Chagall: The Red Horse, 1944. I'm not sure if this was painted after the Liberation, but I wouldn’t be surprised. There is exhilaration here, a spirit of celebration.
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MEGGY
Other cultures have gods for everything,
god of the vineyard, goddess of the hearth,
the orchard, the lambing, the shearing,
god of the manure pile, steamy and rich—
but I have no god to complain to.
Rummaging in the closet I come across
a doll made from a child’s cotton sock,
an Irish bar maid, apron, emerald dress,
saucy cap on red moppy hair—
given to me
by a friend with a sense of humor.
Meggy 0’Shaughnessy, closet waif,
I dub thee goddess of my kitchen.
Wipe the grin off your face.
What do you know of kitchens and duty,
sitting on the spice shelf where I put you,
bloomers smudged with cumin dust,
dill on your cap, sock fists ready
to do battle with the salt?
What do you know about goddessing
for a woman who has spent sixty
years in this kitchen,
sixty years
of colcannon and cabbage, of scraping
plates, the luckless glasses
dropped in despair?
You cannot know the terror of thinking
this is all there is. Maybe it’s enough
that you listen with your embroidered ears.
~ Una Nichols Hynum (Rattle, 2013)
Soft-voiced, large-souled — if I were to describe Una in the fewest words, I'd choose these. We've just lost an extraordinary woman and poet who's been a light to many — and will continue to be.
I am posting this poem in memory of Una, who died just days ago. She used to be a close friend of mine; together we attended a very interesting and different poem workshop called “The Live Oaks” (because live oaks are such strong, vigorous trees, I think — I accepted the name without asking about it).
The workshop was for experienced poets only, and you had to be invited to join. It was demanding. No getting away with triteness or “lazy writing.” We demanded quality of ourselves and each other. We were utterly serious about poetry— in contrast to most workshops I’d ever attended, where sometimes I seemed to be the only person truly dedicated to poetry.
The Live Oaks and other workshops were very important in Una’s life. She attended two or three a week. She liked to get away from the house, even though it meant “time away from the desk,” which she mourned. Still, it was very important to her to have communion with the local poetry world.
“Meggy” is just one of the many poems by Una that became widely known and loved. By “widely,” I mean strictly in the local sense. Connection with other poets was very important to Una. So was presiding as a matriarch over her large and ever-growing family — the number of great-grands grew so large that even she lost track of it toward the end.
But “presiding as a matriarch” sounds so grand, even regal. Women know better: unless you are rich, much of your life is spent in the kitchen. Now, cooking is creative and has its rewards, but there is also a compulsory quality to it when a number of people are waiting to be fed. Sixty years of cooking — that’s not a glamorous admission. And yes, she did cook for as long as her health allowed.
The crucial lines are these:
What do you know about goddessing
for a woman who has spent sixty
years in this kitchen, sixty year
of colcannon and cabbage, of scraping
plates, the luckless glasses
dropped in despair?
You cannot know the terror of thinking
this is all there is.
Much as some may want to see you as an earth goddess, deep down you know these are humble chores, which are endless. And you are giving, and giving, and giving.
Mary:
Wonderful poem. How we need someone to hear us.
Oriana:
This is such a common experience for any older woman: you look back at your life, and see the incredible time you spent in the kitchen, cooking, washing the dishes, cleaning, stocking the fridge. Una called it the “domesticities.” No, they never end, without really adding up to any lasting achievement. Well, you’ve kept your family fed — it is an achievement of sorts, but not one honored by our culture in the same rank as “men’s work.”
In spite of that near-universality (though things may be changing as fewer younger mothers cook), this is the only poem of this sort I’ve ever encountered. And its genius lies in the image of the rag doll, representing a “jolly” Irish barmaid, almost perversely — since it seems a totally inappropriate choice — chosen by the speaker to be her kitchen goddess, for lack of any more dignified figure. And suddenly the reader (especially a woman reader) realizes that while there are gods, goddesses, and patron saints for just about every kind of work, the hugely important task of feeding humanity has been taken for granted, unhonored, despised even as menial — a servant’s kind of work, rather than service of the highest order.
Anyone who’s come to know Una, whether in person or through her poems, would never summarize her as “sixty years in the kitchen.” That sounds like a prison sentence. Any woman’s life is of course much more than that, but it is that too . . . time that could have been spent on other tasks, or simply on resting and dreaming, enjoying life. But thanks to the choice of Meggie, this poem of lamentation rises above mere lamentation. The life of the imagination asserts itself as primary.
Una giving a reading; she said that poetry kept her alive. When she couldn’t write longer poems anymore, she turned to haiku. She attended poetry events every week for as long as she could. And she did live to be 93.
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WHAT PRIDE AND PREJUDICE TEACHES READERS
Before she was a writer, Jane Austen was a reader. A reader, moreover, within a family of readers, who would gather in her father’s rectory to read aloud from the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and William Cowper—as well as, eventually, Jane’s own works-in-progress.
Not surprisingly, then, in Austen’s novels, the act of reading is a key indication of how a character should initially be judged, and of major turning points in her development. For Austen, the way a character reads is emblematic of other forms of interpretation: One’s skills in comprehending written language are linked to one’s ability to understand life, other people, and oneself.
Characters’ choices of books are a frequent target of Austen’s satire. Persuasion, for example, opens with a vignette that might otherwise seem insignificant: the reading habits of the protagonist’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, who “for his own amusement, never took up any book” except one—the record of British families that contains his own lineage. In Pride and Prejudice, the insufferable clergyman Mr. Collins chooses to orate from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women one afternoon because (as he piously proclaims) he abstains from novels. This episode clearly represents what Henry Tilney, Catherine Morland’s love interest in Northanger Abbey, means when he says, “The person … who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” On the other hand, Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe takes great pleasure in novels—but not high-quality ones. Accordingly, Isabella’s character turns out to be as excessive, hyperbolic, dramatic, and deceptive as the Gothic tales she recommends to Catherine.
In the early 19th century, novels—a term frequently associated with the Gothic romances that form Catherine’s early reading tastes—had yet to be fully respected in the world of polite letters. Austen’s realist work contributed significantly to the artistic sophistication of the developing genre. The narrator of Northanger Abbey appears to articulate Austen’s own view in declaring novels to be works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Austen’s works exemplify these narrative possibilities, and extol characters who are capable of appreciating them.
Anne Elliot of Persuasion is just such a character. As I discuss in On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, Anne exemplifies the virtue of patience, an essential skill in reading—and living—well. The act of submitting oneself to the demands of a slowly unfolding plot entails an exercise of patience similar to that required in navigating the twists and turns (and disappointments) of life. When Persuasion opens, Anne is patiently awaiting a turn in her own life story, having long ago broken off an engagement with Captain Frederick Wentworth and borne the heavy burden of regret in the years since.
When Anne discusses literature with her new friend Captain Benwick, who is grieving over the death of his fiancée, she concludes that Benwick’s reading, which consists mainly of Romantic poetry, has deepened his sorrow in lost love (just as Marianne Dashwood’s does in Sense and Sensibility). Anne recommends that he read more prose. As a skilled reader, she understands how each mode affects the spirit differently under different circumstances, and though she loves both prose and poetry—even reciting poetry “worthy of being read” to herself while walking—she recognizes the distinction between life and art.
This conversation with Benwick helps Anne to gain the critical distance she needs to perceive her own situation more accurately. After recognizing that she, like Benwick, has succumbed in her own way to heartbreak, she realizes that she has not, as she had mistakenly thought, lost all hope of regaining Wentworth’s love. And when Wentworth renews his marriage proposal—in the form of a letter—she is able to put aside her own pride, prejudices, and doubts to readily comprehend the intent of the letter’s author. In so doing, she finds happiness at last.
Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet lacks some of Anne’s maturity, but is a more reliable reader than Catherine Morland (as indicated metaphorically by Elizabeth’s famous “fine eyes”). What’s more—as seen in Miss Bingley’s attempt to insult Elizabeth by calling her “a great reader” after Elizabeth turns down a card game in favor of a book—she reads thoughtfully in a society where women are not expected to. In contrast to her pedantic sister Mary, who is so absorbed in scholarly books that she is ill-adjusted to the real world, Elizabeth understands that reading, though worthwhile, is no substitute for living. Thus, when Mr. Darcy tries to discuss literature with Elizabeth at a ball, she objects, “No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else.”
Yet despite being a perceptive and careful reader, Elizabeth needs improvement. The novel’s central conflict lies in her misreading of Darcy’s personality, and its plot turns on the moment when she’s forced—again, through reading—to reconsider. To emphasize the importance of critical interpretation (both for the novel’s characters and for its readers), Austen presents this plot point in two acts. First, Darcy’s voice takes over the narrative with a letter to Elizabeth that appears without commentary. Here, the audience reads along with Elizabeth as Darcy explains all the circumstances that have led her to, based on her partial knowledge, misjudge his character and refuse his marriage proposal.
Then, Austen begins a new chapter that takes the audience into Elizabeth’s thoughts as she rereads the letter. At first, she denies and resists this new interpretation of the facts, so dramatically divergent from her own. But as she pores over the letter again, she takes it in “with somewhat clearer attention,” “weigh[s] every circumstance,” and “deliberate[s] on the probability of each statement” until she realizes “how differently did everything now appear,” and how she has, in truth, been “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.”
All along, as Austen’s audience reads about Elizabeth Bennet, they also read with her. And in this way, as Elizabeth revises her reading of characters and situations she was once certain about, the readers of Pride and Prejudice do so too. As they see her “first impressions” (Austen’s original title for the novel) through her eyes, they share her misreading of Darcy’s character. Recoiling with her at Darcy’s unmistakable pride, the readers become prejudiced. They are duped into trusting Elizabeth’s interpretations because her keen insight, sharp wit, and self-assurance make her judgment seem eminently trustworthy. Reading the novel is therefore a lesson in interpretive humility. As Austen’s characters learn to question their own interpretations, Austen’s readers learn, too, that the way one reads—not just what one reads—is important.
Throughout her novels, Austen satirizes both literary works and readers that represent two kinds of excess: those that are overly moralizing, and those that are overly romanticized. Shallow, pietistic, or narcissistic readers such as Isabella Thorpe, Mr. Collins, Sir Walter Elliot, and even, initially, Catherine Morland, are blind to the power of good books to offer both instruction and delight. Austen’s wisest, most admirable characters are those who turn to books for knowledge of things outside themselves—truths about the human nature common to us all. For these readers, among them Anne Elliot and Elizabeth Bennet, good character is cultivated in learning to read literature, other people, and oneself well.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-jane-austen-s-pride-and-prejudice-teaches-readers?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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Even hell. A destination.
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FALLING IN HATE
~ “Often falling in love and falling in hate go together. Since evaluation (e.g. love and hate) are relative, the more you love something the more you hate its opposite. If you romance up merging with a person (a dream come true) you romance down diverging from that person ( the end of the world if we break up).
If you fall in love with a movement (e.g. trump cult fascism) you fall in hate with anything that opposes it.
Falling in hate, we become obsessed, determined, narrowly focused, myopic, intense, losing all perspective in our surge to destroy.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
All I can say is “How true.” But note that Jeremy says that falling in love and falling in hate *often* go together — I’d soften it to *sometimes.* One or the other emotion becomes dominant. I tend to think that positive emotions, being life-giving, dominate in the long run, and that’s the reason humanity still exists, having survived both man-made and natural atrocities and disasters.
I also wonder about the “miraculous” cancer cures, sometimes sounding somewhat like: “I had terminal cancer, then started eating yogurt every day, and after three months I rose from the dead.” Right away I suspect that this had nothing to do with yogurt (or juicing, or medicinal mushrooms and/or herbal extracts), but everything to do with the influx of hope and other positive emotions.
Those of you who follow this blog may know that recently I was extremely sick — nor am I totally recovered, but I’d call myself “on the mend.” In the first week after the hospital, I wasn’t sure I would make it. But my favorite nurse said, “Of course you’ll make it. You know why? Because you are a woman. We women are tough.”
And that unexpected, politically incorrect message and not altogether logical message — you’ll make it because you are a woman — inscribed itself on my mind and did its good work. As John Guzlowski says, “Hope is our mother.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: THREE KINDS OF LOVE (NOT JUST AGAPE AND EROS)
~ “It is amazing, but our theologians still are writing of agape and eros and their radical opposition, as though these two were the final terms of the principle of “love”:the former, “charity,” godly and spiritual, being “of men toward each other in community,” and the latter, “lust,” natural and fleshly, being “the urge, desire and delight of sex.”
Nobody in the pulpit seems ever to have heard of AMOR as a third, selective, discriminating principle in contrast to the other two. For amor is neither the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the ind and the community of man), nor the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the path directly before one, of the eyes and their message to the heart.
There is a poem to his point by a great troubadour (perhaps the greatest of all), Guiraut de Borneilh:
So, through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born
Or have commencement
Then by this birth and commencement
Moved by inclination
By the grace and by command
Of these three, and from their pleasure
Love is born, who with fair hope
Goes comforting her friends.
For as all true lovers
Know, love is the perfect kindness,
Which is born — there is no doubt —
From the heart and eyes.
The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:
Love, which is the fruit of their very need.
Troubadour love was born with the meeting of the eyes. The eyes are the scouts of love. If it is a gentle heart, love is born.
At the moment of the wakening to love, an object, apparently without, “passes [in the words of Joyce] into the soul forever . . . And the soul leaps to the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!”
Love is not only a life experience, but also a mystical experience. In courtly love, the pain of love, the impossibility of fulfillment, was considered the essence of life.
For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishments, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.
The distance of your love is the distance of your life.
Love is exactly as strong as life.” ~ Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
Oriana:
What can one say except Yes, yes, yes!!
Strange, that agape and eros were specifically labeled, but generally we neglect to discuss amor, the discriminating romantic love that insists on a very specific love object which must please the soul. This kind of love is the union of the souls — of minds, of personalities.
In amor, the details count: the quirky little habits, the way a person laughs, wrinkles his brow, his favorite food. The daily and the exalted, the transcendent, the humor and the breath-taking moments — all are intermingled.
Just the right amount of predictability is mixed with unexpectedness. So yes, amor is a great adventure. Empires rise and fall, but amor survives.
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Bellini: Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501. Instead of a comb-over, men wore interesting headgear. From Wiki: “the portrait is notable for being one of the first frontal portraits of a reigning doge; throughout the Middle Ages, mortal men had been portrayed in profile, while the frontal view had been reserved for more sacred subjects.”
DARWIN: THE MAN AND THE GNAT (meditation on “destiny”)
“I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.” ~ Darwin, letter to the American botanist Asa Gray
Some may protest: you mean we weren’t “sent to the earth” with some specific task to accomplish? No, there is no evidence for any such “destiny.” But we are free to keep questioning how best to make use of our talents and our limited time, and to forge our own path.
I'm also struck by the expression “sent to the earth” rather than “born.” Being born is a biological process. Mystics want you to believe that we come from a “higher” realm. The brain-free soul, charged with a specific task, slides into a fertilized egg — perhaps even chooses just the right the egg and the sperm. This is the swamp of the supernatural, just with different details. Plenty of my educated friends have swallowed this version of “destiny.”
They like to say, “There are no accidents.” But there are. There is the unfortunate human tendency to look back and say that whatever happened HAD to happen. The stray bullet HAD to hit a child, who simply HAD to have stood on the porch at the precise time. Why? Well, maybe the mother had a “life lesson” to learn from her grief.
No. The lesson here, if any, is that perhaps we can work to decrease gun violence — a task that seems impossible, but isn’t, if enough good people stand together. And it’s precisely in seeing that the child was NOT DESTINED to be killed — that it did not have to happen — that there is hope.
As for all kinds of random misfortune, we can learn not to blame the victim, and to provide empathy instead. What we need is clarity: here are the things mostly under our control, and here are the things that we don’t control. In the vast majority of cases, not blaming is the beginning of wisdom.
It is scary to ponder that the most important things are due to chance (the genes we inherit, when and where we are born, to what kind of parents) — it’s totally opposite of the brave American notion that if you simply work hard, you’ll be reap rich rewards. And, side by side with the self-made ideal, the New Age delusion that we choose our destiny — just that we do it before birth, so all misfortune is just "life lessons" we came here to learn.
The belief in karma has also taken hold among people who otherwise don't seem anything like the “lunatic fringe.” “The first forty years of your life you're just working off your karma — that's why it's so hard.” Surely there are more plausible explanations for the fact that the first half of life tends to be difficult for many? But then we'd be forced to acknowledge the "unfairness" of life (and of social arrangements) — and who knows where that might lead . . .
One positive outcome, though, would be the end of that cruel division of people into winners and losers.
(A shameless digression: Ah, the extreme individualists out there may say, but didn’t you yourself “choose” not to be depressed? An act of will that shows we create our own destiny?
That act of will happened because of an insight, which in turn happened because of certain books and ideas, which came into my life due to factors too numerous to be even fully known, but which determined that I had the intelligence and education that enabled me to understand ideas — and to have acquired the skills that made it possible for me to substitute productivity for brooding. The more I understand what happened, the more I see the play of
factors quite outside my control.)
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“THE DISPASSIONATE PURSUIT OF PASSION”
~ “Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, talks about how what used to be used as motivators to employees—what he calls the carrots and sticks approach—are now being replaced by what he calls “Motivation 2.0,” which is more trying to figure out what is it that people are really passionate about. Google is a famous big company that tries to practice this, and Whole Foods is another.
I do think that we carry lots of baggage from how businesses used to operate. Simon Sinek, in one of his books, makes the argument that businesses and the rules by which businesses operate are structured along the lines of how the military used to operate—very hierarchical and scarcity-oriented. But he talks about how, actually, if you look a little bit deeper into the best leaders in the military, they tend not to be that way. So there's been a mistaken adoption of a certain set of ideas based on how things used to operate in the past, but in fact, what's now emerging as a much more successful approach to doing business and to being successful is having a more abundance-oriented approach.
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There are expectations that if you achieve some given thing, you're going to be happy. But it turns out that's not true. And a large part of that is due to adaptation, but a large part of it also is that you see this mountain in front of you and you want to climb over it. And when you do, it turns out there are more mountains to climb.
The one thing that has really really helped me in this regard is a concept that I call “the dispassionate pursuit of passion” in the book, and basically the concept boils down to not tethering your happiness to the achievement of outcomes. The reason why it's important to not tie happiness to outcomes is that outcomes by themselves don't really have an unambiguously positive or negative effect on your happiness. Yes, there are some outcomes—you get a terminal disease, or your child dies—that are pretty extreme, but let's leave those out. But if you think about it, the breakup that you had with your childhood girlfriend, or you broke an arm and were in a hospital bed for two months, when they occurred, you might have felt, “Oh my goodness, this is the end of the world! I'm never going to recover from it.” But it turns out we're very good at recovering from those, and not just that, but those very events that we thought were really extremely negative were in fact pivotal in making us grow and learn.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-so-many-smart-people-aren-t-happy-1268988647
I fully agree that it’s best to focus on the work and not the outcome. Enjoying the work itself is its most important reward.
“If you love your work, don’t expect any external rewards,” one of my mother’s friends told her. “You’ve already won a great prize.”
But my mother was one of the lucky people who managed to do the work she loved — though only starting in the middle of her life — AND to earn a good salary and enjoy the prestige that went with being a brain-research scientist.
A long time ago, I automatically assumed the same: I’d get to do the work I loved, AND enjoy external rewards. I don’t know if to laugh or cry, but I was hoping to gain a national recognition as a poet. I wasn’t alone — there were tens of thousands other young and not-so-young poets with the same expectations. When reality could no longer be denied, we turned bitter — sometimes extremely bitter. One of my great regrets is having wallowed in that bitterness for I forget how many years. Again, I had plenty of company — my fellow poets joined the chorus of complaints about the “East Coast poetry establishment.”
And then, almost just as suddenly, we got quiet. After all, there was no point wasting what life remained lamenting a very common human condition: not getting what you dearly wanted. We shrugged and tried to enjoy the proverbial small pleasures. Some stopped writing altogether and developed other interests.
Somehow we manage to unearth ourselves from the ruins of our expectations. I agree with the author of the article: it turns out we are very good at recovering.
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NATURE VERSUS PRIDE
~ “Of the seven deadly sins, the one with perhaps the most diverse menu of antivenins is the sin of pride. Need a quick infusion of humility? Climb to a scenic overlook in the mountain range of your choice and gaze out over the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently into the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you. Or try the star-spangled bowl of a desert sky at night and consider that, as teeming as the proscenium above may seem to your naked gape, you are seeing only about 2,500 of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way — and that there are maybe 100 billion other star-studded galaxies in our universe besides, beyond your unaided view.” ~ Natalie Angier
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IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? MAYBE (~ William James)
~ “A year ago, on a late afternoon in November, I decided to walk the seven miles from my hotel in Manhattan to Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore. It was a cool day, on the cusp of evening, at a moment when things, even grimy New York-type of things, seem to glow, and I was so busy looking around that I almost didn’t notice the small white sign that someone had placed at the bottom of Brooklyn Bridge. The green lettering was newly painted and read: ‘LIFE IS WORTH LIVING.’
For many people, life’s worth is never in question. It never becomes a topic of conversation or debate. Life is simply lived until it is not. But something bothered me: if life’s worth is so obvious, why was the sign put up in the first place? It is because there are those of us who occasionally find themselves on the top of the bridge, contemplating a quick and fatal trip to the bottom. Decades after battling depression in 1870, the American philosopher William James wrote to the philosopher and poet Benjamin Paul Blood that ‘no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide’.
To my surprise and delight, the walkways on the bridge were empty. I’d have the view to myself. With a maximum height of 276 feet (84 metres), it was once regarded as one of the seven wonders of the industrial world. During its construction, 27 workers died, before it was completed in 1883; two years later, Robert Odlum became the first man to jump off the bridge. A swimming instructor who wanted to prove that descending through air at high speed was not necessarily fatal, he sadly died. In the next century, approximately 1,500 people have followed Odlum, for different reasons. I’m not sure how many people are saved by the sign, but I am inclined to think that it is highly ineffective.
It was chilly at the top. I looked across to the Statue of Liberty in the harbor and then back into Manhattan where James had grown up. Then I looked down. There was a terrifying liberty in this – the choice to live and die in a particular moment, as time stretches out endlessly in either direction. After reading James for most of my adult life, this liberty still has its appeal. I think it always will. In the first decade of the 20th century, James developed American pragmatism, a philosophy that held that truth should be judged by its practical consequences. It was a world-ready philosophy that, at its most basic, was supposed to make life more livable. And it does, for the most part.
But if pragmatism does save your life, it’s never once and for all. This is a philosophy that remains attuned to experiences, attitudes, things and events, even when they are the tragic ones. While James occasionally disparaged Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism (and refused to give a cent to a memorial in honor of the 19th-century German philosopher), James’s posthumous writings reveal a deep respect for the grim thinker’s willingness to stare clear-eyed into the gloom of human existence. There was something like courage in this brutal confrontation with quickly impending darkness.
According to James, the sign at the bottom of the bridge should be repainted or at least amended: LIFE IS WORTH LIVING – MAYBE. As he said to a crowd of young men from the Harvard YMCA in 1895: ‘Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.’ It is up to each of us to, literally, make of life ‘what we will’. These days, when I peer down from great heights, in addition to experiencing vertigo, I almost always think about Steve Rose, a young black psychology graduate who threw himself off the William James Hall at Harvard University in 2014. Perhaps James’s way of thinking could have saved him – the suggestion that he was still in charge of his life, that the decision to end it all might be reasonable, even respectable, but so too was the possibility of continuing to live. The possibility was right there – still, always, even in the shit and rancor of it – for him to explore. Perhaps he thought that choosing to die was the only free decision at his disposal, but James always suggested there might be other options.
If meaningful freedom seems evasive or unrealistic, most of us still have a choice about what to see and what to look past. This too can be worthwhile. ‘The art of being wise,’ James suggested, ‘is the art of knowing what to overlook.’ Maybe these possibilities could have kept Rose alive for even longer than they did. Maybe not. I don’t presume to be sure.
If meaningful freedom seems evasive or unrealistic, most of us still have a choice about what to see and what to look past. This too can be worthwhile. ‘The art of being wise,’ James suggested, ‘is the art of knowing what to overlook.’ Maybe these possibilities could have kept Rose alive for even longer than they did. Maybe not. I don’t presume to be sure.
For now, I believe that James’s ‘maybe’ – the open question of life’s worth – is right, or at least right for me, because it maps my existential situation as one who is not always entirely sold on life’s value. It is also right, I think, because his ‘maybe’ is roughly fitted to the open question of the cosmos.
James followed his friend and fellow American philosopher C S Peirce in believing that the world is teeming with hypotheses, with the ‘maybes’ that make life, in all its many forms, possible, and make our lives worthwhile. For James, stars do not burn, much less appear, in perfect order, and human lives are not settled in advance. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay ‘Circles’ (1841), one of James’s favorites: ‘Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter.’ The ‘maybe’ remains constant, or as constant as a ‘maybe’ can. And this is for the best. It gives us something to watch and expect and experience. Persistent variation gives rise to persistent wonder and, for James, this sense of mystery – of chance – was often enough to see him through when other practical measures failed him. ‘No fact in human nature is more characteristic,’ the mature James asserted, ‘than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference … between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’
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James was never a churchgoing man. For the most part, he wasn’t interested in institutional religion or the doctrinal aspects of the spiritual self. He was, as always, interested in experience and life, and in his final years he began to turn explicitly to thinking through the religious possibilities of both. He refused to limit these possibilities, insisting in the Varieties:
~ Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. ~
This adjustment to the unseen order could take many forms and was never restricted to a particular church, temple or mosque. Indeed, James looked for it everywhere leading up to the writing of the Varieties. His exploration into the unseen carried him into experiments with psychotropic drugs but also into a spiritual realm that modernity often dismisses as mere quackery. Today, if something cannot be seen with perfect clarity, it seems easiest to assert that it cannot be seen at all.
When his aged father and newborn son died within a few years of each other, James and his wife Alice tried to contact them: in September 1885, James visited Leonora Piper, a medium who had become a Boston sensation for supposedly channeling spirits. He had his doubts about Piper but concluded that the woman might have what he called ‘supernormal powers’. James was still, and always, the consummate empiricist, and wanted to test these powers more carefully. Luckily, there was a fledgling organization dedicated to precisely this study – James co-founded it in 1885.
Nature loves to hide. Humans like James love to seek. Despite the bafflement – or perhaps because of it – James and his fellow researchers remained pointedly, if cautiously, hopeful. Unlike most psychics of the time, however, the members of the psychical-research society documented and published their findings. None of those were anywhere near conclusive, but they did help to push the boundaries of science, exploring an area that science couldn’t quite explain. This record became the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, for members and close associates, and the Proceedings, intended for the general public. I’m always surprised by the sheer magnitude of the volumes: a little more than 17,000 pages in total. Somewhere between curiosity and suspicion was abiding hope.
The American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once joked that James would turn down the lights in a room so that the miracles could happen. I think that there is some truth in this. It is something like the American self-help author Wayne Dyer’s oft-repeated quote: ‘Miracles come in moments. Be ready and willing.’ James was definitely always ready and willing. When you turn the lights down, your pupils dilate so that more light can get in. You can’t blame James for this. Maybe we surprise ourselves with what we can see. And maybe that is miracle enough. ‘The miracle is not to walk on water,’ insists the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. ‘The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.’ For secular skeptics, this might be as far as they are ever willing to go when it comes to religious experience: to dwell deeply, to ‘live a little’ in the present. James, however, goes just a little farther, a little deeper, in the Varieties.
Sometimes, when you turn the lights very low, you can see things more clearly. James describes such a phenomenon, the only one, he claimed, that could be called genuinely ‘mystical’. Recounting the ‘hour of rapture’ of a clergyman, James writes:
The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
The ‘He’, according to the clergyman, was undoubtedly the Judeo-Christian God, but what we call this presence scarcely mattered to James. ‘He’ is a very old word, older than gender and sex, meaning ‘this here’. ‘This here’ was present, all the more felt, because it wasn’t seen. For James, for his fellow mystics such as Blood, there was a sustained comfort in this story. As the German mystic Novalis wrote: ‘We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.’ This too is a possibility, and the Jamesian pragmatist is happy to entertain it.
James suggests that it is possible, even for a pragmatist, to occasionally feel the reassuring cycle of its flow. At these moments, one has a chance to be ‘religious’ in James’s sense of the word, to enter ‘a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety …’
I looked out to the Statue of Liberty again, and back down into the water below. The sun was indeed setting, and I tried to let myself watch it, as Whitman and James hoped we would, for what seemed like many minutes. Just long enough to be glad that I still had the chance.” ~
https://aeon.co/essays/is-life-worth-living-the-pragmatic-maybe-of-william-james?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a0914a4bb7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_10_03_05_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-a0914a4bb7-40962949
~ “And reincarnation? Really? If that were real, wouldn’t there be some proof by now? A raccoon spelling out in acorns, “My name is Herb Zoller and I’m an accountant.” ~ Bill Maher
Oriana:
Of course some people claim that there are hundreds of stories that prove reincarnation is real. “How else would the Dalai Lama know that his predecessor’s glasses were in the desk drawer?” they may ask. I doubt this kind of “proof” would hold up in court, much less in science. Since we know to some degree (books, movies, family stories) what the past was like, it's very easy to confabulate the story of a “past lifetime.” Once I experienced an especially strong case of false memory, I realized how prone we are to believe what never happened.
Humans have a fantastic imagination, and make up stories as naturally as they breathe. We writers certainly know that. And note that already little children excel at it.
When it comes to afterlife in general, perhaps the saddest thing is those couples, usually deeply loving, who had a kind of contract that whoever goes first would give the bereaved spouse a sign that an afterlife existed — often an agreed-on special sign, but sometimes just any sign, even the slightest -- whatever might be possible. Houdini was one of those who kept waiting — and going to various mediums, only to discover they were all frauds.
*
RELIGIOUS MODERATION IS THE DIRECT RESULT OF TAKING SCRIPTURE LESS AND LESS SERIOUSLY. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings? ~ Sam Harris
Oriana:
Zahra Noorkbakhsh, one of the hosts of the Good Muslim, Bad Muslim podcast by Taz and Zahra, observed that she is seen as a “good Muslim” in inverse proportion to how Islamic she appears: the less Islamic, the better. Some treasures of tradition may be lost that way, but the loss needs to be weighed against the gain in personal freedom, including the freedom of inquiry.
Indeed, we may wish to believe in a powerful invisible parent in the sky. That wish, born of many years of human childhood helplessness, is only natural. I remember hearing grown men cry for Mama, back in the day of poor post-surgery pain control. But there is also the question of the ABILITY to believe something, not matter how pleasant it would be to believe it.
Unicorns were presented as very beautiful animals — how marvelous it would be to have a unicorn graze on one’s lawn! But due to the lack of evidence, we lost the ability to believe in their existence. And likewise the sky and the earth are no longer as densely populated by all kinds of spirits as they were in ancient times, or the Middle Ages. Those supernatural beings were collective social constructs, but there was also the alleged evidence: the “holy” scripture. Once we fully and completely realize that all such books were written by men of their times, of limited knowledge and understanding, we will see, more than anything else, the workings of cultural evolution.
*
~ “By combing through thousands of pages of internal documents, Cristin Kearns and her team have gained unprecedented clarity into the machinations of the sugar industry during the mid-20th century.
They’ve found, for example, that a trade group knew as early as the 1950s that sugar caused tooth decay. But when the group went on to work closely with the federal government on a program about strategies to fight decay, it downplayed the most obvious, cutting out sugar. Another time, the group funded research that inadvertently linked sugar with bladder cancer, then killed the research. Then there was a 1967 paper — secretly funded by that same trade group — that blamed fat and cholesterol for causing heart disease, but minimized data showing sugar’s risks.
More revelations are in the pipeline. Kearns is an assistant professor at UC San Francisco, which houses millions of internal documents from the tobacco, drug, and chemical industries. As of last month, it has also amassed some 30,000 documents from the food industry, including Kearns’ hauls from the basements of Big Sugar.
Kearns’ revelations are feeding a broader backlash against sugar. Consumption of the sweet stuff, now present in all kinds of packaged foods and drinks, has tripled worldwide in the last 50 years. An emerging body of research links it to increasingly common maladies like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. And cities around the country, including Berkeley and Seattle, have started to tax sugary drinks.
The industry is fighting back, most recently by backing ballot measures and state laws that block future sugar taxes. In 2015, Coca-Cola funded a now-defunct network of scientists with the goal of blaming obesity on lack of exercise, not bad diet. Outside the US, manufacturers of sugary foods are funding nutrition research in developing countries where they are seeking to ramp up sales. Corporate funding doesn’t inherently corrupt, but on balance, studies bankrolled by the food industry do tend to favor the interests of their sponsors.
At a dental conference in 2007, Kearns couldn’t help but notice that some things weren’t adding up. According to one handout she received, dentists should tell patients to improve their blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol by “increasing fiber and limiting saturated fats and salt.” What about sugar? she wondered.
A pamphlet given out during another talk said that sweetened Lipton Brisk tea was as healthy as nonfat milk and coffee. Bewildered, Kearns cornered the speaker afterward.
“He said, ‘There is no evidence linking sugar to chronic disease,’ and I had no comeback, because I was so shocked that he said that,” Kearns recalled.
“That was the ‘aha’ moment for me,” she said, “that I needed to dig deeper.”
Together, Kearns and Gary Taubes wrote a cover story for Mother Jones in late 2012. “Research on the suspected links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late 1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end,” they wrote. “So effective were the Sugar Association’s efforts that, to this day, no consensus exists about sugar’s potential dangers.”
The exposé caught the eye of UCSF professor Stanton Glantz, who in the 1990s was leaked internal documents that showed how the tobacco industry covered up smoking’s harms.
Although the tobacco and sugar industries may have employed similar tactics to protect their products, their products were not equally dangerous. Tobacco executives knew that scientific evidence showed that nicotine was addictive and that smoking caused lung cancer, and worked to cover it up. But because the evidence about sugar’s toxicity has always been more ambiguous, “producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered,” Taubes and Kearns wrote in Mother Jones.
Around the time of the rat study [that showed a link between sugar and bladder cancer], the industry was seeking to influence a new tooth-decay prevention program run by a federal agency, Kearns’ team reported in 2015. Sugar companies couldn’t deny that their product caused tooth decay. So they instead funded research about preventing dental plaque and decay, efforts that Kearns says deflected attention away from the true cause of the problem.
Today, many nutrition experts agree that excess sugar provides unnecessary calories with little to no nutritional value and, over time, snowballs into health consequences. “Added sugar in particular has been clearly indicated to be a risk factor for weight gain, for type 2 diabetes, for cardiovascular disease, and I think there’s little doubt that sugar plays a role in these conditions, in the US population in particular,” Deirdre Tobias, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who is not involved in Kearns’ work, told BuzzFeed News.
Although public health bodies have advised generally minimizing sugar intake, they’ve only recently suggested stricter rules. The current national dietary guidelines, published in 2015, recommended for the first time that calories from added sugars be kept below a specific limit, 10% of a daily diet. In 2016, the FDA passed a rule that required food companies to add information about added sugars to nutrition labels.
But Kearns thinks the government — and the general public — would have woken up faster to the perils of sugar if not for the industry’s meddling. “Had that evidence been taken more seriously back in the ’60s, what would the state of chronic disease look like today?” she said.
Next, she wants to dig into candy and beverage manufacturers and trade groups. And although her research so far has retraced the industry’s activities mostly from the 1950s to 1970s, she’s excited about new finds that will widen that scope even further. One set of documents, left over from a Canadian sugar company, could shine a light on how the industry ran publicity campaigns as late as the 1980s.
Another set of documents yet to be explored, stashed at the University of Florida, were donated by relatives of Cuban sugar company executives. They chronicle the birth of the Sugar Research Foundation, when sugar executives were discussing why they needed to form it and deciding which public relations firms to hire. Kearns hasn’t fully dug into them yet, but so far, she said, they appear to show how “they were targeting doctors and dentists and nutritionists, going back to the 1940s, in very sophisticated ways.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/cristin-kearns-sugar-industry-science
Ending on beauty:
A SHORT POEM FOR A HARD FRIDAY
Hope is our mother,
and Kindness is our father
And we are the children
who sometimes stray.
~ John Guzlowski
