La Jument ("the mare") is the name of a lighthouse at the Northwestern part of France, Brittany. The lighthouse is built on a rock (that is also called La Jument) about 300 metres from the coast of the island of Ushant, which marks the north-westernmost point of metropolitan France. Photo by Jean Guichard*
We were thirty-one souls all, he said, on the gray-sick of sea
in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.
By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,
all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.
We could still float, we said, from war to war.
What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?
City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields
of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,
with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.
If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.
There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters
from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under
the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.
But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night
we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-
down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.
After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain
of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?
We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans
again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised
to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive
but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
~ Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World
Aleppo, 2016Oriana:
Political poems can be too didactic and simplistic. this one adds a mythical layer and is just altogether better, more universal. I, for one, can't help but think of this boatman as Charon, who ferried the shades of the dead across the Styx, after having collected the fare, a small coin the living put under their tongue. If I may quote from one of my poems, Charon’s gift:
But whose face is on those coins?
Everyone’s, he says, everyone’s.
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What the poem also has going for it is the evocation of solidarity and friendship and hope at the very end:
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
Here we have both Charon the ferryman to the land of the dead, and a typical-enough refugee, trying to eek out a living by driving a taxi. In terms of both the personal humiliation (the refugee might be a former lawyer or another professional, his expertise useless now), and in terms of the darkness of the times, it's the “end of the world.” The refugee-creating war is both specific (Syria), and and unending warfare in the history of humanity. Those fleeing from a city in flames could as well be the inhabitants of Troy or Warsaw. The task of poetry is to show them as human.
That very act of presenting someone not as enemy or “the other,” but as a human being, restores the hope that hatred shall not prevail — that we can all live safely in the world.
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What the poem also has going for it is the evocation of solidarity and friendship and hope at the very end:
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
Here we have both Charon the ferryman to the land of the dead, and a typical-enough refugee or recent immigrant, trying to eek out a living by driving a taxi. The refugee-creating war is both specific (Syria), and and unending warfare in the history of humanity. Those fleeing from a city in flames could as well be the inhabitants of Troy or Warsaw. The task of poetry is to show them as human, as part of the family.
That very act of presenting someone not as enemy or “the other,” but as a human being, restores the hope that hatred shall not prevail — that we can all live safely in the world.
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I think of some of Forché’s poems as Kafka thought of books: in order to enlarge our empathy, they shake us out of our comfortable apathy and make us suffer.
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THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS
~ Those with high literary standards have often enjoyed Dickens against their better judgment. AN Wilson confesses that he has read Dickens with “obsessive rapture” since his childhood, but had to overcome the presumption, later educated into him, that his writing was insufficiently deep or sophisticated. “The death of Paul Dombey is so schmaltzy that we simply refuse to be moved, but then, damn it, we read and the tears well down our cheeks.” For Wilson, Dickens is an irresistible performer. One chapter of his book is devoted to “The Mystery of the Public Readings”, in which Dickens drove himself to near collapse (and made huge amounts of money) by touring America as well as Britain to perform readings from his work. In 1869, he had a stroke on stage in Chester, but still refused to stop the readings, partly because of the money but mostly because he was addicted to the instant responsiveness of his audience.
The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself – some yen for sexual violence – on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. Wilson’s book is, you might say, bio-critical: “Dickens’s novels tell the story over and over again of his divided self,” he writes. The secrets of his life lie on the surface of his fiction. The dust jacket proclaims that the book goes “beyond standard narrative biography”. Which is to say that The Mystery of Charles Dickens does not reveal anything the previous biographers have not told us (indeed, it is conscientiously reliant on a small number of secondary sources). Instead, it shows, by a mixture of rational inference and I-feel-it-in-my-bones intuition, how the most powerful aspects of Dickens’s fiction drew on the most painful and secret aspects of his life.
The biggest secret of Dickens’s life, of course, was his clandestine relationship with Ellen (“Nelly”) Ternan, the young actor whom he first met when she performed at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in The Frozen Deep, a play that he had written with his friend Wilkie Collins, and in which he himself was acting. She was 18; he was 45. For the next 13 years, Dickens paid for her to live in a series of discreetly located residences, where he would secretly visit her. The last of these was Windsor Lodge in Peckham, then a pleasant village outside London, with a railway station on the line from Dickens’s Kent home.
Each chapter of Wilson’s book is a different “Mystery”, the first being what happened to most of the £22 for which Dickens cashed a cheque on the day before his death. Dickens must have given it to Nelly for housekeeping. Which means that he must have made a quick trip to Peckham and that the “seizure” that killed him must have been induced by some hyper-energetic sex with her. Which means that hasty measures must have been taken to heave the dying novelist into a carriage to be driven back to his Kent home. “Exit Nelly, stage left.” (This enjoyable fiction, which has been hazarded by others before Wilson, is partly withdrawn near the end of the book.)
Next is “The Mystery of his Childhood”. Wilson is hardly the first to suggest that Dickens’s fiction was shaped by what he calls “the grotesquely sad galanty show of his childhood”. He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors’ prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. There is less stress than usual on the improvidence of Dickens’s father, John Dickens (whose self-relishing orotundity at least inspired the matchless idiolect of Mr Micawber). Instead, Dickens blamed his mother. The ludicrous (Mrs Nickleby) or monstrous (Mrs Clennam) mothers in his novels bear the imprint of “the deepest needs of mother-hate”. Wilson asserts that “his flawed relationship with his mother is the defining feature, of the man and of his art”. Yet his privations made him a great novelist. The Blacking warehouse “saved Dickens the novelist, just as grammar school and Cambridge would have destroyed him”.
Then there is “The Mystery of the Cruel Marriage”. Nothing has more tainted Dickens’s reputation than his public repudiation (via an advertisement in the Times) of his wife, Kate, who had borne him 10 children and suffered all his demands for 22 years. Wilson’s house, he tells us, overlooks the back garden of 70 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, whence Catherine Dickens was exiled, with the company of only one of her children, Charley, their eldest son. The others were forbidden to see her. We have found out recently that Dickens tried to have her certified insane, so that she would be put in an asylum. Not only did he want to be free to pursue an affair with Nelly Ternan, he wanted somehow to declare that it was all his blameless wife’s fault. He was the wounded party.
But all the fury and resentment that he felt towards first his mother, and then his wife, inspired his greatest fiction, Wilson thinks. We should be grateful that he was so screwed up. Great Expectations, he believes, was a masterpiece of self-torment, formed from his own ruthlessness, his hunger for money and status, his family hatreds – all handed down to the novel’s narrator, Pip. “A helpful course of cognitive therapy, such as our contemporaries would have urged on a middle-aged man who had just visited such absolute mayhem on his wife and children” would have destroyed his creativity. Just as Pip owed his fortune to a violent criminal, Magwitch, its author owed his lucrative brilliance to “a secret, violent criminal”: himself. Or rather, the dark and nasty secret self that he never consciously acknowledged.
Wilson concedes all the contradictions and hypocrisies anatomized by John Carey in his brilliant, often openly exasperated study of Dickens, The Violent Effigy – but forgives him. Dickens had to contend with the “vast, smoky, cruel, boundlessly energetic, steel-hearted nineteenth century”, which made him variously cruel and sentimental. He was, after all, a nobody, who had grown up “with nuffink”. Alone among all great writers of the 19th century, he had “not merely looked over into the abyss. He had lived in it.”
If you are a Dickens aficionado, you will think that much of the book’s biographical narrative is well-known material, though here revisited in a sprightly manner. Yet its last, highly personal section suddenly shifts your sense of Wilson’s commitment to his subject. In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”. The teacher who introduced him to Dickens was himself utterly sinister and Dickensian, the skill with which he impersonated Fagin and Squeers “all too convincing”.
The shards of Dickens sustained his spirits among the privations and abuse visited on him by the pedophile headmaster and his monstrous wife, uninhibited sadists in Wilson’s vivid, detailed account. After this, nothing would convince him that Dickens should be condescended to as insufficiently “realistic”. And in returning him to the “abject terror and hopelessness” of childhood, but with that strange Dickensian stir of laughter (Fagin and Squeers, those comic turns), the novelist, hypocritical and self-deceiving as he might have been, has done him some matchless kindness.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/03/the-mystery-of-charles-dickens-by-an-wilson-review-a-great-writers-dark-side
Oriana:
On the other hand, Dickens was one of the first to oppose the death penalty. Not surprisingly, he campaigned against child labor. His novels often highlight child abuse.
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~ Dickens’ contributions to child welfare are perhaps nowhere better captured than in these words of British actor Simon Callow, who wrote of him:
“The reason I love [Dickens] so deeply is that, having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and in his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, by giving the dispossessed a voice. From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it, as do I.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fully-human/201912/charles-dickens-savior-children
Mary:
It is important to remember that Dickens was a popular writer, his work intended for mass consumption, his livelihood dependent on pleasing and engaging a large readership. His work can be mawkishly sentimental, and yet irresistible. And he has a range — comedy and satire, pathos, suspense, tragedy — and a keen eye for the worst injustices he opens for all to see. I cannot excuse his bad behavior to his wife, but am less interested in judging his personal worthiness than in the work he left behind.
And I would differ with Wilson about Dickens' "innate cruelty" and "mother hate." It seems to me much of his work involves the question of parents and parenting — there are so many orphans, whose mothers and fathers are absent or unavailable, and who are always in search of home and parents, or who have “parents” that fail them, hurt them, or simply go unrecognized until the orphan learns enough to see their value. Nancy is a kind of substitute mother for Oliver Twist, as Fagin and Sykes are monstrous fathers. Pip has the criminal Magwitch and Joe both in the roles of fathers, neither of which he truly sees or understands until he has lived through and lost his selfish and mistaken ideas about worth and value. Here Pip is the cruel one, a kind of match for Estella's vanity and baseless pride in her own estate . The cruel stepmothers here are Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham. While we eventually come to see Mrs. Joe more kindly, after she has been assaulted, Miss Havisham is the very worst of monster mothers, deliberately manipulating and twisting Estella to use her as an instrument of revenge, without caring how that will destroy and embitter Estella's life. And of course we are also shown Estella's biological mother, the murderess, as if to ask — what is worse here, what is criminal, even when not recognized as such by the world? Has Estella been 'saved' only to be ruined by her saviors?
These are only a few of Dickens' difficult parents. There is the improvident (and sublime) Micawber, Little Dorrit's terrible father, who devours her life with his own irresponsibility, David Copperfield's eccentric Aunt Betsy who manages to do everything right out of the most bizarre attitudes and ideas, ...and the loving, good parents, like Peggoty, Biddy, or David Copperfield's mother, who are too removed, by death, distance, or the child's own rejection, to rescue and protect the child.
Dickens was a comic genius, and his characters, almost caricatures, are irresistible and unforgettable — they seem real and true to life even in their exaggeration. They are types, like the figures in a medieval morality play, but so specific, so recognizable, so realized, they become icons, and a way to understand the human world. Seeing Pickwick, Micawber, Miss Havisham, Sykes, Wemmick and the Aged P, Uriah Heep, etc. we see ourselves more clearly, and, I would think, more generously, the comic and tragic infusing and containing each other.
I guess what I'm saying is the art is more than the artist's autobiography. And it is that "more" I'm more interested in.
Oriana:
One of the most striking things about Dickens is the orphans and the atrocious parents and parent figures. Thanks for bringing Miss Havisham back to me — she was the first Dickensian character I met in the original English, during one of my dull English lessons in Warsaw. That particular lesson was unforgettable — out of hundreds, that one alone.
Dickens never forgave his mother for wanting him to work in the blacking factory beyond the time of the absolute financial need — again, the parent’s selfishness and willingness to sacrifice the child’s needs. That “mother hate.” along with a longing for a nurturing, angelic mother, may have influenced Dickens — but I agree that his writing goes far beyond his childhood experiences. He was a great observer of men and women around him, his inexhaustible material. To be sure, something had to wound him into greatness, and the amount of cruelty in his novels does give us a pause — but his wide range of characters obviously goes beyond his parents.
As for the cruelty, it was all around him. And within him? Yes, but then all literary writing comes from both the without and within, the crazy brew of good and evil in the world and inside our psyche.
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“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.” ~ Beckett, Endgame
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“Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.” ~ Lev Tolstoy
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CONSCIOUSNESS AS “PHYSICS FROM THE INSIDE”: CHRISTOF KOCH
You’ve said you always loved dogs. Did growing up with a dog lead to your fascination with consciousness?
I’ve wondered about dogs since early childhood. I grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family, and I asked my father and then my priest, “Why don’t dogs go to heaven?” That never made sense to me. They’re like us in certain ways. They don’t talk, but they obviously have strong emotions of love and fear, hate and excitement, of happiness. Why couldn’t they be resurrected at the end of time?
Are scientific attitudes about animal consciousness simplistic?
The fact is, I don’t even know that you’re conscious. The only thing I know beyond any doubt—and this is one of the central insights of Western philosophy—is Cogito ergo sum. What Descartes meant is the only thing I’m absolutely sure of is my own consciousness. I assume you’re conscious because your behavior is similar to mine, and I could see your brain if I put you in an MRI scanner. When you have a patient who’s locked-in, who can’t talk to me, I have to infer it. The same with animals. I can see they’re afraid when it’s appropriate to be afraid, and they display all the behavioral traits of being afraid, including the release of hormones in their bloodstream. If you look at a piece of dog brain or mouse brain and compare that to a piece of human brain the same size, only an expert with a microscope can tell for sure that this is a dog brain or a human brain. You really have to be an expert neuroanatomist.
What do you mean when you say “it feels like something?”
It feels like something to be you. I can’t describe it to you if you’re a zombie. If you were born blind, I can never describe what it means to see colors. You are simply unable to comprehend that. So it is with consciousness. It’s impossible to describe it unless you have it. And we have these states of consciousness unless we are deeply asleep or anesthetized or in a coma. In fact, it’s impossible not to be conscious of something. Even if you wake up discombobulated in a dark hotel room, you’re jet-lagged and your eyes are still closed, you are already there. Before there was just nothing, nada, rien. Then slowly some of your brain boots up and you realize, “Oh, I’m here. I’m in Beijing and I flew in last night.” The difference between nothing and something is a base-level consciousness.
Is this self-awareness?
It’s even much simpler. I might not even know who I am when I’m waking up. It takes time to boot up and realize who you are, where you are, what time of day it is. First, you open your eyes and just see darkness. Darkness is different from nothing. It’s not that I see darkness behind my head; I just don’t see at all. That’s what consciousness is. It’s a basic feeling.
. . .
We also know Neanderthals had bigger brains than the Homo sapiens who lived near them in Europe. Yet we survived and they didn’t.
Their brain was maybe 10 percent larger than our brain. We don’t know why we survived. Did we just outbreed them? Were we more aggressive? There’s some research showing that dogs play a role here. At the same time when Homo neanderthalensis became extinct—around 35,000 years ago—Homo sapiens domesticated the wolf and they became the two apex hunters. Homo sapiens and wolves/dogs started to collaborate. We became this ultra-efficient hunting cooperative because we now had the ability to be much more efficient at hunting down prey over long distances and exhausting them. So the creature with the larger brain didn’t survive and the one with the smaller brain did.
Why were humans able to create civilizations that have transformed the planet?
We don’t have a precise answer. We have big brains and are, by some measure, the most intelligent species, at least in the short term. We’ll see whether we’ll actually survive in the long term, given our propensity for mass violence. And we’ve manipulated the planet to such an extent that we are now talking about entering a new geological age, the Anthropocene.
But it’s unclear why whales or dolphins—some of which have bigger brains and more neurons in their cortex than we do—why they are not called smarter or more successful. Maybe because they have flippers and live in the ocean, which is a relatively static environment. With flippers, you’re unable to build sophisticated tools. Of course, human civilization is all about tools, whether it’s a little stone, an arrow, a bomb, or a computer.
So hands are crucial for their ability to manipulate tools.
You need not only a brain, but also hands that can manipulate the environment. Otherwise, you can think about the world but you can’t act upon it. That’s probably why this particular species of primate excelled and took over the planet.
There are fascinating questions about how deep consciousness goes. You’ve embraced the old philosophy of panpsychism. Isn’t this the idea that everything in nature has some degree of consciousness or mind?
Yes, there’s this ancient belief in panpsychism: “Pan” meaning “every,” “psyche” meaning “soul.” There are different versions of it depending on which philosophical or religious tradition you follow, but basically it meant that everything is ensouled. Now, I don’t believe that a stone is ensouled or a planet is ensouled. But if you take a more conceptual approach to consciousness, the evidence suggests there are many more systems that have consciousness—possibly all animals, all unicellular bacteria, and at some level maybe even individual cells that have an autonomous existence. We might be surrounded by consciousness everywhere and find it in places where we don’t expect it because our intuition says we’ll only see it in people and maybe monkeys and also dogs and cats. But we know our intuition is fallible, which is why we need science to tell us what the actual state of the universe is.
Most scientists would dismiss panpsychism as ancient mythology. Why does this idea resonate for you?
It’s terribly elegant in its simplicity. You don’t say consciousness only exists if you have more than 42 neurons or 2 billion neurons or whatever. Instead, the system is conscious if there’s a certain type of complexity. And we live in a universe where certain systems have consciousness. It’s inherent in the design of the universe. Why is that so? I don’t know. Why does the universe follow the laws of quantum mechanics? I don’t know. Can I imagine a universe where the laws of quantum mechanics don’t hold? Yes, but I don’t happen to live in such a universe, so I believe our universe has certain types of complexity and a system that gives rise to consciousness. Suddenly the world is populated by entities that have conscious awareness, and that one simple principle leads to a number of very counterintuitive predictions that can, in principle, be verified.
So it all comes down to how complex the system is? And for the human brain, how its neurons and synapses are wired together?
It comes down to the circuitry of the brain. We know that most organs in your body do not give rise to consciousness. Your liver, for example, is very complicated, but it doesn’t seem to have any feelings. We also know that consciousness does not require your entire brain. You can lose 80 percent of your neurons. You can lose the little brain at the back of your brain called the cerebellum.
Yet the cerebellum has everything you expect of neurons. It has gorgeous neurons. In fact, some of the most beautiful neurons in the brain, so-called Purkinje cells, are found in the cerebellum. Why does the cerebellum not contribute to consciousness? It has a very repetitive and monotonous circuitry. It has 69 billion neurons, but they have simple feed-forward loops. So I believe the way the cerebellum is wired up does not give rise to consciousness. Yet another part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, seems to be wired up in a much more complicated way. We know it’s really the cortex that gives rise to conscious experience.
It sounds like you’re saying our intelligence comes from this wiring, not from some special substance in the neurons. Could a conscious system be made of something totally different?
That’s correct. There’s nothing inherently magical about the human brain. It obeys all the laws of physics like everything else in the universe. There isn’t anything supernatural that’s added to my brain or my cortex that gives rise to a conscious experience.
Remind us what the Fermi paradox is.
We have yet to detect a single intelligent species, even though we know there are probably trillions of planets. Why is that? Well, one explanation is it’s just extremely unlikely for life to arise and we’re the only one. But I think a more likely possibility is that any time you get life that’s sufficiently complex, with advanced technology, it has somehow managed to annihilate itself, either by nuclear war or by the rise of machines.
You are a pessimist! You really think any advanced civilization is going to destroy itself?
If it’s very aggressive like ours and it’s based in technology. You can imagine other civilizations that are not nearly as aggressive and live more in harmony with themselves and nature. Some people have thought of it as a bottleneck. As soon as you develop technology to escape the boundary of the planet, there’s an argument that civilization will also develop computers and nuclear fusion and fission. Then the question is, can it grow up? Can it become a full-grown, mature adult without killing itself?
Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.
No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.
It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.
It sounds like you lost your religious faith as you learned about science.
I lost my religious faith as I matured. I still look fondly back upon it. I still love the religious music of Bach. I still get this feeling of awe. In a cathedral, I can get a feeling of luminosity out of the numinous. When I’m on a mountain top, when I hear a dog howling, I still wake up some mornings and say, “I’m amazed that I exist. I’m amazed there is this world.” But you can get that without being a Catholic.
Does that experience of awe or the numinous feel religious?
Not in a traditional sense. I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.
A few years ago, you and some other scientists spent a week with the Dalai Lama. Was that a meaningful experience?
Yes, it was. There were thousands of monks in the Drepung Monastery who were listening to our exchange. This particular Tibetan Buddhist tradition is quite fascinating. I’m not a scholar of it, but they view the mind primarily from an interior perspective. They’ve developed very sophisticated ways of analyzing it that are different from our way. We take the external way of Western science, which is independent of the observer. But ultimately, we’re trying to approach the same thing. We’re trying to approach this phenomenon of conscious experience. They have no trouble with the idea of evolution and other creatures being sentient. I found that very heartening—in particular the Dalai Lama’s insistence on the primacy of science. I asked him, “What happens if science is in conflict with certain tenets of Buddhist faith?” He laughed and said, “Well, if this belief doesn’t accord with what science ultimately discovers about the universe, then we have to throw it out.”
But the Dalai Lama believes in reincarnation.
We talked about that. In fact, I said, “Well, I’m really sorry, Your Holiness, but I think we just have to agree that Western science shows that if there’s no physical carrier, you’re not going to get a mind. You’re not going to get memory because you need some mechanism to retain the memory.” I asked him, “Were you not reincarnated from the previous Dalai Lama?” And he just laughed and said, “Well, I don’t remember anything about that anymore.”
Has this scientific knowledge helped you sort out the deep existential questions about meaning, about why we’re here?
My last book is titled Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. I’m a reductionist because I do what scientists do. I take a complex phenomenon and try to pull it apart and reduce it to something at a lower level. I’m also romantic in the sense that I believe I can decipher the distant contrails of meanings. I find myself in a universe that seems to be conducive to life—the Anthropic Principle. And for reasons I don’t understand, I also find myself in a universe that became conscious, ultimately reflecting upon itself. Who knows what might happen in the future if we continue to evolve without destroying ourselves? To what extent can we become conscious of the universe as a whole?
I don’t know who put all of this in motion. It’s certainly not the almighty God I was raised with. It’s a god that resides in this mystical notion of all-nothingness. I’m not a mystic. I’m a scientist. But this is a feeling I have. I find myself in a wonderful universe with a very positive and romantic outlook on life. If only we humans could make a better job of getting along with each other.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-spiritual-reductionist-consciousness-of-christof-koch?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Christof Koch
Oriana:
“Consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology.” Physics from the inside — an amazing definition (of sorts) of consciousness!
Even though Koch quotes "I think therefore I am," he is closer to defining consciousness in terms of "it feels like something" — "I sense, therefore I am."
I like what he says about the concept of the soul: ”this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.”
It's interesting that his childhood love of dogs has colored his future thinking as a neuroscientist.
Koch’s latest book is The Feeling of Life Itself - Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can't be Computed, The MIT Press, (2019)
Mary:
Sometimes I think we cannot even be sure of our own consciousness. I say this in relation to an experience that happened 40 years ago, that I have been unable to resolve. Suffering from an intractable depression nothing seemed to touch, I was given a series of shock treatments over the course of a month while hospitalized. Suddenly, on a Sunday night, I "woke up" or "came to," sitting in the hospital lounge watching tv.
Before suddenly seeing the tv and the room, there is nothing...no memory, no images of the previous 4 weeks at all. However I knew where my room was, automatically. And apparently I had not been in a coma, unconscious in that way, but had been walking about, answering questions, confused but not incoherent, doing the basic sleep wake eat every day. Yet no memory of anything at all. Not a flicker.
So who, or what, was going through those motions entirely removed from the consciousness I know as my self? This "nothingness" was like what happens under anesthesia, but I was not inert during it all, there was activity throughout. Who was that? What was going on? Whatever it was is not part of my conscious self, not part of my dreaming self, not mine. I was told that in that period I recognized my family but not my possessions…kept asking for a toothbrush because I didn't recognize mine.
So, anesthesia or trauma to the physical brain can erase consciousness so absolutely, retaining some patterns, I would think in the physical substance of the brain, waiting for the drug haze to lift, the trauma to heal, so you "wake up" and remember yourself and the world. But without that physical substrate, the living cells and nerves and their connections, you simply cease to exist. Without the living physical brain there is neither consciousness nor self .
Oh I would love to talk about the latest studies suggesting there might be a form of consciousness in the sophisticated communication networks of plants and fungi, as well as what we're learning about in other animals beyond apes and chimpanzees and dolphins...but my arm is too sore to keep typing, and I've gone on too long already!
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Oriana:
Never too long (and hope your arms heals soon). The richness of what a human brain, especially a brain like yours, can produce is, as my mother would agree, the greatest wonder of the universe.
The electric shock therapy is known to erase short-term memory and recent memories. The theory is that its curative power is precisely the power of erasing recent badness, so to speak.
But we don’t really understand how ECT works, and there is reason to worry that in some individuals even long-term memory is affected. Yet it is known to work fast against deep suicidal depression that’s resistant to all other treatment, and can indeed be life-saving.
What is of special interest to me as a writer is that “talk therapy” — emotional support from the therapist using words, words, words — has also been shown to actually change the brain. This effect may be the strongest with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
“People who had received CBT showed structural changes in their brains, from the beginning to the end of the initial six months, whereas people in the medication-only group didn't have the same changes. In particular, there was more neural connectivity between the amygdala, which governs fear and emotion in the brain, and areas in the prefrontal cortex that govern higher-order thinking and executive function. But what the study also found was that the stronger connectivity between the regions, the better people’s recovery was over the long term (eight years)—in other words, the brain changes that came from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) were linked to people’s symptoms being significantly improved over the longer term. And this is in people who started out with the differences in brain structure that are linked to schizophrenia, which makes the results even more striking.
Other research has found that this form of therapy can lead to neurological changes for people with other types of mental health issues, like depression and anxiety. A small study last year found that for people with social anxiety benefited from it, and so did their brains. People with social anxiety who took an online CBT course for nine weeks reported fewer symptoms of social anxiety, and this reduction was correlated to less volume in the amygdala, the part of the brain that was also affected in the new study.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/01/25/research-again-finds-that-talk-therapy-can-change-the-brain/#7bf79f2c3278
In other words, yes, the neural substrate has to be there — and “mere” words can change its structure! “Words can heal, words can kill” — supposedly we’ve known this for a long time, but it’s only now that we have the tools to explore the process.
Last thing: speaking from personal experience, it doesn’t have to be an actual therapist. My healing from depression has come from books — see an example in the post below. And it was merely the TITLE of a certain book that caused some important rewiring.
Mary:
I did have CBT therapy for a while, in a group setting, with homework exercises etc. And found it very useful. It provides you with tools to change both thinking and behavior, and thinking about behavior. It breaks that obsessive habit of rumination that freezes everything in a swamp of pain and hopelessness . As you've noted, depression can be a really bad habit, but one you can break.
Oriana:
CBT is said to work well for the intelligent. A therapist-friend (I could never afford her fees) said that I did CBT on myself — that’s how I overcame my depression. now I see there were many steps, but the final one happened in an instant, which went through me like a kind of electricity (not the right analogy, but then there is no accurate analogy — it was a physical sensation). the key phrase “I am a total failure” could no longer open the door to depression. In fact the whole door disappeared. My brain rewired itself. Later I read that this take a burst of high-voltage (relatively speaking) brain activity — maybe a kind of ECT that the brain does to itself to destroy old neural pathways.
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“The earth laughs in flowers.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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OVERTHINKING AS AN ADDICTION
The greatest change in the second half of my life started with a book title: EATING, DRINKING, OVERTHINKING (not the book, just its title). I was thunderstruck, pondering the word OVERTHINKING. So that was just like overeating and overdrinking. Suddenly I had it: depression is an addiction. It’s not a feeling; it’s a behavior, like compulsive eating or shopping.
And a behavior can be changed. Because there wasn’t enough precious life left to be indulging in depression, it had to go. But how to replace it? For me the answer was easy: writing (or any work) with an external focus. “Gaze at the world,” as Larry Levis commanded his students. Describe the weather (the Chinese poets excel at it). Review a book (a lot of non-fiction prose is observational, so inspiration is not needed; the work is always there for me).
Overthinking can be overridden by any deeply engaging activity about which we say, “I lost myself in it.” The sense of the self is gone: the attention goes to the activity itself. One result is being flooded with energy, and “energy is eternal delight” ~ Blake. Mental disorders involve paying attention to the wrong things. This misallocation of attention can be corrected.
For me, this meant that I would never be depressed again. Not that I'd never feel sad again — feeling sad when something bad happens is normal. But I'd never again SEEK TO INCREASE THE SADNESS — which is what a depressive does. People who don't understand depression suggest that the person watch a comedy or listen to cheerful music. You'd have to put a gun to the depressive's head to make her do that. Watching a movie in which the protagonist commits suicide, so that the depressive can identify and cry, now that's a viable suggestion.
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True, various writers over the ages have said something to the effect that to think too much is a disease. This is not a new discovery. Yet in the past I was able to shrug it off, assuming it was a kind of showing off: look, I know what it is to think too much; in much wisdom is much sorrow. Or, as someone said about Rousseau: how well-read he must be to so argue against reading.
Only later I realized that the statement should be taken on face value: there is such a thing as unproductive thinking, or even counter-productive thinking. It leads to paralysis when faced with a difficult choice. Done on a chronic basis, it becomes brooding and leads to depression. And while some have tried to claim that melancholy is noble, a sign of intelligence, no one would declare that there is anything noble about depression. For me, it was a huge step forward to realize that depression was in fact something to be ashamed of, like cowardice or lying to others and/or yourself. Depression, I came to see, was lying to oneself, as distorted as wishful thinking. It wasn’t facing reality.
The most familiar “cure” for overthinking is supposed to be the practice of meditation. Alas, I've never succeeded in meditating in the classic sense except by listening to my refrigerator (it has quite a growl). But I think that getting into hyperfocus doing any kind of work has the same benefits: it gets rid of the chatter of the default mode network, aka “the monkey mind.” Some people’s monkey minds keeps concocting ridiculously sunny visions of the future. My monkey mind juggled catastrophes. Even my dreams were full of concentration camps, complete with gas chambers, and nuclear missiles headed toward my city.
Alternately, they were post-apocalyptic, showing cities emptied of people, grass growing on the crumbling freeways.
We always live in “dark times.” After many disappointments, it takes courage to trust life, to have hope.
“Hope is tough.
It’s tougher to be uncertain than certain.
It’s tougher to take chances than to be safe.
And so hope is often seen as weakness,
because it’s vulnerable,
but it takes strength to enter into that vulnerability
of being open to the possibilities.” ~ Rebecca Solnit
I’ve used this image before, but it’s worth revisiting.
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THE GREATEST VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN HISTORY CHANGED THE 19TH CENTURY
“Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June 18, 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years.
The death toll claimed around 100,000 people, from the thick pyroclastic flows of lava, from the tsunami that struck nearby coasts, and from the thick ash that blanketed South-East Asia’s farmlands, destroyed crops and plunged it into darkness for a week. Both events – Napoleon’s defeat and the eruption – had monumental impacts on human history. But while a library of scholarship has been devoted to Napoleon’s undoing at Waterloo, the scattered writings on Tambora would scarcely fill your in-tray.
Tambora is finally getting its due. With the help of modern scientific instruments and old-fashioned archival detective work, the Tambora 1815 eruption can be conclusively placed among the greatest environmental disasters ever to befall mankind. The floods, droughts, starvation, and disease in the three years following the eruption stem from the volcano’s effects on weather systems, so Tambora stands today as a harrowing case study of what the human costs and global reach might be from runaway climate change.
Tambora’s greatest claim to infamy lies not in the impact it had on what was then the Dutch East Indies (which were terrible enough), but its indirect effects on the disease ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The enormous cloud of sulfate gases Tambora ejected into the atmosphere slowed the development of the Indian monsoon, the world’s largest weather system, for the following two years.
Drought brought on by the eruption devastated crop yields across the Indian sub-continent, but more disastrously gave rise to a new and deadly strain of cholera. Cholera had always been endemic to Bengal, but the bizarre weather of 1816-17 triggered by Tambora’s eruption — first drought, then late, unseasonal flooding — altered the microbial ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The cholera bacterium, which has an unusually adaptive genetic structure highly sensitive to changes in its aquatic environment, mutated into a new strain. This met with no resistance among the local population, and it spread across Asia and eventually the globe. By century’s end, the death toll from Bengal cholera stood in the tens of millions.
Just as the biological disaster known as the Black Death defined the 14th century in Europe and the Near East, so cholera shaped the nineteenth century like no other calamity. Much of our medical science, and our modern public health institutions, originate in the Victorian-era battle against cholera. But only now, thanks to renewed scientific interest in the relation between cholera and climate change, can we make the connection between the worldwide cholera epidemic originating in 1817 and Tambora’s eruption thousands of miles away.
Tambora’s ripple effects were felt across the globe. In southwest China, the outlying mountainous province of Yunnan suffered terribly from the cold volcanic weather, losing crop after crop of rice to bitter winds and flooding rains. The situation was so extreme that desperate Yunnanese resorted to eating white clay, while parents sold their children in the town markets, or killed them out of mercy.
In the aftermath of this three-year famine, Yunnan farmers turned to a more reliable cash crop – opium – to ensure their families’ survival against future disasters. Within a few decades, opium was being grown all across Yunnan, while opium processing technology and expertise drifted south into the remote mountains of modern-day Burma and Laos. The “golden triangle” of international opium production was born.
If the Tambora disaster persists in cultural memory at all, it is as the “Year Without a Summer,” 1816, the most notorious and best chronicled extreme weather event of that century. Snowstorms swept the east coast in June, ensuring the shortest growing season on record. Crowds of desperate and hungry rural folk from Maine and Vermont fled snowfalls of up to 18 inches to the western frontier, which had been spared the worst of Tambora’s weather.
Here grain harvests were fetching sky-high prices on the famine-struck Atlantic market, but after the boom came a shattering bust – the so-called Panic of 1819 – which triggered the first sustained economic depression in US history. East coast speculators had invested hugely in western agriculture post-1816, only to lose their shirts when the similarly-affected European grain markets returned to normal in 1819, and commodity prices plummeted. “Never were such hard times,” wrote Thomas Jefferson of ordinary Americans who, across the country, found themselves “in a condition of unparalleled distress,” persisting well into the 1820s.
As it turns out, however, the indirect ripple effects of Tambora – what climate scientists call “teleconnections” – were even more historically significant. Cholera, opium, and the Panic of 1819 are three examples; another is Arctic exploration.
One of the paradoxical effects of a major tropical eruption is that while the planet in general is cooled by the blanket of volcanic dust that drifts from the equator to the poles, the Arctic itself is drastically warmed owing to changes in wind circulation and north Atlantic ocean currents. This anomaly was only discovered after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the tropical Philippines, the first observed with the benefit of modern climatological instruments.
In 1817 and 1818, the British Admiralty began to receive exciting reports from whaling captains of a remarkable loss of sea ice in around Greenland. Huge icebergs from a broken icepack were spotted floating as far south as Ireland and New York. The prospect of a northwest passage for shipping to the East – a holy grail England had sought since Elizabethan times – beckoned once more. With a generation’s naval captains still hungry for glory but now languishing onshore after the defeat of Napoleon, the Admiralty launched an expensive and ultimately disastrous 50-year-long campaign to chart the elusive northwest passage.
The British could not have known then, of course, that Tambora had caused the Arctic to melt, and that the climatic impacts of a tropical eruption persist for no longer than three years. The Arctic refroze just in time for the arrival of Britain’s first polar expedition under Captain John Ross in 1818. Years of fruitless, icebound sallies into the polar seas culminated in the tragic Franklin expedition of the 1840s, when all hands were lost, and the heroic age of British Arctic exploration came to an end.
It is time to recognize Tambora as the Napoleon of eruptions. The implications – for historians – of a revised, volcanic nineteenth century are immense. As with the global cholera epidemic, and the growth of a Chinese opium empire, Victorian-era polar exploration might not have happened at all, or would have evolved in an entirely different direction, had it not been for Tambora’s climate-wrecking detonation in 1815.
For two long centuries, the connections between this major volcanic disaster and human history have been obscured by two factors: the limitations of scientific knowledge, and by our narrow, anthropocentric vision that seeks out only human causes for human events, neglecting the influence of environmental change. Now, in the 21st century, as we begin to appreciate more profoundly the interdependence of human and natural systems, the lesson of a 200-year-old climate emergency may finally be learned: a changing climate changes everything.
Mt. Tambora in Sumbawa Island, Indonesia, exploded on April 10, 1815 — the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.
from another source:
~ On May 17, 1816, Jefferson wrote:
“[T]he spring has been unusually dry and cold. our average morning cold for the month of May in other years has been 63° of Farenheit. in the present month it has been to this day an average of 53° and one morning as low as 43°. repeated frosts have killed the early fruits and the crops of tobacco and wheat will be poor.”
On April 10, 1815, the volcano Tambora in Indonesia had erupted violently, killing 100,000 islanders and discharging the largest volume of sulfurous gases and volcanic ash from one natural source in recorded history. The blanket of fine particles that hung in the atmosphere reflected a substantial portion of solar radiation, causing what New Englanders referred to as the “Year of No Summer.”
Jefferson wrote: We have had the most extraordinary year of drought & cold ever known in the history of America. in June, instead of 3 3/4 I. our average of rain for that month, we had only 1/3 of an inch, in Aug. instead of 9 1/6 I. our average, we had only 8/10 of an inch. and it still continues. the summer too has been as cold as a moderate winter. In every state North of this there has been frost in every month of the year; in this state we had none in June & July. but those of Aug. killed much corn over the mountains. the crop of corn thro’ the Atlantic states will probably be less than 1/3 of an ordinary one, that of tob[acc]o still less, and of mean quality.” ~
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/eruption-mount-tambora
CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT BELIEF? THE THREE AGES OF CHRISTIANITY
“So many of the Christians and lapsed Christians I know are convinced that belief is at the heart of Christianity. They labor under the assumption that, in order to be a Christian, a person must believe — assent intellectually to — the factuality of traditional Christian teaching and the creeds. It’s the one thing from their childhood Sunday schooling that has stuck with them over the years.
I wonder, do we really have to believe in Christian doctrine in the same way that we believe in gravity, or microbes, or that dinosaurs once roamed the earth? I don’t think so.
Here’s why: The idea of a fixed creed to which a true Christian must subscribe dates back, not to the life of Jesus, but to the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and took control of the church.
Constantine saw marvelous possibilities in the popular new religion that was spreading like wildfire across his empire. But beliefs about the nature of Jesus Christ were diverse and often contradictory in that early church. A common religion with a common creed, Constantine reasoned, would help him to unify — and control — the many and varied peoples of the Roman Empire.
With that in mind, he insisted that church leaders come together and settle on a single set of beliefs. The bishops complied and created the Nicene Creed. And in the centuries that followed — right up into the twentieth century — Christians were taught that, to be a true Christian, one had to believe. So powerful was the Christian belief in belief, that in some eras, heresy — incorrect belief — could get you burned at the stake.
Christianity is entering a new era, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox says. He calls it the Age of the Spirit. Cox identifies three ages in Christian history:
THE AGE OF FAITH
For the first three centuries of Christian history, Cox argues, the early church was not concerned about creed, doctrine, belief or hierarchy. Theological ideas about the nature of God were not as important as following the teachings of Jesus.
THE AGE OF BELIEF
In the fourth century, Constantine asserted control over the Christian church and insisted that everyone in the empire subscribe to a common creed. As a result, until well into the twentieth century, the church focused on correct belief, on doctrine and orthodoxy. For centuries, Westerners assumed that belief — accepting traditional Christian doctrine — was essential to faith.
THE AGE OF SPIRIT
Since the mid-twentieth century, more and more Christians have been ignoring dogma and creed and turning toward a more spiritual Christianity – while finding commonalities with other wisdom traditions. Faith and belief are two different things, Cox argues. Beliefs are opinions, while faith — fidelity — is a way of life, a placing of one’s confidence and trust in Spirit. As for my non-believing friends — maybe they’d like to open Cox’s book and free themselves from the burden of belief.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wrestlingwithgod/2015/04/the-creeds-do-we-really-have-to-believe-all-that-stuff/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Pan%20Patheos%2005.06.15%20%281%29&utm_content=&spMailingID=48601123&spUserID=MTEwMzMwODA5NzI1S0&spJobID=680777160&spReportId=NjgwNzc3MTYwS0
Oriana:
This reminds me of something I heard long ago, possibly already in my teens: that first we had the age of god the Father, then the age of the Son, and now we are in the age of Holy Spirit.
One mark of this age is that many people define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” It started in the twentieth century. The study of the Holy Spirit is called pneumatology, from the Greek Pneumatos Hagiou. (If you are reminded of the word pneumonia, you are on the right track: spirit is closely associated with breath.)
I am not sure that any such division of Christianity into three ages matters any more than the supposed difference between spirit and soul. But it would be good if fewer people argued over the virginity of Mary (perpetual or only temporary), or whether Jesus indeed rose from the dead, and concentrated more on the so-called Christian virtues — arguably simply human virtues — such as kindness, good cheer, non-vengefulness, patience, generosity, and humility.
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Alan Watts went so far as to posit that faith and belief are opposites:
~ “We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.” ~ Alan Watts
I find it fascinating that Watts traced the etymology of “belief” to “lief,” related to wishing or desiring; to him a belief [I think he means mainly religious beliefs] is a type of wishful thinking. Faith seems to be a broader term, and is closer to “trust.”
But perhaps we’re getting too caught up in words here. What matters is not how precisely we define the difference between “belief” and “faith,” or even what we believe and/or have faith in, but how we act.
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I think there are as many “religion”s as there are people. Even among the traditionally religious, each person has different understanding of the divine. And even when it comes to atheists, each person worships something, regards certain things as sacred. Society itself is a kind of sacred trust — we have to trust that if anything serious happened to us, if we were endangered, even complete strangers would rush to our rescue. That’s what makes us human — we lift up those who stumble and fall down; we don’t abandon them. That kind of faith is perhaps more important than any religion.
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VITAMIN K SEEMS TO PROTECT AGAINST COVID
~ Patients who have died or been admitted to intensive care with Covid-19 have been found to be deficient in a vitamin found in spinach, eggs, and hard and blue cheeses, raising hopes that dietary change might be one part of the answer to combating the disease.
Researchers studying patients who were admitted to the Canisius Wilhelmina hospital in the Dutch city of Nijmegen have extolled the benefits of vitamin K after discovering a link between deficiency and the worst coronavirus outcomes.
Covid-19 causes blood clotting and leads to the degradation of elastic fibers in the lungs. Vitamin K, which is ingested through food and absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract, is key to the production of proteins that regulate clotting and can protect against lung disease.
The Dutch researchers are now seeking funding for a clinical trial, but Dr Rob Janssen, a scientist working on the project, said that in light of the initial findings he would encourage a healthy intake of vitamin K, except to those on blood-thinning medications such as warfarin [warfarin leads to calcification of arteries; it shouldn't be prescribed, now that we know that].
He said: “We are in a terrible, horrible situation in the world. We do have an intervention which does not have any side effects, even less than a placebo. There is one major exception: people on anti-clotting medication. It is completely safe in other people.
“My advice would be to take those vitamin K supplements. Even if it does not help against severe Covid-19, it is good for your blood vessels, bones, and probably also for the lungs.”
Janssen added: “We have [vitamin] K1 and K2. K1 is in spinach, broccoli, green vegetables, blueberries, all types of fruit and vegetables. K2 is better absorbed by the body. It is in Dutch cheese, I have to say, and French cheese as well.”
A Japanese delicacy of fermented soya beans called natto is particularly high in the second type of vitamin K and there may be cause for further studies into its health benefits, Janssen said.
“I have worked with a Japanese scientist in London and she said it was remarkable that in the regions in Japan where they eat a lot of natto, there is not a single person to die of Covid-19; so that is something to dive into, I would say.”
Jona Walk, a second researcher on the study, which was submitted for peer review on Friday, said: “We want to take very sick Covid-19 patients and randomize so that they get a placebo or vitamin K, which is very safe to use in the general population. We want to give vitamin K in a significantly high enough dose that we really will activate [the protein] that is so important for protecting the lungs, and check if it is safe.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/05/vitamin-k-could-help-fight-coronavirus-study-suggests
Oriana:
The benefits of Vitamin K2 are largely unknown to most people. And yet this forgotten vitamin is very important for regulating the body’s use of calcium. This means not only bone health, but also cardiovascular health and a strong, well-regulated immune system.
~ K2+D3 = Immune Health + Strong Bones
Vitamin D3 is amazing. It provides a huge boost to the immune system by activating T-cells which attack pathogenic bacteria and viruses as soon as they get in your body, keeping you from getting sick.
The issue is with taking vitamin D is that it increases calcium production. Excess calcium can get in your muscle tissue or build up in your arteries, causing blood to clot or other heart-related issues.
Vitamin K2 helps regulate calcium levels by removing it from the tissues and arteries, then deposits it into your bones and teeth to make them stronger.
This is what makes K2 + D3 such a potent combination for your overall health. ~
https://smarter-reviews.com/lp/top-five-k2?tr=ZkMLr0p&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_ez2BRCyARIsAJfg-ktGtdAD9Edz-pWsWt50OUVXL1WjCAd82NxDl4GKmgJMnup9lfuKDZkaAq6TEALw_wcB
Since Vitamin K if fat-soluble, supplements should contain quality oil. The one I take has extra-extra-virgin olive oil and comes in an opaque container to prevent degradation by light.
Actually I'd prefer coconut oil (or its derivates, such as MCT) as more stable against oxidation, but it's not generally used in capsules.
The richest food source of K2 is natto, a fermented soy product. Now, obvious not everyone lives close to Whole Foods or an Asian market; still, if you live within a reasonable distance of WF, you can make the trip, buy a supply and freeze it.
Nothing can equal natto, but sauerkraut and kimchi also deliver a certain amount of K2. This holds true for fermented foods in general, kefir and yogurt.
Other rich sources include egg yolks, cheese (including brie and cheddar), chicken, lamb, and other kinds of meat; and grass-fed butter such as Kerrygold, imported from Ireland (try it, and you’ll never go back to ordinary butter).
Liver and other organ meats are also good sources.
HEALTHY GUT BACTERIA MAY PREDICT BETTER OUTCOME FOR COVID PATIENTS
~ No one knows exactly why some [covid] patients are affected more than others, but a new study from China (that has not yet been peer-reviewed) makes a provocative assertion: the health of the gut microbiome may predict the severity of the disease. The healthier the gut, the better the outcome. That may be something to cheer about, because you can improve your microbiome in a matter of days just by changing your diet. It could save your life.
Scientists have started to realize that many of the chronic diseases of modern life are significantly associated with systemic inflammation and gut dysbiosis—a loose term that implies an unbalanced, unhealthy gut microbiome. Many of these inflammatory diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, are also associated with COVID-19 complications.
There is a psychological angle to this as well, due to the two-way nature of the gut-brain axis. The state of your microbiome can affect your disposition: the microbes that contribute to a good mood are called psychobiotics. But nature is nothing if not convoluted, and your mood can also affect your microbiome. The implication is that anxiety and depression may add to the complications of a COVID-19 infection.
Although primarily a respiratory disease, COVID-19 affects the gut in half of symptomatic patients. That's due to the unique infection scheme of the virus. The coronavirus has a spiky surface made of proteins that act as keys to unlock cellular portals called receptors. The portals used by the coronavirus are called ACE2 receptors. These are found in many tissues throughout the body, especially lung tissue, which explains why the disease affects respiration. But ACE2 receptors are also found in the small intestines and colon, making the gut an important part of the COVID-19 story.
If what these researchers have found is true, the gut microbiome could be a major contributor to the severity of coronavirus. An unbalanced microbiome may create an inflammatory environment that the coronavirus can exploit. The researchers speculate that these gut-related inflammatory proteins—called cytokines—are amplified by more cytokines when coronavirus hits. The combined inflammation may ignite a "cytokine storm"—a runaway immune reaction that can cause more damage than the virus itself.
As we age, our gut microbiome tends to change to a more inflammatory state. If you are in your 50s or older, you can greatly improve your odds of an uneventful COVID-19 infection by switching to an anti-inflammatory diet. What do beneficial microbes want? In a word, fiber. One of the reasons we have become sitting ducks for a pandemic is that America has exported a largely fiber-free diet around the world. We are suffering from an overload of "processed food," a term that means the fiber has been stripped out.
Fiber is nothing magical. It is composed of long chains of sugars that are too complex for our own digestive juices to break down, so they make it all the way through to the colon intact. There, they feed the three pounds of microbes that constitute the gut microbiome. Those microbes are specialists in fermenting fiber, and in the process, they produce short-chain fatty acids like butyrate that nourish and heal the cells lining the gut.
Fiber is found in vegetables, fruits, grains, greens, and beans, among others. Include these foods in your diet to balance and diversify the microbes in your gut. Studies continually point to a Mediterranean diet as significantly anti-inflammatory. Following it could greatly improve your odds when fighting the coronavirus. And, as a bonus, it could improve your mood.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mood-microbe/202005/can-gut-microbes-predict-covid-19-severity
Oriana:
Let’s not forget that gut bacteria also have a lot to do with slenderness versus obesity. Obesity is a risk factor for severe covid.
And this leads me to a recent post by M. Iossel:
~ Trump notes that the virus is dangerous to people who are “heavy,” and then says how grateful he is that he is in — exact quote — “perfect shape.”
Katya Korsunsky replied: This is exactly “Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors” («Королевство кривых зеркал»), a beloved Russian children’s book of our childhood, about a country where they installed skewed mirrors throughout their land so everyone appeared as their opposites— evil as kind, old as young and fat as thin. Their rulers’ names were also “mirrored”: the king was called Torrap [i.e. Parrot].”
Regardless of politics, please be sure to consume enough fiber. That’s what makes your gut bacteria well-nourished and your immune system well-regulated.
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EXCESS DEATHS IN 2020
~ New York and New Jersey have had more than 44,000 deaths above normal from mid-March to May, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the C.D.C. While Covid-19 is the leading cause of these excess deaths, more people have also died from other causes like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease in recent weeks than for the same period in previous years.
Public health experts have said that many of these additional deaths from other causes may be undercounts or misdiagnoses of Covid-19, or indirectly linked to the pandemic otherwise.
Here is a breakdown of excess deaths in the two states, which together account for more than 40 percent of the official coronavirus death toll in the United States. All numbers in the accompanying charts are rounded down, either to the nearest hundred, or if below 100, to the nearest 10. Totals for the three areas are rounded down from the exact sum.
Covid-19 makes up more than 60 percent of excess deaths so far.
According to the C.D.C., about 30,500 deaths were directly attributed to Covid-19 from March 15 to May 2, the period for which the most recent comprehensive data is available. About half of those deaths were in New York City alone.
But more deaths have also been caused by conditions that are common comorbidities with Covid-19.
Heart disease — the leading cause of death in the United States — saw a large surge in excess deaths over the same time. In New York City, deaths from heart disease were nearly three times the normal.
About 800 deaths above normal have been attributed to diabetes. Research has shown that people with diabetes and heart disease are particularly vulnerable if they contract Covid-19.
“I would assume that a group of these are potentially undiagnosed Covid patients,” said Thomas McGinn, an author of a study about clinical characteristics of patients with Covid-19 in the New York City area.
It’s also possible that some patients with chronic illnesses, like heart disease and diabetes, may have chosen to stay home rather than risk exposure to the coronavirus by going to the hospital. Many doctors have reported a decrease in hospital visits for heart attack and stroke.
“If I had diabetes, and it was barely manageable, and I had some episode that may normally require me to get urgent care … do I want to stay home and manage my diabetes, or do I want to go into a hospital and potentially contract Covid?” said Melody Goodman, a biostatistics professor at New York University.
The pandemic’s strain on the health care system is also forcing some to delay or forgo treatment for illnesses not related to Covid-19.
Some Covid-19 deaths may have been misattributed to other respiratory illnesses.
Some deaths attributed to the flu, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases might have actually been caused by Covid-19, especially earlier during the pandemic, when coronavirus tests were hard to get, Dr. Goodman said. Chest X-rays from the virus and pneumonia look especially similar, for example.
Deaths from flu and pneumonia
1,200 deaths above normal from March 15 to May 2
The C.D.C. data shows flu deaths peaking much later than normal this season. Usually, the peak is in January and February; this year, deaths attributed to the flu spiked in March and April, around the same time as the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.
“As you look at mortality rates as you move through February into March, anything documented as flu, you have to wonder is it truly viral-tested flu or just people thinking it was flu when maybe that was all Covid?” Dr. McGinn said.
Deaths from other respiratory diseases were also about 50 percent higher than normal.
Deaths from chronic lower respiratory diseases:
400 deaths above normal from March 15 to May 2
Deaths from other respiratory diseases
400 deaths above normal from March 15 to May 2
More people died of Alzheimer’s disease than normal.
Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease, a common cause of death among seniors, were more than 60 percent above normal during the same time period.
Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease
500 deaths above normal from March 15 to May 2
“I imagine that the care for people with Alzheimer’s is being complicated by the epidemic, particularly given that this has ripped through certain nursing homes, and that could be affecting the level of care that’s being given,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the C.D.C.’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Deaths from other causes have also spiked.
Deaths from other causes — including Parkinson’s disease, dementia and coronaviruses other than Covid-19 — are more than 25 percent above normal for this time. Deaths that are pending investigation are also included here.
The C.D.C. will ask states if some of the generic coronavirus deaths are indeed Covid-19, Dr. Anderson said.
Determining how a person died can be subjective to a degree, so it’s hard to say exactly how many of the excess deaths might be directly or indirectly linked to Covid-19.
“There’s no completely objective way to do this,” Dr. Anderson said. “Even with autopsy, the cause of death may not be entirely apparent.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/01/us/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-new-jersey.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Oriana:
Rather than post another photo of ambulances or morgue trucks, let me stay with prevention, and remind you of the value of fermented foods: they provide both the wonderful Vitamin K and in some cases (sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled vegetables) the fiber to nourish the beneficial gut flora. Be sure to consume some fermented food every day.
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ending on beauty:
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders
Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing
~ Jorge Luis Borges
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