look up — that was hype. There was nothing all that special about what was going on. I don’t quite remember my age — I’d guess eleven or twelve — too early to fully understand how the whole mass is a kind of theater, and the chanted mass an opera. Or, in a more shamanic interpretation, it was all magic rituals.
That was not the moment when I decided to leave the church, that all-too-human institution. But it was one step toward it. For me the surprise was the absence of feeling as a sinner as I was looking at the monstrance with plain curiosity rather than reverence. A certain emptiness that matched my spontaneous suspicion when I looked at the sky and couldn’t restrain the thought, “There is no one up there.”
Only clouds — and I loved watching clouds.
HOW FASCISM WORKS, by Jason Stanley
~ “The normalization of the fascist myth “makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been”, Stanley writes. “By contrast the word ‘fascist’ has acquired a feeling of the extreme, like crying wolf.”
The assertion that immigrants are responsible for social ills that threaten to ruin a once-great nation, for example, might represent run-of-the-mill racism or xenophobia. His book’s subtitle is after all “The Politics of Us and Them”. But the idea is also drawn from a blueprint shared by the most robust fascistic regimes in recent history.
Any reader for whom that previous sentence anticipates a debate – honestly, do Trump’s offenses of pettiness and corruption warrant such historico-political alarm? – might do well to open Stanley, who reassures us that it is OK to use the F-word, even when applied to regimes that do not appear to seek to mobilize populations for world domination.
Fascist politics – which evoke a mythic past, which rely on a sense of unreality and victimhood, and which use the cloak of “law and order” to hide corruption and attack scapegoats – can be used to flexible ends, writes Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale whose previous book was an analysis of propaganda.
What if a regime, for example, used a dismal us-versus-them divide in national politics to destroy faith in institutions capable of containing its power – elections, an independent judiciary, the public forum – thereby eliminating checks on its own self-enriching schemes?
“Publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and anti-corruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements,” Stanley writes, helpfully, without once mentioning “Drain the swamp”.
What if the regime used the same divisive politics to build popular support for a tax system that preserves wealth for the most privileged while creating no new opportunities for everyone else? Would that warrant the term “fascism”?
“Since I am an American,” writes Stanley, “I must note that one goal appears to be to use fascist tactics hypocritically, waving the banner of nationalism in front of middle-and working-class white people in order to funnel the state’s spoils into the hands of oligarchs.”
Underlying Stanley’s equanimous appraisal of the contemporary political moment is a weighty personal history. Both of his parents arrived in the US as Jewish refugees, his mother from eastern Poland and his father from Berlin, where his grandmother posed as a Nazi social worker to free Jewish prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
“My family background has saddled me with difficult emotional baggage,” he writes. “But it also, crucially, prepared me to write this book.”
The book provides a fascinating breakdown of the fascist ideology, nimbly interweaving examples from Germany, Italy and Hungary, from Rwanda and Myanmar to Serbia and, yes, the US. As he proceeds through his framework of the broadest features of his subject, Stanley includes smaller observations that may for some readers land bracingly close to home.
“In all fascist mythic pasts,” he writes, “an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago …
“In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for ‘universal values’ such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.”
Stanley’s acute awareness of the power of the term, and the subtlety of his argument here, must contribute to the fact that he does not explicitly brand Trump a “fascist”. Nor does he harp on “Make America great again”.
It is a misfortune of yet-unknown dimensions that he does not have to.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/15/how-fascism-works-jason-stanley-review-trump
“If your belief system is shot through with lies, you’re not free. Nobody thinks of the citizens of North Korea as free, because their actions are controlled by lies. Freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth. ” ~ Jason Stanley
FASCISM RESTS ON RACISM AND DENIAL OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS
~ “I’ve worried that gay and abortion rights might be killing our chances of addressing global priorities like the climate crisis. Though it’s heretical I’d be for surrendering on abortion rights if doing so takes the steam out of the right. I’ve worried about fighting the right-wing coup while fighting for a black or woman president. It could be like fighting the ultimate battle with one hand off doing something else.
Reading a recent book “How Fascism Works,” by Jason Stanley, I now see how gay, racial and women’s reproductive rights are always priority subtext.
Fascism is borne of the haves' (by historical accident, us white males’) natural progression from privilege to cozy detachment to annoyance with all obstacles to rationalized annoyance to delusional self-assertion as the chosen people, eternally entitled.
It’s a natural progression, just what you’d expect from an organism with language. What do you get when you cross emotions with language? You get language that rationalizes emotions. The haves justifying their having as though it were the natural order of things is just what you’d expect.
Fascism is the militant reassertion of paternalistic authority, a pecker-based pecking order with the fascist leader as the supreme father figure. Trump cult fascism fits Stanley’s diagnosis perfectly. No wonder it marginalizes civil rights for women, gays and minorities, all of which are at cross purposes to fascism’s goal: To rewrite history, making the white male great again by subordinating all to the father figure. It’s the bible but not just – both secular or religious fascism are all about misogyny and xenophobia.
That diversity is a front-burner subtext doesn’t compel me to drop strategic prioritizing. It’s not like we have the power to bludgeon the backward right into accepting our diversity standards just because they’re urgent. I’m still no fan of “backfiring firebrands,” leftist radicals who set us back by pushing too hard too fast without attention to what’s politically, even humanly possible.
Still, recognizing fascism as a militant absolutist reassertion of eternal god-ordained white male superiority gives me new context and appreciation for the front-burner subtext. The fascists’ fierce and fearful opposition to women, gays and minorities is part of a larger plan: to make us all the supplicating subordinates not to big brother but big daddy, the boorish, profligate, monster-man who thinks he can do no wrong and therefore does lots of it.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/how-fascism-works-one-privileged-white-dudes-awakening-to-fascisms-racist-and-misogynist-subtext/?fbclid=IwAR2bOKtYcH_kjCmn033GtYxy4v87AbrB4K9jThUOSJMfAs5Dl4_vxnJYY4c#.XCPbqMpc7vo.facebook
~ “I really believe in history, and that’s something people don’t believe in anymore. I know that what we do and think is a historical creation. I have very few beliefs, but this is certainly a real belief: that most everything we think of as natural is historical and has roots — specifically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called Romantic revolutionary period — and we’re essentially still dealing with expectations and feelings that were formulated at that time, like ideas about happiness, individuality, radical social change, and pleasure. We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular historical moment. So when I go to a Patti Smith concert at CBGB, I enjoy, participate, appreciate, and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche.” ~ Susan Sontag
Oriana:
Note: “Faith: not wanting to know what is true.” My heavy problem was that a voice in my head was telling me that religion wasn’t true (that there was no one up there, for instance, and the sky was empty except for the clouds) — and the suppression of that voice took a lot of energy and agony.
Of course it didn’t start with Romanticism. Many roots of our culture go back to Hebrew and classical mythology — and those are already composite mythologies going back much earlier. All is historical, and all is fusion and transformation of multiple cultures.
*
“There are those who scoff at the school boy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the school boy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain't so.” ~ Mark Twain
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WERE THE MIDDLE AGES ACTUALLY THE FIRST “AGE OF REASON”?
~ “The development of rationality is the theme of Johannes Fried’s book, The Middle Ages, and it is traced through the application of Aristotle’s logic in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century schools to the spread of its influence in ways that make it possible for Fried to postulate a “thought collective” among educated Western Europeans by the end of the period.
Perhaps there was such a collective. In Fried’s work its rise and achievement are given a priority that leaves not enough room for contrary cultural developments. One that is noted in his book is the almost universal expectation of the imminent end of all things, of the Last Days and Final Judgment predicted by Jesus and accepted throughout the early church. About every thirty years from the tenth century onward, this fear took possession of various, sometimes large bodies of men and women and inspired them to form mass movements. Collective penance, pentecostal enthusiasm, irregular crusades, unauthorized pilgrimages, messianic mobbing—all these engaged Christians who feared it might soon be too late.
This was a recurrent electrical charge both in politics and in religion, and Fried does it justice although it sits ill with his insistence on the period as an Age of Reason. He seems reluctant to concede that hysteria kept pace and outstripped the achievement of the thought collective. By 1500 art, printing, theater, and song had enriched the West with a vivid backdrop on which the presence of Antichrist, the Last Judgment, the Devil, Hell’s Mouth, and torments were made clearer than ever before. Individual consciousness of sin was so intense that the attempted reformation of the church would turn into hell on earth.” ~ source: New York Review of Books
~ “Charlemagne features as a key figure of the time and he is close to Fried’s project as a historian: to relocate the birth of the age of reason from the Renaissance to the middle ages. So his book, translated by Peter Lewis, begins with Boethius and his death in prison at the hands of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric. Boethius translated parts of Aristotle’s Organon into Latin, “an introduction to a mode of thinking that was subject to learnable rules and therefore susceptible to scrutiny and correction ... It wasn’t emperors and kings that made Europe great, but the categorical mode of thinking inspired by this translation”.
When chronicling Charlemagne’s rule, Fried pays particular attention to his interest in founding libraries and other centers of learning, some of which evolved into universities that are still around today. Alfred the Great is also singled out for praise in this regard, and Fried notes that when Europe was being plagued by Vikings, Alfred was apparently the only ruler who bothered to find out what made these marauders tick.
Fried also cites Muslim-ruled Andalucía as a major influence on the development of European thought, with Muslim scholars and visiting European ones translating ancient Greek authors, as well as their exegetes such as Averroës and Avicenna. I experienced a mild frisson of Ukip-baiting as I contemplated the proposition that European civilization as we know it can be at least in part accounted for by a Francophone pan-Europeanism and an expansionist Islam.
It is not all about learning, though. The middle ages may have been more enlightened than we have come to believe, but there were still plenty of examples of mass credulity out there. During the Black Death, traveling mendicants would go from town to town, scourging themselves with nail-studded whips; people would wash their eyes in their blood in the hope of curing or inoculating themselves against the disease. We’re more than 800 years after Boethius, and things don’t seem to have changed much. It is – here Fried borrows the historian RI Moore’s phrase – “a persecuting society”, with almost arbitrary rules determining heresy, and a relish for inflicting the punishments.
You may wonder what the point is of learning about all this but, apart from spotting alarming modern parallels, there is a joy in learning for its own sake. On practically every page something extraordinary is going on. One instance: a decisive battle in the crusade against the Cathars was lost because a commander, Peter II of Aragon (Berenguer IV’s grandson), was “supposedly exhausted by a night of love-making”. That’s one of the more benign examples. Despite the focus on reason, we are never too far from cruelty, or folklore.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/middle-ages-johannes-fried-review
At left, the wedding of Louis and Eleanor; at right, Louis leaving on Crusade; 14th-century
GREATER MATERNAL MORTALITY LINKED TO WEEKEND DELIVERIES
Based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States maternal mortality ratio is three to four times higher than that of most other developed nations. The maternal mortality ratio is increasing, reaching 21-22 per 100,000 live births in 2014 (more than double from 1990.) Although much has been written about this problem, few solutions have been forthcoming.
The researchers of this study wanted to know if maternal and fetal death ratios were higher on weekends versus weekdays or during different months of the year. "We were interested in this study because we believe this data provides a valuable window into the problems with the U.S. system of obstetric care delivery," said Amirhossein Moaddab, M.D., with the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine and the presenter of the study at the SMFM annual meeting.
The researchers analyzed more than 45 million pregnancies in the U.S. between 2004 and 2014 to determine if there are significant differences in ratios of both maternal deaths and stillborn deliveries depending on the day they occurred. Weekend delivery is also associated with differential maternal and neonatal morbidity, including increased ratios of perineal lacerations, maternal transfusions, neonatal intensive care admissions, immediate neonatal ventilation requirements, neonatal seizures and antibiotic use.
"We were able to control for pregnancy complications, and found that most women with pregnancy complications known to lead to death actually deliver on weekdays, suggesting that the actual problem with weekend deliveries is even greater," Steven L. Clark, M.D., senior author of the study explained. Researchers also looked at months of the year including "July phenomenon," the month of the year that is associated with an increased risk of medical errors and surgical complications that occurs in association with the time of year in which United States medical school graduates begin residencies. The researchers found no association between maternal-fetal mortality and July.
Clark continued, "Any system that shows this sort of variation in the most important of all system outcomes is, by definition, badly broken. Our data suggest that a part of the overall dismal U.S. obstetric performance may be related to this systems issue, that is, there may be a 'spill over' effect that is demonstrably worse on weekends but is also present on weekdays to a lesser extent. Our data does not allow us to go any further than this in terms of specifying what the problem is. However, we believe it is likely due to the fact that rarely is care of the pregnant inpatient the primary concern of the treating physician — it is almost always a distraction from office, surgery or personal activities."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170123094707.htm
Giotto: Nativity, 1305 Oriana:
That final statement is a shock — especially when it hits you that a woman may die as a result of this inexcusable attitude.
Mary:
On our miserable distinction of being the only major developed nation with shockingly high, and climbing, rates of maternal mortality and morbidity..this has been going on, and even studied for several years now, and is essentially continuing to rise, and even accelerate. Why?? Are we more concerned with the survival of at risk fetuses and newborns, spending time, money and sophisticated technology to save at risk infants, whose death rates are declining, while ignoring climbing rates of maternal deaths and serious complications?? In reports I've read dangerous symptoms of developing preeclampsia--a catastrophic complication of pregnancy, were not recognized, not reported, not treated, symptoms not monitored, and even symptoms of intense pain were brushed off, even when the pain was not relieved by increasingly strong doses of narcotics. Such intense and unresponsive pain is the body's siren screaming out that something very dangerous is under way.
Our health care system, far from being the finest in the world, is seriously broken. What was an art and a science is being run as a business, and the needs of both Doctors and Patients are pushed aside to satisfy the business model, whose bottom line is not health but financial solvency and profits. So we really get what we pay for, and it's not the best. Certainly not the safest.
Oriana:
You’ve said it all. Profits first. All stems from that. And this is so near-sighted — after all, if a mother survives and is in good health, she’s likely to have another child — more business, more profit! But it’s more important to play a game on the iPhone . . .
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ending on beauty and humor:
When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
~ Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2
OK, let’s reach for the stars.
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