Mondrian: Farm at Duivendrecht, 1916*
STILL ANOTHER DAY
Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don't let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.
Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.
You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.
~ Pablo Neruda, tr. William O’Daly
This is so gorgeous! And I don’t find Neruda to my liking all the time. But when he’s good, and well-translated, he is pure poetry, the way Rilke can be. It’s the skillful use of nature imagery and the creation of mystery and feeling.
Amazing, the way he seems to be addressing a particular day:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.
I’ve never seen anyone else do it. The tone vaguely reminds me of Cesar Vallejo:
I'll die in Paris on a rainy day,
On a day I already remember.
I’ll die in Paris – I am not in a hurry –
Perhaps on a Thursday in autumn, like today.
But back to Neruda’s rain magic. For me the poem truly starts here.
Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Of course I love the rain fallen on the roof of my childhood. Absolutely! And I want it back, all of it, all those tears snailing down the windowpanes.
And I want all the horses, all the erudite professors-atheists, always so full of laughter, and the solemn-faced church-going farm wives too, and their chickens.
This seems to be the style of early Neruda, of 20 Love Poems:
The light wraps you in its mortal flame,
pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight,
pure heir of the ruined day.
And then we come to:
You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
I’m jealous. It’s perfectly OK for a male poet to have a line with all those superlatives, in the tradition of Donne to his lover: “Oh my America! My new-found land!” But if a woman wishes to celebrate her male muse, she risks ridicule if she sounds anything like “my king, my man, my new continent.” She comes under the suspicion of being a love junkie: too dependent, un-feminist, idolatrous in her worship of the man of the moment.
True, there is Sharon Olds with her sex poems. I never cared for those. And now that we know how it ended (“It never crossed my mind that he no longer loved me” and was actually having an affair), those are practically insufferable. You fool! we want to scream at the younger Olds, that strange husband-junkie carrying on about his perfect body. (Ironically, the poems about the divorce are among Olds’s best.)
But Neruda, the old magician, gets away with anything — after all, aside from nostalgia for his homeland, the poem is mainly about the rain, right? And rain is endlessly poetic. Living in California taught me to love the rain and rain poems above all other love poems. Make no mistake about it: this is not a love poem to a woman. She is a mere phantom here, perhaps an invention. This is a love poem to rain.
*
TRUMP: GENIUS, INCOMPETENT, BOGEYMAN
~ It may seem counterintuitive to say so, but Donald Trump is a complicated figure. To be sure, the basic word cloud is clear—narcissistic, deceitful, vindictive, and so on—but there are multiple sides to the personality that has sucked so many people into a vortex of adoration or loathing. Now that his term in office is coming to an end with a combination of farce, folly, and menace, it is worth assessing him as cold-bloodedly as we may.
He is, to begin with, a genius. A very narrow kind of genius, admittedly, but a genius nonetheless. One element of his brilliance is a gift for echoing the anger and resentments of overlooked Americans. One can only be awed by the way in which a germaphobe born into wealth, who in his private life repeatedly fleeced working- and middle-class people and seems to have despised the devout who prayed enthusiastically for him, was able to represent himself so successfully as their avatar and champion.
It’s not just that Trump learned how to use television cameras to his advantage while doing The Apprentice. He also learned (or maybe intuited) the diction, grimaces, japes, chippy belligerence, and malicious wit that millions of Americans have yearned to display on a public stage but could not. He flipped the middle finger at cultural elites, overly sensitive liberals, woke activists, patronizing professors, and condescending atheists, and people loved it, wishing only that they could do the same. He knew how to dabble in race-baiting without quite ever going full George Wallace. He had the great skill of propounding absurd or evil things and adding “It’s what I’ve heard” or “People are saying,” so that there was always enough room for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to sigh wearily rather than face up to what his words meant.
Trump also has, as authoritarians often do, a feral sense for weakness. Hence his usually spot-on dismissive nicknames for his opponents in 2016. More important, he could sense the weaknesses in his audience. In 1932, a novel appeared in German with the title Little Man, What Now? The novel (and its author, Hans Fallada) was by no means pro-Hitler, but it captured the milieu that made many ripe for seduction by a variety of extremist parties, including the Nazis. That is why Trump’s real slogan was not “Make America great again,” a phrase devoid of content, but rather the lasting words of his inaugural address: “American carnage.” He detected, and none better, fear of a collapse—of order, of morals, of traditional hierarchy, of the economy—and played to it.
And, finally, he was smart enough to give people what they wanted: a flourishing economy fed by deregulation and massive stimulus, a promise of controlling immigration, and a foreign policy that retreated from war and slapped around deadbeat, free-riding allies. What was not to like?
But these strokes of genius could work only in an environment where his party of choice (he was never really a Republican) would cave to him completely. Stuart Stevens, in It Was All A Lie, reflects on the ways in which the GOP began sliding down a rathole of race-baiting and antidemocratic behavior long ago—and how he, as a political operative, went along with it. Other thoughtful Republicans (or former Republicans) are mulling over their own complicity in a party that was compromising its values for power. But equally, or more so, there has not been a full reckoning on the left.
Particularly given the impending release of what is sure to be a gracefully written and elegiac memoir by Barack Obama, one could easily elide the mistakes made not only by that administration but by the elites who were so enthusiastic about it. Those mistakes gave Trump his opening—in particular, the lack of empathy, let alone sympathy, for Americans who were whipsawed by changing social norms, who felt their faith to be under attack, or who believed their livelihood endangered by the flight of manufacturing to China. A clash of cultures gave Trump his chance, and it is not clear that the culture warriors on one side have processed adequately why they lost so soundly in 2016, and only barely eked out a victory in 2020.
So yes, Trump is a genius. He is also a bozo. If he had the intelligence, cunning, and courage of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian ruler, American democracy would have trembled on the edge. He never figured out how government worked, so he never figured out how to really go after his enemies—for example, he did not understand that having a security clearance creates a vulnerability to financial exhaustion by lawyers’ fees for someone you wish to bludgeon with prosecution.
More deeply, because of his unwavering pugnacity, Trump is simply incapable of adopting a pose of generosity. It would have cost him nothing to ooze a bit of sympathy for those suffering from the coronavirus, or a hurricane, or police brutality. He might have talked, as Joe Biden has already done with sincerity, about being a president for all Americans, even those who opposed him. But these are all beyond his emotional range, which is spectacularly narrow. He can do hostility, victimhood, and swagger, and that’s about it. And that was simply too little to be able to sustain a reelection campaign.
Trump is, finally, a bogeyman—a fearful devil of our nightmares who will vanish before too long. He will step down and, despite the fears of many, likely recede into the background. He will no longer have the platform of the White House, and all the opportunities that it gave him to dominate the news cycle. He will be faced with a host of lawsuits, including some that have nothing to with his politics and everything to do with his grifting. He reportedly has hundreds of millions of dollars coming due on loans, while no foreign government hoping for favor with the Biden White House will continue to pour money into his overpriced hotels. He seems likely to declare war on Fox, the network that served as his presidential mouthpiece. Republican politicians who have groveled to him in recent years while privately loathing and despising him will be frantic to prevent him from taking the nomination they seek in 2024. They will do their best to undercut not only Trump, but also his equally militant and even more clueless sons. Lastly, he is old and getting older, and we have reason to think that he may not wear particularly well.
Trump will undoubtedly bleat from the sidelines, but the country will move on. What it cannot move on from, however, are the underlying syndromes that gave him his extraordinary success. The cultural condescension and economic hard-heartedness that mobilized his followers, the obliviousness to issues of character that enabled traditional conservatives and devout believers to throw in their lot with a despicable man, the hostility toward facts and evidence that led to an insane opposition to mask wearing during a pandemic, and the belief in winning at all costs including the undermining of democratic norms—these remain with us. And we still do not have more than a superficial understanding of them, of whence they came, how they flourished, and what we can do to remedy them.
The sorry tale of Trump, then, is almost behind us. The difficult tasks of understanding, reflection, and reconstruction are before us, and will last far longer than his appalling strut across the stage of American history. ~ Eliot A. Cohen
Mary: PARANOIA: THE ARCHITECTURE OF A CULT
RUSSIA’S REACTION TO BIDEN’S WIN: "WHOEVER WINS, AMERICA'S POLITICAL SYSTEM HAS ALREADY LOST"
~ “This whole time, we’ve been living with an illusion that Trump is ours,” noted
political scientist Ilya Graschenkov. Host Evgeny Popov corrected him:
“Trump IS ours, but couldn’t lift anti-Russian sanctions because of the
legislation signed into law by Democrats.” Visibly irritated by the lack
of deliverables from the Trump administration, combined with the surety
of additional punitive measures anticipated from the incoming
president, Popov exclaimed: “We spit on them both!”
Trump’s presidency netted plenty of benefits for the Kremlin—from the weakening of transatlantic alliances and decline in America’s global standing, to the deepening divide within the United States. But the Kremlin believed that the American president would pay off like a slot machine on a much bigger scale during his second term. Disappointment with Trump’s failure to lift the sanctions, recognize the annexation of Crimea, stop U.S. support for Ukraine and other perks eagerly anticipated by the Kremlin was threaded through the statements made by Russian lawmakers and political figures.
In
his interview with radio station Echo Moskvy, politician Vladimir
Zhirinovsky—who famously celebrated Trump’s 2016 election by throwing a
champagne party in Russia’s parliament—bitterly complained: “Trump
didn’t do anything good for us ... In his election campaign, he promised
to improve [relations], but in reality he did nothing, he didn’t even
come here. All U.S. presidents came to Russia and invited our
president to their place in Washington, everyone except him. Donald
Trump did not come to Moscow and never invited our president to
Washington. Therefore, all we are left with are bad memories.”
Discussing
U.S. elections on 60 Minutes, co-host Olga Skabeyeva pointed out: “The
last time we interfered, but not this time around.” Writer Zakhar
Prilepin noted that Trump should have been a better friend to Putin and
Skabyeeva enthusiastically agreed: “Then we would have saved him.
Everything would have been fine.”
While Russian experts and politicians are in mourning over Joe Biden’s presidential victory, they managed to make a small amount of lemonade out of the shriveled lemons of Trump’s waning presidency. Russian state media repeatedly aired Donald Trump’s notoriously undemocratic press conference, wherein he baselessly trashed and undermined his own country’s elections, describing the democratic process as unclean, untrustworthy and mired in fraud.
Russian propagandists amplified and embellished Trump’s rabidly anti-American statements and false claims. Appearing on a radio show Soloviev Live, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of state-funded propaganda networks, RT and Sputnik, disingenuously argued that the U.S. president’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be taken at face value simply because of his unprecedented access to information no one else is privy to.
Russian state media described the U.S. elections as a “bacchanalia,” worse than contested elections in Africa or Belarus, and falsely accused the states of egregious “machinations and falsifications” designed to unseat Trump. The Kremlin’s mouthpieces baselessly alleged that 11 million illegal immigrants, 1.5 million dead voters and an untold number of dogs—supposedly registered to vote by their owners—unlawfully voted for Biden. There is no evidence to substantiate any of these allegations, which are rivaled only by the U.S. president’s bold-faced lie that he lost the race due to unproven, phantom “election fraud.”
Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, noted in an interview with state news agency TASS on Saturday that prior to these elections, Americans never thought that their electoral system could be rigged. Thanks to the barrage of allegations by U.S. President Donald J. Trump, that is no longer the case. Kortunov noted: “Whoever wins, the American political system has already lost. Voter confidence will have to be restored again, and what Trump is doing now—accusing the Democrats of very large-scale fraud—also undermines trust.”
During Friday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, co-host Olga Skabeeva claimed that at least half of America is now disappointed in the country’s electoral system. Lawmaker Leonid Kalashnikov summed up the U.S. election debacle: “That’s how you delegitimize a nation.” Discrediting the crown jewel of Western democracy has always been one of Russia’s top priorities—and while he failed to come through on other fronts, Trump delivered a parting gift above and beyond the Kremlin’s wildest dreams. ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/joe-bidens-win-is-making-russian-media-angry-and-desperate
*
MIDDLEMARCH AND UNEASY FEMINISM
~ Middlemarch is such a classic that characters like Dorothea, Casaubon, and Rosamund seem to have been not so much invented as discovered. They have an afterlife in our minds. Dorothea, especially.
But when I was writing my novel about George Eliot, researching her notebooks, letters, diaries from her Middlemarch period, I got a shock. I couldn’t find Dorothea. And then I realized—for the first 18 months of writing Middlemarch, there was no Dorothea. Eliot had one protagonist only during that time—Lydgate.
I became fascinated by this delay. How strange, that what read so naturally, with such aliveness and seeming rightness, had been arrived at with such difficulty, and after such a prolonged block. My book about Eliot is a story (her story) in its own right, but within that, another story was demanding my attention, too. What was this delay? I looked for clues as I read Eliot’s letters, combed through the chronology of her days, thought about who she’d seen and written to, what was going on at home and more generally in her life. Gradually I began to see a shadowy evolution—something in the nature of a feminist awakening.
George Eliot’s personal history, and her achievements, meant that she was a feminist icon for her peers. She’d defied the double standards of the day by living openly with George Lewes, who was married (though separated), but who couldn’t legally get a divorce. Marian Evans, or Marian Lewes, as she called herself, had become instantly notorious, until her books brought her forgiveness and acclaim.
Lewes had three sons from his marriage. The spring that Eliot was brewing Middlemarch, in 1869, Lewes’s middle son Thornie was due to come home from the British colony of Natal (now called Kwa-Zulu Natal, part of South Africa), as he’d fallen ill. Thornie arrived six weeks earlier than expected—just when Eliot had hoped to get down to her book. Terrifyingly emaciated, Thornie had lost four and a half stone. Henry James records visiting them where they lived in Regent’s Park, finding the white-faced Thornie writhing on the drawing-room floor, with a distracted, frightened Eliot in charge, Lewes having dashed out (on a Sunday) to try to find morphine. Thornie had tuberculosis of the spine, undiagnosed.
Thornie’s presence thrust George Eliot back into her role of stepmother, a role that brought with it a variety of tensions—not least, the need to “do her duty.” The mother’s role is an important one in Eliot’s thinking, deeply informing her response to one of the great issues of the day—the position of women. But in spite of being a feminist icon herself, she disappointed her progressive peers (many of whom were her friends) when it came to her views. Eliot was conservative politically—she didn’t think women should have the vote, for instance.
She saw women as having a special power to nurture—”that exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness, possible maternity suffusing a woman’s being with affectionateness, which makes what we mean by the feminine character”—and she saw feminism as threatening this character. “There is no subject on which I am more inclined to hold my peace and learn, than on the ‘Women Question.’ It seems to me to overhang abysses, of which even prostitution is not the worst.”
But now Eliot was being tested on precisely this nurturing territory. She was trying to write Middlemarch, and the periods of concentration and quiet, essential for work, were interrupted by Thornie’s illness, sometimes by his screams. The days were broken “into small fragments.” “We are not only kept at home but kept also from any consecutive occupation by a sad family trouble” she wrote. It was impossible to feel that her reactions to Thornie would have been unmixed. We can perhaps catch this ambivalence in the following letter to her younger friend Emilia Pattison. She begins by apologizing for her effusiveness (they were still getting to know each other, and Eliot worried she’d been over familiar):
But in proportion as I profoundly rejoice that I never brought a child into the world, I am conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness, which sometimes overflows, but not without discrimination.
I hear the veiled note of exasperation in that “profoundly rejoice.” She’d been writing Middlemarch for six weeks, with her Lydgate-only cast, and was beginning to lose steam. (Incidentally here, maybe, we glimpse a seed of the future heroine. Emilia Pattison happened to be unhappily married to the scholar Mark Pattison, 27 years older, who happened to be writing a biography of the Renaissance scholar, Isaac Casaubon…)
Thornie’s troubles continued through the summer. Eliot’s grip on her book faltered. In October she put the manuscript aside and gave herself to her stepson. He died on October 9th. There is no mistaking her sincerity:
Dearest Barbara,
Thanks for your tender words. It has cut deeper than I expected—that he is gone and I can never make him feel my love any more. Just now all else seems trivial compared with the powers of delighting and soothing a heart that is in need.
*
His death hit Eliot hard, in spite of any frustrations she might have experienced. A desolate autumn, spring and summer followed. Middlemarch was fairly paralyzed. But a process had been kickstarted.
In the early summer she heard news of a friend who had been bereaved, Lady Lytton. Eliot wrote to her:
My dear Mrs Lytton,
I know from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you—that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is like an increase of property,—it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.
. . . I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity,—possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.
We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life—some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed—because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defense against passionate affliction even more than men.”
*
Armgart, the eponymous heroine [of Eliot's dramatic poem], is a prodigiously gifted singer—Eliot’s avatar. Eliot is revolving the dilemmas facing women at a deep urgent level now; and it’s as if she hasn’t time to play out these issues in the long characterologically complex way that the form of the novel demands: she wants the arguments out there, at their baldest. Thus, Armgart’s suitor, called Graf, offers Armgart marriage—provided she gives up her art. It’s a stark either-or set-up, the roles of wife and woman-artist mutually exclusive.
Graf argues that a woman’s rank “Lies in the fullness of her womanhood.” Through Armgart, Eliot rebuts this, more fiercely, more directly, than anywhere else in her work. “Yes I know That oft-taught gospel: Woman, thy desire shall be that all thy superlatives on earth Belong to men, save the one highest kind, To be a mother.”
But, she argues, the same Nature that gave women the ability to bear children, gave her her artistic talent, her voice, and her ambition too. Having aired Eliot’s private manifesto, Armgart plays out her most pressing creative concerns. Graf argues that given that Armgart has shown what she can do as a great artist, she had best stop here, in case she fails.
Armgart rebuts this: “True greatness ever wills—It lives in wholeness if it lives at all, And all its strength is knit with constancy.”
Graf goes on to say that “high success has terrors when achieved”—not least, the fear of failing; “You said you dared not think what life had been Without the stamp of eminence; have you thought How you will bear the poise of eminence With dread of sliding?”
Eliot’s getting very confessional here. Her fear of failure is deep and frightening. But something else is getting outed too: her desire not to be ordinary, her desire to be great. She answers Graf through Armgart: “I accept the peril. I choose to walk high with sublimer dread Rather than crawl in safety…”
I love what Armgart shows us about Eliot. She is daring to confront herself. She doesn’t just explore her fears, including that she’s finished as a writer (as she’s so paralyzed writing Middlemarch); she airs her intense pleasure, her triumph in being a great artist, and her view that an artist like herself—she clearly had the measure of herself—deserved fame, “That sense transcendent which can taste the joy Of swaying multitudes, of being adored For such achievement.”
Eliot’s candor is startling. She’s savoring the joy of being adored by swaying multitudes. It contrasts wonderfully with her super-modest persona in her letters, where the rule of thumb is to be desponding, anxious, despairing, when talking about her writing. Although there’s no doubt she did suffer from agonizing self-doubt, it’s also clear, she preferred presenting herself this way, in line with traditional modest femininity. It’s the flip side of the true elephant in the room—ambition.
“I feel that my besetting sin” she writes, age 19, “is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures.”
But here’s the thing. The book she was trying to write, Middlemarch, was about ambition, the desire to do something in life, and it cried out for female treatment, with women denied education and opportunity. Conceiving her theme through Lydgate, Dorothea, was not going to appear until the ghostly obstructive presence of Eliot’s egotism, ambitiousness, had been given shape, as it is in Armgart.
“Shall I turn aside From splendors which flash out the glow I make, And live to make, in all the chosen breasts Of half a Continent? No, may it come, That splendor! May the day be near when men …And new lands welcome me upon their beach, Loving me for my fame. That is the truth Of what I wish, nay, yearn for. Shall I lie? Pretend to seek obscurity—to sing In hope of disregard? A vile pretense!”
The true, problematic nature of Eliot’s position regarding “the women question” could be summed up by this: the power of nurturing is a precious addition to humankind, and this is women’s primary special function—unless, that is, you are a genius like me.
It’s no accident that this block happened with Middlemarch. Not only was the theme right on the money (women and ambition), she was herself upping her game. She was about to write a book that was nothing if not ambitious. Her notebooks for that time, the Folger and Berg, are thrilling, dizzying in their range, their fragments of cultural reference, ancient, medieval, modern, in Greek, Latin, German, Italian, French. Her thematic aim was large: to say that our written histories are not the only way to take account of the past, the big known deeds are only part of the story.
Those unhistoric small invisible acts, that permeate our lives, matter too.
She wrote Armgart in September. In November, though, she began writing a story. It featured a young woman called Dorothea Brooke, and it flowed easily. She didn’t connect it with Middlemarch. But in the following spring the penny dropped; the themes matched, they belonged together. She joined the two parts, and Dorothea took center-stage. From that point, Middlemarch was written at a very good pace. ~
Oriana:
It would have been easy for Eliot to produce a happy ending: Rosamund dies in childbirth, and Lydgate and Dorothea get married — without the sacrifice of Dorothea's considerable wealth that she inherited from her husband, and without Lydgate's ambition to be a pioneer in medicine going to waste. A minor writer would have certainly chosen this easy path. Eliot chooses the difficult, realistic ending.
There is also the “inspirational” ending — the hymn to small, forgotten acts of kindness that determine whether the world we live in is basically kind or cruel. That ending is a consolation for all the non-ambitious female readers (and perhaps for some male readers too). Acts of nurturing are enough, Eliot tries to reassure the Gentle Reader. The life of the mind as presented here — Casaubon’s misguided labors of scholarship — is certainly not an appealing alternative.
*
WE ARE THE HEIRS OF ROMANTICISM
~ I really believe in history, and that’s something people don’t believe in anymore. I know that what we do and think is a historical creation. I have very few beliefs, but this is certainly a real belief: that most everything we think of as natural is historical and has roots — specifically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called Romantic revolutionary period — and we’re essentially still dealing with expectations and feelings that were formulated at that time, like ideas about happiness, individuality, radical social change, and pleasure. We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular historical moment. So when I go to a Patti Smith concert at CBGB, I enjoy, participate, appreciate, and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche. ~ Susan Sontag
Oriana:
We are the heirs of Romanticism, but also of the realism of the late nineteenth century novels and plays: we know that life is a play with a poorly written last act. “Enjoy the small pleasures,” is not really a Romantic message, but that of our own more resigned age. And ultimately, we are the heirs of Ecclesiastes, which reminds us that the race is not always to the swift, and that the wicked can prosper.
*
“Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time compels us to descend to our ultimate depths. I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know it makes us more profound. In the end, lest what is most important remains unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe unexplained sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Oriana:
I can go along with that: suffering doesn’t make us better, but it can make us deeper. I also like the phrase “a second dangerous innocence in joy.”
*
*
*
AMERICA, LAND OF REFUGEES
~ My parents were German refugees, fleeing Hitler. They got out of Germany in the nick of time with no money, no language, and few skills. They had to start all over. My father was the heir to a large department store and like many rich kids, never worried about learning a trade. My mother, from simpler people, was a great athlete and thought she’d become a phys-ed teacher.
German refugees, in the build-up to World War II were looked upon with suspicion by Americans. Were they spies? Saboteurs? (Sound familiar?) My parents were frequently told to go back where they came from and worse. Not surprisingly, they created a ghetto of their own in Washington Heights, and as far as I can remember, they had no American friends. When I was ten, we moved to Miami where, again they only collected friends who were German Jews.
Here’s the hard part to admit: they embarrassed me. I was embarrassed by their accents, their strangeness, and their cliquishness. I did what I could to separate myself from them, and become as American as I could. I learned how to twirl a baton. I knew all the words to every Christmas Carol. I was chosen as the All-American girl for my high school yearbook.
Then the Cuban immigrants started coming to Miami. I saw how hard it was for them, what an effort they made to fit in, yet how wary of them people were at first. It made me think about my parents and what trials they must have gone through.
Here’s a question I get a lot: am I in this book? I have to admit, I am. If any character represents me it’s Meyer, the sometimes vile and nasty farm boy, a rising book author in Germany who takes a demeaning job in America—wearing a sandwich board advertising men’s clothing—before becoming a columnist at a German-Jewish newspaper. I used Meyer’s voice to say all the caustic things I thought about some of the other characters. His views on the politics of the time are largely mine. One exception: I’ve never had the kind of sloppy sex involving spaghetti that he did.
This is what’s true in the book. I did spend the first ten years of my life in Washington Heights. My father did work in a grocery store when he first came to America. (I have no idea if he worked behind the deli counter, but for some reason, I know there was sawdust on the floor). A beautiful friend of theirs did have bruised knees from washing floors at a fancy hotel.
Meeting for cake and coffee once a week at someone’s house or a bakery was a ritual. I remember my parents’ talking about Nash’s bakery and going there frequently. I might have even been there twice.
Without giving away any plot I will say that none of my parents’ friends were as desperate as some of these characters, nor did any of them ever interact with President Roosevelt.
My parents are gone now. Their daughter, the writer, creates worlds with words and inhabits them. (Their other daughter does the same with painting). I wanted to inhabit the world of immigrants that they did when they came here. It is my way of reliving it with them and in some small way, paying them back for being the snotty and ungrateful young girl I suppose I was.
I’m hoping everyone relates to this novel, as most of us are one or two generations away from being someplace else. At some point, we were all strangers once.
https://lithub.com/america-land-of-the-refugee/
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THE NON-VINDICTIVENESS OF NELSON MANDELA
~ After becoming President, I asked some of my bodyguard members to go for a walk in town. After the walk, we went for lunch at a restaurant. We sat in one of the most central ones, and each of us asked what we wanted. After a bit of waiting, the waiter who brought our menus appeared, at that moment I realized that at the table that was right in front of ours there was a single man waiting to be served.
When he was served, I told one of my soldiers: go ask that man to join us. The soldier went and transmitted my invitation. The man stood up, took the plate and sat next to me. While eating, his hands were constantly shaking and he didn't lift his head from the food. When we finished, he waved at me without even looking at me, I shook his hand and walked away!
Soldier said to me:
~ Madiba, that man must be very sick as his hands wouldn't stop shaking while he was eating.
— Not at all! The reason for his tremor is another, I replied. They looked at me weird and I said to them: That man was the guardian of the jail I was locked up in. Often, after the torture I was subjected to, I screamed and cried for water and he came to humiliate me, he laughed at me and instead of giving me water he urinated on my head.
He wasn't sick, he was scared and shook maybe fearing that I, now that I'm president of South Africa, would send him to jail and do the same thing he did with me, torturing and humiliating him. But that's not me, that behavior is not part of my character nor my ethics. Minds that seek revenge destroy states, while those that seek reconciliation build Nations.”
~ Nelson Mandela (From Echeverría Martínez ′′Chicali Wall ′′)
Mary:
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ALEXANDER HERZEN AND NATIONALISM
~ Herzen recognized, as Marx never could, that demagogues would routinely emerge to offer the exhausted and cheated masses the opiate of nationalism: “The classification of men by nationalities,” he wrote in the 1840s, “becomes more and more the wretched ideal of the world which has buried the revolution.” He would have immediately recognized the line that leads from the undermining of socialism and social democracy to white nationalism.
Herzen’s work, his biographer writes, “can now be seen as a uniquely prescient indictment of the political messianism that attained its evil maturity only in the next century and marked that century for all time with its imprint.”
He also rose above an intellectual parochialism to which the Eurocentric Marx was not immune: “Europe,” Herzen pointed out, “resolves everything in the world by analogy with itself.” He rejected its notionally universal path of progress, arguing that countries needed to find their own way, which was always contingent on local circumstances. “Why,” he asked, “should a nation that has developed in its own way, under completely different conditions from those of the West European states, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to?”
His criticism of the narcissism of Western ideologues and Westernized policy makers anticipated that of many disenchanted close observers of the West from the keenly imitative East. Dostoyevsky was among the unlikely figures who borrowed from the incendiary anti-Westernism of From the Other Shore [a collection of Herzen's articles and essays]. Many travelers from the East, such as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Chinese thinker Liang Qichao and the Islamist agitator Sayyid Qutb, would have found little to disagree with. Deploring the bourgeoisie’s homogeneous culture of acquisition and consumption, Herzen came to respect human diversity not just as an abstract value but as a prerequisite for intellectual and aesthetic originality.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, who defended premodern societies against accusations of backwardness, would have endorsed his view that “each phase of historical development has had its end in itself, and hence its own reward and satisfaction.”
Most important, those appalled by the undermining of political life by global commercial, ideological and financial nexuses would recognize Herzen’s insight into the early stages of this process. The “consequences of the supremacy of trade and industry,” he wrote, are that the shopkeeper is at the “helm of the world,” forcing the government to become his “shop assistant.” It is undoubtedly clearer today, with the revolving doors between business, politics and the media spinning ever faster, that “everything—the publication of newspapers, the elections, the legislative chambers—all have become money-changers’ shops and markets.”
Herzen objected most vigorously not to communism but to the “final religion,” as he termed the faith of liberals, whose “church is not of the other world but of this”and whose “theology is political theory,” the “last word of civilization founded on the absolute despotism of property.” He saw through the self-image of a philosophy and politics that claimed to oppose the state on behalf of individual freedom, but imposed its principles with the help of the state’s tools of violence and coercion, as in the imperialist wars waged on behalf of free trade.
“Liberalism,” he wrote, “has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.” It’s not hard to guess what he would have made of neo-liberals, who constantly protest against government while depending on it to extend the market’s coldly evaluative assessments to all aspects of human life (and to lock up the unproductive and the superfluous in ever-expanding prisons).
Herzen’s great achievement was to identify the power that cannily assigns inescapable destinies to individuals in line with their capacity to be competitive and profitable while at the same time paying lip service to universal progress, equality and liberty. “Petite bourgeoisie,” he lamented, “is the idea to which Europe is striving, and rising from every point on the ground.”
He failed to anticipate that all human societies would one day be organized around the bleak project of competitive self-aggrandizement, and that all those trying to catch up with the modern West would reproduce the dialectic of bourgeois “miserliness” and plebeian “envy”and the grim synthesis of ethnic-racial nationalism. But our demagogic present nevertheless vindicates the warnings of this Russian latecomer to modernity that “race hatreds and bloody collisions”would result from the general “ignorance”about the “final religion” and its zealots. ~
https://lithub.com/pankaj-mishra-on-an-oft-misunderstood-russian-revolutionary-socialist/?fbclid=IwAR3GDGMbvM_5KoAvMAc80QF2XKg7xmJRq6qtb1M2JqUA6kQv_TunRBKeWtc
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“Russian radicals disliked Herzen as too moderate. Radicals wanted more commitment to violent revolution and the withdrawal of any hope in the reformist Tsar. Radicals asked Herzen to use The Bell as a mouthpiece for violent radical revolution, but Herzen rejected these requests. He argued that the Russian Radicals were not united and strong enough to create successful political change, stating, "You want happiness, I suppose? I dare say you do! Happiness has to be conquered. If you are strong, take it. If you are weak, hold your tongue.” Herzen feared a new revolutionary government would merely replace the dictatorship with another dictatorship.
Herzen came to believe the complex questions of society could not be answered and that Russians must live for the moment and not a cause, essentially life is an end in itself. Herzen found greater understanding by not committing himself to an extreme but rather lived impartially enabling him to equally criticize competing ideologies. Herzen believed that grand doctrines ultimately result in enslavement, sacrifice and tyranny. ~ wiki
"There are two authors whom I make propaganda for: one is Herzen, the other is Shestov. They are both totally decent, open-minded, open-hearted human beings.” ~ Isaiah Berlin
Oriana:
To me the greatness of Herzen lies in his coming to understand that “grand doctrines ultimately result in enslavement, sacrifice and tyranny.”
Even though Herzen is regarded as the father of Russian socialism, he opposed the idea of a violent revolution.
Herzen favored “small-scale communes.” I favor a truly small-scale commune, i.e. living by myself.
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It’s not a question of being happy or satisfied, but to feel the fire inside. ~ Anais Nin.
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THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUPERMARKETS
~ Author Benjamin Lorr spent five years looking into that as he studied all aspects of American supermarkets — from the suppliers, the distributors, and supply routes, to the workers in the retail outlets themselves.
Your book is subtitled 'The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket.' For all their plentitude, our giant grocery stores mask a great deal of human and animal suffering.
Yes! Here is this institution we spend 2% of our lives in, so routine we often take it completely for granted. And yet, if you stop to think for even a moment, you realize it is completely unprecedented in the human experience. The grocery store is a miracle. It offers a continuous, dreamlike bounty of products. And as a customer, this bounty all appears completely frictionless, like some suburban American birthright.
Of course, from the inside, it is the opposite of frictionless. It requires tremendous power to maintain. And when you scratch the surface of that power, you realize there is something slightly menacing underneath it. And if you scratch further, you get suffering — from our factory-farmed animals to the many workers in our food supply chains.
Far too many Americans suffer from paradoxical afflictions — food insecurity and health conditions related to obesity, like diabetes and heart disease. How do our supermarkets contribute to these problems?
It's a great question. But to answer, I'd almost flip it. Because it's not that the supermarket contributes in a uniquely malevolent way, it merely echoes other structures in our society. So, for me, the question is "What can the supermarket teach us about our responses to these diseases that typically get overlooked?"
And, again, I think this starts with what the supermarket does really well. Rather than respond to our mouthed pieties, the industry caters to our actions, working very hard to provide a few key values that we select at the checkout counter again and again: convenience, low price, and choice. And by choice, I mean something very particular — food options that allow us to express meaning. That is, food that allows us to demonstrate who we want to be — whether that is worldly and sophisticated, thin and athletic, decadent and indulgent, ecologically virtuous, connected to our ancestors, distinct from our kin, etc., down the line of human aspiration.
Now, to circle back to your question: We know that food insecurity, non-communicable disease, and poverty track closely. But our public health responses could benefit by mimicking the grocery store, focusing less on predetermined idea of what people should do and more on what they actually need and want. Poverty is multidimensional. There is financial poverty, i.e. the lack of wealth we are all familiar with. But there is also poverty of time. And poverty of choice. And rather than being distinct, all those different forms of poverty compound. And they parallel the very things grocery excels at serving.
So simply offering cheap vegetables from a CSA is not enough. Nor is pummeling food-insecure folks with "education" about the "right" foods going to flip a switch. Very often that switch has long been flipped, but there are other barriers getting in the way.
To get more concrete, I'd say that means supermarkets are going beyond merely offering affordable healthy options, into affordable healthy options that are also convenient, grab n' go, ready-to-cook, pre-made, or in individual servings for a kid left on their own while a busy parent is working a second job. Similarly, it means recognizing that "health food" all too often expresses a value set that doesn't dovetail with people who are actually poor.
I was surprised to learn that food quality and taste are not the leading criteria that supermarket employees consider when stocking their shelves.
Yes! And maybe not even the third or fourth qualities! Again and again, when talking both to food entrepreneurs working to get their product on the shelf, or supermarket buyers evaluating a product to add to their mix, they'd say things like, "Stop focusing on taste; rookie mistake," or "Stop thinking about this as food; this is a 'food product.' " And they didn't mean that in a sneering, holier-than-thou, "Velveeta is not cheese" sense. They mean that a grocery item needed to excel as a retail product before its identity as food even mattered to them. So qualities like gross margin, stability of the underlying commodities in its ingredient list, shelf life, packaging, availability in a continuous manner — these are what got a buyer's attention. Far more important than knockout flavor.
Health certifications for food, like 'gluten-free' or 'non-GMO' are laden with compromises that consumers are not likely aware of. How can we be better, more informed shoppers?
The audit process that undergirds most food certifications — from "non-GMO" to "fair trade" — is deeply flawed. I think the simplest answer here, from a consumer perspective, is not one people want to hear: Shrink the supply chain. These problems accumulate from lack of visibility in a supply chain that has grown enormous and complex from serving the needs of a supermarket. Buying from sources you implicitly trust, not ones you need dubious proof of that trust, is the way to go. That means local, direct from the farm.
And let me say, farmers are ready to set up these relationships. I get my pecans from a single family farm, New Ground Orchards, that I trust. Do I need to see a list of their certifications? No.
Though we profess to care greatly about the provenance of the foods we eat, price seems to be the main driver of our choices. This can have deleterious effects on laborers like farmhands or fishermen.
Yes, again and again, labor is the place where the industry can extract "efficiencies." It really fits together with what we have been talking about previously. To become a global commodity, you need to meet all sorts of certifications and standards just to gain entry — safety standards, environmental standards, packaging, shipping, and volume standards — and a lot of these can be tracked empirically in ways that are much more difficult with labor.
Then, once you are trapped by these fixed costs, every few years your buyer comes and asks for a lower price, as that buyer is competing with other outlets back home. If you are a producer looking at your cost structure, trying to meet your buyer's demands, labor is often the place where you have control. And so it is the place where cuts occur.
The result, of course, when translated into human lives is devastating. Humans are adaptable and can adapt to misery when they are desperate. For me, a key part of the book is helping readers see the connections on a human level, elevating the "out of sight, out of mind" voices at the bottom of the chain into a visible place.
I was really surprised by the ways these minimum-wage jobs have changed. I've worked a lot of minimum wage jobs over the years, but I worked them 20 years ago or more in high school and right after college. So I had a memory of them that was almost tinged by nostalgia. But, just like everywhere else in the chain, labor in retail has become more "efficient." Industry-wide practices like variable scheduling, on-call scheduling, just-in-time scheduling — where employees don't have a fixed schedule, but rather one that varies week to week by up to 40% — or who only receive their schedule a few days in advance, have devastating effects. You can't get a second job, because there is no schedule to schedule around. You can't arrange child care, and your take home pay swings wildly with the changes in hours worked.
And, of course, given our growing wealth divide, these jobs are no longer "high school" jobs, but careers for middle-aged adults. So the nostalgia I and many people hold can be actively harmful when grappling with the reality and empathy for others.
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You also embedded with a long-haul trucker to see what it's like to bring food to market. The freedom seemingly offered by life on the road made me think more of Sisyphus endlessly rolling a boulder uphill. And it's even tougher for women drivers.
Yes. Trucking is this enormous profession — 10.7 billion tons of freight per year, the number one form of employment in the majority of states — that serves as a literal circulatory system for our economy. And yet, the life of the trucker has been systematically degraded. In the 1970s, trucking was this true middle class profession — blue collar, outlaw maybe, but also deeply stable. Over the last decades that has all changed. Truckers now work to create twice the output at 40% less in wages. Many are caught in a debt peonage they call "sharecropping on wheels," a descriptor that seems overblown until you hear the stories.
And you can see the effects of everything we've talked about here in their lives. The trucker I rode with for the book was wracked with health problems, suffering from many of the noncommunicable diseases we started off talking about. Yet this was not the result of lack of education. She knew what it meant to eat healthily, and talked about wanting to "go Paleo." Yet in the book it almost reads as a joke. The demands of her job, the extremely variable scheduling, the sedentary nature of the profession, the lack of food options at the truck stops — it all conspired to make health an impossible bar for her.
My friend makes his own barbecue sauce — we like to say he should bottle it and sell it. But getting shelf space in our local supermarket is a lot harder than any hobbyist can imagine.
I'd say, "Good luck," but then suggest that before investing any of his own money, he do a real gut check about how important this is to him. And maybe read my book. The entrepreneur I followed, Julie Busha, who was marketing a delicious condiment called Slawsa, disabused me of any idea this was be easy.
Julie was one of the hardest working, most intelligent people I've ever met, and yet as a small- business woman, she was extremely vulnerable to an industry geared to dealing with much bigger players (or those with easy access to venture capital). Most people don't know that supermarkets make a significant amount of their profit directly from these entrepreneurs — i.e. extracted through direct fees, like a landlord leasing space. And so, at every stage Julie was met with demands for payments — for shelf space, for free product, for advertising, for demos. Julie kept moving forward, but it was like watching a hurdler.
Do you see ways supermarkets could do better by their customers?
In the book, I talk with a retail architect, a brilliant guy, Kevin Kelley, who talked about the intricate ways he helps stores create meaning for customers. But this is rarely — if ever — applied to people who are food-insecure. What does a consumer in the South Bronx or San Joaquin Valley want to express? How can we craft messages around healthy food that will speak to their cultural values, as opposed to a Marion Nestle/Michael Pollan paradigm? If you provide all that, I am sure they will get snatched off the shelves. And I am sure people will become healthier for it.
Mary:
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THE WAYS SEVERAL NOVELISTS PRESENTED LIFE IN WISCONSIN, ILLINOIS, INDIANA, AND OHIO IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY
“In these raw mushroom villages, the desperado was ever-present and there were horse thieves, border ruffians, grafting politicians and land-sharks speculating in imaginary titles to claims. It was thought sinful in these bubble-towns to take a bath on Sunday or shave or brush one’s boots or walk in the woods, and the best fare in the sod-built taverns consisted of salt pork floating in lard, bread that was only half-baked and waterlogged potatoes.”
~ from Van Wyk Brooks’ THE TIMES OF MELVILLE AND WHITMAN
THE MYSTERY OF WHEN DOGS BECAME DOMESTICATED
~ Dogs are one of the biggest enigmas of domestication. Despite decades of study, scientists still haven’t figured out when or where they arose, much less how or why it happened. A 2016 study concluded that dogs may have been domesticated twice, once in Asia and once in Europe or the Near East, but critics said there wasn’t enough evidence to be sure. A few years later, researchers reported signs of dogs in the Americas as early as 10,000 years ago, yet those canines appear to have vanished without a genetic trace. Other studies have found evidence of ancient dogs in Siberia and elsewhere, but scientists don’t know how they got there or how they’re related.
To fill in some of the blanks, two big names in dog and human genetics teamed up: Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, and Pontus Skoglund, a paleogenomicist at the Francis Crick Institute. Larsen, Skoglund, and colleagues sifted through more than 2000 sets of ancient dog remains dating back nearly 11,000 years from Europe, Siberia, and the Near East. In the process, they added 27 ancient dog genomes to the five already on record. They then compared those with the genomes of 17 humans living in the same places and times as the dogs.
The dog DNA alone revealed some surprises. As early as 11,000 years ago, there were already five distinct dog lineages; these gave rise to canines in the Near East, northern Europe, Siberia, New Guinea, and the Americas, the team reports today in Science. Because dogs had already diversified so much by that time, “domestication had to occur long before then,” Skoglund says. That fits with archaeological evidence: The oldest definitive dog remains come from Germany about 15,000 to 16,000 years ago.
Remarkably, pieces of these ancient lineages are still present in today’s pooches. Chihuahuas can trace some of their ancestry to early American dogs, for example, whereas Huskies sport genetic signatures of ancient Siberian dogs, the team found. “If you see a bunch of different dogs in a dog park,” Skoglund says, “they may all have different ancestries that trace all the way back 11,000 years” (see figure below).
When the researchers compared their dog DNA with modern and ancient wolf DNA, they got another surprise. Most domesticated animals pick up genetic material from their wild relatives—even after domestication—because the two species often live in close proximity and can still mate (think pigs and wild boars). But dogs show no such “gene flow” from wolves. Instead, the wolves gained new DNA from the dogs—a one-way street.
Larson chalks this up to the intimate relationship between dogs and humans. If your pig or chicken becomes a bit wilder thanks to an infusion of feral DNA, it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to eat them anyway, he explains. But dogs that go native make bad guards, hunting companions, and friends. “If you’re a dog and you have a bit of wolf in you, that’s terrible,” Larson says. People will “get rid of the dog.”
The wolf-dog analysis also suggests dogs evolved only once, from a now-extinct wolf population. Still, Larson, who led the 2016 study on multiple domestication events, says more data are needed to seal the deal.
Then the scientists brought humans into the mix. They selected human DNA samples from the same places and eras for which they had ancient canine DNA, and traced the genetic history of each. “It’s like you have an ancient text in two different languages, and you’re looking to see how both languages have changed over time,” Skoglund says.
In many places, the team found a strong overlap between human and dog genomes. For example, farmers and their pups in Sweden about 5000 years ago both trace their ancestry to the Near East. This suggests early farmers took their dogs with them as agriculture spread throughout the continent. “Writ large, as humans moved, they moved with their dogs,” Larson says.
But sometimes the stories didn’t match up. Farmers in Germany about 7000 years ago also came from the Near East and also lived with dogs. But those animals seem more similar to hunter-gatherer pups, which came from Siberia and Europe.
That suggests many early migrants adopted local dogs that were better adapted to their new environment, Haak says. The benefits were many, adds Peter Savolainen, a geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology and an expert on dog origins. “They were cute. You could use them. You could even eat them.”
Savolainen calls the study “very thorough,” and adds it’s “fantastic” that the researchers were able to bring together so many data. But he has long argued that dogs arose in Southeast Asia and says the work is incomplete without samples from that corner of the globe. “Without those, you could be missing an important part of the picture.”
For now, Larson says his team is analyzing “a ton” of wolf and dog genomes. He and his colleagues have also begun to look at ancient skull shape and genetic markers that could give clues to what early dogs looked like. Whatever he finds, he’s counting on being surprised. “We have to expect the unexpected,” he says, “because that’s all ancient DNA ever gives us.”
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WHAT, NO AUTHOR? “THAT MAKES IT EVEN MORE MAGICAL”
One time I was listening to public radio, and ant and bee behaviors were discussed: how their behavior stems from interaction, the way neurons interact to produce thought (the phenomenon of EMERGENCE; bird migration is another frequent example). You can’t isolate a single neuron and expect to find a “fragment of a thought” inside it. It’s all in the interaction.
An older commentator said, “To me that implies an author.” A younger journalist replied, “You’ve just taken out the magic out of it.” The older man: “So the beautiful world you wake up to every morning has no meaning, no purpose? Are you comfortable with that?” The younger man: “Yes, I’m comfortable with that. That makes it even more magical.”
I agree. Without the invisible man in the sky, it’s even more awesome. We can stop being childlike and imagine that everything that happens is produced by some deity, the way primeval man thought that waves are produced by the god of the ocean, rather than the ocean itself, in interaction with the shape of the bottom (this is not a putdown of early humanity; before scientific investigation, how were they to know?). Of course early humans, seeing the world in terms of human emotions, saw a storm of the anger of a god. Of course it was Zeus or Yahweh tossing lightning, or angry Poseidon causing an earthquake by hitting his trident against the bottom of the sea.
Now that we understand more about the causes of natural phenomena, there is no need for an “author.” Note that I said “more” rather than “everything.” Of course there is still plenty of mystery, but the existence of yet unexplained phenomena (along with phenomena that will perhaps never be explained) does not prove the existence of the prime mover.
I am so glad there is now an open discussion of these matters. As Ginette Paris said, “It’s still early after the death of god.” It’s still early in the transition to the post-religious world (at least in the West), and we are just beginning to shape a positive secular philosophy and a new understanding of the world.
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DOUBT TRIGGERS: NEED FOR CONSTANT PRAISE AND EXCESS STARS
That triggered a lot of doubt in me — what kind of person would want praise 24/7, like Stalin and other big-time dictators? It wasn't easy to suppress my revulsion at someone with that kind of vanity.
Once I began to grasp the size of the Universe, that was another source of doubt — if the earth was the only planet that counted, and humans the only species, why all the excess? And why spend millions of years on dinosaurs?
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WALK FASTER, LIVE LONGER?
Slow walking is a sign of aging associated with age-related medical conditions like heart disease, dementia, diminished response to rehabilitation, and early death. That’s why gait speed is tested and used as an indicator in geriatric health care in order to determine an older patient’s health status and ability to function. A new study from Duke University looked at gait speed and cognition in healthy middle-aged adults in their 40’s and in children, to understand the effects of slow and fast walking at a younger age on later health outcomes.
The researchers predicted that slow walking speed in midlife is predictive of advanced biological aging and poor neurocognitive functioning. They also suspected that walking speed and its ultimate effects on brain and body health not only show effects in midlife but is likely associated with brain development in childhood.
The researchers interviewed, examined and reviewed the records of 938 middle-aged (45-year-old) study participants, all of whom had been assessed at birth and then again at ages 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21, 26, 32, and 38. The pace of aging was measured for each person at ages 26, 32, 38, and 45, using measures such as body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, and cardiorespiratory fitness. General physical functioning was assessed by self-reporting, along with exercises for balance, visual-motor coordination, grip strength, and other standard tests. The researchers used three different conditions to assess walking speed, including walking at a normal pace from a standing start, walking at a normal pace while reciting alternate letters of the alphabet aloud, and walking as fast as safely possible.
At age 45, accelerated aging was also assessed by facial age, rated by an independent panel using standardized photos taken of each participant’s face. At this final assessment, standard neuroimaging procedures were also used to evaluate brain structure. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV, which assesses working memory, perceptual reasoning, and verbal comprehension, was used along with other standardized tests to measure neurocognitive function (executive functioning, verbal fluency, and memory). As children, study participants had taken standardized tests of intelligence, motor skills, and receptive language and were rated for emotional and behavioral regulation.
The results of this study confirmed the researchers’ theory that walking speed is not only an indicator of health status in older people, but also predicts future health and functioning in younger people. Overall, midlife study participants who walked slowly also showed signs of accelerated aging and cognitive decline.
In fact, those who walked slower had been aging five years faster between the ages of 26 and 45 than their fast-walking counterparts. The slow-walkers’ faces were also rated as looking older. Those with slower gait had smaller brain volume and smaller total brain surface at age 45, as well as poorer working memory, poorer perceptual reasoning, and poorer verbal comprehension, and generally performed worse on all tests of IQ and neurocognitive functioning. The study authors found a mean difference of 16 IQ points between the slowest and fastest walkers. A review of neurocognitive testing performed in participants’ childhood indicated that poorer brain health at the age of 3 and ultimate declines between childhood and adulthood were also associated with slower gait and accelerated aging in adulthood. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cravings/201910/faster-walkers-may-stay-healthier-and-live-longer?collection=1149767
Oriana:
Note that the article doesn't tell you to do fast walking in order to live longer. Some people can't walk fast because of obesity or arthritis; the slow gait is simply a symptom of underlying problems.
But since fast walking is good exercise, it probably does help to deliberately fasten one's gait from time to time.
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THE FUNCTION OF SIGHING
~ In the early 17th century in Venice, Italy, a white limestone bridge was built to connect the Doge's Palace to a prison across the canal. Named the Bridge of Sighs by Lord Byron, it was where people had a final look at the city through the bridge's latticed windows before being imprisoned, and, purportedly, let out sighs of regret or remorse.
Research from the University of Oslo found that most people associated sighs with negative emotions like disappointment, defeat, frustration, boredom, and longing. But the primary physical function of a sigh is for the benefit of your lungs. Sighs keep the tiny air sacs in the lungs, the alveoli, from collapsing, and maintain the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
A sigh is a very deep breath, defined scientifically as having an inhalation that is at least twice the volume as a normal breath.
Healthy adults sigh about once every five minutes. If you don’t sigh and re-open the alveoli, you could become hypoxic and die. People died when using the earliest iron lungs because designers didn’t account for sighing, which modern ventilators now do. When mice are genetically engineered to not be able to sigh, they eventually die of major lung problems.
Historically, the sigh was considered to be like a reflex, Pagliardini said. “The lungs collapse, they send some input to the brain, and the brain makes a sigh," she said. In the past few decades, we've learned that sighs are programmed by the brain to occur no matter what signaling is coming from the lungs.
In 2000, Nino Ramirez, a professor of neurological surgery at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and his colleagues published in Nature Neuroscience that a network in the brain stem was responsible for multiple types of breathing patterns, including sighing. In experiments in rats, when scientists sliced the brain stem and put the slices, half a millimeter thick, in Petri dishes, the disembodied brain pieces still showed a respiratory rhythm—including sighs, Ramirez said. No lungs required.
In 2016, Pagliardini and her colleagues were able to understand how sighs are generated in even more detail. In rats, they found a small cluster of neurons in an area of the brainstem called the pre-Bötzinger complex that generates normal breathing as well as sighing and gasping. Specific molecules called neuropeptides activated those brain cells and generated a sigh. “If you add these peptides into this specific part of the brain, you increase the sighs, and if you block the receptors that detect these neuropeptides, you sigh less,” Pagliardini said.
But though we now know the mechanics, Ramirez said we're just at the beginning of understanding how sighing interacts with the brain more generally. In just one example of where this knowledge could be relevant, the pre-Bötzinger complex controls neurons that have norepinephrine in them, a chemical that causes arousal. There is a theory that in infants that die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), this arousal system doesn’t work. The babies don’t sigh properly, or the connection to the norepinephrine neurons is disturbed, and babies don’t wake up when their breathing is disturbed, leading to their death.
“Physiologists for many centuries only thought about breathing as a mechanism for the lungs to provide you with oxygen,” Ramirez said. “They overlooked the role of breathing as a mechanism to control your brain state.”
Breathing isn’t only the automatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, afterall. The way we breathe is influenced by our emotions and environment, and vice versa. Think about anxiety, panic, or pain; or, pleasure, a crush, relief—all of these emotions can influence our breathing, and our sighing.
The ways that our physical sensations interact with our emotions is an evolving area of research, though not a new one. In the 19th century, William James, the "father of American psychology," proposed that our emotions are simply the names we've given to sensations in our body. Following this line of thinking, we experience feeling relief and then sighing, but it could be that the physical sensation we get from the lungs expanding is what we refer to as the emotion of relief.
Our breathing is automatic, yet it also has a lot of built-in variation and flexibility. Our breathing changes a lot, depending on what we’re doing—talking, laughing, running— as well as how we feel, and our environment. When this breathing variability either becomes too low, or starts to become erratic, Vlemincx has found that sighs come in and hit "reset," to bring us back to the “balance between nonrandom and random breathing variability.”
Psychologically, sighing plays a parallel role, “helping to restore calm in the context of stress or emotional arousal, inducing a subjective sense of relief, and may therefore be functional as a mechanism to cope with stress and emotions,” Vlemincx wrote in a review paper on sighs.
If a sigh is a kind of reset, both physically and emotionally, it helps explain the duality of sighs, and how they can be associated with negative emotions, stress, and anxiety, while also being paired with positive emotions like relief, joy, or desire. This seems like a paradox, Vlemincx said, until you think about sighs as an emotional reset. They can be present during any big emotional state, whether good or bad; think of the prisoner on the Bridge of Sighs, or the lovers underneath it.
Trying too hard to modulate your sighing might not even offer the same benefits as sighing on your own. Vlemincx's work has also found that there is a difference between a spontaneous sigh and an instructed sigh—or a sigh on demand, intentionally taking a deep breath. When Vlemincx and her colleagues asked people to take a deep breath intentionally, and measured relief and muscle tension, they saw instructed sighs didn't lead to as much relief as a spontaneous sigh did.
Vlemincx's advice is not to over-complicate sighing. “As long as you’re healthy, don’t force your sighing," she said. "If there’s nothing wrong, don’t fix it. There’s a reason why you’re sighing the way you’re sighing.” ~
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9vyz/why-we-sigh
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ending on beauty:
There is a lake,
Lalla Ded sang, no larger
than one seed of mustard,
that all things return to.
O heart, if you
will not, cannot, give me the lake,
then give me the song.
~ Jane Hirshfield, Lake and Maple
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