Klimt. Is this image too idyllic in the time of a pandemic? I think it’s exactly what we need now.*
FORGETTING
Mazury region, former East Prussia
In the forest near the lake we found,
half-buried in white sand,
a weather-scarred plaque
with the name of a German village.
We stared at the sharp fence
of the Gothic alphabet.
Around, like a prayer for the dead,
the long shush of wind in the pines.
I repeated the name of the vanished
village like a spell.
I thought we’d always find
that greenest of all the lakes,
crowned with the tallest pine
where we sheltered from rain.
He put his jacket around me.
The needles shone with drops,
a forest of crystal. But I forgot
the spell — the lake nameless
among a thousand lakes,
the evenings hyphenated
with gold dashes of the fireflies.
The village weathered into silence —
a memory of a forgetting
I would remember all my life.
The name started with an A,
with an N, as in never.
In between, forest and wind —
the dead keening for the dead
in the amber forgetting of pines.
~ Oriana
This poem mourns the ease with which forgetting happens, sometimes mocking our vow to remember “forever” — just as we blindly promise every new lover, “I’ll always love you.” Life rushes on and we forget — which is mostly a blessing.
I have another poem, “Halloween Birches,” written much later, in which I hope to be remembered — but a new wisdom is born.
The poem ends:
Only the souls of trees walked with me —
birches and beeches, maples, pines.
I whispered to them: Remember me.
They replied: It’s not important to be
remembered — only to be beautiful.
The moon flowed in the sky,
a slender canoe: Get in, not later but now.
It was very liberating to me to reach the conclusion that it’s not important to be remembered — only to be beautiful — and/or enjoy and share beauty — in the now.
*
When it comes to the mysteries of memory and forgetting, Proust is supreme.
REASONS TO READ PROUST
~ Better even than James or Wharton, Proust is the consummate social novelist.
He offers portraits of varied social classes that are psychologically resonant in ways other authors can’t even begin to replicate. For Proust, the duchess and the seamstress are of equal interest, their desires and shortcomings treated with the same deftness. That’s what makes the work so important and viable. It isn’t, as culturally assumed, an elitist, inaccessible collection of memories concerning aristocracy written by a weak, if not outright, invalid aristocrat. That is a reductionist viewpoint that couldn’t be further from the truth.
However, In Search of Lost Time is more than the transposition of people to page, an incisive look at the social lives, minds, foibles and aspirations of people you end up knowing more about than most family members. At root, it’s about the decisions people make or the customs they adhere to in the name of social customs. Whether you’ve ever flirted with an attempt at social ascendency, suffered from loneliness, or love to gossip: you, or someone like you but more French, is in this book.
If you or anyone you know is Jewish, you must read Proust.
At the beginning of Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer says, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” This resonates with In Search of Lost Time in the same way its considerations of religion, ethnicity, and discrimination resonate with our time. Proust was half-Jewish, and one wonders about the amount of Rothian self-loathing he suffered from given the depiction of Jews throughout In Search of Lost Time. Instances of discrimination and anti-Semitism, specifically the Dreyfus affair, are prevalent. As a historical record, it’s fascinating and offers ringside seats to the anti-Semitic hysteria that seized France in the late 19th century.
Most famously, and irritatingly, there is Bloch, narrator Marcel’s friend from childhood. As the novel progresses, we are introduced to Bloch’s family and the myriad ways in which they are discriminated against by characters (see: Marcel’s grandfather) or distrusted by society at large (Bloch’s uncle, M. Nissim Bernard, is portrayed as one of the novel’s most untrustworthy characters. A better protracted consideration of Judaism, anti-Semitism and the danger of breeding it is impossible to find. The motivations for this kind of discrimination, and its social acceptance are all the more frightening while reading Proust in this Trumpian era.
If you have ever been in love, you must read Proust.
Each section of Ulysses corresponds to a different organ, while the entirety of In Search of Lost Time corresponds to one organ. No, not that one. It’s the heart. Whether requited or otherwise, In Search of Lost Time is a novel dedicated thoroughly and deeply to love. In a sense, it serves as a compendium of the different ways we can love, do love, and should love. Of course, one of its central insights is into the ways that we shouldn’t love—whether that means loving the wrong person or in the wrong way. Luther Ingram’s “If Loving You is Wrong” would be the opening track on a Proustian Playlist.
If you have ever had your heart broken, you must read Proust.
I have often wondered whether this novel is more about love or heartbreak. But then it hit me: you can’t cleanly separate the two. Proust routinely explores the very specific strain of sadness that can only occur in romance. This extends from a minimal snub that feels significant to the complete dissolution of relationships. Each stop along the route of amorous pilgrimage is treated with the same forensic interest as the social customs mentioned above. One could picture Marcel listening to Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood and nodding along knowingly.
If you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of your parents, you must read Proust.
You do, I do, and Proust does too; there’s no shame in it. Our first association in life remains one of the most baffling. In Swann’s Way, young Marcel very famously bemoans the prospect of a night without his mother’s goodnight kiss. He hatches a plan to get it and, upon doing so, is devastated by the air of pity and yielding to despair incumbent in the giving of it. Proust is willing to keenly illustrate the disappointment, frustration, tenderness, confusion, irritation and lack of understanding that is intrinsic to the parent-child relationship because it is also underscored by love.
If you are or are considered a human, you must and you can read Proust.
Above all, I must reiterate that In Search of Lost Time isn’t merely the greatest reading experience available but is also, contrarily to popular belief, one of the most accessible. It’s magic is extraordinary for it works with whatever you bring to it. If you haven’t yet experienced what Marcel is remembering, then he prepares you for it. If you have, then he enlightens the experience, provides insight and understanding in a way those closest to us cannot. There are too many reasons to be hesitant. If it’s a matter of translation, just read the first two pages of each and pick the one that feels best. You don’t need to read each volume back to back, though who can blame you if you want to? He shapes the world for you. You can’t shake loose of what he shows you and you wouldn’t want to.
July 10th is Proust’s birthday. There isn’t a Bloomsday-like celebration. Instead, there’s confusion about cork-lined rooms, madeleines, eyeliner, fur coats and whether or not he and Joyce spoke to each other. I urge you to celebrate Proust by giving his work the chance it deserves. Who knows what can happen or where you’ll go if you take the chance? For as Proust says, “reality, even if it is inevitable, is not completely predictable.” Neither are we. You think you may know about Proust, but you have no idea.
Mary:
Both the poem, "Forgetting," and the discussion of Proust raise the question of memory, its complicated nature and its central importance to our lives. We know how fragile it is, how flimsy a fabric, filled with holes and substitutions, like a crazy quilt patched of fragments and inventions . And yet nothing is more essential and powerful. Lost or stolen memories are an unending, painful grief..because truly we Are our memories, erase enough of them, as in Alzheimer's, we cease to exist as individuals, become empty, wordless flesh, and die. Erase a chunk of memory, as a result of brain injury or the again popular ECT treatment for depression, and you are left with a permanent ache, as from an empty tooth socket, a hole you can neither ignore nor forgive. The inability to remember even small things is upsetting, major memory loss is devastating.
I read the entire Proust masterpiece years ago, and, why I'm not sure, remember only fragments now. I do remember thinking that despite the sensory power of that madelaine swamping him with an avalanche of memory, it would have still been impossible to recover everything that follows in such perfect detail...that it was a reconstruction and an invention, as are all our "recovered" memories. Marvelously done, and faithful to the process of memory when dealing with all those lost times...in fact, as stated, filled with an exuberant joyousness in the play of that very process, creating a whole world.
Oriana:
Yes, memory is a reconstruction, and some of our memories are "false memories" -- picked up from the movies, for instance. But even those is who we are.
*
“Oh—Proust—” Edward had been looking for the passage which had so amazed him . . . about Albertine going out in the rain on her bicycle, but he couldn’t find it. He had turned to the beginning. [Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.] What a lot of pain there was in those first pages. What a lot of pain there was all the way through. So how was it that the whole thing could vibrate with such a pure joy? This was something which Edward was determined to find out.” ~ Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice
*
JOJO RABBIT: A WAR FANTASY WITH A GOOFY, LOVABLE HITLER
~ “It’s springtime for Hitler and life is beautiful. At least it is for Johannes “Jojo” Betzler, a 10-year-old German boy who’s been thoroughly indoctrinated by Hitler Youth. That is, until he discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl at home and, boom, his world turns upside down.
Waititi immediately distinguishes itself from the self-serious source material, establishing a farcical opening to the sounds of the Beatles singing a German cover of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” while documentary footage rolls of National Socialists sieg-heiling. Jojo, played by Roman Griffin Davis in one of the best performances ever by a child actor, doesn’t merely subscribe to Hitler Youth; he thinks of the fuhrer as his friend, a surrogate daddy and imaginary buddy with whom he can share his feelings. And with Waititi, a Polynesian Jew who’s cast himself as Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich is mocked early and often.
At a Nazi boot camp for kids, Jojo is trained by the one-eyed Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell) and his minions, broadly played by Rebel Wilson and Alfie Allen. Though he finds a pudgy best friend in Yorki (a terrific Archie Yates), Jojo is forever an outcast. Humiliated when a nearby exploding grenade scars his face and legs, the kid is laughed out of junior military training for failing to prove his manhood by strangling a rabbit, hence the nickname. Audiences have been laughing at Nazis since Charlie Chaplin played the fictional Adenoid Hynkel of Tomania in 1940’s The Great Dictator. But a persistent argument against Jojo Rabbit is that it offers nothing new in its soft-edged condemnation of tyrants. With anti-Semitism on the rise along with other hate crimes, the film’s timely and subversive message surely bears repeating.
Though the resolution of this crisis is predictable, the humanist in Waititi brings intimacy and indelible passion to each step in the boy’s journey to empathy. The film, which grows less comic and more delicate as it moves toward its foregone conclusion, may fall short of greatness, but it never sinks to the maudlin. With expert help from cinematographer Mihai Malaimare (The Master) and composer Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles), the auteur walks a tightrope with uncommon skill.
Elsa tells Jojo that what she misses most is the freedom to dance, a reminder of a time before unspeakable horror stopped the music.
It’s a modest goal. But it’s in the small moments that Jojo Rabbit achieves its greatest impact. Waititi’s faith in the notion that a child will lead us out of ignorance may be naïve. It’s also deeply affecting. Besides, isn’t truth always the first casualty of indoctrination, whether you live in the era of fake news or not? The first words of the Leunens novel come to mind: “The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.” ~
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/jojo-rabbit-movie-review-889145/
~ “Of course, this being a Taika Waititi film, Jojo Rabbit is certainly not a conventional wartime drama. The Nazis here are absolute idiots, the one-liners fly thick and fast, and the protagonist, Johannes 'Jojo' Betzler (the acting debut of Roman Griffin Davis), receives worldly wisdom from his imaginary best friend Adolf Hitler, as played by Waititi himself. Jojo is gung-ho about the Nazi regime, as only a brainwashed ten-year-old can be, but his blind fanaticism is challenged when he discovers that his mother (as played by Scarlett Johansson) is protecting a young Jewish girl called Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) by hiding her in their attic.
Waititi hasn’t been shy in focusing on how the movie is what he calls an “anti-hate satire.” Indeed, it’s on all the posters, almost as a mission statement (and possibly a sad reminder at a time when it seems Nazis have unironically come back in fashion). Jojo Rabbit’s most effective weapon is its humor, and how it uses that to expose the flimsiness of propaganda.
Jojo imagines a version of Hitler that is somewhat accurate to the overblown deified image of him created by the Nazi Party, but twisted to fit the mind of a pre-teen boy. His imaginary BFF take on Adolf is much goofier but near mystical in his abilities, which wasn’t far off how propaganda portrayed him (this one even eats unicorn meat). He’s also played by a Jewish Maori actor, which only further emphasizes the joke. The version of Nazi life Jojo lives seems so care-free and delightful in the way playtime is, because it all seems so unserious and separate from the true devastation by war.
The “exercises” of the Hitler Youth are stupid, but the sort of thing that would seem amazing at the age of ten: from setting things on fire to casually throwing knives at trees to dressing like a robot to collect scrap metal.Jojo imagines a version of Hitler that is somewhat accurate to the overblown deified image of him created by the Nazi Party, but twisted to fit the mind of a pre-teen boy. His imaginary BFF take on Adolf is much goofier but near mystical in his abilities, which wasn’t far off how propaganda portrayed him (this one even eats unicorn meat). He’s also played by a Jewish Maori actor, which only further emphasizes the joke. The version of Nazi life Jojo lives seems so care-free and delightful in the way playtime is, because it all seems so unserious and separate from the true devastation by war. The “exercises” of the Hitler Youth are stupid, but the sort of thing that would seem amazing at the age of ten: from setting things on fire to casually throwing knives at trees to dressing like a robot to collect scrap metal.
Some critics said the reason the film didn’t work for them because it was too carefree in these moments, but this is how a child raised in the smothering grip of propaganda would see the world if they were taught to believe that they were part of the chosen people and their leader was essentially god on earth. Jojo doesn’t see that there’s no real glory in war, or that the adults left in charge are either anti-Nazi rebels like his mother or incompetent dolts like Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson’s characters. It’s only when Jojo finds Elsa in his attic and she ruthlessly takes down every piece of anti-Semitic nonsense he’s been fed by the party that reality hits in. The film’s color palette changes and the world seems a lot grimmer for Jojo. Food runs dry, morale depletes, and in the film’s most heartbreaking moment, Jojo discovers that his mother has been hung after being revealed to be a political dissident. Everything Jojo believed in stops being fun and games when the magnitude of the Nazi regime’s cruelty impacts him directly.
Some critics said the reason the film didn’t work for them because it was too carefree in these moments, but this is how a child raised in the smothering grip of propaganda would see the world if they were taught to believe that they were part of the chosen people and their leader was essentially god on earth. Jojo doesn’t see that there’s no real glory in war, or that the adults left in charge are either anti-Nazi rebels like his mother or incompetent dolts like Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson’s characters. It’s only when Jojo finds Elsa in his attic and she ruthlessly takes down every piece of anti-Semitic nonsense he’s been fed by the party that reality hits in. The film’s color palette changes and the world seems a lot grimmer for Jojo. Food runs dry, morale depletes, and in the film’s most heartbreaking moment, Jojo discovers that his mother has been hung after being revealed to be a political dissident. Everything Jojo believed in stops being fun and games when the magnitude of the Nazi regime’s cruelty impacts him directly.
As the war reaches its end, the Nazi Party desperately try to retain power as the American army draws ever nearer. The Gestapo, led by Captain Deertz (Stephen Merchant, essentially playing Major Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark), arrive at Jojo's home and tear it apart, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. Elsa reveals herself, pretending to be Jojo's late sister. When the Gestapo demands her papers, she hands them over to Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who confirms her date of birth. After they leave, she reveals that she got the date wrong, meaning that Klezendorf chose to let them go. For Jojo, it's a real moment of realization: He's been taught his whole life that Jews are monstrous in appearance and attitude, making them easy to spot in a crowd, but nobody knew Elsa was Jewish when they saw her in his house.
Worried that Elsa will leave him now that the war is gone, Jojo says that the Nazis won. Writing a letter to her in the persona of her boyfriend - an occasionally passive-aggressive treat Jojo has offered Elsa since meeting her - he says he has a way to smuggle her out of the house. For one last time, Jojo's imaginary Hitler appears. He's far less humorous now and fully shows himself as a monster. Jojo realizes he has no need for him and rejects him with a kick out of the window. Jojo takes Elsa outside, where it's revealed that the Allies did indeed win. She slaps Jojo for tricking her and then, free and alone together with no idea what the future holds, they dance.
Jojo and Elsa dance to "Heroes" by David Bowie, one of the musician's most iconic songs. The 1977 hit was part of Bowie's Berlin period after he took up residence in West Berlin and began experimenting with krautrock and electro music. The song was so beloved that the German Foreign Office paid homage to Bowie for "helping to bring down the wall" after his death in 2016. In Jojo Rabbit, the version the pair dance to is in German, as is the version of The Beatles's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in the opening credits.
The use of anachronistic pop music l ends the film a level of out-of-time modernity that fits its aesthetic and Waititi's humor, but the dancing itself is the climax to a hard-won battle for Jojo and Elsa. Jojo's mother frequently preached the joys of dancing and living life joyously, even when everything seems irredeemably dark. This is something Jojo, while still deeply entrenched in blind loyalty to the Nazis, never saw as a necessary part of his childhood. After the war has ended, neither Jojo nor Elsa have much left in the world following the deaths of their respective families. In an uncertain future, all they can do is dance.
https://screenrant.com/jojo-rabbit-movie-ending-explained/
The negative reviews can be scathing:
~ “Ludicrously billed as an “anti-hate satire”, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is so concerned with making its thematic intentions unmistakable that it neglects to be a satire of any kind. Its premise, of a young child indoctrinated from birth with Nazi ideology, is fertile ground for commentary on how extremism can seem normal, but Jojo’s (Roman Griffin Davis) Panglossian view of the Third Reich lacks bite, with much of its bizarrely lackadaisical rendering of Nazi Germany epitomized by the mewling giddiness of Jojo’s imaginary friend version of Adolf Hitler (Waititi).
Indeed, for a film that needs to illustrate the systems that warped a child like Jojo from birth, Jojo Rabbit paints a bafflingly unthreatening vision of Nazi Germany. Jojo himself, virulently antisemitic thanks to a lifetime of brainwashing propaganda, is the only character to consistently air a hatred and fear of Jews.
Everyone else, more preoccupied with Germany’s impending defeat, couldn’t care less about them, from his young peers to SS officers like Captain Klenzendorf, who at first seems like the latest in a string of redemptive racists for Sam Rockwell to play until it swiftly becomes clear that the soldier has already become disgusted with Nazi ideology and thus has no real moral arc.
The unwillingness to depict the pervasive hatred instilled in Nazi society even undermines Jojo’s emotional journey when he discovers that a Jew, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), is being hidden in the attic by his mother (Scarlett Johansson). Contriving to gain Elsa’s trust and lure her into a false sense of comfort to turn her in, Jojo instead engages in a budding romance with the girl, posing as her missing fiancé and writing love letters which ask a wryly amused Elsa to confirm the most outlandish myths he’s heard about Jews.
In theory, Jojo’s rapidly warming, even smitten attitude toward Elsa is a charming means of confronting the absurdity of bigotry with flesh-and-blood human connection, but in practice, Jojo’s attempts to keep Elsa in his attic merely water down how racists are often attracted to the very people they hate.
Any of these might have been at least partially salvaged by some decent jokes, but Jojo Rabbit runs almost entirely on goofy voices and twee energy over actual punchlines. And only once is the true menace of the Third Reich communicated in the form of Stephen Merchant’s looming, calmly authoritarian Gestapo agent. With no bedrock of horror, and no comic insight into it, Jojo Rabbit is a satire without purpose, a minor titillation in setting that ultimately amounts to little more than a slightly crooked rom-com.
https://lwlies.com/reviews/jojo-rabbit/
Oriana: LOVABLE HITLER
Or, if not exactly lovable, then goofy and harmless. And there is some sweet revenge in seeing a half-Maori, half-Jewish man play Hitler — even though it’s Hitler as an imaginary friend, already an outrageous idea.
There is some horror in the movie, especially toward the end, but it’s arguably the wrong move. The movie wins the hearts of the audience by being a charming celebration of life and love, freedom and music and dancing.
Is it completely unfunny? It’s chuckle-funny from time to time, not belly-laugh funny. “They snip off the ends of their penises. The rabbis use them for earplugs.” Or my favorite: Hitler calls Elsa “that female Jesse Owens.”
True: an in-depth exploration of how war and anti-Semitic indoctrination can affect a young boy (“We could use more of your blind fanaticism”) would probably be more interesting. One could also plead for more historical accuracy — reality is usually more absurd, both comic and tragic, and altogether fascinating than a mere “war fantasy” (as my companion categorized this movie). We have developed an insatiable appetite for non-fiction. That’s the reason memoirs are ahead of novels in popularity.
Nevertheless, there is something healing about exposing the absurdity of bigotry through satire. Monty Python’s sketches about the Spanish Inquisition didn’t make us forget the horror of it — you could be tortured and burned at the stake for not believing that a communion wafer becomes the literal body of Christ — but the Python buffoonery detoxed us by focusing on how grotesque it all was. Jojo detoxes us by presenting the Nazis as idiots.
The negative reviews make various valid points. No one will claim that Jojo Rabbbit is a masterpiece. Still . . . it’s an endearing, heart-warming movie. Just the friendship between Jojo and fat-boy Yorki is wonderful to watch. The mother-son scenes are suffused with tenderness and wisdom. It’s a lovable movie that even manages the impossible: it creates an almost lovable Hitler.
Jojo and Yorki: “Our only friends are the Japanese, and just between you and me, they don’t look very Aryan.” *
Mary:
I haven't seen JoJo Rabbit, but can see how an “anti-hate satire” might be fitting to our present situation. But would the subjects of this satire see themselves there, would they feel its sting? Sadly, I am pretty sure they would not...after all, they cannot even see the orange emperor in his bombastic nakedness, posturing daily in front of all the world. Maybe it would take a child, like JoJo, like the child in the original tale, innocent of collusion, to see what's right in front of him. Maybe we're not tired enough yet, maybe we're still too heavily invested, like those pandering senators, to risk losing whatever we imagine we have.
Oriana:
The phenomenon of bigotry, be it racial, religious, or any other kind, is immemorial and suggests biological roots. Tribalism worked when we really were tribal; now we need to learn to think of humanity as a whole, the planet as a whole. But the solution has been known for some time: get to know some of the people who are supposed to be so terrible: Jews, Muslim, Afro-American, whoever. This happens naturally in large cities, and there seems to be less bigotry in urban vs rural areas.
*
WHAT MAKES MEN HAPPY
~ “The 2018 Harry’s Masculinity Report, as it’s titled, surveyed 5,000 men ages 18-95 across the US, weighted for race, income, education, sexual orientation, military service, and more. The respondents were asked about their happiness, confidence, emotional stability, motivation, optimism, and sense of being in control. They were then asked how satisfied they are with their careers, relationships, money, work-life balance, physicality, and mental health, and also about the values that matter most to them.
The results showed an clear trend: The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success.
This measure, the study finds, is influenced by whether men feel they are using their own unique talents at work, whether they are surrounded by a diverse set of perspectives, how easily and often they can chat with co-workers, whether they feel their opinions are valued, and whether they’re inspired by the people they work with.
These results aligned with Harry’s 2017 survey of 2,000 men in the UK, also led by Barry, which similarly found that satisfying, secure employment is the strongest predictor of British men’s positive mindset. ”Men who have high job satisfaction are very likely to be content in other aspects of their life,” the report on the UK study explains. “Men at work are more likely to be men at ease with themselves. Everything else—contentment at home, in relationships and friendships—flows down from men being satisfied at work.”
Following job satisfaction, the top indicators of a positive mindset and wellness for American men are, in descending order, their physical and mental health, income, age (men over age 50 were significantly happier, especially in the US Midwest), and relationship status.
The survey found that 91 percent of married men had normal or better levels of mental positivity, compared with 80 percent of single or unmarried men. Regionally, friendship is a particularly strong predictor of well-being for men in the west and northeast US, while socializing through sports and healthy competition was a stronger indicator of well-being for men in the US south.
If this study teaches us anything, it’s that by and large, American men (along with their peers in the UK) derive happiness not from traditional notions of power and strength, but from the typically quieter task of doing meaningful work and contributing to the communities around them.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-strongest-predictor-of-men-s-well-being-isn-t-family-or-health?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
WHY MONOGAMY HELPS MEN
“My explanation focused on male interests, by suggesting that monogamy was imposed as a kind of reciprocal exchange between high status and low status men in ancient and medieval Europe: elite men allowed low status men to marry, in exchange for their tax contributions and military service. It's reasonable to suggest that the institutionalization of monogamy did mainly reflect male interests, as these societies were heavily male-dominated in fields that were highly relevant to this institutionalization, such as law, politics and religion.” ~ Michael Price
*
NAMES AND AFFECTION
Thinking about the power of names . . . some create affection (maybe because they are already endearments, or similar to endearments), and some don't. Sometimes I regret having dropped “Ivy” in favor of “Oriana,” since “Ivy” seemed to inspire affection. It was a bit little-girlish (that's why I dropped it), but people seemed to like the name and to like me just because of the name. And I think the same may be true of “Bernie.” If he insisted on “Bernard,” it would be no better than “Donald” or “Hillary.” “Hillary” is an ugly name. I suspect it was an extra handicap.
I’m glad that Nancy Pelosi is a Nancy, and not, say, Chelsea or Skipper.
Just think how differently people respond to the sound of “Nancy.” It was difficult to hate Nancy Reagan precisely because her name was Nancy. And though Nancy called RR “Ronnie,” to everyone else he was merely “Ronald,” and “Ronald” does not inspire affection.
*
HOW LIFE MAY CHANGE AFTER THE PANDEMIC
~ “Although I stopped shaking hands with interviewees 10 days ago, to avoid any chance of passing on a virus I almost certainly don’t have, even Lady Macbeth-like levels of hand washing suddenly don’t feel quite socially responsible enough. Never mind “dancing like nobody’s watching”, as the twee motivational quotes have it; “living life as if an NHS contact tracer is counting how many people you’re breathing germs over” suddenly seems a more appropriate motto.
Nobody should be blamed for unwittingly infecting others, obviously; we’re all in this together. But we are entering the next stage of coronavirus now, where life will change and perhaps dramatically. Diaries will empty almost as fast as train carriages, as all but essential meetings are scrapped. But that’s just the beginning, as the shutters come down all over Europe. We may be entering a grim, involuntary social experiment revealing which everyday habits and practices we’d miss if they were gone, and which could be swept away surprisingly easily.
It’s no longer unthinkable that this year’s exams might need to be scrapped or postponed, and suddenly an argument that has been going round in circles for years about whether testing at 16 really makes sense – because ultimately ditching it always feels like too much of an upheaval, unfair on the children who would become guinea pigs – changes. We may be entering an era where things that once seemed impossible, become almost impossible to avoid.
Sadly for the theory that crises are opportunities in disguise, the changes that may be coming won’t always be benign or within our control. A major coronavirus pandemic may mean social consequences we never foresaw and painful shifts away from economic models on which many jobs depend – on top of the deaths and suffering the virus itself will bring. But this crisis could end up being less like the banking crash and more like a war, an event throwing everything high enough into the air that some of it never returns to Earth.
Women taking over men’s work in factories and offices was meant to be a sticking plaster solution to get us through the second world war, but when the fighting was over women balked at returning to narrow domestic lives. Rationing was just a pragmatic response to food shortages but it accidentally created a giant control group of children all raised on the same diet, whose health outcomes obesity researchers would study for decades to come.
Wartime desperation accelerated the development of everything from antibiotics to radar to sexual health services free at the point of need, years before the NHS was established (it was a first world war outbreak of venereal disease among soldiers that led to the setting up of the first clinics in 1916).
Since few in 1939 would have predicted a movement for women’s liberation, all predictions of how this outbreak will change us should be taken with a bucket of salt. But ideas long parked in the “too difficult” box may begin breaking out of it.
After the 2008 banking crash, some firms of City lawyers or accountants whose work had abruptly dried up started asking for volunteers to work four-day weeks and take a pay cut. Part-time work went from being seen as something only working mothers did, to a heroic gesture men could also feel good about; when the crisis passed, some chose to stick with the new working pattern.
What stops most people taking Fridays off now is that they can’t afford to earn less, while most employers can’t face reorganizing the whole office to pack the same work into fewer, more productive days. But some companies facing a catastrophic slump in demand are already pleading for volunteers to cut their hours, while others will end up making radical changes to the way they operate in order to cope with the numbers going off sick.
If the need to share work around during the Great Depression helped kill the six-day week, this virus may knock another brick out of the wall of Monday to Friday working. And how many of those cancelled meetings, or mothballed conferences, will be actively missed?
The existing shift from an analogue world to a digital one will surely speed up too. Rather than risk exchanging germs, we’ll shop online, FaceTime the grandparents instead of visiting, pay electronically rather than handle cash, stockpile ebooks for long dull days indoors.
Politics, too, will change. There has long been stiff resistance in parliament to letting MPs vote electronically from wherever they happen to be; only after a heavily pregnant Tulip Siddiq was pushed through the lobbies in a wheelchair were proxy votes for new parents reluctantly granted. But keeping elderly peers cooped up in the House of Lords seems almost irresponsible now, and e-voting could be the safest way of passing legislation in an epidemic. If it works, then can it be long before the rest of us are voting online in general elections, not walking to polling stations?
And if all this sounds like a lonely, antiseptic way of living, then perhaps it will also make us appreciate the human contacts that matter. My son was longing for school closures until his teachers explained that the contingency plan is to set daily lessons online instead; all the same grind, but no break times with your friends (and no staffroom camaraderie).
What we will miss most in a crisis, I suspect, is each other. But don’t be surprised, when things eventually return to normal, if it isn’t quite the normal we knew.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/coronavirus-school-exams-five-day-week-pandemic?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2nOXLTHgKSxQyQZVJMTEbemy-XmR_YCHP-ICtAwVbGLwXt81n5fTCfUn8#Echobox=1584084044
Oriana:
A short while ago we worried about too much social isolation. Now “social distancing” is a primary virtue. And it’s surprisingly easy. Yesterday at the grocery store I saw two women friends greet each other with a sideways, no-hands hug — it was fun to watch. Fun, but in a sad way, since we already have too little human connection.
I get some of my connection at two Unitarian discussion groups — those got canceled, along with the Sunday services, “until further notice.” If that suspension of gathering together goes on long enough, we may lose the habit of socializing in certain ways. On the other hand, it’s a fascinating experiment: if people stop going to church, how many will miss it?
But for me the most interesting question is whether “social distancing” will lead to a four-day work week and more working from home.
Mary: “HOME, WHERE WE ALWAYS WANT TO GO”
What will the world be like after this pandemic?? Different, in ways we can hardly imagine. Plagues have always shaped and reshaped history, bringing down empires, making feudalism obsolete, emptying a continent of 90 percent of its indigenous population, redefining social roles and morals, changing fashion, and even standards of beauty and romantic idesls. Pathogens, bacterial and viral, are like invisible engines driving changes not only in how we suffer and die, but how we live and behave, changes from the level of our DNA to the structure of society and the sweep of history. Whatever comes, it will surprise us.
Hoping you remain well. My anxiety level is becoming a problem...but pretty well contained. I am focusing on keeping busy and productive...the anxiety comes out in dreams. Last night I was putting all effort into keeping my baby brother (who died quite a while ago) from being killed in traffic.we were walking somewhere along a crazy busy highway, with no sidewalk or footpath, only great vigilance and care keeping us from being run over. And then crossing very dicey rope and stick bridges over roaring rivers. Don’t know where we were going. Home, probably, where we always want to go. Waking up from this already exhausted. Using strategies I know however, like beauty, to detox.
Oriana:
A greater awareness of vulnerability will probably remain with us for a while — especially for those people who understand that another pandemic is just a matter of time in this super-connected world.
I too woke up from a strange dream, with the thought in my mind, “Enough Holocaust! I’m done with the Holocaust!” — and opening the door to an empty room. I knew the meaning wasn’t “Never again” — rather, I was simply tired of that horrific time in history. A frivolous attitude, I know . . . a personal reaction, strictly my own, that I want other stories, other themes.
As someone wisely observed, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” We want “normalcy,” before we witnessed the neo-Nazis parading again. We want to keep going to movies and restaurants, parks and museums. We want the reality that used to be our home just such a short time ago.
*
THE MYSTERY OF ZEBRA STRIPES SOLVED AT LAST? “ THEY EVOLVED TO DETER BLOOD-SUCKING FLIES”
~ “By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”
The team found the same trend when they put striped coats on the horses. Cloaked in stripes, the very same animals suddenly became more resistant to flies, except on their uncovered heads. And uniformly colored coats had no effect; the stripes, specifically, befuddled the flies.
“When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.
Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido of the University of Minnesota, who studies insect vision, favors the latter idea. These insects use optic flow to gauge their own speed and their distance from nearby objects. “I think that the key is that the stripes’ thickness and orientation is not consistent, either within a stripe or across them,” she says. “This is probably what makes it difficult for the flies to control their landing.” (She also notes that cuttlefish use their color-changing skins to create striped patterns that move across their bodies, and these “passing clouds” might also work by disrupting the optic flow of their prey.)
If Gonzalez-Bellido is right, a more evenly striped coat should offer less protection. Caro’s team is now planning to test this hypothesis, and others. “Now that we know striped coats work just as well as stripes on real zebras, we can really play around with them,” he said. “We can put on coats with very wide stripes, or different orientations, or gray stripes. We can see how those affect fly behavior.”
In the meantime, he is wary of making firm recommendations to the equine industry. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that horse-wear companies sell striped livery for their riders yet,” he said. “We need to do the work first.”
*
THE SEXLESSNESS OF YAHWEH AND JESUS
While the sexual potency of various pagan gods is seen as part of their power and glory, Yahweh — at least once monotheism was established — was presented as sexless, even though he’s unquestionably male. As I argue in a previous blog, Yahweh does appear to have a body, just as the pagan gods had perfect and immortal bodies:
http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2015/10/yahweh-had-body-word-that-dissolves.html
But Yahweh’s body is described in a rather restrained manner. He has hands and feet, a backside, and presumably a mouth (he kisses Moses — the “kiss of death” that sucks out the breath of life out of Moses). If he can walk and talk, then presumably he has the kind of anatomy that makes it possible. In spite of the prevalent assumption about a long gray beard, there is no reference to a beard. More important, there is no reference to genitals — though if humans were created in the image of god, then both male and female genitals should be present, and breasts too. A problem, yes, but given all the confusion and contradictions that are found in the bible, this may be minor, relatively speaking.
We sense there is something more fundamental involved here. While many ancient cultures glorified sex, especially male sexuality, here we find ambivalence at best (e.g. being ashamed of nakedness, which never occurred to the Greeks). Worse: sex is unclean. It’s defiling.
Blood was defiling, especially menstrual blood of course, but all blood by association. Touching a dead body was defiling — “whoever touches a corpse shall be unclean for seven days.” Childbirth was defiling. The discharge of semen was defiling, even without contact with a woman. Procreation was certainly seen in a positive light, but sex made you ritually unclean. Obviously the deity could not engage in such a disgusting activity.
There is a lot of sex in the bible, but Yahweh has none. He has no female mate (the kabbalistic/folkloric “Shehina” as Yahweh’s lover is not very convincing). His celibacy is absolute. The contrast with the rampant sexuality of the pagan gods couldn’t be greater.
Jesus, being an ideal human being, even before being deified, could not be presented as having sex either. There may be a troublesome suggestion in the person of John as “the beloved disciple.” Was Jesus gay? But that’s only a suspicion at best. The official message is that Jesus had no sex. He was even conceived without sex, through some strange doings of the Holy Ghost that did not interfere with Mary’s virginity.
So the requirement that priests (and monks and nuns) be sexless — they mustn’t even think about it — is in keeping with the negative view of sex that goes back to the remote past. If the deity is male but never has sex then this is obviously the ideal.
Angels likewise don’t have sex, though there is the strange passage describing how some angels (“sons of god”) found the “daughters of men” so attractive that they descended from heaven and had sex with them, fathering a race of giants (Nephilim) (Genesis 6:1-4). This was not something my catechism nun ever told us about. But then the bible is full of off-color stories, as I was to discover later.
Along with those stories, however, the message was clear: Yahweh was sexless, as was Jesus, as were the angels. As a Catholic, you should be too, virginity being a higher state than matrimony and parenthood. Given the fallen nature of humanity, sex — for procreation only, never for pleasure — had to be allowed within marriage. But priests represented Christ, so they had to be male and sexless. Oddly enough, they didn’t have to be Jewish.
*
~ “The very thing that has forced Christianity to redefine its positions, is the very thing that is not permitted in Islamic states, and it is a secular government. If it was not for a secular government to protect the rights of individuals to speak against religious dogma, free-thought heroes like Frederick Douglass would never have been permitted to say, “I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.” It was only because individuals like Douglass were free to write and speak as they pleased that Christianity was forced to incorporate verses like Galatians 3:26-28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,” into its theology.
Likewise, it was the restraints of a secular government that allowed women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton the liberty to say, “The church is a terrible engine of oppression, especially as concerns women,” and Susan B. Anthony to state, “The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.” It was the protection of a secular government that required Christian theologians to redefine their stances on women with verses like Acts 2:17 “… your sons and daughters shall prophesy.”
We should expect nothing less in the Islamic world. The religious despots of Islam have never allowed a Reformation, and it is time world leaders begin encouraging one. It certainly does not help when leaders like President Bush compare the battle against terrorism as a “crusade.” Where were the leaders advising Iraq that a democracy only works if it is secular? Perhaps they were too caught up in the false belief that the United States is a Christian nation.” ~
(oops, I lost the link. It’s obviously not a recent article, but the points it makes and examples it gives are wonderful.)
*
WHY THE PLAGUE SPARED POLAND AND MILAN
~ “The Black Death was a ruthless killer – and, if you were lucky, a swift one. Its more fortunate victims "ate lunch with their friends, and dinner with their ancestors in paradise," wrote Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through the initial wave of the Plague as it struck Italy in the 1340s.
The Plague was brought from China to Europe in the 1330s by rodents hitching rides with traders. The infection with the Yersinia pestis bacterium was typically transmitted to humans by fleabites. The Plague's three manifestations were bubonic (causing painful swellings), septicemic (infecting the bloodstream) and pneumonic (choking off breathing, and transmittable via coughing). Left untreated – as was necessarily the case in the Middle Ages – bubonic plague had a mortality rate of about 50%, for the other two, it's virtually 100%.
Bocaccio's Italy was hit hard by the epidemic. Cities like Venice and Pisa lost three-quarters of their population. The disease followed the traditional trading routes north, racing forward each spring as a new generation of fleas was ready to spread the infection.
The Plague afflicted most of Europe in a relatively brief period. It's estimated that it killed as many as 25 million – a third of Europe's population at the time – in just five short years.
Absent explanations and remedies, Europe's populations turned to God for hope, and victimized outsider groups as scapegoats. Some of Western Europe's worst anti-Jewish pogroms before WWII took place during outbreaks of the Plague.
• First afflicted (in 1347) were Asia Minor, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, with just small bridgeheads on the European mainland: Marseilles and environs, Calabria (the tip of Italy's shoe), and the southern shore of what is now Turkish Thrace (i.e. European Turkey).
• By the next year (1348), the disease had achieved a firm foothold in Europe, reaching as far as the gates of Toledo and Paris.
• In early 1349, the Plague had overwhelmed London and Frankfurt, and was poised to pounce Vienna and Bucharest. Later that year, it reached as far as Ireland and Norway.
• Its relentless march north continued. In 1350, it hit Lübeck and Copenhagen, reaching high into Norway. In 1351 and thereafter, it swept further north, touching the entire continent.
The Black Death has left deep traces in European history. To this day, ødegård – 'deserted farm' – is a fairly common place name in Norway, to name just one example.
The Plague spared certain areas (marked green on the map) on march of destruction:
an area in Italy centered on Milan;
small, contiguous parts of Spain and France, on either side of the Pyrenees;
an area in the Low Countries around Bruges;
a large area in Eastern Europe, stretching from Magdeburg to beyond Warsaw, taking in most of present-day Poland, plus some surrounding areas.
Why? First off, the map is slightly misleading. Green does not mean 'safe', just 'less deadly'. Milan, for example, only lost about 15% of its population. Horrific by today's standards, but a mere trifle compared to the almost wholesale extinction of Italy's other cities. In Poland and the other 'green' areas too, people did die of the Plague, albeit in much lower numbers than elsewhere.
One main reason why Poland escaped relatively unscathed, was the decision by Poland's king, Casimir the Great, to close the country's borders – and set up internal quarantines.
This increased Poland's natural isolation, both from the outside world and between the settlements within the country – generally smaller and less connected than elsewhere in Europe. Prague to Krakow took eight days on horseback. People infected took between 24 to 72 hours to get sick. So the issue would 'resolve' itself well before the danger reached the Polish border.
Isolation plus quarantine certainly helped spare Poland from the worst of the epidemic. One more spurious explanation is that Poland had more cats than other parts of Europe, and thus less disease-carrying rats…
Milan's significantly lower mortality rate may also be down to the city's stricter quarantine measures: The houses of infected families were simply bricked up (with the infected left to die inside).
Like Poland, the French-Spanish area, corresponding to the then-kingdom of Navarre, may have benefited from its relative isolation. Why the area around Bruges – then a thriving port with connections to the Mediterranean – might have been spared, is more of a mystery.
So, what's the lesson, if any? Isolation definitely helps against infectious diseases. But that's about the only advantage of being isolated. Take this map of the spread of COVID-19 as of 11 am on 5 March. If you had to divide the world into 'fun' and 'no fun' halves, they would correspond quite well with the blue and grey zones on this map, respectively.
For example, one sure-fire way to limit your exposure to the outside world is to have a bloody civil war – see Yemen, Libya and Syria. Another is to be a destination as out of the way and unconnected as Paraguay, the Central African Republic or Mongolia.
If it's the price of living in an interconnected world, then perhaps there are worse things than having to fight off a slightly deadlier iteration of the flu. Praise globalization and pass the hand sanitizer – with your elbows, please!
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/bubonic-plague-spares-poland?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3
Oriana:
The same was true during the Spanish flu pandemic: places that practiced strict quarantine managed to escape catastrophe.
King Casimir the Great, venerated for his wisdom70% ALCOHOL DISINFECTS BETTER THAN 90% ALCOHOL
~ “Basically, a 90 or 91 percent alcohol solution is too powerful in some cases: It fries the outside of the cell before it can get into the inside and kill the actual germ. 70 percent alcohol is just the right proportion of water and alcohol to zap the entire cell. “Seventy percent alcohol has some water in it that allows it to cross a cell membrane, to really get into the bacteria to kill them,” Scott says.
Interestingly, Scott explains this rule of thumb only applies when you’re attempting to fend off bacteria. Alcohol’s effectiveness against viruses depends on the unique virus. Viruses with an envelope structure—including the flu virus, the common cold, HIV, and the new coronavirus—can be can be deactivated by alcohol solutions (like hand sanitizer) of 60 percent or more, while others like norovirus won’t be effectively targeted by any concentration of alcohol. (Hand-washing helps to physically remove every type or virus and bacteria from your hands, and is an important part of any hygiene routine.)
Practically, how does this rule-of-thumb apply to home hygiene? If you’re cutting raw chicken on the counter and want to effectively disinfect the surface to prevent cross-contamination of E. coli and salmonella bacteria, you’d want to opt for 70 percent alcohol. But if you’re trying to disinfect a surface that might have viruses lingering on it—for example, if someone in your house has the flu—any dilution of alcohol will work as long as it’s above the recommended 60 percent.
In any case, it’s important to focus on hygiene practices like thorough hand washing (20 seconds of scrubbing each time!) and targeted hygiene (regularly disinfecting high-traffic hand-contact areas in your home, especially if someone sick has touched them). Stay healthy!
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/isopropyl-alcohol-percent-disinfecting-36723904?utm_source=pocket-newtab
ending on beauty:
I beg you have no fear of silence
silence is eloquent
hatred yells roars barks and howls
love smiles and keeps silent
it’s waiting for you
~ Tadeusz Różewicz, tr Oriana
Renoir: The Canoe
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