Saguaro in bloom; Lana Dejong*
WHEN DEATH COMES
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
~ Mary Oliver
Poets certainly write more about mortality than anything else. If they write about love, it's typically lost love. Most poems are lamentations. But now and then we find a poem of celebration, and it could be argued that Oliver's poem is a poem of celebration rather than lamentation. Lines such as "I think of each life as a flower" are frankly amazing in our dark times when we hear arguments to the effect that seniors ought to die for the sake of the economy. Oliver sees the world and everything in it as precious. In a line that could have been written by Whitman, Oliver says "I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
Such poems are written usually many years before the speaker feels death breathing upon her shoulder. In our last days, if not sooner, we are not likely to be clear-minded and celebratory. If we want a more realistic account of how a poet might approach the theme of "when death comes," there is a short poem that seems convincing to me:
PSALM TO BE READ WITH CLOSED EYES
Ignorance will carry me through the last days,
the blistering cities, over briny rivers
swarming with jellyfish, as once my father
carried me from the car up the tacked carpet
to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.
~ Dennis Nurkse
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Mary:
Oliver's poem is indeed a celebration of the value of each individual life, singular, each name its own "comfortable music in the mouth.” That music that of course, like all music, tends "toward silence." Death is not denied its portion, but gentled..there is no terror in naming it a "cottage of darkness." I am also engaged by her curiosity...In her last year my mother said to me "I think this is my last spring.” When I asked her how she felt about that, she said, "A little curious." So much better to meet death with curiosity rather than fear!
I think my favorite line is "I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement." What could be more glorious?? In that amazement lies all the richness and wonder of the world..a gift so full and complete nothing is left wanting...all that is, is enough, and more than enough, abundance and completion without scarcity or need for more. And yes, that kind of abundance and inclusiveness is very like Whitman.
~ “And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life, and for time's old memories that are good and sweet; and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still.” ~ Max Ehrmann
Oriana:
"Teach me still to be thankful for life" —let's hope that no matter all the disappointments and shattered dreams, we won't end bitter, but still grateful for all that life has given us.
Let’s lighten up with “directional sound locators for detecting enemy aircraft, 1917”
*
JOSEPH CONRAD: THE ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH IS OUR IGNORANCE
~ “[After The Nigger of the Narcissus] came the breakthrough — a startlingly original narrative voice that not only severed Conrad’s fiction from realism but questioned the idea of a consensual “reality.” In January, 1898, the month after “The Nigger” was published, Conrad wrote the story “Youth,” introducing the forty-two-year-old merchant seaman Charles Marlow, who recalls his maiden voyage to Eastern seas. Defined by his creator as “a mere device . . . a whispering ‘daemon,’ ” Marlow is more specifically a vehicle for exploring the perspectival nature of human affairs—the idea that, for example, the Indian Ocean has no stable essence or identity beyond the excitement it inspires in one excitable twenty-year-old sailor. Recalling the Judea, the bark on which he served as second mate, Marlow says that, to him, it was not “an old rattle-trap” but “the endeavor, the test, the trial of life.” Youth is what Marlow saw with and what he saw. Places tell us about the people who visit and inhabit them.
Marlow doesn’t celebrate the role played by passion or prejudice in our descriptions of the world; it’s just something he acknowledges. In Conrad’s next Marlow story, “Heart of Darkness” (1899), set in an unnamed colony whose rulers talk exclusively in propagandist falsehoods, Marlow is the one person willing to call a rattletrap a rattletrap. Coming upon a group of natives labelled “enemies,” he identifies men who were “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” But bafflement is futile. The world has been rewritten in accordance with the white man’s vocabulary. What he says goes.
Conrad’s theme is familiar from countless earlier writers, notably Flaubert, who in “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education” measured the gulf between fact and fantasy. But, where Flaubert adopted an air of superhuman detachment, Conrad insures that Marlow’s position is itself relativized. Though clearly Conrad’s alter ego and even mouthpiece, Marlow is not the narrator of “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” but a yarn-spinner described by a member of his audience. Everything he says comes pinched between inverted commas.
The uncertainties are multiplied in “Lord Jim” (1900), Conrad’s first full-length novel using this method. It concerns the spiritual odyssey of a young “water clerk,” drawn to the sea by “light holiday literature,” who abandons a sinking passenger ship called the Patna. The story, mostly delivered as a dinner-table anecdote, has been cobbled together from Marlow’s own “impression” of Jim—at the Patna inquiry and during the warm friendship that followed—and from the reminiscences of various bit players, including the dying mercenary “Gentleman Brown” and “an elderly French lieutenant whom I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort of cafe.” But the witnesses, far from helping him to “get at the truth of anything,” only reinforce Marlow’s sense that “there are as many ship-wrecks as there are men”—logic that holds not just for “belief” and “thought” and “conviction” but also for “the visual aspect of material things.”
What saves Conrad’s work from coldness and nihilism is his embrace of an alternative ideal. If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless. He doesn’t reject what Marlow calls “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization” in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of “something,” “some saving truth,” “some exorcism against the ghost of doubt”—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn’t call itself “theory” or “wisdom”—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with “impressions” or “sensations” the nearest you get to solid proof. Marlow may be just another partial observer, another myopic pair of eyes, but he knows what he is, so we trust his sincerity about the “glamour” he found in the East, or the depth of his engagement with Jim’s fate.
Conrad never denied that his writing was autobiographical, but he used the word in a specific connection. “Youth” was “exact autobiography,” in his phrase, only insofar as the experiences it depicted had been filtered through his “temperament,” or “the medium of my own emotions”—and that went for the “outward coloring,” too. When he said that his life in the wide world could “be found” in his books, he was promising only an emotional record.
The most Conradian novelist in recent American literature was Saul Bellow. In his Nobel Prize lecture, in 1976, Bellow recalled that as a “contrary” undergraduate, at the University of Chicago, he enrolled in a class on Money and Banking and then spent his time reading the novels of Joseph Conrad. (Thomas Pynchon, studying at Cornell in the fifties, was contrary in his own way: he skipped a class on some of Conrad’s stories in order to read the whole of Conrad.) Bellow said he had “never had reason to regret this”—and why would he? All those decades later, he was quoting Conrad in a Nobel speech, teaching Conrad as a Chicago professor, borrowing from Conrad in his novels.
It’s only a little reductive to say that Bellow spent the first half of his career describing himself and the second half describing his friends. Starting in 1975, with “Humboldt’s Gift,” he wrote a series of Conrad-like novels and stories about people he had known, as he had known them. In “The Bellarosa Connection,” he went all the way, employing a frame narrator (“I got it in episodes, like a Hollywood serial”). But Bellow borrowed more than a narrative method. No reader of his late work can fail to hear a similar abrupt oracular tone in the opening of “The Shadow-Line.” (“Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No.”) . . . The narrator of “Humboldt’s Gift” shares Marlow’s first name and sounds like him, too, when he describes himself “groping, thrillingly and desperately, for sense.” ~
(New Yorker, 2-11-2018)
Anchor-shaped monument to Conrad in Gdynia, a seaport in PolandOriana:
Conrad is known for a complexity of his writing. Few things are as they appear. Polite lies may be necessary for the smooth functioning of “polite society,” but there is little doubt that Conrad is on the side of the “deeper order of things.” The ending of Heart of Darkness is indelible: “He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “’The horror! The horror!’” But let’s not forget what happens later. Marlow, when asked by Kurtz’s fiancée about his last words, forces himself to say, “He died — with your name on his lips.” But we can never forget Kurtz’s gasped death cry, made all the more stark by Marlow’s knowledge that Kurtz’s “intended” would rather cling to romantic fiction.
True, Marlow is an unreliable narrator, and Kurtz’s last words could be interpreted in many ways. After all, the dying man is delirious, hallucinating rather confessing. Yet whatever image fills his last moment of consciousness, this is as close as we get to some essential event that broke down his initial idealism and “sacred” beliefs. Was it his participation in some “unspeakable rites”? Put in his place and time, would you and I also succumb to the power of darkness? Conrad is too subtle to provide an answer. He leaves us with . . . darkness.
And yet Conrad is regarded not as a moral relativist, but as a writer profoundly concerned with ethics and loyalty to something higher than polite fictions. He is a Stoic, and he certainly admired mental strength and endurance — but Stoicism is a label of convenience that implies too much formula. Conrad is a seeker. He rejects utilitarian or “patriotic” lies, but, to his great credit, he also rejects idealistic revolutionary slogans as another set of lies. He gropes for a truth that transcends the misleading human simplifications, “an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words.”
His acceptance of complexity and ambiguity, and ultimately of mystery we can only sense but not penetrate since words would only falsify it —“This is the price one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought” — was not something that pleased those readers who wanted only exciting adventure stories. Nothing upset Conrad so much as being reduced to an adventure writer. He was trying to demolish illusions, to get as close as possible to the deep truth he knew to be beyond words.
*
“Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.” ~ Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
Oriana:
A great piece of advice. The birth of my growing up was my decision not to be depressed — to stop falling apart (remember, no one ever lacked a reason for suicide), and instead practice being strong. I told this story many times, and don’t mean to rehearse the details again and again. Conrad survived a youthful suicide attempt; I survived chronic depression, which is a kind of suicide. To grow up means to be strong — to keep on sailing through rough waters rather than escape into depression. Joseph Conrad would approve.
*
*
OUR COLD CIVIL WAR
~ There are cold and hot wars. There are civil, international and global wars.
What would a cold civil war look like?
I'd say we’re in one now. This is what a cold civil war looks like.
In wars, one side is often the aggressor though usually both sides deny that they're the aggressor. Though we think of Germany as the WWII aggressor, just before committing suicide, Hitler said he was only trying to protect Germany from the Judeo-Bolshevik threat.
In our cold civil war, who is the aggressor? MAGA and KAG (The resistance that was trying to “Keep America Great”) both accuse each other of being the aggressor. I'm with KAG of course so I would say MAGA's the aggressor. And likewise the people who side with MAGA I talk to say that they're just trying to protect the US from the Meltingpot-Bolshevik threat.
I wish Hilary’s campaign had embraced the slogan, Keep America Great. Perhaps it didn’t because Democratic voters were hoping for change.
And what kind of change? A restoration of the traditions we grew up with and not just among liberals, but was the established national cultural standard piped into every home from the 60's to today.
The first big movie, Birth of a Nation was a racist vilification of blacks. Woodrow Willson praised it and played it in the white house. Since then, of the thousands of movies and TV shows made, they don't make any for national syndication that are anywhere near as racist. Our media has an American bias by the KAG, not the MAGA definition of American. We are as meltingpot as the media depicts us. The confederates lost. The union won.
Obviously, we want to keep whatever's great about the US and improve on what isn't. Political slogans get dumbed down so far that they make us stupid.
Take Obama's “change.” Again we want to change what's not working and keep what is. Only coke addicts want everything to change. MAGA, KAG and “Change,” are productively mobilizing but counter-productive for wisdom to know the difference between what to change, what to make and what to keep for greatness to continue to grow.
To get beyond tribalism, look to history to determine which side is the aggressor. I know MAGA supporters who insist that the Democrats have changed most over the past 50 years.
I don't think so. Kennedy would identify with Biden. Even W and Romney don't identify with Trump. ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
The hostility between the two sides certainly feels like a “cold civil war.” To call it merely a “culture war” dilutes the feeling of deep hostility between the two sides, and ignores the parading of assault weapons by the MAGA extremists. The urban/rural divide was never as great as now, or the educated/uneducated divide, or the the secularists versus the right-wing Christians (these categories all largely overlap). The country has become the Divided States of America.
What makes it all the more painful for me is remembering that the Soviet Union had no plans to attack America militarily. “We will destroy you from inside,” the Russian leaders threatened with a shrewd smile. Putin is of course enthusiastic about this far-from-secret policy. China probably approves. The world watches the crazy circus. Some would call it a train wreck. It may take the younger generations to achieve the kind of unity on the question of basic values that enables a nation to work toward a better future.
The very word “America” used to stand for an ideal. And now, instead, this “cold civil war.”
When I came here, one of my questions was, “What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats?” Nobody thought it was a great difference. Nobody spoke about the Red states versus the Blue states. Cry, Beloved Country.
Mary:
Our cold civil war, the deep divisions in the US today is both frightening and heartbreaking. The hostility, the neo nazis parading with their assault rifles and threatening to assassinate governors can't simply be dismissed as ridiculous...at one point Hitler was seen as ridiculous. The stupid and the asinine can be as destructive as the fiendishly clever, especially when playing to the fears and anger of people who feel threatened in their basic assumptions. That those basic assumptions were those of privilege and exceptionalism can only make the mix more toxic, the violence more probable.
What I find particularly chilling is the cognitive distance between the opponents in this great divide. Talk is almost impossible, it is as though we no longer share the same language, are seeing and reacting to the same world. The campaign to obfuscate and deny, to cast doubt on any facts by continuously calling anything inconvenient "fake news" and offering "alternate facts" has become so common and so entrenched it is as though truth has become so elusive and slippery no one can be sure of it...if everyone can have their own truth to buttress their own opinions there can be no dialogue, no conversation, no cooperation. The propaganda of the powerful replaces truth and even the effort to find it. All that is left is to acquiesce and obey, or rebel and be eliminated. And yes, it is that bad. So bad we actually look to the tragedy of this pandemic as a weapon in this civil war — one they are doing their best to spin, whatever waffling of numbers and denials that requires.
Edward Hopper: Approaching a City, 1946 *
“There was no point trying to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and that this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and totally subordinate to tactics and psychology.” ~ Joseph Goebbels on Propaganda
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AS LONG AS A DICTATOR LIVES, HE IS IMMORTAL
5 March 1953:
“'Stalin is dead!' she shouted now, from my doorway. I went cold all over and pulled her into the room. As long as a dictator lives he is immortal. I decided my colleague must finally have taken leave of her senses: for such words you could easily be accused of plotting to kill the Leader and be packed off to rot in a camp to the end of your days...
I switched on the radio and was overcome by a joy such as I had never known before in the whole of my life. It was true: the Immortal One was dead. I now rejoiced as I went on packing my wretched rags and tatters, and for the first time in many years I looked at the world with new eyes.”
~ Nadezhda Mandelstam in "Hope Abandoned" (trans. Max Hayward)
Stalin and Lenin in the Mausoleum; Stalin's mummy was later removed.
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SECRETS OF THE CREATIVE MIND
~ Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in standard educational settings. Famously, three Silicon Valley creative geniuses have been college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs—for many, the archetype of the creative person—popularized the motto “Think different.” Because their thinking is different, my subjects often express the idea that standard ways of learning and teaching are not always helpful and may even be distracting, and that they prefer to learn on their own. Many of my subjects taught themselves to read before even starting school, and many have read widely throughout their lives.
Many creative people are polymaths, as historic geniuses including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were. George Lucas was awarded not only the National Medal of Arts in 2012 but also the National Medal of Technology in 2004. Lucas’s interests include anthropology, history, sociology, neuroscience, digital technology, architecture, and interior design.
Creative people tend to be very persistent, even when confronted with skepticism or rejection. Asked what it takes to be a successful scientist, one replied: Perseverance … In order to have that freedom to find things out, you have to have perseverance …
They trust their thinking. In A Beautiful Mind, her biography of the mathematician John Nash, Sylvia Nasar describes a visit Nash received from a fellow mathematician while institutionalized at McLean Hospital. “How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical truth,” the colleague asked, “believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” To which Nash replied: “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/secrets-of-the-creative-brain?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME
~ Rich people are ridiculous, and they know it.
In the VIP party circuit, clubs provide a stage for the jet-set to display their wealth with bottle service. The markup on a bottle of champagne was going for over 1,000 percent in the Meatpacking District prior to the pandemic. Bottles come in jumbo sizes with Biblical names like jeroboam (4.5 L) and methuselah (6 L), the equivalent of eight regular bottles, a Cristal of which was priced at $40,000 at Provocateur in New York circa 2015.
But in interviews, outside of the club, when I interviewed people about their bar tabs, they were repulsed by such consumption, widely denouncing it as vulgar and “ridiculous.” Speaking in quiet cafes or in corporate boardrooms, clients who had spent thousands on nightclubbing downplayed the expense, and pointed to other clients known for spending more—like oligarchs, or Arabs.
“It’s people that have not earned their dime,” as one banker in New York told me. The clients I met wanted to be seen as hard working and deserving of their material success. If they worked so hard, didn’t they deserve to play hard on occasion? So they reasoned with a pinch of unease.
Herein lies a fundamental tension of class privilege: economic elites are often uncomfortable with the fact of their wealth and the inequality it supports, while they also enjoy what it brings.
There are no women in the VIP party scene. But there are a lot of girls.
To distinguish itself as a high-end place, a club needs a so-called “quality” crowd which comes down to two indicators: men with money and women with beauty. The goal is to have significantly more women than men at all times. To that end, clubs hire party promoters to recruit women with a very specific sort of rarified beauty: fashion models who are, thin, predominantly white, and typically young.
Promoters take pains to find fashion models, recruit them, and bring them to the clubs, usually enticing them with free meals and bottomless glasses of champagne, sometimes also free transportation and accommodations in jet-set destinations like Cannes and St. Barts. After authentic models, the next best thing is a “good civilian,” a woman who looks like she could be a model. She has the two most important bodily cues that signal high status: height and slenderness.
All women in possession of this “bodily capital” are ubiquitously called girls. There are no women in the VIP club, because “girl” is an altogether different social category from woman.
The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the late 19th century to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, the girl was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, and she was thought to engage in “frivolous” pursuits like urban leisure. By virtue of sitting with a promoter, wearing high heels, and being a part of the VIP club, any woman becomes a girl. Because in this rarefied world, there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.
Promoters who were men were far better positioned to capitalize on girls’ beauty than were women promoters, who struggled in the job. Of the seventeen clubs I regularly attended in New York, just one was owned by a woman. The world of VIP nightlife is run by men, for men, and fueled by girls.
Rich men love to hate models.
As valuable as models were to the scene, promoters and clients alike looked down on them as unserious women. By using their “bodily capital,” the main trait they needed to enter a VIP space in the first place, women entered into a dubious position that rendered their other qualities nearly invisible.
Clients liked being around party girls at night, but they were the last thing they wanted to see in daylight, since they imagined such women to be promiscuous and not fit for long-term relationships. Party girls were the pool of hook ups, but not the pool of future wives.
The “party girl” is a sexist and classist trope that penalizes women for accessing a world of wealth and power they have historically been excluded from. The term “party girl” holds deeply classist and sexist assumptions that a woman’s morality is compromised if she uses her beauty to access men’s worlds of power. And if she has fun doing it, heaven forbid!
It is actually really fun to be there.
Now that I’ve described this sexist world in which “girls” are paraded in high-heels for men’s status contests, you might be wondering, why do women participate at all? For the most part, they like it. They found exciting the experiences of partying in exclusive destinations, meeting celebrities, and flying with the jet-set.
They also got the thrill of attention from rich and powerful men. Through their looks, they could get close to what they and most other women are otherwise excluded from: economic power. In this exploitative arrangement, women are active participants, and seeking pleasure, too.
Mary:
The rich are not only ridiculous, they are ethically repulsive. Perhaps a deep repugnance growing out of my own class background, I still can't find a reason to deny it. Looking at a magazine devoted to the wealthy and their philanthropies only strengthens my bias. There is nothing to admire here, nothing to emulate, and nothing to excuse. At a grand party in surroundings resplendent with excess, dressed and adorned in garments and jewels costing many times the annual income of most, they sign pledges to scatter some of their wealth to the rest of us, to "causes" and "charities" that make the world their beggars.
It is unfortunate so many admire the rich (and the more vulgar “famous”). It can only distract us from the real work of making a better world.
I suppose I am a secular as well as a religious apostate here, but there it is, as much a part of me as my bones and body. No apology.
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THE BUDDHA: NO GOD, NO SELF, NO SOUL (redux)
A few nights ago I felt so much delight when I looked at the crescent moon that you’d think I’d never seen this curved luminosity before. And now, as if for the first time, I find myself pondering Buddhism’s “no god, no self, no soul” with astonished pleasure. It’s one thing to hold such beliefs in the modern era, in the age of science, with scientific viewpoint providing non-supernatural answers; it’s another to have said such things 500 years BCE, when the dominant worldview was totally supernaturalist.
To be sure, there have been Western thinkers such as Spinoza who asserted that the soul was mortal and inseparable from the body, dying when the body died, not going anywhere, but ceasing like a flame. But those thinkers (the “mortalist” philosophers) were rare and utterly exceptional. Sometimes their “blasphemous” thoughts were discovered in their secret journals found only after their death.
It’s been my impression that many people are more disturbed by the statement “there is no soul” (or rather, “there is no immortal soul”; no one denies the existence of thoughts and dreams and feelings, and whatever else we might include in the category of the mind) than by the statement “there is no god.” If we could live forever, who needs god? No one would miss him.
Many people are also disturbed by the statement, “There is no preconceived purpose to your life, no ‘special task’ that you and only you were born to fulfill. There is no “destiny.” You forge your own meaning. Or, if you prefer, you are your own creator and savior — constrained by the web of your complex circumstances, of course, but insofar as you gain awareness, more and more your own moment-to-moment creator and savior.
The Buddha was profoundly radical with his ruthless unmasking. He knew no neuroscience; all it took for him to come to his “no self, no soul” conclusion was clear, logical thinking. And that just takes my breath away. Five centuries BCE — WOW.
The norm is to be mired in wishful thinking and cognitive errors. The human brain apparently evolved to seek not truth, but survival. It’s a wonder that science emerged at all. But it’s not surprising that humanity has created thousands of deities and demons since the dawn of recorded time — out of fear, and wishing to gain some degree of control, however illusory, over natural phenomena.
In “The Belief Instinct,” a book that hugely influenced me to end any remnant “agnostic” fence-sitting, the cognitive psychologist Jesse Bering explains that it’s very difficult for us to imagine not being. Freud too decided that the unconscious thinks it’s immortal. I know a scientist who had a surgery and emerged disturbed by the “nothing” of anesthesia-produced lack of consciousness — even though even before surgery he was an avowed atheist with no belief in the afterlife (or so he said). In other instances, whenever I brought up the nothingness of anesthesia as a foretaste of “where we go” after death, the counterargument was that that was “only anesthesia and not death,” “drug-caused,” “not what it feels like after real death.” Yet already dreamless sleep is a foretaste of that nothing. We experience many natural occasions when consciousness is erased, but mostly we try not to notice. If consciousness is a process, an emergent phenomenon dependent on the right conditions, then obviously it can cease when those conditions no longer obtain.
It’s easy to imagine an indulgent wide smile blossoming on the Buddha’s face if he heard someone hold forth on what it “feels like” after death. Or maybe he’d experience a brief twinge of impatience before resuming the serene resignation to having to witness the parade of common cognitive errors. Yet everyone readily agrees that the self that exists in this moment is not the self of a moment ago, much less a year ago, and much, much less ten years ago. The self is not a thing; not a noun but a verb. It’s an ongoing process.
Thus there is no “thing” that leaves the body — no little ghost escaping through some real or imaginary orifice, carrying with it, intact, all memories, thoughts, wishes, regrets, the accumulated wisdom of experience, and other idiosyncratic aspects of the deceased individual. It doesn’t matter how intensely we may wish for precisely the kind of immortality where the whole personality is preserved (the personality we had at twenty? or at seventy? everyone knows the difference can be huge), and every tiniest memory, even if we happened to forget that particular incident. Milosz wanted even the insects to be restored just as they were in our lifetime — but at what point? In the summer of 1969? And if those insects are to be restored, then what about the bacteria? The viruses? The particles of soil? Of the very air, including pollution?
Or is it to be a perfected restoration, without the mosquitoes? And those we love without their quirky neuroses? Everyone perfect, straight-nosed?
(As an aside, during the process of dying people seem to go into their inner world, and it’s usually the time of their youth; I'm curious if that’s because early youth is typically the time of most vivid memories. My poor father, alas, who died of Parkinson’s, a macabre death, went back to wartime; at least my mother was spared that, going back to her hometown right after high school. I watched someone else go back to his first “real” job.)
To be sure, most of us would be happy enough with even a partial preservation, a self we had at any point during adulthood. Never mind the insects; just let my consciousness continue, my ability to observe, feel, think, remember — definitely to remember, because without a name, a soul/mind vanishes like a bird into fog, as during the end stage of Alzheimer’s. No, no, some would protest, the soul is still there and remembers everything, even the dress grandma wore on her birthday forty years ago. Some, and I once had a New Age friend who belonged to that school of thought, believe that the soul leaves a long time before an Alzheimer’s victim actually dies: “Only the robot is left on this plane — the body carrying on like a robot.”
Never mind what happens to the “soul” of someone slowly dying of Alzheimer’s. No point dealing with unreality, and the Buddha knew that. Five hundred years BCE, he shrugged off all questions about god and the afterlife. “No one saves us but ourselves,” he’d say, or something like it. Or: “It’s better to travel well than to arrive.” It seems he meant living in the now.
for an interesting discussion of Buddhism in the light of evolutionary psychology, you can go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJZTrVlSBTY&t=953s
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THE CATHOLIC OBSESSION WITH SIN
"I would go [to confession] at LEAST once a week that last year I was Catholic. Lamentably, I was shackled down by the Church’s concept of sin, and what’s sickening to me is that I didn’t realize it till later because I’d grown so numb to that soul-crushing guilt. The Church made me think I was filthy and contemptible in nature and needed to be washed clean, when the dirt was, in fact, imaginary.”
This reminded me of the long list that Newton made of his sins, most of them imaginary. My lists were shorter, but I carefully memorized them since to omit a sin would be a grave sin in itself. In fact just to be on the safe side I'd make up a sin or two -- what if I committed this or that trespass without being aware of it? This could mean a longer time on my knees on the cold stone church floor, but better safe than sorry. My nun, an expert mental terrorist, reminded us that there is always the possibility of being run over by a truck -- "And then where would your soul go?" That's why it was necessary to go to confession often and to overconfess rather than underconfess.
Like the author of this article, I did not find any of this absurd or disgusting until I was thoroughly ripe for exit.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularspectrum/2016/05/confessions-of-a-former-nun-wannabe/?fbclid=IwAR0WpErC_Uq6uxLEjlT0NJ-TmFq4VKAJsT7SsV9UhVrn0_g4qLe7ry2KvEE
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BEING DAZZLED BY LIFE
~ The day before singer Lou Reed died, according to his wife composer/performance-artist Laurie Anderson, he was floating in his swimming pool at home, and said, “You know, I am just so susceptible to beauty.”
Anderson said of it: “I think of that every day. How to open yourself to the world. And really appreciate it. Because boy, this is it. This is all we have. Right here. So you better pay attention. After Lou died, I was not expecting that at all—this feeling of being dazzled by life.” ~
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COVID SYMPTOMS CAN LAST A LONG TIME
~ “The symptoms were weird as hell,” Paul Garner says. They included loss of smell, heaviness, malaise, tight chest and racing heart. At one point Garner thought he was about to die. He tried to Google “fulminating myocarditis” but was too unwell to navigate the screen.
Garner refers to himself wryly as a member of the “Boris Johnson herd immunity group”. This is the cluster of patients who contracted Covid-19 in the 12 days before the UK finally locked down. He assumed his illness would swiftly pass. Instead it went on and on – a rollercoaster of ill health, extreme emotions and utter exhaustion, as he put it in a blog last week for the British Medical Journal.
There is growing evidence that the virus causes a far greater array of symptoms than was previously understood. And that its effects can be agonizingly prolonged: in Garner’s case for more than seven weeks. The professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine says his experience of Covid-19 featured a new and disturbing symptom every day, akin to an “advent calendar”.
He had a muggy head, upset stomach, tinnitus, pins and needles, breathlessness, dizziness and arthritis in the hands. Each time Garner thought he was getting better the illness roared back. It was a sort of virus snakes and ladders. “It’s deeply frustrating. A lot of people start doubting themselves,” he says. “Their partners wonder if there is something psychologically wrong with them.”
Since his piece was published, Garner has received emails and tearful phone calls from grateful readers who thought they were going mad. “I’m a public health person,” he says. “The virus is certainly causing lots of immunological changes in the body, lots of strange pathology that we don’t yet understand. This is a novel disease. And an outrageous one. The textbooks haven’t been written.”
According to the latest research, about one in 20 Covid patients experience long-term on-off symptoms. It’s unclear whether long-term means two months, or three or longer. The best parallel is dengue fever, Garner suggests – a “ghastly” viral infection of the lymph nodes which he also contracted. “Dengue comes and goes. It’s like driving around with a handbrake on for six to nine months.”
Many Covid patients do not develop a fever and cough. Instead they get muscle ache, a sore throat and headache. The app has tracked 15 different types of symptoms, together with a distinct pattern of “waxing and waning”.
Meanwhile Covid “long-termers” have been comparing notes via a Slack support group. It has #60plus-days and #30plus-days chat groups. The dominant feeling is relief that others are in the same grim situation, and that their health problems are not imaginary. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/weird-hell-professor-advent-calendar-covid-19-symptoms-paul-garner?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_News_Feed&fbclid=IwAR2MejzC8QI44Tw5l1Qh71Mt0Xu-yH9FxannVknUHms3DsWiR-YZJechrHA
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“Let me go on being naked. Let it hurt. But let me survive.” ~ Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
Erik Desmazières: The wind blows where it wants, 1989*
COULD EXISTING VACCINES PROTECT US FROM COVID?
~ As the world waits for a coronavirus vaccine, tens of thousands of people could die. But some scientists believe a vaccine might already exist.
Surprising new research in a niche area of immunology suggests that certain live vaccines that have been around for decades could, possibly, protect against the coronavirus. The theory is that these vaccines could make people less likely to experience serious symptoms — or even any symptoms — if they catch it.
At more than 25 universities and clinical centers around the world, researchers have begun clinical trials, primarily in health care workers, to test whether a live tuberculosis vaccine that has been in use for 99 years called the bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or B.C.G., vaccine, could reduce the risks associated with the coronavirus.
Another small but esteemed group of scientists is raising money to test the potential protective effects of a 60-year-old live polio vaccine called O.P.V.
It’s counterintuitive to think that old vaccines created to fight very different pathogens could defend against the coronavirus. The idea is controversial in part because it challenges the dogma about how vaccines work.
But scientists’ understanding of an arm of immunology known as innate immunity has shifted in recent years. A growing body of research suggests that live vaccines, which are made from living but attenuated pathogens (as opposed to inactivated vaccines, which use dead pathogens) provide broad protection against infections in ways that no one anticipated.
“We can’t be certain as to what the outcome will be, but I suspect it’ll have an effect” on the coronavirus, said Jeffrey Cirillo, a microbiologist and immunologist at Texas A&M University who is leading one of the B.C.G. trials. “Question is, how big will it be?”
Scientists stress that these vaccines will not be a panacea. They might make symptoms milder, but they probably won’t eliminate them. And the protection, if it occurs, would most likely last only a few years.
Still, “these could be a first step,” said Dr. Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who is leading another one of the trials. “They can be the bridge until you have the time to develop a specific vaccine.”
The first evidence to suggest that live vaccines could be broadly protective trickled in nearly a century ago, but no one knew what to make of it. In 1927, soon after B.C.G. was rolled out, Carl Naslund of the Swedish Tuberculosis Society observed that children vaccinated with the live tuberculosis vaccine were three times less likely to die of any cause compared with kids who weren’t.
“One is tempted to explain this very low mortality among vaccinated children by the idea that B.C.G. vaccine provokes a nonspecific immunity,” he wrote in 1932.
Then, in clinical trials conducted in the 1940s and ’50s in the United States and Britain, researchers found that B.C.G. reduced nonaccidental deaths from causes other than tuberculosis by an average of 25 percent.
Also in the 1950s, Russian researchers, including Marina Voroshilova of the Academy of Medical Science in Moscow, noticed that people who had been given the live polio vaccine, compared with people who hadn’t, were far less likely to fall ill with the seasonal flu and other respiratory infections. She and other scientists undertook a clinical trial involving 320,000 Russians to more carefully test these mysterious effects.
They found that among individuals who had received the live polio vaccine, “the incidence of seasonal influenza was reduced by 75 percent,” said Konstantin Chumakov, Voroshilova’s son, who is now an associate director for research in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.
Recent studies have produced similar findings. In a 2016 review of 68 papers commissioned by the World Health Organization, a team of researchers concluded that B.C.G., along with other live vaccines, “reduce overall mortality by more than would be expected through their effects on the diseases they prevent.”
The W.H.O. has long been skeptical about these “nonspecific effects,” in part because much of the research on them has involved observational studies that don’t establish cause and effect. But in a recent report incorporating newer results from some clinical trials, the organization described nonspecific vaccine effects as “plausible and common.”
Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a vaccinologist and emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the rubella vaccine but has no involvement in the current research, agreed. “Vaccines can affect the immune system beyond the response to the specific pathogen,” he said.
Peter Aaby, a Danish anthropologist who has spent 40 years studying the nonspecific effects of vaccines in Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa, and whose findings have been criticized as implausible, is hopeful that these trials will be a tipping point for research in the field. “It’s kind of a golden moment in terms of actually having this taken seriously,” he said.
The possibility that vaccines could have nonspecific effects is brow-furrowing in part because scientists have long believed that vaccines work by stimulating the body’s highly specific adaptive immune system.
After receiving a vaccine against, say, polio, a person’s body creates an army of polio-specific antibodies that recognize and attack the virus before it has a chance to take hold. Antibodies against polio can’t fight off infections caused by other pathogens, though — so, based on this framework, polio vaccines should not be able to reduce the risk associated with other viruses, such as the coronavirus.
But over the past decade, immunologists have discovered that live vaccines also stimulate the innate immune system, which is less specific but much faster. They have found that the innate immune system can be trained by live vaccines to better fight off various kinds of pathogens.
For instance, in a 2018 study, Dr. Netea and his colleagues vaccinated volunteers with either B.C.G. or a placebo and then infected them all with a harmless version of the yellow fever virus. Those who had been given B.C.G. were better able to fight off yellow fever.
Research by Dr. Netea and others shows that live vaccines train the body’s immune system by initiating changes in some stem cells. Among other things, the vaccines initiate the creation of tiny marks that help cells turn on genes involved in immune protection against multiple pathogens.
This area of innate immunity “is one of the hottest areas in fundamental immunology today,” said Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-founder of the Global Virus Network, a coalition of virologists from more than 30 countries. In the 1980s, Dr. Gallo helped to identify H.I.V. as the cause of AIDS.
Dr. Gallo is leading the charge to test the O.P.V. live polio vaccine as a treatment for coronavirus. He and his colleagues hope to start a clinical trial on health care workers in New York City and Maryland within six weeks.
O.P.V. is routinely used in 143 countries, but no longer in the United States. An inactivated polio vaccine was reintroduced here in 1997, in part because one out of every 2.7 million people who receive the live vaccine can actually develop polio from it.
But O.P.V. does not pose this risk to Americans who have received a polio vaccine in the past. “We believe this is very, very, very safe,” Dr. Gallo said. It’s also inexpensive at 12 cents a dose, and is administered orally, so it doesn’t require needles.
Some scientists have raised concerns over whether these vaccines could increase the risk for “cytokine storms” — deadly inflammatory reactions that have been observed in some people weeks after they have been infected with the coronavirus. Dr. Netea and others said that they were taking these concerns seriously but did not anticipate problems. For one thing, the vaccines will be given only to healthy people — not to people who are already infected.
Also, B.C.G. may actually be able to ramp up the body’s initial immune response in ways that reduce the amount of virus in the body, such that an inflammatory response never occurs. It may “lead to less infection to start with,” said Dr. Moshe Arditi, the director of the Infectious and Immunological Diseases Research Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who is leading one of the trial arms.
The science on this is still early days. Several pre-prints — scientific papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed — published over the past few months support the idea that B.C.G. could protect against the coronavirus. They have reported, for instance, that death rates are lower in countries that routinely vaccinate children with B.C.G. But these studies can be fraught with bias and difficult to interpret; it’s impossible to know whether the vaccinations, or something else, provided the protection.
Such studies are “at the very bottom of the evidence hierarchy,” said Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, who is raising funds for a Danish B.C.G trial. She added that the protective effects of a dose of B.C.G given to adults decades ago, when they were infants, may well differ from the protective effects the vaccine could provide when given to adults during an outbreak.
“In the end,” said Dr. Netea, “only the clinical trials will give the answer.”
Thankfully, that answer will come very soon. Initial results from the trials that are underway may be available within a few months. If these researchers are right, these old vaccines could buy us time — and save thousands of lives — while we work to develop a new one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-vaccine-innate-immunity.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
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PLACENTAL CELLS MIGHT HELP COVID PATIENTS
~ Last month, Pluristem began testing its PLX cells on patients with COVID-19 in hopes of reducing the effects of the virus-induced pneumonia or pneumonitis and leading to a better prognosis.
Eighteen Patients were treated under a compassionate use program in Israel and the FDA single Patient Expanded Access Program. They were all in intensive care units, on invasive mechanical ventilation and suffered from Acute Respiratory Syndrome at the time of treatment.
So far, eight of the patients have completed a 28-day follow up period.
The survival rate of the eight patients is 87.5%.
In contrast, nearly 90% of coronavirus patients who required mechanical ventilation in New York's largest health system, Northwell Health, died, according to a report by The Journal of the American Medical Association.
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PLacental eXpanded (PLX) cells are placenta-derived, mesenchymal-like adherent stromal cells that are designed to be administered to patients without the need for tissue or genetic matching. These cells release soluble biomolecules, such as cytokines, chemokines and growth factors, which act in a paracrine or endocrine manner to facilitate healing of damaged tissue by stimulating the body’s own regenerative mechanisms. ~
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israels-pluristem-75-percent-of-treated-covid-19-patients-off-ventilators-628213
Oriana:
The one American patient who received the treatment was Broadway designer Edward Pierce.
ending on beauty:
My generation was lost.
Cities too. And nations.
But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window,
a swallow.
~ Czeslaw Milosz
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