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THREE ANGELS
Suddenly three angels appeared
right here by the bakery on St. George Street.
Not another census bureau survey,
one tired man sighed.
No, the first angel said patiently,
we just wanted to see
what your lives have become,
the flavor of your days and why
your nights are marked by restlessness and fear.
That's right, fear, a lovely, dreamy-eyed
woman replied; but I know why.
The labors of the human mind have faltered.
They seek help and support
they can't find. Sir, just take a look
— she called the angel “Sir”! —
at Wittgenstein. Our sages
and leaders are melancholy madmen
and know even less than us
ordinary people (but she wasn't
ordinary).
Then too, said one boy
who was learning to play the violin, evenings
are just an empty carton,
a casket minus mysteries,
while at dawn the cosmos seems as
parched and foreign as a TV screen.
And besides, those who love music for itself
are few and far between.
Others spoke up and their laments
surged into a swelling sonata of wrath.
If you gentlemen want to know the truth,
one tall student yelled — he'd
just lost his mother — we've had enough
of death and cruelty, persecution, disease,
and long spells of boredom still
as a serpent's eye. We've got too little earth
and too much fire. We don't know who we are.
We're lost in the forest, and black stars
move lazily above us as if
they were only our dream.
But still, the second angel mumbled shyly,
there's always a little joy, and even beauty
lies close at hand, beneath the bark
of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration,
and another person hides in each of us —
universal, strong, invincible.
Wild roses sometimes hold the scent
of childhood, and on holidays young girls
go out walking just as they always have,
and there's something timeless
in the way they wind their scarves.
Memory lives in the ocean, in galloping blood,
in black, burnt stones, in poems,
and in every quiet conversation.
The world is the same as it always was,
full of shadows and anticipation.
He would have gone on talking, but the crowd
was growing larger and waves
of mute rage spread
until at last the envoys rose lightly
into the air, whence, growing distant,
they gently repeated: peace be unto you,
peace to the living, the dead, the unborn.
The third angel alone said nothing,
for that was the angel of long silence.
~ Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021), Without End: New and Selected Poems
Three angels or sometimes three strangers, the Three Graces, the Three Fates — we know that these are important visitations. In this case three angels have been sent on an inspection tour, just as the Adversary once walked up and down the Earth and spotted the pious Job — god doesn’t know everything after all. Why are people mostly unhappy? Why are they filled with all kinds of fear?
The first reply is that even the best human minds have not found working solutions to life’s persistent problems:
That's right, fear, a lovely, dreamy-eyed
woman replied; but I know why.
The labors of the human mind have faltered.
They seek help and support
they can't find. Sir, just take a look
— she called the angel “Sir”! —
at Wittgenstein. Our sages
and leaders are melancholy madmen
and know even less than us
ordinary people (but she wasn't
ordinary).
A boy learning to play the violin joins in, and others too:
. . . those who love music for itself
are few and far between.
Others spoke up and their laments
surged into a swelling sonata of wrath.
If you gentlemen want to know the truth,
one tall student yelled — he'd
just lost his mother — we've had enough
of death and cruelty, persecution, disease,
and long spells of boredom still
as a serpent's eye.
The second angel tries to remind these people of the good things in life:
But still, the second angel mumbled shyly,
there's always a little joy, and even beauty
lies close at hand, beneath the bark
of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration,
and another person hides in each of us —
universal, strong, invincible.
But the anger at the way life is only gathers strength:
He would have gone on talking, but the crowd
was growing larger and waves
of mute rage spread . . .
And, as usual in poetry, we are left with questions, not answers. Life will always be difficult, and we must make the most of what joy we can find. As we grow older, we tend to drop youth’s “heroic ego project” and settle for small pleasures. But is it so terrible, compared to the filth, diseases, and constant warfare of the past centuries (not that we are entirely free of those constant companions — but at least it’s small wars, diseases for which we find vaccinations, and so on).
And besides, there is much to be said for the benefits of silence.
PS. If you’d like to sample more of Zagajewski, I especially recommend his volume Mysticism for Beginners. His essays (In Defense of Ardor; Two Cities) are also excellent.
crown of thorns; Seretta Martin
Mary:
Perhaps it is the third angel, the angel of long silence, whose message can strike the balance, the silence of acceptance, of letting go all those complaints and demands of the never satisfied self, of recovering that still point that holds all without strife, without fear or anger or desire. I would think it is from that still center one would be truly able to see the beauty “beneath the bark of every hour” and it would, finally and always, be enough.
A way hard enough for all of us in these times, so full of distraction, temptation, obligation and unrest — but not impossible, and perhaps now more than ever, necessary. And perhaps it is a matter of maturity. All those angry complainers to the first angel are like children, demanding the universe "play fair” — a childish concept matching nothing in nature, which knows necessity but nothing at all of fairness. Suffering and pain are present everywhere, yes, but not meted out as punishment, not “deserved” — they are as blind and empty of intent as the air, random and without agenda. If we could stop our habits of thinking in terms of reward and punishment we would gain not only perspective, but a new freedom.
*
“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” ~ Stéphane Mallarmé
*
LEAPS OF FAITH: AN INTERVIEW WITH ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
Americans are puzzled by your ability to juggle such radically different worlds: Houston and Kraków. [He was at that time teaching in Houston for part of the year.] I would have thought that, say, Boston would have been much more congenial. Or perhaps to you they aren’t as radically different as they seem to us?
Well, that’s very true, Boston would have been more congenial but it so happened that I went to Houston instead; the invitation to teach came from Houston. And both as a human being and a writer I have to live with what is there, with the reality of my life and to use it as a building material for my imagination. These realities do connect even if in a strange way; Houston is very strange when measured by Central (Eastern) European standards and yet longing for something (for some ideal European things) can easily be seen in Houston.
I notice on the cover of your book, A Defense of Ardor, you feature Gus Powell’s photo, “Polish Wood” — but the landscape seems peculiarly Californian or Texan – a representation of your mixed worlds?
The photo on the cover of ‘A Defense of Ardor’ is bizarre, that’s true and represents a mix that I’d prefer to avoid in my writing. On a different level, the juxtaposition of Houston and Kraków for instance corresponds to the mobility of people now, both in the US and, more recently, also in Poland.
Czeslaw Milosz once said that “We are in a largely post-religious world.” He recounted a conversation with the pope, who commented upon his work, saying ,”‘Well, you make one step forward, one step back.’ Milosz replied, ‘Holy Father, how in the 20th Century can one write religious poetry differently?'”
You have referred in your essays to a “higher reality” and “yearning for eternity.” You have observed that Polish literature is one of “last bastions of a more assertive attitude” towards such things. You have upheld the need for sacred feeling, religious sensibility – while avoiding the word God. Comment?
That’s an interesting question; I don’t think I avoid the word God, though. I have Jesus Christ in “Senza Flash” and God in many poems. I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank. But I also need to distance myself from “professional” Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery, a certain newness, a certain surprise.
What is this disease that you have identified – this relaxing into irony, if not cynicism – and how do we cure it? And why have two prominent Polish poets struggle with it so consciously and conspicuously? I ask because so many are completely oblivious to it – and it is a noticeable feature in both your writing and Milosz’s.
I recall your comments about the influence of Nietzsche: Noting his minting of such terms as “superman,” “will to power,” “beyond good and evil” — and adding that “someone once rightly observed that beyond good and evil lies only evil” — you suggested that without these influences, “the spiritual atmosphere of our century might have been purer and perhaps even prouder.”
Well, the disease of irony seems to be well identified. I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance. How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small but it’s my space.
*
You wrote: “We need to go on, paying the price, sometimes, of being not only imperfect but even, who knows, arrogant and ridiculous.”
My temperament is different. Sometimes I wish I were an arrogant prophet, an aggressive guy. But my force – if I have any – is different, it lives more in nuances, in tranquility of my voice. Somehow I hope that the rhetoric of tranquility is after all stronger and more long-term than the one of a furious attack.
“My defense of poetry would be much more savage and desperate now than it used to be.” You said that several years ago.
I don’t quite remember the context of this statement so it’s hard to say. Defenses of poetry are not very efficient, anyway, poetry has to defend itself. Does it go downhill (the situation of poetry)? Probably not.
You have urged young poets to “please read everything,” and in your Neustadt speech you comment on the importance of tradition, of being humble before the “gigantic shadow of the dead.” From one of your essays: “The writer ordinarily sits alone with a blank piece of paper or a pale computer screen staring boldly and intently back at him. He’s alone although he doesn’t write for himself, but for others. Inspired and impeded by tradition, that great tumult of dead voices, he struggles to see into the future, which is always mute.” Brodsky also spoke for the need to acknowledge and respect “hierarchy” in this way. Did you speak of this as a common point? Do you feel this cry has any sort of resonance in a world which largely seeks novelty?
What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.
Could you offer a word of explanation about the amazing miracle of Polish poetry in the 20th century — what forces caused it to burst from obscurity (what Milosz called “an unheard-of tongue”) to becoming one of the great world literary legacies?
Good question. I have many contradictory explanations. One of the main ones is that the attention given to the meaning of human life in radical circumstances (as opposed to the hermetic direction, or to a purely formal quest) in Polish poetry after the WWII catastrophe was a very important move: it gave the dying Modernism a new energy. It “rehumanized” a highly sophisticated but a bit empty palace of modern poetry.
The future of poetry. I know this sounds trite – the lamenting of poetry as an “endangered species.” But as someone who writes about poetry for a living, I know what a tough sell it is. Despite the national drumbeating for “Poetry Month,” we live in a world where long, slow thoughts are disappearing.
What do you think? What is the future for us who like to spend our days chewing the end of a pen and having long thoughts?
We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish–and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.
You wrote that Erbarme Dich [have mercy on us] is the heart of civilization. Comment?
Bach represents the center and the synthesis of the western music. To say, as I did, that this particular aria is the center of western music is a leap of faith, of course. I couldn’t prove it. I love this aria. ~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBeXF_lnj_M&t=67s
Adam Zagajewski, a portrait in clay by Jonathan Hirschfeld, 1990
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/?p=61897&preview=true&_thumbnail_id=61923&fbclid=IwAR14u1CAquQEb1KW78bJkDZZoJDnQ6H4DlDXh-11sZpbSascOFOU6-yNhnU
Mary:
I think there is much truth in Zagajewski's statement about the "miracle" power of Polish poetry coming from giving attention "to the meaning of human life in radical circumstances.” The horror and catastrophe of WWII challenged artists, as well as philosophers, historians, and the ordinary folk who lived through it, to find a way to meaning as a matter of survival itself. In the face of this challenge the empty palace of formalism was no use at all: clever, erudite, but a waste of time and energies we could no longer afford — simply irrelevant in the post war, post-Holocaust world.
Oriana:
*
SOMETIMES THE ABYSS STARES BACK
*
“You can only become extrovert as you have been introvert, that is, as you have been perceptive, as you have perceived, taken into yourself, something you can give.” ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” ~ Lev Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
Tolstoy in 1910, the last year of his life.
*
VIOLET GIBSON, THE IRISH WOMAN WHO SHOT MUSSOLINI
~ In his lifetime, just four people managed to launch successful assassination attempts against Benito Mussolini, the infamous fascist dictator who brought Italy into World War II and inspired Adolf Hitler.
Of those four, just one—Anglo-Irish woman Violet Gibson—ever came close to succeeding. The 50-year-old made headlines on April 7, 1926, when she fired on Mussolini and almost altered the course of history forever. But in the years after her bold attack, Gibson was consigned to an asylum, and her story was all but forgotten.
Born in 1876, Gibson hailed from a wealthy family headed by her father, Lord Ashbourne, a senior judicial figure in Ireland. As a young woman, notes Michael Murphy for the Irish Post, she served as a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria.
Growing up between Dublin and London, Gibson was a sickly child who suffered from physical and mental illness—what was then termed “hysteria,” per the Irish Post. In her mid-20s, she converted to Catholicism; later, she moved to Paris to work for pacifist organizations.
According to the World, Gibson’s passionate political and religious beliefs drove her to attempt to murder the Italian dictator in April 1926.
On the day of the shooting, Mussolini had just finished giving a speech to a conference of surgeons in Rome. He was walking through the Piazza del Campidoglio, a square at the top of the Italian city’s Capitoline Hill, when Gibson—a small, “disheveled-looking” woman—raised a gun and fired at him at point-blank range, Lynam tells the World.
Two chance events prevented Gibson from succeeding: First, Mussolini happened to turn his head to look at a group of nearby students who were singing a song in his honor. This caused the bullet to graze the bridge of his nose rather than hit him square in the face. Second, though Gibson fired another bullet, it lodged in her pistol. By that point, she had already been dragged to the ground by a mob.
Police escorted her away before the furious onlookers could exact their revenge. Hours after the attempt on his life, Mussolini reemerged in public, a bandage on his nose but otherwise no worse for the wear.
Despite this cool façade, Stonor Saunders tells the World that Mussolini was embarrassed to have been injured by a woman.
“He was very misogynistic, as was the entire fascist regime,” she says. “He was shocked to be shot by a woman. And he was shocked to be shot by a foreigner. It was a kind of injury to his great ego.”
Gibson was deported to England, where doctors declared her insane. Her family agreed to place her in a mental asylum in Northampton. While imprisoned, Gibson wrote letters pleading for her release. Addressed to the likes of Winston Churchill and Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth, the letters were never actually sent.
Gibson was locked away until her death at age 79 in 1956. No family members attended her funeral, according to the World, but BBC News notes that Gibson’s remaining relatives have expressed their support for a plaque in her honor.
“It is now time to bring Violet Gibson into the public eyes and give her a rightful place in the history of Irish women and in the history of the Irish nation and its people,” said Dublin councilor Mannix Flynn in the motion seeking the plaque’s installation.
As Stonor Saunders explains to the World, misogyny and stigma surrounding mental illness played a role in silencing Gibson’s story for decades. The Irish woman’s contemporaries labeled her as insane instead of acknowledging her intellectual qualms about Mussolini’s dictatorship.
“It suited both the British authorities and her family to have her seen as ‘insane’ rather than as political,” said Flynn in the motion.
When authorities and her family decided to lock Gibson away for the rest of her life, they “excluded the possibility that you could be mad or have what is conventionally described as moments of madness, but that you can also have completely legitimate political ideas,” Stonor Saunders tells the World. “And she did.”
Oriana:
Violet's story reminded me of Fanya (Fanny) Kaplan, who shot at Lenin (she regarded him as a traitor to the Revolution) and badly injured him. But probably little good would have come from Lenin's death, given that Stalin proved so competent at seizing power.
In any case, the injuries inflicted by Fanya Kaplan (who was quickly executed) probably hastened Lenin's death, but again, what good did it good with Stalin waiting to take over.
*
“… In describing his face... we should not be discouraged by intervening millennia from making the apt comparison that he looked like a young, aristocratic Englishman of rather faded stock: tall, arrogant, and weary, with a large drooping chin that one could not call receding but that was nevertheless weak; a nose whose narrow, somewhat indented bridge made his broad, sensitive nostrils all the more striking; and deep-set, dreamily veiled eyes from which he was never able to raise the lids entirely and whose dull luster stood in bewildering contrast to the unhealthy, flushed red of very full lips…" ~ Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
*
IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND, SUICIDE WAS A FELONY
People in medieval England struggled with suicide just like people do today, and they also imagined and enacted practices of care and compassion to support the vulnerable. In the last decades of the 13th century, King Edward I extended compassionate action to a number of English subjects whose family members had died by suicide. A century later, a story in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales shows friends and neighbors responding with care to a woman on the verge of suicide.
Suicide in medieval England was considered a felonious offense, the self-murder of the king’s subject, so the Crown confiscated that person’s goods and chattels. This could leave some women whose fathers or husbands had died by suicide in dire straits, impoverished by the confiscation of goods and chattels and the loss of that man’s future earnings. Legal records suggest that such women petitioned the king for the return of goods and chattels, often using physical or mental sickness (‘acute fever’, ‘anguish’, ‘madness’) to describe the man’s state when he died by suicide.
In most cases, the Crown returned the goods and chattels to petitioners, explaining that the person had died by suicide while suffering from sickness or madness or that the woman and her children were now impoverished, acknowledging the extreme circumstances that had led to the suicide while also providing a sort of excuse for returning the goods and chattels. The king’s action is described in these Latin records as ‘compassionate’, language that implies the moral duty of the Crown to be moved by and to mercifully support vulnerable subjects in the face of the trauma and hardship of suicide.
We get a more vivid picture of suicide from medieval English literature. Even though these aren’t the suicidal impulses or deaths of real people, literary depictions engage readers’ feelings. Consider the pangs of sympathy you feel when a character goes through the dark night of the soul, the sense of tragic loss you experience with the death of a hero or heroine – these emotional contours of fictional narratives also shape our emotional lives.
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Franklin (a wealthy, free landholder) tells a tale that depicts care for someone struggling with a suicidal impulse. The central character in The Franklin’s Tale is Dorigen, a woman whose honor is threatened almost to the point of suicide. Dorigen descends into deep ‘hevynesse’ when her husband, the noble knight Arveragus, sails away for two years to win honor through feats of arms.
Dorigen’s friends comfort her, warning her that she is slaying herself without cause – their consolation working like the slow engraving of an imprint on a stone as they eventually assuage her sorrow. They persuade her to join them for clifftop walks overlooking the ocean, but when she becomes afraid of the black rocks below, they instead take her to other pleasant places to dance and play games.
At one of these garden revels, Dorigen has a polite exchange with her neighbor, Aurelius, a young, lusty squire who has long been in love with Dorigen (unbeknown to her). When he admits his love for her, she turns him down – she will never be an untrue wife. But then Dorigen makes a rash promise: she jokingly pledges that if Aurelius can remove all of the black rocks on the shore, she will love him.
When, after making a deal with a magician, Aurelius seems to make the rocks disappear, Dorigen finds herself in a bind. As she wrestles with what to do, she cries out to Fortune, lamenting her impossible decision: death or dishonor. She must shame her body by having sex unwillingly with a man who isn’t her husband, or break her promise and thus know herself to be false. Her only solution seems to be death by suicide. In this decision, Dorigen claims, she is not alone, and she describes women from classical literature who have faced a similar impasse. The passage is moving, reading like a medieval #MeToo Twitter thread, and it infuses further compassion into the text by heightening readers’ empathy for Dorigen as she faces the threat of rape or death by suicide.
Ultimately, Aurelius releases Dorigen from her rash promise, affected by how distraught she is and impressed by her husband’s advice to her that she uphold her truth. Granted, choosing not to rape someone and not to cause them further distress that could end in death by suicide is a very low bar. But the characters in the tale are attuned to feelings, and the practices of care that we see for Dorigen, from her friends’ comforting her to Aurelius’s acknowledgement of her great distress and his release of their bond, become potential models for how to recognize and care for someone struggling with a suicidal impulse.
We don’t know exactly how medieval English people felt, but King Edward I’s compassionate responses to petitions of suicide cases and the emotional arcs of The Franklin’s Tale are historical and literary witnesses of people responding practically and with feeling to care for people affected by the trauma of suicide. As readers of these narratives, we’re reminded of the systemic and personal ways that we can support vulnerable people, especially in hard times.
Taking a cue from Dorigen’s friends, one of the most meaningful ways we can act is to recognize people who are struggling and to ask one another: ‘Are you OK?’ By attuning ourselves to the emotions of those around us, we open up opportunities to care for one another and even save a life.
https://psyche.co/ideas/suicide-in-medieval-england-was-not-simply-a-crime-or-sin
CHRIST CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY
~ THERE ARE STORIES PASSED DOWN about my grandfather Clarence, who died several years before I was born, to the effect that he could take quickly to the stern edge of his character and at times be brusque, impatient and demanding. While he was an industrious and productive Virginia farmer who certainly knew the meaning of hard work, with prosperous farmlands and fruit orchards to show for it, he now and again failed to notice that others worked equally as hard as he, and for far lower wages. One such person was a long-time faithful farmhand by the name of Elijah, who by this time had become an old man, as had my grandfather.
As always, the toil fell to Elijah to till the ground. With his hand faithfully to the plow one sultry summer afternoon, he struggled to keep his usual pace behind the mule as from a distance my grandfather assumed the inherited posture of one whose job it was to oversee. It was not uncommon that Papa, as his children affectionately called him, might unconsciously overlook the fact that the sweltering humidity had drawn beads of perspiration down Elijah’s dark brown cheeks. For a split instant as the mule turned in its path, the two old men stood side by side at the corner of the field.
“Mr. Davisson, would you mind takin’ hold of the plow whilst I go relieve myself?”
“Gladly, Elijah.”
It not only had been ages since Clarence had taken hold of anyone’s plow including his own, but for many years Elijah had accumulated a debt of more than just a few greenbacks that he still owed my grandfather. Circumstances being what they were during the Depression, coupled to the customary social, economic and political arrangement, such debt hung overhead like an iron cleaver. It precluded the chance that a poor and aged black man would ever have hours enough in a lifetime, much less in a matter of months, to earn what it took to erase a debt that was part of a system of duties and obligations that kept one particular class of people subservient to another. Elijah, a descendant of slaves, had spoken nothing of such obligations on this particular day; nor had my grandfather, a descendant of slave owners.
Having obliged himself to do Elijah a small favor as the afternoon sun bore down upon the sweaty back of Elijah’s trusty old mule, Grandfather took hold of the reins and plow handles as beneath the pummeling heat he jostled with the soil up one row and down the other. When Elijah eventually returned from his errand, Grandfather spoke the first word.
“You know, Elijah, it’s been a long time since I’ve walked behind a plow. Mighty hard work, I’d forgotten just how!”
“Yessir, Mister Davisson.”
“Elijah, you know that $5,000 you currently owe?”
“Yessir, Mister Davisson.”
“It’s forgiven. You don’t owe it anymore.”
Elijah stood in sheer dumbfounded amazement, exclaiming, “Oh, thank you, Mister Davisson! Thank you! Thank you!”
Not many months thereafter, early on a cold, blustery Sunday morn in January 1941, for causes I have never fully known nor fully understood, concerning the extent of all that burdened him and made him a prisoner within himself, my grandfather Clarence went to the basement of his house and put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.
The irony of what otherwise appeared to be a largely successful life, despite the share of human foible and failure to which all are entitled, was that Grandfather Clarence at age sixty-five, having forgiven the $5,000 owed him by Elijah, could not for whatever personal reason forgive the “debt” he owed himself. Perhaps that, too, was debt in the form of a deficit long ago transmitted. My guess is that it had already begun to accumulate when at an early age he lost his mother to death’s dark door. Being told that he was somewhat unmanageable, he was soon shuffled off by his father to live with a relative. The rage that more than once manifested itself outwardly eventually turned its way inwardly upon the self.
Sometimes it is necessary to invert Jesus’ maxim, “As you wish that people would do to you, do so to them,” in order to say, “As people wish that you would do to them, do so to yourself.”
Of all the besetting sins of an increasingly narcissistic age of emptiness and brokenness, the failure to love oneself may be a root sin that is perpetuated down the cycles of the generations. In keeping with the Christ-like virtue of losing oneself in order to love another, not to love oneself at all makes it virtually impossible to love someone else. Yes, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” For, only as grace is received can grace be given.
Grandfather in a brief moment of grace walked in Elijah’s shoes. I do not know, nor can I know, precisely what that meant. Perhaps there dawned upon Grandfather the extent of sacrifice Elijah for so many years had made for him, which in turn made it possible in a system that had wounded them both for the one man to extend grace and the other to receive it.
Whatever may have been the case then, or soon thereafter upon that cold, blustery January morn, I believe by the eternal mercies of Christ that Papa Clarence has come at last, with Elijah, as shall we all, to receive the full measure of grace that shows itself upon the ever loving face of God.
“Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2021/03/21/59099
Oriana:
Reading this story I had a thought that keeps coming back to me over the years: that the only way I could still relate to Christianity in a positive way is to let go the fig tree-cursing Jesus, and most definitely of Yahweh, and think instead of Christ Consciousness. It includes what wisdom I gleaned from other traditions as well, e.g. Taoism and Buddhism (e.g. let go of the struggle and trust the unconscious; you give someone the power to hurt you because you WANT something from him).
It’s the Gospels sanitized; it’s a rejection of the Second Coming, Last Judgment, Eternal Damnation — all that vengeful stuff. Just purely humanitarian teaching, including indeed self-respect (Dostoyevsky was good on that; came very close to stating that evil comes from lack of self-love [or, as Dostoyevsky put it, “Don’t be so ashamed of yourself”])
A REPLY TO‘GRACE GIVEN AS GRACE RECEIVED.’
Two years ago, I went to Ireland to visit Wicklock, a port city in Ireland. I went there with a plan to find the Catholic Cemetery where my ancestors are. I thought about this visit as I read the Vox Populi’s story entitled ‘Grace Given As Grace Received.’
His story was like the story a woman I met by chance told me. I thought some stories need telling but become family secrets, and we store them in the breadbaskets in the pantry of our hearts. Sometimes, we blame the harsh, un-Christian behavior on a person’s stern character or their brusque and impatient tendencies. Yet those excuses cannot diminish the emptiness of their failure to love. I remember the trip to Ireland.
On that dull day in the cemetery, she walked past me with two unwilling children. At a marker enclosed by thorns, vines, and tall weeds, she stopped. The kids bumped her, tumbling, complaining the gnats were biting them. They twisted and turned like a pair of snakes. She persisted in ignoring them as she pulled a pair of garden clippers from her patent leather purse. “Hello. Can I help? They seem to be a handful,” I said. Speaking with a slight brogue, she replied, I brought my grandkids to see Albert’s grave. Clair, Ernie! Behave yourselves.
“Can I clear this for you?” I asked, and I told her I was from California visiting my ancestors. We’re from Florida. This site is my oldest brother’s grave, she said, pointing to the headstone. He was a hero for 24 hours. I left after he died in 58 … 1958. She went on to tell me that during The War, he fought under Monte for the British army. When he came home, the town treated him like a hero. The next day they discovered he fought in the British Army. It would’ve been okay for him to wear a French or American uniform, but to join the British Army was a mortal sin.
He went from hero to traitor in 24 hours. That was during ‘The Troubles.’ Family, friends, the whole town turned against him. That was in 1946. Twelve years later, he died. Everyone said he died from the drink. He died from a broken heart. Only my mother and I came to his funeral. I was 30, and I left for America as soon as I could. It is my first time back. It only took 24 hours. Hero to a traitor ― Hero to zero ― Hero to zero. She repeated as if she thought of the phrase without the help of her family or friends. On that dull day in the cemetery, her tears were a rain that burns.
Thinking about this woman whom I saw one time leads me to question what Christians believe. In my life, Christian behavior has led me to doubt the existence of God’s Grace leading to the practice of Christ-like love. ~ Joseph Milosch
HOW PAST EPIDEMICS IMPROVED PUBLIC HEALTH
At the end of the 19th century, one in seven people around the world had died of tuberculosis, and the disease ranked as the third leading cause of death in the United States. While physicians had begun to accept German physician Robert Koch’s scientific confirmation that TB was caused by bacteria, this understanding was slow to catch on among the general public, and most people gave little attention to the behaviors that contributed to disease transmission. They didn’t understand that things they did could make them sick. In his book, Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Its Modern Prophylaxis and the Treatment in Special Institutions and at Home, S. Adolphus Knopf, an early TB specialist who practiced medicine in New York, wrote that he had once observed several of his patients sipping from the same glass as other passengers on a train, even as “they coughed and expectorated a good deal.” It was common for family members, or even strangers, to share a drinking cup.
With Knopf’s guidance, in the 1890s the New York City Health Department launched a massive campaign to educate the public and reduce transmission. The “War on Tuberculosis” public health campaign discouraged cup-sharing and prompted states to ban spitting inside public buildings and transit and on sidewalks and other outdoor spaces—instead encouraging the use of special spittoons, to be carefully cleaned on a regular basis. Before long, spitting in public spaces came to be considered uncouth, and swigging from shared bottles was frowned upon as well. These changes in public behavior helped successfully reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis.
As we are seeing with the coronavirus today, disease can profoundly impact a community—upending routines and rattling nerves as it spreads from person to person. But the effects of epidemics extend beyond the moments in which they occur. Disease can permanently alter society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. Crisis sparks action and response. Many infrastructure improvements and healthy behaviors we consider normal today are the result of past health campaigns that responded to devastating outbreaks.
In the 19th century, city streets in the U.S. overflowed with filth. People tossed their discarded newspapers, food scraps, and other trash out their windows onto the streets below. The plentiful horses pulling streetcars and delivery carts contributed to the squalor, as each one dropped over a quart of urine and pounds of manure every day. When a horse died, it became a different kind of hazard. In “Portrait of an Unhealthy City,” Columbia University professor David Rosner writes that since horses are so heavy, when one died in New York City, “its carcass would be left to rot until it had disintegrated enough for someone to pick up the pieces. Children would play with dead horses lying on the streets.” More than 15,000 horse carcasses were collected and removed from New York streets in 1880.
Human waste was a problem, too. Many people emptied chamber pots out their windows. Those in tenement housing did not have their own facilities, but had 25 to 30 people sharing a single outhouse. These privies frequently overflowed until workers known as “night soil men” arrived to haul away the dripping barrels of feces, only to dump them into the nearby harbor.
As civic and health leaders began to understand that the frequent outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid and cholera that ravaged their cities were connected to the garbage, cities began setting up organized systems for disposing of human urine and feces. Improvements in technology helped the process along. Officials began introducing sand filtration and chlorination systems to clean up municipal water supplies. Indoor toilets were slow to catch on, due to cost, issues with controlling the stench, and the need for a plumbing system. Following Thomas Crapper’s improved model in 1891, water closets became popular, first among the wealthy, and then among the middle-class. Plumbing and sewage systems, paired with tenement house reform, helped remove excrement from the public streets.
Disease radically improved aspects of American culture, too. As physicians came to believe that good ventilation and fresh air could combat illness, builders started adding porches and windows to houses. Real estate investors used the trend to market migration to the West, prompting Eastern physicians to convince consumptives and their families to move thousands of miles from crowded, muggy Eastern cities to the dry air and sunshine in places like Los Angeles and Colorado Springs. The ploy was so influential that in 1872, approximately one-third of Colorado’s population had tuberculosis, having moved to the territory seeking better health.
Some of this sentiment continues today. While we know that sunshine doesn’t kill bacteria, good ventilation and time spent outside does benefit children and adults by promoting physical activity and improving spirits—and access to outdoor spaces and parks still entices homebuyers. This fresh-air “cure” also eventually incited the study of climate as a formal science, as people began to chart temperature, barometric pressure and other weather patterns in hopes of identifying the “ideal” conditions for treating disease.
Epidemics of the past established an ethos of altruism in the U.S. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Philadelphians selflessly stepped up to save their city. With no formal crisis plan, Mayor Matthew Clarkson turned to volunteers collect clothing, food and monetary donations; to pitch a makeshift hospital; and to build a home for 191 children temporarily or permanently orphaned by the epidemic. Members of the Free African Society, an institution run by and for the city’s black population, were particularly altruistic, providing two-thirds of the hospital staff, transporting and burying the dead and performing numerous other medical tasks.
A 20th-century diphtheria outbreak in a small region in the Alaska Territory inspired a national rally of support—and created the Iditarod, the famous dog sled race. When cases of “the children’s disease” began to mount in Nome, Alaska, in January 1925, the town was in trouble. Diphtheria bacteria produces a toxin, making it especially deadly, unless the antitoxin serum is administered. This serum had been readily available for decades, but Nome’s supply had run short, and the town was inaccessible by road or sea in the winter.
Leaping into action, 20 of the area’s finest dogsled teams and mushers carried a supply of the serum all the way from Fairbanks—674 miles—in record time, facing temperatures of more than 60 degrees below zero. Their delivery on February 2nd, plus a second shipment a week later, successfully halted the epidemic, saving Nome’s children from suffocation. Newspapers across the country covered the rescue. It was also memorialized in movies (including the animated Balto), with a Central Park statue—and, most notably, with the annual Iditarod race. The significant challenges of delivery by dogsled also sparked investigation into the possibilities of medical transport by airplane, which takes place all the time in remote areas today but was still in its infancy at the time.
Diseases fueled the growth of fundraising strategies. The polio epidemic of 1952 sickened more than 57,000 people across the United States, causing 21,269 cases of paralysis. The situation became so dire that at one point, the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis, a premier polio treatment facility, temporarily ran out of cribs for babies with the disease. In response, the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), which had been founded in 1938 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later came to be known as the March of Dimes, distributed around $25 million through its local chapters. It provided iron lungs, rocking chairs, beds and other equipment to medical facilities, and assigned physicians, nurses, physical therapists, and medical social workers where they were needed. The March of Dimes success has served as the gold standard in public health education and fundraising since its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.
Public health emergencies have inspired innovations in education. Starting in 1910, Thomas Edison’s lab, which had invented one of the first motion picture devices in the 1890s, partnered with anti-TB activists to produce short films on tuberculosis prevention and transmission—some of the first educational movies. Screened in public places in rural areas, the TB movies were also the first films—of any type—that viewers had ever seen. The anti-tuberculosis crusade was also a model for later NFIP efforts to combat polio that relentlessly put that disease at the front of public agenda until an effective vaccination was developed and implemented, and set a standard for future public health campaigns.
Past epidemics fueled the growth of civic debate and journalism in the U.S., too. As far back as colonial times, newspapers built their audiences by providing an outlet for debate on controversial issues, including disease. Founders of the New England Courant—the first paper in Colonial America to print the voices and perspectives of the colonists—launched their paper as a vehicle to oppose smallpox inoculation during the 1721 Boston epidemic. As smallpox ravaged the city, a Boston doctor named Zabdiel Boylston began using inoculation, a practice in which people are intentionally infected with a disease, to produce milder cases and reduce mortality risk. Backed by those opposed to the practice, James Franklin started the Courant to serve as a tool to fight it. Inoculation’s success was demonstrated in 1721 and later smallpox epidemics, eventually convincing even staunch opponents of its value—but by inspiring an outlet to air their concerns, the anti-inoculation camp had made an important contribution to public discourse.
Since colonial times, newspapers, pamphlets, and a host of other outlets have continued to thrive and evolve during outbreaks—updating the public on believed transmission and remedies, announcing store closing and quarantine restrictions, advertising outbreak-related job openings (florists, nurses, grave diggers, coffin makers, to name a few), and serving as spaces for public debate. The cycle continues today, as media powers and regular citizens flock to social media to discuss COVID-19—disseminating information, speculating on its origins, expressing fear of its unknowns.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-epidemics-past-forced-americans-promote-health-ended-up-improving-life-this-country-180974555/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR0pZLaJ7U_7bQxJmhVNItejok5E2rudcYJz5jzISQ24Bw-goFp9Q1C9890
Mary:
The idea that epidemics spur improvements in public health seems at first counter intuitive, but is really a demonstration of our best survival skill: the ability to learn and change. Thinking of the not so distant world before good plumbing and civic water/waste systems beggars belief — how could people live surrounded by such filth!! And imagine walking through those filthy streets in long heavy dresses! And imagine the stench!
But once the connection to disease was clear progress was not only possible, it was inevitable. The clear connection is the important thing, and not an easy one to convince people of. It seems unbelievable to us that people sick and well would pass around the same drinking cup, or that people habitually spit on the ground and floor just about everywhere...but it took a lot of education and knowledge to break those habits and make them repugnant rather than ordinary.
And consider what we have been experiencing with mask wearing…people not only resisting because it's unfamiliar, but convinced it will interfere with breathing, build up carbon dioxide, cause them to faint, etc etc. And then all the people who wear their masks over their mouth and not the nose — something that defies logic, but is very difficult to stop.
We learn, and that's how we survive, but change still is uncomfortable and comes slowly. People neither like to change their assumptions nor their habits. And learning involves eventually establishing new habits, so the new practices no longer feel new and strange, or anything you need think about at all, they are simply now the way things are, and we can't imagine going back to old beliefs and old habits. People don't go about spitting anymore, so we don't need spittoons. This same process is continuing with smoking. Ashtrays are now rare indeed, and were once ubiquitous. Progress.
Oriana:
Such a good point about resistance to mask-wearing, or wearing them over the mouth but not the nose. I think there should be a public campaign to address this: the nose is the chief entryway for the virus. No point wearing a mask unless it covers your nose.
Thankfully, enough people wear the mask correctly so that lives have been saved.
Japan never had a lockdown, but the Japanese are so used to wearing masks (to prevent the flu, I guess), no lockdown was needed.
I hope we'll learn this lesson for use during the ordinary flu season (this time we basically had no flu at all -- the masks and social distancing worked wonderfully to prevent the flu).
*
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BODY DURING FASTING
~ In a paper published in January 2019 in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and Kyoto University revealed some of the effects of fasting, which go way beyond just burning fat. By analyzing the blood of four young, healthy human participants after they fasted for 34 and 58 hours — whoa! — the team found 42 different substances whose levels increase while a person is fasting (as well as two that go down), only 14 of which scientists had previously detected in fasting humans. That means they discovered 30 substances the human body produces in large quantities during fasting that scientists didn’t know about.
The fact that the body produces all these compounds, write the researchers, indicates that fasting jumpstarts a whole lot more metabolic processes than scientists had ever realized, some of which may have significant health benefits, including antioxidative defense — which may explain its supposed anti-aging effects.
“We have been researching aging and metabolism for many years and decided to search for unknown health effects in human fasting,” the study’s first author Takayuki Teruya, Ph.D., a technician at OIST, said in a statement. “Contrary to the original expectation, it turned out that fasting induced metabolic activation rather actively.”
As a human is fasting, the body has to switch from using food for energy to using the energy that’s stored in the body, in the form of fat and glycogen. Flipping this switch, in turn, kicks off a whole bunch of other metabolic processes that result in the compounds measured in this study. These include well-known byproducts of fasting, like butyrates, acylcarnitines, and branched chain amino acids, as well as a host of other organic acids, coenzymes, antioxidants, purines, and pyrimidines, which, the team writes, “appear to implicate hitherto unrecognized metabolic mechanisms induced by fasting.”
While some of these compounds peaked in participants’ blood and plasma at the 34-hour mark, others continued to rise for the full 58-hour fast, reaching levels 60 times their normal concentrations in human blood.
The implications of these findings aren’t completely clear, as the study was small and didn’t track the participants’ long-term health over multiple fasts, but the researchers say they point to several potential benefits of fasting. In addition to antioxidative defense, which helps protect the body against some of the long-term damage associated with aging, the study’s authors argue that fasting appears to enhance activity in the mitochondria — the powerhouse of the cell.
Complicating the picture, the researchers write that the body may actually be producing some antioxidant compounds in response to the dangerous oxidative stress that fasting can cause in the first place.
One thing is abundantly clear, though: Fasting really changes the body.
“Since the 44 metabolites account for one-third of all blood metabolites detected, fasting clearly caused major metabolic changes in human blood,” write the researchers. With future studies, they hope to gain a clearer picture of how fasting affects the human body by recruiting more volunteers, lowering the chances that variations in metabolism will be due to individual differences.
But for now, it’s safe to say that fasting is nowhere near as simple as it seems, and scientists are only beginning to bring the full picture into focus. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/japanese-fasting-study-reveals-complex-metabolic-changes-in-the-human-body?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Until a fuller picture emerges, it's best to be cautious when it comes to long-term fasting.
For fasting as a method to lose weight, medical supervision is definitely needed. And be sure the doctor has expertise in fasting.
As for experimenting on your own, another word of caution: I've seen a case of anorexia develop, with resulting heart trouble. If you have a compulsive personality, why not stay away from fasting (other than short term fasting, e.g. skipping breakfast) and use berberine instead . . . it's an excellent calorie-restriction mimic, as potent (at the right dose) as the life-extension drug metformin.
ending on beauty:
I like the silence between us,
The quiet—that holy state even the rain
Knows about.
~ Charles Simic, This Morning
