Saturday, January 26, 2019

QUICK WAYS TO IMROVE YOUR MOOD; PRACTICE EMOTIONAL STRENGTH; RIGHT-LEFT HEMISPHERE PUSH-PULL OF DECISION MAKING; VIRGINIA WOOLF’S LOVING SUICIDE NOTE; NAZI RALLY IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, 1939; DO WE HAVE TO RESPECT RELIGION?

Sculpture by Isabel Miramontes (b. 1962). I don’t know the actual title, but I call it “The Helping Hand.” There are ugly things out there in the world, and this blog has certainly not been trying to prettify reality. But I also think it's wrong to ignore the goodness out there. Acts of kindness deserve celebration because they enlarge us and give us hope for humankind.

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GOD AND MOSES ARE KEEPING SECRETS - A poem for Parsha Vaera (Aliyah 1)

“I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob with [the name]
Almighty God, but [with] My name YHWH, I did not become known to them.”

If God walked amongst us,
what would we call him or her?
What name would we use if God
was sitting two bar stools away?

Who’s your friend? they’d ask
and we’d stutter like Moses
realizing we never knew.
What have we been calling

God this whole time,
when we cry out, when we
ask for things? Who are
you talking to we deserve

to be asked and, I think we
deserve to know the answer too.
I’m not a big fan of labels, but
I do like names.

I think it’s time we learned Yours.

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“How then will Pharaoh hearken to me,
seeing that I am of closed lips?”

You have to wonder with
God’s hidden name as his example
if Moses’ closed lips are just him
keeping secrets and not

a stutter after all? What isn’t Moses
prepared to tell the Pharaoh?
He smells like the Nile or the
details of future plagues have

already been written down.
I’d keep my lips closed too if
I had infinite frogs ready to go.
The best negotiators use their

words sparingly. Any deal a
gamble with what is truly available.
I say keep your lips closed and
your frogs close to your chest.

Your people will be crossing the sea
in no time.

~ Rick Lupert

Blake: Moses at the Burning Bush

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Parsha = a portion of the Torah read during a particular week.

My favorite lines:

I say keep your lips closed and
your frogs close to your chest.

And here the poem could end. I’d prefer this to the relatively trite and prosy last two lines.

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The poems are meant to be humorous. There is no need to “explicate” them, aside from noting how Lupert derives the humor from inserting the modern elements — god walks into a bar, but of course he is nameless:

Who’s your friend? they’d ask
and we’d stutter like Moses
realizing we never knew.


And then — this is brilliant — transposing the card-playing idiom for keeping secrets into keeping frogs close to one’s chest — referring of course to the plague of frogs. (So many people are no longer familiar with those references! The solution would be to teach the bible as mythology, and this is sometimes done in college classes that have somewhat evasive titles, e.g. “Mythological and biblical references in literature.”)

On a somewhat different note, the events in the second poem remind me of the problem that plagued me in childhood since my first religion lessons: how come god walks and talks and otherwise manifests himself to the ancient Israelites, but will not walk among us — will certainly not walk into a bar? The idea that you can’t see the face of god and live is inconsistent with the narratives in which various people do see god face to face.

I know I must have told this story in the blog before, possibly more than once. I wasn’t the only one puzzled by the current silence of god, given his talkative nature early on (think of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses — but there are other examples as well). I didn’t dare ask the nun about it, but one brave little boy did: “How come god used to talk to people in the bible, but he no longer talks to us?” The nun fell silent, and slowly smiled a sad smile. Slowly, thinking about each word, she replied, “The times were different then.”

(Or did she say, “People were different then”? I am no longer sure, but it comes down to the same thing: different times, different conditions, different people — people whose minds worked differently because the world was different then.)

That early on god had no trouble showing himself, doing things (even eating), and above all talking means not only that Yahweh had a body just as the Greek gods had bodies, but that there was no concept of no, we mustn’t have any direct, compelling evidence of god’s existence because “that would be knowledge and not faith” — and only faith is a virtue. The evidence must be so weak that you are free not to believe in god, and have to make the absurdist “leap of faith.”

Yet early Hebrew had no word for faith in the sense of religion. There was no separation of religion from the rest of reality — supernatural beings (let’s not forget angels and demons) were constantly at work. The altars flowed with blood because Yahweh, like all the other gods, demanded these literal offerings of animal protein.

Yet as soon as the Second Temple was destroyed, the sacrifices ended, and worship became centered on reading. Words, words, words — but the living voice gone long ago. A fascinating study of how god gradually becomes silent already in the course of the Tanakh is Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Disappearance of God. Friedman is a Hebrew scholar who did his own translations.

Here theists have found this answer: at first people were unsophisticated and helpless (“People were different then”). But as they started to gain more knowledge, god simply stepped aside and let them be on their own.

To quote Friedman:

~ What the recurrence of the phrase [Hester Panim — the Hiding of the Face] indicates is that the diminishing apparent presence of God was not only a literary-historical development in biblical narrative, but rather it was felt, consciously, acutely, by sensitive persons in the biblical world. In every occurrence the phrase reflects a condition in which the deity is understood to exist but not be available to humans, giving no visible signs of presence, leaving a human community to face their troubles on their own. ~

God’s face by Michelangelo
And if that silence, that Hiding of the Face, has led to the Holocaust, among other evils, that’s just too bad. To show oneself, to say anything — that would be in conflict with freedom and independence, and those are apparently the highest values, regardless of how unkind they may appear in some circumstances. You could call it “tough love.”

Now, the pope doesn’t have any such scruples about violating freedom and independence when he allegedly speaks infallibly ex cathedra, and all Catholics are supposed to blindly obey. But, to return to Rick Lupert’s brilliant metaphor, popes are as shrewd as Moses and have learned to keep their frogs close to their chest, releasing a few when the time is right.

photo: Michael Simms
 
Mary:

I always try to keep my frogs close to my chest!!!

PS. Reminds me of a Joan Osbourne song..”What if God was one of us? A stranger on the bus, trying to get home.”

 
Oriana:

Love the idea of god on the bus, rather than in a limo.

And note that rather than the imageless, nameless god, the modern trend (at least in poetry) has been to humanize god.

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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

 
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S INCREDIBLY LOVING SUICIDE NOTE TO HER HUSBAND

 
“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”


Virginia Woolf, photo by Giselle Freund, 1939 (Woolf died in 1941)
 
Oriana

January 25 marked Virginia Woolf’s birthday. It reminded me of the great affection her husband Leonard Woolf gave her — and she was profoundly grateful to him. This is perhaps the most loving suicide note ever written.


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ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI: TRADITION AND “THE NEWNESS OF THE DAY”

Agni Interviewer: We need the writing of the past; we hope that it infuses our own writing with its immortality.

AZ: Tradition is something we do every day: it’s a life of reading. You read poetry from Homer to Sappho and Archilochus, old Chinese poetry, whatever you can find. You find those ashes of old inspiration in your poems, and, in a more or less active way, you reflect on what is your response. But tradition for me also means poets like Milosz or Herbert, from the generation before me.

On the other hand, I always think that POETRY EXPRESSES THE NEWNESS OF THE DAY. If you were only here to continue tradition without existentially responding to the new day, I think it would be purely academic. It’s a very intricate combination of adhering to the voices of the past and somehow incorporating them, or dialoguing with them. But also there’s this feeling of newness — that every generation has some new word to say, because the world changes all the time.

(This interview goes back to 2004, and the link I have no longer works.)

Oriana:

Zagajewski’s best known formulation is that poetry needs to combine irony and ecstasy — that it holds the dramatic tension between these two, even in our age, which is more the age of irony. We get weary of poems that are 100% irony, just as we can’t endure too many poems that lack irony (Byron is a very interesting Romantic poet because he was a master of irony).

But I like Zagajewski’s  ideas about tradition and the “newness of the day” very much as well. As usual, Zagajewski warns against “binary thinking”: we either cling to tradition or we try to be super-avant-garde. He likes works that contains the dramatic tension of expressing both.

Thinking about the beginning of modern poetry: Poetry really changed after WW1. It wasn't possible to romanticize trench warfare or mustard gas. A lot more ugliness became permissible in poetry, a lot more realism. Though I still say that “the task of poetry is not to debunk; it's to bunk” — to find and nurture the ecstatic elements in life — poeticizing a la Tennyson became just too old-fashioned. We can still appreciate the best of Tennyson and other Victorian poets, but the average Victorian poem has become pretty unendurable.

Krakow, first snowfall. Krakow is Zagajewski’s favorite city, ahead of Paris. 

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“If we can’t learn to be kind to each other how will we ever learn to be kind to the most desperate parts of ourselves.” ~ Rupi Kaur

 
Oriana:

“The most desperate parts of ourselves” is a very striking phrase. I moves me toward self-compassion just through the choice of words.

Still, when I consider the whole statement, I think that in my experience it’s much easier to learn to be kind to others, to accept them and forgive their “only human” foibles, than it is to be equally kind and supportive to ourselves. In fact when therapists find that a person is full of self-condemnation, they may ask the patient to imagine what they would say to a friend who’s having the same difficulties. And right away the patient sees all kinds of “mitigating circumstances” rather than the friend’s inherent “badness.”

Alas, we have internalized the critical parents, teachers, toxic priests and nuns, cruel classmates, etc., and have become experts as self-punishment. It’s quite a journey to undo this damage, and it can take decades to stop seeing yourself as a bad, inferior, unlovable, undeserving person (or a permanently unlucky one, the one who “gets no respect,” etc). If you were raised in a particularly punitive way, it may take until the dawn of old age to grant yourself the same kind of respect and approval that you automatically grant to your friends. 


Dali: Anthropomorphic Cabinet, 1936


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A quick detox:


MORE THAN 4,000 YEARS AGO, A DOG LEFT HIS (OR HER) FRONT PAW MARKS ON THIS CLAY BRICK WHILE IT WAS LYING OUT TO DRY.

 
The brick was used in the construction of the ziggurat of the moon god Nanna at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur.

The massive step pyramid measured 210 feet (64m) in length, 150 feet (46m) in width and over 100 feet (30m) in height. The height is speculative, as only the foundations of the Sumerian ziggurat have survived.

https://www.ancient.eu/image/197/great-ziggurat-of-ur/



THE PUSH-PULL OF DECISION MAKING, OR OUR NAUGHTY RIGHT HEMISPHERE

 
~ “It turns out that, like an angel and a devil sitting on opposite shoulders, the two sides of the brain engage in a tug of war. The right hemisphere pushes us toward risk and the left pulls us away from it. And while making risky decisions, we don’t just use the parts of our brains that handle reason and judgment. Our decision-making reaches deep into the brain to areas associated with emotion such as the amygdala.

First, the researchers had to work out how to estimate the bias that each individual brought to each decision. To do that they set up a gambling game on a computer. It included an unlimited deck of only five cards: 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. One card was face-up (the participant’s), the other face-down (the computer’s).  Participants had to bet ($5 or $20) on whether their card was higher. That’s easy with 2s and 4s (you’re likely to lose) and with 8s and 10s (you’re likely to win), but on 6s, when you are equally likely to win or lose, people do “a variety of weird stuff,” Sarma says. In addition to weighing risk and reward, each person’s internal bias comes into play. “How you feel when you gamble in a casino is based on past outcomes.” With a prediction of bias in hand, the researchers were able to compare it to the readings from the electrodes in the brain to ask, “what part of the brain is modulating and moving with or against this internal bias?”

This research advances our understanding of how decision-making is encoded in the brain and might refine therapeutic treatments for gambling addiction or for people with psychiatric and mental disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Treatments like deep brain stimulation (DBS) already work by changing the brain patterns in Parkinson’s patients. This new kind of manipulation, should it be developed, would add treatment for impaired decision-making.

More controversially, says Sridevi Sarma, the senior author on the new paper, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “you can potentially control a person’s decisions by making them take more or less risk.” As an example, she points to military commanders who might want to increase the soldiers’ willingness to head into danger.

Obviously, the ethics of that would have to be debated. And the study led by Sarma and Pierre Sacré, who was a post-doctoral fellow in Sarma’s lab and is now at the University of Liège in Belgium, is not one that can be easily recreated. Its participants were ten epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains in order to locate the origins of their seizures. (In severe cases, neurosurgeons operate to remove that brain tissue to stop seizures.) That set-up allowed Sarma and Sacre and their colleagues to track neural activity throughout the brain in real time, meaning milliseconds. Other techniques don’t allow such precision or such wide coverage of the brain.

They found that the brain uses what they call a “striking” push-pull phenomenon. “Right hemisphere is pushing you to take the bet, take the risk, and left hemisphere is pulling you away from that,” Sarma says. According to Sacre, “there’s no clear answer for why we see these lateralizations in different brain functions,” but they exist in other types of brain processing such as the instinct to approach or avoid. “This push-pull phenomenon seems to be evolutionary,” Sarma says.

It was already known that, on average, people take more or less risks if the left or right sides of their brains were stimulated. But until this study no one had tracked the way that bias shifted with each subsequent bet, i.e., trial by trial in the experiment.

There are plenty of limitations here. As noted, the study included only ten patients and they were all epileptic. Some critics worry that skewed the data, though Sarma and Sacre believe these patients are otherwise healthy and they controlled for some of potential problems. They knew, for instance, which parts of each person’s brain triggered seizures and did not include those regions in their analysis. But they also argue there is no other way at this point to capture these types of recordings since you cannot put electrodes in a human being’s brain unless it is clinically warranted.

In the future, Sarma and Sacre plan to explore whether non-invasive brain stimulation, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), would have the same effect. And now that they have identified the push-pull effect, they could explore it simply by rigging the card decks in their experiment—no stimulation required.

“This is just the tip of the icerberg,” says Sarma. “As soon as you understand how the brain governs behavior, then you can manipulate it.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-waves/201901/risky-decisions-reflect-tug-war-in-the-brain


Oriana:

Every woman who's ever bought lipstick knows that push-pull. Crazy how agonizing it can feel. I wonder if it's the right hemisphere pushing for shameless crimson while the left one advises a muted pink.

Speaking of shameless crimson, desert sunsets apparently owe their drama to low humidity. Here is a recent sunset in Carefree, Arizona.



Photo: Charles Sherman

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“Often, disagreement is a product of different life experiences, not differences in rationality.” ~ Jeremy Sherman

 
Oriana:

Travel abroad, and especially having lived abroad for a while, is one of those life-transforming experiences.

Also, having been raised in an enlightened vs fundamentalist religion -- though some manage to break away. There is a saying that half the Unitarians are former Catholics. That's true of my Unitarian Wisdom Circle. One of the things we share is our journey of healing toward self-acceptance.


Blood Moon, Seattle; Tim Urpman

 
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THE PRO-NAZI RALLY AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, February 20, 1939

 
~ “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans,” the banners cried out. “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism,” others admonished, draping from the rafters above a packed, roaring crowd at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

On Feb. 20, 1939, 22,000 members of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, took over the venue that stars still consider a peak achievement if you can fill it up. That night, it was a full house for Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, who had become a household name as the “American Hitler. ”

Dozens of the Bund’s drum and bugle corps marched down the center aisle and mounted the stage, which featured a 30-foot-tall portrait of George Washington surrounded by American and Bund flags. Color guards bearing more Nazi flags followed behind.

Then 3,000 of the Bund’s version of Adolf Hitler’s SS protection squadron troops, the Ordnungsdienst — or OD for short — marched in dressed in SS-like uniforms of black pants, black shoes, gray shirts, Sam Browne military cross straps and swastika insignia.

“Sieg Heil!” the OD and the crowd shouted, with arms outstretched in a sea of Nazi salutes.

The Bund claimed 20,000 members and 100,000 sympathizers across the country at the time of the rally. Members were everyday people, from butchers and steelworkers to bakers and housewives. Many were among the 400,000 Germans who immigrated to the United States between 1919 and 1933, when the post-World War I German economy was in shambles.

The organization sponsored Nazi summer camps for families and children, the largest being Camp Siegfried in nearby Yaphank, N.Y., whose main thoroughfare was called Adolf Hitler Street.

The official flier advertising the Nazi rally displayed a swastika emblem over the words “True Americanism and George Washington Birthday Exercises. ”

Civic groups were outraged over the Bund equating Nazism with Americanism.
“The German American Bund wanted to identify as Americans and give the veneer that they were about America,” said Arnie Bernstein, author of “Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund. ”

Meanwhile, inside, the rally reached its agitated peak as Bund leader Kuhn took the stage for the final speech of the night.

Heavyset with thick eyeglasses, “Fritz Kuhn was the most unlikely leader you could imagine,” Bernstein said. Kuhn previously worked as a chemist for Ford Motor Co., where he was fired for his anti-Semitic politicking, despite Henry Ford’s own anti-Semitism.

“If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter: First, a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination,” Kuhn told the crowd.

Kuhn then incited the crowd by referring to President Roosevelt as “Rosenfield” and Manhattan District Attorney Thomas Dewey as “Thomas ‘Jewey.’” The city’s half-Jewish/half-Catholic mayor became “Jew lumpen LaGuardia,” Bernstein writes in “Swastika Nation. ”

“In 1939, American Jewry was terrified that Nazism could happen in America,” Robert Rockaway, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University said in an interview, noting that the Bund was using the Constitution and First Amendment to attack Jews.

Many of the rally’s speakers talked about patriotism and Americanism, which is the kind of language that can be abused by political groups, Bernstein said: “White nationalists are not shy about perverting what America really stands for. ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/09/night-thousands-nazis-packed-madison-square-garden-rally-violence-erupted/?utm_term=.c75450b4cafb

 
Madison Square Garden, New York, February 20, 1939

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“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies'—‘one against all’—and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common humankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” ~ Hannah Arendt
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PERHAPS THE BEST AND MOST REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN IDEA

 
THE IDEA THAT THE MANY, RATHER THAN JUST THE FEW, CAN AND SHOULD ENJOY LIFE that the pursuit of happiness is an un-alienable right — strikes me as particularly American. Americans take it for granted, as self-evident — believe me, it is NOT self-evident except in the context of the secular (and liberal Protestant, and liberal-Jewish) worldview that accepts THIS life as important, that it’s not just a brief and miserable way station before the afterlife, the “true” life.

Coming from a masochistic Catholic background (“Suffering is good for you”; “God sends suffering to those he loves”; "The more you suffer in this life, the shorter the time in Purgatory"), I had great trouble with the notion of the pursuit of happiness. It took me a very long time to learn not to despise it, and finally to accept it for myself (though later I came to give priority to “pursue being useful”).

The most significant modern opponent of this idea is not so much the Catholic church, no longer a powerful cultural force. It is radical Islam, with its rejection of modernity and this-worldliness.


Francisco Goya: Flagellants

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SELF-FLAGELLATION IN SHIA ISLAM

~ “Religion gone bad: Shia Muslims engage in gory mourning rituals such as self-flagellation and self-mutilation in celebration of Ashura, one of the holiest days in Shia Islam.

For Shias, Ashura commemorates the killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in 680 CE.

Shias constitute Islam’s second-largest denomination (about 10-15 percent of the world Muslim population), and consider Hussein to be the one true heir of Muhammad’s legacy.

A minority of Shias mark the holiday with bloody self-flagellation rituals. One such ritual is called “tatbeer,” participants cut their heads with swords and spears in mourning for the fallen Imam Hussein.

Another Shia self-flagellation ritual involves the use of a zanjeer (a chain with blades). Participants wear black and march through the streets chanting and hitting themselves in the chest with whips and chains to ritually punish their bodies.

Particularly disturbing is the participation of minors in the Ashura rituals of self-mutilation.

Ashura observances are carried out in countries with large Shia populations, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, India, and Bahrain.

Through the bloody rituals, Shia Muslims mourn Hussein’s death and express regret for the fact that they were not present at the battle to fight and save Hussein and his family

Not all Shias condone the bloodletting ritual, and the practice has been condemned by some Shia leaders. Ashura blood drives are often organized as a substitute for the bloody and self-destructive spectacle.

Ashura is commemorated by Sunni Muslims (who refer to it as The Day of Atonement) as the day on which the Israelites were supposedly freed from the Pharaoh.” ~

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2014/11/shia-muslims-mark-holy-day-with-bloody-self-mutilation-nsfl/



“YOU HAVE TO RESPECT RELIGION” — REALLY?

 
 The politically correct people may say, “Oh, but we must respect religion.” Really? There is no moral obligation to respect nonsense, no matter how many adherents the particular kind of nonsense happens to have. And there is certainly no obligation to respect psychopathology and cruel practices.

Of course I see the dual character of any major religion: the preaching of mercy and compassion and the corresponding bible or Koran verses are there, not just the vicious stuff about smiting the enemies and killing the infidels. The vengeful god and the kind one are supposed to be the same deity. One theory is that religion stems from the infant-mother bond: hence the longing for unconditional love and the fear of the all-powerful, judgmental, punishing parent.

Christianity has made a valiant effort to let go of the nastiness and keep the goodness. But the scaffolding of supernaturalism is wobbly and more and more out of touch with what we are discovering about the nature of reality (e.g. earthquakes are the result of the movement of tectonic plates, rather than divine punishment; never mind that whenever a natural disaster strikes, a televangelist will announce that this is punishment for gay marriage). And without supernaturalism, with the laws of nature seen as inviolable, is it still religion?

Call me naive, but I think the best sayings can be extracted from all religions and repackaged as ethics and philosophy of life.

But individual large religions (I don’t mean the Unitarians, say, or any other liberal Protestant denominations that at this point have only a tenuous connection with Christianity) — the sooner they are gone, the better. Imagine a world without suicide bombers eager for paradise. Imagine people understanding that they are already living in paradise, and that this magnificent garden needs loving care. The “better place” is right here — if we make it better. Plant a tree. Every tree is a tree of life.


 Angel Oak in South Carolina; photo: Magda Bognar

FOUR MOOD-CHANGING MOVES

 
~ “There really is something to the mind-body-spirit connection and when all three are in alignment you’re going to feel better. This is the point, then, where spirituality and personal development become physical.

When we move with awareness and give attention to how we stand, sit, move during our days, we can change how we feel.

Here are four ways to do it.

Smile: Plenty of research, including one study from 1989 and another published in the journal Psychological Science last year proves that a smile – even a faky, contrived one – can actually induce happiness and reduce stress. So, even if you have to talk yourself into it, give yourself a grin or simply repeat the long “e” sound, as psychologist Robert Zajonc had participants do in that early study, to stretch out a smile, and you’ll feel better.

Give yourself a hug. Kristen Neff, renowned for her research into self-compassion suggests a hug as a way of coping with the stress of making a mistake. When we wrap our arms around, our arms or shoulders, our bodies release oxytocin which is causes us to feel more nurturing and less reactive.

Tilt your chin up
. Look at the sky. Just look up. Lifting your chin up and letting your shoulders sit back improves mood and confidence in potentially difficult situations, according to Paula Niedenthal, a psychology professor, who has studied the link between posture and emotion. No surprise then, that people who keep their chins down and shoulders slumped generally don’t feel as positive.

Dance. Seriously. Just do it. Rock out by yourself in the living room, before the kids get home, or gently sway with your husband long after they are in bed. Scores of studies show that various dance forms decrease stress, improve focus and concentration, and yep, you guessed it, boost your mood.

So, next time you’re feeling blue, stressed, anxious, angry, or inadequate, shift your body, go for a walk, concoct a face-stretching smile, or change your posture and your mood may just follow will follow along.” ~

(Alas, I don’t have a link to this article, but I’d be willing to be it’s from Psychology Today.)

Oriana:

To these tips, I'd add a walk somewhere where there are trees. Clouds also do it for me. And, oddly enough, the fake smile (which doesn’t have to be social; a solitary fake smile feels wonderful).


 

Mary:

Well you kept some very special frogs there for the end, and who could resist those crazy smiles?? It certainly lifted my spirits!

Thinking about internalizing the damage done to us, becoming unforgiving and punishing toward ourselves and seeing ourselves as unworthy of happiness, love, or even kindness, it seems to me these attitudes become a matter of habit, a painful and negative state that is yet familiar, its thoughts and feelings dangerously seductive because they are so familiar. However bad, they feel like something we know and understand, they feel like home.

At times of crisis, especially encountering a situation like the cruel and abusive ones suffered in the past, there can be a sudden and overwhelming collapse into the darkest kind of self hatred and despair . . .  you can see it happening and yet be unable to shake free of the old habits learned as a child. You may have the urge to abandon yourself instead of struggling, again, to recover, to accept yourself with the same kindness and forgiveness you allow to others.

I also think there is much to be said for the physical gestures that can do much to lift our moods. Just as the right and left sides of the brain engage in their push-pull dynamic (And I'm sure that's a great simplification) we are always body and mind both — there is no separation. The act of looking up does more than tilt the head, it refocuses the attention and changes the relation between self and world. And dancing, just imagine what that can do!! It's a whole conversation!

I've been having a few bad days myself lately, and observed my own tendency to that sudden collapse---to go from ok to suicidal thoughts in one jump...and have to shake myself hard out of that old habit of despair. To just, as you have said before, refuse it. I think those of us who have been on that dark path in the past have to pay close attention, be vigilant . . . probably forever.
And then I remember beauty, and joy, creativity and discovery, and all the potential for good in humanity. There’s  simply too much wonder here I don't want to miss. Including our conversations, my dear Oriana!!


Oriana: “PRACTICE BEING STRONG”

Yes, so much of it is an enormous amount of past learning. For me one statement that delivered a healing insight was: “If you practice being strong, you will become strong. If you practice falling apart, you’ll become become better and better at falling apart.” This was in the book “Eat, Pray, Love,” of all places — “beach reading,” as a friend put it. It was a great piece of sheer luck — and I don’t tend to see myself as a lucky person, unless right after I do my “count your blessings” exercise.

Body and mind can’t be separated, and the “falling apart” — that ease with which we slip into suicidal despair even if the triggering stress is relatively mild if regarded separate from the cumulative life stress — has a huge physiological component. I think the best label for it is “overactive sympathetic system plus automatic negative thoughts.” It’s a mouthful, but for me a that’s the most accurate summary. It took me decades to arrive at this.

The sad part is that there isn’t enough life left for a more complete recovery. I am in a much, much better shape than in the past, but one bad night is enough to initiate a setback. That’s where awareness comes in. Knowing that one kind of stress (e.g. not having gotten enough sleep) makes me more vulnerable to overreacting to any extra stress is a reminder that I can choose to “practice being strong.”

Thus, if I find myself at the edge of a crying fit, I know I can step back and not have it. Yes, I’ve had a lot of practice in how to fall apart in an instant, but . . . somehow over the years I’ve also learned self-control. Maybe that comes from having grown up in an oppressed country where you had to keep silent and do a lot of pretending; or perhaps it’s my acting talent. Once in a while I meet someone without that self-control, and realize how far I’ve come in my journey toward emotional strength.

That others typically see us as strong women also says a lot. In public we don’t throw tantrums or begin to sob out of control and out of all proportion to the situation. And that shows that we are not controlled mainly by our wounds.  Whatever neural pathways are involved in emotional self-control can indeed take over. Those pathways become more dominant as we “practice being strong.” The tricky part is not to forget this. But that too comes with practice.

Learning, practice, habit. Many wise people (the Buddha included) have said this in different ways over the ages: what happens is just part of the suffering. What comes later is just as important, or perhaps even more so: how we react to what happened. And we can learn to react differently and suffer less.

I have to confess that I could never master meditation (I’ve tried, but I'm just too restless). Nevertheless, I’ve learned to use deep breathing to calm down. I’ve learned to distract myself, knowing that thinking about a current stressor would be exaggerated negative garbage if there is too much adrenaline in me. Also: “This will pass.”

Different methods work for different people. It’s not that we don’t know many effective ways to quickly lift our mood. The big obstacle is the lack of motivation to be happy. The perversity of it puzzles me — is sadness more attractive just because it’s familiar, i.e. “home”? Or is it something like the minor mode in music, inherently more lyrical, while upbeat music can be irritating? Regardless, even in the absence of wanting to be happy, you and I know that giving in to debilitating sadness would mean missing too many good things in life — and we literally don’t have the time for that. And yes, those good things include our conversations.

*
 

ending on beauty:

A freshness lives deep in me
which no one can take from me
not even I myself —

~ Gunmar Ekelöf




Saturday, January 19, 2019

MUNCH’S SCREAM: BASED ON A LIGHTBULB? WHY MORE BOYS ARE BORN AFTER A WAR; EDITH WHARTON’S ANTI-SEMITISM: WRITERS AS PRODUCTS OF THEIR ERA; NIETZSCHE:ALCOHOL AND CHRISTIANITY; MLK: “BEYOND VIETNAM”; BOY OR GIRL? DEPENDS ON THE FATHER’S GENES

“Sperm whales sleep while hovering motionless in a vertical position, usually somewhat close to the surface. I've been lucky enough to witness this several times in Dominica over the years and every single time it takes my breath away.” ~ Amanda Cotton
*

STATISTICS

I dream I'm teaching
statistics — and who enters
but my grandmother,

robust, smiling, looking
“like a doughnut in butter,”
as she herself would say.

I wonder what sense it makes
for her to study this dry subject,
especially since she is dead.

But no subject is boring
for her who was taken
out of school in the fourth grade,

put to work in a textile factory
to pay for her brother’s education.
Now she’s going to college at last —

wants all that has been denied.
She sits in the front row.
Her eyes are wild for it.


~ Oriana

I am so glad that I had this happy “justice is restored” dream. My grandmother finally gets the education that has been denied to her; as my mother said, “A crime was committed against this bright little girl.” 



James Hillman posits that dreams are an Underworld. We travel to it, and, not surprisingly, meet the dead — that’s where they live, in the underworld of our dreams. Without getting too literal about this, I can see something to this theory. It’s the same longing that has people posit the afterlife: how do we compensate for the unjust world?

Justice and injustice are human concepts, not anything that exists in nature. But the notorious indifference of nature has its own compensation in the beauty of nature. I feel I owe my survival thus far to two main factors: my curiosity (including the curiosity about what happens next) and my delight in beauty.



*

WRITERS AS PRODUCTS OF THEIR TIME

 
~ "Not long ago, during an Amtrak ride, I met a college student who told me he was a fiction writer. I asked him what he’d been writing and reading, and he said that he was writing a novel about time travel, and that he was reading — well, he had been reading Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” but after about 50 pages, he said, he’d tossed it into the trash.

“The House of Mirth,” which was published in 1905, describes the efforts of a young woman named Lily Bart to find an acceptable husband. The student explained that he had been sailing along until he came to a description of one of Lily’s suitors, Simon Rosedale: “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with … small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.” At that point, the student said, he lost sympathy not only for Lily, but for the novel as a whole.

It would have done no good for me to lecture him about the difference between a character’s point of view and the author’s. Whenever Rosedale appears in the novel, Wharton describes his repulsiveness with such gusto it’s clear that she isn’t just describing Lily’s feelings; she’s describing her own.

Wharton’s anti-Semitism, the student said, filled him with rage. “I don’t want anyone like that in my house,” he said.

 
Anyone who’s taught literature in a college or university lately has probably had a conversation like this. The passion for social justice that many students feel — a beautiful passion for social justice — leads them to be keenly aware of the distasteful opinions held by many writers of earlier generations. When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked to, but many perform an equivalent exercise, dumping the offending books into a trash basket in their imaginations.

It was only after the student left the train that I had the rather obvious thought that an old book is a kind of time machine too. And it struck me that the way he’d responded to “The House of Mirth” betrayed a misunderstanding of what kind of time machine an old book is.

 
I think it’s a general misunderstanding, not just his. It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.

As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.

The difference in perspective, the clarification of who exactly is doing the traveling, might lead to a different kind of reading experience.

If we were to sign up for a trip to the New York of 1905 — Wharton’s New York — we’d understand, even before buying our tickets, that we were visiting a place where people’s attitudes were very different from ours. We’d know that nearly everyone we’d meet, even the best, most generous minds — rich or poor, male or female, white or black — would hold opinions that would be unacceptable today. We’d be informed of this in the contract we’d be required to sign, at the same time as we’d be given our inoculations and fitted for our period clothing — our hoop skirts, our waistcoats, our top hats.

 
Knowing all this before we went back in time, met Wharton and discovered that some of her opinions were abhorrent, we’d be prepared. We wouldn’t be outraged or shocked.

Instead, we’d probably be curious. We’d probably be interested in exploring the question of how one of the most intelligent and fearless minds of her time was afflicted by moral blind spots that are obvious to us today.

And maybe, without overlooking or forgetting about Wharton’s blind spots, we’d be able to appreciate the riches she had to offer — her aphoristic wit; her astonishingly well-wrought sentences; her subtle sense of how moral strength and weakness coexist in each of us; her criticisms of the cruelties of her historical moment, which are not unlike the cruelties of ours.

And if we stuck around in the past and observed her in the context of her contemporaries, we’d see that although Wharton held many views that were reactionary even then (she was writing, after all, during a moment when the whole world was watching the Dreyfus Affair, and when thoughtful people understood anti-Semitism to be a sordid prejudice), she was ahead of her time in other ways, particularly in her awareness of how women of her era were suffocated by the social roles imposed on them.

Regarding a writer like Wharton as a creature of her age might bring a further benefit. It might help us see ourselves as creatures of our own.

 
When we imagine that writers from the past are visiting our world, it subtly reinforces our complacence, our tendency to believe that the efforts at moral improvement made by earlier generations attained their climax, their fulfillment, their perfection, in us. The idea that we are the ones who are doing the time-traveling doesn’t carry the same implication.

If, whenever we open old books, we understand from the get-go that their authors have motes in their eyes regarding important ethical or political questions, it might help us understand that the same thing could be said of us today.

To take an example almost at random: Most of us rely on technology that can be traced to child labor or even slave labor. We know this — or we should know this — but we don’t think about it much. When we’re texting or using social media, we don’t tend to be troubled by the thought that the cobalt in our phones may have been extracted by 10-year-olds in Katanga working 12-hour shifts for a dollar a day. We don’t stop short, seized by the realization that taking part in the fight against global inequality is more urgent than anything else we could possibly be doing. We finish the text or the tweet or the email and go on with our lives.

If you or I were to write a novel with a passage in which someone takes a casual glance at his phone, how might this strike a reader from the future — someone whose understanding of human interconnectedness is far more acute than our own? I’m guessing that readers from the future might find our callousness almost unbearable, and might have to remind themselves that despite the monstrousness into which we could descend in passages like this, some of what we were saying might be worth listening to.

If we arm ourselves with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of curiosity (those essential tools of the time-traveler), we’ll be able to see the writers of the past more clearly when we visit them, and see ourselves more clearly when we get back. We’ll be able to appreciate that in their limited ways, sometimes seeing beyond the prejudices of their age, sometimes unable to do so, they — the ones worth reading — were trying to make the world more human, just as we, in our own limited ways, are also trying to do.” ~ Brian Morton

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review/edith-wharton-house-of-mirth-anti-semitism.html?fbclid=IwAR0Opk07JHZyAimesS9KAhraQkvrp3P2gE0z88BRP7qTarchWa6IH3Wr0pY
 

Oriana:

This is a tremendously important article. I’ve known a few people who’ve become unmoored and tossed away masterpieces because the author offends our modern standards by being sexist, for instance (think of Milton; nor can we quite absolve Tolstoy), or a “classist” like Virginia Woolf, or indeed anti-Semitic like Wharton. Not that we have to ignore the views they express that we find repugnant. We can duly note these — and still appreciate these authors when they are at their best — when they speak from the kind of depth and timeless insight that makes their work still alive today.


Mary:

I agree that the article on who is doing the time traveling when we read is an important one. It speaks to our blindness about our own limitations of vision and understanding. It is easy to look at characters and authors from the past and fault them for not being as enlightened as we are, for having prejudices and attitudes we find reprehensible and abhorrent — but only if we forget that our own attitudes and ideas are as much determined by time and place as those we feel we have outgrown.

Our sense of moral superiority depends on the invisibility of injustices so embedded in our present social reality they seem "natural", and thus neutral, not part of any created system, and thus not "chosen," and certainly not part of our moral responsibility. To condemn writers for the limitations and injustices embedded in their historical era, determined by circumstances of class, race, gender, geography, politics, etc., is to assume we are somehow free of those same limitations in our own circumstances  And of course we are not.

Reading with attention to history is both more rewarding and more interesting, shedding light both ways, on the world that produced the author and the book, and the world that produced the reader, with all her ideas and tastes, giving a richer and deeper experience beyond simple dismissal. We cannot read books from an earlier time as they were read in that time — we must see it through the lens of our own historical moment — but while understanding that is what we are doing. Only then can we see the dynamic between art and audience with clarity and justice.
 

Edith Wharton, 1889. Restricted life, anyone?

Mary:

The Hat, the Sleeves, the Dogs, the Expression!!!! No wonder she looks sad.


Oriana:

As you once said, clothes were prisons for women. Oddly enough, it seems rich women were more imprisoned that way.

*


~ “Most of the film boils down to a single undeniable assertion: Much of what we believe about the world is a product of the place and class into which we are born, and the vast majority of these beliefs and values don't hold up under scrutiny. "We are not born free," as one interviewee puts it, but instead are programmed from birth in ways that aren't even seen as programming by most of the people doing the job. (Science fiction has been teaching this lesson for generations, doing a job conformity-minded schools avoid.)” ~  (from the Hollywood Reporter review of Lottery of Birth)


“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

 
Oriana: 


Hmmm, was he already pondering White Fire? I rather like to see it happen: footnotes that pursue their own thread only tenuously related to the main text. That’s where the author is having fun.

By the way, I have that feeling about poems — that these are scraps, fragments of some greater and unfinished whole.



*


“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power — he's free again.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 
Oriana:

This reminds me of another statement by Solzhenitsyn. He suggests to a person in extreme circumstances (e.g. being a Gulag inmate): “Think of yourself as already dead.” Don’t try to defend your life because then the guard has total power over you. But if in your mind you see yourself as already dead, then you can still preserve your dignity.

Some will be reminded of  Janis Joplin’s “freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”  There's something to be said for "nothing left to lose." The feeling of freedom of real!



MUNCH’S SCREAM BASED ON A LIGHTBULB?

 
~ “It has long been assumed that the howling figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream – an archetype of angst that still flickers above the popular imagination more than a century after it was created – was indebted chiefly to the aghast expression frozen on the face of a Peruvian mummy that the artist encountered at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. But Munch was an artist concerned more about the future than the past, and especially anxious about the pace of technology. Surely he would have been even more deeply impressed by the breath-taking spectacle of an enormous lightbulb filled with 20,000 smaller bulbs that stood on a pedestal and towered over the pavilion in the same Exposition? A tribute to the ideas of Thomas Edison, the sculpture rose like a crystalline god heralding a new idolatry, flipping a switch in Munch’s mind. The contours of The Scream’s yowling face reflect with extraordinary precision the drooping jaw and bulbous cranium of Edison’s terrifying electric totem.” ~ 


Charles:

Interesting that Munch created four versions in paint and pastels, (the one in blog is pastel) as well as a lithograph stone from which several prints survive. Both of the painted versions have been stolen, but since recovered. One of the pastel versions commanded the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction.

*

“JEWISH WOMAN SELLING ORANGES”: PHOTO AND PAINTING


 photo by Konrad Brandel , 1879


~

Aleksander Gierymski: Jewish woman selling oranges, 1881. The painting was looted by the Nazis, and returned to Poland only in 2011. You may be wondering why the Nazis would want a painting of a Jewish woman. Well, they had a special book that was created by German art historians, of all paintings of special value. And the title could be changed simply to "Seller of oranges."

Oriana: 


The photograph moves me more. The painting has the advantage of color, but I still respond more strongly to the photograph. Also, in the painting, the knitting is not convincing. You don’t knit standing up.

*

ALFONSO CUARON, CREATOR OF ROMA, ON RACISM IN MEXICO

 
~ “Much of Mexico remains divided along stark ethnic and racial lines that were drawn hundreds of years ago. When Spanish colonizers first showed up in Mexico, they instituted a race-based caste system. Spanish men from Spain were on top. Spanish men from the new land, Mexico, were next. Then came Mestizos, people with one indigenous parent and one Spanish one. Fully indigenous people followed. Last in this social hierarchy were black people. In each of these categories, women were lower than men. The caste system persisted throughout the colonial era until 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain.

In practical terms, however, remnants of the system persisted. A couple of decades after Mexico's 1910 revolution, President Lazaro Cardenas spearheaded efforts to change this worldview, but his administration's efforts were highly flawed. "Their approach to indigenous people was this deep romanticizing," says Marjorie Becker, a historian and scholar of Mexico at UCLA. "They believed the indigenous were natural artists who sang and danced — of course, that was racist, too."

Cuaron, who grew up identifying as white, says his countrymen still obfuscate the corrosive nature of racism. Mexicans often speak about systemic inequalities using euphemistic language that obscures the real problems. "People like to talk about these issues of inequality and discrimination by using the term 'classism' — as if that would make it better," says Cuaron, shaking his head with disgust. "But let's call it for what it is. It's racism.”

The director found himself delving into some of these themes during long discussions with the real-life Cleo, Liboria Rodriguez, an indigenous woman from Oaxaca who was the core source of his emotional nourishment as a child. Within the middle class, vast inequalities persisted between relatively wealthy, white families like his own and the indigenous people hired to help them.

Yalitza Aparicio, who plays Cuaron's main character Cleo, says she experienced racism as an indigenous woman growing up in Oaxaca. She was raised speaking her native language of Miztec at home, but found that non-indigenous people made fun of her if she spoke it elsewhere. Cleo, while loving and being loved by the family, is never able to forget that she is a maid and employee first.

Exploring this, Cuaron began examining how the Mexican government had distorted and manipulated indigenous people's identity for its own cynical purposes, how people like Liboria Rodriguez were, in some sense, convenient propaganda tools for a government eager to cling to power, often using the language of the populist, leftist electorate. "There was this celebration of these folkloric views of Mexico," he says. "On the one hand, [they touted] our Indian heritage, what they called 'the heroic indigenous.' Or, it was mostly about the complete caricature of someone ignorant. There was no middle ground."

The ideology of a permanent, institutionalized revolution that hovered over Cuaron's childhood was riddled with contradictions and absurdities that crystallized when he started speaking to Rodriguez about her own life. "The revolution that was supposed to be about the peasant, forced the peasant to move to the suburbs of the city in conditions of misery," he says.

Roma depicts flashes of the political tumult that would follow. A quarter-century later, in 1994, a professor who had participated in the student protest movement in 1968 adopted the nom de guerre El Subcomandante Marcos and established the Zapatista movement, a guerrilla army of indigenous peasants in Chiapas, to try and address some of these lingering inequalities.

After his father abandoned his family, says Cuaron, Rodriguez and his mother eventually took on co-equal roles as parental figures in the household. During a recent conversation, Rodriguez told Cuaron, "It was as if [your mother] was the husband and I was the wife." Cuaron and Rodriguez grew so close that he often called her mama. "We became a part of [Libo's] family, but it was not always like that," he says. "Even if there was love and care, there was also a very marked journey, which conveys a certain abuse." ~

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alfonso-cuaron-real-problems-challenging-mexico-1176331


Thinking of black-and-white movies, I never tire of this image from High Noon.


*

CAREFUL HOW YOU SALT YOUR FOOD — OR “NO DEAL” WITH JAPAN

 
Imre (the man in charge of my solar panel project) told me a story about having gone to Japan, seeking a business deal with a Japanese firm. The two Americans did their presentation, and then a meal was served to all. Imre’s boss reached for the salt shaker and sprinkled salt over his food. From the changed facial expressions of the Japanese team, Imre suddenly knew: no deal.

The concluding words from the leader of the Japanese team were: “If he had tasted the food first, and then salted it, we would have signed the deal. But since he salted it before tasting it, we know what kind of person he is and we don’t wish to work with him.”

I don’t know if they perceived the American boss as careless, illogical, impatient, thoughtless, impulsive, or what (maybe, more than anything, impolite toward his hosts) — but this small act wrecked the deal.

Wild boar, Book of Hours, Bruges or Ghent, 15th century
 
*


MARTIN LUTHER KING’S 1967 SPEECH: “BEYOND VIETNAM”

 
~ “Most Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.

It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today.

Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers. Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

In his speech, which he delivered exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, King foresaw how the war implied something larger about the nation. It was, he said, “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality … we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ committees for the next generation … unless there is a significant and profound change in American life.”

King’s prophecy connects the war in Vietnam with our forever wars today, spread across multiple countries and continents, waged without end from global military bases numbering around 800. Some of the strategy for our forever war comes directly from lessons that the American military learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass bombing; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of gruesome images from the battlefronts; and encouraging the reverence of soldiers.

You can draw a line from the mantras of “thank you for your service” and “support our troops” to American civilian regret about not having supported American troops during the war in Vietnam. This sentimental hero worship actually serves civilians as much as the military. If our soldiers can be absolved of any unjust taint, then the public who support them is absolved too. Standing in solidarity with our multicultural, diverse military prevents us from seeing what they might be doing to other people overseas and insulates us from the most dangerous part about King’s speech: a sense of moral outrage that was not limited by the borders of nation, class or race but sought to transcend them.

What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

 
Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today.” ~

http://time.com/5505453/martin-luther-king-beyond-vietnam/?fbclid=IwAR1ruITKsk77zQHSO_2akQF2texfDVJTa2pFSSGwyHqJ5GO7-4BhyeU9Tg8



Oriana: 

I especially love the notion of the “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” If that shift happens, a lot will naturally follow. 

John Guzlowski:

I saw some stats recently suggesting we have been at war with someone somewhere for 93% of the time we’ve been a nation. I think Americans like to ignore this about us. They like to think we’re the peaceful kingdom. I remember when I was teaching a course called War Stories. I would always begin with the students writing how they were touched by war. All of them had no trouble writing it. All of them had been touched by war.

Tilford Bartman:

King was successful in every single battle he fought in the South, and pretty quickly vanquished Jim Crow. When he went North and began to take on what at that time the White power structure to challenge the system of economic discrimination and discrimination in housing in the North he ran into what was pretty much a brick wall largely from urban white ethnic machine politicians and groups. I think he said that he ran into as much or more hatred and determined opposition in Chicago as he did in Alabama. He was actually beaten in the street in Chicago.

*

“Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Wilde at Work, a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley
*

“If God created the universe, who created God? If God didn’t need a creator, why does the universe?” ~ Matt Flumerfelt

Peridot in Volcanic Lava from the mountains of Canary Islands in Spain — a kind of “cosmic egg”

Charles:


The peridot egg is definitely sculpted and then polished into an egg shape.
 

*


The two great European narcotics: alcohol and Christianity. ~ Nietzsche

 
Oriana:

It’s the unexpectedness of the second narcotic that makes this a startling statement. As someone said, Nietzsche is the master of the disruptive aphorism.

To my knowledge, Nietzsche wasn't familiar with Marx's “religion is the opium of the people” (Opium des Volkes), published in 1844 but hardly paid much attention to back then (if Marx had to depend on his income from publishing, he would have starved). Yet it may be assumed that intellectuals of the era had formed this opinion in one form or another, perceiving religion as a consolation favored by the poor and the desperate. “Your reward will be in heaven”  and “Christ will dry every tear” were attractive promises that until fairly recently were rarely dismissed as “pie in the sky.”

And the New Age movement? It offers what might be called an individualist-universalist perspective. Louise Hay (whose wisdom has been helpful to me) says, “In the Aquarian Age we are learning to go within to find our savior. We are the power we are looking for. Each of us is totally linked with the Universe and with Life.”

Does Nietzsche's observation still hold? When faced with an adversity (or, as a friend said, “Shit happens” is a translation of the First Noble Truth), some people drink, others pray, still others go to a therapist or a psychic (therapists themselves go to psychics), some meditate and seek an answer within — and now, increasing, many seek answers on the Internet.

It's interesting that I first remembered this quotation as “the two great American narcotics” —  and, not sure who said it, I wondered if Oscar Wilde would have been so daring. Well, that's the way the brain works — instead of accuracy, it transforms a statement into what is relevant and more familiar to us.

By the way, it's unfair to Marx to use the short form of the quotation. Marx also saw religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

The decaying St. Bonaventure church in Philadelphia — odd, for some reason I never thought I'd see the decay of religion at this kind of literal level.

*

A BOY OR A GIRL? IT’S IN THE FATHER’S GENES

 
~ “[A recent] Newcastle University study suggests that an as-yet undiscovered gene controls whether a man’s sperm contains more X or more Y chromosomes, which affects the sex of his children. On a larger scale, the number of men with more X sperm compared to the number of men with more Y sperm affects the sex ratio of children born each year.

A study of hundreds of years of family trees suggests a man's genes play a role in him having sons or daughters. Men inherit a tendency to have more sons or more daughters from their parents. This means that a man with many brothers is more likely to have sons, while a man with many sisters is more likely to have daughters.
MORE BOYS BORN AFTER A WAR

In many of the countries that fought in the World Wars, there was a sudden increase in the number of boys born afterwards. The year after World War I ended, an extra two boys were born for every 100 girls in the UK, compared to the year before the war started. The gene, which Mr Gellatly has described in his research, could explain why this happened.

As the odds were in favor of men with more sons seeing a son return from the war, those sons were more likely to father boys themselves because they inherited that tendency from their fathers. In contrast, men with more daughters may have lost their only sons in the war and those sons would have been more likely to father girls. This would explain why the men that survived the war were more likely to have male children, which resulted in the boy-baby boom.

In most countries, for as long as records have been kept, more boys than girls have been born. In the UK and US, for example, there are currently about 105 males born for every 100 females.

It is well-documented that more males die in childhood and before they are old enough to have children. So in the same way that the gene may cause more boys to be born after wars, it may also cause more boys to be born each year.” ~

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081211121835.htm


ending on beauty:
 
WHITE TREES

When the white trees are no longer in sight
they are telling us something,
like the body that undresses
when someone is around,
like the woman who wants
to read what her nude curves
are trying to say,
of what it was to be together,
lips on lips
but it’s over now, the town
we once loved in, the maps
we once drew, the echoes that
once passed through us
as if they needed something we had.

~ Nathalie Handal

There are plenty of trees (conifers, mainly spruce) in this photo of a mountain peak (Śnieżka) in Western Poland. They just happen to be under heavy snow.