Swirls in Jupiter’s atmosphere (left) and swirls in Earth’s Baltic Sea (right); Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory. “This is all about fluids moving around on a rotating body.”*
HOTEL AMERICA
I stand in the lobby of a grand hotel.
Someone passes through the false living room —
a slippery love sofa, a pretend fireplace —
someone passes and says, “America is
finished.” The faux marble floor is strewn
with wilted blooms. I begin to pick up
the withered flowers, the hotel as empty
as the city streets — only me, a stray housewife,
limp petals in my insufficient hands.
“Your dream of America is finished,”
says Lucrezia, before merely Donna,
pointing out the expensive
dead flowers, the mausoleum-like floor.
And Daisy, my former musical Danuta,
Daisy says, “America is a good place
to make money, but — real life
is over there.” How do we know
what we love? Saint Yakub’s church
in winter, the snow-crusted coats,
a fugue of steam like breath —
the smell of wet wool, the borrowed
animal human smell. Some part of us
ascended, not the soul perhaps,
but more real than the synthetic perfume
sprayed on the massive, stiff
centerpiece bouquets, though by now
Warsaw’s Hotel Europa may have
adopted these scents and ways,
incense against the backward years,
that animal touch and press —
no airy scallops of angels.
But on altars, flowers and candles
prayed in tongues, the wings
of the petals trembled, the tall glow
of flame mirrored in the chalices’
blaze of silver and gold. Pipe organ
shook the stone pillars. Roses, lilies,
peonies — what it must have cost,
in winter. Back then in the communal
breath, the church gave us splendor.
Now it’s finished, hellfire and flowers.
~ Oriana
Mary:
I like the poem very much. It talks about what's false, what 's lost, how the world is diminished, nothing as real or sumptuous as it was, or as it's remembered...and then there's that bit of redemption starting with "But on altars," redemption not by faith but by beauty. All the final lines beautifully remembering the wonderful splendor the Old church offered. And the final lines: even that gone, all gone, both the hellfire and the splendor.
So many of your poems are of memory and loss. You speak so truly of these.
Oriana:
I also hope that the reader picks up a bit of social and psychological commentary here. An American friend changes her very American name (Donna) to the exotic Lucrezia; a Polish friend Americanizes her beautiful name (Danuta — it’s actually Lithuanian, but quite popular in Poland) to Daisy. And of course “Real life is over there” is exactly the attitude of many immigrants who see their new new surroundings as false, fake, a betrayal of their dreams (which were false to start with, but that’s another issue). The feeling of falseness arises in part from a special kind of trauma related to the overwhelming loss of familiarity.
What, then, is real? In large part, that which we grew up with. Objectively, those things may have been unpleasant. The smell of wet woolen coats cannot be idealized away. Terrifying children with descriptions of hell is surely a form of child abuse. And yet nostalgia makes it all the lost “real life” — the lost home and not the fake hotel.
*
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” ~ W.H. Auden
Smokers beware: W. H. Auden in his older years*
SAUL BELLOW: “GUILTY OF HUMANIZING THE ENEMY”
~ “ . . . the attacks Bellow would receive for To Jerusalem and Back, a portrait of Israel drawn from reportage, memoir, and, in the spirit of the Committeee on Social Thought, a deep reading of philosophy, history, and literature, mixing his own observations with those of Stendhal and Sinyavsky and Sartre. “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics,” wrote Bellow, explaining his method. “Then human feelings, human experience, the human form and face, recover their proper place — the foreground.” He used the novelist’s devices of analogy, description, and deep questioning, always being careful to avoid the imperatives of activist writing. This enraged partisans and close observers of Israel. The Jerusalem Post attacked him for mimicking “Arab and left-wing propaganda against the State of Israel”; for Noam Chomsky, [Bellow’s biographer, Zachary] Leader writes, “Bellow’s book might have been written by the Israeli Information Ministry.” Both camps held Bellow guilty of humanizing the enemy.” ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/saul-bellow-swiveling-man/
from the same source:
BELLOW WRITING IN THE FIFTIES ON RURAL AMERICA
“. . . the rural white poor, whom he held responsible for much of the nation’s racial animosity and violence. “Rural America has had a long history of overvaluation,” he wrote, thanks to the mistaken notion that
~ everyone was better and sounder on the farm, in the woods and hills, less anomic, more self-reliant, fairer, more American. This is simply not so. In provincial America, North no less than South, lives the most unhappy, troubled and alienated portion of the population . . . The glamor of Confederacy and insurrection, of “tradition” and “gentility” has been laid in poster colors over provincial pride, backwardness, xenophobia and rage. ~
Oriana:
By now there have been scores of articles saying the same thing, but to have said them in the nineteen fifties meant dissenting from the prevailing view of the rural idyll.
also from the same source:
THE PRIVATE PERSON, NOT THE MOVEMENT
~ “He violated a major taboo on the right when he suggested in Ravelstein (2000), his fictionalized eulogy for Allan Bloom, that his late friend was a homosexual who had died of AIDS. Bloom’s friends had known of his homosexuality but kept it private out of fear that the revelation would destroy his reputation in the conservative circles. “I can understand that, because for them it’s not just a friend, it’s a movement,” Bellow told The Times.
“I couldn’t be both truthful and camouflaged.” Bellow meant true to the requirements of fiction, which demands that any believable character must be full of contradictions, secrets, regrets. For Ravelstein to succeed as fiction, it required “the elasticity provided by sin.” Absent disclosure of Bloom’s secret life, the character would be false — a two-dimensional public figure instead of the private person, who was the only one worth writing a novel about.” ~
Oriana:
I’ve read Ravelstein, and have certainly not found it boring. Bellow doesn’t just “suggest” homosexuality — it’s in plain view, the intellectual’s non-intellectual “pretty boy” lover being part of the scenery, so to speak. In some ways, he’s like an adoptive son — everyone knows he’s the one who’s going to inherit, and that’s probably the only reason he doesn’t leave the older man.
Bellow at an older age*
“I am not a conservative—neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook ... I just do not happen to be that animal.” ~ Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs
Bloom’s major idea: “the "openness" of relativism as leading paradoxically to the great “closing" ~ Wiki
“I came some time ago to think of despair and victimization as being at the service of the ruling class and the whole social edifice. it is the way in which imagination and intelligence eliminate themselves from the contest for power.” ~ Saul Bellow
*
~ “In 1964, Vassily Grossman, author of the epic and brilliant WWII novel modeled on War and Peace, died of stomach cancer, unknown to the point of non-existence. In 1960, he completed the manuscript of Life and Fate, submitted it for publication and waited, likely unaware of the intensity of his editors' panic at reading the novel, with its stark depiction not only of Nazi savagery but also of the sheer incompetence and extreme senseless cruelty of Stalin's regime.
On March 14, 1961, three senior KGB officers seized the manuscript of the novel from the apartments of Grossman and his typist, along with the carbons and the ribbons from the typewriter. The Soviet ideology czar, Savonarolaesque Mikhail Suslov, told Grossman the novel could not be published for at least 200 years. (Not 150 or 700 or 2000 years: 200. We will never be able to penetrate the mindset of the moral mutants like Suslov.)
In an act of providential foresight, Grossman had given another copy of the manuscript to a friend, and the latter brought it to his dacha and hid it there. It was later discovered and copied onto microfilm, apparently by Andrei Sakharov. The novelist Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the microfilm out of the Soviet Union into Switzerland, where Life and Fate was published in 1980, 16 years after its author's death. Robert Chandler’s translation into English was published in 1985, and New York Review of Books brought it out in paperback in 2006.” ~ M.Iossel
*
Suslov to Grossman: I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have written down.... Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?... Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?
Oriana:
My main reason for including this is Suslov’s startling question: “Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?”
Well, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it turned out that the Soviet Union was not needed — not a topic anyone dared broach until then — that’s why Suslov’s question astonishes me. Even if it was meant as a rhetorical question, it does contain the phrase “or not” — raising the possibility that no, the artificial and oppressive entity was not needed . . . having grown up behind the Iron Curtain (though people said that the REAL Iron Curtain was between Poland and Russia) I find no words powerful enough to express my astonishment.
That Suslov was even able to state the question — well, that would be like a top-ranking cardinal asking whether anyone needs the Catholic Church. Wild! And yet after the Soviet Union collapsed, the answer became plain. And should be Catholic Church collapse, I suspect it will be the same thing.
(It reminds me of the time I asked a former Jesuit about the ordination of women. He replied, “Perhaps we should stop saying the mass for three years, and see if anyone misses it.”)
Vasily Grossman in Schwerin, GermanyWAR AS A SECULAR CRUSADE
“The idea that war is a secular crusade and involves the smiting of the wicked pervades how Americans discuss it. If you want to save your soul go to church. There is no holiness to be found on a battlefield and nations seek it at their own peril. War always amounts to a failure of normal ‘politics’ to resolve a contention, which is why it is ‘politics by other means.’ People are often willing to be cynical about normal politics but drop such skepticism when it comes to politics and organized violence, which is usually infinitely more ethically murky than normal politics often is.” ~ Adam Elkus
Life and Fate is actually Grossman’s second novel. His first novel could be called a “prequel.” Grossman wanted the title to be Stalingrad, but the censors changed it to “For a Just Cause.” In the U.S., it was published with Grossman's intended title. Oriana:
I think one of the factors that prevented the Cold War from becoming hot was that many Americans understood that Russians were people just like them — they were not their government. And the educated were familiar with great Russian literature, and Russian music (Swan Lake etc) and the enchanting folk songs, When you’re familiar with the Red Army chiefly through its choir singing Kalinka, it’s hard to imagine shooting the soloist, his stunning tenor surely an international cultural treasure. It's much harder to dehumanize the enemy if you are at least partly familiar with the attractive aspects of their culture.
“Familiar” may be the crucial word. Not that many non-Germans knew how beautiful Dresden was. Thanks to mass media (movies, TV, popular illustrated magazines like Life), even back in the fifties and sixties, Americans had an idea of how beautiful Moscow and St. Petersburg were. Now, of course, had the Soviet Union decided, in some suicidal delusion, to strike first . . . but the probability of that, after Stalin’s death, was zero.
P.S. Kyoto was high on the list of possible targets for the first A-bomb. It was allegedly saved by the Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of its beauty and cultural importance as the ancient Japanese capital. Stimson had visited Kyoto several times. He was an admirer of Japanese culture.
RED JOAN: DID THIS “GRANNY SPY” HELP PRESERVE WORLD PEACE?
If you like spy thrillers, go see another movie. This is mainly a romantic drama. Loyalty to one’s country versus one’s obligations to humanity and world peace (as the movie’s heroine comes to understand these obligations) — this would be a sufficiently large conflict, but more attention is given to virginal Joan’s helpless attraction to Leo, a Soviet agent who pretends to love her (though he never says so — his most tender utterance is “My little comrade”) and her later more mature love for her boss, Max, who does truly love her. Fake, deceptive love versus true love, with the building of the first nuclear weapons and espionage as background, almost part of the scenery along with the enchanting views of Cambridge, which seems to symbolize civilization itself the way Notre Dame did for Kenneth Clark.
Cambridge glows in its ageless gilded afternoon if we don’t get distracted by its sexism, and Notre Dame is of course so splendid that it would be in bad taste to bring up the Catholic Church’s trail of blood. But to be fair, sexism is portrayed in this movie, though its condescending ugliness is softened by the use made of it by the two women spies: “Nobody will suspect us — we are WOMEN!” Of course: women exchange cookie recipes, and not nuclear secrets. In fact one wonders how their tiny mentality can cope with something as complex as baking a cookie.
But Max, Joan’s boss, appreciates her mind from the start. His first words to her are “I'm so glad I told them to send me someone smart, and not just a pretty face.” He quickly tries to correct himself by adding, “Not that you’re not a pretty face.” Later he confesses that he fell in love with her precisely as me made the faux pas of saying “Not that you’re not a pretty face.” And he stands up for her against a flagrantly sexist colleague.
To be sure, the heroine is in fact a pretty face who sports marvelous hairdos and interesting little hats. And she’s certainly brave, and indeed smart — if we are to believe that she’s the one to come up with the idea of using a centrifuge for separating the various isotopes of uranium while the male physicists appear never to have thought of it. (A more convincing proof of her intelligence comes toward the end, when she manages to blackmail a high government official.)
Leo is meant to be charismatic — yet almost from the start he exudes sinister deceptiveness and dangerous extremism — he wouldn’t mind seeing Cambridge destroyed if it were to serve the building of a better world “from the ground up.” But even the hideously manipulative Leo is more sympathetic than his alleged cousin Sonia, the rather overstated bad woman in this movie, with obligatory femme-fatale cigarettes and red high heels; in case we still don’t get the message, she even steals Joan’s mink coat.
But even Sonia seems more human than the British intelligence investigators, whose stiff, cold, judgmental faces and emotional brutality make the viewers hate them — and possibly remember that the KGB, by contrast, gave their agents psychological training so they’d know how to play the nice guys and engage in much more subtle cat-and-mouse games.
Alas, this is not a subtle movie. Frankly, it’s not a good movie. It’s interesting in how it essentially exonerates the heroine by first presenting her as blinded by love, and then as a pacifist idealist ready to risk her life because she believes that if more countries have nuclear weapons, none will dare use it. Her son, in a rousing and tear-jerking finale, defends her as having done the right thing for world peace. But did she? The question remains unresolved.
HAS “MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION” SAVED THE WORLD?
SJM: The relative balance of nuclear power is essential to the logic of strategic nuclear deterrence. The security paradigm of the Cold War remained so stable because of the paradox of Mutually Assured Destruction – the state whereby opposing nuclear powers each possess the means to launch a decisive nuclear attack against the other, even after absorbing a first nuclear strike itself. By threatening to unleash on a decisive scale the very process it seeks to avoid – war – MAD ensures that the consequences of a strategic nuclear exchange are sufficiently terrifying to convince a would-be aggressor that the costs of war outweigh the benefits.
MC: Two factors (there are many others) are the destructiveness of major 20th-century wars, and luck. Even before the atomic age, there was considerable international concern that major interstate wars were becoming so destructive as to be untenable. The First and, most significantly, Second World Wars proved this point.
[In the case of] Cuba, luck – in the sense of the right person making the right decision at the right time – played a significant role in global nuclear war being averted. Soviet submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov could have agreed to the firing of a nuclear torpedo at US warships. US fighter pilots could have launched nuclear-tipped rockets at their Soviet counterparts. Sometimes, luck really is a factor.
BP: The two major military powers of the Cold War (the US and Soviet Union) were the first two to develop nuclear weapons, building 70,000 of them. That suggests that, at least for a time, possession of nuclear weapons in large numbers was a crucial feature of world power. However, those two countries possessed many other features of power. Also, Japan, Germany, South Korea and South Africa have explicitly built their strategy of emergence on the international stage on renunciation of nuclear weapons.
Members of groups such as the G7 to G20 [representatives from the banks and governments of the world’s leading economic nations] have increasingly included non-nuclear-armed states, and emerging states have rarely sought to acquire those weapons. It’s notable that India failed to acquire the status of permanent member of the UN Security Council after its nuclear weapons tests. Nuclear-weapon states have been attacked and lost wars against non-nuclear-weapon states (the US in Vietnam, for example, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan). So nuclear superiority has not been sufficient to guarantee either victory or war prevention. The record of coercion based on nuclear superiority is very limited. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear weapons use was avoided through luck. In that crucial case, nuclear balance was simply irrelevant.
BP: Deterrence theory claims that the destructive capability of nuclear weapons triggers fear, which in turn makes leaders cautious. However, recent scholarship shows that this relationship is far from automatic; classic works have also shown that threats intended to deter may have adverse effects, as can any other public policy. If one needs to constantly establish the credibility of a deterrent threat based on nuclear weapons, this will obviously lead to more risk-taking.
MC: One of the remarkable things about nuclear proliferation is that, despite consistently alarmist assessments of ‘tipping points’ and ‘cascades’, few countries have chosen to attain full nuclear capability. Nations such as Argentina, Sweden and South Korea all had at least partial nuclear programs at some point since the 1950s, but chose to abandon their ambitions. There were many reasons: internal politics, outside influence, leaders’ psychology, and so on. In some ways this tells us that the reasons not to go for full nuclearization are more popular than the reasons to do so.
However, nuclear weapons are an issue in the tension between India and Pakistan. Pakistan has ‘the bomb’ as a fundamental part of its strategy in the event of major war with India. Any potential battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons could escalate a conflict to the strategic nuclear scale, with horrific regional and global consequences.
In some cases, nuclear capability matters not a jot. British governments have been heavily invested in the idea of a nuclear weapon state, but do those weapons deter potential enemies? Britain’s nuclear status did little to deter Argentina in 1982. Likewise, Al-Qaeda wasn’t deterred by the vast US nuclear arsenal. This leads to another question: what purpose do nuclear weapons serve in the 21st century?” ~
MC: Malcolm Craig; SJM: Simon J Moody; BP: Benoît Pelopidas
https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/have-nuclear-weapons-helped-to-maintain-global-peace/
HOW WW1 IS TAUGHT: US HISTORY VERSUS WORLD HISTORY
~ “In U.S. history, the content standards of all three states place World War I within the rise of the United States as a world power. In all three sets of state standards, students are expected to learn about World War I in relationship to American expansion into such places as Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii. The ways in which the war challenged a tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements is given attention in each set of standards.
By contrast, the world history standards of all three states place World War I under its own heading, asking students to examine the war’s causes and consequences. All three sets of state standards reference large-scale historical processes as the causes of the war, including nationalism, imperialism and militarism. Sometimes the U.S. is mentioned, and sometimes it’s not.
And so, students are learning about World War I in two very different ways. In the more nationalistic U.S. history curriculum, the United States is the defender of global order and democracy. In the world history context, the United States is mentioned hardly at all, and impersonal global forces take center stage.
Scholars today continue to debate the wisdom of President Wilson’s moral diplomacy – that is, the moral and altruistic language (like making the world “safe for democracy”) that justified U.S. involvement in World War I. At the same time, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center has shown that the American public has deep concerns about the policy of promoting democracy abroad.
In an age when protectionism, isolationism and nationalism are seemingly on the rise, our country as a whole is questioning the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
History teachers are therefore left with a dilemma: teach toward national or global citizenship? Is world history something that happened “over there,” or is it something that happens “right here,” too?
In my own view, it seems incomplete to teach just one of these conflicting views of World War I. Instead, I would recommend to history teachers that they explore competing perspectives of the past with their students.
How do Hungarians, for example, generally remember World War I? Or how about Germans? How about the Irish? Armenians? How do these perspectives compare to American memories? Where is fact and where is fiction?
Such a history class would encourage students to examine how the present and the past are connected – and might satisfy both nationalists and globalists alike.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-should-world-war-i-be-taught-american-schools-180962761/#DXpLIjGKdf4bEvu0.99
EASTERN MEDITATION COMPARED TO WESTERN PSYCHOTHERAPIES
~ “Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way? What are the transformations that occur in the brain when we practice meditation? In a book titled Beyond the Self, two friends—Matthieu Ricard, who left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—engage in an unusually well-matched conversation about meditation and the brain. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt.
Ricard: Buddhist contemplative science has many things in common with cognitive therapies, in particular with those using mindfulness as a foundation for remedying mental imbalance. As for psychoanalysis, it seems to encourage rumination and explore endlessly the details and intricacies of the clouds of mental confusion and self-centeredness that mask the most fundamental aspect of mind: luminous awareness.
Singer: So rumination would be the opposite of what you do during meditation?
Ricard: Totally opposite. It is also well known that constant rumination is one of the main symptoms of depression. What we need is to gain freedom from the mental chain reactions that rumination endlessly perpetuates. One should learn to let thoughts arise and be freed to go as soon as they arise, instead of letting them invade one’s mind. In the freshness of the present moment, the past is gone, the future is not yet born, and if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom, potentially disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace.
Singer: What you have to learn then is to adopt a much more subtle approach to your internal emotional theater, to learn to identify with much higher resolution the various connotations of your feelings.
Ricard: That’s right. In the beginning, it is difficult to do it as soon as an emotion arises, but if you become increasingly familiar with such an approach, it becomes quite natural. Whenever anger is just showing its face, we recognize it right away and deal with it before it becomes too strong.
Singer: It is not unlike a scientific endeavor except that the analytical effort is directed toward the inner rather than the outer world. Science also attempts to understand reality by increasing the resolving power of instruments, training the mind to grasp complex relations, and decomposing systems into ever-smaller components.
Ricard: It is said in the Buddhist teachings that there is no task so difficult that it cannot be broken down into a series of small, easy tasks.
Singer: I have no difficulty in accepting that a learning process can change behavioral dispositions, even in adults. There is ample evidence of this from reeducation programs, where practice leads to small but incremental behavior modifications. There is also evidence for quite dramatic and sudden changes in cognition, emotional states, and coping strategies. In this case, the same mechanisms that support learning—distributed changes in the efficiency of synaptic connections—lead to drastic alterations of global brain states.
Ricard: You could also change the flow of neuron activity, as when the traffic on a road increases significantly.
Singer: Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is rather stable after age 20, but it is still possible to route activity flexibly from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensure that a given activation pattern is not broadcast in a diffuse way to all connected brain regions but sent only to selected target areas.
Ricard: So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.
Singer: So you have to use your cognitive abilities to identify more clearly and delineate more sharply the various emotional states, and to train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to increase or decrease selectively the activity of subsystems responsible for the generation of the various emotions.
In the naïve state, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly refined until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should thus become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures exploiting mental training as a source of knowledge should have a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the outer world.
Ricard: Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 main mental events and various subdivisions thereof. It is quite true that by conducting an in-depth investigation of mental events, one becomes able to distinguish increasingly more subtle nuances.
Another result of cultivating mental skills is that, after a while, you will no longer need to apply contrived efforts. You can deal with the arising of mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas. The crows often attack them, even though they are much smaller. They dive at the eagles from above trying to hit them with their beaks. However, instead of getting alarmed and moving around to avoid the crow, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, letting the diving crow pass by, and extends its wing back out. The whole thing requires minimal effort and is perfectly efficient. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way. When you are able to preserve a clear state of awareness, you see thoughts arise; you let them pass through your mind, without trying to block or encourage them; and they vanish without creating many waves.
Singer: This suggests that the neuronal codes become sparser, perhaps involving fewer but more specialized neurons, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/neuroscience-has-a-lot-to-learn-from-buddhism?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
Thinking of the connections between a Buddhist approach and cognitive therapy, I think both provide a practical and effective solution to breaking away from negative emotions. What is essential is that space, a step outside the rush of thought and feeling, that allows you to Observe, without bias, emotion and behavior in that present moment. It is only that distance, that step back, that makes it possible to decide whether to continue in these feelings and behaviors, or simply, look at them and let them go.
What freedom!! What a release from senseless suffering and the endless repeating of harmful patterns. It is not necessary to dissect all the whys whens and hows that set up that pattern in order to be free of it. Sometimes that kind of archeological research of one's psyche and history can be a fruitless and endless life devouring task that can actually keep you stuck in the destructive patterns you have learned so well. First, step back, become the calm impartial Observor, that is what changes your position, what empowers, what will allow you to choose not to suffer, but to create and accept the possibility of happiness.
In some way in my own history, even when assaulted by positive tornadoes of destructive thoughts and feeling, suggesting dangerous behaviors, I always had that Observer standing in the background, dispassionate, rational, unconvinced. Even without my deliberate cooperation, the presence of that Observer, I am certain, allowed me to resist my worst and most dangerous inclinations.(For instance, urges to suicide or self harm.) Actually practicing mindfulness would probably have released me much sooner from my life long habit of mental and emotional suffering, and have allowed me greater access to my creativity and productive energies.
Oriana:
How amazing! I also used the name OBSERVER for that part of me that never surrendered to irrationality and even downright delusional thinking that starts churning in deep depression. It was not a sweet and gentle voice, not a feminine voice — the closest that comes to mind is my engineer cousin (but that’s only an analogy). Dispassionate, yes, absolutely. Your description of your Observer sounds just like my Observer.
I hate to sound trite, but perhaps the “voice of reason” is really the best description. Or maybe the “voice of sanity” — the way that, aside from an acute psychotic episode, a schizophrenic has a dual consciousness, and a part of his or her psyche is completely normal. Still, whenever I heard that voice of reason, of sanity — the voice that seemed reserved for my most hysterical antics and depressive effluvia that tried to pass as insight — I called it the Observer.
The Observer never pitied me. I resented that somewhat, but then the Observer used the fewest possible words — just enough to cut through the b.s. and very quickly talk sense into me. It was naked reason, no emotion. At least there was no condemnation, just a kind of aloof dismissal with which I could not argue. “The voice with which there is no arguing” was another, more elaborate way I sometimes called it. Later I learned that in Buddhism the label for that part of psyche is called the Witness. It witnesses your latest crazy thought, but is not interested in any storyline. Feel it, think it, and then let it go.
Back in the years when I had the greatest need of the Observer, just knowing that the Observer was there, and would tolerate only so much, already had a certain power. I sensed something else in my psyche, almost the opposite of the Observer: what I’d called the Anti-Self. That was the perverse part of me that wanted me to fail, to suffer — that knew how to augment any sadness, any perceived insult from others, any memory of what went wrong — never mind that we’re talking about preschool here.
So happy that I'm able to use the past tense. Well, the Observer is still there, but hasn’t had to correct me in that curt way for a long while now. And I think I now hear yet another voice — warm and supportive. It typically says, “You’re fine. You’re doing fine.” Reading Louise Hay helped me develop that voice.
Sudden huge stress can drown out the good voices — but only temporarily.
*
“Civilization begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.” ~ Gertrude Stein, As Fine as Melanctha
Photo: Brenda Hammack*
CAN ANY LIFE BE MEANINGLESS? I think what existentialists were trying to say was: there is no externally imposed meaning of life — but they didn't deny creating a personal meaning in your life.
SUPERIONIC ICE
~ “Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.
The x-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically—but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected—the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice.
The findings, published this week in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.
Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.
Including the hexagonal arrangement of water molecules found in common ice, known as “ice Ih,” scientists had already discovered a bewildering 18 architectures of ice crystal. Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.
Including the hexagonal arrangement of water molecules found in common ice, known as “ice Ih,” scientists had already discovered a bewildering 18 architectures of ice crystal. Yes, there is an ice IX, but it exists only under contrived conditions, unlike the fictional doomsday substance in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.
Superionic ice can now claim the mantle of ice XVIII. It’s a new crystal but with a twist. All the previously known water ices are made of intact water molecules, each with one oxygen atom linked to two hydrogen atoms. But superionic ice, the new measurements confirm, isn’t like that. It exists in a sort of surrealist limbo, part solid, part liquid. Individual water molecules break apart. The oxygen atoms form a cubic lattice, but the hydrogen atoms spill free, flowing like a liquid through the rigid cage of oxygens.
Depending on whom you ask, superionic ice is either another addition to water’s already cluttered array of avatars or something even stranger. Because its water molecules break apart, said physicist Livia Bove of France’s National Center for Scientific Research and Pierre and Marie Curie University, it’s not quite a new phase of water. “It’s really a new state of matter,” she said, “which is rather spectacular.”
Right around the time when the phase was first predicted, the probe Voyager 2 had sailed into the outer solar system, uncovering something strange about the magnetic fields of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
The fields around the solar system’s other planets seem to be made up of strongly defined north and south poles, without much other structure. It’s almost as if they have just bar magnets in their centers, aligned with their rotation axes. Planetary scientists chalk this up to “dynamos”: interior regions where conductive fluids rise and swirl as the planet rotates, sprouting massive magnetic fields.
By contrast, the magnetic fields emanating from Uranus and Neptune looked lumpier and more complex, with more than two poles. They also don’t align as closely to their planets’ rotation. One way to produce this would be to somehow confine the conducting fluid responsible for the dynamo into just a thin outer shell of the planet, instead of letting it reach down into the core.
But the idea that these planets might have solid cores, which are incapable of generating dynamos, didn’t seem realistic. If you drilled into these ice giants, you would expect to first encounter a layer of ionic water, which would flow, conduct currents and participate in a dynamo. Naively, it seems like even deeper material, at even hotter temperatures, would also be a fluid. “I used to always make jokes that there’s no way the interiors of Uranus and Neptune are actually solid,” said Sabine Stanley at Johns Hopkins University. “But now it turns out they might actually be.”
The new analyses also hint that although superionic ice does conduct some electricity, it’s a mushy solid. It would flow over time, but not truly churn. Inside Uranus and Neptune, then, fluid layers might stop about 8,000 kilometers down into the planet, where an enormous mantle of sluggish, superionic ice begins. That would limit most dynamo action to shallower depths, accounting for the planets’ unusual fields.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-bizarre-form-of-water-may-exist-all-over-the-universe/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
A REVERSE BAR MITZVAH
“For a medieval farmer to enter a church with its icons, gargoyles and stained glass must have been something dazzling, like the circus before the circus. The church frowned on the circus. It didn't want the competition.
The circus was a more dizzying escape than the church, but paradoxically a more dizzying escape into fantastical reality, the wonders of earthly life and its great potential.
I remember the morning when I first escaped into the larger reality, the morning realized how big the world really was. I was nine. I suddenly understood that one could run away to the circus if one wanted. I didn't have to stay in my orthodox Jewish community. I could escape it.
It was 1965. I was eating a breakfast of red licorice and cold pizza with my dad in our Disneyland hotel room.
That unorthodox breakfast was my reverse bar mitzvah, not a ritual of commitment to my tribe but my liberation into the larger world and all the existential doubts that come with having to guess my place within it.
And I was at Disneyland, a descendant of the circus dazzling us with just how many things are possible.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Albert Bloch: March of the Clowns*
Then there is the "kingship" of god, sitting on a throne (in Polish, a popular euphemism for sitting on the toilet). Such archaic images do less and less for us.*
GLUCOSAMINE MAY BENEFITS THE HEART
~ “A popular and widely used dietary supplement for joint pain could also be beneficial for your heart.
According to new research Trusted Source published in The BMJ, habitual use of the supplement glucosamine was found to be associated with a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and its more severe consequences like stroke.
New research that included nearly a half-million participants found that habitually taking glucosamine was associated with 15 percent lower overall risk of CVD events, compared to nonusers.
It was further associated with a 9 to 22 percent lower risk of CVD death, coronary heart disease, and stroke, compared to nonusers.
However, researchers point out that despite this association, their work doesn’t establish a causal link between glucosamine and better CVD outcomes.
“Our study suggests a potential new beneficial effect of glucosamine on cardiovascular health. The practical implication would be upon further evidence from future studies, such as clinical trials, that verify such effects as causal,” said Dr. Lu Qi, a professor in the department of epidemiology at Tulane University and one of the study’s authors.
Nonetheless, the data from the study is robust.
This isn’t the first study to take note of glucosamine’s beneficial relationship with CVD.
Its results are in line with an Australian study from 2012 Trusted Source of 266,848 adults 45 years and older. Researchers found a negative association between taking glucosamine, heart disease, and other cardiovascular conditions.
Still, there remains a large unknown: If glucosamine is in fact protective for the heart (and that’s still a big if), how does it work?
The answer just isn’t clear.
“The data on mechanisms are limited. Currently we know little about how glucosamine may affect cardiovascular health,” said Qi.
But, as Qi points out in the study, there are some theories.
Inflammation is common among heart disease and stroke patients, and it’s believed to play a role in cardiovascular disease. Glucosamine appears to have anti-inflammatory properties, which could therefore be preventive.
Another theory is that glucosamine supplementation may mimic certain biological effects of a low-carbohydrate diet that help lower risk of CVD.
Qi and his colleagues point out a 2014 animal study Trusted Source that found glucosamine extended the life span of aging mice as possible evidence of this.
Clinical trials would be a necessary next step to better understand whether glucosamine really benefits heart health.
Glucosamine is a naturally occurring substance found within the body that’s recognized for its role in maintaining the cartilage between joints.” ~
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/common-supplement-may-help-with-heart-health#The-bottom-line
Shellfish chitin can be a source of glucosamineending on beauty:
Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.
Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.
~ Wallace Stevens, Lebensweisheitspielerei
Bruce Dern in the movie Nebraska (superb)
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