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PORTRAIT IN NIGHTSHADE AND DELAYED TRANSLATION
In Saint Petersburg, on an autumn morning,
having been allowed an early entry
to the Hermitage, my family and I wandered
the empty hallways and corridors, virtually every space
adorned with famous paintings and artwork.
There must be a term for overloading on art.
One of Caravaggio’s boys smirked at us,
his lips a red that betrayed a sloppy kiss
recently delivered, while across the room
the Virgin looked on with nothing but sorrow.
Even in museums, the drama is staged.
Bored, I left my family and, steered myself,
foolish moth, toward the light coming
from a rotunda. Before me, the empty stairs.
Ready to descend, ready to step outside
into the damp and chilly air, I felt
the centuries-old reflex kick in, that sense
of being watched. When I turned, I found
no one; instead, I was staring at The Return
of the Prodigal Son. I had studied it, written about it
as a student. But no amount of study could have
prepared me for the size of it, the darkness of it.
There, the son knelt before his father, his dirty foot
left for inspection. Something broke. As clichéd
as it sounds, something inside me broke, and
as if captured on film, I found myself slowly sinking
to my knees. The tears began without warning until soon
I was sobbing. What reflex betrays one like this?
What nerve agent did Rembrandt hide
within the dark shades of paint that he used?
What inside me had malfunctioned, had left me
kneeling and sobbing in a museum?
Prosto plakat. Prosto plakat. Osvobodi sebya
said the guard as his hands steadied my shoulders.
He stood there repeating the phrase until
I stopped crying, until I was able to rise.
I’m not crazy, nor am I a very emotional man.
For most of my life, I have been called, correctly, cold.
As a student, I catalogued the techniques, carefully
analyzed this painting for a class on the “Dutch Masters.”
Years later, having mustered the courage to tell
this ridiculous story, a friend who spoke Russian
translated the guard’s words for me: “Just cry. Just cry.
Free yourself.” But free myself from what, exactly?
You see, I want this whole thing to be something
meaningful, my falling to my knees in front of a painting
by Rembrandt, a painting inspired by a parable
of forgiveness offered by a father to his lost son.
But nothing meaningful has presented itself. Even now,
after so much time has passed, I have no clue
what any of this means. I still haven’t figured out
whether or not I am the lost son or the found.
~ C. Dale Young
Oriana:
It's a remarkably honest poem. Rather than try to force some kind of easy-to-understand meaning, the speaker admits to being at a loss to explain why he was so emotionally overwhelmed by the painting. The guard's reaction (the guard may be assuming that the weeping viewer has a father-son problem — or maybe it's just a lot of stress, and the painting's strong emotional content simply released the urge to cry) shows great compassion and a cultural permission in the culture to touch a stranger and try to console him. The guard is saying that it's OK to cry.
Note that the painting presents also the resentful “good son” who apparently never received such affection. The resentful son has a point — his goodness has been taken for granted and never celebrated. People want to feel appreciated, and should be. The situation can easily make us think, "Well, the younger kid had lots of fun spending all this money, and then he just returns and gets all this love from his father, and a party thrown in his honor!” Oh sure, the prodigal son got to suffer too before daring to approach his father, but it seems like he got to live it up and had interesting experiences. The stay-at-home son got no fun and no appreciation.
The bible is full of examples of favoritism and the damage it causes but the damage is not acknowledged, and the favored son gets all the prizes after all. And I suspect that in this situation, even though the prodigal already spent his portion of the inheritance, he will get inheritance later after all — some will be taken away from the older son so the younger doesn't miss out on anything.
I'm not saying that the father should not forgive the prodigal son. But to completely disregard the other son, to have no empathy for him in this situation, is wrong also.
Though the speaker doesn't understand the guard's words, the body language of consolation is obvious. Note that the guard patiently stays with the visitor until the weeping stops. For me the “hero” of this poem is the guard.
Mary:
Yes. I would like to meet that compassionate guard.
And somehow I feel so moved. I understand the speaker and his overwhelming emotion . . . not understand what it means, not understand how this can happen, out of nowhere, unexpected, overwhelming, triggered by some powerful stimulus that speaks to us so directly we cannot say why or how . . . many things can do this, art, music, nature . . . and I love how he ends it — not knowing if he's lost or found.
Oriana:
And because it’s Russia, a warm Slavic culture, we aren’t surprised. It seems perfectly natural — just as in Anglo culture, it would be natural for the guard to turn away. A public display of grief — of powerful emotions in general — is not well tolerated. A man bursting into tears in a museum — no. Pretend you never saw it.
PS.
There is a term for what is described in this poem: the Stendhal Syndrome. It’s a strong psychosomatic reaction in response to an experience of great personal significance, especially while viewing art.
Wiki: ~ “When Stendhal visited the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo Galilei are buried, he was overcome with emotion. He wrote:
I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves'. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.” ~
I have certainly teared up many times when watching beautiful ice-skating, for instance, or listening to certain kinds of music. Operas are notorious tear-jerkers, and though you may try to steel yourself and not cry while Mimi is dying, suddenly you lose that self-control and start sobbing. The conditions have to be right. There is a certain poem that I’ve read a few times, filled with admiration but perfectly dry-eyed — and then one time I must have been especially receptive, and started vehemently sobbing.
Yes, art can overwhelm us. Beauty can do it; a compelling presentation of an emotional experience can do it.
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“What cannot be said will be wept.” ~ Sappho
Of course art can give a lot of pleasure without bringing us to tears, as in these examples of Japanese and Impressionist art.*
“Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.” ~ Julian Barnes, The Only Story
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WHY ARE READERS SO FOND OF JANE AUSTEN?
~ “I blame my first marriage on Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet married for gratitude and esteem, and these were exactly the feelings I had for my first husband. If they were good enough for Elizabeth, why wouldn’t they be good enough for me? But I wasn’t Elizabeth; I was much more like Emma, a far more flawed heroine. The romantic Emma would never have been satisfied with gratitude and esteem, and neither was I. To be fair, I know my husband felt the same way, although I don’t think he blamed Austen for his mistake.
. . . Indeed, readers tend to think of characters as real people when they read, especially when they read novels. One reason we read for the plot is that we want to find out what happens to people we’ve come to know and care about.
At the elite institution I attended, thinking about characters as real people was strictly taboo, the sign of naïveté and ignorance. Doctoral candidates were expected to be professional readers who realized that every “text” (we didn’t call them books or novels) consisted of words on a page and nothing more. We were being trained to decode, not to read. Many of us still harbored a “naïve” love of literature and authors, but this was our shameful secret, the madwoman who lived in hidden rooms in the attic.
Thinking about Austen in the context of the mind and the brain, I was now able to find an answer to my question: So many of us love and trust Austen because she possessed extraordinary powers of empathy.
Empathy means seeing the world from a different perspective, walking a mile, or even a moment, in someone else’s shoes. It means actually experiencing, although in a weaker form, another person’s state of mind, while also maintaining your own perspective. So if a friend is panicking, becoming anxious yourself wouldn’t be true empathy but rather emotional contagion. Empathy means understanding your friend’s panic while at the same time realizing that the anxiety of the moment is hers, not yours.
For Austen to have created such a variety of convincing imaginary people, she must have been a profoundly astute mindreader of real people. And no one familiar with her work can doubt her compassion for the unfortunate, or her glad participation in the happiness of others. She knew loss and thwarted love in her own life, which enabled her to portray the sufferings of disappointed love. But she could also show the joy of love’s fulfillment. I can think of no other novel in which the happy ending is rendered so poignantly meaningful as it is in Persuasion. Yes, Austen must have possessed a high degree of empathy.
The second experience of empathy is even more crucial: Because Austen understands human nature so thoroughly, we have the sense that she empathizes with us, her readers. To put this in the apt phrase of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, when we read Austen, we have the feeling of “feeling felt,” of having our innermost feelings understood and resonated with. This is inherently gratifying because as a species, humans crave such understanding. We have a profound need for empathy, to know that we’re not alone with our joys and sorrows.
These two kinds of empathy, of recognizing and feeling recognized, are two sides of the same coin. Austen conveys her understanding of us, her readers, precisely by creating characters that we identify with. And we’re able to identify with Austen’s characters because they mirror our ways of thinking and feeling.
The literary scholar Patrick Hogan has found that love stories are told in cultures throughout the world, and that the same situations and emotions tend to appear within those stories no matter where or when they were written. We might find much about the Latin classic The Aeneid alien and even alienating, but we can still identify with Dido’s heartbreak when her lover, Aeneas, abandons her. Austen concentrates on this world of ubiquitous feelings and perceptions.
Austen’s style remains as accessible as her stories. She writes in pithy, crystal-clear sentences, creating novels that are paced quickly enough even for our impatient 21st-century sensibilities. In Austen, the heart of the matter, which is indeed the matter of the heart, is right there; we don’t have to penetrate layers of cultural and stylistic difference to get at it. Because Austen creates a world that has much common ground with our own, there’s a strong foundation for empathy.
Perhaps it seems strange to characterize Austen’s novels as being about empathy. After all, Austen’s great subject is love: its different varieties, its frustrations, its nuances, and, above all, its satisfactions. And not just love between couples, but also between friends, parents and children, siblings. Austen certainly understood this most precious of human emotional resources.
But there’s no contradiction here. Austen’s novels show again and again that the most complete and satisfying relationships rely on perspective taking, understanding, and emotional resonance. Whatever its other features—gratitude, esteem, passion, nurturing—at its core, true love is empathy. Think about all of Austen’s happy couples and you’ll see that this is the case. Anne of Persuasion might be more intuitive and passionate than Elizabeth of Pride and Prejudice, but sensitivity and understanding lead to happy endings for both of them.
Above and beyond the kindness and understanding that empathy creates, it’s valuable because it unlocks the prison house of cosmic loneliness that threatens each of us with a life sentence of solitary confinement. Anglo-European politics, philosophy, and psychology have emphasized our separateness, condemned us without a trial, insisting that we’re stuck in a container, the body, looking out through windows, the eyes. We’re born alone and we die alone, even if other people are near us for these two defining events in the life cycle of every human.
But the latest work in social intelligence tells us that we’re profoundly interconnected in terms of brain, body, and mind. This has been a key insight of the literary imagination all along, that fund of wisdom and observation found in literature.” ~
https://lithub.com/i-blame-my-first-marriage-on-jane-austen/?fbclid=IwAR3UpryQExT4KvMjhGs-rx5I2WJd0mzubUntdhDP0S9hW4B4uWsvyvOtBlg
Oriana:
I took me a while to warm up to Austen. At first I found her style too plain, completely unlyrical. What, no descriptions of nature? Nothing poetic whatsoever? Just straight plot and dialogue?
But fast-paced plot certainly draws and keeps a reader’s interest — and Austen also had quite a bit of wit. Some of her characters are satirical portraits that Dickens might envy — though she rarely goes for pure caricature. She’s basically a realist, and her satire emerges organically from accurate portrayal.
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MY CULTURE COMES FROM EVERYWHERE
“My culture comes from everywhere. I'm sick of this notion of nationality, that if you're brought up in the same city or same country you're the same. Even three kids brought up in the same family with the same genes, they are not the same. Just consider a human a human.” ~Marjane Satrapi
Oriana:
It reminds me of my constant battle not to be introduced as a Polish poet. It’s both inaccurate and limiting. Imagine Einstein being introduced as a Swiss Jew — that would be ridiculous.
A person is so much more than their nationality — especially someone educated and accomplished. We can take it for granted that many cultures went into the making of that person’s unique mental make-up.
I think something revolutionary happened when the knowledge of Buddhism and Taoism became widespread in the West. As philosophies as least — practice is always "impure" — they were arguably superior. No one died on the cross for anyone else's sins — how repugnant. Nature was revered (especially in Taoism). The Flower Sermon was amazing, and certainly on a different plane than debating whether Jesus died only for the Elect. So at least the educated were forced to see that other cultures had something valuable to offer, and the idea of Christian supremacy began to crack.
I am not advocating that anyone accept any philosophy or idea in its entirety. We need to be selective. Cherry picking, yes, by all means! Let's sift “wisdom literature” for the best it has to offer. Also, in retrospect, the way the educated preserved classical mythology, philosophy (especially Stoicism, which, like Buddhism, cannot be dismissed as inferior), and literature was amazing, and perhaps actually the first crack in Christian supremacy — this reverence for ancient, non-Christian cultures with their cultural treasures.
I'm also reminded of Vonnegut's idea of a granfalloon -- a false grouping, basing your identity on having been born in a particular state, for instance — thus, those born in Indiana are “Hoosiers.”
True, people frequently ask me, “Where are you from?” I was going to say “always,” but I’ve noticed that this has ceased to be 100% “always.” Some people have the tact not to ask that question, knowing that I’ll reveal my national origin if it becomes relevant in any way, at my own choosing. I remember a beautiful moment when I did reveal it, and a Japanese man bowed and said only one word: “Chopin.” And we were instantly in a much wider realm. Love of music made us part of what Vonnegut called a “karass” — a more authentic grouping based on something of universal value.
Magda Abakanowicz: Crowd Abakanowicz (1930-2017) was an internationally famous fiber artist. She happened to have Tatar ancestry (Abba Khan + “owicz,” one of the typical ending of Polish family names, an example of how names became polonized) — but is that in any way essential? It’s interesting, but no doubt her knowledge of modern art and her art education and her peers were ultimately more influential.
PS.
A sign of progress: it seems the Catholic church no longer preaches (or doesn’t preach it as openly and emphatically as in the past) that Catholicism is the only true religion. I was taught that all Protestants, Jews, Muslim, Buddhists, Hindus, and on and on (we hardly need to mention atheists), went to hell to burn there for eternity — not because they were evil but because they weren’t Catholic. All those not baptized as Catholics — and all baptized Catholics who became “lapsed” (these days that’s apparently over 80% of those who start as Catholics leave the church — either for other denominations [Episcopalians and Unitarians are popular alternatives], or because they decide all religions are man-made archaic nonsense.)
Nevertheless, let’s bear in mind that not speaking of eternal damnation for all non-Catholics is a huge step toward greater tolerance. And now there is even the revolutionary talk that not just Protestants, but virtuous Jews and Buddhists maybe go to heaven too! That perhaps Jonas Salk, who gave the world the polio vaccine as a gift, without taking out a patent on it, is not after all being boiled in a cauldron of tar, right along with Hitler!
I suspect that some of the ideas that were forced on me in childhood are now viewed by more and more people as morally obscene.
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“Stupidity isn't embracing bad ideas. It's failing to replace them when better ideas come along.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
Some stupid (or at least outdated) ideas are imparted to us in childhood. We shouldn’t blame ourselves for having accepted them — a child’s brain can do only so much critical thinking (yet note how many questions children tend to ask). But as we get older, it’s time to examine the validity of what we were taught, and to explore alternatives. Perhaps Buddhism and/or Taoism have something to offer? Or the great Russian writers? Or a maverick psychologist like BF Skinner, who dared suggest that rewards are more effective than punishment?
OVERBITE, DIET, AND SPEECH
~ “We draw on evidence from paleoanthropology, speech biomechanics, ethnography and historical linguistics to suggest that new speech sounds emerged in our ancient ancestors as their jaws and teeth evolved to deal with new kinds of diets.
Like the communication systems of other animals, language is simply part of our nature. We process it with the neural wiring in our brains, and we produce it with our bodies: mostly with our mouths, but in the case of sign languages, also with our hands and other gestures.
Language is also often seen as a fixed skill – it arose with the emergence of our species and has been stable in its basic design since its origin.
This traditional view is part of what researchers call the uniformitarian assumption in linguistics and anthropology. The assumption is that languages today are the same — in terms of their types and distributions of linguistic structures — as they were in the past.
Food and language
Our research group’s work directly challenges this uniformitarian assumption. We believe the range of available speech sounds used in human language has not remained stable since its origin. Our research shows that labiodental sounds – such as “f” and “v,” which are made by raising the bottom lip to the upper teeth – began to arise only after the transition to agriculture, between 10,000 and 4,000 years ago (depending on the world region).
While labiodentals are rather common today and appear in roughly half of the world’s languages, we show that in the case of Indo-European languages, they’ve been innovated mainly since the Bronze Age.
Why? What caused this sudden emergence of a new class of speech sounds?
To understand the relevant processes, we need to quickly dive into some biological anthropology. All primates start with an overbite and overjet bite configuration – colloquially a scissors bite – both with their baby teeth and their permanent teeth. Then a traditional diet of tough foods naturally develops the scissors bite of a young individual into an edge-to-edge bite by adulthood.
The invention of food processing technologies – like milling and fermentation – that gained steam with the development of agriculture allowed people to move toward a softer diet. And those softer foods meant people retained the scissors bite well into adulthood. For example, the archaeological evidence shows adult skulls with the scissors bite as early as 4,300 years ago in what is today Pakistan.
This rather recent change in the human bite paved the way for labiodentals to be incorporated into spoken languages. This process gradually began to appear in geographic areas including Europe and South Asia where there was increased access to softer foods through food processing technologies.
But these new sounds didn’t emerge everywhere: Retention of the overbite and overjet only facilitates the ease of producing labiodentals and increases the probability for producing them accidentally – it does not mandate it. So across diverse regions, societies and cultures, many groups slowly developed a new class of speech sounds, but others did not.
A biological perspective on language evolution allows us to ask exciting new research questions, like how did the current diversity of speech sounds develop over evolutionary time?
At present, there are over 2,000 different speech sounds that play a role in the world’s roughly 7,000 or so spoken languages. These speech sounds range from the omnipresent cardinal vowels (i, a and u) found in most languages to the rare click consonants found in a handful of languages spoken in southern Africa. Why is there such immense diversity in the sounds of the world’s languages?
Recent research suggests that the basic anatomical conditions for speech were in place long before the emergence of Homo sapiens. According to those results, it was chiefly a matter of neural development that allowed the sophisticated motor control that human beings now have over their speech organ. But our new findings now hint that researchers might have underestimated the importance of fine anatomical details: While the basics may have been set, some sounds may be older than others in the hominin and primate lineage, simply because of anatomical conditions and independent of motor control.
We believe that our discovery opens a new chapter in the quest for the origins of humanity’s most distinctive faculty, language, a quest that has been called the hardest problem in science.” ~
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/softer-processed-foods-changed-the-way-ancient-humans-spoke?fbclid=IwAR1r0v4KWsEShwz68P3G7wq9q7YAgrfzJBWWZZB45iIM37q0V-Gxylne088
Overbite is shown on the right
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DO WE BECOME MORE SPIRITUAL AS WE GROW OLDER?
In my experience and observation, we don’t become progressively spiritualized with age until we are “ripe for death”. It’s fine to be “spiritual” when one is healthy and has plenty of energy for exploration and new beginnings: in late adolescence and one’s twenties and thirties, sex drive notwithstanding. That’s when the urge to explore monastic life is sometimes acted on. Then there is a somewhat chastened spiritual quest of healthy middle age — we see people leaving monasteries, un-cocooning themselves from the collective robes and striking out in a new direction — Thomas More leaving the Servites and becoming a Jungian is only one example. Merton was apparently about to leave his order too, but the stupid accident with the electric fan deprived us forever of knowing how that would go. Karen Armstrong left the convent to think and write according to her new insights. Even Martin Luther’s journey from priesthood to a break with the church and a happy marriage with Katherine von Bora, a former nun, echoes this pattern to some extent.
As for non-celebrities, I imagine this pattern repeated and repeated countless times.
But then as people grow older, the body becomes more and more INTRUSIVE. With its proverbial aches and pains fusing into chronic pain, and the various dysfunctions and diseases of old age, it keeps the mind prisoner by constantly calling attention to itself. It’s too strong a statement, I know, but I'm tempted to say it: we die slaves to the body.
This is not to deny the positive aspects of aging: the proverbial “mellowing,” a greater clarity about what really matters, taking delight in the small daily pleasures, increased empathy, gentleness, and affection toward others. This is not universal, and again is predicated on a brain function that, while diminished, is still sufficient, and health still not so poor that life becomes an ordeal.
PS. When I was growing up, the people I most often saw in church were elderly women. Since faith was a gift, I wondered why it was so disproportionately given to elderly women. Later I saw the sociological dimension — some of these women practically lived in church, spending most of the day in the pews.
But even here, again it seems that older and downright elderly women are the majority of various dwindling congregations and the most active members . . . But after they are gone?
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DNA STUDY UNDOES THE MYTH OF THE ARYAN ORIGIN OF MODERN INDIAN POPULATION
~ “The study showed that there were two major migrations into India in the last 10,000 years.
The first one originated from the Zagros region in south-western Iran (which has the world's first evidence for goat domestication) and brought agriculturists, most likely herders, to India.
This would have been between 7,000 and 3,000BCE. These Zagrosian herders mixed with the earlier inhabitants of the subcontinent - the First Indians, descendants of the Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who had reached India around 65,000 years ago - and together, they went on to create the Harappan civilisation.
In the centuries after 2000 BCE came the second set of immigrants (the Aryans) from the Eurasian Steppe, probably from the region now known as Kazakhstan. They likely brought with them an early version of Sanskrit, mastery over horses and a range of new cultural practices such as sacrificial rituals, all of which formed the basis of early Hindu/Vedic culture. (A thousand years before, people from the Steppe had also moved into Europe, replacing and mixing with agriculturists there, spawning new cultures and spreading Indo-European languages).
Other genetic studies have brought to light more migrations into India, such as that of the speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages who came from south-eastern Asia.
The best way to understand the Indian population is to imagine it as a pizza, with the first Indians forming its base. Though the base of this rather irregular pizza is thin in some places and thick in others, it still serves as the support that the rest of the pizza is built upon because studies show that 50% to 65% of the genetic ancestry of Indians derives from the First Indians.
On top of the base comes the sauce that is spread over the pizza - the Harappans. And then come the toppings and the cheese - the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European language speakers or Aryans, all of whom found their way into the subcontinent later.
To many in the Hindu right wing, these findings are unpalatable. They have been campaigning to change school curricula and remove any mention of Aryan immigration from textbooks [the right wing would like people to believe that the Aryans originated in India]. And on Twitter, several hugely popular right-wing "history" handles have long been attacking India's leading historians who have defended the theory of Aryan migrations and continue to do so.
For Hindu nationalists, there is a cost to admitting that the Aryans were not the first inhabitants of India and that the Harappan civilization existed long before their arrival. It would mean acknowledging that Aryans or their Vedic culture were not the singular fountainhead of Indian civilization and that its earliest sources lay elsewhere.
The idea of the mixing of different population groups is also unappealing to Hindu nationalists as they put a premium on racial purity. There is also the additional issue of the migration theory putting Aryans on the same footing as latter-day Muslim conquerors of India - such as the Mughals.
These are not just theoretical debates. The ruling BJP government in Haryana state, which neighbors the Indian capital Delhi, has demanded that the Harappan civilisation be renamed the Saraswati river civilization. Since the Saraswati is an important river that is mentioned in the earliest of the four Vedic texts, such a renaming would serve to emphasize the link between the civilization and the Aryans.
The new study puts an end to these debates and it has thus come as a shock to the Hindu right-wing. In a tweet attacking its co-author Prof Reich, ruling party MP and former Harvard University professor Subramanian Swamy said: "There are lies, damned lies and (Harvard's 'Third' Reich and Co's) statistics."
However, the real message that the new research carries is an exciting and hopeful one: that Indians have created a long-lasting civilization from a variety of heredities and histories.
The genius of the Indian civilization during its best periods has been inclusion, not exclusion. Unity in diversity is, indeed, the central theme of India's genetic make-up.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46616574?ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_mchannel=social&ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_source=facebook
A descendant of the Aryan tribe. Somehow I don't think that Hitler would be happy with this image.
MEN FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPES MIGRATED AS FAR WEST AS SPAIN
~ “In a new paper in the journal Science, a group of 111 population geneticists and archaeologists charted 8,000 years of genetics in the region. They paint a picture that shows plenty of genetic complexity, but that also hints at a single mysterious migration about 4,500 years ago that completely shook up ancient Iberians’ DNA.
The team searched DNA evidence for clues to how and when various populations became part of the Iberian Peninsula’s gene pool. They sequenced the genomes of 271 ancient Iberians, then combined that information with previously published data about 132 other ancient peninsula dwellers.
Beginning in the Bronze Age, the genetic makeup of the area changed dramatically. Starting in about 2,500 B.C., genes associated with people from the steppes near the Black and Caspian seas, in what is now Russia, can be detected in the Iberian gene pool. And from about 2,500 B.C. much of the population’s DNA was replaced with that of steppe people.
The “Steppe Hypothesis” holds that this group spread east into Asia and west into Europe at around the same time—and the current study shows that they made it to Iberia, too. Though 60 percent of the region’s total DNA remained the same, the Y chromosomes of the inhabitants were almost entirely replaced by 2,000 B.C. That suggests a massive influx of men from the steppes, since Y chromosomes are carried only by men.
“It looks like the influence was very male dominated,” says Miguel Vilar, a genetic anthropologist who serves as senior program officer for the National Geographic Society.
Who were these men—and did they come in peace? Vilar, who was not involved with the study, speculates that the steppe men may have come on horses bearing bronze weapons, hence ushering in the Bronze Age to the area. He compares the migration to the one the indigenous peoples of North and South America faced when the first Europeans landed in the 1490s.
“It shows that you could have a migration all the way across the whole continent (of Europe) and still have a heavy influence on this far extreme,” he says.
Although bronze came into use in Iberia around that time, no other distinct traces of steppe culture have yet been found. The study did show that people in present-day Basque, who speak Western Europe’s only non-Indo-European language, carry genetic markers closely related to those of the steppe people. And unlike modern Spaniards, modern-day Basques don’t show the same amount of genetic mixing that happened on the peninsula over the centuries.
The team also found a single individual with North African DNA from a site in the middle of Iberia. His bones date to about 2,500 B.C.
“At the beginning I thought it was a mistake,” says Iñigo Olalde, a population geneticist who led the study.
When he replicated his work, it checked out. The presence of that lone African suggests early, sporadic interchange between Iberia and North Africa, making sense of archaeological discoveries of African ivory at Copper-Age Iberian digs. But the team thinks that North African ancestry became widespread in Iberia only in about the last 2,000 years.
Ice Age diversity
The study forms a complex picture of the genetic history of Spain—one that’s reinforced in a companion piece published in the journal Current Biology. In that study, researchers from Spain and Germany found that hunter-gatherers and farmers living on the Iberian Peninsula also were more genetically diverse than previously thought. They found evidence that different hunter-gatherer cultures mixed on the warm Iberian Peninsula, which they used as an Ice Age refuge 19,000 years ago. Newer farmers to the area mixed with the hunter-gatherers later.
”The DNA was a surprise,” says doctoral student Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, an archaeogeneticist who led the research for the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and the University of Zaragoza in Spain. “Clues about what happened in that moment help us understand the evolution of the next period. We need to sample more individuals to know their history in a more accurate way.”
Ancient DNA work “is helping us deconstruct the idea that that we have distinct geographic populations like Africans or Asians or Europeans,” says Vilar. “Not only are people living in areas like Iberia heterogeneous, but they were the product of different waves of migration themselves.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/03/ancient-iberians-dna-from-steppe-men-spain/
Two skeletons of hunter-gatherers who also happened to be brothers
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Mary:
What we are finding with studies of DNA, both in ancient and modern populations, is that ideas of 'racial purity' and of race itself, have, as has long been asserted by science, no real basis. Our history as a species is being gradually uncovered by these studies, with DNA as a historical record. Part of the problem I think with proponents of race as a determining factor in the development of cultures and nations is that none of these ideas go deep enough into time. They put their ideas of origins in the framework of early agricultural societies, and of course much of our ideas of history come from those beginnings — agriculture, cities, states, writing. All those ways of being remembered.
But what we are finding is that our history goes back incredibly far, and that all that enormous expanse of time was filled with two important and astonishing things. First, there was more than one type of hominin, at least three we know of with tantalizing hints of more. And all these folks engaged in massive migrations, and when they met, they interbred. It looks like there was not one massive migration out of Africa, but two. And various populations rapidly, and very early on, surged across the continents, Europe, Asia, Indonesia Australia. Parts of the DNA of other hominin groups are embedded in the DNA of modern populations outside sub-Saharan Africa — so bits of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA persist in us.
The movements and migrations of these early peoples lasted for tens of thousands of years. They swept back and forth and across the same territories again and again, apparently mixing and mating when opportunity arose. Inevitable conclusion: everyone is the end result of uncounted repeated genetic exchanges between different groups, the only exception being isolated sub- Saharans whose ancestors did not leave Africa in any of the migratory waves.
And if the idea of separate and distinct “races" is no longer credible, how much more baseless the idea of “nationalism”? Simply think of all the national boundary shifts in Europe over the last 150 years. These boundaries describe political entities that aren't congruent with cultural or linguistic ones common to groups of the people living there. An imposed and artificial construct, the state, like the idea of race or racial purity, exists to serve it's own agenda.
At least, that's what I think. Look long and deep, and a lot of nonsense melts away like fog. The closer you look, the more you see connections, the less convincing divisions become.
Oriana:
I'm in no way against the cultivation of regional cultures — folk singing, cuisine, unique local varieties of cheese, whatever. This makes the world richer, more interesting through its diversity. The only problem is with the larger states that somehow develop the idea that they are exceptional and superior.
Now, this is by no means confined to giant countries like the US and Russia. Poland developed its own ridiculous nationalism based on all kinds of myths — in the 19th century, it was the idea that Poland was the “Messiah of nations.” It had to do with the supposedly Christ-like suffering of the Polish people during the time when Poland did not exist as an independent country. Please don’t ask about the logic — it’s ridiculous on the face of it.
Also, Poland used to be a multi-ethnic state, a fact that Polish nationalists hate, wanting an ethnic and religious “purity” — this after centuries of intermarriage with Germans, Russians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and other groups. And of course it doesn’t even take marriage to produce ethnic mixing — not all official fathers were the biological fathers.
And a saying like “Scratch a Pole, find a Jew” doesn’t come out of nowhere either. The greatest of Polish Romantic poets, the official national bard, had a Jewish mother and married a Jewish woman in a temple. He increasingly insisted on identifying himself as Jewish — not something we were ever told in school. I learned it only in the US, after reading an eye-opening article by Milosz.
Of course it’s entirely OK to feel both Polish and Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian, and so forth. And it’s best, I think, not to give it any special importance. The important thing is to be a good human being, kind to all regardless of nationality. And it helps to remember that we are all “mixed” — both genetically and culturally. 
An example of folk art from one region of central Poland.
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“They used to say: 'When you are as ugly as that and when you have a voice like that, you do not sing.' But Piaf used to tell me: 'You will be the greatest.’" ~ Charles Aznavour
Aznavour statue in Gyumri, Armenia
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THE ROOTS OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE ARE IN SLAVERY
~ “Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.
The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election.
In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.” ~
http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
from another source:
~ “While there are many grievances about the Electoral College, one that’s rarely addressed is that it was created to protect slavery, planting the roots of a system that’s still oppressive today.
“It’s embarrassing,” said Paul Finkelman, visiting law professor at University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I think if most Americans knew what the origins of the Electoral College is, they would be disgusted.”
Madison, now known as the “Father of the Constitution,” was a slave-owner in Virginia, which at the time was the most populous of the 13 states if the count included slaves, who comprised about 40 percent of its population.
During that key speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Madison said that with a popular vote, the Southern states, “could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”
Madison knew that the North would outnumber the South, despite there being more than half a million slaves in the South who were their economic vitality, but could not vote. His proposition for the Electoral College included the “three-fifths compromise,” where black people could be counted as three-fifths of a person, instead of a whole. This clause garnered the state 12 out of 91 electoral votes, more than a quarter of what a president needed to win.
“None of this is about slaves voting,” said Finkelman, who wrote a paper on the origins of the Electoral College for a symposium after Gore lost. “The debates are in part about political power and also the fundamental immorality of counting slaves for the purpose of giving political power to the master class.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slavery-constitution?fbclid=IwAR0CiBNJX5-uimx8WKIll-Ju75AMvPc6yCVwvwgWvx8hBHFvRW2qjyjl1u0
WHY ARGUMENTS FOR RETAINING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE ARE WRONG
~ “Myth #1: Electors filter the passions of the people
College students first learning about the Electoral College will often defend the system by citing its original purpose: to provide a check on the public in case they make a poor choice for president.
But electors no longer work as independent agents nor as agents of the state legislature. They’re chosen for their party loyalty by party conventions or party leaders.
Myth #2: Rural areas would get ignored
Since 2000, a popular argument for the electoral college made on conservative websites and talk radio is that without the Electoral College, candidates would spend all their time campaigning in big cities and would ignore low-population areas.
Other than this odd view of democracy, which advocates spending as much campaign time in areas where few people live as in areas where most Americans live, the argument is simply false. The Electoral College causes candidates to spend all their campaign time in cities in 10 or 12 states rather than in 30, 40 or 50 states.
Presidential candidates don’t campaign in rural areas no matter what system is used, simply because there are not a lot of votes to be gained in those areas.
Myth #3: It creates a mandate to lead
Some have advocated continuation of the Electoral College because its winner-take-all nature at the state level causes the media and the public to see many close elections as landslides, thereby giving a stronger mandate to govern for the winning candidate.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 51 percent of the national popular vote but 91 percent of the electoral vote, giving the impression of a landslide victory and allowing him to convince Congress to approve parts of his agenda.
Perhaps for incoming presidents, this artificial perception of landslide support is a good thing. It helps them enact their agenda.
But it can also lead to backlash and resentment in the majority or near-majority of the population whose expressed preferences get ignored. Look no farther than the anti-Trump protests that have erupted across the country since Nov. 8.
Rural states do get a slight boost from the two electoral votes awarded to states due to their two Senate seats. But as stated earlier, the Electoral College does not lead to rural areas getting more attention.
And there is no legitimate reason why a rural vote should count more than an urban vote in a 21st-century national election.
http://time.com/4571626/electoral-college-wrong-arguments/
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Don't you know there ain't no devil.
It's just God when he's drunk.
~ Tom Waits
Oriana: I suspect that Jung would agree, in a way: he wanted us to acknowledge god’s dark side, especially in Answer to Job: “Jung saw this evil side of God as the missing fourth element of the Trinity, which he believed should be supplanted by a Quaternity. However, he also discusses in the book whether the true missing fourth element is the feminine side of God. Another theme in the book is the inversion of the myth that God sent his son Christ to die for the sins of humanity. Jung maintains that upon realizing his mistreatment of Job, God sends his son to humankind to be sacrificed in repentance for God's sins. Jung sees this as a sign of God's ongoing psychological development.” ~ Wiki
It’s a mind-blowing idea: Jesus dying for Yahweh’s sins.
On the other hand, Tom Waits’s idea makes sense on the face of it.
And then Slavoy Žižek sees it as god’s suicide, i.e. that was the actual “death of god.”
All made-up, I know, but still it’s fascinating what people will make up, and how religions evolve.
Slavoy Žižek: “Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonetheless it retains a certain trust into the Big Other. This Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within the harmonious whole of evolution, or whatever, but the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Other, no point of reference which guarantees meaning.”
“The death of Christ,” says Žižek, “is not any kind of redemption… it’s simply the disintegration of the God which guarantees the meaning of our lives.”
I think already the Book of Job does that, showing that suffering happens for no reason — it’s not divine punishment — it’s not “justice” (“justice” is just a more respectable word for revenge). It's based on a bet that Yahweh makes with Satan.
If Christianity is atheist, in my view it’s because there is an essential incompatibility between the OT god of vengeance and capricious favorism (a god who is never called “father”) and Christ’s message of non-judgment and compassion.
I don’t have an obvious Big Other (unless, to some extent, the genius of humanity; the goodness of most, the endurance). In writing I sometimes invoke that Big Other, realizing that there are endless complications and limitations. And nature is also the Big Other. But for daily use I have a Small Other — the cognitive unconscious (not to be confused with Freud’s concept of the unconscious). I know that my “back-burner” brain is smarter than my consciousness. The smarter neural processors will communicate the answer to consciousness when that answer is ready. I call it “email from my other self.”
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/slavoj-zizek-on-atheism.html?fbclid=IwAR3ascowv26Hn8kXpvGb8nt-Cw1SJjP4dux_0h0QCozUCNbp1v9uczPZxno
Peter and Paul, a 4th century etching
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ADDED SUGAR AND HEART DISEASE
~ “In the American diet, the top sources are soft drinks, fruit drinks, flavored yogurts, cereals, cookies, cakes, candy, and most processed foods. But added sugar is also present in items that you may not think of as sweetened, like soups, bread, cured meats, and ketchup.
The result: we consume way too much added sugar. Adult men take in an average of 24 teaspoons of added sugar per day, according to the National Cancer Institute. That's equal to 384 calories.
In a study published in 2014 in JAMA Internal Medicine, Dr. Frank Hu and his colleagues found an association between a high-sugar diet and a greater risk of dying from heart disease. Over the course of the 15-year study, people who got 17% to 21% of their calories from added sugar had a 38% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with those who consumed 8% of their calories as added sugar.
"Basically, the higher the intake of added sugar, the higher the risk for heart disease," says Dr. Hu.
Consuming too much added sugar can raise blood pressure and increase chronic inflammation, both of which are pathological pathways to heart disease. Excess consumption of sugar, especially in sugary beverages, also contributes to weight gain by tricking your body into turning off its appetite-control system because liquid calories are not as satisfying as calories from solid foods. This is why it is easier for people to add more calories to their regular diet when consuming sugary beverages.
"The effects of added sugar intake — higher blood pressure, inflammation, weight gain, diabetes, and fatty liver disease — are all linked to an increased risk for heart attack and stroke," says Dr. Hu.” ~
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-sweet-danger-of-sugar
Oriana:
This may seem like old news by now, but it’s worth repeating. The public has been so brainwashed by being told for decades that heart disease is caused by saturated fats that the role of sugar is still unknown to many. Actually it was only in 2016 that the scandal emerged: the US sugar industry actually paid scientists to publish papers that emphasized the role of saturated fats in heart disease while suppressing the publication of findings on the harmful effects of sugar (first discovered in the late 1960s by the British nutritionist John Yudkin).
Sugar consumption also increases cancer risk, especially for pancreatic, breast, prostate, and bladder cancer. It seems that fructose (table sugar is composed of glucose and fructose) is a particular culprit here. Fructose is also implicated in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and other metabolic disorders.
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ending on beauty:
KALOS is written over the heads of the gods
on the Greek vases. They like beauty so much
they fill the world with it. . . .
The gods must not know us well or they would
not dance so openly, so happily before us.
~ Linda Gregg (died 3-20-2019), The Gods Must Not Know Us
Poppies, March 2019, aerial photo of the hills NE of I-15 near Lake Elsinore; WingsByWerntz
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