A diver touching North America and Europe at the same time. This location between the continents is in Iceland's Thingvellir Lake. The Silfra fissure is the only spot in the world where you can swim between two continental plates. *
THE WOMEN APPEAR AS AURORA BOREALIS
One night in the Arctic, the villages saw the “flashing elements
of female souls.” The women kept indoors, women whose windows
had been painted black, who dressed in head-to-toe black.
They floated out of their houses through the cracks to the Arctic
where they could be seen without the burka.
Luminous beauty. Their long black hair, slender bodies from so
much weeping, shadows under their eyes like the dark of the moon.
Look, Mother, with your shadowed eyes.
Soon the aurora of mirth will appear. First their bodies in the sky.
Brilliant ice maidens! Then the laughing of the heavens.
Then the laughing of the women themselves who prefer the cold,
the seals, the walrus, the ice floes, the dangerous polar bear, to
the death of the heart. My mother prefers death to leaving him.
They are laughing in the cold, and we villagers are making ice candles.
See us come out on our dogsleds. Hundreds of ice candles lead the
way to the Yypnik village. These women, a gift from the gods.
My father saw her as no gift but his.
Look how beautiful they are. Northern dancers, we call them.
They are not aurora flowers that open and die in a single hour.
They become aurora snakes to protect themselves from those men.
Poison him.
The women are gorgeous feather boas across the night sky.
Everything is called aurora in honor of the gods.
The aurora of mirth. Hear these women laughing?
You have never heard them laugh before.
They fled the harsh husband who caged them without light.
Mother, you could be all light. It’s not too late to seep from the
crack he forgot in the east wall.
~ Margaret Szumowski, The Night of the Lunar Eclipse, 2005
Oriana:
This is a poem imagining the escape of all oppressed women, not just the Muslim women forced to dress in black head to toe, with only a slit for the eyes (one Islamic scholar suggested that it would be more pious to leave an opening for only one eye). The poem is strange, surreal, and extremely moving. I can’t read it without feeling my eyes moisten. The address to “Mother” moves me — it gives the poem its intimacy. But mainly I feel its power as poetry because it takes me to the Otherworld — that place in the imagination where we can find refuge, almost no matter how oppressive the reality.
And yet it’s more than just some vague “place in the imagination.” This poem makes us imagine sheer beauty: the undulating lights in the Arctic sky: “Look how beautiful they are. Northern dancers, we call them.” It’s a summons — mostly doomed, we know that — to all oppressed women to connect with their strength and beauty. A political poem, yes, but a poem that does not sacrifice the strangeness and indirectness of poetry — and, above all, its beauty.
Mary:
It is both magical and heartbreaking. Love the idea of the gorgeous dancing lights in the sky escaping the shroud of the burka.
*
“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.” ~ George Monbiot
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DON’T WORRY ABOUT YOUR UMS AND UHGS; THEY HELP US COMMUNICATE
~ “Many scientists think that our cultural fixation with stamping out what they call “disfluencies” is deeply misguided. Saying um is no character flaw, but an organic feature of speech; far from distracting listeners, there’s evidence that it focuses their attention in ways that enhance comprehension.
Disfluencies arise mainly because of the time pressures inherent in speaking. Speakers don’t pre-plan an entire sentence and then mentally press “play” to begin unspooling it. If they did, they’d probably need to pause for several seconds between each sentence as they assembled it, and it’s doubtful that they could hold a long, complex sentence in working memory. Instead, speakers talk and think at the same time, launching into speech with only a vague sense of how the sentence will unfold, taking it on faith that by the time they’ve finished uttering the earlier portions of the sentence, they’ll have worked out exactly what to say in the later portions. Mostly, the timing works out, but occasionally it takes longer than expected to find the right phrase. Saying “um” is the speaker’s way of signaling that processing is ongoing, the verbal equivalent of a computer’s spinning circle. People sometimes have more disfluencies while speaking in public, ironically, because they are trying hard not to misspeak.
Since disfluencies show that a speaker is thinking carefully about what she is about to say, they provide useful information to listeners, cueing them to focus attention on upcoming content that’s likely to be meaty. One famous example comes from the movie Jurassic Park. When Jeff Goldblum’s character is asked whether a group of only female animals can breed, he replies, “No, I’m, I’m simply saying that life, uh…finds a way.” The disfluencies emphasize that he’s coming to grips with something not easy to explain—an idea that turns out to be a key part of the movie.
Experiments with ums or uhs spliced in or out of speech show that when words are preceded by disfluencies, listeners recognize them faster and remember them more accurately. In some cases, disfluencies allow listeners to make useful predictions about what they’re about to hear. In one study, for example, listeners correctly inferred that speakers’ stumbles meant that they were describing complicated conglomerations of shapes rather than to simple single shapes.
Disfluencies can also improve our comprehension of longer pieces of content. Psychologists Scott Fraundorf and Duane Watson tinkered with recordings of a speaker’s retellings of passages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and compared how well listeners remembered versions that were purged of all disfluencies as opposed to ones that contained an average number of ums and uhs (about two instances out of every 100 words). They found that hearers remembered plot points better after listening to the disfluent versions, with enhanced memory apparent even for plot points that weren’t preceded by a disfluency. Stripping a speech of ums and uhs, as Toastmasters are intent on doing, appears to be doing listeners no favors.
Moreover, there’s reason to question the implicit assumption that disfluencies reveal a speaker’s lack of knowledge. In a study led by Kathryn Womack, experienced physicians and residents in training looked at images of various dermatological conditions while talking their way to a diagnosis. Not surprisingly, the expert doctors were more accurate in their diagnoses than the residents. They also produced more complex sentences—and a greater number of disfluencies, giving lie to the notion that disfluencies reflect a lack of control over one’s material. On the contrary, the study’s authors suggest that the seasoned doctors had more disfluent speech because they were sifting through a larger body of knowledge and constructing more detailed explanations while planning their speech.
If disfluencies appear to generally help communication more than they hinder it, why are they so stigmatized? Writer and linguist Michael Erard argues in his book Um… that historically, public speakers have been blissfully unconcerned with disinfecting their speech of disfluencies until about the 20th Century—possibly because neither hearers nor speakers consciously noticed them until it became possible to record and replay spoken language in all its circuitous and halting glory. The aversion to disfluencies may well have arisen from speakers’ horror at hearing their own recorded voices. Erard suggests that the modern repugnance for disfluencies is less an assessment of a person’s speech than it is a “deeper judgment about how much control he should have over his self-presentation and his identity.” In truth, disfluencies appear to distract mainly those who have been trained to revile them.
In fact, designers of synthesized voice systems, who often are rather solicitous when it comes to the hearer’s ease and comfort, have begun experimenting with the insertion of naturalistic disfluencies into artificial speech (though it’s too soon to tell whether listeners respond to these as they do to human disfluencies). It’s an irony of our age that robots, unconcerned with ego, may be busy putting disfluencies into their speech just as humans, preoccupied with their self-images, are submitting to strenuous training to take them out.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/your-speech-is-packed-with-misunderstood-unconscious-messages?utm_source=pocket-newtab
“Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.” ~ Salvador Dali
UMBERTO ECO ON FASCISM
~ “In his 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", cultural theorist Umberto Eco lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organize these into a coherent system, but that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it". He uses the term "Ur-fascism" as a generic description of different historical forms of fascism. The fourteen properties are as follows:
"The Cult of Tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
"The Rejection of Modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
"The Cult of Action for Action's Sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
Umberto Boccioni: The City Rises, 1910. Note the incongruous (in our era) combination of tall city buildings in the background, and, front and center, horses and men in postures of great muscular effort. "Disagreement Is Treason" — Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
"Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
"Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
"Obsession with a Plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite's 'fear' of the 1930s Jewish populace's businesses and well-doings; see also anti-Semitism). Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
"Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy" because "Life is Permanent Warfare" — there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to NOT build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
"Contempt for the Weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force. "Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero" leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
"Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
"Selective Populism" — The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People."
"Newspeak" — Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.” ~ Emilio Gentile
T shirts sold at the recent Trump rally in Tupelo, Mississippi. Photo: Jeremy Sherman *
AN UPLIFTING HOLOCAUST STORY
In Crown Heights, there was a Jew, Yankel, who owned a bakery. He survived the camps. He once said, “You know why it is that I’m alive today? I was a kid, just a teenager at the time. We were on the train, in a boxcar, being taken to Auschwitz. Night came and it was freezing, deathly cold, in that boxcar. The Germans would leave the cars on the side of the tracks overnight, sometimes for days on end without any food, and of course, no blankets to keep us warm,” he said. “Sitting next to me was an older Jew – this beloved elderly Jew — from my hometown I recognized, but I had never seen him like this. He was shivering from head to toe, and looked terrible. So I wrapped my arms around him and began rubbing him, to warm him up. I rubbed his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. I begged him to hang on. All night long; I kept the man warm this way. I was tired, I was freezing cold myself, my fingers were numb, but I didn’t stop rubbing the heat on to this man’s body. Hours and hours went by this way. Finally, night passed, morning came, and the sun began to shine. There was some warmth in the cabin, and then I looked around the car to see some of the other Jews in the car. To my horror, all I could see were frozen bodies, and all I could hear was a deathly silence.
Nobody else in that cabin made it through the night – they died from the frost. Only two people survived: the old man and me… The old man survived because somebody kept him warm; I survived because I was warming somebody else…”
Let me tell you the secret of Judaism. When you warm other people’s hearts, you remain warm yourself. When you seek to support, encourage and inspire others; then you discover support, encouragement and inspiration in your own life as well. That, my friends, is “Judaism 101”.
THE LAST ENTRIES IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S JOURNAL
~ “Virginia Woolf’s devotion to her art and her acute sense of individuality, he notes, have generated one of literature’s most singular legacies. At one point, Auden refers to the last entries in the journals, which were penned during the Second World War, a few days before her death, after her London house had been destroyed by bombings. “A kind of growl behind the cuckoos and t’other birds. A furnace behind the sky,” Woolf writes. “It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’ has vanished. No audience. No echo. . . . We live without a future. That’s what’s queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door.”
Even in her final days, Woolf’s literary insights flicker and resonate, offering a poignant closing look at a city—and a world—descending into chaos. Her words, Auden suggests, provide a rare glimpse into the nature of a writer’s soul and into the creative spark that endures until the last breath.” ~ W. H. Auden’s “A Consciousness of Reality” discussed in the New Yorker newsletter of October 30, 2019
Virginia Woolf, photo by Giselle Freund, London, 1939. I assume the photo was taken in the very house that was later destroyed during the bombing raids.
HOWARD ZINN: SMALLER DEPRESSIONS BEFORE THE GREAT ONE
Ray Suarez: The conventional tellings of American history often portray the Great Depression as an aberration, a sudden descent into economic calamity from the relatively prosperous efflorescence of the Jazz Age. But in A People’s History, you tell a very different story about the roots of the Great Depression being very much in the 1920s.
Howard Zinn: The idea that the great Depression of the 1930s was an aberration in an otherwise prolonged march of prosperity in the United States is itself simply false. There had been depressions, and severe ones, all through American history from the early 19th century on. The Depression of 1873 was one of the causes of the great Railroad Strike of 1877. There was a Great Depression in 1893; I mentioned the fact that Emma Goldman was imprisoned for addressing people in New York who were in desperate trouble because of the economic crisis of 1893.
I did not learn a certain important truth about the pre-Depression years, about the 1920s, until I began doing research on the life and career of Fiorello La Guardia. I was doing my doctoral dissertation and I came across the papers of Fiorello La Guardia, which had just been deposited in the Municipal Archives of New York City by his widow.
La Guardia was a congressman in the 1920s, representing a district in east Harlem. I was reading all of the letters that had been sent to La Guardia in the 1920s, in the age of prosperity, the Jazz Age, this period that still is remembered that way. There were people writing letters saying, “My husband is out of work. They have turned off the electricity, ’cause we can’t pay the bill. My kids are going hungry.” And when I looked into other parts of the country, I realized that although it wasn’t a depression in the strictest sense, the 1920s was a period of great wealth on one side and poverty on another side.
Ray Suarez: It’s funny how master narratives get built, and even in the face of all kinds of other evidence, you just can’t pierce the armor of that master narrative. When you think about the sepia-toned silent movie footage that runs through Jazz Age storytelling, those people doing the Charleston, the tops being knocked off of champagne bottles, and so on—they don’t intersperse that with mounted soldiers ousting people out of tents during the Bonus Marches. Those Bonus Marchers were working-men who just couldn’t make it in 1920s America.
Howard Zinn: It’s interesting that you talk about the Bonus Army, because that is certainly something known to people who know history. But most Americans don’t know about the Bonus Army, even though it was a very, very dramatic moment in American history at the very beginning of the Great Depression.
It was only 13 years after the end of World War I, and these veterans were now probably in their 30s, and they had families. And they were suffering. They had been promised money, they had been promised a bonus, as veterans are always given promises.
If you are going to risk your limbs, you have to be given promises, so the veterans had been given promises that at least they would get a bonus after the war. But a bonus was never given to them, and now that they were hungry, they organized what was called a Bonus Army. They came from all over the country, thousands of them, came in every which way they could—riding the rails, hitchhiking, whatever. They arrived in Washington and encamped across the Potomac River from the Capitol. They set up tents there, and they wanted to be a visible presence in Washington, to say to Congress, “We want our bonus.”
Herbert Hoover was president. I don’t know if any other president would have behaved differently. I don’t know, if we had had a Democratic president at that time, if he would have behaved differently. But what Hoover did was to send the army to destroy their camp and drive them out of there. It was one of the most shameful episodes in modern American history.
Now, maybe it had some effect on Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe he decided when he came into office in 1933 that you couldn’t simply send the army to suppress people who were in dire economic straits. I think Roosevelt was more sensitive than Hoover, and probably Roosevelt was more sensitive than any president that followed him in regard to the plight of people.
The country was in turmoil in the 1930s when Roosevelt came into office. There were strikes all over the country. There were riots. There were people breaking into places where there was food. There were children marching into city halls demanding that they be fed and taken care of. Tenants were organizing and refusing to be evicted, bringing furniture back into the homes after it had been taken out to the street. It was a country that was in a state of near-revolution, something that very much worried the people in Washington.
Certainly Roosevelt was sensitive to this. The New Deal was the result of it—the result of the combination of Roosevelt’s sensitivity and the events, the uproar, the rebellions taking place all over the country, which he had to take notice of.
Ray Suarez: It sounds as though, in part, you think the New Deal was done to forestall revolution. I guess historians have different points of view that we could graph out on a continuum, from the belief that he saved the country because he wanted to save the people, to a more cynical take that he saved capitalism because he realized it was having a nervous breakdown but really wasn’t all that interested in saving the people per se.
Howard Zinn: I would probably argue that there was truth in both sides. This sounds as if I am a moderate, compromising, finding the center between two points of view, but I wouldn’t give equal weight to both analyses. I think, yes, Roosevelt was saving capitalism, no question about that—and I think he was conscious of that too.
I think he was saving the system that he believed in from revolution, from very deep trouble, but I think he also was a human being responding to the plight of people. He may not have responded so easily if there hadn’t been all this turmoil and threat to the system, but there was something in Roosevelt that wanted to do some good.
I think probably one of the elements that should be considered in assessing Roosevelt is that he had a wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was actually more sensitive than he was to the plight of poor people. She had been a social worker on the Lower East side of New York; she had actually been among the poor. You can’t say this about Roosevelt himself. She had a better grasp of how poor people lived, of how black people were suffering in a racist society, and I think she was a good influence on Franklin Roosevelt.” ~
https://lithub.com/howard-zinn-how-fdr-forestalled-a-second-american-revolution/?fbclid=IwAR2drMmE_io4LI_WGjHh-A8ebs4b71mcs4ATGpSRAMj5_8HXnMKOO7QMmpI
Breadline during the Great Depression Oriana:
Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins — two women whose historical importance has only recently been more appreciated. Two icons of compassion combined with action. And there must have been more activist women — organizers, leaders, doers — just not given credit, mostly erased from history.
Frances Perkins“One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
Oriana:
Some say that virgins are the ultimate temptresses.
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CLIMATE CHANGE, EPIDEMICS, AND THE COURSE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
~ “It turns out that climate had a major role in the rise and fall of Roman civilization. The empire-builders benefited from impeccable timing: the characteristic warm, wet and stable weather was conducive to economic productivity in an agrarian society. The benefits of economic growth supported the political and social bargains by which the Roman empire controlled its vast territory. The favorable climate, in ways subtle and profound, was baked into the empire’s innermost structure.
The end of this lucky climate regime did not immediately, or in any simple deterministic sense, spell the doom of Rome. Rather, a less favorable climate undermined its power just when the empire was imperiled by more dangerous enemies – Germans, Persians – from without. Climate instability peaked in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian. Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’, when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years. This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unraveling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.
Disruptions in the biological environment were even more consequential to Rome’s destiny. The highly urbanized, highly interconnected Roman empire was a boon to its microbial inhabitants. Humble gastro-enteric diseases such as Shigellosis and paratyphoid fevers spread via contamination of food and water, and flourished in densely packed cities. Where swamps were drained and highways laid, the potential of malaria was unlocked in its worst form – Plasmodium falciparum – a deadly mosquito-borne protozoan. The Romans also connected societies by land and by sea as never before, with the unintended consequence that germs moved as never before, too. Slow killers such as tuberculosis and leprosy enjoyed a heyday in the web of interconnected cities fostered by Roman development.
However, the decisive factor in Rome’s biological history was the arrival of new germs capable of causing pandemic events. The empire was rocked by three such intercontinental disease events. The Antonine plague coincided with the end of the optimal climate regime, and was probably the global debut of the smallpox virus. The empire recovered, but never regained its previous commanding dominance. Then, in the mid-third century, a mysterious affliction of unknown origin called the Plague of Cyprian sent the empire into a tailspin. Though it rebounded, the empire was profoundly altered – with a new kind of emperor, a new kind of money, a new kind of society, and soon a new religion known as Christianity. Most dramatically, in the sixth century a resurgent empire led by Justinian faced a pandemic of bubonic plague, a prelude to the medieval Black Death. The toll was unfathomable – maybe half the population was felled.
The plague pandemic was an event of astonishing ecological complexity. It required purely chance conjunctions, especially if the initial outbreak beyond the reservoir rodents in central Asia was triggered by those massive volcanic eruptions in the years preceding it. It also involved the unintended consequences of the built human environment – such as the global trade networks that shuttled the germ onto Roman shores, or the proliferation of rats inside the empire. The pandemic baffles our distinctions between structure and chance, pattern and contingency. Therein lies one of the lessons of Rome. Humans shape nature – above all, the ecological conditions within which evolution plays out. But nature remains blind to our intentions, and other organisms and ecosystems do not obey our rules. Climate change and disease evolution have been the wild cards of human history.
Our world now is very different from ancient Rome. We have public health, germ theory and antibiotic pharmaceuticals. We will not be as helpless as the Romans, if we are wise enough to recognize the grave threats looming around us, and to use the tools at our disposal to mitigate them.
But the centrality of nature in Rome’s fall gives us reason to reconsider the power of the physical and biological environment to tilt the fortunes of human societies. Perhaps we could come to see the Romans not so much as an ancient civilization, standing across an impassable divide from our modern age, but rather as the makers of our world today. They built a civilization where global networks, emerging infectious diseases and ecological instability were decisive forces in the fate of human societies. The Romans, too, thought they had the upper hand over the fickle and furious power of the natural environment. History warns us: they were wrong.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/12/15/climate-change-rome/?utm_source=dscfb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dscfb&fbclid=IwAR3W4It-djrl5tPCGnX9dG1I0tEBZc2-INJRBUs6BnQAsOSxjU_NrgSg6DY#.XbSQ879JnFM
Thomas Cole, The Fall of Rome, 1836Oriana:
What a warning to us! Reminds me of the first and dearest biology teacher I had, by turns jocular and melancholy. He said, more than once: Nature could wipe us out anytime. All it would take is the right pathogens. The most primitive form of life, a virus, could eliminate us who proudly place ourselves at the top.
Mary:
Such interesting topics this week! I am particularly interested in the discussion of climate and disease evolution and how it intersects with the human projects of culture and civilization. "Humans shape nature" but nature is and will remain not only "blind", but most importantly "indifferent" to that shaping and to all our intentions and ambitions. Climate change and disease evolution are wild cards largely because we fail to recognize how our agency has altered conditions so as to make their challenges not only possible but inevitable . An asteroid slamming into the Yucatan, a chain of volcanic eruptions, may be accidental in that they are outside and undetermined by human action — but so much more of the challenges we face are made possible precisely because of human activity.
Floods and fires come immediately to mind. Building on flood plains, draining wetlands, paving marshes, shifting the pressure of waters with dams and levees, suppressing fires until tinder builds dangerously thick on forest floors...so many of our efforts at "management" are shortsighted and misconceived, actually contributing to the disasters they are meant to avert. We seem to just recently have begun to re-evaluate these approaches to environmental control, and in small, experimental steps, to change them. Some places along the Mississippi are now moving away from flood barriers like levees and toward creation and restoration of natural buffers like wetlands to absorb and contain surging floodwaters.
I have been particularly interested in how new diseases are emerging, or perhaps more accurately, old diseases changing to become new and devastating threats. The Romans created opportunity for the spread and development of disease by becoming an empire linking distant places with a web of roads and international commerce. And of course, by building a civilization of great cities with populations enough to host, incubate and propagate infectious diseases — the powerful and terrible ones — malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, bubonic plague. These diseases in turn with their horrible depredations, reshaped our fate: our history, psychology, and social structure.
Just as the rise of a merchant class and the fall of the feudal system were greatly enabled, if not actually created, by the population loss and upheaval caused by the bubonic plague, the shape of our own society and behavior has been changed by the new and terrible diseases emerging from Africa — AIDS, Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers with terrifyingly rapid and highly fatal courses. It seems that these diseases emerged from their original homes and their original hosts, primates living in remote forest areas, to spread to new hosts, ourselves, and new places, pretty much everywhere in the civilized world.
How? Development. New roads where there were no roads. Populations spreading to new places, becoming more mobile, eventually globally mobile. Huge opportunities for infection with densely populated and highly mobile groups of hosts with no natural defenses against these new and rapidly evolving forms of infectious agents.
The cultural result?? A sort of existential terror. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic there was so much fear and so little knowledge, and like the plague in its time, AIDS changed us. Pretty much put a stop to the sexual revolution. Sex was great, but not if it could kill you. No more love- ins, bathhouse encounters, careless love. It changed medical practice profoundly. The fear of blood contamination led to strict new protocols for blood collection, transfusion, handling of needles, disposal of medical waste, even the construction of hospital rooms with negative air pressure, the imposition of universal precautions, isolation procedures and how often they were used..and this is just a list of some procedural changes. Technological changes were just as numerous and visible, from sharps containers to almost always working gloved, to needleless iv delivery systems .
We learn, but do we learn fast enough? How much is lost and how much changed, how well we adapt and how quickly, and whether we will continue or come to some inescapable end, is impossible to say.
I tended to go on a bit here but it's something I experienced first hand as a practicing nurse in the 80's, and it made a deep impression. For me such questions always give rise to hope and fear...and also to wonder— that life and history, the world in all its wild complexity and our place in that complexity, is always deeply fascinating and worthy of exploration .
Thanks for the chance to think about these things, and for the lovely poem, and the story of the man in the boxcar working so hard to keep the other warm that his generosity saved them both, at least for that night, that day. There's more, but you always give such riches I can’t number them all.
Oriana:
Yes, the article on the role of epidemics in the fall of Rome is probably the most central and urgently relevant in this blog. And your response, fortified by your expertise as a nurse who speaks from experience, is of particular value.
For instance, I didn’t know about negative pressure versus positive pressure hospital rooms. How impressive that we have those measures against the spread of infection! And indeed, Ebola did not “go global” — the containment measures did work (where is our Albert Camus to write about the heroes of that story?)
What you wrote about the changes brought on by AIDS, both in medical practice and in society at large, should be “required reading” for all who want to understand contemporary culture. The legalization of gay marriage also owes a lot to the awakening that swept through the gay community as a result of AIDS: long-term partners were not allowed in ICU to say the final goodbye; they had no legal rights; their de-facto marriages had no acknowledged dignity compared to heterosexual marriages. The injustice of it was so glaring that it had to be remedied.
It was a giant leap in human rights — and, ironically, it renewed rather than threatened the “sanctity of marriage.” The vows say: “in sickness and in health.” You don’t abandon your spouse when he or she gets sick. That’s bound up with the essence of human decency. I call it the “pact of non-abandonment.” It springs from the larger idea that if we fall, someone will come to help us. Civilization is founded upon this.
And yes, somehow it also harkens back to the story of the Good Samaritan. It reminds us that the idea of helping a fellow human being regardless of color of skin or religion has been with us for millennia. Whether lofty terms like “human dignity” are used, or whether we ponder the possibility that eventually it might be us, bleeding by the side of the road — we have to humbly accept that we are not self-sufficient, but are part of the human family. Auden was right after all: “We have to love one another or die.”
(P.S. Some have proposed “robot nurses.” But I suspect that humans have to be cared by humans — they need to know that at least one other human truly cares if they live or die.
A different cultural aspect here is, again, the effectiveness of science-based medicine as opposed to religious practices such as prayer. But the way that hospitals are becoming dehumanized, I suspect that eventually we will notice that somehow or other we have to bring back the soul (for lack of a better term) into medical care. Or call it “the human touch.”
We know that children can die for lack of love. And adults? They thrive on the proverbial TLC. “Without tenderness, we are in hell.” And it’s possible that the lack of loving human touch will prove a great threat than pathogens.)
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“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh: Seascape at Scheveningen, 1882*
After this dark and austere seascape, let’s have a mild chuckle
Gravestone of Elijah Bond, designer of the Ouija board*
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN RELIGIOUS HUMANITY AS LATCHKEY KIDS COOPED UP ON EARTH WHO DON'T REALIZE THEY'RE ORPHANS WHO HAVE TO FEND FOR THEMSELVES
~ “Don’t worry. This will all work out fine. It always does. We’re not alone. They’re coming back. They’ll fix this.
Yeah. Allah always provides.
What do you mean Allah?! That’s not who we’re waiting for! We’re waiting for Jesus to return. This is all God’s plan.
No, it’s “Imshe Allah,” not Jesus or God.
Stop bickering over names. What matters is signs of their return. As in the prophecy. Just be patient. Wait for the sign.
Ha! Your kind are waiting for the wrong sign. Ours is the sign that foretells the return of our savior. They’ll fix this. They’ll explain what this is all about and how it fits their plan.
Hello? We’re not just supposed to wait here for the sign. Don’t you know? Before the savior, the sign. The sign won’t appear until we all get with their plan.
What plan? Aren’t we waiting for the savior to come and tell us the plan?
Wake up! They already told us what we’re supposed to do. We’re just not doing it. More of us must commit to the plan. Then the sign. Then the savior.
You’re right, the plan first. But your kind misheard the plan. It’s not what you think. It’s something completely different. Then the sign, then the savior.
You’re confused. We’ve not been told how to live in preparation for their return to solve things. It’s a guessing game, a riddle, a mystery. God works in mysterious ways.
Allah, not God.
Yeah, we haven’t settled on the name yet. But what we have to do is turn toward them. That’s all. Just really, really believe that they’re coming back. No plan yet. Just we wait faithfully. When more of us do, they’ll send signs and then come back to save us.
How can we wait faithfully if we haven’t even settled on the name of who we’re waiting for?
It’s getting really bad out there. I hope they come soon.
It’s supposed to get bad. That’s part of their plan. It’s not really bad. It’s good. We humans are just too out of God’s loop to see why it’s good. God works in mysterious ways.
Again, not God. “Imshe Allah.” Allah’s will, not Jesus’s or God’s.
I’m sure they won’t be offended if we call them different names.
Do you hear yourself? Call them? We’re waiting for one and only one savior. When we call them by different names, he think we’re just a bunch of insulting polytheists. He’s offended. He won’t come back until we honor him and only him. What matters is that we get his name right. Allah is not coming back to save us until we get his name right. That’s what Jihad is all about. We fight in Allah’s name. We win. That’s the sign. Then Allah saves us. That’s the plan.
Will they explain why this needed to get so bad?
Not bad, and yes, they’ll explain why.
Hey guys, it’s getting really bad here. Do you think they’ll be back soon? I don’t know how much more of this we can survive.
Yeah, be quiet everyone. Scrunch your eyes shut and pray. Pray for their return. Pray with all your might.”
~ Jeremy Sherman
The only true religion?*
THE COLLECTED SCHIZOPHRENIAS
Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5)’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood).
Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”)
She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangers of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. ~ Katie Yee
“Drawing on scientific literature, pop culture, and her own experience, [Esmé Weijun Wang] discusses a range of conditions affecting some five per cent of Americans; her account of Cotard delusion, a belief that one is dead, is especially moving. . . . Fragmented by design, the book’s structure heightens the immediacy of its testimony.”―The New Yorker
Ending on beauty:
When I rise up
Let me rise up joyful
Like a bird.
When I fall
Let me fall without regret
Like a leaf
~ Wendell Berry
Leafbirds; Javier Jaen 
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