Jan van Eyck: Man with a Carnation, 1435. I almost can't believe this is for real. That face seems familiar — someone I met in Milwaukee, perhaps, minus the fur hat and of course the carnation.*
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
~ Yehuda Amichai
I love it how he dares to contradict the famous passage in Ecclesiastes! The first stanza instantly draws me in:
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
The rest of the poem goes on to explain how the human nature is full of contradictions:
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes . . .
~ and more examples follow.
I like the last stanza most (and I too have sometimes said that heaven would be having time for everything):
He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
But I also like the soul as professional, the body as an amateur, how you hate and love at the same time, and more. This is a splendid poem, full of wisdom — and it delivers this wisdom without losing poetry.
Mary:
Yes, wonderful poem… love the description of the dying man a a fig, shriveled and full of sweetness.
*
BECAUSE WE JUST HAD THE IDES OF MARCH
Brutus: Let us be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius.
. . . And, gentle friends,
Let’s kill him boldly but not wrathfully.
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
~ Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 1
Julius Caesar by Clara Grosch, 1892“A dish fit for the gods”! We’ve totally forgotten where this phrase comes from — or we might refrain from using it.
"'A dish fit for the gods' vaguely recalls the legend of Tantalus, who offered up to the gods an unusual meal -- his son Pelops. The gods, however, were not exactly pleased . . . Brutus neglects to pursue the lesson of this famous tale."~ Michael Macrone
THE GREEN BOOK: HOLLYWOOD FINALLY GETS IT RIGHT
One of the moments I loved was the scene when Tony asks about the super-romantic letter to his wife that Don Shirley dictates to him, “Can I put a PS: Kiss the kids from me?” and Don replies, “A PS — that would be like clanging a cowbell after the end of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony.” This goes over Tony’s head, but he won’t be intimidated: “That sounds fine to me,” and Don laughs — his first “warm-up” moment.
Thanks to Tony, the overly serious virtuoso pianist Don Shirley does indeed learn how to laugh rather than take everything oh so seriously. He starts out so tremendously “dignified” that he comes across as rather cold and aloof — some might see him as pretentious. But life has taught him that maintaining one’s dignity works better than violence, Tony’s automatic response to being insulted. And in the end Tony does rethink his “natural” response. He comes to see Don’s courage in the face of the racism that the pianist repeatedly encounters — a racism so blatant that it seems almost absurd — what do you mean, they wouldn’t let him use the regular restroom and expected him to use an outhouse instead? And yet history provides much worse examples . . .
The racism is the reason why this movie can’t be classified as yet another “on-the-road” movie, or simply a variation on the Odd Couple, with the black-and-white twist — Tony Lip being the uncouth glutton, while the erudite Afro-American pianist (who tries to improve Tony’s pronunciation of “butter,” among his other valiant efforts to raise Tony’s cultural level) is downright dainty and at first refuses to eat fried chicken with his hands. Nor can the movie be classified as either a comedy or a tragedy — it’s a challenging mixture of both. Without the laughs, it would be unbearable. Without the sadness and ugliness, it would be shallow.
But ultimately it’s the two great performances that make this movie so memorable and outstanding. Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip has uninhibited street-smart charm. Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley has a powerful presence. When he flashes a big smile at the audience, we know the pain behind that smile. Without totally compelling acting, we’d probably find Shirley not quite believable. Those critics who say things like, “There is nothing new here,” seem to miss the uniqueness of Shirley’s personality, life, and of course the unusual musical style he created for himself.
The letter-writing sceneFor all the laughs, this is a movie with a serious message about the possibility of change in attitude through getting to know the person one may be prejudiced against “up close,” at a deeper level. Tony starts out as what I’d call an “ordinary racist,” a product of his times. He’s not a deep, vicious racist — he discovers that kind of racism only in the South, and he’s obviously upset by it. It offends his sense of decency, of how a human being should be treated. Don Shirley, on the other hand, manages to relax his disapproval of Tony’s proletarian manners. He gets to appreciate his skills with “public relations” — but above all, he perceives Tony’s basic good-heartedness, his love for his wife and children, his different kind of intelligence (though Shirley also imparts a lesson about dignity that is not lost on Tony).
Tony drops his unthinking racism; Don Shirley drops his superior airs and aloofness that isolates him from people to the point that his only companion is a bottle of Cutty Sark. We learn from every relationship, but especially from people who are different, who may in fact get on our nerves. Very simply, we learn acceptance.
PS (cowbell notwithstanding)
After Don Shirley cancels his last performance because he’s not allowed to eat in the restaurant at the place where he’s supposed to play, he goes with Tony to a “colored” establishment where he’s at first looked at with suspicion by the locals. There, with Tony’s encouragement, he wows the crowd by first playing a devilishly difficult piece by Chopin (he always dreamed of performing Chopin, but early on he let himself be persuaded that audiences were not ready for a black classical concert pianist), before relaxing into a jazz improvisation. He doesn’t care that the piano is not a Steinway — but he does remove a glass of whisky from it. Some standards are not to be lowered.
And suddenly, for the first time, he is happy. At last he is accepted, and he knows he’s bringing joy to the people in the bar, who start dancing. Afterwards he says, “That was so much fun I could do it once a month for free.”
Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, #11, “Winter Wind”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx6-Z0nsWnw
Charles:
My favorite line comes from the scene when Don, with exquisite politeness, asks Tony Lip, a bouncer, “In what capacity did you work for the Copacabana?” and Tony answers, “Public relations.”
I also really enjoyed the part when Tony corrects Shirley about the “Lip” surname: “It’s not Tony the Lip, just Tony Lip. That’s because I'm such a great bullshitter.” ~ “You mean you are a liar.” ~ “No, I'm a bullshitter. I know how to talk to get people to do what I want.”
I’d also like to disagree with those reviewers who put down the movie as “derivative.” All art is derivative. That becomes a negative only when the derivative work is worse than what it derives from. If the artist takes it to another level, then it’s fine — it’s art.
Oriana:
Loved Tony’s “I'm not a liar, I'm a bullshitter.” Yes, Tony Lip has acquired his nickname for a reason: he’s a street-smart “bullshit artist” who can talk his way out of anything. And he’s very proud of his greatest skill.
One display of this priceless survival skill is the police-bribing scene. “Are you trying to bribe us?” ~ “Not at all. I'm trying to make a gift, a donation to the police department.” When that doesn’t work, he switches to “the nice suits in that store just down the street.” Of course it takes Tony’s never-miss-a-beat delivery of these lines, facial expression and body language included, to bring out the humor.
The way Tony eats is another source of humor, another special language that is a kind of “slang of food.” No pimento cheese canapés for Tony — he shoves a whole one into his mouth, doesn’t like it, spits it out into a napkin, then places that napkin back on the silver tray. A more blatant protest against pretentiousness could hardly be imagined.
Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip
*
BEHAVIOR SHIFT ON THE BASIS OF INSIGHT: “INTELLECT ANNIHILATES FATE”
You may think that “easy” is an exaggeration, or even downright falsehood — but in my experience, once I have an insight, going back to the old perception and the old behavior is impossible! My most dramatic example of that was the insight that made me drop depression — which depended on brooding on my past misfortunes.
Emerson said “Intellect annihilates fate.” By “intellect” he really meant perception — I dare say he meant insight.
I forget in which essay he said this, but the words instantly engraved themselves on my mind — even though at first I wasn’t sure if to believe him. I prefer the word “perception” — otherwise some might understand the statement as a New-Agey attempt at controlling your own thoughts. Genuine shift in perception is a very interesting experience — it happens or it doesn’t happen, according to the unconscious processing of a myriad bits of knowledge. Emotions enter too, but let me end this before getting hopelessly lost in complexity.
PS (Where is my cowbell?)
If we get a better understanding of emergent phenomena, I think there might be some chance to resurrect the notion of “free will” — and if not “free,” then perhaps at least “will.”
Mary:
A word on free will . . . I never could entirely buy the argument that everything's determined and overdetermined. I find it particularly wrongheaded, even repugnant, when applied to things like addiction. There are a series of ads I've seen for some recovery programs that state something on the order of addiction can happen to anyone anywhere, anytime, as though it was like a natural catastrophe completely out of your control, involving no choice and no responsibility. This is a trap and not an explanation.
Yes there are a million circumstances, and yes there are physiological changes that constitute addiction as a physical state. But addiction is not simply bad luck, overwhelming and irreversible. Somewhere along the line a choice was made.
I am not advocating blaming the victim, or shaming them, or denying the existence of powerful environmental, social and biological influences. I simply want to insist there always remains, however brief or narrow, a space where choice happens, a space that may be as small, and as powerful, as the potential between synapses. Choice involves responsibility, and empowerment. It may be tremendously difficult, but not impossible, and certainly not rare. And I do agree that part of what creates the opportunity for choice is insight, perception, intellect — that moment of vision when the smoke clears and you can see where you stand. That is the beginning of freedom.
I suppose this sounds like an outmoded argument, but we are not docile creatures like lab rats bred for experiments, all the wildness sorted out. We are much more difficult and contrary and full of surprises, much more apt to go against the grain than not. Otherwise we would not have so very many stories to tell — each one with its own particular mysterious heart.
Oriana: GRANTING INNOCENCE TO OURSELVES AND OTHERS
I'm more of a determinist, but not of a mechanical sort. How come we say that a dog doesn’t have “free will” but a human being does? Where did that mysterious power come from? What we do know is that the human brain is more complex, with gazillions of neural connections. The way our brain processes information, and the conditions under which this processing happens — the amount of stress, for instance — these are huge game players about which we still know rather little, and which we’ll probably never understand completely. But just as we came to understand that milk becomes sour not because of the spells cast by demons or witches, but because of certain bacteria, we may yet come to understand much more about about why we act the way we do.
Likewise, we know that a toddler doesn’t have a free will — his brain isn’t yet developed enough. Hence the theological debate at which point a child is old enough to be subject to eternal damnation — free will is a precondition, provided the “stain of Original Sin” has been removed through baptism. When I was growing up, conservative Catholics saw the critical age as eight, while the more liberal Catholics suggested twelve, which at the time sounded like dangerous permissiveness. (As we know, conservative Catholics are winning, but that may be temporary.)
Likewise, we say that a person with a gun to his head doesn’t have free will. But how many circumstances are in effect a gun to one’s head? We don’t know until we’ve been there. It can be a profoundly joyful experience.
To grant innocence to ourselves or someone else can be a beautiful experience. For me, a more deterministic attitude meant a tremendous liberation from always blaming myself for every bad thing that happened. At the same time, I realized that I was a child of intellectual privilege, both genetically and environmentally, so I couldn’t really feel it was my merit that I won this or that poetry prize, say. I could see the main circumstances — including sheer luck — that led to that. It took me longer to apply this to the unfortunate aspects of my life.
And a recent experience showed me that if the stress is extreme enough, I fall back into thinking it must be my fault — no rational thought is possible until the emotional shock and the physical shaking are over. This may take hours, days, or weeks, depending on the kind of trauma. Some damage may be permanent, e.g. less trust in life once you know that certain misfortunes can hit randomly, out of the blue. This is the kind of awareness that doesn’t help you cope better, unless resignation results in a more relaxed attitude: que sera, sera. If there is truly nothing you can do, stop thrashing around. Water your plants, do the laundry — you’ve probably neglected that due to overwhelming stress.
But perhaps the best part of determinism has been my ability to drop blaming others, to grant them innocence (I owe the phrase to Richard Carlson of the “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” fame). A woman who feeds junk food to her children? She has never been taught about healthy food and how to cook. Perhaps there is no decent grocery store within a doable commute. Perhaps, even if she knows how to cook, she’s working two full-time jobs and has no time for it. And perhaps she truly doesn’t know that soda and chips is not the right kind of dinner. Words like “protein” mean nothing — no one has taught her.
I’ve learned this new attitude of compassion the hard way — when I myself hit areas in which I had no knowledge or skills. And it took me a while before the automatic self-blame receded enough so that I could realize “No one has taught me how to do that — but perhaps there is a way to learn.”
I recovered from severe chronic depression that was only getting worse by what might be called “making a choice not to be depressed” — or so it looked at first. Then I managed to trace a multitude of preliminary steps before the insight and the decision. First of all, I had the resources — the most important of which, as I see it now, was the ability to shift from brooding into productive work. I had the skills, and I already had the habit of working very hard — it just needed to be reactivated. I also knew how to “act strong” — another habit that merely needed reactivation.
Awareness was one of the critical “fate-changing” factors — but by itself it wasn’t enough. I also had to have the resources — and just sheer good luck, starting with having the kind of parents I had, who in turn had the luck of having the kind of parents they had. (Not ideal parents by any means — but next to the truly disastrous parents that some children have, yes, I was magnificently lucky). So yes, ultimately it goes back generations . . . it involves history, technology, cultural evolution and more.
I’ve read that a huge problem with a lot of addicts is that “they were raised to be incompetent” — on top the genetic susceptibility (it’s true that under sufficient stress we can all become addicted, but some people become addicted faster and more easily). Those who are particularly susceptible to addiction don’t necessarily have the skills to create a fulfilling life for themselves. They may also lack meaningful social connections. The most effective therapies are typically those that incorporate changes in physical, financial, and social circumstances.
One school of thought is: forget trying to change your thoughts. Instead, change your behavior. But again, it takes the right circumstances and resources before we are able to change behavior. But once that happens, the results can be virtually instant.
So yes, addiction can be a product of overwhelming bad luck (bad genes plus early trauma plus the availability of drugs and alcohol, at first very effect self-medication). But no, it’s not irreversible. Take away the overwhelming stress (e.g. the Vietnam war), and a great majority of addicts will recover on their own (the woman who discovered this by studying Vietnam veterans was persecuted for years on account of her heretical findings).
As has been discovered with the homeless: provide housing first (tiny modular houses work in some places); give them a job, be it cleaning the street; give them a haircut and some decent clothes. Positive changes snowball from there on — just as they do for former convicts who were taught truly marketable skills (some got training as gourmet chefs).
If some thin slice of individual choice exists here, fine. I don’t see much “free will,” but I think the concept of “will” is useful once you have the mental clarity. But first of all, let’s not forget the huge role of external forces and circumstances. Once we have more understanding of those forces, they can be used to produce positive change.
But some see not blaming the individual as a threat to their whole worldview. What, it’s not about individual will power? Are you saying that dramatically reducing stress will lead to dramatic results? Or that teaching someone a marketable skill will result in employment? That having a place that lends business suits to those who go out for job interviews can be more effective than preaching, especially when combined with some training in how to speak and maintain eye contact?
Those of us who were taught early how to dress, how to speak correct English, how to have good manners, can easily forget that not not everyone is taught those skills.
A typical woman doesn’t know how to fix a leaky faucet — because she was never taught that. She was taught to be helpless and incompetent when it comes to such small domestic emergencies. Just based on that, I can understand the statement that some people were raised to be incompetent. But most are teachable. And there are also ways to reduce overwhelming stress. What is often lacking is the collective will to do anything to help.
PPS. There is intellect as insight, and intellect as overthinking. Below is a useful reminder not to succumb to the latter.
PPS.
I also owe gratitude to Louise Hay. When I read “Immediately stop attacking yourself and criticizing yourself,” I finally heard that voice of kindness and precisely the right words at the right time. Luck? Yes. The bad luck of decades of needless suffering, but ultimately the good luck of having received the antidote — also in the form of language, which can do both great harm and great good things.
an example of social support and a healing use of language: Frida Kahlo’s letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, 1933*
“Women are machines for suffering.” ~ Pablo Picasso
Oriana:
He certainly knew how to transform a woman into a machine for suffering.
“I always saw Dora Maar as a weeping woman. And one day I was able to paint her as the Weeping Woman.” *
HOW WE CAN KNOW WHEN THE ERA OF FOSSIL FUELS WILL BE OVER
~ “Major technological transitions often take a while. The Czech-Canadian academic Vaclav Smil has pointed out that although James Watt developed the coal-powered steam engine in 1776, coal supplied less than 5 percent of the planet’s energy until 1840, and it didn’t reach 50 percent until 1900. But the economic effect of those transitions can happen much earlier, Bond writes, as soon as it becomes clear to investors that a new technology is accounting for all the growth in a particular sector.
Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store energy. This has led to rapid expansion of these technologies, even though they are still used much less than fossil fuels: in 2017, for instance, sun and wind produced just 6 percent of the world’s electric supply, but they made up 45 percent of the growth in supply, and the cost of sun and wind power continues to fall by about 20 percent with each doubling of capacity. Bond’s analysis suggests that in the next few years, they will represent all the growth. We will then reach peak use of fossil fuels, not because we’re running out of them but because renewables will have become so cheap that anyone needing a new energy supply will likely turn to solar or wind power.
Bond writes that in the 2020s—probably the early 2020s—the demand for fossil fuels will stop growing. The turning point in such transitions “is typically the moment when the impact is felt in financial markets”—when stock prices tumble and never recover. Who is going to invest in an industry that is clearly destined to shrink? Though we’ll still be using lots of oil, its price should fall if it has to compete with the price of sunshine. Hence the huge investments in pipelines and tankers and undersea exploration will be increasingly unrecoverable. Precisely how long it will take is impossible to predict, but the outcome seems clear.
*
In 2017 Kentucky’s coal-mining museum installed solar panels on its roof in order to save $10,000 a year on electric costs.
And it’s not just coal that’s on the way out. Natural gas was supposed to be the planet’s next big fuel source, since it produces less carbon than coal (although its production releases great clouds of methane, another potent greenhouse gas). While fracking has produced high volumes of natural gas—especially in the US, where it was pioneered—wells tend to dry out quickly, and despite enormous investment, the International Energy Agency estimates that between 2010 and 2014 the shale industry operated with negative cash flows of more than $200 billion.
Even “cheap” natural gas is now starting to look expensive compared to the combination of sun, wind, and batteries. In an essay for Vox, the energy reporter David Roberts listed all the natural gas plants—many of them designed to provide quick bursts of “peaking power” on heavy demand days—whose planned construction has been canceled in recent months, as utilities and banks began to figure out that over the projected forty-year life of a new plant, there was a good chance it would become an uncompetitive “stranded asset” producing pointlessly expensive electricity. The chief executive of one US solar company said in January, “I can beat a gas peaker anywhere in the country today with a solar-plus-storage power plant. Who in their right mind today would build a new gas peaker? We are a factor of two cheaper.”
You get some sense of the future from the stunning fall of General Electric.
“They were the world leader, the thought leader, the finance leader, the IT leader,” said Buckley. “And their share price is down 70 percent in the last two and a half years, in a market that’s up 50 percent. It’s a thermal power–reliant basket case.” That’s in large measure because manufacturing turbines for coal- and gas-fired power plants was a significant part of the company’s business; in 2015, it hugely expanded that capacity by buying its largest European competitor, Alstom. But then the bottom dropped out of the industry as proposed new generating plants couldn’t find financing. GE makes wind turbines, too, but that’s a lower-margin business with many more competitors. The fall in GE’s stock has meant “hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value reduction,” according to Buckley. Last June, after more than a century, General Electric was dropped from the Dow Industrial Index, replaced by a drugstore chain.
Oil was believed to be better protected than coal and gas from competition because cars have long needed liquid fuel to run. But electric cars are becoming affordable for more and more consumers. In 2017 only three million out of a worldwide total of 800 million cars were electric, but they accounted for 22 percent of the growth in global car sales. The world’s leading car companies have become convinced that electric vehicles will account for all the growth in demand by the early 2020s. That’s why, by January 2018, they had committed $90 billion to developing electric vehicles—and why, by 2017, Tesla was worth more than GM or Ford. And for every Tesla that rolls off the assembly line, Chinese manufacturers are producing five electric cars. Auto analysts are already warning consumers to think twice before buying a gas-powered car, since its resale value may fall dramatically over just the next three years.
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The changeover, of course, would be rocky. Beyond the effects on the global economy or on particular companies and their investors, countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia (and increasingly parts of the US) are essentially oil companies themselves. As these petro-states face a fall in the value of their only real asset, there is a risk of destabilization on a vast scale; in fact, it’s possible that we’re in the early stages of this process, with mischief and cruelty increasingly on display as countries with no other source of economic power struggle to maintain profits while they can. The worst damage will, as usual, be inflicted on the poorest oil producers: Kuwait might be able to manage the transition, but could Angola?
Yet overall the benefits would be immeasurable. Imagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren’t magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world in which the greatest driver of climate change—the unrelenting political power of the fossil-fuel industry—had begun to shrink. The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/04/future-without-fossil-fuels/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20McKibben&utm_content=NYR%20McKibben+CID_89f9037870f6c906d5ee5d8dcb3eeef9&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=A%20Future%20Without%20Fossil%20Fuels
Oriana:
I have just installed solar panels — the best bargain can be obtained through Costco (which has just raised its minimum wage to $15/hr — another reason to be their customer). Now the long wait before the gas-and-electric company grants me a permit to turn on my solar energy production. It’s obviously not in the financial interest of the company to promptly grant such permits. Now that the days are long and sunny, I get a little unnerved about the waiting — but it can’t go on much longer.
And I see more and more neighbors getting their solar panels.
It’s too bad that those most hit by the high price of electricity, people who live paycheck to paycheck, can’t afford the initial investment — even though it’s nowhere as high now as it used to be. And in California, many young people don’t own their homes, and the landlords, who don’t pay the tenants’ utility costs, have no financial incentive to install panels on rental property.
And without solar power, it’s pretty unaffordable to keep charging an electric car — but more charging stations could change that. And all new buildings could be required by law to come equipped with solar panels. As panels become ever cheaper, this will not be oppressive to the builders — and besides, the presence of panels makes the property more attractive to buyers and renters.
Altogether, we are witnessing enormous changes. Many of us can choose to become part of the future rather than, say, buy another gas-powered car whose resale value will be very disappointing five years from now.
As for the oil-producing third-world countries: they get plenty of sunlight, don't they? The investors will be drawn to this brightness.
Mary:
I thought the whole discussion of the end of fossil fuels was a marvelous and very hopeful one. It made a lot of economic and historical sense. The degree of upheaval such a transition will entail is hard to predict, but massive changes of this nature have happened before and been survived. The shape of that survival is probably impossible to yet imagine.
Oriana:
For a while there will of course be an overlap — and maybe even yet another social divide — people who have solar panels and drive electric cars (leasing may be a better option here — another change on the horizon), and people who use dirty fossil fuels because they can’t afford the initial investment. But eventually the fossil fuels will be more expensive, and not just socially deplorable — that will be their true demise.
Shaming poor people for being polluters is not the way; society will have to figure out how to make clean energy more affordable. Hopefully the industry itself will figure out new ways, combined with clean-friendly legislation. As for the financial power of oil giants, that will not last.
Note also the slow return of the hemp industry: here is a fast-growing plant that also happens to be beautiful and produces oxygen — and is also a source of durable, mold-resistant fiber (the word “canvas” derives from “cannabis”). Imagine all the plastic fibers that could be eliminated!
(PS: Note that the divide already exists in the realm of food: the consumers of processed foods
and drinkers of sugary sodas versus those to whom wholesome food is a religion, at the extreme including foodies, vegans, and keto-dieters. It goes by education and social class; it’s the poor who are the most obese and still smoke. Again, shaming is not the way; school gardens, cooking classes, health education are some of the ways we could begin to change this sad divide that’s already producing quite a gap in morbidity and mortality.)
Ruins of the city of Ani in Armenia, once the seat of a powerful medieval empire *
“Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.” ~ Michael Cleary
Oriana:
Even though movies aren’t reality, they reflect reality — and science fiction is the most visionary genre of movies and literature. The shift toward sustainable energy is a race for survival.
*
“The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.” ~ Sharon Olds
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THE MIDDLE EAST: IT’S MAINLY SUNNIS AGAINST SUNNIS
~ “The bloodiest, most vicious, and most pertinent struggles occur squarely inside the Sunni world. Sectarianism is a politically expedient fable, conveniently used to cover up old-fashioned power struggles, maltreatment of minorities, and cruel totalitarian practices.
The region’s most ferociously violent Sunni actor, the Islamic State, for all its anti-Shiite discourse, claims Sunnis as the overwhelming majority of its victims. The fierce battles for the Iraqi city of Mosul or the Syrian city of Raqqa pitted Sunni against Sunni. ISIS attacks in Egypt, Somalia, Libya, Nigeria, and elsewhere almost always have Sunnis as prey. There are few examples of wide-scale killings of Shiites by the group.
The Arab uprisings, the most momentous political upheaval to have shaken the Arab world in a generation, typically involved Sunni-on-Sunni battles: in Tunisia, where the uprisings began; in Egypt, where they grew; and in Libya, where they persist. The same was true of the extraordinarily brutal and bloody Algerian civil war in the nineteen-nineties. Each episode of unrest featured violent confrontations and shifting alliances, among the Muslim Brotherhood, neo-Ottomans, Salafis, Wahhabis (in both their Saudi and Qatari versions) and jihadis. More moderate forces—Al-Azhar in Cairo, Jordanian Hashemites, and the vast majority of peaceful Sunnis—helplessly stood by, hoping for the tumult to pass, and waiting anxiously for an opportunity to be heard.
Iran’s and Hezbollah’s rush to Assad’s defense is political and strategic, not an embrace of common sectarian identity. Indeed, Syria’s regime is about as distant in its religious orientation from that of the Islamic Republic as can be. To a large extent, the war in Syria became a battle among Sunni Islamist groups of assorted persuasions and patrons that spent more time, life, and treasure on fighting one another than on fighting the regime.
When Russia rescued the regime in Damascus—killing a large number of Sunnis in the process—Sunni Arab leaders did not spurn Putin; they instead embarked on repeated pilgrimages to Moscow with offers of arms and trade deals and strategic alliances. Egypt, the most populous Sunni Arab country and the seat of the most respected center of Sunni learning, maintained channels to the Assad regime and kept a distance from the opposition. Cairo saw not a Shiite or Alawite threat from the regime but an Islamist menace from the opposition. Algeria, the largest state in the Maghreb, acted in a similar manner. It is unsurprising that, as the war winds down, the U.A.E. and Bahrain have decided to restore diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime. Both are preoccupied with the struggle against Turkey and Qatar and share a fear of Sunni Islamism. Saudi Arabia may not be far behind.
Yemen’s complicated story has sectarian aspects, but it would be misleading to describe its civil war as a straightforward Sunni-Shiite split. The Houthi rebels are driven in large part by their conviction that their identity is threatened. The Iranian Revolution helped provide a model to emulate and an ally to curry. But at the core of the Houthis’ grievance are social issues: they resent their loss of status and the increased neglect of the northern part of the country, their stronghold. The conflict morphed into a Saudi-Iranian proxy war not because of ancient or durable sectarian identities.
The latest, most covered, and vivid act of violence, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, is also an internal Sunni affair. The slain journalist was Sunni. The perpetrators were Sunni. Turkey, the country in which the assassination took place and that played an instrumental role in leaking information about the culprits, is predominantly Sunni as well. The backdrop to the killing is the tug-of-war among variants of Sunni Islam: the ascetic Wahhabis, the activist Muslim Brotherhood, and the statist neo-Ottomans, each competing for leadership. Conspicuously missing from this crowded drama is Iran, the region’s principal Shiite country.
There is, of course, a Sunni-Shiite divide. It is constantly put to use by Saudi Arabia and Iran to mobilize their respective constituencies in the struggle for regional influence. Al Qaeda and ISIS also attack Shiites in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to foment sectarian strife from which they hope to profit. But these are tactics of war, not its causes. In a region and religion whose glorious days lie in the past, history becomes a potent tonic to mobilize the masses. Political leaders evoke distant quarrels to revive memories of more salubrious and magnificent days. Unable to appeal to higher values such as freedom and tolerance, they resort to narratives of ancient conflict to whip up fervor and loyalty.
There is an explanation for why fighting occurs more often among Sunnis than between Sunnis and Shiites. Sunnis know that, at roughly eighty per cent of the region’s population, they are an undisputed majority and that there is scant threat that they will be overrun by their Shiite brethren. Shiites have long recognized that they will remain a minority in an overwhelmingly Sunni region. Sunnis of various persuasions vie for supremacy and control over their branch of Islam; there is little to gain in that tussle from fighting Shiites.
Wrongly defining the struggles gripping the Middle East encourages misguided remedies. Talk of “moderate Sunni Arab states,” a remarkably entrenched lore in American foreign-policy circles, is drivel. Those who advocated military support for the armed Syrian opposition typically argued that this was necessary to avoid alienating the “Sunni world.” The decision to arm and aid the Syrian opposition, however, did not mean siding with Sunnis against non-Sunnis; it meant taking part in a fierce intra-Sunni fight. It was a choice based on the mistaken conviction that ordinary Syrian Sunnis hoped the Islamist opposition would prevail over the Assad regime because of its atrocities.
Today, the Sunni-Shiite prism prompts illusory pursuits. The attempt to establish an Arab NATO, designed to bring together Sunni Arab states in opposition to Iran, has been mired in intra-Gulf squabbles. Sunnis in the region still perceive Iran as a strategic threat. But the American belief that bellicose U.S. rhetoric can unite Sunni Arabs in an anti-Iranian alliance comes at a time when Sunni regimes are increasingly absorbed by the challenge posed by Turkey. The neo-Ottoman dream is a competitor in a way that Iran is not. The historical roots of the struggle between Ottomans and Arabs date back hundreds of years: the Ottoman Empire ruled Mecca and Medina for four centuries; Persia never did. Longings for a resplendent past do not fade easily. The embrace of simplistic theories has real consequences. It misses the real struggles shaping what the Middle East will become.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-middle-easts-great-divide-is-not-sectarianism?utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&fbclid=IwAR3rSdzWS2j5kBnlwdweRwGo5dJZkI06Z1aBYaU1kgkScBFzEQ2DaCuIwec
Mecca: Pilgrims circling the Kaaba. ~ “The Black Stone is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building located in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is revered by Muslims as an Islamic relic which, according to Muslim tradition, dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. Another tradition says that the Black Stone was originally an angel that had been placed by God in the Garden of Eden to guard Adam. The angel was absent when Adam ate the forbidden fruit and was punished by being turned into a jewel — the Black Stone. God granted it the power of speech and placed it at the top of Abu Qubays, a mountain in the historic region of Khurasan, before moving the mountain to Mecca. When Ibrahim took the Black Stone from Abu Qubays to build the Kaaba, the mountain asked Ibrahim to intercede with God so that it would not be returned to Khurasan and would stay in Mecca. The Black Stone has never been analyzed with modern scientific techniques and its origins remain the subject of speculation.” ~ Wikipedia
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A FORMER MISSIONARY SPEAKS ABOUT LEAVING FUNDAMENTALISM
Kenneth W. Daniels (born in 1968), son of evangelical missionaries, grew up in Africa and returned as an adult to serve with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Niger on the edge of the Sahara Desert. While studying the Bible on the mission field, he came to doubt the message he had traveled across the world to bring to a nomadic camel-herding ethnic group. Though he lost his faith and as a result left Africa in 2000, he remains part of a conservative Christian family.
~ “Like many believers, I was aware of puzzles in the Christian faith even in my youth. Most of us, whether or not we remain in the fold, have wondered about God’s commands to the Israelite soldiers to kill men, women, boys and infants (keeping the virgins for themselves); his endorsement of slavery; the harshness of eternal hell; the apparent discrepancies between parallel passages in the Bible; the hit-and-miss nature of prayer; the mystery of so much human and animal suffering; the silence and hiddenness of God; the kindness and moral uprightness of so many nonbelievers; and the apparent conflict between science and the Bible. Given all these difficulties and many more, why did I not leave the faith earlier in my youth when I first became aware of these issues?
I am also concerned about the scarring mental torment unwittingly served up to children who are taught that the majority of the world is destined to everlasting hellfire. It is one thing for adults to hold to unsubstantiated beliefs, but it is another matter for adults to press these beliefs on vulnerable children who have not yet developed the cognitive faculties needed to weigh the evidence for and against what they are being taught.
Many recognize the problems and unanswered questions in their faith yet persist in believing as I did for years. This is no doubt due to overriding considerations that make belief appear attractive or true despite its difficulties.
I invite Christian readers to consider the possibility that my apostasy is a result not of divine or diabolical deception but of simple weighing of the evidence . . . The knowledge that billions of seekers have lived and died, calling out to God for some revelation without ever receiving it, or receiving revelation that conflicts with the revelation others have found, contributes to my suspicion that there is no personal God who reveals himself to anyone.
Most believers are not prepared to travel as far as I have from my former position as a fundamentalist believer. I implore such readers to consider a middle ground, one that acknowledges both the virtues and vices of the scriptures, as millions of moderate and liberal believers already do. While it is unrealistic to expect a large percentage of Muslims to abandon their faith, most of us can agree that the world would be a better place if Muslim fundamentalists moderated their rigid commitment to every precept of the Qur’an as the divine word of Allah, especially those that call for the destruction of infidels and apostates. Likewise, the world would be a better place if fundamentalist Christians could frankly acknowledge the good, the bad, and the ugly in their own scriptural tradition, whether or not they end up abandoning their faith outright.
I wish to thank the many freethinkers and heretics who have gone before me, some of whom risked or lost their life as a result of their break with the prevailing religious establishment. . . . Millions of others have passed through the valley of the shadow of doubt, finding themselves unable to return to the pastures of faith.” ~
GOD AS DR. STRANGELOVE
I never saw god as father, in spite of the indoctrination. My father was kind, and perhaps that had something to do with my refusal of the "heavenly father" thing. Maybe more important, from the start I noted that Jesus starts calling god "my father" out of the blue. Nowhere in the OT is god referred to as "father." Not one OT character addresses god as "father." He is strictly boss, "Lord," King of Kings etc. So I got suspicious when Jesus started the father business, enlarging it to "our" father.
One possible solution was that to him god was not Yahweh -- that he meant a different god entirely. The Gnostics adopted that solution, and got exterminated. Another solution, which didn't occur to me at the time, that Jesus (if he existed) was a schizophrenic, and this was his central delusion, his "psychotic insight" that explained everything.
Yet another possibility is that Jesus, if he existed, never called god "father," but the writers of the New Testament (whose names were NOT Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) tried to domesticate the obnoxious Yahweh in this manner, to make him more likable. The precedent for this was Zeus, whom Athena keeps addressing as "Zeu Pater" — “Father Zeus” (well, she had a good reason) — and the Romans allegedly mispronounced it as "Jupiter." In any case, thanks to poets, Zeus changed from an obnoxious bully to a more fatherly figure — or at least began “trending” that way.
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“The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.” ~ A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh
Oriana:
Harold Bloom says that in Christianity Yahweh becomes a very shrunken figure. That’s not the way he felt to me. On the contrary, he loomed gigantic, tyrannical, the one with the real power. For instance, only he knew when the world was going to end — a secret he didn’t share with his son. Why? Jesus didn’t have the security clearance? He was not to be trusted not to blab?
Also, in terms of sheer number of pages, the Old Testament entirely overshadows the skimpy New Testament. And the number of stories is prodigious, including of course the creation, Adam and Eve and the Serpent, Cain and Abel, the Flood, Exodus, David and Goliath, and more. Walking on water seems feeble when compared to Moses’s dividing the Red Sea. Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, or the finger writing on the wall are more compelling than any number of repetitious healings.
Thus, to me, Yahweh was always the more powerful deity, bloody and vengeful — never a loving father who, as some Christians would have it, virtually abdicated his throne to his son. He did not abdicate, but he chose to “hide his face” — to withdraw from those who implored him for help. It’s easy to imagine him regretting his earlier promise not to cause another great flood.
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BROADER PERSPECTIVES ON TREATING DEPRESSION
~ “As the 21st century was beginning, a South African psychiatrist named Derek Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia conducting some research on the psychological effects of unexploded land mines — at a time when chemical antidepressants were first being marketed in the country.
The local doctors didn’t know much about these drugs, so they asked Summerfield to explain them. When he finished, they explained that they didn’t need these new chemicals — because they already had antidepressants. Puzzled, Summerfield asked them to explain, expecting that they were going to tell him about some local herbal remedy. Instead, they told him about something quite different.
The doctors told Summerfield a story about a farmer they had treated. He worked in the water-logged rice fields, and one day he stepped on a land mine and his leg was blasted off. He was fitted with an artificial limb, and in time he went back to work. But it’s very painful to work when your artificial limb is underwater, and returning to the scene of his trauma must have made him highly anxious. The farmer became deeply depressed.
So the doctors and his neighbors sat with this man and talked through his life and his troubles. They realized that even with his new artificial limb, his old job — working in the paddies — was just too difficult, that he was constantly stressed and in physical pain, and that these things combined to make him want to just stop living. His interlocutors had an idea.
They suggested that he work as a dairy farmer, a job that would place less painful stress on his false leg and produce fewer disturbing memories. They believed he was perfectly capable of making the switch. So they bought him a cow. In the months and years that followed, his life changed. His depression, once profound, lifted. The Cambodian doctors told Summerfield: “You see, doctor, the cow was an analgesic, and antidepressant.”
In time, I came to believe that this little scene in Southeast Asia, which at first sounds just idiosyncratic, deeply “foreign,” in fact represents in a distilled form a shift in perspective that many of us need to make if we are going to make progress in tackling the epidemic of depression, anxiety, and despair spreading like a thick tar across our culture.
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I spent three years interviewing the leading scientists in the world on [the treatment of depression] to try to understand what is really going on in places where despair in our culture is worst, from Cleveland to Sao Paulo, and where the incidence of despair is lowest, including Amish communities. I traveled 40,000 miles and drilled into the deepest causes of our collective depression.
I learned there is broad agreement among scientists that there are three kinds of causes of depression and anxiety, and all three play out, to differing degrees, in all depressed and anxious people. The causes are: biological (like your genes), psychological (how you think about yourself), and social (the wider ways in which we live together). Very few people dispute this. But when it comes to communicating with the public, and offering help, psychological solutions have been increasingly neglected, and environmental solutions have been almost totally ignored.
Our focus on biology has led us to think of depression and anxiety as malfunctions in the individual’s brain or genes — a pathology that must be removed. But the scientists who study the social and psychological causes of these problems tend to see them differently. Far from being a malfunction, they see depression as partly or even largely a function, a necessary signal that our needs are not being met.
I interviewed in great depth scientists who have conclusively demonstrated that many factors in our lives can cause depression (not just unhappiness: full depression). Loneliness, being forced to work in a job you find meaningless, facing a future of financial insecurity — these are all circumstances where an underlying psychological need is not being met.
Why, some doctors began to ask, should grief be the only situation in which deep despair is not a sign of a mental disorder that should be treated with drugs? What if you have lost your job? Your house? Your community? Once you entertain the idea that depression might be a reasonable response to some life circumstances — as Joanne Cacciatore, an associate professor in the school of social work at Arizona State University, told me — our theories about depression require “an entire system overhaul.”
Once you understand that psychological and social context is crucial to understanding depression, it suggests we should be responding to this crisis differently from how we now do. To those doctors in Cambodia, the concept of an “antidepressant” didn’t entail changing your brain chemistry, an idea alien to their culture. It was about the community empowering the depressed person to change his life.
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A patient named Lisa came to Everington’s surgery clinic one day. She’d been basically shut away in her home, crippled with depression and anxiety, for seven years. She was told by staffers at the clinic that they would continue prescribing drugs to her if she wanted, but they were also going to prescribe a group therapy session of sorts. There was a patch of land behind the clinic, backing onto a public park, that was just scrubland. Lisa joined a group of around 20 other depressed people, two times a week for a full afternoon, to turn it into something beautiful.
On her first day there, Lisa felt physically sick with anxiety. It was awkward to converse with the others. Still, for the first time in a long time, she had something to talk about that wasn’t how depressed and anxious she was.
As the weeks and months — and eventually years — passed, Everington’s patients taught themselves gardening. They put their fingers in the soil. They figured out how to make things grow. They started to talk about their problems. Lisa was outraged to learn that one of the other people in the group was sleeping on a public bus — so she started to pressure the local authorities to house him. She succeeded. It was the first thing she had done for somebody else in a long time.
As Lisa put it to me: As the garden began to bloom, the people in it began to bloom too. Everington’s project has been widely influential in England but not rigorously analyzed by statisticians, who tend to focus on drug-centered treatment. But a study in Norway of a similar program found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants — part of a modest but growing body of research suggesting approaches like this can yield striking results.
This fits with a much wider body of evidence about depression: We know that social contact reduces depression, we know that distraction from rumination (to which depressives are highly prone) has a similar effect, and there is some evidence that exposure to the natural world, and anything that increases exposure to sunlight, also has antidepressant effects.
Everington calls this approach “social prescribing,” and he believes it works because it deals with some (but not all) of the deeper social and environmental causes of depression.
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After he had completed his work in Cambodia, and after he had heard the story about the farmer who was given a cow as an antidepressant, Summerfield returned to London, where he worked as a psychiatrist, and he realized something he had never quite seen so clearly before. He thought about when he had most helped his depressed and anxious patients. Most often, it occurred to him, it was when he helped them to get secure housing, or to fix their immigration status, or to find a job. “When I make a difference, it’s when I’m addressing their social situation, not what’s between their ears,” he told me.
Yet we have, as a society, built our responses to depression and anxiety almost entirely around changing brains, rather than changing lives. Every year we have done this, our depression and anxiety crisis has got worse. When, I began to wonder, will we learn the lesson that those Cambodian doctors understood intuitively, and that the World Health Organization has been trying to explain to us: Our pain makes sense.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/we-need-new-ways-of-treating-depression
Oriana:
Note the repeated message: provide meaningful work and a supportive community. For me personally, insight plus meaningful work was enough: work works. My community is 90% virtual — it’s my readers. It’s not any sort of “support group for depression” — though I am not automatically against those. Better some social support than none. But simple socializing may work better. And affectionate little children climbing into your lap — I highly recommend that kind of exposure, if it can be arranged (there are some volunteer programs — it pays to live in a city).
Animals, too, are great therapists. They are easy to love, and they respond to affection more reliably than people do. Even abused animals have been known to recover quickly when provided with affectionate care. What can hamper people is their use of language and greater mental capacity — which unfortunately also means greater capacity for brooding as well as finding excuses for isolating themselves and other self-harm.
Religious groups? I can recommend the Unitarians, with their outstanding tolerance and appeal to the more educated. True, the veneer of religion is thin, but that’s for the best: members become attached to others they see regularly. The widely publicized health benefits of religion have been traced to church-facilitated socializing.
The unfortunate emphasis on anti-depressants has made us blind to the idea that depression has a lot to do with circumstances — and circumstances can be changed.
(The bipolar disorder is a special case. Like schizophrenia, it may require drugs. But in all so-called mental illness, including even schizophrenia, it’s been found that meaningful work [especially working with animals] and a supportive community do have a positive effect.)
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ending on beauty:
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
~ W. S. Merwin, The River of Bees
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