Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Pandora, 1869THANKSGIVING MEDITATION
Forget the shining city on the hill, or the new
Jerusalem, Eden, Promised Land—you’re reading from
the wrong text, wrong translation, the non-canonical
source, the exquisite forgery stuffed in the turkey-
shaped urn. This is what the disembarking Pilgrims found:
a place of Briars and Thorns, of Troubles and Sorrows,
Valley of the Shadow of Death, where God is no more
a cause of our sin than the sun of a Dunghill’s stench.
Life is indeed strenuous, but the more desperate
the situation, then the more actions it evokes.
we are like soldiers landed in a hostile country
whose commander has burned their ships behind them and told
them to eat up their enemies or drink up the sea.
~ Leonard Kress, American Literary Review
I’ve posted this poem before, maybe even more than once. It goes straight to the heart of the issue: the early Puritan as religiously deluded colonists who thought of themselves as the New Chosen People coming to take possession of the New Canaan. The Elect, while the rest of the humanity was predestined for hellfire. The cruelty and arrogance are beyond words.
On the other hand, the very real difficulties the settlers encountered meant a high mortality rate. For a while, this was indeed the Valley of the Shadow of Death, a place of Briars and Thorns.
By the way, the s0-called Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower never referred to themselves as mere Pilgrims. That's a later appellation. Those whom we now call the Pilgrims saw themselves as Saints.
*
“Our great American philosopher William James has said - 'We have as many personalities as there are people who know us.' To which I would add 'We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.’”~ Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story
*
THANKSGIVING AND THE CIVIL WAR
~ The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841, a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York Governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15, he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U.S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping.
Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And they won.
My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2021.
~ Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook 
Battle of the Ironclads during the Civil War (the bloodiest civil war in human history)
*
SOME FACTS ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
~ When the Pilgrims set out for the New World, they had no idea what they were getting into. The Pilgrims were working-class Christians who left England to avoid religious persecution. They were not experienced farmers, hunters, and fishermen. And they were completely unprepared to deal with New England's cold, harsh climate.
Only half of the original 102 Pilgrim settlers survived their first winter. They were so starved, they even resorted to robbing the houses and graves of a deserted Indian habitation.
Tisquantum (better known as Squanto) was from the Patuxet tribe in modern-day Maine. In 1614, Squanto was kidnapped by English sailors and taken to Spain to be sold as a slave. He was rescued by local Catholic priests but fled to London. When Squanto returned to America, he discovered that his tribe had been almost wiped out by disease — probably viral hepatitis — brought by European settlers.
During his search for surviving tribe members, Squanto met Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag tribe. Massasoit took Squanto as his captive.
Since the Wampanoag had also been devastated by disease, Squanto tried to convince Massasoit to ally with the groups of English settlers that had arrived in Massachusetts. An alliance would help the Wampanoag fend off the threat of the Narragansett, an enemy tribe that hadn't been devastated by disease.
After the Pilgrims suffered their first winter in 1620, Massasoit decided to follow Squanto's advice. Using Squanto's help as translator, Massasoit signed a peace treaty with the Pilgrims. Squanto stayed with the English settlers to teach them to fish, hunt, and cultivate corn — and to avoid captivity under Massasoit.
By the next fall, the Pilgrims hosted a giant feast to celebrate their first successful harvest.
It wasn't exactly peaceful.
On the feast day, Massasoit showed up with 90 men. Many of them carried weapons. Some say Massasoit crashed the party because he was alarmed by celebratory gunfire at the Pilgrim camp; others say the Pilgrims responded with gunfire after Massasoit arrived.
Since the armed Wampanoags outnumbered the Pilgrims almost 2-1, you can bet the feast was pretty awkward.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags weren't friends. They were wary allies. The Pilgrims saw Native Americans as uncivilized savages, while the Native Americans saw Europeans as short, weak, and smelly.
Despite their antagonism, both groups needed each other to survive. The Pilgrims were desperate to avoid starvation and aggression from hostile Native American tribes; the Wampanoags were desperate for guns.
*
Some historians think the first Thanksgiving happened in late September or early October, when the fall crops had just been harvested. If this is true, the "first Thanksgiving" would have resembled more of a harvest festival than a religious gathering.
And harvest festivals were definitely not invented by the Pilgrims. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans held celebratory festivals to honor the gods. Even Native American tribes observed thanksgiving celebrations, long before the Pilgrims arrived.
*
Unfortunately, the "real" Thanksgiving might have much bloodier origins than the Pilgrims' first big feast.
In 1637, English settlers (a group of Puritans, not Pilgrims) raided the village of the Pequot tribe. They burned 700 men, women, and children alive. John Winthrop, governor of the Puritans' Massachusetts Bay Colony, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving to celebrate the return of the colonists who had carried out the massacre.
Then, in 1789, George Washington proclaimed a "day of Thanksgiving" to express gratitude for American independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday to heal a nation ravaged by the Civil War.
Ever since, most Americans have associated Thanksgiving with a day of family, food, and gratitude.
However, for Americans who view the Pequot massacre as the origin of Thanksgiving, the national holiday is seen as a sham. Since 1970, Thanksgiving protesters have gathered at Cole's Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, to honor a "National Day of Mourning" for the indigenous people who were massacred by the Puritans and other European colonists.
There's a lot we can't confirm about the real Thanksgiving. What we do know, however, is the English settlers weren't as virtuous as we thought. (But then again, your sister's Thanksgiving dinner guest might not be either.)
Even if the real Thanksgiving story isn't a happy one, you can still be grateful for your good fortune.
https://www.truthfinder.com/infomania/crime/the-real-thanksgiving-story/?fbclid=IwAR0rXY2tKLjFwlNqJX1bITDeJdyIZmEB4UPSpysa4w798jB7LF6WHqBpeMQ
from another source:
In 1620, a small group of English separatists packed up and headed for the New World in search of religious freedom. Calling themselves “Saints” (the term “Pilgrims” wouldn’t be used to describe the settlers for another 200 years), they headed to what is now Delaware but landed in Plymouth in December after being blown off course by storms. The colonists first encountered the peaceful yet cautious Wampanoag the following spring.
At the time, the two disparate groups were attempting to find common ground. In April 1621, both had signed a treaty pledging to come to the aid of the other in case of attack. After losing nearly half of their settlers to sickness during their first winter in America, the English were teetering on extinction. The Wampanoag weren’t far from that reality themselves: Between 1616 and 1619, diseases introduced by European colonizers killed up to 90 percent of New England’s Native population in an epidemic now referred to as the Great Dying. Greatly weakened, the tribe also needed help fending off incursions from the Narragansett, a rival Native group.
Massasoit smoking a ceremonial pipe with Plymouth Colony Governor John Carver in 1621
Because it was held outdoors, Tom Begley, a historian at Plimoth Patuxet Museums, likens the gathering to a political potluck picnic. Communication was difficult, as only Tisquantum—remembered today as Squanto—and a few other Native American guests spoke English and could act as translators.
“It was a diplomatic event between these two communities,” he says. “Despite the language barrier, it’s still pretty interesting that they were gathering together for three days. We always talk about how the relationship between the Indigenous people and settlers changed over time, and this is one of the earliest examples of relationship building.”
While that first feast was likely festive, what happened after it adds a darker tone to the holiday for many Native Americans, some of whom observe Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning, an annual commemoration that began in 1970. ~
Squanto, a 19th century textbook illustration
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-really-happened-at-the-first-thanksgiving-180979108/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR0rXY2tKLjFwlNqJX1bITDeJdyIZmEB4UPSpysa4w798jB7LF6WHqBpeMQ
*
WE HAVE LOST ROBERT BLY, POET, TRANSLATOR, FOUNDER OF THE MEN’S MOVEMENT
~ In 1986 the New York Times review of Robert Bly’s Selected Poems was headlined “Minnesota Transcendentalist”. It was perceptive to note his link with the New England poets of the 19th century, which was strong, but within a few years it would look absolutely prescient. For although he was one of the outstanding poets of his generation, Bly, who has died aged 94, may be remembered, like the two most enduring of the original Transcendentalists, for facets of his work other than poetry.
Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legacy is as an essayist, the influence of Bly’s essays on poetic theory and his many translations have resonated with readers and his fellow poets. But Bly is more likely to be seen as a 20th-century parallel to Henry David Thoreau. Like Thoreau, he made his mark with civil disobedience, and later with a hugely popular prose work concerned with the denaturing effects of civilization.
Bly’s early poetry in the 60s was his best [Silence in the Snowy Fields], although its quality was often subsumed by controversy surrounding his anti-war positions. In 1966, he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The following year, when he won the National Book award for The Light Around the Body, he donated the prize money to draft resistance. But his entire poetic career was thrown into the shadows by the remarkable success of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990).
A meditation on his vision of American manhood being torn from its natural roots because fathers fail to initiate their sons properly into masculinity, Iron John spawned a movement combining encounter-group sensitivity with primal tree-hugging survivalism. Yet with his imagistic, often spiritual, poetry, his deep interests in mysticism, his rustic dress and his nasal, high-pitched voice, Bly often seemed an unlikely prophet of masculinity.
Bly called his poetic technique “deep image”, and his highly visual, quietly surreal poems, often in rural settings, reflected his upbringing in Scandinavian-settled Minnesota. He was born in Lac qui Parle county, where his parents, Alice (nee Aws) and Jacob Bly, Norwegian immigrants, were farmers. At 18, after graduating from high school in Madison, he enlisted in the US navy.
Discharged in 1946, he enrolled at St Olaf’s College in Northfield, Minnesota, but after a year transferred to Harvard, where he joined a precocious group of undergraduate writers, including John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, John Hawkes, George Plimpton and, at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich. It was at Harvard that he read a poem by WB Yeats, and resolved to “be a poet for the rest of my life”.
After graduation in 1950, he moved to New York, writing and struggling to support himself with a succession of menial jobs and meager disability payments for the rheumatic fever he contracted while in the navy.
In 1954, he returned to the Midwest, as a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s writers’ program, teaching to pay his way. Again he found himself in a writer’s hothouse; his fellow students included Philip Levine, Donald Justice and WD Snodgrass, with Robert Lowell and John Berryman on the faculty. The proliferation of creative writing programs on American campuses today owes much to the collective success of this group, the level of which, it could be argued, has never been repeated.
He married the writer Carol McLean in 1955, and returned to Minnesota. The next year, he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway to translate poetry. There he discovered not only such Swedish poets as Tomas Tranströmer, Gunnar Ekelöf and Harry Martinson, but also, in translation, other writers relatively unknown in English: Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. His translations of Tranströmer continued throughout both their careers, and the affinity between their poetry makes these some of the most effective ever done.
On his return to America, Bly started a magazine to publish such writers. The Fifties, co-edited with William Duffy, would change its name decade by decade, and had an immense effect on American poetry, defining the deep image style. Through the magazine, Bly became close to a similarly inclined poet, James Wright, and with him translated Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl (1961). He also translated Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger from the Norwegian in 1967.
Deep image arose from the way the poets Bly admired drew on almost subconscious imagery, yet used it in a very deliberate way. He called it “leaping” poetry, once describing it as surrealism with a center holding it all together. Out of these influences, in 1962, came Bly’s first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, whose bonding with the countryside would be echoed by later generations of creative writing professors in poems about chopping wood in denim shirts. But in Bly’s hands, the quiet of the northern landscape provided a deep, personal beauty. It was an immediate success, and led to a Guggenheim fellowship.
Those poems gave no hint of the despair that became evident in The Light Around the Body, which not only reflected his feelings about the Vietnam war, but also his years of struggle in New York. They drew on the same imagery as his first book, but used it in a far more ferocious way. Studying Jung’s theories of mythic archetypes led to Bly’s mixing them into his politics in Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), whose long poem, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last‚ is a powerful condemnation of war as an affront to the Great Mother Culture. He placed a long essay, I Came Out of the Mother Naked‚ at the center of this book, and prose poems would soon become an integral part of his poetics, culminating in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopher Wood (1977).
After a divorce from Carol in 1979, in 1980 he married Ruth Ray, a Jungian psychologist, and moved to Moose Lake, Minnesota. He began working with men’s and women’s groups, producing books of poetry that reflected the transactional experience, most notably the love poems in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985).
After PBS Television’s Bill Moyers produced a documentary, A Gathering of Men, about those men’s groups, Iron John became an immediate bestseller. It was followed by The Sibling Society (1996), which lamented the “perpetual adolescence of modern American men”, and The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (with Marion Woodman, 1998). At the same time his translations expanded to include the 15th-century Sufi mystic Kabir and the Urdu poet Ghalib. Bly encapsulated his poetic career in the moving Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) and Morning Poems (1997), and published his second “selected poems” collection, Eating the Honey of Words, in 1999. The US invasion of Iraq inspired the collection The Insanity of Empire (2004).
Bly is survived by Ruth, by four children, Mary, Bridget, Micah and Noah, from his first marriage, and by nine grandchildren. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/nov/23/robert-bly-obituary
Oriana:
My favorite volume by Robert Bly is the one that’s hardly ever mentioned: The Morning Poems. Now that Silence in the Snowy Fields has become rather cliché (beginning with the overuse of the word “silence”), The Morning Poems seem refreshing simple and unpretentious. And of course I'm in awe of the fact that he could write a poem every morning.
Breathing seemed frail and daring in the morning.
To pull in air was like reading a whole novel.
The angleworms, turned up by the plow, looked
Uneasy, like shy people trying to avoid praise.
For a while we had goats. They were like turkeys
Only more reckless. One butted a red Chevrolet.
~ Robert Blue, from Walking on the Farm
*
Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin
Bakhtin is critical of what he calls the monologic tradition in Western thought that seeks to finalize humanity, and individual humans. He argues that Dostoyevsky always wrote in opposition to ways of thinking that turn human beings into objects (scientific, economic, social, psychological etc.) – conceptual frameworks that enclose people in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility: "He saw in it a degrading reification of a person's soul, a discounting of its freedom and its unfinalizability... Dostoyevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable, and unpredeterminable, turning point for their soul.”
*
Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person. It is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.
HOW CHANGING ONE WORD CAN CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARD YOUR LIFE
~ As adults, we spend a lot of time talking about all of the things that we have to do.
You have to wake up early for work. You have to make another sales call for your business. You have to work out today. You have to write an article. You have to make dinner for your family. You have to go to your son’s game.
Now, imagine changing just one word in the sentences above.
You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.
You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales call for your business. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens and turn them into opportunities.
The key point is that both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mind-set we choose.
I once heard a story about a man who uses a wheelchair. When asked if it was difficult being confined, he responded, “I’m not confined to my wheelchair—I am liberated by it. If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my house.” This shift in perspective completely transformed how he lived each day.
I think it’s important to remind yourself that the things you do each day are not burdens, they are opportunities. So often, the things we view as work are actually the reward.
Embrace your constraints. Fall in love with boredom. Do the work.
You don’t have to. You get to. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-be-thankful-for-your-life-by-changing-just-one-word?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I’ve tried it: it does make a difference. It diminishes a negative attitude in a powerful way — and more efficiently, it seems to me, than trying to “think positive” (maybe because you can’t really completely fool yourself; the guffaws of laughter from the Inner Realist stand in the way). But “get to” doesn’t violate reality, even if it’s “I get to go to the hospital.” You’re going to meet a wide variety of people. It’s going to be an adventure.
I think this is also somewhat in line with the “in reverse” kinds of advice. Want to really learn something? Teach it. Want to get yourself motivated? Try to motivate someone else. 
*
IS THE MIND CONFINED TO THE BRAIN?
~ Defining the concept of the mind is a surprisingly slippery task. The mind is the seat of consciousness, the essence of your being. Without a mind, you cannot be considered meaningfully alive. So what exactly, and where precisely, is it?
Traditionally, scientists have tried to define the mind as the product of brain activity: The brain is the physical substance, and the mind is the conscious product of those firing neurons, according to the classic argument. But growing evidence shows that the mind goes far beyond the physical workings of your brain.
No doubt, the brain plays an incredibly important role. But our mind cannot be confined to what’s inside our skull, or even our body, according to a definition first put forward by Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of the 2016 book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.
He first came up with the definition more than two decades ago, at a meeting of 40 scientists across disciplines, including neuroscientists, physicists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The aim was to come to an understanding of the mind that would appeal to common ground and satisfy those wrestling with the question across these fields.
After much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is: “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.” It’s not catchy. But it is interesting, and with meaningful implications.
The most immediately shocking element of this definition is that our mind extends beyond our physical selves. In other words, our mind is not simply our perception of experiences, but those experiences themselves. Siegel argues that it’s impossible to completely disentangle our subjective view of the world from our interactions.
“I realized if someone asked me to define the shoreline but insisted, is it the water or the sand, I would have to say the shore is both sand and sea,” says Siegel. “You can’t limit our understanding of the coastline to insist it’s one or the other. I started thinking, maybe the mind is like the coastline—some inner and inter process. Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind.”
The definition has since been supported by research across the sciences, but much of the original idea came from mathematics. Siegel realized the mind meets the mathematical definition of a complex system in that it’s open (can influence things outside itself), chaos capable (which simply means it’s roughly randomly distributed), and non-linear (which means a small input leads to large and difficult to predict result).
In math, complex systems are self-organizing, and Siegel believes this idea is the foundation to mental health. Again borrowing from the mathematics, optimal self-organization is: flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. This means that without optimal self-organization, you arrive at either chaos or rigidity—a notion that, Siegel says, fits the range of symptoms of mental health disorders.
Finally, self-organization demands linking together differentiated ideas or, essentially, integration. And Siegel says integration—whether that’s within the brain or within society—is the foundation of a healthy mind.
Siegel says he wrote his book now because he sees so much misery in society, and he believes this is partly shaped by how we perceive our own minds. He talks of doing research in Namibia, where people he spoke to attributed their happiness to a sense of belonging.
When Siegel was asked in return whether he belonged in America, his answer was less upbeat: “I thought how isolated we all are and how disconnected we feel,” he says. “In our modern society we have this belief that mind is brain activity and this means the self, which comes from the mind, is separate and we don’t really belong. But we’re all part of each others’ lives. The mind is not just brain activity. When we realize it’s this relational process, there’s this huge shift in this sense of belonging.”
In other words, even perceiving our mind as simply a product of our brain, rather than relations, can make us feel more isolated. And to appreciate the benefits of interrelations, you simply have to open your mind. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-say-your-mind-isn-t-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-body?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
That the mind is more than the brain can be discussed in many ways, certainly in terms of the mind/body relationship. What we have been discovering is more and more evidence that there is no mind/body split, but a continuous organized system of electrochemical interactions governing much of what we thought of as brain activity, emotions, proclivities and personality. The psychoactive drugs used in treating mental illness erase any presumption of separation, as does recent study of the effects of the gut microbiome on emotion and mental states. And then there are those spooky instances of parasites literally "changing the minds" and behaviors of their hosts, as is suspected in toxoplasmosis infections.
Oriana:
My first major experiential lesson in the unity of body and mind was the menopause. A lot of my younger self-image turned around “intelligent, sexy, has a great memory, eager to learn, energetic, hard-working.” And suddenly I was none of those things, and as for my great memory, I couldn’t recall Shakespeare’s first name, and finally my own address (it came back, back that momentary black-out was unnerving). And though the worst is over, having my mind pulled out from under me, so to speak, was a very humbling experience, and certainly confirmed how body and mind are one system, intricately connected, possibly beyond our capacity to completely disentangle which is which.
Add to this all the complex ways in which we interact with others and with the environment, and it’s obvious that nothing whatsoever is an isolated unit. We are part of a whole beyond our comprehension. Like robots in old science fiction, we’re in danger of overloading our circuits. It’s humbling but necessary to stick to one small thing at a time, one foot in front of the other — that’s still the most reliable way to get anywhere.
*
HOW A LITTLE-KNOWN DARWIN IDEA COULD HELP US SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS
~ More than 150 years ago Victorian biologist Charles Darwin made a powerful observation: that a mixture of species planted together often grows more strongly than species planted individually.
It has taken a century and a half — ironically about as long as it can take to grow an oak to harvest — and a climate crisis to make policymakers and landowners take Darwin’s idea seriously and apply it to trees.
There is no human technology that can compete with forests for the take-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its storage. Darwin’s idea of growing lots of different plants together to increase the overall yield is now being explored by leading academics, who research forests and climate change.
Scientists and policymakers from Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US came together recently to discuss if Darwin’s idea provides a way to plant new forests that absorb and store carbon securely.
Planting more forests is a potent tool for mitigating the climate crisis, but forests are like complex machines with millions of parts. Tree planting can cause ecological damage when carried out poorly, particularly if there is no commitment to diversity of planting. Following Darwin’s thinking, there is growing awareness that the best, healthiest forests are ones with the greatest variety of trees — and trees of various ages.
Forests following this model promise to grow two to fourfold more strongly, maximizing carbon capture while also maximizing resilience to disease outbreaks, rapid climate change, and extreme weather.
Why we should plant more forests
In mixed forests, each species accesses different sources of nutrients from the others, leading to higher yields overall. And those thicker stems are made mostly of carbon.
Mixed forests are also often more resilient to disease by diluting populations of pests and pathogens, organisms that cause disease.
Darwin’s prescient observation is tucked away in chapter four of his 1859 famous book On the Origin of the Species. Studies of this “Darwin effect” have spawned vast ecological literature. Yet it is still so outside of the mainstream thinking on forestry that, until now, little major funding has been available to prompt the use of this technique.
Darwin also famously described evolution by natural selection, a process by which genes evolve to be fit for their environment. Unfortunately for the planet, human-induced environmental change outstrips the evolution of genes for larger, slower reproducing organisms like trees.
Yet it is still so outside of the mainstream thinking on forestry that, until now, little major funding has been available to prompt the use of this mixed forest technique.
Healthier trees capture more carbon
At our meeting we discussed a study of Norbury Park estate in central England, which describes how — using the Darwin effect and other climate-sensitive measures — the estate now captures over 5,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, making it quite possibly the most carbon-negative land in the UK. Such impressive statistics don’t happen by accident or by sticking some trees in the ground and hoping; care and ecological nous are needed.
Trees of different ages also continuously provide harvestable timber and so steady jobs, in stark contrast to the other methods of forestry, where large areas are felled and cleared at the same time.
The UK government, like other administrations, has laid down requirements for responsible large-scale tree planting. These requirements continue to be revised and improved. There are still vital questions about which trees we should plant, where we should plant them, and what to do with them once they’ve grown.
It has been said that it is impossible to plant a forest, but it should certainly be possible to design a plantation that will blossom into a forest for future generations. We need forests to be a practical, dependable, and just response to our climate and biodiversity crises, and Darwin has shown us the way.
https://www.inverse.com/s
cience/darwin-forest-planting?utm_campaign=inverse&utm_content=1637069040&utm_medium=owned&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR31ItG6Ls4BmOtPy6iFE846tunDsi52IcNLuyh4uOyfxP6Gg-gs48NJCi0
Mary:
It would be wise to put Darwin's idea about diverse plants grown together being more productive and more sustainable into practice. Yes, planting trees is a great idea, but maybe not so great if what we plant is a monoculture — and that's pretty much the norm. A forest is a complex community of living creatures, comprised of a variety of trees of various ages, undergrowth plants, fungi and the vast underground connecting web of fungal mycelium and tree roots — also insects, mammals, amphibians and birds. A living forest has resiliency and staying power, where a monoculture, any monoculture, does not, and must be nurtured and supported and protected just to keep it going. Another lesson to learn and implement soon, to help avoid the coming climate catastrophe.
*
CATERINA VAN HEMESSEN, SELF-PORTRAIT OF A PAINTER AT WORK, 1548
~ There is every reason to conclude, as art historians have, that an absorbing self-portrait by a gifted young Flemish Renaissance painter by the name of Caterina van Hemessen, painted in 1548, is likely the first self-portrayal of an artist, male or female, at work at the easel. Such attributions are a risky business, of course. Just ask the endless succession of nominees for inventor of abstract painting (now Kandinsky, now Hilma af Klint, now JMW Turner…). There's always a chance that an earlier example, unfairly forgotten by time, will come to light.
But in the case of Hemessen's transfixing masterpiece, it isn't simply the posture – the young woman depicting herself in meta-mid-brushstroke as she sets out to create the very same painting that we see before us – that distinguishes the work as one of the most pioneering in the history of image-making. The depth and complexity of the small, oil-on-oak panel's reflection on the very nature of creativity and self-invention is incontestably ground-breaking and changed forever the way artists presented themselves to the world.
At first glance, it's the slightly unsettling, unrequited stare of the prim sitter, gazing past us to a mirror that sits somewhere outside the frame, that piques our attention. That her plush velvet sleeves are at odds with the grubby task at hand – smudging pigment and oil on a sloppy palette – adds to the curious sense of staging.
It isn't long before our eyes are pulled deeper into the painting's mystery by the teasing inscription that Hemessen has inserted. In the murky void between the larger likeness of herself that dominates the right half of the image and the smaller self-portrait that the painter-within-the-painting has begun to create on the primed oak panel that rests on the easel on the left, it reads: "Ego Caterina de Hemessen me pinxi 1548 Etatis suae 20" (or "I, Caterina of the Hemessens, painted me in 1548 at the age of 20”.)
Though it was customary for portraitists to inscribe their works with captions identifying their sitters, in this instance, the language is anything but clarifying in its function and serves ingeniously to intensify the panel's visual verve with a level of semantic, psychological, and philosophical intrigue. Who, after all, is speaking these wafting, weightless words? Are we to imagine that they are being breathed ghostily down the centuries from the departed lips of the artist herself – a gifted stylist who, in an era when few female artists made much headway, so distinguished herself that the queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia, Mary of Austria, retained her services?
Or is this declaration, "I Caterina…", the ventriloquised whisper from the motionless mouth of the artist's alter ego in the painting – a silent semblance of self whose absent eyes stare out assertively but refuse to meet ours? Or does the "me" in "I … painted me" attach instead to that ever-emerging almost-self on the panel-within-the-panel who is, if we follow the logic of the painting's depiction to its conclusion, the eventual, irreducible "me" that will ultimately be created?
Hemessen's portrait presumes the existence of three distinct selves, refracted like a ray of white light in a prism into the bright spectrum of the painter, the painted, and the yet-to-be-painted – a trio locked forever in a spinning phantasmagoria of identity.
There can be little doubting that Hemessen deliberately hinged so much of the work's intensity on the impenetrable poetry of her riddling inscription. Trained by her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, a leading figure of the Romanist School (16th-Century Low Country artists who'd traveled to Rome) in the Flemish Renaissance, she knew her art history well. The patterning of the language of her floating caption was an unambiguous allusion to what is still, to this day, one of the most arresting self-portraits ever made: Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight (1500).
Amplifying the significance of the mirror in the imagination of the time, and of even deeper resonance to Hemessen's work, are the writings of the 14th-Century Italian mystic, St Catherine of Siena, whose teachings had been in popular circulation in Europe since the beginning of the 16th Century. As if presciently sanctioning the visual verve of Hemessen's painting, in which the artist dares to see herself not merely performing a function typically assigned to men (painting), but assuming aspects of the male Christ, Catherine of Siena challenged the notion that women were not equally summoned to see themselves as mirrors of Christ. Marshalling the metaphor of the looking glass, she asserts that Christ is "a mirrour that needis I moste biholde, in the which myrrour is representid to me that I am thin ymage & creature”.
Caught in a crossfire of ricocheting reflections – religious and feminist, optical and artistic – Hemessen's inexhaustible panel deserves credit for tracing the cultural and psychological axes against which all subsequent self-portraiture will plot itself. Her underappreciated painting in many ways establishes the themes that far-better-known self-portraits from Rembrandt to Cindy Sherman, Artemisia Gentileschi to Picasso, would explore in the ensuing centuries, works that have come to define not merely the respective oeuvres of those exceptional artists, but the story of art itself in the last half millennium. What keeps our eyes transfixed on those masterpieces by Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo is the poignancy of their comprehension, their hope, that perhaps some element of ourselves can survive the fleeting dabs and strokes of our moments in time, can survive as an energy that echoes across ages – an instinct that Caterina van Hemessen gave deft voice to in the confounding physics of her mysterious masterpiece. ~
Oriana:
Alas, she looks so sad and unhealthy. So unloved, I dare guess. We can only imagine how difficult it must have been for a woman to be an artist back in that era. Not that it's every easy to be a professional artist.
*
*
PHASING OUT GASOLINE-POWERED VEHICLES GAINS MOMENTUM
~ A few years ago, when the advocacy group Coltura called on America to stop using gasoline, it prompted mockery.
Coltura had been waging a war against gasoline for a few years by this point, but its primary weapons were things like music and performance art. One piece featured actors inside a clear plastic bubble panicking as it filled with simulated exhaust.
Then in 2017, Coltura's co-executive director, Matthew Metz, published an op-ed calling for Washington state to phase out gas-powered cars completely. A Seattle columnist wrote an article about Metz, with the word "crazy" featuring prominently.
A lot has changed in four years. Tesla is now the world's most valuable automaker. Multiple automakers say they will cease production of gas- and diesel-powered cars within the next two decades.
And what was once a fringe idea is now part of a global trend: momentum is building for the idea that zero-emission vehicles, primarily electric ones, are the future of the auto industry.
"More and more countries are announcing targets to to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles at the national level," Sandra Wappelhorst, who has tracked this trend for the International Council on Clean Transportation, told NPR earlier this year.
The climate talks that recently wrapped up in Glasgow featured a non-binding call for all vehicles sold worldwide to be zero-emission by 2040. The European Union is considering a zero-emission mandate that would kick in five years earlier, in 2035.
The idea is percolating from the heads of government down to individuals. A recent poll commissioned by Coltura, conducted by well-regarded national polling groups, found that more than 50% of U.S. voters support requiring all new cars to be electric within a decade.
"In, like, 10 years, you probably won't even have gas cars anymore. Right?" asked Elle King, as she looked at an electric vehicle on display at a mall in Northern Virginia this week. "And good thing, because gas is expensive.”
In the United States, the federal government has not embraced a full phaseout, instead calling for 50% of new cars sold to be electric. But California, Massachusetts and New York have all set plans to end gas car sales within 15 years.
And these state proposals to transform our automotive lives have not prompted a widespread political backlash – despite Americans' obsession with cars and the country's huge dependence on gasoline.
HUGE CHALLENGES REMAIN BEFORE ACHIEVING TARGETS
Eventually may be the key word here. Phasing out gas cars by 2035 — the date under consideration by the EU and many states — may feel far away, which could help explain why people are not up in arms about the policies.
That could be a problem, says Jasmine Sanders, the executive director of OurClimate. Actually ending gas car sales by 2035 would require a tremendous amount of change over the next 15 years — from infrastructure investments to shifts in consumer thinking and behavior.
"We have to go ahead and start doing this now," Sanders says. "We cannot wait until 2034 and then [start] telling people, 'No, you can't buy that gas vehicle.' "
And the scale of the proposed transformation is immense. Right now, gas and diesel vehicles make up 97% of the U.S. auto market. Electric vehicles still cost more upfront, and America doesn't have the electric grid or charging infrastructure to support a fully electric fleet.
Automakers are increasingly accepting the idea that electric vehicles are the future, but they are also acutely aware of the scale of change involved, and there is no consensus on how quickly it will actually happen.
Environmentalists are pushing for a gas car phaseout as early as 2030, while some skeptical automakers think even 2040 is too ambitious.
In short, America has not yet broken up with gasoline. A few Democratically-controlled states setting targets is no guarantee that it will happen.
But what's clear is that in just a few years, the idea of having no more gas cars has moved from the fringes to the center of attention.
Today, Coltura isn't just writing op-eds about the end of gas cars. It's helping to write legislation to make that a reality, state by state.
Coltura's shift from the outskirts to the halls of power also shows up in unexpected ways. A woman named Jennifer Granholm made a cameo appearance in one of the anti-gasoline music videos Coltura released a few years ago.
At the time, she was the former governor of Michigan and a noted electric vehicle enthusiast. Today, she's the U.S. secretary of energy.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/20/1055718914/giving-up-gas-powered-cars-for-electric-vehicles
Mary:
On the transition away from gas powered engines...I wonder if it might surprise us by how quickly it happens. So many times change comes slow, slow, slow, then all at once. When things reach a certain critical or pivotal point, then rush forward to a new state, a new equilibrium.
Oriana:
That would be a happy surprise indeed. Recently I met a woman who just bought a new car. "Electric?" I asked. The woman said she didn't have 60K to buy a Tesla. As if she never heard that by now we have plenty of affordable models. I wonder if the makers of electric cars should get more aggressive in their advertising, reminding people that not too long from now gas-powered vehicles won't even be manufactured.
Still, some huge changes can happen quite suddenly. I remember when women didn't go to graduate school; the within two-three years, women were the majority of graduate students. So yes, it could happen quickly. I hope it does. (Or if the future is hydrogen or something else entirely, that's fine too.)
*
ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE LANGUAGE OF INTERIORITY
~ Confessions is the story of Saint Augustine’s journey to Christian conversion. There is an earnest anxiety about his project: to explain to God, who already knows and who has given him the very power of expression, how it was that he came to Him. This zero-point in the narrative, before even his birth, is full of tautology and paradox, as if Augustine is spinning in place, unable to launch the telling of his story. But there is also a tender vulnerability and sincerity that, for me, would become the key to a profound sense of recognition: “Who will grant me that you come to my heart and intoxicate it?” and “What am I to you that you command me to love you and that, if I fail to love you, you are angry with me?”
But on the first reading, Augustine began to lose me not long after his introductory excursus, with a description of what he calls the “sins of my infancy.” He uses the term “infancy” in its literal meaning: in-fant, that is, something lacking speech. He acknowledges he doesn’t remember that time of his life, but his observation of infants, he says, gives him the information he needs to confess the sins of his own infancy.
“I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk . . . it can hardly be innocence, when the source of milk is flowing richly and abundantly, not to endure a share going to one’s blood-brother, who is in profound need, dependent for life exclusively on that one food.”
Augustine’s description of this baby was motivated, it seemed to me, by a blind commitment to the Christian doctrine that declares man inherently depraved and marred by sin from the moment of conception. It’s one thing, I thought, to quietly accept this doctrine, and another to go looking at a baby’s behavior and ascribe to it vicious and malevolent intention. It seemed to me a sloppy and bad-faith justification for a suspect idea that he had accepted as a matter of faith and which he now tried to advance on the basis of a dubious interpretation of a baby’s preconscious behavior.
This was an only slightly more sophisticated version of what, growing up in the Dominican Republic, I had seen Christians all around me do. It always irked me. Seeing it in this ancient and revered source, proffered to me by the Columbia faculty as one of the towering achievements of ancient thought, puzzled me. Augustine’s reasoning felt dishonest, forced. Was I meant to take this seriously? Or was I reading it as an example of how blind faith can turn even a “great” thinker into a simpleminded fanatic?
Yet despite this disconcerting opening riff on the sins of infancy, Confessions had an enormous impact on me, and for a few weeks, it even revived my sense of Christianity as a possible way of life. In Augustine, I found many echoes of my own experience.
What would happen to me in the US soon began take its anomalous shape: my father, who had accompanied my older brother and me on the trip, would not stay and reunite with my mother to begin a new life in America; he would return to the Dominican Republic and live his life there, with the family he had made after he and Mom had divorced when I was five. My mother, ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of life in New York, where she had now lived for three years, would be fired from her minimum-wage factory job in Brooklyn and take up with a man my brother and I did not trust and with whom we refused to live. Instead, we would live in a room in the basement of Juan and Fefa Alcántara’s house, making do as best we could.
It happened just at this time, as my brother and I were added to a large roster of mouths to feed and children to mind in Fefa’s household, that the whole family was being convulsed by a religious awakening. And while my brother resisted, I was swept along: I let go the soft atheism that my father, my reason, and the fanaticism of the people I knew who called themselves Christians had engendered in me, and gave myself over to the new and wonderful sweetness of salvation.
My newfound faith brought many happy days to my life and accelerated my learning of English by daily, devoted, and absorbed reading of the King James Version of the Bible. In Fefa’s house, I was no longer a heathenish burden, but a miraculous blessing and testament to the power of the new message. My conversion brought light into the family, made me closer to Fefa’s children, and took away, temporarily, my feeling of being a stranger in an alien world. We prayed together, we sang together, we went to church together.
All of this was with me, fresh with me, as I encountered Saint Augustine’s Confessions in January 1992. Confessions is an intensely intimate book, and you always have the sense that you have just walked into a private, whispered conversation. The book invites you to witness a probing, urgent heart-to-heart between Augustine and his God. The subject is Augustine himself; the journey of becoming Augustine. The object of attention is the self. It is Augustine’s self-analysis.
We probably know more about the psychology and inner life of Saint Augustine than that of any other ancient person. Before conversion, he was a prominent teacher of rhetoric, so in his self-exploration, and in the telling of his life story, he had at his disposal an unsurpassed range of rhetorical tools. His expressive capacity—in particular, his skill at describing emotion and inner experience—is unlike anyone else before modernity.
The first few books of Confessions are slow, and one can get annoyed at what feels like Augustine’s gratuitous beatings around the bush, his reliance on Biblical quotations to say even the most commonplace things, his distracted curiosity that seems unable to stay on any subject. It can be exasperating. Especially if you are reading quickly, as I was in Lit Hum. But once I got past that difficult entry, Augustine had his hooks in me. His insights into human psychology were illuminating and profound, and came to me in a language I understood.
Teaching the book to Columbia first-year students many years later, I found that my transformative first encounter with the text is the exception rather than the rule for the typical eighteen-year-old. Many students find it hard to establish the sympathetic bond that must undergird any powerful encounter with a work of literature. This bond is hard to form for students with Augustine, I think, for reasons embedded in our post-Christian and postmodern condition. It’s hard, in our post-faith world, to inhabit the mind of someone who lives with a vivid sense of God’s presence. I even find some of my students reluctant to admit to a sincere longing for truth, and to the possibility of truth, because it is intellectually unfashionable.
As a college freshman, my own religious experiences gave me an advantage, an entry point, into Augustine that others did not have. The power of his mind, the beauty of his language, and the depth of insight that pervades his writing captivated me. In plumbing the depths of his own psyche, Augustine gave me a language with which to approach my own interiority; he gave me a model and a set of questions with which to explore the emotional wilderness, full of doubt and confusion, that was my own coming-to-adulthood, in America, in New York City, at Columbia.
Perhaps what most amazed me about the saint was his consciousness that his own heart was a mystery, that its inner recesses were dark, unknown, and often inaccessible. Yet he was relentlessly committed to burrowing deeper and deeper into his own self and to discovering there, in the end, the only form of truth he would accept. Far from a pedantic or doctrinaire holy man, I found an uncertain, childlike man trying desperately to make sense of his own being in the world.
https://lithub.com/finding-the-language-of-interiority-in-saint-augustines-confessions/?fbclid=IwAR2V1d_IBt0KaYE7UxgasQoT0e0Ne1pN9Y9pkpheyyqLa8LWtSiwCa1uIq8
* * *
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. ~ St. Augustine
*
*
PRO-INFLAMMATORY DIET MAY TRIPLE THE RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S
~ Diets with higher inflammatory potential were tied to an increased risk of incident dementia, a prospective observational study showed.
Compared with participants with the lowest inflammatory diet scores, those with the highest scores were three times more likely to develop incident dementia (HR 3.01, 95% CI 1.24-7.26, P=0.014), the researchers wrote in Neurology.
"A diet with a more anti-inflammatory content seems to be related to lower risk for developing dementia within the following 3 years," Scarmeas told MedPage Today. Available dementia treatments are not very effective, he said -- "it's quite important that we find some measures to partially prevent it."
"Diet might play a role in combating inflammation, one of the biological pathways contributing to risk for dementia and cognitive impairment later in life," he added.
Evidence suggests certain foods, nutrients, and non-nutrient food components can modulate inflammatory status acutely and chronically. Earlier prospective research looked at dietary inflammatory potential and cognitive decline only in women, not in both sexes, the researchers noted.
Scarmeas and co-authors analyzed data from 1,059 older adults in the Hellenic Longitudinal Investigation of Aging and Diet (HELIAD), a population-based study that investigates associations between nutrition and age-related cognition in Greece. People with dementia at baseline were excluded from the analysis.
Participants had a mean baseline age of 73.1 and a mean 8.2 years of education; 40.3% were men. Dietary intake was evaluated through a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire validated for the Greek population and administered by a trained dietitian.
People
in the first tertile consumed a diet that included about 20 servings of
fruit, 19 of vegetables, four of legumes, and 11 of coffee or tea a
week, on average. People in the third tertile at a more pro-inflammatory diet, with a weekly average of nine servings of fruit, 10 of vegetables, two of legumes, and nine of coffee or tea.
Over an average follow-up of 3.05 years, 62 people were diagnosed with dementia. Higher dietary inflammatory index scores correlated with higher dementia risk. A gradual risk increase across higher tertiles suggested a dose-response relationship between the inflammatory potential of diet and incident dementia, Scarmeas and co-authors observed.
"Our results are getting us closer to characterizing and measuring the inflammatory potential of people's diets," Scarmeas said. "That, in turn, could help inform more tailored and precise dietary recommendations and other strategies to maintain cognitive health.” ~
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/dementia/95626?th=1&xid=fb-md-tm-cardio&scrf=1&trw=no&fbclid=IwAR2fCOXHajGzVcc8tN8qYxpVxvR-_v2HwixxU8T8GBOvhYsue1s1T9TpImU
First, it needs to be noted that there are startling differences in the rates of dementia among various countries. Greece has a relatively low rate of both Alzheimer's Disease and vascular dementia, and its diet is regarded as among the best in the world for brain and heart health. Japan has the lowest rate among developed nations.
Compared with genetics, diet may play a relatively minor role. Still, since diet can be modified, it should be studied in more depth. Fish and seafood? Seaweed salad? Rice versus wheat?
Since the population in this study was Greek, I find it strange that wine wasn’t discussed.
~ The best way to prevent dementia is by consuming red or white wine in moderation daily. The Bordeaux study by Professor J.M. Orgogozo of the University of Bordeaux in 1997, showed that wine could reduce dementia by up to 80%, which is an incredible amount that has unfortunately been ignored by health policy makers. ~
https://www.drnorrie.info/html/article_dementia.html
“Light-to-moderate drinking (one to three drinks per day) was significantly associated with a lower risk of any dementia (hazard ratio 0.58 [95% CI 0.38-0.90]) and vascular dementia (hazard ratio 0.29 [0.09-0.93]). No evidence that the relation between alcohol and dementia varied by type of alcoholic beverage was found. Regular light to moderate drinking [also] seemed to be associated with a decreased risk for ischemic stroke.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15455646/
The role of olive oil likewise needs to be explored further.
“New research in mice suggests that adopting a diet rich in extra virgin olive oil can prevent the toxic accumulation of the protein tau, which is a hallmark of multiple types of dementia.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327141
ALZHEIMER’S VACCINE MAY BE ON THE HORIZON
~ A promising new approach to potentially treat Alzheimer’s disease – and also vaccinate against it – has been developed by a team of UK and German scientists.
Both the antibody-based treatment and the protein-based vaccine developed by the team reduced Alzheimer’s symptoms in mouse models of the disease. The research is published today (November 15, 2021) in Molecular Psychiatry.
The work is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Leicester, the University Medical Center Göttingen, and the medical research charity LifeArc.
Rather than focus on the amyloid beta protein in plaques in the brain, which are commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, the antibody and vaccine both target a different soluble form of the protein, that is thought to be highly toxic.
Amyloid beta protein naturally exists as highly flexible, string-like molecules in solution, which can join together to form fibers and plaques. In Alzheimer’s disease, a high proportion of these string-like molecules become shortened or ‘truncated’, and some scientists now think that these forms are key to the development and progression of the disease.
Professor Thomas Bayer, from the University Medical Center Göttingen, said: “In clinical trials, none of the potential treatments which dissolve amyloid plaques in the brain have shown much success in terms of reducing Alzheimer’s symptoms. Some have even shown negative side effects. So, we decided on a different approach. We identified an antibody in mice that would neutralize the truncated forms of soluble amyloid beta, but would not bind either to normal forms of the protein or to the plaques.”
Dr. Preeti Bakrania and colleagues from LifeArc adapted this antibody so a human immune system wouldn’t recognize it as foreign and would accept it. When the Leicester research group looked at how and where this ‘humanized’ antibody, called TAP01_04, was binding to the truncated form of amyloid beta, the team had a surprise. They saw the amyloid beta protein was folded back on itself, in a hairpin-shaped structure.
Professor Mark Carr, from the Leicester Institute of Structural and Chemical Biology at the University of Leicester, explained: “This structure had never been seen before in amyloid beta. However, discovering such a definite structure allowed the team to engineer this region of the protein to stabilize the hairpin shape and bind to the antibody in the same way. Our idea was that this engineered form of amyloid beta could potentially be used as a vaccine, to trigger someone’s immune system to make TAP01_04 type antibodies.”
When the team tested the engineered amyloid beta protein in mice, they found that mice who received this ‘vaccine’ did produce TAP01 type antibodies.
The Göttingen group then tested both the ‘humanized’ antibody and the engineered amyloid beta vaccine, called TAPAS, in two different mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Based on similar imaging techniques to those used to diagnose Alzheimer’s in humans, they found that both the antibody and the vaccine helped to restore neuron function, increase glucose metabolism in the brain, restore memory loss and – even though they weren’t directly targeted – reduce amyloid beta plaque formation.
LifeArc’s Dr Bakrania said: ‘’The TAP01_04 humanized antibody and the TAPAS vaccine are very different to previous antibodies or vaccines for Alzheimer’s disease that have been tested in clinical trials, because they target a different form of the protein. This makes them really promising as a potential treatment for the disease either as a therapeutic antibody or a vaccine. The results so far are very exciting and testament to the scientific expertise of the team. If the treatment does prove successful, it could transform the lives of many patients.”.
Professor Mark Carr added: “While the science is currently still at an early stage, if these results were to be replicated in human clinical trials, then it could be transformative. It opens up the possibility to not only treat Alzheimer’s once symptoms are detected, but also to potentially vaccinate against the disease before symptoms appear.”
The researchers are now looking to find a commercial partner to take the therapeutic antibody and the vaccine through clinical trials. ~
https://scitechdaily.com/promising-new-approach-to-treat-alzheimers-disease-and-also-vaccinate-against-it/?fbclid=IwAR3hyGxW63kYMHsWeBZrSJT-P_XOItLr2JdZJclWPg5zRlfJLVI-6a0EuKE
Oriana:
Meanwhile a different vaccine is also being developed, one that aims to make the immune system clear away the amyloid plaque.
ending on beauty:
Some say we are living at the end of time,
But I believe a thousand pagan ministers
Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.
~ Robert Bly, Living at the End of Time
Photo: David Whyte
