The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls. ~ Nietzsche
DUSHKA
Dushka, my Soul, do not be so proud
of not being ordinary
stardust. When I go you too
will go, like a flame when the candle
is done with its prayer.
Some say it will feel just as it did
before being born. But Dushka,
before I was born — open any
history book — it was murder.
Dushka, do you remember
the red streetcars in Warsaw?
And the chestnuts rioting in bloom
in front of the Polytechnic?
You and I walked down Wawelska Street,
the long way home so we could pass
the small park of the first kiss.
It was New Year’s Eve,
snow on my eyelashes,
silence on bare branches.
For thirty years now I have lived
with a Norfolk pine. People say
it should be cut down, its roots
buckle the sidewalk. But one
evening on its tip I saw
a mockingbird sing his imitation
of a car alarm, so how could I cut down
my thousand-green-fingered pine?
A neighbor said, “In another
thirty years, it will be the tallest
tree in town.” I said in another
thirty years I don’t think
I will be alive. I am taking
the mockingbird with me.
~ Oriana
It is a beautiful poem, and somehow feels so right to me now, as I feel myself standing in the small space between memory and my own inevitable end. The memories are sweet, feel like an armful of riches I savor one by one, and all at once. And yet I have a sense of time's pressure, of how swift the days pass. Happiness is here, in the moment, in what, like your mockingbird, I choose to keep. Like your red streetcars, my home is gone, return impossible, there is nothing left of that space and all my living there but ash. And we mourn those losses, at the same time we treasure all the beauties we find in the present...your many-fingered evergreen, the birds like angels I see daily on the most ordinary of errands. What a mixed bag life is!! What a wonder!!
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A RUSSIAN BLOGGER EXPLAINS GOGOL
a polemic with Matt Taibbi
~ Gogol’s magnum opus, Dead Souls, which you refer to but are too sloppy to even name in your post, except to describe it as “lunatic, paragraphless prose,” is the best book on Russia there is — and probably will be for the next thousand years. There is nothing lunatic in the prose at all. The language is methodical and lyrical and brutally precise.
Dead Souls is genius because it manages to comically capture Russia’s essence in a way that seems to stand outside of time. Despite being written in the 1830s, all the characters in it feel modern and recognizable in Russian society today — its officials, its businessmen, and its various society men and women. Gogol gets at something deep and mystical about Russia — something that has remained basically unchanged, despite multiple revolutions and the changing of the ruling elite and the passing of almost two centuries. (Another one of his timeless works is his play The Government Inspector, which remains one of the funniest depictions of servility and sycophantic obsession with power and rank.)
The short stories you mention — “The Nose” and “The Overcoat” — they’re not just funny political satire, but sublime and surrealist poems in prose. “The Overcoat” is famous for being a big influence on Dostoyevsky, not because it’s about “a dim and nervous clerk” but because it’s a heartbreaking and touching story about a harassed and bullied small person who finally gets his fantastical postmortem revenge.
As for your commentary on Gogol’s later writing, you seem to be missing the point again. Gogol initially envisioned Dead Souls as a depiction of Hell — the first part of a trilogy that was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. He wrote the second part of Dead Souls, which he intended to be a depiction of Purgatory and was supposed to write a third one — Paradise. But he failed in his mission. He never wrote the third part and burned the second (although some of the chapters remain and are not that bad). I think he failed and burned his work not because he was sick or crazy, like you say, but because it’s actually impossible to write a genuine and honest novel about Russia that’s solely populated by good, angel-like people. Nikolai Chernishevsky tried it in What Is to Be Done and it turned out sentimental and dogmatic. It was bad literature, even if it was avant-garde and politically inspiring to Russia’s revolutionaries. So in a sense, Gogol didn’t really fail. He set himself up with an impossible task.
You write, “Reading Gogol is a gluttonous, frenzied, disgusting experience” — again, what? Gogol’s prose is sublime and never “disgusting.” If anything, it’s overly polite and humorously proper and surgically exact. And that’s true of his descriptions of the lavish dinners that Russia’s landed aristocracy consumed — these meals are funny and saliva-inducing. They’re not disgusting. They’re there to set the mood and to show the interests and the manners of the people he was writing about — like in his great short story, “The Old World Landowners.” In fact, Lev Tolstoy used the same exact technique but without Gogol’s humor.
Matt, if you’re trying to identify yourself with your literary hero, it’s not working well. Gogol was a dark and tragic genius, not a bourgeois armchair journalist who sort of has — or mostly had — a way with words.
Lastly, I’d like to move on to your obsession with cancel culture.
You say that Gogol would probably be cancelled in the horrible puritanical America of today. Again, what are you talking about? Don’t you know basic Russian history?
Censorship didn’t only exist in the Soviet Union — a society that seems to be your reference point for everything evil. There was severe censorship in the Russian Empire as well. All the great Russian writers, Gogol’s included, had to navigate a system of censorship. All of them were pre-cancelled, so to speak. They had to figure out ways to un-cancel themselves and get around dimwitted czarist censors to get their work published. And yet, they somehow managed to produce timeless books.
Makes one think about all this cancel culture outrage that you’re manically producing these days. You constantly write about how dangerous this new wave of censorship is to art and culture and speech and self-expression, and how stifling it is. But Gogol — your literary hero — proves the exact opposite of your argument: writers have been able to publish radical political novels while under heavy censorship.
And one more thing regarding a very specific American cancel culture phenomenon — Gogol was most likely a virgin, at least he never had any known intimate relationship with women and never wrote about sexual matters. So there would be no chance to “cancel” him that way, even in today’s America. ~
Oriana:
Gogol's interest in surrealism and the grotesque influenced Dostoyevsky and Kafka, among many others. Nabokov was a great admirer of Gogol, particularly of Dead Souls.
Trying to evade censorship can actually help improve literary quality by making the writing less direct and more inventive. For instance, Zbigniew Herbert wrote political poems criticizing tyranny in the guise of poems inspired by the history of Ancient Rome.
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“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ~ Claude Monet
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THE NAME OF THE MESSIAH WASN’T CHRIS
How errors in pronunciation have become standard English
Words that used to begin with "n"
Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. [me: "Uncle" used to be "nuncle"] Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.
When sounds swap around
Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.
When sounds disappear
English spelling can be a pain, but it's also a repository of information about the history of pronunciation. Are we being lazy when we say the name of the third day of the working week? Our ancestors might have thought so. Given that it was once "Woden's day" (named after the Norse god), the "d" isn't just for decoration, and was pronounced up until relatively recently. Who now says the "t" in Christmas? It must have been there at one point, as the messiah wasn't actually called Chris. These are examples of syncope.
When sounds intrude
Our anatomy can make some changes more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound ("m" or "n") to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in-between. Thunder used to be "thuner", and empty "emty". You can see the same process happening now with words like hamster, which often gets pronounced with an intruding "p". This is a type of epenthesis.
When "l" goes dark
A dark "l", in linguistic jargon, is one pronounced with the back of the tongue raised. In English, it is found after vowels, as in the words full or pole. This tongue raising can go so far that the "l" ends up sounding like a "w". People frown on this in non-standard dialects such as cockney ("the ol' bill"). But the "l" in folk, talk and walk used to be pronounced. Now almost everyone uses a "w" instead- we effectively say fowk, tawk and wawk. This process is called velarisation.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Your grandmother might not like the way you pronounce tune. She might place a delicate "y" sound before the vowel, saying tyune where you would say chune. The same goes for other words like tutor or duke. But this process, called affrication, is happening, like it or not. Within a single generation it has pretty much become standard English.
What the folk?
Borrowing from other languages can give rise to an entirely understandable and utterly charming kind of mistake. With little or no knowledge of the foreign tongue, we go for an approximation that makes some kind of sense in terms of both sound and meaning. This is folk etymology. Examples include crayfish, from the French écrevisse (not a fish but a kind of lobster); sparrow grass as a variant for asparagus in some English dialects; muskrat (conveniently musky, and a rodent, but named because of the Algonquin word muscascus meaning red); and female, which isn't a derivative of male at all, but comes from old French femelle meaning woman.
Spelling it like it is
As we've mentioned, English spelling can be a pain. That is mainly because our language underwent some seismic sound changes after the written forms of many words had been more or less settled. But just to confuse matters, spelling can reassert itself, with speakers taking their cue from the arrangement of letters on the page rather than what they hear. This is called spelling pronunciation. In Norwegian, "sk" is pronounced "sh". So early English-speaking adopters of skiing actually went shiing. Once the rest of us started reading about it in magazines we just said it how it looked. Influenced by spelling, some Americans are apparently starting to pronounce the "l" in words like balm and psalm (something which actually reflects a much earlier pronunciation).
~ this is from The Guardian, but I accidentally lost the link -- maybe because I was thinking of shiing in Norway.
And this gem from Jeremy Sherman:
THE WHITE CHALK HORSE OF UFFINGTON, MIRACULOUSLY SURVIVING FOR THREE THOUSAND YEARS
~ If you stand in the valley near the village of Uffington in Oxfordshire, England, and look up at the high curve of chalk grassland above you, one thing dominates the view. Across the flank of the hill runs an enormous white, abstract stick figure horse cut from the chalk itself. It has a thin, sweeping body, stubby legs, a curiously long tail and a round eye set in a square head.
This is the Uffington White Horse, the oldest of the English hill figures. It’s a 3,000-year-old pictogram the size of a football field and visible from 20 miles away. On this July morning black specks dot the lower slopes as small groups of people trudge slowly upwards. They’re coming to clean the horse.
It’s chalking day, a cleaning ritual that has happened here regularly for three millennia. Hammers, buckets of chalk and kneepads are handed out and everyone is allocated an area. The chalkers kneel and smash the chalk to a paste, whitening the stony pathways in the grass inch by inch. “It’s the world’s largest coloring between the lines,” says George Buce, one of the participants.
Chalking or “scouring” the horse was already an ancient custom when antiquarian Francis Wise wrote about it in 1736. “The ceremony of scouring the Horse, from time immemorial, has been solemnized by a numerous concourse of people from all the villages roundabout,” he wrote.
In the past, thousands of people would come for the scouring, holding a fair in the circle of a prehistoric fort nearby. These days it’s a quieter event. The only sounds are the wind, distant birdsong and the thumping of hammers on the chalk that can be felt through the feet.
Conservation organization the National Trust oversees the chalking, making sure the original shape of the horse is maintained. But the work is done by anyone who wants to come along. Lynda Miller is working on the eye, a circle the size of a car wheel. “The horse has always been part of our lives,” she says. “We’re really excited that we’re cleaning the eye today. When I was a little girl and I came here with my mother and father, the eye was a special spot. We used to make a wish on it.”
National Trust ranger Andy Foley hands out hammers. “It must have happened in this way since it was put on the hillside,” he says. “If people didn’t look after it the horse would be gone within 20 to 30 years; overgrown and eroded. We’re following in the footsteps of the ancients, doing exactly what they did 3,000 years ago.”
“There is something very special about this landscape that attracts people,” says archaeologist David Miles. In the 1990s, he led an excavation of the site that established the prehistoric date for the horse. Before the excavation, it was thought that the design was only scratched into the chalk surface, and therefore un-datable, but Miles’ team discovered the figure was actually cut into the hill up to a meter deep. That meant it was possible to use a technique called optical stimulated luminescence to date layers of quartz in the trench.
“It was older than I’d been expecting,” Miles remembers. “We already knew it must be ancient, because it’s mentioned in the 12th-century manuscript The Wonders of Britain, so it was obviously old then. And the abstract shape of the horse is very similar to horses on ancient British coins just over 2,000 years old. But our dating showed it was even older than that. It came out as the beginning of the Iron Age, perhaps even the end of the Bronze Age, nearly 3,000 years ago.”
The trenches would have been dug out using antler picks and wooden spades: tough, labor-intensive work. How the builders planned and executed such a large figure when the full effect can only be taken in from several miles away is still a mystery.
Nobody knows for certain why the horse was made. “It’s a beautiful shape, very elegant,” says Miles. “It looks like it’s bounding across the hillside. If you look at it from below, the sun rises from behind it and crosses over it. In Celtic art, horses are often shown pulling the chariot of the sun, so that may be what they were thinking of here.”
From the start the horse would have required regular upkeep to stay visible. It might seem strange that the horse’s creators chose such an unstable form for their monument, but archaeologists believe this could have been intentional. A chalk hill figure requires a social group to maintain it, and it could be that today’s cleaning is an echo of an early ritual gathering that was part of the horse’s original function.
The Berkshire Downs where the horse lies are scattered with prehistoric remains. The Ridgeway, Britain’s oldest road, runs nearby. This is the heart of rural England and the horse is one of the country’s most recognizable landmarks, an identity badge stamped into the landscape. During World War II, it was covered over with turf and hedge trimmings so Luftwaffe bombers couldn’t use it for navigation. (Oxford is about a 30-minute drive and London about an hour-and-a-half.)
For locals, it’s part of the backdrop of daily life. Residents in the village reportedly arrange their rooms so that they sit facing the horse. Offerings, flowers, coins and candles are left on the site.
The people who come to the chalking have a variety of motivations. Martha Buckley is chalking the horse’s neck. "I’m a neo-Pagan and I feel it connects me to the land. It’s of great spiritual significance,” she says. Lucy Bartholomew has brought her children. “It’s good to be able to explain to them why it’s here.” For Geoff Weaver, it’s the imperative to preserve history. “If we don’t do it, it would disappear, and the world would be a sorrier place,” he says.
Up on the hill it’s not possible to view the whole horse at once; the curve of the slope gets in the way, the sheer scale of it confuses the eye. It is only from the valley below that the whole picture can be taken in. From this long distance, the horse is a tiny white figure prancing timelessly across the brow of the hill. But to the people who live near and tend the horse, it’s a monumental reminder of Britain’s ancient past. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/against-all-odds-england-s-massive-chalk-horse-has-survived-3-000-years?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
We are amazed that a community has cared for and maintained the chalk horse for 3000 years, yet we have other instances of the preservation of knowledge, of memory, in traditions that have lasted that long or longer without being recorded in any permanent form — that is, without being preserved in writing or print.
The first that comes to mind is Troy, thought to be mythical, but discovered to be an historical memory, maintained in a long oral tradition before finally being recorded in writing. A more recent, and even more astounding discovery is that indigenous Australians have retained information that is 10,000 or more years old in their oral stories, information never given permanent shape in writing, that has only recently been discovered as accurate.
The stories of several indigenous Australian tribes, in their own individual languages, describe large areas of dry land now under water, and current islands as elevations in that area not surrounded, as they are now, by water. These descriptions have lately been studied, and they turn out to be completely accurate, but for a time 10,000 or more years ago, before sea water rose to submerge those areas.
This is astounding, mind boggling, seems unbelievable, but is demonstrably true. Perhaps what accounts for it, at least in part, is a revolution in human thinking and memory related to the development of writing, and how language in this permanent objectified form changed our mental habits and even abilities to preserve history in an oral form.
What is most exciting is the potential for discovering more historical knowledge preserved in oral traditions, with some urgency, as the languages that preserve these traditions are becoming extinct at a steady pace, joining a huge reservoir of lost and vanished memories. And we are only now beginning to realize the extent of that loss.
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IS CAPITALISM UNFOLDING AS MARX PREDICTED?
~ The 20th century political movements that attempted to make Karl Marx’s ideas reality may have failed but, 200 years since the philosopher’s birth on May 5, 1818, his analysis and foresights have repeatedly proven true. We are, in many ways, living in the world Marx predicted.
Marx showed that recurrent crises were not an accidental side effect of capitalism, but a necessary and inherent feature, explains Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University professor of French and Italian and editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today. “He shows that the source of value in capitalism is living labor. He also shows that capitalism nonetheless tends to eliminate living labor as a necessary dimension of its development,” Nesbitt says. That contradiction means capitalism is never stable, but forever shifting in and out of crises: The system depends on human labor while simultaneously eradicating it.
And the stakes are high. Marx analyzed capitalism as a social system, rather than a purely economic one. “Humans and human relationships depend on our place within the system of capitalism itself,” says Nesbitt. “If we don’t find a place within the system as individuals and human beings then we live under exclusion.” Capitalism doesn’t just determine our source of income but how we relate to each other, our surroundings, and ourselves. To be rendered superfluous by the system is damning to social well-being as well as economic livelihood.
It may be tempting to dismiss Marx’s analysis given that his communist vision failed in practice. However, the politics that developed in the Soviet Union were “not part of Marx’s vision of a social structure” says Nesbitt, but “developments of Leninism and the Russian revolution.” Most of Marx’s work was focused on critiquing capitalism, and he wrote relatively little about exactly what it would take for communism to become reality, or how it would function. Marx famously popularized the slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” meaning that all would have the opportunity to reach their highest potential and to receive the needed goods, such as food and shelter in turn. But, notes Carol Gould, philosophy professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, Marx didn’t say much about what this mantra would look like in practice.
Besides, Marx thought true communism would develop only under certain conditions. “Marx predicted that for a communist revolution to survive, it would need to involve the countries with the most developed industries, and become at least as broadly international as the capitalist system it would replace,” Vanessa Wills, political philosopher at George Washington University, writes in an email. “Neither of these conditions were met in the case of the Soviet Union, which was always highly economically isolated.”
And so it would be wrong to confuse the failure of 20th century communist states with the failure of Marx’s thoughts. Two centuries later, Marx’s writing remains one of the most penetrating analyses of capitalism, says Nesbitt.
The thinker was not only right about the rise of automation. He also predicted globalization and the rising inequality of today, notes Gould. “He was correct that the gap between labor and capital would get worse,” she says. Marx predicted that capitalism would lead to “poverty in the midst of plenty,” a scenario that’s depressingly familiar today. “HUD [US department of housing and urban development] estimates there are roughly half a million homeless people in the United States on any given night, in a country that is estimated to have roughly 18 million empty homes in it,” says Wills.
There are still plenty of contemporary political movements that continue to reference Marx, with various degrees of accuracy. The Chinese government bequeathed a huge statue of Marx to his hometown in Germany in honor of his 200th anniversary; it’s doubtful the thinker would have been as enthusiastic about the totalitarian state as it is of him. The economist and former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis recently wrote a compelling new introduction to “The Communist Manifesto,” detailing why Marx is so essential if we want to reckon with the growing gap between the rich and the poor. His work is still the crucial reference point for those protesting the injustices of capitalism and demanding change to benefit the 99%.
Every major historical advance in technology has destroyed human jobs, with some leaving many unemployed for long periods at a time. The human workforce has responded to these shift by gradually adjusting, taking on the new jobs generated by these advances, and so capitalism has continued to function, always depending on both human labor and technology. The current crises posed by automation may not be resolved as easily as past, though. The situation is “very different,” says Nesbitt, and demands adequately sophisticated analysis about the nature of capitalism. “That’s what makes Das Kapital a work of theory and critique that’s not limited to the 19th century,” he adds. The capitalist system, after all, is “the world we continue to live in today.” ~
https://qz.com/1269525/capitalism-is-unfolding-exactly-as-karl-marx-predicted/?fbclid=IwAR0GP-jPOwgIZ8vlDIY-SbH03ma2ImYXImbGcUWeQp5cVrkqsJx0M_ESt1c
Oriana:
Marx was the first great theorist of capitalism, describing the boom-and-bust cycles. He was dreadfully incorrect when it came to the remedies (e.g. his hostility toward the trade unions).
As for the Soviet Union, I tend to think of what Mikhail Iossel said: "The Soviet Union was never a communist country. It was a fascist country."
Small-scale communism seems to work in religious communities. We speak of the early Christian communes, and even modern convents. Non-religious communes have generally proved to be short-lived.
Mary:
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THE ODDS AGAINST EXISTING
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” ~ Richard Dawkins
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THE REASON WE ARE THE DOMINANT SPECIES HAS BECOME THE GREATEST THREAT TO OUR EXISTENCE
~ From early humans rubbing sticks together to make fire, to the fossil fuels that drove the industrial revolution, energy has played a central role in our development as a species. But the way we power our societies has also created humanity's biggest challenge. It's one that will take all our ingenuity to solve.
Energy is the key to humanity's world domination.
Not just the jet fuel that allows us to traverse entire continents in a few hours, or the bombs we build that can blow up entire cities, but the vast amounts of energy we all use every day.
Consider this: a resting human being requires about the same amount of energy as an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb to sustain their metabolism - about 90 watts (joules per second).
But the average human being in a developed country uses more like 100 times that amount, if you add in the energy needed to get around, build and heat our homes, grow our food and all the other things our species gets up to.
The average American, for example, consumes about 10,000 watts.
That difference explains a lot about us - our biology, our civilization and the unbelievably affluent lifestyles we all lead - compared, that is, with other animals.
Because unlike virtually every other creature on Earth, we human beings do much more with energy than just power our own metabolism.
We are a creature of fire.
Humanity's exceptional relationship with energy began hundreds of thousands of years ago, with our discovery of fire.
Fire did much more than just keep us warm, protect us from predators and give us a new tool for hunting.
A number of anthropologists believe fire actually refashioned our biology.
"Anything that allows an organism to get energy more efficiently is going to have huge effects on the evolutionary trajectory of that organism," explains Prof Rachel Carmody of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She believes the decisive development was cooking. Cooking transforms the energy available from food, she argues.
The carbohydrates, proteins and lipids that provide our bodies with nutrition are unravelled and exposed when they are heated.
That makes it is easier for our digestive enzymes to do their work effectively, extracting more calories more quickly than if we ate our food raw.
Think of it as a way of "pre-digesting" food.
Prof Carmody and her colleagues believe the extra energy it reliably gave us allowed us to evolve the small colons and relatively large energy-hungry brains that distinguish us from our primate cousins.
And, as our brains began to grow, it created a positive feedback loop.
As neurons are added to the mammalian brain, intelligence increases exponentially, says Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
With smarter brains, we got better at hunting and foraging.
And we figured out more ways to access the calories in our food - by pounding it with a rock, by grinding into a powder, or even just letting it rot - or of course by roasting it over a fire.
In doing so, we further increased the supply of energy to our bodies.
This allowed us to evolve even smarter brains, and the ensuing virtuous circle propelled our brains to the top of the class.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, the climate constantly changed, with ice sheets advancing and then retreating across the northern hemisphere.
The last Ice Age ended around 12,000 years ago. Global temperatures rose rapidly and then stabilised, and humanity embarked on its next energy transformation.
It was a revolution that would see the world reach unprecedented levels of technological change.
"Within 2,000 years, all over the world, in China, in the Near East, in South America, in Mesoamerica, you're getting people domesticating crops," says Dr Robert Bettinger of the University of California Davis.
Cultivating crops had been pretty much impossible during the Ice Age, he believes, but the new warmer climate, coupled with a big rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, was very hospitable to plant life.
The cooking ape became a farming ape too.
It took huge investments of human energy in the form of hard, arduous labour. But in return, our ancestors reaped a far more abundant and reliable food supply.
Think for a moment about what you are doing when you raise crops.
Fields act like a kind of solar panel, but instead of making electricity, they turn the Sun's rays into packages of digestible chemical energy.
Above all were cereal crops - domesticated grains like wheat, maize and rice acted like a kind of storable energy currency.
You can bank it away in a silo to consume at your leisure during the winter months. Or you can cart it off to market to trade with others. Or invest it in planting the next harvest.
Or in fattening up animals, which could convert that energy into meat, dairy or draught power.
As the centuries passed, animals and plants domesticated in different locations would coalesce into a kind of agricultural package, says Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist who studies the development of pastoral farming at the Smithsonian Institution.
The crops fed animals. The animals worked the land. Their manure fed the crops. And, says Dr Zeder, as a package, they provided a much more reliable and abundant food source.
More food meant more people - who could then expand into new territory, and develop new technologies that produced even more food.
It was another virtuous circle, but this time powered by the solar energy captured through agriculture.
The surplus energy it created meant we could sustain much larger populations, and what's more, not everyone needed to farm.
People could specialize in making tools, building houses, smelting metals or, for that matter, telling other people what to do.
Civilization was developing and with it some fundamental changes in the relationships between people.
Hunter gatherer communities tend to share resources fairly equally. In farming communities, by contrast, deep inequalities can develop.
Those who worked long hours in the fields would naturally want to hoard their grain. And then there were those with metal weapons who took a cut from those granaries in the form of taxation.
In fact, for thousands of years, the standard of living for the vast majority people on Earth did not improve significantly, despite the bounty of agriculture.
"Hunter gatherer societies were the original affluent society," says Claire Walton, the resident archaeologist at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire. "They spent something like 20 hours a week in what you would call proper labor."
By comparison, a Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman or Saxon farmer would be doing at least double that, she believes.
Only kings and nobles lived the kind of affluent, leisurely lifestyles that more and more of us enjoy today.
It would take an explosive shift in energy use to achieve that, a shift powered by fossil fuels.
By the 18th Century, our increasingly populous societies were beginning to run up against the limits of what the energy provided by the daily influx of the Sun's rays could do.
A Malthusian reckoning loomed. How could we grow food fast enough to feed all those mouths? Or indeed wood to build all our houses and ships, and to make the charcoal to smelt all our metal tools?
So we began to turn instead to a black rock that we could dig up and burn in almost unlimited quantities.
Coal contains the solar energy captured over millions of years by fossilized forests.
In the 20th Century, the black stuff would be succeeded by those even richer geological stores of photosynthetic energy - oil and natural gas.
And with them, all sorts of new activities became possible.
Not only were fossil fuels abundant. They also provided ever greater sources of power, liberating us from our dependence on animals.
First came steam engines to turn the heat from coal into motion. Then the internal combustion engine. Then the jet engine.
"A horse can only give you one horsepower," explains Paul Warde, an environmental historian at Cambridge University.
"We now have industrial machines that can give you tens of thousands of horsepower, and at its limits a Saturn V rocket: 160 million horsepower to deliver you off the surface of the Earth."
Fossil fuels power much more than just our vehicles.
Some 5% of the world's natural gas supply is used to create ammonia-based fertilizers, for example, without which half the world's population would starve.
Turning iron into steel consumes 13% of global coal production.
An estimated 8% of the world's CO2 emissions are from concrete.
But burning fossil fuels has had an incredible effect on our standard of living.
Since the Industrial Revolution we have grown taller and healthier, our life expectancy has increased vastly, and in the developed world we are on average 30 to 40 times better off.
And it's all thanks to the energy revolution driven by fossil fuels, argues Vaclav Smil of Manitoba University in Canada, a hugely respected expert on the role of energy in our societies.
"Without fossil fuels, no rapid mass transportation, no flying, no surplus consumer food production, no cell phone made in China, brought to Southampton by a giant container ship with 20,000 containers. All of that is fossil fuels," he says.
We live in a fossil fuel society, believes Smil.
But while they have lifted ever more of us out of agrarian hardship, and created our global economy and high living standards, the catastrophic climate change they are creating now threatens to derail that society.
Just as two centuries ago we reached the limits of what agriculture could do, now global warming is imposing a limit on what coal, oil and gas can safely do.
It has created the greatest challenge human society has ever faced - moving back to relying on the daily influx of energy from the Sun to meet the huge energy needs of eight billion people and counting.
I believe that is possible.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56544239?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary: THE ORIGIN OF ALL OUR ENERGY, THE SUN
The discussion of our development in terms of our use of energy is both simple and elegant. All energy originates with the sun, and in our progression through learning to release and use the various forms that that energy is stored in, we have developed and changed our physical bodies and social structures in phenomenal and revolutionary ways. Each step was both made possible and dependent on the kind of energy released..fire....farming...fossil fuel, each with its own limitations and negative effects.
I think the author is correct that we have also thus created the possibility of our own destruction with climate change spurred by the enormous and expanding use of fossil fuels. And so we return to the source, the origin of all energy in this system, the sun. The challenge is to find some way to capture and use this energy without all the destruction attendant on earlier strategies. Can we do it, and can we do it fast enough? That is both our chance and our hope.
*
SCOTLAND’S HYWIND WIND FARM A STUNNING SUCCESS
~ t took 10 years to develop the first floating windfarm and it seemed to some a dangerous gamble to put it 15 miles off Aberdeen in the stormiest waters of the North Sea. But after three years of being in operation it has broken world records for maximum output.
Its success even outstrips the speed with which Europe’s other offshore windfarms, those standing in shallow water, have gone from being an expensive renewable option to a mainstream power source. Floating windfarms’ worldwide potential is even greater.
The scale of the first five floating turbines is staggering– 175 metres above the sea with another 75 metres below to balance the weight of the tower and the rotor blade with a diameter of 154 metres. The enormous height makes them a commercial success because further out to sea they can catch a steadily blowing wind and deliver more power.
The Norwegian company Equinor, which took the gamble on Hywind Scotland, has said the experience has allowed them to cut costs by 40%. The company is now building an even bigger floating windfarm off their home coast before looking for more sites around the UK.
They will have competition: firms are already scrambling to bid for floating wind sites off the Welsh coast and Cornwall. ~
Oriana:
Off-shore wind farms are of interest also in the U.S. We’ll see what the future brings: probably a mix of several clean energy sources. We must remember, though, that nothing is all good — we’ll never run out of challenges.
*
NONE OF THIS REALLY HAPPENED — THE BIBLE AS MYTHOLOGY
~ The Hebrew people did not exist before Canaan. They gradually and peacefully emerged as a subset of Canaanite culture somewhere around the 1200s B.C.E.,which is roughly the time we were told they invaded the land. Before that time they simply. didn’t. exist.
The violent conquest of Canaan never actually happened. We know this for certain. We’ve gone to the places that was supposed to have happened and we dug our way down to the bottom. Didn’t happen.
The wandering in the wilderness for forty years? Also never happened. That story was made up. We canvassed that entire region a hundred times now and not so much as a coin or a piece of pottery or anything at all that would signify they were ever there.
The dramatic exodus of millions of Hebrews from Egyptian captivity? We know for a fact that never happened. It’s not even a debate anymore, not among scholars, historians, or archaeologists. The story was undeniably made up. That means that the Passover never happened. Nothing even remotely like it.
There wasn’t even a group of Hebrews in Egypt in the first place. There never was. That whole bit about 400+ years in captivity, with a dozen tribes growing into a large but enslaved nation? Made up out of thin air. We know this now.
Think about what this means for a second. It means there was no Moses. No Aaron. There was no Abraham, no Isaac, and no Jacob. There was no Sarah, no Rachel, no Leah, no Rebekah, etc. All fascinating stories, yes. And could there have been real life analogues many centuries later that got cobbled together into an origin story for the nation of Israel? That’s certainly possible.
But basically every story and every person which appears prior to Israel’s presence in Canaan around the 13th century B.C.E. is a product of pure fiction. After that, much smaller versions of the stories appear to have happened in real life: for example there probably was a King David, only his “kingdom” was more like a small insular group of technologically challenged herdsmen. But never anything like the geopolitical giant the Bible paints him, or them, to be.
I really feel like everybody around me needs to sit and soak in the gravity of this realization.
Everything that happened in the first five books of the Bible is pure fiction. And the next few books don’t get much better. They are stories made up to teach lessons and to provide some kind of political basis for competing factions of ancient Israel, quarrels which no longer mean anything to us today but leave us with the mistaken impression that this people group existed many centuries before it actually did.
Now, I hang out with atheists a lot, so I’m accustomed to hearing people dismiss the entire Bible at once as nonsense. But the reality is that at least some of what the Bible recounts probably did happen, even if in reality the magical parts didn’t. For example, it has become increasingly canon for atheists to confidently assert that Jesus of Nazareth never existed at all.
But they don’t really know that. They’re simply arguing that we don’t have any credible evidence outside of the Bible itself that such a man existed, and they could be right. But on that matter I still have to point out that most biblical scholars (regardless of their religious orientation) are convinced that somebody named Jesus did exist, even if he didn’t perform party tricks or die and come back from the grave.
So the existence of Jesus is a debatable subject…but the exodus is not. Nor is anything that was supposed to have happened leading up to it nor afterward. That entire phase of Israel’s history is made up—including the sacred Passover itself—and we know this. Even their own rabbis have taken to admitting this, controversial though the admission may be.
The Dirt Doesn’t Lie
Back before World War II, biblical historians had a more limited number of resources to draw from in order to ascertain fact from fiction. They had to rummage through the annals of Egyptian and Sumerian and Babylonian historical accounts to see if this divinely favored nation ever got mentioned, but they kept coming up empty handed.
Sometimes they would come across something that sounded enough like a Bible name that they would count that as confirmation and move on. For most of them the standard of verification was very, very low. Quite frankly, in retrospect, they were wearing their desperation on their sleeves.
But instead of finding evidence of a mighty kingdom spreading across a large geographical region governed by legendary kings with hundreds of wives and concubines, all anyone could turn up was an occasional reference to a small confederation of tribal heads inhabiting negligible territories sandwiched between much more powerful kingdoms which were constantly taking them over. And nothing at all prior to their supposedly forceful conquest of the Promised Land.
Biblical Archaeology was a relatively young science at the time, but considering how difficult it was to move around in most of the territories that historians wanted to explore, there wasn’t much we could do. But then the First and Second World Wars happened and, after the region underwent a whole lot of forceful territorial reassigning, the “Holy Land” once again became open for business.
Over the next couple of decades, archaeologists carried their students and volunteers on hundreds of excavation trips to every biblical place you could imagine, digging down as far as they could go in order, quite literally, to get to the bottom of what happened. What they discovered was disappointing to say the least.
There were no Hebrews prior to their gradual and peaceful emergence within Canaanite culture in the 1200s B.C.E. None of that stuff in the Bible prior to Canaan appears to have ever happened. And even when they did begin to slowly emerge as a people group, they looked and acted almost exactly like their surrounding neighbors, but with a couple of notable quirks: they left behind no pig bones, and they seemed disproportionately fond of one particular member of the Canaanite pantheon, Yahweh, the god of war.
At first, Yahweh (aka “Elohim,” which also may have referred to a whole group of gods) appears to have had a wife named Asherah. We know that the worship of the goddess still continued for centuries into Israel’s history despite many leaders’ attempts to cleanse the land of her memory (like ISIS, physically destroying monuments and disposing of her corresponding cultus). But subsequent versions of the Israelite religion became increasingly monotheistic, vehemently disavowing all of its polytheistic precursors. Occasionally you will still find remnants of this culture war preserved for us in the biblical texts.
A Valiant Attempt, Thwarted
No one walked through this eye-opening discovery more directly than William Dever, a post-war biblical archaeologist with a Disciples of Christ education who later studied at Harvard and led hundreds of students on dozens of excavations all over Israel. After a lifetime of study and first-hand exploration of the biblical lands, Dever reports:
After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible “historical figures.” Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20 years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History. And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness.*
Remember the story of the wall of Jericho? Didn’t happen. Archaeologists like Dever inform us there wasn’t even a wall in existence during the time the Israelites were supposed to have taken the city. And the city, which by the way was likely abandoned before these invaders were supposed to have gotten there, was in its heyday no larger than the size of a couple of baseball fields side-by-side, occupied by no more than maybe 600 people. Can you imagine a nation of over a million adults marching around such a place, waiting for something miraculous to deliver this small town into their hands? They could have just walked right in and eaten their lunch.
There is not so much as a Late Bronze II potsherd of that period on the entire site…Nor is there any other possible candidate for biblical Jericho anywhere nearby in the sparsely settled lower Jordan Valley. Simply put, archaeology tells us that the biblical story of the fall of Jericho…cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources. It seems invented out of whole cloth.**
Try for a moment to imagine millions of Israelites. According to the Bible, there were 600,000 men who left Egypt on the night of Passover. Given that most adult men counted as heads of households would have been married, and given that the Bible stories show each family punching out at least half a dozen children a piece, we are being told that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million people exited a nation of only about 6 million in one single evening, leaving not a single trace of their presence in that country.
So we are to believe that those 3-4 million people spent 40 years in a deserted wasteland (getting their water from a rock, by the way, with their food just falling from the sky every morning) and yet somehow left not a single trace of their presence anywhere. No evidence of their existing in Egypt, no evidence of their dramatic departure, no evidence of their presence in the wilderness for decades, and zero evidence of their forceful takeover of any territories prior to their gradual emergence among the Canaanites several hundred years after the time they were supposed to have first come to be.
In short, none of this happened. The whole story is just made up. We know this.
*
What grabs my attention the most in all this isn’t the fact that the Bible got something so important so incredibly wrong. I got over that a long time ago, even if I continue to be impressed with just how much of this book was made up over time. What fascinates me most is the rationalization process that kicks in the moment a true believer is confronted with these realities. The mental contortions are impressive, and I can’t help but recall as I watch them happen how I myself once walked through these steps as well. I’m trying to remember what it was like to be so imprisoned by predetermined conclusions in my search for truth.
From this point forward, I’ll be happy to talk to believers about the things in this book which they are certain must be true. But until they are willing to wrestle with what the ground itself has to say about all of these stories, I’m not going to take the conversation seriously. The dirt is better at telling the truth.
quotations from * William Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It? (p.98-99)
** Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (pp.46-47)
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/02/18/none-really-happened/
“And it came to pass that the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt. Archeologists posit that traumatic event as a possible source of the Exodus legend.” ~ Headline in Haaretz, https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-the-exodus-ancient-semitic-memory-1.5244679?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=haaretz-news&utm_content=35f10210e2
I too am amazed — sometimes when I ponder that I ever accepted as factual stuff like Eve created from the rib, or virgin birth, my mouth literally falls open. Then I remember the indoctrination happened in childhood, it was conducted by experts better than, say, the KGB, and no free inquiry was tolerated. We were also admonished never ever to think about such matters "because that leads to heresy" (i.e. hell). But at least I never believed that god was good. That would have been just too much to swallow. Don’t forget that I was raised by an Auschwitz survivor.
*
DR. DAVID SINCLAIR (HARVARD RESEARCH SCIENTIST): WHY WE AGE AND WHY WE DON'T HAVE TO
Here is a talk from a Harvard scientist who’s into the nitty gritty of aging (and natch he takes metformin, of which berberine is hopefully an adequate mimic; blood sugar is the best indicator of longevity).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nXop2lLDa4
This was the first time I heard of NMN. Its action is basically like that of NR (Niagen— nicotinamide ribosome — Sinclair admits that NR powder is cheaper; you need bulk powder because capsules give you stingy, ineffective quantities).
What really daunts me is the benefits of fasting. Just two days of fasting, and you supposedly clean out all the old cells from you body. Even one day of fasting scares me — how weak and awful I’d feel, would I be able to sleep at all . . .
Here is Dr. David Sincleair's longevity regimen:
1 g of NMN powder and .5 g resveratrol powder mixed with some yogurt
1 g metformin at night — which makes me wonder if berberine could/should be taken all at once
Vit D, Vit K2
a small dose of aspirin
Diet:
Intermittent Fasting: Skip breakfast/lunch on most days
Eat as many vegetables/leafy greens as possible
Resveratrol is just one of a bunch of polyphenols that plants make when they’re stressed
1 cup of coffee in the morning
Avoid Sugar and Carbs (me: but centenarians on Okinawa, for instance, eat sweet potato a lot; I think it’s a matter of not eating excess carbs)
Limit protein intake, and specifically red meat
Why? A molecule in meat (Trimethylamine N-oxide – TMAO) has been linked to heart disease
Some fish, and occasionally chicken
vigorous exercise, cold baths, etc. — not doable for me, but of course the benefits are well known.
Wearing blue light blocking glasses a few hours before bed has greatly improved David’s sleep quality
Avoid X-Rays (planes and dentists)
Why? – X-ray scanners “change the epigenome” (cause chromosome breaks)
The genome is your DNA/genes
The epigenome is what regulates/reads those genes at the right time
“What I think is causing aging is not the loss of the digital information (the genes/DNA), but the reader (the epigenome)”
So when we age, our cells are losing the ability to read the right genes the way we could do in our younger years.
In short, x-rays add up over time, and act as smalls “scratches” to the DNA/chromosome. When the body repairs these “scratches”, this disrupts its ability to read the right gene at the right place (aka the epigenome).
Sirtuins are a class of proteins that have two jobs:
1) Regulate gene expression
2) Help repair DNA damage
Sirtuins need NAD+ (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide) to function properly. Without it, aging is accelerated.
As we age, our NAD+ levels drop
By the time we’re 50, our NAD+ levels are about half what they were when we were 20
You can boost NAD+ through precursor supplementation, exercise, fasting, and by exposing yourself to cold/heat stress
NMN and Resveratrol are molecules which essentially mimic the effects of the sirtuin genes
“You can think of resveratrol as the accelerator pedal for the sirtuin genes, and NMN as the fuel”
“Resveratrol steps on the accelerator pedal of the sirtuin enzymes”
So you need the fuel (NMN) for resveratrol to work [me: pterostilbene should work as well or better]
There are 3 pathways related to aging:
AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) – metformin targets this pathway
Sirtuin pathways – NMN and resveratrol help with this one
mTOR – this is a pathway in the body activated by protein/amino acids
The only way to effect the mTOR pathway without fasting or eating a lower protein diet, is through a drug called rapamycin
Peter Attia talks about rapamycin extensively in these Podcast Notes – he takes a low dose every 4-7 days
David doesn’t take it – he says it’s too risky to do just yet [me: I’ve read that metformin (and hopefully berberine) also inhibits mTOR]
Oriana:
Progesterone inhibits mTOR pathways.
Exercise inhibits mTOR in the liver and fat cells, but activates it in the muscles, brain, and heart (that’s where you want growth).
Curcumin, berries, onions, cruciferous vegetables, green tea, dark chocolate, coffee, walnuts, and many other foods activate sirtuins (searchable online).
But then metformin itself appears to inhibit mTOR signaling, which may be the secret of its cancer-preventive properties.
***
Oriana:
For a long time my guess about what’s most important for longevity (aside from genes — nothing beats having centenarian genes) was “positive emotions” and “having something to live for.” Positive emotions and a strong sense of purpose are no doubt extremely beneficial, and probably influence longevity, but . . . long-term human studies are notoriously difficult and expensive, not to mention the multiple confounding variables (e.g. are you a boss or a subordinate? how long is your daily commute? do you live in a highly polluted area? etc etc)
And then I learned about metformin — how, instead of making the lab rodents fast every other day, or go somewhat hungry every day (calorie restriction), you could just give them metformin, a well-known anti-diabetes drug, and obtain an equivalent extension of life span. But what really got me agitated was learning that diabetic patients given metformin on average live longer than non-diabetics. And there was no reason to think that positive emotions had anything to do with it; it seemed plain that the drug switched on the master enzyme regulating the production of energy, lowering blood sugar and insulin levels.
I say “agitated” rather than “excited” because I wasn’t about to make myself diabetic in order to qualify for metformin. And even the anti-aging physicians I came to know in my free-lancing years did not seem to be informed about metformin. Growth hormone? Sure, they were perfectly willing to prescribe growth hormone, in spite of serious questions of its efficacy and safety. But metformin? Not if your blood sugar is under the diabetic threshold. Never mind if patients given metformin say they suddenly feel great.
Metformin is the most widely used anti-diabetes drug in the world, but . . . you need to be a diabetic to qualify for it.
It was only this past past January that I happened to come across the information on berberine and how it has the same action as metformin. Those who missed that blog can find it here: https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2021/01/camus-and-hope-myths-about-exercise.html
(Please don’t be discouraged by the wording of the link; the post about the berberine is there; keep scrolling until almost the end)
So, it comes as no surprise that Dr. Sinclair takes metformin. That's his best resource. Those of us without his connections can go online and order berberine. I like mine in MCT oil, but that’s not to say that the powder extract doesn’t work. NMN and NR can be bought in powder form. Buying the powder in bulk is pretty much the only way you can get enough for the money (and it’s still pretty expensive). And if Dr. Sinclair mixes his powder into yogurt, that’s probably an excellent way to take it. (Yogurt seems to ameliorate the taste of various medicinal powders.)
Considering that NR and NMN are both niacin derivatives, I wonder if perhaps taking niacin in divided doses (25 mg each) with each meal would be enough (and incredibly cheap by comparison? Personally I'm very happy with this method.)
And let’s not forget about the benefits of coffee. The right dose of coffee (only the caffeinated kind) resembles the action of metformin. By stimulating AMPK, it protects the liver, the heart, and the brain. These results hold for long-term consumption.
And, as usual, we could use a lot more research. For instance, is intermittent fasting really necessary if you’re taking metformin, which mimics the effects of fasting? Is fasting for two days once a month more effective than just taking metformin or berberine? And so on. But research using human subjects is very expensive, especially if samples are of a robust size (at least 40 subjects per group). As long as the pharmacologically expensive diseases of aging are the focus, rather than their underlying cause — aging itself — we will be forced to rely largely on guesswork and mouse studies.
After long rainy afternoons an hour
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.
Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a sleeping silence lies.
~ Rilke, In April
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