photo: Zac Hanscom*
THE LANDSCAPE INSIDE ME
IS NOT THE LANDSCAPE AROUND ME
A road runs through my childhood,
with willows.
and a ditch on each side
crowded with tall nettles
and luxuriant horsetail.
Two white butterflies
flit over the nettles.
Along that road
stands a wooden cross.
Hung across the beams,
a crown of wildflowers
sways in the summer wind.
Silvering, the ghosts of flowers
tap lightly on the weathered wood,
as if knocking, asking
to be let in.
Now I speed on white freeways,
sky-level interchanges.
Tell me, am I still
on the road to Damascus.
~ Oriana
*
Mary:
It is very haunting in itself and also about a haunting, of being haunted by an inner landscape from the past (childhood) that is disjunct from the outer landscape one currently inhabits. The differences between the two landscapes are extreme. The inner landscape speaks of a more rustic, natural, unpolished, mythic sort of place---the weeds in the ditches, the country road, the roadside shrine, the white butterflies and flowers, ghostly in both color and in that they exist as ghostly memories, not part of the present inhabited world. The final lines take us abruptly into the outside, current world of freeways, high skyway interchanges, demanding both speed and separation from the actual ground, which is all sealed and paved over.
The final question takes the whole to another level...asking if this speaker, haunted and inhabited by a landscape foreign to her surroundings and the present time, is not on the way to some great revelation, some experience of reversal or conversion that will be life changing. This question leaves many others in its wake...is the speaker waiting for this experience still, or having had it, now continuing the journey in order to fulfill its demands? Was this something she sought or wished to avoid...this sudden overwhelming conversion experience? Is she a pilgrim or prisoner? Caught by the past or the present? Does she want to move forward or back, or is she pulled equally in both directions?
Very engaging and thought provoking, and part of what we all experience in some measure, that split between the inner and outer worlds, the present haunted by the past, the mix of longing and regret.
Oriana:
The cross also symbolizes martyrdom, or at least great suffering — and it so happens that the last couple of days I was pondering my accumulated suffering, wondering all over again (strange as that may seem after so many years) if I would have left Poland if I had any inkling of that suffering, and leaned to No. But of course by now all the arguments for and against have been rehearsed endless times, and I don’t mean just rational arguments that can be put into words. The gist is basically emotional, the self-inflicted wound is emotional — and that’s simply the price. But then in life there is a price for everything.
And yes, something great and near-miraculous was supposed to happen — but don’t we all have that outrageous expectation? I suspect that in great part it is an imprint of Catholicism, with its legends of the saints, be it St. Paul or the apocryphal St. Christopher carrying the Christ child on his shoulders across the stream, the child growing heavier and heavier with the weight of all the sins of the world. Rilke has a brilliant poem about this — how we keep waiting for the one great thing, which in fact has already happened — not one but a number of “great things.” It’s an interesting discovery, both humbling and consoling.
Also, in my case the easy answer is that the “great thing” happened to me when I was 17 and came by myself to America. But that didn’t end that crazy hunger for something extraordinary, some instant of a great light. But life is now more like that crown of dried flowers still knocking against the weather-beaten wood — but gently, calmly. And I’m grateful.
(A quick clarification: I was essentially a city child. But my summers were a different world: the Polish countryside. Most of my “Polish poems” contain the images of those half-mythic summers.)
*
WHAT JOHN LE CARRÉ UNDERSTOOD ABOUT ENGLAND
~ In A Perfect Spy, John Le Carré writes of America, “No country was ever easier to spy on … no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them.” Presenting the country as the opposite of England, rather than its logical extension as is often assumed, he continued: “They loved their prosperity too obviously, were too flexible and mobile, too little the slaves of place, origin and class.” Driving through Ohio, welcomed into homes and college campuses to report on American decline and rebirth, I remember thinking of these lines.
Or listen to him on political fanaticism in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, writing of Karla, the Russian spy chief: “Karla is not fireproof, because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.” It is an insight that has stuck with me since.
Yet the most penetrating observations in his espionage novels were not about foreign adversaries or global conflict—they were about decaying old England. “They are the body corporate I once believed was greater than the sum of its parts,” he wrote of the ruling class in A Perfect Spy. “In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet airplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British institution.” It is impossible not to read those lines and think of Brexit and the disastrous response to COVID-19.
So who are the ruling class? “The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth,” le Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley, says in The Secret Pilgrim. “Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skillfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool.” Who today can look at the former premier David Cameron, or current Prime Minister Boris Johnson—both the products of Eton and Oxford—and not smile reading these lines?
To watch Johnson in particular—a cosmopolitan with a bohemian multicultural background, born in New York, named after a Russian, great-grandson to an assassinated Turk, who nevertheless presents himself as the most English person of all—is to see the shadow of Jerry Westerby, the tragic hero in The Honorable Schoolboy, another outsider inside the upper class, like le Carré himself. Westerby’s speech is full of “good old boys” and the like. But, as le Carré writes, there is a “hardness buried in the lavishness.” And, as with all le Carré’s characters, a romanticism underneath the world-weary cynicism.
Le Carré also presents a bygone Englishness that many of us wish still existed. How, for example, does Smiley react to his ultimate victory in Smiley’s People? “Did I?” He responds to the news that he has prevailed over his nemesis. “Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.” Oh, how Johnson must wish he could find a way to reenact that scene with Brexit, or the coronavirus. Did I win? Oh, yes, I suppose I did. England’s tragedy today is that it has allowed the part of the understated victor to slip from its grasp; now it must beat its chest in a way Smiley would loathe.
In fact, the reality is that the English upper class doesn’t just con its fellow countrymen, but the wider world as well. I’ve lost count of the number of times European diplomats and officials have told me of the brilliance of the old British civil service before Brexit. Even as the wool is pulled from their eyes, they still don’t see that they’ve been conned, that the British foreign office was never a Rolls-Royce, just richer and better dressed than it is today. Even now, a certain type of Englishman, eyebrow permanently raised, can prosper mightily abroad by presenting this same cultured cynicism and easy wit.
Smiley is the central hero of le Carré’s works, and like le Carré himself, the kind of hero a certain part of England loves: calm and pudgy and resolute and cultured, driven by inner passions that he must occasionally escape to the countryside to soothe lest they overwhelm him. “George doesn’t alter,” le Carré writes in A Legacy of Spies, his final Smiley novel. “He just gets his composure back.” He is a cynical romantic with a terrible domestic life who commits himself to England for reasons he is never quite sure of—a player of the great game, but wise to it. He is an outsider uncomfortable in any social class, but capable of moving through them all. To be English, after all, is to always feel a little bit out of place, even in England.
Smiley—and, by extension, le Carré—also embodies a different England. In A Legacy of Spies, Smiley looks back on his career and what it was all for. Was it for world peace, whatever that is? “Yes, yes of course.” But that’s not really the answer. “In the great name of capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again.” So was it all for England, Smiley wonders. Perhaps. He is a patriot, but a moderate one. And, anyway, he asks: “Whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere?”
This is le Carré the fierce anti-Brexiteer, whose politics were never far from the surface in his novels. “I am European,” Smiley says. “If I had a mission—if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”
In A Perfect Spy, le Carré is back grappling with the same question of human motivation. What is it that drives us to spy or fight or hope or kill? For England, or for class, or for Europe, or for America? Under all of it, he was also a kind of romantic, just one who is well hidden. I wonder if it’s for this reason that Smiley and his creator remain the heroes many of us Englishmen most want to be? But enough of that, or as Smiley himself said, closing le Carré’s final Smiley novel, “Forgive me, Peter. I am pontificating.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/12/john-le-carre-england-politics/617379/?utm_term=2020-12-14T20%3A18%3A54&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR36cMyqlnGOosLLSTifFiZ_qPoFxdfdKEtgkE8LAW048TeEKqWUQhpiyMQ
~ His particular ability, animating his Cold War novels, was to capture the psychology of an empire in decline, the British sense of a world that was suddenly and simultaneously decolonized, Soviet, and American, three centuries of dominance coming to an end in lonely mansions looking up at gray skies pouring with rain. As Connie Sachs, an Oxford don who has trained generations of spies, puts it to Smiley in drunken, postimperial melancholy, “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.”
It might have been easy to scoff at this in the light of the new millennium, when Britain appeared to have reinvented itself as effectively as New Labour, goaded on by the fulminations of Niall Ferguson and Martin Amis into a digital, consumerist cool and by new imperial adventures in the old staging grounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the events of recent years—Brexit, Trump, and, of course, the astonishing, ongoing unraveling precipitated by Covid-19—remind us that imperial decline may, in fact, be the norm of our times. In this world of shrunken horizons, where instead of one nationality or race hubristically attempting to rule the waves, the waves themselves rise inexorably over humankind, Le Carré’s fiction of decline manages to speak to us all. ~
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/john-le-carre-imperial-decline/
WHY WE CHOOSE THE PARTNERS WE DO
~ Have you ever thought there was an uncanny family resemblance between your friend and her partner? Or wondered for a fleeting moment whether the pair walking down the road were husband and wife, or brother and sister? You might not be imagining things. Animals of many species “learn” what a suitable mate looks like based on the appearance of their parents, and so, it seems, do humans.
Scientists have long known that species including birds, mammals and fish pick mates that look similar to their parents. This is known as positive sexual imprinting. For example, if a goat mother looks after a sheep baby, or a sheep mother looks after a goat baby, then those babies grow up to try to mate with the species of their foster mother, instead of their own.
It seems humans also “learn” from our parents in a similar way. When you ask people to judge the similarities between heterosexual couples and their parents from photos, a fascinating picture emerges. Women tend on average to pick partners whose faces look a bit like their fathers’, while men often choose partners who slightly resemble their mothers. Resemblance doesn’t stop at faces – you can also see subtle similarities on average between partner and parent height, hair color, eye color, ethnicity and even the degree of body hair.
But what’s really going on here? We tend to look like our parents, so how do we know that people aren’t just picking a partner who resembles themselves? We know that such self-resemblance influences partner choice. But a number of studies have suggested that this can’t be the whole story. One such study of adopted women found that they tended to choose husbands who looked like their adoptive fathers.
We also know that, in general, heterosexuals are more attracted to those who resemble their opposite-sex parent than their same-sex parent. What’s more, research has shown that it’s not merely appearance that matters: it’s also about your relationship with that parent. People who report more positive childhood relationships with a parent are more likely to be attracted to partners who resemble that parent.
This isn’t Freud’s Oedipus complex revisited. Freud believed that children have a suppressed desire for their parents. But this branch of research doesn’t in any way show that we secretly desire our parents, just that we simply tend to be attracted to people who resemble them to some extent.
If anything, we seem to find our immediate family members unattractive. For instance, people find the very idea of sexual relationships with their siblings deeply unappealing. This aversion seems to develop automatically through two distinct processes. One process turns off attraction to those that we spend a lot of time with during childhood. The other turns off attraction to any infants that our mother looks after a lot. Sexual aversion to siblings might be nature’s way of ensuring we don’t try to reproduce with someone who is too closely related to us and reproduction with close relatives is linked to an increased likelihood of genetic disorders in any resulting offspring. This aversion to close relatives is known as negative sexual imprinting. However, genetic sexual attraction can occur between siblings that have been separated and meet first as adults.
I found that the women who reported a better relationship with their parents after puberty were more likely to be attracted to partners with similar eye color to them. In contrast, if a woman was close to her parents earlier in life, she was actually less likely to prefer the eye color of her parents in a partner. In science, we always like to see replications with different samples, methodologies and research groups before we generalize findings too much. So far though, the intriguing pattern of this early study suggests that there may be complex developmental patterns underlying how we construct our idea of an ideal partner. Perhaps we are seeing the actions of both positive and negative sexual imprinting at work.But one question remains. If we’re finding preferences for parental resemblance across different populations, then what is the biological explanation for this behavior? It turns out that coupling up with a distant family member seems to be the best bet, biologically, to produce a large number of healthy children. One possibility is that if you are attracted to people who look like your parents, then chances are you may get a crush on distant relatives. This might give you better chances of more healthy children, and so this behavior persists.
Despite this research, if you were to tell me that your partner doesn’t look anything like your parents, then I wouldn’t be surprised. Parental resemblance probably isn’t at the top of anyone’s wish list. Like most people, you probably want a partner who is kind, intelligent and attractive. But if all else is equal, then that comfortable feeling of familiarity might be enough to get a relationship underway, or to maintain feelings of trust in a relationship. ~
https://theconversation.com/why-we-are-secretly-attracted-to-people-who-look-like-our-parents-54590
Oriana:
Note that we are talking about physical resemblance here, not resemblance in personality. When it comes to personality, one thing I’ve heard is “we all marry our mother” (who tends to be the primary parent). So yes, familiarity seems to operate — at least based on an anecdotal level.
But back to physical resemblance. In my own case, for whatever it’s worth, I found myself attracted to men who looked like my maternal cousins. I felt more at ease with them, and instantly felt a higher level of trust. The relationship felt in some ways like a continuation of an already familiar relationship.
A friend confided that she feels that way around men who look like her favorite uncle.
Whenever I feel an automatic sense of closeness with a person, I can usually trace it to physical similarity with someone I was fond of (or even had a crush on) early on.
Logically, we are on shaky ground here — a physical resemblance to someone dear to us does not guarantee that the potential partner will be similar in more significant ways. Be that as it may, I wouldn’t be surprised if some early imprinting did in fact take place. Many psychologists have affirmed that we seek the familiar.
RILKE: LIFE’S BESTOWAL OF RICHES
~ You might notice that in some ways the effects of our experiences are similar. You write of a constant sense of fullness, an almost overabundance of inner being, which from the outset counterbalances and compensates all deprivations and losses that might possibly come. In the course of my work this last long winter, I have experienced a truth more completely than ever before: life’s bestowal of riches already surpasses any subsequent impoverishment. What, then, remains to be feared? Only that we might forget this! But around and within us, how much it helps to remember! ~ Rilke, Letter to Lisa Heise, May 1922
Oriana:
I love this passage, so comforting as one grows older, closer to losing everything. We need to remember the riches that life has granted us — all that wealth of beauty and experience.
Our resentments and frustrations at not having been granted this or that are indeed petty when we remember life’s generosity — how much we’ve been given after all, the beauty and affection we’ve enjoyed day after day. Gloria Steinem said that her first thought after her breast cancer diagnosis was “I’ve had a fabulous life.”
I too was once given a serious diagnosis, and, to my amazement, instead of terror I experienced a great sense of gratitude. “Life has given me so much,” I realized — at a time when by all objective standards my life was at its lowest low. But that’s just when I remembered that I had known great love, had extraordinary parents, had been able to enjoy masterpieces of literature, art, and music. The beauty of nature was with me daily. At what could be also seen as my most miserable moment, I realized that I had nothing to complain about.
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LIFE’S CARESSES — TROTSKY ON “HAPPY CHILDHOOD”
“Childhood is looked upon as the happiest time of life. Is that always true? No, only a few have a happy childhood. The idealization of childhood originated in the old literature of the privileged. A secure, affluent, and unclouded childhood, spent in a home of inherited wealth and culture, a childhood of affection and play, brings back to one memories of a sunny meadow at the beginning of the road of life. The grandees of literature, or the plebeians who glorify the grandees, have canonized this purely aristocratic view of childhood. But the majority of the people, if they look back at all, see, on the contrary, a childhood of darkness, hunger, and dependence. Life strikes the weak – and who is weaker than a child?
My childhood was not one of hunger and cold. My family had already achieved a competence at the time of my birth. But it was the stern competence of people still rising from poverty and having no desire to stop half-way. Every muscle was strained, every thought set on work and savings. Such a domestic routine leaves but a modest place for the children. We knew no need, but neither did we know the generosities of life – its caresses.”
A quotation from Trotsky’s Autobiography – its opening paragraphs
Oriana:
I’m thrilled by the phrase “life’s caresses.” I feel infinitely grateful to my mother for flowers on the table. And for taking me to the High Tatra mountains in springtime, just to show me wild crocus blooming in the snow.
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HOW SHARPER THAN A SERPENTS’S TOOTH
~ At times, Trump’s railing-against-his-fate outbursts seem like a story straight out of William Shakespeare, part tragedy, part farce, full of sound and fury. Is Trump a modern-day Julius Caesar, forsaken by even some of his closest courtiers? (Et tu, Bill Barr?) Or a King Richard III who wars with the nobility until being toppled by Henry VII? Or King Lear, railing against those who do not love and appreciate him sufficiently? How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless electorate.
“This is classic Act V behavior,” said Jeffrey Wilson, a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard who published the book “Shakespeare and Trump” this year. “The forces are being picked off and the tyrant is holed up in his castle and he’s growing increasingly anxious and he feels insecure and he starts blustering about his legitimate sovereignty and he starts accusing the opposition of treason.
https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-final-days-rage-denial-161650930.html
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“It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.” ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe: Cow's Skull with Calico Roses
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THE WORLD’S OLDEST LANGUAGES
BASQUE
The Basque language, or Euskara as it is known by its speakers, is truly an amazing and one-of-a-kind language in Europe. It is widely agreed - and certainly true - that Basque is the only remaining Old European language, having survived on its own for centuries, while the others disappeared before the spread of Indo-European languages.
It is spoken today in Basque Country, by some 750,000 native speakers, and around 1,185,000 passive speakers. Basque Country is the home of the Basque people, and it is an area that straddles the border of Spain and France, centered around the Bay of Biscay. Basques and their identity are the last remnants of an ancient, Old Europe, and their independence is denied even today. Their own name for the region is Euskal Herria.
As a language, Basque shows no connections to its neighboring languages, all of which belong to the Romance family. An interesting theory links Basque with languages of the Caucasus mountains, such as Chechen and Georgian, which are also unique. Either way, Basque is definitely a language that carries immense importance, and the Basque people deserve their independence.
KARTVELLIAN LANGUAGES (GEORGIAN)
Native to the Southern Caucasus Mountains region, the Kartvelian languages are certainly amongst the oldest still in use. They consist of Georgian, Svan, Zan, Mingrelian, and Laz. They are one of the world’s primary language families, and are thoroughly unique in many aspects, surviving in this mountainous region for countless centuries.
The geographical isolation of the tribes that lived here, allowed for undisturbed development of unique societies that would later dominate the region. The Georgian language has its earliest written form dating to 430 AD. But the language itself is certainly much older. This language family is not related to any other in the world, and it has roughly 5.2 million speakers around the world. Its earliest reconstructed form is called Proto-Kartvelian, reaching far back in time and showing certain borrowings and influences on Proto-Indo-European, even if it predates it, telling us that it had contact with the Indo-European nomads.
TAMIL
Tamil is a part of the Dravidian languages, and is spoken by the Tamil people, who are native to the southernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. It is also one of the oldest surviving classical languages that are in use today. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu it is the official language, adding to the wealth of dialects and languages that are in use in India.
Tamil has no connection ‘genetically’ to the dominant Hindi language of India, which is Indo-European, and also, can’t be understood by Hindi people. It has around 75 million native speakers worldwide. It has a long tradition that survives to this day, and its earliest written form dates to 300 BC, making it over 2000 years old.
PALEO-SIBERIAN LANGUAGES
We cannot focus only on the languages whose age is determined by their earliest written form. One great example of this are the oldest languages of remote tribes of Siberia and the Far East of Russia. This is a truly enormous expanse, which means that many of these languages are isolates - an astonishing phenomenon that shows us the diversity of the wild Siberia.
Paleo-Siberian languages include: the Ket language, Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, Nivkh and Yukaghir. These in turn consist of many separate regional forms and dialects. It is certain that these languages predate by far the dominant languages of modern Siberia, like Russian, Tungusic, and Turkic languages.
Even though these simple nomadic tribes never developed a written system of their own, it should not be overlooked that their languages are very, very old, which allowed them to thrive and develop for centuries in the wild landscapes of the world’s remotest region - Siberia.
AINU
Another language without an early written form, but boasting anciency and absolute uniqueness - Ainu. It is the language of the Ainu people who are native to Northern Japan, and predate the modern Japanese people who settled the islands. Ainu is a language isolate, having no connections whatsoever to Japanese. Some small connections with the Paleo-Siberian languages exist.
Ainu people and their language are endangered today, and they show distinct genetic and cultural traits in comparison to the Japanese people. They show us a clear glimpse into the ancient world that predates the establishment of modern nations. And even though their language never had a written system of its own, its advanced age cannot be argued.
ARABIC
Arabic language belongs to the group of Semitic languages, and is certainly amongst the oldest still in use. Even though it encompasses many sub-groups and variants, it is unified in a standardized form of Classical Arabic - a lingua franca of the Arab world. Amongst the oldest written languages, some inscriptions date to 125 AD.
It is a great example of how a language of a powerful conquering nation can establish itself over a wide area and survive for centuries in its original form. With its spread, it influenced many modern languages all across the world, leaving loanwords everywhere it went.
ARAMAIC
Part of the Northwest Semitic group of the Afro-Asiatic languages, Aramaic is certainly amongst the oldest languages in the world. It boasts roughly 3,100 years of written history, placing it at the top of our list. It was originally the language of the Aramean tribe, which spread over the regions of Levant, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and already had established kingdoms around 1000 BC.
Even in the ancient times, it was used as a royal, prestigious language in some of the oldest courts of the world. Royal Inscriptions in Aramaic date to the 10th century BC, solidifying its position as one of the oldest languages still in use. It is also written in a highly unique Aramaic script, the earliest form of which was based off of Phoenician.
CHINESE
We all know that the Chinese history spans far back in time, and was always amongst the most advanced civilizations on Earth. The Chinese language is equally old, and is also amongst the most unique languages of the world. It is highly complex - both in the written and the spoken form - and its writing system can consist of up to 100,000 different symbols! It truly is one of a kind. The earliest written form of Chinese dates to 1250 BC, making Chinese one of the oldest living languages.
PERSIAN
Persian, also known as Farsi, is a widely used, and a very old Indo-European language, belonging to the Indo-Iranian subdivision. It boasts around 70 million native speakers around the world. It is attested in written form as early as 6th century BC, but its history is known to reach further than that. Old Persian was the language of the Achaemenid Empire, which lasted from 550 to 330 BC, and later in the Sasanian Empire as well. The oldest writing dates to the rule of Darius I - and are written in cuneiform.
IRISH GAELIC
Gaeilge is the Irish branch of the Goidelic languages, a part of the Celtic family of Indo-European languages. While not as old as some of the other languages on our list, Irish Gaelic is certainly amongst the oldest. The earliest writings in Irish date to 4th century AD, in the form of the linear Ogham scripts.
After centuries of brutal suppression in Ireland by the English occupiers, Irish is today once again accepted and is experiencing a revival. One of the largest surviving Celtic languages, it is a great insight into the history of the Irish people and Europe as well.
Oriana:
I am disappointed that Lithuanian and Latvian weren't mentioned as the oldest living Indo-European languages in Europe.
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“Death is a very liberating thought [...] One should try to write as if posthumously.” ~ Christopher Hitchens (died on December 16, 2011).
Oriana:
I think now meaning of “one should try to write as if posthumously” is to write without an ego. Another might be to try to imagine the world as it’s likely to be in the future — to form a vision of the future that’s neither naively optimistic nor too dark. Of these efforts, writing without an ego is actually easier, I think.
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SANTA CLAUS: “GOD WITH TRAINING WHEELS”
~ Santa Claus meets a profound human need to believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful human-like figure with superpowers who looks after us and has our best interests at heart. Both God and Santa may have magical powers, but they are sufficiently human for us to connect with. They are not “abstract” or “beyond our understanding.” We know they both have agendas and we’re encouraged to live our lives accordingly. And we know that God and Santa both control powerful consequences for us.
If you were thinking of starting up a new religion, Pascal Boyer (2001) has offered a blueprint for a successful God figure. It turns out you couldn't ask for a more effective candidate than Santa Claus. Santa checks off all the boxes in Boyer’s list of effective God qualities. Not surprisingly, it doesn't take much for kids to accept Santa Claus, believe in his power, and try to please him. In fact, it is easier for a child to believe in Santa Claus than to resist such belief. Similarly, it takes less effort for most adults to believe in God than to become atheists. This has nothing to do with the “truth” of such beliefs. It simply reflects the way supernatural beliefs map on to the cognitive architecture of our minds, and how widely and conspicuously supported such beliefs already are in our culture.
It doesn't hurt that Santa gets a lot of outside help. He’s a good “meme” (Blackmore, 1999). Society reinforces and enables Santa by making him a major part of popular culture. People talk about him, sing about him, and show him in popular movies and books. It's really a shame that we blow the whole Santa thing almost overnight for the kids. In doing that, we leave them with a huge hole in their psyches. They still have that abiding need for a magic, caring, all-powerful figure, and we are only too glad to replace Santa Claus with a more up-to-date version that even the adults can participate in.
Santa Claus is really God with training wheels. Once they've had practice believing in Old Saint Nick, kids don't require much shaping to accept another magic figure in the sky who has essentially the same abilities and wants the same thing from them. Pleasing Santa, pleasing God, what's the difference? The bottom line is, there is someone all-knowing and all-powerful who cares about you, and who watches over you.
In the case of God, who is geared to a more adult audience, the requirements are a little more sophisticated, and so are the consequences. We adults are in it for more than toys and candy canes. Our needs are bigger, although we don't hesitate to beg and bargain just like a child. Unlike Santa, who either comes through for you or doesn't, God is a lot more powerful. The way we've constructed him, God can actively punish. Just read the Old Testament. This is a being who doesn’t hesitate to let you know his displeasure in more devastating ways than withholding a Game Boy.
Some years ago I had an animated conversation with magician and social critic Penn Jillette, whose wife was expecting their first child at the time. Penn told me in no uncertain terms that he would not allow Santa Claus into their home. I believe the phrase “God with training wheels” emerged during that conversation. Penn hoped to immunize his kids against theism by keeping Santa at bay. The idea is certainly not without support. Belk (1987) analyzed similarities between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, including the role of miracles, gifts, prayer and omniscience, and concluded that Santa Claus is a secular version of Christ.
Speaking as an evolutionary psychologist, I asked Penn if he really believed he could insulate his children from latching onto a magical omniscient, omnipotent character by keeping Santa Claus out of his home? I told him I thought he was fighting a rear-guard action against some powerful evolutionary wiring that predisposed us to accept powerful controlling figures. It begins with our parents, and moves on to our grandparents, and “tribal elders” such as teachers and doctors. The progression is obvious in the way kids latch onto Santa Claus. But Santa is just an early choice; God is the ultimate version for most people. Could Penn really banish such a hardwired human pattern?
“It doesn't always work,” he pointed out. “Look at you and me. We didn't fall for it.”
What do kids believe? I wondered what we really knew about kids’ beliefs. Working with my student Stephanie Tytus, we interviewed kids ages 4 - 6 to learn what they believed about Santa Claus and God. The results were remarkably consistent and in some cases pretty amusing. In general, kids had a difficult time distinguishing between Santa and God. Often when they started talking about one, they ended up talking about the other. They knew both were human looking, had magical powers, and lived “up there” as many of them put it. Some of the youngest ones got confused and reported God living in the North Pole and Santa living in heaven. Interestingly, such confusion is not confined to children. [Footnote 1]
Kids believed neither God nor Santa were hemmed in by the laws of physics and could move freely through time and space, including being in two places at once. Kids saw the similar physical appearance of God and Santa (both are old white guys), and reported that they had similar agendas (they want us to be good). They knew it was useless to try to fool either character - the "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" syndrome. Many kids quoted the line “He sees you when you're sleeping/ He knows when you're awake,” but many weren’t sure whether it applied to God or Santa or both.
This article is not about being the Grinch. I love Christmastime and, unlike Penn Jillette, I enjoy the idea of sharing Santa Claus with kids. It's a joyous childhood fantasy. I don't think you're going to change Human Nature by boarding up the chimney and keeping Santa out of your house.
I don't remember the moment that I realized Santa Claus wasn't real. I can only imagine it wasn't a very pleasant experience. It was costly. It took away some of the innocence and joy that was part of my childhood. But it had to be done. Santa was replaced by an alternate understanding of Christmas morning that didn’t rely on a supernatural being. It was my parents giving me those gifts, not a magic guy in a red suit.In its own way, this was even richer. It was part of the real world, and it was filled with love. I couldn't have imagined how that richness felt while I still believed in Santa Claus. But I took a leap of faith and moved into a more adult understanding of the world. It paid off and I found other ways to fill the void. We don't need to base our safety and our place in the universe on supernatural beings. There is plenty here in the real world to make every day, not just Christmas morning, full of joy and wonder.
[Footnote 1: There is a widely recounted cross-cultural story of Santa/God confusion, although it has begun to take on the status of an urban myth (www.snopes.com; see also The Economist, 1993 and Hartford Courant, 1997). According to this tale, in the years immediately following World War II, at least one Japanese merchant, in a newfound attempt to embrace western culture, decorated its store window on the Ginza with a model of Santa Claus mounted on a crucifix.]
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/caveman-logic/202012/confusing-santa-claus-god
Hasidic family in Jerusalem
Oriana:
My parents took care to make sure I didn't believe me Santa, or ghosts and witches. I think it was a successful inoculation against the supernatural. Even though for some years I did go to church, my faith was riddled with doubt. At fourteen I managed to relegate Christianity to mythology.
That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy Christmas and its cheerful colors and shameless excess. It's a holiday of hope and generosity. In 2020, we need Christmas lights more than ever.
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HOW WALKING MAKES US HEALTHIER, HAPPIER, AND SMARTER
~ Taking a stroll with Shane O’Mara is a risky endeavor. The neuroscientist is so passionate about walking, and our collective right to go for walks, that he is determined not to let the slightest unfortunate aspect of urban design break his stride. So much so, that he has a habit of darting across busy roads as the lights change. “One of life’s great horrors as you’re walking is waiting for permission to cross the street,” he tells me, when we are forced to stop for traffic – a rude interruption when, as he says, “the experience of synchrony when walking together is one of life’s great pleasures”. He knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data – walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier.
O’Mara, 53, is in his element striding through urban landscapes – from epic hikes across London’s sprawl to more sedate ambles in Oxford, where he received his DPhil – and waxing lyrical about science, nature, architecture and literature. He favors what he calls a “motor-centric” view of the brain – that it evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won’t work as well.
This is neatly illustrated by the life cycle of the humble sea squirt which, in its adult form, is a marine invertebrate found clinging to rocks or boat hulls. It has no brain because it has eaten it. During its larval stage, it had a backbone, a single eye and a basic brain to enable it to swim about hunting like “a small, water-dwelling, vertebrate cyclops”, as O’Mara puts it. The larval sea squirt knew when it was hungry and how to move about, and it could tell up from down. But, when it fused on to a rock to start its new vegetative existence, it consumed its redundant eye, brain and spinal cord. Certain species of jellyfish, conversely, start out as brainless polyps on rocks, only developing complicated nerves that might be considered semi-brains as they become swimmers.
Sitting at a desk all day, it’s easy to start feeling like a brainless polyp, whereas walking and talking, as we are this morning, while admiring the Great Sugar Loaf mountain rising beyond the city and a Huguenot cemetery formed in 1693, our minds are fizzing. “Our sensory systems work at their best when they’re moving about the world,” says O’Mara. He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants’ activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O’Mara, “from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion – and we need to test this – is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.”
(from GetPocket.com — sorry not to have the exact link)
Oriana:
Walking a walk also a cognitive workout — all those outdoor sights and sounds to process. Helps prevent dementia.
William:
I read that Einstein formulated his famous theory while walking around Lake Bern in Switzerland. I believe it.
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WALDEMAR HAFFKINE, DEVELOPER OF THE CHOLERA AND PLAGUE VACCINE
~ To Haffkine, the bustees [villages on city outskirts] were an ideal proving ground for his nascent vaccine. In each household, he had a group of people living in identical conditions, equally exposed to cholera. If he could inoculate some of each family and leave some untreated, with enough participants he might finally produce some meaningful results.
At the end of March, two people died of cholera in the Kattal Bagan bustee, signalling a new outbreak. Haffkine traveled to the bustee and inoculated 116 of the 200 or so inhabitants. Afterwards, his small team observed 10 further cases there, seven fatal - all among the uninoculated.
The results were encouraging enough for the Calcutta health officer to fund a wider trial, but convincing people to be vaccinated was easier said than done. Years of top-down medical programs by the British government had sowed distrust among the population, and to many the very concept of vaccination was still alien.
Haffkine's solution was to work with a team of Indian doctors and assistants, rather than the British - Drs Chowdry, Ghose, Chatterjee, and Dutt, among others. And he had a new trick up his sleeve in the world of vaccinology: publicly injecting himself to prove he thought his preparation was safe.
"What is remarkable, and is often lost in the story, is that after the initial resistance people began to queue in the slums in Calcutta for Haffkine's cholera vaccine, they queued for the whole day," said Professor Pratik Chakrabarti, the Chair in History of Science and Medicine at the University of Manchester.
"He would spend hours and whole days in those slums working with Indian doctors. He would start vaccinating in the morning before people went to work, and continue after they came back in the evenings, sitting by an oil lamp in the slum."
Haffkine's work in the Calcutta slums placed him among a select group of scientists who pioneered a profound and global shift in the way disease was understood and treated. But unlike Edward Jenner before him and Jonas Salk after, Haffkine's name never really entered the public imagination, either in India or in Europe.
*
Building on the work of Pasteur and Jenner, Haffkine discovered that by passing cholera bacilli through the peritoneal cavity of guinea pigs — 39 passes in total — he could produce a strengthened, or "exalted" cholera culture, which he could then attenuate using heat. An injection of the attenuated bacteria, followed later by an injection of the exalted bacteria, appeared to immunize guinea pigs against a lethal attack of the disease.
Up until that point, diseases like cholera had been thought of in miasmatic terms — that they traveled in bad air — and tackled with what Prof Chakrabarti called "broad spectrum treatments". ("You put someone in a bath and steam them until they are half dead, or spray carbolic acid everywhere.") But the work of Haffkine and others was giving disease management a focal point — a virus or bacterium that could be cultivated and attenuated, targeted precisely in the body.
After Haffkine's experiments in the bustees of Calcutta yielded promising results, he was invited by the owners of tea plantations in Assam to vaccinate their workers. Haffkine conducted large scale trials there on thousands of plantation workers, but in the autumn of 1895 he contracted malaria and was forced to return to England to recuperate. According to his records, he had by that point inoculated nearly 42,000 people against cholera.
Haffkine noted later that while his vaccine appeared to reduce cases, it did not appear to reduce mortality in those who were infected. When he returned to India in 1896, he planned to address this deficiency by testing a new two-pronged formula he had developed. But there was a more pressing problem in Bombay that would take Haffkine away from cholera for good.
*
The world's third plague pandemic began in Yunnan, China in 1894. It spread down to British Hong Kong and from there by merchant ship to the bustling coastal metropolis of Bombay in what was then British India, where the first case was discovered in September 1896 at a grain merchant's quarters at the city's docks.
At first, the British government underplayed the severity of the outbreak, keen to keep a key port city open for business. But the disease tore through Bombay's tightly-packed slums — its mortality rate nearly twice that of cholera — and the number of dead soared. The governor turned to Haffkine for help. Haffkine traveled to Bombay, where he was set up in one small room and a corridor, with one clerk and three untrained assistants, and tasked with coming up with the world's first plague vaccine from scratch.
"He didn't have a lot in terms of space, manpower or facilities, but it was the first time he was working independently and had his own lab," said Chandrakant Lahariya, an epidemiologist in Delhi. "He knew that developing a plague vaccine at record pace would make him a leading scientist of his time."
Haffkine worked tirelessly through that winter. He discovered that if he placed plague bacilli in a nutrient broth to which he had added a small quantity of clarified butter or coconut oil, the bacilli formed into a signature stalactite growth, creating microbes and toxic products on the side. He was using the same approach he had devised for the new treatment of cholera, combining the microbes with the toxic products they produced to form a single-injection vaccine.
In December, Haffkine successfully inoculated rabbits against an attack of plague, and by January 1897 he was ready once again to test a fresh vaccine for a deadly disease on a human.
On 10 January 1897, Haffkine injected himself with 10cc of his preparation - a significantly higher dose than the 3cc he planned to use in wider testing. He experienced a severe fever but recovered after several days.
At the end of that month, a plague outbreak occurred at Bombay's Byculla House of Correction - a jail housing hundreds of inmates - and Haffkine went there to carry out controlled tests. He inoculated 147 prisoners and left 172 untreated. There were 12 cases and six deaths among the untreated and just two cases and no deaths among the treated.
The apparent success at Byculla jail set off a rapid expansion of production and testing and Haffkine was relocated from his small one-room laboratory to a government-owned bungalow, and then on to a large lodge owned by the spiritual leader the Aga Khan, who also volunteered himself and thousands of members of his Khoja Mussulman community for inoculation.
Inside a year, hundreds of thousands of people had been inoculated using Haffkine's vaccine, saving untold numbers of lives. He was knighted by Queen Victoria, and in December 1901 he was appointed director-in-chief of the Plague Research Laboratory at Government House in Parel, Bombay, with new facilities and a staff of 53.
Then disaster struck.
In March 1902, in the village of Mulkowal in Punjab, 19 people died from tetanus after being inoculated with Haffkine's vaccine. The 88 others inoculated that day were fine. All the evidence appeared to point to a fatal contamination of bottle 53N - prepared 41 days earlier at the Parel lab.
An Indian government commission was tasked with investigating, and it discovered that Haffkine had changed the procedure for sterilising the plague vaccine, using heat instead of carbolic acid because it sped up production. The heat method had been safely in use at the world-leading Pasteur institute for two years, but it was unfamiliar to the British, and in 1903 the commission concluded that bottle 53N must have been contaminated in Haffkine's lab in Parel. Haffkine was fired as director of the plague lab and placed on leave from the Indian Civil Service.
In 1904, two years after Haffkine was suspended, the plague reached its peak in India, killing 1,143,993 people that year. Haffkine's vaccine was the "main line of defense", Hawgood said, but its creator was stuck in London fighting for his name.
Documents revealed that the assistant who opened bottle 53N dropped his forceps on the ground and failed to sterilize them properly before using them to remove the bottle's cork stopper.
Haffkine was finally exonerated in November 1907 after Simpson and Ross's campaign raised the matter in the British parliament. Haffkine was granted leave to return to employment in India and he gladly returned as director in chief of the Calcutta Biological Laboratory. But his redemption was incomplete - he was barred from carrying out any trials, limiting him to theoretical research.
He returned briefly to the study of cholera and became interested in developing a new "devitalized" vaccine - a method that would later become widely used - but his repeated applications to the Indian government to carry out trials were refused. In 1914, aged 55, Haffkine retired from the Indian Civil Service and left the country. The Mulkowal disaster had been indelibly printed on him, and done him lasting damage.
Between 1897 and 1925, 26 million doses of Haffkine's anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay. Tests of the vaccine's efficacy showed between a 50% and 85% reduction in mortality. But "no figure" could be put on the number of lives he saved, Hawgood said. "The numbers are just enormous."
Haffkine returned to France and devoted his later life to his faith, becoming increasingly orthodox and establishing a foundation to promote Jewish education in Eastern Europe. He never married and lived his final years alone in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was a "scholarly, lonesome, handsome man of few words, who remained a bachelor," wrote the Indian bacteriologist HI Jhala.
Haffkine died in Lausanne in 1930, aged 70. A short obituary notice circulated by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that his plague vaccine had been "adopted throughout India" and his lab had "issued many thousands of doses to various tropical countries". The notice also quoted Lord Lister, the great British bacteriologist and pioneer of antiseptic surgery, who called Haffkine, simply, "the savior of mankind".
"He inspired so many scientists to take up vaccine research in the early 20th Century, but somehow his contributions were forgotten," Dr Lahariya said. "We should never forget that Haffkine made a viable vaccine in a two-room lab with a very small team. It is almost unbelievable."
Haffkine's name does live on prominently in one sense. In 1925, five years before his death, the Indian government was lobbied by some of his supporters to rename the Parel lab 'The Haffkine Institute'. The government agreed, and the name remains to this day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55050012?utm_source=pocket-newtab
William:
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ending on beauty:
Yet there was a man within me
Could have risen to the clouds,
Could have touched these winds,
Bent and broken them down,
Could have stood up sharply in the sky.
~ Wallace Stevens
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