*
AT LUCA SIGNORELLI'S RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
See how they hurry
to enter their bodies,
these spirits.
Is it better, flesh,
that they
should hurry so?
From above
the green-winged angels
blare down
trumpets and light. But
they don't care,
they hurry to congregate,
they hurry
into speech, until
it's a marketplace,
it is humanity. But still
we wonder
in the chancel
of the dark cathedral,
is it better, back?
The artist
has tried to make it so: each tendon
they press
to re-enter
is perfect. But is it
perfection
they're after,
pulling themselves up
through the soil
into the weightedness, the color,
into the eye
of the painter? Outside
it is 1500,
all round the cathedral
streets hurry to open
through the wild
silver grasses...
The men and women
on the cathedral wall
do not know how,
having come this far,
to stop their
hurrying. They amble off
in groups, in
couples. Soon
some are clothed, there is
distance, there is
perspective.
Standing below them
in the church
in Orvieto, how can we
tell them
to be stern and brazen
and slow,
that there is no
entrance,
only entering. They keep on
arriving,
wanting names,
wanting
happiness.
~ Jorie Graham (first half of the poem)
*
Oriana:
“How can we tell them . . . that there is no entrance, only entering.” I love this statement, and I think it applies to life in general. Every experience is a process, and not a static “thing.” Consciousness itself is a process, constantly changing. Even memories keep changing.
Another statement that struck me was the human longing for happiness. Never mind the terrifying universality of death — humans can imagine a happy afterlife in a wonderful garden somewhere . . . in the clouds? In outer space or “hyperspace”? Never mind the lack of convincing evidence, the obvious wishful nature of such thinking. It was never about evidence — only about longing.
“I believe only in those things that make me happy,” a New Age friend I once had told me, in all seriousness. She had a rather difficult life, getting by on very little income, a single woman without a partner, and I could see that she sought consolation as best she could — including a belief that her dead canary was waiting for her in heaven.
We could dismiss someone like her as an eccentric, but what about the phenomenal popularity of books about the near-death experiences? I stopped presenting my arguments that there is a neurological explanation because people (often with college education) were oblivious to anything coming from science, whose very attempt at objectivity was dismissed as an error — “Why would you believe anything so depressing?” The longing to believe appears to be a lot more common than wanting to know the truth. In most cases, the longing for happiness wins.
And given all the hardship in life, it isn’t hard to see that from the point of view of evolution, that makes sense. If we can’t have everlasting life on earth, then let us imagine it “on another plane of reality,” perhaps “vibrating along different frequencies.”
Oddly enough, traditional Judaism did not promise an enticing afterlife. However, god could choose to re-animate a dead body by breathing into it the “breath of life.” That was the origin of the idea of the resurrection. Only those who breathed were alive. Christianity really has no explanation for the need to resurrect the body for the Last Judgment and the existence that was to follow it — wouldn’t it be more expedient to live on in a disembodied state, free of the trouble of having to eat, drink, wash oneself, and otherwise take care of the body?
The only semi-sensible argument I heard about this point is that the resurrected body will be perfected, without any sickness or blemish. And yes, to have a young, perfectly healthy body — that would be paradise.
Mary:
Why are those spirits so eager to be re-embodied? Why does the final judgement also involve the resurrection of the restored body? I think the answer may be that the body is the basis for all we know, the ground of all experience of both pain and pleasure. We cannot imagine any experience of either completely bodiless. The experience of spirits must be as insubstantial and weightless, as empty, as the idea of disembodied spirit itself. The happiness of spiritual beings is as pale and tasteless, as boring, as most ideas of heaven.. Some have even imagined that the angels envy us our bodies, not only for the pleasures of the flesh but for the flesh itself, able to feel pleasure as well as pain, able to yearn for happiness and know it, not abstractly, but in our living cells and bones.
Oriana:
Descartes was wrong when he said, “I think therefore I am.” Modern neuroscience tells us that we get a sense of of our continued existence, of being ourselves, from the signals that come from the body. And those are transmitted not by the neocortex, the most recent brain structure from the standpoint of evolution, nor from the limbic system, the so-called mammalian or “emotional brain,” but by the “archaic” brain structure called the brain stem.
From an earlier blog:
Antonio Damasio makes a compelling case for the brain stem as the structure responsible for our sense of self, which in turn relies on the sameness of the internal body. And we share this with most animals. The richness of our consciousness is due to the complexities of the cortex, but not our elementary sense of having a self, or being a self (vocabulary tends to get slippery here, but hello there, good morning to me, it’s me again, my “daily body” — how amazing!)
This makes more sense about the sense of self than anything else I've come across. The brain stem! Yes, it would be an ancient, primary structure . . .
Kevin Nelson, who wrote the most comprehensive neurological account of near-death experiences, explains: ~ “The brain stem orchestrates consciousness. When regions within the brain stem only millimeters in size are destroyed, a deep, permanent coma ensues.
The brain stem not only arouses us, it also regulates breathing, heartbeat, “fight or flight,” and vegetative functions. The arousal system contains the switches that shift our consciousness between its three states. The body’s nervous system connects with the arousal system through the spinal cord that extends upward as a great stalk, entering the skull to merge with the brain stem. The same system automatically controls our heart and lungs.
The brain stem began developing early on in evolution, 300 million years ago, and it has changed very little from species to species since that time. From rat to human, the brain stems of all mammals are curiously similar. The reason for this is that the brain stem’s function is so critical — to get it wrong in even the slightest way is usually incompatible with life itself.”
Cogito ergo sum? Only an intellectual could come up with this delusion. Besides, my guess is that, given the involuntary nature of thinking (to use a common idiom, thoughts “arise”), it would be more correct to say that thoughts think us.
I love Damasio’s conclusion that the sense of self derives from the continuity of our body, the stability of the inner physiological state. “I have a body, therefore I am.” We share that body-derived I AM not only with dogs and cats, complex animals who obviously each have a unique personality, but with rats and wombats, and probably most “sentient creatures.”
And in reply to Mary: Yes! Without the body we are, ahem, nothing.
*
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down happy. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.” ~ John Lennon
*
VARLAM SHALAMOV’S GULAG TALES
~ “Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,” Varlam Shalamov wrote to his friend Irina Sirotinskaya in 1971, “and like any slap in the face, has laws of a purely muscular character.” He returns to the idea a little later in the letter, contrasting his own ideal of prose to the expansive “spadework” of Tolstoy: “A slap in the face must be short, resonant.” Most of Shalamov’s stories are indeed short, some extremely so, and constitute an argument both with the great nineteenth-century Russian novels and with the wretched ones of the Stalinist era that sought to pour the pap of socialist realism into a pseudo-epic form. The slap works simultaneously as a figure for aesthetic form and political protest, and in Shalamov’s late essays and letters, it functions as a motto of sorts, a creed of laconic defiance echoing, distantly, the Russian futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste and—more intimately and immediately—the famous opening of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope against Hope: “After slapping Aleksey Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow.”
Nadezhda Mandelstam sent the manuscript of her memoir about life with the poet Osip Mandelstam to Shalamov in 1965, and while neither could hope to publish their prose in the Soviet Union at that time, the two established in the correspondence that followed a shared sense of purpose. He writes: “If I had to give a literature course on the second half of the twentieth century, I would start by burning all the textbooks on the podium, in front of the students. The link between eras, between cultures has been broken; the exchange has been interrupted and our mission is to pick up the ends of string and tie them back together.” She replies: “I don’t think we should burn textbooks: it’s too classical a gesture … Let’s just not use any”; her main concern, too, she writes, is “the link that connects one era to another, the only thing that allows society to be human, a human being to be human.”
The task Shalamov took on as a writer was what Osip Mandelstam in the celebrated and chilling poem “The Age” (“Vek”) figured as piecing together the broken back of an animal.
My age, my beast, who will look you
straight into the eye
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries’ vertebrae?
Shalamov conceives of his writing not only as an act of witness (to a crime) but also as an act of healing or at least of treating an illness or injury. The crimes of Stalinism were committed by a country against itself, in a self-consuming process by which each generation of executioners soon became the next group of victims.
Giving an account of the gulag means finding a form for a suicidal cycle of alienation and death. What is being documented has no end, either logically (since to rid the Soviet state of all its possible “enemies” Stalin would have had to exterminate every single citizen) or historically (there was no liberation of the camps, no formal end to the system, even after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s denunciation). The literary means to find an escape from a vicious cycle is necessarily elliptical. A narrative slap in the face, as opposed to a physical one, is the opposite of mimetic violence: it is a transformation of pain into artistic form—a form that, like a set fracture, makes the bone stronger than it was before.
But the Stalinist years brought with them—along with the torture, starvation, and destruction of millions of human beings—an assault on language that systematically subverted and diminished the power and viability of words. To resurrect the dead in living memory Shalamov had to bring words back into an organic relation with reality. He found help in the Acmeist movement to which Mandelstam had belonged, the work of a group of poets reacting against the mystical vagaries of symbolism and striving to plant poetry firmly back in the soil of the physical, perceptible world. The essays that Shalamov wrote alongside his stories in the fifties and sixties—including one titled “Diseases of Language and Their Treatment”—are his continuation of that struggle. In their polemical, battle-ready tone and their call for a “new prose” equal to the new crisis conditions of Soviet life, they bring to mind the manifestos of the prewar avant-garde. Challenge and disputation are methods of “tying the ends together” no less than reverence and emulation.
In 1958, drawing from his own experience of near starvation and his passage (a year earlier) through the same transit camp near Vladivostok where Osip Mandelstam died, Shalamov wrote the story “Cherry Brandy” about the poet’s last days hovering between life and death, a narrative of the end of a life permeated and animated by a poetic consciousness (reminiscent in some ways of Hermann Broch’s magisterial novel The Death of Virgil, but condensed into six pages).
The later story “The Resurrection of the Larch” enacts an oblique resurrection in the form of a larch branch sent from Kolyma to the poet’s widow. Aided by the woman’s “passionate will,” the branch miraculously returns to life standing in an empty food can with dirty Moscow tap water, growing fresh green needles and exuding the vague odor of turpentine, which is “the voice of the dead.” Only a living culture can remember and mourn. In bringing the branch back to life, both sender and recipient resurrect for a moment “a memory of the millions who were killed and tortured to death, who are laid in common graves to the north of Magadan.”
To Shalamov, Dostoyevsky is a genius and an example of artistic integrity, but he is also to be judged severely for his failure to reveal the true depths of depravity in penal-camp life. In “What Fiction Writers Get Wrong,” an argument against nineteenth-century literary romanticization of criminals, Shalamov claims that Dostoyevsky mistook the accidental criminals he came across during his imprisonment for gangsters, for the professional class of criminals who live by their own brutal code of law and have dominated camp life for generations.
Shalamov is willing to allow for the possibility that “Dostoyevsky never knew them,” because “if he did see and know them, then, as an artist, he turned his back on them.” Tolstoy and Chekhov also failed in this regard, in Shalamov’s view, although he felt Chekhov had undoubtedly come across real criminals on his journey to the prison island of Sakhalin; in “Crooks by Blood” he is pleased to be able to correct Chekhov on a fragment of gangster cardplayers’ slang misheard on Sakhalin.
Shalamov considered swashbuckling portrayals of criminal outlaws by twentieth-century writers like Babel to be frivolous. In the letter to Sirotinskaya quoted earlier, his censure also falls on Babel’s prose style (to many a model of concision): “If I practically never thought about how to write a novel, I thought about how to write a short story from early on and for decades … I once took a pencil and crossed out of Babel’s stories all their beauty, all those fires like resurrections, and looked at what was left. Of Babel not much was left, and of Larissa Reissner, nothing at all.”
As for poets, Sergei Yesenin, despite his great lyrical gifts, was fatally compromised in Shalamov’s eyes by sucking up to the criminal world and by the fact that criminals had adopted him as their bard, tattooing lines from his poems on their bodies. “The gangster … is not wholly without aesthetic needs, however little he may be human. His needs are satisfied by prison songs … usually very sentimental, plaintive, and touching” (this from “Apollo among the Criminals”). Yesenin caters to that taste.
Another connoisseur of Soviet prisons, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, recalls in My Century his own bewildering contact during his wartime odyssey with the “immense pararepublic of criminals … a dense network covering Stalin’s tzardom” and remarks on the close sympathy between the gangs of juvenile delinquents he observed in prison camps and the NKVD officers overseeing them, many of whom he rightly assumed had emerged from gangs in the first place. Traditions of criminal organization predating the revolution (and manifest in slang that Shalamov knew well) were themselves preserved and absorbed into the culture of the new Soviet state—institutionalized, just when the pre-revolutionary traditions of the Russian intelligentsia were being systematically destroyed. His stories show better than anything written about the gulag how these processes were parallel and inseparable.
Shalamov is rare as a writer on camp life because he refuses to provide any variety of redemptive narrative, whether by portraying death in the gulag as martyrdom or by finding heroism in survival or in acts of witness. Survivors have no aura of courage or strength, just qualities of luck or cunning that do not reflect particularly well on their character. Nor does Shalamov participate in the process by which the state, having lost the ability to justify its killing by keeping its victims within a zone of exception, chooses to portray them as tragic sacrifices of a cruel but rational strategy.
[Shalamov states that poetry] is as vital to prisoners as food, so that even if gathering for recitations in the bandaging room of the camp hospital exposes them to the danger of discovery and punishment, they continue to meet until they are prevented by the imposter “Dr. Doctor.” They recite Pushkin, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova to one another not because they are sublimating or rising above their physical needs but because poetry can aid the return of “goners” to the world of the living.
Shalamov’s Kolyma stories are an astonishing achievement in a tradition of high art that surprises by surviving and describing the very conditions created to destroy it. In Shalamov’s own account, when he wrote he paced and raged in his room, weeping and shouting, saying every story aloud. Most of his best stories, he told Sirotinskaya, “were written in one go, or rather, copied from a draft only once.” They were intentionally left unpolished, in a conventional sense unfinished, meant to retain the rough edges that proved they had been torn whole from real experience.
How Shalamov found the strength to carry out this arduous labor after almost two decades of crippling prison life and exile, in impoverished isolation and recurrent physical and mental pain, with no hope of recognition or publication, without the slightest compromise with a timid post-Stalinist literary establishment and without allowing himself to be used as a pawn in the Cold War, is one of the miracles of modern literature.” ~
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/01/21/a-slap-in-the-face-of-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR0FJR0-YoRLxctRvvWPHR8mQRpA9ngSirX54FZOU7znb7ujb4nE6WMs2lM
Varlam Shalamov
*
from Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag
The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.
I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.
Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.
I saw what a weighty argument for the intellectual is the most ordinary slap in the face.
I understood why people do not live on hope — there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will — what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.
I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.
I understood what power is and what a man with a rifle is.
I am proud to have decided right at the beginning, in 1937, that I would never be a foreman if my freedom could lead to another man’s death, if my freedom had to serve the bosses by oppressing other people, prisoners like myself.
Both my physical and my spiritual strength turned out to be stronger than I thought in this great test, and I am proud that I never sold anyone, never sent anyone to their death or to another sentence, and never denounced anyone.
I consider the best period of my life the months I spent in a cell in Butyrki prison, where I managed to strengthen the spirit of the weak, and where everyone spoke freely.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/12/forty-five-things-i-learned-in-the-gulag/
Oriana:
This is of course only a sample of the things that Shalamov says he learned in the Gulag. Note the seeming contradiction: only the intensely religious can survive extreme abuse without compromising their dignity — and yet Shalamov himself takes pride in not having become the kind of “beast” who’d harm fellow prisoners. Solzhenitsyn is another example. German concentration camps provided more instances of exceptional nobility under the most horrific circumstances.
And indeed there was no liberation of the Gulag camps, no formal end to the system.
Kolyma Tales has been called the most terrifying book in Russian literature.
*
Mary:
I have never truly understood the romanticization of the criminal. The fascination with figures like Bonnie and Clyde or Billy the Kid, the idea of the outlaw who is smart enough or sly enough, to outwit the law long enough to become a legend, has a kind of defiant, provocative appeal to all of the rest of us who meekly obey and never risk much.
But the kind of career criminals involved in organized crime, the gangsters, simply echo the organization of the state in its most brutal and degenerate form. These are not rebels, they are more like soldiers in an army as rigidly ordered as that of any oppressive government, whose weapons are fear, coercion and violence, and whose interests are greed and power. I see nothing attractive here, nothing to admire or interest me. I walked out of the Godfather because I had no interest in what happened to any of them, or in their characters, thoughts and motivations. They and their organization were not fascinating, but brutal, and monotonous in their unrelieved automatic violence.
Obviously others see this differently, so we have all the godfather movies, and The Sopranos, and lots of novels.. Drug cartels and kingpins, the Russian mob...all more of the same..organized thugs, predators, all the worst humanity can be and do...again and again, the same old same old. They mirror and amplify the evils of whatever system they operate in, the gulag, Stalin's state, or our own. They take greed and murder to their ultimate conclusions. Gangsters are parasites on any society they infect, and they cannibalize it with great appetite and no mercy.
*
GLOBAL RISE OF DICTATORSHIP
~ “WWI was the first truly industrial global war. People had no idea how bad it would be. This is the first post-internet global rise of dictatorship. It's going to be a doozy.
But it also may reveal what's been obscure before, the very essence of dictatorship. This is slow-growing enough we can track it and it's blatant as can be. It should be so clear to almost everyone by now that nothing matters to these people but claiming as much power as possible, claiming victories non-stop, denying challenges non-stop, amassing power non-stop. That's all we've gotten from the entire cult for its entire lifespan, wall-to-wall, "me-over-reality" absolutism.
It takes societies a long time to co-evolve resistance to such catastrophes. It's debatable whether they ever do.
Sometimes I think that if the tyranny's supporters don't learn from this blatant, crystalline, pure instance of mindless dictatorship, it's evidence that humanity really never stood a chance to progress beyond a certain level of civilizing anyway.
I'm not giving up. Not at all. But the observation holds. If 40 percent can fall for BS this obvious in the US after centuries of heavy doses of humanism, Christianity, the American dream and reality-based science-driven progress, then our powers of rationalization, escapism, and self-aggrandizement are just too great. We don't end up being a species that has what it takes to bravely study reality well enough to survive it.
On a more positive note, this is the moment to watch, the prime of humanity's life, the make it or break it on people waking up to the essence of asshole, tyrant, dictator, cult nature, and not to some rebranded wokeness, the next round of counter-tyrant and counter-cult, like the libertarian dictator/cult as a response to the communist dictator/cults. No, seeing the general pattern underlying millennia of rebranding.
I'm thrilled to be alive just now, with us all a hair's breadth from the native wit necessary to see the pattern. This is the most exciting extended-run drama ever, a white knuckle ride that will be our edifying culmination or just our culmination.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Dali: The Enigma of Hitler, 1939
*
BALANCED TENSIONS, NOT SOME ONE TRUE WAY
~ “The lesson learned from the catastrophes of the 20th century wasn't that this or that ideology failed but that all absolutisms do – all One True Way claims to have all the answers, so get the fuck out of our way you conflicted weaklings, we're taking over.
Absolutism is what lost. That's what always fails. That absolutists happen to rationalize their take-over with this or that ideology is a distraction.
They don't really care about their ideologies and anyway, ideologies are inherently un-implementable. Even when a movement is sparked by an ideology, practical complications flood in until all that remains is the absolutism. As we're seeing with the Trump cult today. It stands for nothing but its absolute authority.
Capitalist ideology didn't win the Cold War against the Communist Ideology. Democratic ideology didn't win the WWII against Nationalist ideology.
So what won?
The alternative to One True Way ideologies: Checks and balances. Managed tensions between opposing priorities. That's also what wins within individuals. Though we may claim to be of one mind, we never are. Our lives, our politics, our economies only thrive when ever-balancing the tensions between competing appetites.
Mixed checks-and-balanced political and economic systems won. The One True Way to survive turns out to be resisting all One True Ways, instead living with internal and external tensions. And that's different from finding the perfect, stable restful middle way some simple happy medium. Rather it's ongoing effort to keep managing the tensions. Checks-and-balances.
It's curious then that, though we all hear that systems thrive on checks-and-balances, we name our political parties in the singular: Democrats as though pure democracy is The One True way, Republican as though Republics are the One True Way. People claim to be capitalists or socialists, left, right, libertarian, liberal, progressive, conservative. They never simply are.
Why do we name our parties singularly? Maybe because simple singularity mobilizes movements. Singular purpose is alluring.Absolutism makes us feel big, strong and certain. The doubt inherent in managing tensions makes people feel small, weak, conflicted.
People may think they're coming for some singular principle but they're largely drawn to and certainly staying with the movement for the absolutism.
Mobilization feeds on naive oversimplification. That's the movement paradox: Launching a movement depends upon an oversimplification that inevitably undermines the movement. In its death throes, all that remains is the absolutism.
I wish there were a party name that reflected the checks and balances, something like capitalist socialist democratic republicanism.
And I know why we don't. That rallying cry will, to most ears, sounds conflicted and therefore weak compared to some singular, mobilizing One True Way.”
~ Jeremy Sherman
Alexander Deineka. Night landscape with horses. 1933
*
Oriana:
History is a record of failed ideologies — whether it’s Communism or Fascism or, to go back in time, the Divine Right of Kings. Made me think of old-time totalitarian Catholicism (especially back in the heretic-burning era).
Interesting the way absolutism — absolute power without checks and balances — indeed corrupts quite quickly. Totalitarian institutions never escape corruption. I say “interesting” even though it’s predictable — interesting because whether it’s religion or a secular “ism” there is usually such a huge appeal to idealism, virtually to sainthood.
You could say that the central idea of modernity is the lack of absolutism. Most people have not been able to accept it. Hannah Arendt dared to postulate the “banality of evil” and got vilified for it. People wanted to see evil as demonic, rather than inherent in any ideology.
As you’ve suggested many times, the remedy is to accept “fallibilism” (the opposite of absolutism) and construct a system of checks and balances that prevents the development of absolute power. Alas, what a setback we’re witnessing right now, what backlash against the recent progress in science, free trade, democracy and human rights — a right-wing (even fascist) backlash not only in the US, but pretty much globally.
The yearning for absolute certainty, for unchanging answers, seems to be an incurable disease, especially of the young and of those with low intelligence and meager education. Reality? There are always “alternative facts.” The Christian ideal of compassion? There is always “alternative Christianity” (odd how it appears to be an anti-Christianity, e.g. the so-called “Prosperity Gospel”).
*
Of course the yearning for simple, absolute answers is only one of the reasons that makes it possible for dictatorship to take hold and thrive. Hannah Arendt considered the lack of reliable information to be another major reason.
HANNAH ARENDT ON WHAT MAKES DICTATORSHIPS POSSIBLE
~ “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” ~ Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt in 1943
Mary:
After the last two days it seems clear our checks and balances have been rendered ineffective, and language itself bankrupted…not so hard to sort the truth from lies as to no longer trust there is anything but lies. The devolution of discourse, the reduction of government to a charade of charlatans full of greed and self delusion…it almost buries hope. I do admire Romney's stand, and thank him for it. The rest of it...a wasteland of shame. And fears that the worst is yet to come.
*
WHY NAMES MATTER
~
“ In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of
thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether
their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with
unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or
to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with
more common names. The Mikes were doing just fine, but the Berriens were
having trouble. A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative
psychological effect on its bearer.
In 2004, the economists
Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan created five thousand résumés
in response to job ads posted in the classifieds in Chicago and Boston
newspapers. Using Massachusetts birth certificates from between 1974 and
1979, Bertrand and Mullainathan determined which names appeared at a
high frequency in one race but at a low frequency in another, creating
groups of what they termed “white-sounding names” (like Emily Walsh and
Greg Baker) and “black-sounding names” (like Lakisha Washington and
Jamal Jones).
They also created two types of candidates: a
higher-quality group, with more experience and a more complete profile,
and a lower-quality group, with some obvious gaps in employment or
background. They sent two résumés from each qualification group to every
employer, one with “black-sounding” name and the other with a
“white-sounding” one (a total of four CVs per employer). They found that
the “white-sounding” candidates received fifty per cent more callbacks,
and that the advantage a résumé with a “white-sounding” name had over a
résumé with a “black-sounding” name was roughly equivalent to eight
more years of work experience. An average of one of every ten “white”
résumés received a callback, versus one of every fifteen “black”
résumés. Names, in other words, send signals about who we are and where
we come from.
These findings have been demonstrated internationally as well.
A Swedish study compared immigrants who had changed their Slavic,
Asian, or African names, such as Kovacevic and Mohammed, to more
Swedish-sounding, or neutral, ones, like Lindberg and Johnson. The
economists Mahmood Arai and Peter Skogman Thoursie, from Stockholm
University, found that this kind of name change substantially improved
earnings: the immigrants with new names made an average of twenty-six
per cent more than those who chose to keep their names.
The
effects of name-signalling—what names say about ethnicity, religion,
social sphere, and socioeconomic background—may begin long before
someone enters the workforce. In a study of children in a Florida school
district, conducted between 1994 and 2001, the economist David Figlio
demonstrated that a child’s name influenced how he or she was treated by
the teacher, and that differential treatment, in turn, translated to
test scores. Figlio isolated the effects of the students’ names by
comparing siblings—same background, different names. Children with names
that were linked to low socioeconomic status or being black, as
measured by the approach used by Bertrand and Mullainathan, were met
with lower teacher expectations.
Unsurprisingly, they then performed
more poorly than their counterparts with non-black, higher-status names.
Figlio found, for instance, that “a boy named ‘Damarcus’ is estimated
to have 1.1 national percentile points lower math and reading scores
than would his brother named ‘Dwayne,’ all else equal, and ‘Damarcus’
would in turn have three-quarters of a percentile ranking higher test
scores than his brother named Da’Quan.’ ” Conversely, children with
Asian-sounding names (also measured by birth-record frequency) were met
with higher expectations, and were more frequently placed in gifted
programs.
The economists Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer
looked at trends in names given to black children in the United States
from the nineteen-seventies to the early aughts. They discovered that
names which sounded more distinctively “black” became, over time, ever
more reliable signals of socioeconomic status. That status, in turn,
affected a child’s subsequent life outcome, which meant that it was
possible to see a correlation between names and outcomes, suggesting a
name effect similar to what was observed in the 1948 Harvard study. But
when Levitt and Fryer controlled for the child’s background, the name
effect disappeared, strongly indicating that outcomes weren’t influenced
by intrinsic qualities of the name itself.
As Simonsohn notes, “Names tell us a lot about who you are.”
In
the 1948 study, the majority of the uncommon names happened to be last
names used as first names—a common practice among upper-class white
families at the time. Those names, too, served as a signal, but in this
case as one of privilege and entitlement—perhaps their unsuccessful
bearers thought that they could get by without much work, or that they
could expose neuroses that they would otherwise try to hide. We see a
name, implicitly associate different characteristics with it, and use
that association, however unknowingly, to make unrelated judgments about
the competence and suitability of its bearer. The relevant question may
not be “What’s in a name?” but, rather, “What signals does my name send—and what does it imply?”
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-your-name-matters?utm_campaign=falcon&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR3pzzXUWfl5qY6alBlMmKooEb07r7z7_D7wPDLwavqQ8nJAtj3eU3GUXR4name
on clothes
STEALING THE TRANSCENDENT
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" ~ Douglas Adams, writer, environmentalist, atheist (he created the counter fine-tuning argument of “a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, "This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”)
The hijacking of meaning and morality by religion, the claim that once they leave religion people become immoral, their lives suddenly meaningless, is bad enough — and has been refuted countless times, both by studies and by simply pointing to various artists, scientists, teachers, physicians, engineers, and on and on — are their lives meaningless? Would Marie Curie have made a greater contribution by entering a convent?
I admire dedicated people, and lives filled with purpose. That purpose is individual, for each person to find. What are you good at, how can you make a contribution? The best strategy, I have discovered, is to “think small.” Geniuses are few, but practically everyone has a talent of some sort, an ability to excel in a field. If I had a magic wand, I’d wish that each child encounter a great teacher, and have supportive parents.
I think that the claim that by themselves humans can create nothing because they are weak-minded and no good does not even merit a reply. We are all beneficiaries of the collective human genius, and the response to it should be gratitude, not the constant belittlement of human capacity.
Nor do we need to pray to experience what is usually called a transcendent state: serenity, bliss, and the sense of being connected to everything that exists. Slowing down can be enough, getting calm just through slow breathing. This is easiest in beautiful surroundings, with the sound of surf, wind through the trees, or birdsong.
It’s this kind of beauty that’s closest to my heart, and that’s where the hijacking by religion hurts most. A mountain meadow, a forest, a lake, a sunset; a bird in flight — here militant theists feel they must not pass by the opportunity to deliver god talk. To them, beauty is a proof that god exists. Actually, the existence of beauty proves only that beauty exists — and humans, with their advanced brain, can perceive whatever it is that strikes us as beautiful.
There is a strange negativity in the mind of a theist. Not only are human beings no good, but the world is to be despised. Yet beauty is right here — the trees, the clouds. “So much beauty wasted on mere earth!” as St. Therese is said to have exclaimed at the sight of a meadow in bloom, before she entered the convent. “Mere” earth, compared to the alleged paradise beyond. Of course an inspiring saint will claim that the earth and everything on it must be despised. Both humans and nature are fallen. So if beauty exists, and in startling abundance at that, it must be god’s work — wasted, to be sure, on the undeserving fallen beings. Imagine, even an atheist is allowed to take delight in flowers! What justice is that, if this will never lead him or her to a deathbed conversion?
With god talk, we are back to the times when humans knew very little about nature, so there must have been an ocean god creating waves and storms — and earthquakes (an interesting combination). Now we know there is no need for a god of the ocean — waves and tides are natural phenomena, as are earthquakes and volcanoes and thunderstorms. As are mountains and flowers and everything around us that is not man-made — there is no need for a god to “rule” nature. Nature is enough.
Let us cultivate our garden. Good soil is the foundation, and not fairies and leprechauns (though at least those have some charm; it’s striking how monotheistic deities are devoid of charm).
I heard a New Age theist say, “The flowers here are NOTHING compared to the flowers in the astral world. Astral flowers are many times more beautiful!” I can’t quite choose which statement I find more revolting: the one by St. Therese about the “wasted” beauty of a meadow, or the one about astral flowers. How easily religion deludes certain minds with its promises of greater beauty elsewhere — in the case of teenage St. Therese, to be earned by denying yourself the pleasures and beauties of this mere life (she later "mellowed").
But real beauty is here, and we mustn’t let the clergy or anyone else forbid us to enjoy it. As children of the universe, we have the full right to enjoy it. We can fill our days with joy because we are not fallen; we are in fact rising from religious oppression and badmouthing of nature and humanity into fuller humanity. We can no longer be kept on our knees by being told we are wretched sinners in need of salvation. We are beings whose magnificent brains make the perception of beauty possible. Let’s feast on it “while the music lasts” (as I say in one of my poems, written entirely without divine assistance).
Cassowary, the world's third largest bird after the ostrich and the emu
*
~ “His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh. ~ Deuteronomy 33:17, KJV (the blessings of the twelve tribes)
The original "sacred" text has its hidden delights — of which I knew nothing during my Catholic years. I had no idea about the existence of the Song of Songs, for instance.
The twelve tribes, from a mosaic on the wall of a synagogue in Jerusalem*
“Salvation is liberation from fear” ~ Marcus Borg
But the church’s tactic was always to manipulate through fear. That’s why hell was absolutely necessary as the very foundation of Christianity. Now the Catholic church, with its redefinition of hell as a state of mind, has taken a huge step forward. But the fundamentalist right wing is never going to give up hell, their chief tool and means of imaginary revenge. Never.
Hell, Islamic. Muhammad visits hell and sees women punished for showing their hair to strangers*
98.6 F IS NOT “NORMAL” BODY TEMPERATURE
~ “Nearly 150 years ago, a German physician analyzed a million temperatures from 25,000 patients and concluded that normal human-body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
That standard has been published in numerous medical texts and helped generations of parents judge the gravity of a child’s illness.
But at least two dozen modern studies have concluded the number is too high.
The findings have prompted speculation that the pioneering analysis published in 1869 by Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich was flawed.
Or was it?
In a new study, researchers from Stanford University argue that Wunderlich’s number was correct at the time but is no longer accurate because the human body has changed.
Today, they say, the average normal human-body temperature is closer to 97.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Body temperature is a crude proxy for metabolic rate, and if it has fallen, it could offer a clue about other physiological changes that have occurred over time.
“People are taller, fatter and live longer, and we don’t really understand why all those things have happened,” said Julie Parsonnet, who specializes in infectious diseases at Stanford and is senior author of the paper. “Temperature is linked to all those things. The question is which is driving the others.”
To test their hypothesis that today’s normal body temperature is lower than in the past, Dr. Parsonnet and her research partners analyzed 677,423 temperatures collected from 189,338 individuals over a span of 157 years.
The readings were recorded in the pension records of Civil War veterans from the start of the war through 1940; in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1971 through 1974; and in the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment from 2007 through 2017.
Overall, temperatures of the Civil War veterans were higher than measurements taken in the 1970s, and, in turn, those measurements were higher than those collected in the 2000s.
“Two things impressed me,” Dr. Parsonnet said. “The magnitude of the change and that temperature has continued to decline at the same rate.”
A complicating factor for the comparisons is that the Wunderlich and Stanford data used different methods and instruments.
Human temperature can be measured in the mouth, armpit, ear or rectum. Ear and rectal temperatures tend to be half a degree higher than oral temperature. Axillary temperature, taken in the armpit, tends to be one degree lower.
Wunderlich preferred the axillary method but used a thermometer that was calibrated higher than normal, according to Dr. Mackowiak, who critiqued the work in the Journal of the American Medicine Association in 1992. (He recommended abandoning Wunderlich’s standard.)
The methods used in Dr. Parsonnet’s data vary. The Civil War records could have included a mixture of axillary and oral temperatures taken with mercury thermometers—the researcher couldn’t tell for sure. The precision of the instruments is also unknown. The 1970s measurements used readings from oral mercury thermometers exclusively. And the data from the 2000s used digital oral instruments.
Age, time of day, physical activity and other factors, which the researchers couldn’t always account for, also affect body temperature.
Still, Dr. Parsonnet is convinced of the validity of the aggregated data.
“Wunderlich did a brilliant job,” Dr. Parsonnet said, “but people who walked into his office had tuberculosis, they had dysentery, they had bone infections that had festered their entire lives, they were exposed to infectious diseases we’ve never seen.”
Dr. Parsonnet suspects inflammation caused by those and other persistent maladies explains the temperature documented by Wunderlich and that a population-level change in inflammation is the most plausible explanation for a decrease in temperature.
Although he doubts the quality of data, Dr. Mackowiak finds this hypothesis persuasive.
“The conclusion is the average temperature of Americans has dropped over that time,” Dr. Mackowiak said. “If that observation is real, her explanation is very reasonable.”
Given the accumulation of evidence, Frank Rühli, director of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, who peer-reviewed the Stanford study, suggested the medical establishment should respond.
“Medical norms and guidelines and thresholds for interventions need to be adjusted,” Dr. Rühli said. “That is the major issue.”
This is important for researchers and physicians who need to make decisions about when and how to treat patients. But for most of us, a thermometer reading matters less than how we feel.
“If you’re sick, you’re sick,” Dr. Parsonnet said, “regardless of your temperature.” ~
https://www.wsj.com/articles/98-6-degrees-fahrenheit-isnt-the-average-any-more-11579257001?shareToken=st351ebbc1b9224430ab4cc4b38ac43706&mod=evgrn2701
Oriana:
I once had a deluded doctor who had me measure my temperature first thing in the morning. Over the weeks, it mostly stayed under 98, and he tried to treat me with T3 (the active thyroid hormone). I developed chest pains and insomnia. He prescribed nitroglycerine. I finally woke up and ran for my life — but still thinking there was something wrong with me because my temp wasn't 98.6.
This article is such a relief!
And to quote a wise physician I know: Actually there in no such thing as "normal" in medicine, only “average”.
*
ending on beauty
My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.
~ Rilke, The Book of Hours
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