“Grieving Flag” by Charles Sherman, June 2020. An upside down flag is a signal of distress. The artist explained that he is grieving over how divided the country has grown.
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THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw
A pigeon flew in
through an open window,
got trapped in the sheen
of the long hallways where we lived —
My father caught it and handed it to me.
I held the bird tight against my chest,
then leaned over the sill
and handed it to the sky.
For a moment it dropped,
dead stone — then wobbled,
the spread wings found again
the art of the air,
and the bird wheeled
over the wide yard,
and flew out of sight.
Flew away
like the years.
But I still
feel it beat,
that heart against my heart.
~ Oriana
My comment is this statement from Saul Bellow’s Herzog:
“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That’s what life is.”
The pigeon was terrified — it wasn’t a beautiful moment for the bird, until it found itself free and safe in the air. His heart beat so fast when I held him tight to my chest that I was afraid it would somehow burst through this rib cage. Poor scared thing! But soon he was freed — and that wheeling flight was magnificent. For me it it remains a beautiful memory.
*
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THOMAS MERTON
“Merton was a remarkable man by any measure, but perhaps the most remarkable of his traits was his hypersensitivity to social movements from which, by virtue of his monastic calling, he was supposed to be removed. Intrinsic to Merton’s nature was a propensity for being in the midst of things. If he had continued to live in the world, he might have died not by electrocution but by overstimulation.
Thomas Merton was born in 1915, to parents living in the French Pyrenees. His American mother, Ruth, who would die of cancer when Thomas was only six, was a Quaker and an artist, though a less ambitious one than his father, Owen. Owen, a New Zealander, had great hopes to make a career as a painter, some of which he later realized. Living in Catholic France, married to a Quaker, he wanted his son baptized in the Church of England. This was done, bequeathing to Thomas a certain confusion about religious affiliation right from the outset.
For the next twenty years, Merton’s life was peripatetic, oscillating between New York (Long Island, Queens) and various locations in France and England. Eventually, in 1933, he was admitted to Clare College, Cambridge, but he was unhappy there—“Perhaps to you the atmosphere of Cambridge is neither dark nor sinister,” he would later write—and preferred drinking and bumming around on the Continent to studying. When in Cambridge, he was frequently in legal trouble, and, worst of all, fathered a child outside of marriage—a child he never met. At least some of these disorders stemmed from the loss of his father, who had died from a brain tumor, in 1931, but, in any case, Merton would come to think of this period as one in which his soul was dead, and in which, he believed, “I had done all that I could to make my heart untouchable by charity and had fortified it, as I hoped, impregnably in my own impenetrable selfishness.”
Tom Bennett, the childhood friend of Owen’s who had become Merton’s guardian, grew exasperated and declined to continue to bail him out of jail, pay his drinking and lodging bills, or send him back to a university from which, it was clear, he would never graduate. New York seemed a safer location, a point which Merton did not dispute, and, for lack of anything better to do, in January of 1935 he applied and was accepted to Columbia University. There and then his spiritual life began.
That may be putting the point too strongly. A decade later, in writing the autobiography that would make him famous, he discerned many signs of incipient religion that, in the upheavals of late adolescence, had been invisible to him.
The proximate instrument of his internal transformation was Columbia University’s devotion to the Great Books. In the course of his study—and inspired to learn more about the great sweep of cultural history by his mentor and eventual friend Mark Van Doren—he read Etienne Gilson’s “The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy,” a book that seamlessly blends profound scholarship and an evangelistic zeal for Catholic tradition. That book, and the extraordinary variety of Catholic churches in Manhattan, almost all of which he seems to have visited, led Merton inexorably to an embrace of Catholicism.
But it did not seem inexorable at the time. Merton wanted to be a poet; he was politically active, an eager participant in leftist demonstrations; and he grew increasingly interested in Eastern religions. He was probably more likely to end up an English professor with eclectic “spiritual” interests than anything else. But then he met, and developed a great admiration for, a Hindu monk named Mahanambrata Brahmachari. He thought perhaps Brahmachari would lead him into Hinduism, certainly into some form of Eastern mysticism, but, to his surprise, the monk told him that he should read more in the Christian tradition. He especially recommended St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and Thomas à Kempis’s “The Imitation of Christ.” Then, “He repeated what he had said, not without a certain earnestness: ‘Yes, you must read those books.’ It was not often that he spoke with this kind of emphasis.”
He turned to the ancient bibliomantic ritual of the Sortes Sanctorum, grabbing a Bible (the Latin Vulgate, of course), opening to a random page, and stabbing a finger at the text. What he saw was “ecce eris tacens”—Luke 1:20, “Behold, you shall be silent.” That seemed to point to the Trappists—more formally, the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance—and eventually to the Trappists he went.
But that house, the Abbey of Gethsemani, would not, over the long run, prove to be the home that Merton had hoped it would be. For one thing, he suffered profound anxiety about his writing. He loved writing and believed that he was good at it, but it was not clear whether writing was compatible with the highly communal life of Gethsemani. Would he not, by writing, set himself apart from his brothers in unhealthy ways? His abbot encouraged him to write, and when his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” appeared in 1948 and quickly became a best-seller, the abbot’s wisdom was surely confirmed.
Or was it? To be sure, “The Seven Storey Mountain” was a magnificent advertisement for Catholicism in general and for monastic life in particular—almost every monastery in America saw a massive upsurge in postulants in the years following the book’s publication—and all of the book’s considerable royalties went straight into the bank account of the abbey. However, the more Merton wrote, the less time he had to spend at the common work, leaving more for his brothers to do. One of the subsequent abbots sought to remedy this situation by making Merton the master of novices, which gave him a lot of teaching to do—a responsibility which Merton gladly accepted, surely out of obedience, but also, I suspect, because it was a relatively trivial matter to convert the lectures he gave the novices into books.
After years of this kind of tension, Merton begged to be allowed to become a hermit, living alone on some remote corner of Gethsemani’s property. This most thoroughly un-Trappist request was granted. It was probably the best solution that, practically speaking, could have been achieved. Merton collected some of his talks to novices under the title “No Man Is an Island”—a title either aspirational or ironic or both. He moved to his little two-room hermitage, near the end of 1961.
*
Perhaps the central question for him was: What contribution can the contemplative make to peacemaking, especially in a bellicose age? He wrote to Ernesto Cardenal often on this topic. “As to politics and the world situation, a little news comes through sometimes and then long periods of silence. . . . Yet I wonder if I really know less than those who get the papers.” It’s obvious that “the world is full of great criminals with enormous power and they are in a death struggle with each other. . . . What can come of it? Surely not peace.” He understood that “we must pray and be joyful and simple because we do not after all understand most of it. . . .But let us avoid false optimism, and approved gestures, and seek truth.”
But he renewed another old interest—and this one did take him into the public world. When he was in the midst of his campaign for a hermitage, he found himself thinking and writing about the Desert Fathers of the fourth century—many of them were hermits, after all—and when he published “The Wisdom of the Desert,” his small book recounting and retelling their stories, he wanted to ask the great Zen master, D. T. Suzuki, to write an introduction to the book. (He had exchanged a series of letters with Suzuki in 1959.) This idea was firmly rejected by his Trappist superiors, and Merton ended up writing his own quite eloquent and illuminating introduction, but the request marked his fascination with what the various contemplative and mystical traditions might have in common—and what the elements they shared might give to the world.
In 1968, he was asked to go to Asia to meet with practitioners of the monastic life in various religious traditions. It was the rare chance to travel, and he leaped at it. In the journal he kept in those weeks, the last of his life, Merton seemed to be leaving behind everything that belongs to Christianity alone. In his journal, he wrote:
Joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around. . . . May I not come back without having settled the great affair. And found also the great compassion, mahakaruna . . . I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body.
The most interesting sentence here is: “May I not come back without having settled the great affair.” Two years earlier, when recuperating from back surgery in Louisville, he had fallen in love with a student nurse and had thought of abandoning his vows for her, though they never had sex. But that cannot be the “great affair” he had in mind; his rededication to the monastic life had been settled by then. It is hard to see “the great affair” as anything other than the status of Christianity among the religions of the world. Is Jesus Christ the world’s one Savior? Or is Christianity just one among several ways to reach toward the divine?
There are hints of how he might have settled it. For instance, he wrote of meeting an Indian hermit called Chatral Rinpoche, “The unspoken or half-spoken message of our talk was our complete understanding of each other as people who were on the edge of great realization and knew it and were trying, somehow or other, to go out and get lost in it.” And he had a dream. “Last night,” he wrote, “I dreamed I was, temporarily, back at Gethsemani. I was dressed in a Buddhist monk’s habit.”
But what he would have done when he returned to Gethsemani we cannot know. In Bangkok, Merton stepped out of his shower, slipped on the floor, reached instinctively for support, grabbed an electric fan, and died. His body was taken back to America on a U.S. Army plane, returning from the war in Vietnam that he had so passionately deplored.
The writings of the New Testament repeatedly tell followers of Jesus that they must die to themselves, but half-dead is the most that Father Louis (Merton’s priestly name) ever managed. Once, when he was in Louisville, he had a kind of epiphany. He described the experience in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” He “was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people,” the people walking the streets of the city. “They were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.” This did not make him doubt his monastic vocation, he says—the denial is not wholly convincing—but it did make him realize that the monk’s life lends itself to a powerful and dangerous illusion: “the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudoangels, ‘spiritual men,’ men of interior life, what have you.”
What is vital here is that Merton could only have achieved that understanding of monastic life by venturing into public space; but he could only have had that epiphany of endless love—what W. H. Auden called a “vision of Agape”—because he spent so much time in his hermitage. He devoted most of his adult life to seeking an unqualified, immediate, self-authenticating encounter with God, but, because he never found it, he wrote endlessly about that search—and loved both the writing and the attention that it gave him. He repeatedly affirmed a creed that can be stated in words, but was drawn to a discipline whose masters insist that Zen cannot be articulated. He was his contradictions: the person in motion who seeks stillness; the monk who wants to belong to the world; the famous person who wants to be unknown.
Merton lived the public world, the world of words and politics, but knew that living in it had killed him. (“Thomas Merton is dead.”) He sought the peace of pure and silent contemplation, but came to believe that the value of that experience is to send us back into the world that killed us. He is perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of us who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return. As we always will.”
Oriana:
Merton is an interesting writer because he was also a monk. An activist at heart, he was forced to obey his abbot — after all, he took “the vow of obedience.” He was obviously moving toward Buddhism — and if not for his tragic death, would have probably left the monastery.
In a different vein, I'm startled that he never met the child he fathered with the woman he abandoned. He apparently never sought to see the child, even only once, maybe from a distance, without actual contact. It’s difficult for a woman to imagine this lack of curiosity — after all, a child is that part of you that travels into the future.
Mary:
Merton is indeed a man of contradictions: the profligate who becomes a monk, the word lover who takes a vow of silence, the eager traveler who asks to become a hermit, the monk who vows to be member of a community and then seeks his own isolation, the convert who continues to search for truth in other religions. I think it is that very tension between opposites that he may have been trying to resolve when he speaks of "the great affair." He was seeking to penetrate the distractions of difference to find the common ground/ultimate truth beyond them.
A difficult, long endeavor, one that made him feel like he had been, perhaps, on a fool’s journey. But this kind of spiritual questing has its own truths and fulfillments, its moments of revelation, and even ecstasy, as well as its frustrations and times of confusion and despair. In fact, the journey is in many ways its own answer, its own destination — as when he asked the Hindu monk for answers, and was told to read more, to study the texts of his own chosen discipline...in other words, keep searching. To stop, anywhere, to become stationary, is to lose the thread, the impetus to discovery, to diminish possibility and curtail understanding. In opposition lies the balance of truth, the flow between silence and speech, self and community, individual and infinity, the dynamic of something much like a dance.
Oriana:
For me Merton is a lesson in not thinking in either/or terms. I must have solitude — my mother worried that my deepest desire was to be a recluse. But now and then I become quite sociable, especially around people who have interesting things to say — but then practically everyone is interesting and unusual in some way, once you find out enough about them. Still, I am a solitary first and foremost; I am not sure if Merton would call himself a solitary, given his bent for social activism. Of course a writer can be involved with others in an intense way, through written communication. And that, finally, is how I understand the contradictions of Thomas Merton: he was a writer first.
Merton is indeed a man of contradictions: the profligate who becomes a monk, the word lover who takes a vow of silence, the eager traveler who asks to become a hermit, the monk who vows to be member of a community and then seeks his own isolation, the convert who continues to search for truth in other religions. I think it is that very tension between opposites that he may have been trying to resolve when he speaks of "the great affair." He was seeking to penetrate the distractions of difference to find the common ground/ultimate truth beyond them.
A difficult, long endeavor, one that made him feel like he had been, perhaps, on a fool’s journey. But this kind of spiritual questing has its own truths and fulfillments, its moments of revelation, and even ecstasy, as well as its frustrations and times of confusion and despair. In fact, the journey is in many ways its own answer, its own destination — as when he asked the Hindu monk for answers, and was told to read more, to study the texts of his own chosen discipline...in other words, keep searching. To stop, anywhere, to become stationary, is to lose the thread, the impetus to discovery, to diminish possibility and curtail understanding. In opposition lies the balance of truth, the flow between silence and speech, self and community, individual and infinity, the dynamic of something much like a dance.
Oriana:
For me Merton is a lesson in not thinking in either/or terms. I must have solitude — my mother worried that my deepest desire was to be a recluse. But now and then I become quite sociable, especially around people who have interesting things to say — but then practically everyone is interesting and unusual in some way, once you find out enough about them. Still, I am a solitary first and foremost; I am not sure if Merton would call himself a solitary, given his bent for social activism. Of course a writer can be involved with others in an intense way, through written communication. And that, finally, is how I understand the contradictions of Thomas Merton: he was a writer first.
Joe:
I see the conflict between the two paths of life that Merton chose. As an introvert, I enjoy the stay at home orders. It gives me time to meditate and work around the house without pressure to visit or perform my social duties. I find this type of monastic life appealing. That was one reason I seriously considered the seminary.
On the other hand, being a writer has the demands that I interact with society. To fill your life with spiritual ideas demands a commitment to social justice. For example, if I know people go to jail or die because of systematic racism, I must protest and work to change this. Otherwise, I’m not treating society with respect.
Behaving disrespectfully toward the community inside and outside of the monastery prevents writing from achieving a point of authenticity to him. Therefore, to write, Merton must act or his work will only be an act of vanity.
Although I agree that Merton was conflicted, I believe that writing requires solitude. To pray demands seclusion, and to be human demands social involvement. To be a poet, a monk, or a socially responsible person was a balancing act for Merton. Of course, the religious doctrine confused and complicated his thinking.
Within the Catholic church, there is the belief that one must prove their love to God. God sacrificed his son for you. What are you going to sacrifice to him? Gerald Manley Hopkins burned all his poems to prove his love [after his conversion to Catholicism, Hopkins burned his early poems and did not write for seven years.]. Merton sacrificed his son, so to speak, for God.
It is a wonder how any Christian survives without committing suicide. I mean what more could you sacrifice to prove your love than your life. I think that is why Buddhism is so appealing. Of course I think that Christians would be better off getting rid of everything in the Bible but Christ’s sermons and parables.
The early Christians discussed mainly his sermons, parables and miracles. This was a way to form a community that would please Christ. In these communities, the main emphasis was on a love based upon compassion and empathy.
In the Miracle of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, the most widely accepted interpretation is that after a day of listening to Christ preach, his disciples collected the food. Christ blessed it; then, everyone ate until they were full.
The less popular interpretation is that Christ’s disciples collected the food. Christ blessed, and everyone received an equal proportion that would sustain until they arrived home. The multiplication of food wasn’t the miracle. It was that Christ got everyone to share without regard to wealth or rank. That was the miracle because the people imitated the infinite love of God.
When Constantine converted to Christianity, he quickly changed the emphasis from compassion and empathy to punishment and death. Constantine emphasized on sin as an act against God. The punishment was an act by God where the sinner went to hell, which is a place of eternal torture. That is similar to Roman law. A crime is an act against the State. Punishment is an act by the State resulting in being tormented to death.
I see the conflict between the two paths of life that Merton chose. As an introvert, I enjoy the stay at home orders. It gives me time to meditate and work around the house without pressure to visit or perform my social duties. I find this type of monastic life appealing. That was one reason I seriously considered the seminary.
On the other hand, being a writer has the demands that I interact with society. To fill your life with spiritual ideas demands a commitment to social justice. For example, if I know people go to jail or die because of systematic racism, I must protest and work to change this. Otherwise, I’m not treating society with respect.
Behaving disrespectfully toward the community inside and outside of the monastery prevents writing from achieving a point of authenticity to him. Therefore, to write, Merton must act or his work will only be an act of vanity.
Although I agree that Merton was conflicted, I believe that writing requires solitude. To pray demands seclusion, and to be human demands social involvement. To be a poet, a monk, or a socially responsible person was a balancing act for Merton. Of course, the religious doctrine confused and complicated his thinking.
Within the Catholic church, there is the belief that one must prove their love to God. God sacrificed his son for you. What are you going to sacrifice to him? Gerald Manley Hopkins burned all his poems to prove his love [after his conversion to Catholicism, Hopkins burned his early poems and did not write for seven years.]. Merton sacrificed his son, so to speak, for God.
It is a wonder how any Christian survives without committing suicide. I mean what more could you sacrifice to prove your love than your life. I think that is why Buddhism is so appealing. Of course I think that Christians would be better off getting rid of everything in the Bible but Christ’s sermons and parables.
The early Christians discussed mainly his sermons, parables and miracles. This was a way to form a community that would please Christ. In these communities, the main emphasis was on a love based upon compassion and empathy.
In the Miracle of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, the most widely accepted interpretation is that after a day of listening to Christ preach, his disciples collected the food. Christ blessed it; then, everyone ate until they were full.
The less popular interpretation is that Christ’s disciples collected the food. Christ blessed, and everyone received an equal proportion that would sustain until they arrived home. The multiplication of food wasn’t the miracle. It was that Christ got everyone to share without regard to wealth or rank. That was the miracle because the people imitated the infinite love of God.
When Constantine converted to Christianity, he quickly changed the emphasis from compassion and empathy to punishment and death. Constantine emphasized on sin as an act against God. The punishment was an act by God where the sinner went to hell, which is a place of eternal torture. That is similar to Roman law. A crime is an act against the State. Punishment is an act by the State resulting in being tormented to death.
Of course, guilt is a passive-aggressive form of torture. When you think about it, Buddhism doesn’t have a doctrine of intimidation. Its message is one of respect and love. It would seem a thinking Christian would prefer Buddhism. I have to agree, Merton might have become a Buddhist.
Oriana:
Victor Hugo said that his whole life could be summarized by the rhyme “solitaire et solidaire.” Albert Camus wrote a short story about an artist’s life; all that’s left at the end is a scribble that could be read as either “solitaire” or “solidaire.” Alas, in English we don’t have a good way to translate “solidaire” — “in solidarity”? But we get the point: an artist (and perhaps everyone with a rich inner life) needs both solitude and some degree of involvement with people.
“Every person I interact with is part of the person I am becoming,” Patricia Moreno reminds us— a brilliant insight that points to the “personality enlargement” that happens to us thanks to others. But an introverts absolutely needs solitude to digest and absorb the gift of an encounter with another person, and to recover from the intensity of it.
The tension between solitude and solidarity plays itself out in any monastic tradition. Some orders are more concerned with social service; others emphasize silent contemplation, sometimes to the exclusion of interaction. And there are of course more moderate monastic orders that acknowledge the importance of both, and try to insure balance.
Being a writer is a special situation, because a significant part of your social interaction is writing itself — which requires solitude. But you must have experiences on which to draw, or risk becoming one of those who write endlessly about their childhood “because that’s the last time anything happened to them.” Merton discovered the always precarious balance of what worked for him. He knew that he had much to give to others precisely because he took the time for solitude.
Oriana:
Victor Hugo said that his whole life could be summarized by the rhyme “solitaire et solidaire.” Albert Camus wrote a short story about an artist’s life; all that’s left at the end is a scribble that could be read as either “solitaire” or “solidaire.” Alas, in English we don’t have a good way to translate “solidaire” — “in solidarity”? But we get the point: an artist (and perhaps everyone with a rich inner life) needs both solitude and some degree of involvement with people.
“Every person I interact with is part of the person I am becoming,” Patricia Moreno reminds us— a brilliant insight that points to the “personality enlargement” that happens to us thanks to others. But an introverts absolutely needs solitude to digest and absorb the gift of an encounter with another person, and to recover from the intensity of it.
The tension between solitude and solidarity plays itself out in any monastic tradition. Some orders are more concerned with social service; others emphasize silent contemplation, sometimes to the exclusion of interaction. And there are of course more moderate monastic orders that acknowledge the importance of both, and try to insure balance.
Being a writer is a special situation, because a significant part of your social interaction is writing itself — which requires solitude. But you must have experiences on which to draw, or risk becoming one of those who write endlessly about their childhood “because that’s the last time anything happened to them.” Merton discovered the always precarious balance of what worked for him. He knew that he had much to give to others precisely because he took the time for solitude.
*
“The beginning of love
is the will to let those we love
be perfectly themselves,
the resolution not to twist them
to fit our own image.”
~ Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
HOW TO TALK TO YOURSELF
~ One night I got caught in a harrowing blizzard in a remote area of the North Carolina Mountains without snow tires or four-wheel drive. I couldn’t stop or pull off the road, and my car was skidding on ice. Clutching the steering wheel, I had to drive another 30 miles straight up steep treacherous mountain curves. At first, I heard my judgment’s reprimands, I hope you’re satisfied, dummy. You’ve done it now. Before the harshness escalated, I was aware that my judgment had tangled up with me like a ball of yarn. I took a deep breath, moved into coaching myself with kindness, Okay Bryan, easy does it. You’ve got this. You’re going to be just fine. Just breathe. That’s right, Bryan, just keep it on the road. Awesome job!
There was a time when people who talked to themselves were considered “crazy.” Now, experts consider self-talk to be one of the most effective therapeutic tools available.
Obviously, I made it home safely because I’m here to tell the story. I believe I survived because of the way I spoke to myself. The science of self-talk has shown time and again that how we use self-talk makes a big difference. Negative, survive talk can lead to anxiety and depression. Positive, thrive talk can mitigate dysfunctional mental states and cultivate healthier states of mind.
Self-Distancing
Research shows silently referring to ourselves by name instead as “I,” gives us psychological distance from the primitive parts of our brain. It allows us to talk to ourselves the way we might speak to someone else. The survive mind’s story isn’t the only story. And the thrive mind has a chance to shed a different light on the scenario. The language of separation allows you to process an internal event as if it happened to someone else. First-name self-talk or referring to yourself as “you," shifts focus away from your primitive brain’s inherent egocentricism. Studies show this practice lowers anxiety, gives us self-control, cultivates wisdom over time and puts the brakes on the negative voices that restrict possibilities.
University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross conducted research into the value of first-name self-talk as a way to disable social anxiety before and after a stressful event when people often ruminate about their performance. Kross gave 89 participants five minutes to prepare a speech. Half were told to use only pronouns to refer to themselves while the other half were told to use their names. The pronoun group had greater anxiety with such comments as, “There’s no way I can prepare a speech in five minutes,” while the name group had less anxiety and expressed confidence using self-talk such as, “Bryan, you can do this.” The name group was also rated higher in performance by independent evaluators and were less likely to ruminate after the speech. Other studies also show that first-name self-talk is more likely to empower you and increase the likelihood that, compared to someone using first-person pronoun self-talk, you see a challenge (thrive mind) instead of a threat (survive mind).
Broaden-and-Build
Like the zoom lens of a camera, Mother Nature hardwired your survival brain for tunnel vision to target a threat. Your heart races, eyes dilate, and breathing escalates to enable you to fight or flee. As your brain zeroes in, your self-talk makes life-or-death judgments that constrict your ability to see possibilities. Your focus is narrow like the zoom lens of a camera, clouding out the big picture. And over time you build blind spots of negativity without realizing it. Self-talk through your wide-angle lens allows you to step back from a challenge, look at the big picture, and brainstorm a wide range of possibilities, solutions, opportunities and choices.
In a study conducted by Dr. Barbara Frederickson at the University of North Carolina, researchers assigned 104 people to one of three groups: Group 1 experienced positive feelings (amusement or serenity), Group 2 negative feelings (anger or fear), and Group 3 no special feelings (neutrality). Then the researchers said, “Given how you’re feeling, make a list of what you want to do right now.” The positive group had the longest list of possibilities compared to the negative and neutral groups because the positive perspective showcased a range of possibilities. You have agency to broaden and build your survival brain’s constrictive “zoom lens” into a “wide-angle lens,” creating a perspective that broadens your range of vision to take in more information and free you from your mind’s limitations.
Self-Affirmations
During the 1990s, comedians mocked the notion of self-affirmations with tongue-in-cheek phrases such as, “I’m smart enough” or “I’m good enough.” Al Franken created and performed the fictional character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live in a mock self-help show called Daily Affirmations—a psychotherapist’s nightmare. Years since, otherwise willing clients have steered away from the off-putting idea of self-kindness and positive affirmations. The comedic antics of the 1990s stigmatized the practice with shame and embarrassment, which led the public to disavow the practice.
In 2014, enter Clayton Critcher and David Dunning at the University of California at Berkeley. The psychologists conducted a series of studies showing that positive affirmations function as “cognitive expanders,” bringing a wider perspective to diffuse the brain’s tunnel vision of self-threats. Their findings show that affirmations help us transcend the zoom-lens mode by engaging the wide-angle lens of the mind. Self-affirmations helped research participants cultivate a long-distance relationship with their judgment voice and see themselves more fully in a broader self-view, bolstering their self-worth.
Relationships With Your ‘Parts’
When you notice you’re in an unpleasant emotional state—such as worry, anger, or frustration—holding these parts of you at arm’s length and observing them impartially as a separate aspect of you, activates your thrive talk (clarity, compassion, calm). Thinking of them much as you might observe a blemish on your hand allows you to be curious about where they came from. Instead of pushing away, ignoring, or steamrolling over the unpleasant parts, the key is to acknowledge them with something like, “Hello frustration, I see you’re active today.” This simple acknowledgment relaxes the parts so you can face the real hardship—whatever triggered them in the first place. This psychological distance flips the switches in your survive brain and thrive brain at which point you are calm, clear-minded, compassionate, perform competently, and have more confidence and courage.
Self-Compassion
There is a direct link between self-compassion and happiness, well-being, and success. The more self-compassion you have, the greater your emotional arsenal. Studies from the University of Wisconsin show that meditation cultivates compassion and kindness, affecting brain regions that make you more empathetic to other people. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers discovered that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be developed in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The imaging revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive practice in compassion meditation.
Other studies show that the expression of empathy has far-reaching effects in your personal and professional lives. Employers who express empathy are more likely to retain employees, amp up productivity, reduce turnover, and create a sense of belonging in the company. If you cultivate the habit of speaking with loving-kindness, you change the way your brain fires in the moment. Studies show when abrasive, survive self-talk attacks you, it reduces your chances of rebounding and ultimately success. Instead of coming down hard on yourself, loving-kindness helps you bounce back quicker. Forgiving yourself for previous slip-ups such as procrastination, for example, offsets further procrastination. A survey of 119 Carleton University students who forgave themselves after procrastinating on the first midterm exam were less likely to delay studying for the second one.
When we talk ourselves off the ledge (as I did in the snowstorm) using self-distancing, compassion, and positive self-talk, we perform better at tasks and recover more quickly from defeat or setbacks—regardless of how dire the circumstances.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-right-mindset/202006/the-5-types-self-talk-your-brain-likes-best
Oriana:
I’ve noticed that how I talk to myself makes a lot of difference in how I feel and how productive I can be, especially in adverse circumstances. Forgiving yourself is obviously important, but what works fastest for me is using an endearment that only my mother had for me. The last time she called me that, before slipping into a coma, I thought, with great melancholy, “No one will ever call me that again.” Eventually I realized that I can use that endearment talking to myself in my mind — and it makes me happy every time.
Mary:
On self talk, distancing, and the zoom lens...a couple of examples..once in a CBT [cognitive-behavioral therapy] group, a woman described herself as completely wrong and hopeless, citing as evidence the morning's incident. She was baking something, and it caught fire in the oven. She closed the oven door, turned it off and called 911. The firemen arrived, made sure all was ok, fire out, and then she came to our session, feeling she had again created a circus of errors and chaos as she "always did” — couldn’t even bake something without creating an emergency.
I was stunned by her interpretation, pointing out she actually had done everything not wrong, but right. Closed the door, turned off the oven called 911 — thus avoiding, not creating, catastrophe. But her habit of mind could only see herself in a negative way.
And an example of the zoom focus...when I was in a very bad and rapidly worsening state of mind it was as if I was looking through a very narrow tube that only allowed me to see a small part of the world, a very narrow range of possible actions, blind to all other possibilities. That narrowing of vision led to faulty choices I got caught up in, that later I was somewhat, but not completely, able to correct. If I have any regrets at all, they come from this period when I could only see parts of my situation, but not all of it, and nevertheless had to make important choices with long range effects. Could my choices have been better?? Maybe, but I couldn’t see clearly enough to do anything else. Only a few roads were open, all the rest hidden and blockaded.
Oriana:
For me, the “door to depression” had to disappear before I could see anything other than my own misfortunes and shortcomings, the shattered dreams. Until that happened, i.e. my brain rewired itself, and the key that used to open the door, “I am a total failure” suddenly sounded ridiculous. Thus the key no longer worked, but even more important, I could no longer find the door!
The statement I happened to read — “You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong” — was my personal miracle. In an electrifying instant, the delusional thinking of deep depression simply vanished. What an example of the power of words! How we speak to ourselves is very important — and the words we read or hear can have an astonishing power as well.
I was stunned by her interpretation, pointing out she actually had done everything not wrong, but right. Closed the door, turned off the oven called 911 — thus avoiding, not creating, catastrophe. But her habit of mind could only see herself in a negative way.
And an example of the zoom focus...when I was in a very bad and rapidly worsening state of mind it was as if I was looking through a very narrow tube that only allowed me to see a small part of the world, a very narrow range of possible actions, blind to all other possibilities. That narrowing of vision led to faulty choices I got caught up in, that later I was somewhat, but not completely, able to correct. If I have any regrets at all, they come from this period when I could only see parts of my situation, but not all of it, and nevertheless had to make important choices with long range effects. Could my choices have been better?? Maybe, but I couldn’t see clearly enough to do anything else. Only a few roads were open, all the rest hidden and blockaded.
Oriana:
For me, the “door to depression” had to disappear before I could see anything other than my own misfortunes and shortcomings, the shattered dreams. Until that happened, i.e. my brain rewired itself, and the key that used to open the door, “I am a total failure” suddenly sounded ridiculous. Thus the key no longer worked, but even more important, I could no longer find the door!
The statement I happened to read — “You can practice falling apart, or you can practice being strong” — was my personal miracle. In an electrifying instant, the delusional thinking of deep depression simply vanished. What an example of the power of words! How we speak to ourselves is very important — and the words we read or hear can have an astonishing power as well.
*
JUNG: THE SECOND PERSONALITY
“One of the most profoundly interesting ideas in depth psychology is the second personality. We must credit Jung with coining this phrase and articulating the idea. However, first, to better understand the dualistic nature of our inner life it will be helpful to consider Freud’s idea of the id and the superego.
This is perhaps the simplest, most enduring and definitely one of Freud’s signature ideas. Freud described the psyche as being a contest for dominance between the instinctive, impulsive, infantile self, governed principally by the pleasure principle, which he called the id. Opposing the id is the superego. The superego is the voice of collective morality, of civilization, of the law – judicial, moral, cultural, societal and divine.
The superego tells you what you should do while the id tells you want you want to do.
It can also be understood as the struggle that takes place in the ego, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
For Freud this was the means by which dreams and fantasies, including cultural products of fantasy such as myths and art can be understood. These were expressions of the pleasure principle. Society and reality, by its very nature, has a repressive effect on the id and pleasure principle. Initially this repression is handled by the child’s parents and educators.
We all remember this well no doubt from our own childhood. You can’t do this, you mustn’t do that, this is bad for you, that is forbidden…and so on. Even though most (all?) of these wants were the expression of our most sincere desires at the time. Later on we internalize this parental voice and it becomes the voice of our conscience or the superego.
Our entire adult lives become an intense struggle between these two opposing voices or personalities. It is the cause of much neurosis and the reason one ends up of the psychoanalysts couch. And yet it is essential to mental health and normal function. Without desire there is no motivation to live; without a conscience we would be psychopaths.
This is often portrayed in popular culture as the competing angel and devil, each perched on an alternate shoulder, of the poor soul who must make a difficult choice.
*
Jung writes about a second, bigger, personality that he became aware of as youth in his biography Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
~ What I am here unfolding [about the second personality, the internal other]…was something I was not then conscious of in any particular way, though I sensed it with an overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling. At such times I knew I was worthy of myself, that I was my true self. As soon as I was alone, I could pass over into this state. I therefore sought the peace and solitude of this “Other,” personality No. 2 (ibid, p. 62). ~
“Jung goes on to speak at length about this second personality in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and how the awareness of this internal other, so different from his conscious ego personality, affected him and constituted a kind of guiding light. I think it would not be incorrect to say that his idea of individuation is also informed by this inner experience.
Something along the lines that the individuated self is the realization in consciousness and in one’s life of the presence of this second latent personality. So this is a radical break with Freud and earlier ideas about the tension of opposites between the id and the superego. For Jung one might better frame it as the possibility of psychological transmutation. That the conscious personality has a greater counterpart in the unconscious and this constitutes the idea of Jung’s second personality.
HOW REALISTIC AND PRACTICAL IS THIS IDEA?
Let us start by conceding that, like so much of Jung, it is a very romantic idea. I know for many prominent Jungians and post Jungians this idea has lost its appeal and is definitely not the goal of analysis. However I would speculate that the impulse for individuation still continues to motivate the majority of Jungian analysts in their work with their clients.
It is a very dangerous idea.
The possibility that you are not who you think you are and have a ‘destiny’ is the kind of idea that can, and sometimes does, destroy lives. As we all know, only too well, it may sound very blasé to be average or normal, but actually that takes a hell of lot of work. And it doesn’t take much to deconstruct that edifice.
Juxtaposed against this consider not only the really big personalities throughout history, but everyone whose contribution to the world exceeds their personal interests must, in some sense or another, be accessing this 2nd personality.
The first personality, the conscious ego identity, is the smaller, personal self, while the second personality, at least in Jung’s framing, has the possibility for original, creative and transpersonal (exceeding the personal domain) contribution.
If we think of Moses, Albert Einstein, Alexander the Great or Jesus Christ it is not the subtle nuances of their personal and private self we celebrate but their genius in their role they chose to play.
Like so much in psychology and life we should not confuse ourselves by taking this idea too literally. This metaphor is not meant to suggest that two totally separate and autonomous selves reside in your breast. Rather it is a very useful metaphor to illustrate different capacities we carry with ourselves, one of which, in this case, is frequently latent and holds great potential.”
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.” ~ Jung
Oriana:
Ah, those were the glory days — when I was at the height of my creativity, “driven by my daimon.” So what if sometimes I couldn't fall asleep because new inspiration kept coming.
Now I have the small pleasures, the daily contentment, the leisure and the presence of mind to attend to practical problems. Each stages of life has its special gifts. In spite of all the uncertainties and difficulties, more than ever I feel grateful simply to be alive.
“Despair is suffering without meaning.” ~ Viktor Frankl
*
THE HIGHEST POWER IS THE HUMAN MIND ~ MORGAN FREEMAN
“The highest power is the human mind. That’s where God came from and my belief in God is my belief in myself.” ~ Morgan Freeman, interview, The Daily Beast, January 2014
This reminds me of the moment when my mother said, “The most magnificent thing in the universe is the human brain.” It wasn’t as shocking as the time, when I was ten and she tried to relieve my terror of hell by saying, “There is no hell. God wouldn’t be so cruel” — but it was still brave, given the general human-demeaning cultural climate.
I take great joy in the collective human genius, in the advances in science and technology. But the creative process was also one important way in which I gained confidence in the workings of the brain — specifically, in the power of the unconscious to turn up a surprising answer (insight, opening or ending of a poem, a memory of long ago, etc). Kafka was right: Wait. And Shakespeare, and Rilke: Ripeness is all.
Even little things about the mind give me joy — yesterday I surprised myself at Home Depot, picking a wonderful dolly to replace the one that got stolen from my garage — and on the conscious level, what do I know about such things?
*
But quite a few intellectuals I know, including writers, have a very dark view of humanity. I can’t help but suspect that they derive perverse joy in pointing out human failings. Note also the uproar when Pinker published his books on progress, showing one graph after another that documented the lessening of chances of dying a violent death and the global growth in prosperity. Faith is humanity is made to seem unsophisticated and downright naive.
*
SHTEYNGART: AMERICA IS BECOMING MORE LIKE RUSSIA
~ “I grew up in an authoritarian country. I thought after the Soviet collapse it would become more like America in many ways. Civil society, rule of law, elections. But everything's going the opposite way. America is becoming more like Russia. Trump looks at someone like Putin and I think the envy is real. The respect is real, because this is a kleptocrat in the same way that Trump wishes to be. This is somebody who has muzzled the media the way Trump wishes to do. It's a perfect world for him. As somebody born in Russia, finding myself here in an election that has been in part determined by Russia, it's very strange. [this was written in 2016]
I think a large part of the population, they want the opposite of truth to be beamed into their home — or more importantly onto their screen. If they can be proven right in their hatred and their racism, they would rather get that news beamed into their device than the hear the truth. I think people aren't that stupid. A lot of people, even people at Trump rallies, know that he was just speaking crap, that none of his stuff really makes sense. That he's lying about everything. We live in a world where people will vote for a lie. What is more '1984' than that?”
"People want entertainment," he continues, "and we've made everything entertainment. Fox is entertainment as well as news. The posts you get which are untrue on Facebook, they're more like fiction. They're like little horror stories to get people into this idea of, 'I don't need the truth. I need this instead. This is what makes me happy.' The Russians have figured out how to weaponize it. The right-wing has also figured out how to weaponize it. They work in concert. The future is really all these societies learning from Moscow. You see what's happening in Western Europe; you see this happening in Eastern Europe as well. They've created this sort of weapon grade virus that can now be transmitted across the world. In many ways, America in 2016 was just very ripe for it.” ~ Gary Shteyngart
https://www.salon.com/2018/09/24/america-is-becoming-more-like-russia-says-russian-born-novelist-gary-shteyngart/#.W6or7_Yx2N8.twitter
Oriana:
Seeing an American president adore a Russian dictator (and other dictators as well) was a shock to me for the same reason — when I came, I expected this country to be the opposite of the Soviet Union. True, right away I was struck by something odd: in some ways the US and its ideal vision by Americans seemed like something from the magazine Soviet Life, which was all smiles and sanitized progress. But people also said, “This is a free country” — which I can't imagine Soviet citizens saying, and that was enough. Learning about checks and balances was beautiful. The bill of rights. those didn't seem to be lies, nor the President as the "leader of the free world." but now we happen to be caught in a nightmare that Shteyngart describes (weren't checks and balances supposed to protect us from that?), and some don't believe the nightmare will ever end.
*
RECOGNIZING THE REAL ROBERT E. LEE
~ “I’ve heard people say he was against slavery and treated his slaves with respect and kindness. In fact, he married into money and 200 slaves by betrothing George Washington’s great granddaughter. He promptly violated decades of tradition by breaking up slave families. Many of Lee’s slaves had expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, but Lee had the will interpreted in a way that kept them enslaved until a Virginia court forced their emancipation. They hated the man. He was kind and affable to his troops but he had a horrible temper. He personally whipped his slaves and on at least one occasion not only lacerated his slave to the bone, he ordered his overseer to scrub the man’s back with brine.
When he invaded the North, he captured free blacks and sent them into slavery. When his men murdered surrendering black soldiers in the Battle of the Crater, he failed to stop it; he failed to investigate it; he failed to reprimand any of his subordinates; and he even failed to ever write or speak of having any regret that it occurred. When the survivors were paraded through the streets and humiliated, he stood by in silence when he could have stopped it. His silence spoke volumes.
When Ulysses S. Grant offered to exchange prisoners, as long as captured black soldiers were freed as well, Lee refused, despite his desperate need for men, despite the fact that his men were suffering in Union camps, and despite the hardship of caring for tens of thousands of federal troops. Lee’s response; “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.”
After the war, Lee argued in favor of “disposing of” blacks from the south. Here is a quote from his private correspondence: “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”
While president of Washington College after the war, Lee turned a blind eye to his students forming their own KKK chapter, to the attempted abduction and rape of black female students from a nearby school, and to several attempted lynchings by his students.
Lee was a failed general, a cruel owner and tormentor of fellow human beings, and, yes, he was unquestionably a white supremacist.” ~
the statue of Lee being prepared for removal
*
THE HISTORY OF SOAP
~ Ancient Mesopotamians were first to produce a kind of soap by cooking fatty acids – like the fat rendered from a slaughtered cow, sheep or goat – together with water and an alkaline compound like lye, a caustic substance derived from wood ashes. The result was a greasy and smelly goop that lifted away dirt.
An early mention of soap comes in Roman scholar Pliny the Elder’s book “Naturalis Historia” from A.D. 77. He described soap as a pomade made of tallow – typically derived from beef fat – and ashes that the Gauls, particularly the men, applied to their hair to give it “a reddish tint.”
Ancient people used these early soaps to clean wool or cotton fibers before weaving them into cloth, rather than for human hygiene. Not even the Greeks and Romans, who pioneered running water and public baths, used soap to clean their bodies. Instead, men and women immersed themselves in water baths and then smeared their bodies with scented olive oils. They used a metal or reed scraper called a strigil to remove any remaining oil or grime.
By the Middle Ages, new vegetable-oil-based soaps, which were hailed for their mildness and purity and smelled good, had come into use as luxury items among Europe’s most privileged classes. The first of these, Aleppo soap, a green, olive-oil-based bar soap infused with aromatic laurel oil, was produced in Syria and brought to Europe by Christian crusaders and traders.
French, Italian, Spanish and eventually English versions soon followed. Of these, Jabon de Castilla, or Castile soap, named for the region of central Spain where it was produced, was the best known. The white, olive-oil-based bar soap was a wildly popular toiletry item among European royals. Castile soap became a generic term for any hard soap of this type.
The settlement of the American colonies coincided with an age (1500s-1700s) when most Europeans, whether privileged or poor, had turned away from regular bathing out of fear that water actually spread disease. Colonists used soap primarily for domestic cleaning, and soap-making was part of the seasonal domestic routine overseen by women.
As one Connecticut woman described it in 1775, women stored fat from butchering, grease from cooking and wood ashes over the winter months. In the spring, they made lye from the ashes and then boiled it with fat and grease in a giant kettle. This produced a soft soap that women used to wash the linen shifts that colonists wore as undergarments.
In the new nation, the founding of soap manufactories like New York-based Colgate, founded in 1807, or the Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, founded in 1837, increased the scale of soap production but did little to alter its ingredients or use. Middle-class Americans had resumed water bathing, but still shunned soap.
Soap-making remained an extension of the tallow trade that was closely allied with candle making. Soap itself was for laundry. At the first P&G factory, laborers used large cauldrons to boil down fat collected from homes, hotels and butchers to make the candles and soap they sold.
THE CIVIL WAR WAS THE WATERSHED. Thanks to reformers who touted regular washing with water and soap as a sanitary measure to aid the Union war effort, bathing for personal hygiene caught on. Demand for inexpensive toilet soaps increased dramatically among the masses.
Companies began to develop and market a variety of new products to consumers. In 1879, P&G introduced Ivory soap, one of the first perfumed toilet soaps in the U.S. B.J. Johnson Soap Company of Milwaukee followed with their own palm-and-olive-oil-based Palmolive soap in 1898. It was the world’s best-selling soap by the early 1900s.
Soap chemistry also began to change, paving the way for the modern era. At P&G, decades of laboratory experiments with imported coconut and palm oil, and then with domestically produced cottonseed oil, led to the discovery of hydrogenated fats in 1909. These solid, vegetable-based fats revolutionized soap by making its manufacture less dependent on animal byproducts.
Shortages of fats and oils for soap during World Wars I and II also led to the discovery of hydrogenated fats in 1909. These solid, vegetable-based fats revolutionized soap by making its manufacture less dependent on animal byproducts. Shortages of fats and oils for soap during World Wars I and II also led to the discovery of synthetic detergents as a “superior” substitute for fat-based laundry soaps, household cleaners and shampoos.
Today’s commercially manufactured soaps are highly specialized, lab-engineered products. Synthesized animal fats and plant-based oils and bases are combined with chemical additives, including moisturizers, conditioners, lathering agents, colors and scents, to make soaps more appealing to the senses. But they cannot fully mask its mostly foul ingredients, including shower gels’ petroleum-based contents.
As a 1947 history of P&G observed: “Soap is a desperately ordinary substance to us.” As unremarkable as it is during normal times, soap has risen to prominence during this pandemic. ~
Oriana:
Thanks
to the current pandemic, now people know that soap destroys viruses.
Soap has saved many lives, and continues to. The doctor who made his
hospital staff wash their hands was relentlessly persecuted by his
colleagues.
**
PLASTIC RAIN IS THE “NEW ACID RAIN”
~ Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.
Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it's shocking.”
It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.
Plastic rain could prove to be a more insidious problem than acid rain, which is a consequence of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. By deploying scrubbers in power plants to control the former, and catalytic converters in cars to control the latter, the US and other countries have over the last several decades cut down on the acidification problem. But microplastic has already corrupted even the most remote environments, and there’s no way to scrub water or land or air of the particles—the stuff is absolutely everywhere, and it’s not like there’s a plastic magnet we can drag through the oceans.
What makes plastic so useful—its hardiness—is what also makes it an alarming pollutant: Plastic never really goes away, instead breaking into ever smaller bits that infiltrate ever smaller corners of the planet. Even worse, plastic waste is expected to skyrocket from 260 million tons a year to 460 million tons by 2030, according to the consultancy McKinsey. More people joining the middle class in economically-developing countries means more consumerism and more plastic packaging.
Overall, the researchers found that a stunning 98 percent of samples collected over a year contained microplastic particles. On average, 4 percent of captured atmospheric particulates were actually synthetic polymers. The particles that fell in rain were larger than those deposited by wind—lighter particles are more easily caught up in air currents. Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. “I was just completely floored to see little brightly-colored pieces of plastic in nearly every single sample,” says Brahney. Plus, the team wasn't able to count clear or white particles and fibers with their equipment, so their tally is likely conservative.
Looking at the path of the storms that deposited the wet microplastic samples, Brahney and her colleagues were able to map how weather systems transport the particles. Winds, for instance, might kick up microplastic particles off the ground in an urban area and carry them downwind before forcing them to the surface once more. “Rain is very effective at scrubbing the atmosphere of everything that's in it,” says Brahney. “And so there could be a fair amount of dust and plastics in the atmosphere and a rainstorm will wash those out.” Microplastic particles could even be acting as condensation nuclei, bits of debris that attract water vapor to form a cloud.
The dry fallout, on the other hand, appears to be traveling longer distances. These particles’ smaller size indicates they’re more easily carried on winds for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles—consider that dust from the Sahara readily blows across the Atlantic and falls in the Amazon rainforest—instead of getting caught up in storms, a more regional phenomenon. And microplastics are probably traveling even farther than soil particles because they're far less dense.
“We saw relationships to the location of the jet stream, which implies that the air masses that are controlling deposition are really high in the atmosphere,” says Brahney. (In the US, the fast-moving jet stream runs from west to east across the continent.) This jibes with what other scientists are starting to see elsewhere around the world: Tiny pieces of plastic—largely synthetic fibers from clothes—are getting caught in the wind and spread far and wide, tainting formerly pristine habitats. For example, the cities of Europe seem to be seeding the Arctic with microplastic.
This new research comes with another troubling surprise: 30 percent of the sample particles were microbeads, tiny synthetic spheres that the United States banned from beauty products in 2015. The microbeads in the samples, though, were generally smaller than the ones you’d find in those products. “We did see a lot of brightly-colored microbeads, in all colors of the rainbow, and some of those we identified as acrylic,” says Brahney.
That leads the researchers to speculate that the microbeads are coming from industrial paints and coatings. If these are sprayed, they could easily spew the microbeads into the atmosphere, where they’d be picked up by winds and carried afar. If that’s indeed the case, the paint industry may be in for the same kind of microbead reckoning that sullied the beauty industry. Still, if one country bans microbeads in paints, the stuff could well blow in from a neighboring country.
More troubling still, microplastics eventually break into nanoplastics, bits so small that researchers may not be able to detect them without the right equipment. “I couldn't see anything smaller than four microns, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there,” says Brahney. “Just because we can't see them in front of us, doesn't mean we're not breathing them in.”
Scientists don't yet know what inhaling microbeads might mean for human health, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s not beneficial. Bits of plastic tend to leach their component chemicals over time, and have been known to transport microbes like viruses and bacteria.
Researchers are just beginning to explore what this means for other organisms: One study published earlier this year found that hermit crabs exposed to microplastics have difficulties choosing new shells as they grow, a particular problem since they need those shells to survive.
In the soils of America’s national parks, the arrival of plastics could have cascading effects. “These can not just block up the digestive tract of small animals, like worms,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Steve Allen, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “But it's also the chemicals that are on these plastics and in these plastics that can have an effect on the soil. A lot of that is still theoretical—we're still trying to work it out.”
Brahney and her colleagues note that microplastics may be changing the thermal properties of soil, for instance, altering how it absorbs and stores heat. They may also lead to the growth of more or less of the microbes that normally live there, rearranging communities and altering the way the dirt cycles nutrients. Microplastics may also change how water moves through these soils.
But setting these many remaining unknowns aside, this research puts in place a critical piece of the puzzle regarding the microplastic life cycle, which grows increasingly complex with each new study. Scientists have been trying to figure out what happens to the world’s plastic pollution, nearly all of which seems to “disappear” in the environment. But studies like this one are showing that the stuff never truly goes away, it just gets shredded into smaller bits that disperse all over the world, perhaps spending many years cycling through different systems—air, land, and sea.
Scientists have discovered, for instance, that currents are carrying microplastic particles into deep-sea ecosystems—when the currents slow, the suspended particles fall out and settle on the seafloor. “Deep sea currents basically behave in the same way as atmospheric currents do,” says University of Manchester earth scientist Ian Kane, who was lead author on that study, but wasn’t involved in this new work. “They're part of a global recirculation pattern, and the particles are transported according to the shape and the density. And so it's the same process. What these authors found is that the heavier particles tended to fall out in the wet conditions.”
Other research published last month by Steve Allen and his spouse Deonie Allen, also a microplastic researcher University of Strathclyde, found that the oceans are burping up microplastic particles, which then float onshore on sea breezes. Previously, it was believed that when microplastics flowed into the sea via wastewater, they’d stay there. So it may also turn out that microplastics landing on soil are also not staying put. “It may not be static,” says Deonie Allen. “It's not going to just sit. Some of it ends up going down through our water table, some of it moves because of erosion, or gets rereleased back into the atmosphere.”
There’s still much that science has to learn about this microplastic cycle, but this much is clear: There’ll be no putting the plastic back in the bottle. ~
Oriana:
You’re probably thinking: Oh, no, one more thing to worry about — one more way we’re destroying the earth. I put my hope in the eventual decrease of the human population — though I know it won’t happen in my lifetime. Two billion people would probably be a sustainable number . . .
Meanwhile, let’s look at the virtues of old-fashioned ways. For instance, soap can still be bought in bars — or one can buy a plastic pump-dispenser. True, the latter is a convenience — but, ultimately, at what price? Or take cotton — so good and breathable, unlike polyester. I hated the 100% polyester gowns and bedsheets in the hospital. But, as with “heart-healthy” diet, so many daily practices are all wrong: bad for health, and bad for the planet.
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CELEBRATING THE HUMAN VERSUS DOSTOYEVSKY’S CHOICE BETWEEN CHRIST AND TRUTH
~ “[Dostoyevski] was never able to resolve the contradiction contained in his statement on the choice between Christ and truth,” Milosz writes in “The Land of Ulro.” Milosz is referring here to the startling sentence in one of Dostoyevsky’s letters: “If I had to choose between Christ and the truth, I would let go of the truth.” ~
And yet Dostoyevsky never provided an adequate rational counter-response to Ivan’s arguments. In fact the writer boasted that no one had presented the case for atheism as eloquently as he did through the mouth of Ivan Karamazov. True, there were supposed to be two additional volumes of the trilogy. Only the first volume was meant to belong to Ivan. But ultimately that first volume is all we have, and the scene between the proto-Communist Grand Inquisitor and the silent, non-interfering Christ (and, in the background, an absent god) remains one of the great scenes in all of literature.
I guess it was too early in the history of ideas for D to see that there is no need to believe in Christ (by which I mean a historical Jesus who was also the second person of the Trinity) in order to preserve both moral values and some significant degree of freedom from oppression by state and/or church. The term “Christ Consciousness” wasn’t yet in the air. To me that phrase implies the ethics of compassion, non-judgment, and non-revenge.
Belief in the supernatural need not enter here at all. To me a kind person who believes in the value of kindness is more admirable than someone who is motivated by the supernatural carrot and stick of heaven and hell.
In fact it is sad to remember a minister’s objection to the idea of doing away with hell: “That would take away anyone’s motivation to follow Christ.” I think it’s precisely the threat of hell that weakens the appeal of Christianity. \
I am reminded of Ginette Paris, author of “The Wisdom of the Psyche.” She states, “It is still early after the death of god” — meaning we are still developing a secular worldview, still trying to find our way. A variety of truths (or call them “perspectives”) rather than a single “truth” have emerged. We can take what is best in several religious traditions and leave the rest.
The way the brain works, it’s virtually impossible to let go of the truth — once a particular truth is clearly perceived. We can hold on to truth as we see it — e.g. all religions are mythologies — and still find the ideal of Christian ethics inspiring.
It wouldn't surprise me if a secular fusion of Christianity and Buddhism became dominant in the future. Of course it’s always risky to make predictions. But the balance seems to be shifting toward human empowerment and an ever-wider recognition of human dignity as opposed to seeing humans as inherently weak, evil, “fallen” and due to the Original Sin ruled by Satan etc, and thus in need of supernatural salvation. Compared with the previous centuries, the quality of life has improved for many, allowing the growth of a new awareness: we can cope.
I chose the image for this post, a Virgin and Child by Michiel Sittow (an Estonian painter of the Flemish School), 1489, not because of the apple, which is probably meant to symbolize the Forbidden Fruit, but because Baby Jesus is reaching for his big toe, an endearing human detail. This is a real baby. I think humanism started with the painters celebrating the human.
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“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?” Job 38:22-23
Oriana:
Hail used as missiles! Being stored in a celestial storehouse for use in battle! How did I miss it until now . . . I realize of course that Israel had scant experience of snow and hail.
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“Whether there is a God is not the issue. The issue is people pretending they speak on God’s behalf.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
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COVID AND BLOOD TYPE
~ Variations at two spots in the human genome are associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid-19, the researchers found. One of these spots includes the gene that determines blood types.
Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study.
The study was equally striking for the genes that failed to turn up. The coronavirus attaches to a protein called ACE2 on the surface of human cells in order to enter them, for example. But genetic variants in ACE2 did not appear to make a difference in the risk of severe Covid-19.
The findings suggest that relatively unexplored factors may be playing a large role who develops life-threatening Covid-19. Scientists have already determined that factors like age and underlying disease put people at extra risk of developing a severe case of Covid-19. But geneticists are hoping that a DNA test might help identify patients who will need aggressive treatment.
The scientists were looking for spots in the genome, called loci, where an unusually high number of the severely ill patients shared the same variants, compared with those who were not ill.
Two loci turned up. In one of these sites is the gene that determines our blood type. That gene directs production of a protein that places molecules on the surface of blood cells.
It’s not the first time Type A blood has turned up as a possible risk. Chinese scientists who examined patient blood types also found that those with Type A were more likely to develop a serious case of Covid-19.
No one knows why. While Dr. Franke was comforted by the support from the Chinese study, he could only speculate how blood types might affect the disease. “That is haunting me, quite honestly,” he said.
He also noted that the locus where the blood-type gene is situated also contains a stretch of DNA that acts as an on-off switch for a gene producing a protein that triggers strong immune responses.
The coronavirus triggers an overreaction of the immune system in some people, leading to massive inflammation and lung damage — the so-called cytokine storm. It is theoretically possible that genetic variations influence that response.
A second locus, on Chromosome 3, shows an even stronger link to Covid-19, Dr. Franke and his colleagues found. But that spot is home to six genes, and it is not yet possible to say which of them influences the course of Covid-19.
One of those gene candidates encodes a protein known to interact with ACE2, the cellular receptor needed by the coronavirus to enter host cells. But another gene nearby encodes a potent immune-signaling molecule. It is possible that this immune gene also triggers an overreaction that leads to respiratory failure.
Dr. Franke and his colleagues are part of an international effort called the Covid-19 Host Genetics Initiative.
A thousand researchers in 46 countries are collecting DNA samples from people with the disease. They are now beginning to post data on the initiative’s website.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/health/coronavirus-blood-type-genetics.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR30834oYuU9GpfR6RguuwPxE841KKi1XLnYJ3TAqat7McG194vOHUM3KV0
THIS IS NOT THE LAST PANDEMIC
~ "In the last 20 years, we've had six significant threats - SARS, MERS, Ebola, avian influenza and swine flu," Prof Matthew Baylis from the University of Liverpool told BBC News. "We dodged five bullets but the sixth got us.
"And this is not the last pandemic we are going to face, so we need to be looking more closely at wildlife disease."
Many scientists agree that our behavior - particularly deforestation and our encroachment on diverse wildlife habitats - is helping diseases to spread from animals into humans more frequently.
According to Prof Kate Jones from University College London, evidence "broadly suggests that human-transformed ecosystems with lower biodiversity, such as agricultural or plantation landscapes, are often associated with increased human risk of many infections".
"That's not necessarily the case for all diseases," she added. "But the kinds of wildlife species that are most tolerant of human disturbance, such as certain rodent species, often appear to be more effective at hosting and transmitting pathogens.
"So biodiversity loss can create landscapes that increase risky human-wildlife contact and increase the chances of certain viruses, bacteria and parasites spilling over into people."
In first outbreak of Nipah virus in 1999 in Malaysia, a viral infection - carried by fruit bats - spilled over into a large pig farm built at the edge of a forest. Wild fruit bats fed on the fruit trees and the pigs munched on half-eaten fruit that fell from the trees and was covered in bat saliva.
More than 250 people who worked in close contact with the infected pigs caught the virus. More than 100 of those people died. The case fatality rate of the coronavirus is still emerging, but current estimates put it at around 1%. Nipah virus kills 40-75% of people it infects.
Prof Eric Fevre from the University of Liverpool and the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, says researchers need to be on constant watch in areas where there is a higher risk of disease outbreaks.
Farms on the edge of forests, markets where animals are bought and sold - all are blurred boundaries between humans and wildlife, and places where diseases are more likely to emerge.
"We need to be constantly on the look-out at these interfaces and have systems in place to respond if we see anything unusual", like a sudden disease outbreak in a particular location.
"New diseases pop-up in the human population probably three to four times per year," Prof Fevre said. "It's not just in Asia or Africa, but in Europe and the US as well."
Matthew Baylis added that this ongoing surveillance for new disease is increasingly important. "We've created almost a perfect storm here for the emergence of pandemics," he told BBC News.
Prof Fevre agreed. "This kind of event is likely to happen again and again," he said.
"It's been happening all throughout our interaction with the natural world. What's important now is how we understand it and respond to it. ~
Mary:
We seem to be gradually learning about covid-19 and its actions, their range, their targets, and their severity. I can only hope this gives us some effective strategies to use againt it, before too many more are lost. I wish the learning curve was steeper, closer to a real cure, effective treatment, or prevention. We've known for a while that "progress" in terms of new roads into what was wilderness, populations shifting and engaging in long-distance travel and migration, living in close proximity to animals...all can invite the mutations that allow a pathogen to infect another species. What we need to know is the means of limiting and preventing these scourges, which seem to be increasing in severity and complexity. It's a race for survival, and who will win is still completely up for grabs.
Oriana:
If we survive as a species, it will be thanks to scientists — and hopefully more people will see the value of science and medical technology. By medical technology I don’t mean ventilators; I mean rather the humble oximeter which can tell an infected person when to seek medical help early enough so a ventilator (practically a death sentence for older patients) won’t be needed. And we know that later in the illness there is a need to rein in the immune system so it doesn’t kill us via a “cytokine storm,” and this is where anti-inflammatory steroids, such as dexamethasone, come to the rescue. Practically every week, we are learning something of use.
We seem to be gradually learning about covid-19 and its actions, their range, their targets, and their severity. I can only hope this gives us some effective strategies to use againt it, before too many more are lost. I wish the learning curve was steeper, closer to a real cure, effective treatment, or prevention. We've known for a while that "progress" in terms of new roads into what was wilderness, populations shifting and engaging in long-distance travel and migration, living in close proximity to animals...all can invite the mutations that allow a pathogen to infect another species. What we need to know is the means of limiting and preventing these scourges, which seem to be increasing in severity and complexity. It's a race for survival, and who will win is still completely up for grabs.
Oriana:
If we survive as a species, it will be thanks to scientists — and hopefully more people will see the value of science and medical technology. By medical technology I don’t mean ventilators; I mean rather the humble oximeter which can tell an infected person when to seek medical help early enough so a ventilator (practically a death sentence for older patients) won’t be needed. And we know that later in the illness there is a need to rein in the immune system so it doesn’t kill us via a “cytokine storm,” and this is where anti-inflammatory steroids, such as dexamethasone, come to the rescue. Practically every week, we are learning something of use.
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DR. FAUCI’S LATEST PRONOUNCEMENT ON COVID-19
“In a period of four months, it [covid-19] has devastated the whole world,” Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Tuesday during a conference held by BIO, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. “And it isn’t over yet.”
Although he had known that an outbreak like this could occur, one aspect has surprised him, he said, and that is “how rapidly it just took over the planet.”
Vaccines are widely regarded as the best hope of stopping or at least slowing the pandemic, and Dr. Fauci said he was “almost certain” that more than one would be successful. Several are already being tested in people, and at least one is expected to move into large Phase 3 trials in July.
He said that he had spent much of his career studying H.I.V., and that the disease it causes is “really simple compared to what’s going on with Covid-19.”
The differences, he said, include Covid’s broad range of severity, from no symptoms at all to critical illness and death, with lung damage, intense immune responses and clotting disorders that have caused strokes even in young people, as well as a separate inflammatory syndrome causing severe illness in some children.
Another looming question, he said, is whether survivors who were seriously ill will fully recover.
He described the pandemic as “shining a very bright light on something we’ve known for a very long time” — the health disparities and the harder impact of many illnesses on people of color, particularly African-Americans.
The coronavirus has been a “double whammy” for black people, he said, first because they are more likely to be exposed to the disease by way of their employment in jobs that cannot be done remotely. Second, they are more vulnerable to severe illness from the coronavirus because they have higher rates of underlying conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and chronic lung disease.”
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DON’T DROP THE PRECAUTIONS
~ “superspreader events,” like parties, concerts and restaurant meals, where multiple people get sick. Such events may account for 80 percent of all transmissions, research suggests.
One crucial caveat is that the virus will outlast the summer — everywhere. During the 1918-19 flu, transmission rates fell in the warmer months, only to soar again in the fall. “People thought it was over,” as Apoorva Mandavilli, a science reporter at The Times, said, “and stopped taking precautions.”
(from the New York Times Thursday [6-11] briefing)
Oriana:
I'm so glad that now we know about the protective effects of vitamin K against viruses in general and for lung protection. Certain unexpected drugs work too to fight the coronavirus — who knew about Pepcid? And we are learning more and more about what works to minimize contagion — outdoors is safest (wind), but don’t go into enclosed, crowded spaces.
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ending on beauty:
The last words the sea spoke
before it died, the last sigh
of the great wind that blew
before we were born, the last
light that dawns on the hill
of our dying, skull hill we
would call it.
~ Philip Levine, A Sign
Traditional site of Golgotha, within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
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