Marc Chagall: I and the Village, 1911I, MAY I REST IN PEACE
I, may I rest in peace — I, who am still living, say,
May I have peace in the rest of my life.
I want peace right now while I'm still alive.
I don't want to wait like that pious man who wished for one leg
of the golden chair of Paradise, I want a four-legged chair
right here, a plain wooden chair. I want the rest of my peace now.
I have lived out my life in wars of every kind: battles without
and within, close combat, face-to-face, the faces always
my own, my lover-face, my enemy-face.
Wars with the old weapons — sticks and stones, blunt axe, words,
dull ripping knife, love and hate,
and wars with newfangled weapons — machine gun, missile,
words, land mines exploding, love and hate.
I don’t want to fulfill my parents’ prophecy that life is war.
I want peace with all my body and all my soul.
Rest me in peace.
~ Yehuda Amichai, tr. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld
*
I love the idea of wanting to rest in peace while still alive — wanting a plain wooden chair in this life, rather than one leg of the golden chair in paradise. I planned to follow up Amichai with a beautiful, humanitarian poem by Mahmoud Darwish, called perhaps My Enemy — or perhaps The Man I Wanted to Kill — but couldn’t find it online. I kept finding love poems instead, which was frustrating at first, but now it seems symbolic — a love poem is a love poem regardless of the ethnic or religious identity of the poet. The face of the beloved is always the most beautiful sight in the world. A love poem from Africa resembles a love poem from Australia or India or Japan. All love poetry reminds us of our common humanity.
But the poem by Darwish that I couldn’t find is more explicit about that common humanity than most poems. The speaker describes wanting to kill a particular man — one who displaced him from his house and land. But then he pauses and wonders if that man, his enemy, has a father who sighs when he hears about his son, and presses his hand to his heart — and imagining the aggrieved father, the speaker can’t proceed with the killing. Or perhaps the enemy has a mother who stays up at night, praying for her son's safety — or a sister, or wife, or children who eagerly wait for Papa to return — or anyone to whom that enemy is dear, anyone who daily prays for his safety — and the weapon falls from the speaker’s hand.
It’s one of the eternal themes of poetry, the recognition that the enemy is a kind of secret brother — part of the greater human community that ultimately also includes the poet. Alas, the kind of empathy that poetry tries to express seemed sadly lacking in a video I recently watched. An Israeli teenager was running for his life from the site of the music festival which turned into a massacre in the latest Hamas attack. He was pursued by an armed Palestinian of about the same age. The Israeli youth, likely exhausted, lay down on the ground, seeking shelter alongside a white car parked nearby. His pursuer, who looked uncannily similar, got closer and shot him point blank.
No recognition of their common humanity. No empathy.
Given the many atrocities committed on that day, the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, this could be dismissed as a minor incident. But because the victim and the killer looked practically the same, and could be otherwise mistaken for two classmates running after a soccer ball, I was particularly shaken. I could indeed see how the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of a million is a statistic.
A friend pointed out that someone must have been very near, shooting a video of this — a fact that sickened me all the more.
Stav Bartel, former commander in IDF, posted this message on Quora:
~ Lots of my friends and acquaintances and their loved ones were butchered. The enemy is cynically denying anything they themselves filmed doing. Don't legitimize this. Hamas is evil. Don't fall into that stupid relativistic attitude, that attempts to show the "other side" of Hamas.
See the true pictures from Gaza, the voice of the Gazans, but not the voice of Hamas. A group that launches an attack that massacres, butchers innocent men, women and babies, a group that burns houses with civilians trapped inside, forcing them to flee and then massacring them. My friends told me the terrorists were piling bodies from the festival with a tractor and tried to burn them.
A family member of a friend of mine was raped three times. Others were abducted. An acquaintance of mine told me she hid in a bunker after the attack on the rave party, luckily left to treat the wounded, and she saw the terrorists throwing grenades into the bunkers. Her friends were injured, others killed. She carried them wounded under fire. I've received these testimonies already on Saturday morning. At the kibbutzim, babies were abducted, others killed, choked, and beheaded. Grandmothers were abducted, entire families were wiped out.
This is not an IDF assault from air on a building used by Hamas, housing civilians as human shields. And this is no mistake. There is no way to compare. None of these people were a threat to anyone, they were not next to IDF troops. And this attack had no military objective. This is not a legitimate response to anything, not a proper way to deal with occupation or blockade. There is absolutely no way to justify any of this.
. . . But Hamas are not true representatives of the Palestinians. They are a proxy of Iran, they are a lunatic, ultra-religious murderous organization. They portray themselves as the weak freedom fighters, but in truth, they are just thugs. All of them. We are no saints, but they are the devil. While we sometimes fail in judgment, they have no morals in the first place. They celebrate death, cheer for the sight of fire and destruction and enjoy the smell of blood. They are animals and they have always been, ever since they started with the suicide bombings. And Hezbollah and the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] and all other terrorist organizations are no different.
I woke up on Saturday with a rocket barrage on my city, Tel Aviv, in the metropolitan area of 3 million people was attacked. A rocket fell in my neighborhood, where there is no military presence, no strategic sites. Just civilians. Soon we received the reports of terrorists armed for an all out war, rampaging through cities and villages, butchering people, desecrating their bodies and burning houses. We saw the videos of thousands of people fleeing from the festival. And there are stories I've heard that I can't yet process. I am unable to even think about them. So much blood and gore on the most innocent of lives.
No more than 6 hours later, I was already on my way south to arm up with hundreds of other reservists in my unit. Some of them I've never seen. People who did not show up to previous reserve activity for years have showed up. 300 thousand Israelis showed up. This is the largest deployment in the country's history. This is how eager we are to defend our homeland.
And civilians are doing everything they can just to provide us with food and equipment. Everyone joined, not a single soul in Israel remained indifferent. Jews, Druze, Christians, Arabs, Bedouin, people who just a few seconds ago only saw their differences, have all united against evil. There is no question here, Hamas must be eradicated, just like ISIS. And what they have done is as big a crime against Israel as it is against the Palestinians. They have done nothing but bring on death and destruction on themselves, and we haven't started yet.
I am now near the front, thwarting continuous infiltration attempts. They try and fail. Dozens of terrorist were killed. They are getting weaker and weaker and we are getting stronger and braver. They keep shooting at civilians. Rockets are falling near us, exploding over our heads. But our spirit is strong, we are strongly united, brothers and sisters, from all over the country, religious, secular, rich, poor... And the ground is shaking under our feet front our air force pounding of the devil's den.
While their leaders are hiding in bunkers, some of our leaders, members of the Knesset, have showed up, volunteered to join the fighting units. My battalion commander, who lives in a kibbutz just next to the strip, who was abroad at the time, has lost his 18-year-old son, and before burying or even seeing him, he decided to take a flight, show up and help in whatever he can, even though he was given the option to stay home and weep. This is the spirit of our country. And we have no other land to go to. This is our secret weapon. We have one homeland.
I have gave much thought about my grandparents who fought the Nazi attempt to eradicate them, and others who suffered persecution anywhere they've been. Here we are united together, we have the right and duty to help ourselves. And we will do that for eternity. We cannot be beaten, and whoever will challenge us will be destroyed.
I am no religious person, but now more than ever the words Am Yisrael Chai [the people of Israel live] are inscribed on my heart. ~
*
MORE THAN ONE THING CAN BE TRUE AT THE SAME TIME, INCLUDING BUT NOT EXCLUSIVELY:
~ Jews were mass murdered over and over again and have a justifiable fear of being murdered again AND that fear has made us do horrifying things to the Palestinians over and over again that are not justified in any way.
Jews have lived in Israel for thousands of years, and have a historic claim to it AND we use religious language and assumptions that may be mythological to most. AND real Palestinian people lost their homes unfairly. More than one people can have a historic claim to the same place.
The Palestinians were cruelly displaced AND the Arab countries around declined to take them in even though they had kicked out hundreds of thousands Jews into Israel. Everyone was a refugee, and refugees don't have good choices.
Gaza is a monstrous construction, a huge open air prison with horrific mistreatment of the Palestinians that is absolutely evil and wrong AND Palestinians keep choosing leadership that wants to murder all Jews. Hamas has used millions of dollars not to build infrastructure and schools but to dig tunnels and buy weapons.
We all (including me) live on stolen land, and have no intention of giving it back, but you want the Israelis to give back the land they stole and have lived on. AND when America is attacked we go on to conquer countries that weren't even involved, but when Israeli is attacked they should show more restraint. AND Israeli disproportionism in attacking civilians is reprehensible, as is Hamas in taking civilian hostages as possible human shields.
Israelis were attacked shamefully by Hamas during a religious holiday causing mass death, AND Israelis have engaged in colonial provocation and colonization is generally overthrown by violence.
Europe offloaded its "Jewish problem" to the Middle East rather than give up Bavaria for a Jewish homeland, which should have happened, and translated its profound and loathsome historic antisemitism into anti-Zionism (which are not the same things, but can be hard to sort out), AND Jews then created a situation so horrifying that many leftist Jews became anti-Zionist too.
This is a proxy conflict for a number of countries (and has been since before Israel existed actually, pretty much for the entire history of the area for thousands of years) and is being played out in part in the lives of people who do not deserve it on both sides. And it should scare us all — not just for the victims, but for how this could light a larger fire.
2. I don't care how justified you think Palestinian or Israeli violence is in the circumstances. If you argue that the sexual abuse of women, torture, parading naked corpses through the streets or mass bombing civilians BY ANYONE is an acceptable response, you have crossed the line. Those are war crimes.
3. This has more actors than just the Israelis and the Palestinians and has throughout everything. The technology for those drone strikes came from somewhere. The Israeli intelligence failures came from somewhere. Nations are choosing up sides in a proxy conflict, and that's dangerous as hell. Remember that — no one is acting alone here, so if you ascribe everything to one party, you are missing important stuff.
4. This is a climate change problem as well. There is a very good chance we are starting a global war over a place where NEITHER national group will be able to live in 50 years due to extreme heat and lack of water.
5. This is just fucking sad and awful and horrible. And the people who suffer the most will be the ones with the fewest choices and least power. And most of the people involved have no safe place to retreat to. This will be a long nightmare. It is fine to be sad and angry here. It is not fine to blanket blame any people, who all pretty much feel about their governments much the way we do about ours, and often don't have a lot of good choices.
(Though the name of Naomi Weisberg Siegel was attached to this, she denies being the author.)
Israeli fighter jet
*
Misha Iossel:
The different faces of hatred.
The Nazis murdered Jews — especially women and children and the elderly — with a slightly disgusted look on their faces, as if performing some distasteful yet essential duty, something that needed to be done as expeditiously and dispassionately as possible; they were exterminating Jews in the same way people get rid of rats or cockroaches, for that's who Jews were to the Nazis: subhuman creatures.
Now behold the faces of the Hamas terrorists in their own videos — and they were very eager to document the carnage they were carrying out, at that rock festival, in those kibbutz homes — as they were murdering and raping and mutilating Jews last Saturday: what joy illuminates their visages, what pure ardor, what unadorned happiness. Yes, you can tell they're experiencing some of the happiest moments of their miserable lives doing the unthinkable. They're shouting for joy and thanking God for giving them the opportunity of slaughtering those babies, those teens, those infirm old people.
They didn't come there to take on the Israeli army — they knew they stood no chance against it. No, they came to kill and rape and mutilate and burn the helpless and the innocent, especially the women of all ages, the little children and the elderly: the more helpless the victims, the better, the greater the satisfaction, the happier that made them feel.
Murdering babies in their cribs, raping girls and parading women's bodies through jubilant crowds, abducting little children and putting them in cages — what made those men the way they are? What has disfigured them so as human beings? What has turned them into vicious animals? What kind of culture had shaped them? What their home life was like, when they were little?
Indeed, how horribly humiliating and cruel and emasculating their childhood must have been, how much cruelty they must have witnessed and experienced at home…
They won't change — those terrible, unspeakable men. Yes, the concrete perpetrators of the Saturday horrors will be hunted down and eliminated, but there is a whole generation of their likes to replace them. The world must be mindful of that.
*
THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS DEAD
~ Israelis attending a music festival murdered in cold blood. Reports of women stripped naked and paraded by fighters in Gaza, toddlers kidnapped alongside Holocaust survivors, homes burst into by terrorists hunting down Jews. Naked bodies, mutilated bodies, dead bodies. Jubilant shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) over the carnage. Two-state solution.
Which of these terms doesn’t belong? The last one, with its supposed vision of a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel.
I spent nearly three years at the Trump White House attempting to reach a peace deal between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors. But I always understood that among the many reasons it was unachievable then, and unlikely to be for the foreseeable future, was not just the seemingly unbridgeable positions on land, Jerusalem and other well-known obstacles. (Indeed, the peace plan we crafted was rejected by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah before they even read it.)
Even if we had come up with a solution that was acceptable to the parties, though, there were still far too many Palestinians who were intent on massacring Jews and destroying the Jewish State of Israel.
That desire was on full display in Saturday’s unprecedented, devastating attack. Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel and killed at least 900 people, wounded thousands and took hostage up to 150 (no official number has been released). The captives will surely be spread out and hidden all over the Gaza Strip, making their rescue extraordinarily challenging.
I was supposed to be in the Middle East this week for work, but postponed my trip in light of what’s going on. Almost every single one of my Arab colleagues and friends understood immediately why and expressed outrage, concern or disgust over what happened. Clearly, many Arabs oppose such horrific violence. But I also heard a minority of voices blaming Israel.
Unless and until Palestinians of good will and their leaders fully and unequivocally condemn and repudiate this hatred and the glorification of the slaughter of Jews, Palestinians will not achieve any of their aspirations because Israel cannot, and should not, compromise on the security of its citizens. No country should.
Israel cannot achieve peace with Palestinians when a segment of the Palestinian population still intends to destroy it. Israel cannot make peace when the leaders of the Palestinians include Hamas. Or when a member of Fatah, Hamas’ political opponent and the party that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, expresses not sorrow over the loss of innocent life, but celebrates a “morning of victory, joy, and pride” and urges all Palestinians to participate in the terror against Israel.
Many of the would-be peacemakers I spoke to during my time in the White House ignored the deep-seated hatred in this subset of the Palestinian population intent on ruining any chance for peace.
They told me that if the Palestinians were given a fully autonomous state of their own, this would all go away, or they pretended away this hatred in the first place. After the events of the last few days, I think they finally have to accept the truth.
Israel, like communities of Jews throughout history, will always need to protect itself from haters. As a consequence, any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if ever one is to present itself, must always address the need for Israel to defend itself, control security over whatever the Palestinian areas might become and do what it needs to protect its citizens.
I am heartened by the tremendous support for Israel from around the world. Scenes of the Israeli flag being displayed on the façade of 10 Downing Street and on Germany’s Brandenburg Gate are inspiring in these dark days. As was President Joe Biden issuing strong, appropriate remarks. I hope this support will be unwavering and be followed up by serious assistance to Israel for whatever it needs. I hope the Biden administration also recognizes the Iranian regime’s suspected role in this carnage and acts accordingly.
Indeed, the focus of the world must be to support Israel in its quest to punish those who perpetrated these dastardly acts and to work to prevent attacks like this in the future. Any human being who values life must condemn these acts unequivocally, with no moral ambivalence.
Accordingly, the world must recognize that Israel is now defending itself in Gaza, as any country would, and that the fault for the unfortunate casualties that will inevitably occur among innocent Palestinians lies with Hamas. War is a terrible thing. But it’s not Israel that asked for this war.
Those who gather in cities around the world to celebrate the death and destruction perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including in my former home state of New York, are in essence saying they believe in the slaughter of innocent individuals, that it’s okay to shoot children in front of their parents, that it’s acceptable to parade women naked and to massacre grandparents.
They are saying that they are the enemy of Jews. But they are also saying that they are the enemies of peace and of the Palestinians as well for so deeply hurting their cause. These people should tell their loved ones, including their own grandparents, that this is what they stand for — death, destruction and misery. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/10/opinions/israel-gaza-hamas-biden-greenblatt/index.html
Misha Iossel posted this article by Julia Ioffe:
TRAGEDY IN ISRAEL
~ "I want to start by saying that, like for so many Jews in the world, this is deeply, deeply personal for me. This isn’t just because I have friends and relatives in Israel, though I do. (Ironically, many of them are from Moscow: they just fled the war there 18 months ago.) Like so many modern Jews, I am alive because so many of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on up the chain, managed to escape annihilation just in time. Scores and scores didn’t. They haunt my family. And I’m not just talking about the Holocaust, but pogroms, the Crusades, the Khmelnitsky revolt in Ukraine, the antisemitic violence launched against Jewish communities all across Europe because someone owed money to a Jew or it was a Christian holiday or because hey, someone was just in the mood to lock some Jews in a synagogue and set it on fire.
We’ve been driven to near extinction in Europe many times, and the Holocaust was just the latest salvo. Most Ashkenazi Jews are descended from just 350 people because of a population bottleneck that occurred about a thousand years ago, and it wasn’t for happy reasons. And by the way, the reason we were in Christian Europe to begin with—where every country and kingdom would take turns expelling us—is because, in the first and second centuries A.D., the Romans slaughtered us and kicked us out of the place we were originally from, Judea, and then renamed it Palaestina. After the slaughter, the Romans brought 100,000 Jewish slaves from there to ancient Rome, where they were forced to build some of the monuments tourists flock to see today. And still, there was a small but continuous presence in what is now Israel-Palestine from then until now.
I say all this not because I don’t also value Palestinian life—I do—or because I don’t think this place is also Palestinians’ home—I do—but because so many people who are not Jewish do not understand the urgent feeling of scarcity that so many Jews feel about their community. After everything, and especially after the Holocaust killed most European Jews, there is not just a sense of fear that something like this can happen again—after all, it always has—but also that we’re always balancing on the precipice of extinction. So when 1,000 Jews are killed in a single day—the single deadliest day for Jews since the end of the Holocaust—it strikes at something very, very deep in me and, I’m sure, most Jews.
We see the photos of people who were killed—who look like they could have been our parents, our children, our family members—and we feel that we have been pushed that much closer to the abyss of oblivion. (To pretend that there isn’t some tribal element in all this would be dishonest, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily malign. It all depends on what you do with those feelings, but more on that in a bit.)
The other reason I mention all this brutal history is because I have been stunned at the level of historical illiteracy I’ve seen. (Though seeing Donald Trump, Jr. post that Hamas would have been 'no más' if his dad were president, as if he hadn’t already been president and hadn’t already had a chance to make Hamas no más, was something.)
But I’m especially concerned by the illiteracy on the left, especially when it comes to the Jewish side of this conflict, because it has real implications for the Democratic Party. The party base, especially its younger and more progressive wings, have been moving steadily on the issue, to a point where now, Democrats are more sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians than Israelis, as if it is a zero-sum game.
Two years ago, during the last war between Hamas and Israel, I did a little survey on social media and asked people where Jews came from, originally. Most people said 'Europe.' It was deeply telling and explained why, in so many narratives I’ve seen proliferate on social media, Jews are considered the white colonizers of Palestinians and people of color. The Jews, in this narrative, were like the British in Africa, India, and Pakistan: white foreigners who came from far away to subjugate brown people and steal their resources. It’s a nice, easy narrative that fits perfectly into the conversations about the evils of colonialism and systemic racism. And it’s why so many groups on the left have aligned themselves exclusively with the Palestinian cause and see Jews as white aggressors.
There’s one problem: it’s not quite true. It would be if the British were originally from India or Africa and returned, 2,000 years later, to claim it as theirs. In fact, most of these misguided narratives also leave out the role of British colonial rule and especially the U.N. in creating the state of Israel—as well as an Arab Palestinian state next to it. (Which Palestinians rejected, for some understandable reasons, after which neighboring Arab countries attacked the new Jewish state.) Israel, in other words, wasn’t a rogue state, but one created and recognized by the international community. It wouldn’t have existed without it.
These narratives also completely ignore the fact that not all Jews are white and European. In fact, Jews of color make up around half the Jewish population, and they include Black Jews, the Falasha or Ethiopian Jews. The Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews of North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and Syria, are not white, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them were thrown out of their homes and violently dispossessed by these Muslim countries after 1948 in response to the founding of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinians. Do they too have the right of return?
My point here is not to relitigate history or to excuse the actions of the Israeli government, which has pursued an increasingly horrific and dehumanizing policy toward the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, especially under Bibi Netanyahu. (In fact, Bibi has always played with violence, provoking it and ratcheting it up in the occupied territories so that he can come down hard and show Israelis, See? Only I can protect you.) My point is these incomplete narratives—if I’m to put it diplomatically—erase the Jewish connection to the place. They also erase the value of Jewish life.
We see that kind of erasure, unfortunately, on both sides. Right-wing Israelis claim that Palestinians aren’t a real people and that they don’t have a right to the land. Left-wing Westerners, often with no ties to the region, say that Jews are white colonizers, oppressors who are getting what they deserve. Much of what is being said now on the left in response to this horrific attack is that this is what decolonization looks like, with many reluctant to criticize the Hamas attacks, saying that the blame for it lies solely with Israel, mocking the victims and even reveling in the violence. (To be fair, some, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, decried this as antisemitism.)
I don’t know what will happen or what can happen to solve this. Those who talk about a two-state solution are living in a world that hasn’t existed for a decade. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians seem to want one anymore. They each want a state of their own, a state without the other, and the ethno-nationalism that built Israel—born as it was out of slaughter and oppression—has fueled the ethno-nationalism of the Palestinians, born out of the exact same elements. Both sides have hardened to an exclusionary extreme that precludes compromise or coexistence, and the events of the last week will ensure that even the embers of those hopes are doused cold. Before Saturday, the plan seemed to have been to wait each other out—or, if they were Israelis, ignore the problem and their complicity in it. Now, it is to fight to the death.
The last time Israel and Hamas fought, in 2021, I had many private conversations with people I didn’t naturally agree with, people who held some of the above views. I said that I felt absolutely hopeless about a two-state solution, but that I also couldn’t imagine how—after everything Israelis have done to Palestinians and Palestinians have done to Israelis—they could live in one country together, serve side by side in one military or one police force.
This was, I was told, colonialist thinking. This was how the British thought about Indians—that they were savages incapable of peace. The Palestinians wanted one state where everyone was equal before the law, not retribution, these people told me. I don’t know how Saturday’s massacre and the left’s defense of it as a necessary and expected part of decolonization squares with that. I do know that there are now far fewer ears ready to hear it. And after the retribution that Israel will continue to deliver, I doubt there will be many Palestinians who will want it either. I can’t say I blame them.
I don’t know exactly how this ends, nor do I have any hope that it ends well. It had always been hard for people to hold two contradictory truths simultaneously, that these two deeply traumatized peoples both have a real and legitimate claim to the land, claims that each side has at times acknowledged about the other, claims that have been warped in both camps by emotion and trauma and religion and nationalism into dehumanization and heartlessness, into forgetting that Israeli children and Palestinian children both deserve to live and thrive. Now, it will be impossible, at least for the foreseeable future, though, my god, do I wish it weren’t so.”
~ Julia Ioffe, Puck News
Mary:
The war between Israel and Hamas is indeed a proxy war, and the immediate combatants seem unable to see any solution but total eradication of the other's existence. This truly precludes resolution, guarantees perpetual conflict, and assures that conflict will NOT avoid, but employ tactics considered War Crimes. Once you have named the enemy inhuman, animal, vermin, there is no limit to your actions in the course of extermination.
The fear and hate driving this war is longstanding, deep rooted, buttressed by the historical experience of both Jews and Palestinians — as well as by the history of all the states in the Middle East. It goes back not only to partitions made after WWII but to the history of the Crusades, and the Roman Empire. I can't see much hope for anything but escalation, and a long horrible struggle, with massive human losses.
Oriana:
In my teens, I couldn’t understand any of it (nor can I claim to have arrived at any radiant clarity). To me, the “Promised Land” was not Israel but America. One time I even suggested to my mother that the creation of the state of Israel was questionable in view of all the wars that followed. She responded with a brief but decisive little lecture that radically enlarged my perspective.
Of course I don’t have any practical solutions, and it seems no one does. Greater minds than mine have grappled with this, yet here we are . . . again.
*
ON MARC CHAGALL
~ It was inevitable, perhaps, that the headline on The New York Times’s front-page obituary of Marc Chagall would describe him as “One of Modern Art’s Giants.” This was the status which the press had routinely conferred upon the artist for as long as anyone could remember, and it would have been churlish—if not something worse—to deny him this outsize claim on the occasion of his death at the age of ninety-seven. It may, after all, have been one of the last occasions on which the claim could be made without risking ridicule. Posterity, which can always be counted on to observe a different code of etiquette in regard to fame of this sort, is unlikely to be so kind.
Yet if Chagall was never exactly the towering “giant” which his admirers had long taken him to be, he was certainly a better painter and a more interesting artist than his detractors—who were also numerous—were generally willing to grant. It was in fact Chagall’s reputation as a “giant” which came more and more to act as an obstacle to any clear understanding of his achievement. To that reputation he owed the large decorative commissions of his later years— commissions which proved, in all too many cases, to be unmitigated aesthetic disasters, and which had the effect of making the artist an object of contempt for anyone capable of distinguishing the artist an object of contempt for anyone capable of distinguishing artistic quality from its meretricious counterfeit. The generation that knows Chagall primarily as the author of those ghastly murals at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, can easily be forgiven for regarding him as something of a hack. It was New York’s misfortune—and not only New York’s, of course—that such commissions came to Chagall when he was no longer in a position to do them justice, and it was Chagall’s misfortune that they came to loom so large in the public’s perception of his gifts.
Marc and Bella Chagall, 1923, Hugo Erfurth, bromoil print
But there is another Chagall, as we know. He is a smaller and more distant figure, to be sure, than the hyped-up colossus who, in the last three decades of his life (when his artistic powers were clearly on the wane), became a kind of mascot of government agencies, cultural bureaucrats, and religious publicists the world over; but this figure is a more authentic one. And it is to him that we must turn if we are to recover a sense of the artist’s special quality and power.
In this other Chagall—the young and vigorous artist who had made his way from the provincial backwater of Vitebsk to the cosmopolitan art worlds of St. Petersburg and Paris in the first decade of the century—we shall find the originals, so to speak, from which all those later counterfeits were made and remade with such an easy, dispiriting fluency. We shall find something else as well—an artist of far narrower and more intensely inward interests than could ever be suspected from the anodyne public symbols and universalist sentiment which made the decorative projects of the later years so appealing, so popular, and so empty.
By a happy stroke of timing, the retrospective exhibition needed for the recovery of this more interesting and authentic Chagall was already in place at the time of his death on March 28. Organized by Susan Compton at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where I saw it in March, the exhibition goes on view this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—its only American showing. While it is anything but complete —particularly in the way it scants, for example, the artist’s immense graphic oeuvre, where some of the best of his later work is likely to be found—this exhibition is at once a fitting memorial to Chagall and something of a milestone in itself.
Dr. Compton is a specialist in modern Russian art. She thus brings to this exhibition precisely the perspective which in the past has so often been missing from the study of Chagall’s art—a perspective which places the artist and his work firmly in the context of the Russian cultural milieu which exerted so great an influence on his artistic outlook. Much has been made—and properly made—of Chagall’s life as a Jew, of course, and Dr. Compton does not neglect this crucial element in the artist’s identity and in the subject matter of his art.
But even this crucial matter is not easily separable from the Russian context, and it is especially to the illumination of the latter that Dr. Compton makes an important contribution. Hers is, I believe, the first major Chagall exhibition to give this subject its due. The essay Dr. Compton has written on “The Russian Background” for the catalogue of the exhibition, together with some of the detailed commentaries on individual paintings, adds a great deal to our understanding of the oeuvre as a whole. In the end we are fully persuaded that in some important respects “the Russian Chagall,” as Dr. Compton writes, “takes precedence over the adoptive Frenchman, or even the Jew.”
It certainly alters our view of the young Chagall to be made aware, as we are on this occasion, that until 1922, when the artist was thirty-five years old and had already produced the bulk of the work likely to retain a place among the classics of twentieth-century art, he had spent a total of less than four years outside his native Russia. For the better part of those four years (1910-14) he was in Paris, and, as everyone knows, his encounter with the Paris avant-garde brought decisive and permanent changes in his painting. Yet even in this pivotal stage of Chagall’s development he tended, not surprisingly, to frequent a distinctly Russian milieu—and this, in turn, had very specific consequences for both his art and his life.
He was particularly close to the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, who had lived in St. Petersburg for three years (1904-07) and spoke Russian. (So did the woman Cendrars married, Féla Poznanska, to whom Chagall was also close.) He was drawn into the circle of Sonia Delaunay, who was Russian, and her husband Robert Delaunay—probably the most important single influence on Chagall’s painting in this Paris period. In the studio building—the legendary La Ruche—where Chagall lived for a time, “there were so many Russian contributors to the Salon des Indépendants,” Dr. Compton writes, “that it was even suggested that they should form a separate exhibit.” And not all of the Russians who inhabited La Ruche were painters. One of them was the writer A. V. Lunacharsky, who, as Lenin’s first Commissar of Education subsequently appointed Chagall to the position of Commissar of Art in his hometown of Vitebsk. It wasn’t until 1923 that Chagall settled in France, and even then the first task he undertook on his return to Paris was to produce a series of etchings based on Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Thus, the crucial turn in Chagall’s life and work occurs not—as we have tended in the past to believe—in 1910, when he goes to Paris for the first time, but in 1922 when he uproots himself from his native Russia for the last time. From 1923 onward Chagall is a different kind of artist—an artist adrift in a dream of the past. There is even something apt in the choice of Gogol as the author he illustrated at this important juncture in his life, for not only does Chagall at that moment take leave of the present in order to find refuge in the past but there is a sense in which it can be said that he, too, now turns to trafficking in dead souls. The present is never again quite as real for Chagall as it was before 1922.
Perhaps another way of saying this is that from this time onward he severs his connection with history. Thereafter, like those floating figures who now become so ubiquitous in his paintings—is this, perhaps, their real meaning?—he quits the realm of earthly events to enter a world of timeless and homeless archetypes, which, the further removed from real experience they become, the more they succumb to an unalloyed sentimentality. After his exit from Russia—which was also, it is worth recalling, his exit from the Revolution he served as an artist and a commissar—Chagall made some periodic attempts to re-attach his art to the realm of historical experience, most notably in the paintings he produced in 1944 as a response to the Holocaust. But by then it was too late. He no longer possessed the means of bringing that effort to an effective realization. In a sense he never touched earth again.
The difference between this “floating” Chagall, aloft in a world of increasingly unreal archetypes, and the young artist who preceded him is so striking and definitive that in the exhibition at the Royal Academy, where each period was afforded a separate gallery, one had the sensation of encountering the work of a quite alien personality as soon as one entered the third gallery, devoted to “France 1923–41.” In the first two galleries, given over respectively to “St. Petersburg 1907–10 and Paris 1910–14” and “Russia and Berlin 1914–22,” one saw an artist vibrant in his response to the diverse worlds he inhabited, an artist keenly observant of both familiar surroundings and new experiences, and eager to provide a vivid account of them in his painting.
At the same time, it is painting itself that is clearly the most highly charged area of experience for this young artist. The intensity of Chagall’s engagement with his medium is there in the earliest pictures—those dark and melancholy portraits and genre scenes, painted in St. Petersburg in 1908–10, which have nothing of the light, the clarity, or the complexity that came into his art once he immersed himself in the Paris art scene, but which sing, all the same, with a vitality and tenderness that remain irresistible. They are the pictures of a young man for whom painting has become the central experience of life.
This headlong engagement is further intensified and brought to maturity in the pictures which Chagall produced with such dizzying speed and confidence in that first encounter with the Paris avant-garde. Let us remember that he was twenty-three years old when he arrived in Paris in the fall of 1910, and scarcely twenty-five when he painted Half Past Three (The Poet), Homage to Apollinaire, The Soldier Drinks, I and the Village, and The Cattle Dealer—his first masterpieces and almost his last. His entire experience until this time had been that of a Northerner, nurtured on the long, dark, snowbound ordeals of the Russian winter and the white nights of the Northern summer—a climate that is the natural habitat for the kind of introspective and melancholic expressionism that characterized the paintings of the St. Petersburg period.
Upon a Northern sensibility of this sort we naturally expect the impact of Paris to have had the customary salutary effect—which it did, of course, but not always in the ways that might have been predicted. Chagall does not at this time become what Dr. Compton calls an “adoptive Frenchman.” That was a development which came later, in the Twenties, when his art was already in decline. In this first Paris period Chagall’s painting becomes, if anything, more deeply entrenched than ever in exploring his memories of Russia. Despite the Paris-from-my-window motif—a theme probably traceable to the influence of Robert Delaunay and never, in any case, a major one for Chagall—France remains a largely unrecorded experience in his painting. It never takes possession of his soul. What consumes his imagination is the life he left behind in Russia. What Paris gives him is a new way of encompassing that life in his painting.
Chagall: The Soldier Drinks, 1911-1912Except in the case of Cendrars, for whom he always retained a tender and grateful memory, Chagall was notoriously ungenerous in acknowledging the influences—especially the avant-garde influences—which shaped his painting at a crucial stage of its development. Cubism, for example, he was later in the habit of mocking. Yet it was from Cubism that he derived the syntax of his greatest paintings. The entire design of a picture such as Half Past Three (The Poet) (1911) is unimaginable without that syntax, and so is the modeling of the face and the hands in The Soldier Drinks (1911-12).
The whole subject is really beyond argument. The hard, crystalline quality of the forms in Chagall’s painting, together with their transparency—which has the effect of radiating an inner light—and the discipline of their control, all this owes everything to Cubist precedents, and it is nonsense to claim otherwise. The precedents in question might have been Le Fauconnier’s and Delaunay’s rather than Picasso’s or Braque’s—as Norbert Lynton suggests in his essay for the catalogue—but that is a subsidiary issue. Cubism of one sort or another is central to Chagall’s pictures in this period.
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Chagall: Half Past Three (the Poet), 1911The question of Chagall’s color, which also becomes an important element in his painting for the first time in this period, is less easily resolved. Fauvism is often claimed as the principal influence on Chagall’s use of color, and it would be foolish to deny that Fauvist color played some role in the formation of his style. After all, it affected virtually every painter who followed closely in the wake of Matisse’s chromatic audacities.
Yet the fact remains that Chagall’s color isn’t really Fauvist in quality. Mr. Lynton shifts the emphasis in claiming that “it is primarily and specifically Delaunay from whom [Chagall] learnt the art of . . . using color not just brightly (after his often dark Russian paintings) but also lightly, strong enough to give sensations of light but also transparently, freshly, so that light seems to come through the canvas as well as from it.” This too is not to be denied. Yet it doesn’t solve the problem, for Chagall’s color isn’t really Delaunay’s either.
It seems to me there is a specifically Russian quality to Chagall’s color that is not accounted for in these explanations. No doubt Fauvism—and Delaunay, too—taught Chagall much about the importance of color, but they would appear to have contributed little to the particular quality of the color he came to use. My own hunch is that the key is to be found in Post-Impressionist color (Gauguin especially) as it was adapted to Russian taste by Bakst, Chagall’s teacher in St. Petersburg. There is a nocturnal, artificial, theatrical quality to Chagall’s color we do not find in Matisse or Delaunay—but it is pervasive in Russian painting of this period.
It is color which has almost nothing of the sun in it—it is interior and mystical, it has more to do with lamplight and memory than with the sun-drenched color of the French landscape or cityscape. It is color which has virtually nothing to do with natural light—color which therefore easily lends itself to illuminating the scenery of dreams. This, it seems to me, is its real function in Chagall’s painting—to serve the interests of a dreamlike narrative.
In the paintings of his first Paris period it is his highly imaginative use of the narrative mode that accounts for what is most truly original in the work. That he felt compelled to deny the very source of his own originality tells us something about the real relation in which Chagall stood to the world of “advanced” art in pre-1914 Paris—it was, in fact, an extremely tenuous relation—but it does nothing to alter the centrality of the narrative mode in his own art.
Chagall: The Cattle Dealer, 1912
Chagall had journeyed to Berlin in the summer of 1914 for the opening of his one-man show at the Sturm gallery. From there he traveled to Vitebsk to see his family and the girl he hoped to marry (and whom he did marry the following year)—his beloved Bella. If it was the coming of the First World War that at first prevented Chagall from returning to Paris, it was no doubt the Revolution that kept him in Russia after 1917. For the Revolution, which he welcomed with enthusiasm, made him a power in the new Soviet art world. In 1918 he was named Commissar of Art for Vitebsk and the surrounding region. He presided over a museum, an art school, and theater production. By 1920–21, moreover, he was also designing productions for the new State Kamerny [Chamber] Theater in Moscow. It was to the Revolution that Chagall owed his emergence as a “public” artist.
But the power and position which he now enjoyed were anything but secure. In art matters, no less than in other realms of revolutionary ideology, factionalism abounded, competition for preferment was fierce, and the debates often acrimonious. The avant-garde was given unprecedented authority under Lunacharsky’s short-lived reign as Commissar of Education, but did Chagall really qualify as a member of this new avant-garde? There were important figures in the expanding Soviet art establishment who thought not.
In a cultural milieu that came more and more to look upon a doctrinaire commitment to abstraction as a test of revolutionary orthodoxy, Chagall’s figurative paintings—which were even more avowedly figurative than thitherto—looked old fashioned, a throwback, perhaps, to the despised bourgeois era. There were plots and intrigues and bureaucratic squabbles. Malevich, the leader of the Suprematists, was dispatched to Vitebsk to assist Chagall in his duties. There was a power struggle, and Chagall lost out. Whenever, years hence, Chagall could be heard denouncing abstract art, one could be reasonably certain that it was the power struggle with Malevich and his gang he had in the back of his mind.
Chagall: The Birthday, 1915Chagall’s own paintings in this period are of several kinds. The best of them—The Birthday (1915), for example—continue very much in the narrative Cubist vein he developed in Paris. But joining these pictures now are others, like David in Profile (1914), a portrait of his brother, that are more studiedly objective in style—they resemble, in fact, some of the portraits that emerged from the New Objectivity movement in Germany in the Twenties. In still others, of which the marvelous Bella with a White Collar (1917) is the outstanding example, the narrative and objective modes are combined. There is also in these years a more concentrated interest in Jewish themes. Chagall’s religious outlook does not succumb to the facile universalism he made famous in later years until he quits the scene of his childhood associations and family connections.
There are ample signs, even in this second Russian period, that Chagall had lost a certain sense of direction in his painting. The really achieved paintings come less often now and are less consistent in their strengths than the paintings he produced in Paris before 1914. But he remains recognizably the same artist who produced those earlier masterpieces.
It was Marc Chagall’s tragedy to become, early on in his long career, an artist orphaned by history. It is not for us to pretend that this tragedy had a happy ending. ~
Chagall: The Hour between the Wolf and the Dog, 1938-1943
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1985/5/marc-chagall-1887-1985 (slightly abbreviated by Oriana)
Oriana:
What matters to me is that Chagall did create some magical paintings that live on after him. The question of whether or not he deserves to be called one of the "giants" of modern art doesn't really interest me. The "tragedy" of Marc Chagall? His best paintings live on. I see this as the happiest of possible happy endings.
What this article opened my eyes to is that this is a story of a man's great love for one woman. I wondered about the frequent presence of the newlyweds in Chagall's paintings. Perhaps the answer is really startlingly simple: he was passionately in love with his wife. This too is opposite of a tragedy.
Charles:
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DENVER’S EXPERIMENT: GIVING CASH TO THE HOMELESS
~ Several hundred Denverites experiencing homelessness have received regular sums of cash, no strings attached, as part of an experiment by the Denver Basic Income Project. Six months into its yearlong experiment, an interim report has shown some encouraging results. Recipients are spending the money on vital needs and sleeping on the street less, and they appear to be securing full-time work at higher rates when given more money.
The cash assistance program, which is being conducted in coordination with the University of Denver’s Center for Housing and Homelessness Research, involves 820 adults who lack “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” because of loss of housing or economic hardship or similar problems. The participants are divided randomly into three groups: Group A, in which participants receive $1,000 a month for 12 months (a total of $12,000 for the year); Group B, in which participants receive $6,500 upon enrollment and then $500 a month for the following 11 months (also a total of $12,000 a year); and Group C, which receives $50 a month, for a total of $600 for the year. This third group is meant to provide a point of comparison for the two other groups.
The idea behind experiments associated with the idea of “universal basic income” (UBI) is to measure the effects of giving people cash directly and without restrictions on how it can be spent. Unlike, say, federal SNAP benefits (which most of the study’s participants were receiving), the money doesn’t have to be spent on food. In many ways, UBI experiments are meant to challenge and test the premise that people — especially poor people — can’t be trusted to spend money responsibly and for their own good without supervision.
Six months in, a majority of the program’s participants report that they are seeing marked improvements in their lives on many fronts. All three groups saw significant upticks in participants who were staying at homes they either rented or owned: Group A reported a 26% increase, Group B reported a 35% increase, and Group C reported a 20% increase. There was also a decline in participants sleeping outside, which isn’t where most people sleep when they are homeless, although it represents one of the most publicly visible — and dangerous — ways homelessness is experienced.
Upon enrollment, 10% of Group A’s participants were sleeping outside, but by the six-month mark no one was. Group B went from 10% to 3%, and Group C went from 8% to 4%. The percentages of participants who spent nights in shelters roughly halved across all three groups, as well. Participants in Groups A and B reported feeling safer and more welcome in their sleep environments.
One of the report’s most notable findings is that cash assistance is associated with a higher likelihood of securing a job. At enrollment, 18% of participants in Group A had full-time work, and at the six-month mark 25% did. In Group B, the number went from 21% to 35%. Group C saw no change.
With another six months to go, there’s reason to be tentatively optimistic that Denver’s cash assistance program is having a meaningfully positive effect. The preliminary findings suggest that the larger amounts of cash assistance are allowing some of the city’s most vulnerable residents to live safer lives and to find proper places to rest their heads at night and that they help them find jobs.
This data tracks with widely observed trends in other basic income experiments that show that recipients of “no strings attached” cash tend to use the money effectively to address urgent necessities. While American conservatives prefer to attach conditions and strict supervision to financial assistance, experiments with unconditional cash transfers, like the one in Denver, can counter the knee-jerk assumption that people with limited resources can’t be trusted to help themselves.
Reading the report raised many questions for me about basic income as a way to address homelessness specifically. I’m still curious to know whether cash assistance to people experiencing homelessness is the most efficient or effective way to help people during a housing and financial crisis, as compared to, for example, immediately placing people in permanent housing.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness describes the “housing first” model as a belief in “housing as the foundation for life improvement” that’s guided by the belief that “people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues.”
A lot of data shows that supportive housing is an effective way to reduce homelessness among certain populations and to help people get back on their feet, mentally and financially.
Another question is how much the Denver model could inform policy decisions to address homelessness when eligibility for the program required “not having severe and unaddressed mental health or substance use needs.” A significant proportion of the chronically homeless population experiences such challenges. It seems possible that cash assistance and supportive housing could serve as different, complementary solutions to different parts of the homeless population, but it would be useful to see comparative data.
In any case, the data from Denver’s program is interesting and important. Particularly at a time when housing prices are spiraling out of control, it’s imperative to remain open-minded and take risks as governments and nonprofit groups work through how to alleviate the tremendous crisis of people losing safe places to stay. ~
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/denver-basic-income-homeless-cash-rcna119033
HITLER’S GREATEST MISTAKE (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Hitler lost WW2 in the east. If he had won over the USSR, he most probably would have won the entire world war, one way or another.
The main reason why Hitler lost in the East was the irreconcilable contradiction between the ultimate goal of winning Lebensraum (“living space”) in our territory and the hard requirements of a protracted all-out war.
To win over Russia, you need support from the locals. But you can’t win their support if you obviously trying to get rid of them!
Consider the following: thanks to improbable luck, Hitler caught Stalin wrong-footed and in 1941–42 annihilated almost the entire Red Army in our European territory. The immense advantage we possessed over Nazi Germany before June 22, 1941, dissipated.
By the end of 1942, Hitler possessed our most productive farming lands, and the territory with 40% of our pre-war population. That’s 80 million. You can do a lot with 80 million souls on your side, even if Stalin’s mobilization took many able men among them.
These territories were severely hit by Stalin’s collectivization. When Hitler attacked, Stalin ordered a scorched earth policy for our retreating troops. If executed properly, this order doomed the death of everyone left behind on the occupied territory, as it happened during Napoleon’s invasion. Thanks to the chaos of the first months of the war, the execution was patchy, and most of the remaining locals got a chance to survive.
This made the local population largely friendly to the Germans. To begin with, WW2 on our territory turned into a continuation of the Civil War of 1918–34. Many troops were unwilling to fight for Stalin and surrendered. (As it turned, foolishly—. Millions would starve to death as PoWs.) Over the course of the war, at least 800,000—and probably more than 2 million—Soviet citizens took the side of the Nazis against Soviet rule, many as a fighting force.
However, Hitler wasn’t very interested in cooperation from the locals. They occupied the territory where Germans were supposed to settle after the war. They consumed food that should have been eaten by German troops and civilians throughout the war. Hitler simply didn’t see them as a resource. They were a liability, an economic burden.
As a result, the Germans didn’t abolish the kolkhoz (compulsory “collective farms”) system and didn’t return land to the peasants. Despite what Soviet propaganda claimed, this—and not the German atrocities—became the major factor why the locals increasingly turned against the Germans and cooperated with the embedded NKVD commandos in what we call partisan movement (“guerrilla warfare”).
The same thinking was behind the willful murder of more than 3 million Soviet PoWs by starvation in German captivity. Hitler didn’t use this massive manpower against Stalin, which might have broken the back of the Red Army already in the winter of 1941/42. Hitler reasoned that they would rob his own soldiers of food he expected to provide to his army on our territory.
The decision to form the Ostlegionen was too little done too late. By that time, the US was already heavily involved in the war in Europe, the torrent of Lend-Lease deliveries was swelling the Soviet war capacity by the hour, and the Allied bombardments were steadily crumbling the German military production.
If Hitler had immediately started arming and sending to battle our PoWs after the attack on June 22, 1941, we would have lived in a different world now. ~ Quora
Andy Wiskonsky:
You pretty well hit this on the head. Hitler's treating Slavs as Untermenschen doomed him to failure in the East. Millions of ex-Soviet and newly Soviet residents would have gladly fought against Stalin and what was left of the Bolsheviki. Instead, Hitler murdered millions of Soviet POWs and mistreated the local populations who had plenty of grievances against Soviet rule.
Yevgeniy Leto:
The irony is that USSR was big and had more than enough land to incorporate the (imagined) “German settlers” without destroying the local Ukrainians and Russians. The reality was that there weren’t many Germans who were willing to leave home and settle in the steppe.
The Austrian corporal was crazy, but he was an oratorial demon who managed to convinced the nation to go crazy with him.
Tim Orum:
Hitler made the same mistake in France. Much has been made of the weakness of the response of the French military to Hitler’s invasion. I believe they used the correct tactic. Rather than throwing wave after wave of human bodies at the superior speed and military might of Hitler’s army many of them melted into the landscape. While Hitler strutted around the Eiffel Tower his military now faced endless sabotage and guerilla strikes from the partisans that never stopped. They drained the Germans slowly but without the millions of dead and wounded that a full-on frontal assault would have brought. That is the same tactic used by native Americans that made life miserable for the colonists for centuries. Hitler would have been dead much sooner than that.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A CHILDFREE LIFE
~ Deciding whether or not to become a parent is deeply personal, which is why I’ve never felt compelled to write about my own experience. But I was excited to read Maria Coffey’s new book, Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life, in hopes that she would articulate emotions I’ve been carrying around for decades.
Coffey, who splits her time between British Columbia and Spain, is 71 years old and a hard-core traveler in the vein of her contemporaries Tim Cahill or Paul Theroux. She’s paddled a kayak all over the world; started the adventure travel company, Hidden Places, with her partner Dag Goering; and co-founded the non-profit Elephant Earth Initiative.
She’s also an award-winning author of 12 books. In 1989, seven years after Joe Tasker, the love of her young life, disappeared while trying to summit Mount Everest, Coffey wrote Fragile Edge: A Personal Portrait of Loss on Everest. She followed it up with Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, exploring what happens to the people left behind by tragedy through interviews with the world’s top climbers and the families of climbers who had died. It won a 2004 National Outdoor Book Award.
Coffey’s books are honest, full of inquiry, and beautifully written. But what intrigued me about Instead is the hard-earned wisdom: It’s one thing to proclaim the joys of a child-free life as a twenty- or thirty-something influencer. It’s another thing to examine that life as a septuagenarian facing old age without any biological offspring. Perspectives change as we age—was Coffey still happy with her decision?
“Yes I am,” Coffey told me in an email. But there are caveats. “It was only around my mid- sixties, when I realized others were seeing me as elderly, that I began to think about the reality of being old and child-free, and fear started creeping in. What happens to old child-free nomads when they get really old?”
With Instead, Coffey sets out to answer that question. In the process she offers readers a generous glimpse into her lifetime of wanderings, which makes her book feel like the best kind of old-school adventure travel yarn.
It begins with a Covid-era anecdote that would chill any traveler: While they’re living in Catalonia, Spain, Coffey’s husband Goering fails to return home after a routine e-bike ride. He’s crashed, destroyed a leg, and dragged himself more than a mile to the nearest country road, where he flags down a passing vehicle. Maria is on her own to navigate the complications of care and recovery in a foreign country during a pandemic.
The book then skips back in time to Coffey’s own precarious brush with death, a near drowning at age 21 off the coast of Morocco. She survives, barely: “I had been returned to life—but differently,” she writes. “The invincibility of youth had been stripped away. Underneath was a raw understanding of the fragility of existence. It was a knowledge that would impel me to chase my dreams and inform the biggest choices I was to make in the years ahead.”
The trouble, however, is that Coffey grew up in England and her Irish Catholic parents, who lived through World War II and only want peace and stability for their children, resist most of her choices. That sets her at odds with her mother, a woman she describes, in part, as “a fierce and controlling matriarch who branded guilt like a weapon.”
Coffey backpacks through Europe, staying in youth hostels, hitchhiking, and experimenting with drugs. Upon graduating from university, she tries to appease her parents, accepting a teaching position at a Liverpool high school, but longs for something “bigger and exciting” and soon quits that job to follow her boyfriend to Peru. That relationship blows up and Coffey returns to Manchester, which leads her to a new circle of friends and to Tasker, who disappears on Mount Everest 30 months into their relationship. His death sets off three years of despair, inspires Coffey’s first book, and fuels her exodus to Canada.
In Canada, Coffey falls in love with Goering, a veterinarian five years her junior who wants five children. His wish forces her to face her fears around motherhood that “are rooted in loss,” she writes. After Tasker’s death, she writes: “I understood there was no way to defend oneself against such pain, except not to love so deeply….No matter how I tried to rationalize it, the thought of having a child, of opening myself up to the possibility of the worst kind of bereavement, terrified me.”
The couple delay their decision to have kids and instead set off around the world on a tandem kayaking journey. The years tick off as they survive many near-misses while paddling, Goering’s cerebral malaria in the Solomon Islands, and a riot in Kenya. They start an adventure travel company to feed their wanderlust. In lieu of having her own kids, Maria forms bonds with children along the way, like Agnes, a Samburu girl from Kenya who she helps support through university and who calls her “mother.”
Coffey’s life is full. She has friends and family across the globe who have replaced the need for a nuclear family. But as she ages, doubts creep in: “All those warnings during my reproductive years about not having children started looming up again,” she writes. “‘You’ll regret it. You’ll be lonely when you’re old.’ At the time, I’d easily sloughed them off. Now I kept thinking about where parenthood might have led us.”
Reading comments like these, I had an inkling that Coffey wasn’t as sold on her child-free life as her book title implies. Or that she may have written it to finally free herself of the guilt brought on by her mother. She later clarifies, however, that it’s not regret she’s feeling. It’s more, as a friend helps her realize, “counterfactual curiosity, wondering about ways you could have lived life differently.” Ultimately, Coffey concludes that “the life I chose is the one I wanted.”
That knowledge, though, doesn’t help Coffey and Goering circumvent the realities of aging. One of the more poignant and humorous moments in Instead comes when they decide to play it safe and move off their island to an inland co-housing project where meals and chores are shared by neighbors. It’s a cloying mismatch from day one. They quickly sell the house and move to Spain, where Georing’s near-fatal accident takes place.
Coffey is almost 20 years older than me, but our lives have parallels. I, too, have had an overpowering desire to see the world since I was a girl. And I had childhood experiences that made me ambivalent toward motherhood. As a child-free adult I’ve also felt as if people perceive my life as more frivolous and less meaningful than that of a mother’s, and I’ve even been told outright that I’m selfish. Unlike Coffey, however, I had support from my parents. Instead of feeling guilty, I was free to make the best choice for me at the time I was able to bear children.
I picked up Coffey’s book hoping that it would be a ringing endorsement of a child-free life. But I quickly realized that Coffey is too honest to oversimplify such a fundamental, complex choice. What she offers instead is an articulate grappling with the great cosmic irony of being a woman: whether you bear one child, many children, adopt, or have none at all, each of these decisions will bring joy and pain. This reality should bond, rather than separate women, no matter which path we choose.
“Having a child is taking a big risk,” Coffey wrote me in an email. “Deciding not to have children is also a risk. Life is a risk. You have to follow your own heart, trust your gut instincts. Don’t make the decision to make someone else happy. Make it entirely for yourself.” ~
https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/instead-maria-coffey-child-free-review/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
Due to many factors, one of them being probably having been an only child and liking it, I knew early on that solitude was extremely important to me — meaning having enough time to myself to pursue my passions, making my own mistakes, having a rich inner life.
Part of that inner life, however, included trying to imagine what it would be like to have a child. Never “children” plural — just the very thought was exhausting. With my intensity, one thing I knew with certainty was that one would be the maximum I could cope it.
Or perhaps even that would be too much, and I wouldn’t be able to hide my resentment at child-rearing chores. I couldn’t afford a nanny — but couldn’t help noticing that women who had nannies still put a lot of energy into child-rearing. There was no escape.
What helped me a lot was an article in a women’s magazine — I forget which one, I forget the name of the author — which now feels like flagrant ingratitude.
The article had the refreshingly cool-headed tone of someone who has learned that nothing is all good or all bad, and that most choices involve sacrifices. It outlined the positives and negatives, and included a sentence that I instantly knew to be an important truth. In paraphrase, it stated “If your work requires a lot of quiet and solitude, then you shouldn’t have children.” The bliss of relief enveloped my whole body. It was the opposite of being labeled “selfish.”
It was, finally, a permission to put my own life first. While in fantasy I could envision a beautiful and gifted child, another part of me warned that the complex self I liked to commune with would be erased —a voice crying in the wilderness and getting no answer. No matter what the adventures and rewards of motherhood, that erasure of myself and my dreams seemed too high a price.
There used to be a saying about those from Eastern European countries who chose to stay in the West: “He chose freedom.” Of course that meant sacrifices as well, and many moments of doubt and despair — perhaps the choice was a huge mistake. But for all the chorus of voices warning me, “When you get older, you will regret it” — somehow in the depths I knew I would not regret it. Not in any significant way. I reveled in my clarity. For me, life without quiet solitude was not worth living.
But I also acknowledge that for many — probably most — people, “family” means mainly children, and for them life might not be worth living without children. And that’s fine with me.
In my younger years I too have experienced the pressure to have children, and that was unwelcome and unpleasant, to put it mildly. The main argument was, “When you get older, you will regret it.” I don’t regret it. I realize that I've lost something and also gained something — but that’s how life is. No matter what you choose, there is a price to pay.
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She was what we used to call a suicide blonde — dyed by her own hand. ~ Saul Bellow
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WHY DO HUMANS DIE AROUND EIGHTY?
The mystery of why humans die at around 80, while other mammals live far shorter or longer lives, may finally have been solved by scientists.
Humans and animals die after amassing a similar number of genetic mutations, researchers have found, suggesting the speed of DNA errors is critical in determining the lifespan of a species.
There are huge variations in the lifespan of mammals in the animal kingdom, from South Asian rats, which live for just six months, to bowhead whales, which can survive for 200 years.
Previously, experts have suggested that size is the key to longevity, with smaller animals burning up energy more quickly, requiring a faster cell turnover, which causes a speedier decline.
But a 2022 study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge suggests the speed of genetic damage could be the key to survival, with long-living animals successfully slowing down their rate of DNA mutations regardless of their size.
It helps explain how a five-inch long naked mole rat can live for 25 years, about the same as a far larger giraffe, which typically lives for 24.
When scientists checked their mutation rates, they were surprisingly similar. Naked mole rats suffer 93 mutations a year and giraffes 99.
In contrast, mice suffer 796 mutations a year and only live for 3.7 years. The average human lifespan in the study was 83.6 years, but the mutation rate was far lower at around 47.
Genetic changes, known as somatic mutations, occur in all cells and are largely harmless, but some can start a cell on the path to cancer or impair normal functioning.
Dr Alex Cagan, the first author of the study, said: “To find a similar pattern of genetic changes in animals as different from one another as a mouse and a tiger was surprising.
“But the most exciting aspect of the study has to be finding that lifespan is inversely proportional to the somatic mutation rate. This suggests that somatic mutations may play a role in aging.”
The team analyzed genetic errors in the stem cells from the intestines of 16 species of mammal and found that the longer the lifespan of a species, the slower the rate at which mutations occur.
The average number of mutations at the end of lifespan across species was around 3200, suggesting there is a critical mass of errors after which a body is unable to function correctly.
‘Aging is a complex process’
Although the figure differed about threefold across species the variation was far less than the variation in body size, which varied up to 40,000 fold.
The researchers believe the study opens the door to understanding the aging process, and the inevitability and timing of death.
Dr Inigo Martincorena, the senior author of the study, said: “Aging is a complex process, the result of multiple forms of molecular damage in our cells and tissues.
“Somatic mutations have been speculated to contribute to aging since the 1950s, but studying them has remained difficult.
“With the recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies, we can finally investigate the roles that somatic mutations play in aging and in multiple diseases.”
The research was published in the journal Nature. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/mystery-of-why-humans-die-around-80-may-finally-be-solved?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. ~ Saul Bellow
CHANGING HOW WE TALK ABOUT SUICIDE
~ Social stigma around suicide can amplify shame for people experiencing suicidality — which includes suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts — making seeking help or talking about it more difficult, said Urszula Klich, a clinical psychologist in Atlanta.
“When we’re stigmatizing those aspects of mental health, and then those individuals don’t get help,” Klich added, “very often, that’s the slippery slope into some of the key factors that wind up increasing risk for death by suicide.”
Stigmatizing language about suicide can also cement ideas that people who attempted or died by suicide, when compared with everyone else, are broken, disabled, less than or different in some way, experts said.
This “us and them” mindset can detract people from feeling empathy or being compassionate, fragmenting our ability to connect with others’ struggles and developing strategies that might help prevent suicides, Klich said — which is why experts have suggestions for ways you can discuss suicide without potentially worsening the problem.
Some of the earliest calls for changing how we talk about suicide began in the mid-2000s, with authors whose own lives had been affected by the suicides of loved ones. P. Bonny Ball’s 2005 book “The Power of Words: The Language of Suicide” identified words in need of replacing due to problematic connotations. Thomas Joiner’s 2007 book “Why People Die by Suicide” also helped facilitate understanding about the issue, Klich said.
It was around then that the Alberta Mental Health Board, as part of its provincial suicide prevention strategy, addressed harmful standard terms and suggested alternatives, according to Canada’s Centre for Suicide Prevention. The center publicly supported this in 2011, saying educating those in power — such as the media, academia and educators — would be key in efforts to change the language overall.
Since then, studies have shown that academic publication of the word “commit” has decreased by about 20% since 2000 — but “it has not translated, really, to the general population,” Klich said.
Use of the word “committed” stems back to when suicide attempts were illegal in many countries, before Germany was the first country to decriminalize the act in 1751 and other European countries and North America did so after the French Revolution, according to a 2015 study. Suicide remains a crime in at least 23 countries, including the Bahamas, Nigeria and Bangladesh, according to the World Health Organization.
In addition to the phrase “committed suicide” implying criminality, it also “clearly has a moral judgment, and it might not reflect the situation,” said Dr. Jacek Debiec, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan.
Some other problematic words people use are “successful,” “failed” or completed, experts said.
The first two are particularly harmful. “Successful” has connotations of a positive achievement, which taking one’s life is not. Additionally, “to the person struggling with (suicidality), that success to them might be very different than the provider assessing the risk,” said Justin Baker, clinical psychologist and clinical director of The Suicide and Trauma Reduction Initiative for Veterans at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.
And since “failed” typically has negative undertones, using it to describe someone who attempted, but didn’t die from, suicide can imply a lack of strength of character or that surviving isn’t the best outcome. “It’s not unheard of to have a patient go, ‘I can’t even die correctly,’ and use that to further shame and blame themselves,” he added. “We want to not do that — we want to help work towards improved outcomes and quality of life.”
Given these factors, to eliminate stigma and judgment, the preferred language “is ‘died by suicide,’ (like) ‘someone died of a heart attack or stroke,’” Baker said.
“Fatal suicide attempt,” “killed herself” or “took his own life” are other alternatives, experts said. And when referring to someone who didn’t die from a suicide attempt, acceptable shorthand ways to say that include “nonfatal suicide attempt” or simply “suicide attempt.”
Another commonly used, but misguided, phrase is that suicide is a “selfish act.”
Characterizing suicide as “selfish” has derogatory connotations because it implies the person did it for a pleasurable reason, when in reality, people who attempt or die by suicide more often want to end their pain or see themselves as burdensome, clinical psychologist Michael Roeske explained.
“It’s a decision based on the idea that ‘I don’t know how to get out of this moment. I feel so overwhelmed. I feel so stressed. I feel so sad that this opportunity to escape is what I need, and I don’t feel I have any other choice,’” Roeske, senior director of the Newport Healthcare Center for Research & Innovation, said.
Therefore, “nearsighted” may be a better term, he added, since “their focus becomes really limited down to what’s immediately in front of them and they’re not able to see the larger context of the history of their life, the relationships and the dimensionality of things.”
Overall, sticking to factual, nonjudgmental terms is best, Baker said.
If we use more inclusive language and become “aware that people die by suicide, they die from their mental health problems, then we might be a little bit more apt to feel that we also can,” Klich said. “This consciousness of other people’s distress and a desire to alleviate it — we open the pathway to compassion more than when we say ‘committed suicide.’” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/10/health/suicide-why-you-shouldnt-say-committed-
wellness/index.html
Mary:
What is missing from the usual language about suicide, including words like "commit" and "selfish," is exactly that sense of shared humanity that is empathy and compassion. You "commit" crimes and sins — and suicide has historically been judged as both, punishable by god and the state.
Once when I was sick and struggling and incredibly weary, casting about for some kind of help, I was considered too much of a suicide risk for the practice I came to as a patient. The members were split on accepting me as a patient, with the majority feeling I was too likely to commit suicide, and that would be Bad for Their Reputation. After an extensive interview they "took me on," but only to be handled by their senior psychiatrist.
This experience of dehumanization might have been enough to push me further toward self annihilation, but instead made me angry and resistant to such judgement, such callous worry about their reputation over concern for my survival. At one point in my thrashing around for relief I thought I could go back to the church...that if I went to confession I might win some relief. The priest quizzed me on "the sin of Despair." If I could not give up my despair I would not be forgiven.
Medicine and Religion both absolved themselves from empathy.
I admit some of this seeming callousness comes out of fear...fear of contamination, fear of seeing yourself mirrored in the suffering of the Other, fear of getting too close to their madness, their pariah existence. Suicide threatens our most basic assumptions about life, and is frightening. This may be true, but is not an excuse…certainly not from health care professionals.
Oriana:
I was once involved with someone who ended up killing himself. It’s not like a natural death. The first few months I was completely in a daze from the emotional shock. I was so sure he wouldn’t do it as long as his mother was alive that I ignored signs as obvious as his asking, the last time we were together, “Wanna see my revolver?”
And I was quite familiar with suicidal depression myself, and yet . . . I was blind.
And then the never-ending (at first constant, calming down with time) questions: 1)Why? 2) Could I have done or said anything to prevent it?
Now I realize that I’ll never know the full answer to these questions, especially the Why. But the point is not to find a rational answer(s), but indeed to show empathy and somehow affirm that this person is to be valued.
The “Sin of Despair” is an astonishing example of Catholic insanity. As I came to understand it it’s the “sin against the Holy Ghost” — and sins against the Holy Ghost is the only kind that will not be forgiven. A murder can be forgiven, but not despair. You are absolutely required to believe in salvation — in the afterlife, so no need for any evidence.
And the body of someone without died by suicide could not be buried in consecrated ground, i.e. a cemetery. So even the dead body was further insulted.
Thank goodness we have the suicide hotline now, and some counseling help that’s not the super-expensive individual therapy.
Even so, suicide presents a continual puzzle, since the risk of suicide is actually higher for those with higher IQ, more education, and even higher income.
Various solutions have been proposed, including this controversial one: “You want to kill yourself? Sure, fine, you have the right to. When?” — After the “when” question is answered, “Why the delay? Why not now? What’s keeping you from doing it today?”
I’m not sure I could be cold-blooded enough to use this technique when faced with an actual person who’s just bought a revolver. What appeals to me more is “Sure. But before you do, I want you to do just one more good thing while you’re still here.”
I’m sure the hotline people have been trained in various techniques, possibly different if it’s a man than a woman.
As for the greater problem of living in a society in which it’s so easy to see oneself as a failure, that’s beyond me. Depression changes the brain, including access to positive memories — I know it was very hard for me, and I could barely remember two good things, while a friend readily rattled off thirteen. And she too had experienced the pull of suicide . . . 
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FEMALE GHOSTS DOMINATE THE AFTERLIFE
~ If you drive south of San Antonio, Texas on Applewhite Road, past the fire station and the Toyota plant, and pull over just shy of the Medina River, you can walk a few hundred feet through tranquil forest and patchy sunlight to where a small bridge crosses a burbling stream just out of sight of the highway.
There, on certain evenings, when the last rays of light cut through deepening shadows, and the sound of the wind has faded from the tree tops, you may have an experience you cannot easily explain. A rustle in the undergrowth, a flicker in your vision, the distinct clopping of hooves. You may not see her, but, as many visitors report, the Donkey Lady was nearby.
This quirkily-named phantom has for decades been said to haunt the San Antonio bridge. Visitors report the sound of hoofbeats and distant screams and the presence of a specter, her face and body disfigured, lurking nearby. Some even claim to have found hoofprints on their cars. Despite the apparent danger, or perhaps because of it, the Donkey Lady bridge has become a popular spot with locals eager for a ghostly encounter, and a tourist attraction of sorts.
“When I moved to San Antonio in 2002, the first stop that my friends brought me to [was] not to the Fiesta, or the Riverwalk, or even the Alamo, it was the Donkey Lady bridge,” says Marisela Barrera, a San Antonio-based artist.
As one version of the story goes, the Donkey Lady is the ghost of a woman who lived outside of San Antonio more than a century ago, raising donkeys on a farm by herself. She died in a fire that left her body horribly maimed and, unable to find peace, her spirit lingers near the bridge.
For Barrera, this supernatural persistence, similar in some ways to the stubborn animals the unnamed woman raised, is a measure of her spirit’s strength.
“The Donkey Lady stands her ground,” she says. “She’s so strong-willed that she could survive despite her circumstances.”
Real or not, the Donkey Lady is also representative of a curious trend found throughout American folklore. A significant proportion of ghosts, from the omnipresent Lady in White to the spectral “Mrs. Spencer” who haunted Joan Rivers’ New York apartment, are women.
The Afterlife is Female
There is no conclusive database of hauntings to reference, of course (though perhaps there should be). But browse through lists of haunted places and famous ghosts, and you’ll notice a distinct bias.
“It does really seem that the numbers are skewed more towards female ghosts,” says Leanna Renee Hieber, a writer and co-author of A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts.
Potential explanations range from the supernatural to the mundane. Do women’s souls have more sticking power? Are women more motivated to return after their mortal coil has been shuffled? Are female ghosts more memorable to us? Or perhaps we’re more likely to think of a woman in a white dress when we see an errant patch of fog (or ectoplasm).
It could be, as Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, that dead women are simply more emotionally resonant than dead men.
“The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” Poe wrote in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition.”
Whatever the reason, the preponderance of ghostly women is interesting for much the same reasons that ghosts themselves are interesting, regardless of your belief in the supernatural.
“There’s a saying that seeing is believing, but it’s equally true that believing is seeing,” says Anna Stone, a psychologist and researcher at the University of East London “Our ghosts are a reflection of our own beliefs about what ought to be happening, our own desires.”
What then, is the common thread that unites feminine specters like Gertrude Tredwell, who haunts the Merchant’s House in New York City, the Bell Witch that tormented the Bell family in Tennessee, and the undead, forlorn lover said to claw at cars passing over Emily’s Bridge in Vermont? Like women’s evolving role in society, the answer is complex.
“There’s just like layers and layers and layers of the way female identity, as it’s constructed in Western society in the last two to three centuries, overlaps and intersects with the deathly,” says Andrea Janes, who runs the ghost tour company Boroughs of the Dead, and co-wrote A Haunted History of Invisible Women with Hieber.
Who’s Afraid of a Woman Ghost?
One big factor could be the gravitational pull of the Victorian era, when ghost stories abounded, on present-day culture. It was a time when gender roles were becoming tightly confined, Hieber says, in response to a changing, industrializing society.
That meant women were more tightly tied to the domestic sphere, and their houses, even after death. In a time before funeral parlors, it was often women who washed and prepared the dead, further strengthening their connection with death. Add to that a predilection toward romanticizing death, as Poe did, and you’ve got a formula for memorable dead women—and their ghosts.
Women also took a more central role in the otherworldly around this time, Hieber says, from their involvement with the spiritualist movement as mediums, to a growing cadre of 19th-century authors like Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Ridell penning stories populated by phantasms and spirits, who were often women.
“The pump was primed, as it were, for women to be involved in ghost lore because they had been directly involved in creating it,” Hieber says.
A ghost’s purpose has shifted over time, too. In Medieval times, ghosts were manifestations of cautionary tales. A woman might return as a ghost if she transgressed society’s boundaries, or committed a perceived wrong. Think, for example, of Anne Boleyn’s ghost wandering Hampton Court with her head under her arm.
Those cautionary tales cut both ways. In Medieval times, being a ghost was typically a punishment for misdeeds, real or perceived. Later, it was ghosts like the Bell Witch, rumored to have killed Bell family patriarch John Bell, doing the punishing.
“We have an innate sense of justice, we all do,” Stone says. “We like to see bad people punished and good people rewarded, however long it takes.”
For a woman abused by her husband, or cast out by her community, the post-mortal realm may have been the only avenue for recompense available. Her story, relayed by women to their family members and friends, could then serve as its own kind of healing.
There’s “some kind of comfort in the fact that you can haunt someone forever if they failed to meet your needs in life,” Janes says.
Ghost stories are also a means of preserving history. For past women who may not have had the right to own property, represent themselves in court, or even keep their last names, a ghost story may be the most powerful means of being remembered.
As ghosts, women “have a staying power, they have a voice,” Hieber says.
A seance in a French parlor, 1898; medium: Eusapia PalladinoA Female Ghost Phones Back
In San Antonio, that voice became literal in 2018, when Barrera established a hotline for San Antonio residents to call and leave messages about their encounters with the Donkey Lady. For some lucky callers, the Donkey Lady even picked up and talked back. The hotline received thousands of calls, Barrera says, and the responses revealed a community with diverse, sometimes contrasting opinions.
“The Donkey Lady received marriage proposals,” she says. “She received sweet messages. She received laughs. She received racist messages.”
The Donkey Lady’s story, as originally told, reflects some stereotypes of female ghost stories (stereotypes that are also reflected in haunted house attractions). She was seen as a spinster, an independent woman raising livestock in male-dominated ranching country who may have been marginalized by her community. Her death was gruesome, perhaps befitting her status as an outcast.
But the Donkey Lady also embodies the strength and resourcefulness of women who struck out on their own. In San Antonio, Barrera says strong, independent women are sometimes called a “burra,” which translates as something close to “Donkey Lady.”
It is perhaps that spirit of independence, more than anything else, that lent the Donkey Lady her fearsome aura.
“Is it sort of scary when a female then does not meet a cookie cutter type of identity?” Barrera says. “Is it scary when a female then has the strength?”
In San Antonio, the story of the Donkey Lady has been around for decades, the details shifting with the times. In some versions, she is ferocious, in others she is a misshapen victim, in yet others a steadfast protector. But, always, she is there. ~
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ghost-women-why-are-there-so-many-female-ghosts?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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SPREADING THE WORD ON A POSSIBLE ALZHEIMER’S TREATMENT
~ Discoveries that transcend boundaries are among the greatest delights of scientific research, but such leaps are often overlooked because they outstrip conventional thinking. Take, for example, a new discovery for treating dementia that defies received wisdom by combining two formerly unrelated areas of research: brain waves and the brain’s immune cells, called microglia. It’s an important finding, but it still requires the buy-in and understanding of researchers to achieve its true potential. The history of brain waves shows why.
In 1887, Richard Caton announced his discovery of brain waves at a scientific meeting. “Read my paper on the electrical currents of the brain,” he wrote in his personal diary. “It was well received but not understood by most of the audience.” Even though Caton’s observations of brain waves were correct, his thinking was too unorthodox for others to take seriously. Faced with such a lack of interest, he abandoned his research and the discovery was forgotten for decades.
Flash forward to October 2019. At a gathering of scientists that I helped organize at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, I asked if anyone knew of recent research by neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had found a new way to treat Alzheimer’s disease by manipulating microglia and brain waves. No one replied.
I understood: Scientists must specialize to succeed. Biologists studying microglia don’t tend to read papers about brain waves, and brain wave researchers are generally unaware of glial research. A study that bridges these two traditionally separate disciplines may fail to gain traction. But this study needed attention: Incredible as it may sound, the researchers improved the brains of animals with Alzheimer’s simply by using LED lights that flashed 40 times a second. Even sound played at this charmed frequency, 40 hertz, had a similar effect.
Today, brain waves are a vital part of neuroscience research and medical diagnosis, though doctors have never manipulated them to treat degenerative disease before now. These oscillating electromagnetic fields are produced by neurons in the cerebral cortex firing electrical impulses as they process information. Much as people clapping their hands in synchrony generate thunderous rhythmic applause, the combined activity of thousands of neurons firing together produces brain waves.
These waves come in various forms and in many different frequencies. Alpha waves, for example, oscillate at frequencies of 8 to 12 hertz. They surge when we close our eyes and shut out external stimulation that energizes higher-frequency brain wave activity. Rapidly oscillating gamma waves, which reverberate at frequencies of 30 to 120 hertz, are of particular interest in Alzheimer’s research, because their period of oscillation is well matched to the hundredth-of-a-second time frame of synaptic signaling in neural circuits.
Brain waves are important in information processing because they can influence neuronal firing. Neurons fire an electrical impulse when the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron reaches a certain trigger point. The peaks and troughs of voltage oscillations in brain waves nudge the neuron closer to the trigger point or farther away from it, thereby boosting or inhibiting its tendency to fire. The rhythmic voltage surging also groups neurons together, making them fire in synchrony as they “ride” on different frequencies of brain waves.
I already knew that much, so to better understand the new work and its origins, I sought out Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist at MIT. She said the idea of using one of these frequencies to treat Alzheimer’s came from a curious observation. “We had noticed in our own data, and in that of other groups, that 40-hertz rhythm power and synchrony are reduced in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease,” she said, as well as in patients with the disease.
Apparently, if you have Alzheimer’s, your brain doesn’t produce strong brain waves in that particular frequency. In 2016, her graduate student Hannah Iaccarino reasoned that perhaps boosting the power of these weakened gamma waves would be helpful in treating this severe and irreversible dementia.
To increase gamma wave power, the team turned to optogenetic stimulation, a novel technique that allows researchers to control how and when individual neurons fire by shining lasers directly into them, via fiber-optic cables implanted in the brain. Tsai’s team stimulated neurons in the visual cortex of mice with Alzheimer’s, making them fire impulses at 40 hertz. The results, published in 2016 in Nature, showed a marked reduction in amyloid plaques, a hallmark of the disease.
It was a good indication that these brain waves might help, but Tsai’s team knew that an optogenetic approach wasn’t an option for humans with the disease, because of ethical concerns. They began to look for other ways of increasing the brain’s gamma wave activity. Tsai’s MIT colleague Emery Brown pointed her to an older paper showing that you can boost the power of gamma waves in a cat’s brain simply by having it stare at a screen illuminated by a strobe light flickering at certain frequencies, which included 40 hertz. “Hannah and our collaborators built a system to try that sensory stimulation in mic
e, and it worked,” Tsai told me. The thinking is that the flashing lights whip up gamma waves because the rhythmic sensory input sets neural circuits “rocking” at this frequency, like when people rock a stuck car out of a rut by pushing together in rhythm.
In fact, the strobe lights had an additional effect on mice: They also cleared out amyloid plaques. But it wasn’t clear exactly how the optogenetic stimulation or the flashing-light therapy could do that.
Following a clue from Alois Alzheimer himself, the researchers quickly shifted their attention from neurons to microglia. In Alzheimer’s first description of brain tissue taken from patients with “presenile dementia,” which he examined under a microscope near the turn of the 20th century, he noted that the deposits of amyloid plaques were surrounded by these immune cells. Subsequent research confirmed that microglia engulf the plaques pockmarking these patients’ brains.
Tsai and colleagues decided to check out these immune cells in the animals whose brain waves they’d boosted. They observed that microglia in all the treated animals had bulked up in size, and more of them were digesting amyloid plaques.
How did these cells know to do this? Unlike immune cells in the bloodstream, which are unaware of neuronal transmissions, the brain’s microglia are tuned in to the rhythms of electrical activity in the brain. While immune cells in the bloodstream and microglia in the brain both have cellular sensors to detect disease and injury, microglia can also detect neurons firing electrical impulses. That’s because they have the same neurotransmitter receptors that neurons use to transmit signals through synapses. This gives microglia the ability to “listen in” on information flowing through neural networks and, when those transmissions are disturbed, to take action to repair the circuitry. Thus, the right brain waves can drive microglia to consume the toxic protein deposits.
“I find this intersection [between brain waves and microglia] to be one of the most exciting and intriguing results of our work,” Tsai told me. Her team reported last year in Neuron that prolonging the LED strobe-light flashing for three to six weeks not only cleared out the toxic plaques in mice brains but also prevented neurons from dying and even preserved synapses, which dementia can destroy.
The team wanted to know if other types of rhythmic sensory input could also rock the neural circuits like a stuck car, producing gamma waves that resulted in fewer amyloid plaques. In an expanded study in Cell, they reported that just as seeing flashes at 40 hertz resulted in fewer plaques in the visual cortex, sound stimulation at 40 hertz reduced amyloid protein in the auditory cortex.
Other regions were similarly affected, including the hippocampus — crucial for learning and memory — and the treated mice performed better on memory tests. Exposing the mice to both stimuli, a light show synchronized with pulsating sound, had an even more powerful effect, reducing amyloid plaques in regions throughout the cerebral cortex, including the prefrontal region, which carries out higher-level executive functions that are impaired in Alzheimer’s.
I was amazed, so just to make sure I wasn’t getting unduly excited about the possibility of using flashing lights and sounds to treat humans, I talked to Hiroaki Wake, a neuroscientist at Kobe University in Japan who was not involved with the work. “It would be fantastic!” he said. “The treatment may also be effective for a number of neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease and ALS,” where microglia also play a role. He notes, however, that while the link between microglia and brain oscillations is well founded, the biological mechanism by which 40-hertz stimulation prods microglia into removing the plaques and rescuing neurons from destruction remains unknown.
Tsai said the mystery may be solved soon. A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including Tsai lab veteran Annabelle Singer, laid out a possibility in a February paper. They reported that in normal mice, gamma stimulation with LED lights rapidly induced microglia to generate cytokines, proteins that neurons (and immune cells generally) use to signal one another. They’re one of the main regulators of neuroinflammation in response to brain injury and disease, and the microglia released them surprisingly quickly, within just 15 to 60 minutes of the stimulation. “These effects are faster than you see with many drugs that target immune signaling or inflammation,” Singer said.
Cytokines come in many forms, and the study found that getting the microglia to produce different kinds required specific frequencies. “Neural stimulation doesn’t just turn immune signaling on,” Singer said. It took a particular rhythm to produce these particular proteins. Different types of stimulation could be used to tune immune signaling as desired.
That means doctors could potentially treat different diseases just by varying the light and sound rhythms they use. The different stimuli would rock the neurons into producing appropriate brain wave frequencies, causing nearby microglia to release specific types of cytokines, which tell microglia in general how to go to work repairing the brain.
Of course, it may still be a while before such treatments are available for patients. And even then, there may be side effects. “Rhythmic sensory stimulation likely affects many types of cells in brain tissue,” Tsai said. “How each of them senses and responds to gamma oscillations is unknown.” Wake also pointed out that rhythmic stimulation could do more harm than good, because such stimuli could induce seizures, common in many psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
Still, the potential benefits are great. Tsai’s team has just begun assessing their strobe-light method on patients, and they’re sure to be joined by others as more researchers learn of this promising work. (Most experts I talked to were not aware of this research until I asked.)
Just as new species spring up at the boundaries between ecosystems, new science can flourish at the interface between disciplines. It takes a sharp eye to spot it, but as Richard Caton found, it can also require a bit of persuasion to convince others. ~
https://www.quantamagazine.org/spreading-the-word-on-a-possible-alzheimers-treatment-20200527/
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ending on beauty:
I touch your lips with my fingers:
that too is a prophetic gesture.
And your lips are red, the way a burnt field
is black.
It’s all true.
~ Yehuda Amichai
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