*
RED LICORICE
Turns out the universe is an accordion.
I take this as vindication of the polka.
If it began with the Big Bang
will it end with the Big Suck?
I like physics more than psychics.
These days there are psychics all night on TV.
Nostradamus would be ashamed.
Why predict sexual dysfunction
when there are tidal waves in the offing?
If we didn’t die we wouldn’t care about time.
We’d make and break
appointments with a shrug.
The top half of calendars with pretty pictures
would be enough. Ansel Adams
aimed a slow exposure at the Rockies
but didn’t know they were running away.
Maybe all matter is shy. This hubbub
makes me stay at home.
Stop signs have no effect on entropy.
I’m saddened by the eventual demise of red licorice
but not black. Yet consider how often
you’ve wanted a second chance.
Nietzsche said we do the whole thing
again and again. That life’s
an endless waltz to a patient band.
If I come back I hope gravity’s
reversed. To fall up.
To be with my wife but not have to shop
for shoes. Somewhere is the first atom
that existed. The next time
you feel nostalgic wait your turn.
~ Bob Hicok
Oriana:
Now and then Bob Hicok comes up with an irresistible poem. “Turns out the universe is an accordion.I take this as vindication of the polka.” ”If we didn't die we wouldn't care about time . . . The top half of calendars with pretty pictures would be enough.”
This is certainly more appealing than Nietzsche’s amor fati and the eternal return of the same (I personally could not say Yes to that). But a “timeless” life in which only the pretty pictures in calendars seems appealing. Or at least a very long life. But I do wonder if our sense of urgency about making a good use of life would disappear if our literal “deadline” either disappeared or existed only vaguely, a long time off. As for artists, even they might get tired of their work — the problem of repeating yourself, especially if you are restating what you said twenty years ago, except better the first time (a crushing perception), exists already, within our limited lifetime. But there would be the joy of sampling many disciplines — whereas now we are acutely aware of having developed an advanced skill in one of them, and being a beginner again — starting to take piano lessons, say — might not be all that fulfilling.
But . . . who knows. Perhaps I’d like piano lessons a hundred years from now. If an opportunity for a very long life existed, I’d say the Nietzschean Yes without hesitation.
*
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war;
love is a growing up.” ~ James Baldwin
Ballet class in the slums of Nairobi
*
SHALAMOV: FICTION WRITERS HAVE ROMANTICIZED CRIMINALS
~ “Fiction has always represented the criminal world sympathetically, sometimes sycophantically. Deceived by cheap and tawdry ideas, it has given the world of thieves a romantic aura. Fiction writers have been unable to see through the aura to the actual revolting reality of that world. This deception is a pedagogical sin, a mistake for which our young people are paying a high price. You can forgive a boy of 14 or 15 for being thrilled by the “heroic” figures of the criminal world, but you can’t forgive a writer.
Yet even among great writers we cannot find any who are able to discern the thief’s true character and to reject or condemn him, as all great artists should condemn that which is morally bad. Moreover, historically the most enthusiastic preachers of conscience and honor, for example, Victor Hugo, have often used their gifts to praise the criminal world. Hugo was under the illusion that this world was a part of society engaged in a strong, decisive, and public protest against the false world of power.
But Hugo didn’t bother to examine what the position that this community of thieves adopted to struggle against the state authority entailed. Quite a few young boys have tried to befriend real misérables after reading Hugo’s novels. Even today Jean Valjean is a popular nickname among gangsters.
In his Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky avoids giving a direct, categorical answer to the question of real criminality. All his Petrovs, Luchkas, Sushilovs, and Gazins were, as far as the criminal world of real gangsters was concerned, just “suckers,” "freiers," “pushovers,” “oafs”—in other words, the sort of people the gangsters despised, robbed, and trampled on. Gangsters saw murderers and thieves like Petrov and Sushilov as resembling the author of Notes from the House of the Dead more than they resembled themselves.
Dostoyevsky’s thieves were as likely to be attacked or robbed as the hero Aleksandr Gorianchikov and his equals, however wide the chasm that separated this criminal gentry from the ordinary people. After all, a thief is not just someone who has stolen something. You don’t have to be a gangster to belong to that foul underground order, to steal something or even to thieve systematically. Apparently, when Dostoyevsky was doing hard labor, this category of the gangster didn’t exist. Gangsters are not usually punished with very long terms of imprisonment, for most of them are not murderers. Or rather, in Dostoyevsky’s time they weren’t.
There weren’t too many people in the criminal world who were prepared to “whack” anyone, whose hands were “brazen.” The basic categories of crooks or cons, as the criminals called themselves, were “cracksmen,” “filchers,” fences, pickpockets. The phrase “criminal world” is an expression that has a specific meaning. Crook, con, cove, gangster are all synonyms. Doing hard labor, Dostoyevsky did not encounter any of them, and if he had, we might very well have been deprived of the best pages in his book, pages where he affirms his faith in human nature.
But Dostoyevsky did not encounter gangsters. The convict heroes of Notes from the House of the Dead are just as peripheral to real criminality as the main hero Gorianchikov. For instance, was stealing from one another, something that Dostoyevsky dwells on several times and emphasizes in particular, really possible in the gangsters’ world? They went in for robbing freiers, sharing the loot, playing cards, and then finally losing possessions to various master criminals, depending on the outcome of their games of poker or pontoon.
In Notes from the House of the Dead, Gazin sells alcohol, as do other “barmen.” But gangsters would have instantly taken Gazin’s alcohol, and his career would have been nipped in the bud.
Traditional “law” dictated that no gangster ever worked when in prison: the freiers ["suckers"] had to do his work. Dostoyevsky’s Miasnikovs and Varlamovs would have been called by the contemptuous criminal name “Volga dockers.” None of those sneaks, louts, and pilferers have anything to do with the gangster world, the world of recidivist convicts. They’re just people caught up in the negative side of the law, entangled by chance, or overstepping some limit in the dark, like Akim Akimovich, a typical “freier fool.”
The gangster world is a world with its own laws; it is eternally at war with the world represented by Akim Akimovich or Petrov, as well as the eight-eyed deputy commandant. In fact, the deputy commandant is closer to the professional criminals. He’s their God-given boss, so that their relationship with him is as simple as with any representative of authority: anyone like him will hear a lot of talk from a gangster about fairness, honor, and other lofty subjects. And it has been going on for centuries. The pimply, naïve deputy commandant is the gangsters’ declared enemy, but the Akim Akimoviches and the Petrovs are their victims.
None of Dostoyevsky’s novels contains a single gangster. Dostoyevsky never knew them, and if he did see and know them, then, as an artist, he turned his back on them.
Tolstoy doesn’t have any memorable portraits of this sort of person either, even in Resurrection where the external and illustrative descriptive brushwork is done in such a way that the artist cannot be held responsible for his criminal characters.
Chekhov did come across this world. Something in his journey to Sakhalin changed the way he wrote. In a few of his letters after Sakhalin, Chekhov clearly indicates that everything he’d written before the journey seemed to him to be trivia unworthy of a Russian writer. Just as in Notes from the House of the Dead, the stupefying and debauching foulness of the prisons on the island of Sakhalin inevitably destroys anything pure, good, or human.
The criminal world horrifies the writer. Chekhov senses that this world is the chief battery of the foulness, a sort of atomic reactor that creates its own fuel. But all Chekhov could do was wring his hands, smile sadly, and point out this world with a mild, albeit insistent, gesture. He, too, knew it from reading Hugo. Chekhov was in Sakhalin for too short a time, and until the day he died he lacked the boldness to use this material for his fiction.
One might think that the biographical side of Gorky’s work would give him a reason to show the gangster world truthfully and critically. His Chelkash is undoubtedly a gangster. But this recidivist thief is portrayed in Gorky’s story with the same forced pretense at fidelity as the hero of Les Misérables. Gavrila, of course, can be interpreted as something more than just a symbol of the peasant soul. He is the pupil of the old crook Chelkash, perhaps by chance, but nevertheless inevitably: a pupil who might the next day have become a “gutless wannabe” rises one rung higher on the ladder leading to the criminal world.
For as one philosopher, who also happened to be a criminal, said, “Nobody’s born a criminal; they become one.” In “Chelkash,” Gorky, who came across the criminal world in his youth, was just paying his dues to that ill-informed delight at what appears to be that social group’s freethinking and bold behavior.
Vaska Pepel (in The Lower Depths) is a very unlikely criminal. Just like Chelkash, he is romanticized and exalted, instead of being exposed for what he is. A few superficial, well-rendered features of this figure, and the author’s obvious sympathy, mean that Pepel, too, serves an evil cause.
Such are Gorky’s attempts to portray the criminal world. He too was ignorant of this world and had apparently never really encountered gangsters, for such encounters are generally difficult for a writer. The gangster world is a closed, if not particularly secretive order, and outsiders who want to study and observe it are not allowed in. No gangster would open up to Gorky the tramp, or to Gorky the writer, for Gorky is just another freier in the gangster’s eyes.
In the 1920s our literature was swept by a fashion for portraying robbers: Babel’s “Benya Krik,” Leonov’s The Thief, Selvinsky’s “Motke Malkhamoves,” Vera Inber’s poem “Vaska Svist Behind Bars,” Kaverin’s “The End of the Hide-out,” and, finally, Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender. Every writer appears to have frivolously paid tribute to a sudden demand for romantic criminality.
This unbridled poetization of criminality was greeted as a fresh new current in literature, and it led many experienced literary writers astray. Although all the authors I have mentioned, as well as others not mentioned, show an extremely weak understanding of the essence of what they were dealing with in their works on this theme, they had great success with readers and consequently did a significant amount of harm.
Ever since Gutenberg began printing, the criminal world has been a sealed book for writers and readers. Writers who have tried to tackle this theme have dealt with it frivolously; they have let themselves be carried away and deceived by the phosphoric glare of criminality, they have disguised it with a romantic mask and thus reinforced their readers’ utterly false idea of what is in fact a treacherous, revolting, and inhuman world.” ~ Varlam Shalamov, 1959
https://lithub.com/what-the-great-russian-writers-didnt-get-about-the-criminal-mind/?fbclid=IwAR0Oo5CK5F5yUNuly0gT6MWDSOIpM1CJmABLXMl9rXn5XBrVwSZ0phnPL9g
*
“Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own. . . . I respectfully confess that to him and not me it was given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A Virgil of this icy underworld, Shalamov is at his most compelling when bearing witness. He spares no detail, describing the diagnosis of dysentery, corpses exhumed for their clothing and the hacked-off hands of fugitives used for fingerprint identification. . . . We are fortunate that he — who died deaf, nearly blind and institutionalized — not only survived his sentence but had the force to withstand the exorcism of the experience. ~ Mia Levitin, The Spectator
*
HOW DOES ONE CEASE BEING HUMAN? (SHALAMOV’S SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD)
~ “A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins don’t survive. A doctor refuses to treat new patients, fearing that someone has been sent to kill him. Characters like these populate Varlam Shalamov’s criminal world, the depraved underbelly of society born and bred in the Soviet prison system. Many of the criminal world’s citizens were locked up under vague pretenses of “counterrevolutionary activity,” so why should they uphold the laws that failed them in the first place? Why not murder and steal before your neighbor beats you to it? Morals, after a while, can become relative. Life in prison may get easier without a domineering boss, cheaper without children to care for, and safer without new faces in the ward.
Varlam Shalamov was a natural dissenter. Born to an Orthodox priest in 1907, Shalamov lived as a staunch atheist. As Josef Stalin rose to power, Shalamov joined a Trotskyist group in direct opposition to the new government. There, he helped distribute pamphlets that were highly critical of Stalin, leading to his first imprisonment from 1929 to 1932. He continued writing politically charged pieces that brought him in and out of prison camps in Kolyma, the Far East of Russia, from 1937 to 1951.
In the decades that followed, Shalamov documented his experiences through thinly veiled fictions in the six-part Kolyma Stories. The first volume, published two years ago, contains an updated translation of the first three parts, with stories that have been widely known since the 1980s. By contrast, many stories in Sketches of the Criminal World were only recently discovered and appear here in English for the first time. Together, the two volumes constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s fiction. While his writing was suppressed in the Soviet Union, his stories leaked out into Europe and beyond, placing him on the world stage as one of the foremost chroniclers of the gulag.
Many “stories” in this collection are simply essays masquerading as fiction, offering Shalamov a platform to comment on literature, incarceration, and the intersection of the two. Russian literary giants like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Babel were all too mawkish for Shalamov’s taste, and their attempts to accurately write about criminals simply missed the mark. None of these authors lived among criminals, real criminals, long enough to properly understand their rituals and influence. Shalamov did. By writing these stories, Shalamov was providing what he thought was the most genuine account of the gangsters who lived in and controlled Soviet gulags. There is nothing redemptive about these characters—they’re no Robin Hoods or Jean Valjeans. For Shalamov, criminals are not romantic ideals; rather, they represent the nadir of human morality.
They’re far from the hardened criminals, the gangsters, that live and thrive in this system. Being a gangster is more than a career, it’s a generational calling. The gangsters in Shalamov’s writing are the sons and grandsons of gangsters, and they bear children to one day fill their shoes. Naturally, the gangsters prey upon the freiers, stealing bread rations from them and murdering them when convenient. The freiers want to survive; the gangsters want to wield more power. Shalamov, through his first-person narration, does not firmly align himself in either camp. He treats both sides equally, and by doing so, he gestures towards the transition from freier to gangster, from human to inhuman. In “The War of the ‘Bitches," the narrator witnesses rival gangs in conflict. As the “war” presses on, the gangs begin recruiting both freiers and gangsters into their ranks. The narrator watches inmates futilely join and switch sides, asking:
'How? Could the ceremony of kissing a knife change a criminal soul? Or had the notorious crook’s blood changed its chemical composition in the veins of an old crook just because his lips had touched a steel blade?'
Reading Shalamov often feels like a quick slip into darkness. Many of his stories are poignantly short, often fewer than five pages, some no more than a paragraph. Today, these would likely be categorized as flash fiction, offering glimpses into characters’ lives without any direct plot. Shalamov knew the effect of this length, and he used it with great precision. His shortest stories focus in on an object or moment and strip them of their familiarity.
In “Graphite,” one of the most famous stories from the collection, Shalamov directs his attention towards pencils. Pens, he says, are the preferred writing implement in prisons. Only indelible ink ensures that gangsters cannot cheat in a card game or that doctors cannot alter a death certificate. Pencil marks can be erased and changed to change fate, so pencils are seldom found in Kolyma. In a few pages, Shalamov turns graphite into an unattainable luxury. He shows that the criminal world is not entirely isolated from the civilian world, but runs parallel beneath it. Pencils are simply one of the freedoms that become alien when crossing over into a prison camp like Kolyma.
The natural world that houses these prisoners is just as antagonistic as any gangster or mob boss. High in the Arctic Circle, Kolyma winters last for nine months of the year, and the short summers are hardly enough to thaw the ice. A short walk can become dangerous as frostbite can set in within minutes. Out of both respect and fear for this environment, Shalamov’s writing is that of a naturalist. Describing flora and fauna are some of the only times Shalamov embellishes his usually terse prose style. Stories like “The Path” and “The Waterfall” depict the brief Kolyma summers and the respite that they provided. Natural warmth like this was a gift of hospitality in an otherwise unrelenting environment.
“The Resurrection of the Larch,” more than any other story, shows the inextricable tie between the prisoners and nature. It was common for prisoners to send larch branches to their families, not because they were particularly pretty, but because they could come back to life in a glass of water. By sending home life, prisoners could send a message, more tangible than a letter, that they were still there. At the start of the story, the narrator writes:
'In the Far North man looks for an outlet for his sensitivity, when it hasn’t been destroyed or poisoned by decades of living in Kolyma. A man sends an airmail parcel: not books, not photographs, not poetry, but a larch branch, a dead branch from living nature.'
To Shalamov, survival itself was an act of defiance. Staying alive meant that your will was stronger than the prison systems. In the most personal, autobiographical story of the collection, “The Examination,” Shalamov recounts the process of becoming a paramedic. In his early years as a prisoner, Shalamov worked in coal and gold mines. He fought to become a paramedic, a less strenuous job, knowing full well that his body likely couldn’t take more abuse in the mines. Shalamov’s life comes down to a chemistry exam given by an indifferent proctor. Chemistry, we learn, is one of his weaknesses because his chemistry teacher was executed for counterrevolutionary activity. Now, the knowledge he was robbed of is the only thing that can save him. Living through his exam meant living through his sentence, a win against the Soviet government. “I survived,” he writes. “I walked out of hell. I finished the classes, ended my sentence, outlived Stalin, and then returned to Moscow.” In a world shadowed by Stalin’s Iron Curtain, the general secretary is very rarely mentioned. Shalamov uses the name sparingly, only when he’s sure of a victory.
“How does someone stop being human?” Shalamov poses the question to the reader many times throughout his stories. Slowly, he begins to answer it by offering bite-sized portraits into life in a Soviet gulag. Bringing clarity to an oppressive regime’s darkest moments wasn’t pleasant for Shalamov, but it was necessary. Doing so could have easily placed him back in Kolyma, but political dissidents like Shalamov have to take that risk. His relentless, macabre imagery is painful, both for the subjects and for the author who is reliving these moments.
The fact that Shalamov was able to produce these stories at all is a testament to his integrity as an artist and documentarian. He leads us down the path towards inhumanity. He shows us that this path is lined with theft and murder and indecency, but he never outright blames anyone for following it. The criminal world could not exist without the government that created it, so this journey is just a symptom of the Soviets’ immoral, self-serving policy.
Shalamov lays this bare as he brings us all the way to inhumanity. Only then, lost and battered, can we start answering the bigger question: How do we go back?” ~
https://www.cleavermagazine.com/sketches-of-the-criminal-world-further-kolyma-stories-by-varlam-shalamov-reviewed-by-dylan-cook/
*
“As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” ~ Bertolt Brecht
Oriana:
And writers like Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov devoted themselves to trying to prevent that.
*
Mary: AN UNFORTUNATE PART OF OUR CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY
Here in the US we are certainly guilty of romanticizing criminals and the criminal world. There is a fascination with criminal behavior that tends to see the criminal as a rebel and critic of the boring and restrictive status quo. But the criminal is not a rebel or a revolutionary, not a critic of the world he preys on...He is more like an imitation of that world in his dedication to both power and profit, gained by any means, with a preference for the efficiency of violence. The gangster world is a shadow of the structure of our legal society, but without the interference of any moral considerations. To romanticize the gangster you must ignore his absolute ruthlessness and indifference to anything but his own "business" of profit and power.
Popular culture romanticizes the Outlaw as imagined in the mythology of the Wild West, the gangs of thieves and gunslingers, historically sometimes living on both sides of the law and blurring the lines between, as in the complicated story of Wyatt Earp and associates and enemies, and that iconic battle still argued over, at the OK Corral. Later we have Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, all those bank robbers who seemed to challenge the boring restrictions of society not only with their defiant criminality, but with a certain glamorous and daring style.
Real gangsters are, however, not adventurers or individualists challenging the rules of polite society. Gang members are subsumed by the gang and act within its rules of operation. Those rules place no value on the individual human life, seeking only to dominate and profit. Violence, murder, all are required to cement the gangster into the gang, and force his actions into the gang's requirements without hesitation.
To romanticize the gangster, to talk of things like “honor”, is to obscure and misrepresent what is actually a systemic requirement that turns morality on its head, dehumanizing both gangster and victim. Mafia dons are not elegant, fascinating men of honor with loyal coteries of “family” members. “The Godfather” is a portrait of evil, systemic, deliberate, amoral, indifferent to human value. Gangsters are thugs, predictable and ultimately boring in their habitual violence. The popularity of these stories and characters is an unfortunate part of our cultural mythology.
Oriana:
Sharp insights as usual. So grateful for your comments, Mary.
*
HOW TO TELL IF SOMEONE’S LYING — FORGET “BODY LANGUAGE”
~ “Thomas Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.
Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work.
Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefufully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.
The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses. “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,” says Ormerod.
Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70 percent of the time.
“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most realistic study around.”
Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.
Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90 percent accuracy; one expert was even correct 100 percent of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80 percent accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.
Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”
Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.
There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-best-and-worst-ways-to-spot-a-liar?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
HOW FRANCES PERKINS HAD TO PLAY THE GAME
Frances Perkins took her post as U.S. Secretary of Labor on this date in 1933. She was the first woman to serve on an American president’s cabinet. . . . But many people, including labor union bosses, opposed the nomination of a woman to the post. Perkins believed men were more amenable to women who reminded them of their mothers, so she dressed modestly and rarely wore makeup. She kept quiet in meetings. She later recalled: “I tried to have as much of a mask as possible. I wanted to give the impression of being a quiet, orderly woman who didn’t buzz-buzz all the time. […] I knew that a lady interposing an idea into men’s conversation is very unwelcome. I just proceeded on the theory that this was a gentleman’s conversation on the porch of a golf club perhaps. You didn’t butt in with bright ideas.”
Her policies did away with child labor in the United States. They also led the way to the 40-hour workweek, the Federal Labor Standards Act, and Social Security — and they formed a large part of the New Deal. ~ Writer’s Almanac, March 4, 2020
Oriana:
She deserves a good documentary —and the eternal gratitude of working America.
How sad that she felt (probably correctly) that she needed to stay quiet during meetings.
*
“Not “in the beginning was the word” but rather in the end. Language makes us more visionary and more delusional than other organisms.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana: THE APPEAL OF DICTATORSHIPS
After reading the brief article on humanism, I finally reached clarity: it's not about religion vs a secular ideology: it's about DICTATORSHIP. The remedy is DEMOCRACY.
The Church is hierarchical; it's certainly not democratic. Based on what I experienced in my childhood, the Catholic church seemed to me more totalitarian by far, more mind-enslaving and fear-based than the inept apparatus of the Polish Communist Party (a huge difference between Poland and Russia: many Westerns said that the real Iron Curtain existed between Poland and Russia).
Freedom? Pursuit of happiness? How laughable to a dictatorship!
A dictatorship is not about the doctrine or ideology, but about dictatorship. Naked brutal power. Rules jammed down your throat, and no right to question. It's not about religion as opposed to a secular ideology: it's about dictatorship, i.e. the lack of democracy, the lack of debate.
With apologies for repeating what I wrote in another post, imagine a Catholic dictatorship forcing you to pray the Rosary on your knees at noon every day and contemplate the 5 wounds of Christ at 3 pm. A crucifix in every room, including classrooms and offices -- yes, just as the portraits of Marx, Lenin and Engels used to be in all public buildings, that precise trinity, Marx, with his fabulous beard, obviously a parallel to God the Father. Fasts, pilgrimages on foot, self-flagellation - I don't insist on those elaborations, though they and much more can easily be imagined. But this is non-negotiable: there would of course be the Inquisition to root out heretics and the insufficiently devout. Dictatorships need the inquisition.
I am speaking hypothetically of course, not referring to any literal regime, since for centuries the secular government, though until recently not democratic either, provided some resistance, some balance, some patronage of the arts other than in the service of the church. Often it was one kind of dictatorship against another, and I'm not saying that the secular government was automatically better.
Only now we can take a different perspective and see the anti-democratic aspect of the church as archaic and part of the reason behind the decline of religion in the west. True, the improving standard of living may be the most important factor, but the fact that dictatorships don't appeal to us as much anymore is also significant.
Wait a minute — what do I mean by “us”? Am I forgetting millions if not billions of people who adore dictators and flow along with their delusions? Were not absolute kings and emperors practically worshipped by the majority of the population? The Founding Fathers realized that democracy is fragile indeed, and requires an educated electorate. Let me stop right here before I get too depressed.
Bayon, Angkor complex, the stone faces on the temple towers. These are not Buddhas, but the face of the ruler who built this temple, Jayavarman VII. The ruler was a Buddhist but I don't think that constrained his giant ego.
*
THE COLLAPSE OF NEOLIBERALISM
~ “With the 2008 financial crash and the Great Recession, the ideology of neoliberalism lost its force. The approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy that defined an era led not to never-ending prosperity but utter disaster. “Laissez-faire is finished,” declared French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in testimony before Congress that his ideology was flawed.
For some, and especially for those in the millennial generation, the Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started a process of reflection on what the neoliberal era had delivered. Disappointment would be an understatement: the complete wreckage of economic, social, and political life would be more accurate. In each of these arenas, looking at the outcomes that neoliberalism delivered increasingly called into question the worldview itself.
Start with the economy. Over the course of the neoliberal era, economies around the world have become more and more unequal. In the United States, the wealthiest 1 percent took home about 8.5 percent of the national income in 1976. After a generation of neoliberal policies, in 2014 they captured more than 20 percent of national income. In Britain, the top 1 percent captured more than 14 percent of national income—more than double the amount they took home in the late 1970s. The story is the same in Australia: The top 1 percent took about 5 percent of national income in the 1970s and doubled that to 10 percent by the late 2000s. As the rich get richer, wages have been stagnant for workers since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 2008, 100 percent of income growth in the U.S. went to the top 10 percent of Americans. The bottom 90 percent actually saw a decline in their income.
During the neoliberal era, the racial wealth gap did not fare much better. In 1979, the average hourly wage for a black man in the U.S. was 22 percent lower than for a white man. By 2015, the wage gap had grown to 31 percent. For black women, the wage gap in 1979 was only 6 percent; by 2015, it had jumped to 19 percent. Homeownership is one of the central ways that families build wealth over time, yet homeownership rates among African Americans in 2017 were as low as they were before the civil rights revolution, when racial discrimination was legal.
It is also worth putting the 2008 economic crash into perspective—both historical and global. Between 1943 and the middle of the 1970s, the number of bank failures in the country was minimal—never getting above single digits in any given year. Deregulation of the savings and loan associations brought widespread failures and bailouts in less than a decade. Deregulation of Wall Street brought the epic crash of 2008 in less than a decade.
Despite its alleged commitment to market competition, the neoliberal economic agenda instead brought the decline of competition and the rise of close to monopoly power in vast swaths of the economy: pharmaceuticals, telecom, airlines, agriculture, banking, industrials, retail, utilities, and even beer. A study by The Economist found that between 1997 and 2012, two-thirds of industries became more concentrated. Even centrist think tanks like the Brookings Institution have recognized the dangerous rise of monopolies and argued that the concentration of economic power brings with it higher prices for consumers, increased economic inequality, and a less dynamic economy.
The neoliberal embrace of individualism and opposition to “the collective society,” as Margaret Thatcher put it, also had perverse consequences for social and political life. Humans are social animals. But neoliberalism rejects both the medieval approach of having fixed social classes based on wealth and power and the modern approach of having a single, shared civic identity based on participation in a democratic community. The problem is that amid neoliberalism’s individualistic rat race, people still need to find meaning somewhere in their lives. And so there has been a retreat to tribalism and identity groups, with civic associations replaced by religious, ethnic, or other cultural affiliations. Neoliberalism’s war on “society,” by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for a free and democratic society.
https://newrepublic.com/article/155970/collapse-neoliberalism?utm_content=buffer39130&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR2X75NUIhU5-x8NknMvN29cpUd5nUp0JN2UqFzDYNllA4dgrMYtiD2gVac
*
A LOST CONTINENT FOUND, AND IT’S NOT ATLANTIS (another try— this is a more clear presentation)
~ “Researchers have discovered a hidden continent on Earth, but it's not Atlantis. They found it while reconstructing the evolution of Mediterranean region's complex geology, which rises with mountain ranges and dips with seas from Spain to Iran.
The continent is called Greater Adria. It's the size of Greenland and it broke off from North Africa, only to be buried under Southern Europe about 140 million years ago.
Researching the evolution of mountain ranges can show the evolution of continents.
"Most mountain chains that we investigated originated from a single continent that separated from North Africa more than 200 million years ago," said van Hinsbergen. "The only remaining part of this continent is a strip that runs from Turin via the Adriatic Sea to the heel of the boot that forms Italy.”
This area is called Adria by geologists, so the researchers for this study refer to the previously undiscovered continent as Greater Adria.
In the Mediterranean region, geologists have a different understanding of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory behind how oceans and continents form, and for other parts of the Earth, that theory suggests that the plates don't deform when they move alongside each other in areas with large fault lines.
But Turkey, and the Mediterranean, is entirely different.
"It is quite simply a geological mess: Everything is curved, broken and stacked," said van Hinsbergen. "Compared to this, the Himalayas, for example, represent a rather simple system. There you can follow several large fault lines across a distance of more than 2,000 kilometers.”
In the case of Greater Adria, most of it was underwater, covered by shallow seas, coral reefs and sediments. The sediments formed rocks and those were scraped off like barnacles when Greater Adria was forced under the mantle of Southern Europe. Those scraped rocks became mountain ranges in these areas: the Alps, the Apennines, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey.
"Subduction, the plunging of one plate under the other, is the basic way in which mountain chains are formed," said Van Hinsbergen.
Using plate tectonic reconstruction software, the researchers literally peeled back layers to go back in time when continents appeared much different from the map we know today.
The researchers found that Greater Adria started to become its own continent about 240 million years ago during the Triassic period.
"From this mapping emerged the picture of Greater Adria, and several smaller continental blocks too, which now form parts of Romania, North Turkey or Armenia, for example," said Van Hinsbergen. "The deformed remnants of the top few kilometers of the lost continent can still be seen in the mountain ranges. The rest of the piece of continental plate, which was about 100 km thick, plunged under Southern Europe into the earth's mantle, where we can still trace it with seismic waves up to a depth of 1,500 kilometers.”
This isn't the first time a lost continent has been found.
In January 2017, researchers announced the discovery of a lost continent left over from the supercontinent Gondwana, which began breaking apart 200 million years ago. The leftover piece, which was covered in lava, is now under Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean.
And in September 2017, a different research team found the lost continent of Zealandia through ocean drilling in the South Pacific. It's two-thirds of a mile beneath the sea.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/23/world/lost-continent-europe-scn-trnd/index.html
The island of Mauritius*
THE EROTIC APPEAL OF CHRISTIANITY
“In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen actually dressed her nuns as brides when they went forward to receive communion. And Hadewijch and Mechtild of Magdeburg, women given voice by the emergence of the vernaculars, found in secular love poetry the vocabulary and the pulsating rhythms to speak of the highest of all loves.”
My thanks to William Leslie for reminding me that the name for “guy” Christianity is "muscular Christianity." I can see the appeal of that term — but then why not just go to the gym and work out with weights? That's the real muscular church: a place where you bench press. And thanks for reminding me of churches using the boy-meets-girl market bait: Catholic singles, Jewish singles, Christian singles (“Christian” here becomes a synonym of “fundamentalist,” but the organizers know that “Fundamentalist Singles” would not work, and might even send women running for their lives).
But there is an erotic bait in Christianity itself. Let’s face it: Jesus has sex appeal.
For a while (around age 13) I felt the erotic pull of Jesus. He had the most beautiful, idealized, feminized face that forever set the standard of the kind of face, male or female, that I’d be drawn to. His hair was reddish and slightly wavy, flowing — never mind that, historically speaking, he’d be covering his head. A historically and culturally accurate portrayal would not be appealing in most Christian countries. As with angels, the face had to be large-eyed, soft-lipped, totally symmetrical and not too masculine. No oversize jaw please.
Therese the Little Flower actually chose Therese of the Face of Jesus to be her nun’s name. In “The Idiot,” Dostoyevsky speaks about the beauty of Christ’s face. The Polish poet Aleksander Wat explains that he had no interest in Judaism, but was drawn to Catholicism because of the beauty of that face — as presented by painters, or course. We don’t really know what the historical Jesus looked like, but it doesn’t matter. The painters always made him beautiful, with the exception of one painting by Mantegna — Dostoyevski was horrified to see a realistically ugly dead Jesus.
The body on the cross was not bad either: slender, ripped. I could see how looking at such images could lead to erotic mysticism, but the church wasn't into recruiting female minds. Somehow certain girls would feel a “call” to be the bride of Christ. No one dared suggest that perhaps it was the beauty of the image in popular paintings.
Bright boys had a chance to be courted by Jesuits, with their spiritual exercises, but the clergy's contempt for women meant that nothing "introverted" was offered to girls, no interest shown in their spiritual development. Instead of leaving the church and beginning the ever-deepening journey of atheism, with the right mentoring I could have just as well developed along the lines of Teresa of Avila. (In fact it’s striking how often I’ve been called a spiritual person. Now and then I even see myself as a religious nut — just without religion. I know I have the right temperament for it.)
I've talked with other women who've also felt the pull at some point because it's completely natural for a young girl to fall in love with Jesus. As with everything else at that time, I was scared that to have such feelings was a sin, a blasphemy, especially the desire to kiss the statue of a beautiful Jesus on the lips rather than feet. Much later I read that Therese the Little Flower DID kiss the statue on the lips, shocking the other nuns. To get back to "muscular" Christianity, there is certainly an erotic element that gets repressed rather than resolved, and of course it's women who are more interested in having a “relationship with Jesus.” Talk about safe sex!
Actually the church did me a favor by not being Christ-centered and distorting even Christ with the talk of the Last Judgment and the gaping jaws of hell. Without the anguish over judgment and hell (whatever happened to the teaching that god doesn’t judge, but rather accepts and forgives?), I might have gone into erotic mysticism simply as a form of fulfillment with an imaginary lover — so much easier than dealing with a clumsy male teenager. Oh those school dances when the boys would constantly step on the girls' feet! Of course the girls preferred to dance with other girls, and talk with other girls . . . that’s what felt physically and emotionally comfortable.
Jesus was the perfect transition to the stage of developing interest in the opposite sex — with his almost-feminine face, he was a hermaphrodite love object. As for "putting Jesus at the center of your marriage," what actual man could measure up to Jesus? What coarse husband could have that tender touch with which the imaginary Jesus could stroke your hair or brush your lips with his exquisite fingers? What inarticulate macho clod could talk to a woman the way she likes, with empathy and emotional expressiveness?
And the irony of perceiving, later, that Jesus was probably gay, and the last thing he’d have wanted was a female bride. But what is reality compared to feel-good fantasies?
Michelangelo: Cristo della Minerva, 1519-21, Maria sopre Minerva
Joe:
The church has always been a major persecutor of gay men and simultaneously a haven where gay men could find safety from gay persecution.
Oriana:
So true. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true. And as priests and monks, gay men were free from the pressure to get married.
Lilith:
I especially appreciated your description of Catholicism as a dictatorship. I had never heard this so cogently articulated before. Certainly we were not to pursue happiness in this world — only to wait for it in the next one. And there was no freedom at all since God knows all your secret thoughts and is constantly judging them. How miserable I was all the time, which is, of course, what a dictator wants — keeps us beaten down and subjected.
Oriana:
As you can imagine, years ago when I said on Facebook “In Poland Catholicism was more totalitarian than communism,” the red smear was upon me instantly.
Mary:
On the eroticism of Christianity…I remember the nuns that taught us all wore plain gold wedding bands, as Brides of Christ. And you have to think of that wonderful Bernini statue of St. Teresa in ecstasy — exquisitely portrayed in an orgasmic faint under the attentions of that well-armed angel!
And again, I think of our white communion dresses, with the veils . . . how our 7-year-old selves were dressed like little brides for our First Communion.
Oriana:
At the same time, you don’t want a “relationship with Christ” that has a homosexual aura. So we have the "brides of Christ" but no "bridegrooms of Christ." Unreality breeds peculiar problems.
*
“We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter. … A priest-ridden Godforsaken race.” ~ James Joyce
Ancestral Home of James Joyce: Rose's Cottage, between Fermoy and Ballyhooly, Ireland
*
WHY THE SPANISH FLU KILLED MOSTLY THE YOUNG
~ “Austrian artist Egon Schiele died of influenza in October 1918, just a few days after his wife Edith, who was pregnant with their first child. In the interim, though desperately sick and grieving, he worked on a painting that depicted a family – his own – that would never exist.
Schiele was 28 years old, firmly within an age group that proved acutely vulnerable to the 1918 flu. It is one reason why his unfinished painting, The Family, is often described as a poignant testimony to the disease's cruelty.
Because it was so deadly to 20-to-40-year-olds, the disease robbed families of their breadwinners and communities of their pillars, leaving large numbers of elderly people and orphans with no means of support. Men were at greater risk of dying than women, in general, unless the women were pregnant – in which case they died or suffered miscarriages in droves.
Scientists don't know precisely why those in the prime of life were so vulnerable, but a possible clue lies in the fact that the elderly – always a high-risk group for flu – were actually less likely to die in the 1918 pandemic than they had been in flu seasons throughout the previous decade.
One theory that potentially explains both observations is "original antigenic sin" – the idea that a person's immune system mounts its most effective response to the first strain of flu it encounters. Flu is a highly labile virus, meaning that it changes its structure all the time – including that of the two main antigens on its surface, known by the shorthand H and N, that engage with the host's immune system.
There's some evidence to suggest the first flu subtype that young adults in 1918 had been exposed to was H3N8, meaning they were primed to fight a very different germ from the one that caused the 1918 flu – which belonged to the H1N1 subtype. Following the same logic, the elderly may have been relatively protected in 1918 by dint of having been exposed to an H1 or N1 antigen that was circulating in the human population circa 1830.
DEATH RATES VARIED GREATLY ACROSS THE GLOBE
Flu has sometimes been called a democratic disease, but in 1918 it was anything but. If you lived in certain parts of Asia, for example, you were 30 times more likely to die than if you lived in certain parts of Europe.
Asia and Africa suffered the highest death rates, in general, and Europe, North America and Australia the lowest, but there was great variation within continents too. Denmark lost around 0.4 per cent of its population, while Hungary lost around three times that. Cities tended to suffer worse than rural areas, but there was variation within cities too.
People had a vague sense of these inequalities at the time, but it took decades for statisticians to put hard numbers on them. Once they had, they realized that the explanation must lie in differences between human populations – notably, socioeconomic differences.
In the US state of Connecticut, for example, the newest immigrant group – the Italians – suffered the worst losses, while in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, it was those inhabiting the sprawling shanty towns at the city's edge who were hit hardest.
Paris presented a conundrum – the highest mortality being recorded in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods – until the statisticians realized who was dying there. It wasn't the owners of the grand apartments, but their overworked maids who slept in chilly chambres de bonne high up under the eaves.
All over the world, the poor, immigrants and ethnic minorities were more susceptible – not, as eugenicists liked to claim, because they were constitutionally inferior, but because they were more likely to eat badly, to live in crowded conditions, to be suffering from other, underlying diseases, and to have poor access to healthcare.
Things haven't changed all that much. A study of the 2009 flu pandemic in England showed that the death rate in the poorest fifth of the population was triple that in the richest.
Less well-known is the fact that the flu affected the entire body. Teeth and hair fell out. People reported dizziness, insomnia, loss of hearing or smell and blurred vision. There were psychiatric after-effects, notably "melancholia" or what we might now call post-viral depression.
It continues to be true that the waves of death associated with both flu pandemics and annual flu seasons are followed by waves of death due to other causes, notably heart attacks and strokes – indirect consequences of the inflammatory response to flu. Flu wasn't in 1918, and still isn't, exclusively a respiratory disease.
The pandemic revealed the truth: that although the poor and immigrants died in higher numbers, nobody was immune. When it came to contagion, in other words, there was no point in treating individuals in isolation or lecturing them on personal responsibility. Infectious diseases were a problem that had to be tackled at the population level.
Starting in the 1920s, this cognitive shift began to be reflected in changes to public health strategy. Many countries created or re-organized their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialized medicine – healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.
The expression "the lost generation" has been applied to various groups of people who were alive in the early 20th Century, including the talented American artists who came of age during the First World War, and the British army officers whose lives were cut short by that war. But it could reasonably be argued, as I do in my book Pale Rider, that the title should really go to the millions of people in the prime of life who died of the 1918 flu, or to the children who were orphaned by it, or to those, not yet born, who suffered its slings and arrows in their mothers' wombs.
Those who survived the flu in utero to be born, lived with the scars until they died. Research suggests that they were less likely to graduate or earn a reasonable wage, and more likely to go to prison, than contemporaries who hadn’t been infected.
There is even evidence that the 1918 flu contributed to the baby boom of the 1920s, by leaving behind a smaller but healthier population that was able to reproduce at higher rates.
That the 1918 flu cast a long shadow over the 20th Century is not in doubt. We should bear that in mind as we prepare for the next one.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-the-flu-that-transformed-the-20th-century
Oriana:
So here for once the elderly had an advantage: a degree of immunity they acquired through exposure to various strains over their lifetime.
As the article points out, it wasn’t the flu virus itself that killed, but rather the complications that followed the flu: pneumonia and “heart attacks and strokes — indirect consequences of the inflammatory response to flu.”
“CYTOKINE STORM” — THEIR OWN IMMUNE SYSTEM KILLED THEM
~ “Besides replicating very quickly, the 1918 strain seems to trigger a particularly intense response from the immune system, including a ‘cytokine storm’ – the rapid release of immune cells and inflammatory molecules. Although a robust immune response should help us fight infection, an over-reaction of this kind can overload the body, leading to severe inflammation and a build-up of fluid in the lungs that could increase the chance of secondary infections. The cytokine storm might help to explain why young, healthy adults – who normally find it easier to shake off flu – were the worst affected, since in this case their stronger immune systems created an even more severe cytokine storm.” ~
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181029-why-the-flu-of-1918-was-so-deadly
from another source:
~ “The first wave of the Spanish flu struck in the spring of 1918. There was nothing particularly Spanish about it. It attracted that name, unfairly, because the press in neutral Spain tracked its progress in that country, unlike newspapers in warring nations that were censored. But it was flu, and flu as we know is transmitted on the breath—by coughs and sneezes. It is highly contagious and spreads most easily when people are packed together at high densities—in favelas, for example, or trenches. Hence it is sometimes referred to as a “crowd disease.”
That first wave was relatively mild, not much worse than seasonal flu, but when the second and most deadly phase of the pandemic erupted in the autumn of 1918, people could hardly believe that it was the same disease. An alarmingly high proportion of patients died — twenty-five times as many as in previous flu pandemics. Though initially they reported the classic symptoms of flu—fever, sore throat, headache—soon they were turning blue in the face, having difficulty breathing, even bleeding from their noses and mouths. If blue turned to black, they were unlikely to recover. Their congested lungs were simply too full of fluid to process air, and death usually followed within hours or days. The second wave receded towards the end of the year, but there was a third and final wave—intermediate in virulence between the other two—in early 1919.
The disease claimed between 50 and 100 million lives, according to current estimates, or between 2.5 and five percent of the global population. To put those numbers in perspective, World War I killed about 18 million people, World War II about 60 million. Rates of sickness and death varied dramatically across the globe, for a host of complex reasons that epidemiologists have been studying ever since. In general, the less well-off suffered worst—though not for the reasons eugenicists proposed—but the elites were by no means spared.” ~
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-1918-flu-pandemic-revolutionized-public-health-180965025/#PbIsOOzjowIGU9U5.99
Spanish flu ambulances Mary:
I think we may be truly in for it with this pandemic. The media hype is ramping up panic. Some of it may be justified, I just don't know. We never had cancellation of Broadway, Disney, all the major sports seasons. Even our community theater performances are cancelled for the season. Seeing St Peter's Square, the entrance to the Louvre, and scenes from Venice completely empty is chilling...like scenes from a post apocalyptic SF film. I am afraid for everyone I know. This is yet early days here for us, and the economic effects may be even greater than the human cost, before it's over.
*
ending on beauty:
All passes and all remains,
and ours is to pass by,
to pass by making roads,
roads over the sea.
~ Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, translated by Willis Barnstone
Siesta
Beach, FL; Wojtek Sawa. I love the light here. It made me recall that
in Polish the words for “light” and “world” seem to stem from the same
root. And the world is in great need of gentle light now. (What strikes
me as even more strange is that the Russian word for “world” is the same
as the word for “peace.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment