Photo: Anna Stępień*
LILACS FROM PERSEPHONE
I take my other name
and enter autumn,
this harvest of myself. I ignite
stars of moss, agate veins.
To me return all heartbeats,
all stories and all names.
a new tenderness?
Smoky lilacs
I give you in memory
of rain-beaded blossoms —
lilacs in your arms,
the moist hearts of leaves.
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Insatiable girl, do you still
want more? That last
lavish summer, the wind
in leaf shimmer —
that’s the gold and gray
Tree of Knowledge singing
with memory of birds.
You who crave to know
more than peace, than rest,
take this phantom fruit
from forgotten hands.
~ Oriana
A friend described my poems as “songs of exile.” At first I was somewhat upset — after all, my poems show quite a diversity. On closer look, however, the theme of exile, of “paradise lost,” may show in an indirect way. Sure, the real lilacs have a heady scent and droplets of moisture filled with tiny rainbows that remembered lilacs can hardly render. And since everyone seems to love lilacs, that’s what might be called a public reference here, an obvious invocation of loss. But there is a private meaning to “that last / lavish summer, the wind // in leaf shimmer.” Was that last summer really more lavish than the other summers? There is no objective proof. The speaker tries to seduce us with lyrical beauty so that we feel what she feels.
On the objective level, there is a certain similarity to a very ancient story. What did I gain in exchange for choosing exile? Knowledge. Was it worth it? The poem can afford to lean toward “No,” but I, the author, cannot — not in real life. If I answer No, then I doom myself to everlasting regret (and for a while I did live in that regret, so I speak from the experience of the most bitter misery). If a choice cannot be undone, then you have to convince yourself that the gains outweigh the losses. Or you can acknowledge that it was a mistake, but you can move on and try to make the best of it. Keep counting your blessings.
Photo: Mikhail Iossel
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“We always feel younger than we are. I carry within myself my earlier faces as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is ‘me.’ The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.” ~ Tomas Tranströmer
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JOHN GUZLOWSKI: ME AND WORLD WAR I — A MEMORY OF VETERANS
~ I first heard of World War I when we came to America as Displaced Persons in 1951. We were refugees after World War II, and we moved into a basement apartment on Hamilton Street in Chicago.
Our landlord was a veteran of the World War I. He was a Polish-American named Ponchek. He was also a drunk, but that wasn’t anything special. There were a lot of drunks around. What made Ponchek special was that he had a steel plate in his head. As a kid and a recent immigrant to America, he was drafted and sent to France to stop the Germans who were trying to rip France apart and shove it into the Atlantic. He ended up in the trenches in France in late October of 1917 fighting the Germans, and a bullet took off the top of his head. The doctors cut away what bone they could, cleaned out the wound, and screwed a steel plate into the bone of his skull.
This fascinated me when I was a kid. I wondered a lot about that plate, and what it felt like. Did Ponchek always feel a weight pressing down on his head? Was it like wearing a steel hat? A steel helmet? And I wondered what they covered the plate with. Skin? And where did it come from? Was it his skin or someone else’s? I never could ask.
Like a lot of the veterans I knew, he was frightening. He wasn’t a guy you wanted to spend a lot of time talking to.
Veterans were men who limped. They dragged their legs behind them like Lon Chaney in the Mummy movie. They were men who had wooden legs that creaked when they walked past you and the other kids sitting on the stoop. These veterans had no arms or only one arm, or were missing fingers or hands, or ears.
My dad, a guy who lost his left eye when he was clubbed by a Nazi guard in a concentration camp, used to go to a bar where the owner had a black, shiny rubber hand. He lost his real hand during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 when he shoved a homemade grenade into the steel treads of a German tank. The black rubber hand was like some kind of weird toy. Sometimes, it looked like a black fist, sometimes it looked like an eight ball.
A lot of times, a guy without arms or legs sat in front of this bar. He had a cloth hat in front of him, and he sold pencils. He’d sit there smiling, making chitchat with the guys walking in and out of the bar. You’d toss him a nickel, and you could take a pencil, but most guys didn’t. Who needed a pencil.
Ponchek was a veteran too, and — like I said — he was a drunk and a man with a steel plate in his head. One time he and his two buddies got so drunk that they all came down to our basement apartment and tried to force my mother into giving them money for whiskey. There she was alone in a house with her two little kid, me and my sister Danusha, and this drunk and his two drunk buddies came around trying to take money from her. Ponchek told my mom that she hadn’t paid the rent, and that if she didn’t paid him, he would throw her out on the street. What kind of guy would do that?
My mom pushed Ponchek down and kicked him, and she took a broom and beat him and his friends as they tried to get away from her. My mom was a veteran too; she survived two and a half years in a slave labor camp.
Three or four years later, my mom and dad and my sister and me visited Ponchek in the big Veterans Administration hospital on the south side of Chicago. We didn’t have a car, and so we had to take buses, and it seemed like it took forever to get to the hospital. This must have been about 1956 or 1957. The hospital was full of veterans, men from World War I and World War II and the Korean War.
Ponchek was dying of some kind of stomach cancer, and he was in a lot of pain. We came to say goodbye to him. We found him in a bed in the corridor because there were no available rooms.
He sure was happy to see us. My parents had brought him some cigarettes, and my dad gave him one, and lit it for him. My sister and I stood there watching my mom and dad and Ponchek smoke and talk. They talked about those old days on Hamilton and the good times they had.
They didn’t mention his steel plate and his drinking and his craziness. ~
John Guzlowski https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/guzlowski/ja-i-pierwsza-wojna-swiatowa/?fbclid=IwAR098qPjDQ7-LRK-5vhwb_7sOEdMrgJb4Nr2Up9e8w1HuYe-FHTo719UxiQ
Joe Milosch:
The only WWI veteran that I knew was my great Uncle Leo. His family farmed in Michigan, and as a boy, he hated farm work. When the Great War started, he enlisted and planned never to return to the farm.
After the war, he returned hungry to work the land, surprising the entire family. What happened to him in North-Eastern France was never discovered. He refused to discuss his experiences. Upon his return, he refused to leave the family farm, and for the rest of his life, he never went to town, church, or a bar.
His brother ran the business end, and my uncle tended the crops and livestock. The citizens of the small agricultural town he lived in said the war made him crazy. During school, children teased my mother’s cousins unmercifully. My mom was close to my uncle’s daughter, her cousin, Martha. She and her husband were taking over the farm. After I received my draft notice in 1971, we visited them.
Helping him in the barn, I told him I was going into the army and asked what he thought about his war. The trenches always had two to five inches of water in them. It surprised me how fast the rats swam, he said. Then, he surprised me by saying, the hippies have it right. Everyone should protest the war.
Later, I repeated what he said to my mother and Martha. See how the war affected his mind, she said to my mom. During my tour in the army, my great uncle died, and I thought how strange it was to survive the trenches of France and have a short trench be his grave. Still, it was an act of honor to bury him in the soil he worked as he endured the consequences of the war for fifty-plus years.
WWI, Belleau WoodMary:
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MARK TWAIN: FAMILY HISTORY
~ John Clemens was only 11 years old when his father died in 1798. As a result of his father’s death John and his family left their home in Campbell County, Virginia and moved to Kentucky. In order to help support himself and his family, John dropped out of school and took a job working as a clerk in an iron mine. Later, as a young man he studied law and he eventually became a lawyer and a county judge. Although he served his community and was a good citizen, John was a poor businessman, and his poor decisions eventually required his family to move to Missouri.
Then history repeated itself.
When John died in 1847 his son Sam was only 11 years old. Just as his father had done, Sam quit school (he was in the 5th grade at the time) and took a job as a printer’s apprentice. Over the course of his life Sam too was a poor businessman, but he made quite a name for himself (literally) as a writer.
Samuel Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835. Sam is better known to the world today by his pen name—Mark Twain. ~
Mark Twain (then Samuel Clemens) at age 15.
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“Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe.” ~ George Saunders
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WE HAVE TO DIE TO KNOW WE WERE HAPPY~ ARISTOTLE
The first, happy year with M, he once said to me, “If I had to die right now, I wouldn't mind. I could just go anytime. “ I knew what he meant: life had finally granted him the fulfillment he wanted. He was so sated with happiness that he felt calm and accepting — and willing to let go of life with gratitude.
I knew, because even at a very unhappy time in my youth I experienced a similar serenity and a similar perception of being ready to die, even though I was only 28. Just before my most serious surgery ever, I realized (an unforgettable minute when it all flowed to me) that, for all the misery I’d also experienced, life had given me great gifts and blessings. I had known great love; I didn’t know motherhood, but I didn’t resent it because now I didn’t have to worry about leaving an orphan. I had had the best of literature, art, and music; I’d seen gorgeous scenery; my Polish summers were a paradise of nature, even the time I got chased by hissing geese that nipped my shins. Even that memory was precious; I was glad to have been chased by angry geese.
I felt reconciled to the possibility of dying, even though I hadn’t yet accomplished anything to speak of (and I was raised in the worship of achievement). That was irrelevant somehow. What was relevant was how much I’d been given. I felt peaceful and accepting: life had been generous to me; I didn’t feel cheated.
Occasionally this theme appears in poetry: in Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” Sexton’s “Starry Night,” Hölderlin’s “To the Fates.” Hölderlin says he’ll enter the world of shadows content after he’s had his fill of singing: “Once I lived as the gods; more is not needed.” Keats and Sexton want to die sated with beauty: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”; “Oh starry, starry night! This is how I want to die.”
And there is Jack Gilbert’s wonderful title: “We Have Already Lived In the Real Paradise.” It’s all in the title; more is not needed.
It’s not dying we dread, but not having fully tasted of life’s riches.
Vincent Van Gogh: Starry night on the Rhone, 1888
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Oriana:
I think very few people get exactly what they want, and nobody gets all they want. The challenge is not to stew in disappointment but to embrace the challenge of making the most of what you do get. And once in a while, we get more than we ever thought we would — though sometimes that’s a lesson that confirms St. Teresa’s “More tears are shed over answered prayers than over the unanswered ones.”
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My all time favorite subject line was, “How To Attract Men With Larger Breasts” ~ Shirley Worth (Facebook, a discussion of spam)
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HOW TO LOWER STRESS
~ You’ve no doubt heard the story of Viktor Frankl, the inspiring psychiatrist who survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. He observed firsthand the profound difference between his fellow prisoners who lost hope—and soon died—compared with those who found a purpose. Focusing on that purpose allowed them to take back some measure of psychological control. The difference was literally life and death.
What if I told you that same powerful difference in focus and mindset is impacting you right now?
Viktor Frankl knew something science would later verify: perception can mediate the effects of stress. In other words, two people faced with exactly the same stressful situation can have very different physical and emotional reactions. How does that happen? To answer that question, let’s take a look at some fascinating research about the power of feeling in control.
THE POWER OF CONTROL
A classic study of two rats (D.L Helmreich et al) reveals an important insight about the role control plays in the experience of stress. The two rats are in separate cages connected to the same electrical circuit. The circuit administers random shocks through the metal floor of their cage. One rat has a lever in its cage that enables it to turn off the shocks while the other rat does not.
The rat with the lever in its cage is called “the executive rat,” because it has control. It has the power to turn off the electric current flowing through the cage. The rat with no control is called the “subordinate rat.”
When the experiment begins, both the executive rat and the subordinate rat show signs of stress, indicated by a sudden surge of the stress hormone, cortisol. Then, something interesting happens. The executive rat’s stress levels drop back to normal, while the subordinate rat’s stress remains high. Why? In a word, control.
The executive rat has discovered that it can turn off the stressful stimulus (the random shocks) by pressing the lever in its cage. For the executive rat, it’s as if the physiological effects of its stressful situation have been turned off completely. In contrast, the subordinate rat’s health steadily declines due to the stress, leading to secondary effects including a suppressed immune system.
Here’s what’s happening. The electrical shock is the stressor, and both rats experience exactly the same amount of that stressful stimulus. Yet one rat feels in control of the stress. He can turn it off at will. On a psychological level, this makes all the difference.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMMUNITY TO STRESS
The stress we experience is based on our perception of what’s going to happen next. If we anticipate a threatening situation, our body releases stress hormones to prepare us to face the threat.
But if we believe we have control over a threatening stimulus, then we don’t need to prepare for that threat in the same way. We don’t need to be on full alert with the fight-or-flight response gearing us up for survival. How can we regain a sense of control when faced with stress and uncertainty?
Let’s return to the story of Viktor Frankl. Faced with unimaginable hardship, he had no idea how long the torment would continue. There was no guarantee of rescue, and many of his companions died of starvation, illness, or worse. What did he do differently to cope with the stress?
He changed the focus of his attention. Frankl searched for meaning and purpose in the smallest daily actions, like caring for a friend or saving a scrap of string that might be useful later. He also found long-term meaning and purpose in the idea of survival itself. He reminded himself continuously that surviving this hardship would be meaningful to his family and friends. They needed him to come back to them alive.
This change in focus—from the many uncontrollable aspects of life to the few controllable ones—can have a profound effect. That’s because our perception of reality is, to a large extent, created by the focus of our attention.
Are you facing the stress of an uncertain future? If so, it helps to focus on what you can control. Sometimes that means bringing the finish line closer by setting goals for today or this week instead of trying to figure out what you’ll do if you lose your job three months from now. Sometimes, it means making a list of 10 ways you can stay connected with friends and choosing the best one to put into action.
Our human tendency is to focus on threats and problems. For the sake of our emotional wellness, it makes sense to modify that automatic tendency. You can’t control the stressors that come your way, but you can influence the focus of your own attention. That’s why we recommend you focus on the things that give you back a feeling of control.
Want another tool to combat stress? Counterintuitively, one of the best things we can add to your toolbelt is an entirely different belief about stress—one befriending it instead of battling against it.
THE POWER OF YOUR BELIEFS
In her TED talk, psychologist Dr. Kelly McGonigal revealed an important insight that changed her own mind about stress. After decades educating people about the dangers of stress and imploring them to reduce stress for the sake of their health, Dr. McGonigal discovered an unexpected trend in the data.
When people believed stress was something bad that must be avoided, it had a far worse impact on their health. In contrast, among those who perceive stress as a normal part of pursuing goals, there was no correlation between higher stress and poor health outcomes.
Once again, how we perceive stress matters. If you believe stress itself is a threat, something you must reduce for the sake of your health, and yet can’t effectively reduce it, you feel trapped. You have no control, just like the rat getting shocked at random.
Feeling out of control makes us feel even more stress, perpetuating the harmful cycle. Perhaps it’s time to consider an alternative view of stress. What if we stopped seeing stress as something abnormal or threatening to your future health and instead thought of it as something that empowers us to be our best?
STRESS FOR SUCCESS?
In his book, The Power of Full Engagement, peak performance coach Jim Loehr recommends oscillating back and forth between pushing hard and relaxing. Observing both athletes and executives, Loehr noticed that we engage more fully in our work if we push hard for periods of time and then pull back toward rest and recovery.
An athlete who knows there’s a short break around the corner is capable of pushing harder during periods of extreme exertion. And if you think about this in the context of your own life, it probably makes sense. It’s easy to push hard for the last two days of work before a vacation, or even the last hour of a typical workday. That’s because you know you’re about to get a break.
When you intentionally push yourself outside of your comfort zone and schedule periods of rest and recuperation, something interesting happens—your capacity to endure stress increases. It’s as if you’ve created a new set point for what feels normal.
For example, an entrepreneur who feels constantly pressed for time during her nine-hour workday might experiment with doing a 14-hour workday once per week for three weeks. Each of these long workdays is followed by a shortened workday of only six hours. In this case, she is stretching her sense of what’s possible by working longer than what feels comfortable. Then she recovers, taking it easy the next day.
The effect is less stress. Can you guess why? She has expanded her sense of what’s possible. She feels in control of the stressor (time pressure to get things done), because she knows that if the worst comes to worst, she can put in a few longer work days to get caught up. Things no longer feel out of control.
Alternatively, she can practice timeboxing. This time management tool gives her better control over the focus of her attention when too many things are competing for her time. Timeboxing allows her to translate her highest priorities into blocks of time she’s reserved to get the most critical things done. Once again, the result is a feeling of control.
Since stress comes from feeling out of control, you can sometimes put yourself back in the driver’s seat, deliberately steering toward stress so you have greater control over deciding when to steer away toward rest.
ACHIEVE MORE WITH LESS STRESS
You don’t have to choose between a healthy life and a life of full engagement with high, hard goals. You can have both.
The way to have both is to take control of the stress you put on yourself. By proactively seeking stress in forms that further your goals, you can change your set point for what feels overwhelming. Doing so will eliminate the feeling that stress is happening to you. It’s instead something chosen by you. You’re taking control of stress before it takes control of you.
If done correctly, as you steer toward stress, difficult challenges will begin to feel more like an adventure. Emotionally, you’ll experience a sense of thriving and empowerment as you navigate your way toward difficult goals rather than a feeling of being crushed by their weight. Then, when you steer away from stress, you’ll experience a deeper level of relaxed contentment that contributes to your well-being, both mentally and physically.
Bottom line—stress isn’t your enemy. It’s not even a bad thing. Stress is, in a very real way, what you make of it. You can take control of it, or you can let it control you. The choice is yours. ~
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Oriana:
The sense of control is extremely important. Remember the rat that could press a lever to turn off the electric shock. And it should be added that the executive rat is healthier and lives longer than the helpless rat. This is one of the classic findings in the field of human life expectancy as well: bosses live longer than subordinates.
Another way to say it is that autonomy protects from stress. A college professor has more autonomy than a factory worker. People prefer jobs that provide them at least some autonomy, even if the salary is lower.
However, we don’t always have that sort of stress-cancelling lever (or "leverage"). Likewise, we don’t always have the ability to establish our own schedule. For those who do, yes, by all means experiment with different hours on alternate days or whatever you please — the result just might be both more productivity and better health.
But all of us have the power to adopt a particular attitude toward anything we do. Frankl spoke a lot about “meaning.” “Sense of purpose” is also a useful term, but for me, meaning is broader and more powerful. Work must have a meaning. Once you gain clarity about the meaning of your work, that pretty much does everything. As Nietzsche said, he who has the “why” of his life can endure almost any “how.”
The meaning need not be something lofty like helping humanity. Perhaps you find yourself in a boring job that in itself doesn’t have much meaning. However, if you do it well, there’s a good chance you’ll get a promotion, or at least a good letter of recommendation when you apply for another job. In this case, you create an external meaning. Sometimes it’s the only way.
Also, with practically any job, you acquire skills that can be used elsewhere. My boring secretarial jobs showed me that office skills (including a diplomatic way of communicating in difficult situations) come very handy to a writer. “I'm learning new skills” is certainly a productive attitude.
Sometimes you don’t like your job, but you enjoy the company of your co-workers. You can focus on the social aspect as your blessing. Or there may be a venue for creativity. A librarian friend of mine enjoyed producing beautiful displays of books, plants, photographs, and the like. In service jobs, remember how useful you are (Frankl would certainly approve of that). Driving a truck? You are more useful by far than a corporate lawyer.
And on and on. Whatever you focus on, grows — that goes for both the negative and positive things in life.
And of course humor is a great de-stressor. The photo below never fails to make me laugh.
Mary: SHIFT THE LOCUS OF ATTENTION; CREATE MEANING
How to lower stress is a topic particularly important as we enter the third pandemic year. The crux truly is, as the rats demonstrated, what control do we have? The feeling of helplessness is a trap that can lead to despair if it can't be alleviated or modified in some way. One essential tool is, as Frankl noted, to shift the focus of your attention. I remember a story from his work about an event in the concentration camp where prisoners on one occasion left their meagre bowls of soup to go out and see a particularly beautiful sunset. It almost beggars belief, but the experience of natural beauty may be as essential and sustaining as food even to the starving.
When I am hit with depression, a life long enemy, I have gathered a set of strategies that have truly functioned as survival strategies. The shift of attention is a primary and effective tool. Just to look up, look outside the self, pay attention to the world, which always offers us beauties, if we can only see. Go to the things you love, that will refresh and sustain, whether music and art, simple creature comforts, or time in a natural setting, and give them your complete attention.
The other means of handling stress is to actively work...it hardly matters what you are working on, whatever you do is giving you agency and control, a real sense of accomplishment and empowerment. You will no longer feel like the helpless rat without a control lever, waiting for the next shock. Once you establish yourself as having the power to work you can regulate periods of work and rest, you can treat yourself with kindness instead of always seeing yourself as falling short, as failure, as unfortunate victim.
Frankl talks about meaning as crucial to health and survival, and meaning is something you must either find or create. It's always an active process, even if your meaning is centered in a particular religion, philosophy or system of thought.
Acceptance, belief, and particularly action comes with making choices, developing understanding, and being convinced...Convictions are the end of a process of learning, discovery and identification, they are not easy and ready made, unseen and unexamined. We create meaning and purpose simply because there is no living without them.
Oriana:
I agree. Work, especially the work we love, is an excellent de-stressor. This may sound paradoxical, since we often think of work as stressful. But even if it’s not the kind of work we love, any work, as long as we give ourselves to it whole-heartedly, is marvelous therapy. It took me a while to learn that.
And yes, looking at the beautiful world around us is an excellent antidote as well. Life is a long process of learning how to deal with stress, and some people, alas, turn to drugs and alcohol (though that takes a genetic predisposition). '
And, if nothing else, there is away this Old Reliable: "This too shall pass."
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IN SPITE OF THATCHER AND REAGAN, SOCIETY EXISTS
~ In March 2020, Boris Johnson, pale and exhausted, self-isolating in his flat on Downing Street, released a video of himself – that he had taken himself – reassuring Britons that they would get through the pandemic, together. “One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society,” the prime minister announced, confirming the existence of society while talking to his phone, alone in a room.
All this was very odd. Johnson seemed at once frantic and weak (not long afterwards, he was admitted to hospital and put in the intensive care unit). Had he, in his feverishness, undergone a political conversion? Because, by announcing the existence of society, Johnson appeared to renounce, publicly, something Margaret Thatcher had said in an interview in 1987, in remarks that are often taken as a definition of modern conservatism. “Too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’” Thatcher said. “They are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing!” She, however, had not contracted Covid-19.
Of course, there is such a thing as society. The question now is how the pandemic has changed it. Speculating about what might happen next requires first deciphering these statements, and where they came from. Johnson was refuting not only Thatcher, but also Ronald Reagan. Thatcher’s exclamation about the non-existence of society and the non-ability of government to solve anyone’s problems echoed a declaration made by Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
Thatcher and Reagan often conflated the two – to diminish both – but society and government mean different things. Society usually means the private ties of mutual obligation and fellowship that bind together people who have different backgrounds and unequal education, resources and wealth. Government is the public administration of the affairs of people constituted into a body politic as citizens and equals. Society invokes community, government polity.
According to the Reagan-Thatcher worldview, there is no such thing as society. There are only families, who look after one another, and individuals, who participate in markets. The idea that government is the solution to people’s problems rests on a mistaken belief in the existence of society. This mistaken belief leads to attempts to solve problems such as ill health with government programs such as government-funded healthcare, as if these were problems of society, rather than problems of individuals. Government programs like these will also interfere with the only place where real solutions are to be found, which is the free market.
Not many worldviews build worlds but, long before the pandemic, this one did. It not only contributed to the dismantling of social supports in the US and the UK, but also undergirds the architecture and ethos of the internet, which is ungoverned, deregulated, privatized and market-driven – a remote and barren wasteland where humans are reduced to “users”, individuals, alone.
This year, while the world begins to remake itself, and as each of us, like so many hermit crabs crawling along the blinding sand, try to get our bearings, it may be that the future of society can be found in its past. Even before the pandemic, intellectuals and policymakers on both the left and the right had been raising alarms about the future of society, launching initiatives designed to pin, stitch and darn the world’s tattered “social fabric”. In 2018, the American conservative columnist David Brooks founded Weave: The Social Fabric Project, advocating “a life for community rather than a life for self”. Last year, Onward, a conservative thinktank in the UK, founded Repairing Our Social Fabric, a program aimed at offering “a comprehensive understanding of the state of community in Britain”. Nor have these calls come only from conservatives. More in Common, a nonpartisan, multinational research organization, undertakes projects designed, for instance, to “strengthen the parts of Germany’s social fabric that remain intact”.
The expression “the social fabric” was coined in the 1790s, the age of the machine loom, when observers worried that the growth of factories and cities, and the movement from farms and towns, was leaving people isolated and alone. Over the next century, all sorts of thinkers, from the Romantics, De Tocqueville and Marx to Hegel and the utopian socialists, agreed that something called “society” was coming apart. They disagreed about solutions but, broadly, for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, liberals placed their faith in liberal democracy. In the US, faith in society was a hallmark of progressive and New Deal-era liberalism, especially during the Great Depression. “The faith of a liberal is a profound belief not only in the capacities of individual men and women,” Franklin D Roosevelt said in 1935, “but also in the effectiveness of people helping each other.”
But by then, in much of the industrial world, in an age of bone-breaking economic inequality, the suffering masses had grown so impoverished, lonely and alienated that they bent before authoritarians. Fears of economic collapse, civilizational decay and social disintegration go back to antiquity. People are forever warning that the sky is falling. But in the 1930s and 40s, the sky fell. After the second world war, the anguished investigation into the rise of totalitarianism shattered liberals’ faith in society, and “gave rise to a theory of mass society that rooted totalitarianism in modernity itself”, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross has recently argued. As Ross writes: “The threat to liberal democracy of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union brought these fears into focus: the atomized individuals of mass society were ready supporters of totalitarian movements and the false solidarity they promised.”
Conservative thinkers blamed the fraying fabric of society – and the masses’ vulnerability to totalitarianism – not on the dislocations and inequality wrought by industrial capitalism, but on the growing power of the state. In a 1953 book called The Quest for Community, the American sociologist Robert Nisbet lamented the modern state’s “successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances”. He believed that it was not capitalism but secularism and statism (especially, in the US, the New Deal) that had loosened social bonds, leading to “personal alienation and cultural disintegration”. He contrasted the pathology of modern life with “earlier times” (when “family, church, local community drew and held the allegiances of individuals in earlier times”). In earlier times, people knew where they stood, and they took care of one another, and didn’t look to the government to help them out when things got difficult.
Conservatives had long placed their faith not in society, but in the free market. But the gap between liberalism and conservatism closed in the 1950s, when liberal intellectuals, terrified at the prospect of a collapse of liberal democracies into totalitarianism, lost faith in the idea of society and abandoned their commitment to social democracy. In the 1960s, liberals would seem to have renewed their commitment to the idea of society – by way of the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – but this, for Ross, was a mere blip, a slight detour, in liberals’ decades-long abandonment of the social. “The political resurgence of social liberalism during the 1960s did not last,” Ross writes, “for it provoked a political and intellectual resurgence of conservatism and the fragmentation of liberal politics and social thought.”
In the middle decades of the 20th century, people on all sides seemed to agree about the problem: the vulnerability of rootless, ignorant mass society to political persuasion and propaganda. But they had different ideas about both its causes and the solution. Nisbet and his conservative kin, blaming the state, placed their faith in a laissez-faire free market and a return to institutions more powerful in “earlier times”: the family, the church. Black civil rights activists called on the communal traditions of the Black church and the Nation of Islam. The New Left, which began as a movement of students, placed its faith in the university and, ultimately, in cultural rather than social or political change. But everyone seemed to agree that no matter what they tried, social bonds kept weakening.
The world wide web is the 21st century’s machine loom. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric,” said the venture capitalist and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya in 2017. Critics lately argue that the social network is destroying the social fabric, but the people who built the social network thought it would repair the social fabric. Facebook’s actual mission statement – part of its terms of service – is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. Technological utopians have always believed that if the machinery of industrialism had torn apart the social fabric, another machine could repair it. Technologies of transportation and communication always seemed especially promising: bringing people closer together, faster. The telegraph, the telephone, the radio, television, cable television, the internet, the so-called world wide web, its wispy threads gathering us all together.
In 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times who wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Quest for Community, published The Decadent Society. Its arguments rest on a Nisbet essay about how golden ages end when the balance between individual and community is lost, in favor of rampant individualism and what Douthat calls decadence. In another 2020 book, A Time to Build, Yuval Levin, the founding editor of the conservative magazine National Affairs, quoted at length from Nisbet’s work. Nisbet wrote of a “twilight age”, marked by the “decline and erosion of institutions” and a strong “sense of estrangement from community”. This is the sort of thing Levin means when he writes that “we are living in an era marked by vacuum of allegiance”.
For Douthat, who is less interested in loneliness than in cultural decay, the fall began in 1969, when men landed on the moon, and can be followed, among other places, in American cinema, with its endless remakes of old movies. (How many more Star Wars and superhero movies can be left to make?) This comes straight out of Nisbet, and Douthat acknowledges that debt. “The creative burst can last just so long,” Nisbet wrote, “and then everything becomes routine, imitation, convention, and preoccupation, with form over substance.”
Arguments made in the shadow of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin do, eventually, become obsolete. In many parts of the world, totalitarianism remains a danger, not from the state but from corporations that control data, knowledge and information. There is no escape. They know everything about you. You can hardly engage in a transaction – political, financial, cultural or social – without them. It’s less that the social fabric has grown frayed, its edges unravelling, than that the so-called social fabric is now manufactured, for profit, by monopolistic businesses, a cheap, throwaway fake.
What’s needed is nothing less than a new social contract for public goods, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, public health, community centers, public education, grants for small businesses, public funding for the arts. It won’t be a new New Deal. The dangers are graver because decades of a world, both real and virtual, shaped by Reaganism and Thatcherism, has left the waters rising, all around us, and the forests on fire. Governments rest on a social contract, an agreement to live together. That contract needs renewing. But the problem, in the end, isn’t with society, or the social fabric. It’s with governments that have abandoned their obligations of care.
Liberalism didn’t kill society. And conservatism didn’t kill society. Because society isn’t dead. But it is pallid and fretful, like a shut-in staring all day long at nothing but a screen, mistaking a mirror for a window. Inside, online, there is no society, only the simulation of it. But, outside, on the grass and the pavement, in the woods and on the streets, in playgrounds and schoolyards and ballparks, in council flats and shops and pubs and agricultural fairs and libraries and union halls, society hums along, if not with the deafening thrum of a steam-driven machine, then with the hand-oiled, creaking clatter of an old-fashioned wooden loom. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/society-thatcher-reagan-covid-pandemic?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
The great sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim was the first to observe that capitalism, while in some ways liberating, was a factor in increasing individualism, the dark side of which is the weakening of the influence of family and church, and other institutions that create a sense of belonging (spectator sports may be a fascinating exception here). Basically we are still seeking new ways of belonging.
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TAKING CARBON OUT OF THE AIR — IS IT DOABLE?
~ It was undoubtedly the most august gathering ever convened on the uninhabited lava plains of Hellisheidi, Iceland. Some 200 guests were seated in the modernist three-story visitors’ center of a geothermal power plant—the country’s prime minister and an ex-president, journalists from New York and Paris, financiers from London and Geneva, and researchers and policy wonks from around the world. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on miles of moss-carpeted rock, luminously green in the September morning sunlight. Transmission towers marched away to the horizon, carrying energy from the power plant to the capital, Reykjavik, half an hour’s drive away.
The occasion: the formal unveiling of the world’s biggest machine for sucking carbon out of the air. The geothermally powered contraption represented a rare hopeful development in our climatically imperiled world—a way to not just limit carbon emissions but shift them into reverse.
Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald, cofounders of Climeworks, the company behind the carbon capture plant, strode up to the front of the room together. “This year could turn into a turning point in how climate change is perceived,” said Wurzbacher. “Thirty years down the road, this can be one of the largest industries on the planet,” enthused Gebald.
These are some mighty bold claims for a small industrial plant in a tiny, peripheral country. Climeworks’ facility is capable of pulling down only about 4,000 tons of carbon per year—an eye-dropper’s worth of the 40 billion tons the world emits annually. The plant uses a technique known as direct air capture, in which enormous fans suck in vast amounts of air from our despoiled atmosphere and run it over chemical-laden filters. It’s similar in principle to the tech that factories and refineries use to scrub CO2 from their exhaust streams. But what’s potentially much better about direct air capture is that it can be deployed anywhere, and it removes carbon already in the atmosphere, whether it was belched out 10 years ago by a cement factory in Alabama or last week by a pickup truck in Zanzibar.
True believers have been trying to turn the idea into reality for at least 20 years. For most of that time they were ignored by investors, dismissed by scientists, and regarded with suspicion by environmentalists, who worry the technology will give businesses license to keep on polluting. Now the ground is shifting rapidly. The Climeworks facility is just the first of a handful of large direct air capture plants slated to go up in the next several years, propelled by nine-figure investments and the support of powerful allies, including in the US government.
But direct air capture faces huge obstacles. Despite carbon’s enormous impact down at ground level, it is barely a trace element in the air—only about 415 out of every 1 million atmospheric particles are CO2. Imagine putting a single drop of ink into an Olympic-size swimming pool; the challenge of direct air capture is akin to taking that drop back out. The cost is staggering: To pull in any meaningful amount of carbon requires armies of giant machines and titanic amounts of energy to run them. Then there is the question of how to get all that energy. If you burn carbon-spewing fossil fuels to run your carbon-capturing machines, you’re kind of defeating the point. Finally, there is the carbon itself; once you’ve gathered up a few million tons of CO2, what do you do with it?
The rooftop machine is a small operation, but its launch marked the first time anyone had managed to use direct air capture to gather carbon and then sell it. It brought Climeworks plenty of admiring press, a visit from Greta Thunberg, and some $30 million in investment. With that plant, “we blew away the first layer of criticism” by proving that the technology works, Gebald says. But there aren’t enough incinerators to heat thousands of direct air capture machines, and greenhouses can’t absorb gigatons of carbon dioxide. To level their system up to the next order of magnitude, Wurzbacher and Gebald still had to contend with the questions of where the energy would come from and where the captured carbon would go.
Carbfix, a subsidiary of publicly owned Reykjavik Energy, was developing a system to sequester carbon by injecting it into underground geologic formations. Reykjavik Energy also happens to operate a couple of nice, clean geothermal power plants. Grímsson made some introductions, and soon after, Gebald and Wurzbacher were hammering out a partnership with Carbfix.
Icelandic officials may have been welcoming, but Iceland itself was less so. Wurzbacher and Gebald built a small experimental plant with a single intake fan near Hellisheidi in 2017, but in short order “it literally froze,” Gebald says. One day when the temperature dropped below zero, steam from the geothermal plant hit the machine’s bare metal, covering it in ice. Another time, a giant storm almost carried away the whole multiton structure. “We had to bolt it to the ground,” Gebald says.
Four years and many hitches later, Climeworks’ new plant, dubbed Orca (after both killer whales and the Icelandic word for “energy”), came online. It sits in the verdant volcanic plain, a short drive from the visitors’ center where the opening ceremony was held. Eight olive-green steel boxes the size of shipping containers stand on concrete risers, connected by elevated pipes to a low white building that is the control center. The steel vessels, dubbed CO2 collectors, are fronted by large black fans that pull in rivers of air.
Inside the collector boxes, the air runs over filters coated with amine-based sorbents and other materials that grab hold of the CO2 molecules. The carbon eventually saturates the filters, like water bloating a sponge. At that point, sliding gates seal off the air intake, and hot air is piped in from the control center to heat the filters to around 100 degrees Celsius, which releases the CO2. Vacuums then pull the free-floating molecules to the control center, where gleaming tanks, ducts, and other hardware compress the gas. It’s then piped over to a handful of igloo-sized geodesic steel domes a couple miles away, squatting on the plain like emergency housing for Martians.
Carbfix technicians and machines handle the next steps. Inside the domes, a powerful motor pushes an incoming stream of water down into an injection well. The CO2 pipeline dumps the gas into the water. “It’s an underground Soda Stream!” says Sandra Snæbjörnsdóttir, a Carbfix scientist with shoulder-length brown hair and earnest green eyes framed by tortoise-shell glasses who helped design the system. A few hundred meters down, the soda stream flows into the ground, where it reacts with basalt deposits that turn it into a solid mineral. In other words, the climate-warming carbon gas is turned into stone, like the villain in a fairy tale. “It’s essentially nature’s way of storing CO2,” says Snæbjörnsdóttir. There’s plenty of room for this tactic. Worldwide, there are probably enough suitable geologic formations to store trillions of tons of carbon.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Climeworks’ principal rival is racing to build a facility that will also enable a giant corporation to bury carbon—but for quite a different purpose.
Steve Oldham, a middle-aged Brit from Manchester, is CEO of that rival company, Carbon Engineering.
The demonstration plant set up in 2015 is still there, a cobbled-together collection of machines inside a beat-up, corrugated-metal building inherited from the chemical company that used to occupy the site. Powered largely by natural gas, the machine sucked in about a ton of carbon per day. When I visited, a construction crew was working on a bigger facility that is expected to come fully online in 2022.
The plant, which will capture only about 1,000 tons of carbon per year, will serve as an experimental lab for much larger facilities coming soon. First up: a 1 million-ton-per-year plant that’s slated to break ground in Texas in 2022. Systems in Scotland and Norway are in the design phases and will capture 500,000 to 1 million tons per year.
Carbon Engineering’s tech works on the same basic principles as Climeworks’, but the two companies have very different business models. That million-ton plant in Texas is a partnership with a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, a major oil and gas company based in Houston. Oxy, as it’s commonly known, plans to inject the captured carbon into the ground to push more oil into its wells, a process known as enhanced oil recovery. The CO2will stay underground—but putting it there will drive more fossil fuels into the maw of the American economy, which will belch them back out as greenhouse gases. In other words, the plant will capture carbon and use it to help put more carbon into the air.
Back in Oldham’s office after our tour, I ask him: Doesn’t that seem counterproductive? “We get this criticism a lot,” he tells me, leaning back in his chair.
“I’m a pragmatist,” he says. “We’re pulling as much CO2 out of the air as is contained in the crude that comes up.” He doesn’t expect to stick with enhanced oil recovery forever. Like Climeworks, Carbon Engineering is also trying to spin captured carbon into synthetic fuel. But in the meantime, Oldham needs customers, and the world still runs on oil. “If we can make fossil fuel carbon-free,” he asks, “why is that a bad thing?”
There are other ways we might do that—we might plant billions of trees or spread out tons of minerals, such as olivine, that bind to carbon in the air. Those strategies have significant costs and risks of their own, of course. Among other things, trees can burn and re-release all their carbon, and mining and crushing minerals eats up a lot of energy. No single method is potent enough to capture the 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year the National Academy of Sciences prescribes. We’ll need to deploy several.
We make those kinds of investments when we believe the well-being of the entire nation is in danger. We don’t wait around for a market to develop when we’re confronted with a crisis that imperils millions of lives. We pulled out all the stops to fight an airborne virus; we need to do the same to fight an even worse threat that’s also carried in the air. ~
https://www.wired.com/story/the-quest-to-trap-carbon-in-stone-and-beat-climate-change/
Oriana:
I have drastically reduced the length of the original article, but I hope I have preserved the spirit of it: yes, we need to take carbon out of the air, using all kinds of methods at our disposal; at the same time, the obstacles are immense. We need to approach the problem with the same sense of urgency that we had regarding the development of anti-Covid vaccines.
If the problem of taking carbon dioxide out of the air has been successfully solved for submarines and the space station (otherwise everyone would suffocate), we already know that certain chemicals successfully capture CO2. This is by now an "old technology." Submarines use "soda lime" (sodium hydroxide and calcium hydroxide). Lithium hydroxide is another such compound. The space station, on the other hand, uses the mineral zeolite. Oxygen is created through the electrolysis of water. Better life through chemistry! But there has to be a will.
Orca, the decarbonizing plant in Iceland
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RELIGIOUS SCHOLARS AND AN ATHEIST: ATTITUDES TOWARD DEATH
~ Just a few days before my father died in 2014, I asked him a question some might find insensitive or inappropriate:
“So, what are your thoughts now about dying?”
We were in the hospital. My father had not spoken much at all that day. He was under the influence of painkillers, and had begun the active stage of dying.
He mustered all of his energy to give me his answer. “It’s too complex,” he said.
They were his final spoken words to me before he died. I had anticipated something more pensive, something more drawn-out. But they were consistent with our mutual grappling with the meaning of death. Until the very end, he spoke with honesty, courage and wisdom.
Confronting the reality of death and trying to understand its uncanny nature is part of what I do as a philosopher, and as a human being. My father, while not a professional philosopher, loved wisdom, and had the gift of gab. Our many conversations over the years touched on the existence of God, the meaning of love, and, yes, the fact of death.
In retrospect, my father and I refused to allow death to have the final word without first, metaphorically, staring it in the face. We were both rebelling against the ways in which so many hide from facing the fact that consciousness, as we know it, will stop — poof!
We know the fact of death is inescapable, and it has been especially so for the nearly two-year-long pandemic. As we begin another year, I am astonished again and again to realize that more than 800,000 irreplaceable persons have died from Covid-19 in the United States; and worldwide, the number is over five million. When we hear about those numbers, it is important that we become attuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped just like that. This is not just about how people have died, but that they have died.
My father and I, like the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, came to view death as “by no means something in general.” We understood that death is about me, him and you. But what we in fact were learning about was dying, not death. Dying is a process; we get to count the days, but for me to die, there is no conscious self who recognizes that I’m gone or that I was even here. So, yes, death, as my father put it, is too complex.
It was in February of 2020 that I wrote the introduction to a series of interviews that I would subsequently conduct for The Times’s philosophy series The Stone, called Conversations on Death, with religious scholars from a variety of faiths. While my initial aim had little to do with grappling with the deaths caused by Covid-19 (like most, I had no idea just how devastating the virus would be), it soon became hard to ignore. As the interviews appeared, I heard from readers who said that reading them helped them cope with their losses during the pandemic. I would like to think that it was partially the probing of the meaning of death, the refusal to look away, that was helpful. What had begun as a philosophical inquiry became a balm for some.
While each scholar articulated a different interpretation of what happens after we die, it was not long before our conversations on death turned to matters of life, on the importance of what we do on this side of the grave. Death is loss, each scholar seemed to say, but it also illuminates and transforms life, and serves as a guide for the living.
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The Buddhist scholar Dadul Namgyal stressed the importance of letting go of habits of self-obsession and attitudes of self-importance. Moulie Vidas, a scholar of Judaism, placed more emphasis upon Judaism’s intellectual and spiritual energy. Karen Teel, a Roman Catholic, emphasized her interest in working toward making our world more just. The Jainism scholar Pankaj Jain underscored that it is on this side of the veil of death that one attempts to completely purify the soul through absolute nonviolence. Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Taoism, stressed the importance of embracing this life as constant change, being able to let go, of allowing, as he says, every new situation to “deliver to us its own new form as a new good.”
Leor Halevi, an historian of Islam, told me that an imam would stress the importance of paying debts, giving to charity and prayer. And Jacob Kehinde Olupona, a scholar of the Yoruba religion, explained that “humans are enjoined to do well in life so that when death eventually comes, one can be remembered for one’s good deeds.” The atheist philosopher Todd May placed importance on seeking to live our lives along two paths simultaneously — both looking forward and living fully in the present.
The sheer variety of these religious insights raised the possibility that there are no absolute answers — the questions are “too complex”— and that life, as William Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet there is so much to learn, paradoxically, about what is unknowable.
Perhaps we should think of death in terms of the parable of the “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Just as the blind men who come to know the elephant by touching only certain parts of it, our views of death, religious or not, are limited, marked by context, culture, explicit and implicit metaphysical sensibilities, values and vocabularies. The elephant evades full description. But with death, there doesn’t seem to be anything to touch. There is just the fact that we die.
Yet as human beings we yearn to make sense of that about which we may not be able to capture in full. In this case, perhaps each religious worldview “touches” something or is touched by something beyond the grave, something which is beyond our descriptive limits.
Perhaps, for me, it is just too hard to let go, and so I refuse to accept that there is nothing after death. This attachment, which can function as a form of refusal, is familiar to all of us. The recent passing of my dear friend bell hooks painfully demonstrates this. Why would I want to let go of our wonderful and caring relationship, and our stimulating and witty conversations? I’m reminded, though, that my father’s last words regarding the meaning of death being too complex leaves me facing a beautiful question mark.
My father was also a lover of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.” He would quote sections from it verbatim. I wasn’t there when my father stopped breathing, but I wish that I could have spoken these lines by Gibran as he left us: “And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”
In this past year of profound loss and grief, it is hard to find comfort. No matter how many philosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And yet silence in the face of this mystery is not an option for me, as it wasn’t for my father, perhaps because we know that, while we may find solace in our rituals, it is also in the seeking that we must persist. ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opinion/death-religion-interviews-lessons.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220103&instance_id=49253&nl=the-morning®i_id=62348556&segment_id=78507&te=1&user_id=e18ae510841c77329a0e2626cc03d351
Oriana:
I won't pretend that this is a good article. But it reminded me again that rather than focus on death itself, we (as a society) could do something to fight the terrible diseases of aging, especially the various brain disorders that lead to dementia.
We already have anti-aging drugs such as metformin, and supplements such as berberine, the equivalent of metformin when taken in sufficient dose. But the huge wealth of the industrial-medical complex depends on keeping the public ignorant.
As for death itself, I still think that Epicurus made the best case against the fear of it
THE ONLY DEITY I COULD RESPECT
In Catechism classes I was told that after death there is immediate judgment (as opposed to the Last Judgment), and all my sins will be reviewed (something like, "On January 5, 1982, 3:12 pm, envied a neighbor her nice new car"). Only this morning, i.e. decades later, it occurred to me that the only kind of deity I could respect would be one that instead asks a different question: WHAT GOOD HAVE YOU DONE?
I think my answer would consist of several parts, including the good I think I’ve done as a teacher, as a friend and lover, and as a poet (yes! a stranger coming up to me after a reading, obviously affected by an insight in a poem of mine, uplifted — that counts, doesn’t it?) But I’d start with beauty — I have tried to nourish people with beauty.
And I think the deity that I could respect would have not only an ethical aspect, and be friendly and cuddly, but also have the attribute of beauty (am I thinking of a feline deity?) Just indulging in flights of fancy here — but if one can create a god, but create a cruel, punitive one? For social control through guilt, yes, but at the individual level, there is a need for a beautiful friend . . .
"SACRED SCRIPTURES" AND ILLITERACY
~ "It Is Written" was established as a phrase of power when most people were illiterate. The educated priesthood presented reading and writing as quasi-magical gifts. And not only could they pick and choose from scriptures that were poles apart, they could alter them or simply tell the people they said something other than they really did. Sword or plowshare, as current circumstances dictate. The congregation are taught that the bible is their master. The clergy act as masters of the scriptures, making them serve their will and ambition.
“One wonders why God would choose a Bible to reveal himself thousands of years before the invention of the printing press and at a time when few people could read.” ~ C.W. Dalton — posted by David Tingley
Oriana:
This reminded me of how some anthropologists pointed out that when they scribbled notes in their notebook, the natives regarded that as a form of magic. One tribal chief even engaged in make-believe writing to enhance his supposed secret powers.
And let's not forget that for centuries the Catholic church tried to reserve the power of reading the bible solely for the clergy. It was forbidden to translate the bible from Latin into spoken languages. William Tyndale got burned at the stake for daring to translate the Gospels into English.
Even when I was growing up, the prohibition still held; we were not allowed the read the Scripture. But I knew an American woman who taught ESL to me. I asked me if she could lend me her bible until our next lesson. She did. I found the Song of Songs (of which I'd heard somehow), and I was utterly astonished. Deep and enlightening astonishment came later,
when I took the Bible as Literature class.
William Tyndale
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NIACIN AND COVID
~ A recent paper published in early March, COVID-19 Infection the Perspectives on Immune Responses, stated “Since Vitamin B3 is highly lung-protective, it should be used as soon as coughing begins”. There is considerable experimental evidence that this is indeed the case but like all therapeutic strategies in COVID-19 it will be some time until this is proven.
Between 1945 and 1961 several studies found Vitamin B3 to be useful in the treatment of TB of the lung, but it was superseded by modern antibiotics. More recently it has been investigated, and found to be promising, as the treatment of HIV. A recent paper stated, “this small molecule could emerge at the beginning of the 21st century either as a therapeutic agent in itself or as the lead compound for a new class of agents with activity against both TB and HIV.”
Vitamin B3 has been used effectively to treat high cholesterol for 60 years. It can raise HDL, “good cholesterol”, by 30%. However, since statin drugs have been developed it has fallen out of use except in those individuals who cannot tolerate statins or still have high cholesterol levels despite statin use.
Vitamin B3 is converted in the body to NAD, a compound that is currently being investigated for its anti-aging properties, notably by Prof John Sinclair at Harvard. According to a paper that he co-authored “NAD + levels steadily decline with age, resulting in altered metabolism and increased disease susceptibility. Restoration of NAD + levels in old or diseased animals can promote health and extend lifespan, prompting a search for safe and efficacious NAD-boosting molecules that hold the promise of increasing the body’s resilience, not just to one disease, but to many, thereby extending healthy human lifespan. NAD boosting supplements are now being actively marketed but there is no proof, as yet, that they have any beneficial effect for humans.
Vitamin B3 has a long history of use in medicine which was superseded by modern drugs.
However, it may be making a come back as a treatment for HIV, COVID-19, and possibly as an anti-aging supplement. ~
https://www.otandp.com/blog/covid-19-about-vitamin-b3
from another source:
~ Niacin acts as a building block of NAD and NADP, both vital during chronic systemic inflammation [12]. NAD+ acts as a coenzyme in various metabolic pathways and its increased levels are essential to treat a wide range of pathophysiological conditions. NAD+ is released during the early stages of inflammation and has immunomodulatory properties, known to decrease the pro-inflammatory cytokines, IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α. Recent evidence indicates that targeting IL-6 could help control the inflammatory storm in patients with COVID-19.Moreover, niacin reduces neutrophil infiltration and exhibits an anti-inflammatory effect in patients with ventilator-induced lung injury. In hamsters, niacin and nicotinamide prevent lung tissue damage. In addition, nicotinamide reduces viral replication (vaccinia virus, human immunodeficiency virus, enteroviruses, hepatitis B virus) and strengthens the body’s defense mechanisms. Taking into account the lung protective and immune strengthening roles of niacin, it could be used as an adjunct treatment for COVID-19 patients. ~
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428453/
Niacin and other B vitamins in relation to the anti-viral response.
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APPENDECTOMY AND THE RISK OF PARKINSON’S DISEASE
~ Published this fall in Science Translational Medicine, the study compared the health records of nearly 1.7 million Swedes over 52 years. It found that Swedes who underwent an appendectomy decreased their chance of developing Parkinson’s disease by roughly 20 percent compared to the general population. A removed appendix also appeared to delay the onset of Parkinson’s.
The culprit is not the appendix, per se, but the Lewy bodies it houses. Lewy bodies are abnormal deposits of alpha-synuclein proteins. When these proteins accumulate in neurons, they affect the brain’s biochemical processes, leading to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. Scientists aren’t sure how Lewy bodies alter the brain, but they do know these protein clumps appear in the gut before disease onset.
When the researchers analyzed appendix tissue from people who underwent an appendectomy, but were not diagnosed with Parkinson’s, they found the tissue “contained high levels of intraneuronal alpha-synuclein aggregates” and was rich in truncated forms of the protein. This discovery strengthens the case that these protein clumps travel from the gut to the brain.
As neuroscientists Viviane Labrie told Science News, “[P]reventing excessive alpha-synuclein clump formation in the appendix, and its departure from the gastrointestinal tract, could be a useful new form of therapy.”
Interestingly, the study found that an appendectomy showed the greatest benefits for Swedes living in rural areas. Rural living is associated with a higher risk early onset Parkinson’s, but the research suggests that an appendectomy decreased the risk of Parkinson’s for countryfolk by about 25 percent compared to the general population.
While the study is eye opening, it does have some limitations. First, the study only looked at the appendix, so the authors are not sure what other gastrointestinal tissues may contain alpha-synuclein and what role that may play. Additionally, undetermined genetic and environmental factors may play significant roles, too.
And the appendix may yet be shown to provide salubrious benefits, as well. One study out of Midwestern University “discovered that the appendix has evolved independently in several mammal lineages, over 30 separate times, and almost never disappears from a lineage once it has appeared.” The researchers believe this is strong evidence for an adaptive purpose.
Going back to Darwin, that adaptive purpose may be to safe house gut bacteria. A study published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology argues that immune system cells in the appendix protects good bacteria during trying abdominal circumstances.
For example, a gut can’t differentiate between good and bad bacteria when it purges the system with a bout of diarrhea. During this time, the appendix houses good bacteria like an intestinal Noah’s Ark. Once the inner, ahem, flooding has subsided, the good bacteria go forth to repopulate the gut.
Even if this theory is correct, people still live long and fruitful lives without an appendix, so the question that needs further research is whether the benefits of keeping your appendix outweigh the risks of keeping it. ~
https://bigthink.com/health/appendix-function-parkinsons-disease/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3SdDb1_1myXaKEExcl_MRNtzs6mI9RN_ua7aDDYiaUfY71Z8oWKvvxulc#Echobox=1637077793-1
Oriana:
On the other hand, still another study found the opposite: those who have had an appendectomy had triple the risk of Parkinson’s.
~ One study published in 2019 by Sheriff and colleagues found the opposite of the already published literature.
They examined data from around 62 million patients. The overall risk of developing Parkinson’s with appendectomies was 3.19 compared to those without appendectomies. This was irrespective of age, gender, and race. However, this study did not examine the period between appendectomy and the onset of Parkinson’s disease.
As with all of these studies, only correlation can be assumed and not causation. These were all retrospective epidemiological studies based on health records, and whilst they were all age, sex, gender and matched for other parameters, complete control cannot be achieved. ~
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Is-Appendectomy-Linked-to-Parkinsons-Disease.aspx
Oriana:
So there we have it: contradictory results. There is much we still don’t know about the gut-brain connection.
One Parkinson’s risk factor that seems to be firmly established is pesticide exposure. Other risks factors that aren't as strong include traumatic head injury, family history of neurological disease, history of depression, older age, and being male.
The use of ibuprofen appears to lower the risk of Parkinson’s, as does coffee (with caffeine, not decaf) and, possibly, nicotine (though no one should start smoking in the hope of avoiding Parkinson’s). (The use of ibuprofen also lowers the risk of Alzheimer’s; lowering inflammation, including the suppression of TNF, seems crucial in the treatment of brain diseases)
H. pylori infection may increase the severity of Parkinson’s. In general, Parkinson’s patients have a different microbiome than healthy people, raising the possibility that fecal transplant might prove therapeutic. Also, it's been long known that intestinal problems such as constipation may precede neurological symptoms by many years https://www.nature.com/articles/s41575-020-0339-z, seeming confirming the ancient belief that "all disease begins in the gut."
But, as usual, we have to invoke the eternal phrase: "more research is needed."
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WHY OMICRON IS MILDER
~ A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus.
In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty.
“It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway.
In November, when the first report on the Omicron variant came out of South Africa, scientists could only guess at how it might behave differently from earlier forms of the virus. All they knew was that it had a distinctive and alarming combination of more than 50 genetic mutations.
Previous research had shown that some of these mutations enabled coronaviruses to grab onto cells more tightly. Others allowed the virus to evade antibodies, which serve as an early line of defense against infection. But how the new variant might behave inside of the body was a mystery.
“You can’t predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations,” said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.
Over the past month, more than a dozen research groups, including Dr. Gupta’s, have been observing the new pathogen in the lab, infecting cells in Petri dishes with Omicron and spraying the virus into the noses of animals.
As they worked, Omicron surged across the planet, readily infecting even people who were vaccinated or had recovered from infections.
But as cases skyrocketed, hospitalizations increased only modestly. Early studies of patients suggested that Omicron was less likely to cause severe illness than other variants, especially in vaccinated people. Still, those findings came with a lot of caveats.
For one thing, the bulk of early Omicron infections were in young people, who are less likely to get seriously ill with all versions of the virus. And many of those early cases were happening in people with some immunity from previous infections or vaccines. It was unclear whether Omicron would also prove less severe in an unvaccinated older person, for example.
Experiments on animals can help clear up these ambiguities, because scientists can test Omicron on identical animals living in identical conditions. More than half a dozen experiments made public in recent days all pointed to the same conclusion: Omicron is milder than Delta and other earlier versions of the virus.
On Wednesday, a large consortium of Japanese and American scientists released a report on hamsters and mice that had been infected with either Omicron or one of several earlier variants. Those infected with Omicron had less lung damage, lost less weight and were less likely to die, the study found.
Although the animals infected with Omicron on average experienced much milder symptoms, the scientists were particularly struck by the results in Syrian hamsters, a species known to get severely ill with all previous versions of the virus.
“This was surprising, since every other variant has robustly infected these hamsters,” said Dr. Michael Diamond, a virologist at Washington University and a co-author of the study.
Several other studies on mice and hamsters have reached the same conclusion. (Like most urgent Omicron research, these studies have been posted online but have not yet been published in scientific journals.)
The reason that Omicron is milder may be a matter of anatomy. Dr. Diamond and his colleagues found that the level of Omicron in the noses of the hamsters was the same as in animals infected with an earlier form of the coronavirus. But Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the level of other variants. ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/health/covid-omicron-lung-cells.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR1tEN9Snr-GvHhVNxw2Q6Bgi0TWA4cUQHQNAX-654T6zTMp8vmOoytLKCA
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ending on beauty:
All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.
Soon those names will travel with the leaves.
Then you can trade places with the wind.
Then you’ll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.
~ Li-Young Lee
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