*
GLASS MOUNTAIN
Beyond seven rivers,
beyond seven seas,
there was a princess who lived
on a glass mountain.
She had mirrors for companions.
She had see-through dreams.
The knights’ horses’ hooves
kept slipping.
But a hero, the youngest, the fool,
in return for a crumb to a crone
at the crossroads, with the usual one tooth,
won a horse with diamond hooves.
*
Every morning I slid
my hands into solitude
as into a basin of water,
and waited for the knight.
Only diamond like a dancing star
could carve a stairway
up the mirrored slope.
Ice-blue windows blew open,
crystal doors slammed shut.
An owl flew to the top:
“If not you, then who?
Who else will be a fool?”
*
The mountain is slippery and steep.
Its sheen half-blinds me with reflections,
a glassy, insomniac light.
I carve one step, then another.
It may take me a lifetime, I know.
But the princess in her tower of cloud
can already hear
starry beat of diamond hooves.
~ Oriana
*
I liked fairy-tales as a child, but was bothered by the vengefulness and cruelty in the classics: Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Little Red Hiding Hood. Even Goldilocks and The Three Bears presented a rather frightening situation, no matter how charmingly told. I preferred the less well-known fairy-tales in which virtue is rewarded without mayhem befalling anyone. In those, only good people suffered for a while, but one knew that virtue will triumph, and the wicked will either see the light or be forgotten. No being baked alive in the oven, no red-hot shoes put on the step-mother's feet, no horrible punishments whatsoever.
The tale of that benign sort that I especially remember is the story of the Glass Mountain. A king imprisoned his beautiful daughter on top of a glass mountain. All the knights the kingdom and beyond tried to climb up to her, but their horses kept slipping off the glass. Finally a poor but kind-hearted youth, in reward for helping an old woman in some simple way — he just shared his humble bread with her, while others were in too much hurry to get to the princess — was given a horse with diamond hooves. And only the horse with the diamond hooves was able to climb the glass mountain.
Three daughters or three sons (the youngest usually the underdog); goodness rewarded, poverty turned to riches —fairy-tales were obviously based on a few eternal formulas, and I've forgotten most of them. But I do remember the horse with the diamond hooves climbing up the glass mountain, the hooves carving steps in the glass. The image was compelling: the mountain shining, very steep, totally slippery; the beautiful princess waiting on top of it; and the hero on a horse with diamond hooves unfailingly moving up and up the impossible slope.
I find it extraordinary that it has stayed in my mind because now it seems a metaphor for my life situation. That's the image for a poet’s life: it's like trying to climb a glass mountain. It takes talent, skill, and endless work. Fortunately, all my resources, including synchronicities as a blessed gift from the universe, are a horse with diamond hooves. But it's still extremely laborious and difficult, carving these steps in the glass — poem by poem, publication by publication . . .
(There are several variants of the Glass Mountain fairy-tale, not just the one that I remember from my childhood. I was very surprised to learn that this fairy-tale is practically unknown outside of Poland, where the expression “[X] is my glass mountain” has entered the language.)
Mary:
I remember the glass mountain fairy tale. It was in one of our readers in grade school. I remember the illustration. There's something about those old stories that's basic to our psychology, our experience, our dreams, and in particular our fears and nightmares. Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Rapunzel, old, old stories, with analogs in many cultures, hold encapsulated basic human relations, challenges, terrors, and, I think, cultural memories. That is why they still resonate with meaning, why for instance, Hansel and Gretel, and even Sleeping Beauty, can reappear as tales about the holocaust. Tales that, like the fairy tales, take you through nightmare to a resolution that is a kind of redemption/ reward, a magical rescue/escape that feels essential to our humanity.
Oriana:
One wonderful thing about fairy tales is that they often present a situation of extreme terror and danger, but there is always a happy ending, no matter how improbable. Jesus rising from the dead — that’s how we know it’s a fairy tale. A grim one, to be sure — not as charming as the Sleeping Beauty awakened by a Prince’s Kiss. Or the Beast turning into a Prince — no, alas, there are no real-life instances of that.
But hope is regarded as one of the three cardinal virtues — I never knew why, except that we need it to continue to have a will to live. “Hope is our mother,” as John Guzlowski says. We learn fairy tales early in life, and it’s a kind of vaccine, I think. A disaster hits us, but thanks to our fairy tale vaccine we hang on to hope, even if it seems irrational.
Interestingly, it turns out that fairy tales (other than Goldilocks) go back in origin not just centuries, but thousands of years. Apparently children always needed to be told that everything will turn out fine in the end, that there is always hope.
*
“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.” ~ Don DeLillio, "Underworld"
*
REBECCA SOLNIT ON DUNE: AGAINST THE LONE HERO
~ Since Dune is out, let me reiterate that violence is pathetic and lone heroes are usually trouble at best, and we need to find better stories to tell and I went after all that here a few years ago. (And yes, you can argue that Paul Atriedes listens to the Fremen and makes alliance with them, but also that he's using them to his own ends, empathy as bait).
I wrote (in part): Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, and the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that’s what we get, over and over, and in the course of getting them we don’t get much of a picture of how change happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” is a line of Bertold Brecht’s I’ve gone to dozens of times, but now I’m more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.
We like heroes and stars and their opposites, though I’m not sure who I mean by we, except maybe the people in charge of too many of our stories, who are themselves often elites who believe devoutly in elites, which is what heroes and stars are often presumed to be. There’s a scorching song by Liz Phair I think about whenever I think about heroes. She sang:
He’s just a hero in a long line of heroes
Looking for something attractive to save
They say he rode in on the back of a pick-up
And he won’t leave town till you remember his name
It’s a caustic revision of the hero as an attention-getter, a party-crasher, a fame-seeker, and at least implicitly a troublemaker in the guise of a problem-solver. And maybe we as a society are getting tired of heroes, and a lot of us are certainly getting tired of overconfident white men. Even the idea that the solution will be singular and dramatic and in the hands of one person erases that the solutions to problems are often complex and many faceted and arrived at via negotiations. The solution to climate change is planting trees but also transitioning (rapidly) away from fossil fuels but also energy efficiency and significant design changes but also a dozen more things about soil and agriculture and transportation and how systems work. There is no solution, but there are are many pieces that add up to a solution, or rather to a modulation of the problem of climate change.
That’s from Le Guin’s famous 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which notes that though most of early human food was gathered, and gathering was often women’s work, it’s hunting that made for dramatic stories. And she argues that though the earliest tools have often been thought to be weapons in all their sharp-and-pointy deadliness, containers were maybe earlier and as or more important, gender/genital implications intended.
Hunting is full of singular drama—with my spear I slayed this bear. A group of women gathering grain, on the other hand, doesn’t have a singular gesture or target or much drama. “I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible,” says Le Guin toward the end of her essay. Among the Iban people of Borneo, I read recently, the men gained status by headhunting, the women by weaving. Headhunting is more dramatic, but weaving is itself a model for storytelling’s integration of parts and materials into a new whole.
~ Rebecca Solnit, Facebook, October 25, 2021
Oriana:
I haven’t seen Dune yet, but intend to — because it’s supposed to be visually splendid.
The parts of it that are the typical lone hero/action movie — well, that’s where endurance comes in. Nothing is perfect.
I agree that the lone hero theme has been done to death. It’s time to reveal more about his (it’s usually a he) helpers. In the Glass Mountain fairy tale, the hero would slip down the mountain with all the other knights if the old woman at a crossroads didn’t give him a horse with diamond hooves. So there we have it: the woman behind the man.
In Dune (the movie), that woman appears to be the hero’s mother, Lady Jessica. Nothing unusual about that. Freud wrote: “To have been your mother’s favorite son is a life-long feeling of triumph.”
*
THE OREGON DUNES THAT INSPIRED HERBERT’S NOVEL
~ History can be one trippy storyteller – and so was author Frank Herbert, who penned the Dune anthology series. The universe he created around the planet Arrakis and the mind-bending intrigue that took place there and in space influenced at least three generations and created legions of obsessed fans.
It turns out, Herbert was visiting the Oregon National Dunes Recreation Area and Florence back in 1957, studying the movement of the dunes and the beachgrass of the area, and that planted a seed in his mind. A few years later, it culminated in being much of the inspiration behind his book series, with the first Dune book getting published in 1965.
Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, to write a magazine article on the Oregon Dunes. Fascinated by the struggle between nature and humanity, he wrote to his agent, “Sand dunes have been known to swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways.”
“The article never materialized, but the awe of the Oregon dunes became the inspiration for “Dune,” said Meg Spencer, executive director for the Siuslaw Public Library. ~
https://www.beachconnection.net/news/herber_dune_florence101121.php
~ In the early 20th century, the coastal Oregon city of Florence was under threat of being consumed by the nearby dunes that were being whipped across human structures by the coastal winds. Roads, railroad tracks, even homes were being swallowed up by blowing sand. Starting in the 1920′s, the US Department of Agriculture ran a program to try and stabilize the dunes by planting European Beach Grass. The hope was that its dense roots would hold the sand in place and prevent it from burying nearby cars and homes.
Herbert came to Florence in 1957, planning to write an article documenting this battle between man and nature. He was awestruck by the power of the blowing desert sand. As he wrote in a letter, “These waves can be every bit as devastating as a tidal wave in property damage.”
Herbert finished his article on Florence, but it was never published. Instead, he began to dig deeper into desert ecosystems and human interactions with nature. “The experience here seeing the dunes — and the interaction between the people here and the environment they were living — that really did become the center of Dune and Arrakis,” says Spencer.
She knows this because the Siuslaw Public Library is home to an archive of many of the original materials that Herbert collected to research Dune. It includes books like “The Sociology of Nature,” a 1962 book on modern ecology, and “The Changing Nature of Man,” a book of historical psychology from 1961.
The collection also includes books on Marxism, poetry, ethics, and hypnosis.
“He was clearly reading across this huge breadth of titles,” says Spencer. “It’s so clear that he was trying to bring in psychology and religion; it’s fascinating to see all the sources he was pulling from to write this giant universe that became Dune.”
But it was the ecology of the desert he witnessed in Florence that most inspired Dune’s setting on Arrakis. “It’s easy to say he was prescient,” Spencer said, “but maybe it’s better to say he was far-sighted. He saw how that interaction between people and the environment could result in chaos and unintended consequences.”
Dune tells the story of a civilization struggling to balance their relationship with an unforgiving natural world, and the unintended consequences of their actions. Ironically, that same struggle is playing out today on the sand dunes of Florence. The efforts to plant European beach grass did manage to hold the dunes in place, “but what they discovered is that the beach grass is also an invasive species,” Spencer says. “The amount of land that is the sand dunes has decreased and decreased, year by year.”
“It’s a perfect example of the unintended consequences you see in Dune,” Spencer says. “Now there’s a lot of work being done to remediate that, to allow humans to go on living here successfully and having roads and buildings, but also trying to make sure that we save this incredibly special gem that we have.”
Still, the sand dunes of the Oregon coast retain the majesty that inspired Frank Herbert more than 60 years ago. Spencer says she feels the alien landscape of Dune every time she visits.
“Walking out on those dunes, spending time on them, is the thing you see throughout the book and throughout the adaptations… that feeling of sand that goes on forever and is un-tameable,” Spencer says. ~
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/10/23/florence-oregon-movies-dune-frank-herbert-science-fiction-novels/
Dunes in Florence, Oregon
*
REAL-LIFE HERO (WITH HELPERS): ELEANOR ROOSEVELT 1884–1962)
~ FDR’s election and the New Deal coalition also marked a turning point in another way, in the character and ambition of his wife, the indomitable Eleanor Roosevelt. Born in New York in 1884, she’d been orphaned as a child. She married FDR, her fifth cousin, in 1905; they had six children. Nine years into their marriage, Franklin began an affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, and when Eleanor found out, he refused to agree to a divorce, fearing it would end his career in politics. Eleanor turned her energies outward. During the war, she worked on international relief, and, after Franklin was struck with polio in 1921, she began speaking in public, heeding a call that brought so many women to the stage for the first time: she was sent to appear in her husband’s stead.
Eleanor Roosevelt became a major figure in American politics in her own right just at a time when women were entering political parties. It was out of frustration with the major parties’ evasions on equal rights that Alice Paul had founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916. Fearful that soon-to-be enfranchised female voters would form their own voting bloc, the Democratic and Republican Parties had then begun recruiting women. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) formed a Women’s Division in 1917, and the next year, the Republicans did the same, the party chairman pledging “to check any tendency toward the formation of a separate women’s party.” After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the League of Women Voters, steered women away from the National Woman’s Party and urged them to join one of the two major parties, advising, “The only way to get things in this country is to find them on the inside of the political party.” Few women answered that call more vigorously than Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a leader of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party while her husband campaigned and served as governor of the state. By 1928, she was one of the two most powerful women in American politics, head of the Women’s Division of the DNC.
Eleanor Roosevelt, lean and rangy, wore floral dresses and tucked flowers in the brim of floppy hats perched on top of her wavy hair, but she had a spine as stiff as the steel girder of a skyscraper. She hadn’t wanted her husband to run for president, mainly because she had so little interest in becoming First Lady, a role that, with rare exception, had meant serving as a hostess at state dinners while demurring to the men when the talk turned to affairs of state. She made that role her own, deciding to use her position to advance causes she cared about: women’s rights and civil rights.
She went on a national tour, wrote a regular newspaper column, and in December 1932 began delivering a series of thirteen nationwide radio broadcasts. While not a naturally gifted speaker, she earned an extraordinarily loyal following and became a radio celebrity. From the White House, she eventually delivered some three hundred broadcasts, about as many as FDR. Perhaps most significantly, she reached rural women, who had few ties to the national culture except by radio. “As I have talked to you,” she told her audience, “I have tried to realize that way up in the high mountain farms of Tennessee, on lonely ranches in the Texas plains, in thousands and thousands of homes, there are women listening to what I say.”
Eleanor Roosevelt not only brought women into politics and reinvented the role of the First Lady, she also tilted the Democratic Party toward the interests of women, a dramatic reversal. The GOP had courted the support of women since its founding in 1854; the Democratic Party had turned women away and dismissed their concerns. With Eleanor Roosevelt, that began to change. During years when women were choosing a party for the first time, more of them became Democrats than Republicans. Between 1934 and 1938, while the numbers of Republican women grew by 400 percent, the numbers of Democratic women grew by 700 percent.
In January 1933, she announced that she intended to write a book. “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has been one of the most active women in the country since her husband was elected President, is going to write a 40,000-word book between now and the March inauguration,” the Boston Globe reported, incredulous. “Every word will be written by Mrs. Roosevelt herself.”
It’s Up to the Women came out that spring. Only women could lead the nation out of the Depression, she argued — by frugality, hard work, common sense, and civic participation. The “really new deal for the people,” Eleanor Roosevelt always said, had to do with the awakening of women. ~ excerpt from Jill Lepore’s These Truths
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/04/12/jill-lepore-eleanor-roosevelt-these-truths/?fbclid=IwAR1n3j2WqcYjhlbzUvRbIo5jrTpmpbjYP7Y2bUTXI45_vHVeZ4KBW0pHzTs
*
THOSE DANGEROUS EARLY PRINTED BOOKS
~ One of the greatest visual developments of the Tudor world was the explosion in the printing industry. The first press had been developed by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany as early as the 1430s, although it was not until 20 years later that he produced his first version of the Bible. New presses were set up across Europe, arriving in the Westminster workshop of William Caxton in 1477, Oxford in 1478 and St. Albans in 1479. By 1500, it was estimated that 1,000 establishments existed worldwide that were able to produce printed matter of some form, either as full-length books or as simpler pamphlets.
By the advent of the Tudors, Caxton was already an expert translator and printer, having produced his own versions of Aesop, Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, The Golden Legend, John Mirk’s Festival and Nicholas Love’s Speculum Vitae Christi. From 1485 until his death in 1492, he produced more poetry, romances like Blanchardin and Eglantine, and spiritual works such as The Craft for to Die Well and The Book of Divers Ghostly Matters.
The earliest books, published before 1501 and known as incunabula, were finished by hand, with color plates, marginal illustrations and capital letters. In addition, the books of Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde effected a standardization of the English language, with greater consistency of spelling in comparison to what had previously been an aural, and therefore highly varied, tradition. It has been estimated that Caxton provided the first known usages of around 1,300 English words.
The Reformation also contributed to the rise of literacy. Church murals were replaced by texts; the translation of the Bible into English and the proliferation of psalters and homilies replacing the old visual books of hours encouraged a greater personal connection with the written word. Literacy was embraced by the Church as a means of fighting heresy. It also enabled heretics to read and imbibe the messages of forbidden texts.
In 1535, the English reformer and printer, William Marshall, produced The Defence of Peace, his translation of a 14th-century anti-papal text. Marshall was also a confidential agent of Cromwell, who allowed the book’s publication, in spite of its controversial and unpopular advocacy of the burning of religious images, such as was soon to take place at Cromwell’s home in Chelsea.
Thomas Broke wrote to inform the minister of the public response, as “the people greatly murmur at it.” Imperial ambassador Chapuys reported this to the emperor as an indication of the direction Henry VIII intended to take the English Church:
There is a report that the King intends the religious of all orders to be free to leave their habits and marry, and that if they will stay in their houses they must live in poverty. He intends to take the rest of the revenue, and will do stranger things still.
Shortly afterwards, Lord Chancellor Audley judged that the text went too far and wrote to Cromwell:
In the parts where he has been there has been some discord and diversity of opinion touching worshiping of saints and images, creeping at cross, and such ceremonies, which discord it were well to put to silence. This book will make much business if it should go forth. Intends to send for the printer to stop them. It were good that preachers and people abstained from opinions of such things until the King has put a final order by the report of those appointed for searching and ordering the laws of the Church. A proclamation to abstain until that time would do much good.
Audley’s warnings came too late, as by that October 24th copies had been distributed among the monks of the Charterhouse, although these had been returned after three days. Jasper Fyloll complained of finding “three or four foreign printed books of as foul heresies and errors as may be.”
During the visitation to the monasteries, other dangerous books were sought out. John Horwood reported the discovery of a book by Alverius, “which some think smells of the Popish pannier.” In December that year, books of sermons by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who had been executed that summer for refusing to swear the Oath of Succession, were recalled by the chancellor, along with “other books containing error or slander to the King or to the diminution of his Imperial Crown, or repugnant to the Statutes of the Succession or for the abolition of the usurped power of the bishop of Rome.”
Those who printed seditious material took their liberty, and their businesses, into their own hands. In June 1574, William Cecil and Robert Dudley, Lords Burghley and Leicester contacted Sir William Fleetwood, the recorder of London, to act against a Mr. Bradborn. Fleetwood was required to go to Southwark “very early in the morning” and apprehend Bradborn, “dwelling near the sign of the Red Leg, a hat maker, and search his house for printing presses, letters” and anything else “belonging to printing.” Fleetwood was also to seize all books and writings relating to religious matters and keep Bradborn “a close prisoner till the Queen’s further orders.” However, upon executing his orders, Fleetwood found that no man named Bradborn existed there, and wondered if it had been an alias.
Elizabeth had to issue a declaration in 1576 against a pamphlet printed in Milan entitled Novo Aviso, which charged her with ingratitude towards Philip of Spain, and with an intended plot against his life.
Seditious books continued to be a problem throughout the 16th century. In 1579, a book entitled A Discovery of the Gaping Gulf was printed, which “very contemptuously intermeddled in matters of estate touching her Majesty’s person” and her friendship with the Duke of Anjou, “the intention evidently being to cause a suspicion of her Majesty’s actions, as tending to the prejudice of the realm and the subversion of the estate of true religion.” A proclamation from the queen was published and all civic dignitaries called to assemble in their halls to hear it read and collect all copies to be destroyed.
Mayors and aldermen continued their vigilance and, in April 1580, John Fagge, mayor of Rye, searched a boat from Dieppe on which “certain little books called the Jesus Psalter to the number of two dozen” were found and removed to safe custody. Two years later, another ship was intercepted, “full of Popish and superstitious books” hidden in a barrel of worsted yarn, and the miscreants were apprehended and questioned.
Books might contain other dangerous practices. Thomas, abbot of Abingdon, reported the arrest of a priest, “a suspect person with a book of conjurations for finding hidden treasures, consecrating rings with stones in them and for consecrating a crystal in which a child may see things.” They also contained disturbing images, including a sword crossed over a scepter.
Books and pamphlets could be aimed at specific patrons. Thomas Nicholas wrote to William Cecil from the Marshalsea Prison in November 1582 and entrusted the letter to a printer, who had recently produced Nicholas’ treatise, Caesar and Pompeius. Nicholas had penned another tract while he was incarcerated about the prison experience, entitled Monastical Life in the Abbey of Marshalsea. Trying to please Cecil, at a time when the queen was increasingly under threat from Catholic plots, he claimed the pamphlet would “terrify all the Papists in England.” Nicholas concluded by asking for the question of his imprisonment to be examined, as it was a “great wrong.” ~
https://lithub.com/the-lives-of-dangerous-books-on-the-explosive-rise-of-literacy-in-tudor-england/?fbclid=IwAR0GMpt2o6yF6h-dedPxYH32KdyTuQIRO1zFu8aiM0B2SMxTpFlhVIlWp0Y
Mary:
The printing press and dangerous books; new technology presents new opportunity and new challenges. Ideas can be more widely disseminated, both those that buttress the powers that be, and those seeking to undermine or replace those powers. So, books take sides in the matters of church and the monarchy, and there is an attempt to control and even eliminate threatening texts. Books are hunted and burned like spies and traitors. The press is an instrument of sedition, right from the start.
Each new technological development in communication amplifies the potential and the threat: books, broadsides, newspapers, radio, TV, the internet. Each step more efficient at reaching a wider and wider audience, each there to spread information or misinformation, to educate or manipulate, to provide facts or to propagandize and convert.
Modern information technology is powerful and pervasive, and it can be confusing and confounding, allowing conspiracy theories the same wide access as legitimate science and news. We are seeing the danger in this now, in some frightening ways. What tools we have in these technologies for authoritarian and fascist regimes! Not burnable, like books, they are all pervasive, everywhere, inescapable, not easily discounted...and particularly in the US, polarizing to an extreme degree, with no workable middle ground, no impetus to compromise.
Oriana:
It’s been said that the Internet revolution is comparable to the print revolution. Once books became more widely available, people could learn all sorts of uncomfortable truths — and religions and monarchies started declining. Of course there were also books of witches’ spells and other nonsense. Always the good and the bad.
With the Internet, both sides revealed themselves with unprecedented speed: useful knowledge at out fingertips, and conspiracy theories spreading as never before. And we feel helpless when someone we liked and thought to be smart suddenly says that the Moon landing was a hoax and/or 9/11 was “an inside job.” We are in midst of information war, and there is nothing we can do. We have to take the bad with the good. 
Book burning in Nazi Germany. As someone observed, those who burn books will soon start burning people.
*
HOMER, SCHLIEMANN, AND THE SWASTIKA
~ When archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Ithaca, Greece in 1868, one goal was foremost in his mind: discovering the ancient city of Troy using Homer’s Iliad. The epic poem was widely believed to be no more than a myth, but Schliemann was convinced otherwise. For him, it was a map to the hidden location of ancient cities.
It wasn’t until 1871 that Schliemann achieved his dream. The discovery catapulted him to fame, and with his fame came a burst of interest in all that he uncovered. The intrepid archaeologist found his Homeric city, but he also found something else: the swastika, a symbol that would be manipulated to shape world history.
Schliemann found his epic city—and the swastika—on the Aegean cost of Turkey. There, he continued the excavations started by British archaeologist Frank Calvert at a site known as Hisarlik mound. Schliemann’s methods were brutal—he used crowbars and battering rams to excavate—but effective. He quickly realized the site held seven different layers from societies going back thousands of years. Schliemann had found Troy—and the remains of civilizations coming before and after it. And on shards of pottery and sculpture throughout the layers, he found at least 1,800 variations on the same symbol: spindle-whorls, or swastikas.
“The antiquities unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Troy acquire for us a double interest,” wrote British linguist Archibald Sayce in 1896. “They carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race.”
Initially, “Aryan” was a term used to delineate the Indo-European language group, not a racial classification. Scholars in the burgeoning field of linguistics had noticed similarities among the German, Romance and Sanskrit languages. The rising interest in eugenics and racial hygiene, however, led some to corrupt Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient, master racial identity with a clear throughline to contemporary Germany. As the Washington Post reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several years before the start of World War II, “[Aryanism]… was an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered scholars as to the existence of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at one stage of the earth’s history.” In the 19th century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and others made the connection between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who were the superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead the world towards greater advancement by conquering their neighbors.
The findings of Schliemann’s dig in Turkey, then, suddenly had a deeper, ideological meaning. For the nationalists, the “purely Aryan symbol” Schliemann uncovered was no longer an archaeological mystery—it was a stand-in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the Reichshammerbund (a 1912 anti-Semitic group) and the Bavarian Freikorps (paramilitarists who wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic in Germany) used the swastika to reflect their “newly discovered” identity as the master race. It didn’t matter that it traditionally meant good fortune, or that it was found everywhere from monuments to the Greek goddess Artemis to representations of Brahma and Buddha and at Native American sites, or that no one was truly certain of its origins.
“When Heinrich Schliemann discovered swastika-like decorations on pottery fragments in all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site had been Aryan all along,” writes anthropologist Gwendolyn Leick. “The link between the swastika and Indo-European origin, once forged was impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol, which hence served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non-Aryan, or rather non-German, and German identity.”
As the swastika became more and more intertwined with German nationalism, Adolf Hitler’s influence grew—and he adopted the hooked cross as the Nazi party symbol in 1920. “He was attracted to it because it was already being used in other nationalist, racialist groups,” says Steven Heller, author of The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? and Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State. “I think he also understood instinctually that there had to be a symbol as powerful as the hammer and sickle, which was their nearest enemy.”
To further enshrine the swastika as a symbol of Nazi power, Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s minister of propaganda) issued a decree on May 19, 1933 that prevented unauthorized commercial use of the hooked cross. The symbol also featured prominently in Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandist film Triumph of the Will, writes historian Malcolm Quinn. “When Hitler is absent… his place is taken by the swastika, which, like the image of the Führer, becomes a switching station for personal and national identities.” The symbol was on uniforms, flags and even as a marching formation at rallies.
Efforts to ban the display of the swastika and other Nazi iconography in the post-war years—including current German criminal laws that prohibit the public use of the swastika and the Nazi salute—seem to have only further enshrined the evil regime it was co-opted by. Today the symbol remains a weapon of white supremacist groups around the world. In recent months, its prevalence has spiked around the U.S., with swastikas appearing around New York City, Portland, Pennsylvania, California and elsewhere. It seems the harder authority figures attempt to quash it out, the greater its power to intimidate. For Heller, this is an intractable problem.
“I think you can’t win,” Heller says. “Either you try to extinguish it, and if that’s the case you’ve got to brainwash an awful lot of people, or you let it continue, and it will brainwash a lot of people. As long as it captures people’s imaginations, as long as it represents evil, as long as that symbol retains its charge, it’s going to be very hard to cleanse it.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-man-who-brought-the-swastika-to-germany-and-how-the-nazis-stole-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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"THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION CONSISTS ALMOST ENTIRELY OF DECAY"
from Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost*
THE MAGIC KINGDOM OF FUNGI
~ Fungi are responsible for almost all our food production, and most of our processed materials. They are also to be thanked for many of the important medical breakthroughs in human history that treat both physical and mental ailments, for naturally sequestering and slowly releasing carbon, for optimizing industrial processes, and so much more.
When most people think about fungi, they tend to associate them with decay. Many people mistakenly believe fungi are plants. However, fungi are neither plants nor animals but rather organisms that form their own kingdom of life.
The way they feed themselves is different from other organisms: they do not photosynthesize like plants and neither do they ingest their food like animals. Fungi actually live inside their food and secrete enzymes to dissolve nutrients they then absorb.
Included in this kingdom are yeasts, molds, mushrooms, wood-ears or conks, and several other different types of unicellular and multicellular organisms that live in marine, freshwater, desert and both young and old ecosystems on Earth. Basically, a morel and a chanterelle are as closely related as a flea and an elephant. The latter are both animals, the former are fungi.
Interestingly, fungi are more closely related to us animals than to plants, sharing a common ancestor in the form of an opisthokont, which is a cell with a posterior flagellum – like human spermatozoids.
Now to the central question: what would happen in a world without fungi? Most plants can’t live outside water and rely on fungi to survive. There would be no forests for you to hike in or any agriculture to feed you. Herbivores such as cows can’t break down grass without the fungi in their gut. Fermentation is possible only because of yeasts, which means that no fungi would mean no bread, no chocolate, no soy sauce, no beer or wine.
Moreover, without molds like koji many ancient civilizations could not have preserved food, other than using salt or smoking (imagine that for a second). For decades we have extracted enzymes from fungi to clean clothes in cold water (yes, it’s fungi that do that in your detergent), have bioengineered natural pesticides with entomopathogenic fungi that eliminate the toxic burden of synthetic pesticides, and have learned to use some species to maximize the amount of metal extracted from rocks in mining processes.
We have also discovered the cholesterol-lowering statins in fungi, life-saving antibiotics like penicillin, the medicines that allow for organ transplants to be successful, and we are now finally accepting and legalizing medicinal compounds made by fungi to treat urgent and life-threatening mental health ailments such as PTSD and depression.
As if that weren’t impressive enough, our ancestral and traditional ways of ritually reaching the celestial from the terrestrial almost all include fungi – from the ritual beverage Soma in Vedic cultures to communion with bread and wine in Roman Catholic cultures. Fungi matter – a lot.
Nevertheless, the entire kingdom is ignored in most biodiversity, climate change and environmental legal frameworks. And by the general public too: for too long macroscopic diversity and species on earth have been referred to using the now obsolete term flora & fauna, or just plants and animals instead of fauna, flora & funga, or animals, fungi and plants.
The third “f”, representing fungi, is acknowledged as the correct term to refer to the diversity of fungi of a given place. The IUCN species survival commission and the global NGO Re:Wild – among others – have adopted this terminology. It seems the time has finally come to leave mycological illiteracy behind.
Decomposition, or decay, is the very beginning of a fundamental natural process that enables life. There is no regeneration without degeneration of organic compounds, because energy is not lost, it is transformed – and it is the fungi that are heavily responsible for this vital transformation. For example, if we look at a fallen tree in the forest and imagine it is composed of building blocks, we can understand how decomposition works: fungi weave their way through the blocks, loosening them until they are “free” and ready to “rebuild” in another form.
For too long this process has been considered distasteful, under the once-upon-a-time understanding that life is a linear process. It is shocking to think that we can attribute any negativity to rot when we understand the incredible nature-based solutions it holds.
We can use rot for a more sustainable future too. For instance, mycelium – a mostly invisible group of fungi, such as mushrooms and conks – is a tangible and safe alternative to animal leather as well as plastic packaging, and is starting to revolutionize the fashion industry. Mycelium leathers and packaging are offering the opportunity to use fungi involved in decomposition as a source of clothing and durable, recyclable and natural materials that are more sustainable to produce.
Materials like Mylo Unleather and Made with Reishi, as well as incredible packaging materials made by Ecovative, are trailblazing for industry to move away from pollutant materials whose manufacturing process requires unsustainable amounts of water, toxins, and energy, and sometimes requires the end of an animal’s life.
As legendary mycologist Paul Stamets said during Paris and London fashion weeks on the Stella McCartney runways: “In fashion, mushrooms are the future.” He says this while he wears a hat made of amadou, a fungal felt or suede of ancient eastern European origin which demonstrates that fungi have a successful past in fashion too.
There is consensus among mycologists that we know only 10% of species diversity within kingdom fungi, at most. It is urgent to further species knowledge before species are lost forever and with them their potential. This goes beyond their use as materials or food: fungi sustain culturally important activities for rural communities all over the world. Thousands of families living in subsistence economies depend on the seasonal appearance of fungi as food and as a tradable product to be consumed both locally, nationally and internationally.
We must not ignore or underestimate the fact that fungi create ecosystems. How so? Well, let’s picture a cake: if we don’t put that binding ingredient like egg or aquafaba [bean liquid] into the mix, the sugar and flour do not stick together. In a forest, for example, plants and animals do not “stick” together without the fungi to create the ecosystem.
The science is clear: fungi are essential to maintaining a stable climate system (given their role in sequestering carbon in soil) and preserving ecosystemic health. Legislation, however, has not caught up. Across many environmental and conservation policies, fungi have been overlooked or undervalued. This oversight has consequences: when fungi are put at risk – endangering the ecosystems that depend on them – we miss opportunities to advance solutions to serious environmental problems like climate change and land degradation.
All mushrooms are magic. Take it from me, as someone who studies them. It’s time to say their name by acknowledging them all around - from the dinner table to international conservation policies - and including them in our conception of ecosystems that need to be cherished and protected. Say it with me: the world is inhabited by fauna, flora and funga.
Without fungi, the world as we know it would not exist. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/fungi-earth-secret-miracle-weapon?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The mycelium is the earth’s natural internet. ~ Paul Stamets
Fungi are the interface between life and death. ~ Paul Stamets
Bacteria use mycelium as superhighways for transporting them over vast distances microscopically. This alliance is mutually beneficial to both. This extraordinary insight into the interrelationships between bacteria and fungi may well lead to innovations we can barely begin to imagine. ~ Paul Stamets
Mary:
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IS THERE ANY DEFENSE AGAINST AN ONCOMING ASTEROID?
~ One cannot discount the possibility of larger objects coming uncomfortably close to Earth in the near future: Apophis, with its 1,214-foot (370 meter) diameter, is due to make a close pass on Friday the 13th in April 2029, while Bennu, at 1,608 feet (490 m) in diameter, is expected to perform a similar pass in 2036. Though they are not anticipated to hit Earth, even relatively small changes in their orbit could cause them to enter gravitational pockets called “keyholes” that can place them on a more direct trajectory toward Earth.
“If it goes through the gravitational keyhole, it will generally hit Earth on the next round,” Lubin says.
Strategies for planetary defense have progressed from research into better methods for understanding the threats, to efforts to deflect potential hazards and change their orbits, including a strategy developed by Philip Lubin’s group, which proposed the use of lasers to push threatening objects out of Earth’s way. (See their website for more information on laser-based planetary defense.)
“While we often say that nothing in life is certain but death and taxes, we can certainly also add human extinction to this list,” Lubin says. “There is a large asteroid or comet lurking in our solar system with ‘Earth’ written on it. We just do not know where it is or when it will hit.”
In the last 113 years, the Earth has been hit by two large asteroids that could have threatened the lives of millions, had they struck over a major city. However, humanity was lucky. In light of this very real threat, it is time to seriously plan for and execute a planetary defense program, the researchers say. PI allows for a logical and cost-effective approach to the ultimate environmental protection program. [PI stands for “pulverize it”]
SLICE AND DICE THE ASTEROID
Key to the PI strategy is the deployment of an array of penetrator rods, possibly filled with explosives, laid in the path of the asteroid to “slice and dice” the threatening object. The penetrator rods—about 4-12 inches (10-30 cm) in diameter and 6-10 feet long—fragment the asteroid or comet nucleus as it crashes into them at extreme speed.
Crucially, instead of deflecting the object, the strategy is to let the Earth take the hit, the researchers say, but first to disassemble the asteroid into smaller pieces—typically the size of a house—and let the fragments enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere can then absorb the energy and further vaporize the house-sized pieces into small debris that do not hit the ground.
Since the original asteroid now enters the atmosphere as a large, distributed cloud of small fragments, they spatially and temporally distribute the energy of the impact, which de-correlates the blast waves created by each fragment. This vastly reduces the threat from catastrophic to more of a “fireworks display,” complete with light and sound.
“If you can reduce the big events, which are dangerous, into a bunch of little events that are harmless, you’ve ultimately mitigated the threat,” Cohen says.
“What’s unique about this method is that you can have incredibly short response times,” Lubin adds. “A problem that other techniques like asteroid-deflecting methods have is that they are severely limited in their response times. In other words, they rely on getting an asset to deflect the threat all the way out to the asteroid long before it comes close to the Earth.”
Instead, the PI “slice and dice” method intercepts asteroids or comets as they approach the Earth and could be deployed by launch vehicles that already exist today, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and NASA’s SLS for larger targets. According to the physicists’ calculations, smaller targets like the Chelyabinsk meteor could be intercepted just minutes before impact using much smaller launchers similar to ICBM interceptors, while targets that pose a more serious threat, like Apophis, could be intercepted just 10 days prior to impact. Mitigation times this short are entirely unprecedented, according to the researchers.
PLANETARY DEFENSE OR OFFENSE?
Another part of the program is to consider a proactive approach to protecting our planet, the researchers say.
“Much as we get vaccinated to prevent future diseases, as we are now so painfully aware, we could vaccinate the planet by using the penetrator arrays like the needles of a vaccine shot to prevent a catastrophic loss of life in the future,” Lubin says.
In this approach, the same system can be used to proactively eliminate threatening objects like Apophis and Bennu to protect future generations.
“It is not well appreciated that large and threatening objects like the Apophis and Bennu asteroids are extremely serious,” he continues. “Should they strike, each of them has an energy at impact equal to all of the nuclear weapons on Earth combined. Imagine all of the Earth’s nuclear arsenal being detonated in a few seconds. With PI we can prevent this scenario.”
This new approach, according to Lubin and Cohen, could make planetary defense quite feasible and “easy as PI,” and would allow for a logical roadmap to a robust planetary defense system.
“Extraordinarily rapid response is possible,” Lubin says. “We don’t see any technological showstoppers. It’s synergistic with the current generation of launch vehicles and others that are coming out.” Additionally, Lubin adds, the method “would be in great synergy with future lunar operations,” with the moon potentially acting as a “forward base of operations.”
“Humanity could finally control its fate and prevent a future mass extinction like that of the previous tenants of the Earth who did not bother with planetary defense, the dinosaurs.”
To see how this system works, visit the UCSB Experimental Cosmology group’s PI-Terminal Planetary Defense project page.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/protect-earth-from-asteroids/
Asteroid PI defense
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A VACCINE AGAINST RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS?
~ Chakravarti has for years studied a PROTEIN CALLED 14-3-3 ZETA and its role in immune pathologies, including aortic aneurysms and interleukin-17— a cytokine associated with autoimmune diseases. Based on their prior work, the research group was focused on the protein as a potential trigger for rheumatoid arthritis.
Instead, they found the opposite.
Rather than preventing rheumatoid arthritis, researchers discovered that removing the protein through gene-editing technology caused severe early onset arthritis in animal models.
Working under a new theory that the 14-3-3 zeta protein protects against rheumatoid arthritis, the team developed a protein-based vaccine using purified 14-3-3 zeta protein grown in a bacterial cell.
They found the vaccine promoted a strong and immediate — but long-lasting — response from the body’s innate immune system, providing protection against the disease.
“Much to our happy surprise, the rheumatoid arthritis totally disappeared in animals that received a vaccine,” Chakravarti said. “Sometimes there is no better way than serendipity. We happened to hit a wrong result, but it turned out to be the best result. Those kinds of scientific discoveries are very important in this field.”
In addition to suppressing the development of arthritis, the vaccine also significantly improved bone quality — a finding that suggests there should be long-term benefits following immunization.
“We have not made any really big discoveries toward treating or preventing rheumatoid arthritis in many years,” Chakravarti said. “Our approach is completely different. This is a vaccine-based strategy based on a novel target that we hope can treat or prevent rheumatoid arthritis. The potential here is huge.”
Researchers have filed for a patent on their discovery and are seeking pharmaceutical industry partners to support safety and toxicity studies in hopes of establishing a preclinical trial. ~
https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/scientists-accidentally-discover-a-vaccine-against-rheumatoid-arthritis
Mary:
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IS EVEN SLEEP IS BEST IN MODERATION?
~ A multiyear study of older adults found that both short and long sleepers experienced greater cognitive decline than people who slept a moderate amount, even when researchers took into account the effects of early Alzheimer’s disease.
Poor sleep and Alzheimer’s disease are both associated with cognitive decline, and separating out the effects of each has proven challenging. By tracking cognitive function in a large group of older adults over several years and analyzing it against levels of Alzheimer’s-related proteins and measures of brain activity during sleep, the researchers generated crucial data that help untangle the complicated relationship among sleep, Alzheimer’s, and cognitive function.
“Our study suggests that there is a middle range, or ‘sweet spot,’ for total sleep time where cognitive performance was stable over time. Short and long sleep times were associated with worse cognitive performance, perhaps due to insufficient sleep or poor sleep quality. An unanswered question is if we can intervene to improve sleep, such as increasing sleep time for short sleepers by an hour or so, would that have a positive effect on their cognitive performance so they no longer decline? We need more longitudinal data to answer this question.”
Alzheimer’s is the main cause of cognitive decline in older adults, contributing to about 70% of dementia cases. Poor sleep is a common symptom of the disease and a driving force that can accelerate the disease’s progression. Studies have shown that self-reported short and long sleepers are both more likely to perform poorly on cognitive tests, but such sleep studies typically do not include assessments of Alzheimer’s disease.
To tease apart the separate effects of sleep and Alzheimer’s disease on cognition, Lucey and colleagues turned to volunteers who participate in Alzheimer’s studies through the university’s Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center. Such volunteers undergo annual clinical and cognitive assessments, and provide a blood sample to be tested for the high-risk Alzheimer’s genetic variant APOE4. For this study, the participants also provided samples of cerebrospinal fluid to measure levels of Alzheimer’s proteins, and each slept with a tiny electroencephalogram (EEG) monitor strapped to their foreheads for four to six nights to measure brain activity during sleep.
In total, the researchers obtained sleep and Alzheimer’s data on 100 participants whose cognitive function had been monitored for an average of 4 1/2 years. Most (88) had no cognitive impairments, 11 were very mildly impaired, and one had mild cognitive impairment. The average age was 75 at the time of the sleep study.
The researchers found a U-shaped relationship between sleep and cognitive decline. Overall, cognitive scores declined for the groups that slept less than 4.5 or more than 6.5 hours per night—as measured by EEG—while scores stayed stable for those in the middle of the range. EEG tends to yield estimates of sleep time that are about an hour shorter than self-reported sleep time, so the findings correspond to 5.5 to 7.5 hours of self-reported sleep, Lucey says.
The U-shaped relationship held true for measures of specific sleep phases, including rapid-eye movement (REM), or dreaming, sleep; and non-REM sleep. Moreover, the relationship held even after adjusting for factors that can affect both sleep and cognition, such as age, sex, levels of Alzheimer’s proteins, and the presence of APOE4.
“It was particularly interesting to see that not only those with short amounts of sleep but also those with long amounts of sleep had more cognitive decline,” says co-senior author David Holtzman, a professor of neurology. “It suggests that sleep quality may be key, as opposed to simply total sleep.”
Each person’s sleep needs are unique, and people who wake up feeling rested on short or long sleep schedules should not feel compelled to change their habits, Lucey says. But those who are not sleeping well should be aware that sleep problems often can be treated.
“I ask many of my patients, ‘How’s your sleep?'” says co-senior author Beau M. Ances, a professor of neurology who treats patients with dementia and other neurodegenerative conditions at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “Often patients report that they’re not sleeping well. Often once their sleep issues are treated, they may have improvements in cognition. Physicians who are seeing patients with cognitive complaints should ask them about their quality of sleep. This is potentially a modifiable factor.”
https://www.futurity.org/sleep-cognitive-decline-alzheimers-disease-2645932/
GAP IN COVID DEATHS BETWEEN RED AND BLUE STATES
~ The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.
Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.
Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent.
As a result, Covid deaths have been concentrated in counties outside of major metropolitan areas. Many of these are in red states, while others are in red parts of blue or purple states, like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Virginia and even California.
The future of Covid is uncertain, but I do think it’s possible that the partisan gap in Covid deaths reached its peak last month. There are two main reasons to expect the gap may soon shrink.
One, the new antiviral treatments from Pfizer and Merck seem likely to reduce Covid deaths everywhere, and especially in the places where they are most common. These treatments, along with the vaccines, may eventually turn this coronavirus into just another manageable virus.
Two, red America has probably built up more natural immunity to Covid — from prior infections — than blue America, because the hostility to vaccination and social distancing has caused the virus to spread more widely. A buildup in natural immunity may be one reason that the partisan gap in new Covid cases has shrunk recently.
Death trends tend to lag case trends by a few weeks, which suggests the gap in deaths will shrink in November.
Still, nobody knows what will happen next. Much of the recent decline in caseloads is mysterious, which means it may not last. And the immunity from vaccination appears to be much stronger than the immunity from infection, which means that conservative Americans will probably continue to suffer an outsized amount of unnecessary illness and death.
(Romania, where religious figures have pushed anti-vaccine disinformation, has the world’s highest Covid death rate.)
~ New York Times, the Morning newsletter, 11-8-21
ending on beauty:
TIME'S PASSAGE
I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.
~ Álvaro de Campos (one of the “heteronyms” of Fernando Pessoa)
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