*
FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING: BETWEEN A PORN SHOP AND A CREMATORIUM
~ I arrived to see a media scrum around a chain link fence that led into the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The building itself was one-story, with a neat lawn and a row of hedges at the front. It was in that part of town that every town has, where businesses which have no right being grouped together nonetheless gather due to one reason or another — usually the cheap rent. Across the street from Four Seasons Total Landscaping was a crematorium. Next door to it was an adult book store with a bright yellow sign that displayed its offerings: DVDs and lotions, novelty gifts, viewing booths. It was called Fantasy Island. In retrospect, it was an omen of what was to come.
The media was told to line up outside while the press conference was prepared. Journalists from Japan, Germany and Britain took their place as a crowd of Trump supporters gathered around them.
I approached a man named Ron, who held a sign that read: “Biden Laptop Matters.” Since we were about to hear from the president’s lawyers about how this election was stolen, I wanted to hear what he thought about the process.
“What they did is they got ‘em fearful with corona, and once they got them in a fearful state, they suppressed them, they funelled all the ballots through mail-in, where they controlled that process, they can manipulate better,” he said.
As we waited outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, we began to wonder what had led us to this point. Had a Trump campaign booked the wrong Four Seasons and diverted to the landscaping company as a quick fix? Was the owner of the business a witness to this massive voter fraud the president was alleging?
The day after the event, a cryptic Facebook post by the owners of Four Seasons Total Landscaping revealed little about how this all came to be.
“Four Seasons Total Landscaping is a family-owned small business run by life long Philadelphians. We were honoured to be asked to host a press conference at our facility. We thank all of those that have shown support for our business and while we understand the negative comments, it saddens us that we have received such harsh judgement. Our team at Four Seasons would have proudly hosted any presidential candidate’s campaign at our business. We strongly believe in America and in democracy” they said, before adding that they would soon be selling T-shirts on their website.
One journalist remarked that the entire episode was beginning to acquire a Muammar Gaddafi flavour to it. When Nato powers started to bomb Tripoli in support of Libyan rebels and it appeared the leader was on his last legs, he emerged briefly from hiding riding a golf cart and holding an oversized umbrella. It was intended to project perseverance and strength — it had the opposite effect.
Private security guards hired by the president’s lawyers began to call in media outlets by name so they could enter the parking lot. When a media outlet was called, the gathered Trump supporters booed those which they felt had been unfair to the president. “Washington Post”.. “Boooo.” “Fox News”.... “Boooooo!” “CNN” “BOOOOOOOO!”
This was an American pantomime.
In the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot the cameras were assembled, the sound levels checked, the pens were poised and the gates were closed. The world’s press waited for the evidence that would blow this big scam wide open. The sun shone brightly.
Then, out of nowhere, a journalist with a European accent announced the news: “CNN called the presidency for Biden!”
The assembled journalists were paralyzed for a moment. Phones started to ring and calls were made. Some were given instructions to leave and started to do so.
Soon after, the sound of car horns honking and cheers in the street began to drift into the backlot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
A car with a young Black woman named Jada Carter stopped in front of the Trump supporters. She screamed at the top of her lungs: “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!” A flag with a picture of Donald Trump’s head superimposed onto the body of Rocky Balboa fluttered in the wind as she cried out.
Just a few minutes later Rudy Giuliani appeared. This was the second press conference Mr Giuliani had called in Philadelphia in a matter of days, both to make unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. The first took place at an airport hangar.
The president’s personal lawyer was serious and solemn as he took his place at the podium, in front of a garage door covered with Trump campaign posters and a bright yellow hose pipe attached to the wall.
“I’m here to describe to you the first part of a situation that is very troubling,” he began. He went on to claim that dead people were still voting in Philadelphia.
“Joe Frazier is still voting here. Also Will Smith’s father voted here twice since he died.”
He said he had brought with him a number of poll watchers who alleged that they had been blocked from monitoring the vote count. When they spoke, however, their complaint appeared to centre around how far they had been asked to stand away from the counting process. Not the evidence of massive fraud Mr Giuliani or the president had promised.
“Who was it called by?”
“All of them,” came the response.
Mr Giuliani took a moment before erupting in mock incredulity: “All the networks? Wow! All the networks!” He raised out his arms and looked to the sky, for a moment looking and sounding like Larry David doing a bit. But the wind had been sucked out of him. The smile had gone.
I walked out onto the street, where more Biden supporters had gathered across the road. A Trump supporter in his underwear and a Biden mask pulled up over his head (who appeared to be dressed as an embodiment of Trump’s insult “Sleepy Joe Biden”) shouted: “Who pays for all that? Who pays for it all. George Soros! George Soros! Tell your daughter who George Soros is hun! Give her a real education. Look it up!”
Next to him, a man wearing an American flag suit and hat, and a full Donald Trump mask, stood silently and still. Even the mask he wore seemed to wear a dejected expression.
Across the road, Kelisha Carter was jubilant. She had come down with two of her daughters and a giant Biden flag to soak up the atmosphere.
“Relief! There’s some hope coming. God, I prayed for this,” she said, when asked how she felt about the victory.
“It’s not even that I don’t like that man, I just don’t like his tactics,” she said of Mr Trump. “He just divides everybody. He brings the racists out of the closet. It’s scary for Black people, it’s scary for a lot of people. I have daughters and I have a husband that goes out every day and I want him to come home at night.”
Her daughter Jada, who had earlier argued with the Trump supporters from her car, was too excited to stand still. She performed a backflip in the middle of the road.
The owner of the Fantasy Island adult book store had come out onto his porch to watch the circus. He stood and stared in disbelief until a customer jolted him awake again.
“Are you open?”
“Yes,” he said, before following him inside.
It felt like an ending. ~
No, I'm not chortling. I'm deeply saddened. Supporters should not be disrespected in this manner, fed out of a dumpster when they come expecting a banquet. What a travesty. What downright delusionary insanity. It is high time to put an end to the language of hate and baseless accusations. Alas, I know that a lot of bitterness will be poisoning many people sense of trust in the system for who knows how long.
First, undermine the credibility of the media. Then, undermine the credibility of the electoral system. Russia hardly needed to lift a finger. The Great Divide was a perfect inside job.
*
So much depends
Upon
Four Seasons
Total Landscaping
Across from
The cremation center
Beside Fantasy Island
Porn shop
~ John Gallaher
Mary:
This is the way gangsters operate, and the kind of place they would choose — the level just gets lower and lower. Consider also that it's positioned near a porn shop and a crematorium...how perfect! Location as metaphor..a deal done before the gates of sex and death, cheap fantasy sex and the industrialized kind of mass immolation of remains a crematorium presents.
And the whole thing collapses into nothing. I have said Trump operates like a Mafia Don, but a very bad one, who has a poor grip on the realities he tries to manipulate. The press conference devolves the way his speech does...into incoherence, a word salad.
TRUMP SHOULD HAVE LOST IN A LANDSLIDE. THE FACT THAT HE DIDN’T SPEAKS VOLUMES
~ Millions more people voted for Trump than in 2016, and it became disturbingly clear that even if Trump himself is booted from office, “Trumpism” is alive and well.
There was no need for it to be this way. Donald Trump has badly mishandled the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The economy is in recession. The Republican war on the Affordable Care Act seems more heartless than ever as millions lose their insurance.
Trump did not run a good campaign. He botched the first debate. He squandered his campaign cash. His messaging against Joe Biden was unfocused and often incoherent, simultaneously trying to paint him as a radical Antifa-sympathizing socialist and a corrupt corporate establishment figure. At a time when the economy was voters’ No 1 issue, Trump was focused on the emails of Biden’s ne’er-do-well son, Hunter. A campaign that presented voters with a clear and compelling alternative should have easily defeated Trump.
But Biden didn’t offer a clear and compelling alternative. He was a weak candidate from the start, so much so that even some of his allies were worried what would happen if he won the primary. Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, represented the corporate wing of the Democratic party; he loudly defended the private health insurance industry and the fracking industry from attacks by the left. He ran away from proposals favored by the Democratic base like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. He didn’t show much interest in courting core constituencies like Latino voters (reportedly, the Biden campaign did not consider them part of its “path to victory”, which helps explain the losses in Texas and Florida). Biden didn’t even put much energy into the campaign; at crucial moments when Trump’s team were knocking on a million doors a week, Biden’s was reportedly knocking on zero. His ground game in important swing states like Michigan was “invisible”.
To many on the left, then, Biden’s lackluster performance is no surprise. Yes, Trump could have been resoundingly defeated. But 2016 proved once and for all that the Democratic establishment simply doesn’t have a message that can effectively counter Trump. The party leadership ignored the lessons that should have been learned four years ago. Instead, Democratic strategy is the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
We know how Democrats can win again. Thomas Frank, in his vital book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, explains that Democrats need to get back to being a party that offers something meaningful to working people. We know that voting Republican is no indication that voters actually want the agenda the Republican party will pursue in office. Fox News polling indicates voters want universal healthcare, abortion rights and a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. Florida voters, even as they selected Donald Trump, also opted to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. The Democrats do not need to propose insipid half-measures when the data indicates that the public are fully on board with a progressive agenda.
Blaming the voters simply will not do. This is a failure of leadership. Those responsible for it need to be held accountable. Unfortunately, it looks like some in the party will learn the wrong lessons. Even though dozens of democratic socialists won their elections this year while centrists struggled, there is a contingent among Democrats whose solution to any problem is the same: become more like Republicans.
Already, there is talk that they need to embrace tax cuts and run away from the “socialism” label. In other words, double down on what they were already doing. Those who think that is the lesson may simply be “unteachable” – a word George Orwell used to describe the old British cavalry generals who still insisted on using horses long after the invention of automatic weapons, and could not be persuaded that a horse is not useful against a machine gun. Today’s Democratic leaders are like those generals. If 2016 couldn’t persuade them that they were wrong, this won’t either. Nothing ever will.
Trumpism will not “self-destruct”: you can’t simply run against Trump, you need a powerful alternative vision that actually gives people what they say they want and fights for something worth believing in.
Oriana:
I agree that Biden didn’t present a “powerful” alternate vision for the country. But simply a return to normalcy is at this point an attractive vision. A return to sanity, to civility. To dignified discourse as opposed to the language of hate.
Biden presents a likable, normal, emotionally reassuring personality. People felt they could trust him — what I’d call the “Walter Cronkite effect.” He is a man who’d suffered great personal losses, and showed both resilience and empathy toward the suffering of others. By contrast with the incumbent, Biden stands for for decency and maturity. No toddler-like temper tantrums, pouting, or abusive tweets would be coming from him. And that is enough — for the moment.
A First Lady who actually lives in the White House, and two dogs —
who knew those signs of loving marriage were so important . . . I think
the First Couple reflects hopes and ideals also in the private sphere.
What convinced me more than anything else about the intense longing for normality was, in many places, the long lines people were willing to endure in order to cast their vote. They were willing to wait even in the rain and cold wind, knowing this election would be like no other. The desire to restore truthfulness and decency could not be held back. These people wanted America to be America again.
Another mark of how abnormal this presidency has been: the rumors that not only will Trump never concede, but that he’ll barricade himself in the White House and refuse to leave office. These may be mere rumors, but they point to the belief of more than a few that Trump is genuinely delusional.
Trump returning from golfing the day he learned about his defeat. *
~
No President of the United States must ever again have the totalitarian
depravity to call our free press, which is protected by our
Constitution, “enemies of the people.” ~ M. Iossel
Oriana:
It was Stalin who called anyone who disagreed with him an “enemy of the people.”
*
“WELCOME BACK, AMERICA!” ~ Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, on Biden’s victory
“Welcome back, competence. Welcome back, decency. Goodbye, lies.” ~ John Willis
Joe Biden, Jill and one of their dogs, Champ (the name of the other one is Major)
*
*
and now for something entirely different . . .
MY FIRST LOVE: THE ASTONISHING DREAM AND "WHAT REALLY HAPPENED"
I was only 12 going on 13, and he was 13, or maybe already 14. One day I looked at him and saw how very handsome he was, and that strange new feeling took over. I couldn’t stop looking at him.
Of course it was all 99% in my head, but just the amazement of it, the intensity. He was constantly in my thoughts. But I needn’t describe such things to any reader. We know the glorious madness of being in love.
When I still lived in LA, I wrote a poem based on a strange dream I had about him.
MY FIRST LOVE WEARS DENTURES
He moves into my house. On the way
to the bathroom to shave, he takes out
his teeth. In the dream, we’re as easy
together as an old married couple.
At thirteen, I’d almost faint if he
stood near — after such trembling
passion, surely he should leave me
more than just his dentures.
He closes the bathroom door. I knock,
bringing him fresh towels.
All those years it might as well
have been him —
a woman’s endless work of love:
bringing clean towels, tenderness.
I walk into the bathroom. He shrinks
and travels backward, a web of cracks
at the border of childhood and youth.
Like Penelope I unravel the navy-
blue sweater he wore in high school.
“Love, where are you going?” I call.
I can no longer see his face.
I can no longer tell, is it him
or is it me, who would prefer
to keep on trembling.
~ Oriana
*
A few days ago I had the impulse to look up his name on the Internet. To my astonishment, I found him instantly. He came to the US on a ship, imagine. Got a PhD in physics, worked at the University of Texas, and then for the Defense Department. 400 technical publications. Died in 2009 “after a long illness.” Is buried in Alexandria, Virginia.
And no, the poem wasn’t written near the time he died — I guess no mysticism can be applied to this case. He was my earth-shattering experience of first love (I would have died for him, and I’m not saying this lightly) — and also the experience of the sudden vanishing of love, which was a shock — based on songs and novels, based on movies with discreet blackouts, I thought that love never ends.
How much longer it took to come across Heidegger’s little-known advice: “Fall in love as many times as necessary for happiness.” Nothing shameful or sinful about it.
Anyway, that was a strange dream, about that transformation from a young girl’s trembling passion to womanly, domestic caring.
At least he’s had a successful career, and then the “long illness” — perhaps cancer.
Why did he leave Poland together with his parents and sister? This was a high-status, affluent family — for instance, they could vacation in Bulgaria, enjoying the much warmer Black Sea, a favorite with the Polish elites. They prospered in Poland — until 1968, the year the Communist government began an anti-Semitic purge. Between 1968 and 1972, about 20,000 Polish Jews were declared “enemies of the state” and forced to leave Poland.
But considering his later eminent career in the US, this forced exile turned out to be beneficial for the man who was once my first love. It’s only that I know the grief of leaving your homeland — which must be compounded when you are being expatriated, your citizenship stripped from you. And before then — the humiliation of being removed from your job, your children expelled from school.
He and I never met in the US, or had contact of any sort. I’ll never know his impressions of America, his various adventures. It’s only that I had this unforgettable dream.
And when I think of the dream now, knowing that he is dead, I remember not so much the dentures as the strange ending, when he begins to crack and crumble —and he, together with the wall of bathroom, starts to rush away from me like the expanding universe.
This poem was published in an ephemeral little magazine whose name I no longer recall. Perhaps I presented it at a local reading — perhaps . . . But somehow the poem has lived in me.
Sometimes I come across a poem I forgot ever having written. Not this one. It narrates
what has never happened, but thanks to the merciless clarity of the dream, it did.
*
We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light with patience.
~ Pablo Neruda
*
BELLOW’S HERZOG AS A REVENGE NOVEL
~ At Bard, Bellow became close friends with a literature professor named Jack Ludwig. As Zachary Leader describes him, Ludwig was an oversized personality, a big man, extravagant, a shameless purveyor of bad Yiddish, and an operator. Ludwig idolized Bellow; people who knew them said that Ludwig wanted to be Bellow. He flattered Bellow, went for long walks with him, started up a literary journal with him, and generally insinuated himself into Bellow’s life. Bellow accepted the proffer of adulatory attentiveness. The couples (Ludwig was married) socialized together.
Saul and Sasha got married in 1956, after Bellow had obtained a Nevada divorce. Sasha accepted the domestic role that Bellow insisted on without demur. She says that when they had a son, Adam, Bellow told her that the baby was her responsibility—he was too old to raise another kid. In 1958, Bellow was offered a one-year position at the University of Minnesota. He insisted that Ludwig receive an appointment as well; the university obliged, and the families moved to Minneapolis together.
Saul and Sasha fought. Some of the strains were apparently due to sexual dissatisfaction. Bellow began seeing a psychologist, a man named Paul Meehl; Meehl suggested that Sasha see him as well (a suggestion that Leader charitably calls “unorthodox”). Ludwig served as a sympathetic confidant to both parties. Then, one day in the fall of 1959, Sasha told Bellow that she was leaving him. There was no third party in the picture, she said. She just did not love him.
Devastated, Bellow went to Europe on a cultural-diplomacy junket for the State Department. While abroad, he engaged assiduously in what Leader calls “womanizing.” He returned to Bard, in the summer of 1960, and took up with a visiting French professor named Rosette Lamont. The divorce from Sasha went through in June. For a while, Bellow and Sasha had the same lawyer, who was pleased to be representing both parties in the hottest divorce in town, but eventually Bellow was persuaded to retain his own attorney.
In November, Bellow learned from a possibly overly conscientious babysitter that Sasha and Ludwig were sleeping together. It turned out that the affair had been going on for two and a half years, since the summer of 1958. And although Ludwig was still married, it continued. Adam was living with Sasha while it was going on. Given Bellow’s vulnerabilities, the double betrayal was his worst nightmare come to life. According to Atlas, he talked about getting a gun.
I have just given you the back story and the dramatis personae of “Herzog.” “Herzog” is a novel about a forty-seven-year-old man having a nervous breakdown after learning that his much younger wife, who has left him abruptly, had been cheating on him with his closest friend. The man seeks succor in the arms of a loving, patient, and understanding woman. There is at least one respect in which the novel is not based on real life: Bellow didn’t have a nervous breakdown. He wrote “Herzog” instead.
He also got married again, in 1961, to Susan Glassman, another celebrated beauty, this time eighteen years younger. (Glassman was a former girlfriend of Philip Roth, who said that the transfer of affections “turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul.” The marriage lasted five years; she was still taking Bellow to court in 1981.)
“Herzog” is a revenge novel. The ex-wife, Madeleine, is a stone-cold man-killer. Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, is described as a “loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute.” Ludwig had a Ph.D. and a damaged foot; Bellow makes Gersbach a radio announcer with a wooden leg. The Herzog character is passive, loving, an innocent soul who cannot make sense of a world in which people like his estranged wife and her lover can exist. He is an ex-university professor, the author of a distinguished tome called “Romanticism and Christianity.” The Rosette Lamont character, called Ramona, is a sexpot with a heart of gold; she specializes in intimate candlelight dinners and lacy lingerie. She is a professor of love, not French.
“Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
Howe wrote that “Herzog” was a novel “driven by an idea”—the idea that modern man can overcome alienation and despair. Howe could see the appeal of this idea, but he was worried that it might not have been “worked out with sufficient care.” The reviewer in the Times Book Review thought that the novel offered “a credo for the times.” “The age is full of fearful abysses,” the reviewer explained. “If people are to go ahead, they must move into and through these abysses,” and so on.
Bellow must have been tickled to death. The inventive feature of “Herzog” is a series of letters that the protagonist, in his misery, composes not only to Madeleine and Gersbach but to famous people (like President Eisenhower) and philosophers (like Heidegger and Nietzsche). These long letters, unfinished and unmailed, are sendups of an intellectual’s effort to understand human behavior by means of the conceptual apparatus of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books. Herzog is a comic figure, a holy fool, a schlimazel with a Ph.D. The whole point of his story is that when you are completely screwed the best you can hope for is a little sex and sympathy. The Western canon isn’t going to be much help.
The determination to consider the novel strictly as fiction extended even to its characters. Rosette Lamont reviewed the novel. She, too, treated the book as pure make-believe. She breezed right by the Ramona character (“Her religion is sex, a welcome relief from Madeleine’s phony conversion. But Herzog is too divided in his mind, too busy with resentment to free himself from a heavy conscience. Besides he is suspicious of pleasure, having learned Julien Sorel’s lesson,” and so on). She concluded with the thought that at the end of the novel Herzog enters into “a theandric relationship with the world around him.”
And it got even better. Jack Ludwig reviewed the novel. He informed readers of Holiday that “the book is a major breakthrough.” By no means should it be read as autobiography—“as if an artist with Bellow’s enormous gifts were simply playing at second-guessing reality, settling scores.” No, in this book, Ludwig wrote, “Bellow is after something greater.” The greater something turns out to be “man’s contradiction, his absurdity, his alienation,” and so on. It was pretty chutzpadik, as even Bellow had to admit. But by then he was laughing all the way to the bank.
You can see the biographical problem. From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters. In “Augie March,” almost every character—and there are dozens—was directly based on some real-life counterpart. Most of “Herzog” is a roman à clef. Leader therefore decided to treat the novels as authoritative sources of information about the people in Bellow’s life. When Leader tells us about Jack Ludwig and Sondra Tschacbasov, he quotes the descriptions of Gersbach and Madeleine in “Herzog.” In the case of the many relatives with counterparts in “Augie March,” this can get confusing. You’re not always sure whether you’re reading about a person or a fictional version of that person.
One reason for reading biographies of writers like Bellow, who draw from people in their own lives, is to learn what those people were really like, or at least what they were like to someone who is not Bellow. You often can’t do that with Leader’s biography. Leader also wants to assess Bellow’s accomplishment as a novelist. He has to keep three balls in the air at once: the biographical story, an interpretation of the fiction as autobiography, and a consideration of the fiction as fiction. That’s why his book is so long.
“Herzog” sags in the middle, a long episode in which Herzog reconnects with Ramona. But Bellow came up with a brilliant solution for the second half. Waiting in a courthouse to see his lawyer, Herzog sits in on a trial. A woman and her boyfriend are being tried for murdering her small child, whom they have tortured and beaten to death. The woman is mentally unfit; Herzog hears evidence that she has been diagnosed with a lesion on her brain. (A diabolical touch: Sasha had been diagnosed with a brain lesion.)
Horrified that Madeleine and Gersbach might be abusing his child (in the novel, a girl), Herzog rushes off to his deceased father’s house, finds a gun his father owned, and goes to Madeleine’s. It is evening. He creeps into the yard and watches Madeleine and Gersbach through the window, loaded pistol in hand. What he sees is an ordinary domestic scene. Gersbach is giving the little girl a bath. Herzog creeps away.
Actually, these episodes were not entirely invented. Bellow lifted them straight out of “The Brothers Karamazov.” A child tortured by its parents is Ivan Karamazov’s illustration of the problem of evil: what kind of God would allow that to happen? And Herzog with his gun at the window is a reënactment of Dmitri Karamazov, the murder weapon in his hand, spying through the window on his father. Dmitri is caught and convicted of a murder he desired but did not commit.
“Herzog,” though, is a comedy. The next day, Herzog gets in a minor traffic accident and the cops discover the loaded gun in his car. But, after some hairy moments in the police station, he is let go. Desperately searching the Great Books for wisdom, Herzog briefly finds himself living in one. He can’t wait to get out.
The decorum in Bellow criticism is to acknowledge the original of the fictional character when the person is famous, and otherwise to insist on treating it all as fiction. Thus everyone knows that, in “Humboldt’s Gift,” Von Humboldt Fleisher “is” Delmore Schwartz, and that, in “Ravelstein,” Abe Ravelstein “is” Allan Bloom, the Chicago professor who wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” and was a good friend of Bellow’s.
But “Ravelstein” is a revenge novel, too. It’s not really about Ravelstein/Bloom. It’s about the narrator, a writer named Chick, who has been treated cruelly by his wife, Vela, a beautiful and brilliant physicist—a wicked caricature of Bellow’s fourth wife, the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. There are also a couple of drive-by take-downs along the way—of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion at Chicago rumored to have been involved in the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, and of the owner of a restaurant on St. Martin, in the Caribbean, where Bellow contracted a case of food poisoning that nearly killed him. He brings them into the story just to skewer them.
Podhoretz told Leader that he considered all of Bellow’s characters puppets. Bellow tended to make his characters look the way a child sees grownups, unalterable cartoons, weirdly unself-conscious in their one-dimensionality.
But there is usually one fully imagined character in Bellow’s books, one character whose impulses the author understands and sympathizes with, whose sufferings elicit his compassion, and whose virtues and defects, egotism and self-doubt, honorable intentions and less than honorable expediencies are examined with surgical precision and unflinching honesty. That character is the protagonist—Augie, Herzog, Chick, even Tommy Wilhelm, in “Seize the Day,” who tries to leverage his pain to win respect. Their real-life counterpart is, of course, Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself. ~
A long article — I've shortened it considerably, trying to zero in Herzog itself. Herzog was the first novel I read after arriving in Los Angeles, a welcome change from Milwaukee. I loved Herzog and his mad letters to famous dead people — fragments of an eternal intellectual quarrel that makes mere love affairs ephemeral. After all, nothing is all bad or all good, and yet we keep debating — because we can.
And no, I didn't have the slightest idea that the novel was based so closely on Bellow's life, or that both Bellow's friend and his ex-wife actually wrote reviews of Herzog! — praising it for its universality, of course.
I particularly remember Herzog's disgust with his friend's bad Yiddish. At that point it was still hard for me to get over the warped Polish of the sons and daughters of Polish immigrants.
I've read or heard at readings plenty of “revenge poems” about a poet's ex. But only now it occurred to me that of course there is such a thing as a revenge novel — at least in part. What writer can resist writing about former lovers? Not always in the spirit of revenge, but more trying to present the complexity of each partner and doomed the relationship.
*
~ Works of art belong immeasurably to themselves, and are accessible least of all to criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and respond to them fairly. Always trust your own feelings, rather than others’ discussions, interpretations, or arguments. Should you be mistaken, then slowly and with time the natural growth of your inner life will bring you to fuller awareness. ~ Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
I’m not using this quotation to undermine the argument that Herzog is a revenge novel. The article brought me back the memories of reading Herzog, and my delight with most of book — especially its intimate tone. Herzog is confiding, confessing, not trying to be brave and hard-hearted, without self-pity. The article has shed another ray of light on what was already radiant.
I am using the quotation because of its first statement, which I find powerful: “works of art belong immeasurably to themselves.” They are their own reality which derives from ours, but has been transformed into their own domain.
*
“Silence can be like a hand extended.” ~ John Berger
Oriana:
To me that’s the test of a relationship: you are comfortable being silent together. You don’t have to fill every moment with babbling.
And silence can be erotic. In fact, without silence, love won’t happen — at least in my case. Once I was somewhat interested in a certain man, but if we’d start talking, we’d go on and on. One time I even thought, “We could stand here and talk like this for ten years.” It was a strange case of having too much in common, and yet not enough to pass the test of being silent together.
John Berger photographed by Henri Cartier-BressonQUICK FIX: FEEL BETTER IN NO TIME
~ Researchers have demonstrated that just a few minutes of deep and slow breathing can significantly decrease feelings of anger, depression, tension, and even physical pain. There’s not much evidence that the specific program of deep and slow breathing you follow matters — just pick one that is comfortable for you. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beauty-sick/202011/3-ways-feel-better-right-now?collection=1153028
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KNITTING DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND WORLD WAR II
~ I discovered the true language of knitting when I was reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, and I had been knitting for a few years. My father had bought me a collection of classic books, which I devoured and discussed with my grandmother as we knitted together. She had read them all, remembered all the stories, and had so many insights about both the facts and the fiction.
“This woman, Madame Defarge,” my grandmother said to me one day as she knit a bedcover for her goddaughter’s wedding. “Do you really believe she existed and encoded in her knitting the names of the aristocrats who were beheaded?” Of course I believed it—Charles Dickens, one of my favorite authors, had said it was so! My grandmother shook her head. “To what purpose?” she continued. “For revenge,” I said, “because the French aristocracy had oppressed the people for so long, had abused its powers, and the Revolution brought justice to the masses.”
“Madame Defarge is a fictional character created to symbolize the brutality of the Revolution, of any revolution, through the dehumanization of those involved in it,” my grandmother said. “It does not tell you the real story of the tricoteuses, the Frenchwomen who sat and knit in front of the guillotine.” Wow, I thought in excitement, there is more to the story than I have read.
In the second half of the 18th century, she told me, market women in Paris were the backbone of society. They worked, traded, administered their husbands’ meager salaries, looked after the kids, clothed their families with their knitting and sewing, and made ends meet. They were the barometers of social stability. When they realized they had no more bread to feed their families, they rebelled. They marched on Versailles, demanding bread because they were hungry. That was the spark that started the French Revolution.
Years later, while taking a course on the French Revolution at university, I discovered that those women had become heroines in the people’s eyes. They created groups, presided over by women such as Reine Audu, Agnès Lefevre, Marie Louise Bouju, and Rose Lacombe, similar to the Jacobin Club, which was one of the most radical movements of the Revolution, headed by Robespierre. These courageous women walked the streets of Paris insulting whoever they thought was wealthy and encouraging the revolutionaries to arrest them. They were invited to observe the National Convention, the first assembly to govern France during the Revolution, which formally abolished the monarchy.
My grandmother continued the knitting history lesson. Soon, she said, the revolutionary government felt threatened by these women, by their political role, rising power, and popularity within the Revolution. The market women may have been the spark of the Revolution, but its management was firmly in the hands of men, men who became increasingly authoritarian. So it was decided that the women could not sit in the gallery during meetings of the National Convention, and eventually they were forbidden to participate in any political assembly.
But the women did not give up on being part of this process they had started. Some of them moved to the Place de la Révolution (today known as the Place de la Concorde), where the executions took place. They brought chairs from their market stalls and miserable homes and placed them around the guillotine, then sat all day watching their enemies getting their heads severed from their bodies. And they brought their knitting.
The revolutionary government was helpless to stop them. The square was a public place, and people were encouraged to witness the executions, so no one could ask the market women to move. Being accustomed to trade, the women started to sell their seats to people who wanted to watch the executions of specific individuals. They also knit various garments, socks, mittens, and scarfs, which they sold after the executions. But mostly they knit the red bonnets de la Liberté (“Liberty caps”) that became one of the symbols of the French Revolution, worn by everyone in Paris. Renting the chairs and selling the items they knit proved to be a good business for the market women, even more profitable than their traditional trade. This was a blessing, because during the Revolution, it was harder for people to make even a meager living. Remarkably, the market women were able to support their families with their knitting.
The Liberty cap, I discovered in school, is a copy of an ancient hat, the Phrygian cap, which originated in Anatolia. Marianne, the symbolic figure who embodies “liberty, equality, and fraternity”—the motto of the French Revolution—is always depicted as wearing a red Phrygian cap).
Marianne, here as Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix, 1830). Note the Phrygian cap.
As usual, my grandmother’s interpretation of historical events, especially when knitting was involved, had a unique twist. Dickens wrote that the market women knit as a substitute for eating and drinking, a totally nonsensical conclusion, according to her. When you are almost starving, as the people of Paris were at the end of the 18th century, nothing can replace a loaf of bread, not even knitting.
I must confess that as a child, I found the idea that the tricoteuses knit while watching people die deeply disturbing. Associating knitting with a violent act was not possible; it did not make any sense. It was my grandmother who explained to me why knitting came to be linked with the beheading of the French aristocrats. The market women knit during meetings of the assembly, she said, and they knit as the heads of the aristocrats rolled into the basket at their feet all for a simple reason: they always knit. Knitting was a part of their lives, just like breathing and working; it was a required activity. The tricoteuses had to keep busy all the time. Even when they were entertaining themselves with their revenge over the aristocrats, they had to be productive. “And by the way,” she added, “none of them knew how to read or write.” So they could not have encoded the names of the executed aristocrats in their knitting, as Dickens claimed they had.
“Dickens was right in one thing,” she said. “Knitting is a language that only knitters understand. You can knit anything into your pattern: a name, a story, a prayer, or a poem.” Then she showed me how she had knit her wisdom about marriage into the wedding blanket she was making for her goddaughter. She took my finger and guided it over the purls and stitches in a corner of the blanket and read out the words hidden there: “Love is a daily victory and a lifetime treasure.”
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THE KNITTING SPIES, THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO DURING TWO WORLD WARS SPIED FOR THE ALLIES USING KNITTING AS THEIR COVERT MESSAGING SYSTEM
Knitting is ideal for hiding messages, like Morse code, because it is binary: there are only two stitches, knit and purl. Positions of troops, numbers of weapons, movements of trains—everything can be hidden in a simple hat, in a pair of mittens, in a scarf. For the non-knitter, it is impossible to read the codes; even knitting patterns themselves appear to be written in a secret code. This explains why during World War II, the British government banned all printed knitting patterns out of fear that they could be used to communicate information to the Germans.
During World War I, in Roubaix, near Lille, a region of France under German occupation, Madame Levengle, a woman who lived in a house overlooking the loading yard of the Roubaix railway station, was a knitting spy. Louise de Bettignies, a truly remarkable woman, had recruited Levengle into the Alice Network, a group of spies and allies who operated in Northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, gathering and passing on intelligence about the Germans to the British. Madame Levengle sat knitting in front of a window on the first floor of her house overlooking the loading yard. Each time she saw something to report, she tapped out the information on the floor in code. Her children, pretending to do their homework on the floor below, wrote down the codes. To understand the courage of this woman and her children, one has also to know that they did this dangerous work even as a German field marshal lived in their home.
During World War II, the Belgian Resistance enrolled older women who, like Madame Levengle, lived near train lines and loading yards and could watch the German movements as they knit. These women reported messages in their knitting using codes that were rather simple but very effective: a dropped stitch, which produced a hole, for example, signified the passing of one type of train; purling on a field of knit stitches, which forms a bump in the fabric, referred to another type of train. The finished knitted fabrics were then handed over to fellow spies in the Belgian Resistance.
Although both sides used knitting spies, knitting proved to be an excellent cover for those spying for the Allies. Elizabeth Bentley, an American, carried clandestine material from the US government to Soviet agents inside her knitting bag. She hid microfilms, memos, and coded documents in a basket full of balls of wool, needles, patterns, and fabric. After the war, when people referred to her as the “Red Spy Queen,” she replied that a better name would have been the “Communist June Cleaver”—the ultimate dutiful housewife character of the popular 1950s show. The absurdity of this image illustrates why knitting was such a successful cover: in the collective imagination of the first half of the 20th century, a woman knitting was the antithesis of a spy.
Phyllis “Pippa” Latour Doyle was one of the knitting spies who proved this stereotype wrong. Her amazing life story could easily have come from my grandmother’s lips. It is a hidden gem from a time of heroism, self-sacrifice, and courage, but it also is a testimony to the modesty of those who were motivated by a strong sense of duty and honor to fight Nazism. Pippa did not reveal her spying activity to anyone, keeping it secret even from her own children, until several decades after the war ended. Only then was her heroism praised and her story published in the New Zealand Herald. One of the forty women members of the Special Operations Executive, the secret force that Winston Churchill wanted to use to “set Europe ablaze,” her code name was Genevieve.
At the age of twenty-three, Latour, perfectly fluent in French, was trained to become a British spy inside occupied France. On a cold winter night, she was parachuted into the darkness of war, behind enemy lines, with her precious communication code encrypted in a length of silk yarn that she wore as a ribbon in her hair.
Genevieve cycled across occupied France, reporting on the position and movements of the Germans, carrying her knitting in her basket. She recorded her discoveries, purling and stitching in the coded message and then transmitting the information via radio from different locations. A few times she was stopped and searched by the Germans and narrowly escaped being discovered. Once, a female police officer asked her to strip naked on the suspicion that she was hiding something underneath her clothes. The officer even untied the silk yarn that held her hair back, and Pippa shook her head to prove that there was nothing hidden in her hair.
Knitting for the Revolution, knitting for the resistance, knitting for spying: the stories I learned through my childhood, adolescence, and youth have all enriched my life, and I like to think that they helped me become a better adult. My grandmother was my first guru, but she was not the only one. ~
Mary:
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KATHERINE HEPBURN ON GIVING
~“Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus.
Finally, there was only one other family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me.
There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn't have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean.
The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives.
The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband's hand, looking up at him as if to say, "You're my knight in shining armor." He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.
The ticket lady asked the man how many tickets he wanted? He proudly responded, "I'd like to buy eight children's tickets and two adult tickets, so I can take my family to the circus." The ticket lady stated the price.
The man's wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man's lip began to quiver. Then he leaned a little closer and asked, "How much did you say?" The ticket lady again stated the price.
The man didn't have enough money. How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn't have enough money to take them to the circus?
Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.”
The man understood what was going on. He wasn't begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation.
He looked straight into my dad's eyes, took my dad's hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied, "Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”
My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with.
Although we didn't get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide.
That day I learnt the value to Give.
The Giver is bigger than the Receiver. If you want to be large, larger than life, learn to Give. Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.
The importance of giving, blessing others can never be over emphasized because there's always joy in giving. Learn to make someone happy by acts of giving.” ~ Katharine Hepburn
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LOW-INCOME WORKERS REPORT MORE PHYSICAL PAIN AND DIE YOUNGER
~ “Life expectancy in the U.S. declined slightly in 2016, as it did in 2015, and — at least as important — the overall trends continue to mask increasing disparities across socioeconomic groups. Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution helps explain why. Her important new book is the empirical version of "Hillbilly Elegy."
I have long suspected that stress and lack of hope are to blame for widening the gap in life expectancy between lower and higher earners. Graham uses survey data to support this explanation, documenting striking differences in stress and optimism across segments of the population.
One type of stress is an unpredictable work schedule. More than 40 percent of early-career hourly workers in the U.S. learn of their work schedules less than a week in advance, recent evidence shows. Among retail and food-service workers, almost 90 percent face variation in at least half of their usual work hours.
Graham also finds major differences across income groups in reported physical pain. Almost 80 percent of people with household income below $24,000 a year reported being in physical pain the day before they were asked, compared with only about 30 percent of those with incomes above $90,000 a year. Her basic findings have been confirmed by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, using a different data set. These researchers conclude that an astonishing 34 percent of Americans experience bodily aches and pains either often or very often.
The U.S. stands out on many of these measures compared with other countries. The gap in stress levels between low- and high-income people is noticeably smaller in Latin American countries, for example. Low-income American workers are also less likely than Latin Americans to believe that “hard work gets you ahead.”
And Blanchflower and Oswald show that reported pain is higher in the U.S. than in any other country they study. “As the U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world, and in principle might be expected to have one of the most comfortable lifestyles in the world,” they note, “it seems strange — to put it at its mildest — that the nation should report such a lot of pain.”
Graham notes one encouraging trend: While the differences among income groups are growing, the gaps between races are shrinking. Life expectancy differences between whites and African Americans are narrowing, even as the gaps by income within each race are widening. And low-income African Americans are quite hopeful about the future — more so even than non-poor white Americans.” ~
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-17/extraordinary-stress-and-pessimism-take-a-grim-toll
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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.” ~
https://thehumanist.com/commentary/racism-past-present
Robert E. Lee and staff, 1865
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BISHOP SPONG ON CRUCIFIXION AND ST AUGUSTINE (condensed):
~ “The language of original sin and atonement has emanated from Christian circles for so long that it has achieved the status of a sacred mantra. This means that it cannot be questioned. Upon closer inspection, these sacred concepts involve us in a view of human life that is no longer operative, a theistic understanding of God articulated in a form that is all but repulsive, a magical view of Jesus that violates our minds, and the practical necessity for the church to elicit guilt as a prerequisite to conversion.
The service of baptism presupposes the rescue operation. The primary eucharistic worship of the church, frequently referred to as “the sacrifice of the mass,” reenacts liturgically this rescuing view of Jesus. The entire corpus of the the bible traditionally has been read and interpreted in such a way as to undergird this particular understanding of Jesus as the rescuer. The presence of a cross or a crucifix as the central symbol of Christianity proclaims it.
To be human was by definition to be evil, fallen, and in need of rescue.
It was the conviction that humans were sinful and in need of redemption that enabled guilt and religion to be so closely tied together in the history of the Western world. Religious empires were built on helping people live with and, to some degree, overcome their sense of guilt. Confession, penances, acts of supererogation (going beyond the call of duty), and masses for the dead were but a few of the guilt levers built into the Christian enterprise.
Death was not natural, Augustine argued: it was punitive. The sin of Adam had been passed on through the sex act to every other human being. Sex was evil. Sex was universal. So evil was universal. It was said to be the heritage of Adam. We were fallen creatures in need of rescue. Christ died, said Paul, “for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3). Our sins somehow required his death. He was the sacrifice made on our behalf. God, it was said, sent his son to “pay the price of sin.”
It was said “God nailed his son to the cross for our salvation.” Seldom did Christians pause to recognize the ogre into which they had turned God.
The unraveling of this strange theological system began with the realization that Adam and Eve were not the primeval human parents. The theory of evolution made Adam and Eve legendary at best. There were no first parents, and so the primeval act of disobedience on the part of the first parents could not possibly have affected the whole human race. The myth was thus dealt a death blow, and he monolithic story of salvation built by Christian apologists over the ages began to totter.
How can there be a fall into sin if there has never been a perfection from which to fall? What kind of deity is it who would require of us a sacrificial offering to overcome a chasm that is now understood to be nonexistent? All of these interpretations [of atonement] involve us in images of an external deity who acted like a capricious human authority figure who would be displeased with human conduct and who would require some kind of restitution. They involve us in a definition of human life as sinful and fallen.
We human beings do not live in sin. We are not born in sin. We do not need to have the stain of our original sin washed away in baptism. We are not fallen creatures who will lose salvation if we are not baptized. We were not created in God’s image in any literal way. We simply evolved out of lower forms of life and ultimately developed a higher consciousness. There was no fall into sin. Yet there is a sense in which all human beings are still caught in the struggle to become our deeper and truest selves.
The realization is dawning that we human beings are alone and therefore are responsible for ourselves, that there is no no appeal to a higher power for protection. We are learning that meaning is not external to life but must be discovered in our own depths and imposed on life by an act of our own will. ~
(oops! I lost the link. But the words are those of Bishop Spong — the only Christian author who makes sense to me.)
El Greco: St. AugustineOriana:
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"We didn't fall from grace. We rose from slime." ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
By the way, it was the sin-obsessed St. Augustine who developed the notion that god elects those who will enter heaven and gives them the gift of grace. Augustine thought that people can do only evil; they cannot NOT sin. When they do good, it’s not their own merit; it’s because god gave them grace, empowering them to do something good in spite of their fallen nature.
Let me quote Leszek Kolakowski on this:
“If we accept that everything we do of our own volition is evil and we do good only thanks to the operation of irresistible divine Grace, can we still maintain, without contradiction, that we have free will?” Now, free will is an absolute necessity in most religions (as well as secular legal systems) because it means you can be punished. And we are still completely enamored of punishment.
The celestial spheres
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THE SILENCE OF PAUL
~ “Paul seems unaware of any virgin birth. No wise men, no star in the east, no miracles. Historians have long puzzled over the “Silence of Paul” on the most basic biographical facts and teachings of Jesus.
Paul fails to cite Jesus’ authority precisely when it would make his case. What’s more, he never calls the twelve apostles Jesus’ disciples; in fact, he never says Jesus HAD disciples –or a ministry, or did miracles, or gave teachings. He virtually refuses to disclose any other biographical detail, and the few cryptic hints he offers aren’t just vague, but contradict the gospels. The leaders of the early Christian movement in Jerusalem like Peter and James are supposedly Jesus’ own followers and family; but Paul dismisses them as nobodies and repeatedly opposes them for not being true Christians!
Liberal theologian Marcus Borg suggests that people read the books of the New Testament in chronological order to see how early Christianity unfolded.
Placing the Gospels after Paul makes it clear that as written documents they are not the source of early Christianity but its product.
For David Fitzgerald, these issues and more lead to a conclusion that he finds inescapable:
Jesus appears to be an effect, not a cause, of Christianity. Paul and the rest of the first generation of Christians searched the Septuagint translation of Hebrew scriptures to create a Mystery Faith for the Jews, complete with pagan rituals like a Lord’s Supper, Gnostic terms in his letters, and a personal savior god to rival those in their neighbors’ longstanding Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman traditions.
Even if one accepts that there was a real Jesus of Nazareth, the question has little practical meaning: Regardless of whether or not a first century rabbi called Yeshua ben Yosef lived, the “historical Jesus” figures so patiently excavated and re-assembled by secular scholars are themselves fictions.
The presence of mythic tropes or legendary elements in the gospel stories has been broadly accepted and documented, while the imprint of any actual man who may have provided a historical kernel — how he may have lived, what he may have said, and how he died — is more hazy than most people dream.” ~
https://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/here-are-5-reasons-to-suspect-jesus-never-existed/
Oriana:
Paul was fixated on the imminent second coming and the promise of immortality — in a perfect “spirit body” rather than as a resurrected corpse.
When Paul wrote his epistles, the Nativity story didn’t yet exist. Likewise many teachings (or what we’ve come to accept as such) are not relevant to the second coming. Even if Paul was familiar with some of them, they simply didn’t especially interest him. He was obsessed with the imminent coming of the “kingdom of heaven.”
Now, just because something is a fiction (or call it a myth, or a legend) doesn’t mean it has no value. The nativity story is heart-warming and easily understood: a child is born in a barn — “because there was no room for them at the inn” — presumably with animals looking on. Whether it’s “mythologized history” or “historicized mythology” is besides the point when it comes to the emotional appeal of the kind of love that’s universally understood: a new baby, the loving, protective parents, gifts for the baby, the angels singing, the shepherds kneeling, and even the animals appearing to be affectionately curious.
By the way, Mary and Joseph (Miriam and Yosef) were not likely the real names of the parents (assuming historicity). They were chosen for their special dignity in ancient Judaism — the sister of Moses and a major patriarch. A lot of the details in the gospels seem to have been chosen so as to fit in with established Judaism, e.g. you flee to Egypt (even though the Slaughter of the Innocents never took place), and then you come out of Egypt — just to repeat the sanctified pattern.
Caravaggio: Rest on the Flight from Egypt, 1597; detail
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~ A single line in Matthew—“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”—largely accounts for why the West isn’t still hostage to theocracy. ~ Sam Harris
Titian: Jesus and the tribute coin
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HERPES SIMPLEX AND ALZHEIMER’S — AND HOPE
~ The virus implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1), is better known for causing cold sores. It infects most people in infancy and then remains dormant in the peripheral nervous system (the part of the nervous system that isn’t the brain and the spinal cord). Occasionally, if a person is stressed, the virus becomes activated and, in some people, it causes cold sores.
We discovered in 1991 that in many elderly people HSV1 is also present in the brain. And in 1997 we showed that it confers a strong risk of Alzheimer’s disease when present in the brain of people who have a specific gene known as APOE4.
The virus can become active in the brain, perhaps repeatedly, and this probably causes cumulative damage. The likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease is 12 times greater for APOE4 carriers who have HSV1 in the brain than for those with neither factor.
Later, we and others found that HSV1 infection of cell cultures causes beta-amyloid and abnormal tau proteins to accumulate. An accumulation of these proteins in the brain is characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.
We believe that HSV1 is a major contributory factor for Alzheimer’s disease and that it enters the brains of elderly people as their immune system declines with age. It then establishes a latent (dormant) infection, from which it is reactivated by events such as stress, a reduced immune system and brain inflammation induced by infection by other microbes.
Reactivation leads to direct viral damage in infected cells and to viral-induced inflammation. We suggest that repeated activation causes cumulative damage, leading eventually to Alzheimer’s disease in people with the APOE4 gene.
Presumably, in APOE4 carriers, Alzheimer’s disease develops in the brain because of greater HSV1-induced formation of toxic products, or less repair of damage.
In an earlier study, we found that the anti-herpes antiviral drug, acyclovir, blocks HSV1 DNA replication, and reduces levels of beta-amyloid and tau caused by HSV1 infection of cell cultures.
It’s important to note that all studies, including our own, only show an association between the herpes virus and Alzheimer’s – they don’t prove that the virus is an actual cause. Probably the only way to prove that a microbe is a cause of a disease is to show that an occurrence of the disease is greatly reduced either by targeting the microbe with a specific anti-microbial agent or by specific vaccination against the microbe.
Excitingly, successful prevention of Alzheimer’s disease by use of specific anti-herpes agents has now been demonstrated in a large-scale population study in Taiwan. Hopefully, information in other countries, if available, will yield similar results. ~
CAN SUNLIGHT EXPOSURE LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE?
~ Our bodies get Vitamin D from the sun, but as dermatologist Richard Weller suggests, sunlight may confer another surprising benefit too. New research by his team shows that nitric oxide, a chemical transmitter stored in huge reserves in the skin, can be released by UV light, to great benefit for blood pressure and the cardiovascular system. ~
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_weller_could_the_sun_be_good_for_your_heart?language=en
Weller starts his talk by talking about his trip to Australia, and how his Australian medical colleagues boasted of of having a one-third lower rate of cardiovascular disease than the UK. But even in the UK, there is less cardiovascular disease in the southern part of the country than father north, in Scotland. That’s the so-called South-North Health Divide.
Weller has pointed out some important things. The human skin contains a large reservoir of nitric oxide (obtained as nitrates and nitrites from leafy vegetables and beets), which, when released, dilates the blood vessels, lowering blood pressure. Weller’s most recent study, using volunteers, had them exposed to “sun lamps” — not the ordinary kind, but those producing UVA radiation, which doesn’t lead to the production of Vitamin D (it takes the UVB radiation to do that; the effect weaken with age). By measuring blood flow, Weller was able to show (as in a previous study) that UVA radiation did increase blood flow, presumably due to the release of nitric oxide.
Surprisingly, the effect was greater in older patients — the group at particular risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke.
At the population level, even a small decrease in systolic blood pressure can lead to significant lowering of risk for cardiovascular disease.
Weller is a dermatologist, well aware that UV radiation is a risk factor for skin cancer. But skin cancer mortality, he points out, is small compared to that of cardiovascular disease mortality.
(You need to be concerned about melanoma if you have very fair skin and freckles, and are prone to burn rather than tan when exposed to intense sunlight. Tanning booths are definitely not for the fair-skinned.
Now, after this talk, I’d be all in favor of tanning both that exclude UVB from the lamps, while deliver the nitric-oxide releasing UVA radiation — of course after a number of controlled studies. [By the way, living at a high elevation also increases the risk of melanoma])
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AVOIDANCE OF SUN EXPOSURE IS A RISK FACTOR FOR ALL-CAUSE MORTALITY: RESULTS FROM THE MELANOMA IN SOUTHERN SWEDEN COHORT
~ We assessed the avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for all-cause mortality for 29 518 Swedish women in a prospective 20-year follow-up of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden (MISS) cohort. Women were recruited from 1990 to 1992 and were aged 25 to 64 years at the start of the study. We obtained detailed information at baseline on their sun exposure habits and potential confounders.
There were 2545 deaths amongst the 29 518 women who responded to the initial questionnaire. We found that all-cause mortality was inversely related to sun exposure habits. The mortality rate among avoiders of sun exposure was approximately twofold higher compared with the highest sun exposure group, resulting in excess mortality with a population attributable risk of 3%.
The results of this study provide observational evidence that avoiding sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality. Following sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health. ~
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24697969/
Oriana:
Note that this is about all-cause mortality. “The mortality rate amongst avoiders of sun exposure was approximately twofold higher compared with the highest sun exposure group (. . .) The results of this study provide observational evidence that avoiding sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality.”
The study is observational. I would obviously be very difficult to conduct an experimental study of the effects of sunlight exposure on mortality. But pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fit together: sunlight and vitamin D, sunlight and blood-pressure lowering nitric oxide, sunlight and better sleep at night. I predict that more benefits will be discovered, and we’ll find more ways to spend more times outdoors.
*
ending on beauty:
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, you who were lost
from the start, I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I’ve given up
trying to recognize you in the surging wave
of the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the deeply felt
landscape, unsuspected turns in the path —
cities, towers, bridges,
and those powerful lands that once pulsed
with the life of the gods —
all arise within me to mean you,
who forever elude me.
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