*
IN THE NAKED BED, IN PLATO’S CAVE
In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
Hearing the milkman’s chop,
His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window. The stony street
Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,
The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience.
The winter sky’s pure capital
Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.
Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose
Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls,
Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.
A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of beginning
Again and again,
while History is unforgiven.
~ Delmore Schwartz
Mary:
One line in the Delmore Schwartz poem stays with me: “strangeness grew in the motionless air.” It captures that sense of disjunction, of unfamiliarity, that sometimes comes when we first wake and find the world again naked and unprocessed, without the garments of the habits and assumptions that let us get through the days, over and over again. All feels strange and distant, sounds of the ordinary far removed, the world caught, if just for a moment, without disguise. He captures here that feeling of alienation, of separation, of loneliness...where yes, the past hangs unresolved, mysterious and unforgiven.
Gustave Doré: Bridge of Sighs, Venice
THE CHILD'S CRY OF THIRTY CENTURIES AGO
~ “The earth we tread is spread with pain, we wade in it — the pain of today, of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, of past millennia. But let’s not deceive ourselves: it does not fade with time, the child’s cry of thirty centuries ago is no different from that of three days ago. It is the pain of every generation and every being — not only man.” ~ Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, 1960
Oriana:
Gombrowicz was an avant-garde Polish writer who spent most of his writing life in exile in Argentina. Milosz mentions him quite a bit; he regarded him as a rare “true atheist.” Most atheists, Milosz claimed, simply believed in something else, usually the inevitable progress of humanity toward a more advanced civilization.
Note the similarity to the outrage of Ivan Karamazov over the suffering of children: "the child’s cry of thirty centuries ago is no different from that of three days ago.”
On the other hand, as Jack Gilbert observed, to see only suffering and evil is to worship the devil. Indeed, the passage by Gombrowicz starts: “I am afraid of the devil, very afraid. A strange admission coming from an unbeliever. Still, I am unable to free myself from the concept. What are police, laws, safety measures against the Freak against which there is no protection, nothing, nothing, no barrier between us and it.”
True, a misfortune doesn't spare anyone; it's only a matter of time. And there is often a terrifying randomness to it: a child dies of brain cancer for no reason that makes any moral or metaphysical sense; another becomes paralyzed in a car accident, and so on — not because of “deserving” such fate and not a marvelous one.
I don't think we need to invoke the devil. The Buddha didn't imagine a supernatural evil-doer when he said “Life is suffering.” But to see life as only suffering is a distortion. Alas, we are wired for an easier access to negative memories, and sometimes we practically need to force ourselves to remember also the moments of joy and contentment that make life worth living.
Mary:
That cry of a child that is the same as it ever was, that unending undeserved suffering, is the rock no God can convince us to swallow without choking. No matter what is said about sin, original or not, that child stares back at us, his agony as random and meaningless as any other natural catastrophe. To my mind, prayer is always an unanswered accusation...demanding mercy and justice that will never come, from a source that never existed, and who had to be, even in our imaginings, cruel beyond belief.
The forces that shape things, whether they are mountains or men, are neither inherently benevolent nor kind. So much suffering is not "intended", but accidental and random, a fact so frightening we invent gods to avoid it. But those inventions must be either incredibly cruel, like the God of Job, or unwilling and unable to prevent suffering, even making a virtue of it...that suffering somehow elevates us and makes us closer to the divine, particularly the divine as expressed in that Christian God of suffering, bleeding on the cross.
What a hoax!! What a perverse argument, justifying horrors. Like what has been said about Mother Teresa 's mission to the poor...that she admired their suffering and saw it as holy, and certainly didn't want to alleviate or interfere with it. Even the vast indifference of the universe is preferable to such "spirituality."
And for me the redemption is in our own intentionality. That whatever cruel things happen, whatever suffering exists, can be met with kindness and love. That we can use all the powers of reason and imagination to alleviate suffering wherever we can, and refuse to create harm, or cooperate with evil. Not to pray for rescue but to provide what good we can where and whenever we can.
*
THE SCATHING NEW YORKER REVIEW OF 1917
~ “The most vulgar visual effect that I saw in a movie last year wasn’t Marvel-ous or otherwise superheroic; it was in “1917,” and depicted the death of a soldier in combat. The soldier is stabbed, and, as he bleeds out, his face is leached of pinkness and turns papery white just before he expires. The character’s death would have been as wrenching for viewers if the soldier’s appearance remained unaltered and he merely fell limp. Instead, the director, Sam Mendes, chose to render the moment picturesque—to adorn it with an anecdotal detail of the sort that might have cropped up in a war story, a tale told at years’ remove, and that would have stood for the ineffable horror of the experience. Instead, rendered as a special effect, the character’s end becomes merely poignant—not terrifying or repulsive—making for a very tasteful death.
That tastefulness is a mark of the utter tastelessness of “1917,” a movie that’s filmed in a gimmicky way—as a simulacrum of a single long take (actually, it’s a bunch of takes that run up to nine minutes and are stitched together with digital effects to make them look continuous). Yet that visual trickery isn’t the fakest aspect of the movie. Rather, the so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.
. . . Mendes shuts down Blake and Schofield and envelops them in a silence of the mind in order not to probe or care what they think. What he substitutes for their inner lives are sequences that exist solely because they make for striking images (a big fire at night, a run through a crowd of soldiers going over a trench wall). These shotlike compositions that arise from the flow of long takes come at the expense of plot and character, as in a scene of hand-to-hand combat that’s framed in the distance without regard to its mortal stakes and intense physicality. Once more, violence is moved offstage and prettified. The movie’s long takes, far from intensifying the experience of war, trivialize it; the effect isn’t one of artistic imagination expanded by technique but of convention showily tweaked. Its visual prose resembles a mass-market novel with the punctuation removed.
The film is dedicated, in the end credits, to Lance Corporal Alfred H. Mendes—the director’s grandfather—“who told us the stories.” In honoring the recollections and experiences of his grandfather, Mendes remains trapped in the narrow emotional range of filial piety that, far from sparking his imagination, inhibits it. His sense of duty yields an effortful and sanctimonious movie that, at the same time, takes its place in a lamentable recent trend.
Mendes joins such directors of proud and bombastic craft as Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, and Damien Chazelle, who’ve recently made films that are fixated on the heroic deeds of earlier British and American generations. These filmmakers, celebrating their truncated yet monumental versions of history’s heroes, are separating the public figures from their private lives, their visible greatness from mores that might not pass current-day muster. (It’s worth comparing their films to the work of Clint Eastwood, who’s upfront about the powers and limits of his stunted heroes.) The vision of heroism that these directors present bleaches the past of its presumptions and prejudices, cruelties and pettiness, but also of its genuine humanity, courage, and tragedy.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-beauty-of-sam-mendess-1917-comes-at-a-cost
NOT AN ANTI-WAR MOVIE?
~ “1917, in the end, isn’t an anti-war movie. Mendes loves war and he loves the hell of war, all that ugliness and mud and all those bodies piled up like cordwood, and he loves it precisely for the false significance and unbearable pathos he can wring from the grisly mysticism of the Western Front — every last drop, and forget being quiet about it.
There is one significant glimmer of hope in this film — just the barest hint of what 1917 might have been. Early in the film, right before the worm turns, the two soldiers commissioned to deliver a message across German lines encounter a lieutenant in the trenches, played by Andrew Scott. His performance is riveting from the getgo, a brief flare of hard-earned wisdom and gruff fatalism that, unfortunately, works only to reveal the manufactured frippery of his cinematic surroundings.
It’s as though Scott, with his deadpan cynicism and smirking weariness, is in a different film altogether — a much better, more honest film, one that respects its audience.” ~
https://www.eugeneweekly.com/2020/01/16/cease-fire-please/?fbclid=IwAR3_61OAsNkJT0L_fL_Bou3l5ECzA732y3BZhLEl9tl0l9oivbYD74bnSww
*A TECHNICAL FEAT THAT LEAVES US UNMOVED
~ “Weaving through hundreds of extras in the trenches, tiptoeing across enemy minefields — the effect is nothing short of incredible.
Be in no doubt, this is an incredible technical triumph from Mendes.
The sheer scale and audacity is breathtaking.
I spent far longer being dazzled by the cinematography than I ever did about the story or the performances — both of which, I would argue, could have done with a bit of attention.
Considering the subject matter, I was left extremely impressed but not particularly moved.” ~
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10709253/1917-technical-triumph-mendes-review/
Oriana: WAR AND LOVE
And yet, though the critics deride the “sentimentality,” the cherry blossoms and the (not entirely convincing) encounter with the French woman trying to keep a baby girl alive in a ruined, abandoned little town, do give the movie some break from brutality and are in fact moments of unexpected love. Charles suggested that the woman’s trying to take care of the wound on the back of Schofield’s head amounted to making love. Maybe. In any case, it was tenderness.
In addition, the woman stood for the Eternal Feminine — for normal, civilized life based on trust and affection, not hate. I’d hate to equate the Eternal Masculine with warfare and struggle for dominance, but this movie has moments when that is blatant (for instance, the advice given to Schofield: "When you give the colonel the letter with orders from the general, make sure there are witnesses. Some men want to fight regardless of the price.") Except for the episode with the French woman, it is a relentlessly all-male movie.
I don't know what I'll remember of this movie months from now, but I hope it's not just the giant rats, the endless mud, or the rather cliché images of the heroic protagonist running with shells exploding all around him and hitting others, while he of course remains untouched. The wound from impaling his hand on barbed wire seemed a rare completely authentic moment.
One of the problems with 1917 is the shock of the elimination of the more expressive and charismatic of the two main actors midway through the journey. The audible gasp from the audience remains in my mind — though I can’t go more into it without a big spoiler alert. And yes, it’s more stark and heroic for Schofield to carry out the desperate mission by himself. However, his survival brings up the question of credibility.
Nevertheless, the movie does convey the special hell of trench warfare. That alone may be its best recommendation.
Charles:
I wouldn't say 1917 is gimmicky; I'd say it was clever. Nobody has created a movie with one scene stitched together like this before that I know of. I do believe that the characters are shallow.
I agree with this totally: “I was left extremely impressed but not particularly moved.”
This is my favorite paragraph in entire review: "In addition, the woman stood for the Eternal Feminine — for normal, civilized life based on trust and affection, not hate. I’d hate to equate the Eternal Masculine with warfare and struggle for dominance, but this movie has moments when that is blatant. Except for the episode with the French woman, it is a relentlessly all-male movie"
Lilith:
I haven’t seen 1917, and I’m not sure I want to. War movies are especially distressing to me. I remember the still photographs by Matthew Brady of the Civil War, that were apparently the first, or almost the first, actual photographs of dead bodies on a battlefield, and there was no glory certainly In those pictures. Later I learned that Brady had arranged the corpses on the battlefield so that he would have better compositions for his photographs. In other words, so that he could create works of art.
Oriana:
After 1917, I feel that if I never see another war movie again, that’s fine with me. The stuff of nightmares since childhood.
Brady arranged the corpses for better composition? I suppose we have to forgive him — extreme as it sounds, being an artist came first to him. Still, a shocking bit of information to come across.
Charles:
A great work of art shouldn't be contrived.
Mary: THE SMELL
I haven't seen 1917 but get the impression from the comments and reviews that the movie presented the war as "cinematic"-- a continuous stream of action seen from outside the action, without much actual focus on the individual human experience. Even the way one death is described as the soldier gradually becoming more and more pale as he bleeds out seems like an impersonal perspective that makes the death itself less important than picturesque and cleverly demonstrated.
And even if most of the actuality of trench warfare is depicted there is something that will always be missing from visual narratives, something so basic and essential, and so horrible, that it underlines the enormous obscenity of war like nothing else can. The smell. The smell of torn and rotting bodies, of filth and rot and death. Of battlefields thick with human and animal flesh decaying in the open air. Not the relatively "clean" smell of fire and gunpowder and napalm in the morning..but a choking all enveloping stink that might remain for days. I remember reading of the terrible stink of civil war battlefields, where thousands of bodies, men and beasts, lay rotting, polluting the air for miles, to surrounding towns and villages. The people who were actually in war zones would surely say, seeing this film, what John's mother said...it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.
Hope I don't sound too cock sure and preachy here!! I think it's very telling that many many soldiers are very quiet about their war experiences — almost like it's something they can't find words for, something beyond their power to contain.
“WW1 WAS THE “STUPIDEST THING HUMANITY EVER DID TO ITSELF”
~ “When Sam Mendes was small, he would laugh at his grandfather’s habit of forever washing his hands. His father took him to one side. “It’s because he remembers the mud in the trenches,” he said, “and never being able to get clean.”
Sam stopped laughing. He asked his grandfather, then in his mid-70s, to tell him more about the war. After five decades’ silence on the subject, “he finally cracked. And he told us loads and loads of stories, especially after a couple of rums. He was very theatrical and charismatic and Edwardian. He was also quite deaf, so he shouted them all.”
Alfred Mendes was 16 when he enlisted, excited at the chance to serve in a good war that was going so well. When he got to the western front, “he just couldn’t believe what he found. His stories weren’t about bravery, but how utterly random it all was.” His small stature meant he was often chosen as a messenger. “That image of that little man, cut adrift in that vast, misty landscape, really stayed with me.”
This film has one linear storyline and just one long shot – well, really a couple of dozen, invisibly stitched together by the cinematographer Roger Deakins. Two young lance corporals, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are hauled in front of their general (Colin Firth) and given a mission. They must shin up the dugout, race across no man’s land (mind the barbed wire, gunfire, rats, craters and corpses), along the (abandoned, probably) enemy trenches, through a French countryside strewn with booby traps, then find an adjoining battalion and tell them to call off their dawn attack as they would be advancing into a trap. If the pair fail, 1,600 men – including Blake’s brother – will die.
Originally, says Firth, his scene was yet more brutal: as the boys hurry off to almost certain death, an orderly unfurls a white linen tablecloth for the officer’s high tea. That was scrapped. “The military establishment’s indifference to the wellbeing of these two young men was abundantly clear without that kind of emphasis,” says Firth, “or making it about the callousness of one particular general.”
“The mission the boys are sent on is one of brutal necessity, a tragedy compounded, of course, by the fact that the war itself was not.” Firth is only on screen for a few minutes, but filming even that short scene made him reassess his feelings. “One could empathize with the powerlessness and terror of young men who had no say in their fate, acting on decisions made by old men.”
*
[Krysty] Wilson-Cairns is a 32-year-old Glaswegian, perky in a jumpsuit. This is her first film.
One of Wilson-Cairns’s own grandfathers didn’t serve in the armed forces, but he was evangelical about educating Krysty about war. “He told me that understanding history is the only way to avert future catastrophe. The first world war was the stupidest thing humanity ever did to each other.”
Both she and Mendes separately say they want the film to act as a corrective to a repackaging of the war in the service of jingoistic isolationism. “People who are attached to some sort of nostalgic vision treat these wars retrospectively as triumphs,” says Mendes. “In fact, they were tragedies.
“That kind of hijacking of shared cultural memories and pride is very subtle, and very easy to do. At the moment, it happens all the time. ‘We’re going back to being on our own again! This is the spirit that fought two world wars!’ That’s what we’re now lumbered with.”
And while the volume rises on such dodgy tub-thumping, so the values that meant people were prepared to lay down their lives have been eroded, Mendes thinks; it’s only extreme environmental activists who are today doing something analogous.
“Sacrifice has fallen out of fashion,” says Wilson-Cairns. “The idea of having something above you, something to die for, is becoming an antiquated notion. People are inherently more selfish and more self-obsessed nowadays.”
[The actor who plays Schofield,] MacKay, 27, gentle and diplomatic, is wary of damning his – or any – generation. Our unfamiliarity with the need to give up everything is only for the good, he says. And how do you understand hardship if you’ve known nothing but comfort; he talks about wanting to grow his own veg.
“We’re less in touch with what really matters because we’re not being stretched. The film is about being at your absolute pits. You don’t want to be in a place where you only have what you need. But we’re perhaps rather too far down the other end of the scale and need to stop before we exhaust everything.”
Mendes cast MacKay partly, he says, because his face and demeanor suggested old-fashioned qualities of dignity and virtue. MacKay couldn’t possibly comment, but says he based Schofield on his own grandfather, for whom he was named, and who was a man of honor and tact.
In the film, neither Blake nor Schofield speak about their feelings; they don’t need to – nor do they have time. Mendes was surprised, he says, at how many American viewers identified 1917 as a singularly English film because of this. “It’s about telling the truth in the face of great difficulty. The classic example is Brief Encounter; a particular way of handling great emotion.”
MacKay cautions against rose-tinting reticence. “Stiff upper lips can be very unhealthy. Denial is rarely good. But there’s a real depth of resolve to swallowing something for the now. There’s weight, like an ocean. Under the surface, there’s so much bottled that, when it does break, it’s bigger than those that break all the time.”
The audience is unable to look away or avoid the brutality. And while most first world war films are slow-burns of claustrophobia and paralysis, this is queasily kinetic: a horrifying rollercoaster taking you on a nightmarish heist.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins has a slightly different take. “It’s not naturalistic,” he says. “If you really showed what it was like, you wouldn’t have anybody in the cinema after five minutes.” Still, he was buoyed by Mendes’s backbone when they were shooting a hospital tent scene near the end. “He said: ‘We can’t pussyfoot around. We have to do it justice.’ I remember saying: ‘I think we’ve earned it. We should have, by this point.’”
And what of Alfred Mendes? What would he have made of the film, of the upshot of finally sharing his stories? His grandson pauses. “I think he would have found it extremely uncomfortable to watch. But I’m sure he would have appreciated its existence.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/03/the-stupidest-thing-humanity-ever-did-to-itself-sam-mendes-and-colin-firth-on-1917
Oriana:
I think it’s true that nowadays people are less willing to die for a cause, including one’s country. Patriotism used to be a secular religion, with childhood indoctrination beginning at an early age. Two world wars seem to have cooled off the general ardor. What used to be normal patriotism in the past would now strike us as hyper-patriotism — or perhaps “nationalism” is a better term. “God and Fatherland” is not being bandied about as it used to be. “God with us” now seems more like a blasphemy, with ever-greater recognition that Christ was a pacifist. It was General Sherman who first said that war was not glory; it was hell. And today’s movies generally show war as hell, not as glory.
Also, religion has declined, and death at a young age, even if heroic, has less appeal without the faith in “going to a better place.” Life is less harsh, less a “vale of tears,” and promise of paradise seems less certain than the hellishness of war. And perhaps no war has been as brutal, as hellish, as the Great War — which was supposed to end all wars. But war begets war . . .
Still, there is hope in knowing that the two world wars did manage to teach a lesson, considering that we know that Germany isn’t suddenly going to invade France or Norway or any other country, even if provoked. That is no longer imaginable.
For me, this is the image that says most about WW1:
“If you really showed what it was like, you wouldn’t have anybody in the cinema after five minutes.” ~ 1917 cinematographer, Roger DeakinsNote also the dead animal. “Eight million horses and countless mules and donkeys died in the First World War. They were used to transport ammunition and supplies to the front and many died, not only from the horrors of shellfire but also in terrible weather and appalling conditions.”
*
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” ~ Antonio Gramsci
Oriana:
But is it humanly possible to “live without illusions”? Milosz may be right: true atheists are extremely rare.
*
“Three Amish Men in Ybor City, FL.” They make me think of Heidegger's "thrown-ness." We are thrown into a life we never chose. The most important things — where and when we are born, to what kind of parents — sheer circumstances, an “accident of birth.” If I happened to be born in an Amish community, would I be sufficiently like “the real me” to escape? A ludicrous question, I know. Might as well ask if I'd dream of beardless men.
*
“I want to give not only that which I am, but that which I might be if only I had the chance.” ~ Anzia Yezierska
*
NIETZSCHE AND MARX ON RELIGION
“The two great European narcotics: alcohol and Christianity.” ~ Nietzsche
It's the unexpectedness of the second narcotic that makes this a startling statement. Nietzsche is a master of the disruptive aphorism.
To my knowledge, Nietzsche wasn't familiar with Marx's "religion is the opium of the people" (Opium des Volkes), published in 1844 but hardly paid much attention to back then (if Marx had to depend on his income from publishing, he would have starved). Yet it may be assumed that intellectuals of the era had formed this opinion in one form or another, perceiving religion as a consolation favored by the poor and the desperate. “Your reward will be in heaven” and “Christ will dry every tear” were attractive promises that until fairly recently were not regarded as “pie in the sky.”
Does Nietzsche's observation still hold? When faced with an adversity (or, as a friend said, “Shit happens” is a translation of the First Noble Truth), some people drink, others pray, still others go to a therapist or a psychic (therapists themselves go to psychics), some meditate and seek an answer within — and now, increasing, many seek answers on the Internet.
It's interesting that I first remembered this quotation as “the two great American narcotics” — and, not sure who said it, I wondered if Oscar Wilde would have been so daring. Well, that's the way the brain works — instead of accuracy, it transforms a statement into what is relevant and more familiar to us.
By the way, it's unfair to Marx to always use only the short form of the quotation. Marx also saw religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
Another of Nietzsche’s memorable aphorisms on religion: “Faith: not wanting to know what is true.”
(By the way, my late husband liked to quote a little boy who said, “Religion is when you try to believe what you know is not really true.”)
Geertgen tot Sint Jons, St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness
Charles:
Notice his little sheep is a pet like a dog.
Oriana:
A good observation. This lamb is meant to symbolize Christ, but there's no denying its pet-like appearance.
*
SCHIZOPHRENIA AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
~ “Scientists at Harvard Medical School in Boston have uncovered important clues about what may cause schizophrenia. First signs of the disorder often appear in adolescence, and the team thinks they may have found the reason why. According to a study published this week in Nature, schizophrenia may be the result of overactive "brain pruning" caused by high levels of a molecule called complement component 4 (C4).
New Scientist explains that C4 is primarily known for the role it plays in immune system processes. In the blood, the molecule binds to unwanted microbes, signaling to immune cells that they should be destroyed. However, scientists found that C4 also plays a role in the brain, binding to synapses, which connect neurons, and signaling that they should be consumed by immune cells.
While all teenagers go through a process known as brain pruning, in which they lose synapses, scientists now believe that too many C4 molecules may cause too much pruning. According to New Scientist, postmortem studies have found that people with schizophrenia have fewer synapses than their peers. Harvard molecular biologist Steven McCarroll believes that risky C4 gene variants are responsible for over-pruning. “[The study] suggests that schizophrenia can result from a normal stage of teenage brain maturation gone wrong,” explains New Scientist.
Of course, schizophrenia is an incredibly complex condition, and it’s more than likely that other factors play a role in its onset as well. But the finding is a major breakthrough in the study of schizophrenia, linking the condition with immune system processes and presenting very promising future avenues of study.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/74572/scientists-have-new-theory-about-what-causes-schizophrenia
Oriana:
The immune system has been implicated in all kinds of diseases, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. The causation of schizophrenia appears to be multi-factorial, with genetics playing a major role.
Paul Klee: Strong Dream, 1929
*
HAVING HAD A DOG IN CHILDHOOD SEEMS TO LOWER THE RISK OF SCHIZOPHRENIA
"Serious psychiatric disorders have been associated with alterations in the immune system linked to environmental exposures in early life, and since household pets are often among the first things with which children have close contact, it was logical for us to explore the possibilities of a connection between the two," says Robert Yolken, M.D., chair of the Stanley Division of Pediatric Neurovirology and professor of neurovirology in pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, and lead author of a research paper recently posted online in the journal PLOS One.
In the study, Yolken and colleagues at Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore investigated the relationship between exposure to a household pet cat or dog during the first 12 years of life and a later diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. For schizophrenia, the researchers were surprised to see a statistically significant decrease in the risk of a person developing the disorder if exposed to a dog early in life. Across the entire age range studied, there was no significant link between dogs and bipolar disorder, or between cats and either psychiatric disorder.
According to the American Pet Products Association's most recent National Pet Owners Survey, there are 94 million pet cats and 90 million pet dogs in the United States. Previous studies have identified early life exposures to pet cats and dogs as environmental factors that may alter the immune system through various means, including allergic responses, contact with zoonotic (animal) bacteria and viruses, changes in a home's microbiome, and pet-induced stress reduction effects on human brain chemistry.
Some investigators, Yolken notes, suspect that this "immune modulation" may alter the risk of developing psychiatric disorders to which a person is genetically or otherwise predisposed.
Surprisingly, Yolken says, the findings suggests that people who are exposed to a pet dog before their 13th birthday are significantly less likely — as much as 24% — to be diagnosed later with schizophrenia.
"The largest apparent protective effect was found for children who had a household pet dog at birth or were first exposed after birth but before age 3," he says.
"There are several plausible explanations for this possible 'protective' effect from contact with dogs — perhaps something in the canine microbiome that gets passed to humans and bolsters the immune system against or subdues a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia," Yolken says.” ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191218153448.htm
Oriana:
Dogs are the best therapists — they help humans heal from trauma. Childhood trauma has been linked to increased risk of schizophrenia.
Animals in general seem to have a therapeutic effect, and should be used more in therapy. They are a great source of positive emotions. Studies have confirmed the therapeutic effect of animals on people in general, including those physically or mentally ill.
*
ending on beauty:
CUTTING LOOSE
Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.
Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.
Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path — but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.
~ William Stafford (dedicated to James Dickey)
*
Image: Charles Sherman, Bird Dance
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