Saint Petersburg Palace Square, the Alexander Column. In the early 1950s, there were plans to replace the statue of the angel with the statue of Stalin.*
1 JANUARY 1965
The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.
What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.
You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It's clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it's too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven's light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.
~ Joseph Brodsky, Nativity Poems; tr George L. Kline
After the mournful mood of the first stanza — this is a sad, lonely Christmas indeed — the poem performs an astonishing feat of turning into an affirmation, made all the more powerful by being “in spite of.” The speaker manages to be grateful for the gift that his life is. In the hour of his death, he hopes he’ll be able to turn his gaze “to the far sky” and be filled with gratitude.
How clumsy this prose summary is next to the lines of the poem. I think the translation is excellent, so the poem has an easy fluency, and seems to flow by itself. The diction is both old-fashioned and modern in a way that makes the poem seem to step out of its historical time, though its title is a date: 1 January 1965. It’s not called New Year’s Day, 1965, which would sound festive rather than cold. January is indeed the coldest month — “the very dead of winter,” as Eliot put it in his Journey of the Magi. Out of this morose mood rises the miracle of gratitude simply for being alive — the one miracle for which it’s never too late.
The date marks the time of Brodsky’s northern exile, but no direct complaint about it is made. Each life has its winters, but that’s one of the reasons we have poetry — to keep reminding us that just being alive is a gift.
The Dream of the Magi, Autun Cathedral, Gislebertus, 1120-1130
BRODSKY: THE GIFT OF MISFORTUNE
~ He was restless. He left the factory job [he dropped out of school at fifteen) after six months. Over the next seven years, until his arrest, he worked at a lighthouse, a crystallography lab, and a morgue; he also hung about, smoking cigarettes and reading books. He traveled around the Soviet Union, taking part in “geological” expeditions, helping the rapidly industrializing Soviet government comb the vast country for mineral wealth and oil. At night, the geologists would gather around the campfire and play songs on their guitars—often poetry set to music—and read their own poems. Upon reading a book of poems on the “geological” theme, in 1958, Brodsky decided that he could do better himself. One of his earliest poems, “Pilgrims,” was soon a campfire hit.
The whole country was going crazy for poetry; it had become central to the atmosphere of Khrushchev’s Thaw. In 1959, as part of a return of sorts to the Bolshevik past, a statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky was unveiled in central Moscow, and soon young people began to gather around it to read their own poetry. In the early sixties, a group of poets started a series of well-attended readings at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow, catercorner from the headquarters of the K.G.B. There is a film of one of these evenings, and, though it’s just a poetry reading (rather than a Beatles concert, say), and though the poems of these semi-official poets weren’t especially good, the atmosphere is electric. A crowd had gathered and before it stood a young man talking about his feelings: this was new.
Searching for English-language equivalents, Robert Hass wrote that Brodsky sounded “like Robert Lowell when Lowell is sounding like Byron.” As a cultural figure in Russia, though, Brodsky was more akin to Allen Ginsberg (with whom he later went shopping for used clothes in New York—“Allen bought a tuxedo jacket for five dollars!” he told Loseff, who wondered why a beatnik needed formal wear). For Ginsberg and his friends, freedom lay in breaking the bounds of traditional prosody; for Brodsky and his friends, freedom came from reëstablishing a tradition that Stalin had tried to annihilate. Brodsky was able to find surprising ways of doing this, seemingly with no effort, and always remaining cool and nonchalant. His early poems describe the narrator walking home from the train station; the narrator touring his old Leningrad haunts; the narrator watching a married couple argue, wondering whether he himself will always be alone.
It was a period of tremendous generational energy and hope; someone had to embody it. It was important that Brodsky’s poems were contemporary and local. It was also important that, in their debt to Anglo-American modernism, they connected the small group of Leningrad poets and readers to the great world. And most important of all was that, in their creative fealty to an old-fashioned formal tradition, they connected this generation to the great poets of the Russian past; Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet’s widow, declared Brodsky a second Mandelstam.
Then, in October, 1962, Khrushchev was confronted by President Kennedy over a shipment of missiles sent by the Soviets to Cuba. After a tense standoff, the Soviets withdrew in humiliation, and Khrushchev lashed out at home. Just a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis, he lambasted a group of young artists at an exhibit in Moscow, calling them “faggots.” The Thaw was finished. A year later, Brodsky was charged with “freeloading” on the back of the great Soviet people.
Brodsky’s trial took place in two sessions, several weeks apart, in February and March of 1964; in between, Brodsky was confined to a mental hospital, where it was determined that he was psychologically fit to work. The trial was a farce, its outcome predetermined. “Trial of the freeloader Brodsky,” a sign outside the courtroom read, a little prejudicially. Inside, neither the judge nor the people testifying against Brodsky had any interest in his poetry. Brodsky, who remained unpublished, made what money he could doing translations, sometimes working from literal translations when he didn’t know the source language; his accusers wanted to know, among other things, how this was possible, and whether Brodsky wasn’t exploiting his collaborators on such projects.
Brodsky at the time was not yet twenty-four. His friend Rein recalls how the second session of the trial fell on Maslenitsa, or Butter Week, the traditional pancake-eating holiday in advance of Lent. Consequently, on the day of the trial, Rein and some other friends went to the restaurant at the Hotel European to eat pancakes. Then, at four o’clock, they went to the courthouse. Not everyone, in other words, had a sense of the gravity of the occasion.
In the end, the judge sentenced the so-called poet to five years of exile and labor up north, to straighten him out.
On the subject of Brodsky’s exile, Loseff is once again forced to disappoint readers who have grown accustomed to thinking of the poet as someone who spent time in the Gulag. His confinement to a mental hospital in between sessions of the trial was miserable. His eighteen months in the village of Norenskaya were among the best times of his life.
Norenskaya was three hundred and fifty miles from Leningrad, and Brodsky could receive visitors. His mother visited him; his friends Rein and Naiman visited; his lover Marina Basmanova visited. Even Bobyshev came to visit! (He was looking for Basmanova.) Brodsky rented a little cottage in the village and, while it didn’t have central heating or plumbing, it was, as one visitor marveled, his very own. “For our generation this was an unthinkable luxury,” the visitor recalled. “Iosif proudly showed off his domain.” Brodsky had a typewriter and was reading a lot of W. H. Auden. On the whole, this was more Yaddo than Gulag.
But there is nothing to be done about a legend once it’s created. Akhmatova’s famous dark joke at the time of his arrest—“What a biography they’re writing for our redhead”—told only half the story. After his arrest, Brodsky met the occasion; he built his own biography. The transcript of the trial, made by a brave journalist named Frida Vigrodova, quickly appeared in samizdat and was sent abroad, where it was published in many languages (in the United States it appeared in The New Leader). A concerted campaign led by Akhmatova and joined by Jean-Paul Sartre resulted in Brodsky’s early release. By the time he returned to Leningrad, in late 1965, Brodsky was world famous, and had developed profoundly as a poet.
He also continued to describe and memorialize his love for [the painter] Marina Basmanova. From “Six Years Later,” in Richard Wilbur’s translation:
So long had life together been that once
the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I’d shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
would beat against my palm like butterflies.
In the early nineteen-seventies, the geopolitical wheel turned again, and took Brodsky with it. Brezhnev’s desire to clear house dovetailed nicely with pressure from the West to release Soviet Jews, and in the spring of 1972 Brodsky was given three weeks to pack his bags and board a plane to Vienna. Unlike Norenskaya, this would be true exile, and it lasted the rest of his life.
Brodsky makes a cameo appearance in the novelist Sigrid Nunez’s new memoir about Susan Sontag, “Sempre Susan.” It is 1976 and Brodsky has recently started dating Sontag. He is romantic, brooding, mostly bald. “None of it matters,” he announces one day. “Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.” Another time, he takes everyone out for Chinese, his favorite New York meal. Sitting around the table with Sontag, her son, and the young Nunez, Brodsky is the bohemian paterfamilias. Nunez describes him purring to this small, unlikely clan, “Aren’t we happy?”
This is the image one has of Brodsky in America: a runaway success. Only from the Russian side can one see how difficult it was, and also just how much it meant. For members of that Soviet generation, America was everything. They listened to its music, read its novels, translated its poetry. They caught bits and pieces of America wherever they could (including on trips to Poland). America “was like a homeland in reserve for us,” Sergeyev (who translated, among others, Robert Frost) later wrote. When, in the nineteen-seventies, the opportunity presented itself, many went. It was only upon arriving here that they discovered what they’d lost.
Brodsky’s poems during his first years in the States are filled with the most naked loneliness. “An autumn evening in a humble little town / proud of its appearance on the map,” one begins, and concludes with an image of a person whose reflection in the mirror disappears, bit by bit, like that of a street lamp in a drying puddle. The enterprising Proffer had persuaded the University of Michigan to make Brodsky a poet in residence; Brodsky wrote a poem about a college teacher. “In the country of dentists,” it begins, “whose daughters order clothes / from London catalogues, . . . / I, whose mouth houses ruins / more total than the Parthenon’s, / a spy, an interloper, / the fifth column of a rotten civilization,” teach literature. The narrator comes home at night, falls into bed with his clothes still on, and cries himself to sleep. That year, Brodsky wrote a poem indicating that, in being forced to leave Russia, he lost a son [with Basmanova].
Eventually, Brodsky escaped the country of dentists for a small Greenwich Village garden apartment in New York.
Brodsky’s own English improved rapidly. In 1977, he bought a secondhand typewriter in Manhattan and soon was writing the essays directly in a supple, playful, ironic English, through which you could sometimes hear the poetic voice of his Russian. In these essays, many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Brodsky wrote with great sympathy of the poets he most admired: Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and, on the other shore, Robert Frost and, especially, Auden. In this way he was able to repay his debts. He was also able, in several autobiographical essays, to recast his painful experiences in a new form.
From the very first, it had fallen to Brodsky to experience all the struggles of his generation on his own hide, as the Russians say. His immigration was no exception. He was spared the loss of social status that tormented other immigrants (indeed, the memoirs of later immigrants who had known him in Leningrad are filled with tales of how Brodsky didn’t introduce them to another luminary, or pretended not to see them while doing a reading somewhere). Although his health was poor (he had his first heart attack in 1976), he was spared the material concerns many immigrants had. But he was not spared the dislocation, the misunderstanding. He failed to see that the social changes that made his poetry resonant in Russian had obviated just this kind of poetry in the States. Writing about his generation of idealistic Russians, he put it best: “Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought that at least that world was like themselves; now they know that it is like the others, only better dressed.”
In his last decade, Brodsky achieved an unprecedented level of success. He was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature. Afterward, he spent a lot of time in Italy, got married to a young student of Russian and Italian descent, became the Poet Laureate of the United States, moved to Brooklyn. In 1993, his wife gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Anna.
As often happens, Brodsky was more visible in his last years as an essayist and a propagandist for poetry than as an actual poet. His ideas about the moral importance of poetry—inherited from the poets of the Silver Age, including Mandelstam, who had died for his poetry—eventually hardened into dogma; his Nobel Prize address stressed that “aesthetics is the mother of ethics,” and so on. Poetry was immortal, he argued: “That which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium.”
But this wasn’t true, as Brodsky eventually acknowledged in a great and furious late poem, “On Ukrainian Independence,” in which he berated the independence-minded Ukrainians for casting aside the Russian tongue. “So go with God, you swift cossacks, you hetmans, you prison guards,” it says, and concludes:
Just remember, when it’s time for you, too, to die, you bravehearts,
as you scratch at your mattress and visibly suffer, you’ll forget
the flatus of Taras, and whisper the verses of Alexander.
Alexander Pushkin, that is. Despite itself, the poem is an anguished admission that a Russian state and Russian-speaking subjects are still vital to the project of Russian poetry.
In late January, 1996, Brodsky died, of his third heart attack, after a life of not taking very good care of himself. “If you can’t have a cigarette with your morning coffee,” he once said, “there’s no point getting up.”
The book ends with Bobyshev [once Brodsky’s rival for Marina Basmanova’s love], now in America, calling Brodsky in New York. They haven’t spoken in two decades, but Bobyshev has an important matter relating to Akhmatova to discuss with him, and they briefly put their differences aside. They settle the matter, and then Brodsky asks, “So how do you like America?” It’s not easy, Bobyshev says, but still it’s an interesting place. “What about it is interesting?” Brodsky asks. Bobyshev says it’s all very interesting, the colors, the faces, all of it. “Hmm,” Brodsky says. And they hang up. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-gift-keith-gessen?utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR2aoGjr2CDmnY6m2ZTe2kTQt4a-A4xthPTLpD8dede0T3UZKISgllmFGKc
Brodsky and Baryshnikov, New York, 1985Oriana:
I can identify with the loneliness. To me America was a synonym of loneliness. The Soviet government knew very well what it was doing, forcing dissident writers like Brodsky or Solzhenitsyn to leave for the “paradise” of the West. It was a terrible punishment — a sentence to loneliness and never feeling quite at home.
“Once snow began to fall, it seemed unending” — exile is its own season, and the loss of one’s homeland — which has been described as the trauma of the “loss of familiarity” — becomes woven into the psyche, creating a sense of distance, of estrangement.
And that he thought anyone would recite Pushkin even on his deathbed shows the poetry-worship of the culture in which he grew up. Spoken slowly, Russian already sounds like a song; falling in love with Pushkin's lines is only natural. German poetry also has that power. I think it's the great emotional power of music.
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From wiki: ~ In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth Russian-born writer to do so. In an interview he was asked: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?" "I'm Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist – and, of course, an American citizen", he responded.
Joseph had difficulty understanding why poetry did not draw the large audiences in the United States that it did in Russia. He was proud of becoming an American citizen in 1977 (the Soviets having made him stateless upon his expulsion in 1972) and valued the freedoms that life in the United States provided. But he regarded poetry as "language's highest degree of maturity", and wanted everyone to be susceptible to it. As Poet Laureate, he suggested that inexpensive anthologies of the best American poets be made available in hotels and airports, hospitals and supermarkets. ~
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“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” ~ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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"[Reading its literature] it is the only way to truly understand a country. In literature you enter into the hearts and souls of people in ways no other art form allows." ~ Jhumpa Lahiri
Oriana:
Overall, I agree on a deep level. You can't hate Germany after you read Goethe, or Russia after you read Chekhov.
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HOW THE PRESENCE OF ESCAPED NAZIS HELPED “NORMALIZE” TOTALITARIANISM IN ARGENTINA
~ In my work as a writer, I focused on how hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators escaped to Argentina. This made me painfully aware of how their presence during the thirty years between the end of World War II and the 1976 coup had numbed the moral sense of what was then an affluent, well-educated nation, with disastrous consequences for its people. Argentines’ forced cohabitation with Nazi fugitives resulted, I came to believe, in a normalization of the crimes that the German émigrés had committed. “He came to our country seeking forgiveness,” Argentina’s Cardinal Antonio Caggiano told the press when Israeli operatives captured the Nazi arch-criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina in 1960 to stand trial in Jerusalem. “Our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he’s done.”
Some fifteen years later, Argentina began its own descent into full-blown totalitarianism, and its military embarked on a mass killing program that differed in scale, though not in essence, from the Nazis’: an estimated 30,000 people were made to “disappear” by the dictatorship. The same politicians and religious leaders who had turned a blind eye to the presence of Nazi criminals in Argentina looked away again as blood-soaked generals kneeled to receive their blessings in Buenos Aires Cathedral. Much of my adult life has been haunted by the need to answer the question of how this could have come to pass in Argentina. And how it might come to pass elsewhere.
As the US diplomats well understood, the military’s real war was not against the chimera of a communist threat, but against liberalism. The Nazis’ presence in Argentina normalized their ideology and weakened society’s democratic defenses against the totalitarian ideas they represented. Seeing Nazi flags paraded down the streets of Charlottesville last year, seeing them again in Washington, D.C., this year, makes me realize how different today’s America is from the country where I was born and grew up. It makes me realize how far advanced such a normalization already is in the US. ~
"Silence is health" sign in Buenos Aireshttps://getpocket.com/explore/item/silence-is-health-how-totalitarianism-arrives?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
The dictatorship hated the democracy-demanding liberals; communism wasn't a real threat, just a convenient false reason for the murderous campaign against liberals.
Interesting how the very presence of unpunished Nazis “normalized” their type of ideology.
Lilith:
I was in Argentina in 2005, the only time I've ever been in the Southern Hemisphere. In many ways, Buenos Aires is a sophisticated, literate city — hard to jibe with the atrocities there as recent as the 1980's. I appreciate the article's insights about who the victims were. They were the college students, the hippies, the ones who wore Che Guevara t-shirts, in other words, the liberals. The right wing junta decided to get rid of liberalism by throwing these kids out of airplanes into La Plata, and the Reagan administration was supportive of that regime. They snatched newborns from pregnant women and then threw the mothers out of airplanes. Could it happen here? This week Trump retweeted someone who wrote "the only good democrat is a dead democrat.”
Oriana:
Scary. I too was deeply distressed reading about the mothers and newborns. All those murders were appalling, but the mother-child part hit me particularly hard. Must be something about it that says it’s a primal violation — particularly heinous.
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PUTIN AND THE VIRUS
~ Rather than coming off as the all-powerful strongman, Putin “looks like an old, sick wolf,” the political scientist Alexander Kynev told the Moscow Times. Earlier this month, the independent polling agency Levada Center found that Putin had an approval rating of fifty-nine per cent, a historic low.
One of Putin’s signal pronouncements—that doctors and other medical personnel treating COVID-19 patients would receive bonuses from the state—has been marred by sporadic and delayed implementation, with scores of doctors all over the country complaining that they have nothing at all. In multiple statements and meetings with officials, Putin expressed his displeasure at the problem, but still hundreds of medical workers treating patients from Siberia to the Caucasus continue to publicly complain about not receiving the promised money.
In early and mid-March, when the spectre of the pandemic was bearing down on Russia, Putin focussed on a different matter entirely: a constitutional referendum, initially planned for April 22nd, that was designed to reset the clock on his Presidential terms, allowing him to run again in 2024 (and potentially even in 2030). “He was preparing for the final act of perestroika of the entire political system, and the virus only got in the way,” Pavlovsky told me.
“The vertical of power is a kind of theatrical façade,” Pavlovsky told me. “It is good at producing the appearance of authority, but it doesn’t actually have managerial abilities or the ability to quickly mobilize resources.” The myth of the vertical has served Putin well over the years, as he has been seen by various constituencies—from warring security and intelligence chiefs to rival businesspeople and oligarchs—as the singular arbiter capable of keeping the over-all system buoyant and profitable. But that doesn’t help you in a crisis that is driven by scientific cause and effect, rather than by political or emotional factors.
The point is not that Russia’s response to the pandemic has been horrible; even with its high number of cases and dubious official death count, the country’s health-care system has avoided total collapse and a death toll so high that it would be impossible to hide. Instead, regional officials and medical workers have responded to the spread of the virus largely on their own. It turns out that the vertical is better at fostering a kind of psychic or virtual power than wielding real power in a time of genuine crisis.
This is partly the inevitable result of the Putin system’s longevity; after twenty years in power, Putin thinks of himself less as a politician and more as a “messianic” or “historic” hero, as Tatiana Stanovaya, the head of the analysis firm R.Politik, put it. This period crystallized in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fuelled a would-be separatist insurgency in Ukraine. Sanctions, opprobrium, and attempts at isolation followed—but Russia was again an undeniable force on the world stage.
“If, in earlier times, Putin stood before the people and in some way was responsible to them, he now sees himself as standing before history,” Stanovaya told me. He is consumed with the idea of restoring Russia’s great-power status, and so the tasks that interest him are commensurate with this sweeping mission: navigating an oil-price war with Saudi Arabia and the United States; dispatching Russian forces and paramilitaries around the Middle East to take advantage of the vacuum left by the U.S.; and courting foreign leaders, whether Donald Trump or China’s Xi Jinping.
Stanovaya said that Putin sees “social problems,” of which COVID-19 is one, as “too small compared to his great mission. They’re simply not interesting to him; they don’t rise to his level.” (Putin, though, relishes high-profile events like the military parade commemorating victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, normally held on May 9th. In April, Putin delayed it indefinitely, citing the pandemic; on Tuesday, he announced that it would go ahead after all, on June 24th.)
With the limitations, or even hollowness, of the vertical exposed by the pandemic, one lasting impact may be a process of “involuntary federalization,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a noted political scientist in Moscow, told me. Regional leaders mobilized to deal with COVID-19 in their territories, and, as a result, their popularity has risen while trust in Putin has fallen. Previously, Putin could blame regional officials for any shortcomings while emerging unscathed himself. But now, as Schulmann put it, “The perennial idea of ‘good tsar, bad boyars’ has stopped working.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-the-coronavirus-revealed-the-hollowness-of-putins-vertical-of-power?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&fbclid=IwAR1r6V1Pa7bEBADdVNzuG18Mc4O9RnX8GyQA_RpBNP21Qx7Y5PBLXQVf6do
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PUTIN’S BRUTAL SUPPRESSION OF PROTESTS
“Eleven years ago, an ordinary Russian citizen named Sergey Mokhnatkin was passing by the Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow, where a civil political-protest gathering was taking place. Seeing several special-force policemen (OMON) descend in gang-like fashion upon one peaceful protester with life-threatening brutality, on the spur of the moment, he intervened, trying to shield the prone person from the crushing blows of the OMON batons and truncheons. For that spontaneous act of kindness, right then and there he was severely beaten up, arrested, sped through the charade of an imitation trial and, without any further unnecessary legal formalities, thrown in jail. There, he would be constantly beaten, tortured, humiliated, and have his bones broken and re-broken. Putin's Russia's repressive machine doesn't like people engaging in random acts of kindness when it is taking its sadistic rage out on those daring to oppose the chekist-mafia regime it is paid handsomely to protect.
In all, in rapid succession, he would be given five prison terms. Yesterday, one day after his last release, a thoroughly broken shell of a man, he died of multiple internal injuries. He was 67 years old.” ~ Mikhail Iossel
Sergey Mokhnatkin*
IF SELF-HELP FEELS UNHELPFUL (“The half-baked hollowness of pop-psych and how to graduate beyond it”)
~ Most self-help suggests a simple solution: “Always do X, not Y.” It’s a relief to boil everything down to something so simple but it’s only relief as long as you can ignore the value of doing Y.
Yes, we have an angel and a devil on our shoulders. Trouble is it’s hard to know which is which. It’s a relief to realize that X was the angel and Y was the devil all along. For example, judgment is the devil, non-judgment is the angel. Such a relief to get that sorted out finally.
But you didn’t really and here’s why: Every one of those supposed one-wise-fits-all solutions is half the story. To get at the other half, just rephrase your sacred pop-psych principle as the self-contradiction it really is:
Love is the answer: Hate your hate.
Kindness is the answer: Be unkind to your unkindness.
Fearlessness is the answer: Fear your fear
Generosity is the answer: Make yourself selfless.
Mindfulness is the answer: Fill your mind with emptiness.
Non-judgment is the answer: You should not be judgmental
Non-negativity is the answer: Negativity is a no-no
Integrity is the answer: Pretend you can square all your inner circles.
Living in the moment is the answer: Commit to spending your future in the moment.
One graduates from pop self-help when one trades in one’s embraced “Always do X, not Y” half-truths for a serenity-prayer treatment of life’s dilemmas [“and the wisdom to know the difference”].
Wisdom isn’t a formula. Rather, it’s wedding life’s inescapable tensions as inescapably your own. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/202005/if-self-help-starts-feeling-unhelpful-heres-why?fbclid=IwAR0UXB9I6yN4JIpue3mau4wicKKVKhbbiCceDAykWj4af68Ar2xCa7LzdQs
“The world says: 'You have needs—satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Oriana:
Dostoyevsky was bothered by the self-centeredness of modern culture, its ever-growing concern with one’s own needs and rights. He wanted more concern about others, taking more responsibility for the actions in one’s community.
"I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism.” ~ Amos Oz, The Woman in the Window
Night; Greta Hällfors-Sipilä. 1931*
“Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.” ~ Werner Herzog
Oriana:
I wish I had come across this years ago. For most of my adult life I felt depression was nothing to be ashamed of. Yet in my case, when I finally did feel ashamed of wasting my life that way, that was a significant step toward recovery.
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“I relish solitude. Solitude, if anything, is my only conviction.” ~ Susan Sontag
Oriana:
Living alone spoils you. Not just the freedom to eat or stay up, etc, when you wish to. It's being able to make a mess, be clumsy, forgetful, burn the food — but there are no witnesses! You don't have to say you are sorry, you don't have to talk about it for an hour, and a month later — a year later — maybe even on your deathbed. You can calmly clean up and soon it's like it never happened.
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OUR SOLAR SYSTEM IS AN ODDBALL
~ In retrospect, the first exoplanetary system was discovered by Galileo in 1610 when he turned his telescope to Jupiter and noticed the movements of its four largest moons. Jupiter’s Galilean Satellites (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) form a compact, almost perfectly co-planar family of worlds on near-circular orbits that together add up to about two ten-thousandths of Jupiter’s mass, and have orbital periods ranging from a scant two days (Io) to more than two weeks (for Callisto).
This basic architecture, as defined by the range of orbital periods and the ratio of the satellites’ masses to that of the planet, is pleasingly replicated for the systems of moons orbiting Saturn and Uranus. But it doesn’t resemble the architecture of the solar system, where the largest planet has a thousandth of the sun’s mass, and where the orbital periods of the planets are much longer than those of the large planets’ satellites.
To astronomers’ lasting surprise, it is now clear that the average planetary system in the galaxy looks a lot more like the Jovian moons than like the sun’s planets. Of order half of nearby stars have at least one (and often several) worlds with masses substantially greater than Earth and orbital periods ranging from mere days to weeks; in our system, the space interior to tiny Mercury’s 88-day orbit is entirely empty.
The first hints of the ubiquity of compact, short-period planetary systems came just over a decade ago, with the results from the HARPS spectrograph located in La Silla, Chile. HARPS employed the Doppler velocity technique to detect a profusion of low-mass planets. The results were so unexpected that they were met with skepticism. Doubts, however, were eliminated when NASA’s Kepler mission found hundreds of systems with multiple, transiting super-Earth–sized planets.
Density estimates now exist for well over a hundred planets with masses below 30 Earth masses, and the aggregate of results is bewildering. In a nutshell, planetary densities are all over the map. If you know the radius of a planet (but have no other information), you have virtually no basis for guessing its mass. Among planets that fall in the size range between Earth and Neptune (which has four times Earth’s radius), the range of masses at a given radius can vary by over a factor of 10. This huge variation points to a startling range in compositions that must run the gamut from dense worlds made of iron to puffy spheres that include ample supplies of hydrogen.
It is now clear that the distribution of planet sizes contains a distinct double-peaked shape. Planets with radii of about 1.75 times that of Earth are substantially less common either than planets that are slightly bigger than Earth or than those with 2.5 or more times Earth size. This planetary “radius gap” is telling us something important. Most likely, it delineates a fairly sharp transition between roughly Earth-sized worlds that are fundamentally terrestrial in character and planets with deep hydrogen-helium atmospheres that are hotter, smaller cousins to Uranus and Neptune.
A separate, and even more intriguing insight was elucidated by a team led by Lauren Weiss, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal, who established the existence of a curious organizing principle for the sprawl of planetary masses and sizes. The planets within a particular system tend to have very similar sizes (and masses) and tend to adhere to a geometric uniformity of spacing, much like the arrangement of peas in a pod.
While there are hints of this phenomenon among the sun’s planets (Earth and Venus present a uniform pair, as do Uranus and Neptune) it is much more pronounced among the systems discovered by the Kepler mission. The origins of this curious intra-system uniformity are as-yet completely unclear, and they provide an interesting constraint on the planet formation process. That is, a mechanism must exist to coordinate the growth and spacing of planets within a given system, even as these attributes vary wildly from star to star.
The Milky Way contains over a trillion planets. While we are nowhere remotely close to a full accounting of this vast population, the outlines of the distribution, and how it came to be, are rapidly falling within our grasp.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-trillion-worlds?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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I think the West is unable to fully embrace Buddhism because the West is on the side of love, for all its dark side. I am drawn to the serenity of Buddhism, but my emotional intensity and what might be called my "individuation" also make me unable to adopt it – even though I find its teaching on detachment quite useful, a warning against getting over-involved. Milosz writes about his rejection of the Eastern tradition in his Berkeley poem “To Raja Rao.”
No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love and self-hate,
prayer for the Kingdom
and reading Pascal.
Yes, for those like Milosz, sooner the pierced heart of Catholic mysticism.
Buddhists might object to Osborne’s statement by pointing out that compassion is very important in Buddhism. But Osborne doesn’t mean compassion; I’m pretty sure he means romantic love, or any other kind of love that involves intensity. The West has not been blind to pain inherent in romantic love, but has found the gifts of this love to be so great that falling in love is worth the inevitable suffering. Jack Gilbert, at the threshold of old age, pleads with the gods: Let me fall in love one more time. A friend of mine who is 85 recently said the same thing: love is worth all the pain that may follow. And looking at my own most traumatic love experience, I was finally able to say, “But the gift was so great.” Only then I was at peace. For me that gift was and is personality enlargement, the intellectual and experiential expansion.
I suppose it all comes down to the attitude toward individuality: the West treasures individuality and a rich, differentiated self. “Life is suffering” seems a partial truth, just as “life is happiness” would be a partial truth. I appreciate both peacefulness and passionate intensity. Sometimes I want peacefulness; at other times, passion.
I realize that in the recent decades Buddhism has had a huge impact on the Western culture, including even Christianity. Father Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk, asserts that our deepest self is the Christ. The personality does not survive death; what happens is that the Christ consciousness chooses another container. But that is the opposite of the promise that meant so much to Milosz: all, all will be preserved. The flowers on the table, the tube of lipstick on the bed stand, even the “sweet little neuroses” of our beloved. And even in Hell (as well as in Purgatory and Heaven), Dante shows the personality as preserved; his dead are as individual and recognizable as Homer's and Virgil's shades in the Underworld.
Romantic passion has often been called a delusion, and there is really no arguing with that. Passion can’t stand up to rational scrutiny. The beloved is a flawed human being, and not an almost supernaturally wonderful person. So let’s admit that it’s a delusion. Ah, but it’s a glorious delusion, often transformative, a driving force of growth. And yet, and yet . . . excess intensity can ruin everything.
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THE STAGE IS TOO BIG FOR THE DRAMA
“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” ~ Richard Feynman
Oriana:
The idea that it's “all about us” implies a god enormously entertained by the human drama — wouldn't a perfect being be in fact bored by all the repetitious stuff, the petty thoughts, marital arguments, etc?
On top of it, if we consider ancient Judaism, all these stars and planets and the tremendous diversity and complexity just so that god could communicate to one tiny nation in a tiny portion of the earth, which is an infinitesimal portion of the universe.
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LIFE EXPECTANCY INCREASED DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION
“The Great Depression had a silver lining: During that hard time, U.S. life expectancy actually increased by 6.2 years, according to a University of Michigan study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Life expectancy rose from 57.1 in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1932, according to the analysis by U-M researchers José A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase occurred for both men and women, and for whites and non-whites.
"The finding is strong and counterintuitive," said Tapia Granados, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "Most people assume that periods of high unemployment are harmful to health.”
For the study, researchers used historical life expectancy and mortality data to examine associations between economic growth and population health for 1920 to 1940. They found that while population health generally improved during the four years of the Great Depression and during recessions in 1921 and 1938, mortality increased and life expectancy declined during periods of strong economic expansion, such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936-1937.
The researchers analyzed age-specific mortality rates and rates due to six causes of death that composed about two-thirds of total mortality in the 1930s: cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer, influenza and pneumonia, tuberculosis, motor vehicle traffic injuries, and suicide. The association between improving health and economic slowdowns was true for all ages, and for every major cause of death except one: suicide.
"Working conditions are very different during expansions and recessions," Tapia Granados said. "During expansions, firms are very busy, and they typically demand a lot of effort from employees, who are required to work a lot of overtime, and to work at a fast pace. This can create stress, which is associated with more drinking and smoking.
"Also, new workers may be hired who are inexperienced, so injuries are likely to be more common. And people who are working a lot may also sleep less which is known to have implications for health. Other health-related behaviors such as diet may also change for the worse during expansions.”
In recessions, Tapia Granados noted, there is less work to do, so employees can work at a slower pace. There is more time to sleep, and because people have less money, they are less likely to spend as much on alcohol and tobacco.
In addition, economic expansions are also associated with increases in atmospheric pollution which has well-documented short-term effects on cardiovascular and respiratory mortality. Other reasons that periods of economic expansion may be bad for health could include increases in social isolation and decreases in social support that typically occur when people are working more.
The researchers noted that their study examined the relation between recessions and mortality for the population as a whole, and not the effect of becoming unemployed on an individual person. In fact, their results show that downturns in economic activity may have overall beneficial effects on the population, even if becoming unemployed has adverse health consequences for a given person.
Other studies suggest that the relationship between population health and business cycles may be weakening, at least in the U.S. and in Japan, where the phenomenon of karoshi—sudden death from overwork among Japanese salarymen—dramatically illustrates the dangers of life in economic boom times.
Still, Tapia Granados hopes that a better understanding of the beneficial effects of recessions on health may perhaps contribute to the development of economic policies that enhance health and minimize or buffer adverse impacts of economic expansions. And he cautions that the findings also suggest that suicide prevention services—often the casualties of budget cuts during economic downturns—are more important during bad times than ever.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090928172530.htm
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DEFOE: THE PLAGUE HIT THE POOREST WORST
~ As described by Daniel Defoe in his nonfiction novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the epidemic, rather than cutting a broad swath through London society, spared the wealthy and targeted the city’s hardest-pressed and least powerful—the workers serving the merchants and government officials whom the city quarantined and isolated. Bound to the middle-class households they served, these workers could hardly flee in the style of the care-free narrators of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), a classic of plague literature that little resembles Defoe’s account.
The people left behind in 17th-century London had more in common with Defoe’s narrator, “H.F.” Unlike “the vast many people” who left the city as soon as they could and who were “chiefly from the west end of the town . . . that is to say, among the wealthiest of the people,” H.F., a single businessman, has stayed behind with his “family” (a few servants) and the goods deemed too precious to his livelihood to risk abandoning. In surveying the damage around him, H.F. shines a light on the predicament of London’s working poor.
In fact, as rendered by Defoe, the plight of London’s house servants, dead-cart drivers, and house watchmen recalls the situation of today’s grocery store employees, restaurant cooks, Amazon warehouse workers, and other “front line” employees. Like these low-income workers, many of plague-year London’s workers had no choice but to endanger themselves to help society reduce the rate of infection.
Perhaps the most pitiable class of these collateral victims was the “poor servants,” whose situation “was very dismal,” as H.F. says. Many found themselves either abandoned by fleeing households or turned out of doors. A dose of salt came from fortune-tellers—unscrupulous “quacks” who exploited the fears and anxieties of servants, maids in particular, to separate them from their meager wages. H.F. illustrates their plight with the tale of a maid-servant who had the bad luck to catch the plague in the home of a less than honorable master. Desperate to free himself from responsibility for her care, the man sent threatening letters to his alderman and the Lord Mayor demanding she be removed to a nearby “pest-house” or he would starve her to death.
Although the campaign failed, he was undeterred. After being locked in his house as mandated by the city, the man contrived errands for their designated watchman in order to break through a wall and flee with his wife and children, leaving the task of burying the maid to a nurse whom he also abandoned. H.F. states that stories such as this were common, but even well-treated servants faced more exposure to the plague than others because they ran errands and tended to the sick.
The Journal also depicts the hard lot of the dead-cart drivers and “buriers,” but the text’s treatment of these workers exposes the limitations of H.F.’s perspective. In matter-of-fact style, he relates witnessing someone’s illegal visit to a mass grave and learning to his surprise that the visitor is not a suicidal plague victim seeking to throw himself into the earth, a common occurrence. Instead, he is a widower who has followed a cart to its destination, hoping to see the bodies of his children and wife one final time. The narrator calmly relates, from the widower’s perspective, the horrifying spectacle that buriers and cart drivers probably witnessed on a daily basis:
[N]o sooner was the cart turned round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise to [the widower], for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in, though indeed he was afterwards convinced that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see the sight but he cried out aloud, unable to contain himself. . . . The buriers ran to him and took him up, and in a little while he came to himself, and they led him away to the Pie Tavern . . . where, it seems, the man was known, and where they took care of him.
In relating these horrors, the passage is affecting but also odd: it shares nothing from the workers’ point of view. The contrast between this silence and the care taken to elicit feeling for the widower points to sharp boundaries on the narrator’s empathy. Considering the buriers’ brutalizing work, their ability to recognize the husband’s pain and console him seems almost magical, but the narrator takes this heroic sensitivity for granted. In this light, the exploitative and, ultimately, irrational treatment of essential workers (considering that, then as now, essential roles like “burier” are jobs and not shared duties) comes to seem, at its roots, a feature of the society, not a bug—or, for that matter, a flea.
In our plague year, the working poor and precariat have likewise been drafted into the role of hero. The self-employed find themselves risking death to pay rent, while hourly employees get time and a half, if they are lucky, for “heroically” packing boxes amid lax or absent workplace protections. As The New York Times recently reported, Amazon has expected warehouse workers to fulfill orders in the face of unsafe crowding and a lack of hand sanitizer, despite seeing a marked increase in profits after lockdowns began. Activism on the part of essential workers shows they know well enough that heroism without choice is not, in fact, heroism but sacrifice.
For all the sympathy they elicit for some, narratives like Defoe’s are ultimately autocratic states in which the condition of having a voice and a say—not being “dumb”—is a privilege. ~
https://lithub.com/great-plagues-always-hit-workers-the-hardest/?fbclid=IwAR3zBl7_VNWQhkfSZw1OjrWVwI9rjDst_Nu62QM1HZslqSnKsfEG85dCIc8
plague cart with the dead
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WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE ON A VENTILATOR
~ Ventilation for Covid-19 is a painful intubation that goes down your throat and stays there until you live or you die. Patients can't talk or eat or do anything natural — the machine keeps you alive. Discomfort and pain they feel from this means that medical experts must administer sedatives and pain meds to ensure pipe tolerance as long as the machine is needed. After 20 days from this treatment, a young patient loses 40 % muscle mass and gets trauma in the mouth or vocal cords, as well as possible lung or heart complications. It is for this reason that old or already weak people can't stand treatment and die. They put a tube in your stomach...either through your nose or skin for liquid food, a sticky bag around your butt to collect diarrhea, one to collect urine, and an IV for fluids and meds. A team of nurses, CNA, and MA move your limbs every two hours and you lie on a carpet circulating ice cold liquid to help reduce your 40° degree temp. All of this while your loved ones cannot even come to visit. You will be alone in a room with your machine. ~
(note: images from educational material on prone positioning. No hipaa violation)
“Almost everyone getting put on ventilators is dying. They die alone in their hospital room, on the ventilator, gasping for air.
Bottom line is if you get put on a ventilator, it is very hard to get these patients to breathe on their own again, and if you're still on the ventilator after one or two weeks, you're probably going to die.”
~ a nurse at Morristown Memorial Hospital, NJ
Oriana:
A reminder: this ghastly treatment can be avoided by using an inexpensive device called the pulse oximeter, available over the counter in drugstores and online (I bought mine at Walmart). Normal blood oxygen readings range from 96 to 99%. If you're having symptoms such as coughing, and your oxygen level falls under 95%, call your doctor. If it goes under 90%, you must get medical help -- which at that point will mean supplementary oxygen, but not being put on a ventilator.
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SWEDEN’S COVID DEATHS
~ Sweden has now overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to have the highest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world, throwing its decision to avoid a strict lockdown into further doubt.
According to figures collated by the Our World in Data website, Sweden had 6.08 deaths per million inhabitants per day on a rolling seven-day average between May 13 and May 20.
This is the highest in the world, above the UK, Belgium and the US, which have 5.57, 4.28 and 4.11 respectively.
However, Sweden has only had the highest death rate over the past week, with Belgium, Spain, Italy, the UK and France, still ahead over the entire course of the pandemic. ~
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/20/sweden-becomes-country-highest-coronavirus-death-rate-per-capita/?fbclid=IwAR0-sg3y0C7c4nIqj5d83B5BoZd34L51Lbwlf7R2IWzKuRVAMxpWGOziXV0
~ A number of countries in Europe and elsewhere have been successful at suppressing the coronavirus by pursuing very strict lockdowns, coupled with high rates of testing, isolation of cases, and contact tracing. These include, among others, Austria, Greece, New Zealand, Norway, and Portugal. These countries have achieved both substantially reduced numbers of cases and low death rates, significantly better outcomes than Sweden, which in the past 10 days has seen its mortality rate climb to the top of the table in Europe.
As of Friday, May 22nd, 3,925 people have died from Covid-19 in Sweden, a country with a population of 10 million. Neighbors Denmark, Finland and Norway - each with populations about half of Sweden’s - have recorded death tolls of 561, 306 and 235, respectively.
The number of confirmed cases in Sweden stood at 32,809 on May 22nd, between three and five times higher than neighboring countries. But, it’s likely the Swedish figure vastly undercounts the real number of infections given that the country’s testing rate is remarkably low compared to Western European countries and the U.S.
Conspicuously, in the past week, based on a rolling seven-day average, Sweden currently has the highest per capita mortality rate in Europe, having overtaken the U.K., Italy and Belgium. In recent weeks, as deaths have decreased significantly in most other European countries, Sweden’s numbers have remained flat.
The death rate is notable, because Sweden has a relatively low population density, a disproportionate number of single households, and low rates of chronic conditions known to be risk factors for severe Covid-19 illness and death.
Moreover, a comparatively open economy hasn’t translated into economic benefits for Swedes. The Swedish economy is contracting at a similar rate to the rest of Europe. For a country as dependent on international trade and finance as Sweden, the recession is mostly a function of the European and global economic recession.
In many ways Sweden and much of the rest of the world are at present in a similar position vis-à-vis the coronavirus. Whether having opted for a stringent confinement policy, a lighter version of lockdown, or a more lenient approach like Sweden's, for the time being countries must rely on development of treatments for the critically ill, in addition to continued physical distancing, hygiene, face coverings, and contact tracing, until there is an effective vaccine. ~
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2020/05/23/swedens-gamble-on-coronavirus-has-it-paid-off/#5a6337632dcd
Oriana:
Part of Sweden’s problem is its immigrant population, which has trouble following the guidelines. “Social distancing” goes directly against their culture.
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EXERCISE AS PREVENTION OF COVID (NATURAL KILLER CELLS)
~ A substantial proportion of COVID-19 patients admitted to intensive care die of pneumonia due to a cytokine storm, where the body attacks itself rather than fighting off the illness, said Jan Willem Cohen Tervaert, director of rheumatology in the Department of Medicine.
In a new paper published in Autoimmunity Reviews, Cohen Tervaert and his colleagues note that such storms, whether in patients with COVID-19 or rheumatic diseases, are caused by dysfunctional "natural killer" (NK) immune cells.
They say that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, might attack NK cells directly by binding to angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2), a receptor on the cells that COVID-19 researchers believe attracts and opens the door to the virus.
"This virus is so smart, it kills the cells that are supposed to kill it," Cohen Tervaert said.
Trials with rheumatoid treatments
Worldwide clinical trials are being carried out to test treatments typically used to treat cytokine storm in patients with juvenile arthritis and other rheumatic diseases.
These include intravenous immunoglobulin, a blood transfusion product prepared from the serum of thousands of healthy or previously infected patients, and rheumatic drugs such as tocilizumab and anakinra. Some researchers in China are even attempting to transplant healthy NK cells.
In a healthy person, natural killer cells are responsible for both turning on and turning off the immune response when a body is attacked by disease, including viruses and even cancer. Unlike other immune cells (T and B cells), natural killer cells don't need to be trained or primed to fight infection.
"They are not thinkers," Cohen Tervaert said. "They immediately do their work without being exposed previously to a virus. As soon as a virus affects the cell and the cell wall changes, NK cells can attack that cell."
After the NK cells kill the virus-infected cells, the T and B immune cells come along and produce cytokines, making the immune reaction stronger and stronger.
"But at a certain time the immune reaction has to end," he said. "Natural killer cells play an important role in finishing that huge attack.
"If they don't work, the cytokine storm goes on and on, and the patient will die."
Exercise is prevention
For those who have not been infected with the virus, Cohen Tervaert recommends regular mild to moderate exercise to boost their NK cells. His own daily routine includes step climbing, walking and weightlifting.
"If you sit the whole day in your room because you have to be isolated, your NK cell activity goes down," he said. "That's the big warning about the isolation of elderly people who are not allowed to go outside of their rooms. Over time they are more and more at risk to die from COVID-19." ~
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-flag-similarities-covid-deaths-severe.html
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ending on beauty:
the feeling of your first
kiss on my lips, it went on
for hours, first by the tree,
then by the side of the my car,
never knew a kiss could last so long
~ Sam Hamod, remains
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