Saturday, May 30, 2020

EXERCISE AS COVID PREVENTION; PUTIN AND THE VIRUS; BRODSKY: THE GIFT OF MISFORTUNE; LIFE EXPECTANCY INCREASED DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION; THE NAZIS IN ARGENTINA AND THE “DISAPPEARED”

Saint Petersburg Palace Square, the Alexander Column. In the early 1950s, there were plans to replace the statue of the angel with the statue of Stalin.

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1 JANUARY 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.

What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of  death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It's clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it's too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven's light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.

~ Joseph Brodsky, Nativity Poems; tr George L. Kline

After the mournful mood of the first stanza — this is a sad, lonely Christmas indeed — the poem performs an astonishing feat of turning into an affirmation, made all the more powerful by being “in spite of.” The speaker manages to be grateful for the gift that his life is. In the hour of his death, he hopes he’ll be able to turn his gaze “to the far sky” and be filled with gratitude.

How clumsy this prose summary is next to the lines of the poem. I think the translation is excellent, so the poem has an easy fluency, and seems to flow by itself. The diction is both old-fashioned and modern in a way that makes the poem seem to step out of its historical time, though its title is a date: 1 January 1965. It’s not called New Year’s Day, 1965, which would sound festive rather than cold. January is indeed the coldest month — “the very dead of winter,” as Eliot put it in his Journey of the Magi. Out of this morose mood rises the miracle of gratitude simply for being alive — the one miracle for which it’s never too late.

The date marks the time of Brodsky’s northern exile, but no direct complaint about it is made. Each life has its winters, but that’s one of the reasons we have poetry — to keep reminding us that just being alive is a gift. 



The Dream of the Magi, Autun Cathedral, Gislebertus, 1120-1130

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BRODSKY: THE GIFT OF MISFORTUNE

 
~ He was restless. He left the factory job [he dropped out of school at fifteen) after six months. Over the next seven years, until his arrest, he worked at a lighthouse, a crystallography lab, and a morgue; he also hung about, smoking cigarettes and reading books. He traveled around the Soviet Union, taking part in “geological” expeditions, helping the rapidly industrializing Soviet government comb the vast country for mineral wealth and oil. At night, the geologists would gather around the campfire and play songs on their guitars—often poetry set to music—and read their own poems. Upon reading a book of poems on the “geological” theme, in 1958, Brodsky decided that he could do better himself. One of his earliest poems, “Pilgrims,” was soon a campfire hit.

The whole country was going crazy for poetry; it had become central to the atmosphere of Khrushchev’s Thaw. In 1959, as part of a return of sorts to the Bolshevik past, a statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky was unveiled in central Moscow, and soon young people began to gather around it to read their own poetry. In the early sixties, a group of poets started a series of well-attended readings at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow, catercorner from the headquarters of the K.G.B. There is a film of one of these evenings, and, though it’s just a poetry reading (rather than a Beatles concert, say), and though the poems of these semi-official poets weren’t especially good, the atmosphere is electric. A crowd had gathered and before it stood a young man talking about his feelings: this was new.


Searching for English-language equivalents, Robert Hass wrote that Brodsky sounded “like Robert Lowell when Lowell is sounding like Byron.” As a cultural figure in Russia, though, Brodsky was more akin to Allen Ginsberg (with whom he later went shopping for used clothes in New York—“Allen bought a tuxedo jacket for five dollars!” he told Loseff, who wondered why a beatnik needed formal wear). For Ginsberg and his friends, freedom lay in breaking the bounds of traditional prosody; for Brodsky and his friends, freedom came from reëstablishing a tradition that Stalin had tried to annihilate. Brodsky was able to find surprising ways of doing this, seemingly with no effort, and always remaining cool and nonchalant. His early poems describe the narrator walking home from the train station; the narrator touring his old Leningrad haunts; the narrator watching a married couple argue, wondering whether he himself will always be alone.

It was a period of tremendous generational energy and hope; someone had to embody it. It was important that Brodsky’s poems were contemporary and local. It was also important that, in their debt to Anglo-American modernism, they connected the small group of Leningrad poets and readers to the great world. And most important of all was that, in their creative fealty to an old-fashioned formal tradition, they connected this generation to the great poets of the Russian past; Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet’s widow, declared Brodsky a second Mandelstam.

Then, in October, 1962, Khrushchev was confronted by President Kennedy over a shipment of missiles sent by the Soviets to Cuba. After a tense standoff, the Soviets withdrew in humiliation, and Khrushchev lashed out at home. Just a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis, he lambasted a group of young artists at an exhibit in Moscow, calling them “faggots.” The Thaw was finished. A year later, Brodsky was charged with “freeloading” on the back of the great Soviet people.

Brodsky’s trial took place in two sessions, several weeks apart, in February and March of 1964; in between, Brodsky was confined to a mental hospital, where it was determined that he was psychologically fit to work. The trial was a farce, its outcome predetermined. “Trial of the freeloader Brodsky,” a sign outside the courtroom read, a little prejudicially. Inside, neither the judge nor the people testifying against Brodsky had any interest in his poetry. Brodsky, who remained unpublished, made what money he could doing translations, sometimes working from literal translations when he didn’t know the source language; his accusers wanted to know, among other things, how this was possible, and whether Brodsky wasn’t exploiting his collaborators on such projects.

Brodsky at the time was not yet twenty-four. His friend Rein recalls how the second session of the trial fell on Maslenitsa, or Butter Week, the traditional pancake-eating holiday in advance of Lent. Consequently, on the day of the trial, Rein and some other friends went to the restaurant at the Hotel European to eat pancakes. Then, at four o’clock, they went to the courthouse. Not everyone, in other words, had a sense of the gravity of the occasion.

In the end, the judge sentenced the so-called poet to five years of exile and labor up north, to straighten him out.

On the subject of Brodsky’s exile, Loseff is once again forced to disappoint readers who have grown accustomed to thinking of the poet as someone who spent time in the Gulag. His confinement to a mental hospital in between sessions of the trial was miserable. His eighteen months in the village of Norenskaya were among the best times of his life.


Norenskaya was three hundred and fifty miles from Leningrad, and Brodsky could receive visitors. His mother visited him; his friends Rein and Naiman visited; his lover Marina Basmanova visited. Even Bobyshev came to visit! (He was looking for Basmanova.) Brodsky rented a little cottage in the village and, while it didn’t have central heating or plumbing, it was, as one visitor marveled, his very own. “For our generation this was an unthinkable luxury,” the visitor recalled. “Iosif proudly showed off his domain.” Brodsky had a typewriter and was reading a lot of W. H. Auden. On the whole, this was more Yaddo than Gulag.


But there is nothing to be done about a legend once it’s created. Akhmatova’s famous dark joke at the time of his arrest—“What a biography they’re writing for our redhead”—told only half the story. After his arrest, Brodsky met the occasion; he built his own biography. The transcript of the trial, made by a brave journalist named Frida Vigrodova, quickly appeared in samizdat and was sent abroad, where it was published in many languages (in the United States it appeared in The New Leader). A concerted campaign led by Akhmatova and joined by Jean-Paul Sartre resulted in Brodsky’s early release. By the time he returned to Leningrad, in late 1965, Brodsky was world famous, and had developed profoundly as a poet.

He also continued to describe and memorialize his love for [the painter] Marina Basmanova. From “Six Years Later,” in Richard Wilbur’s translation:


So long had life together been that once


the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;

that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,

I’d shield them with my hand, and they, pretending

not to believe that cherishing of eyes,

would beat against my palm like butterflies.

In the early nineteen-seventies, the geopolitical wheel turned again, and took Brodsky with it. Brezhnev’s desire to clear house dovetailed nicely with pressure from the West to release Soviet Jews, and in the spring of 1972 Brodsky was given three weeks to pack his bags and board a plane to Vienna. Unlike Norenskaya, this would be true exile, and it lasted the rest of his life.


Brodsky makes a cameo appearance in the novelist Sigrid Nunez’s new memoir about Susan Sontag, “Sempre Susan.” It is 1976 and Brodsky has recently started dating Sontag. He is romantic, brooding, mostly bald. “None of it matters,” he announces one day. “Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.” Another time, he takes everyone out for Chinese, his favorite New York meal. Sitting around the table with Sontag, her son, and the young Nunez, Brodsky is the bohemian paterfamilias. Nunez describes him purring to this small, unlikely clan, “Aren’t we happy?”

This is the image one has of Brodsky in America: a runaway success. Only from the Russian side can one see how difficult it was, and also just how much it meant. For members of that Soviet generation, America was everything. They listened to its music, read its novels, translated its poetry. They caught bits and pieces of America wherever they could (including on trips to Poland). America “was like a homeland in reserve for us,” Sergeyev (who translated, among others, Robert Frost) later wrote. When, in the nineteen-seventies, the opportunity presented itself, many went. It was only upon arriving here that they discovered what they’d lost.

Brodsky’s poems during his first years in the States are filled with the most naked loneliness. “An autumn evening in a humble little town / proud of its appearance on the map,” one begins, and concludes with an image of a person whose reflection in the mirror disappears, bit by bit, like that of a street lamp in a drying puddle. The enterprising Proffer had persuaded the University of Michigan to make Brodsky a poet in residence; Brodsky wrote a poem about a college teacher. “In the country of dentists,” it begins, “whose daughters order clothes / from London catalogues, . . . / I, whose mouth houses ruins / more total than the Parthenon’s, / a spy, an interloper, / the fifth column of a rotten civilization,” teach literature. The narrator comes home at night, falls into bed with his clothes still on, and cries himself to sleep. That year, Brodsky wrote a poem indicating that, in being forced to leave Russia, he lost a son [with Basmanova].

Eventually, Brodsky escaped the country of dentists for a small Greenwich Village garden apartment in New York. 


Brodsky’s own English improved rapidly. In 1977, he bought a secondhand typewriter in Manhattan and soon was writing the essays directly in a supple, playful, ironic English, through which you could sometimes hear the poetic voice of his Russian. In these essays, many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Brodsky wrote with great sympathy of the poets he most admired: Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and, on the other shore, Robert Frost and, especially, Auden. In this way he was able to repay his debts. He was also able, in several autobiographical essays, to recast his painful experiences in a new form. 


From the very first, it had fallen to Brodsky to experience all the struggles of his generation on his own hide, as the Russians say. His immigration was no exception. He was spared the loss of social status that tormented other immigrants (indeed, the memoirs of later immigrants who had known him in Leningrad are filled with tales of how Brodsky didn’t introduce them to another luminary, or pretended not to see them while doing a reading somewhere). Although his health was poor (he had his first heart attack in 1976), he was spared the material concerns many immigrants had. But he was not spared the dislocation, the misunderstanding. He failed to see that the social changes that made his poetry resonant in Russian had obviated just this kind of poetry in the States. Writing about his generation of idealistic Russians, he put it best: “Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought that at least that world was like themselves; now they know that it is like the others, only better dressed.”


In his last decade, Brodsky achieved an unprecedented level of success. He was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature. Afterward, he spent a lot of time in Italy, got married to a young student of Russian and Italian descent, became the Poet Laureate of the United States, moved to Brooklyn. In 1993, his wife gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Anna.


As often happens, Brodsky was more visible in his last years as an essayist and a propagandist for poetry than as an actual poet. His ideas about the moral importance of poetry—inherited from the poets of the Silver Age, including Mandelstam, who had died for his poetry—eventually hardened into dogma; his Nobel Prize address stressed that “aesthetics is the mother of ethics,” and so on. Poetry was immortal, he argued: “That which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium.” 


But this wasn’t true, as Brodsky eventually acknowledged in a great and furious late poem, “On Ukrainian Independence,” in which he berated the independence-minded Ukrainians for casting aside the Russian tongue. “So go with God, you swift cossacks, you hetmans, you prison guards,” it says, and concludes:

Just remember, when it’s time for you, too, to die, you bravehearts,


as you scratch at your mattress and visibly suffer, you’ll forget

the flatus of Taras, and whisper the verses of Alexander.

Alexander Pushkin, that is. Despite itself, the poem is an anguished admission that a Russian state and Russian-speaking subjects are still vital to the project of Russian poetry.
In late January, 1996, Brodsky died, of his third heart attack, after a life of not taking very good care of himself. “If you can’t have a cigarette with your morning coffee,” he once said, “there’s no point getting up.”

The book ends with Bobyshev [once Brodsky’s rival for Marina Basmanova’s love], now in America, calling Brodsky in New York. They haven’t spoken in two decades, but Bobyshev has an important matter relating to Akhmatova to discuss with him, and they briefly put their differences aside. They settle the matter, and then Brodsky asks, “So how do you like America?” It’s not easy, Bobyshev says, but still it’s an interesting place. “What about it is interesting?” Brodsky asks. Bobyshev says it’s all very interesting, the colors, the faces, all of it. “Hmm,” Brodsky says. And they hang up. ~

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-gift-keith-gessen?utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR2aoGjr2CDmnY6m2ZTe2kTQt4a-A4xthPTLpD8dede0T3UZKISgllmFGKc


Brodsky and Baryshnikov, New York, 1985
 
Oriana:

I can identify with the loneliness. To me America was a synonym of loneliness. The Soviet government knew very well what it was doing, forcing dissident writers like Brodsky or Solzhenitsyn to leave for the “paradise” of the West. It was a terrible punishment — a sentence to loneliness and never feeling quite at home.

“Once snow began to fall, it seemed unending” — exile is its own season, and the loss of one’s homeland — which has been described as the trauma of the “loss of familiarity” — becomes woven into the psyche, creating a sense of distance, of estrangement. 


And that he thought anyone would recite Pushkin even on his deathbed shows the poetry-worship of the culture in which he grew up. Spoken slowly, Russian already sounds like a song; falling in love with Pushkin's lines is only natural. German poetry also has that power. I think it's the great emotional power of music.

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From wiki: ~ In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth Russian-born writer to do so. In an interview he was asked: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?" "I'm Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist – and, of course, an American citizen", he responded.

Joseph had difficulty understanding why poetry did not draw the large audiences in the United States that it did in Russia. He was proud of becoming an American citizen in 1977 (the Soviets having made him stateless upon his expulsion in 1972) and valued the freedoms that life in the United States provided. But he regarded poetry as "language's highest degree of maturity", and wanted everyone to be susceptible to it. As Poet Laureate, he suggested that inexpensive anthologies of the best American poets be made available in hotels and airports, hospitals and supermarkets. ~

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“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” ~ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina



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"[Reading its literature] it is the only way to truly understand a country. In literature you enter into the hearts and souls of people in ways no other art form allows." ~ Jhumpa Lahiri
 
Oriana:

Overall, I agree on a deep level. You can't hate Germany after you read Goethe, or Russia after you read Chekhov.

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HOW THE PRESENCE OF ESCAPED NAZIS HELPED “NORMALIZE” TOTALITARIANISM IN ARGENTINA

 
~ In my work as a writer, I focused on how hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators escaped to Argentina. This made me painfully aware of how their presence during the thirty years between the end of World War II and the 1976 coup had numbed the moral sense of what was then an affluent, well-educated nation, with disastrous consequences for its people. Argentines’ forced cohabitation with Nazi fugitives resulted, I came to believe, in a normalization of the crimes that the German émigrés had committed. “He came to our country seeking forgiveness,” Argentina’s Cardinal Antonio Caggiano told the press when Israeli operatives captured the Nazi arch-criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina in 1960 to stand trial in Jerusalem. “Our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he’s done.”


Some fifteen years later, Argentina began its own descent into full-blown totalitarianism, and its military embarked on a mass killing program that differed in scale, though not in essence, from the Nazis’: an estimated 30,000 people were made to “disappear” by the dictatorship. The same politicians and religious leaders who had turned a blind eye to the presence of Nazi criminals in Argentina looked away again as blood-soaked generals kneeled to receive their blessings in Buenos Aires Cathedral. Much of my adult life has been haunted by the need to answer the question of how this could have come to pass in Argentina. And how it might come to pass elsewhere. 


As the US diplomats well understood, the military’s real war was not against the chimera of a communist threat, but against liberalism. The Nazis’ presence in Argentina normalized their ideology and weakened society’s democratic defenses against the totalitarian ideas they represented. Seeing Nazi flags paraded down the streets of Charlottesville last year, seeing them again in Washington, D.C., this year, makes me realize how different today’s America is from the country where I was born and grew up. It makes me realize how far advanced such a normalization already is in the US. ~ 


"Silence is health" sign in Buenos Aires
 
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/silence-is-health-how-totalitarianism-arrives?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Oriana:

The dictatorship hated the democracy-demanding liberals; communism wasn't a real threat, just a convenient false reason for the murderous campaign against liberals.

Interesting how the very presence of unpunished Nazis “normalized” their type of ideology. 


Lilith:

I was in Argentina in 2005, the only time I've ever been in the Southern Hemisphere. In many ways, Buenos Aires is a sophisticated, literate city — hard to jibe with the atrocities there as recent as the 1980's. I appreciate the article's insights about who the victims were. They were the college students, the hippies, the ones who wore Che Guevara t-shirts, in other words, the liberals. The right wing junta decided to get rid of liberalism by throwing these kids out of airplanes into La Plata, and the Reagan administration was supportive of that regime. They snatched newborns from pregnant women and then threw the mothers out of airplanes. Could it happen here? This week Trump retweeted someone who wrote "the only good democrat is a dead democrat.”


Oriana:

Scary. I too was deeply distressed  reading about the mothers and newborns. All those murders were appalling, but the mother-child part hit me particularly hard. Must be something about it that says it’s a primal violation — particularly heinous.


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PUTIN AND THE VIRUS
 
~ Rather than coming off as the all-powerful strongman, Putin “looks like an old, sick wolf,” the political scientist Alexander Kynev told the Moscow Times. Earlier this month, the independent polling agency Levada Center found that Putin had an approval rating of fifty-nine per cent, a historic low.

One of Putin’s signal pronouncements—that doctors and other medical personnel treating COVID-19 patients would receive bonuses from the state—has been marred by sporadic and delayed implementation, with scores of doctors all over the country complaining that they have nothing at all. In multiple statements and meetings with officials, Putin expressed his displeasure at the problem, but still hundreds of medical workers treating patients from Siberia to the Caucasus continue to publicly complain about not receiving the promised money.


In early and mid-March, when the spectre of the pandemic was bearing down on Russia, Putin focussed on a different matter entirely: a constitutional referendum, initially planned for April 22nd, that was designed to reset the clock on his Presidential terms, allowing him to run again in 2024 (and potentially even in 2030). “He was preparing for the final act of perestroika of the entire political system, and the virus only got in the way,” Pavlovsky told me.

“The vertical of power is a kind of theatrical façade,” Pavlovsky told me. “It is good at producing the appearance of authority, but it doesn’t actually have managerial abilities or the ability to quickly mobilize resources.” The myth of the vertical has served Putin well over the years, as he has been seen by various constituencies—from warring security and intelligence chiefs to rival businesspeople and oligarchs—as the singular arbiter capable of keeping the over-all system buoyant and profitable. But that doesn’t help you in a crisis that is driven by scientific cause and effect, rather than by political or emotional factors.

The point is not that Russia’s response to the pandemic has been horrible; even with its high number of cases and dubious official death count, the country’s health-care system has avoided total collapse and a death toll so high that it would be impossible to hide. Instead, regional officials and medical workers have responded to the spread of the virus largely on their own. It turns out that the vertical is better at fostering a kind of psychic or virtual power than wielding real power in a time of genuine crisis.

This is partly the inevitable result of the Putin system’s longevity; after twenty years in power, Putin thinks of himself less as a politician and more as a “messianic” or “historic” hero, as Tatiana Stanovaya, the head of the analysis firm R.Politik, put it. This period crystallized in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fuelled a would-be separatist insurgency in Ukraine. Sanctions, opprobrium, and attempts at isolation followed—but Russia was again an undeniable force on the world stage.


“If, in earlier times, Putin stood before the people and in some way was responsible to them, he now sees himself as standing before history,” Stanovaya told me. He is consumed with the idea of restoring Russia’s great-power status, and so the tasks that interest him are commensurate with this sweeping mission: navigating an oil-price war with Saudi Arabia and the United States; dispatching Russian forces and paramilitaries around the Middle East to take advantage of the vacuum left by the U.S.; and courting foreign leaders, whether Donald Trump or China’s Xi Jinping. 


Stanovaya said that Putin sees “social problems,” of which COVID-19 is one, as “too small compared to his great mission. They’re simply not interesting to him; they don’t rise to his level.” (Putin, though, relishes high-profile events like the military parade commemorating victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, normally held on May 9th. In April, Putin delayed it indefinitely, citing the pandemic; on Tuesday, he announced that it would go ahead after all, on June 24th.)

With the limitations, or even hollowness, of the vertical exposed by the pandemic, one lasting impact may be a process of “involuntary federalization,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a noted political scientist in Moscow, told me. Regional leaders mobilized to deal with COVID-19 in their territories, and, as a result, their popularity has risen while trust in Putin has fallen. Previously, Putin could blame regional officials for any shortcomings while emerging unscathed himself. But now, as Schulmann put it, “The perennial idea of ‘good tsar, bad boyars’ has stopped working.” ~

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-the-coronavirus-revealed-the-hollowness-of-putins-vertical-of-power?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&fbclid=IwAR1r6V1Pa7bEBADdVNzuG18Mc4O9RnX8GyQA_RpBNP21Qx7Y5PBLXQVf6do


 
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PUTIN’S BRUTAL SUPPRESSION OF PROTESTS


“Eleven years ago, an ordinary Russian citizen named Sergey Mokhnatkin was passing by the Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow, where a civil political-protest gathering was taking place. Seeing several special-force policemen (OMON) descend in gang-like fashion upon one peaceful protester with life-threatening brutality, on the spur of the moment, he intervened, trying to shield the prone person from the crushing blows of the OMON batons and truncheons. For that spontaneous act of kindness, right then and there he was severely beaten up, arrested, sped through the charade of an imitation trial and, without any further unnecessary legal formalities, thrown in jail. There, he would be constantly beaten, tortured, humiliated, and have his bones broken and re-broken. Putin's Russia's repressive machine doesn't like people engaging in random acts of kindness when it is taking its sadistic rage out on those daring to oppose the chekist-mafia regime it is paid handsomely to protect. 


In all, in rapid succession, he would be given five prison terms. Yesterday, one day after his last release, a thoroughly broken shell of a man, he died of multiple internal injuries. He was 67 years old.” ~ Mikhail Iossel


Sergey Mokhnatkin

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IF SELF-HELP FEELS UNHELPFUL (“The half-baked hollowness of pop-psych and how to graduate beyond it”)

 
~ Most self-help suggests a simple solution: “Always do X, not Y.” It’s a relief to boil everything down to something so simple but it’s only relief as long as you can ignore the value of doing Y. 


Yes, we have an angel and a devil on our shoulders. Trouble is it’s hard to know which is which. It’s a relief to realize that X was the angel and Y was the devil all along. For example, judgment is the devil, non-judgment is the angel. Such a relief to get that sorted out finally.

But you didn’t really and here’s why: Every one of those supposed one-wise-fits-all solutions is half the story. To get at the other half, just rephrase your sacred pop-psych principle as the self-contradiction it really is:


Love is the answer: Hate your hate.
Kindness is the answer: Be unkind to your unkindness.
Fearlessness is the answer: Fear your fear
Generosity is the answer: Make yourself selfless.
Mindfulness is the answer: Fill your mind with emptiness.
Non-judgment is the answer: You should not be judgmental
Non-negativity is the answer: Negativity is a no-no
Integrity is the answer: Pretend you can square all your inner circles.
Living in the moment is the answer: Commit to spending your future in the moment.

One graduates from pop self-help when one trades in one’s embraced “Always do X, not Y” half-truths for a serenity-prayer treatment of life’s dilemmas [“and the wisdom to know the difference”].


Wisdom isn’t a formula. Rather, it’s wedding life’s inescapable tensions as inescapably your own. ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/202005/if-self-help-starts-feeling-unhelpful-heres-why?fbclid=IwAR0UXB9I6yN4JIpue3mau4wicKKVKhbbiCceDAykWj4af68Ar2xCa7LzdQs

“The world says: 'You have needs—satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


Oriana:

Dostoyevsky was bothered by the self-centeredness of modern culture, its ever-growing concern with one’s own needs and rights. He wanted more concern about others, taking more responsibility for the actions in one’s community.



 

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"I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism.” ~ Amos Oz, The Woman in the Window 

Night; Greta Hällfors-Sipilä. 1931

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“Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.” ~ Werner Herzog


 
Oriana:

I wish I had come across this years ago. For most of my adult life I felt depression was nothing to be ashamed of. Yet in my case, when I finally did feel ashamed of wasting my life that way, that was a significant step toward recovery.

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“I relish solitude. Solitude, if anything, is my only conviction.” ~ Susan Sontag

 
Oriana:

Living alone spoils you. Not just the freedom to eat or stay up, etc, when you wish to. It's being able to make a mess, be clumsy, forgetful, burn the food — but there are no witnesses! You don't have to say you are sorry, you don't have to talk about it for an hour, and a month later — a year later — maybe even on your deathbed. You can calmly clean up and soon it's like it never happened.

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OUR SOLAR SYSTEM IS AN ODDBALL

 
~ In retrospect, the first exoplanetary system was discovered by Galileo in 1610 when he turned his telescope to Jupiter and noticed the movements of its four largest moons. Jupiter’s Galilean Satellites (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) form a compact, almost perfectly co-planar family of worlds on near-circular orbits that together add up to about two ten-thousandths of Jupiter’s mass, and have orbital periods ranging from a scant two days (Io) to more than two weeks (for Callisto)


This basic architecture, as defined by the range of orbital periods and the ratio of the satellites’ masses to that of the planet, is pleasingly replicated for the systems of moons orbiting Saturn and Uranus. But it doesn’t resemble the architecture of the solar system, where the largest planet has a thousandth of the sun’s mass, and where the orbital periods of the planets are much longer than those of the large planets’ satellites. 


To astronomers’ lasting surprise, it is now clear that the average planetary system in the galaxy looks a lot more like the Jovian moons than like the sun’s planets. Of order half of nearby stars have at least one (and often several) worlds with masses substantially greater than Earth and orbital periods ranging from mere days to weeks; in our system, the space interior to tiny Mercury’s 88-day orbit is entirely empty. 


The first hints of the ubiquity of compact, short-period planetary systems came just over a decade ago, with the results from the HARPS spectrograph located in La Silla, Chile. HARPS employed the Doppler velocity technique to detect a profusion of low-mass planets. The results were so unexpected that they were met with skepticism. Doubts, however, were eliminated when NASA’s Kepler mission found hundreds of systems with multiple, transiting super-Earth–sized planets. 


Density estimates now exist for well over a hundred planets with masses below 30 Earth masses, and the aggregate of results is bewildering. In a nutshell, planetary densities are all over the map. If you know the radius of a planet (but have no other information), you have virtually no basis for guessing its mass. Among planets that fall in the size range between Earth and Neptune (which has four times Earth’s radius), the range of masses at a given radius can vary by over a factor of 10. This huge variation points to a startling range in compositions that must run the gamut from dense worlds made of iron to puffy spheres that include ample supplies of hydrogen.

It is now clear that the distribution of planet sizes contains a distinct double-peaked shape. Planets with radii of about 1.75 times that of Earth are substantially less common either than planets that are slightly bigger than Earth or than those with 2.5 or more times Earth size. This planetary “radius gap” is telling us something important. Most likely, it delineates a fairly sharp transition between roughly Earth-sized worlds that are fundamentally terrestrial in character and planets with deep hydrogen-helium atmospheres that are hotter, smaller cousins to Uranus and Neptune. 


A separate, and even more intriguing insight was elucidated by a team led by Lauren Weiss, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal, who established the existence of a curious organizing principle for the sprawl of planetary masses and sizes. The planets within a particular system tend to have very similar sizes (and masses) and tend to adhere to a geometric uniformity of spacing, much like the arrangement of peas in a pod. 


While there are hints of this phenomenon among the sun’s planets (Earth and Venus present a uniform pair, as do Uranus and Neptune) it is much more pronounced among the systems discovered by the Kepler mission. The origins of this curious intra-system uniformity are as-yet completely unclear, and they provide an interesting constraint on the planet formation process. That is, a mechanism must exist to coordinate the growth and spacing of planets within a given system, even as these attributes vary wildly from star to star. 


The Milky Way contains over a trillion planets. While we are nowhere remotely close to a full accounting of this vast population, the outlines of the distribution, and how it came to be, are rapidly falling within our grasp. 


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-trillion-worlds?utm_source=pocket-newtab


*

I remembered why I liked Buddhism, despite being unable to adopt it: because there is no drama of love at its heart. ~ Lawrence Osborne
 

I think the West is unable to fully embrace Buddhism because the West is on the side of love, for all its dark side. I am drawn to the serenity of Buddhism, but my emotional intensity and what might be called my "individuation" also make me unable to adopt it – even though I find its teaching on detachment quite useful, a warning against getting over-involved. Milosz writes about his rejection of the Eastern tradition in his Berkeley poem “To Raja Rao.”

No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love and self-hate,
prayer for the Kingdom
and reading Pascal.

Yes, for those like Milosz, sooner the pierced heart of Catholic mysticism.

 

Buddhists might object to Osborne’s statement by pointing out that compassion is very important in Buddhism. But Osborne doesn’t mean compassion; I’m pretty sure he means romantic love, or any other kind of love that involves intensity. The West has not been blind to pain inherent in romantic love, but has found the gifts of this love to be so great that falling in love is worth the inevitable suffering. Jack Gilbert, at the threshold of old age, pleads with the gods: Let me fall in love one more time. A friend of mine who is 85 recently said the same thing: love is worth all the pain that may follow. And looking at my own most traumatic love experience, I was finally able to say, “But the gift was so great.” Only then I was at peace. For me that gift was and is personality enlargement, the intellectual and experiential expansion.

I suppose it all comes down to the attitude toward individuality: the West treasures individuality and a rich, differentiated self. “Life is suffering” seems a partial truth, just as “life is happiness” would be a partial truth. I appreciate both peacefulness and passionate intensity. Sometimes I want peacefulness; at other times, passion.

I realize that in the recent decades Buddhism has had a huge impact on the Western culture, including even Christianity. Father Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk, asserts that our deepest self is the Christ. The personality does not survive death; what happens is that the Christ consciousness chooses another container. But that is the opposite of the promise that meant so much to Milosz: all, all will be preserved. The flowers on the table, the tube of lipstick on the bed stand, even the “sweet little neuroses” of our beloved. And even in Hell (as well as in Purgatory and Heaven), Dante shows the personality as preserved; his dead are as individual and recognizable as Homer's and Virgil's shades in the Underworld.

Romantic passion has often been called a delusion, and there is really no arguing with that. Passion can’t stand up to rational scrutiny. The beloved is a flawed human being, and not an almost supernaturally wonderful person. So let’s admit that it’s a delusion. Ah, but it’s a glorious delusion, often transformative, a driving force of growth. And yet, and yet . . . excess intensity can ruin everything. 

*  
*
THE STAGE IS TOO BIG FOR THE DRAMA 
 
“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” ~ Richard Feynman

 
Oriana:

The idea that it's “all about us” implies a god enormously entertained by the human drama —  wouldn't a perfect being be in fact bored by all the repetitious stuff, the petty thoughts, marital arguments, etc?

On top of it, if we consider ancient Judaism, all these stars and planets and the tremendous diversity and complexity just so that god could communicate to one tiny nation in a tiny portion of the earth, which is an infinitesimal portion of the universe. 





*
LIFE EXPECTANCY INCREASED DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 
“The Great Depression had a silver lining: During that hard time, U.S. life expectancy actually increased by 6.2 years, according to a University of Michigan study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Life expectancy rose from 57.1 in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1932, according to the analysis by U-M researchers José A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase occurred for both men and women, and for whites and non-whites.

"The finding is strong and counterintuitive," said Tapia Granados, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "Most people assume that periods of high unemployment are harmful to health.”

For the study, researchers used historical life expectancy and mortality data to examine associations between economic growth and population health for 1920 to 1940. They found that while population health generally improved during the four years of the Great Depression and during recessions in 1921 and 1938, mortality increased and life expectancy declined during periods of strong economic expansion, such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936-1937.

The researchers analyzed age-specific mortality rates and rates due to six causes of death that composed about two-thirds of total mortality in the 1930s: cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer, influenza and pneumonia, tuberculosis, motor vehicle traffic injuries, and suicide. The association between improving health and economic slowdowns was true for all ages, and for every major cause of death except one: suicide.
"Working conditions are very different during expansions and recessions," Tapia Granados said. "During expansions, firms are very busy, and they typically demand a lot of effort from employees, who are required to work a lot of overtime, and to work at a fast pace. This can create stress, which is associated with more drinking and smoking.


"Also, new workers may be hired who are inexperienced, so injuries are likely to be more common. And people who are working a lot may also sleep less which is known to have implications for health. Other health-related behaviors such as diet may also change for the worse during expansions.”


In recessions, Tapia Granados noted, there is less work to do, so employees can work at a slower pace. There is more time to sleep, and because people have less money, they are less likely to spend as much on alcohol and tobacco.


In addition, economic expansions are also associated with increases in atmospheric pollution which has well-documented short-term effects on cardiovascular and respiratory mortality. Other reasons that periods of economic expansion may be bad for health could include increases in social isolation and decreases in social support that typically occur when people are working more.


The researchers noted that their study examined the relation between recessions and mortality for the population as a whole, and not the effect of becoming unemployed on an individual person. In fact, their results show that downturns in economic activity may have overall beneficial effects on the population, even if becoming unemployed has adverse health consequences for a given person.

Other studies suggest that the relationship between population health and business cycles may be weakening, at least in the U.S. and in Japan, where the phenomenon of karoshi—sudden death from overwork among Japanese salarymen—dramatically illustrates the dangers of life in economic boom times.


Still, Tapia Granados hopes that a better understanding of the beneficial effects of recessions on health may perhaps contribute to the development of economic policies that enhance health and minimize or buffer adverse impacts of economic expansions. And he cautions that the findings also suggest that suicide prevention services—often the casualties of budget cuts during economic downturns—are more important during bad times than ever.”


https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090928172530.htm


 
*
DEFOE: THE PLAGUE HIT THE POOREST WORST

~ As described by Daniel Defoe in his nonfiction novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the epidemic, rather than cutting a broad swath through London society, spared the wealthy and targeted the city’s hardest-pressed and least powerful—the workers serving the merchants and government officials whom the city quarantined and isolated. Bound to the middle-class households they served, these workers could hardly flee in the style of the care-free narrators of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), a classic of plague literature that little resembles Defoe’s account.


The people left behind in 17th-century London had more in common with Defoe’s narrator, “H.F.” Unlike “the vast many people” who left the city as soon as they could and who were “chiefly from the west end of the town . . . that is to say, among the wealthiest of the people,” H.F., a single businessman, has stayed behind with his “family” (a few servants) and the goods deemed too precious to his livelihood to risk abandoning. In surveying the damage around him, H.F. shines a light on the predicament of London’s working poor.


In fact, as rendered by Defoe, the plight of London’s house servants, dead-cart drivers, and house watchmen recalls the situation of today’s grocery store employees, restaurant cooks, Amazon warehouse workers, and other “front line” employees. Like these low-income workers, many of plague-year London’s workers had no choice but to endanger themselves to help society reduce the rate of infection.


Perhaps the most pitiable class of these collateral victims was the “poor servants,” whose situation “was very dismal,” as H.F. says. Many found themselves either abandoned by fleeing households or turned out of doors. A dose of salt came from fortune-tellers—unscrupulous “quacks” who exploited the fears and anxieties of servants, maids in particular, to separate them from their meager wages. H.F. illustrates their plight with the tale of a maid-servant who had the bad luck to catch the plague in the home of a less than honorable master. Desperate to free himself from responsibility for her care, the man sent threatening letters to his alderman and the Lord Mayor demanding she be removed to a nearby “pest-house” or he would starve her to death.


Although the campaign failed, he was undeterred. After being locked in his house as mandated by the city, the man contrived errands for their designated watchman in order to break through a wall and flee with his wife and children, leaving the task of burying the maid to a nurse whom he also abandoned. H.F. states that stories such as this were common, but even well-treated servants faced more exposure to the plague than others because they ran errands and tended to the sick.

 
The Journal also depicts the hard lot of the dead-cart drivers and “buriers,” but the text’s treatment of these workers exposes the limitations of H.F.’s perspective. In matter-of-fact style, he relates witnessing someone’s illegal visit to a mass grave and learning to his surprise that the visitor is not a suicidal plague victim seeking to throw himself into the earth, a common occurrence. Instead, he is a widower who has followed a cart to its destination, hoping to see the bodies of his children and wife one final time. The narrator calmly relates, from the widower’s perspective, the horrifying spectacle that buriers and cart drivers probably witnessed on a daily basis:


[N]o sooner was the cart turned round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise to [the widower], for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in, though indeed he was afterwards convinced that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see the sight but he cried out aloud, unable to contain himself. . . . The buriers ran to him and took him up, and in a little while he came to himself, and they led him away to the Pie Tavern . . . where, it seems, the man was known, and where they took care of him.


In relating these horrors, the passage is affecting but also odd: it shares nothing from the workers’ point of view. The contrast between this silence and the care taken to elicit feeling for the widower points to sharp boundaries on the narrator’s empathy. Considering the buriers’ brutalizing work, their ability to recognize the husband’s pain and console him seems almost magical, but the narrator takes this heroic sensitivity for granted. In this light, the exploitative and, ultimately, irrational treatment of essential workers (considering that, then as now, essential roles like “burier” are jobs and not shared duties) comes to seem, at its roots, a feature of the society, not a bug—or, for that matter, a flea.


In our plague year, the working poor and precariat have likewise been drafted into the role of hero. The self-employed find themselves risking death to pay rent, while hourly employees get time and a half, if they are lucky, for “heroically” packing boxes amid lax or absent workplace protections. As The New York Times recently reported, Amazon has expected warehouse workers to fulfill orders in the face of unsafe crowding and a lack of hand sanitizer, despite seeing a marked increase in profits after lockdowns began. Activism on the part of essential workers shows they know well enough that heroism without choice is not, in fact, heroism but sacrifice.


For all the sympathy they elicit for some, narratives like Defoe’s are ultimately autocratic states in which the condition of having a voice and a say—not being “dumb”—is a privilege. ~

https://lithub.com/great-plagues-always-hit-workers-the-hardest/?fbclid=IwAR3zBl7_VNWQhkfSZw1OjrWVwI9rjDst_Nu62QM1HZslqSnKsfEG85dCIc8



plague cart with the dead

*

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE ON A VENTILATOR

~ Ventilation for Covid-19 is a painful intubation that goes down your throat and stays there until you live or you die. Patients can't talk or eat or do anything natural — the machine keeps you alive. Discomfort and pain they feel from this means that medical experts must administer sedatives and pain meds to ensure pipe tolerance as long as the machine is needed. After 20 days from this treatment, a young patient loses 40 % muscle mass and gets trauma in the mouth or vocal cords, as well as possible lung or heart complications. It is for this reason that old or already weak people can't stand treatment and die. They put a tube in your stomach...either through your nose or skin for liquid food, a sticky bag around your butt to collect diarrhea, one to collect urine, and an IV for fluids and meds. A team of nurses, CNA, and MA move your limbs every two hours and you lie on a carpet circulating ice cold liquid to help reduce your 40° degree temp. All of this while your loved ones cannot even come to visit. You will be alone in a room with your machine. ~

(note: images from educational material on prone positioning. No hipaa violation)


 

Almost everyone getting put on ventilators is dying. They die alone in their hospital room, on the ventilator, gasping for air.

Bottom line is if you get put on a ventilator, it is very hard to get these patients to breathe on their own again, and if you're still on the ventilator after one or two weeks, you're probably going to die.”

~ a nurse at Morristown Memorial Hospital, NJ


Oriana:

A reminder: this ghastly treatment can be avoided by using an inexpensive device called the pulse oximeter, available over the counter in drugstores and online (I bought mine at Walmart). Normal blood oxygen readings range from 96 to 99%. If you're having symptoms such as coughing, and your oxygen level falls under 95%, call your doctor. If it goes under 90%, you must get medical help -- which at that point will mean supplementary oxygen, but not being put on a ventilator.


*
SWEDEN’S COVID DEATHS


~ Sweden has now overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to have the highest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world, throwing its decision to avoid a strict lockdown into further doubt.


According to figures collated by the Our World in Data website, Sweden had 6.08 deaths per million inhabitants per day on a rolling seven-day average between May 13 and May 20.
This is the highest in the world, above the UK, Belgium and the US, which have 5.57, 4.28 and 4.11 respectively.


However, Sweden has only had the highest death rate over the past week, with Belgium, Spain, Italy, the UK and France, still ahead over the entire course of the pandemic. ~


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/20/sweden-becomes-country-highest-coronavirus-death-rate-per-capita/?fbclid=IwAR0-sg3y0C7c4nIqj5d83B5BoZd34L51Lbwlf7R2IWzKuRVAMxpWGOziXV0


~ A number of countries in Europe and elsewhere have been successful at suppressing the coronavirus by pursuing very strict lockdowns, coupled with high rates of testing, isolation of cases, and contact tracing. These include, among others, Austria, Greece, New Zealand, Norway, and Portugal. These countries have achieved both substantially reduced numbers of cases and low death rates, significantly better outcomes than Sweden, which in the past 10 days has seen its mortality rate climb to the top of the table in Europe.

As of Friday, May 22nd, 3,925 people have died from Covid-19 in Sweden, a country with a population of 10 million. Neighbors Denmark, Finland and Norway - each with populations about half of Sweden’s - have recorded death tolls of 561, 306 and 235, respectively.

The number of confirmed cases in Sweden stood at 32,809 on May 22nd, between three and five times higher than neighboring countries. But, it’s likely the Swedish figure vastly undercounts the real number of infections given that the country’s testing rate is remarkably low compared to Western European countries and the U.S.

Conspicuously, in the past week, based on a rolling seven-day average, Sweden currently has the highest per capita mortality rate in Europe, having overtaken the U.K., Italy and Belgium. In recent weeks, as deaths have decreased significantly in most other European countries, Sweden’s numbers have remained flat. 


The death rate is notable, because Sweden has a relatively low population density, a disproportionate number of single households, and low rates of chronic conditions known to be risk factors for severe Covid-19 illness and death.


Moreover, a comparatively open economy hasn’t translated into economic benefits for Swedes. The Swedish economy is contracting at a similar rate to the rest of Europe. For a country as dependent on international trade and finance as Sweden, the recession is mostly a function of the European and global economic recession.

In many ways Sweden and much of the rest of the world are at present in a similar position vis-à-vis the coronavirus. Whether having opted for a stringent confinement policy, a lighter version of lockdown, or a more lenient approach like Sweden's, for the time being countries must rely on development of treatments for the critically ill, in addition to continued physical distancing, hygiene, face coverings, and contact tracing, until there is an effective vaccine. ~

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2020/05/23/swedens-gamble-on-coronavirus-has-it-paid-off/#5a6337632dcd


 
Oriana:

Part of Sweden’s problem is its immigrant population, which has trouble following the guidelines. “Social distancing” goes directly against their culture.

*
EXERCISE AS PREVENTION OF COVID (NATURAL KILLER CELLS)


~ A substantial proportion of COVID-19 patients admitted to intensive care die of pneumonia due to a cytokine storm, where the body attacks itself rather than fighting off the illness, said Jan Willem Cohen Tervaert, director of rheumatology in the Department of Medicine.


In a new paper published in Autoimmunity Reviews, Cohen Tervaert and his colleagues note that such storms, whether in patients with COVID-19 or rheumatic diseases, are caused by dysfunctional "natural killer" (NK) immune cells.


They say that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, might attack NK cells directly by binding to angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2), a receptor on the cells that COVID-19 researchers believe attracts and opens the door to the virus.


"This virus is so smart, it kills the cells that are supposed to kill it," Cohen Tervaert said.
Trials with rheumatoid treatments


Worldwide clinical trials are being carried out to test treatments typically used to treat cytokine storm in patients with juvenile arthritis and other rheumatic diseases.


These include intravenous immunoglobulin, a blood transfusion product prepared from the serum of thousands of healthy or previously infected patients, and rheumatic drugs such as tocilizumab and anakinra. Some researchers in China are even attempting to transplant healthy NK cells.


In a healthy person, natural killer cells are responsible for both turning on and turning off the immune response when a body is attacked by disease, including viruses and even cancer. Unlike other immune cells (T and B cells), natural killer cells don't need to be trained or primed to fight infection.


"They are not thinkers," Cohen Tervaert said. "They immediately do their work without being exposed previously to a virus. As soon as a virus affects the cell and the cell wall changes, NK cells can attack that cell."


After the NK cells kill the virus-infected cells, the T and B immune cells come along and produce cytokines, making the immune reaction stronger and stronger. 


"But at a certain time the immune reaction has to end," he said. "Natural killer cells play an important role in finishing that huge attack.


"If they don't work, the cytokine storm goes on and on, and the patient will die."


Exercise is prevention


For those who have not been infected with the virus, Cohen Tervaert recommends regular mild to moderate exercise to boost their NK cells. His own daily routine includes step climbing, walking and weightlifting. 


"If you sit the whole day in your room because you have to be isolated, your NK cell activity goes down," he said. "That's the big warning about the isolation of elderly people who are not allowed to go outside of their rooms. Over time they are more and more at risk to die from COVID-19." ~


https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-flag-similarities-covid-deaths-severe.html


*
ending on beauty:



the feeling of your first
kiss on my lips, it went on
for hours, first by the tree,
then by the side of the my car,
never knew a kiss could last so long

~ Sam Hamod, remains








Saturday, May 23, 2020

THE PROMISE OF OLD VACCINES AND PLACENTAL CELLS; OUR COLD CIVIL WAR; JOSEPH CONRAD’S SEARCH FOR A DEEPER MORAL ORDER; THE “PARTY GIRLS” OF THE VERY RICH

Saguaro in bloom; Lana Dejong

*
WHEN DEATH COMES


When death comes 


like the hungry bear in autumn; 

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; 


when death comes 
like the measle-pox;

when death comes 


like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 


what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything 


as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 

and I look upon time as no more than an idea, 

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 


as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, 


tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 


precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life 

I was a bride married to amazement. 

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


~  Mary Oliver


Poets certainly write more about mortality than anything else. If they write about love, it's typically lost love. Most poems are lamentations. But now and then we find a poem of celebration, and it could be argued that Oliver's poem is a poem of celebration rather than lamentation. Lines such as "I think of each life as a flower" are frankly amazing in our dark times when we hear arguments to the effect that seniors ought to die for the sake of the economy. Oliver sees the world and everything in it as  precious. In a line that could have been written by Whitman, Oliver says "I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

Such poems are written usually many years before the speaker feels death breathing upon her shoulder. In our last days, if not sooner, we are not likely to be clear-minded and celebratory. If we want a more realistic account of how a poet might approach the theme of "when death comes," there is a short poem that seems convincing to me: 

PSALM TO BE READ WITH CLOSED EYES

Ignorance will carry me through the last days,
the blistering cities, over briny rivers
swarming with jellyfish, as once my father
carried me from the car up the tacked carpet
to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.

~ Dennis Nurkse


*
Mary:

Oliver's poem is indeed a celebration of the value of each individual life, singular, each name its own "comfortable music in the mouth.” That music that of course, like all music, tends "toward silence." Death is not denied its portion, but gentled..there is no terror in naming it a "cottage of darkness." I am also engaged by her curiosity...In her last year my mother said to me "I think this is my last spring.” When I asked her how she felt about that, she said, "A little curious." So much better to meet death with curiosity rather than fear!

I think my favorite line is "I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement." What could be more glorious?? In that amazement lies all the richness and wonder of the world..a gift so full and complete nothing is left wanting...all that is, is enough, and more than enough, abundance and completion without scarcity or need for more. And yes, that kind of abundance and inclusiveness is very like Whitman.


*
~ “And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life, and for time's old memories that are good and sweet; and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still.” ~ Max Ehrmann


Oriana:

"Teach me still to be thankful for life" —let's hope that no matter all the disappointments and shattered dreams, we won't end bitter, but still grateful for all that life has given us.

*
Let’s lighten up with “directional sound locators for detecting enemy aircraft, 1917”



*
JOSEPH CONRAD: THE ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH IS OUR IGNORANCE

 
~ “[After The Nigger of the Narcissus] came the breakthrough — a startlingly original narrative voice that not only severed Conrad’s fiction from realism but questioned the idea of a consensual “reality.” In January, 1898, the month after “The Nigger” was published, Conrad wrote the story “Youth,” introducing the forty-two-year-old merchant seaman Charles Marlow, who recalls his maiden voyage to Eastern seas. Defined by his creator as “a mere device . . . a whispering ‘daemon,’ ” Marlow is more specifically a vehicle for exploring the perspectival nature of human affairs—the idea that, for example, the Indian Ocean has no stable essence or identity beyond the excitement it inspires in one excitable twenty-year-old sailor. Recalling the Judea, the bark on which he served as second mate, Marlow says that, to him, it was not “an old rattle-trap” but “the endeavor, the test, the trial of life.” Youth is what Marlow saw with and what he saw. Places tell us about the people who visit and inhabit them.

Marlow doesn’t celebrate the role played by passion or prejudice in our descriptions of the world; it’s just something he acknowledges. In Conrad’s next Marlow story, “Heart of Darkness” (1899), set in an unnamed colony whose rulers talk exclusively in propagandist falsehoods, Marlow is the one person willing to call a rattletrap a rattletrap. Coming upon a group of natives labelled “enemies,” he identifies men who were “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” But bafflement is futile. The world has been rewritten in accordance with the white man’s vocabulary. What he says goes.


Conrad’s theme is familiar from countless earlier writers, notably Flaubert, who in “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education” measured the gulf between fact and fantasy. But, where Flaubert adopted an air of superhuman detachment, Conrad insures that Marlow’s position is itself relativized. Though clearly Conrad’s alter ego and even mouthpiece, Marlow is not the narrator of “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” but a yarn-spinner described by a member of his audience. Everything he says comes pinched between inverted commas.

The uncertainties are multiplied in “Lord Jim” (1900), Conrad’s first full-length novel using this method. It concerns the spiritual odyssey of a young “water clerk,” drawn to the sea by “light holiday literature,” who abandons a sinking passenger ship called the Patna. The story, mostly delivered as a dinner-table anecdote, has been cobbled together from Marlow’s own “impression” of Jim—at the Patna inquiry and during the warm friendship that followed—and from the reminiscences of various bit players, including the dying mercenary “Gentleman Brown” and “an elderly French lieutenant whom I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort of cafe.” But the witnesses, far from helping him to “get at the truth of anything,” only reinforce Marlow’s sense that “there are as many ship-wrecks as there are men”—logic that holds not just for “belief” and “thought” and “conviction” but also for “the visual aspect of material things.”

What saves Conrad’s work from coldness and nihilism is his embrace of an alternative ideal. If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless. He doesn’t reject what Marlow calls “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization” in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of “something,” “some saving truth,” “some exorcism against the ghost of doubt”—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn’t call itself “theory” or “wisdom”—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with “impressions” or “sensations” the nearest you get to solid proof. Marlow may be just another partial observer, another myopic pair of eyes, but he knows what he is, so we trust his sincerity about the “glamour” he found in the East, or the depth of his engagement with Jim’s fate.

Conrad never denied that his writing was autobiographical, but he used the word in a specific connection. “Youth” was “exact autobiography,” in his phrase, only insofar as the experiences it depicted had been filtered through his “temperament,” or “the medium of my own emotions”—and that went for the “outward coloring,” too. When he said that his life in the wide world could “be found” in his books, he was promising only an emotional record.


What he really learned as a sailor was not something empirical—an assembly of “places and events”—but the vindication of a perspective he had developed in childhood, an impartial, unillusioned view of the world as a place of mystery and contingency, horror and splendor, where, as he put it in a letter to the London Times, the only indisputable truth is “our ignorance.” Writing replaced seafaring as his means of confronting this state of affairs.

The most Conradian novelist in recent American literature was Saul Bellow. In his Nobel Prize lecture, in 1976, Bellow recalled that as a “contrary” undergraduate, at the University of Chicago, he enrolled in a class on Money and Banking and then spent his time reading the novels of Joseph Conrad. (Thomas Pynchon, studying at Cornell in the fifties, was contrary in his own way: he skipped a class on some of Conrad’s stories in order to read the whole of Conrad.) Bellow said he had “never had reason to regret this”—and why would he? All those decades later, he was quoting Conrad in a Nobel speech, teaching Conrad as a Chicago professor, borrowing from Conrad in his novels.

It’s only a little reductive to say that Bellow spent the first half of his career describing himself and the second half describing his friends. Starting in 1975, with “Humboldt’s Gift,” he wrote a series of Conrad-like novels and stories about people he had known, as he had known them. In “The Bellarosa Connection,” he went all the way, employing a frame narrator (“I got it in episodes, like a Hollywood serial”). But Bellow borrowed more than a narrative method. No reader of his late work can fail to hear a similar abrupt oracular tone in the opening of “The Shadow-Line.” (“Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No.”) . . . The narrator of “Humboldt’s Gift” shares Marlow’s first name and sounds like him, too, when he describes himself “groping, thrillingly and desperately, for sense.” ~

(New Yorker, 2-11-2018)


Anchor-shaped monument to Conrad in Gdynia, a seaport in Poland

Oriana:

Conrad is known for a complexity of his writing. Few things are as they appear. Polite lies may be necessary for the smooth functioning of “polite society,” but there is little doubt that Conrad is on the side of the “deeper order of things.” The ending of Heart of Darkness is indelible: “He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “’The horror! The horror!’” But let’s not forget what happens later. Marlow, when asked by Kurtz’s fiancée about his last words, forces himself to say, “He died — with your name on his lips.” But we can never forget Kurtz’s gasped death cry, made all the more stark by Marlow’s knowledge that Kurtz’s “intended” would rather cling to romantic fiction.

True, Marlow is an unreliable narrator, and Kurtz’s last words could be interpreted in many ways. After all, the dying man is delirious, hallucinating rather confessing. Yet whatever image fills his last moment of consciousness, this is as close as we get to some essential event that broke down his initial idealism and “sacred” beliefs. Was it his participation in some “unspeakable rites”? Put in his place and time, would you and I also succumb to the power of darkness? Conrad is too subtle to provide an answer. He leaves us with . . . darkness.

And yet Conrad is regarded not as a moral relativist, but as a writer profoundly concerned with ethics and loyalty to something higher than polite fictions. He is a Stoic, and he certainly admired mental strength and endurance — but Stoicism is a label of convenience that implies too much formula. Conrad is a seeker. He rejects utilitarian or “patriotic” lies, but, to his great credit, he also rejects idealistic revolutionary slogans as another set of lies. He gropes for a truth that transcends the misleading human simplifications, “an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words.”

His acceptance of complexity and ambiguity, and ultimately of mystery we can only sense but not penetrate since words would only falsify it —“This is the price one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought” — was not something that pleased those readers who wanted only exciting adventure stories. Nothing upset Conrad so much as being reduced to an adventure writer. He was trying to demolish illusions, to get as close as possible to the deep truth he knew to be beyond words. 

 
*
“Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.” ~ Philip Roth, The Dying Animal


Oriana:


A great piece of advice. The birth of my growing up was my decision not to be depressed — to stop falling apart (remember, no one ever lacked a reason for suicide), and instead practice being strong. I told this story many times, and don’t mean to rehearse the details again and again. Conrad survived a youthful suicide attempt; I survived chronic depression, which is a kind of suicide. To grow up means to be strong — to keep on sailing through rough waters rather than escape into depression. Joseph Conrad would approve.





*

“... at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.” ~ Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”    
 

*
OUR COLD CIVIL WAR


~ There are cold and hot wars. There are civil, international and global wars. 


What would a cold civil war look like? 


I'd say we’re in one now. This is what a cold civil war looks like. 


In wars, one side is often the aggressor though usually both sides deny that they're the aggressor. Though we think of Germany as the WWII aggressor, just before committing suicide, Hitler said he was only trying to protect Germany from the Judeo-Bolshevik threat. 


In our cold civil war, who is the aggressor? MAGA and KAG (The resistance that was trying to “Keep America Great”) both accuse each other of being the aggressor. I'm with KAG of course so I would say MAGA's the aggressor. And likewise the people who side with MAGA I talk to say that they're just trying to protect the US from the Meltingpot-Bolshevik threat. 


I wish Hilary’s campaign had embraced the slogan, Keep America Great. Perhaps it didn’t because Democratic voters were hoping for change. 


And what kind of change? A restoration of the traditions we grew up with and not just among liberals, but was the established national cultural standard piped into every home from the 60's to today. 


The first big movie, Birth of a Nation was a racist vilification of blacks. Woodrow Willson praised it and played it in the white house. Since then, of the thousands of movies and TV shows made, they don't make any for national syndication that are anywhere near as racist. Our media has an American bias by the KAG, not the MAGA definition of American. We are as meltingpot as the media depicts us. The confederates lost. The union won.


Obviously, we want to keep whatever's great about the US and improve on what isn't. Political slogans get dumbed down so far that they make us stupid. 


Take Obama's “change.” Again we want to change what's not working and keep what is. Only coke addicts want everything to change. MAGA, KAG and “Change,” are productively mobilizing but counter-productive for wisdom to know the difference between what to change, what to make and what to keep for greatness to continue to grow. 


To get beyond tribalism, look to history to determine which side is the aggressor. I know MAGA supporters who insist that the Democrats have changed most over the past 50 years.
I don't think so. Kennedy would identify with Biden. Even W and Romney don't identify with Trump. ~ Jeremy Sherman


Oriana:


The hostility between the two sides certainly feels like a “cold civil war.” To call it merely a “culture war” dilutes the feeling of deep hostility between the two sides, and ignores the parading of assault weapons by the MAGA extremists. The urban/rural divide was never as great as now, or the educated/uneducated divide, or the the secularists versus the right-wing Christians (these categories all largely overlap). The country has become the Divided States of America. 


What makes it all the more painful for me is remembering that the Soviet Union had no plans to attack America militarily. “We will destroy you from inside,” the Russian leaders threatened with a shrewd smile. Putin is of course enthusiastic about this far-from-secret policy. China probably approves. The world watches the crazy circus. Some would call it a train wreck. It may take the younger generations to achieve the kind of unity on the question of basic values that enables a nation to work toward a better future. 


The very word “America” used to stand for an ideal. And now, instead, this “cold civil war.” 


When I came here, one of my questions was, “What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats?” Nobody thought it was a great difference. Nobody spoke about the Red states versus the Blue states. Cry, Beloved Country.


Mary:

Our cold civil war, the deep divisions in the US today is both frightening and heartbreaking. The hostility, the neo nazis parading with their assault rifles and threatening to assassinate governors can't simply be dismissed as ridiculous...at one point Hitler was seen as ridiculous. The stupid and the asinine can be as destructive as the fiendishly clever, especially when playing to the fears and anger of people who feel threatened in their basic assumptions. That those basic assumptions were those of privilege and exceptionalism can only make the mix more toxic, the violence more probable.

What I find particularly chilling is the cognitive distance between the opponents in this great divide. Talk is almost impossible, it is as though we no longer share the same language, are seeing and reacting to the same world. The campaign to obfuscate and deny, to cast doubt on any facts by continuously calling anything inconvenient "fake news" and offering "alternate facts" has become so common and so entrenched it is as though truth has become so elusive and slippery no one can be sure of it...if everyone can have their own truth to buttress their own opinions there can be no dialogue, no conversation, no cooperation. The propaganda of the powerful replaces truth and even the effort to find it. All that is left is to acquiesce and obey, or rebel and be eliminated. And yes, it is that bad. So bad we actually look to the tragedy of this pandemic as a weapon in this civil war — one they are doing their best to spin, whatever waffling of numbers and denials that requires.

 

Edward Hopper: Approaching a City, 1946

*
“There was no point trying to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and that this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and totally subordinate to tactics and psychology.” ~ Joseph Goebbels on Propaganda


 
*
AS LONG AS A DICTATOR LIVES, HE IS IMMORTAL


5 March 1953:


“'Stalin is dead!' she shouted now, from my doorway. I went cold all over and pulled her into the room. As long as a dictator lives he is immortal. I decided my colleague must finally have taken leave of her senses: for such words you could easily be accused of plotting to kill the Leader and be packed off to rot in a camp to the end of your days...


I switched on the radio and was overcome by a joy such as I had never known before in the whole of my life. It was true: the Immortal One was dead. I now rejoiced as I went on packing my wretched rags and tatters, and for the first time in many years I looked at the world with new eyes.”


~ Nadezhda Mandelstam in "Hope Abandoned" (trans. Max Hayward)



Stalin and Lenin in the Mausoleum; Stalin's mummy was later removed.


*
SECRETS OF THE CREATIVE MIND


~ Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in standard educational settings. Famously, three Silicon Valley creative geniuses have been college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs—for many, the archetype of the creative person—popularized the motto “Think different.” Because their thinking is different, my subjects often express the idea that standard ways of learning and teaching are not always helpful and may even be distracting, and that they prefer to learn on their own. Many of my subjects taught themselves to read before even starting school, and many have read widely throughout their lives.

Many creative people are polymaths, as historic geniuses including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were. George Lucas was awarded not only the National Medal of Arts in 2012 but also the National Medal of Technology in 2004. Lucas’s interests include anthropology, history, sociology, neuroscience, digital technology, architecture, and interior design.

Creative people tend to be very persistent, even when confronted with skepticism or rejection. Asked what it takes to be a successful scientist, one replied: Perseverance … In order to have that freedom to find things out, you have to have perseverance …

They trust their thinking. In A Beautiful Mind, her biography of the mathematician John Nash, Sylvia Nasar describes a visit Nash received from a fellow mathematician while institutionalized at McLean Hospital. “How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical truth,” the colleague asked, “believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” To which Nash replied: “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both. ~

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/secrets-of-the-creative-brain?utm_source=pocket-newtab



*

THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME
 
~ Rich people are ridiculous, and they know it.

 
In the VIP party circuit, clubs provide a stage for the jet-set to display their wealth with bottle service. The markup on a bottle of champagne was going for over 1,000 percent in the Meatpacking District prior to the pandemic. Bottles come in jumbo sizes with Biblical names like jeroboam (4.5 L) and methuselah (6 L), the equivalent of eight regular bottles, a Cristal of which was priced at $40,000 at Provocateur in New York circa 2015.


But in interviews, outside of the club, when I interviewed people about their bar tabs, they were repulsed by such consumption, widely denouncing it as vulgar and “ridiculous.” Speaking in quiet cafes or in corporate boardrooms, clients who had spent thousands on nightclubbing downplayed the expense, and pointed to other clients known for spending more—like oligarchs, or Arabs.


“It’s people that have not earned their dime,” as one banker in New York told me. The clients I met wanted to be seen as hard working and deserving of their material success. If they worked so hard, didn’t they deserve to play hard on occasion?  So they reasoned with a pinch of unease.


Herein lies a fundamental tension of class privilege: economic elites are often uncomfortable with the fact of their wealth and the inequality it supports, while they also enjoy what it brings.


There are no women in the VIP party scene. But there are a lot of girls. 


To distinguish itself as a high-end place, a club needs a so-called “quality” crowd which comes down to two indicators: men with money and women with beauty. The goal is to have significantly more women than men at all times. To that end, clubs hire party promoters to recruit women with a very specific sort of rarified beauty: fashion models who are, thin, predominantly white, and typically young.


Promoters take pains to find fashion models, recruit them, and bring them to the clubs, usually enticing them with free meals and bottomless glasses of champagne, sometimes also free transportation and accommodations in jet-set destinations like Cannes and St. Barts. After authentic models, the next best thing is a “good civilian,” a woman who looks like she could be a model. She has the two most important bodily cues that signal high status: height and slenderness.


All women in possession of this “bodily capital” are ubiquitously called girls. There are no women in the VIP club, because “girl” is an altogether different social category from woman.

The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the late 19th century to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, the girl was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, and she was thought to engage in “frivolous” pursuits like urban leisure. By virtue of sitting with a promoter, wearing high heels, and being a part of the VIP club, any woman becomes a girl. Because in this rarefied world, there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.

Promoters who were men were far better positioned to capitalize on girls’ beauty than were women promoters, who struggled in the job. Of the seventeen clubs I regularly attended in New York, just one was owned by a woman. The world of VIP nightlife is run by men, for men, and fueled by girls.

Rich men love to hate models.


As valuable as models were to the scene, promoters and clients alike looked down on them as unserious women. By using their “bodily capital,” the main trait they needed to enter a VIP space in the first place, women entered into a dubious position that rendered their other qualities nearly invisible.


Clients liked being around party girls at night, but they were the last thing they wanted to see in daylight, since they imagined such women to be promiscuous and not fit for long-term relationships. Party girls were the pool of hook ups, but not the pool of future wives.


The “party girl” is a sexist and classist trope that penalizes women for accessing a world of wealth and power they have historically been excluded from. The term “party girl” holds deeply classist and sexist assumptions that a woman’s morality is compromised if she uses her beauty to access men’s worlds of power. And if she has fun doing it, heaven forbid!


It is actually really fun to be there. 


Now that I’ve described this sexist world in which “girls” are paraded in high-heels for men’s status contests, you might be wondering, why do women participate at all? For the most part, they like it. They found exciting the experiences of partying in exclusive destinations, meeting celebrities, and flying with the jet-set.


They also got the thrill of attention from rich and powerful men.  Through their looks, they could get close to what they and most other women are otherwise excluded from: economic power. In this exploitative arrangement, women are active participants, and seeking pleasure, too.


https://lithub.com/five-surprising-things-i-learned-from-partying-with-rich-people/?fbclid=IwAR2rUfRJQEX1jJcTUZUo09H8YIkatJjLb97Vw9MxMUMrO4yh9NUuFs4KG8o
 

Mary:

The rich are not only ridiculous, they are ethically repulsive. Perhaps a deep repugnance growing out of my own class background, I still can't find a reason to deny it. Looking at a magazine devoted to the wealthy and their philanthropies only strengthens my bias. There is nothing to admire here, nothing to emulate, and nothing to excuse. At a grand party in surroundings resplendent with excess, dressed and adorned in garments and jewels costing many times the annual income of most, they sign pledges to scatter some of their wealth to the rest of us, to "causes" and "charities" that make the world their beggars.

It is unfortunate so many admire the rich (and the more vulgar “famous”). It can only distract us from the real work of making a better world.

I suppose I am a secular as well as a religious apostate here, but there it is, as much a part of me as my bones and body. No apology.


*
THE BUDDHA: NO GOD, NO SELF, NO SOUL (redux)

 
A few nights ago I felt so much delight when I looked at the crescent moon that you’d think I’d never seen this curved luminosity before. And now, as if for the first time, I find myself pondering Buddhism’s “no god, no self, no soul” with astonished pleasure. It’s one thing to hold such beliefs in the modern era, in the age of science, with scientific viewpoint providing non-supernatural answers; it’s another to have said such things 500 years BCE, when the dominant worldview was totally supernaturalist.

To be sure, there have been Western thinkers such as Spinoza who asserted that the soul was mortal and inseparable from the body, dying when the body died, not going anywhere, but ceasing like a flame. But those thinkers (the “mortalist” philosophers) were rare and utterly exceptional. Sometimes their “blasphemous” thoughts were discovered in their secret journals found only after their death.

It’s been my impression that many people are more disturbed by the statement “there is no soul” (or rather, “there is no immortal soul”; no one denies the existence of thoughts and dreams and feelings, and whatever else we might include in the category of the mind) than by the statement “there is no god.” If we could live forever, who needs god? No one would miss him.
Many people are also disturbed by the statement, “There is no preconceived purpose to your life, no ‘special task’ that you and only you were born to fulfill. There is no “destiny.” You forge your own meaning. Or, if you prefer, you are your own creator and savior — constrained by the web of your complex circumstances, of course, but insofar as you gain awareness, more and more your own moment-to-moment creator and savior.

The Buddha was profoundly radical with his ruthless unmasking. He knew no neuroscience; all it took for him to come to his “no self, no soul” conclusion was clear, logical thinking. And that just takes my breath away. Five centuries BCE — WOW.

The norm is to be mired in wishful thinking and cognitive errors. The human brain apparently evolved to seek not truth, but survival. It’s a wonder that science emerged at all. But it’s not surprising that humanity has created thousands of deities and demons since the dawn of recorded time — out of fear, and wishing to gain some degree of control, however illusory, over natural phenomena.

In “The Belief Instinct,” a book that hugely influenced me to end any remnant “agnostic” fence-sitting, the cognitive psychologist Jesse Bering explains that it’s very difficult for us to imagine not being. Freud too decided that the unconscious thinks it’s immortal. I know a scientist who had a surgery and emerged disturbed by the “nothing” of anesthesia-produced lack of consciousness — even though even before surgery he was an avowed atheist with no belief in the afterlife (or so he said). In other instances, whenever I brought up the nothingness of anesthesia as a foretaste of “where we go” after death, the counterargument was that that was “only anesthesia and not death,” “drug-caused,” “not what it feels like after real death.” Yet already dreamless sleep is a foretaste of that nothing. We experience many natural occasions when consciousness is erased, but mostly we try not to notice. If consciousness is a process, an emergent phenomenon dependent on the right conditions, then obviously it can cease when those conditions no longer obtain.

It’s easy to imagine an indulgent wide smile blossoming on the Buddha’s face if he heard someone hold forth on what it “feels like” after death. Or maybe he’d experience a brief twinge of impatience before resuming the serene resignation to having to witness the parade of common cognitive errors. Yet everyone readily agrees that the self that exists in this moment is not the self of a moment ago, much less a year ago, and much, much less ten years ago. The self is not a thing; not a noun but a verb. It’s an ongoing process.

Thus there is no “thing” that leaves the body — no little ghost escaping through some real or imaginary orifice, carrying with it, intact, all memories, thoughts, wishes, regrets, the accumulated wisdom of experience, and other idiosyncratic aspects of the deceased individual. It doesn’t matter how intensely we may wish for precisely the kind of immortality where the whole personality is preserved (the personality we had at twenty? or at seventy? everyone knows the difference can be huge), and every tiniest memory, even if we happened to forget that particular incident. Milosz wanted even the insects to be restored just as they were in our lifetime — but at what point? In the summer of 1969? And if those insects are to be restored, then what about the bacteria? The viruses? The particles of soil? Of the very air, including pollution?

Or is it to be a perfected restoration, without the mosquitoes? And those we love without their quirky neuroses? Everyone perfect, straight-nosed?

(As an aside, during the process of dying people seem to go into their inner world, and it’s usually the time of their youth; I'm curious if that’s because early youth is typically the time of most vivid memories. My poor father, alas, who died of Parkinson’s, a macabre death, went back to wartime; at least my mother was spared that, going back to her hometown right after high school. I watched someone else go back to his first “real” job.)

To be sure, most of us would be happy enough with even a partial preservation, a self we had at any point during adulthood. Never mind the insects; just let my consciousness continue, my ability to observe, feel, think, remember — definitely to remember, because without a name, a soul/mind vanishes like a bird into fog, as during the end stage of Alzheimer’s. No, no, some would protest, the soul is still there and remembers everything, even the dress grandma wore on her birthday forty years ago. Some, and I once had a New Age friend who belonged to that school of thought, believe that the soul leaves a long time before an Alzheimer’s victim actually dies: “Only the robot is left on this plane — the body carrying on like a robot.”

Never mind what happens to the “soul” of someone slowly dying of Alzheimer’s. No point dealing with unreality, and the Buddha knew that. Five hundred years BCE, he shrugged off all questions about god and the afterlife. “No one saves us but ourselves,” he’d say, or something like it. Or: “It’s better to travel well than to arrive.” It seems he meant living in the now.


 
for an interesting discussion of Buddhism in the light of evolutionary psychology, you can go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJZTrVlSBTY&t=953s

*
THE CATHOLIC OBSESSION WITH SIN

"I would go [to confession] at LEAST once a week that last year I was Catholic. Lamentably, I was shackled down by the Church’s concept of sin, and what’s sickening to me is that I didn’t realize it till later because I’d grown so numb to that soul-crushing guilt. The Church made me think I was filthy and contemptible in nature and needed to be washed clean, when the dirt was, in fact, imaginary.”

This reminded me of the long list that Newton made of his sins, most of them imaginary. My lists were shorter, but I carefully memorized them since to omit a sin would be a grave sin in itself. In fact just to be on the safe side I'd make up a sin or two -- what if I committed this or that trespass without being aware of it? This could mean a longer time on my knees on the cold stone church floor, but better safe than sorry. My nun, an expert mental terrorist, reminded us that there is always the possibility of being run over by a truck -- "And then where would your soul go?" That's why it was necessary to go to confession often and to overconfess rather than underconfess.

Like the author of this article, I did not find any of this absurd or disgusting until I was thoroughly ripe for exit.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularspectrum/2016/05/confessions-of-a-former-nun-wannabe/?fbclid=IwAR0WpErC_Uq6uxLEjlT0NJ-TmFq4VKAJsT7SsV9UhVrn0_g4qLe7ry2KvEE



*


"We have one life, one shot at all the glorious things of life, and we walk about constricted, apologetic, afraid. We have so little time; we have so little space upon which to spread our love 
and our talents and our kindness. Run toward life fulsomely and freely." ~ Tennessee Williams  

 
*

BEING DAZZLED BY LIFE

~ The day before singer Lou Reed died, according to his wife composer/performance-artist Laurie Anderson, he was floating in his swimming pool at home, and said, “You know, I am just so susceptible to beauty.”


Anderson said of it: “I think of that every day. How to open yourself to the world. And really appreciate it. Because boy, this is it. This is all we have. Right here. So you better pay attention. After Lou died, I was not expecting that at all—this feeling of being dazzled by life.” ~



*

COVID SYMPTOMS CAN LAST A LONG TIME
 
~ “The symptoms were weird as hell,” Paul Garner says. They included loss of smell, heaviness, malaise, tight chest and racing heart. At one point Garner thought he was about to die. He tried to Google “fulminating myocarditis” but was too unwell to navigate the screen.


Garner refers to himself wryly as a member of the “Boris Johnson herd immunity group”. This is the cluster of patients who contracted Covid-19 in the 12 days before the UK finally locked down. He assumed his illness would swiftly pass. Instead it went on and on – a rollercoaster of ill health, extreme emotions and utter exhaustion, as he put it in a blog last week for the British Medical Journal.


There is growing evidence that the virus causes a far greater array of symptoms than was previously understood. And that its effects can be agonizingly prolonged: in Garner’s case for more than seven weeks. The professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine says his experience of Covid-19 featured a new and disturbing symptom every day, akin to an “advent calendar”.


He had a muggy head, upset stomach, tinnitus, pins and needles, breathlessness, dizziness and arthritis in the hands. Each time Garner thought he was getting better the illness roared back. It was a sort of virus snakes and ladders. “It’s deeply frustrating. A lot of people start doubting themselves,” he says. “Their partners wonder if there is something psychologically wrong with them.” 


Since his piece was published, Garner has received emails and tearful phone calls from grateful readers who thought they were going mad. “I’m a public health person,” he says. “The virus is certainly causing lots of immunological changes in the body, lots of strange pathology that we don’t yet understand. This is a novel disease. And an outrageous one. The textbooks haven’t been written.”

According to the latest research, about one in 20 Covid patients experience long-term on-off symptoms. It’s unclear whether long-term means two months, or three or longer. The best parallel is dengue fever, Garner suggests – a “ghastly” viral infection of the lymph nodes which he also contracted. “Dengue comes and goes. It’s like driving around with a handbrake on for six to nine months.”

Many Covid patients do not develop a fever and cough. Instead they get muscle ache, a sore throat and headache. The app has tracked 15 different types of symptoms, together with a distinct pattern of “waxing and waning”.

Meanwhile Covid “long-termers” have been comparing notes via a Slack support group. It has #60plus-days and #30plus-days chat groups. The dominant feeling is relief that others are in the same grim situation, and that their health problems are not imaginary. ~

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/weird-hell-professor-advent-calendar-covid-19-symptoms-paul-garner?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_News_Feed&fbclid=IwAR2MejzC8QI44Tw5l1Qh71Mt0Xu-yH9FxannVknUHms3DsWiR-YZJechrHA


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“Let me go on being naked. Let it hurt. But let me survive.” ~ Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980


Erik Desmazières: The wind blows where it wants, 1989

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COULD EXISTING VACCINES PROTECT US FROM COVID?

 
~ As the world waits for a coronavirus vaccine, tens of thousands of people could die. But some scientists believe a vaccine might already exist.

Surprising new research in a niche area of immunology suggests that certain live vaccines that have been around for decades could, possibly, protect against the coronavirus. The theory is that these vaccines could make people less likely to experience serious symptoms — or even any symptoms — if they catch it.

At more than 25 universities and clinical centers around the world, researchers have begun clinical trials, primarily in health care workers, to test whether a live tuberculosis vaccine that has been in use for 99 years called the bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or B.C.G., vaccine, could reduce the risks associated with the coronavirus.

Another small but esteemed group of scientists is raising money to test the potential protective effects of a 60-year-old live polio vaccine called O.P.V.

It’s counterintuitive to think that old vaccines created to fight very different pathogens could defend against the coronavirus. The idea is controversial in part because it challenges the dogma about how vaccines work.

But scientists’ understanding of an arm of immunology known as innate immunity has shifted in recent years. A growing body of research suggests that live vaccines, which are made from living but attenuated pathogens (as opposed to inactivated vaccines, which use dead pathogens) provide broad protection against infections in ways that no one anticipated.

“We can’t be certain as to what the outcome will be, but I suspect it’ll have an effect” on the coronavirus, said Jeffrey Cirillo, a microbiologist and immunologist at Texas A&M University who is leading one of the B.C.G. trials. “Question is, how big will it be?”

Scientists stress that these vaccines will not be a panacea. They might make symptoms milder, but they probably won’t eliminate them. And the protection, if it occurs, would most likely last only a few years.

Still, “these could be a first step,” said Dr. Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who is leading another one of the trials. “They can be the bridge until you have the time to develop a specific vaccine.”

The first evidence to suggest that live vaccines could be broadly protective trickled in nearly a century ago, but no one knew what to make of it. In 1927, soon after B.C.G. was rolled out, Carl Naslund of the Swedish Tuberculosis Society observed that children vaccinated with the live tuberculosis vaccine were three times less likely to die of any cause compared with kids who weren’t.

“One is tempted to explain this very low mortality among vaccinated children by the idea that B.C.G. vaccine provokes a nonspecific immunity,” he wrote in 1932.
Then, in clinical trials conducted in the 1940s and ’50s in the United States and Britain, researchers found that B.C.G. reduced nonaccidental deaths from causes other than tuberculosis by an average of 25 percent.

Also in the 1950s, Russian researchers, including Marina Voroshilova of the Academy of Medical Science in Moscow, noticed that people who had been given the live polio vaccine, compared with people who hadn’t, were far less likely to fall ill with the seasonal flu and other respiratory infections. She and other scientists undertook a clinical trial involving 320,000 Russians to more carefully test these mysterious effects.

They found that among individuals who had received the live polio vaccine, “the incidence of seasonal influenza was reduced by 75 percent,”
said Konstantin Chumakov, Voroshilova’s son, who is now an associate director for research in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.


Recent studies have produced similar findings. In a 2016 review of 68 papers commissioned by the World Health Organization, a team of researchers concluded that B.C.G., along with other live vaccines, “reduce overall mortality by more than would be expected through their effects on the diseases they prevent.”

The W.H.O. has long been skeptical about these “nonspecific effects,” in part because much of the research on them has involved observational studies that don’t establish cause and effect. But in a recent report incorporating newer results from some clinical trials, the organization described nonspecific vaccine effects as “plausible and common.”


Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a vaccinologist and emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the rubella vaccine but has no involvement in the current research, agreed. “Vaccines can affect the immune system beyond the response to the specific pathogen,” he said.


Peter Aaby, a Danish anthropologist who has spent 40 years studying the nonspecific effects of vaccines in Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa, and whose findings have been criticized as implausible, is hopeful that these trials will be a tipping point for research in the field. “It’s kind of a golden moment in terms of actually having this taken seriously,” he said.


The possibility that vaccines could have nonspecific effects is brow-furrowing in part because scientists have long believed that vaccines work by stimulating the body’s highly specific adaptive immune system.


After receiving a vaccine against, say, polio, a person’s body creates an army of polio-specific antibodies that recognize and attack the virus before it has a chance to take hold. Antibodies against polio can’t fight off infections caused by other pathogens, though — so, based on this framework, polio vaccines should not be able to reduce the risk associated with other viruses, such as the coronavirus.


But over the past decade, immunologists have discovered that live vaccines also stimulate the innate immune system, which is less specific but much faster. They have found that the innate immune system can be trained by live vaccines to better fight off various kinds of pathogens.


For instance, in a 2018 study, Dr. Netea and his colleagues vaccinated volunteers with either B.C.G. or a placebo and then infected them all with a harmless version of the yellow fever virus. Those who had been given B.C.G. were better able to fight off yellow fever.


Research by Dr. Netea and others shows that live vaccines train the body’s immune system by initiating changes in some stem cells. Among other things, the vaccines initiate the creation of tiny marks that help cells turn on genes involved in immune protection against multiple pathogens.


This area of innate immunity “is one of the hottest areas in fundamental immunology today,” said Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-founder of the Global Virus Network, a coalition of virologists from more than 30 countries. In the 1980s, Dr. Gallo helped to identify H.I.V. as the cause of AIDS.


Dr. Gallo is leading the charge to test the O.P.V. live polio vaccine as a treatment for coronavirus. He and his colleagues hope to start a clinical trial on health care workers in New York City and Maryland within six weeks.


O.P.V. is routinely used in 143 countries, but no longer in the United States. An inactivated polio vaccine was reintroduced here in 1997, in part because one out of every 2.7 million people who receive the live vaccine can actually develop polio from it.


But O.P.V. does not pose this risk to Americans who have received a polio vaccine in the past. “We believe this is very, very, very safe,” Dr. Gallo said. It’s also inexpensive at 12 cents a dose, and is administered orally, so it doesn’t require needles.


Some scientists have raised concerns over whether these vaccines could increase the risk for “cytokine storms” — deadly inflammatory reactions that have been observed in some people weeks after they have been infected with the coronavirus. Dr. Netea and others said that they were taking these concerns seriously but did not anticipate problems. For one thing, the vaccines will be given only to healthy people — not to people who are already infected.


Also, B.C.G. may actually be able to ramp up the body’s initial immune response in ways that reduce the amount of virus in the body, such that an inflammatory response never occurs. It may “lead to less infection to start with,” said Dr. Moshe Arditi, the director of the Infectious and Immunological Diseases Research Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who is leading one of the trial arms.


The science on this is still early days. Several pre-prints — scientific papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed — published over the past few months support the idea that B.C.G. could protect against the coronavirus. They have reported, for instance, that death rates are lower in countries that routinely vaccinate children with B.C.G. But these studies can be fraught with bias and difficult to interpret; it’s impossible to know whether the vaccinations, or something else, provided the protection.


Such studies are “at the very bottom of the evidence hierarchy,” said Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, who is raising funds for a Danish B.C.G trial. She added that the protective effects of a dose of B.C.G given to adults decades ago, when they were infants, may well differ from the protective effects the vaccine could provide when given to adults during an outbreak.


“In the end,” said Dr. Netea, “only the clinical trials will give the answer.”


Thankfully, that answer will come very soon. Initial results from the trials that are underway may be available within a few months. If these researchers are right, these old vaccines could buy us time — and save thousands of lives — while we work to develop a new one.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-vaccine-innate-immunity.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article


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PLACENTAL CELLS MIGHT HELP COVID PATIENTS
 
~ Last month, Pluristem began testing its PLX cells on patients with COVID-19 in hopes of reducing the effects of the virus-induced pneumonia or pneumonitis and leading to a better prognosis.

Eighteen Patients were treated under a compassionate use program in Israel and the FDA single Patient Expanded Access Program. They were all in intensive care units, on invasive mechanical ventilation and suffered from Acute Respiratory Syndrome at the time of treatment.

So far, eight of the patients have completed a 28-day follow up period.

The survival rate of the eight patients is 87.5%.

In contrast, nearly 90% of coronavirus patients who required mechanical ventilation in New York's largest health system, Northwell Health, died, according to a report by The Journal of the American Medical Association.

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PLacental eXpanded (PLX) cells are placenta-derived, mesenchymal-like adherent stromal cells that are designed to be administered to patients without the need for tissue or genetic matching. These cells release soluble biomolecules, such as cytokines, chemokines and growth factors, which act in a paracrine or endocrine manner to facilitate healing of damaged tissue by stimulating the body’s own regenerative mechanisms. ~

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israels-pluristem-75-percent-of-treated-covid-19-patients-off-ventilators-628213


Oriana:

The one American patient who received the treatment was Broadway designer Edward Pierce.


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ending on beauty:


My generation was lost.


Cities too. And nations. 

But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window, 

a swallow.

~ Czeslaw Milosz