Mesopotamian statue Prince Gudea with a vase of flowing waters c. 2120 bc. Note the little fishes.*
ADAM’S LANGUAGE
I wake and dream: What language am I in?
Dazed with creation, he stares at me
in dawn’s amber twilight. I tell him
like a happy child: I am in Adam’s language.
My voice this morning has a higher pitch —
I recognize my cousin Zula’s voice.
Across the ocean, mountains, graves,
she seems to ask, “Why don’t you trust
the syllables you tasted first,
the tongues of wind over the Baltic dunes?”
But I want Adam, the yet unharmed
man in the Garden before the exile,
tendrils of fingers still divine.
Let’s name again the animals.
Let’s fish in the newborn river
for shiny silver vowels.
But Adam is forbidden —
we are the fruit of Eden,
our first language lost
like the face of the unknown god.
The burning branches of I AM
will never speak to us again.
I grieve that I am homeless.
A larger self replies:
All languages are Adam's.
Beloved, you are home.
~ Oriana
“Adam names the animals” at the Creationist Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Note the penguin in the Garden of Eden, front center.I'm fascinated by the idea of Adam naming the animals. Lucille Clifton has this short poem about it:
How delightful to contemplate Adam's mother — especially if she participates in the task.
*
Another unusual painting of the Garden of Eden. Because it came without a caption, I call it The Elephant in the Garden. M. Kasprzyk, an art educator, has identified the style of Poussin and Claude Lorraine for the landscape, with the figures pointing to somewhat earlier. Note the Rubenesque Eve.
Mary:
The elephant is adorable.
Oriana:
The adorable elephant upstages Adam and Eve and the serpent.
Charles:
Favorite image: Elephant in the Garden. The Rubenesque Eve parallels the Rubenesque elephant but not the skinny snake.
*
THE UNCONVENTIONAL HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
~ The year is 1819 and a lonely teenage boy is making his way by coach to the city of Copenhagen. From the top of a high hill its moats and ramparts glitter in the morning sunlight like a fairy-tale palace. Although the stench of refuse is thick, the boy isn’t bothered by it. He has only ten rixdollars in his pocket but harbors a quiet ambition to make his name among the city’s aristocratic families. More than that—a longing he hasn’t put into words yet—he wishes to be remembered forever. Hans Christian Andersen—14 years old, friendless, virtually penniless—wishes to become immortal.
Circumstances are not in his favor. Born of a peasant family, he has only a rudimentary education. At present, his only discernible talent is an angelic singing voice, which he hopes will attract the attention of a wealthy patron. Yet in the way of all fairy-tale heroes he has something else, too, something inherited from his mother, a hardy, barely literate woman who drinks schnapps and tells stories of trolls and ghosts, and from his late father, a dreamy, impractical soul who read to him from One Thousand and One Nights: a love of all things fantastical, an imagination peopled with mermaids and jinn and magic carpets.
As Andersen descends the hill into the city, near the spot where they will one day erect a statue in his honor, he’s no longer mindful of the obstacles in front of him. Like Aladdin, with whom he feels an intense affinity, he is descending into a cave of wonders.
Andersen is due for a reassessment. The true story of his life—his incurable social awkwardness; his passionate, unrequited longings for both men and women; his casual defiance of gender norms; his prickly, sensitive and (to his contemporaries) often insufferable personality—make him a figure of continuing relevance. The world needs this Andersen: the Romantic, lonely striver, effeminate and shy, defender of the humanities and friend of the marginalized.
In his memoirs Andersen tells of a childhood flirtation with a Jewish girl, Sara. Wanting to impress her, he explained that he secretly came from a noble family and would one day inherit a castle. He offered her a job there as a dairy maid. Indignant, Sara told her other friends, “He’s mad, just like his grandfather.”
The story is peak Andersen: the accidental rudeness, the fairy-tale embellishments, a certain cluelessness in love, the sting of rejection—traits that would recur throughout his life, for Andersen retained a touch of childish naiveté even in adulthood which annoyed some and endeared him to others. (English writer Elizabeth Rigby described him as “a long, thin, fleshless, boneless man”—fleshless and boneless!—“bending and wriggling like a lizard with a lantern-jawed, cadaverous appearance.”) Something of his personality seems to have seeped into Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts films—lank, sensitive, foppish, more at home in the company of women than men, averse to conflict, a lover of animals, forever on the brink of tears.
As a boy Andersen was more than once mistaken for a girl—he was beaten up for it—and routinely referred to himself as womanly or “woman-soft” in private correspondence. He never forgave the stern schoolteacher who accused him of being effeminate and forbade him from writing fiction. His sensitivity to injury concealed a vindictive edge—decades later he was still writing stories in which villainous figures try to prevent children from reading fairy-tales—but Andersen’s empathy and complete lack of concern with conforming to conventional gender norms is refreshing now, in a world littered with red-pilled grifters and toxic pick-up artists peddling flimsy or violent ideals of masculinity.
If Andersen’s effeminacy feels strikingly modern, his sexuality feels even more so. Like Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and some other queer writers of that era, he developed powerful romantic attachments that were never returned with the same intensity, expressed his affections through long, florid letters, was compromised by his intense shyness and inability to pass as normal in his culture, and was ultimately disappointed in love. Andersen never married, though it isn’t clear whether he really wanted to. He was committed to his vocation above all else and seemed to relish the emotional high of an unrequited attraction; on the rare occasions when a crush surprised him by returning his affections, he took pains to talk them out of it. Andersen lived for his crushes; in his prime he often nursed two at once, toward a man and a woman, both of whom were usually safely inaccessible. What he seemed to crave more than sex was the ecstatic spark of a passionate kinship between someone of like mind.
It may have been this platonic intellectual kinship that Andersen was seeking when he famously visited Charles Dickens at Gad’s Hill in 1857, a stay of five weeks which the Dickens family experienced as a prolonged torture: Andersen, oblivious to the marital tensions—Dickens was preparing to leave his wife in favor of a young actress—spent the trip histrionically weeping on the front lawn, overcome with both joy and grief, and making whimsical paper cutouts for the entertainment of the younger children. Dickens has generally come off as more sympathetic than Andersen in this episode, though not entirely: as a sophisticated, powerful, socially adept man of the world, Dickens was accustomed to using charm and flattery to put other people at ease. When he disingenuously welcomed Andersen to stay as long as he liked, Andersen naively took him at his word.
The extended visit irretrievably ruined Andersen’s friendship with Dickens, who eventually stopped responding to his letters. Overly trusting, perpetually overwhelmed, gifted with a Romantic’s sense of the world’s horror and beauty, Andersen was tremendously flawed, but even those flaws had a way of working to his credit. Certain critics have noted the postmodern flavor of his later fairy-tales, but Andersen himself seems uniquely modern in a way that many of his contemporaries, more willing to adhere to the social conventions of their time, no longer do. Messy, depressive, nakedly emotional, and sweetly clueless, he’s both reassuringly relatable and deeply sympathetic. The exquisite sensitivity he embodied is a powerful antidote to the coarseness and cruelty that, more and more, seem to be infecting our public life. ~
https://lithub.com/hans-christen-andersen-original-literary-softboi/?fbclid=IwAR0wpmjJZw0DtQP-k6p4N1Z-3wpQB4pqNZuUWTDu3LJCbn_8XMDUmM5cmiQ
Joe:
I especially liked the article on Hans Christian Anderson. One of my favorite writers as I grew up. In the small Catholic school I attended, he was one of the few writers in the library that actually had interesting stories. Although, I'm sure the books were a sanitized version.
*
TALES OF THE PLAGUE YEAR
I got ziplock bags at the drug store, and as I was checking out, I asked about TT. And behold, the clerk lifted a pack from under the counter (imagine: concealed toilet tissue!) and said, “But these are $12.99.” After a brief hesitation, I bought the overpriced TT.
I'm also planning to sacrifice a bra to fashion a facial mask. I wonder if stranger things will follow.
*
A neighbor just assured me, re: covid-19, that “God has a plan.” “I hope it's a good one,” I replied — because what can you really say.
*
LOOKING AT HISTORICAL PHOTOGRPAHS
Times Square, 1911. I'm fascinated by how different the world looked a mere 100 years ago.
And yet, as we look at these peaceful images, there's our knowledge of what happened later: two horrific world wars, the Spanish flu with at least 50 million dead, the Great Depression, nuclear testing, the rise and fall of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. On the positive side, Social Security, the polio vaccine, the measles vaccine, antibiotics (yes, a problem too), votes for women, civil rights, and more. Even with Covid-19 and the uncertainty of how it will play out, how many lives it will take, it’s much better to be alive now than back in 1911.
On a personal scale, perhaps that's why I can't journal — more specifically, I can't bear to read any of that stuff afterwards, with the knowledge of what happened later. Too few happy endings.
“For the first time in history all peoples on earth have a common present: no event of any importance in the history of one country can remain a marginal accident in the history of any other. Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other side of the globe.” ~ Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
THE PARADOX OF GLASS
~ “When you cool a liquid, it will either crystallize or harden into glass. Which of the two happens depends on the substance and on the subtleties of the process that glassblowers have learned through trial and error over thousands of years. “Avoiding crystallization is a dark art,” said Paddy Royall, a glass physicist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
The two options differ greatly.
Crystallization is a dramatic switch from the liquid phase, in which molecules are disordered and free flowing, to the crystal phase, in which molecules are locked in a regular, repeating pattern. Water freezes into ice at zero degrees Celsius, for instance, because the H2O molecules stop jiggling around just enough at that temperature to feel each other’s forces and fall into lockstep.
Other liquids, when cooled, more easily become glass. Silica, for example — window glass — starts as a molten liquid well above 1,000 degrees Celsius; as it cools, its disordered molecules contract slightly, crowding a bit closer together, which makes the liquid increasingly viscous. Eventually, the molecules stop moving altogether. In this gradual glass transition, the molecules don’t reorganize. They simply grind to a halt.
Exactly why the cooling liquid hardens remains unknown. If the molecules in glass were simply too cold to flow, it should still be possible to squish them into new arrangements. But glass doesn’t squish; its jumbled molecules are truly rigid, despite looking the same as molecules in a liquid. “Liquid and glass have the same structure, but behave differently,” said Camille Scalliet, a glass theorist at the University of Cambridge. “Understanding that is the main question.”
A clue came in 1948, when a young chemist named Walter Kauzmann noticed what became known as the entropy crisis, a glassy paradox that later researchers realized ideal glass could resolve.
Kauzmann knew that the more slowly you cool a liquid, the more you can cool it before it transitions into glass. And slower-formed glass ends up denser and more stable, because its molecules had longer to shuffle around (while the liquid was still viscous) and find tighter, lower-energy arrangements. Measurements indicated a corresponding reduction in the entropy, or disorder, of the slower-formed glass — fewer ways its molecules could be arranged with the same low energy.
Extrapolating the trend, Kauzmann realized that if you could cool a liquid slowly enough, you could cool it all the way down to a temperature now known as the Kauzmann temperature before it fully hardened. At that temperature, the resulting glass would have an entropy as low as that of a crystal. But crystals are neat, orderly structures. How could glass, disordered by definition, possess equal order?
No ordinary glass could, which implied that something special must happen at the Kauzmann temperature. Crisis would be avoided if a liquid, upon reaching that temperature, attained the ideal-glass state — the densest possible random packing of molecules. Such a state would exhibit “long-range amorphous order,” where each molecule feels and affects the position of every other, so that in order to move, they must move as one. The hidden long-range order of this putative state could rival the more obvious orderliness of a crystal. “That observation right there was at the heart of why people thought there should be an ideal glass,” said Mark Ediger, a chemical physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
According to this theory, first advanced by Julian Gibbs and Edmund DiMarzio in 1958, ideal glass is a true phase of matter, akin to the liquid and crystal phases. The transition to this phase just takes too long, requiring too slow a cooling process, for scientists to ever see. The ideal-glass transition is “masked,” said Daniel Stein, a condensed matter physicist at New York University, by the liquid becoming “so viscous that everything is arrested.”
When a liquid becomes a glass, it’s actually attempting to transition to the ideal-glass phase, drawn by a fundamental pull toward long-range order. The ideal glass is the endpoint, Royall said, but as the molecules try to crowd closer together, they get stuck; the increasing viscosity prevents the system from ever reaching the desired state.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ideal-glass-would-explain-why-glass-exists-at-all-20200311/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
How refreshing to have someone describe life as too long for something, rather than as too short! I suspect Tolstoy wants to warn us especially against the promises of eternal love.
*
THE PRIMEVAL FOREST OF BIAŁOWIEŻA (near the border of Poland and Belarus)
~ The story of this forest begins 10 thousand years ago, in the vacuum left by the vanishing of ice.
The glaciers of the north shrink back. The permafrost loses its permanence. As the frozen climate warms, the tundra that covers the North European Plain—part of the vast “mammoth steppe” that stretches from Spain to Siberia—undergoes a process of rapid recolonization.
The first pioneers to arrive are the tiny windblown seeds of birch, which travel long distances to populate open ground; their pale trunks are like the blueprints of the future forest. Behind them come alder, poplar, and dwarf pine, enriching the soil with fallen leaves. That first wave also brings willow, the tree of Veles. ["Lord of the Forest"]
Perun [god of the storm] arrives later as the oaks spread slowly from the south, where they have waited out the Ice Age sheltered by the protective wall of the Alps and Carpathians. With them come hazel, elm, lime, ash, spruce, beech, maple, holly, fir, hornbeam, and other trees, packing out the understory with layers of complexity. By the early Neolithic, the forest is general over northern Europe, reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Baltic Sea.
Europe has been colonized not only by trees but by shadow.
What about the people who live through this great shadowing? For thousands of years they have hunted here, following mammoth, deer, and bison across the wide-open steppe, and now—in the space of a few generations—their horizons are filled in. Saplings shoot up everywhere, too fast to be grazed back; in this new landscape of fear, where predators might be hiding behind every fallen bough, the herds cannot linger long and quickly move away. Some people keep following them, to lands beyond the range of trees. But others stay and adapt to life beneath the leaves.
It is as if a great roof has been woven across the continent, blocking out the light of the sky.
Part of it must feel like a death.
But new gods peer from between the trunks.
From the darkness of death comes life.
*
My guide points them out one by one, softly, reverentially: golden saxifrage, a flower with yellow, rounded leaves; red-banded polypore, an orange-crimson fungus; toothwort, a parasite with leaves like sickly purple hands; dead man’s fingers, black fungus that pokes searchingly through damp moss. There are mushrooms in great racks and bergs; lichen ranging from cool gray-green to fluorescent orange; moss so intensely green that, even in this dim light, it appears to burn.
Once, to look closer at one of these things—a cascade of fungal forms spilling from some riven flank—I take a few steps off the permitted track and am instantly reprimanded. Not even a footstep is allowed. I have the sense of breaking a religious prohibition.
Free from euphemistic “management”—in this most strictly protected part of the forest, not so much as a twig can be taken away—Białowieża contains, by mass, more dead than living wood. My guide explains the process by which one becomes the other. Funguses with ghoulish names like wet rot fungus and jelly rot fungus feed off the lignin and cellulose of which wood is comprised.
As their webs of hyphae spread, they create honeycombed labyrinths that provide further access to moisture, bacteria, and insects. The hatching larvae of burrowing beetles create layered galleries, allowing more species in: woodlice, millipedes, slugs, snails, wood wasps, springtails, and earthworms that mine the rotten seams, dying and decomposing in turn, adding sediment to sediment.
Depending on the type of tree, a fallen trunk can take anywhere from several decades to several hundred years to be broken down, during which time it is home, and food, for multiple generations. Eventually, when its physical mass has entirely disappeared, it can be said to no longer exist, but its components do, in innumerable other life-forms.
There are more microbes in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.
The forest does subversive things to conceptions of life and death. We tell ourselves that these states are opposites and absolutes, separated by a line from which there is no crossing back. But in the heart of Białowieża that line is far from clear. The claim that over 50 percent of the forest’s wood is dead appears somewhat meaningless, as much of what we’re walking through is dead and alive at the same time. The dead and the living are constantly in the process of becoming each other.
Civilization’s ancient fear of what the forest represents—the dark, mysterious, tangled woods beyond the village in a fairy tale—surely has its roots in this. A forest is a reminder of death, a living memento mori.
*
Not far outside the strict reserve is a tourist-frequented grove known as Stara (“Old”) Białowieża. A boardwalk trail leads around the so-called “century oaks” that are venerated as icons of the forest and even of Poland itself. This isn’t only for their age—most are around 400 years old—but for the history they embody. Each one bears the name of Polish-Lithuanian royalty.
The Jagiełło Oak is named for the forest’s first protector, Władysław II Jagiełło, the last pagan Grand Duke of Lithuania, who, after converting to Christianity, went on to lay the foundations of the future Polish state. The tree fell down in a 1970s storm but still lies as a noble ruin. A nearby signboard reads: “King Władysław Jagiełło initiated the tradition of royal huntings in Białowieża Forest in 1409,” and then—in what is either a typo or a claim of immortality—“Władysław came here in 1926, protecting himself from the plague.”
By the Old Zygmunt Oak, a signboard says: “King Zygmunt constituted the law that a death meets the one who would kill an animal in the Royal Forest.” By the Helena Oak, named for the wife of King Aleksander Jagiellończyk: “This lady of hot blood was so unrestrained in her hunting spirit that only the most tenacious could keep up with her.”
If I did not know what they were, I would not even recognize these giants, on first encounter, as oaks. The ancient oaks I am used to meeting—English oaks lining the driveways of grand country estates—are short and squat, knobbled with galls, often lightning-struck or dying from the inside out. These trees, deprived of the roominess they require to spread out wide, launch themselves directly up to heights of thirty or forty meters, practically branchless for most of the trunk and then crowning at canopy level into mazes of enormous limbs. Their girth is formidable, machines pulling water from the earth. Touching the bark of an English oak is like touching noble but corrupted flesh; this, by contrast, feels like laying my hands on living power.
Craning my neck to look up produces an inverse vertigo. It is easy to understand why such trees were worshiped.
These century oaks—with their official designation as “national monuments,” afforded the same status as statues or war memorials—are symbolic reincarnations of the figures they represent, the royal heroes of the past alive in the form of trees. This patriotic overlay has roots deeper than the nation state.
Perun still has a presence here, stretching up towards the sky, deity of metal and war, of vigorous fertility.
How else to describe this place but as a sacred grove? ~
https://lithub.com/journeying-into-the-depths-of-europes-oldest-primeval-forest/?fbclid=IwAR0Fmf5KyXtjfn1-Hoc4smHVbXuIhBTtc4h_IHmHSNQE09wl9w-09cLWEUk
*
QUESTIONS TO EXPLORE WITH YOUR PARTNER
Set 1
1.Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Set 2
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set 3
25. Make three true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling _____."
26. Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share _____."
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
*
We all want to be known. We want to be known by our friends, our colleagues, our family members, even our neighbors. We want to be seen for what we have to offer, for what we provide, for who we are.
But the person we often crave to feel most known by is our partner. This is the person with whom we share the most intimate details of our lives (not to mention our bodies). It's the person who sees us at our best and our worst. The one who knows our history and is a primary part of our future.
We want them to know us — really know us, and these questions can help. As Catron says, "Most of us think about love as something that happens to us," she said. "We fall. We get crushed. But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/want-to-fall-in-love-with-your-partner-again-science-says-to-ask-them-these-36-questions?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
CORONAVIRUS IN THE US: THE TRAGEDY OF WASTED TIME
~ When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended.
In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.
Top of their to-do list: work with private industry to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test” – in other words, just what South Korea was doing.
It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
Those missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership. Today, 86,012 cases [update: April 4: 299,861] have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
More than a quarter of those cases are in New York City, now a global center of the coronavirus pandemic, with New Orleans also raising alarm. Nationally, 1,301 people have died. [April 4: 8,1333]
Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
“The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently.
“What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster?fbclid=IwAR16cqNWlZ8DWiMCZq1-zlDHAsWoT1IaN3IFbpBa015ei1gD1Fd0lsai0f0
Oriana:
According to what I’ve read, CDC knew about a dangerous new virus that originated in China already on January 3. Regardless, the time to start acting was in January.
“Please don't kiss me.” Mother during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Smoking! An MD I knew told me, “Most people die of ignorance.” This makes me wonder if we commonly do something now that in the future will be revealed as harmful.*
Reported US coronavirus cases:
0 to 100,000 cases: 66 days
100,000 to 200,000 cases: 5 days
200,000 to 300,000 cases: 3 days
*
Mary (a former nurse):
A few thoughts on the ongoing disaster here in the US. As I said before, our sense of privilege and entitlement leads to some crazy and foolish behaviors, as people continuing to socialize and party because to tell them they can't is an infringement on their “civil rights.” That objection has actually been indignantly raised.
Another problem comes from the independent governance of the individual states — instead of everyone being on the same page they're all doing it differently and on their own schedules. Instead of any central organization, individual states are actually competing for essential supplies: all the ugliness of bidding wars, hoarding, rationing, jerry-rigging equipment to make what you have go farther.
Yes, most of our pitiful and chaotic response can be laid at the feet of the president and his coterie of slavering lackeys, but some of it is due to the very organization of the states, and to our typical values of fierce individualism and "me first" habits of thought. Maybe this is where a central totalitarian state actually can be at an advantage in meeting this kind of crisis. Not enough reason of course, to recommend it! But here in Florida even the recommendation of social distancing came late, and even individual COUNTIES have different policies. Flagler county has closed its beaches, Volusia has not. So there's one long empty beach, then past the county line, one with lots of people on it.
And thinking about the effects of the pandemic we can't ignore the huge psychological toll it is taking. Fear, of course, for yourself, your family, your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues. But there is also an incalculable weight of grief, growing heavier every day. I have experienced the death of patients I cared for, and it was never easy, always hard to process emotionally. I can't imagine what is happening to the nurses and doctors on the front lines, losing many patients every day, every single day.
An important factor in this burden is that it happens very fast, it's not a long or lingering process, the deterioration is rapid and precipitous — and must seem unnatural even to people used to seeing illness and death. This was something true also of other terrible plagues — bubonic, cholera, the Spanish Flu — where people could go from well to dead in a matter of hours. We have lived with other terrible scourges, no less merciless, that move slower, that let you adjust in some ways, to the inevitable end, like tuberculosis and malaria, deadly, but not coming with the obliterating shock of suddenness, like being struck by lightning. I think coming through this, whenever we do, there will be a kind of shared, cultural PTSD, that all the survivors will need to find a way to heal.
Already we feel nostalgic, not for some far past time, but for things as they were only weeks ago, and we wonder if they will ever come again, or be lost forever.
Oriana:
I can only nod my head to everything you say. Things that used to be too ordinary to even mention — going to a market or to the bank or drugstore — have become an ordeal. But it is an eye-opener too. For instance, I never thought I’d come to appreciate soap as one of humanity’s greatest, life-saving inventions.
And of course we now have new heroes: medical professionals and scientists of course, but also truck drivers, garbage collectors, janitors — people who used to get little respect. Now we can see whose work is truly essential — and it’s not that of hedge-fund managers or Wall Street lawyers.
One thing that the US has going for it, though, is the fact that it's basically non-urban. Sure, there is New York and Chicago and Boston, but even there, and especially in Los Angeles and San Diego, it's mostly single-family houses. Hundreds of millions of people don't have to enter elevators and breathe the possibly virus-laden air. The low population density reduces the chances of coming into contact with someone infected.
But we are yet to see how it will all play out . . .
Mary:
Yes, it's one day at a time, it's hard to even think much farther. I was thinking about distance, how different it is now. At the beginning of all this some friends of ours had a trip to Italy scheduled. When I expressed reservations about their being able to go, she said, “Well, it's Italy, so far away from China.” But the truth of our world is nothing's far away, everything's just an airport away. Another reason nationalism and isolationism is just crazy now, and really not possible. Of course our friends couldn't go...and how ironic their destination was Italy, hardest hit after China, and before the US.
Oriana:
Yes: “everything's just an airport away.” That’s why we are more susceptible to pandemics than ever. In 1910, a dreadful respiratory disease broke out in Manchuria — but it stayed there. I write about it in my previous blog: https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2020/03/can-n95-mask-save-us-new-viruses-and.html
Dr. Anthony Fauci. He's 79?? What a fabulous man.
*
CHILDREN’S RESPONSE TO CORONAVIRUS*
Mary (a former nurse):
A few thoughts on the ongoing disaster here in the US. As I said before, our sense of privilege and entitlement leads to some crazy and foolish behaviors, as people continuing to socialize and party because to tell them they can't is an infringement on their “civil rights.” That objection has actually been indignantly raised.
Another problem comes from the independent governance of the individual states — instead of everyone being on the same page they're all doing it differently and on their own schedules. Instead of any central organization, individual states are actually competing for essential supplies: all the ugliness of bidding wars, hoarding, rationing, jerry-rigging equipment to make what you have go farther.
Yes, most of our pitiful and chaotic response can be laid at the feet of the president and his coterie of slavering lackeys, but some of it is due to the very organization of the states, and to our typical values of fierce individualism and "me first" habits of thought. Maybe this is where a central totalitarian state actually can be at an advantage in meeting this kind of crisis. Not enough reason of course, to recommend it! But here in Florida even the recommendation of social distancing came late, and even individual COUNTIES have different policies. Flagler county has closed its beaches, Volusia has not. So there's one long empty beach, then past the county line, one with lots of people on it.
And thinking about the effects of the pandemic we can't ignore the huge psychological toll it is taking. Fear, of course, for yourself, your family, your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues. But there is also an incalculable weight of grief, growing heavier every day. I have experienced the death of patients I cared for, and it was never easy, always hard to process emotionally. I can't imagine what is happening to the nurses and doctors on the front lines, losing many patients every day, every single day.
An important factor in this burden is that it happens very fast, it's not a long or lingering process, the deterioration is rapid and precipitous — and must seem unnatural even to people used to seeing illness and death. This was something true also of other terrible plagues — bubonic, cholera, the Spanish Flu — where people could go from well to dead in a matter of hours. We have lived with other terrible scourges, no less merciless, that move slower, that let you adjust in some ways, to the inevitable end, like tuberculosis and malaria, deadly, but not coming with the obliterating shock of suddenness, like being struck by lightning. I think coming through this, whenever we do, there will be a kind of shared, cultural PTSD, that all the survivors will need to find a way to heal.
Already we feel nostalgic, not for some far past time, but for things as they were only weeks ago, and we wonder if they will ever come again, or be lost forever.
Oriana:
I can only nod my head to everything you say. Things that used to be too ordinary to even mention — going to a market or to the bank or drugstore — have become an ordeal. But it is an eye-opener too. For instance, I never thought I’d come to appreciate soap as one of humanity’s greatest, life-saving inventions.
And of course we now have new heroes: medical professionals and scientists of course, but also truck drivers, garbage collectors, janitors — people who used to get little respect. Now we can see whose work is truly essential — and it’s not that of hedge-fund managers or Wall Street lawyers.
One thing that the US has going for it, though, is the fact that it's basically non-urban. Sure, there is New York and Chicago and Boston, but even there, and especially in Los Angeles and San Diego, it's mostly single-family houses. Hundreds of millions of people don't have to enter elevators and breathe the possibly virus-laden air. The low population density reduces the chances of coming into contact with someone infected.
But we are yet to see how it will all play out . . .
Mary:
Yes, it's one day at a time, it's hard to even think much farther. I was thinking about distance, how different it is now. At the beginning of all this some friends of ours had a trip to Italy scheduled. When I expressed reservations about their being able to go, she said, “Well, it's Italy, so far away from China.” But the truth of our world is nothing's far away, everything's just an airport away. Another reason nationalism and isolationism is just crazy now, and really not possible. Of course our friends couldn't go...and how ironic their destination was Italy, hardest hit after China, and before the US.
Oriana:
Yes: “everything's just an airport away.” That’s why we are more susceptible to pandemics than ever. In 1910, a dreadful respiratory disease broke out in Manchuria — but it stayed there. I write about it in my previous blog: https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2020/03/can-n95-mask-save-us-new-viruses-and.html
Dr. Anthony Fauci. He's 79?? What a fabulous man. *
~ Just as with adults, children exposed to the coronavirus can be infected with it and display signs of Covid-19. “At the beginning of the pandemic, it was thought that children are not getting infected with the coronavirus, but now it is clear that the amount of infection in children is the same as in adults,” explains Andrew Pollard, professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford. “It’s just that when they do get the infection they get much milder symptoms.”
Data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that children under 19 years of age comprised 2% of the 72,314 Covid-19 cases logged by February 20th, while a US study of 508 patients, reported no case fatalities among children, with this group accounting for less than 1% of the patients in hospital.
“It could be that the virus has preferentially affected adults at the moment because there has been workplace transmission and transmission during travel,” says Sanjay Patel, a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at Southampton Children’s Hospital. “Now that adults are spending more time with their children we might see a rise in infection in children, but we might not.”
“It is a remarkable observation, in the global literature that we have for coronavirus already, that even children with very serious medical conditions, who are on immunosuppressive therapies or on cancer treatments, are much less affected than adults, especially older adults,” says Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, whose researchers have recently identified a vaccine candidate for Covid-19.
Data from a Chinese study of Covid-19 in children confirmed slightly more than half showed mild symptoms of fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, body aches and sneezing; around a third showed signs of pneumonia, with frequent fever, a productive cough and wheeze but without the shortness of breath and difficulty breathing seen in more severe cases.
Graham Roberts, an honorary consultant paediatrician at the University of Southampton, explains: “Children (with Covid-19) are predominantly affected in their upper airways (nose, mouths, and throats) so they get cold-like features rather than the virus managing to access their lower airways, ie lungs, and giving the pneumonia and life-threatening Sars picture that we see with adult patients.”
The proportion of children who went on to develop severe or critical Covid-19 illness with breathlessness, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and shock was much lower (6%) than among Chinese adults (19%) – especially older adults with chronic cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. A small proportion of children (1%) did not show any signs of infection at all, despite harbouring the virus. In comparison, only 1% of infected adults remained asymptomatic.
Why do children infected with the coronavirus fare better than adults?
“The virus is so new that we don’t really know”, says Roberts, who is also director of the David Hide Asthma and Allergy Research Centre, in Newport, UK.
“One of the likely reasons is that the virus needs a protein on the surface of a cell (a receptor) to get into the inside of a cell and start causing problems,” he says. “The coronavirus seems to use the Angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE-2) receptor for this purpose. It may be that children have less ACE-2 receptors in their lower airways (lungs) than in their upper airways, which is why it is their upper airways (nose, mouths and throats) that are predominantly affected.”
This may explain why children infected with the coronavirus seem to get more of a cold rather than a pneumonia or the life threatening Sars picture that is seen in adults. The coronavirus’s affinity for the ACE-2 receptor was demonstrated in cell lines and in mouse models in laboratory studies as early as 2003, and in genome studies of novel coronaviruses RsSHC014 and Rs3367 (related, but not identical, to the SARS coronavirus) isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats in 2013.
Pollard says there may be another explanation. “It is not so much that children are not being as affected, but that something changes as a person gets much older that makes one more likely to be affected.”
He puts this down to the aging of the immune system (immunosenescence), which makes the body less able to fight off new infections. “However, we don’t see immunosenescence in young adults, and it’s very clear that even young adults have a higher risk of severe disease than children do so that is probably not the whole answer,” adds Pollard.
There are many ways in which the immune system of a child differs from that of an adult, not least because the immune system of children is still very much a work in progress: children, especially those in nursery or school, are exposed to a large number of novel respiratory infections and this might result in them having higher baseline levels of antibodies against viruses than adults.
“Children seem to mount more intense responses (to viral infections) than adults, such as high fevers that you just don’t see very often in adults,” says Roberts. “It is very possible that the children’s immune systems are better able to control the virus, localize it to their upper airways without it causing too many other problems and eliminate the virus”.
“It might also be that children previously infected with the other four types of coronavirus might experience cross protection from previous infections,” adds Patel.
Additionally, the authors of the study of childhood cases in China suggest that because children have fewer chronic cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, they are more resilient to severe coronavirus infection than elderly adults.
“Very few children have severe Covid-19 infection,” says Pollard. “That does suggest that there is something fundamentally different about the way they are handling the virus.”
There is a third reason as to why children don’t seem to be getting severely ill with Covid-19. In critically ill adults, an overzealous immune response to fight off the virus – termed a cytokine storm – appears to do more harm than good, causing multi-organ failure. Children, with immature immune systems, appear to be less capable of mounting cytokine storms to fight off viral infections.
While this hypothesis is yet to be proved in Covid-19, studies of immune responses in children during the 2003 Sars outbreak proved that, unlike adults, children did not mount an overtly elevated cytokine response.
Can children, with mild or no illness, transmit the Coronavirus to others?
Yes, they can.
“This is the big issue,” says Roberts. “Many think that children are at low risk and we don’t need to worry about them, and yes, that is true for children who don’t have chronic medical conditions like immunodeficiencies. What people are forgetting is that children are probably one of the main routes by which this infection is going to spread throughout the community.”
The coronavirus is transmitted from an infected person to a non-infected person through direct contact with the respiratory droplets of an infected person (generated through coughing and sneezing), and touching surfaces contaminated with the virus. This means that children infected with the coronavirus, with very mild or no illness, can transmit the infection to others, especially family members and elderly relatives.
“Children with very mild disease are probably going to be one of the major contributors to spreading the virus across the population,” says Roberts. “This is why schools closing are crucial to reducing the rate at which the pandemic spreads across the UK.”
Have we seen a similar pattern, with other viruses, where children experience milder illness than adults but are important spreaders of the infection?
Yes, influenza is one such virus that most of us are familiar with.
“Influenza is often just a runny nose in a child, in the older members of the population it can lead to hospitalisation, intensive care, or can be fatal,” says Roberts. He has an important message: “A few years ago the government (in the UK) brought in flu vaccinations for children. That wasn’t particularly to protect children in the population, that was to stop children from passing influenza to their elderly relatives who can be much more affected by it.”
The principle holds true for the coronavirus. The risk of Covid-19 to children themselves is low, the risk of them transmitting it to vulnerable elderly or ailing relatives, is high.
Another example is the swine flu (H1N1) virus, responsible for the flu pandemic of 2009 and 2010. “H1N1 infection was preferentially much worse in pregnant women and the elderly, with children having some tummy symptoms but much milder than in adults,” says Patel.
Does Covid-19 affect children of different ages differently?
It appears so. The Chinese data suggests that young children, particularly infants, are more vulnerable to Covid-19 than other age groups. While severe or critical illness was reported in one in 10 infants, these rates decreased dramatically as children grew older so that in children aged five years or older, only three or four in 100 developed severe or critical illness.
“There is a predilection for preschoolers,” says Roberts. “They have small airways, and they are less robust that older children in fighting off the infection. They are also more likely to be admitted to hospital because they are so young.”
What about teenagers?
“At some stage children turn into adults,” says Roberts. “In teenagers, we see a maturation in the immune system into a more adult pattern, which may be less effective at controlling this virus. It is important to remember, however, that we know very little about this virus, we are really speculating in terms of trying to understand why we are seeing the epidemiology that we are seeing.”
In the Chinese study, no deaths were reported among children aged nine years and younger, while the only death in children under 19 occurred in a 14-year-old. On 23 March, the UK reported one Covid-19 related death in an 18-year-old with an underlying health condition.
Can Covid-19 affect newborns?
Yes.
While the pandemic is still unfolding in many parts of the world, there are at least two cases of confirmed infection in newborns – one in Wuhan, China and one in London in the UK. It is not yet known whether these babies contracted the infection in the womb, or after being born. In both cases, their mothers tested positive for the virus.
What do we know about how the coronavirus affects babies in the womb?
Not much.
While coronaviruses responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) can affect the pregnant woman as well as her baby, causing miscarriages, premature delivery, and poor growth of the baby, similar patterns have as yet not been reported for mothers with Covid-19.
*
The separation of apparently healthy children from elderly relatives may seem an unnecessarily stoic measure. However, it is important to remember that while most children infected with the coronavirus show only mild signs of illness, or no signs at all, they can still transmit the virus to others.
Limiting the spread of the coronavirus and containing the Covid-19 pandemic will depend as much on the success of social and behavioral changes, as on modern medicine and scientific advances. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200330-coronavirus-are-children-immune-to-covid-19
Times Square, March 2020*
St. Petersburgh, Nevsky Prospect, April 3, 2020 *
Young Dr. Fauci — world’s most handsome epidemiologist. Intelligence is sexy.*
BIG GODS EMERGE AS SOCIETIES GET MORE COMPLEX
“God only started watching over us quite recently, according to a study that analyzed 414 societies from 30 world regions.”
~ When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behavior. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.
Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralizing religions came into being.
Now, thanks to our massive new database of world history, known as Seshat (named after the Egyptian goddess of record keeping), we’re starting to get some answers.
Eye in the Sky
One popular theory has argued that moralizing gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behavior without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.
What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly.
Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions. Maybe it would also increase trust among traders. If you believe that I believe in an omniscient moralizing deity, you might be more likely to do business with me, than somebody whose religiosity is unknown to you. Simply wearing insignia such as body markings or jewelry alluding to belief in such a god might have helped ambitious people prosper and garner popularity as society grew larger and more complex.
One of the earliest questions we’re testing is whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies. We analyzed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter. New research we’ve just published in the journal Nature reveals that moralizing gods come later than many people thought, well after the sharpest rises in social complexity in world history. In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilizations – but came later.
Our statistical analysis showed that beliefs in supernatural punishment tend to appear only when societies make the transition from simple to complex, around the time when the overall population exceed about a million individuals.
We are now looking to other factors that may have driven the rise of the first large civilization. For example, Seshat data suggests that daily or weekly collective rituals – the equivalent of today’s Sunday services or Friday prayers – appear early in the rise of social complexity and we’re looking further at their impact.
If the original function of moralizing gods in world history was to hold together fragile, ethnically diverse coalitions, what might declining belief in such deities mean for the future of societies today? Could modern secularization, for example, contribute to the unraveling of efforts to cooperate regionally – such as the European Union? If beliefs in big gods decline, what will that mean for cooperation across ethnic groups in the face of migration, warfare, or the spread of xenophobia? Can the functions of moralizing gods simply be replaced by other forms of surveillance?
Even if Seshat cannot provide easy answers to all these questions, it could provide a more reliable way of estimating the probabilities of different futures. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/big-gods-came-after-the-rise-of-civilisations-not-before-finds-study-using-huge-historical-database
God the Father and Cherub by Guercino Barbieri
Charles:
Why would God have male pattern baldness and arthritis?
Oriana:
It’s obvious that Barbieri totally humanized the deity and is presenting to us a grandpa with a grandson. An omnipotent god should be exempt from imperfections and afflictions like baldness and arthritis. Note that the Greek gods weren’t even omnipotent, but they were immortal, and thus exempt from ailments. One can’t imagine Apollo coming down with a cold, too hoarse to keep on singing. Or Aphrodite contracting a venereal disease.
I think that starting in the High Renaissance, artists began to secularize religious art, celebrating the human more so than the idealized divine. They also became interested in depicting Greek mythology, with its idealized nudes. But when it came to god the father, he was traditionally presented as an old man with a gray beard.
But note that Mary remains always young and beautiful, and so does Jesus. So while god the father shows signs of aging, Jesus is always shown as young and very attractive, with a beautiful soft face. In paintings and sculptures of the Crucifixion, he has a perfect body, with no chest chair — chest hair would probably be seen as an animalistic imperfection.
As if to offset the Father's baldness and gnarled hands, his beard, which we might expect to be bristly, appears to be very soft, almost downy. Obviously the painter didn't want to create too much ugliness. But the beard is white-gray, in keeping with traditional iconography.
Let's face it, the entire Trinity is rather strange: old man, a beautiful young man, and a dove.
*
By the way, god is holding the scepter and the orb — insignia of royal power. After all, he is the “king of kings.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_cruciger
*
ending on beauty:
Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne turning into laurel
wants you to turn into wind.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 2, 12
No comments:
Post a Comment