*
AZRAEL
“Polish or German, what’s the difference,”
he shrugged, the American
who thought I was German.
“A huge difference,” I began,
face flushed with the venom of history.
Dates of battles,
marshes of blood.
I grew up in a mass graveyard.
Yet the stranger was right.
No nation is eternal.
Greece keens over the splendid
broken bodies,
Egypt sleeps in her own tomb.
Who I really was —
Polish or German,
French or Russian —
empty thrones in echoing museums.
*
On my second trip to Poland, we visited
my mother’s schoolteacher.
Ninety-four, she’d grown tiny as a child,
her skin peeling like an old oilcloth.
Straining to see us, her eyes bleached of color,
she fluttered to the oak wardrobe:
“I must put on something pretty!”
She recognized only my cousin
Janina, the daughter of her
great love. Told over and over
who I was, whose daughter I was,
she’d forget and greet me again,
looking up with such light
in those half-blind eyes
that slowly I understood:
who I was, what my name was —
echoes thinner than the soul.
When the Angel of Love and Death
stands over us with trembling wings,
no difference as she sings
another story. It’s the music
that carries us on.
~ Oriana
If only one poem of mine were to survive, it would be between this one and Lot’s Wife.
Azrael is the name of the Angel of Death — in this poem I prefer to call him the Angel of Love and Death, since the two are more related than people suspect. On the biological level, it’s puberty that’s the first “death switch.” The capacity for sexual reproduction means that the end growth is near, and with it the ability to repair tissue damage (a fetus is best at it, but children still do very well). Without puberty, we’d be near-immortal (only “near” because some mishap would wipe out us in the end) — and we’d continue growing throughout lifetime.
And since we are doomed to mortality and erotic love, labels that we put on ourselves — in terms of nationality, parentage, professional titles, possessions, and the like — are pretty ridiculous when it comes to the larger picture of being human. What matters is that we are not isolated individuals — we are part of humanity. Each story is part of the greater story of humanity.
Mary:
With Azrael opening this blog you set the stage for Vonnegut and his Slaughterhouse Five. What is it to be human — so temporary, so fragile, and so fierce in our desires---for more, for love, for something that will last past our individual stories? Those stories we feel so singular, so all absorbing, so important, precious as the memories of fallen heroes, splendid as Egypt in its glory. The particularities of identity we treasure — nationality and culture, Poland and Germany, not to be muddied and confused, not to be disregarded, and yet in time all ephemeral, all wonder and accomplishment come down to the same as Shakespeare's definition of man . . . a "quintessence of dust."
What is important, as both the poem and Vonnegut's work discover, is not so much each single story, but all of them, one following another, all they share, the grief and hope and all the absurdities of chance, that we are all like the soldier on the battlefield, whose survival or death is purely a matter of luck. There is no fairness, no justice, no deserving one fate or another, no meaning to discover but the one we make. And it is our community, our connection, the situation we all suffer in a world that can be worse than even the most horrific imagined hell, that can become the "music that carries us on." Empathy, compassion, kindness, and the kind of humor that recognizes absurdity without nihilism, horror without despair . . . the only road out of a world ravaged and destroyed beyond recognition.
Oriana:
Thanks for your eloquent commentary.
I feel grateful to that American stranger. Until that encounter, I was trapped in the very thing I said I left Poland to escape — nationalism. I didn’t realize it — in Europe even the smallest countries (and perhaps especially the smallest countries) are still quite obsessed with their history and changing borders, their heroic myths about themselves, their particular enemies (never mind that it was centuries ago). And of course you can’t criticize that without giving tremendous offense.
But the truth is: no country is eternal. Even worse for the nationalists: once you look at the larger picture, the differences are almost insignificant next to what people have in common.
Nationalism is what Vonnegut called a “granfalloon” — a pretty meaningless identity, like being a “Hoosier.” I had a few friends who grew up in Poland, but those friendships fell apart quickly. We simply didn’t have enough in common.
Christian Schloe: Amor
*
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE FIFTY YEARS LATER
~ “On Shrove Tuesday – 13 February 1945 – the weather lifted as children prepared for carnival. Air raid sirens wailed at 9.51pm and minutes later 800 RAF planes began dropping their bombs, guided by the flares that lit up the city for one final view of what had stood for 700 years. The American POWs joined the hanging beef in the Schlachthof underground with only four German soldiers, who shut the steel door behind them.
Sheer walls of heat blockaded the city. Within, the tornado of fire created by the incendiary bombs was so intense that the air crews could feel the heat from 8,000 feet up. A second wave of RAF bombers attacked three hours after the first.
When the POWs emerged on Wednesday, Dresden was gone. Mardi Gras had become a grotesque parade, the streets filled with charred corpses frozen in time, with remains of children in fancy dress and dead animals everywhere – even the horror of people boiled alive after diving into water tanks and fountains. In the afternoon a third wave of aircraft, American B-17 bombers, attacked the remains. The Americans were moved through this three-dimensional Bruegel painting to the barracks of South African POWs housed four miles south of the city center. Modern historians believe 25,000 people died over the three days and 100,000 refugees fled the city.
On Thursday the POWs were instructed to help the clear-up: moving rubble, piling bodies and salvaging anything worthwhile. Vonnegut was told to locate the dead in basements, what he called “corpse mining”. Over the next few weeks, the harder-to-reach bodies began to decompose and those hunting them were driven mad by the leaking viscera from families of disintegrating cadavers, so the Germans decided their only option was to incinerate them with flame throwers.
As Vonnegut himself says in the introduction, all this is “pretty much true” and the war experiences of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, mirror his own. But here’s the thing: the firebombing of Dresden covers little more than a page. What Slaughterhouse-Five becomes is metafiction with a sigh.
Billy has become “unstuck in time” and claims he has been kidnapped by aliens who reveal to him how their species see in four dimensions. Billy is placed in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore and partnered in captivity with an adult-film star, Montana Wildhack, with whom he has a child. “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present and future always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.”
Vonnegut inserts “so it goes” – a Tralfamadorian expression – for each death we encounter. Anything or anyone that dies is leveled in time, from Billy’s dog and the bubbles in champagne to the lice on the uniforms of American soldiers and inhabitants of Dresden. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition at that particular moment.”
Vonnegut’s literary Möbius strip works because he finds a way to balance horror and humor, philosophy and farce, narrative and chaos. In Germany, Billy ends up dressed in a torn woman’s jacket and the silver boots he stole from British POWs after a performance of Cinderella. When Billy watches a war movie backwards, Vonnegut recounts the sight of bombs being sucked back into the bellies of aircraft, corpses coming back to life and crews returning safely to base. The pace and simplicity of the telling is what makes it so moving.
Articulation is left to the birds. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre... Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’”
As if to accept the legacy left him by his mother [who had committed suicide], Vonnegut attempted suicide on 13 February 1984 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. It was the 39th anniversary of the Dresden firebombing. It was also the day in 1976 Billy Pilgrim died once and forever in Slaughterhouse-Five. But Vonnegut lived, so more a case of “but not me” than “so it goes”.
We must listen to people who have seen such things as Vonnegut. Far from nihilism, he extols empathy, generosity and the notion of common decency personified by the character Edgar Derby – the soldier who survived Dresden only to be executed for stealing a teapot.
It is the easiest thing to ignore war for those who have not known it. Vonnegut was plagued by the idea that humans could kill each other in such a way. We need him to express that obsession, because most of us will never understand it. Hopefully. It seems that we are now closer to another global conflict than any time since the Sixties. It’s almost like we can’t avoid it. That, sadly, is about as Vonnegut a sentiment as you get. At least we can still laugh. Kurt Vonnegut made you ashamed to be human, but glad to be alive.” ~
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/kurt-vonnegut-slaughterhouse-five?fbclid=IwAR2f-Tquf7UglelUqJCDGrwTBNC49WIiqiq3LEbMkxrPgZLO2hu2Jj8eK-o
Dresden, February 1945: collecting the dead bodies
Oriana:I left out two paragraphs that I now think do summarize Vonnegut’s writing in general:
~ “Laughter and sobbing are physiologically the same thing,” said Kurt Vonnegut. “I prefer laughter to tears because there’s less cleaning up to do afterwards.” Always with the jokes. Vonnegut was unable to make a joke without leaving a tragedy around the next corner and unable to pass up the opportunity to undermine his most profound utterances with a laugh. That, for him, was reality, however unreal it seemed.
This is a story about stories. It’s about how experience is turned into art and how horror becomes beauty. It’s about how something beyond expression can become something expressed in a way no one had thought of before and, in particular, it’s about how one very funny but damaged writer turned a catastrophic loss of human life into a novel that can just about save your faith in humanity.” ~
Vonnegut certainly knew that often we laugh in order not to cry; we sing in order not to scream; we dance in order not to fall down. These choices may be unconscious, but are profound nevertheless.
*
“But she did look back, and I love her for that because it was so human.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Oriana:
I have a persona poem about Lot's wife, and she says "Only I obeyed / the human commandment" -- which is to see, to know, to find out. And in her famous poem about Lot’s Wife, Akhmatova also says she cannot reject "her who gave her life / for a single glance."
There is a rabbinical midrash that calls Lot's wife "Edith" (humanizing her that way) and explains she looked back to see if perhaps her two other daughters (the married ones) had left the city after all and were following. But I prefer the human drive to see and know as the reason.
Mary:
And to witness and remember.
"Lot's Wife" on Mount Sodom
PS.
Much as I admire Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan that has indelibly marked me as the darkest dystopia, including Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. No religion could survive truth in advertising.
*
“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. THE ARTS ARE NOT A WAY TO MAKE A LIVING. THEY ARE A VERY HUMAN WAY OF MAKING LIFE MORE BEARABLE. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country
“WE MUST TRY TO CONTRIBUTE JOY TO THE WORLD” ~ Roger Ebert
I remember when I used to make myself unhappy. To paraphrase Plath, I did it exceptionally well. And it's hard or even impossible for an unhappy person to make others happy. Here is Ebert's wisdom:
“Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find out.”
~ Roger Ebert (1942-2013)
spring blossoms in Krakow; Ania Stepień
I absolutely could not believe this kind of wisdom when I was young. The cult of suffering was ingrained in me. I don't know if it was the persistence of the belief that suffering is good for you — it allegedly “builds character” and “makes you stronger” — or perhaps even some unconscious remainder of the Catholic idea that “The more you suffer here, the less time in Purgatory.” Or maybe it was a shallow understanding of existentialism. In any case, I despised happiness: “happiness is for pigs.” Such stupidity, such cruelty to the self. It took me a very long time to see that being happy and contributing to the joy of others (which also increases our happiness in a "virtuous circle") is by far the most important.
John Guzlowski:
Happiness has a bad rap in western civilization. suffering gets a lot of press and praise. Hamlet, Raskolnikov, Satan — they all are seen as heroic unhappy sufferers.
Gustave Doré: Satan
Oriana:
True. And all those Byronic heroes with their mysterious melancholy. Likewise, we tend to see tragedy and unhappy endings as greater art than works with happy endings. As John says, it is a deep bias in the Western culture. But perhaps things are changing somewhat — we are becoming more aware that a work of art need not be shallow — or even be devoid of tragedy — in order to “contribute joy to the world.”
*
. . . this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
~ Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
Alan Cumming as Hamlet
*
“Love is not the answer; it's the question. What to love? What to hate? What to be for? What to be against? Yes, I have hatred in my heart, and would argue so does anyone who loves deeply. You can’t love something deeply without hating its opposite.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
This seems true. At the same time, we can try to focus more on things we love rather than those we hate. It’s the focus, the dominant emphasis, that makes a profound difference.
*
“A customer who turned 98 yesterday was reminiscing about the days when Franklin Roosevelt raised the minimum wage from 40 cents a day to $1 a day. That, my friends, was the beginning of America’s descent into socialist hell.” ~ Matt Flumerfelt
Oriana:
FDR is my favorite president, ahead even of Lincoln. And I feel a deep gratitude to LBJ for having managed to introduce Medicare. Like FDR with Social Security, LBJ had to deal with tremendous opposition to Medicare as “socialized medicine.” The long-term plan was indeed Medicare for All. I'm curious if I’ll see it in my lifetime. At least it’s being discussed.
FDR and Frances Perkins, signing of the Social Security Act
*
THE DEMOGRAPHIC FUTURE: MORE GRAY, MORE GREEN, AND LESS WHITE
~ “Much about demography is “baked into the future” and is certain to happen. And this demographic future can be summarized in three colors: more gray, more green and less white.
MORE GRAY:
The median age of the world’s population has already risen by around seven years since 1960. In the developed world, it has risen by more than a decade in the same period, while in east Asia as a whole it has risen by 16 years and in South Korea, an astonishing 22 years.
Yet the process is only just beginning. According to the middle-range UN forecasts, by the end of the present century median man or woman will be over 40, a dozen years older than today. This means that between 1960 and 2100 the median person will have doubled in age from barely 20 to more than 40.
Among the record-breakers for greater age will be Ethiopians (today on average 18, by 2100 aged 43), and Syrians (today aged barely 20, in 2100 likely to be aged nearly 47). Many countries, from Poland to Sri Lanka and Japan, will have a median age of over 50. By the end of this century, Libya’s median age is projected to be roughly where Japan’s is now.
Such aged societies have never been seen in history. When Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story was first produced in 1957 the median age among Puerto Ricans (in Puerto Rico rather than in New York, it is true) was around 18; by 2100 it will be little short of 55. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, to be age representative, a latter-day Bernstein would need to set his musical in an old people’s home rather than among street gangs.
How this marked aging will affect the world cannot be predicted with any certainty, but it is surely the case that a world in which the median age is around 20 (1960) is profoundly different from one in which it is over 40 (2100), not only because of all the political, economic and technological changes that are likely to have happened, but also by sheer dint of its aging population. The changes effected by aging are likely to be both positive and negative. Viewed optimistically, the world is more likely to be a peaceful and law-abiding place.
There is a strong correlation between the youth of a society and the violence and crime within it. Not all young societies are embroiled in crime and war, but almost all old societies are at peace. Not only are older people less likely to take up arms or become criminals; young people, where they are few and far between, are more valued and more heavily invested in. Mothers who have only one son are less likely than mothers with many sons to goad them to take up arms against enemies real or perceived.
On the other hand, older societies are less likely to be dynamic, innovative and risk-taking. An older population is more likely to want to hold the safest sort of investment, high-quality bonds rather than equities, for example, and this will affect markets and in turn the real economy. Real estate demand will also change as more and more accommodation is required by elderly singles and less and less by growing families—these effects are already at work in much of the developed world, and are set to go global.
While median age captures the age of a society as a whole, it is the rise in the number of elderly which tends to receive the greatest attention, not least because of the pressure this is likely to put on the welfare states of developed countries where state provision for older people is advanced. This is often expressed as a “support ratio”—the number of people of working age (however defined) to each older person—and as early as 2050 in Japan this figure will be approaching one to one. In Western Europe, although lower than Japan, it will be twice as high in 2050 as it was in 2005. Pensions in the developed world as a whole are set to double as a share of GDP without significant reform by 2050, and the greater demands of older people on health services will also be a fiscal challenge for a developed world where budgets are already under strain and debt to GDP ratios are seen by many as perilously high.
In the developed world, with state welfare provision, this may still be an issue, but in the developing world the question will be more critical. Countries will have to cope with growing old before they grow rich. In the developed world, however financed, young workers from countries like Thailand and the Philippines can be drawn in to help with elderly care, at least if allowed to do so by local immigration legislation. For developing countries with an aging population this will not be a luxury they can afford.
MORE GREEN:
Accepting that almost come what may, the world is set to become more gray, there is also every chance that it could become more green. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which suggests that humanity is still in the midst of a population explosion which is wrecking the planet. There is no doubt that the great increase in human population on the one hand and the vast increase in living standards on the other has done much environmental damage. Humankind has taken over more and more of the planet for living space and farming, and modern lifestyles certainly churn out a great deal of environmentally damaging substances.
Where human population starts to decline, from Japan to Bulgaria, nature moves fast into the void. Because of slower than once expected decline in African fertility rates, the UN now expects the global population to exceed 11 billion and not to have stopped growing by the end of the current century; however, by then it should just about have stabilized, with growth at a tenth of that experienced today and a twentieth of that experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Demography is a car that first trundles along slowly, then reaches tremendous speed and most recently has decelerated so significantly that in the course of this century it is very likely to have ground to a halt.
LESS WHITE:
The third color we can predict with some certainty is “less white.” With the great population explosion starting among the Anglo-Saxons and then moving on to other Europeans, the white population of the world experienced an extraordinary expansion both in absolute and relative terms from the start of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. This has had profound political consequences, and without it, it is hard to imagine that European imperialism could have grown so extensive or had such an impact on the world. However, the Anglo-Saxons had no monopoly on falling mortality and sustained high fertility (and hence high population growth), and neither have people of European extraction. Until recently the lowest fertility, oldest and slowest-growing populations in the world were in Europe, and it was here, too, that population decline in recent times first set in. More recently, however, the peoples of north-east Asia have begun to catch up and in some cases, on some measures, overtake Europeans, and in time no doubt others will follow. Thai women have fewer children than British women, although Thailand still has some “demographic momentum” to enjoy.
The decline in people of European origin can be seen on two levels: continental within a global context, and country by country. Starting with the first of these, in 1950, as the era of European imperialism was ending, the population of the European continent contained around 22 percent of humanity. Adding in overwhelmingly white Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the figure came to 29 percent. Sixty-five years later, Europe’s share was down to 10 percent and that of the “wider white world” down to 15 percent. Taking UN median projections, these two figures will by the end of the current century fall to 6 percent and 11 percent respectively. Many countries in Europe are already experiencing population decline, or would be were it not for inward migration. If UN projections are correct, then Bulgaria and Moldova will have lost half their population by the end of the current century and Latvia will not be far behind. Germany will have lost 10 percent and Italy 20 percent.
Moreover, those countries are themselves becoming less white. By the middle of this century people of “white British” origin may be just 60 percent of the population of the UK, although admittedly many of the immigrants and people of immigrant origin will be of European extraction. The white population of the United States, 85 percent in 1965 and 67 percent in 2005, is projected to dip below 50 percent by mid-century. In both countries it is likely that a “mixed origin” element will be significant and fast-growing.
The flipside of white decline in relative numbers has been and will continue to be the rise of Africa. In the middle of the 20th century, after centuries of being sidelined, colonized and subject to slavery, sub-Saharan Africans accounted for barely one person in ten on the planet; by the end of this century they are likely to account for one person in four.” ~
https://lithub.com/what-will-happen-to-the-world-as-life-expectancy-goes-up/?fbclid=IwAR1KR6hzfwL8pMLPCmQ-uhvuL-ivNedS5XJtaV_NCfXBk6fLSoeP4dX3ysM
Oriana:
This is such an interesting reversal of Malthus, who of course goes back to before effective contraception. As the prosperity of the country increases, families get smaller. In fact the demographic problem in Europe and parts of Asia is women’s unwillingness to bear children (plural) — they often stop at one, or choose to remain childless (or “child-free” — the very emergence of that phrase points to the awareness of how having children is increasingly perceived as more stress and expense than it’s worth).
Yes, but before the population shrinks, the earth will be crowded indeed — and increasingly in cities. The phase of the most rapid population growth is already over, but at this point the world population is still growing. Nevertheless, women everywhere are already having fewer children — in many countries, the birth rate is below the 2.1, the so-called replacement rate. Some experts think that the shrinking may start as early as 2060.
You might say, but at a certain degree of crowding, won’t there be wars and diseases that will shrink the population sooner than the “baked-in demographics”? Here is one reader’s comment:
“War has little effect on population growth. Even WW II had little effect. Barring global nuclear war, war is likely to have little effect. ~"Professor Barry Brook, who co-led the study at the University of Adelaide, Australia, said: ‘'We were surprised that a five-year WW3 scenario, mimicking the same proportion of people killed in the first and second world wars combined, barely registered a blip on the human population trajectory in this century.’'
from another source:
~ “In the 1970s, the fertility rate began to drop below 2.1 in the most advanced economies and began dropping in developing countries as well, a phenomenon that has been described as “one of history’s most astounding global shifts.” In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. The more a society urbanizes and the more control women exert over their bodies, the fewer babies they choose to have. Today, in most Western nations, such as the United States (fertility rate: 1.9) and Canada (fertility rate: 1.6), 80 percent of the population live in cities, and women have something close to total control over their reproductive choices.
But fertility declines aren’t unique to the developed world. Urbanization and the empowerment of women are global phenomena. We know that China and India are at or below the 2.1 replacement rate. But so are other developing countries: Brazil (1.8), Mexico (2.3), Malaysia (2.1), Thailand (1.5). Birth rates are still very high in Africa (Niger: 7.4; Malawi: 4.9; Ghana: 4.2) and parts of the Middle East (Afghanistan: 5.3; Iraq 4.6; Egypt: 3.4). But these high-fertility countries share one thing in common with their low-fertility counterparts: Everywhere, virtually without exception, birth rates are coming down. Nowhere are they going up.
Once having one or two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm.” ~
https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-global-population-will-start-to-shrink-2f606c1ef088
Mary:
I find the completely unexpected universal change in population growth — that is to zero or even negative growth — actually a very hopeful one. Not so much in the resulting shrinkage in population as that it is a lesson in caution when assuming things will continue always moving in the direction we are used to. Things always change, of course, but this particular reversal of what was assumed to be a permanent movement toward more and more population growth, teaches us that some of our most basic ideas can be upended by developments we thought impossible, that go on and happen anyway.
Oriana:
I know it definitely won’t happen in my lifetime, but I think it would be fabulous if we could stabilize the population at two billion or so. It would be lovely to have more forests and more “nature” in general . . .
But first we have to resolve the climate crisis, or else the climate change will shrink — or even eliminate — the population in very unpleasant ways.
HOW NOT TO TAKE THINGS PERSONALLY AND OTHER IMPORTANT LIFE SKILLS WE ARE NOT BEING TAUGHT
~ “Just because you experience something, just because something causes you to feel a certain way, just because you care about something, doesn’t mean it’s about you.
When people criticize you or reject you, it likely has way more to do with them — their values, their priorities, their life situation — than it does with you. I hate to break it to you, but other people simply don’t think about you that much (after all, they’re too busy trying to believe everything is about them).
When something you do fails, it doesn’t mean you are a failure as a person, it simply means you are a person who happens to fail sometimes.
When something tragic happens and you become horribly hurt, as much as your pain has you absolutely convinced that this must be about you, remember that hardship is part of choosing to live, that the tragedy of death is what gives meaning to life, and that pain has no prejudice — it afflicts us all. Deserving or not deserving isn’t part of the equation.
Second Important life Skill: How to Be Persuaded and Change Your Mind
Most people, when their beliefs are challenged, hold onto them as though they are a life vest on a sinking ship.
The problem is that often times their beliefs are the sinking ship.
Take dating. I’ve seen men who still held onto beliefs about themselves that they formed in high school — that women aren’t interested in nerds; that they need to have a bunch of money or a sweet ass car to be loved. Maybe these beliefs served them and explained their lives when they were 16. But at 32, these same beliefs and assumptions were wrecking their dating life.
You’re going to be wrong a lot in life. In fact, you’re going to be wrong pretty much all of the time. And in many ways, your ability to succeed and learn over the long-term is directly proportional to your ability to change what you believe.
Try this: Write down 20 things in your life today that you could potentially be wrong about. And again, I don’t just mean material stuff. I’m sure my understanding of physics is sorely lacking in many ways. But that’s not the most important thing I need to change my mind about.
What we’re going for here is questioning some of those deep assumptions about your identity — I am not an attractive person; I am lazy; I don’t know how to talk to people; I won’t ever be happy because I feel stuck in my life; I think the world is going to end next Tuesday.
The more emotionally charged the assumption, the more important it is to write it down and challenge it.
Then, after you’ve gotten 20, go through and write down what it would mean in your life if it were wrong.
Third Important Life Skill: How to Act Without Knowing the Result
Teacher wants a paper. So you write it. Mom wants a clean room. So you clean it.
But most of life — that is, real life — doesn’t work this way. When you decide to change careers, there’s no one there telling you which career is right for you. When you decide to commit to someone, there’s no one telling you this relationship is going to make you happy. When you decide to start a business or move to a new country or eat waffles instead of pancakes for breakfast, there’s no way of knowing — for certain — if what you’re doing is “right” or not.
And so we avoid it. We avoid making these decisions. We avoid moving and acting without knowing. And because we cannot act on what we don’t know, our lives become incredibly repetitive and safe.
Developing the ability to simply do things for no other reason than curiosity or interest or hell, even boredom — the ability to do things with no expectation for result or accolade or productivity or fanfare — will train you to better make these big ambiguous life decisions. It will train you to simply start on something without knowing where in the hell it’s going.
And while this will result in a thousand tiny failures, it will also likely result in your life’s biggest successes.
Stop making everything you do about accomplishing some fucking goal.
Or to put it another way: Get good at wasting time in unexpected ways.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/3-important-life-skills-nobody-ever-taught-you
Oriana:
Hard to disagree with any of it. Life is so full of surprises that making a big deal of the goals we may have set for ourselves in youth is usually a guarantee of frustration. True, “diminished expectations,” that unmistakable sign of growing older, has a negative ring to it. Don’t be too put off by “diminished.” It’s a sign of the “wisdom of age” — as is knowing that the outcome of what we do is uncertain at best, and in any case whatever we achieve will be only temporary.
So is the knowledge that what people think about you says a lot more about them than about you. You are lucky to be important to one person, maybe two or three. It’s best to pay no attention to your “importance” — only to keep asking yourself how you can contribute. And it's best to concentrate on the work itself, not the outcome. Deep focus = happiness.
"We must let go of the life we've planned so that we can have the life that's waiting for us." ~ Joseph Campbell
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GLOBAL WARMING 55 MILLION YEARS AGO: THE PALEO-EOCENE THERMAL MAXIMUM
~ “In the late 1980s, as the world's governments were waking up to the problem of climate change, the mud at the bottom of the ocean near Antarctica revealed a surprise. Earth had lived through rapid global warming before.
About 55 million years ago global temperatures spiked. Then, as now, sea levels rose, the oceans became more acidic, and species disappeared forever.
The geologists who studied those Antarctic sediments in the 1980s published their findings in 1991. They reported that the shells of tiny planktonic fossils in the muds had betrayed the rapid temperature swings.
More precisely, it was the oxygen isotopes locked away in those shells. At around the 55-million-year mark, the amount of "heavy" oxygen-18 in the shells rose relative to "lighter" oxygen-16.
That greater abundance of oxygen-18 is a sure sign that conditions were getting warmer. Water evaporates more readily at higher temperatures, and it's the "light" oxygen-16 that is most easily vaporized. This means that warmer water contains more oxygen-18, and the plankton living in warmer water incorporate more of the stuff into their shells.
Like oxygen, carbon exists in different isotopic forms. At exactly the same time that the plankton shells became rich in oxygen-18, they also began carrying much more carbon-12 relative to carbon-13. The oceans must suddenly have gained a big supply of carbon-12.
This is something that generally happens after a massive injection of carbon-rich greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane – into the atmosphere.
In other words, the PETM seems to have been caused by greenhouse gases just like modern-day climate change.
Most researchers think the PETM warming really took place over a long period, but exactly how long is still up for discussion.
One 2011 estimate suggests that the carbon was released over a period of perhaps 20,000 years.
Such a slow release is very different from today. It might indicate that the greenhouse gases came from the relatively gradual release of gases from volcanic activity.
Research published in 2014 points to a middle ground. Gabriel Bowen at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his colleagues examined the carbon isotopes preserved in soils that formed 55 million years ago in what is now Wyoming.
Whereas the ocean sediments tell us about conditions in the PETM oceans, the soils sample the PETM atmosphere, which responds more rapidly to climate change.
The by-now-familiar surge in carbon-12 popped up again, this time preserved in carbonate nodules that grew in the soil. In this case, it looks like the carbon was released into the atmosphere over about 1500 years: a timescale that looks more similar to today's atmospheric changes.
The ancient soils also indicate the pace of carbon emissions.
The researchers calculated that something approaching 1 billion tonnes of carbon entered the ancient atmosphere each year. That is within an order of magnitude of the current annual release rate of 9.5 billion tonnes.
Bowen and his colleagues made another discovery in Wyoming. They realized that there were actually two distinct pulses of warming 55 million years ago.
A few thousand years before the PETM itself, a vast quantity of carbon-rich greenhouse gases entered the atmosphere from an unidentified source, again at a rate of about 1 billion tonnes per year.
The environment seemed seems to have almost brushed off this "pre-onset event". Atmospheric temperatures rose, but within a couple of thousand years they fell again. Conditions had apparently returned to normal.
The fall in atmospheric temperatures probably came about because the oceans absorbed the heat from the pre-onset event. That might have paved the way for the PETM itself.
When the oceans warm up a little, vast deposits of methane that are "frozen" in the seabed begin to melt. The methane – a potent greenhouse gas – bubbles up, enters the atmosphere and raises global temperatures.
This leads to more ocean warming, triggers more methane release from the seabed, and causes atmospheric temperatures to rise more, and so on. Soon the planet becomes very warm, which is exactly what happened 55 million years ago during the PETM.
Something similar might be happening today. As the modern oceans warm there is good evidence that methane is once again bubbling up from the seabed. The PETM offers us a preview of where that can lead.
Regardless, while the PETM's exact cause is still elusive, its effects are clear.
Even back in 1991 when it was first described, it was evident that the PETM was a killer.
Some of the microfossil species preserved in the Antarctic sediments disappeared as the warming began. The species impacted were those that lived deep in the oceans. They experienced their most severe extinction in tens of millions of years.
Curiously, many microscopic species that lived in the shallower ocean waters actually flourished – an early sign that there were winners and losers as the climate changed.
It was probably a combination of factors that killed the deep-sea species. The warmer temperatures would have been unwelcome, but there may also have been less oxygen available in that warmer water.
However, other microbes may have taken advantage of those oxygen-poor conditions.
Seawater changed in other ways that were clearly harmful. When the oceans absorb greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the process produces a mild acid in the water, lowering the pH: a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. We know it is happening in the world's oceans today, and it happened 55 million years ago too.
Then, as now, ocean acidification was bad news for marine species that build skeletons out of calcium carbonate, because this solid mineral begins to dissolve when the pH drops. Acidification might have been a factor in the deep-sea extinction, and it also affected some shallow living species.
In particular, the world's coral reefs faced one of their five greatest crises since they first evolved 550 million years ago.
In the Arctic, plenty more rain than usual fell during the PETM, probably because stronger ocean evaporation in the tropics delivered more water vapor to higher latitudes.
In Wyoming, plant ranges shifted hundreds of kilometers north as temperatures rose. Conifers apparently disappeared from the area entirely, only returning as temperatures fell after the PETM.
The PETM also marks the moment when many of the mammal groups that dominate the world today – including horses, cattle and other hoofed animals – appeared and spread across the northern continents. They probably did so probably in response to the warmer conditions.
But members of these familiar animal groups would have looked odd to our eyes.
"There is strong evidence that about 40% of the mammalian fauna got smaller during the PETM," says Ross Secord at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. "Nothing appears to have gotten larger."
Some mammals became very small indeed.
When atmospheric CO2 levels rise, the leaves and shoots of plants may become less nutritious and harder for herbivores to digest. If that happened during the PETM, it could have led to slower animal growth, and herbivores might have begun to shrink. Carnivores, forced to target smaller prey, might have followed suit.
Modern primates appeared and spread at the beginning of the PETM, alongside horses and other hoofed animals. Their early fossil record is patchy, but they appear at almost exactly the same time in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa.
Within a few tens of millions of years, our particular branch of the primate tree had flourished to such a degree that the world really had become the planet of the apes. About 5 million years later, the first upright apes we recognize as our direct ancestors appeared.
Would primates have become so successful if the PETM had never happened? No one can say for sure.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150914-when-global-warming-made-our-world-super-hot
horse the size of a domestic cat (Sifrhippus)
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GOD AS A GREEK TRAGEDY
Anger at god is common after something nasty happens. Paradoxically, one can be seized with a real rage against a fictional character — that is, the rational mind knows that it’s a fictional character, but the emotional circuits fire on automatic. A Yiddish proverb: “If god lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
Priests shrewdly did not allow the gods to live on earth, unless on inaccessible mountain peaks (it was forbidden to climb a sacred mountain). Still, a throne in the clouds was safer by far from the curious. But as scientific knowledge began to grow, this throne was placed farther and farther away. In the first half of the twentieth century, Simone Weil, though highly educated, believed that god literally lived in cosmic space just beyond earth’s atmosphere. When that became untenable, the throne of gold was disposed of, and the answer became the mystical “everywhere.”
But “everywhere” is so non-specific that it can easily flow into nowhere. So a kind of pity can arise — agains in spite of knowing that we are talking about a fictional character — when we ponder god’s homelessness, loneliness, and lack of anything to do, since he can’t violate the laws of nature (which means that it's the laws of nature that are actually "in charge" and not god).
Pity and anger — that reminds me of “pity and horror,” the emotions that Greek tragedies were supposed to inspire. His human creators endowed him with so much hubris that a fall was inevitable: a dethroned deity, shrinking into uselessness — but still, in one remaining version, used to promote the horror of violence.
Jewish, I guess?
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SCHIZOPHRENIA AND SHORTER LIFE EXPECTANCY
~ “PERSONS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA HAVE A GREATLY DIMINISHED LIFE SPAN. [THEY TEND TO] DIE MORE THAN 25 YEARS EARLIER THAN THE GENERAL POPULATION. In other words, these individuals can only expect to live about 70% of the normal life span. Why do they die early?
In a paper recently published in JAMA Psychiatry, Mark Olfson and colleagues set out to answer this question. They examined reasons for premature mortality in a group of over 1 million people with schizophrenia covered by Medicaid, the largest insurance provider for persons suffering from schizophrenia in the U.S. They identified causes of death for over 65,500 of the 74,000 people who died during the study period and found that individuals with schizophrenia had an increased rate of death across all ages and all demographic groups when compared to the general population.
What were the causes of death in these individuals? Olfson and colleagues found that both natural causes and unnatural causes of death were increased by over three-fold. The most common causes of death were cardiovascular disease, cancer (particularly lung cancer), diabetes, influenza, accidental deaths, and suicides. The large majority of deaths (almost 55,750) resulted from natural causes. However, the rates of death from suicide and accidents were also substantially elevated.
Smoking is a significant risk factor for a number of diseases on this list. It has been known for a long time that a large majority of persons with schizophrenia smoke. In fact, the rate of smoking for individuals with schizophrenia is more than twice the rate observed in individuals without schizophrenia. Many are also very heavy smokers. This increased rate of smoking accounts for some of the increased death rate, but not all of it.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/demystifying-psychiatry/201602/why-do-people-schizophrenia-die-prematurely
ending on beauty:
The water, that circle of shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back
with the back-lit light of polished steel,
and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees,
shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away.
~ Mary Oliver, Alligator Poem
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