A butterfly egg; Martin Oeggerli*
THE TRUE SUBJECT
The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.
~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz
The death of the fantasy man I loved,
the one I called by your name
and held in my arms every night,
caused me more pain than later
the throbbing bullet of your real
suicide. Then I learned about
poetry’s true subject: the tremble
in your voice when you said,
I want to do something great —
the heft of a thousand-page
anthology of regrets we read in the dark,
and yes, it ruined our eyes;
eating oatmeal, the only
food you had, as we listened
to the aria of the Queen of Night;
your turning to the wall
when I tried to wake you up;
the sudden lightning
like an angry god
dancing around the room —
though it never seemed to rain
when I was at your house —
my dreams withering without
the veil of that sound.
~ Oriana
Francis Picabia, A Man and a WomanMy fantasy lover had my actual lover’s name and face, but gradually the contrast became so stark that the fantasy could not be sustained. I realize that the poem does not really indicate that . . . of course it wasn’t eating oatmeal that I minded, and certainly not listening to Mozart together. But in the poem, I wanted beauty, so I memorialized a few beautiful moments.
And the lightning in its crazed dance around the room — it might be taken as the writing on the wall, a prophecy of a violent end. But only a reader who reads the entire sequence might make this connection.
Perhaps Jack Gilbert’s short poem can illuminate the unsaid:
GOING THERE
Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
~ Jack Gilbert
Note that Gilbert too is being evasive.
In terms of honesty, my poems fails utterly. But are poems about honesty? Someone said: “The task of the poet is not to debunk; the task of the poet is to bunk.” But in real poetry, this “bunking” is not about a cheap consolation and a quick affirmation, something like, “But isn’t life glorious in spite of all the suffering?”
Gilbert states it in a much more modest way:
Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
I took up the question of the disparity between life and poetry in discussing my poem “Tristan” — also about a young man who died in a self-destructive way, arguably a suicide. It could be argued that the real story is more interesting than what is revealed by the poem — take his mother, for instance, so detached from reality it would be a comedy if it weren’t a tragedy. But the poem is about trying to discover the deeper, more universal meaning of the events. The power and purpose of poetry are much bigger than “what really happened.”
Mary:
Speaking of memory, the stories we tell ourselves, and "what really happened," it seems such a layered, shifting, subjective thing. Difficult enough when we are discussing history, itself so laden with differing perspectives, retold through the lenses of cultural, political and ideological bias, so very different for the winners and losers, the rich and the poor, slaves and masters, women and men. Even family history is hard to pin down, each one remembers experience in the terms of their own fears, hopes and desires, each story a personal mythology. But just as in art, the story, the myth, may be closer to the truth, the emotional, psychological, human truth, embodying values and meaning, than even the most accurate catalogue of events.
Oriana:
That’s a very important last point: myths and “inaccurate stories” may be closer to the psychological truth. Thank you for reminding of that. Any poem — anything we say, for that matter — is at best a partial truth. In my case, the desire to create beauty is one of the distorting factors — but then, as Nietzsche said, “we have art so we don’t die of truth.”
Charles:
The black and white photo of the children of photographer holding hands is one of the most famous and valuable of photographer Eugene Smith.
*
“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.” ~ Miranda July
Two barred owls in Florida*
POETRY AND SIMPLICITY
From Anton Chekhov’s letter to Maxim Gorki: “. . . cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can . . . It is comprehensible when I write ‘The man sat on the grass,’ because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write, ‘The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that has already been trampled down by pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.’ The brain can’t grasp all of that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.”
This passage, quoted in What Light Can Do, Robert Hass’s new collection of essays, is a pearl of great price. In every writing class, over and over you are told not to use too many adjectives and adverbs. What you are not told is the rationale: art needs simplicity. “When you lose simplicity, you lose art,” Joseph Campbell said (The Campbell Companion), probably quoting someone else. Chekhov explains why: the brain can grasp only so much, while “art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.”
On closer look, however, it’s not the number of details per se that clogs the cluttered second version of the man sitting on the grass. It’s the fact that these details are crammed into one sentence. What we have here is not just the too-muchness of things, but disrupted flow clogged with commas. Velocity is lost, flow is lost. And a good piece of writing needs to flow by itself. The syntax needs to be simple, particularly in poetry, which otherwise risks being “hard on the brain.” Simple words and simple syntax, further split into simple units with the magic tool of line breaks — now there is a chance that poetry can happen.
(A shameless digression on line breaks. I remember a workshop with Jeffrey Levine, during which he mused: “There are terrible things happening in the world: warfare, famine, genocide. And here we are, talking about line breaks . . . isn’t that wonderful?”)
Line breaks are immensely important; I protest the current popularity of prose poems. The brain can grasp only so much at a time, and line breaks help. Recently a friend sent me a poem that delighted me with its elegant, sophisticated simplicity, far from simplistic:
ORIGAMI
Yesterday I laundered a mouse —
wash, rinse, spin cycled.
She came out a little damp,
lying on her side as if asleep,
tiny whiskers, claws folded,
thin tail, exquisite ears, so complete
as if sculpted from Japanese Kami paper.
If there were children in the house
there would have been a funeral —
match box coffin, bouquet of weeds,
Boy Scout version of taps.
But they are gone and I am old —
I scooped her into the trash.
~ Una Hynum
***
Aside from the brilliance of noting that a laundered mouse came out looking like origami, what don’t we have in this poem? There is childhood and old age, life and death, domestic practicality versus sentiment, the mouse as art and the mouse as reality. We have the past overlaid on the present like a revenant ghost, a lifetime of mothering — one infinity after another. And yet it sounds so simple: “Yesterday I laundered a mouse . . . She came out a little damp.”
***
Just a week ago I was treated to another feast of infinity in simplicity, and more life and death.
THE SCATTERING
the ashes are from a woman
named Mo
my lover’s lost wife
whom I only meet
as I pour her
into my pottery urn
whom I only feel
when I scoop in my hand to hold
small hunks of her bone
her white sparkling dust
clings to me
as I scatter her
into the lake
where the dog
laps her up
what’s left of her
we rub on our pant legs
while we circle around each other
in silence, wondering
how could we be so bold?
to reach in
to grab a messy handful
that spills
like all the sand and gravel
we’d picked up as children
sifting all sorts of remnants
of life, not knowing
until this dust of a wife
I breathe into me
until her death resounds
in the song that I sing
which is heard before
it comes out of my mouth
until I begin to sparkle
like one’s body
cast into the air
we sit in silence
with the lake and the forest
saying, “Mo. Mo.”
~ Lisa Ezzard
***
Again we have the past and present, nature and culture, ruthlessness and tenderness. Infinities blossom forth one after another, and we can grasp those unending complexities precisely because of the simplicity of the poem. The words here are simple and ordinary, especially the one-syllable active verbs that move the narrative forward: meet, pour, feel, scoop, clings, rub, circle. Like “Origami,” this poem too is not “hard on the brain.” That’s why it touches us. Both poems practically bypass the intellect, going deeper.
I think it’s safe to say that the greatest poetry uses the simplest words, the simplest syntax, a child-like parallel construction. To be or not to be? And if not that, then: Can I make it more simple? It is one of the most important questions a poet needs to ask during revision. Paradoxically, depth resides in simplicity. So yes, please cross out most of those adjectives and adverbs. And let the silence around the words speak for itself.
~ Oriana
(this essay was published in Atticus Review, October 11, 2012)
PASCAL AND KAFKA ON BEING INA ROOM ALONE
“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” ~ Blaise Pascal
It surprised me to see that Pascal said that. For introverts — and Pascal certainly was one — that’s the easiest thing in the world.
By the way, this reminds me of Kafka’s
You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Be quiet, still, and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
To me the image of the world rolling in ecstasy at my feet is one of Kafka’s greatest gifts.
*
HOW PEOPLE LEARN RESILIENCE OR NON-RESILIENCE
“[Martin Seligman], who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology, found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression.
The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus (“I can change this”) tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.
Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened.
Resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be learned.” ~
(The source is the New Yorker, February 11, 2016 — now unfortunately behind a pay wall.)
from another source:
~ “According to the research of leading psychologist, Susan Kobasa, there are three elements that are essential to resilience:
Challenge – Resilient people view a difficulty as a challenge, not as a paralyzing event. They look at their failures and mistakes as lessons to be learned from, and as opportunities for growth. They don't view them as a negative reflection on their abilities or self-worth.
Commitment – Resilient people are committed to their lives and their goals, and they have a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning. Commitment isn't just restricted to their work – they commit to their relationships, their friendships, the causes they care about, and their religious or spiritual beliefs.
Personal Control – Resilient people spend their time and energy focusing on situations and events that they have control over. Because they put their efforts where they can have the most impact, they feel empowered and confident. Those who spend time worrying about uncontrollable events can often feel lost, helpless, and powerless to take action.
Another leading psychologist, Martin Seligman, says the way that we explain setbacks to ourselves is also important. (He talks in terms of optimism and pessimism rather than resilience, however, the effect is essentially the same.) This "explanatory style" is made up of three main elements:
Permanence – People who are optimistic (and therefore have more resilience) see the effects of bad events as temporary rather than permanent. For instance, they might say "My boss didn't like the work I did on that project" rather than "My boss never likes my work.”
Pervasiveness – Resilient people don't let setbacks or bad events affect other unrelated areas of their lives. For instance, they would say "I'm not very good at this" rather than "I'm no good at anything.”
Personalization – People who have resilience don't blame themselves when bad events occur. Instead, they see other people, or the circumstances, as the cause. For instance, they might say "I didn't get the support I needed to finish that project successfully," rather than "I messed that project up because I can't do my job.”
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/resilience.htm
Oriana:
It comes down to this: resilience is a set of cognitive skills. You have to learn how to talk to yourself in a way that makes you resilient rather than makes you feel defeat. For instance, if you try to enter a website and get the message that your user id and password don’t match, don’t let yourself think, “I am hopeless with computers.” From there it’s only a step to “I am a total failure in life” which opens the portals to depression. No, you want constructive action.
Wait, you say, “just one step”? For people who are prone to depression and well-practiced at inducing it (be it unintentionally), it can indeed be just one step. So doing cognitive therapy on yourself is a must if you tend to always blame yourself, see whatever happens in absolutes (“I always” . . . “I never”), or whose national anthem is “You just can’t win.” I’ve been at all those places, and more — for decades. Sometimes it stuns me to think that thought habits ingrained for so long can be replaced by productive thought habits. But they can.
It also helps to have a supportive partner — one who doesn’t criticize you if you make a mistake, but stands by you and helps you get out of the mess.
Charles:
I relate to the article on resilience. The only thing I would add is that you need to love the challenge.
Oriana:
For me the biggest obstacle used to be self-blame. It was always my fault. Louise Hay was a great teacher of learning to stop self-blame.
*
Mary:
When you say resilience is the result of a set of cognitive skills you are absolutely correct. Cognitive errors can become a deadly habit, so ingrained they seem natural and correct. The habitual errors become like a straitjacket, making positive change increasingly difficult. First you have to recognize the error (I am a failure, I can’t do anything right) and then correct it (mistakes are challenges to learn and improve; I can learn and improve.) The problem with habitual errors is that they are of such long standing, such habits, they feel comfortable, familiar . . . painful, but it's a familiar pain, easier than change.
Oriana:
A therapist friend of mine said, “You’ve done cognitive therapy on yourself.” It was like falling asleep: slowly, slowly — and then all of a sudden you are asleep. In hindsight I can trace a long preparation for the insight (It’s too late in life to be depressed) that ended my depression in an instant. It was a mental lightning — it may sound surreal, but I could feel something happening in my brain as it was rewiring itself, with a different neural pathway forming and “burning out” the depressive thinking.
It wasn’t just that the door to depression got shut — it simply disappeared. I was suddenly homeless. So I had to find my home elsewhere — in my work.
I didn’t become happy in an instant — I’d lost the capacity for happiness, and it took a while to gradually regain positive memories and positive emotions. But I never lost my writing skills and the capacity to be productive. I’ve exchanged brooding and crying for productivity. I could still work, I could still contribute.
Work saved me. I realized that I mustn’t ask about the meaning, the purpose — just work. My motto became “work works.” And I’ve discovered I wasn’t alone. Many others have discovered that work — any work, even cleaning the house, if you really throw yourself into it — is the best remedy against the life-wasting low moods. And I’ve witnessed how work can ameliorate even schizophrenia. Yes, you’ve read it correctly: even schizophrenia, as long as it’s not the acute phase. Work empowers the “sane” neural pathways.
*
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*
THE BRAIN OF HIGHLY SENSITIVE PEOPLE FUNCTIONS DIFFERENTLY
~ “1. Your brain responds to dopamine differently.
Dopamine is the brain's reward chemical. It's what makes you "want" to do certain things, and then feel a sense of victory or happiness when you do them. But many of the genes involved in high sensitivity affect how your body uses dopamine, in ways we don't fully understand. It's likely that HSPs are less driven by external rewards, which is part of what allows them to hold back and be thoughtful and observant while they process information. That would also help prevent HSPs from being drawn to the same highly stimulating situations that end up overwhelming them.
If you're an HSP, and you just don't find yourself all that interested in a super loud party, you have your dopamine system to thank — it's helping you avoid overstimulation and burnout.
2. Your mirror neurons are more active than those of others.
Mirror neurons help you understand what another person is doing, or what they're experiencing, based on their actions. They do that by comparing the other person's behavior with times when you yourself have behaved that way — effectively "mirroring" the other person to figure out what's going on for them.
That's an important job for a lot of reasons, but one of the things it does in humans is allow us to feel empathy and compassion for others. When we recognize the pain (or joy) that someone is going through and relate to it, it's because of this system. More mirror neuron activity means a more empathetic person — like an HSP.
HSPs don't necessarily have "more" mirror neurons than others. It’s that their mirror neuron systems are more active. In 2014, functional brain imaging research found that HSPs had consistently higher levels of activity in key parts of the brain related to social and emotional processing. This higher level of activity kicked in even in tests involving strangers, showcasing HSPs' ability to extend compassion to people they don't personally know. (The effect was still highest with loved ones, however).
As a highly sensitive person, these mirror neurons are both your superpower and, at times, more than a little inconvenient — like when you can't watch the same TV show as everyone else, because it's too violent. But it's also what makes you warm, caring, and incredibly insightful about what other people are going through.
3. You really do experience emotions more vividly than others.
Hidden away in the front of the brain is a fascinating area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). This area is hooked in to several systems involving your emotions, your values, and processing sensory data. When we say that highly sensitive people "process things more deeply than others," there's a good chance it happens right here.
While not all of the jobs the vmPFC does are well understood, it's definitely associated with emotional regulation — and it enhances the things we experience with a certain emotional "vividness." Everyone experiences life more vividly during emotional moments, not just HSPs. But high sensitivity is linked to a gene that increases this vividness, essentially "turning up the dial." That gene allows emotional enhancement to have a much greater effect on the vmPFC as it processes experiences.
What does this mean for HSPs? Unlike mirror neurons, this emotional vividness isn't necessarily social in nature. It's all about how vividly you feel emotions inside yourself in response to what's happening around you. So, if you seem to feel things more strongly than other people do, it's probably not just in your head. HSPs are finely tuned to pick up even subtle emotional cues and react to them.
4. Other people are the brightest thing on your radar.
For some less sensitive people, it's easy to tune out other people. But for an HSP, almost everything about the brain is wired around noticing and interpreting others.
This is clear from the many, many other parts of the brain that get extra-active for HSPs in a social context. For example, the brain imaging study mentioned above didn't just show greater activity in areas associated with empathy. It also showed increased activity in the cingulate area and the insula — two areas that, together, form the "seat of consciousness" and moment-to-moment awareness. For HSPs, these areas become far more active in response to images of other people, especially those exhibiting a relevant social or emotional cue.
In other words, highly sensitive people actually become more alert, almost "more conscious," in a social context. If you're an HSP, other people are the brightest thing on your radar.
The Gift of the Highly Sensitive Brain
There's a lot that can be said about the gifts of the highly sensitive brain. It processes information on a deeper level, sees more connections, and cares and relates to others in a profound way. If you're a highly sensitive person, it's not an exaggeration to say that your brain is among the most powerful social machines in the known universe.
But perhaps your most important gift as an HSP is the one designed to protect you: Your brain is fine-tuned to notice and interpret the behavior of everyone around you. If someone is bad news, you know it. If someone is not going to treat you right, you see it coming. And if a situation isn't right for you, you know that, too.
That's vital, because a highly sensitive person needs a healthy environment and supportive loved ones in order to thrive — perhaps even more so than others.
If you're a highly sensitive person, trust your intuition about people. Your brain is on your side, and it's rooting for you.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/highly-sensitive-refuge/201901/4-brain-differences-highly-sensitive-people?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost&fbclid=IwAR1lI_7X9Mf3VoFMJh_1v5cADbLMLFBcPvMIHnurEfMezj_e0dr9KG0OFzY
Creation of animals, Master Bertram, 1383, Grabow altarpiece. Does anyone else get the impression that the creator is Jesus rather than Yahweh?*
THE MYTH OF THE KINDLY GENERAL LEE
~ “The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
Lee was a slaveowner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:
I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.
The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.
Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”
Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.
When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”
Every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause in their declarations of secession. Lee’s beloved Virginia was no different, accusing the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to fight for the South can only be described as a choice to fight for the continued existence of human bondage in America—even though for the Union, it was not at first a war for emancipation.
During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”
Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”
The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.
After the war, Lee did counsel defeated southerners against rising up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”
Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free, he fought for the preservation of slavery, his army kidnapped free blacks at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for blacks. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that "between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."
Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.
Lee is not remembered as an educator, but his life as president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee) is tainted as well. According to Pryor, students at Washington formed their own chapter of the KKK, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to attempt to abduct and rape black schoolgirls from the nearby black schools.
There were at least two attempted lynchings by Washington students during Lee’s tenure, and Pryor writes that “the number of accusations against Washington College boys indicates that he either punished the racial harassment more laxly than other misdemeanors, or turned a blind eye to it,” adding that he “did not exercise the near imperial control he had at the school, as he did for more trivial matters, such as when the boys threatened to take unofficial Christmas holidays.” In short, Lee was as indifferent to crimes of violence toward blacks carried out by his students as he was when they were carried out by his soldiers.
Lee died in 1870, as Democrats and ex-Confederates were commencing a wave of terrorist violence that would ultimately reimpose their domination over the Southern states. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866; there is no evidence Lee ever spoke up against it. On the contrary, he darkly intimated in his interview with the Herald that the South might be moved to violence again if peace did not proceed on its terms. That was prescient.
To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.
There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.
The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.
The question is why anyone else would.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/?fbclid=IwAR0ay5wZl_9MnIoql0D6Zjz7KlfHhcUxSYCTDbhM24WbzXOrhIAtOXajc_o
Lee surrenders at Appomattox, 1865 from another source:
~ “Robert E. Lee was not an abolitionist. It is a gross injustice and an insult to the memory and sacrifices of those who fought against the cruelty and immorality of forced servitude–or who suffered under it–to claim Lee was anti-slavery. He once remarked that the status quo of slavery was “the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country,” and that he “would depreciate any sudden disturbance of that relation unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity to both.”
In short, slave ownership was the best relationship whites could currently have with blacks, and unless it was a means to avert an even worse situation, it should continue. Let’s not overlook the irony that a four year war that resulted in the death of 620,000 soldiers was apparently not a great enough calamity to warrant a “disturbance” of the “relation” of slave and master.
[Lee believed that] God will one day see fit, when this inferior race has finally been oppressed enough and Christianized enough to become equal to their slave-owners, to emancipate the slaves. This is not for men to do. In fact, he claims that abolitionists therefore have “no right” to push for the end of slavery and even goes so far as to say that it is an “evil” endeavor to do so.
This is not the language of an anti-slavery mentality. This is a man who can find no moral justification for it other than the tired “it is as God wills it.”
He then gives this little jab to northern abolitionists: “Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom have always proved the most intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”
Yes, you read that right. Lee found it anathema to the idea of freedom to push for the freedom of slaves, because to him, the freedom to OWN slaves was clearly the more pressing matter.
Yes, Lee eventually freed his slaves, but only because he was ordered to by the courts because those were the terms in the will of his father-in-law. He didn’t want to at all.
What he did do is lead an army against his own country because he was loyal to a state that seceded so that they could continue to own people like cattle.
Upon his death, a wave of admiration for Lee sprang up which sickened Frederick Douglass, who wrote, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries” of General Robert E. Lee. Those flatteries blossomed over the next century and a half so that today, Lee enjoys a reputation not as a “hard taskmaster” slave-owner who believed human beings he owned as property were divinely placed in servitude to prepare them for equality, but as a misunderstood gentleman who did not exemplify the underlying mentality that perpetuated the repugnant institutions he fought to defend.
The removal of his statue is not the erasure of history, nor is it the politicizing of it. It is a rejection of a myth and a refusal to celebrate a man whose morals deserve no celebration.” ~ Matt Ferrara
https://automateddissolve.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/taking-down-the-myth-on-the-removal-of-the-robert-e-lee-memorial/?fbclid=IwAR0kEorKlrHazttEeobMHBpt4vzi9RUsQQ83sRNK3xnA_Kz3uchCHJHmJyk
Lee statue being removed, New Orleans
Mary:
With the mythologizing of General Lee, the story of the man and his actions was reshaped to fit the purposes of the "Lost Cause" mythology, where the hideous and evil institution of slavery is justified and obscured by a picture of genteel and gracious life in a romantic, and completely false, antebellum South. The stinking odor of suffering, the brutal debasement of humanity, is denied by the façade of chivalry, brave soldiers, white mansions, ladies in elaborate gowns. And it still stinks.
The refusal to abide these mythologies any longer is evidence that as an apology and perpetrator of inequality and injustice these stories no longer convince, no longer have the power to silence other stories, the stories of those not in power, who are moving to reclaim a history and power of their own.
Oriana:
Beautifully put. The myths justifying slavery no longer have the power to silence the stories of the slaves themselves. Let us also remember books such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Huckleberry Finn.” They did have a moral power. Now it’s chiefly the movies, I think — The Green Book is the most recent example — that humanize the victims and make racism look not only morally abhorrent but also simply absurd.
I think Oscar Wilde had a point when he said that it’s useless to tell people that war is immoral. You need to tell them that war is vulgar. I have a feeling that we need to start saying “Racism is vulgar.”
And if that word doesn’t quite have the clout it used to have, and in Europe, still has, then we need to cast after another word that signifies the opposite of the kind of white-mansion elegance and refinement that the South aspired to. (Here I'm reminded that Hitler had “beautiful manners with women” — he always kissed their hands and gave them flowers. Perhaps the more atrocities you commit, the more you need to kiss women’s hands.) “Vulgar” may be too weak to express the moral ugliness, the stench of the underlying human debasement and suffering — but I keep returning to it.
*
WHY PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WORKS OUTSIDE THE US
~ “Unlike their American counterparts, European planners designed new suburbs in ways that made transit use still viable. Many new towns were built around train and metro stations.
Early U.S. suburbs like Levittown, New York, on the other hand, were built along highways and had virtually no transit service at all. They’re almost all still built on the model developed in the 1940s: single-family homes on isolated streets, with stores surrounded by parking lots a decent drive away.
In contrast, places like Vällingby, a Swedish suburb outside Stockholm built in the 1950s, were sited around a new Metro station. Building rail infrastructure through built-up areas is extremely expensive, but building it through farmland, before new neighborhoods are built, is comparatively cheap.
This is the model that cities like Copenhagen, Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam have used. Instead of building highways first, which tends to make neighborhoods auto-centric and de-prioritizes transit, European cities tended to put transit first when they built new neighborhoods.
Existing Rail Lines
Many, though not all, major cities in the U.S. have a number of rail lines radiating out of their centers. Most of them are only used by freight or a few commuter train trips a day. It’s a huge, untapped resource. There’s no reason why those railway lines can’t be turned into what are effectively subway lines—high-capacity routes that allow people to get across the city quickly—without the immense cost of tunneling. In Europe, what we usually call “commuter rail” operates frequently, all day, and cost the same fare as other local transit. That’s the difference between regional rail and commuter rail. A transit system with service that is only useful to 9-to-5 commuters to downtown will never be a useful one for most people.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Paris built its RER network, which included new tunnels to connect its disconnected Paris terminals. The system now moves more people per year than all American commuter railways combined. Many German cities built similar systems, and London is now following them with Crossrail.
Look at any American commuter rail system, and imagine that instead of high fares and a few trips a day designed to take people to jobs downtown, it had trains every few minutes, all day, and the same fare as other local transit. Los Angeles’ Metrolink, Chicago’s Metra, and Boston’s MBTA commuter rail all have extensive networks that blanket their metropolitan areas, but their trains are too infrequent and too expensive to be used as a real local transit service. Why do we only run decent service on expensive subways that were built from scratch?
Feeder Buses
A good feeder bus system can save huge capital costs, because it can bring people to the existing rail line, thus eliminating the need to bring a rail line through existing development to the riders. Converting existing rail lines to run real transit service can be shockingly cheap: Ottawa converted a lightly-used freight route to a five-stop rail transit line with trains every 15 minutes for only $16 million. By comparison, one station on New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost $740 million; the 2.2-mile-long D.C. Streetcar cost $200 million. Even on lines with heavy freight traffic, adding extra tracks for passenger service costs a fraction of the cost of subway tunnels.
For another example, take Munich, a German city with a population roughly comparable to that of Denver or St. Louis. It has 95 kilometers of subway—only about half the length of Washington’s Metro system. But on top of that, it has 434 kilometers of S-Bahn, which is like American commuter rail, except that it uses the same fare as the local bus and metro service and its trains come every 20 minutes, all day. Through the downtown core, all the S-Bahn routes combine into one underground line that acts as a kind of super-subway, with trains every two minutes.
It would never have been affordable for Munich to build that many miles of rail if it had to be in tunnels, like a subway. But most of these lines were already built a century before and had previously been used just for freight, long-distance, and conventional commuter trains. So it was comparatively cheap to adapt them to also provide local transit service. With that many kilometers of rail transit, the idea of centering most development around rail stations is actually realistic.
*
For people who can’t drive or choose not to, the dependence on cars in the U.S. is a huge mobility barrier. It also means that many drivers suffer long commutes on congested roads. Cars and trucks are the largest source of carbon emissions in the U.S., worsening air quality and driving climate change. America’s dependence on them also contributes to the extremely high cost of housing in urban neighborhoods that are served by transit. Because so few places fit that description, people who prefer not to drive everywhere pay an enormous premium.
Take Nashville, for example. There, a well-organized anti-transit lobby defeated a referendum to significantly improve transit service. In most of the city, if you’re not in a car it’s all but impossible to get around after 10 p.m., even if you live on some of the major routes. Other parts of the city lack Sunday service, and many bus trips that should take only 30 minutes end up tripling that travel time because of the long waits for connections. This isn’t the kind of transit that would encourage anybody to leave their car at home.
Sustaining higher gas prices aren’t going to single-handedly save transit systems, as advocates sometimes wishfully hope. European countries shows that, while pricier fuel may drive some people to transit, it doesn’t make a meaningful difference if service isn't improved first.
In some ways, the story of American transit is not so unique. Europeans and Canadians also like to drive. Their countries have also built big expressway networks. The difference is more basic, yet profound: When transit service isn’t good, few will choose to use it.
Fortunately, improving American transit doesn’t necessarily demand multi-decade, hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure projects: It can be done by better advantage of existing space and existing vehicles, and then deploying them in ways that encourage people to actually use them.” ~
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america-suffocated-transit-other-countries-embraced-it/572167/
Oriana:
I think there is one more barrier to effective public transport in the US. Americans are used to going to stores and buying a tremendous amount of stuff all at once — stuff (groceries, home-improvement supplies) that it takes a car — sometimes a van — to transport back home.
I'm not sure what the solution to that would be — delivery services by the store? A limited use of cars specifically for shopping, with commuting to work using mostly public transit? One thing is certain: one innovation leads to another, and solutions would emerge.
Amsterdam commuters at a bus stopCharles:
In Los Angeles are real estate prices soared near every projected metro station and now small cities are emerging around the stations.
Oriana:
Fantastic!! People are always saying that public transportation can't work in America. But give it an earnest try, and sure enough . . .
*
ONLY 23% PERCENT OF AMERICANS SEE GOD AS BENEVOLENT
~ “Those who believe in an authoritarian God represent 32 percent of America. They believe God is very angry and willing to punish anyone who is unfaithful or who acts in an ungodly way. They may even believe that God causes earthquakes and human disasters as a wake-up call about the sinful behavior of people.
Another 16 percent of Americans believe that God is critical but will neither punish nor comfort his flock. This God has an unfavorable view of society. He does not intervene with the world, but he will cast judgment on people in the afterlife.
The second largest group, comprising 24 percent of the American population, sees God as distant and uninvolved. He does not hold opinions about the world or about personal behavior; thus we are left to our own free will to decide what is right and wrong. This God is less of a person and more like a cosmic force that set the laws of nature into motion.
Those who perceive God as distant have higher levels of income and education than any other group. Approximately a third of all Catholics, Protestants, and Jews believe in a distant God, yet this group is more open-minded when it comes to gay rights, abortion, and premarital sex. Within this group, many people question the existence of God.
In contrast to 72 percent of Americans who believe in an authoritarian, critical, or distant God, only 23 percent see God as gentle, forgiving, and less likely to respond with wrath. Like those who believe in an authoritarian God, believers in a benevolent God think he is very active in their lives. He listens, responds to prayers, and cares deeply about the suffering of others, but he sometimes causes suffering and pain.
Only a quarter of Catholics, mainstream Protestants and evangelics embrace a loving God, whereas less than 14 percent of black Protestants and Jews see God as a benevolent force.
Envisioning an authoritarian or critical entity — be it another person or God — will activate the limbic areas of the brain that generate fear and anger. However, when you perceive God as a benevolent force, a different part of the brain is stimulated … . . the anterior cingulate. The God of the limbic system is a frightening God, but the God of the anterior cingulate is loving.
Our Survey of Spiritual Experiences illuminated a fifth personality of God that we think the Baylor study missed. When we asked our survey participants to described their spiritual experiences, many talked about God as an emotional presence, using words like peace, energy, tranquility, or bliss. God was not a separate entity, but rather a force that permeated everything. God didn’t create the universe, God WAS the universe, a radiance that extended throughout time and space. God was light, God was freedom, and for many people God was consciousness itself.
Based upon national surveys conducted by the Barna Group, 11 percent of Americans believe that God is “a state of higher consciousness that a person may reach.” Eight percent define God as “the total realization of personal, human potential,” and 3 percent believe that each person is God.
Something happened in the brains of our ancestors that gave us the power to tame the authoritarian God. No one knows exactly when or how it happened, but the neural structures that evolved enhanced our ability to cooperate with others. They gave us the ability to construct language and to consciously think in logical and reasonable ways. Our research shows that they are the same structures stimulated when we meditate and pray, which is what allows us to consciously envision a loving and compassionate God.
We can’t get rid of our old limbic God, which means that anger and fear will always be a part of our neural and spiritual personality. However, we can train the newer structures of our brain to suppress our biological tendency to react with anger and fear.
Along with the Unitarians, Unity Churches, and Quakers, the Church of Religious Science developed philosophies of greater open-mindedness by proclaiming the inner divinity of the human being and extending kindness to every person regardless of their religious orientation. In these churches, God, consciousness, morality, and science are melded into a universal HUMAN spirit that is simultaneously mystical and materialistically pragmatic. In many ways these modern churches reflect the same deist philosophy that had captured the imagination of the eighteenth-century leaders of the Enlightenment. God had fallen out of heaven and taken up residence in the mind.
Source: the section “THE FOUR GODS OF AMERICA,” in “How God Changes Your Brain” by Andrew Newberg and Mark R. Waldman, 2009. The authors quote the results of a survey conducted by Baylor University.
*
A FOOD ADDITIVE THAT COULD BE MAKING YOU FAT
~ “The recent study finds one food additive may be (at least partly) responsible for many health issues.
The food additive is calcium propionate, used to keep foods fresh and prevent mold. Some foods containing propionate include:
bread and baked goods
dairy products, including flavored milk, cheeses, and puddings
processed meats such as canned fish and sausage casings
Other foods with propionate added to them include beer, sports drinks, diet foods, commercially prepared potato salad, nut butters, and vinegar.
Researchers initially tested propionate in mice and found it quickly activated the sympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for automatic functions such as heart rate.
This caused a surge in hormones that increased blood sugar levels in the test animals, a characteristic symptom of diabetes. When the mice were chronically exposed to the same amount of propionate typically consumed by humans, they gained weight and became insulin resistant (prediabetes).
To discover how these findings applied to humans, the researchers designed a double-blind, placebo controlled study with 14 participants.
Half of the participants took one gram of propionate in their food. The other half ingested a placebo.
Those who ate food with propionate experienced the same surge in hormones as the mice. According to the researchers, this indicates that propionate may be an endocrine disruptor that increases the risk of both diabetes and obesity in humans.
However, some medical professionals are hesitant to accept the study results, at least for now.” ~
Oriana:
Obviously the sample size in the human study was very small. And it could be argued that mold is more dangerous than a small dose of calcium propionate. Still, this is another (perhaps minor) reason to avoid processed foods.
Ending on beauty:
BELL
Sound, no longer defined
by our hearing. As though the tone
that encircles us
were space itself expanding.
~ Rilke, Uncollected Poems
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