Kathryn Federer: Treescapes*
WARSAW POPLARS
Do you miss your country? people ask.
But it’s not the country I miss.
I miss the poplars
lining the long avenue,
leafy perspective I loved to trace
from my fourth-story window,
past Cemetery of the Russian Soldiers
all the way to the airport.
The avenue was named
after the first aviators.
uncle Gienio, killed in air battle
over France, was an aviator,
his leather cap, his biplane, his smile
fading in a sepia photograph.
To his little sister, my mother, he said,
“We’ll fly around the world.”
I stood in each window,
walked out every door —
daydreamed on all bridges, dazed
with departure’s nets of light. I too
wanted to fly around the world.
At seventeen, you don’t ask
the price. In a sepia October,
I left. Behind me swayed
Warsaw poplars, tree by tree
bowing back. Shadows laced
my hands, the passing leaves
rustled warnings I didn’t hear —
long perspective of poplars,
upward arms burned to gold —
behind me an endless
avenue of gold wind.
~ Oriana
*
TRUMAN CAPOTE: DESTROYED BY SUCCESS?
~ It’s 1965. Truman Capote was a known figure on the literary scene and a member of the global social jet set. His bestselling books Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had made him a literary favorite. And after five years of painstaking research, and gut-wrenching personal investment, part I of In Cold Blood debuted in The New Yorker. As people across the country opened their magazines and read the first lines of the story, they were riveted. Overnight, Capote catapulted from a mere darling of the literary world to a full-fledged global celebrity on a par with the likes of rockstars and film legends.
The success was all encompassing, but the cost would prove greater than even Capote had realized. Having read an article in the New York Times about the brutal slaying of a family at their farmhouse in Kansas, Capote embarked on a journey to the small rural farming town. Holcomb, located in Southwest Kansas, was a town of just under three hundred people and quintessential 1950s America. A small tight knit community that felt and acted more like one large family than a municipality.
Needless to say, the murders of prominent farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife Bonnie, their youngest daughter Nancy and their son Kenyon, sent shockwaves through the town. Not only was this kind of crime unheard of in Holcomb, it also cast a cloud of suspicion over the entire town. Who would have had reason to kill the Clutters? And even if there had been cause to kill Mr. Clutter, how could anyone justify killing young Nancy and sweet Kenyon? Neighbors locked their doors and kept their children home from school, firearms were placed next to bedside tables, and all were on high alert for fear that they were next on an unknown killers hit list.
It is amidst this air of fear and dread that Truman Capote arrived in Holcomb in 1959. The town had never seen anything like Capote. A man of diminutive stature, great flamboyance of style and a uniquely high-pitched vocal quality, he was a character that the townspeople could never have dreamed up. But there he was, with his notebook in hand, getting the story. It took time for the community to warm to Truman. Their inherent unease with outsiders was immediately on display, not to mention their added skepticism around a New York City reporter’s arrival in town. But Capote did what he was consistently able to do throughout his life—he charmed them into being on his side.
Capote’s charm offensive was especially targeted toward Alvin “Al” Dewey and his wife Marie. Dewey was the special agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, assigned as the Chief Investigator of the Clutter murders. Known as an honest, dedicated and earnest public servant, Dewey was a member of the Holcomb community and knew the Clutters socially from church.
Capote, being both a journalist and sharp social observer, knew that Dewey was the key that could unlock all the access that he needed. His charm offensive on the couple ranged from dinner at their home, where he regaled them with stories of his celebrity friends in New York and Los Angeles, to invitations for them to come and visit him around the world. Before long a bond had been forged (one which would last the rest of Capote’s life) and Truman had the access he needed to begin investigating and writing his story.
Truman now had entrée not only to the details of the investigation, but also to the townspeople who felt he was safe to speak with, given that he had the confidence of Chief Investigator Dewey. Soon Truman was interviewing everyone, from the late Nancy Clutters boyfriend to members of the investigative team. He was given access to files and tips that had pointed the investigators in divergent directions. He had the inside track on how the investigation was progressing.
By December 1959, the search for the killers had run hot, cold and hot again. The investigators had a tip from a prison inmate that seemed credible. Chief Dewey and the investigators followed the lead and headed to Las Vegas where it was believed the perpetrators were. On December 30th, 1959, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were arrested in Las Vegas and charged with the murders of Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter. They were promptly transferred from Las Vegas to Kansas where the trial would soon begin. Chief Investigator Alvin Dewey’s arrival back in Holcomb with Smith and Hickock was a triumphant return, as he had successfully tracked down the two men, but it was the end of innocence for the small town.
Would the townspeople come together in solemn remembrance of their slain brethren, or would they jeer at and riot around those who had killed them? The sentiments of the town and the people were all on display and Capote was there to witness and transcribe each and every breath of contradiction.
Perry Smith and John Hickock were now the objects of Capote’s investigative desire. His story was their story, and he had to once again turn on his charm offensive. While he spoke and communicated extensively with both men, it was Perry Smith who Capote developed a particularly close relationship with. Capote’s obsession seemingly straddled from the physical to the psychological. In Perry he saw the person he might have become had his life taken a different path.
Both men were from homes torn apart and both were eventually orphaned. Truman, ever the intellectual and the aesthete, found in Perry a gentle soul with an artistic nature and intellectual curiosity. They traded books and stories and letters. Their connection became one in which Capote could not fully separate himself from his subject, so as the months turned into years, the relationship became increasingly interdependent.
The years between 1959 and 1965 were filled with Capote communicating with the community at large, the investigators and of course the inmates. Trials came and went, and despite confessions from both men, the wheels of justice turned slowly. By 1965, Truman had finished his manuscript except for the ending. And the ending he needed, the ending he felt his story deserved was a complete resolution for the crimes committed, and that meant death to Smith and Hickock.
As they went through additional motions and hearings, Capote became agitated. His book was ready and after five years, he needed his ending to arrive. Court antics and filings could only continue to delay what he needed, and his fear was always rising that they might receive a stay of execution, in essence leaving him with no ending at all. Yet throughout this entire process, Capote had not fully realized the relationship that had developed between him and the killers, particularly Perry Smith. So, as he waited anxiously for their death, he had not fully assessed what the loss would be for him personally.
Eventually there were no more legal motions filed, no stays of execution from the governor. The future for Hickock and Smith was the gallows. And Capote had his ending. He knew he had to see the story through to its most final conclusion, which meant being there as the executioner placed the sacks over the heads of the two young men as they were dropped from the gallows, and as the last moments of life twitched out of their bodies. Capote watched in tears and was inconsolable on the plane ride back to Manhattan. His friends rallied around him, but each acknowledged that something in Truman had died with Perry. A small, unidentifiable element of himself had been ripped away.
The success of In Cold Blood was instant and it bestowed upon Truman all the riches he had dreamed. His five years of work had created a new genre of literature, the nonfiction novel, as he declared it. Soon after publication he gave his storied Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He was the toast of jet set society, and the guests who came to fête him were world leaders, royalty, film stars and of course Alvin and Marie Dewey and a few friends from Holcomb Kansas. 1965 was to be the best year for Capote as he ascended to the global stage as the “It” author and personality of his generation; but something eerie lurked just below the surface.
When I began work on my documentary The Capote Tapes, I was initially drawn to Truman’s years following the publication of In Cold Blood; but I quickly realized that I could never tell Truman’s story without telling the story of In Cold Blood. His story is intrinsically wrapped in Perry’s story. And the sorrow he felt at the loss of Perry’s life and yet the realization that his success was dependent on that life coming to an end, always lingered for Truman. As glamorous as his life was, the years following 1965 and Perry’s death became a slow and long decline into alcohol and drug addiction.
As a young boy in the American South, I grew up reading Capote, from the short stories to the novels. He was an aspirational figure. Someone who lived a grand far away life, he was both indulgent and intellectual. He stood out as an openly gay man when the laws of the land deemed it criminal, but he chafed at the idea of being defined by his sexuality. He was a media personality who emitted wit and charm, but he could also be cruel and inhumane. He was a ball of contradictions. But perhaps most important of all, was his writing. It remains for me so close to home, so near the smells and sounds of the South, so rich in tone and elegant in prose. As Norman Mailer said, “He wrote the best sentences.”
My exploration into Capote’s life was through the lens of never heard interviews that Capote’s friends had given the author George Plimpton. Plimpton had turned those interviews into his oral history on Capote. The tapes are a rich history not simply of Truman, but of the era in which he lived and the range of people he charmed and alienated along the way. Additionally, I spent hours poring over Capote’s notebooks and correspondence, immersing myself in his detailed penmanship, concise and often witty observations, and the pure genius that is his writing.
Having access to these incredible notes and drafts, was essential in allowing me to further dive into Capote the man, as well as the author. Capote’s literature remains ever more relevant today. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the stories of young people running from their past to make a new life in New York, to the True Crime genre which he is undoubtedly the godfather of following his writing of In Cold Blood. Capote’s talent—his unyielding talent—is what continues to make him a captivating personality and author. He wrote it best himself in Music for Chameleons, “But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.” ~
https://lithub.com/how-truman-capote-was-destroyed-by-his-own-masterpiece/?fbclid=IwAR1TPV4DJIF7hjfjG2Tv3gRxxtSDa13C6jg1nn_9buRbiQ4dnKCBDciw1sQ
Oriana:
One rarely hears about it now, but the movie "Capote," with Seymour Hoffman as Truman, turned out to be one of the most memorable movies I've seen. At one point Truman says, "Perry and I grew up in the same house, but I left by the front door, and he left through the kitchen door."
Both were outsiders, but Truman was more privileged. Most of all, he had talent, and could write about anything in a style that fascinated the public. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was made into a movie with the irresistible Audrey Hepburn, "In Cold Blood" followed, with critics saying that Hoffman was "more Capote than Capote."
*
AUGUST 9, 1974 (Misha Iossel, Facebook; excerpts)
”If I ever get out of here," Paul McCartney is singing. "If we ever get out of here." Out of *where*, I wonder. Wherefrom, I'd like to know, Paul McCartney is hoping to escape. I mean, seriously? He already is Paul McCartney -- and more importantly, he already is in the West, outside the Soviet Union, in the outer world, the world of light (to put it grandly... but yes, that's how I envision it), on another planet... for all intents and purposes. He has no reason -- and to be honest, no right -- to wish to escape from anywhere with such wistful existential intensity. He already has effing escaped, merely by not having been born in the Soviet Union. It is us, the supernaturally effing lucky, historically fortunate Soviet people, some of whom (probably millions, but who knows?) can only hope at some indeterminate and, frankly, unimaginably distant future point, to get out of.... well, this, here.
And so — it's noon, and I am nineteen and... and nothing. The air outside is buzzing with stillness. Silence is a million-strong army of non-existent cicadas. I unlatch the door of my car, jump off the footboard's top rung, landing softly, easily, weightless.
Igor is the only other Jew among us, in our train-bound bunch, our motley college crew, but... I'm not going to discuss any of this with him either. Because I have no way of knowing his, like, inner thoughts. Because, to be honest, we're not really, well, the real, *Jew* Jews: we're the Soviet Jews, knowing nothing about the meaning of being Jewish, about the history of Jews or anything else. None of that stuff. We just have the word *Jew* inscribed prominently in our Soviet passports. We were born and raised in a world where the word Jew is a shameful one, an accusation. We are Jews by designation only, if you will, in this Soviet world. Because someone has to be, after all. But enough about that... Some day, I sure as hell am going to try my absolute damnedest to, yes, get out of here -- even if only because I know, having been told as much in no uncertain terms, that I never could, never would, absolutely never, due to my father's being one of the leading designers of Soviet submarines' electromagnetic defenses against the American radars deep in world ocean... and all that crap. Due to my own following in my father's footsteps, too, at this juncture -- life's trajectory-wise.
And so, immersed in that ephemeral cloud of unworded thought, I'm walking lightly and aimlessly on the heavy loose sand, bleached white by the sun, of the railway embankment, in the middle of southern-Russian nowhere. Everyone else in our *brigade*, it appears, has also gotten out of the train already, and is enjoying the freedom of unfettered being in sunny world's stillness -- stretching, yawning, squinting at the sky and smiling absently, walking around in circles and making circular motions with one's arms, sitting quietly or laying sprawled on mounds of sand with one's eyes closed.
Igor, however, is still inside, where McCartney is still singing. Banozerahn, banozerahn. Presently he sticks his head out the open door of his car and shouts merrily after me: "Mishka! Hey, Mishka! Guess what? Just heard on the radio: Nixon got im... im... impeached? Yes. Impeached. In America! Fired, kicked out ! Them Americans, I'm telling you! Their own president! Crazy, right?”
"Ah, eff Nixon," I yell back, without turning around, just continuing to walk, aimlessly yet with a purposeful air, as if I had somewhere to be here, in this nowhere place. As if I knew where I was going. "To hell with him!" I yell back. I don't like Richard Nixon. I have my reasons for feeling that way. But that's another story altogether.
Noon. Heat. August. The train emits a plaintive wailing, whistling siren sound. This little break from life's unstoppable forward-bound motion is over. Banozerahn. Banozerahn. Time to get back on the train.
[“Banozerahn” — at this point Misha knows only a little English, so he can’t understand what Paul McCartney is singing. To him it sounds like “Banozerahn.”]
Back to Misha’s text: ~ Banozerahn, the album is called... at least as far as we are concerned. And the title song also, accordingly: *Banozerahn.* They don't often write about rock music, especially the one from the capitalist countries, in the Soviet Union, you know. And we don't know what that supposed word means in English -- banozerahn. Maybe it means something, and maybe nothing at all. Maybe it's not even a noun. Maybe it's some exotic place. The Russian word "ozero" -- "lake" -- is contained within it, sort of. But we kind of doubt it has anything to do with any lake known to man. It probably does mean nothing -- on the surface of it. An abracadabric mantra of sorts, one you say when in strong need of something good happening. Just a word... The song itself is so beautiful, even though the only words of its lyrics that are comprehensible to us, through me (the rest of us hardly know any English at all), are these: "If I ever get out of here," and also “If we ever get out of here.” ~
Oriana:
I know it well, that unappeasable desire to “get out of here” even if “here” is beautiful, lush and vegetal, especially in summer and autumn.Or unbeautiful, like the Palace of Culture, mocked as Saint Joe’s (because it was Joseph Stalin’s “gift” to the people of Warsaw), but still a place of unconscious worship.
Speaking of "Travels with Charlie," I did connect with one chapter — Steinbeck’s visit to the Sequoia National Park, and his frustration that to his canine companion those magnificent survivors from the era of the giants meant nothing at all. Dogs have a different, limited vision, and can see neither sunsets nor sequoias. But perhaps they can smell them — I suspect the air smells different at sunset, a holy feast of departing light.
*
WE LIVE IN OPPENHEIMER’S WORLD; IS AI A PARALLEL TO THE A-BOMB?
~ Oppenheimer writer and director Christopher Nolan is no stranger to dark, brooding films. His list of credits includes the Batman trilogy, Dunkirk, Inception and Insomnia. But he says the story of Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, stayed with him in a way his other films didn’t.
"If movies are a sort of collective dream, there's a sense in which Oppenheimer's a collective nightmare," Nolan says. "Of all of the subject matter I've dealt with, it's certainly the darkest."
A theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer directed Los Alamos, the secret project in New Mexico where researches developed the first nuclear bombs, and conducted the Trinity test, a trial detonation, on July 16, 1945. A month after that test, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 200,000 people in an effort to end World War II.
Nolan says he was drawn to the tension of Oppenheimer's story — particularly the disconnect between the joy the physicist felt at the success of the Trinity test, and the horror that later resulted.
"At the heart of the film, there's a pivot, and it's really the pivot between the successful Trinity test and then the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the actual use of the weapon," Nolan says. "Whether we like it or not, we live in Oppenheimer's world, and we always will.”
After the war, Oppenheimer became an advocate of arms control, and opposed military plans for massive strategic bombing with nuclear weapons, which he considered genocidal. In 1954, during the height of the anti-Communist era, he was accused of being a risk to national security. The Atomic Energy Commission stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance in June 1954, irrevocably damaging his career. (In December 2022, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm reversed the AEC's decision.)
Nolan says Oppenheimer's story resonates today, especially as we talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
"A lot of the researchers in AI talk about this as their Oppenheimer moment," Nolan says. "They're looking at his story and sort of saying, 'OK, what are the responsibilities of a researcher or a scientist bringing something into the world that may have unintended consequences?’”
Interview highlights:
On how science advances before we know the consequences
They knew the theory [of nuclear fallout] and they knew the possibilities to some degree. But as with so much in science, the real knowledge comes from experimentation. This is the nature of science, is it moves forward, continually correcting itself. Science is not a process whereby you are able to sit down and perfectly map everything out in theoretical terms, and then that just becomes the future. It has to interact with the real world — and to a certain extent our film is about the consequences of that.
On creating the image of the explosion without CGI [Computer generated imagery]
One of the first people I showed the script to when I finished it was my visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson, and I showed it to him right away because I said to him, "We have to get the Trinity test across. We also have to try and give some insights into the way Oppenheimer would have visualized molecular interactions and how that builds to its ultimate expression in the Trinity test. But I want to do it without computer graphics."
And the thing with CG, even though it's very versatile, as animation, it tends to feel a bit safe, a bit anodyne. And it was very important to me that firstly, the atomic interactions that Oppenheimer's visualizing, but then, ultimately, the power of the device they build itself — the "gadget," as they called it — that they detonated at Trinity, you wanted it to be the most beautiful and most terrifying thing simultaneously.
So Andrew spent many months experimenting with very small things, very microscopic images that could be filmed to represent bigger things, but then also massive explosions using different forms of explosives, magnesium flares, petrol explosions, black powder explosions, things like that, different frame rates and so forth. So there was just a lot of experimentation that went into it. And what I was very happy about was that the imagery that he was giving me did have the requisite threat, even with its hypnotic beauty.
On capturing the tension of the Trinity test
We had engineered a situation whereby we were performing very large explosions for the actors there, out in the desert in the middle of the night, in the same bunkers they would have been in. But I think that gave all of us some feeling of the tension that would have been there leading up to the Trinity test in particular, because when you do pyrotechnic effects, safety is obviously of paramount importance. And so there's an extraordinary amount of tension and planning around those moments before you trigger those events. And there's always that slight uncertainty about exactly what they're going to look like, what they're going to sound like, how frightening they're going to be, essentially. So I think all of us, in our own small way, got some taste of what the tension there would have been for the people at Trinity. And I think that that helped us construct the drama of it for the audience.
On his approach to the biopic
In a funny sort of way, my approach is to not even acknowledge biopic as a genre. In other words, if something works, like Lawrence of Arabia, for example, you don't think of it as a biopic. You think of it as a great adventure story, even though obviously it's telling the story of somebody's life. Or Citizen Kane ... I mean, obviously that's fiction. But for me, I had the benefit of this extraordinary book [written by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird], American Prometheus, that won the Pulitzer Prize. I had this extraordinary sort of bible to work from. And so for me, it was really a process of saying, "OK, what's the exciting story that develops, the cinematic story that develops from a reading of it, from several readings of it?" And then [I] started to develop a structure for how I might be able to put the audience into Oppenheimer's head.
On why he shot his film in IMAX
I've used IMAX for years and going into Oppenheimer, talking to [Hoyte van] Hoytema, my [director of photography], we knew that it would give us with its high resolution, its sort of extraordinary analog color sharpness ... the big screens that you projected on, we knew it would give us the landscapes of New Mexico, that it would give us the Trinity test, which we felt had to be a showstopper.
But we actually got really excited about the idea of the human face. How can you help us jump into Oppenheimer's head? The story is told subjectively. I even wrote the script in the first person — "I" this, "I" that. We were looking for the visual equivalent of that. And so taking those high-resolution IMAX cameras and really just trying to be there for the intimate moments of the story in a way that we felt we hadn't really seen people do before with that format. That was a source of particular excitement for us. ~
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193448291/oppenheimer-director-christopher-nolan
Dali: Three Sphinxes of Bikini, 1947
*
GEORGE ORWELL ON REVOLUTIONS AND THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE
“Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world. The High, the Middle and the Low. (…) For long periods, the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later, there always comes a moment when they lost either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.” ~ George Orwell, 1984
This quote says two things, the first of which is obvious, revolutions don’t bring meaningful change to the masses. Fair enough, but it says another thing, which is important for this answer: the revolution isn’t carried out by the proles. It’s carried out by the middle, a middle class, lower echelons of high society, people wealthy enough to have some power and yearn for more. The low don’t revolt, the middle do and they enlist the low to do their bidding.
This is true for all revolutions by the way. American founding fathers were all wealthy landowners; the French revolution was spearheaded by the bourgeoisie, who now form a ruling class across most the world. What happened in 1917 in Russia wasn’t a revolt of commoners. The Russian bourgeoisie forced the Tzar to abdicate, his brother wouldn’t take the throne, so they established a democratic republic. This broke down into bitter squabbles and a few months later a minor party, the Bolsheviks, carried out a violent coup later named the October Revolution. It wasn’t a revolution by the way, that happened in March and changed Russian politics. What happened in October of 1917 was merely a coup of one political party over others.
Unfortunately this also has another implication. All this dissent of Russian commoners won’t do much to change Russia, for the better or otherwise. Sure they might do minor sabotage, offer information they might have to CIA or MI6 to be forwarded to Ukrainians and be a general nuisance, but that’s it, a nuisance. Unless leaders appear from among the middle and lead the masses onto the streets and against the Kremlin, the later remains secure. Russian army is a joke, but their secret police isn’t. The secret police make damn sure every potential leader is quickly mobilized to lead a storm detachment, falls from a balcony, shoots himself seven times in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun, stabs himself in the throat with a spatula or accidentally mixes household chemicals as to produce aerosolized novichok. If he’s particularly dangerous he does several of these things and then hangs himself in shame.
The ground is fertile for a change in Russia. The country is held together by assault rifles and very serious threats to use them. But don’t count on mere dissent doing much by itself and above all — don’t hope for positive improvement once change does arrive. What will likely happen in Russia is a fragmentation, but this will be short lived and one group will eventually reunite most of Russian territory under one flag. Unfortunately the most likely group to do so is the most vile, violent, sadistic of them all.
Russian future looks no more pleasant than their past. Luckily for us, once it happens, they’ll no longer have the strength to bother us any more, probably for a century or more. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
*
How do you turn around the mindset of people who think tyrants like Djugashvili [Stalin] and Ulyanov [Lenin] and Putin are heroes. I realize so many decent Russians have left the country over the last century never to return. But I am sure there is a strong remnant minority who must be waiting for a Decembrist type of liberal democracy revolution. ~ Geoffrey Anderson, Quora
*
SLAVOY ZIZEK ON “COLD WAR, HOT PEACE”
~ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has gone so far as to suggest that the only comprehensive solution would be to demilitarize all of Europe, with Russia with its army maintaining peace through occasional humanitarian interventions.
Similar ideas abound in the Russian press. As the political commentator Dmitry Evstafiev explains in a recent interview with a Croatian publication: “A new Russia is born which lets you know clearly that it doesn’t perceive you, Europe, as a partner. Russia has three partners: USA, China, and India. You are for us a trophy which shall be divided between us and Americans. You didn’t yet get this, although we are coming close to this.”
Dugin, Putin’s court philosopher, grounds the Kremlin’s stance in a weird version of historicist relativism. In 2016, he said: “Post-modernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept…. If the United States does not want to start a war, you should recognize that United States is not any more a unique master. And [with] the situation in Syria and Ukraine, Russia says, ‘No you are not any more the boss.’ That is the question of who rules the world. Only war could decide really.”
This raises an obvious question: What about the people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they not also choose their truth and belief, or are they just a playground – or battlefield – of the big “bosses”? The Kremlin would say they don’t count in the big division of power. Within the four spheres of influence, there are only peacekeeping interventions. War proper happens only when the four big bosses cannot agree on the borders of their spheres – as in the case of China’s claims to Taiwan and the South China Sea.
But if we can be mobilized only by the threat of war, not by the threat to our environment, the liberty we will get if our side wins may not be worth having. We are faced with an impossible choice: if we make compromises to maintain peace, we are feeding Russian expansionism, which only a “demilitarization” of all of Europe will satisfy. But if we endorse full confrontation, we run the high risk of precipitating a new world war. The only real solution is to change the lens through which we perceive the situation.
Global problems like climate change play no role in the hackneyed narrative of a clash between barbaric-totalitarian countries and the civilized, free West. And yet the new wars and great-power conflicts are also reactions to such problems. If the issue is survival on a planet in trouble, one should secure a stronger position than others. Far from being the moment of clarifying truth, and when the basic antagonism is laid bare, the current crisis is a moment of deep deception. While we should stand firmly behind Ukraine, we must avoid the fascination with war that has clearly seized the imaginations of those who are pushing for an open confrontation with Russia.
Something like a new non-aligned movement is needed, not in the sense that countries should be neutral in the ongoing war, but in the sense that we should question the entire notion of the “clash of civilizations.” According to Samuel Huntington, who coined the term, the stage for a clash of civilizations was set at the Cold War’s end, when the “iron curtain of ideology” was replaced by the “velvet curtain of culture.”
At first blush, this dark vision may appear to be the very opposite of the end-of-history thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama in response to the collapse of communism in Europe. What could be more different from Fukuyama’s pseudo-Hegelian idea that the best possible social order humanity could devise had at last been revealed to be capitalist liberal democracy? ~
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/hot-peace-putins-war-as-clash-of-civilization-by-slavoj-zizek-2022-03?fbclid=IwAR3HmBIQGhoX-5qHuWv3SupBbddGFOi11HXkZhw23v7thikYXnighoiaA2o
*Francis Fukuyama
is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in
which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle
between ideologies was largely at an end, with the world settling on
liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989.
Oriana:
I think it was Churchill who said, “Democracy is a terrible form of government — until you consider the alternatives.”
Only democracy takes seriously the necessity of human rights. Its opposite is tyranny: a dictator who believes that might makes right.
Putin is a humiliated mafia boss. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Putin regards as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” (never mind the two world wars and the never-ending attempts at genocide somewhere in the world), Putin allegedly took great offense at Obama’s statement that Russia is a “regional power” rather than a global super-power. Putin’s fragile ego demands that Russia be treated as the peer of the United States. He demands “respect.” That term is big in prison culture. It's at least as big in the gang culture, which shaped Putin's adolescence.
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THE AFTERMATH OF PRIGOZHIN’S REBELLION
~ Putin initially stated that the mutiny’s perpetrators were treasonous, criminal terrorists who would be “brought to account”. Yet weeks later Prigozhin was shown at the Belarusian camp exhorting Wagner forces to prepare for future African deployments. Russian state television broadcast an embarrassing security service raid on Prigozhin’s St Petersburg properties, with commentators again calling him a traitor and criminal.
Yet authorities returned almost £85m to him through his driver, according to Fontanka, an online St Petersburg newspaper. The Kremlin shuttered Prigozhin’s media empire, but Russian social media accounts linked to him are still functioning. Last week those accounts showed Prigozhin hobnobbing with diplomats on the sidelines of Russia’s Africa summit in St Petersburg, and aired his offer to help support the coup in Niger.
The Wagner group is a low-cost lever for Russian influence in Africa. Prigozhin’s contracts with foreign leaders probably make Wagner’s actions there self-financing. Wagner’s willingness to fight in Africa allows Russia to avoid having its regular troops suffer casualties that might anger the Russian public. Wagner forces prop up dictators and warlords in Central African Republic (CAR), Mali and Libya who now depend on Moscow for their survival.
In Sudan and CAR, Wagner also oversees gold mining and smuggling operations that help the Kremlin evade western sanctions. Wagner’s African presence may become even more important for Russia now, as Moscow’s other geopolitical tools on the continent dwindle. Many African leaders stayed away from Putin’s Africa summit last week, as fears grow that African food security will be endangered by Putin’s exit from the grain deal that allowed Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea.
It is not yet clear how official Russian military forces will ultimately react to Putin’s decisions. The situation is complicated because at least some high-level officers may have supported the mutiny. Aerospace commander Gen Sergei Surovikin, who formerly commanded Russian operations in Syria and Ukraine and is highly regarded within the Russian military, seems to have taken the fall for Prigozhin. Surovikin was detained in early July and has not been seen since. Prigozhin had earlier called him the go-between in his longstanding legal and resource battles with the defense ministry, and western intelligence officials believe Surovikin knew of the mutiny in advance.
Meanwhile, Prigozhin appears largely unscathed, despite his challenges to the regime and the death and destruction his actions caused. Instead he seems to have reached a profitable modus vivendi with Putin. This must leave Russian officers and soldiers confused at best, and perhaps doubting the worth and purpose of the sacrifices they have made in Ukraine, if a traitor who said that Putin’s justifications for the war were lies, retains Putin’s favor.
Regardless, none of this is likely to spark either a popular revolution or a real coup attempt in Russia. Putin has always been surrounded by an armed presidential regiment, and now hundreds of thousands of personnel in Russia’s national guard, who report directly to Putin and are responsible for domestic security, are receiving heavy weapons. The Kremlin has also cracked down even further on dissent, arresting two prominent pro-war nationalists who have criticized Putin’s handling of the invasion.
But Putin’s dithering and backtracking, both during the mutiny and afterwards, must be giving his inner circle pause. Western intelligence officials revealed that Putin knew about the mutiny in advance, yet did nothing to stop it. Now he seems to have done little to punish it. One factor that has long kept members of the Russian elite from challenging Putin – their belief in his invincibility – is now suspect.
The fortunes of the elite remain tied to Putin and his networks. There is no obvious contender to replace him, and Russia’s domestic intelligence services are all-intrusive. Those risks mean that it would take a very big loss indeed in their confidence in Putin for any elite cabal to consider deposing him.
Yet the president is more vulnerable now than he has ever been, especially amid the bleak outlook for Russia’s costly and grinding war in Ukraine. Both the US president, Joe Biden, and CIA chief, William Burns, suggest that Prigozhin should watch his back, since Putin’s vindictiveness often leads him to take revenge long after a perceived betrayal. Now Putin may be watching his own back, too. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/04/wagner-group-mutiny-putin-prigozhin-russia
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SUROVIKIN, “GENERAL ARMAGEDDON,” UNDER HOUSE ARREST
Russia’s General Sergei Surovikin, believed to be an ally of exiled Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been removed from his leadership role in Moscow’s war on Ukraine and is under house arrest, according to reports circulating among Russian military bloggers and media.
The VChK-OGPU blog, which is considered close to Russia’s security forces, reported late Sunday that Surovikin is now “under a kind of house arrest” where he can’t leave the apartment he is being kept in, but has been permitted visitors, including several of his subordinates.
Surovikin, known as “General Armageddon” for his aggressive military strategies in Chechnya and Syria, has not been seen in public since Wagner’s march on Moscow in June, after reports circulated that he had known about Prigozhin’s planned mutiny.
“There is no official investigation, but Surovikin spent a long time in limbo answering uncomfortable questions,” VChK-OGPU reported, adding that the general has been advised to stay under the radar so that he is “forgotten.” Quoting a person with knowledge of the situation, the blog said a decision on Surovikin’s ultimate fate “must be taken by one person, and the longer this takes, the more this person will cool down” — referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The report came just a few days after Viktor Sobolev, a former Russian lieutenant general who now sits as an MP in the state Duma, told News.ru that Surovikin had been removed from his role as commander of the Kremlin’s forces in Ukraine.
Sobolev also hinted that Surovikin could ultimately make a comeback, telling the Russian news site that the general could be useful to the army at a later point, if he isn’t found to have committed serious violations.
The Kremlin has not yet made an official public statement about Surovikin’s whereabouts or the reports about his foreknowledge of the Wagner mutiny, only referring to “speculations, allegations” when probed by reporters on his disappearance.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-general-armageddon-sergei-surovikin-removed-military-leadership-under-house-arrest-reports/
Oriana:
Meanwhile, Prigozhin has been seen in St. Petersburg, meeting with African leaders, and promising to support the coup in Niger. Apparently Prigozhin is seen as too useful to be liquidated.
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Once Stalin was dissatisfied with how Nadezhda Krupskaya( Lenin’s wife ) commented one of his decisions. It was a couple of years after Lenin’s death . So he told her, “Another remark like this and we will appoint another woman as Lenin’s widow!”
Oriana:
Perhaps apocryphal, but it epitomizes the spirit of Stalinism: no lives matter, no-one is irreplaceable And seeing how Putin uses body doubles and travels by armored train, I think it might have actually happened. Russia and paranoid leaders who are also mass murderers . . . who says that history doesn't repeat itself? We might as well read about the intrigues in the medieval Russian Mongol Empire or Ivan the Terrible.
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A RUSSIAN JOKE AND A TRUE STORY
Q: Why hasn’t Russia sent men to the Moon?
A: What if they won’t come home?
True stories from the Stalinist period may not be very cute, but they can be funny. Supposedly true story from the life of Dimitri Shostakovich, the famous Soviet composer who outlived Stalin. In the ‘30s, artists and intellectuals had to tread the party line very carefully. Dmitri was never certain of his status and lived with a suitcase packed with warm clothing. One night, his turn seemed to come when he was ordered to report to a certain office tomorrow to answer some questions. He showed up, suitcase in hand, and waited in the Commissar’s anteroom, and waited, and waited. Finally, a secretary to the Commissar found Dmitri waiting patiently in his chair. She quickly apologized. “Oh, have we kept you waiting all day?” “Oh, um no, not really. I have an appointment with comrade XX.” “Oh no. I’m terribly sorry. Someone should have told you. Your appointment has been canceled.” “Why?” “Well, you see, comrade XX was arrested this morning.”
The spirit of Stalinism is alive, but now the methods of execution have changed.
FSO Secret Service General Genady Lopirev who was once responsible for the security of the notorious Putin’s Palace in Gelenzhik was poisoned with Novichok in the penal colony where he was serving a sentence on made up charges and died.
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EARTH IS LITERALLY SPINNING FASTER NOW THAN 50 YEARS AGO
~ Ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day? Turns out, you might be onto something. Earth is rotating faster than it has in the last half-century, resulting in our days being ever-so-slightly shorter than we’re used to. And while it’s an infinitesimally small difference, it’s become a big headache for physicists, computer programmers and even stockbrokers.
Why Earth Rotates
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago, when a dense cloud of interstellar dust and gas collapsed in on itself and began to spin. There are vestiges of this original movement in our planet’s current rotation, thanks to angular momentum — essentially, “the tendency of the body that's rotating, to carry on rotating until something actively tries to stop it,” explains Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.
Thanks to that angular momentum, our planet has been spinning for billions of years and we experience night and day. But it hasn’t always spun at the same rate.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth made about 420 rotations in the time it took to orbit the Sun; we can see evidence of how each year was jam-packed with extra days by examining the growth lines on fossil corals. Although days have gradually grown longer over time (in part because of how the moon pulls at Earth’s oceans, which slows us down a bit), during humanity’s watch, we’ve been holding steady at about 24 hours for a full rotation — which translates to about 365 rotations per trip ’round the Sun.
As scientists have improved at observing Earth’s rotation and keeping track of time, however, they've realized that we experience little fluctuations in how long it takes to make a full rotation.
A New Way to Track Time
In the 1950s, scientists developed atomic clocks that kept time based on how electrons in cesium atoms fall from a high-energy, excited state back to their normal ones. Since atomic clocks’ periods are generated by this unchanging atomic behavior, they don’t get thrown off by external changes like temperature shifts the way that traditional clocks can.
Over the years, though, scientists spotted a problem: The unimpeachably steady atomic clocks were shifting slightly from the time that the rest of the world kept.
“As time goes on, there is a gradual divergence between the time of atomic clocks and the time measured by astronomy, that is, by the position of Earth or the moon and stars,” says Judah Levine, a physicist in the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Basically, a year as recorded by atomic clocks was a bit faster than that same year calculated from Earth’s movement. “In order to keep that divergence from getting too big, in 1972, the decision was made to periodically add leap seconds to atomic clocks,” Levine says.
Levine, a physicist in the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Basically, a year as recorded by atomic clocks was a bit faster than that same year calculated from Earth’s movement. “In order to keep that divergence from getting too big, in 1972, the decision was made to periodically add leap seconds to atomic clocks,” Levine says.
Leap seconds work a little like the leap days that we tack on to the end of February every four years to make up for the fact that it really takes around 365.25 days for Earth to orbit the Sun.
But unlike leap years, which come steadily every four years, leap seconds are unpredictable.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service keeps tabs on how quickly the planet spins by sending laser beams to satellites to measure their movement, along with other techniques. When the time plotted by Earth’s movement approaches one second out of sync with the time measured by atomic clocks, scientists around the world coordinate to stop atomic clocks for exactly one second, at 11:59:59 pm on June 30 or December 31, to allow astronomical clocks to catch up. Voila — a leap second.
Unexpected Change
Since the first leap second was added in 1972, scientists have added leap seconds every few years. They’re added irregularly because Earth’s rotation is erratic, with intermittent periods of speeding up and slowing down that interrupt the planet’s millions-of-years-long gradual slowdown.
“The rotation rate of Earth is a complicated business. It has to do with exchange of angular momentum between Earth and the atmosphere and the effects of the ocean and the effect of the moon,” Levine says. “You're not able to predict what's going to happen very far in the future.”
But in the past decade or so, Earth’s rotational slowdown has … well, slowed down. There hasn’t been a leap second added since 2016, and our planet is currently spinning faster than it has in half a century. Scientists aren’t sure why.
“This lack of the need for leap seconds was not predicted,” Levine says. “The assumption was, in fact, that Earth would continue to slow down and leap seconds would continue to be needed. And so this effect, this result, is very surprising.”
The Trouble With Leap Seconds
Depending on how much Earth’s rotations speed up and how long that trend continues, scientists might have to take action. “There is this concern at the moment that if Earth’s rotation rate increases further that we might need to have what's called a negative leap second,” Whibberley says. “In other words, instead of inserting an extra second to allow Earth to catch up, we have to take out a second from the atomic timescale to bring it back into state with Earth.”
But a negative leap second would present scientists with a whole new set of challenges.
“There's never been a negative leap second before and the concern is that software that would have to handle that has never been tested operationally before,” Whibberley adds.
Whether a regular leap second or a negative leap second is called for, in fact, these tiny changes can be a massive headache for industries ranging from telecommunications to navigation systems. That’s because leap seconds meddle with time in a way that computers aren’t prepared to handle.
“The primary backbone of the internet is that time is continuous,” Levine says. When there’s not a steady, continuous feed of information, things fall apart. Repeating a second or skipping over it trips up the whole system and can cause gaps in what’s supposed to be a steady stream of data. Leap seconds also present a challenge for the financial industry, where each transaction must have its own unique time stamp — a potential problem when that 23:59:59 second repeats itself.
Some companies have sought out their own solutions to leap seconds, like the Google smear. Instead of stopping the clock to let Earth catch up with atomic time, Google makes each second a tiny bit longer on a leap second day. “That’s a way of doing it,” Levine says, “but that doesn’t agree with the international standard for how time is defined.”
Time As a Tool
In the grand scheme of things, though, we’re talking about very tiny amounts of time — just one second every couple of years. You’ve lived through plenty of leap seconds and probably weren’t even aware of them. And if we view time as a tool to measure things we see in the world around us, like the transition from one day to the next, then there’s an argument to be made for following the time set by the movement of Earth rather than the electrons in an atomic clock — no matter how precise they might be.
Levine says he thinks that leap seconds might not be worth the trouble they cause: “My private opinion is that the cure is worse than the disease.” If we stopped adjusting our clocks to account for leap seconds, it could take a century to get even a minute off from the “true” time recorded by atomic clocks.
Still, he concedes that while it’s true that time is just a construct, a decidedly human attempt to make sense of our experiences in a big, weird universe, “it's also true that you have the idea that at 12 o'clock noon, the Sun is overhead. And so you, although you don't think about it often, do have a link to astronomical time.” Leap seconds are just a tiny, nearly invisible way of keeping that link alive. ~
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/earth-is-spinning-faster-now-than-it-was-50-years-ago?utm_source=acs&utm_medium=email&utm_email=ivy333%40cox.net&utm_campaign=News0_DSC_230813_000000_CRV1AUD000_Short&eid=ivy333%40cox.net
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TO STAY COOL, SHOULD WE LIVE UNDERGROUND?
~ On the long road towards central Australia, as you travel 848km (527 miles) north from Adelaide's coastal plains, is a scattering of enigmatic sand-pyramids. Around them, the landscape is utterly desolate – an endless expanse of salmon-pink dust, with the occasional determined shrub.
But as you venture further along the highway, more of these mystery constructions emerge – piles of pale earth, haphazardly scattered like long-forgotten monuments. Every now and then, there is a white pipe sticking up from the ground next to one.
These are the first signs of Coober Pedy, an opal mining town with a population of around 2,500 people. Many of its little peaks are the waste soil from decades of mining, but they are also evidence of another local specialty – underground living.
In this corner of the world, 60% of the population inhabits homes built into the iron-rich sandstone and siltstone rock. In some neighborhoods, the only signs of habitation are ventilation shafts sticking up, and the excess soil that has been dumped near entrances.
In the winter, this troglodyte lifestyle may seem merely eccentric. But on a summer's day, Coober Pedy – loosely translated from an indigenous Australian term that means "white man in a hole" – needs no explanation: it regularly hits 52C (126F), so hot that birds have been known to fall from the sky and electronics must be stored in fridges.
This year, the strategy seems more prescient than ever. In July, the city of Chongquing, in southwest China, resorted to opening up air raid shelters built during WW2 – amid large-scale bombing from Japan – to shelter citizens from a very different threat: a 10-day streak of weather above 35C (95F). Others have been retreating to underground "cave hotpot" restaurants, which are popular in the city. As the blistering three-month heatwave continues in the US – with temperatures even cacti can't handle – and wildfires incinerate swathes of southern Europe, what could we learn from Coober Pedy's residents?
A long history
Coober Pedy is not the world's first, or even its largest, subterranean settlement. People have been retreating underground to cope with challenging climates for thousands of years, from the human ancestors who dropped their tools in a South African cave two million years ago, to the Neanderthals who created inexplicable piles of stalagmites in a French grotto during an ice age 176,000 years ago. Even chimpanzees have been observed cooling down in caverns, to help them cope with the extreme daytime heat in southeastern Senegal.
Take Cappadocia, an ancient district of central Turkey. The region sits on an arid plateau, and is famous for its striking, almost fantasy geology, with a landscape of sculpted pinnacles, chimneys, and spires of rock, like a kingdom in a fairytale. But it is what's among these that is truly spectacular.
According to popular rumor, it all started with some disappearing chickens. In 1963, a man was knocking through the basement of his home when his poultry kept going missing. He soon found they were disappearing into a hole he'd accidentally opened up, and after clearing the way, he followed them in. From there, things became even stranger. The man had discovered a secret passageway – a steep subterranean path that led to a labyrinth of niches and further corridors. This was one of many entrances to the lost city of Derinkuyu.
Derinkuyu is just one of hundreds of cave dwellings and several underground cities in the area, and is thought to have been built around the 8th Century BC. It was almost constantly inhabited for millennia – with its own ventilation shafts, wells, stables, churches, warehouses and a vast network of underground homes – and doubled as an emergency shelter for up to 20,000 people, in case of invasion.
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Like at Coober Pedy, subterranean living helped the region's inhabitants to cope with the continental climate, which swings between hot, dry summers and frigid, snowy winters – while outside, it varies from well below zero to above 30C (86F), underground it is always 13C (55F).
Even now, the region's man-made caves are renowned for their passive cooling abilities – a building technique involving using design choices instead of energy to reduce heat gain and loss. Today Cappadocia's ancient galleries and passages are piled high with thousands of tons of potatoes, lemons, cabbages, and other produce that would otherwise need to be refrigerated. They are in such popular demand, new ones are being built.
An effective solution
Further along the road to Coober Pedy is the main town. At first glance, it could be mistaken for an ordinary outback settlement – the streets are pink with dust, and there are restaurants, bars, supermarkets and petrol stations. On a ridge overlooking all this is the town's only tree, a sculpture made of metal. Coober Pedy is eerily empty. The buildings are widely spaced, and something doesn't quite add up.
But below ground, all is explained. Some of Coober Pedy's "dugouts", as they are known, are accessed through what look like small ordinary buildings – as you step inside, their underground passages gradually reveal themselves, like stepping through a wardrobe into Narnia. Others are more obvious – at Riba's, a campsite where people can pitch their tents in niches several meters below ground, the entrance is a dark tunnel.
Derinkuyu
In Coober Pedy, subterranean buildings must be at least four meters (13ft) deep, to prevent their roofs collapsing – and under this amount of rock, it is always a balmy 23C (73F). While above-ground residents must endure oven-hot summers and frigid winter nights, where it regularly dips to 2-3C (36-37F), subterranean homes remain at perfect room temperature, 24 hours a day, year-round.
Apart from comfort, one major advantage of underground living is money. Coober Pedy generates all its own electricity – 70% of which is powered by wind and solar – but running air conditioning is often impossibly expensive. "To live above ground, you pay an absolute fortune for heating and cooling, when it's often above 50C (122F) in the summer", says Jason Wright, a resident who runs Riba's.
Oddly, the subterranean lifestyle might also provide some protection against earthquakes, which Wright describes as producing a vibrating noise that builds to a crescendo, then rolls through to the other side of the dugout. "We've had two since I've lived here and I've never even flinched," he says. (However, how safe underground structures are during seismic activity is entirely dependent on how large, complex and deep they are.)
The sandstone is structurally sound without supports, so it's possible to make (literally) cavernous rooms with high ceilings, in any shape you like, with no additional materials. In fact, tunneling in Coober Pedy is so straightforward, many locals live in elaborate, luxury dwellings, with underground swimming pools, games rooms, expansive bathrooms, and high-spec living rooms. One local has previously described his subterranean home as "like a castle", with 50,000 tumble bricks and arched doorways to every room.
"We've got some stunning dugouts here," says Wright, who explains that the residents are notoriously private – another possibility when you live underground – so you only tend to find out about them when you're invited over for dinner.
THE HUMIDITY PROBLEM
Of the many rock dwellings that have been inhabited by humans, the majority are in dry areas – from the towers and walls built onto the cliffs at Mesa Verde in Colorado, inhabited for over 700 years by the Ancestral Pueblo people, to the elaborate temples, tombs and palaces cut into the pink sandstone at Petra, Jordan. Today, one of the last inhabited rock-cut villages in the world is Kandovan, in the foothills of Mount Sahand in Iran – a valley scattered with strange, pointed caves that have been hollowed out into houses, like a colony of termite mounds. The area receives just 11mm (0.43in) of rainfall each month on average throughout the entire summer.
On the other hand, building underground in wetter areas is notoriously tricky. To waterproof the original London underground tunnels, which were built in the 19th Century, each one was encased in several layers of brick and a liberal coating of bitumen (today more modern methods are used). But even with those precautions, there are still regular reports of black mold. The same issue plagues basements, bunkers and car parks in high-rainfall areas throughout the globe.
There are two main reasons for this: a lack of ventilation, which can allow moisture from cooking, showering and breathing to condense onto a cave's cool walls, and groundwater – if underground homes are built near the water table.
Take the Hazan Caves in Israel, a complex network of underground hideouts built by Jewish people avoiding persecution by the Romans in the 2nd Century AD – complete with olive presses, kitchens, halls, water reservoirs and a columbarium for storing funerary urns. Just 66m (217ft) into the cave, the temperature drops significantly compared to outside, but the humidity also leaps from just 40% to double this level. This may be partly because the cave system is built into porous rock in a lowland area – where there tends to be more groundwater. With narrow passageways and limited entrances, it also has poor air flow.
But in Coober Pedy, which sits on 50m (164ft) of porous sandstone, conditions are arid even underground. "It's very, very dry here," says Wright. Ventilation shafts are added to ensure an adequate supply of oxygen and to allow moisture from indoor activities to escape, though these are often just simple pipes sticking up through the ceiling.
There are some other downsides to these heatwave-proof bunkers. Lewis currently lives above ground on a caravan park, after his underground home – at the very same spot – collapsed. "It doesn't happen very often," he says. "It was on bad ground." It's also not unheard of for residents to accidentally knock through into a neighbor's house.
Despite the setback, Lewis misses dugout life – and Wright would highly recommend it to anyone who is currently suffering in unreasonably high temperatures. "It's a no-brainer when you experience that heat," he says.
Perhaps soon Coober Pedy's peculiar sand-pyramids will start popping up in other places too. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230803-the-town-where-people-live-underground
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THE IMPACT OF CANADIAN AIR FIRES ON THE STRATOSPHERE
~ Apocalyptic images of wildfire devastation – from charred homes to cities shrouded in deadly smoke – are fast coming to embody the world's unfolding climate disaster.
In Hawaii this August, the death toll is still rising after the deadliest US wildfire in over a century ripped through Maui. In Canada, extreme fires blazing across the country are more widespread than at any other time on record.
Research has shown that wildfires' likelihood and intensity have already increased due to human-caused global temperature rise. But there is still so much we don't yet understand about these powerful phenomena. Not least, wildfires' own ability to alter and disrupt climate systems long after their flames die out.
One of the most far-reaching ways fires impact the climate is their ability to release vast quantities of carbon stored in trees and soils into the atmosphere. In a vicious feed-back loop, the additional CO2 then contributes to the same long-term warming of the planet that makes the fires themselves more likely. In 2020 alone, California's wildfires were estimated to have negated 16 years of the state's cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. Forest regrowth may occur, the researchers suggest, but not fast enough to help keep global warming under the 1.5C limit.
Not all of wildfires' impacts on climate are so long-lasting, however. Nor do all produce warming. By blocking sunlight and attracting additional water droplets that brighten clouds, smoke aerosols can reflect sunlight back into space, leading to localized cooling in the lower atmosphere.
This cooling effect typically only lasts until rain washes the aerosols back to earth. Yet as wildfires increase in scale, even these more temporary impacts are expanding their reach and duration. Australia's 2019-2020 fire season, for instance, produced a widespread smoke-induced cooling that may have influenced the recent "triple dip" in the La Niña weather pattern, research suggests.
Understanding how wildfires' various impacts interact is therefore key to understanding their overall impact on the climate – and thus to guiding humanity's attempts to limit dangerous climate change.
Super outbreaks
Calculating the net warming or cooling effect of wildfires means considering their impact across various time-scales and levels of the atmosphere, from surface up. One avenue of research has thus focused on the stratospheric reactions that take place 4-31 miles (6-50km) up in the air.
Beneath this level, the lower troposphere is warming due to rising levels of CO2. Yet the same trend is also cooling the stratosphere, where thinner air allows the carbon dioxide to release its energy into space.
In Canada, extreme fires blazing across the country are more widespread than at any other time on record.
Until recently, it was thought only volcanoes or nuclear explosions were powerful enough to interrupt this cooling process by propelling smoke up into the stratosphere. But when large wildfires meet with the right meteorological conditions, they can produce vast dirty thunderstorms which darken the sky, create erratic winds and tornadoes, and inject large plumes of wildfire smoke five to nine miles (8-14km) above the surface. Known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs, these thunder-clouds release aerosols that can travel thousands of miles across the globe.
Once airborne, the black carbon in these wildfire aerosols absorb heat, causing them to rise and warm the surrounding stratosphere, says Matthias Stocker from the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change at the University of Graz, Austria.
His research on large wildfires' stratospheric impact has shown that smoke from the pyroCb super outbreak in Australia in 2019-20 caused the stratosphere to warm very strongly (by up to 10C/18F) during the plumes' early development. Over the next few months, it remained an average of 3.5C (6.3F) warmer, before the aerosols sank back to earth.
Canada has this year seen by far its most active pyroCb year over the last decade, says David A Peterson, a meteorologist with the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, which is attempting to create a prediction system for the movement of pyroCb smoke, and has been building a global dataset since 2013.
"At least 133 pyroCbs have been observed in Canada since early May, with 153 observed worldwide," he adds – more than doubling the country's previous seasonal maximum. (Read about the latest science on whether climate change caused Canada's wildfires).
However, none of the many pyroCb events observed in 2023 rival the stratospheric impact of the 2019-20 Australia super outbreak, or the 2017 Pacific Northwest event in Canada, says Peterson. Both produced stratospheric smoke plumes that "rival or exceed the impact from the majority of volcanic eruptions over the past decade", he says – persisting at high altitudes for many months.
Stratosphere vs troposphere
Models clearly show that the conditions for pyroCb wildfires are set to increase, meaning there is the potential for the effects of such aerosols to become significant enough "to change dynamics in the stratosphere and have consequences," Stocker says.
One particular concern is that the recovery of the ozone layer, which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation, could be delayed – and research has already demonstrated some negative impacts).
Exactly how stratospheric warming could affect weather, almost all of which occurs in the troposphere, is not yet known, however.
Changes in the heat of the stratosphere in turn changes the circulation of winds, says Karen Rosenlof of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Chemical Sciences Laboratory. "Changing the winds can change how waves propagate in the stratosphere, and that provides the feedbacks on the troposphere." But the impact on surface weather is "going to depend on the distribution of the heating in the stratosphere, so it's not really possible to generalize", she says.
"The big thing we've already learnt is that wildfires can be important for several effects in the stratosphere," says Stocker. "It's a big experiment. And in my opinion, I don't want to try out the changes. Researchers see there can already be harmful effects.”
Albedo and evaporation
Wildfires can also influence climate back on the ground.
One mechanism involves changes to a landscapes' albedo, or ability to reflect light. In the aftermath of a fire, charred surfaces can reduce albedo, leading to an increase in surface warming. Conversely, a reduced forest canopy can raise albedo by exposing more reflective entities such as grass or snow, leading to a cooling effect.
Another process involves the evaporation of water. Thriving plants release water from their leaves in a process known transpiration, and water also evaporates directly from the soil and canopies. The surrounding air is cooled as a result. But when wildfires suppress this, warming increases.
A 2019 study which investigated the interplay of these factors found that the average surface temperature can warm for at least five years after flames are extinguished. Reduced transpiration was found to be the main cause of this, says Zhihua Liu, an ecology researcher at the University of Montana and lead author of the study.
"If there are more frequent and severe fires in the future, this land surface warming may contribute to climate warming," he adds. "However, the interactions among climate warming, vegetation dynamics, and fire are very complex, and yet to be fully understood.”
'It's a big experiment’
With wildfires impacting the climate system in so many ways, understanding the different interactions and timescales is essential for understanding their overall impact in the long term. "We need to understand the net outcomes because we need to understand how fast to reduce our human CO2 emissions," says Stocker.
There are suggestions that solar geoengineering, which would simulate the cooling effects of volcano and wildfire smoke, could help address some of climate change's worst effects by artificially injecting aerosols into the stratosphere.
But doing so when we cannot yet fully model wildfires' myriad impacts would be unwise, Stocker says. "At the moment, we don't know what geoengineering would do. [Studying wildfires] helps us to understand what changes there could be – but hopefully we won't try a big geoengineering scenario.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230817-how-wildfires-push-up-temperatures-long-after-they-are-extinguished
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OLDEST HUMAN BONES
~ Fossils recovered from an old mine on a desolate mountain in Morocco have rocked one of the most enduring foundations of the human story: that Homo sapiens arose in a cradle of humankind in East Africa 200,000 years ago.
Archaeologists unearthed the bones of at least five people at Jebel Irhoud, a former barite mine 100km west of Marrakesh, in excavations that lasted years. They knew the remains were old, but were stunned when dating tests revealed that a tooth and stone tools found with the bones were about 300,000 years old.
“My reaction was a big ‘wow’,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, a senior scientist on the team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “I was expecting them to be old, but not that old.”
Hublin said the extreme age of the bones makes them the oldest known specimens of modern humans and poses a major challenge to the idea that the earliest members of our species evolved in a “Garden of Eden” in East Africa one hundred thousand years later.
“This gives us a completely different picture of the evolution of our species. It goes much further back in time, but also the very process of evolution is different to what we thought,” Hublin told the Guardian. “It looks like our species was already present probably all over Africa by 300,000 years ago. If there was a Garden of Eden, it might have been the size of the continent.”
Jebel Irhoud has thrown up puzzles for scientists since fossilized bones were first found at the site in the 1960s. Remains found in 1961 and 1962, and stone tools recovered with them, were attributed to Neanderthals and at first considered to be only 40,000 years old. At the time, a popular view held that modern humans evolved from Neanderthals. Today, the Neanderthals are considered a sister group that lived alongside, and even bred with, our modern human ancestors.
In fresh excavations at the Jebel Irhoud site, Hublin and others found more remains, including a partial skull, a jawbone, teeth and limb bones belonging to three adults, a juvenile, and a child aged about eight years old. The remains, which resemble modern humans more than any other species, were recovered from the base of an old limestone cave that had its roof smashed in during mining operations at the site. Alongside the bones, researchers found sharpened flint tools, a good number of gazelle bones, and lumps of charcoal, perhaps left over from fires that warmed those who once lived there.
“It’s rather a desolate landscape, but on the horizon you have the Atlas mountains with snow on top and it’s very beautiful,” said Hublin. “When we found the skull and mandible I was emotional. They are only fossils, but they have been human beings and very quickly you make a connection with these people who lived and died here 300,000 years ago.”
The first almost complete adult mandible discovered at the site of Jebel Irhoud. The bone morphology and the dentition display a combination of archaic and evolved features.
The researchers describe how they compared the freshly-excavated fossils with those of modern humans, Neanderthals and ancient human relatives that lived up to 1.8m years ago. Facially, the closest match was with modern humans. The lower jaw was similar to modern Homo sapiens too, but much larger. The most striking difference was the shape of the braincase which was more elongated than that of humans today. It suggests, said Hublin, that the modern brain evolved in Homo sapiens and was not inherited from a predecessor.
Apart from being more stout and muscular, the adults at Jebel Irhoud looked similar to people alive today. “The face of the specimen we found is the face of someone you could meet on the tube in London,” Hublin said. In a second paper, the scientists lay out how they dated the stone tools to between 280,000 and 350,000 years, and a lone tooth to 290,000 years old.
The remains of more individuals may yet be found at the site. But precisely what they were doing there is unclear. Analysis of the flint tools shows that the stones came not from the local area, but from a region 50km south of Jebel Irhoud. “Why did they come here? They brought their toolkit with them and they exhausted it,” Hublin said. “The tools they brought with them have been resharpened, resharpened, and resharpened again. They did not produce new tools on the spot. It might be that they did not stay that long, or maybe it was an area they would come to do something specific. We think they were hunting gazelles, there are a lot of gazelle bones, and they were making a lot of fires.”
Hublin concedes that scientists have too few fossils to know whether modern humans had spread to the four corners of Africa 300,000 years ago. The speculation is based on what the scientists see as similar features in a 260,000-year-old skull found in Florisbad in South Africa.
But he finds the theory compelling. “The idea is that early Homo sapiens dispersed around the continent and elements of human modernity appeared in different places, and so different parts of Africa contributed to the emergence of what we call modern humans today,” he said.
John McNabb, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, said: “One of the big questions about the emergence of anatomically modern humans has been did our body plan evolve quickly or slowly. This find seems to suggest the latter. It seems our faces became modern long before our skulls took on the shape they have today.”
“There are some intriguing possibilities here too. The tools the people at Jebel Irhoud were making were based on a knapping technique called Levallois, a sophisticated way of shaping stone tools. The date of 300,000 years ago adds to a growing realization that Levallois originates a lot earlier than we thought. Is Jebel Irhoud telling us that this new technology is linked to the emergence of the hominin line that will lead to modern humans? Does the new find imply there was more than one hominin lineage in Africa at this time? It really stirs the pot.”
Lee Berger, whose team recently discovered the 300,000 year-old Homo naledi, an archaic-looking human relative, near the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site outside Johannesburg, said dating the Jebel Irhoud bones was thrilling, but is unconvinced that modern humans lived all over Africa so long ago. “They’ve taken two data points and not drawn a line between them, but a giant map of Africa,” he said.
John Shea, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the study, said he was cautious whenever researchers claimed they had found the oldest of anything. “It’s best not to judge by the big splash they make when they are first announced, but rather to wait and see some years down the line whether the waves from that splash have altered the shoreline,” he said, adding that stone tools can move around in cave sediments and settle in layers of a different age.
But Jessica Thompson, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, said the new results show just how incredible the Jebel Irhoud site is. “These fossils are the rarest of the rare because the human fossil record from this time period in Africa is so poorly represented. They give us a direct look at what early members of our species looked like, as well as their behavior.
“You might also look twice at the brow ridges if you saw them on a living person. It might not be a face you’d see every day, but you would definitely recognize it as human,” she said. “It really does look like in Africa especially, but also globally, our evolution was characterized by numerous different species all living at the same time and possibly even in the same places.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/07/oldest-homo-sapiens-bones-ever-found-shake-foundations-of-the-human-story
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“Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.” ~ Nietzsche
It still takes Nietzsche to say something as politically incorrect as this, and as exhilarating. Do we need “mystical” explanations of the universe, or is that another cover for wishful thinking (eternal bliss awaits me; not sure about you)? The greatest mysteries lie all around us, in the nature of reality. Have you tried to nibble, at least, at quantum physics? chaos theory and emergence? Next to these, mystical imaginings seem downright childish and simplistic.
We are hard-wired to seek patterns and meaning. On the whole this is a good thing, but it can result in the mistake of manufacturing supernatural explanations. Once enshrined in "holy scriptures," thousand-year-old absurdities continue to weigh us down.
Matt Flumerfelt commented, “Mysticism throws everything back in the formless cauldron so it can be endlessly prated about without logical restrictions.”
The good news is that we can enjoy the thrill of the mysterious without multiplying useless metaphysics. Once you delve into science, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the true mystery is all around us. As Nietzsche also said, every time you look at something in sufficient depth, an infinity opens up.
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COULD CHRISTIANITY REJECT THE IDEA OF HELL?
I always felt that saying to someone “You’ll burn in hell forever!” was hate speech. I live in a Navy town, so there are plenty of believers. For decades I've had to follow cars whose bumper sticker said "Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior or you'll burn in hell forever." Sad that it was the sole reason given. Once I read a discussion on rejecting the idea of hell. One commenter (a Catholic) said, "But then no one would have any reason to follow Jesus."
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A VERY, VERY SHORT WORKOUT
~ Bicep curls aren't the only way to strengthen your arm muscles.
A recent study demonstrates an effective alternative technique that achieves results after just three seconds of working out three times a week.
That's just 36 seconds of weight work over the course of a month, according to a team from Edith Cowan University in Australia in collaboration with institutions in Japan.
The study is small, but it supports previous findings that suggest eccentric, muscle-lengthening exercises can strengthen bands of fibrous tissue more efficiently than concentric, muscle-shortening actions.
Past research has found a small amount of resistance training that focusses on lengthening muscles is a far more effective technique.
In other words, lifting a heavy dumbbell from the waist to the chest may not be as useful for muscle conditioning as the reverse movement. Sure, it burns more calories, but the alternative stiffens the muscle more and also induces changes in the brain associated with greater muscle responsiveness.
In the current experiment, 26 young, healthy adults were split into two groups.
One group performed three-second workouts of bicep extensions twice a week. The other group performed the same exercises three times a week.
After four weeks, researchers compared the forces delivered by their elbow flexors and the muscle thickness of their biceps brachii and brachialis.
These results were then compared to a previous study by some of the same authors, which had participants do similar exercises five days a week.
In this past study, 3-second workouts that lengthened bicep muscles produced the best results compared to those that shortened them.
After a minute of accumulative exercise, spread across four weeks, participants in the eccentric training group improved their muscle strength by 11.5 percent.
"We haven't investigated other muscles yet, but if we find the three-second rule also applies to other muscles then you might be able to do a whole-body exercise in less than 30 seconds," said exercise and sports scientist Ken Kazunori Nosaka in 2022.
To be clear, these short workouts probably don't improve cardiovascular fitness, just muscle strength.
Nevertheless, the current study suggests that these three-second bouts of eccentric biceps contractions can achieve impressive physical results with as few as three workouts a week.
After four weeks, participants who worked out three times a week saw, on average, a 2.5 percent increase in concentric strength and a 3.9 percent increase in eccentric strength.
Those who worked out twice a week showed no significant improvements.
"Our previous work has shown regular, shorter exercise is more beneficial than a one or two big training sessions in a week," explains Nosaka.
"Now, we have a clearer idea of where the tipping point is where you start to see meaningful benefits from such a minimal exercise. These new results suggest at least three days a week are required, at least for the single three-second eccentric contraction training."
Nosaka and his colleagues suspect that these super-short workouts are more effective than a big workout because they allow the muscle to recover more easily.
The rest between exercises is close to 28,800 times more than the actual exercise time.
In a study from 2017, this down-time was linked to a 'silent period' in the motor cortex, and initial results suggest this silence may be involved in increasing muscle strength.
More research needs to be done to suss out the details, but it seems possible that to a certain extent, the frequency of a workout matters more than the actual duration of it.
"It is important to note that even a very small amount of exercise can make a difference to our body, if it is performed regularly," says Nosaka.
The study was published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology.
https://www.sciencealert.com/shortest-workout-ever-3-seconds-of-exercise-3-times-a-week-grows-muscle
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WHAT IS THE BEST SLEEP POSITION?
~ Researchers in Denmark used small motion-sensor detectors attached to volunteers' thighs, upper backs and upper arms before they went to sleep to establish their favored sleeping position. They found that during their time in bed, people spent just over half their time on their sides, around 38% on their backs and 7% on their fronts. The older the people were, the more time they spent on their sides.
This bias towards sleeping on our sides is something we develop only as we become adults, because children over the age of three spend on average an equal amount of time sleeping on their sides, back and fronts.
Babies, meanwhile, sleep mainly on their backs because they're put in their cots this way for safety reasons.
So sleeping on your side is the most common position and we could trust the wisdom of the crowd to choose the position where they sleep best, but what about the data? A very small observational study in which people could sleep however they preferred found that those who slept on their right side slept slightly better than those on their left, followed by those on their backs.
If you find it easy to sleep on your side, then it's probably also best for anyone else trying to get to sleep nearby. On one occasion, while touring a submarine for a radio program I was making, the submariners showed me their sleeping quarters, where the bunks were stacked so closely on top of each other that it was hard to turn over. That meant they tended to sleep on their backs, so they told me it was a race to get to sleep first before the whole cabin was full of snoring men.
Another small study looked at seafarers working on merchant container ships and found that respiratory disturbances such as snoring were more common when the seafarers were sleeping on their backs.
Some snoring is caused by severe obstructive sleep apnea, where breathing stops and starts while the person is sleeping. This has been found to be more common in people who consistently sleep on their backs.
By contrast, lying on your side helps to clear the upper airway and prevents the uvula (the fleshy bit that hangs down in the back of your throat) and the tongue from obstructing the throat, leading to less snoring. Indeed, in some cases, a move from sleeping mainly on your back to mainly sleeping on your side has been shown to solve the problem of sleep apnea altogether.
Sleeping on your side may well have other benefits too. For instance, research into the sleep patterns of welders on container ships in Nigeria showed that those who slept on their back were more likely to suffer back pain, compared with those who slept on their sides.
But this doesn't mean sleeping on your side works for everyone or is a panacea for all aches and pains. It depends on your ailment and the exact position you adopt during sleep. Researchers in Western Australia monitored volunteers' bedrooms for 12 hours a night using automatic cameras and found that those who said they regularly woke up with a stiff neck spent more time sleeping in what the researchers refer to as "provocative side sleeping positions”.
This phrase might conjure up all sorts of possibilities in your mind, but what it means in this context is sleeping on your side in a twisted position, for example, with your top thigh reaching across the other thigh, twisting the spine. By contrast, people who slept in a straighter, more supported side position reported having less neck pain.
What the design of this study couldn't ascertain of course is whether sleeping in the "provocative" position was causing the neck pain or whether people were adopting this position because it was the only way they could get comfortable because of neck pain.
So how about if you got people to trial a new sleeping position and then followed them to see if it made a difference to the pains they experienced?
In a study conducted with older people taking part in a fitness program in Portugal, people with back pain were instructed to sleep on their sides and those with neck pain to try sleeping on their backs. Four weeks later 90% of the participants said their respective pains had reduced.
This looks like an impressive result, but there is a caveat. Only 20 people took part in the study – a small sample – so it's not possible to conclude that this simple change of sleeping position would have such a positive effect on everyone who suffers from back or neck pain. As ever in scientific research, more studies are needed.
For one medical issue, it's not just a question of whether to lie on your back or side, but rather, which side you lie on. In acid reflux, gastric juices come up from the stomach, causing an intense burning in the chest. Sometimes doctors advise people to try sleeping on propped-up pillows in an attempt to relieve this very unpleasant kind of pain.
If the discomfort happens repeatedly it is known as gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, which can have serious consequences. Why this should have happened is not entirely clear, but one possible explanation is that sleeping on the left keeps the junction between the stomach and oesophagus above the level of the gastric acid. Sleeping on the right relaxes the lower oesophageal sphincter, allowing the acid to escape.
Whatever the answer, if you do suffer with heartburn, it might be worth trying to sleep more on your left side in future.
So far I've concentrated on sleeping on your side or your back because that is what the majority of people do. But what about those people – a small minority – who sleep on their fronts?
Well, to start with, one study suggests it’s not a good idea if you suffer with jaw pain, which is perhaps not very surprising.
And what about wrinkles? Surely, lying with your face squashed into your pillow makes wrinkles worse?
Writing in Aesthetic Surgery Journal, a group of plastic surgeons suggest, rather poetically, that the skin on your face is best preserved if it is treated like "seaweed that sways while tethered to a stalk".
So the idea is to impose the least strain possible on your face while you sleep and that rules out sleeping face down. And if preserving your skin is most important to you than sleeping better or dealing with aches and pains or reflux, then sleeping on your side isn't ideal either.
What then can we conclude from all this? First that, all other things being equal, sleeping on your side seems to have several advantages, but your precise posture can have an effect on neck and back pain – and the side you sleep on can increase or reduce acid reflux. Snoring increases if you sleep on your back, but we all vary so it could still be the way you sleep best.
It's worth trying out new sleep positions and keeping a diary if your current position isn't giving you a good night's sleep. But remember not to obsess too much about different positions or you may keep yourself awake worrying. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230811-which-is-the-best-position-to-sleep-in
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TERMINAL LUCIDITY
~ I was taking care of a patient in the neuro ICU once. He had been comatose for quite a while after a CVA and was going to be transferred to long term care as not likely to awaken. I always talk to my comatose patients as if they can hear me, explaining what’s about to happen, what day it is and the like. I was talking to the guy explaining the night’s plan and his eyes were tracking me, something he didn’t normally do. Comatose people will sometimes open their eyes and stare at something bright, or just straight ahead, but this guy normally did not open his eyes.
“Are you listening to me?” He nodded. “Can you speak?” He shook his head no. “Give me a thumbs up on the left hand” He did. “Now the right” He did. “That’s great! Welcome back! You’ve been away so long we thought you weren’t coming back! I’ll go call the doc to come check you out!”
The guy smiled, and died. ~ Quora
Oriana:
The closest I have come to witnessing terminal lucidity was when my mother, close to death and in vascular dementia after a series of silent strokes, suddenly recognized me and called me by an endearment that only she ever used. (“No one will ever call me that again,” I realized.) But after two minutes or so, she said, “You are such an excellent lawyer” — confusing me with her best friend in college. Soon she slipped into a coma.
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Ending on beauty:
WHITNEY PORTAL
What she loved was the view
of the highest peak —
the mountain’s two great wings,
a granite angel. Silent strokes
were eroding the trails
in my mother’s brain. I thought,
if only she could live
in a nursing home near Lone Pine,
looking at Mt. Whitney —
the mountain she loved, had climbed
on her birthday so many times.
But the dying leave
before the last breath.
She wouldn’t have seen
the stone angel —
Nor would she need to,
my mother, ninety,
in a deepening coma,
on the steep switchbacks
with my father —
Then, before all motion
stopped: she lifted her arm
and reached for his hand,
to help her cross the last stream.
~ Oriana
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