*
THE SNOW MAN
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
~ Wallace Stevens
*
Oriana: THE UNIVERSE IS OUR PARENT, OUR FAMILY, OUR HOME
Some poems can be read a hundred times, and the delight in them only increases. For me “The Snow Man” is among such poems. It’s an example of the paradox of poetry: a poem can be about bleakness, yet be so rich that it makes us feel richer just for knowing it.
I don’t really want to specify any particular lines as my favorites: I’d have to quote the entire poem. But if forced to, I’d go for
One must have a mind of winter
. . .
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind
~ and of course the last stanza. But in terms of great language, “shagged with ice” strikes me as genius. “The distant glitter” of the winter sun makes me remember how very distant the sun used to feel in the northern latitudes — pale-white, if visible at all.
It’s been a very long time since I stood in a field of snow, contemplating the wonderful nothing. But I remember that I wasn’t afraid then, and I’m not afraid now. Nature has a healing tranquility even at its most bleak. We know we belong to that order of things, and mysteriously, at least in that moment, all is at it should be. There is no misery or poverty in that whiteness — only beauty.
So I do not read this classic poem in terms of bleakness. I read it in terms of belonging.
Buddha under snow*
I see Stevens’s Snow Man as a twin to “Gravelly Run” by A.R. Ammons. Both of them see the world as completely natural, with no gods and demons running the great cycles of nature. Ammons says:
somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees
. . .
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
. . . I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
I differ from Ammons (and possibly from Stevens) in that I don’t see myself as a stranger in this world. I see myself as a child of the universe just as much as the stones and trees (if I may steal from Desiderata). Yes, the world is completely natural, but the human mind of part of the universe, and not something radically different and foreign. Likewise the affection and empathy that’s expressed by all social animals evolved because cooperation makes us more effective.
Now, my mind could insert Hegel’s “Spirit” into the light in the pines, but I am thankful to have no such impulse. And speaking of “thankful,” just this morning I discovered, for the first time, the meaning of EUCHARISTIA, the Greek word from which get Eucharist. Unlike “hostia” (the origin of our “host”) it does not mean “victim” in the sense of a “sacrificial victim.” It means THANKSGIVING, being thankful, thankfulness.
Eucharist does not mean “transubstantiation.” It means “gratitude.”
A eucharistic meal was a feast of love (agape) and gratitude (eucharistia).
Imagine if priests and nuns encouraged us not toward false guilt over our wickedness (so enormous that Christ had to die for our sins), but toward . . . gratitude.
Every time we count our blessings, or simply feel joy (already a kind of gratitude), that’s our eucharist. I feel thankful for living in this beautiful world, for human and animal affection, and for the richness of culture in general, and for good books and great poems in particular. To feel communion with the world is to feel gratitude.
“Eucharistia” also reminds me of Charites, the Three Graces: Beauty, Joy, and Good Cheer.
I wonder if I’ll find a third poem to balance The Snow Man and Gravelly Run — one that doesn’t just acknowledge the natural order, but rejoices in the miracle of our consciousness being part of this power and beauty and glory. Perhaps somewhere in the sprawling opus of Whitman. But I’d love something as elegant and concise as The Snow Man.
Mary:
The feast of agape and eucharist is what I believe could be our salvation from all the griefs of history and incarnation. Gratitude exactly as love of the other. In "Braiding Sweetgrass" a Native American ecologist talks about the stance of gratitude as the best and basic connection between humanity and nature. Thankfulness and reciprocity, not greed and rapine.
*
The friend I lost last year, Una, once observed that there is a special quiet during winter nights, even without snow. Again I think again how beautiful solitude feels, how free. But the time between Christmas and New Year and the Feast of the Three Magi and is also a time when we celebrate “family values.” I like the way Christopher Reeves (the actor who played Superman until he became paralyzed) defined “family values”: “We are all family, and we all have value.”
That family includes all sentient beings. And, if we open up enough, it includes the universe.
Wishing you peace, joy, gratitude and affection every day of the year.
Mary:
The world is not here FOR us, but we are part of it and the endless dance, our gift that we can sing, and see the steps unfold, and maybe know something of the pattern we are making.
THE WONDERFUL EMPTINESS OF AMERICA
One of the things i love about the American West Coast is how uncrowded it is, on the whole. I still remember the first time I saw this sign in Nevada:
NO GAS OR FOOD
NEXT 160 MILES
I felt a rush of ecstasy. Perhaps I'm just wacky, or more Zen than I ever suspected, but I love those roads that seem to go nowhere. And until you’ve driven on those roads and seen those signs, I say you don’t understand a thing about America. The size. The emptiness. Self-reliance. Port-a-potties.
And of course driving off into the sunset.
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer House in Gdansk *
NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM’S LAST LETTER TO OSIP MANDELSTAM, 1938
Osia, my beloved, faraway sweetheart!
I have no words, my darling, to write this letter that you may never read, perhaps. I am writing in empty space. Perhaps you will come back and not find me here. Then this will be all you have to remember me by.
Osia, what a joy it was living together like children — all our squabbles and arguments, the games we played, and our love. Now I do not even look at the sky. If I see a cloud, who can I show it to?
Remember the way we brought back provisions to make our poor feasts in all the places where we pitched our tent like nomads? Remember the good taste of bread when we got it by a miracle and ate it together? And our last winter in Voronezh. Our happy poverty, and the poetry you wrote. I remember the time we were coming back once from the baths, when we bought some eggs or sausage, and a cart went by loaded with hay. It was still cold and I was freezing in my short jacket (but nothing like what we must suffer now: I know how cold you are). That day comes back to me now. I understand so clearly, and ache from the pain of it, that those winter days with all their troubles were the greatest and last happiness to be granted us in life.
My every thought is about you. My every tear and every smile is for you. I bless every day and hour of our bitter life together, my sweetheart, my companion, my blind guide in life.
Like two blind puppies we were, nuzzling each other and feeling so good together. And how fevered your poor head was, and how madly we frittered away the days of our life. What joy it was, and how we always knew what joy it was.
Life can last so long. How hard and long for each of us to die alone. Can this fate be for us who are inseparable? Puppies and children, did we deserve this? Did you deserve this, my angel? Everything goes on as before. I know nothing. Yet I know everything – each day and hour of your life are plain and clear to me as in a delirium.
You came to me every night in my sleep, and I kept asking what had happened, but you did not reply.
In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. The people with me were total strangers. When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are.
When I woke up, I said to Shura: ‘Osia is dead.’ I do not know whether you are still alive, but from the time of that dream, I have lost track of you. I do not know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I could never tell you how much I love you. I cannot tell you even now. I speak only to you, only to you. You are with me always, and I who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears – now I weep and weep and weep.
It’s me: Nadia. Where are you?
Farewell.
Nadia
*
This letter was written in October 1938. Osip Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, in a transit camp near Vladivostok.
Oriana:
I'm especially struck by the image of two blind puppies nuzzling each other. Nadezhda was the more devoted of the two, but we needn’t feel sorry for her: it appears that in a relationship, the one who loves more gains more happiness than the one who is more the receiver. As Auden says, “Let the more loving one be me.”
I am also struck by Nadia’s gratitude for everything the couple had together — their “happy poverty.” She was the one who remembered even insignificant-seeming details, like the cart loaded with hay that went by.
Their marriage was sacred to her: “Osia, what a joy it was living together like children — all our squabbles and arguments, the games we played, and our love. Now I do not even look at the sky. If I see a cloud, who can I show it to?”
Osip Mandelstam and Nadezhda Mandelstam monument in Amsterdam sculpted by Hanneke de Munck, unveiled in September 2015*
WORDS THAT CAME INTO ENGLISH DURING THE TWENTIES
WHEE as an exclamation of exhilaration; GAGA (adj.) "crazy, silly," probably from French; ACTIVISM in the political sense of "advocating energetic action;" RITZY; REMILITARIZE; PARKING LOT; COUNTERPRODUCTIVE "having the opposite of the desired effect;" FUNDAMENTALISM in the religious sense (also BORN-AGAIN, as an adjective, of Protestant Christians); BALL AND CHAIN in the slang sense of "one's wife;" NAH reflecting a drawn-out American English pronunciation of "no;" EINSTEIN as a type-name for a person of genius (he had achieved world celebrity in 1919 through media accounts of his work in theoretical physics); FAN MAIL in the Hollywood sense; BUBBLY as a slang noun meaning "champagne;" NITE as an arbitrary respelling of "night;" RAZZ "to hiss or deride" as a shortened and altered variant of "raspberry" in its rhyming slang sense.
In clothing we have T-SHIRT (so called in reference to the shape it makes when laid out flat; "t-shirt" is thus incorrect); SWIMSUIT; and STRAPLESS, in reference to gowns.
Jazz slang began to percolate into the mainstream and yielded up SOLID in the sense of "wonderful, remarkable;" CAT (n.) in the slang sense of "fellow, guy;" and LONG-HAIR (n.) "intellectual," especially in musical tastes, "devotee of classical music."
Prohibition began (Allen's book is the only one I know that makes sense of it, insofar as it attempts to answer the question, "what the hell were people thinking when they believed this would work?"). Many of the words associated with it are older than the period, such as SPEAKEASY and BOOTLEGGER.
In science, PROTON was coined in 1920 by English physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) from noun use of Greek proton, neuter of protos "first," on analogy of electron; supposedly because hydrogen was hypothesized as a constituent of all the elements.
A once-popular phrase that rolled out in 1920 was TAKE A POWDER for "scram, vanish"; it was a common phrase as a doctor's instruction, so perhaps the colloquial use is from the notion of taking a laxative medicine or a sleeping powder, with the result that one has to leave in a hurry (or, on another guess, from a magician's magical powder, which made things disappear).
F. Scott Fitzgerald made his debut in 1920, and a number of words seem to have first been attested in his book about the dissipated post-World War I generation of youth, "This Side of Paradise." Among them is PETTING (n.) in the sense of "amorous caressing, foreplay," and the rum-based drink DAIQUIRI, which is said in drink-lore to have been invented in 1896 by a U.S. mining engineer in the Cuban district so named. Fitzgerald's book also gave us WICKED in the ironic slang sense of "wonderful:"
"Tell 'em to play 'Admiration'!" shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf," and they sailed off in the muddled crowd.
Fitzgerald probably didn't invent these words; he wasn't writing "A Clockwork Orange." But he got them into the public eye.
A notorious word of the year was NORMALCY, though it wasn't a new word. It dates to at least 1857 in mathematics for "condition of being at right angles, state or fact of being normal in geometry." Before 1920 it had been used mostly in the mathematical sense; the word preferred for "a normal situation" was NORMALITY.
Still over the horizon, but beginning to glimmer, was a noun that had begun to rise in Italy. Its final English form was a few years away, but in 1920 it began to appear in English-language publications in its Italian form, “fascismo."
(no link was provided)
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his daughter Scottie*
“One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.”~ John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous
Oriana:
On the other hand, there is also a rich vocabulary of hostility and contempt, so language is not all sweetness and light.
WOMEN ARE HAPPIER WITH LES ATTRACTIVE MEN, AND SOME OTHER RECENT FINDINGS ABOUT SEX AND MARRIAGE
1. Women are happier with less attractive men.
Maybe all those CBS shows about schlubby leading men with hot wives were onto something: A 2017 study out of Florida State University found that in successful relationships, the woman is generally more “aesthetically gifted” than her partner ― and that women are happier with less attractive men.
In the survey, a group of 113 newlywed couples were rated on their individual looks. The researchers found that if the male was less attractive than his wife, he was much more likely to compensate with gifts, sexual favors and doing chores around the house. Unsurprisingly, that lead to higher marital satisfaction for the wife.
“The husbands seemed to be basically more committed, more invested in pleasing their wives when they felt that they were getting a pretty good deal,” said the study.
2. If your ex wants to be friends, they might be a psychopath.
The next time your ex asks “can we still be friends?” you might want to be wary. In 2016, researchers from Oakland University in Michigan found that people with the so-called “dark triad” personality traits ― like narcissism and psychopathy ― often keep their exes around for calculating, self-serving purposes.
A desire for continued sexual access, financial help or a need to still exert some control over a former partner were among key reasons for maintaining contact, especially for men, according to the study.
3. Male gay couples stay together longer than heterosexual ones.
With gay marriage comes gay divorce? Social scientists had a whole new demographic to report on as same-sex marriage was legalized across the country as of 2015.
In 2018, a study by The Williams Institute at UCLA examining same-sex and heterosexual couples over 12 years found that gay couples were the least likely to break up. Lesbians were most likely to break up and straight couples were somewhere in the middle: female-female couples (29.3%) were twice as likely as male-male couples (14.5%) to terminate their relationships, compared to 18.6% of male-female couples.
4. We might be in the middle of a millennial “sex recession.”
In December 2018, the Atlantic ran a cover story with a hyper-dramatic headline: “The Sex Recession: Why Young People Are Retreating From Intimacy ― And What This Means For Society.” Drawing on a 2017 study led by psychologist Jean M. Twenge and data from the General Social Survey (GSS), the story suggested that today’s young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations.
People in their early 20s were two-and-a-half times as likely to be abstinent than Gen Xers were at that age, the story said, and 15% reported having had no sex since they reached adulthood.
It’s not just millennials whose sex lives have taken a hit: From the late 1990s to 2014, sex for all adults dropped from 62 to 54 times a year, on average.
As an article published by UC Berkeley noted, however, a drop in sexual encounters from 62 to 54 times per year means that the average adult is still having sex more than once a week.
5. Most of us are trying to date out of our league.
According to a study published in August 2018 in the journal Science Advances, users of online dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people out of their league.
Researchers reviewed thousands of messages exchanged on an unnamed “popular, free online-dating service” between nearly 200,000 straight men and women.
After a month of careful observation, they found most online daters tend to message people exactly 25% more desirable than they are (with desirability determined by how many messages a user received during the month).
“Our study suggests that people are pursuing partners who are a little more desirable than they are. Women are a bit less aspirational than men,” Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study, told HuffPost.
6. Men having affairs are more likely to break their penis.
Men, be wary of those 5 p.m.-to-7 p.m. relationships with someone who’s not your spouse: That casual affair might result in a fractured peen.
According to a 2011 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, cheating may make a man more likely to suffer from penile fractures. Researchers at the University of Maryland Medical Center looked at men who “broke” their penises and found that half were having extramarital affairs at the time. (Relax, it’s not actually a break, it’s a rupturing of one of the tube-like chambers in the penis.)
What makes extramarital sex so risky? (Besides getting caught by your partner.)
“If a guy is having an extramarital affair or he’s rushed or in a weird place, the situation is different [somehow],” lead researcher Andrew Kramer told HuffPost at the time. “I think the time you don’t see a lot of men fracturing their penises is in the bedroom with his wife that he’s been married to for a number of years.”
7. If you want to get married, your best bet is to marry between the ages of 25 and 32.
Want to get married and stay that way? Don’t rush to get hitched when you’re young ― but don’t dawdle, either. Once you’re past your early 30s when you wed, the risk of a divorce down the road starts to creep up again, according to research that came out of the University of Utah in 2015.
Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the school, looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth and found that while the risk of a marriage ending in divorce declines steadily as marital ages go from the teens into the late 20s, it then starts to rise again. Once you reach the age of 32 before getting married, the odds of getting a divorce once you do increase by 5%. In other words, the sweet spot to get married statistically speaking is from age 25 to 32.
Some good general news about the state of marriage from the decade? The divorce rate is going down, partially because millennials are waiting to partner up ― or not partnering up at all. Hard to get divorced when you aren’t even getting married!
8. Divorce can be potentially deadly for men.
In the most Debbie Downer divorce research of the decade, researchers at the University of Nebraska found that divorced and unmarried men have higher rates of mortality and are more prone to substance abuse and depression than married men. The researchers also found that divorced men are more likely to partake in risky activities such as abusing alcohol and drugs, and divorced or separated men have a suicide rate that is 39% higher than that of married men. Depression is also more common for divorced men than married men, and divorced men undergo psychiatric care 10 times more often than married men do.
9. That sexual afterglow you feel after sex lasts 48 hours.
You’re generally in a better mood after sex, thanks to a flood of endorphins and other feel-good hormones released post-climax ― aka, sexual afterglow.
10. A close relationship with your in-laws may change your divorce odds.
Happy wife in-laws, happy life? In November 2012, a 26-year longitudinal study released by the University of Michigan found that when a husband reported having a close relationship with his wife’s parents, the couple’s risk of divorce decreased by 20%. On the other hand, when a wife reported having a close relationship with her husband’s parents, the couple’s risk of divorce increased by 20%. Why the difference?
Researcher Terry Orbuch told the Wall Street Journal that she believes that many wives eventually view their in-laws’ input as meddlesome, while husbands tend to take their in-laws’ actions less personally.
11. Couples who share chores have better sex lives.
Pitching housework to your partner seems supremely unsexy, right? Next time you do it, mention this study finding: In 2015, researchers from the University of Alberta found that couples who divvied up chores had higher relationship satisfaction and had more sex than couples who didn’t mutually contribute.
“A division of household labor perceived to be fair ensures that partners feel respected while carrying out the tasks of daily life,” lead researcher Matt Johnson wrote. “Completing housework may or may not be enjoyable, but knowing that a partner is pulling his weight prevents anger and bitterness, creating more fertile ground in which a (satisfying) sexual encounter may occur.” ~
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/love-and-relationship-studies_l_5e0a1e22e4b0843d360a09c9?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&utm_source=main_fb&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0wiAHXbNM-_yzz07FfPyIuEOqY59_T1k028sIyP8KMcnuQiWUqapQQO3Y&fbclid=IwAR1RzdUImGcBtc6evD2NnMxCBkx6_NBR22_CFnHnJkB1CwPx3RK1D6hliK0
Couple in the street in moonlight André Poffé (1911-1990)
"The
tragedy of marriage is that women think men will change and they
don't, and men think women won't change but they do." ~ from a BBC show
(sounds like Oscar Wilde, doesn't it? But no; it was said by a little
known writer, Leonard Cyril Deighton.)
Oriana:
In marriages that aren't a tragedy, both people change but only gain respect for their now more mature partner. In any case, it's always a different marriage every 5-7 years or so.
Oriana:
In marriages that aren't a tragedy, both people change but only gain respect for their now more mature partner. In any case, it's always a different marriage every 5-7 years or so.
*
“IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE”: GRATITUDE NOT AS SELF-LOVE, BUT AS LOVE OF OTHERS
. . . if there’s a Heaven, it’s a movie theater where the film of our life is perpetually playing. More moving, still, is the idea that such a movie is one we could be proud of.”
~ “~ “Now that I’ve seen Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s A Wonderful Life countless times, I can only imagine Heaven as a thankless military bureaucracy.
Consider Clarence, the AS-2, or “angel, second-class” played by the character actor Henry Travers. When first we see him, he’s been dispatched by God to squire Jimmy Stewart through visions of a yuletide netherworld. He strikes us as perhaps a little homely for Heaven, with his gentle Muppet face and billowy eyebrows. His clothes look thrifty, even threadbare. He has a single shirt to his name—the same one he died in—and a single ambition: to gain a rank and his proverbial wings. Practically speaking, this means he has to work on Christmas.
Perhaps this fixation is depressing, but It’s a Wonderful Life is often a depressing movie. A family film about suicidal ideation, it follows a loan officer named George Bailey, played with easy charm and toxic bile by Stewart. George’s childhood, like his adulthood, is blighted by humiliation. Kids scream at him: go to work, slave! Adults slap him until his ears bleed. He grows up and dreams of going to college, or to Europe, or anywhere at all. Out of loyalty to his father, he takes over the family business, the Bailey Building and Loan. Out of intense sexual frustration, he marries a college freshman played by Donna Reed. He has a carload of children, perhaps out of necessity. He never goes to college, or to Europe, and a childhood accident prevents him even from going to war. At best, he might go to prison, after a bungling relative implicates him in a financial scandal.
Which brings us to Clarence, and the movie’s famous fantasy sequence. On a snowy Christmas night, George stares down into black waters and contemplates suicide. Suddenly, Clarence appears, standing beside him with a menacing closeness. To restore George’s faith in life, Clarence shows him what the world would be like had he never been born. There, he encounters his wife transformed—horror of horrors!—into a librarian. The virtuous Bedford Falls, renamed Potterville, is a hotbed of drinking and gambling. His neighbors are drunks and delinquents, possibly prostitutes. Following this grim vision, George, like Scrooge before him, is reformed. Rather than jumping from the bridge, he runs hatless through the town, proclaiming his love to all manner of people and places: “Merry Christmas, Ernie!” “Merry Christmas, Library!”
The sentimentality here is shameless and characteristic Capra. His other most famous films also sing the virtues of little lives in little places—think of Jimmy Stewart’s first tortured turn as the title character and political neophyte in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And while I’m unfailingly delighted by his screaming, “Merry Christmas, you wonderful Building and Loan,” the scene often strikes me as a moralizing Goodnight Moon, with George naming all the institutions that have tethered him to his mediocrity and misery. What restores George’s optimism in this scene isn’t a sudden recollection of life’s pleasures, but the fear of how much worse it could be. It’s the suggestion that life is a duty rather than a joy, wearily performed for the benefit of others.
This, too, is true Capra. For all their unvarnished sentiment, his movies paint the world over with cynicism. In Capra’s vision, even life in heaven is a poisoned by ambition, while life on Earth is harried by greed and corruption. The film, perhaps, is more about thanklessness than gratitude. George, despite his Eagle Scout earnestness, still needs divine intervention to appreciate his life. So, too, does he need to make a soul-journey into the nightmare world where friends and family have been plunged into unwitting, perpetual mourning. These scenes are animated by a gentle sadism, and a belief that perverse tours of the imagination can soothe the spirit. Perhaps this is true. At our frequent worst, gratitude isn’t something we feel so much as calculate, tallying our advantages to weigh against the miseries of others. In the privacy of our own minds, our gratitude can bear a family resemblance to schadenfreude—a secret reassurance that others will always have it worse.
But, as I have watched and rewatched the film, it seems to me that Capra’s point is that real gratitude should be difficult. Consider the scene about halfway through the movie when the wicked financer Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, offers to hire George at a salary of $10,000 a year. The offer, we know, is in bad faith—a ploy to wipe out the Bailey Building and Loan, so Potter can further exploit the working classes without the interference of liberal-minded competitors. For a moment, though, George forgets himself. He considers the offer, flush with the possibilities of wealth, travel, prestige. And then—and not for the last time—he is restored to himself. He remembers that Potter, simpering across his giant desk like a malevolent Winston Churchill, is a fat-cat and a crony. “You’re a warped, frustrated old man,” George fumes, and recalls his father: he “was no businessman, but he died a richer man than you’ll ever be!”
Often, the suggestion to be grateful can sound like a suggestion to be complacent: to accept thing as they are, because they could always be worse; to accept what we’re given, lest we get even less. As Ehrenreich wrote in a 2016 op-ed for the New York Times, this is the gratitude preached by celebrities and pop psychology, and which is, at bottom, a form of “self-love.” But in Potter’s office, we see gratitude practiced not as the love of oneself but as a love of others. We see someone refuse the given in favor of the good.
It’s A Wonderful Life suggests gratitude isn’t a feeling so much as the difficult work of discerning and defending value. Perhaps this is why gratitude seems like the least Hollywood of qualities. Famously, It’s A Wonderful Life bombed when it first premiered. Its popularity grew only gradually in the following decades, through television specials every Holiday season. We aren’t used to movies that advocate exacting standards and a strenuous elevation of what’s right over what’s compromised or merely second-rate. For movies to do so as practice would mean, after all, that they’d be often advocating against themselves. Hollywood exists to stoke fresh desires rather than stimulate gratitude. Recent Christmas movies like Krampus threaten to bloat into franchises, functioning as trailers for their own inevitable sequels.
Against this backdrop, It’s A Wonderful Life remains remarkably self-contained. It’s impossible to imagine it being remade, if only because its enduring success begs the question of why it would ever need to. The film’s very history is exemplary of its spirit, and Jimmy Stewart never embodied George Bailey more fully than when he protested the film’s colorization before Congress in 1987. Of course, it takes gratitude—that is, attention and sensitivity—to recognize the worth of a black-and-white film from 1946.
This is to say that the gratitude espoused is as much a way of evaluating life as a way of evaluating movies. The more I watch the film, the more I suspect that it’s a movie that, in some small way, is about movies—about what they can do at their best. Notice that Clarence, from his outpost in Heaven, meets George Bailey in the same way that we do: through film. George’s childhood unspools before his and our eyes at the same time.
https://lithub.com/real-gratitude-shouldnt-be-easy-on-its-a-wonderful-life/?fbclid=IwAR0tfYCWTvIPUrWvi270UFYCopGnVhqR_D2AuNsish65FZhki17-yQQKHfA
Oriana:
I know: there is a contradiction between the opening and the ending ("a thankless military bureaucracy" vs "a movie theater where the movie of our life is perpetually playing"). Perhaps it's both. But the author seems to slowly move in attitude toward the latter option.
To me the most striking idea is that gratitude should be inclusive, collective. Life isn’t just our private joys — it’s perhaps more so our duties to others. It’s the Victorian idea that we are here not to feel good, but to do good. Fortunately, being social animals, we tend to enjoy helping another. Doing good usually makes us feel good as well.
Obviously this is not a foolproof mechanism. We can be manipulated both into excessive self-sacrifice or, in the worst case, learn to exploit the kindness and trust of others. “The devil made me do it” is not a convincing explanation anymore, but neither is “my brain made me do it” (it did, but why?) All we seem to know is that much depends on the amount of love we’re given in childhood. I like the idea that we should “recycle” all the love that we’ve received.
In any case, more than ever now we need to realize that being able to give is a great privilege — and that if we take, it’s not enough to just say thank you; we also need to pay it forward. And the mental experiment presented by this dream is at least as useful as the Scrooge’s Christmas visions. How would things be without us? If we can immediately think of good things that wouldn't exist, that’s a good sign.
John Guzlowski:
What I like about Frank Capra is that he’s not afraid to tell us what’s wrong in America.
Oriana:
And yet here we have a "good banker." Another movie that I think is amazingly fearless is "The Best Years of Our Lives." And one of the main characters is indeed a banker who stands up for the little guy.
I think Capra also desperately wants to show that the little guy can win — if others unite behind him and have a strong sense of decency.
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PURPOSE-DRIVEN ACTIVITIES VERSUS LIMITLESS PROCESS
~ “Arthur Schopenhauer is notorious for preaching the futility of desire. That getting what you want could fail to make you happy would not have surprised him at all. On the other hand, not having it is just as bad. For Schopenhauer, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you get what you want, your pursuit is over. You are aimless, flooded with a ‘fearful emptiness and boredom’, as he put it in The World as Will and Representation (1818). Life needs direction: desires, projects, goals that are so far unachieved. And yet this, too, is fatal. Because wanting what you do not have is suffering. In staving off the void by finding things to do, you have condemned yourself to misery. Life ‘swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents’.
Schopenhauer’s picture of human life might seem unduly bleak. Often enough, midlife brings with it failure or success in cherished projects: you have the job you worked for many years to get, the partner you hoped to meet, the family you meant to start – or else you don’t. Either way, you look for new directions. But the answer to achieving your goals, or giving them up, feels obvious: you simply make new ones. Nor is the pursuit of what you want pure agony. Revamping your ambitions can be fun.
Still, I think there is something right in Schopenhauer’s dismal conception of our relationship with our ends, and that it can illuminate the darkness of midlife. Taking up new projects, after all, simply obscures the problem. When you aim at a future goal, satisfaction is deferred: success has yet to come. But the moment you succeed, your achievement is in the past. Meanwhile, your engagement with projects subverts itself. In pursuing a goal, you either fail or, in succeeding, end its power to guide your life. No doubt you can formulate other plans. The problem is not that you will run out of projects (the aimless state of Schopenhauer’s boredom), it’s that your way of engaging with the ones that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and thus expel them from your life. When you pursue a goal, you exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.
Hence one common figure of the midlife crisis: the striving high-achiever, obsessed with getting things done, who is haunted by the hollowness of everyday life. When you are obsessed with projects, ceaselessly replacing old with new, satisfaction is always in the future. Or the past. It is mortgaged, then archived, but never possessed. In pursuing goals, you aim at outcomes that preclude the possibility of that pursuit, extinguishing the sparks of meaning in your life.
The question is what to do about this. For Schopenhauer, there is no way out: what I am calling a midlife crisis is simply the human condition. But Schopenhauer was wrong. In order to see his mistake, we need to draw distinctions among the activities we value: between ones that aim at completion, and ones that don’t.
Adapting terminology from linguistics, we can say that ‘telic’ activities – from ‘telos’, the Greek word for purpose – are ones that aim at terminal states of completion and exhaustion. You teach a class, get married, start a family, earn a raise. Not all activities are like this, however. Others are ‘atelic’: there is no point of termination at which they aim, or final state in which they have been achieved and there is no more to do. Think of listening to music, parenting, or spending time with friends. They are things you can stop doing, but you cannot finish or complete them. Their temporality is not that of a project with an ultimate goal, but of a limitless process.
If the crisis diagnosed by Schopenhauer turns on excessive investment in projects, then the solution is to invest more fully in the process, giving meaning to your life through activities that have no terminal point: since they cannot be completed, your engagement with them is not exhaustive. It will not subvert itself. Nor does it invite the sense of frustration that Schopenhauer scorns in unsatisfied desire — the sense of being at a distance from one’s goal, so that fulfillment is always in the future or the past.
We should not give up on our worthwhile goals. Their achievement matters. But we should meditate, too, on the value of the process. It is no accident that the young and the old are generally more satisfied with life than those in middle age. Young adults have not embarked on life-defining projects; the aged have such accomplishments behind them. That makes it more natural for them to live in the present: to find value in atelic activities that are not exhausted by engagement or deferred to the future, but realized here and now. It is hard to resist the tyranny of projects in midlife, to find a balance between the telic and atelic. But if we hope to overcome the midlife crisis, to escape the gloom of emptiness and self-defeat, that is what we have to do.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-schopenhauer-s-thought-can-illuminate-a-midlife-crisis?utm_source=pocket-newtab
I wish the headline didn't use the term “Midlife Crisis.” I find that what the article describes applies to finishing any big project, regardless of the stage of life. The exhilaration gives way to that “lost” feeling.
And yes, based on both personal experience and what I have witnessed: older age makes us appreciate process-type activities more — just taking a walk, talking with a friend.
Even when the activity does have a terminal point. e.g. right now I'm doing some sewing, I don't feel any hurry about it. It's just not that important that whatever I'm doing get done; my enjoyment of the activity has become more important.
The first time I experienced the exhilaration of working on a big project was when I began to learn English in earnest. I wanted to gain as complete a mastery as possible, so I started devoting considerable time to studying the language. And I loved working very hard at it, giving myself whole-heartedly to my goal. I loved watching myself have that kind of self-discipline when it came to something quite difficult. I’ll never forget how happy I felt.
And then, as any Buddhist could have predicted, the crash into emptiness.
Then poetry worked for me the same way. I was elated to see my progress during the years when I was truly becoming a better poet. And this, I thought, was at last the lifelong project that would never run out. I also didn’t realize that it took special life circumstances; when those circumstances changed, and I no longer had the mental space that poetry voraciously demands, I was again in a depressing void. This empty feeling is quite familiar to writers, film-makers, or anyone else who works basically on self-initiated projects. The time between the completion of the old project and the start of a new one (if a new one is ever found) is sheer misery.
As for relaxing, well . . . for people who love to work more than anything else in life, “relaxing” (other than sleep after a day of satisfying work) is not very satisfying.
For me salvation from this boom-bust cycle came by turning to the “ephemeral” — what the author of the article would call “atelic” (perhaps “non-telic” would be better). A visual artist once remarked, “You can always sketch . . . it doesn’t take inspiration.” There is a kind of writing that is like sketching. You could even call it “sketching with words.” For me the kind of commentary I post on my Poetry Salon and in this blog is that ephemeral activity that gives pleasure without leading to some terminal point. There is no big goal ahead. It’s ephemeral, of the moment.
It doesn’t produce the kind of high that telic activity does. However, like a good talk with a friend, it creates a feeling of contentment.
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I read this article after seeing “Knives Out,” which I found mildly satisfying at best (perhaps it takes the British to give us great detective stories). I'm bringing up the movie because something in it related to the telic/atelic divide. Marta, the lovely nurse and companion, is the only one who can beat the rich guy at the game of Go. She explains, “I don’t play to win. My aim is to create a beautiful pattern.”
Mary:
The proper choice between purpose-driven, actions with a finite and determined end, a product, and continuous process can be seen in the difference between western christianity, where history is basically over, the end already determined, all done except for the waiting, and the dancing gods of hinduism engaged in continuous creation. An easy choice, it seems to me, without the barren acre between one finished project and the next. The joy is not in the end, but in getting there.
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“He is on the track of Canaan all his life; it’s incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. The dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is human life.” ~ Franz Kafka, quoted by Harold Bloom in “Ruin the Sacred Truths.”
Oriana:
But I find a certain consolation in the thought that even Moses “failed.” And no, it wouldn’t do to tell Moses that “it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.” For Moses it was definitely about the destination.
Let’s face it: most of our dreams do NOT come true, and if they do, suffering may follow, not the joy we expected. As Teresa of Avila remarked, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than over the unanswered prayers.”
But tears aren’t shed over activities that aren’t goal-oriented — the non-telic, “process” activities. Ideally, art should be a non-telic activity — concentrate on the process, let the poem or sculpture simply emerge when ready.
And thus, without even trying, you've entered the Promised Land. Or rather, to change metaphors, you are tasting the fruit from the Tree of Life.
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“Poetry is everywhere, it just needs editing.” ~ James Tate
COLDEST PLACE ON THE EARTH
Edward: ~ “Which town is the coldest in the world? With an extreme subarctic climate, Oymyakon, Russia, is known as the coldest place in the world. It also known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, the other being the Verkhoyansk. The ground there is permanently frozen. In 1924, Russian scientist Sergey Obrychev registered the lowest temperature −71.2 °C (−96.2 °F) recorded at Oymyakon’s weather station. This is the lowest recorded temperature for any permanently inhabited location on Earth. Only Antarctica has recorded lower official temperatures (−128.6 °F), recorded at Vostok Station on 21 July 1983.”~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRbaAaJgW0A
Grandfather Frost, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus.Mary:
I love his outfit!!
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“CAPTURE” AS THE UNDERLYING MECHANISM OF MENTAL ILLNESS (David Kesller)
I first heard about this almost 20 years ago: "All mental disorders stem from paying attention to the wrong thing(s)." Kessler broadens this to a special kind of intense selective attention (which can be to something positive). And "capture" builds on previous capture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=uaPqYWHiHcA&feature=emb_logo
~ “The writer David Foster Wallace killed himself at the age of 46, after decades of struggling with depression. For all his extraordinary talent and success, he could not pry himself away from the cast of mind that wound up convincing him that he’d be better off dead. “Jumping out of a burning building,” his mother tells David A. Kessler in his new book “Capture.” “That’s the way I view David’s suicide.”
The case of David Foster Wallace, says Kessler, is a tragic instance of “capture”: his Big Idea about how to conceptualize the mind and the brain. “ ‘Depression’ is a label used to describe a group of symptoms. It is not a cause,” Kessler reminds us. And where psychiatry has failed to illuminate, capture offers a new lens through which to understand human behavior.
Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has spent much of his career researching the ways in which human will can be so inexplicably hijacked, as his book “The End of Overeating” shows. With “Capture,” he offers the intriguing idea that one brain-based mechanism underlies a wide range of behaviors from suicide to addiction to artistic obsession. “The theory of capture is composed of three basic elements: narrowing of attention, perceived lack of control and change in affect, or emotional state,” he writes.
And who among us hasn’t experienced this kind of mental vise grip, this total preoccupation that reshapes our lives in its image? This is capture, says Kessler, and it is, according to him, what drove John Belushi to disappear into drug addiction, and Virginia Woolf to walk into the river. But capture can also turn us toward constructive, even exalted, purposes, as it did for Martin Luther, when he set in motion the Protestant Reformation, or Bill Wilson, when he experienced the spiritual awakening that helped him recover from alcoholism and found Alcoholics Anonymous. It might be possible, Kessler says, to learn to harness our own capture circuitry.
In our current moment, there is perhaps no more relevant a subject than attention — that most precious of all our possessions. Kessler’s contribution is to lay out case after case of people in the throes of single-mindedness. Many of these stories are about famous figures; he also extends the notion of capture to the infamous, like Ted Kaczynski and Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, arguing that they represent the dark side of the capture moon.
For a book positing a new “biological mechanism” through which to understand a wide swath of human experience, there is a surprising emphasis on the anecdotal, with only a sprinkling of science. Kessler invokes such concepts as Hebb’s rule, that staple of Neuroscience 101 classes everywhere, which says that our neurons get into the habit of listening to those neurons they’ve heard from before, forming patterns of reaction that are reinforced through repetition. This, Kessler suggests, might be the physical basis for capture. He doesn’t provide the usual evidence from brain-imaging labs that shows that the brain “lights up” in whatever configuration supports the author’s particular point.
Instead, Kessler’s book reads like an ode to the great romantic scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries, men like Sigmund Freud and A.R. Luria, who offered vivid case studies of single subjects in the absence of empirical data. That approach is problematic in an age of physical proof, of results drawn from large groups of subjects averaged out to one impersonal number. Without this kind of data, you are left feeling that Kessler has not really substantiated his Big Idea. On the other hand, it is refreshing to read about actual people, drawn in full color, in a book about human behavior. In our struggle to understand the brain, both perspectives — the scientific and the personal — are indispensable. Both must be brought to bear. Ultimately, nothing less will do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/books/review/capture-unraveling-the-mystery-of-mental-suffering-by-david-a-kessler.html
Mary:
The theory of "capture" is actually a good fit for David Foster Wallace, whose writing has been called "hysterical realism." His enormously lengthy and multilayered work, "Infinite Jest," explores many things, but some of the most central are addiction, attention, and pain. The deadly "entertainment" that captures its viewers so completely they can't turn away, just continue to watch it in eternal repetitions until they die of starvation, dehydration and immobility…is a particularly horrible picture of what seems both execution and suicide. It is eventually revealed that this irresistible and murderous film is of a blurry image of a woman from an infant's point of view, a mother, who is tenderly and endlessly repeating "I'm so sorry." A mother apologizing for bringing one into a world of constant existential pain.
This is interesting also in light of the title, "Infinite Jest," a quote from Hamlet, who wanted many things from his mother, certainly including a sincere apology for causing so much of what he suffers. Wallace thought the problems of addiction, of dependence on all forms of entertainment and distraction from the suffering of being, could be solved by strategies of endurance, attention, and a transformative creativity that could remake us as fully human beings.
The theory of Capture would judge that his focus was actually reinforcement of feelings and behaviors that were a death sentence — no matter the power of his intelligence and creativity, no matter how he worked and struggled, no matter how well he was loved or honored. Infinite Jest is huge, fascinating, an enchantment, overwhelming, brilliant, funny, tragic and wise. Also manic and obsessive in its very form. It has hundreds of footnotes, many of which have their own footnotes. It rushes on, exuberant and unstoppable as the pressured speech of mania. He can't leave anything out. There is desperation here.
And when I saw what he took on in his next project, the one he feared he couldn't finish, and didn't, I thought…oh, what a fatal choice!! Pale King is a book about accountants at the IRS, about boredom, the pale dead columns of endless numbers, with men bowed over them in rows of desks, like monks in a medieval scriptorium. He apparently thought such intense concentration could act like a type of meditation, that would allow transcendence to a zen like release from the constant pain of existence. A transcendence as improbable at last as his own survival.
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“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” ~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
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From another source
~ "The theory of capture is composed of three elements: Something seizes our attention; it changes how we feel; [and] there’s a perception of a loss of control.
I became convinced there was a common mechanism underlying many of our emotional struggles and mental illnesses. If you look at someone who’s depressed, there’s a constant attentional shift toward negative: I’m a fraud, I’m a failure, I’m no good.
Can we escape our traps by thinking or willing our way out?
If you look at the traditions of Buddhism — they try to decrease your emotional reactivity. What antidepressants do is reduce emotional reactivity. I’m convinced that the best way to get release from capture is to find something more positive that can be more meaningful that captures you.
In the book, for one character it was music, for another it was running, for [Winston] Churchill it was painting. You don’t necessarily control what you’re captured by, but you can put yourself in a position to be captured by certain things.
Is the idea of capture relevant to the current Presidential campaign?
What are some of the candidates playing with? They’re playing with highly salient stimuli. Whether it’s the decline of America or scapegoats or being cheated by others. Leadership can either capture people with a negative image of the world or a positive image. Both will work, but [the negative] is scary, with a direct line to violence.
Do companies use capture to manipulate us?
Making things salient, isn’t that the goal of advertising?
https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/22/david-kessler-capture-theory-mind/
Oriana:
Having once been captured by long-term depression, I think I understand Kessler's suggestion that you need to find something better and more meaningful to capture you. I threw myself into work. After a while I discovered I didn't have to be obsessive about it, but those first months were certainly exhausting.
And, like many people before me, I discovered a simple truth: Work works.
I love the way Rilke put it: "To work is to live without dying."
Also, I'm grateful for that remark made by a woman scientist at a biomedical conference: Mental illness stems from paying attention to the wrong thing.
I like this "for the sake of your other selves" argument. "I am large; I contain multitudes."
It also reminds me of Baal Shem Tov's "If I fall, the one I am becoming will catch the one who is falling."
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THE POWER OF “YET”
~ “Adding the word "yet" to pessimistic or doomful predictions often gets a patient's attention and introduces the possibility that their strong beliefs in a negative future outcome may not be entirely accurate.
"I know that I will never find someone to marry!" becomes "I haven't found someone to marry, yet." "We will never be able to work things out!" becomes "we have not been able to work things out, yet." No, there is nothing magical about adding this word, however it does introduce a measure of hope into the proceedings without which a change effort may not fare well. Simply stated, people work toward change differently when they believe that change can actually occur.
Yet. Perhaps you might find this word a useful addition to your own emotional vocabulary, especially when you observe pessimism interfering with your ability to be reasonably hopeful and optimistic when an outcome has yet to occur. It might even influence your attitude about an important issue in your life and lead to actions in behalf of meaningful change.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moments-matter/202001/the-power-yet
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RILKE’S HELPLESS “NEIGHBOR GOD”
When I paint your portrait, God,
nothing happens.
But I can choose to feel you.
At my senses' horizon
you appear hesitantly,
like scattered islands.
The choruses of angels use up all of heaven.
There's no more room for you
in all that glory. You're living
in your very last house.
~ Rilke, from The Book of Hours, 1, 18
Oriana:
I’m amazed that Rilke could imagine a reasonably likable deity, if perhaps rather helpless, pathetic. We know that religion declined in the twentieth century, but the decline began much earlier, and was notable already in the nineteenth century. Note the speaker’s warning: “You’re living / in your very last house.”
It’s also telling that Rilke says, “I can choose to feel you.” This is not anything like Abraham’s reply, “Here I am” when he hears god’s voice. This is not a servant-and-master relationship. For Rilke the belief in a deity — which includes making that deity psychologically real through prayer and poems — has already become optional. God disappears when the god-creating activity ceases.
Milosz, another semi-Catholic, also felt that faith was a matter of choice. It seems that it’s a popular view with some: you can choose to believe, or you can choose not to believe. Why was it such a big deal in the past? Non-believers knew that they had to pretend to believe or the consequences could be severe, even lethal.
Rilke’s poem astonishes me in that I think the Catholicism Rilke grew up in was even more backward than mine, and leaving it might have provoked a revulsion against religion. True, the poet’s friendship with the “neighbor God” didn't last, and ultimately he insisted that his burial service be secular, but still . . . after what one endures in catechism classes, any positive feeling makes me envious. Mine was strictly fear.
ending on beauty:
I know it must be winter (though I sleep)—
I know it must be winter, for I dream
I dip my bare feet in the running stream,
And flowers are many, and the grass grows deep.
I know I must be old (how age deceives!)
I know I must be old, for, all unseen,
My heart grows young, as autumn fields grow green
When late rains patter on the falling sheaves.
~ Edith Matilda Thomas, Winter Sleep
Winter willow, Warsaw
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