This still life was painted by — surprise! — Caravaggio. Note the imperfections — wilted or damaged leaves, a boo-boo on the apple, the spots on the pear. We are supposed to be reminded of death and decay. And right now we are certainly getting a heavy reminder of our fragility.
*
MARY OF NAZARETH
Painters made her eternally
young and beautiful,
our virgin Aphrodite
with her glorious names:
Queen of Heaven,
Our Lady of the Flowers,
Star of the Sea.
But that’s not what she was
back in Galilee —
a small, skinny woman,
breasts and belly drooping
from ten births —
tossing seed to the chickens,
tying up the goat,
carrying water from the well —
shrinking darker and smaller,
wrinkled with the years.
Shrinking so small that nothing
real of her remained —
instead, the bright archangel
pointing with a sword-
like lily, to the terrified girl
announcing
the terrifying news —
In her modesty she doesn’t
even lift her eyes
from the book she’s supposed to read —
we know she couldn't read —
and lilies of obedience
tumble from her sinless mouth.
But I think that is her
in the parable of the lost coin —
the village woman who swept
every inch of her house,
rummaged in every chest and alcove,
poked into every jar —
and found
the coin and kissed it,
held it up high like a tiny sun —
then laughing ran to tell the neighbors.
That is the only
story about her one can trust.
~ Oriana
Roman coins used in Ancient Israel
Charles:
This poem made me smile and cry at the same time.
*
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
~ Bertolt Brecht
Mary:
Singing in the dark times, of course. How else could we exorcise our fears, get through one long day of hours after another? And I see the attraction in reading about other times of plague, we want to know how it happened, how people made it through, how bad it might be, and what might be left after. Even, maybe especially, because none of this will be reassuring. We pride ourselves on our sophisticated medical technology, and yet see how simple numbers can overwhelm, and leave us with no treatment at all for too many, helpless as the medieval victim blaming contagion on bad air. The refrigerated morgue trucks outside New York hospitals are simply our version of the medieval death carts, and just as terrifying
*
“Man starts over again everyday,
in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.” ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay
AN ITALIAN CLASSIC ABOUT THE TIME OF THE PLAGUE
~ “It makes sense for people to return to what they know intimately at a difficult time, and The Betrothed is deeply ingrained in Italian popular culture, where its role is hard to overstate; it’s perhaps second only to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The historical novel is compulsory reading in schools across Italy, where students dissect it for a full school year. The prominence of Manzoni is such that many schools—including the one I attended—are named after him in Italy, while his characters, like Don Abbondio, became so popular in popular culture that even the Pope has occasionally referenced them in sermons.
The book had historical importance, too. Maria Gabriella Riccobono, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Milan, told me that it was the first important novel written for a wider audience in the Italian language—with earlier novels either of little value or written only for the elites. “To do that, he used lower-class protagonists and a language accessible maybe not to the many, but to most of the literate,” she added, adding that most Italians still couldn’t read when the novel was first published in 1827.
Forced by the lockdown to work from home, Riccobono has included the novel in her course this year and was uploading handouts for her students when we spoke. (She uploaded them to a personal blog after her university’s platform crashed repeatedly from overuse.)
The plot of The Betrothed is far from a Hollywood storyline. Renzo and Lucia—the two titular betrotheds—want to marry, but local squire Don Rodrigo, who wants Lucia, threatens the cowardly prelate, Don Abbondio, not to celebrate the couple. They are forced to flee, their unwavering love tested by a long series of daunting challenges, until the plague arrives in Milan, killing Don Rodrigo but sparing the heroes.
Most readers said the chapters about the plague, when Manzoni abandons his characters to tell the history of how the plague arrived in Lombardy, seemed the most realistic to them. In the book as in now, Lombardy was the main area of an initial outbreak. Then, like now, the disease arrived from abroad, Italian politicians (like the Spanish kingdom that ruled over Milan at the time of The Betrothed) were slow to react—and waiting facilitated the contagion. The population first ignored or denied the problem, then became overly suspicious about foreigners, then panicked.
“In those pages there is already everything [that we are living today],” Domenico Squillace, the principal of the Volta high school in Milan, wrote to his students in an open letter when the government decided to suspend schools on 24 February. “The certainty of the dangerousness of foreigners, the violent conflict among authorities, […] the uncontrolled rumors, the absurd remedies, the raids for goods of first necessity, the health emergency… More than from Manzoni’s novel, they seem like pages that came out of one of today’s newspapers.”
In other cases, readers took to the book not only to learn historical facts and predict the outcome of the pandemic, but to draw lessons. After the historical descriptions, Manzoni follows Renzo as he enters Milan and observes harrowing scenes—lynching attempts, grieving mothers, and quarantined families left without food, with their doors nailed against the wall to block them in.
Squillace told me that the parallel was useful because he thought it would teach his students a valuable lesson: when a pandemic strikes, he says, it’s easy to lose our humanity. “The risk,” Squillace said, “is that seeing the enemy everywhere poisons our life, our social interactions, barbarizes civil living.”
Luca Napolitani, a reader from Teramo, in central Italy, said what most fascinated him was the fact that the book’s ending showed how pandemics could be great levelers—when the plague hits, wealth and class don’t matter. “Even pious Lucia is ‘hardened’ by life towards the end of the book—a sign that hardships can test everyone, even those with strong religious values.”
Tiziana Benedetti, a retired elementary school teacher, told me that she found the novel’s most realistic character to be the aristocrat and intellectual Don Ferrante, a man who devotes most of his time to obscure studies, authors and disciplines. When the plague outbreak reaches Milan, he refuses to acknowledge it, instead formulating perplexing astrological and philosophical theories to account for reality. “He reminds me of the intellectuals of today who denied that the coronavirus was dangerous,” Benedetti said. “They live a life that is very far from everyday reality.”
At the end, Don Ferrante dies, killed by the plague he tried to refute.
*
Meanwhile, as I had these conversations, I got closer to the epidemic. I spoke to the doctors on the frontlines and to the infected, to the people whose life is suspended by the lockdown and to the scientists trying to account for why this happened in Italy. And I realized that all these people would take to the book for very different reasons—finding a unifying one was always a doomed mission.
Professor Riccobono agreed; some might look for moral guidance or comfort, others may be trying to understand the reaction to the current pandemic through the mistakes of the book’s characters, and others are drawn to it simply because it was the pandemic-themed story they knew best. In almost all cases, though, reading The Betrothed was a defensive instinct, Riccobono said. “At the root of it, there’s our fear, and when fear is depicted in such an authentic way, we can exorcise it,” she said.
As another deadly pandemic takes hold, she said, turning to the old stories we know satisfies a primal impulse. We want to know how it ended for them and how it will end for us.” ~
https://lithub.com/italys-answer-to-coronavirus-is-a-classic-published-almost-200-years-ago/?fbclid=IwAR1WvtTs6-olrTnJPDpeucCN2koA7wT2ghyIqc5GuMK6yNZBhSuUGnBO_9A
Mary:
Can genius be inspired by catastrophe? The pressures of time cut short, the threat of death, the sense of being on the cusp of great change, along with the social isolation and suspension of ordinary business and occupation — I think all this can be a spur to creative invention and discovery. None of this comes easy to us — we are a gregarious, social, busy species.
Quarantine is the reversal of all we find most normal, it goes against our basic herd instincts, leaving us all alone...like those prophets in the desert…where they had their best visions. Thrown back on our own resources, without the distractions of our usual everyday lives, we might find unsuspected resources, wells of inspiration suddenly available and full of riches. Answers we can hear when it gets quiet enough, interests and abilities we suddenly have time for, all with the knowledge that time may be quite short.
Oriana:
Change often leads to inspiration — falling in love or the loss of love, travel to places quite different from home. And sudden isolation, yes, if typically we are with others. But fear . . . well, I suppose it depends on the degree. Terror, panic — those are never good things.
But history shows wars and other emergencies do lead to some benefits — inventions and discoveries that might otherwise take decades more, or never. Again, pressure and deadlines can be a terrific spur to creativity, but only if the potential creator does not slide into a state of panic.
Newton, undistracted in his country house, well, that's a wonderful story, and even those desert hermits . . . Sometimes we need the synergy of being around other minds; at other times, solitude is best. We are certainly learning from this epidemic.
We could use a chuckle:
FAMOUS FIRST SENTENCES OF NOVELS REWRITTEN FOR SOCIAL DISTANCING
Mrs. Dalloway :
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Then she remembered the florist was closed. And the party was cancelled. Finally, some time to rest and reflect on her marital choices.
Swann’s Way :
For a long time, I went to bed early. I wasn’t even that tired. It was more like, hey: here’s a good way to pass the time.
Middlemarch :
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by the same leggings and sweatshirt she has been wearing for the last five days.
Notes from Underground :
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man… I am a man who is going to McSorley’s to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day!!!
The Bell Jar :
It was a queer, pandemic spring, the spring they cancelled all the orgies, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
The Great Gatsby :
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like going to a restaurant,” he told me, “just remember there are people in this world whose immune systems haven’t had all the advantages yours has had.”
Moby-Dick :
FaceTime me, Ishmael.
The Hobbit:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. He planned to stay there indefinitely in order not to make the lives of essential healthcare personnel more perilous.
Jane Eyre :
There was every possibility of taking a walk that day, as long as we kept six feet between us and the others on the path.
Pride and Prejudice :
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be hoarding toilet paper.
https://lithub.com/the-first-lines-of-10-classic-novels-rewritten-for-social-distancing/?fbclid=IwAR0hI1zP2UMqCSo7xQKyU2kTvYUwg_nHvUUoBGJCkiILNK674cn18OmgTvs
*
WHAT ISAAC NEWTON DID DURING THE PLAGUE YEARS
~ “During the years 1665-67, the time of the Great Plague of London, Newton’s “genius was unleashed,” writes biographer Philip Steele. “The precious material that resulted was a new understanding of the world.”
In Shakespeare’s case, only decades earlier, the “plagues may have caused plays”—spurring poetry, fantasy, and the epic tragedies of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Newton too was apparently inspired by catastrophe.
These years of Newton’s life are sometimes known in Latin as anni mirabilies, meaning “marvelous years.” However, they occurred at the same time as two national disasters. In June 1665, the bubonic plague broke out in London…. As the plague spread out into the countryside, there was panic. Cambridge University was closed. By October, 70,000 people had died in the capital alone.
Newton left Cambridge for his home in Woolsthorpe. The following year, the Great Fire of London devastated the city. As horrifying as these events were for the thousands who lived through them, “some of those displaced by the epidemic,” writes Stephen Porter, “were able to put their enforced break from their normal routines to good effect.” But none more so than Newton, who “conducted experiments refracting light through a triangular prism and evolved the theory of colors, invented the differential and integral calculus, and conceived of the idea of universal gravitation, which he tested by calculating the motion of the moon around the earth.”
Right outside the window of Newton’s Woolsthorpe home? “There was an apple tree,” The Washington Post writes. “That apple tree.” The apple-to-the-head version of the story is “largely apocryphal,” but in his account, Newton’s assistant John Conduitt describes the idea occurring while Newton was “musing in a garden” and conceived of the falling apple as a memorable illustration. Newton did not have Netflix to distract him, nor continuous scrolling through Twitter or Facebook to freak him out. It’s also true he practiced “social distancing” most of his life, writing strange apocalyptic prophesies when he wasn’t laying the foundations for classical physics.
http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/isaac-newton-conceived-of-his-most-groundbreaking-ideas-during-the-great-plague-of-1665.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Woolsthorpe Manor Home, England, where Isaac Newton retreated to escape the 1665 Bubonic Plague
OCTOBER 1918 WAS THE DEADLIEST MONTH IN THE US
~ “The first officially recorded case of what has been called the “mother of all pandemics” occurred in early March 1918, at a U.S. Army training camp in Kansas. After mess cook Albert Gitchell complained of flu-like symptoms in the morning, another 107 soldiers followed by lunchtime. Five weeks later, more than 1,000 soldiers had been infected and 47 were dead. The deadly influenza tore through the overcrowded army training camps populated by one million new recruits, and the doughboys sent to Europe in the spring of 1918 carried with them infinitesimal microbes that proved as lethal as their guns.
After subsiding over the summer, a second, even more powerful wave of influenza swept across the United States after two sailors in Boston contracted the illness. The flu quickly reached nearby military installations such as Camp Devens before spreading to civilian populations across the country.
Working 16 hours a day, Grist saw patients who arrived with coughs, sore throats and high fevers “very rapidly develop the most viscious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen.” Within hours, mahogany spots dotted soldiers’ cheeks before their faces turned such a dark shade of blue or purple from a lack of oxygen in their blood that Grist reported it became “hard to distinguish the colored men from the white.” Patients bled from their noses and ears, gasped for air as fluid filled their lungs and eventually suffocated from their own mucus and blood.
This influenza strain was more virulent than any seen before or since, and instead of striking the very old and the very young, it cut down otherwise healthy young adults such as the soldiers preparing for war.
Some saw an enemy hand at work. Rumors spread that the Kaiser’s U-boats had released poison clouds in American ports and that German pharmaceutical company Bayer had tainted its aspirin tablets. Preachers such as Billy Sunday blamed sin for the seemingly biblical plague. They were as good an explanation as any at a time when scientists knew much less about viruses, which were too small to be seen by the microscopes of the day. The U.S. Navy Bureau of Sanitation reported bacteria caused the illness and advised that “fresh air and sunshine kill the germ in a few minutes.”
In some cases, more concerned about the spread of panic than the flu itself, public health authorities downplayed the risks. “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed,” proclaimed U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue. Not wanting to run afoul of censorship laws that called for up to 20 years in prison for printing anything the government deemed detrimental to the war effort, newspapers under-reported the rapid spread of the pandemic.
While news of the influenza was suppressed in the United States, France and Great Britain, that was not the case in Spain, which remained neutral in World War I. Wire service reports of a flu outbreak in Madrid in the spring of 1918 led to the pandemic being called the “Spanish flu,” even though it originated elsewhere. [Oriana: the current theory is that it originated in China]
Life in much of America came to a standstill in October 1918 as municipalities shuttered public gathering places such as schools, churches, theaters and saloons. With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still decades away from establishment, however, responses to the pandemic varied from city to city. In San Francisco, judges held court sessions outside in public squares, and citizens who did not wear protective gauze masks—dubbed “mask slackers” by the press—could be fined $5 or even sent to jail. “Obey the laws, and wear the gauze,” urged public service posters.
Arguing that children would be safer surrounded by school nurses than at home, New York City Health Commissioner Royal Copeland chose to keep schools open along with other public venues. In one concession, Copeland mandated staggered opening and closing hours of businesses and factories in order to minimize rush-hour crowds on subway trains.
Few cities were struck harder than Philadelphia where Public Health Director Wilmer Krusen ignored pleas from doctors and refused to cancel a parade to promote the sale of government war bonds that was attended by 200,000 people. “Three days later every bed in the city’s hospitals was filled,” says Kenneth C. Davis, author of “More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War.” “Philadelphia was almost on the verge of a total collapse as a functioning city.”
After taking the lives of 195,000 Americans in October 1918, the Spanish flu dissipated as quickly as it had arrived, although it had a brief resurgence after crowds flooded city streets to celebrate the November 11 announcement of the armistice. Between war and sickness, life expectancy fell from 51 to 39 years of age in 1918, according to Davis.
By the time it abated in 1920, the Spanish flu had killed 675,000 Americans and left hundreds of thousands of children orphaned. Not only did more Americans die of the Spanish flu than in World War I, more died than in all the wars of the 20th century combined. Globally, the pandemic infected a third of the planet’s population and killed an estimated 50 million people.
Yet for all the lives lost and changed forever, the Spanish flu quickly faded from public consciousness. “It fell into this black hole of history,” Davis says. “Impacted families never seemed to talk much about it, perhaps because it was so terrible that no one wanted to think about it again. That’s the way the country also dealt with it.”
While it may have gone unmentioned, the Spanish flu left a lasting imprint in the decades to come. “The combination of the flu and the war made Americans afraid of what was out there in the wider world, so there was a growing notion of becoming an isolationist country and keeping out foreign elements,” Davis says. “It combines for a period of great fear—fear of communism, bolshevism and socialism. There’s a tremendous growth of the Ku Klux Klan because people were afraid of what was foreign. The whole nativist impulse was fed by people’s fear generated by flu and war.”
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-deaths-october-1918?fbclid=IwAR3dgPHDJPeLFEHy3fgtTdDAnsE_hbekzvjP8D2PqiTimDpYpMa6RQEP1Lw
Mary:
Unfortunately another effect of such pandemics is casting blame on and great fear of the outsider…anyone "not us" becomes a possible source of evil intent and infection. Chauvinism and nationalism grow. Conspiracy theories gain traction. Isolationism looks ever more sensible and desirable. We've got to expel the strangers, tighten our borders, get rid of any evil others in our midst. This is a great danger, especially seen in the light of the current world wide tendency to the far right already notable. It will get worse.
So, must we despair? No, and no, and no. In the dark times acts of human tenderness and generosity shine fiercely bright. It is like that crucial shift in perspective that banished your depression — rather than waste time lamenting your losses, use that time to do all you can, do what you love, rejoice in your luck at having time at all, and live it fully and well. Meister Eckhardt said what it is well to remember — life is its own reason for being, glorious from the smallest most minute particle to the great sweep of the universe through time. Being is, and always was, its own meaning. Life is its own sufficiency, always, no matter the time or circumstance, reason to rejoice.
Even if we're scared, I think, knowing we're all going to lose, if not our own life, inevitably some of those we know and care for, before this is over.
*
WHERE DID THE SPANISH FLU ORIGINATE?
~ “The global flu outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million people worldwide, ranking as one of the deadliest epidemics in history.
For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France, China, the American Midwest, and beyond. Without a clear location, scientists have lacked a complete picture of the conditions that bred the disease and factors that might lead to similar outbreaks in the future.
The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars.
Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic.
Writing in the January issue of the journal War in History, Humphries acknowledges that his hypothesis awaits confirmation by viral samples from flu victims. Such evidence would tie the disease's origin to one location.
But some other historians already find his argument convincing.
"This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get," says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. "These records answer a lot of questions about the pandemic."
Last of the Great Plagues
The 1918 flu pandemic struck in three waves across the globe, starting in the spring of that year, and is tied to a strain of H1N1 influenza ancestral to ones still virulent today.
The outbreak killed even the young and healthy, turning their strong immune systems against them in a way that's unusual for flu. Adding to the catastrophic loss of lives during World War I, the epidemic may have played a role in ending the war.
Even as the pandemic's origins have remained a mystery, the Chinese laborers have previously been suggested as a source of the disease.
Historian Christopher Langford has shown that China suffered a lower mortality rate from the Spanish flu than other nations did, suggesting some immunity was at large in the population because of earlier exposure to the virus.
In the new report, Humphries finds archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
He also found medical records indicating that more than 3,000 of the 25,000 Chinese Labor Corps workers who were transported across Canada en route to Europe starting in 1917 ended up in medical quarantine, many with flu-like symptoms.
Origins Debated
The Spanish flu reached its height in autumn 1918 but raged until 1920, initially gaining its nickname from wartime censorship rules that allowed for reporting on the disease's ravages in neutral Spain.
Physicians began debating the origin of the pandemic almost as soon as it appeared, Higgins says, with historians soon joining them.
France's wartime trenches, ridden with filth, disease, and death, were originally seen as the flu's breeding ground. The flu's tendency to strike young adults was explained as the disease targeting itself to young soldiers in trenches. The theory also purported to explain how the illness spread from Europe to cities such as Boston and Philadelphia by pointing a finger at returning troop ships.
A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground, due to reports of an influenza outbreak there that spread to a nearby Army camp in March 1918, killing 48 soldiers.
But in his study, Humphries reports that an outbreak of respiratory infections, which at the time were dubbed an endemic "winter sickness" by local health officials, were causing dozens of deaths a day in villages along China's Great Wall. The illness spread 300 miles (500 kilometers) in six weeks' time in late 1917.
At first thought to be pneumonic plague, the disease killed at a far lower rate than is typical for that disease.
Humphries discovered that a British legation official in China wrote that the disease was actually influenza, in a 1918 report. Humphries made the findings in searches of Canadian and British historical archives that contain the wartime records of the Chinese Labor Corps and the British legation in Beijing.
Sealed Railcars
At the time of the outbreak, British and French officials were forming the Chinese Labor Corps, which eventually shipped some 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France during the war.
"The idea was to free up soldiers to head to the front at a time when they were desperate for manpower," Humphries says.
Shipping the laborers around Africa was too time-consuming and tied up too much shipping, so British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe.
So desperate was the need for labor that on March 2, 1918, a ship loaded with 1,899 Chinese Labor Corps men left the Chinese port of Wehaiwei for Vancouver despite "plague" stopping the recruiting for workers there.
In reaction to anti-Chinese feelings rife in western Canada at the time, the trains that carried the workers from Vancouver were sealed, Humphries says. Special Railway Service Guards watched the laborers, who were kept in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Newspapers were banned from reporting on their movement.
Roughly 3,000 of the workers ended up in medical quarantine, their illnesses often blamed on their "lazy" natures by Canadian doctors, Humphries said: "They had very stereotypical, racist views of the Chinese."
Doctors treated sore throats with castor oil and sent the Chinese back to their camps.
The Chinese laborers arrived in southern England by January 1918 and were sent to France, where the Chinese Hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer recorded hundreds of their deaths from respiratory illness.
Historians have suggested that the Spanish influenza mutated and became most deadly in spring 1918, spreading from Europe to ports as far apart as Boston and Freetown, Sierra Leone.
By the height of the global pandemic that autumn, however, no more such cases were reported among the Chinese laborers in Europe.
"I'm not sure if this question can ever be fully answered," Taubenberger cautions, noting that even the origin of a smaller flu pandemic in 2009 still eludes certainty.
Ultimately, "these kinds of [historical] analyses cannot definitively reveal the origins and patterns of spread of emerging pathogens, especially at the early stages of the outbreak," Taubenberger said, of the new historical report.
In the end, however, knowing the origin of the disease might provide information that could help stop a future pandemic, making the search worthwhile.
History has a way of repeating, he says, and research into the origins of the 1918 flu could help prevent a scourge like that from happening again.” ~
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/
How fragile we are,
between the few good moments.
~ Jane Hirshfield
*
Oran, Algeria, the site of Camus's Plague (La Peste)*
MEDITATING (AGAIN) ON THE END OF MY DEPRESSION
This suddenly struck me as funny. One huge resentment that I used in order to maintain my depression was that I had no future; my future had been stolen from me. Then suddenly I got old enough to realize that OMG, I REALLY did not have a future! It was my last chance — if not to enjoy the present, then at least not waste it on lamenting what I’d lost. Instead of weeping over the glorious contribution I didn’t get a chance to make, “my gift ungiven,” I realized even the smallest contribution would be better than sitting there feeling miserable. On the outside, nothing changed. But inside, everything did.
“For if life were questioned a thousand years and asked, ‘Why live?’ and if there were an answer, it could be no more than this: ‘I live only to live!’ And this is because Life is its own reason for being, springs from its own source, and goes on and on, without ever asking why — just because it is life.” ~ Meister Eckhart
It’s so ecstatic just to exist, I can’t understand why, not so many years ago, I was suicidally depressed and had automatic imagery wind itself through my mind like a shroud: the sight of my dead body from above, either shattered on the pavement after a jump from a high window or roof, or pale and stiff on the bed, having taken a massive overdose. The moment I decided not to be depressed, the imagery was gone. Evaporated. Instantly. After half a lifetime, simply gone! I marvel at the self-healing power of the brain, at the master neural network that took over.
I happen to be reading a neurologist’s explanation of NDE’s, Kevin Nelson’s “The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain.” It’s a very lucid explanation of the calm and even bliss that people experience in moments of mortal danger. It is all inside the brain, produced by the brain, like all experience, including dreams and hallucinations — the mind/consciousness never leaves its bodily palace. Even in experiences of unity, a speck of the self remains, Meister Eckhart said; or, as neurologists might say, enough brain activity to lead us back to the memory synapses of self.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: THE “HOLY BOOKS” ARE A DEAD WEIGHT BORN OF TRIBAL CHAUVINISM; WHY A NEW MYTHOLOGY IS NOT GOING TO BE BORN
~ “The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it’s a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world is that this particular society that’s represented in the Bible isn’t even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It’s pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can’t break loose and move into a modern theology.
One of the great [unifying] promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God’s world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.
[But a new mythology is not likely to be born] I don’t think anything of that kind will happen because there are too many points of view floating around the world. All myths so far have been within bounded horizons.” ~
Interviewer: ~ “The sacred literature of all major religions is written in the language of the Empire Era, and is deeply entangled with the warlord consciousness. If we are to move forward, we need to look at these texts with clear eyes, able to see tribal chauvinism, male chauvinism, militarism, etc., for what they are. Only then will we be able to translate the wisdom they do have into a fresh language appropriate to the planetary era.” ~
(I typed this from loose pages; apologies for not having a link)
~ “I cannot believe that any religion has been revealed to Man by God. Because a revealed religion would be perfect, but no known religion is perfect; and because history and science show us that known religions have not been revealed but have been evolved from other traditions.” ~ Robert Blatchford, writer, journalist, and freethinker in God and My Neighbor (1903)
Oriana:
The crucial idea here is that religions borrow from other religions and, above all, evolve. The evolution of religion is part of the overall cultural evolution. If that were understood — that humans create and slowly shape religions — I think a lot of nonsense would fall away, and we would perhaps finally be able to select from religions those parts of them that are beneficial.
Robert Blatchford *
from the Journals of Susan Sontag: IT'S TIME FOR HOMER
[David is Sontag's son.]
1/14/57
Yesterday David announced, as he was being prepared for bed, "You know what I see when I shut my eyes? Whenever I shut my eyes I see Jesus on the cross." It's time for Homer, I think. The best way to divert these morbid individualized religious fancies is to overwhelm them by the impersonal Homeric bloodbath. Paganize his tender spirit . . .
Oriana:
My tender spirit was certainly paganized as soon as we had Ancient Greece in history lessons. And yes, it was a potent factor in leading me to atheism.
The gore in the Iliad was too much for me, though. I greatly preferred the Odyssey.
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HAVING CONTROL OVER YOUR LIFE PREDICTS WELL-BEING AND LONGEVITY
~ Low control leads to chronic stress. High-status work, on the other hand, tends to be associated with greater control, more power, and better health.
~ the lower the grade of employment, the higher the risk of heart disease. But not just heart disease, every major cause of death.
“The conditions in which we live — that foster autonomy and control over life, love, happiness, social connectedness, riches that are not measured by money — affect illness.”
(Oriana: I’m also reminded of the primate study where the alpha males were removed from the group. The health of the remaining animals improved. The very presence of “dominators” is stressful to the subordinates.)
“You probably didn't realize that when you graduate from college you increase your lifespan, or that your co-worker who has a slightly better job is more likely to live a healthier life. In this groundbreaking book, epidemiologist Michael Marmot marshals evidence from nearly thirty years of research to demonstrate that status is not a footnote to the causes of ill health — it is the cause. He calls this effect the status syndrome.
The status syndrome is pervasive. It determines the chances that you will succumb to heart disease, stroke, cancers, infectious diseases, even suicide and homicide. And the issue, as Marmot shows, is not simply one of income or lifestyle. It is the psychological experience of inequality — how much control you have over your life and the opportunities you have for full social participation-that has a profound effect on your health.”
“In rich countries, Marmot states, most people have the basic resources necessary for life. But they do not have, as the Whitehall II studies demonstrated, control over their lives — the power to live as they want. The lower that people stand in the hierarchy, the less they have a sense of controlling their own destiny. Low control leads to chronic stress.
High-status work, on the other hand, tends to be associated with greater control, more power, and better health. Stress, of course, isn't always a bad thing. Our quick response to a short-term stressor — our flight from an attacker, say — may sometimes save our lives. But studies of other primates have helped researchers understand how chronic stress overwhelms our systems and leads to most of the diseases of modern life.
And the chronic status dynamics that Marmot unveils start their overwhelming early in life. Our well-being, he shows, is directly related to where our parents stood on the ladder of hierarchy. In this area, Marmot considers intergenerational phenomena surrounding mothering behaviors that are transmitted nongenetically and influence our health.
~ From the Amazon description of The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot
From an interview with Michael Marmot:
In the 1970s, the conventional wisdom was that it was the business executive who had a high rate of heart attacks. It was the person with “executive stress” who was striving, hard driving. People would say, “Don’t work so hard, you’ll get a heart attack.” That was the conventional wisdom.
What we found in Whitehall was that *the lower the grade of employment, the higher the risk of heart disease. But not just heart disease, every major cause of death.* And that was a bit shocking. The higher the grade, the better the health. The lower the grade, the higher the mortality rate and the shorter the life expectancy,in this remarkably graded phenomenon. So if you were second from the top, you had worse health than if you were at the top; if you were third from the top, you had worse than if you were second from the top ― all the way from top to bottom.
The other striking thing about Whitehall is that no one of them is poor in the conventional sense. We’re used to thinking that poverty is bad for health, and so it is. Poverty is dreadful for health. But even the lowest grades of British civil service are not poor in any absolute sense of the word.
And certainly it’s a puzzle why somebody who is a senior executive officer should have a higher risk of death and a shorter lifespan than somebody who is above him in the hierarchy who is a senior administrator, and the senior executive officer would have lower risk than an executive officer, who would have a lower risk than a clerical officer.
What we found in Whitehall turns out to be a remarkably general phenomenon. It was seen in the national statistics in Britain. Then “classless” countries like the United States and Australia and Scandinavia said, “Well, we wouldn’t find that here, because we don’t have social classes like they do in Britain.” And of course, once people started to look at the United States and Australia and Canada and Scandinavia, they found social gradients in disease of the same order as those we found in Britain. So it was not because the civil service is atypical, and it was not because Britain is a class-ridden society. We find these social gradients in health everywhere.
We have strong evidence that there are two important influences on health in explaining the hierarchy in health. The first is autonomy, control, empowerment. People who are disempowered, people who don’t have autonomy, people who have little control over their lives, are at increased risk of heart disease, increased risk of mental illness. In the Whitehall studies, increased risk of absence from work and increased risk of decrements in functioning, in physical, psychological and social functioning. So autonomy, control, empowerment turn out to be a crucial influence on health and disease.
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ending on beauty:
The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.
~ Sharon Olds, Take the I Out
Van Gogh: Pine Trees at Sunset 
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