We create the work, and the work creates us.*
THE LETTERS OF THE DEAD
We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods —
gods nevertheless, because we know what happened later.
We know which debts will never be repaid,
the widows who rushed to remarry.
Poor, unseeing dead,
deceived, fallible, pathetically prudent.
We see the faces people make behind their backs,
catch the rustle of ripped-up last wills.
They sit there before us, ridiculous as if perched
on buttered bread, or they race after blown-away hats.
Their bad taste — Napoleon, steam and electricity,
their deadly remedies for curable diseases,
their foolish Apocalypse of St. John,
the false heaven on earth of Jean-Jacques . . .
Silently, we observe their pawns on the chessboard
— but shifted by three squares.
Everything they foresaw has happened quite differently,
or a little differently — which is the same thing.
The most fervent among them stare into our eyes;
they trust they’ll find perfection there.
~ Wislawa Szymborska, tr. Vuyelwa Carlin
Oriana:
It’s humbling to realize we’ll be just as ridiculous to the future generations. Let’s hope they’ll remember our mitigating circumstances: our brutal, still primitive medicine, our idiot politicians, the junk food, the junk entertainment, the worsening climate, and on and on . . . and give us a bit of credit for what we did right.
That's a fantastic first line: "We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods." And thinking of deadly remedies for curable diseases, that's one reason I hate the idea of past lives — I can't stand the thought of what life was like in the past. Of course future generations will see us as barbarians who used chemo for cancer, did pathetically little to prevent environmental destruction, tolerated a lot of child abuse, and so on.
But mainly they’ll be exclaiming, “How could they have been so blind?” Yes, the gods are those who’ll come after us.
(It’s not just the letters and diaries. I remember reading in my late teens a pre-WW2 article by a military officer claiming that cavalry “will be very important in the coming war.”)
Mary:
Thinking of the "Letters of the Dead," the end is so poignant: that the dead stare at us still, hoping to see perfection, while looking back at them we know we are just as circumscribed by our times as they were by theirs. We all wear the blinders of circumstance, our understanding and our prophecies defined by limits and forces invisible to us, but very real. Imagination itself can only work with the given facts of the present moment, and all extrapolations are shaped accordingly. Even hopes and dreams can't be free, must all reflect what is true of our present lives. All prophecies are bound by the particularities of history. The future is always a surprise.
Hieronymus Bosch, St. John of Patmos*
“Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.” ~ George Steiner (1929-2020)
Oriana:
And language can create unreal, demented causes for which people are willing to kill and die. It can create gods and demons — and also magnificent poetry. Below is a stanza of Yeats's Second Coming.
Mary:
One line from Yeats' poem strikes me as particularly suited to our time: “the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.” We are seeing the unashamed fervor for attitudes and ideas we thought we had outgrown coming violently and aggressively to center stage. The hopes of all those dead, unfulfilled, defeated, disappointed...a failure whose cost will be told in human suffering...again, again, the tragedy begins.
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“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader.” ~ Nabokov.
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“What is human existence? It turns out it's pretty simple: We are dead stars, looking back up at the sky.” ~ Michelle Thaller, astrophysicist
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THE HORROR HIDDEN IN JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS OF LOVE
~ “There is a kind of monster hiding in the cheery, almost frivolous, Clueless-inspiring Emma, the story of an eligible young woman who delights in matchmaking others while she remains at home with her dependent father. This father, Mr. Woodhouse, is treated by his daughter and the other characters as though he were an adorable nervous wreck, one who must be coddled and looked after, treated with respect and unquestioning love. It’s easy to follow the characters’ lead of affection and gentle comedy, but if you allow yourself to be jarred out of this complicity, Mr. Woodhouse becomes suddenly grotesque.
In a thousand moments throughout the novel, Mr. Woodhouse builds up his oppressive, claustrophobic presence, trapping Emma, then Mr. Knightley, and eventually the reader inside his closely monitored home. “It is tenderness of heart which makes my dear father so generally beloved,” Emma reflects, but Mr. Woodhouse feels like nothing so much as a paternal non-sexual version of a honey trap. Lacking any supernatural characteristics, there is something nevertheless vampiric about Mr. Woodhouse, who is “fond of every body that he was used to, and hate[s] to part with them.” He has a cloying, parasitic need to keep people close. He is the ugly thing in the corner, sucking up everyone’s life force just to keep himself warm.
Over the course of the novel, Mr. Woodhouse frets about: weddings, marriage, food, windows left open, rain, snow, drafts, damp, children, horses, coachmen, carriages, inns, too many visitors, too few visitors, walking too much, not walking enough. This is only a partial list. What begins as an amusing quirk becomes stifling; Mr. Woodhouse will not let his guests eat their fill, desperately wishes to force gruel upon everyone as a meal of choice, and even when Emma, leaving her father alone with guests, provides “a plentiful dinner . . . she wished she could know that they had been allowed to eat it.” His need for love and attention are all-consuming, but he starves himself and his guests. By the end of a recent reread, I could only hiss, “I hate you,” whenever he appeared, as revolted as though I’d come across something rotting.
Worst of all, there is no escaping Mr. Woodhouse: the only way for Emma and Mr. Knightley to have their happy ending is to agree to live together with him in Hartfield. It’s hard to imagine the steadfast, quietly confident Mr. Knightley bowing under Mr. Woodhouse’s thumb; but Mr. Woodhouse already has cheerful, willful Emma completely bound to him. Here is a villain who will always get his way, the novel suggests, because no one is willing to recognize him as a villain.
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Fanny Price, the frequently disparaged heroine of Mansfield Park, seems in contrast surrounded by villains on all sides. Raised scornfully as the poor relative of a rich family, belittled and abused, Fanny eventually triumphs by sheer accident, as characters around her slowly come to realize the value of her meekness and her quiet Christian goodness. She is a difficult character to love; not as clever as Elizabeth Bennett, not as fun as Emma. For a long time I read Fanny as an exercise in patience, a testimony to steadfastness. But Austen has already written a character who is quiet and patient and good and still beloved: Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood, who is passive but firm, decorous but sure of her own heart. As far as I’m aware, there are no great anti-Elinor campaigns. But readers hate Fanny: her submission, her passivity. For years, I excused her, despite the unsettling feeling that descended upon me every time I reread the novel. But actually—why do we hate Fanny Price? What’s wrong with her?
Mansfield Park is a darker, more worrying novel than the rest of Austen’s oeuvre—critic Pam Perkins described it as Austen’s “ugly duckling.” It could quite easily be read as a Gothic novel; an innocent heroine, surrounded on all sides by powerful markers of the patriarchy with dangerous social forces bent on her. But Austen is not particularly interested in the Gothic. Northanger Abbey, her affectionate satire, shows that she is too amused in the structures and tropes of the genre to take it very seriously. In Austen’s reading, Gothic fiction’s menacing rooms and villains are too melodramatic to be very frightening.
When Austen herself sets out to be frightening, she does so in a very different manner. Her horror is one of unsettling ambiguity and sustained discomfort, as with Mr. Woodhouse, who is not so very evil until his horror is repeated to the point of becoming unbearable. More than any other 18th century novelist, Austen had an eye for microaggressions: her novels track anxieties that flare up again and again, until a tickling annoyance becomes repugnance and then, ultimately, fear.
And Fanny Price’s meekness has its own chilling core. Surrounded by structures of patriarchal violence and power, Fanny Price manages to win without exerting herself, without making any effort to change anyone’s mind. She wins through suffering; through bearing the cold rules and abusive systems of the game the Bertrams play. She allows them to treat her terribly until she has been tested enough to be worthy of Edmund. She submits totally, playing the game according to their rules. But that doesn’t mean she’s not playing.
What’s worse is that Fanny is offered the opportunity to get out. Henry Crawford is one of Austen’s more ambiguous men, lacking the forthright honest heart of Austen’s heroes but not so deliberately cruel a rake as Wickham. But when he pursues Fanny, offering her a taste of the outside world intruding, she banishes him. Her happy ending—as expressed through her marriage with Edmund Bertram—lies in embracing the very power structures that have imprisoned her.
Maria Bertram, strolling in what should be a pleasure garden, acknowledges how trapped she is: “Yes, certainly, the sun shines and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,’ as the starling said . . . Mr. Rushworth is so long fetching this key!”
I cannot get out. But Fanny Price does not want to get out. When the gates of the novel close, she is behind them, and so are we.
https://lithub.com/the-hidden-horror-inside-jane-austens-novels-of-love/?fbclid=IwAR1PyLZfJp7-ypGsve6SFUecVO_uNYAdkt5lmbFZRz1av4c3NJo1nFtjfD4
Mary:
Seeing Austen's work as light romance, wars as heroic enterprises won by great generals with genius strategies...both, I think, are errors of romanticism. Dangerous errors that ignore true determinants and thus perpetuate the horrors they misinterpret. Beneath the light surface of Austen's works is the rigid prison of economics and class. None of her heroines choices are free, they can't be, because marriage is an economic strategy, a bargain struck in a marketplace that determines the circumstances of a woman's future. The choice is singular, maybe the only one she gets to make, and vital as determinant of her entire future.
Dali: Dancing Dandelion, 1944*
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AGAINST THE IMPERIAL EAGLE
~ “Benjamin Franklin had urged that the new States should take the turkey as their bird, representative of a domestic peace and prosperity, and he protested strongly that the eagle stood for the ambitions of rapacious and murderous empires. Imperial Rome had subjugated a world to the law and order of its Caesars under that winged predator; and wherever the arrogance of world dominion goes the eagle appears on its standards.
Franklin, who thought abruptly and realistically, knew the powers of the insignia, and he argued for the turkey cock in his domestic pride. We almost snicker. In our sense of how inappropriate the turkey is, we can see how much our own sense of dignity has departed from that of men like Franklin and how much it demands the Mithraic imperium of the Bird of War.” ~ Robert Duncan
Roman eagle*
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.
It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
~ Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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WARS ARE NOT WON BY BATTLES OR MILITARY GENIUS
~ “War is the most complex, physically and morally demanding enterprise we undertake. No great art or music, no cathedral or temple or mosque, no intercontinental transport net or particle collider or space program, no research for a cure for a mass-killing disease receives a fraction of the resources and effort we devote to making war. Or to recovery from war and preparations for future wars invested over years, even decades, of tentative peace. War is thus far more than a strung-together tale of key battles. Yet, traditional military history presented battles as fulcrum moments where empires rose or fell in a day, and most people still think that wars are won that way, in an hour or an afternoon of blood and bone. Or perhaps two or three. We must understand the deeper game, not look only to the scoring. That is hard to do because battles are so seductive.
The idea of the ‘decisive battle’ as the hinge of war, and wars as the gates of history, speaks to our naive desire to view modern war in heroic terms. Popular histories are written still in a drums-and-trumpets style, with vivid depictions of combat divorced from harder logistics, daily suffering, and a critical look at the societies and cultures that produced mass armies and sent them off to fight in faraway fields for causes about which the average soldier knew nothing.
Visual media especially play on what the public wants to see: raw courage and red days, the thrill of vicarious violence and spectacle. This is the world of war as callow entertainment, of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) or Brad Pitt in Fury (2014). It’s not the world of real Nazis or real war.
Battles also entice generals and statesmen with the idea that a hard red day can be decisive, and allow us to avoid attrition, which we all despise as morally vulgar and without redemptive heroism. We fear to find only indecision and tragedy without uplift or morality in trench mud, or roll calls of dead accumulating over years of effort and endurance.
Instead, we raise battles to summits of heroism and generals to levels of genius that history cannot support. Though some historians might try, celebrating even failed campaigns as glorious. Prussia is wrecked, yet Frederick is the greatest of Germans. France is beaten and an age is named for Louis XIV, another for Napoleon. Europe lies in ruin, but German generals displayed genius with Panzers.
Whether or not we agree that some wars were necessary and just, we should look straight at the grim reality that victory was most often achieved in the biggest and most important wars by attrition and mass slaughter – not by soldierly heroics or the genius of command. Winning at war is harder than that. Cannae, Tours, Leuthen, Austerlitz, Tannenberg, Kharkov – all recall sharp images in a word. Yet winning such lopsided battles did not ensure victory in war. Hannibal won at Cannae, Napoleon at Austerlitz, Hitler at Sedan and Kiev. All lost in the end, catastrophically.
There is heroism in battle but there are no geniuses in war. War is too complex for genius to control. To say otherwise is no more than armchair idolatry, divorced from real explanation of victory and defeat, both of which come from long-term preparation for war and waging war with deep national resources, bureaucracy and endurance. Only then can courage and sound generalship meet with chance in battle and prevail, joining weight of materiel to strength of will to endure terrible losses yet win long wars. Claims to genius distance our understanding from war’s immense complexity and contingency, which are its greater truths.
Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius. Strategic depth and resolve is always more important than any commander. We saw such depth and resilience in Tsarist Russia in 1812, in France and Britain in the First World War, in the Soviet Union and the United States during the Second World War, but not in Carthage or overstretched Nazi Germany or overreaching Imperial Japan. The ability to absorb initial defeats and fight on surpassed any decision made or battle fought by Hannibal or Scipio, Lee or Grant, Manstein or Montgomery. Yes, even Napoleon was elevated as the model of battle genius by Clausewitz and in military theory ever since, despite his losing by attrition in Spain, and in the calamity of the Grand Armée’s 1812 campaign in Russia. Waterloo was not the moment of his decisive defeat, which came a year earlier. It was his anticlimax.
Losers of most major wars in modern history lost because they overestimated operational dexterity and failed to overcome the enemy’s strategic depth and capacity for endurance. Winners absorbed defeat after defeat yet kept fighting, overcoming initial surprise, terrible setbacks and the dash and daring of command ‘genius’. Celebration of genius generals encourages the delusion that modern wars will be short and won quickly, when they are most often long wars of attrition. Most people believe attrition is immoral. Yet it’s how most major wars are won, aggressors defeated, the world remade time and again. We might better accept attrition at the start, explain that to those we send to fight, and only choose to fight the wars worth that awful price. Instead, we grow restless with attrition and complain that it’s tragic and wasteful, even though it was how the Union Army defeated slavery in America, and Allied and Soviet armies defeated Nazism.
With humility and full moral awareness of its terrible costs, if we decide that a war is worth fighting, we should praise attrition more and battle less. There is as much room for courage and character in a war of attrition as in a battle. There was character aplenty and courage on all sides at Verdun and Iwo Jima, in the Hürtgen Forest, in Korea. Character counts in combat. Sacrifice by soldiers at Shiloh or the Marne or Kharkov or Juno Beach or the Ia Drang or Korengal Valley were not mean, small or morally useless acts. Victory or defeat by attrition, by high explosive and machine gun over time, does not annihilate all moral and human meaning.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/wars-are-not-won-by-military-genius-or-decisive-battles?utm_source=pocket-newtab
“Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel. The war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources. The word attrition comes from the Latin root atterere to rub against, similar to the "grinding down" of the opponent's forces in attrition warfare.
The difference between war of attrition and other forms of war is somewhat artificial since war always contains an element of attrition. One can be said to pursue a strategy of attrition if one makes it the main goal to cause gradual attrition to the opponent eventually amounting to unacceptable or unsustainable levels for the opponent while limiting one's own gradual losses to acceptable and sustainable levels.
One of the most enduring examples of attrition warfare on the Western Front is the Battle of Verdun, which took place throughout most of 1916. Erich von Falkenhayn later claimed that his tactics at Verdun were designed not to take the city but rather to destroy the French Army in its defense. Falkenhayn is described as wanting to “bleed France white” and thus the attrition tactics were employed in the battle. [Eventually the French claimed victory, but only at a huge cost.]
An example in which one side used attrition warfare to neutralize the other side's advantage in manoeuvrability and unit tactics occurred during the latter part of the American Civil War, when Union general Ulysses S. Grant pushed the Confederate Army continually, in spite of losses; he correctly predicted that the Union's far superior and more numerous supplies and manpower would overwhelm the Confederacy to the point of collapse, even if the casualty ratio was unfavorable.” ~ Wiki
Ulysses Grant, 1861Mary:
As for wars won by great generals and genius strategies, that is another instance of a romantic, heroic, interpretation. All wars may be essentially wars of attrition, of who has more resources, who can grind on the longest, or obtain and use weapons and technologies that give a great advantage. It has been said before that generals are always fighting the last war rather than the present one, that adjustment to new weaponry and circumstance always lags behind. Each advance — longbow, crossbow, guns, bombs, chemical weapons, or battle lines, trench warfare, saturation bombing, guided missiles, or the adjustment from conventional to guerrilla warfare — is not automatic, but a long and grueling process. Even the idea of “winning” a war has changed, become more complicated, more difficult to assess, as has the notion of a war “ending.” Wars don't seem to end anymore, just shift and morph and continue.
Maybe our biggest mistake is insisting on heroes. We want to think in terms of the individual, the soldier, the general, the singular human life, as experienced intimately...like our own. The essence of the story is the character who lives it. That is always where we begin, where we connect, where we put our emotional investment. It is most natural to think this way, to assume the hero is the center and his decisions can determine his fate. Seeing individual choices, individual struggles, as indeterminate, feels like despair, like losing. And maybe that is the terrible lesson we can't accept, not from the dead nor the living…we need to hope, always, everywhere, forever.
Statue of General Sherman led by the Goddess of VictoryWHY WAR MOVIES ARE NOT ANTI-WAR MOVIES
~ “Sam Mendes’s 1917 is a movie so self-consciously overwrought and virtuosic that the only thing you can really do with it is give it an Academy Award—for Best Cinematography, probably, and also maybe for Best Picture and Best Director. Though, for a lot of viewers—and voters—the cinematography in this case is the direction. As you’ve probably already heard, 1917’s World War I narrative has been designed to play out in the form of a single, extended, endlessly mobile shot, an aesthetic with plenty of conceptual precedents but a newly remarkable means to realize it. More than any other movie released this Oscars cycle, 1917 wears its technical complexity on its sleeve, just like the medals bandied about by the two young British lance corporals who serve as the story’s heroes—by the you-are-there logic of Mendes’s setup, the audience’s surrogates, scurrying on our behalf through the alternately blasted and bucolic landscape of Northern France.
To say that their quest is eventful is an understatement: If 1917 has an epigram, it would be Ron Burgundy’s deathless post-street-fight observation, “That escalated quickly.” Never an austere entertainer, Mendes uses the context of World War I to attempt a necessarily sexless, humorless variation on the Bond franchise he hijacked in Skyfall and Spectre, putting his heroes through a series of kinetic set pieces whose carefully orchestrated authenticity begins to mean less and less as the film goes on. The clichés of the script keep bumping up against the real-time conceit in ways that feel ridiculous—i.e., when one of our heroes escapes a firefight, encounters a symbolic mother-and-child in a hidden catacomb, commits an agonizing act of self-defense, and plunges into lethal rapids in the span of about 10 minutes.
Whether Mendes’s work in 1917—dedicated to the combat experiences of his grandfather—is accidentally self-aggrandizing is open to debate. Certainly, there’s evidence that war movies bring out the inner general in most directors. While Orson Welles called his vocation “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had,” he could just as easily have compared it to tin tanks and toy soldiers. It’s not so much that war is an inherently cinematic subject as that cinema is uniquely suited to its depiction, conjuring up a sound and fury that draws on centuries’ worth of artistic, literary, and theatrical representations while intensifying them through a technological sophistication that’s grown more intricate and overpowering at the same rate as military hardware itself.
In an interview in 1973, the great French director Francois Truffaut told Gene Siskel that he “didn’t think [he’d] really seen an anti-war film … every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Before becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut had shaped his perceptions—and those of an extremely influential generation of readers—as a film critic; his comments, while obviously provocative, get at something troubling about the genre.
Obviously, Truffaut had, at that point, seen a great many ostensible “anti-war films,” starting with Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning, paradigm-shifting World War I parable All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)—a film that 1917 pays homage to—and also including his countryman Jean Renoir’s powerful POW drama La Grande Illusion (1937). He’d have understood those movies’ scripts and sentiments as being angled against war, either in retrospect or contextualized as a preventive gesture (Renoir’s plangent plea for pan-European decency was released on the eve of World War II). But Truffaut’s awareness of the movies’ effective power led him to believe that simply showing war onscreen was tantamount to a kind of glorification. You can have characters give speeches about the horror and futility of combat, or tug at audiences’ heartstrings by killing off beloved actors, or deliberately emphasize pain and brutality, but you can never truly drain such material of its basic fascination, so that even the most skillful and poetic attempts to use the medium as a form of protest become weaponized against themselves.
. . . Paths of Glory is a stylistic landmark in both Kubrick’s career and the visual vocabulary of war movies, with the prowling tracking shots through the French trenches imparting a simultaneous sense of majesty and detachment: When the villainous General Mireau (George Macready) strolls through the horizontal labyrinth, he’s like an imperious god descending to bestow well wishes on his human cannon fodder. What Kubrick’s balletic setups are satirizing here is a top-down philosophy of warfare in which those closest to the ground are expendable (later in the film, the black-and-white tiles of a courtroom floor resemble the pattern of a chessboard). Paths of Glory is a brilliantly made movie whose anti-establishment politics are unmistakable, but even its phenomenally moving final sequence, in which a German POW sings a folk song and is joined, one by one, by the French soldiers who’d previously been jeering her, activates something passionate and stirring within the viewer—the solidarity to head back out and join the fray.
The innovation in Saving Private Ryan was to restage D-Day imagery familiar to millions from movies, television shows, and documentaries but punctuated with horror and gore the likes of which had not really been attempted. To see a filmmaker who made his fortune peddling exhilarating escapism suddenly entrap viewers in a relentless, chaotic, multidirectional nightmare was an undeniable show of power, to the point that the film became fully unbalanced: Whatever came next couldn’t live up to the overture, and Saving Private Ryan gradually flattens out into something more conventionally affirmative and reassuring, determined to make Spielberg—and us—feel like our ordeal was “earned” and of worth.
The technocratically picaresque 1917 is the cinematic equivalent of a run-on sentence, one that says very little that we haven’t heard before. When the camera finally comes to rest, it’s meant to be impressive that the last shot echoes the first, but it’s more a matter of redundancy than symmetry. Far from a step forward for the genre, 1917 remains mired in the same artistic no-man’s-land that so concerned Francois Truffaut.”
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/1/29/21112768/war-movies-1917-dunkirk-saving-private-ryan-apocalypse-now
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IN PRAISE OF SLOW THINKING
~ “In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Plato writes that Socrates left the encounter thinking of the politician, “Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.“ Ever since, Socratic ignorance has been the hallmark of wisdom in Western thinking.
Eastern philosophical traditions share this view. The Buddhist monk Suzuki Roshi explained in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind that beginners have expansive and questioning minds, while an expert’s mind is closed. True Zen masters aren’t too certain or eager for followers. They claim no special knowledge, authority, or expertise, and operate from a place of openness. Their enlightenment manifests in having few preferences. Everything is a mixed bag, neither all good or bad, just a situation to be worked with and learned from.
Lao Tzu also said that “great eloquence is tongue-tied,” and that “to use words but rarely is to be natural.” Communication is like wind and rain—necessary, but most fruitful if not constant and brutal.
The way we talk online, however, is constant and limitless. So if we don’t resist the impulse to reach a conclusion fast, all our energy is wasted on debates with few rules of engagement, no end, and many unintended consequences. Exchanges are aggressive, fast, loose, and polarizing.
That’s why slow thinking is not just wise—it’s also a revolutionary act right now. In reactionary times, slowness, responsiveness rather than reactiveness, is a radical rejection of the internet’s perpetual call to action: Always be choosing sides. Deliberate undecidedness, refusing to choose and know it all, is a kind of intellectual rebellion against the relentless pressure to get with the socially appropriate program—whatever it happens to be within your ideological and informational bubbles.” ~
https://qz.com/1179304/in-praise-of-slow-thinking-and-socratic-ignorance/
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.” ~ Audre Lorde
I certainly discovered that when trying to liberate myself from Catholicism. “A recovering Catholic” is no joke. It's a lifelong journey!
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FOCUS ON THE WORK, NOT SELF
~ “But the thing that got me through that moment [losing his first congressional election], and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ --- then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.” ~ Barack Obama
I became interested in Obama’s personal philosophy when I heard that he noticed that black men often came across as chronically angry; he then made a conscious decision not to be angry, to keep his cool. Of course that reminded me of my decision not to be depressed, but the part about focusing on work rather than self ties in with that life-changing moment in a direct way. That’s what I did: I focused on work rather than self, and discovered the healing power of external focus.
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THE WAY OF TALKING THAT SPEEDS UP LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
~ "Goo goo ga ga? Are wu my widdle baby?" If your idea of "baby talk" makes you throw up in your mouth a little, then it's time to get educated.
True baby talk, which a new study shows can boost infant brain and speech development, is actually proper adult speech, just delivered in a different cadence.
"It uses real words and correct grammar, but it does use a higher pitch, a slower tempo and an exaggerated intonation," said Naja Ferjan Ramirez, an assistant professor at the department of linguistics at the University of Washington.
"What people think of as baby talk is a combination of silly sounds and words, sometimes with incorrect grammar," Ferjan Ramirez explained, "like 'Oooh, your shozie wozies on your widdle feets.' “
A parenting speaking style that is used in nearly every language in the world, true "baby talk" became known as "motherese" and today is called "parentese" — because, after all, it's not just moms who use it. Many dads, grandparents, older siblings, aunts, uncles and babysitters speak parentese, intuitively aware that it helps the baby tune in socially and respond, even if only through babbling.
"Parentese has three characteristics," said Patricia Kuhl, the co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, who has been studying children's early language learning for decades.
"One of them is that it has a higher overall pitch, about an octave higher," Kuhl said.
"Another is that intonation contours are very curvy; the highs are higher, the lows are lower, and it sounds excited and happy.
And then it's slower, with pauses between phrases to give the baby time to participate in this social interaction,” Kuhl said.
As it turns out, encouraging the "social brain" is key to boosting a baby's speech and language development, said Kuhl, an internationally known pioneer in the use of brain imaging.
And babies instinctively prefer it -- as if they are wired to respond. Maybe they are.
Kuhl's lab has done studies which show when infants listen to speech, "not only does the auditory cortex area in their brain light up, but the motor areas that will eventually speak light up," she said, showing the baby is getting ready to talk back.
"The more parents naturally use parentese in their homes when speaking to their children, the better and faster those language skills develop," Kuhl said. "So, it turns out that parentese is a social catalyst for language. It gets kids not just listening but talking.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/03/health/baby-talk-boosts-infant-brain-wellness/index.html
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"If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up, rooted like trees." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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AN EGALITARIAN, INFORMAL AMERICAN GOD
Perhaps it’s just me, but I have never met a religiously devout American, a truly pious American. Dedicated to her CHURCH, yes, organizing church picnics and the like, but not devout in the intensely solitary way I observed in my childhood, countless people sunk into prayer, unaware of the world outside, their very faces changed, strangely beautiful, celestial.
And if not that degree of mystical union, then at least an immense reverence. Inwardness, eyes closed. Of course my memories reach before Vatican 2, when people could have privacy while attending mass, without being told to sit, stand, kneel, pray (roll over and shake, someone quipped about these commands).
I suspect Americans find traditional religion too hierarchical, submissive in an almost Islamic way, except worse — you’re supposed to grovel and call yourself an unworthy sinner. Nothing less American than that! What I love most about America is egalitarianism and informality. Hence books with titles like “Are You Running with Me, Jesus?” Only an American could write that kind of a “Hey Jesus!” book. That’s putting yourself on equal social standing. I can easily imagine an American saying, “Hi God! How are you, old man?”
I think the rest of the world will gradually follow. Social media make us more egalitarian, with everyone chiming in, not just the Grand Mufti proclaiming from on high.
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Loy Mauch, Arkansas*
“Humanism means no human gets elevated to godly status — not Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Stalin, Hitler, Darwin, Trump. None.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
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ARM CIRCUMFERENCE (MUSCLE MASS) PREDICTS BETTER HEART HEALTH
~ “A study in the American Journal of Cardiology looked at the upper arms of almost 600 older adults with cardiovascular disease and found a link between their circumferences—the distances around them—and survival rates. The researchers took measurements of the mid-upper arm and calf circumferences, two numbers which are used to help determine muscle mass, and studied the patients’ muscle function through their gait speed and grip strength. During a period of follow-up averaging about a year and a half, 72 of the adults, who were all at least 65 years old, had died, but those with higher circumferences had better outcomes.
Although the raw data suggested both upper arm and calf sizes are correlated with chances of dying of heart disease, the researchers wrote that only the arm measurement proved to be a “significant” capability to independently predict outcomes.
The researchers said the mid-upper arm circumference “could be a readily available and simple metric” for determining risk in older patients with heart disease.
When older people lose muscle mass and strength as they age, it’s referred to as sarcopenia and could be the result of a number of factors, including changes in hormones, less physical activity, chronic illness, neurological decline and poor nutrition, an article on the U.S. National Institutes of Health says. It can be dangerous, leading to a loss of function and weakness or even disability, and has been associated with chronic conditions like increased insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis.
The suggested link between arm circumference, and thus muscle mass, and heart disease survival rates may not be surprising given that exercise has long been noted as a way to stave off or manage the condition.” ~
http://www.newsweek.com/researchers-link-arm-size-heart-disease-539173?rx=us
ending on beauty:
I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is —
which one, at the end of its ray in the sky,
stands like a white city…
~ Rilke, Lament (trans. unknown)
Van Gogh: Starry Night Over the Rhone
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