Yangtze through the Wu Gorge. “Emerging from / an Abyss and / entering it again / that is Life, is / it not?” ~ Emily Dickinson, "The Gorgeous Nothings”*
SUMMER ELEGY
for my father
From June to June, as though uninterrupted,
I was born and orphaned.
My first memory was water: you, mother
and me in a bathtub that seemed to be a river.
From river to river, as though uncut by land,
I’ve swum six thousand miles
just to see the world, my eyes always yours.
First I swam with you in the Yangtze, at age three,
mother watching us under a green sun umbrella
n the riverbank, the Wuhan Bund.
Wind blew around me, and I caught fish
in my little seersucker shirt, but they
jumped out to catch wind. From wind to wind
that moved like waves, from waves to waves
I grew up—I grew up on river tides.
From tide to tide we flew down the Yangtze
to Turtle Island
as if the Pacific Ocean was just a canal.
Who would have thought that you’d stop here
in Los Angeles. It’s only halfway to the moon.
From sky to sky, your face, my mother’s face,
faces of summer stars.
From star to star in the spiral galaxy that
mother went first, isn’t she the longest milky way
you’d ever run across and through?
You, a cowboy from the Three Gorges
by the Yangtze, is there a shortcut for you?
I want to be your daughter again in the next cycle
of life. Show me a way to find the planet
where you’ll meet my mother—
I want to be born again, too old to be an orphan.
I want to hold your hands,
but you slipped away like a breeze
of air. From air to air I’ve looked for you.
From mountain to mountain, stream to stream,
my grief has formed a new age of glaciers.
~ Ming Di
*
Oriana:
The poet’s father died during the pandemic, but he died of cancer. This is an elegy, a poem of mourning, not of social protest. For protest, we need to lean outside the poem, to ponder a world where we spend much more on the military than on research that might lead to cures for disease (not to mention famine, poverty, illiteracy, and so no)
“Turtle Island” means the Earth, or North America, in Native-American mythologies.
Note the lovely repetitions: from June to June, from sky to sky, from mountain to mountain, and so on. Poetry often relies on repetition for its music.
Mary:
Wonderful elegy . . . holds the whole universe in its loving grief.
Oriana:
Chinese poetry is famous for its nature imagery. I started reading a Chinese novel once; it too was richly interwoven with nature imagery. Nature seemed to be what religion used to be in the West, when all the arts revolved around it. Nature is the surest way to achieve lyricism.
Ming Di with her father, 1960s
*
PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT: JEWISH OR UNIVERSAL?
~ The first time I turned to notebook and pen with purpose, I did so while locked in the bathroom, the only room in the house with a key in the door. I was experiencing a fit of adolescent rage, incensed that my parents wouldn’t let me out of the house to go meet up with some friends in town. There were so few outlets through which to channel the anger I felt growing up, and so few ways to exercise the agency one craves as a teenager; cussing my parents out in a diary and knowing they couldn’t get past the door to disturb me as I did it helped ease my anguish to some degree.
It is behind a locked bathroom door that Alexander Portnoy, in one of Portnoy’s Complaint’s many vivid scenes, furiously masturbates as a teenager, even as his mother rattles the doorknob and asks what her son is up to. He lies to her and tells her he has diarrhea, setting off a hilarious interrogation that felt all too familiar to me. “Did you eat French fries after school?” asks Sophie Portnoy, followed by, “I want to see what you’ve done in there.” He flushes the toilet before opening the door to her; ever-probing, she asks, “What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”
Portnoy’s Complaint, known for its outrageous portrayal of masturbation and sex, is often heralded as a seminal (excuse the pun) account of the male, Jewish-American experience—an experience I, as a woman who grew up with Muslim parents in the west of Ireland, certainly can’t say I have claim to. In spite of this, Alex Portnoy might be one of the most relatable characters I’ve encountered in literary fiction.
Though I picked up the book seeking out the vulgarity it is infamous for, I ended up shocked, instead, by how viscerally I was confronted by memories of my upbringing as I read Portnoy’s account of his own. Sophie’s hawkishness and determination in getting to the bottom of Portnoy’s strange behavior in the bathroom scene reminded me so much of my own mother, who never lets even the slightest strangeness go unscrutinized. Throughout the novel, Roth gives Sophie some truly memorable lines; almost all of them could’ve been taken word-for-word from my mother’s mouth.
I understand why, in his review of Portnoy’s Complaint, critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that Roth had “permanently identified the narrative style of the Jewish novel.” But I also question whether we should limit the novel in this way. Upon finishing the book, I came away with the sense that so much of its contents were far more universal than critics would’ve allowed us to believe; that so much of it was relevant beyond Jewish American culture, even if it took that culture as its source material.
Portnoy’s descriptions of the parenting he was subject to, how it was rooted in the family’s identity as part of a religious minority, bore striking resemblance to what I’d written about in my teenage journals (in terms of content, I should stress, rather than quality). The lack of privacy he encounters in his home life, as well as the infantilization, were frustrations I’d had at home, too. The overprotectiveness and fear of his parents, their intense, smothering devotion, and the sheer amounts of guilt they invoke in him; all of this transcends the specificity of Portnoy’s circumstances.
Not only did I see similarities in how Portnoy’s parents treat him and how mine treated me, but also in how he internalizes that treatment and how it later affects him. The novel articulates with stunning clarity the tension one can feel between religious duty and common sense, particularly in its assessment of rules pertaining to food and the subsequent repression they engender—“What else, I ask you, were all those prohibitive dietary rules and regulations all about to begin with, what else but to give us little Jewish children practice in being repressed?” Portnoy asks. His unwillingness to adhere to rules and conventions is seen as selfish by his parents and broader community, and despite overwhelmingly arguing that he should do as he pleases, Portnoy also considers whether the accusations have weight.
The novel conveys extremely well the relentless self-questioning that comes with finding fault in a family, that, on paper, sacrifices so much for its children. Portnoy levels countless critiques against his family, but doubts himself throughout the monologue, at one point asking, “Could I really have detested this childhood and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now, looking backward upon what I was from the vantage point of what I am—and am not?”
*
Until I’d read Portnoy’s Complaint, I had assumed that I would have little in common with people who grew up in Jewish families; that Judaism and Islam were worlds apart, as the historical cultural clash between the two groups would indicate. Identifying so much with Portnoy dispelled that view to some degree. The novel excels, not only in outlining the family’s dysfunction, but in tracing the source of that dysfunction directly to Jewish heritage and cultural practice, something I’ve found difficult to do in relation to my own heritage (particularly in therapy sessions with white therapists). Some critics accused Roth of being “self-hating” for linking familial dysfunction and Judaism, and sometimes I have wondered whether my aversion to fully embracing Muslim identity is symptomatic of a kind of internalized racism.
I’ve seen a movement towards compassion [for the older generation] within myself, and this is where Portnoy and I diverge. Aged 30, Portnoy continues to engage in long tirades on how tiresome his family is, whereas I have largely left that to the realm of those teenage journals. Instead, I have somehow managed to develop some amount of patience to deal with my mother and father and their constant insistence that I get married soon (though I have repeatedly stated that I have no intention of ever doing so). I have stopped arguing and fighting with them as much as I used to, electing instead to quietly nod along at whatever ridiculous suggestions they make to me about my lifestyle. This patience undoubtedly comes from a place of compassion, but at some point, one must ask what the limits of this compassion are, and why it feels somewhat futile to ask that an older generation make efforts to give the same to us.
In private conversations with other Muslims I grew up around, it’s much easier to speak frankly about what a burden parental expectations can be. But because the issue of prejudice tends to dictate media discussions of minority groups, it is expected that publicly, we slip into a state of forgiveness and reverence toward others in our community. Why level any further criticism against our own culture, when someone external to us is already giving us so much flak? I spent much of the beginning of my twenties feeling somewhat ashamed for how I had distanced myself from Islam to the point of agnosticism during my teens, wondering whether there was a way I could come back to it, reconcile myself to it.
But the truth is, believing in God simply stopped making sense at some point. More than anything else, I know that religion will never exist independently of a community that tries to enforce its rules and that demands respect for its beliefs, but will not offer the same to you for your own (or lack thereof). This is one of the central criticisms Portnoy’s Complaint leverages, and in doing so, Roth offers me a different kind of representation.
Wayward children find a voice in Portnoy. It’s what I’ve found so compelling about the novel and why I find it to be an antidote to current discussions on group identity, which so often refuse to engage in honest self-criticism. It never treats Jews as infallible, as beyond reproach—far from it. Instead, Roth foregoes the kinship of an ethnic and religious group to show how its culture and practices can inflict long-lasting trauma on some of its members. To me, that makes the project all the more daring.
*
Oriana:
Also universal is the conflict between the parent generation who grew up in another country, and the younger generation. The young mainly want to be American, and are simply not all that interested in the lost Eden or Holy Land that the parents' country of birth has become. Eventually they may become interested in their "roots," but they'll be American first.
And this is how it should be, and it's out of the parents' hands. It's high time that someone should recognize that Portnoy's Complaint is universal first, American second, and specifically Jewish perhaps third . . . if that.
*
NABOKOV: THE CAPACITY TO WONDER AT TRIFLES
"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good." ~ Vladimir Nabokov, in the essay “The Creative Writer," 1942, based on a lecture given at Wellesley College, 1941
BURR VERSUS HAMILTON: WAS BURR THE REAL HERO?
~ Alexander Hamilton has become an unlikely folk hero in the past year, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Broadway show, which reimagines Hamilton as a scrappy, complicated hero who works his way from humble roots to the heights of power. Hamilton’s nemesis in Miranda’s version is Aaron Burr, who ends Hamilton’s life in an infamous duel.
But Miranda may have lionized the wrong guy. It’s actually Burr who has long deserved a second look from history—and who looks much more like a real hero today.
He fought for the little guy. Burr worked against rules that gave greater weight to the votes of the rich and laws that required people to own property in order to vote. He opened the first bank in New York that extended credit to the middle class, instead of just the rich. And he fought for an electoral system that would give more power to each individual voting district, and less to powerful families, like Hamilton’s, who were used to running the state.
He fought for freedom of the press. Burr defended the rights of Thomas Greenleaf, a newspaper editor whose shop was ransacked by an angry mob, and John Burk, a printer and playwright who was locked up and threatened with deportation for criticizing Washington in print.
He fought for emancipation. Burr was a slaveholder. But when the New York state legislature was considering a bill for gradual abolition in 1785, Burr proposed an amendment that called for immediate emancipation of all people living in slavery.
He fought for women. Burr was the only member of the Founding Fathers who believed wholeheartedly in the rights of women. He called Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women “a work of genius,” and educated his daughter better than most men at the time: by age 10, she could translate Latin and Greek. “I hope yet by her,” Burr wrote, “to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe – that women have souls!”
He loved his wife. Unlike Hamilton, who married at least partially for political gain, then publicly humiliated his wife with a cheating scandal, Burr married for love. He and his wife, Theodosia, set out to form a union of equals, almost unheard of at the time. Their love letters contain everything from discussions of Rousseau to dirty jokes. And there is no evidence that he ever cheated on her.
He fought for the outsider. Burr fought against an ugly tide of anti-immigrant sentiment in the young republic, led by Hamilton’s Federalist party, which suggested that anyone without English heritage was a second-class citizen, and even challenged the rights of non-Anglos to hold office. In response, Burr insisted that anyone who contributed to society deserved all the rights of any other citizen, no matter their background.
He was an outsider. Most of Burr’s political rivals, including Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, gained influence through alliances with elite families who wielded enormous power. Burr came from a line of famous preachers, but his most enduring political alliances were with men who had no ties to the ruling elite. In contrast to Hamilton, who consistently insulted rivals he believed to be lower class, Burr never publicly shamed anyone based on their status. Instead, he fought to welcome more people of all classes into both political and economic power.
Burr may be the only Founding Father who wouldn’t be baffled or outraged by America as we know it today, in which all citizens, including women and minorities, have an equal vote regardless of class.
In Burr’s own time, his ability to forge alliances across political and regional divisions made him powerful–but also left some wondering whose side he was on. And his consistent refusal to act against his conscience for political gain brought him into conflict with formidable enemies on all sides.
Although Burr never spoke negatively about his own adversaries, he was the victim of smear campaigns by two of the country’s great propagandists: Hamilton, who hated Burr for wresting power from Hamilton in his home state of New York, and Jefferson, who worried that Burr might be powerful enough to take the presidency from him or his Virginia cronies.
In his duel with Hamilton, Burr sought to defend his reputation from decades of unfounded insults. He likely had no intention of killing Hamilton: Duels were rarely fatal, and the guns Hamilton chose made it almost impossible to take an accurate shot. But Hamilton’s death made Hamilton a martyr, and only offered more fodder for those who felt threatened by Burr’s independence and power.
Burr believed that history would vindicate him. “I leave to my actions to speak for themselves,” he wrote, “and to my character to confound the fictions of slander.”
But unlike Hamilton, whose wife worked for years to secure his legacy, Burr left no close family to defend his place in history. Burr’s wife, daughter, and grandson all died before him, and many of his papers went down in the shipwreck that claimed his daughter’s life. Hamilton left behind 33 volumes of his writings, Jefferson 27. Burr left only two.
Tantalizingly, Burr claimed that some of the papers lost in that wreck contained notes for an unauthorized biography of the revolutionary generation that would chip away the myths already calcifying around his fellow founders, and reveal the actual men.
When we chip away at those myths today, and sweep the false stories told by Burr’s enemies from the stage, it’s Burr who emerges as a true hero. He was his generation’s most effective enemy of inherited wealth and power. And he consistently challenged his peers to welcome all people into the American experiment.
During America’s crucial first years, as the battles were fought to define American notions of freedom, and decide who should have it, Burr was the most powerful voice calling the young country to actually live up to its radical ideal of freedom for all. ~
https://time.com/4292836/forget-hamilton-burr-is-the-real-hero/
*
THE LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF AARON BURR’S LOVING DAUGHTER
~ Theodosia Bartow Burr was born in Albany, New York, on June 21, 1783. Her mother, also called Theodosia, was a brilliant, cultured woman. She had scandalized New England society, when as a married mother of five, she fell in love with an equally brilliant and much younger blue-blooded lawyer and Revolutionary War soldier—Aaron Burr. After her first husband’s death, the two were married, and little Theodosia, the couple’s only child to survive, became the center of her parents’—particularly her father’s—world.
“Your dear little Theodosia cannot hear you spoken of without an apparent melancholy,” the elder Theodosia wrote to a traveling Aaron in 1785, “insomuch that her nurse is obliged to exert her invention to divert her, and myself avoid to mention you in her presence. She was one whole day indifferent to everything but your name. Her attachment is not of a common nature.”
Aaron reciprocated these feelings. His plans for his lovely, dark-haired “Little Miss Priss,” who was already displaying an extraordinary intellect and sharp wit, were incredibly ambitious, and for the times, highly progressive. “I hope yet by her [Theodosia] to convince the world what neither sex seems to believe,” he wrote, “that women have soul!”
*
In 1800, Theodosia became deeply enamored with Joseph Alston, a wealthy planter from South Carolina. “My father laughs at my impatience to hear from you,” Theodosia wrote teasingly to Joseph during a separation.
The couple were married on February 2, 1801, in Albany. Little more than a month afterwards, she and her new husband watched as her father was sworn in as Vice-President of the United States, under President Thomas Jefferson. They were further blessed nine months later when their son Aaron Burr Alston, nicknamed “Gampy” by his doting grandfather, was born.
However, the birth of her only child took a heavy toll on Theodosia. She was severely injured during the traumatic birth, and the prolapsed uterus she suffered left her in immense pain, and made intercourse impossible. Although she adored her husband and his family, she had a hard time adjusting to the isolated life of a plantation mistress at The Oaks, the family estate on the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, and was soon spending half the year in New York with her father.
On July 10, 1804, Aaron sat down at his desk and wrote his Theodosia a letter of goodbye. “I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped for or even wished.” The next day, Aaron—still the Vice President of the United States—would kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.
*
Rumors swirled as to the cause of the duel. Aaron had been incensed by a comment Hamilton had made about “still more despicable” acts. Some thought Hamilton may have been referring to Aaron and Theodosia’s “morbid affection” for each other, which had led to whispers of incest.
Whatever the case, Aaron was soon on the run, although he was never tried for the murder. After serving out his term as Vice President, Aaron headed west to establish a new country comprised of western North American territory and Mexico. He planned to become emperor of said country, with Theodosia succeeding him as empress. He had the full support of his daughter and son-in-law, who supplied much-needed funds. The Alstons even headed west to help Aaron in his quest.
But the Burr dynasty was not to be. The plot was found out, and Burr was taken into custody. In 1807, he was tried for treason in Richmond, the ever loyal Theodosia at his side. Amazingly, Aaron was acquitted, and with the help of Theodosia he soon smuggled himself out of the country and headed for Europe.
Her father now gone, Theodosia’s health—she was probably in the final stages of uterine cancer— deteriorated further. “The most violent affections have tormented her during the whole of the last 18 months,” she wrote in third-person to a doctor in 1808. “Hysteric fits, various colors and flashes of light before her yes, figures passing around her bed, strange noises, low spirits and worse.” She missed her father intensely. “What indeed,” she wrote him, “would I not risk once more to see him, to hang upon him, to place my child upon his knee, and again spend my days in the happy occupation of endeavoring to anticipate his wishes.”
In 1812, Theodosia’s beloved “Gampy” died of malaria in South Carolina. With the loss of her only child, Theodosia’s world grew darker. “There is no more joy for me,” she wrote. “The world is blank. I have lost my boy.”
On December 10, 1812, Joseph Alston was elected governor of South Carolina. His new position made it impossible for him to accompany Theodosia to New York, and with the War of 1812 raging in the Atlantic, he was worried about his frail wife making the treacherous trip to New York. To ensure his daughter’s safety, Aaron sent down his friend Dr. Timothy Green to secure a boat and make sure that Theodosia made it home to him.
Theodosia, along with Dr. Green, a French maid and skeleton crew, boarded a small schooner called the Patriot at the port of Georgetown on December 31. One week passed, then two, then three—with no word from the Patriot, its small crew or passengers. “In three weeks I have not yet had one line from her,” Joseph wrote Aaron. “My mind is tortured—after 30 days—my wife is either captured or lost!” By February 24, he had given up all hope. “My boy and-my wife- gone both! This, then is the end of all the hopes we had formed,” he wrote to his father-in-law. “You may well observe that you feel severed from the human race. She was the last thing that bound us to the species.”
*
Within weeks of the Patriot’s disappearance, rumors about Theodosia’s fate began to spread in the North and the South. Joseph died in 1816, a shell of the man he once was. Burr lived another 23 years, long enough to witness the cottage-industry of conspiracy theories about his daughter’s disappearance come to life. He refused to believe she was still alive, stating firmly: “She is dead. She perished in the miserable little pilot boat in which she left. Were she alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father.”
Many believed the Patriot had been captured by one of the pirate ships known to troll the Outer Banks. Over the years, numerous “death-bed confessions” from various aged or imprisoned pirates were reported in papers all over the country. The first to gain traction was the case of Jean DeFarges and Robert Johnson, who were executed in 1819 for other crimes. An 1820 article in the New York Advertiser claimed that the two had confessed to having been crew on the Patriot. They claimed to have led a mutiny, and scuttled the ship, killing all on board.
In 1833, The Mobile Commercial Register reported that another man had confessed to raiding the Patriot with other pirates, who had reluctantly forced Theodosia to walk the plank. Other stories claimed that she had become the wife of an American Indian in Texas, been taken as a pirate’s mistress to Bermuda, or that she had killed herself after resisting the advances of the pirate Octave Chauvet. Yet another fanciful story had her writing farewell letters to her father and husband, and stuffing them and her wedding ring into a champagne bottle and throwing it into the Carolina sea before being executed.
Perhaps the most oft-repeated “confession” was that of Benjamin F. Burdick, a “hard, rough old salt” of a sailor. On his death bed at a poor-house in Michigan, he is said to have confessed to a minister’s wife that he had been on the pirate ship that overtook the Patriot. According to an 1878 edition of the New York Times:
He said there was one lady on board who was beautiful appearing, intelligent and cultivated, who gave her name as Mrs. Theodosia Alston. When her turn came to walk the fatal plank she asked for a few moments time, which was gruffly granted her. She then retired to her berth and changed her apparel, appearing on deck in a few moments clad in pure white garments. And with a bible in her hand, she announced that she was ready. She appeared as calm and composed as if she were at home, and not a tremor crept over her frame, or a pallor overspread her features, as she walked toward her fate. As she was taking the fatal steps, she folded her hand over her bosom and raised her eyes to heaven. She fell and sank without a murmur or a sigh.
Then there is the curious case of “the female stranger,” who is buried in the St. Paul’s Episcopal Graveyard in Alexandria, Virginia. It is said this “veiled lady” appeared in the city in 1816, with a man claiming to be her husband. She died a short time later. Legend has it that this was Theodosia and Dr. Green, recently returned from captivity in the islands.
Perhaps the only clue we have as to what really happened to Theodosia is the Nags Head portrait, discovered by Dr. Pool in 1869. According to his daughter, Polly Mann told her and her father that her deceased husband, Joseph Tillett, was a “wrecker” who scavenged the ships that washed up on the shores of the Outer Banks. She claimed that decades before, he and his friends had come upon a scuttled, empty schooner near Kitty Hawk. In one cabin they found many fine items, including the portrait and dresses, which were now in Polly’s possession. “Also exposed to our view—a vase of wax flowers under a glass globe,” Anna remembered, “and a shell beautifully carved in the shape of a nautilus.”
Polly gave the portrait to Dr. Pool in lieu of payment. He took it back home to Elizabeth City. Over the years, he and his cohorts would attempt to get authentication of the portrait from the Burr and Alston families, whose opinions as to whether the likeness was Theodosia varied greatly. “I do remember her beautiful eyes,” Joseph Alston’s youngest sister wrote, “and the eyes in the picture are really beautiful.”
Those who believe in the painting’s authenticity think it proves that Theodosia died off the coast of the North Carolina shore, one way or another. There were fierce storms on the Outer Banks January 2nd and 3rd in 1812, which caused damage to ships nearby the Patriot’s planned route. It is most likely that the small ship was simply over-powered by the storm, but who knows? Perhaps pirates, rogue wreckers, the British, or something else caused the boat’s destruction. Or perhaps Theodosia was spirited away to some exotic land, and lived a long life—though in her precarious health that seems very unlikely.
Today the legend of Theodosia lives on. The Nags Head Portrait now hangs in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. Her ghost is said to haunt her plantation The Oaks, the Outer Banks, Richmond Hill and Bald Head Island, where it is said her spirit is chased by three headless pirates. In the late 19th and early 20th century the mystery was spun into several novels and countless magazine articles. Many little girls were named after her—including Theodosia Burr Goodman, who would become famous as the silent screen vamp Theda Bara. Her story was a favorite of poets, including Robert Frost, whose poem Kitty Hawk includes the line:
Did I recollect how the wreckers wrecked Theodosia
Burr off this very shore? T’was to punish her, but her
father more.
But perhaps the impact of the mystery of Theodosia is best summed up by her friend Margaret Blennerhasset in her poem On A Friend Who Was Supposed To Have Suffered A Shipwreck:
And now I wander all alone,
Nor heed the balmy breeze,
but list the ring dove’s tender moan,
and think upon the seas.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-dramatic-life-and-mysterious-death-of-theodosia-burr?utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0ZvuGGNChQoec5-p5tccQymfOo7C5M-gitkrTKvSpMUnM5oxp678K81wk
Oriana:
Her father hoped that she'd prove that women have a soul . . . and pirates so near the American coast . . . it’s hard to believe the times.
We'll never know for sure how she died, but I like the story that she put on a white dress before walking the plank. Again, what times, what times . . .
**
THE SURPRISING BENEFITS OF UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD
~ Unconditional positive regard is defined by humanistic psychologists to mean expressing empathy, support, and acceptance to someone, regardless of what they say or do.
Unlike other practitioners of his day who offered therapies like behaviorism, which were quick to confront how poor choices hurt us, psychologists like Rogers started by validating their clients’ feelings, withholding judgment, and offering support.
Known as “client-centered therapy,” this treatment emphasizes the healing power of human connection. While Roger’s theory shifted the psychology landscape, it didn’t only benefit therapy seekers.
According to Rogers, problematic behaviors like overeating, drinking too much, and procrastinating aren’t altered with confrontation, judgment, or punishment; they are remedied with compassion, understanding, and acceptance.
In his view, people are wired for self-actualization, or the need to fulfill our potential. However, painful experiences like being bullied, shamed, or judged thwart our growth.
Unconditional positive regard restores hope by showing us we are loved and accepted. From Roger’s lens, when people feel safe, honesty follows. And being honest with ourselves and others is crucial for change.
EXAMPLES:
Unconditional positive regard means offering compassion to people even if they have done something wrong. A therapist practicing unconditional positive regard would respond with compassion to a person in treatment who may have gambled away their savings, lied at work, or mistreated a friend. It is striving to respond with understanding rather than contempt for the individual.
However, unconditional positive regard does not mean unconditional acceptance. We should be careful to not enable others to continue to act in harmful ways out of our desire not to hurt their feelings. Rather, having positive regard means treating people as fallible human beings regardless of what they do, even if we don’t like what they’ve done.
Whereas judgment and shame elicit defensiveness, acceptance fosters safety, which invites honesty and self-exploration. It’s offering the sort of grace we wish others would offer us when we fail.
Let’s say a friend borrowed your new car and brought it back with a dent. Instead of asking, “What on earth happened?” a person-centered therapist would advise you to say, “I see you feel awful. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
In our daily lives, question asking can help us gather information, but in certain tense situations, querying can come across as accusatory and judgmental.
Sometimes it’s hard to withhold our reactions, especially when behavior catches us off guard. For instance, if a co-worker spilled coffee on your laptop, you might be tempted to shout, “Why can’t you be careful?” But in this case, extending unconditional positive regard by saying, “We all make mistakes,” might be a better choice of words.
New parents know it can be stressful to leave their baby with a sitter for the first time. When an anxious mother says, “I’m terrified to leave my baby with a stranger,” the person-centered therapist doesn’t say, “What evidence do you have that your child is unsafe?” Instead, they respond with, “You love your child so much, I can see why you’re worried.” In Roger’s view, providing empathy and acceptance allows people to open up and share more.
Researchers have found unconditional positive regard can benefit us and the people in our lives in many ways.
A 2018 study found that athletes who received unconditional positive regard from their coaches were more motivated to play sports and felt more confident. When adversity cropped up, they rose to the occasion and took on new challenges. Most likely, positive regard sparked their inner enthusiasm and love for the game.
On the contrary, athletes who were criticized were less secure, less motivated, and more likely to burn out. Education researchers also suggest that students who receive unconditional positive regard from their teachers are more motivated to succeed.
The takeaway: unconditional positive regard can spark self-betterment, which can help us lead more meaningful lives. Social scientists also state that using this technique can keep us emotionally fit in several ways.
UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION
According to Rogers, unconditional positive regard helps us reach our highest potential, also known as “self-actualization.” While psychologist Abraham Maslow believed few people are self-actualized, Rogers saw striving towards growth as part of the human condition.
Relationships that encourage openness, creativity, and honesty foster self-actualization by letting us know it’s okay to think, feel, and behave the way we do. Studies show self-actualization can help us solve problems creatively, embrace change, and cultivate deep and meaningful relationships. Self-actualization also ignites our “inner spark,” which helps us pursue our goals, even when obstacles stand in our way.
UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD AND MOTIVATION
While Rogers considered unconditional positive regard necessary for successful therapy, research suggests it’s beneficial in the workplace as well by increasing motivation.
A 2018 study, published in the British Journal of Management found that employees who received unconditional positive regard from their colleagues felt valued, which enhanced their motivation, job performance, and job satisfaction. These collaborative relationships also cultivated a sense of inclusion, which heightened workplace morale.
When it comes to goal-setting, mindset matters. Let’s say we set out to exercise more, be less distracted, or go to bed on time. At the outset, if we call ourselves “lazy,” or “lacking self-control,” our internal narrative can evoke false beliefs that influence our behaviors by reducing our motivation to change.
When we strive to make changes or meet new goals, research suggests positive self-regard can unleash intrinsic motivation, which is the “desire to do something for its own sake.” Taking on challenges that interest us can make us more motivated and more self-determined.
UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD AND AUTHENTICITY
Social worker and shame researcher, Dr. Brené Brown says authenticity is “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” Rogers said authentic people are comfortable with vulnerability and approach others with openness and curiosity. In short, authenticity builds intimacy.
But frequently, our authentic self is shut down by shame, judgment, and criticism. Perhaps someone once told us we were “too sensitive,” “not talkative enough,” or “too nerdy.” Or maybe we were teased for not following the crowd in some way. These messages convey that it’s not okay to be who we want to be.
As a result, we’re forced to choose between living out our values and feeling rejected (usually by those we need and love most) or changing our views to fit in. Often, we’d rather ignore some aspect of ourselves than feel left out.
When we make choices that don’t line up with our values, we often look back in regret. For instance, we may forgo giving a speech or applying for a promotion because we’re afraid of embarrassment or not being able to live up to expectations on the job. But turning down opportunities that can help us become who we want to be because we’re scared of social rejection, stymies our growth and taints our self-perception.
Insecurity and self-doubt may hinder motivation, but unconditional positive regard can dismantle shame, which helps us stay true to ourselves, even when others doubt us.
Behavior change is identity change.
If we are to alter the way we act, we need to change the way we see ourselves. Extending ourselves towards unconditional positive regard and self-compassion invites us to live out our values without fear.
It can be easy to associate unconditional positive regard with “feel good” psychotherapy, but as studies show, the practice can bolster self-motivation, confidence, and foster authenticity.
Perhaps we want to run a marathon, write a book proposal, or develop our ability to be indistractable; whatever the aspiration, compassion and acceptance can get us there. It’s all we really need.
AN ATTITUDE OF GRACE
"People also nurture our growth by being accepting—by offering us what
Rogers called unconditional positive regard," explains David G. Meyers
in his book Psychology: Eighth Edition in Modules. "This is an
attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings.
It is a profound relief to drop our pretenses, confess our worst
feelings, and discover that we are still accepted. In a good marriage, a
close family, or an intimate friendship, we are free to be spontaneous
without fearing the loss of others' esteem."
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US POPULATION GROWTH IS SLOWING DOWN
~ Over the past decade, the United States population grew at the second slowest rate since the government started counting in 1790, the Census Bureau reported on Monday, a remarkable slackening that was driven by a slowdown in immigration and a declining birthrate.
The bureau also reported changes to the nation’s political map: The long-running trend of the South and the West gaining population — and the congressional representation that comes with it — at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest continued, with Texas gaining two seats and Florida one, and New York and Ohio each losing one. California, long a leader in population growth, lost a seat for the first time in history.
The data will be used to reapportion seats in Congress and, in turn, the Electoral College, based on new state population counts. The count is critical for billions of dollars in federal funding as well as state and local planning around everything from schools to housing to hospitals.
The population shift to the Sun Belt has been happening for years, but its political meaning is changing. In decades past, Sun Belt gains often translated to automatic pluses for Republicans in the Electoral College. Now the calculus is more complicated.
While Donald J. Trump won the four fastest-growing states — Utah, Idaho, Texas and North Dakota — President Biden won four of the next five on the list: Nevada, Colorado, Washington and Arizona.
Regardless of which party ultimately benefits, the findings appear to solidify a gathering pattern in American life: The South and the West are increasingly the centers of population and power, surging ahead of the Northeast and the Midwest, whose numbers have been stagnating since a high in the first part of the 20th century.
Booming economies in states like Texas, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina have drawn Americans away from struggling small communities in high-cost, cold-weather states. In New York, 48 of 62 counties are estimated to be losing population. In Illinois, a state that also lost a congressional seat, 93 of 102 counties are believed to be shrinking. In 1970, the West and the South combined for just under half the U.S. population — now they make up 62 percent.
That is shifting political power. In all, six states gained congressional seats: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and Texas, which gained two. Seven lost a seat: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Some states were incredibly close: New York was just 89 people short of keeping its seat, an expert at the Census Bureau said. And there were other surprises: Arizona, which demographers expected to gain a seat, did not. And though New York lost a seat, its population grew by more than 4 percent despite earlier census estimates that predicted the state would stay mostly flat.
The new decennial census counted 331,449,281 Americans as of April 1, 2020, said Dr. Ron Jarmin, the acting director of the Census Bureau. The total was up by 7.4 percent over the previous decade, slightly more than in the 1930s, when the population grew by just 7.3 percent. In that period, the birthrate rose once the economy started to climb out of the Great Depression. But this time it has continued to decline, after dropping in the wake of the Great Recession in 2008.
The lower birthrate, combined with the decline in inflows of immigrants and shifting age demographics — there are now more Americans 80 and older than 2 or younger — means the United States may be entering an era of substantially lower population growth, demographers said. This would put the United States in line with the countries of Europe and East Asia that face serious long-term challenges with rapidly aging populations.
“This is a big deal,” said Ronald Lee, a demographer who founded the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley, noting that the United States had long outpaced other developed countries in population. “If it stays lower like this, it means the end of American exceptionalism in this regard.”
The once-in-a-decade process of counting all Americans redistributes political power based on where in the country people have moved. States that lose seats are not necessarily losing population, but are growing more slowly than the nation as a whole.
That was the case for California. For most of the 20th century, the Golden State was consistently among the fastest growing in the nation. Birthrates were rising and immigrants were moving in, as were people from other states. But over the past 30 years, its growth has slowed, in large part because of an exodus of residents to states with lower costs and booming economies like Texas and Nevada. Then, over the past decade, a falling birthrate and sharp slowdown in immigration caused the state to slip behind the nation.
According to estimates released in 2020, California had 10 percent fewer births in the 2010s than in the 2000s and took in 44 percent fewer immigrants.
Idaho was one of the fastest growers and much of its growth was fueled by transplants from California, previous data show.
When Rachel Abroms and her husband, a psychologist with the Defense Department, began looking at houses a few years ago in Coronado, on a peninsula in the San Diego Bay, even a starter home of about 1,500 square feet cost around a million dollars. So when her husband was offered a position in Boise, Idaho, they decided to move. They eventually bought a house that was twice as big for half the price.
“It’s more space,” said Ms. Abroms of the house they bought in 2019. As for Boise, “it’s small and it’s manageable, and it’s pleasant.”
Another defining feature of the decade was the fall in immigration. The rates of new immigrants had been rising for years, since a modern low in the 1970s. But they mostly leveled off after the Great Recession in 2008, and went into decline during the coronavirus pandemic, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center.
Mr. Passel said the drivers were a worsening economy in the United States and tougher enforcement on the border with Mexico, especially after 2010. Also important, he said, were Mexico’s improving economy and its own lower birthrate.
“The change in the Mexican flows is really what caused immigration to level off,” Mr. Passel said, noting that Mexico had been the biggest source of immigration to the United States for years. He has calculated that, throughout the decade, there were more unauthorized Mexican immigrants leaving the United States than arriving.
The tapering of immigration over all has added to population woes in some states. Over the last decade, three had outright population declines: West Virginia, Mississippi and Illinois.
Illinois came close to breaking even, but still lost. Compared with the century’s first decade, Illinois had 15 percent fewer births and lost nearly 40 percent more residents to other states. Between 1990 and 2010, the state’s foreign-born population doubled to 1.8 million, but there was little growth after that. The state lost a congressional seat in the previous decennial census as well.
Population loss in Illinois has been felt most acutely in rural counties, particularly in the southern part of the state. Towns that were once thriving from manufacturing and the coal industry have seen residents gradually move away in search of jobs, and remaining residents say the quality of life has suffered as restaurants and other businesses have closed.
The Chicago area has been mostly flat in population in recent years, though an exodus of Black families from the city and a decline in immigration has caused alarm. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, a regional planning group, said in a recent report that Illinois residents leave most frequently for Indiana, Florida, Texas, California and Wisconsin.
The final driver of the country’s extraordinarily sluggish growth over the past decade is a stubbornly persistent decline in the birthrate that has surprised demographers and prompted a debate over whether the delay in childbearing is a permanent new fixture in the lives of American women.
Aging populations can mean higher burdens for elder care, and slower labor force growth, with broad implications for the economy and the social safety net. But population slowdowns can also mean an improved outlook for the climate, said Professor Lee, who is also an economist.
And fertility declines also reflect women’s rising roles as professionals and labor force participants.
It is far from clear, Professor Lee said, where the birthrate decline that has taken hold in many rich countries is leading.
“It’s uncharted waters,” he said. “The consequences of low fertility are still unfolding.”
from another source:
Texas and Florida, two Republican titans of the Sunbelt, will gain congressional seats, while two Democratic giants, California and New York, are losing political influence.
US POPULATION GROWTH SLOWS, BUT SOME REGIONS BOOM
~ The census shows the US population currently stands at 331,449,281 — an increase of 7.4% over 2010's count.
The number is the slowest since the 1930s during the Great Depression.
But some regions are booming: the South grew fastest at 10.2%, the West was second fastest at 9.2%, followed by the north-east at 4.1%.
The fastest growing state was Utah, which grew at a rate of 18.4% over the past decade. West Virginia was the fastest shrinking state with a rate of -3.2%.
The census figures are used to determine how to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, which affects the votes in the Electoral College that picks the US president every four year, and to determine how to allocate federal funding.
CALIFORNIA GROWTH SHRINKS
For the first time in US history, California will lose one of its 53 seats in the House after its population grew at a slower rate compared to other states.
Since joining the United States in 1850 amid a gold rush, the Golden State has become the most populous in the country with over 39.5m residents today. Wyoming remains the least populous state with just 576,000 residents.
Experts say the reason for the decline in population growth is due to several trends, including falls in birth rates and immigration, as well as Californians leaving the state as fewer arrivals replace them.
Officials from the US Census Bureau say the state experienced net negative growth, meaning more people left the state than moved there in the past 10 years. However, over 2.2 million people were added in the past decade.
NEW YORK LOSES OUT BY 89 PEOPLE
New York will also lose one House seat after the state came up just 89 people short.
The apportionment means the Empire State will be down to 26 seats in the US House of Representatives.
Census officials say that while New York's population grew overall because of immigration, it had a "negative net domestic migration”.
EVERYTHING’S BIGGER IN TEXAS
Texas will gain two seats in Congress after census figures found the state's population grew over the past decade to around 29m residents.
It comes amid an intense campaign by state officials to attract people and companies there from other states.
Tech companies Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have announced plans to swap California's Silicon Valley for the Lone Star State, with Oracle moving to Austin and HPE to Houston.
Electric car maker Tesla also plans to leave California for Texas and is currently building a factory there.
SUN BELT BEAMS AS RUST BELT BUCKLES
Six states will be awarded additional seats in the US Congress after their population rose, while seven states are poised to lose seats.
Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia join California and New York as states that will lose seats after figures showed their populations had declined.
Joining Texas in the winners' column, Florida, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will each gain one seat.
The trend indicates more Americans are leaving northern "Rust Belt" states - places near the Great Lakes that were once known for steel production and heavy industry - and heading to warmer regions.
The Rust Belt, which includes several north-eastern and mid-western states, has been in decline since the 1980s and has often played a central role in national political campaigns.
Florida's jump comes about seven years after the state first exceeded 20 million residents. In 2019, Florida added former President Donald Trump to its residency log after the born-and-bred New Yorker announced his relocation.
While Republicans hope the shift could boost their chances in next year's US mid-term elections, some of the new arrivals in red states include younger people and people of color, who have trended Democratic as voters.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56896154
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THE SUN IS STRANGER THAN WE THOUGHT
~ A decade’s worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.
The surplus light, the gap in the spectrum, and other surprises about the solar gamma-ray signal potentially point to unknown features of the sun’s magnetic field, or more exotic physics.
The unexpected signal has emerged in data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a NASA observatory that scans the sky from its outpost in low-Earth orbit. As more Fermi data have accrued, revealing the spectrum of gamma rays coming from the sun in ever-greater detail, the puzzles have only proliferated.
Not only is the gamma-ray signal far stronger than a decades-old theory predicts; it also extends to much higher frequencies than predicted, and it inexplicably varies across the face of the sun and throughout the 11-year solar cycle. Then there’s the gap, which researchers call a “dip” — a lack of gamma rays with frequencies around 10 trillion trillion hertz. “The dip just defies all logic,” said Tim Linden, a particle astrophysicist at Ohio State who helped analyze the signal.
The likely protagonists of the story are particles called cosmic rays — typically protons that have been slingshotted into the solar system by the shock waves of distant supernovas or other explosions.
Physicists do not think the sun emits any gamma rays from within. (Nuclear fusions in its core do produce them, but they scatter and downgrade to lower-energy light before leaving the sun.) However, in 1991, the physicists David Seckel, Todor Stanev and Thomas Gaisser of the University of Delaware hypothesized that the sun would nonetheless glow in gamma rays, because of cosmic rays that zip in from outer space and plunge toward it.
Based on the rate at which cosmic rays enter the solar system, the estimated strength of the sun’s magnetic field, the density of its atmosphere, and other factors, Seckel and colleagues calculated the mirroring process to be roughly 1 percent efficient. They predicted a faint glow of gamma rays.
Yet the Fermi Telescope detects, on average, seven times more gamma rays coming from the solar disk than this cosmic-ray theory predicts. And the signal becomes up to 20 times stronger than predicted for gamma rays with the highest frequencies. “We found that the process was consistent with 100 percent efficiency at high energies,” Linden said. “Every cosmic ray that comes in has to be turned around.” This is puzzling, since the most energetic cosmic rays should be the hardest to mirror.
Some aspects of the signal do point to cosmic rays and to the broad strokes of the 1991 theory.
For instance, the Fermi Telescope detects many more gamma rays during solar minimum, the phase of the sun’s 11-year cycle when its magnetic field is calmest and most orderly. This makes sense, experts say, if cosmic rays are the source. During solar minimum, more cosmic rays can reach the strong magnetic field near the sun’s surface and get mirrored, instead of being deflected prematurely by the turbulent tangle of field lines that pervades the inner solar system at other times.
On the other hand, the detected gamma rays drop off as a function of frequency at a different rate than cosmic rays. If cosmic rays are the source, the two rates would be expected to match.
Whether or not cosmic rays account for the entire gamma-ray signal, Joe Giacalone, a heliospheric physicist at the University of Arizona, says the signal “is probably telling us something very fundamental about the magnetic structure of the sun.” The sun is the most extensively studied star, yet its magnetic field — generated by the churning maelstrom of charged particles inside it — remains poorly understood, leaving us with a blurry picture of how stars operate.
Giacalone points to the corona, the wispy plasma envelope that surrounds the sun. To efficiently mirror cosmic rays, the magnetic field in the corona is probably stronger and oriented differently than scientists thought, he said. However, he noted that the coronal magnetic field must be strong only very close to the sun’s surface so as not to mirror cosmic rays too soon, before they’ve entered the zone where the atmosphere is dense enough for collisions to occur. And the magnetic field seems to become particularly strong near the equator during solar minimum.
These fresh clues about the structure of the magnetic field could help unravel the long-standing mystery of the solar cycle.
“Every 11 years, the whole magnetic field of the sun reverses,” said Igor Moskalenko, a senior scientist at Stanford University who is part of the Fermi scientific collaboration. “We have south in the place of north and north in the place of south. This is a dramatic change. The sun is huge, and why we observe this change of polarity and why it is so periodic nobody actually knows.” Cosmic rays, he said, and the pattern of gamma rays they produce “may answer this very important question: Why is the sun changing polarity every 11 years?”
But there are no good guesses about how the sun’s magnetic field might create the dip in the gamma-ray spectrum at 10 trillion trillion hertz. It’s such an unusual feature that some experts doubt that it’s real. But if the absence of gamma rays around that frequency is a miscalculation or a problem with Fermi’s instruments, no one has figured out the cause. “It does not seem to be any instrumental effect,” said Elena Orlando, an astrophysicist at Stanford and a member of the Fermi team.
This time, along with Fermi, a mountaintop observatory called HAWC (for High-Altitude Water Cherenkov experiment) will be taking data. HAWC detects gamma rays at higher frequencies than Fermi, which will reveal more of the signal. Scientists are also eager to see whether the spatial pattern of gamma rays changes relative to 11 years ago, since cosmic rays remain positively charged but the sun’s north and south poles have reversed.
“The worst that can happen here is that we find out that the sun is stranger and more beautiful than we ever imagined,” Beacom said. “And the best that could happen is we discover some kind of new physics.”
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KINDNESS: A MODERN VALUE
I've been pondering Kent Clark’s statement: today, if we asked people what quality is most important, the majority would say “kindness.” Yet Dante or St. Francis would not say that. St. Francis would have probably replied, “Chastity, obedience, and poverty.” Chastity more important than kindness? Apparently so.
Others in earlier centuries might have named courage, virtue, piety. Or endurance and self-control (Stoicism). John Milton would probably put obedience first. Depending on social class, other possible supreme values might be hard work and thrift. It was not until the 19th century that revulsion against cruelty (including slavery) began emerging. The novels of Dickens had an immense social influence — perhaps the most proud chapter in the history of literature, a showcase of how a novel can expand empathy.
A while back I was astonished by an article insisting that Christianity is not about kindness. All those years I thought that Christianity WAS about kindness. In fact the teachings on kindness were Christianity’s saving grace, outweighing the barbarous human sacrifice, the “bloody ransom” that stood as the foundation. But it was possible to put that out of one’s mind and just follow the teachings on kindness. Forgiveness, compassion, non-revenge, helping the less fortunate — that, I thought, was the beauty of Christianity.
How misguided and un-Christian, the article argued. This sentence says it all: “To make kindness into an ultimate virtue is to insist that our most important moral obligations are those we owe are to our fellow human beings” (and to animals, I would add, who are also our brothers and sisters).
Our most important moral obligations AREN’T to our fellow human beings??
Well, no. To use my own lingo now, according to religious conservatives, your highest moral obligation is not to real beings, but to an imaginary being.
And it’s tricky to define our moral obligations to that imaginary being. Are we to wage crusades? If not going to mass on Sunday is a mortal sin, is it a greater obligation than taking the time to play with your children? Obviously everything depends on interpretation, meaning which century you happen live in, and which church you belong to.
I also remembered that for a long time numerous thinkers have argued that the divinity of Jesus was open to question, and he should rather be honored as a teacher of ethics. After all, that was the premise of Unitarianism.
Perhaps not surprisingly, though somehow I was surprised, what followed was a sermon on sin and fearing god and obeying the commandments. As for kindness, the author reminds us that “Jesus did not heal everyone who asked to be healed.” Sometimes, apparently suffering from kindness fatigue, Jesus would go off by himself to rest and pray. (True. Christianity doesn’t insist on excessive, pathological altruism that would destroy our health. Only “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Not more so.)
But somehow the commandment of love is never mentioned — though I admit that the command to "love god above all" caused me much grief since I could not feel the slightest affection for the monster who threw children into hell by the million (all the non-Catholic children, back then). But I loved St. Paul’s “though you speak with the tongues of men and angels . . .” If only it had occurred to me back then (as it did much later) that a nun threatening children with hell is like the clashing of cymbals.
But at the time, it didn’t yet occur to anyone that threats of hell were a form of child abuse. A mild form, I admit, compared to severe beatings, and worse, that used to be normal child rearing practices in past centuries. The levels of stress had to go down for cruelty to lessen too. Dickens and Victor Hugo had to write his novels about the sufferings of children and the poor, so that “kindness” could take root in the collective psyche.
The early deities were cruel. Times were harsh, and this was reflected in the archaic religions. The preaching of loving kindness by the Buddha and Jesus was indeed revolutionary. But for kindness to become more of a reality, life had to become less harsh — and that is fairly recent.
The levels of violence had to go down, as has indeed happened in a significant portion of the world. When we feel secure and when our physical needs are taken care of due to greater prosperity, we then have the luxury (in contrast with the past centuries) of practicing kindness. We can even speak out against spanking and other cruelty against children. We grow intolerant (and justly so) of even petty violence and malice. We start imagining a world at peace, a world where everyone is kind.
Pessimists might reply that that is an unachievable ideal. Cynics might laugh — but not as loud as they would have during the Middle Ages. Against many odds, progress has been made. One indicator of it is indeed the high value we place on kindness. The gap between the ideal and the practice is undeniably there, but I argue that the very visibility of the ideal is already a fact to be celebrated.
As for the concept of hell, I'm told that in liberal Protestant churches hell is not even mentioned anymore. Mark my words: eventually hell will go. Theists still believe in angels, but the percentage believing in the devils is decreasing. It is a trend, one that reflects the great value that put on kindness.
Antonello da Messina: St. Jerome in his study, 1475. Note the sleek peacock.
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GOD AS A GREEK TRAGEDY
Atheism, too, is a lifelong journey. I think there are different stages in disbelief. There may be anger at the church for having massively lied to us and manipulated us using the threats of hell and promise of heaven. There may be some shame we ever fell for such clumsy lies and the obvious carrot-and-stick strategy. That embarrassment tends to dissipate as we remember we were helpless children — though I know two people who told me they were strong-minded youngsters who went to Sunday school just once and never again, or, alternately, stayed in Sunday school just a year or so before deciding it was all fairy tales (young Emily Dickinson, alone in her class, did not come forth to “accept Jesus”).
Even after the anger at the church dissipates, there may still be anger at god is common after something nasty happens. Paradoxically, one can be seized with a real rage against a fictional character — that is, the rational mind knows that it’s a fictional character. A Yiddish proverb: “If god lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
Priests shrewdly did not allow gods to live on earth, unless on summits of the tallest mountains. A throne in the clouds was safer by far. But as scientific knowledge began to grow, this throne was placed farther and farther away. In the first half of the twentieth century, Simone Weil, though highly educated, believed that god literally lived in cosmic space just beyond earth’s atmosphere. When that became untenable, the throne of gold was disposed of, and the answer became the mystical “everywhere.”
But “everywhere” is so non-specific that it can easily flow into nowhere. So a kind of pity can arise — agains in spite of knowing that we are talking about a fictional character — when we ponder god’s homelessness, loneliness, and lack of anything to do, since he can’t violate the laws of nature (which means that it's the laws of nature that are actually "in charge" and not god).
Pity and anger — that reminds me of “pity and horror,” the emotions that Greek tragedies were supposed to inspire. His human creators endowed him with so much hubris that a fall was inevitable: a dethroned deity, shrinking into uselessness — but still, in one remaining version, used to promote the horror of violence.
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WHEN THE IMMUNE SYSTEM ATTACKS THE BRAIN: THE AUTO-IMMUNE THEORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS
~ One day in February 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt his family. His mother, Helen, watched with mounting panic that evening as her previously healthy son forgot the rules to Uno, his favorite card game, while playing it. She began making frantic phone calls the next morning. By then, Sasha was shuffling aimlessly around the yard, shredding paper and stuffing it in his pockets. “He looked like an old person with dementia,” Helen later told me.
That afternoon, Sasha was admitted to the hospital, where he saw a series of specialists. One thought Sasha might have bipolar disorder and put him on antipsychotics, but the drugs didn’t help. Helen, a child psychiatrist at Duke University, knew that psychiatric conditions develop gradually. Sasha’s symptoms had appeared almost overnight, and some of them—including dilated pupils and slurred speech—suggested not mental illness but neurological dysfunction. When she and her husband, Daniel, raised these issues, though, one doctor seemed to think they were in denial.
Sasha, meanwhile, grew increasingly agitated and refused to eat. Food tasted like sewage, he said. Just five days after his strange behavior began, he was in the intensive-care unit, heavily sedated and being fed through a tube. No one knew for sure what was wrong with him.
From that point, his parents say, Sasha could have continued on a downward trajectory—toward institutionalization or even death. But one of Helen’s colleagues, a neurologist named Mohamad Mikati, had listened to their story and conducted a few low-tech tests. Could Sasha touch his nose? Not very easily. Could he draw a clock? Yes, but without the hands.
Mikati had seen a case like Sasha’s years earlier, in an 11-year-old boy who suffered for three months and then spontaneously recovered. The cause, Mikati thought, had been encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. Suspecting that Sasha might have something similar, Mikati ordered an electroencephalogram, a test that monitors electrical activity in the brain.
Daniel Egger watched the needle on the machine dance around all night, a sign of brain dysfunction. Here was a clue, Daniel hoped, that might point the way toward a true diagnosis and treatment.
If Sasha was suffering from encephalitis, though, what had triggered it? Scientists have long known that hallucinations and delusional behavior can result when infections inflame the brain, but Mikati had ruled out such an infection. He knew, however, that autoimmune variants of encephalitis existed. Just two years earlier, in fact, scientists had identified one that resulted when the immune system—perhaps triggered by common infections elsewhere in the body—accidentally attacked crucial receptors in the brain. Symptoms could resemble those of schizophrenia, but proper treatment didn’t involve antipsychotics. Instead, therapy was directed at the immune system.
Mikati gave Sasha an infusion of antibodies that can quell autoimmune attacks, and the boy improved almost immediately. Color returned to his face. His eyes began to focus again. He calmed down. He started asking for food.
Helen and Daniel Egger felt a burst of relief. Then they felt vindicated, and saddened. They’d encountered what seemed like tremendous resistance from some doctors. What happened to patients whose parents were less aggressive or had fewer resources—who didn’t happen to have a child psychiatrist in the family? “If I was not my son’s mother, with my connections, my son would be dead,” Helen told me. “That’s just horrifying.”
For Helen, given her background, the experience also raised a much larger question: If an autoimmune disorder of the brain could so closely resemble psychiatric illnesses, then what, really, were these illnesses?
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The idea that madness might have a discrete, biological cause—that it isn’t just in your head—stretches back at least to the late 19th century, when Europe’s asylums were full of delusional and demented patients suffering from neurosyphilis, a late-stage complication of the venereal disease. The notion that targeting the immune system could cure insanity also has history. In 1927, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg received the Nobel Prize for his “pyrotherapy”—whereby he deliberately infected patients with malaria to induce a fever. (His treatment worked for some patients, but a few unlucky ones died of malaria.)
After languishing for almost a century, this idea has reemerged, prompted in part by observations linking the immune system to psychiatric symptoms. Scientists have found, for example, that simply activating people’s immune systems as though they were fighting a viral infection can cause profound despair and suicidal thoughts.
For years, scientists believed the brain was mostly cut off from the immune system by the so-called blood-brain barrier, and they lacked a clear mechanistic understanding of how the immune system could cause behavioral disturbances. In 2007, Josep Dalmau, a neurologist then at the University of Pennsylvania, described a condition he called anti–NMDA receptor encephalitis, in which the immune system attacks a crucial receptor in the brain, producing severe neurological and psychiatric symptoms—including behavior sometimes compared to that of the possessed girl in The Exorcist.
Scientists had previously noted that certain autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, were associated with psychosis. And they’d begun to suspect that some infections might, by activating the immune system, contribute to psychiatric conditions. But Dalmau provided meticulous proof that the immune system could attack the brain. The development of a test for the disorder, and the fact that very sick patients could recover with treatment, prompted a wave of interest in autoimmune conditions of the central nervous system. In total, scientists have identified about two dozen others—including dementia-like conditions, epilepsies, and a Parkinson’s-like “stiff person” syndrome—and many experts suspect that more exist.
Many of these disorders are treatable with aggressive immunotherapy. “It’s a breakthrough,” Heather Van Mater, a pediatric rheumatologist at Duke who has cared for Sasha, told me. She and her colleagues treat people who, just 10 years ago, might have been given up for lost and locked away. “We can make them better,” Van Mater said. “It’s unbelievably rewarding.”
While each of these autoimmune conditions is rare, the field of autoimmune neurology is expanding, and may force a reexamination of mental illness generally. Some scientists now wonder whether small subsets of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder may be somehow linked to problems in the immune system.
Evidence exists to support this idea. Robert Yolken, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University, estimates that about one-third of schizophrenics show signs of immune activation (though he adds that this could be related to other factors, such as smoking and obesity). And autoimmune diseases are more common among schizophrenics and their immediate families than among the general population, which could hint at a shared genetic vulnerability. Immunological abnormalities have been observed in patients with bipolar disorder and depression as well.
A recent retrospective study by scientists at the Mayo Clinic, a center of research on autoimmune neurological conditions, found that, compared with a control group of healthy people, psychiatric patients were more likely to harbor antibodies directed at brain tissue. One implication is that some of these patients’ psychiatric symptoms might have stemmed from autoimmune problems, and that they might have benefited from immunotherapy.
Scientists are also increasingly interested in the link between depression and systemic inflammation, an immune-system response to infection or other potential triggers such as a lousy diet, obesity, chronic stress, or trauma. Studies suggest that about one-third of people diagnosed with depression have high levels of inflammation markers in their blood. Scientists have posited that the malaise and lethargy of depression may really be a kind of sickness behavior, an instinct to lie low and recover that, in its proper context—infection or illness—aids survival. Problems arise when the immune system stays activated for a long time, possibly leading to clinical depression.
This emerging understanding of the immune system’s role in determining how we feel and behave suggests new avenues of treatment for psychiatric conditions. In 2013, Emory University scientists saw improvement in depressed patients who had markers showing high levels of systemic inflammation, and who’d failed to respond to standard treatment, when they were administered an immunosuppressant called infliximab. Other researchers have found that aspirin, perhaps the oldest anti-inflammatory drug around, may be helpful as an add-on therapy for schizophrenia.
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And then there are cases like Sasha Egger’s. He relapsed a year and a half after his initial recovery. It was the first of five major relapses, two of which required months-long hospital stays.
Although Sasha was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis, scientists have yet to pinpoint which antibodies are causing havoc in his brain. He may suffer from a condition whose antibody markers have yet to be identified, or his condition may involve other components of the immune system.
The Eggers hope for a cure in Sasha’s lifetime—a way to definitively reboot his immune system. “I just need to have him hold on until that cure comes,” Helen told me. She and Daniel co-founded the nonprofit Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance, along with Susannah Cahalan—the author of a memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, about her experience with the condition—and Leslie and Will McDow, whose daughter died from autoimmune encephalitis.
One of the Eggers’ goals is simply to raise awareness about the condition. Given their experience, though, they can’t help but wonder about other psychiatric conditions that may be immune-system disorders in disguise. In some sense, their larger aim is to heal the long-standing rift between psychiatry and neurology—between the concepts of brain and mind. Too often, psychosis is seen as the disease itself, Helen told me. But “psychosis is like a fever,” she said. “It’s a symptom of a lot of different illnesses.” ~
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Oriana:
The more I read about the immune system, the more I find that it's involved in pratically all disease processes, whether it's heart disease or arthritis. The immune system becomes increasingly dysfunctional as we age. In the end, this is what kills us: our own immune system.
ending on beauty:
I will remember your small room,
the feel of you, the light in the window,
your records, your books,
our morning coffee, our noons, our nights,
our bodies spilled together, sleeping,
the tiny flowing currents,
immediate and forever.
~ Charles Bukowski
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