The most beloved gargoyle of Notre Dame — this photo goes back to 1910*
GREAT SATURDAY
No stars before the dawn of resurrection.
The night sky is all white shroud.
Only Jupiter shines
through a window in luminous clouds.
Planet of luck! In my chart
Jupiter rules the house of wealth:
a cruel joke, I thought,
back in my pauper years.
Yet even then how rich I was
in words, in music, in horizons;
rich in mind and rich in time,
in solitude to create myself.
I think of the looters in Iraq,
how in their national museum
they unscrewed even the light bulbs —
“Greed is the failure to choose.”
True wealth possesses even planets.
It watches Venus lay a path of light
on black dolphin waves.
I look away from youth’s
crucifixion. My hands in the dark
blossom like lilies.
~ Oriana
For me Jupiter is special not because it's supposed to be the planet of luck, but because it brings back a childhood memory. When I was eight or so, I asked my father, “What's that bright star?” and he replied, “It's too bright to be a star. It's a planet, probably Jupiter.” And that's how I first heard the word.
Having the kind of father I had, one who read to me at bedtime and introduced me to the universe, you could say, was my real great wealth in childhood. This poem is about real wealth versus “it’s only money.” Once we shift away from the standard definitions, I was indeed a child of privilege. My wealth was of the mind. The crucial stanza is the third one:
Yet even then how rich I was
in words, in music, in horizons;
rich in mind and rich in time,
in solitude to create myself.
My inner wealth also meant that I was able to “possess the world,” so to speak. So the contemplation of how the planet of wealth and luck seemed such a cruel joke in my “pauper years” makes me realize how rich I’ve been all along.
Mary:
The last lines of your opening poem are startlingly, ravishingly beautiful.
Oriana:
Thank you.
Avalanche lilies, Mt. Rainier *
~ “We usually think of tragedy as a misfortune that simply befalls a person (an accident, a fatal disease) or a polity (a natural disaster, like a tsunami, or a terrorist attack like 9/11) and that is outside their control. But if “tragedy” is understood as misfortune, then this is a significant misunderstanding of tragedy. What the 31 extant Greek tragedies enact over and over again is not a misfortune that is outside our control. Rather, they show the way in which we collude, seemingly unknowingly, with the calamity that befalls us.
Tragedy requires some degree of complicity on our part in the disaster that destroys us. It is not simply a question of the malevolent activity of fate, a dark prophecy that flows from the inscrutable but often questionable will of the gods. Tragedy requires our collusion with that fate. In other words, it requires no small measure of freedom. It is in this way that we can understand the tragedy of Oedipus. With merciless irony (the first two syllables of the name Oedipus, “swollen-foot,” also mean “I know,” oida), we watch someone move from a position of seeming knowledge—“I, Oedipus, whom all men call great. I solve riddles; now, Citizens, what seems to be the problem?” (I paraphrase)—to a deeper truth that it would appear that Oedipus knew nothing about: he is a parricide and a perpetrator of incest. On this reading, which Aristotle endorses, the tragedy of Oedipus consists in the recognition that allows him to pass from ignorance to knowledge.
One lesson of tragedy, then, is that we conspire with our fate. That is, fate requires our freedom in order to bring our destiny down upon us. The core contradiction of tragedy is that we both know and we don’t know at one and the same time and are destroyed in the process. How can we both know and not know?
Such is the complex function of prophecy in tragedy. In the tragedy of Oedipus, we watch someone who believes they possess an unencumbered sense of freedom become undone and destroyed by the force of fate. What is so delicate in Oedipus’s experience is that his being is not simply causally determined by fate, by necessity. No, fate requires Oedipus’s partially conscious complicity in order to bring about its truth. Characters in tragedy are not robots or preprogrammed puppets. In its movement from a delusional self-knowledge and the fantasy of an unencumbered freedom to an experience of an insight into truth that costs us our eyes, tragedy gives voice to an experience of agency that is partial and very often painful. It shows the limits of our attempted self-sufficiency and what we might think of as our autonomy. It shows our heteronomy, our profound dependency.
Tragedy gives voice to the complex relations between freedom and necessity that define our being. Our freedom is constantly compromised by that which catches us in the nets of the past, in the determination of our past and future being by fate. Tragedy enacts that which snags at our being and pulls us back to a past that we disavow in our constant thirst for the short-term future.
Tragedy has a kind of boomerang structure where the action that we throw out into the world returns to us with a potentially fatal velocity. Oedipus, the solver of riddles, becomes the riddle himself. Sophocles’ play shows him engaged in a relentless inquiry into the pollution that is destroying the political order, poisoning the wells, and producing infant mortality. But he is that pollution.
The deeper truth is that Oedipus knows something of this from the get-go, but he refuses to see and hear what is said to him. Very early in the play, blind Tiresias tells him to his face that he is the perpetrator of the pollution that he seeks to eradicate. But Oedipus just doesn’t hear Tiresias. This is one way of interpreting the word “tyrant” in Sophocles’ original Greek title: Oidipous Tyrannos. The tyrant doesn’t hear what is said to him and doesn’t see what is in front of his eyes.
There is a wonderful Greek expression recalled by Anne Carson, “Shame lies on the eyelids.” The point is that the tyrant (and we could list many recent examples) experiences no shame. But we also have no shame. We are also little, shameless tyrants, especially when it comes to our relations to those we think of as our parents and our children. I think of Walter White from Breaking Bad, who insisted until almost the end of the final episode of that long show that he did everything, everything, for his family and not for himself. This is tyranny and this is perversion.
Greek tragedy provides lessons in shame. The political world is stuffed overfull with sham shame, ham humility, and carefully staged tearful apologies: I’m so sorry; I’m so, so sorry. But true shame is something else.” ~
https://lithub.com/simon-critchley-on-tragedy-colluding-in-our-calamity/?fbclid=IwAR2J79tFyTsqL29VqiGraGAdmLD5fxEYQ-NH4juV6rHUti3MHURGyhmrfu4
Oriana:
Funny, it’s become Oedipus Rex, King Oedipus — but the Greek title is Oidipous Tyrannos. With his unchecked, hubristic power, “the tyrant doesn’t hear what is said to him and doesn’t see what is in front of his eyes.”
What the Greeks called hubris can be translated as narcissistic grandiosity. Part of it is usually trying to scapegoat someone else for whatever is going wrong.
Mary:
Yes, there is a great difference between catastrophe and tragedy. And we seem to have lost the capacity for shame — which means no one wants to take responsibility for their own words or actions. All is dismissed, in truly absurd fashion, as a 'slip of the tongue' or as "I misspoke”... as though not single words but whole sentences and complete actions can spring into being without deliberation or consent. And certainly shame is not possible then, as though all suffer from a kind of moral Tourette's syndrome and no one is ever guilty of anything.
*
Still, let’s not forget that sometimes we are dealing with complete randomness. As a child of survivors, I know this from many wartime stories. Some people died merely because of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Others survived due to a lucky accident of not being at home at the time the Nazis came. Milosz has poems about this . . .
You mention the randomness of survival or destruction in the course of war — what is, I think, the very essence of the experience of war. What the soldier on the battlefield learns is exactly this randomness, in all its indifference to our demands for meaning and justice. Why does one die and another live? Chance. Luck. Nothing else is as powerful a determinant — not worthiness, or training, certainly not piety and prayer. This randomness denies us the order and meaning we crave, it is so hard to accept, and we go to great lengths to avoid it.
I would argue that the losses and horrors of war that we call tragic are not tragic in the sense that Oedipus, or the other great tragic figures of theater are. The victims of war and genocide do not collude with their own destruction, do not suffer as a result of hubris or any deliberate blindness to their own responsibility. Their sufferings are not punishment — nor are they redemptive. No more so than the losses and suffering resulting from natural calamities or accidents.
But we demand meaning. We need to understand why and how these horrors occur . . . again and again. That understanding cannot come from religion or psychology, but only from an understanding of history. And even there we won't find the satisfactions of justice, or of some inherent meaning. There is no master plan where all works out in the end. If there's to be a better world, with less violence, less suffering, more freedom, more joy and beauty, we will have to make it for ourselves.
Oriana:
Yes, while Hegel thought that “Spirit” unfolded itself in history, we have no such illusions. It’s easier for me to agree with I.B. Singer’s “History is made by the wicked.” But that omits positive developments, such as the abolition of “cruel and unusual punishment” and other accomplishments of the Enlightenment. Not that progress is holy and preordained in any manner. That humanity has survived its own follies and cruelties can sometimes seem miraculous. And even so, we still have religious wars! Who would have thought it possible in the 21st century? 9/11 was a terrible setback.
But it seems that, extremes aside, nothing is all good or all bad and that each curse contains a blessing, and each blessing a curse.
*
NOTRE DAME IN FLAMES: AN EYEWITNESS SPEAKS
~ "PARIS—It was Holy Week and nearing end of day, and the setting sun was as fierce red-orange as the terrible blaze engulfing Notre-Dame—Notre-Dame!—when the spire, spindly and delicate during its long life and now consumed by flames, collapsed. It was near 7:50 p.m. The sky was still light.
I was standing in a hushed, pained throng along the Quai d’Orléans of the Ile Saint Louis facing the back of the basilica, and when I watched the spire fall, I gasped and choked back tears. In this, I was not alone. Billows of pale yellow smoke rose from the nave. They became iridescent against the sky. The firefighters spraying plumes of water onto what was once the roof seemed tiny against the enormity of the structure.
How could Notre-Dame be burning? How could Notre-Dame, which had survived for eight centuries—survived plague and wars of religion, survived the French Revolution, survived the Nazis—be falling? Notre-Dame, the heart of Paris, not only a Catholic site but the preeminent symbol of European cultural consciousness, the heart of France, the kilometer zero from which all its farthest villages are measured—how could this majestic structure collapse so fast? I looked around at the faces with me in the crowd. Written on them was sadness, and pain. But also curiosity. A few giggles, as if the enormity of the loss had not yet quite settled.
The silence was interrupted by the clicking of camera lenses. And then there were the cellphones. Hundreds of people filming, photographing, sharing the tragedy, so many that the networks were jammed. Trying to capture in a few pixels what had stood for centuries, a symbol of endurance, of architectural achievement. Built in the Gothic era, destroyed in the social-media era. [this was written before the author knew most would be saved]
The authorities will now investigate. The basilica was under construction. How maddening to see the metal scaffolding still standing, while the nave itself still burns. Nearby, people in cafés were watching the blaze over drinks. Out of sight of the basilica, they streamed images of the flames on their phones.
To those of us who live in Paris, Notre-Dame is as familiar as a landscape, and as solid as a mountain. How could it have burned so fast? I walk past it so often. I like it best at night, when the sculptures on the outside come alive under the spotlights, the gargoyles and saints and the few fallen angels plunging upside down from heaven above the central door.
On French television, a historian of religion, Jean-François Colosimo, described the scene as “images of the end of the world.” The fire, he said, seemed to communicate “the extreme fragility of our situation.”
Messages come in from friends around the world—“Are you okay?”—as if this were another terrorist attack, or a death in the family. In a way, it is a death. In the human family. We are all shocked together.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/notre-dame-fire-wound-heart-paris/587206/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The interior of Notre Dame after the fire
Oriana:
Fortunately the main structure has been saved. The wonderful “pompiers” (firefighters) — more than 400 of them — worked for 9 hours to put out the fire, using the water pumped from the Seine.
And a new kind of fire fighter was also important in the rescue:
THE FIRE-FIGHTING ROBOT
~ "Say “bonjour” to Colossus: the French firefighting robot that helped save Notre Dame.
As the 850-year-old cathedral burned Monday, the Paris Fire Brigade deployed the fire-resistant, waterproof android to quell the flames.
Dramatic footage shows 2.5-foot tall remote-controlled bot spraying water inside the smoke-filled Gothic gem.
The 1,000-plus pound machine is equipped with a fire hose and a camera that firefighters can control from afar, without having to risk burns, smoke
inhalation or being hit by fallling beams.
Colossus “helped extinguish the fire and lower the temperature inside the nave,” Paris Fire Brigade spokesperson Gabriel Plus told AFP.
It was developed by the company Shark Robotics and added to the Paris Fire Brigade team two years ago, according to France Info.
“This is a robot that is designed to remove humans from danger,” said Shark Robotics co-founder Cyril Kabbara . “Not to replace [humans] but to act as operational support for firefighters.” ~
https://nypost.com/2019/04/17/meet-the-firefighting-robot-that-helped-save-notre-dame/
*
ON THE ROOF BEFORE IT BURNED
~ “Seeing the spire of Notre-Dame split like a pencil, you wanted, honestly, to be sick. “La flèche s’est effondrée” (“The spire has collapsed”) was how they said it—on TV, on the radio, on Twitter—in French. “La flèche” also means “arrow.” That seemed fitting: Notre-Dame’s peak was a standby of Paris wayfinding, but it also pointed to the sky, to the realm of creators and destroyers who, on a whim, could seize a city on a Monday night. To Victor Hugo, the Paris skyline was “more jagged than a shark’s jaw, upon the copper-colored sky of evening.” Now there was a smoking void. The falling arrow seemed to be pointing to some kind of reckoning, to some bigger thing than the construction accident that early reports suggested might have been at fault for the fire. The omniscient of the Internet told us not to fret, that cathedrals had been built and burned before. But Parisians watched with the supplicant helplessness of the ages, singing hymns on their knees as the firefighters battled to save the north belfry on the second day of Holy Week.
The diocese of Paris had recently begun a hundred-and-fifty-million-euro restoration, which was to have been carried out over the next ten years. The façade of the cathedral was cleaned up in 2000, but the rest of its exterior was in dire shape. Flying buttresses were giving way; erosion had blunted the pinnacles into melting candles. In some places, the limestone was so friable that you brushed a finger against it and it ran like sand through an hourglass. In others, missing elements had been replaced by plywood and PVC pipe. The spire’s lead covering was cracked, and water had damaged the wooden structure that underlaid it.
Late on Monday night, I called Olivier Baumgartner, a master technician at a company called SOCRA, which specializes in the restoration of historic monuments. Baumgartner and a colleague, Alexandre Decaillot, had spent a week working at the cathedral, removing copper statues for restoration offsite. “I’m completely nauseated,” Baumgartner told me. He added, of the effort to restore the cathedral, “In wanting to give her a second youth, we have perhaps destroyed her.”
I met Baumgartner on the roof of the cathedral in late March, when I went to see how the renovation was coming along. He and Decaillot had been at Notre-Dame for almost a week, dismantling the copper statues of the twelve disciples that the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc installed around the cathedral’s spire sometime after 1843. The men were wearing hard hats and cobalt-blue jumpsuits. Scaffolding rose around them. Decaillot was carrying the apostle Andrew’s head, which he had just separated from its base with a blowtorch. The head was heavy, so Decaillot held it upside down and face in, with its nose poking into his belly. Then he turned the head around and stuck a hand into its hollow neck, like a puppeteer. Saint Andrew had a mournful look. Streaks of verdigris ran from his eyes to his beard, giving the impression that he’d been crying for a hundred and sixty years.
Decaillot and Baumgartner had been deployed to Versailles (fixing the marble in the Hall of Mirrors) and Mont Saint-Michel (re-gilding the archangel Gabriel and putting him back on top of the church with the aid of a helicopter). Even so, they were discreetly thrilled to be spending their workdays in the gargoylesphere. From where they were standing, you could see the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, the mysteriously lopsided towers of Saint-Sulpice.
Decaillot and Baumgartner finished work on the statues on Thursday. They were looking forward to going back to Notre-Dame in a few weeks, to take down the rooster that perched on top of the spire. Tonight I realized that we may have been some of the last people to stand there. I remember seeing a pigeon that had made its nest in the flat of a gargoyle’s neck. I got up close to a clock that, I was amazed to learn, was wound every Thursday morning. The job site seemed clean and well organized—there was a shower cabin where, before descending, each worker was required to wash off toxic lead, untold quantities of which were released tonight into the atmosphere—but I was amazed at how fragile everything was, and how intimate its upkeep. The cathedral was the work of people, not machines.
As of late Monday evening, the western façade of the cathedral—the twin bell towers, the Portal of Judgment—appeared to have been saved. “The worst has been avoided,” the French President, Emmanuel Macron, said on the scene. For Parisians, Macron said, Notre-Dame was “the epicenter of our lives.” He vowed to rebuild and said that a national fund to do so would be launched on Tuesday.
That morning on the roof, Decaillot and Baumgartner wrapped Saint Andrew’s head in bubble wrap, sealing it with orange tape. They put it in a wooden crate where his brethren—along with four smaller sculptures depicting symbols of the Evangelists—were waiting.
The saints’ bodies were joined with their heads last week, at the artisans’ workshop in Périgueux. They are the city’s sentries, its wayposts, the bombers of a billion photos, the inhabitants of an arrondissement in the sky. They, at least, are safe.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/on-the-roof-of-notre-dame-before-it-burned?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_041619&utm_medium=email&bxid=5c0017f72a077c6ca62cc443&user_id=55544946&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
St. Paul minus head being lowered from the roof of Notre DameOriana:
I chose both these articles not only because, like millions of people everywhere, I love Notre Dame, nor for purely historical reasons, but because the writing is so marvelously vivid.
More good news: Drone photos show that Our Lady’s bees survived! They are flying in and out of their hives.
“In a hopeful development Friday, 180,000 bees being kept in hives on Notre Dame’s lead roofing were discovered alive.
“I am so relieved. I saw satellite photos that showed the three hives didn’t burn. I thought they had gone with the cathedral,” Nicolas Geant, the monument’s beekeeper, told the AP.
Geant has looked after the bees since 2013, when they were installed as part of a city-wide initiative to boost declining bee numbers.
Since the insects have no lungs, Geant said the CO2 in the fire’s heavy smoke put the bees into a sedated state instead of killing them. He said when bees sense fire they “gorge themselves on honey” and protect their queen. He said European bees never abandon their hives.”
https://nypost.com/2019/04/19/notre-dame-rector-says-computer-glitch-likely-started-cathedral-fire/
~ “Notre Dame has housed three beehives on the first floor on a roof over the sacristy, just beneath the rose window, since 2013. Each hive has about 60,000 bees.
[The Notre Dame beekeeper Nicolas] Geant said the hives were not touched by the blaze because they are located about 30 meters below the main roof where the fire spread.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/europe/notre-dame-bees-fire-intl-scli/index.html
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT ON THE BUILDING OF GOTHIC CATHEDRALS
“Millions, millions of tons of stone. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries more stone was excavated than in Egypt. The eighty cathedrals and five hundred churches built in this period, if gathered together, would effect a mountain range erected by human hands. In one of my books I saw a drawing of a façade of a Greek temple imposed on the façade of a Gothic cathedral. It was clear that many an Acropolis could be contained, as in a suitcase, inside cathedrals like Amiens or Reims. However, little results from such comparisons, at least little that would tell us about the functions of sacred buildings in different periods. The temples of antiquity housed the gods; cathedrals house the faithful. The immortals are always less numerous than their believers.” ~ Zbigniew Herbert, “A Stone from the Cathedral” ("Barbarian in the Garden," trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985)
Oriana:
There was indeed a boom in cathedral and church buildings, just as Herbert describes. Then the resources started going into the Crusades . . .
But the real end of the cathedral-building boom was the Hundred-Years' War, 1337 to 1453. Herbert finishes the chapter on cathedral-building with this sentence: “The sons of those who carved the smile of an angel turned to producing cannon balls.”
The Smiling Angel of Reims Cathedral. Reims sustained damage from the German shelling during WW1, and then the wooden ceiling caught on fire. Restoration began in 1919, and the cathedral was re-opened in 1938. Reims is of special importance in French history, since this was the place where the French kings were crowned.
Mary:
What is so interesting is that like the pyramids the cathedral building was a massive cultural project involving whole communities for a long period of time. Of course the purpose, direction and meaning were very different and specific to each culture.
*
AND THE BACKLASH
~ “Protesters set ablaze a car, motorbikes and barricades near the Place de la République as they took to the streets of Paris and other French cities for the 23rd Saturday in a row, the Associated Press reported. This time they say they are outraged the government could raise more than a billion dollars to help restore the burned Notre Dame cathedral, while their demands to fight wealth inequality remain overlooked.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/20/715470174/yellow-vest-protesters-fueled-by-anger-over-notre-dame-funds-march-in-paris
Oriana:
Most posts that I saw on Facebook expressed sorrow over the damage caused by the fire and, later, the joy that much has been saved and that restoration will begin. But a few grimly protested that this kind of money should be spent on the homeless, the infrastructure, and other worthwhile projects.
There is no doubt that much needs to be done to make this world a better place for all. We should definitely help the poor and so forth — but not INSTEAD of restoring an art treasure like a beloved cathedral. I have a feeling that the demand for reforms in Europe will intensify. The great American tragedy continues to be spending of enormous sums on unwinnable wars.
Still, this could be a turning point. Yes, it’s nothing for billionaires to contribute millions to the restoration of a great cathedral. This has not escaped the attention of those of us who want adequate funding for projects designed to fight climate change, for instance. Maybe a transformation will eventually be born of this perception.
*
THE WOMAN WHO LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR SEARCH ENGINES
~ “When most scientists were trying to make people use code to talk to computers, Karen Sparck Jones taught computers to understand human language instead.
In so doing, her technology established the basis of search engines like Google.
A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications.
Sparck Jones’s seminal 1972 paper in the Journal of Documentation laid the groundwork for the modern search engine. In it, she combined statistics with linguistics — an unusual approach at the time — to establish formulas that embodied principles for how computers could interpret relationships between words.
By 2007, Sparck Jones said, “pretty much every web engine uses those principles.”
Karen Ida Boalth Sparck Jones was born on Aug. 26, 1935, in Huddersfield, England, a textile manufacturing town. Her parents were Alfred Owen Jones, a chemistry lecturer, and Ida Sparck, who worked for the Norwegian government while in exile in London during World War I.
When studying history and then philosophy (the department was then called moral sciences) at Cambridge, she met the head of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to enter the field. Sparck Jones later described her as “a very strange and interesting woman” who, unusual for the time, used her maiden name professionally.
Sparck Jones, too, kept her name when she married Roger Needham, a fellow computer scientist, in 1958, saying, “It maintains a permanent existence of your own.”
Sparck Jones started working for Ms. Masterman. She wanted to figure out how to program a computer to understand words that could have many meanings (for example “field”) and set about programming a massive thesaurus.
“All words in a natural language are ambiguous; they have multiple senses,” she said in an oral history interview for the History Center of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “How do you find out which sense they’ve got in any particular use?”
*
Sailing was another passion of Sparck Jones and Needham. They restored an 1872 vintage sailboat called Fanny of Cowes and raced it against other old boats along the east coast of England. They chose not to have children.
“They wanted their intellectual life,” said Andrew Herbert, her friend and a fellow computer scientist. “They were clearly deeply in love with each other all the way through their life.”
Sparck Jones had a booming voice and a puckish sense of humor. At work, she usually wore a simple uniform: bluejeans, red sweater, white blouse. She also wore a brooch, which she made from stones and part of a horseshoe. When she had to bike to a formal dinner, as one often did at Cambridge, she was known to use clothing pegs to pin her dress to the handlebars.
In 1982, the British government tapped Sparck Jones to work on the Alvey Program, an initiative to encourage more computer science research across the country. In 1993, she wrote, with Julia R. Galliers, “Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems,” the seminal textbook on the topic.
Sparck Jones became president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, an international group for professionals in the field, in 1994. She became a full-time professor at Cambridge in 1999 — and it had bothered her that it took so long. For all the years before, she had been on contract with the university, an untenured and lower-status form of academic employment referred to as “living on soft money.”
“Cambridge was in many ways not user-friendly, in the sense of women-friendly,” she said of the delay.
Sparck Jones died of cancer on April 4, 2007. She was 71. Though she did not receive an obituary in The Times, her husband did, in 2003.
Today, researchers are still citing her formulas. Ideas she wrote about are now being put into practice as artificial intelligence research becomes more prevalent.
Sparck Jones mentored a generation of researchers, male and female, and came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.”
She was ahead of her time in another respect. Decades before Silicon Valley was having its moral reckoning, Sparck Jones cautioned engineers to think of their work’s impact on society.
“There is an interaction between the context and the programming task itself,” she said. “You don’t need a fundamental philosophical discussion every time you put finger to keyboard, but as computing is spreading so far into people’s lives, you need to think about these things.” ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/obituaries/karen-sparck-jones-overlooked.html
Oriana:
All I can say is Wow! What wonderful contributions this woman made! But note: “Though she did not receive an obituary in The Times [in 2007], her husband did, in 2003.” I'm so glad she’s being acknowledged at last.
Charles:
Wouldn't it be wonderful if they made a movie about Sparck-Jones?
Oriana:
Yes! I think audiences would love a movie about this brilliant and very colorful woman. She needs a wider exposure. And she would make a fabulous movie character. And we badly need movies about great women and their contributions.
*
“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.” ~ Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Oriana:
I think the main reason for this phenomenon is cognitive dissonance. The less evidence there is, the greater the struggle against cognitive dissonance, and the more peculiar the arguments, e.g. it's good that there is no evidence — otherwise we'd have knowledge, and not faith, and faith is a special virtue, preferable to knowledge. The Protestant principle was sola fide — “faith alone” — souls get into heaven due to correct faith.
I like Nietzsche’s “definition”: “Faith: not wanting to know the truth.”
Pirsig’s book has a lot of tension in it. I remember I could take it only in small segments when I read it (which was long ago). I do remember agreeing with Pirsig on a lot of points, but also disliking the speaker as a domineering, smart-ass father who needs to be right and superior at any price. I think if I re-read now I’d be more compassionate toward the author’s insecurities and his way of projecting his shadow onto his son (who later, like his father, was also diagnosed as mentally ill, and died in a tragic way at the age of 22, “fatally stabbed in a mugging outside the San Francisco Zen Center” ~ Wiki)
Robert Pirsig and Chris, 1968*
CHURCHILL ON STALIN’S MADNESS
“Exploring the mind of a psychotic is impossible—the shortest distance between two points becomes a maze—yet as Churchill perceived, there was method in Stalin’s dementia.” ~ William Manchester, The Last Lion
Oriana:
Years ago I read a pretty convincing argument that at least late in life, Stalin was a paranoid schizophrenic. And paranoids often have a “method”: they have a delusional goal and can take effective actions to reach that goal.
By the way, Hannah Arendt fully understood that a revolution devours its children. She didn't advocate revolution (that's why many leftists rejected her as a reactionary, of all things) but a social collaboration (labor unions, progressive legislation) aimed at creating a better world.
(I love the statement "Exploring the mind of a psychotic is impossible—the shortest distance between two points becomes a maze." This seems to apply to theology as well.)
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According to the most recent poll, 70% of Russians have a positive opinion of Stalin — up from 40% in 2008. Not a “mass murderer,” but a “strong leader.” The power of nationalist propaganda.
“The Soviet Union was never a communist country. It was a fascist dictatorship.” ~ M. Iossel. By the way, Noam Chomsky shares this view. He blames Lenin. The point of Lenin’s revolution was not to build Communism, but to establish a dictatorship, Chomsky stated. The terms socialism and communism were used because of their moral appeal.
(A shameless digression: This reminds me of the increasingly popular view that Paul destroyed true Christianity, which would have been based on the teachings of Christ, compassion rather than hierarchy, the inclusion of women rather than their silencing. But others point out that only seven of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul have been authenticated; the rest were forgeries that made Paul look more patriarchal and misogynist. Regardless, and not because of Paul, Jesus preached the imminent end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom. What happened instead was the coming of the Catholic church, as Alfred Loisy pointed out in 1902).
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WHY LIONS EXIST
“When children are asked why, say, lions exist, they prefer teleo-functional explanations — “to go in the zoo.” ~ Jesse Bering, The Belief Instinct
teleo-functional — from “telos,” end, purpose. Bering also gives the example: “Why do mountains exists?” Young children do not reply in terms of geological origins, i.e. they don’t understand the question in terms of how the mountains come to exist, but in terms of the purpose they serve, e.g. “so animals have a place where they can scratch their backs.”
Bering's book on the cognitive biases that lie at the foundation of religion was a tremendous eye-opener for me. It's the only non-fiction book I've read more than once; some sections of it, 3-4 times, I was so intellectually excited by it. And no one else seems to have heard of it!
ONE ARGUMENT FOR SHORTENING THE WORK DAY
“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
On the other hand, if you love your work, you can’t get enough of it. Even if you’re paid for it, you are basically working for yourself.
But in Nietzsche’s era — and to a great extent still in our own — most people labored long hours at jobs they hated —jobs that left them too exhausted to do much else at the end of the day. In our era, the fatigue of the commute adds to the overall exhaustion. It’s not only the worker’s health that suffers; productivity does too.
As for working mothers, volumes have already been written about that. The interesting part is that many women prefer the office to household and child-rearing chores, which they find to be the real slavery.
“I don't like work… but I like what is in work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality —for yourself, not for others — which no other man can ever know.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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“I cannot believe that any religion has been revealed to Man by God. Because a revealed religion would be perfect, but no known religion is perfect; and because history and science show us that known religions have not been revealed but have been evolved from other traditions.” ~ Robert Blatchford, writer, journalist, and freethinker in God and My Neighbor (1903)
Oriana:
By the way, Nietzsche was quite excited by the concept of evolution as applied to religion. He commented that we no longer need to debate the existence of god, only to trace the evolution of the various concepts of god.
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THE CONCRETENESS OF POLISH RELIGIOUS TERMS HELPED ME SHED BELIEF
The Polish word for hell is “Piekło.” The root seems to be “to bake.” Hell is a kind of bakery. Not a bakery where you bake bread, but where you are being baked without end. “Cotto” — cooked or baked — Dante uses that word to describe the faces of the “sodomites” who run under a rain of fire.
But the Polish word is somewhat comical, and the very concreteness of it made it a bit childish. The same could be said for heaven, which is simply "sky," and Purgatory, which is "cleanser." I am very much a "word person," so "she's probably in the Cleanser; let's buy a mass to help get her out of the Cleanser" spoken of someone dead, sounded less and less dignified. I still didn't know that the word "hostia," used for the communion host, meant "victim" — originally a sacrificial animal, then Jesus. Once I learned that, I mentally threw up.
Oddly, I learned about the origin of the mass in the Temple sacrifice ritual at a Jungian lecture, which was quite reverent; the lecturer was obviously in love with the liturgy. And I wondered, how peculiar that we weren't taught any of that in religion lessons — was the church hanging on to Latin in order to hide the meaning, which would reveal the archaic origin — and many people, young girls in particular, find blood sacrifice extremely repugnant.
I did learn at some point in my early teens that there were four prayers from which the priest chooses one, and once he's finished praying, the wafer is changed into the flesh of Jesus. I remember my terrible disappointment: so the priest says a brief prayer, and — abracadabra! — the wafer is changed into flesh? That seemed so bizarre.
Not that the wafer looked any different after the magical transformation from a bit of flour and water to the “living flesh of Jesus” — but we were not supposed to trust our senses. It was a mystery. Whenever something was absurd, the priests and nuns “explained” it as a mystery.
So just as the fairy-tales and children’s books, with their complete absence of god, helped me shed belief (talk about stress reduction! if only it had happened sooner yet), so did the concreteness of the religious Polish words.
Hell as a "bakery." Note that we get to see only male sinners here. Usually both sexes are included, naked of course. I suppose including even one naked woman in this particular representation would push it too far into the worst kind of porn. But what you see here is pretty standard “old-time religion” — religious propaganda that's the ultimate in hideous intimidation.*
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.” ~ Albert Einstein, column for The New York Times, Nov. 9, 1930 (reprinted in The New York Times obituary, April 19, 1955)
Among famous poets, Milosz, though a public Catholic, objected to the notion that god rewards or punishes.
Too bad that Michelangelo did not have Einstein as his model . . . According to what I've read, Michelangelo based his Sistine Chapel Yahweh on representations of Zeus.
Mary:
A little story on "concreteness " and the doctrine of transubstantiation. When my granddaughter made her first communion she told me with disappointment that she expected the communion host to "taste better" after it was consecrated and "became Jesus." But it tasted just as awful as it did when they practiced with unconsecrated hosts in rehearsals.
Oriana:
Thanks for reminding me about those rehearsals. We also rehearsed confession. The first volunteer was a 9-year-old boy. With great confidence, he started rattling off: “I killed five times. I committed adultery three times.” I think that’s about how far he got before being stopped by the alarmed nun.
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KETAMINE MAY RELIEVE DEPRESSION BY REPAIRING DAMAGED BRAIN CIRCUITS
~ “The anesthetic version of ketamine has already been used to treat thousands of people with depression. But scientists have known relatively little about how ketamine and similar drugs affect brain circuits.
Previous research has found evidence that ketamine was creating new synapses, the connections between brain cells. But the new study appears to add important details about how and when these new synapses affect brain circuits.
Dr. Conor Liston and a team of scientists from the U.S. and Japan gave mice a stress hormone that caused them to act depressed. For example, the animals lost interest in favorite activities like eating sugar and exploring a maze.
Then the team used a special laser microscope to study the animals' brains. The researchers were looking for changes to synapses.
"Stress is associated with a loss of synapses in this region of the brain that we think is important in depression," Liston says. And sure enough, the stressed-out mice lost a lot of synapses.
Next, the scientists gave the animals a dose of ketamine. And Liston says that's when they noticed something surprising. "Ketamine was actually restoring many of the exact same synapses in their exact same configuration that existed before the animal was exposed to chronic stress," he says.
In other words, the drug seemed to be repairing brain circuits that had been damaged by stress.
Was the drug really creating all these new synapses in just a couple of hours?
To find out, the team used a technology that makes living brain cells glow under a microscope. "You can kind of imagine Van Gogh's Starry Night," Liston says. "The brain cells light up when they become active and become dimmer when they become inactive.”
That allowed the team to identify brain circuits by looking for groups of brain cells that lit up together.
And that's when the scientists got another surprise.
After the mice got ketamine, it took less than six hours for the brain circuits damaged by stress to begin working better. The mice also stopped acting depressed in this time period.
But both of these changes took place long before the drug was able to restore many synapses.
"It wasn't until 12 hours after ketamine treatment that we really saw a big increase in the formation of new connections between neurons," Liston says.
The research suggests that ketamine triggers a two-step process that relieves depression.
First, the drug somehow coaxes faulty brain circuits to function better temporarily. Then it provides a longer-term fix by restoring the synaptic connections between cells in a circuit.
One possibility is that the synapses are restored spontaneously once the cells in a circuit begin firing in a synchronized fashion.
The new study suggests not only how ketamine works but also why its effects typically wear off after a few days or weeks, she says. "What we can imagine is that ketamine always has this short-term antidepressant effect, but then if the synaptic changes are not maintained, you will have relapse," Beyeler says.
If that's true, she says, scientists' next challenge is to find a way to maintain the brain circuits that ketamine has restored.” ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/04/11/712295937/ketamine-may-relieve-depression-by-repairing-damaged-brain-circuits
During depression, it's difficult to recall any positive memories, or too perceive the beauty of the world.
ending on beauty:
SEPARATION
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
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THE VOW
When the lover
goes, the vow though
broken remains, that
trace of eternity love
brings down among us
stays, to give
dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it.
~ Galway Kinnell
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