Picasso: Marie-Therese in a mirror, 1932
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Now it’s September and the web is woven.
The web is woven and you have to wear it.
~ Wallace Stevens, The Dwarf
And maybe it’s already October, in terms of the seasons of life — we simply don’t know how much time is left — relatively healthy time, that is, when the brain can still produce something interesting, or at least when we can be useful rather than burdensome to others.
But when I look at the most creative years in my life, there’s no evading the diminishment. Perhaps because limited mobility prevented me from following a friend’s advice: travel and have affairs, my creative output in poetry has shriveled to one new poem a year, and even that is not guaranteed. Yes, I have become a dwarf. Meanwhile three people dear to my heart, and who happen to be near my age, continue to produce their best work ever.
My late older friend, Una, also wrote some of her most touching poems in her seventies and eighties. She predicted that I’d pay a price for choosing not to be depressed: “Depression strokes the feathers of the Muse.”
For me success was never about money, but I did have a naive expectation of a kind of sunset beauty of those sunset years, writing my best poems yet. Back at my peak (so long ago it’s scary) I really was so ignorant of how a typical creative life unfolds. (Not for the people I mentioned, whose later-life creativity astonishes me.)
Here is something I recklessly wrote back when poems arose as naturally as thoughts (the title is Latin for where are you going?):
QUO VADIS
Where to? I keep asking
I look at the stained glass of autumn,
watch the blaze of deepening sunset.
Late beauty burns
purest flame. Then the diamond
kindling of the stars.
~ Oriana
I omitted the first stanza, which struck me as too explicit (and besides, less is more)
Where to? I keep asking. Where are you
taking me, my life? But life
doesn’t reply. Only the waving
of the infinite ocean. Only the falling
of innumerable leaves.
There is still an occasional surprise poem, now once a year perhaps. But at least I can do this one thing still — I can still do minor revision, maybe touch up a line or omit it. I think I’ve learned what poetry is, and recognize it, just as I’ve learned to spot the dull, explanatory lines.
And speaking of minor revision, last night I discovered this early Penelope poem — the least accomplished of my several Penelope poems.
THE JOURNEY OF PENELOPE
I roam through my endless house.
I open doors and walk in,
a little scared and hushed,
as if entering pristine
chambers of the heart.
These are not guilty labyrinths
but unfinished solitudes.
I want to find
not the way out,
but the way deeper in.
*
Odysseus only thought
he arrived:
by then Ithaca
was another country.
**
Maybe the second section is its own poem — but for me the creative process washed it ashore, so to speak. Somehow the statement needs to come from the stay-at-home Penelope, the non-dominant character who, if she ever aspired to glory, kept it to herself, and instead concentrated on her weaving and fending off the many suitors.
Mary:
The opening poem, "Quo Vadis," asks that question against a kind of scrim of different lifetimes. The rocks feel no urgency, their time is measured in milllennia. Trees are a "slow harp" while grasses rush to set seed in one season. Our time is longer than grass', shorter than trees', and under the pressure of death we may often experience that deepening sunset blaze, when “Late beauty burns/ purest flame.” Beyond that sunset there is the timeless diamond light of the stars, as close as we can imagine eternity.
Certainly wondrous when it happens, that late sunset blaze is not universal, sometimes creativity flags with age, instead of blossoming. Why? Probably many things determine this, including physical health and economic situation. My creative production increased most after my working days were over, but simply having more time isn't enough to explain much of anything.
Penelope going through the rooms of her house is interesting, as the structure of a house can express the times of a life or the states of a mind.As she moves through her rooms she reflects on her life, both the long years of waiting, and the states of mind changing through those years —memory, consciousness, moods. All the changes of a lifetime. Changes her returning husband could know nothing about.
Oriana:
Thank you for this lovely analysis. Yes, after twenty years apart, Penelope and Odysseus have become largely strangers. But another way to see them is as two aspects of the same personality. But let me restrain myself — as Nietzsche warned, anything you look at closely enough becomes an infinity.
Today's Ithaca*
MIDDLEMARCH, GEORGE ELIOT’S “GREAT EXPECTATIONS” — WHEN GRAND ASPIRATION DWINDLES INTO LESSER ACCOMPLISHMENT
~ It would be hard for even the most devoted aficionado of George Eliot to argue that the opening sentence of Middlemarch should be numbered among the greats in terms of memorability, effectiveness, or enticement. The novel opens with a Prelude—not so much an introduction to the novel’s characters or context as an announcement of its themes. It begins with a rhetorical question: “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?” Modern-day readers, invited at the outset of what is a dauntingly long book to reflect upon their familiarity with the life of a 16th-century Spanish saint, might be forgiven for meekly responding, “Er, me?”
George Eliot—who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, and who adopted her masculine pen name in 1857 when she published her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life—was herself very familiar with the life of Saint Theresa, a Spanish noblewoman of passionate religious conviction who first joined a religious order when she was twenty years old, and who, over the subsequent almost half-century, became an influential theologian, mystic, and religious reformer. The opening sentence of Middlemarch refers to an incident in which the young Theresa and a sibling, seized with precocious religious conviction, set off from Ávila with the intention of being gloriously executed for their faith by non-Christians, only to be thwarted by family members who stopped them in their outing.
It is described in Saint Theresa’s autobiography, which Eliot would doubtless have read multiple times and in different languages: in 1867, three years before Middlemarch was published, she sought out a Spanish-language copy while on a trip through Spain, and seems to have been mildly irked when, in a bookshop, an effort was made to sell her a photograph instead. Eliot might have expected that her contemporary readers would be at least somewhat familiar with the Life of the saint—which is, modern-day readers may be surprised to discover if they look at it, approachable and even winningly ironical in its depiction of its narrator’s early religious ardor. “As soon as I saw it was impossible to go to any place where people would put me to death for the sake of God, my brother and I set about becoming hermits,” Saint Theresa writes of the abortive effort at martyrdom cited by Eliot. “We contrived, as well as we could, to build hermitages, by piling up small stones one on the other, which fell down immediately; and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish.”
Eliot’s opening sentence is ironical, too, though a reader who is new to her voice may not immediately discern the irony amidst the more off-putting elements of Eliot’s prose, such as the alarming capitalization of “Time” and the invoking of an obscure-ish saint. Middlemarch has acquired such a forbidding reputation of literary gravitas that a reader embarking upon it for the fist time may not be primed to expect humor, but it is there from the start, if in subtle form. The novel’s opening sentence suggests that the author is taking no less an object for her novelistic consideration than “the history of man” and the “experiments of Time”—even though, as the reader has been informed by the novel’s subtitle, these large themes are to be explored within the narrow framework of “A Study of Provincial Life.” Like Saint Theresa herself, the novel has epic ambition.
But, also like the young Theresa, Middlemarch—both the novel and the fictional town for which it is named—is limited by the constraints of ordinary life. The novel’s first sentence may not be pithy; it may even be clunky. But with it, Eliot establishes what is to be her theme, developed with complexity throughout the novel: What happens when grand aspiration dwindles into lesser accomplishment?
Grand aspirations are everywhere in Middlemarch, not least nurtured within the breast of Dorothea Brooke, the nineteen-year-old heroine to whom the reader is introduced as soon as the generalities of the Prelude give way to the specifics of the narrative. (“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress,” the fist chapter of Book One of Middlemarch begins—a much more inviting way to start a story.) Dorothea, we can safely assume, has read the autobiography of Saint Theresa.
When we are first introduced to her, it is through the eyes of more conventional Middlemarch dwellers, whose regard for the as-yet-unmarried Dorothea’s high birth and good manners is qualified by the disquieting sense that she also has some unfortunate habits, such as kneeling down on a brick floor to pray by the side of a sick laborer or having “strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!” Even Dorothea’s most fond allies, her family, are skeptical of her predilection for self-denial. “She likes giving up,” remarks Dorothea’s more down-to-earth sister, Celia, with comic generalization. And the ironical voice of the novel’s narrator has fun with Dorothea’s high-minded religiosity, noting, apropos of Dorothea’s fondness for horseback riding, that “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.”
Dorothea’s inclination is not to withdraw to a cloister for a life of private devotion, however. Today we might recognize her motivations to be not so much religious as social and ethical: She wants to do good in the world, which in her case is provincial England around 1830. Dorothea wishes to reform the lives of the tenant farmers on her uncle’s property not by improving their souls for the hereafter, but by building them new and better cottages for the here and now. Early in the novel Dorothea marries a clergyman, Edward Casaubon, but her attraction to him is not due to any exemplary faith on his part, but rather because she believes—mistakenly, it turns out—that he has a great mind, and that by participating in a minor way in his intellectual project, she might contribute to the greater good of the world.
About halfway through Middlemarch—after considerable marital disappointment, among other developments—Dorothea gives an account of the form of religious belief that she has come to hold, which is personal rather than canonical: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
To depict Dorothea’s youthful piety, George Eliot drew on her own. Eliot grew up in far humbler circumstances than did her heroine: as the daughter of a land agent on a country estate in Warwickshire, she might have anticipated a career as a farmer’s wife, not as the editor, critic, novelist, and poet that she became. Enormously gifted intellectually, she attended school until the age of sixteen, and thereafter continued her studies with tutors while also keeping house for her widowed father.
In her teens, she turned her capacious mind to questions of theology, and, like her heroine in Middlemarch, went through a period of devout observance and even ostentatious denial. She disapproved of singing, other than of hymns, and renounced the reading of fiction as a frivolous distraction. “I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life,” she wrote to a friend in 1839, when she was the age of Dorothea at the outset of Middlemarch. “Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?”
By the time Eliot became the author of Middlemarch, thirty years on from writing that letter, she had long been what we would now call agnostic, having undergone a crisis of faith in her twenties and come to the conclusion that the tenets of the church could not stand up to intellectual scrutiny. But Eliot maintained her own adherence to the credo expressed by Dorothea in Middlemarch: that individual acts of goodwill, however small, contributed to the widening of the skirts of light, and the narrowing of the struggle with darkness. Eliot characterized herself as a “meliorist,” a word that she believed was of her own coinage, deriving from the Latin word melior, which means “better.”
Meliorism might best be understood as a belief that the world is gradually improving, or can gradually be improved, through individual, incremental actions in the direction of good. Eliot had come to believe, contrary to her youthful skepticism about the utility of fiction, that the depiction of “things that never existed”—the writing of novels—might itself be a way of making the world better. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures,” she once explained.
By this measure, even the mere activity of reading a novel can be a way of bettering the world, if in doing so the reader expands their capacity for sympathizing with the choices and predicaments of characters whose circumstances may be profoundly different from their own, but whose moral and ethical dilemmas are completely recognizable. The social world of Dorothea Brooke, a daughter of the English landed gentry in the early 19th century, may be unfamiliar to a modern-day reader of Middlemarch; in many ways the conventions of her life, and the expectations that attend her, are as peculiar and obsolete as the practice of riding sidesaddle, the activity that Dorothea so looked forward to renouncing.
On the other hand, the larger world of the town of Middlemarch—which, Eliot shows her readers, is experiencing political upheaval in the form of the Reform Act that extended the franchise beyond the upper classes, and which is bracing itself for the possible spread to its precincts of the global cholera pandemic that occurred in the 1820s and 1830s—has more in common with our own time than we might at first imagine.
Meanwhile, Eliot’s rendering of her characters’ consciousnesses as they come to terms with the disjunction between aspiration and accomplishment needs no explanatory footnote. “For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” Eliot writes of Dorothea near the outset of the novel. “What could she do, what ought she to do?” This is a state of mind that a young reader of today will likely recognize, just as Saint Theresa would have done five hundred years ago.
If readers can be forgiven for grumbling at the first sentence of Middlemarch, the novel’s last sentence is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest ever written. No spoilers—it won’t be quoted here. A first-time reader will have to arrive at it in their own time—after weeks or even months spent in the company of George Eliot and the struggling, erring human creatures who inhabit the fictional town of Middlemarch. Suffice it to say that that the sentence returns to the theme established at the novel’s beginning—the question of what counts as accomplishment for that large majority of individuals who may not have the capacity or the context to achieve the spiritual grandeur attained by the remarkable female saint with whom the book opens. What might the rest of us aspire to? Now read on, reach the ultimate sentence, and see the light widen.
https://lithub.com/the-gulf-between-aspiration-and-accomplishment-rebecca-mead-on-saint-theresa-and-middlemarch/?fbclid=IwAR1qG7_L7Gin39_vGzVwo7xT93G-vNR3VSdA7CD8HDzo9CcwNj7PMgCeyyI
Oriana:
I did read Middlemarch, and remembered that the last sentence had an outstanding insight — something about the merits of kind, unremembered deeds. I looked it up, and here it is: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
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Two unhappy marriages in one novel? Of course the true and tragic shattering of great expectations happens not so much to Dorothea, who after all is liberated by Casaubon’s death and chooses true love over wealth —the book’s “happy ending.” The book’s tragedy unfolds for the ambitious Dr. Lydgate. Somewhere in the middle of the novel, every reader realizes that Lydgate should have married Dorothea, whose wealth would then support his progressive public health projects. Alas, he’s already unhappily married to a shallow and vain coquette and doomed to be an average physician catering to rich patients — a failure in his own eyes.
Eliot is a realist and shatters the romantic convention that true soulmates go on to live happily ever after. Rather, most people end up mismatched. Somehow Eliot got away with this ruthlessness, while Dickens capitulated to public pressure and changed the original unhappy ending of Great Expectations to the romantic one (still apparently preferred even by today’s readers).
But then it’s been said that Middlemarch is the only novel for grown-ups in the English literature.
As for Saint Teresa, she has inspired countless young Catholic girls to want to become nuns. Most of them change their mind, but St. Thérèse of Lisieux persisted in her ambition to become a saint and did enter Carmel. Soon enough she realized that she would never be a great mystic like Teresa of Avila. Having experienced those diminished expectations she then discovered her own “Little Way” — doing small kind deeds. For instance, she was friendly toward a gruff elderly nun, disliked by all others. I have a feeling that, if circumstances allowed it, George Eliot would be keenly interested in that once-ambitious young nun who ultimately chose a “hidden life” filled with small kind deeds rather than hope for visions and miracles.
Now Thérèse is revered as “The Little Flower.” She supposedly said, “I’ll spend my heaven doing good on earth.” If more people chose, in this life, to do good on earth, we’d come closer to experiencing heaven. After all, according to the new Catholic dogma, heaven is not a place but a loving state of mind. And if it is a place after all, then one where everyone is kind.
Dorothea and Casaubon: a woman who marries a much older man pretty much dooms herself to be unhappy.
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’THE LOST LEONARDO” — AN ART MARKET THRILLER
~ “After drugs and prostitution, the art market is the most unregulated market in the world,” quips one of the assortment of engaging talking heads gathered by Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed for his latest documentary, The Lost Leonardo. That would be da Vinci, not DiCaprio (although the latter does make a cameo), and what resurfaced, after 500 years, was “Salvator Mundi,” a painting attributed to the most famous Renaissance master. Allegedly. Possibly maybe, as the song goes. It really depends on who you ask, and while complicated issues of authenticity make up a significant portion of Koefoed’s film, it’s his pursuit of the money through that opaque and unregulated market that reveals the more fascinating, if predictable, themes of greed, power, and deception.
So, a couple of art players buy this painting in New Orleans in 2005 for around $1,200. They’re convinced it’s a lost Leonardo and bring in Dianne Modestini, art restorer extraordinaire, to fix it up – which, after five years of work, she does. In that process, she has restored 85% of this painting depicting Jesus Christ clothed in the fashion of the (Renaissance) times. Now, in order to fetch a nice price at market, this thing has to be authenticated, so enter the experts. There’s a little known fact about art scholars and academics you may not be aware of: They tend to have a propensity for incredibly inflated egos. I know, who would have thought, right? Anyway, none of the scholars want to outright say that “Salvator Mundi” is legit, because what if they’re wrong? And none of the scholars want to say that “Salvator Mundi” is a fraud, because what if they’re wrong? (Art scholarship can be quite a nerve-racking vocation.) So they all agree that it might be an authentic Leonardo.
Well, that’s not conclusive enough to fetch a nice price at market, so enter the museum curator. London’s National Gallery steps in and says, “Hey, not only will we confirm it’s authentic, we’ll put it on display and make loads of cash and increase its cultural capital!” Bingo! Sold in 2013 to a Russian oligarch for $127.5 million (well, actually $83 million, but that’s a whole other story). The Russian billionaire stores his trophy, er, painting in one of those cool, secret billionaire tax evasion warehouses called “freeports.”
So when the Russian oligarch decides, as Russian oligarchs are apt to do, to liquidate his mobile assets, er, art collection in 2017, Christie’s auction house steps in and says, “Hey, not only will we sell this fabulous and completely legitimate Leonardo painting, we’re going to send it on a tour of world museums to make it even more famous (and also make us a lot of money)!” Which they do, launching a full-on blitzkrieg of publicity, which is where the other Leonardo pops up, seen in an ad campaign that equates seeing the painting with basically ascending to godhead. At this point, never mind any questions of authenticity, or that less than 20% of the painting is the work of Leonardo himself (probably), because, as we all are reminded of daily, all you have to do to prove an absolute truth is to keep repeating it. But who needs truth anyway when this commodity, er, painting breaks a world record and is sold for $450 million? To whom, you ask? Why, it’s everyone’s favorite authoritarian, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia himself, Mohammed bin Salman, and you know when MBS shows up in a doc (see: The Dissident), shit’s about to get real.
“Salvator Mundi” is now stored on a yacht somewhere, tucked away like the Ark of the Covenant, which is pretty perfect, metaphorically speaking. That whole art-versus-commerce bit was so 20th century anyway, and Koefoed’s film takes undeniable glee in pointing this out, over and over again. And while some of the re-creations of clandestine meetings and shots of faceless men transporting the painting can be a bit cloak-and-dagger cheesy, that’s the only stumble in a film that tells a strange tale populated by a cast of eccentric and dangerous characters. It’s another peek, along with 2018’s The Price of Everything and 2017’s Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World, into the high-finance world of paintings as investments. As the song goes, “Eyes down, round and round/ Let’s all sit and watch the moneygoround.”
https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2021-09-03/the-lost-leonardo/
Salvator Mundi before restoration; I'm tempted to say that this is my favorite version
from another source:
~ Ten years ago, London’s National Gallery exhibited a heavily restored Salvator Mundi, allegedly painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the attribution of which is fiercely contested. Tracing the painting from discovery to its eventual record-breaking private sale, documentarian Andreas Koefoed’s latest is about how art can become a vector for vanity, status and raw power.
For anyone hoping for this film to offer any kind of definitive answer to the question of the Salvator Mundi’s origins, The Lost Leonardo is likely to disappoint. This is not an investigative documentary and Koefoed sensibly works around the question that has caught up his subjects in obsession. Indeed, The Lost Leonardo is not really about a painting at all; the meaning of the painting – whether it is by the Renaissance master or not – is of secondary concern to the film and apparently entirely superfluous to both its skeptics and the figures that profess absolute faith in its provenance. The art critic Jerry Saltz – the film’s most forthright skeptical voice as well its most amusingly obnoxious – says that a genuine da Vinci or not, Salvator Mundi is not even a good painting.
No, The Lost Leonardo is about obsession, ego, power and greed. For almost all of the film’s characters, Salvator Mundi represents nothing more than opportunity. For some it is increased status in the art world, for others it is the vain satisfaction in being the one who has discovered a lost treasure; for all of them it is about converting that opportunity into capital, whether it be cultural, financial or even political.
A few figures do emerge with some semblance of sincerity. Dianne Modestini, who believes that the work is a true da Vinci, restored the heavily damaged the painting and is one of only two figures who appears to have an actual appreciation of the painting. A question marks hangs over how much, if anything, she expected to profit from its restoration and eventual sale, but she is consistent in her regret that it did not end up in a public gallery. Elsewhere, art scholar Martin Kemp is assured that the painting is authentic, while apparently standing to gain little from the declaration other than perhaps the waning status of having an opinion of the thing.
The film first shows its hand after the painting is acquired by a Russian oligarch through a deal with shady businessman Yves Bouvier. This is where the mask that the acquisition of valuable art is about anything other than power finally drops. Converting liquid cash into physical objects, billionaires’ vast fortunes can be hidden safely from tax authorities in Bouvier’s vast freeport. They can then be reconverted into cash or other forms of capital when needed, such as the painting’s eventual sale for $450m in 2017, allegedly to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The painting’s authenticity would be question if only it still mattered. There are conflicting accounts over the reason that the Louvre Museum, which sought to loan the painting, didn’t display it during their famous da Vinci exhibition, though the one that prevails here is that MBS insisted that it be displayed next to the Mona Lisa, while the Louvre refused. It is a truly fascinating and cynical display of political power by proxy, but at this stage no one is surely under any illusions that it was ever about the art. ~
https://cine-vue.com/2021/09/film-review-the-lost-leonardo.html
Oriana:
I remember first looking at Salvator Mundi (“Savior of the World”) and finding it rather ugly. The eyes were all wrong, especially when compared to the beautiful eyes of Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist.
And no matter how badly damaged The Last Supper is, that is Leonardo’s Jesus: infinitely gentle and sad, resigned to what must be, with the tumult on both sides of him. Who will betray him? Perhaps only that painter who gives us a stiff, un-beautiful Jesus.
But the Guardian comes up with an interesting theory of why this painting does not look like a Leonardo: “If this painting looks fake, that’s because it is a religious masterpiece painted by an atheist. It is a genuine Leonardo but not a genuine expression of his thoughts and feelings. That insincerity saps it of soul even as it spooks you with the illusion of Christ’s presence.” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/16/all-leonardo-da-vinci-painting-rated-salvator-mundi
If so, how come Leonardo did paint beautiful St. John, the soulful, sorrowing Jesus of the Last Supper, beautiful Mary and St. Anne, and exquisite angels?
But there is a more telling detail, even if terrubly mundane detail. We know that Leonardo was a perfectionist. If he painted on wood, he chose the best-quality panels. The panel of Salvator Mundi is the cheap kind, with a knot in it. A knot is harder than the rest of the plank and would eventually cause problems.
There are other red flags as well, but the authenticity of the work is not what this superb documentary is about. As the reviews point out, it’s about the greed and shady practices of the art market. It’s also about the obscenely rich collectors who end up depriving the public of access to various masterpieces by keeping them in a kind of heavily armored safe storage in Geneva, called “freeport.”
The buyer of Salvator Mundi wished to stay anonymous, but his covered was blown by the CIA. It turned out to be Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — the one who ordered ( or, in the new softened media language, “approved””) the barbarously torturous murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The vile and indeed obscenely rich Saudi potentate was apparently willing to pay up to one billion dollars for the painting. For me the most painful scenes of the documentary were those showing French President Macron positively fawning on the Saudi Prince. So much for the West’s willingness to stand up for human rights.
So it's absolutely true that this movie is not really about art, and it's not about Leonardo. It's about corruption at the top. It's about Big Money. And right now no one knows where the painting is. It may be in the Swiss freeport, or on bin Salman’s yacht. If he looks at it, then in the eyes of Islam he’s committing a sin: depiction of the prophets (Jesus is regarded as a prophet) is a major sin, an instance of religious corruption. But most likely he’s not looking at it. To him it’s not art, but an extraordinary financial asset, “a male Mona Lisa.”
If you have a chance, by all means go see “The Lost Leonardo.” It’s superbly well done. You will leave the theater sadder but wiser.
Mary:
Although I have not seen the movie, the Lost Leonardo sounds like it has much to say about the connection between art, power and wealth in our world. It sounds very much like the value of any individual work is not related to its status as an aesthetic object, or barely so, and that the value is something determined by a power game of smoke and mirrors, in order to leverage its financial worth. Rarity and authenticity become selling points, and as the game is played out that worth is inflated over and over again.
So art becomes currency for the very very obscenely rich, who may shift it over agan and again in the marketplace, maximizing their profits...then, often, it is owned and stored in someone’s private collection, removed from any public venue.
This kind of manipulation, in my mind, can actually call into question the intrinsic value of whatever work comes into that rarefied and exclusive marketplace. As the price increases beyond all reason, the artificial and forced nature of that process makes its worth less believable, seem more and more contrived and inauthentic.
As to the painting I don't like it. It doesn't have that exquisite beauty of Leonardo's faces, their subtlety of expression..it seems stiff and unalive. Also, Leonardo was very interested in optics, and the transparent globe this figure is holding does not show the kind of distortions Leonardo would have known present in a curved surface. Here the folds in the clothing and palm of the hand look as they would if viewed through a flat piece of glass. I also find the " cheap panel" detail very telling.
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"ANYTHING WE CAN ACTUALLY DO, WE CAN AFFORD"
~ “The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford,’” writes Adam Tooze. “Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.”
It’s obviously not a novel observation to point out that the global economic response to the pandemic was astounding in size. But I want to start today with just some numbers to put this in context. So the O.E.C.D., which is a consortium of a lot of richer nations, estimates that its members issued a total of 18 trillion in debt in 2020 alone. That is the largest surge in debt ever recorded in peacetime.
A whopping 11 trillion of that was just between the months of January and May. Nearly 70 percent of that debt — 70 percent — was in the U.S. alone. The $2.2-trillion CARES Act — that was passed by a Republican Senate. It was signed into law by a Republican president. And it was more than double the size of the 2009 stimulus. In a matter of weeks, the Federal Reserve bought 5 percent of the entire $20-trillion bond market. At the peak of its action, the Fed was buying bonds at the rate of a million dollars per second. These are wild numbers.
But the most revealing part of that response wasn’t what happened. It was what didn’t happen. Bond vigilantes didn’t send markets into a tailspin. Interest rates didn’t skyrocket. Inflation — well, we’re going to talk about inflation a lot in this. But there was certainly no evidence of a hyperinflationary spiral. Private investment didn’t plummet. The terrified view of future uncertainty hasn’t stopped everyone from hiring or making new capital investments.
Instead, the Treasury market stabilized. The financial markets not only recovered, they surged. The decades of doomsday predictions of what would happen if the government should spend huge amounts of money without paying for it — they didn’t materialize, not in the moment anyway.
Adam Tooze is a brilliant economic historian at Columbia University. He’s the author of the book “Crashed,” which, for my money, is the single best history of the financial crisis, and now of “Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy.” He’s also co-host of the new podcast “Ones and Tooze.” Yeah, that is Tooze spelled T-O-O-Z-E like his name. So who said economic historians don’t have a sense of humor?
EZRA KLEIN: So you’ve written that one of the central takeaways of the last year and a half is that, quote, “John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared, during World War II, that anything we can actually do, we can afford.” Tell me about that idea.
ADAM TOOZE: So it’s double-edged. I think that’s the key. And the penny took a while to drop, for me. But 2020, I think, illustrates both sides of this. So on the one side, there is the emancipatory promise, this open-handed “we can afford anything,” by which I think Keynes means, money is a technical issue.
In the end, it’s a question of mobilizing finance, stringing together the financial engineering, doing some of the central-banking arithmetic we might need to do. But in the end, what limits what we can do is not whether we can afford something, but whether we can actually do it.
And this is why 2020 is — it’s a slightly academic way of putting it, but it’s a kind of beautiful illustration of the force of this point, because we could pay for all sorts of things. But could we organize ourselves to collectively socially distance? Well, in the end, in some places, yes, and in many places, no.
Could we roll out a vaccine? Well, we didn’t know ahead of time. Early in 2020, I remember sitting in meetings with science colleagues at Columbia and them saying, we’ve never done this before. We’ve never had a coronavirus vaccine. And we ended up with a whole suite of them. And that depended on the extraordinary skill of the scientists manipulating nature to produce that result. But then again, can we actually organize to roll that out to the entire world’s population? Certainly not at the pace that we’d want to.
So the book is really a kind of meditation on that, on the one hand, enabling discovery: that really finding the money isn’t the problem, and not just in the rich countries. But if the Fed settings are right, and you’ve got competent management, in fact, in much of the world economy right now, that isn’t the problem. The problem is the nitty-gritty. The problem is what economists call the — if you like — more the supply side, the real economy. That turns out to be where the problems are that we need to overcome.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to drill on this idea for a minute because it is simultaneously deceptively simple and not how we have been taught to think. So what you’re saying here, what Keynes was saying here, is that money can be invented in whatever quantity we want, really. The Federal Reserve can just create more of it. But things cannot be invented in whatever quantity we want.
ADAM TOOZE: I think that’s a really good way of putting it. And part of the tension, part of the stress caused by discovering that, really, budgetary arithmetic is just really budgetary arithmetic, is that without it, we face the really harsh political questions of, could we agree to do this? And if we’re not doing it, it’s because you, the other people, our antagonists, don’t want to do it. You’ve got something else you’d rather do. Or it’s the humbling realization that, will it as much as we will, we just can’t do it. We just don’t have the technical wherewithal.
Oriana:
I'm very struck by the phrase “Money is a technicality” and by this passage: “You can tell by how much money we spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars without an inflationary problem, without a crowding-out problem. We just spent it. We didn’t pay for it. It’s trillions and trillions of dollars.”
I can’t pretend to comprehend the world of trillions and trillions of dollars. It might as well be astrophysics. But if what Tooze says is correct, then the great problems of our times are not financial, but moral. The trillions and trillions spent on no-win wars versus the penny-pinching when it comes to providing housing for the homeless, for instance.
When we truly want something enormously expensive, it gets done — to give a more positive example, think of the Moon landing. And the most recent example, providing hundreds of millions of doses of Covid vaccine, free to the recipient. But there must be a will. That’s the level at which things can break down in a polarized country — the level of politics, of radical differences in values.
I remember discussing, some years ago, universal access to health care. “That will never happen here,” one man argued. “Americans are too selfish.” A burly blue-collar worker, I don’t think he meant it as any kind of leftist criticism. It was rather his honest diagnosis. But at this point I am struck by the fact that he didn’t say, “It would cost too much.”
Mary:
Just a thought on money...this crazy game of inflating the price of a work of art actually undermines the idea of value. The increases are like the inflation of a balloon, growing and growing, but only filled with air. Money is a technicality, yes. And also an imaginary construction...if we need more we can just make more. Smoke and mirrors, number games, creative bookkeeping.
Oriana:
What depresses me no end is that we don't have a consensus on priorities. Of course this country can afford both free tuition at state universities and universal health care, but there is still the bizarre fear of "socialism" and a paralyzing lack consensus and political will. So again the money is spent instead on nuclear weapons that will never be used, and the like absurdities.
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THE DISCOVERY OF MICROSCOPIC LIFE SHOOK UP THEOLOGY (AND MORE)
~ When the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at a drop of pond water through his home-made microscope in the 1670s, he didn’t just see tiny ‘animals’ swimming in there. He saw a new world: too small for the eye to register yet teeming with invisible life. The implications were theological as much as they were scientific.
Invisibility comes in many forms, but smallness is the most concrete. Light ignores very tiny things rather as ocean waves ignore sand grains. During the 17th century, when the microscope was invented, the discovery of such objects posed a profound problem: if we humans were God’s ultimate purpose, why would he create anything that we couldn’t see?
The microworld was puzzling, but also wondrous and frightening. There was nothing especially new about the idea of invisible worlds and creatures — belief in immaterial spirits, angels and demons was still widespread. But their purpose was well understood: they were engaged in the Manichean struggle for our souls. If that left one uneasy in a universe where there was more than meets the eye, at least the moral agenda was clear.
But Leeuwenhoek’s ‘animalcules’ and their ilk indulged their opaque, wriggly ways everywhere one looked: in moisture, air, body fluids. In human semen — Leeuwenhoek studied his own, transferred with jarring haste from the marital bed — there were tadpole-like creatures writhing like eels. In 1687 the German mathematician Johann Sturm suggested that disease was caused by breathing in such invisible animals in air. In 1646 the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher proposed that the plague might be caused by the microscopic ‘seeds’ of virulent worms that enter the body through the nose and mouth — just a step away, it seemed, from a germ theory of contagion. Alas, the impossibility of seeing bacteria and viruses with the microscopes of the time obstructed that leap until Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch made it in the late 19th century.
Pestilence was everywhere, unseen and impossible to fend off — just like medieval demons. The narrator in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) claims he has heard that if a person with the plague breathes on glass, ‘there might living Creatures be seen by a Microscope of strange, monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents and Devils, horrible to behold’. He admits some doubt as to whether this is true, but the message is clear: the invisible microworld is labelled ‘Here be dragons.’
Little has changed. Electron microscopes now reveal miniature viral monsters that look like science-fiction aliens, with arachnoid legs and crystal heads from which they inject genetic venom into cells. MRSA bacteria lurk unseen on hospital door handles and bed sheets. We sprinkle anti-bacterial fluids like holy water to fend off these invisible fiends.
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The idea that matter might be composed of particles and processes too small to see has a long history — from the atoms of Democritus to the whirling vortices of Descartes and the corpuscles of Newton. Yet this fine-grained structure only came to seem like an ‘invisible world’ once the microscope had enabled us, first, to appreciate the intricacy with which it was wrought, and second, to identify life among the grains. When Galileo used one of the first microscopes to study insects, he was astonished and repelled, writing to his friend Federico Cesi in 1624: I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration, among which the flea is quite horrible, the mosquito and the moth very beautiful… In short, the greatness of nature, and the subtle and unspeakable care with which she works is a source of unending contemplation.
The 17th-century philosopher Robert Hooke echoed this wonder at nature’s invisible intricacy. It was his book, Micrographia (1665), that put microscopy on the map. Crucially, Hooke’s volume was not merely descriptive: it included large, gorgeous engravings of what he saw through the lens, skillfully prepared by his own hand. The power of these illustrations was impossible to resist. Here were fantastical gardens discovered in mold, snowflakes like fronds of living ice and, most shockingly, insects such as fleas got up in articulated armor like lobsters, and a fly that gazes into the lens with 14,000 little eyes, arranged in perfect order on two hemispheres.
This was surely a demonstration of the infinite scope of God’s creative power. In comparison, the finest contrivances of man — a needle’s tip, a razor’s edge, a printed full stop — looked crude and clumsy under the microscope. Yet what excited Hooke and his contemporaries most of all was the thought that microscopes might uncover, not just the invisible structures of nature, but its hidden mechanisms as well. In previous ages, natural philosophers had attributed the causes of processes to invisible, occult forces and emanations — vague and insensible agencies. The new mechanistic philosophers of the 17th century argued that nature worked like a machine, filled with levers, hooks, mills, pins and other familiar devices too small to be seen. As Hooke put it: ‘Those effects of Bodies, which have been commonly attributed to Qualities, and those confess’d to be occult, are perform’d by the small Machines of Nature.’
He never quite found them — what the microscope revealed was more often unintelligible in these terms. But there was no shortage of other marvels.
*
Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries, reported in 1676 and verified by Hooke a year later, brought home the full force of a teeming, invisible microworld. The anxieties about scale and perspective that run through Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) make it clear how unsettling this was; recall Gulliver’s disgust at the gigantic bodies of the Brobdingnagians when seen close up: ‘Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than pack-threads.’
In the 19th century, refinements to the design of the microscope allowed scientists to peer into the invisible world with unprecedented resolution. Yet there remained questions about what might be happening down there. In 1896 the pioneering British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley proclaimed that The universe, as it is within [man’s] experience, may be unlike the universe as it is within other living experience, and no more like the universe outside his experience, which he cannot think, than the universe of a mite is like his universe.
Maudsley’s protestation of ignorance was an attack on the complacent assumption held by some of his contemporaries that the invisible realms were peopled with beings like us. But this lack of knowledge could equally license the most exotic speculations. The beginnings of molecular science had suggested that life might have a minimal possible size. When the ‘indivisible’ atom began to display a finer-grained structure of subatomic particles, and light waves proved to have many unexpectedly fine oscillations in the form of X-rays, no one could rule out the possibility of an entire hierarchy of material existences on ever smaller scales.
The physicist George Johnstone Stoney declared in 1891 that the physical universe is really an infinite series of worlds within worlds. The scientist Edmund Fournier d’Albe developed these ideas in Two New Worlds (1907), where he envisaged an ‘infra-world’ at a scale below that which microscopes could register, peopled, like Leeuwenhoek’s drop of water, with creatures that ‘eat, and fight, and love, and die, and whose span of life, to judge from their intense activity, is probably filled with as many events as our own’. The human body, he estimated, could play host to around 10 to the 40th power of these ‘infra-men’, experiencing joys and woes ‘without the slightest net effect on our own consciousness’.
As is often the case with scientific advance, the new and unfamiliar was popularly interpreted by reference to the old and prosaic. Littleness has been a consistent theme in the folklore of demons and faeries. Mischievous imps and fairies that interfere in domestic matters were a commonplace of folk tradition, and if these beings were not necessarily invisibly small, their diminutive stature enabled them to pass unseen. One might be tempted to imagine that, by the late 19th century, such beliefs persisted only in rural backwaters, but that would be to underestimate the grip of the invisible world on the imagination. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the ‘demon’ of James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the most profound physicist of the 19th century.
Maxwell’s idea was a response to the gloomy prediction of a ‘cosmic heat death’ of the universe. In 1851 William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) pointed out that the second law of thermodynamics, which can be expressed as the condition that heat energy always flows from hot to cold, must eventually create a universe of uniform temperature, a universe from which no useful work can be extracted and in which nothing really happens.
A devout Christian, Maxwell could not accept that God would let this happen. He believed that the second law was statistical rather than fundamental: temperature gradients dissipated because it was far more likely that faster, ‘hotter’ molecules would mingle with slower ones, rather than by chance congregating into a ‘hot’ patch. But what if there were, as Maxwell put it in 1867, a ‘finite being’ small enough to ‘see’ each molecule and keep track of it, one who could open and shut a trapdoor in a wall that divided a gas-filled vessel? Such a being could let through fast-moving molecules in one direction so as to congregate the heat in one compartment, separating hot from cold and creating a temperature gradient that could be tapped to do work.
Maxwell didn’t intend his creature to be called a demon; that label was applied by Thomson, and Maxwell was not pleased. ‘Call him no more a demon but a valve,’ he grumbled — albeit a ‘valve’ with intelligence and autonomy. Or, as he put it elsewhere: ‘a doorkeeper, very intelligent and exceedingly quick’.
Several of his contemporaries took these ‘demons’ quite literally. Thomson himself took pains to stress that the demon was plausible, calling it ‘a being with no preternatural qualities, [which] differs from real animals only in extreme smallness and agility’. Maxwell’s friend, the Scottish physicist Peter Guthrie Tait, evidently believed they might exist, and he enlisted them for an extraordinary cause. In 1875, he and a fellow Scot named Balfour Stewart, an expert on the theory of heat, published a tract in which they attempted to show that ‘the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist’. There must be, they wrote, ‘an invisible order of things which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away’. Tait and Stewart were aware of the apparent conflict between the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the second law of thermodynamics, which seemed to enforce an eventual universe of insensate stasis.
Maxwell gave them a way out. ‘Clerk-Maxwell’s demons,’ they wrote, ‘could be made to restore energy even in the present universe without spending work’ — and as a result, ‘immortality is possible’.
Alas, modern studies have shown that Maxwell’s demon cannot evade the second law after all, since it would dissipate heat as part of the process of gathering information about molecular speeds. The conceit is now generally regarded as an amusing thought experiment: it is forgotten that, in Maxwell’s day, the notion of invisibly small demons going about their micro-business seemed plausible, even quite likely.
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It should not be forgotten that the demonization of invisible beings goes on in our own time, though now it is adapted to the fantasies of our age. And so viruses are ‘alien invaders’; we go to ‘war’ on ‘superbugs’ with super-powers, repelling them with ‘magic bullets’ as if they were werewolves. Children are taught that invisible ‘germs’ are the omnipresent enemy. Microbes are invoked, as imps and demons once were, to instill safe behavior. It is a case, as the microbiologist Abraham Louis Baron declared in 1957, of ‘man against germs’. ‘We share the world with an incredible vast host of invisible things,’ he announced, but that wasn’t an expression of wonder so much as a warning. As the physician Robert Hessler wrote in his 1912 study of the hazards of dust: ‘It is the invisible we have to guard against.’
This fear of the malevolent designs of imperceptibly small entities became particularly evident in the early reception of nanotechnology. Among scientists, nanotechnology was a loosely defined collection of attempts to visualize and manipulate matter on scales ranging from ångströms (the size of atoms) to hundreds of nanometers (the size of small bacteria). In public discourse, however, it became dominated by a single, hypothetical entity: the nanobot. This, it was said, would be an autonomous device that could patrol the bloodstream for pathogenic invaders, or else construct materials and molecules, atom by atom. It was, in other words, a human avatar on an invisible scale.
But what if nanobots ran amok, as robots (in fiction) are almost predestined to do? A rogue robot might be a menace, but it is a comprehensible one, a kind of superhuman being. A rogue nanobot, capable of replicating like bacteria and of pulling matter into its component particles, would be an unthinkable threat. Hidden from sight, it could reduce anything in seconds to a formless mass of atoms, which would then be reconstituted into replica nanobots: an amorphous ‘grey goo’. Michael Crichton exploited the terror of this imagery, crudely but effectively, in his novel Prey (2002).
If the grey goo idea is frightful, it is also familiar. Invisible powers have long been held capable of animating clay, creating the fearsome Golem, or of disintegrating and deliquescing matter and flesh (think now of the Ebola virus). What’s more, the nanobot connects with long-standing images of the exploration of new worlds, most notably the submarine Nautilus in which Captain Nemo explores the hidden deep sea in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Once again, it seems we must remake the invisible microworld in our own image before we can explore its promise and peril. This became most explicit in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, and its parodic 1987 remake, Innerspace, in which humans are shrunk to a scale that allows them to navigate through the human body.
The extreme miniaturization that has its ultimate expression in nanotechnology has not yet given birth to an invisible nemesis. Indeed, it shows no sign of doing so. Instead, in conjunction with invisible rays such as Marconi’s ‘wireless’ emanations, it has created an age of technological invisibility, a world in which things happen with no mechanism in sight, even without our volition, via an omnipresent field of information. Items in stores speak to barriers and computers; miniaturized sensors control our cars and refine our household environment; libraries leap into our pockets. Dust, a metaphor for worthless matter while it was the smallest thing that could (just) be seen with the naked eye, has become ‘smart dust’, a nanotechnological promise of particles laced with invisible circuitry, programmed to self-assemble as we will them: to make a Golem, perhaps, rebranded now as a ‘reconfigurable robot’.
It has become a cliche that these advances would have seemed like magic in earlier times. Something that is acknowledged less frequently is how traditional reactions to invisibility might help us comprehend the cultural changes that have ensued. The boundaries between rationality and insanity can no longer be policed in behavioral terms. Is the person who is gesticulating and talking out loud in the street communing with demons of the mind, or with a friend? Is the person fretting over the invisible threats of nearby radio masts succumbing to some modern version of the mal aria theory of contagion, or do they have a point? We entrust our digital secrets to the intangible Cloud, assuming that this nebulous entity can be summoned to regurgitate them at will. With invisibly small technology harnessed to the invisible ether, we have animated the world. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/small-things?utm_source=pocket-newtab
mayfly nymph
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HOW THE BRAIN CLEANS ITSELF DURING REM SLEEP
~ Scientists have long wondered why almost all animals sleep, despite the disadvantages to survival of being unconscious. Now, researchers led by a team from the University of Tsukuba have found new evidence of brain refreshing that takes place during a specific phase of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when you tend to dream a lot.
Previous studies have measured differences in blood flow in the brain between REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and wakefulness using various methods, with conflicting results. In their latest work, the Tsukuba-led team used a technique to directly visualize the movement of red blood cells in the brain capillaries (where nutrients and waste products are exchanged between brain cells and blood) of mice during awake and asleep states.
"We used a dye to make the brain blood vessels visible under fluorescent light, using a technique known as two-photon microscopy," says senior author of the study Professor Yu Hayashi. "In this way, we could directly observe the red blood cells in capillaries of the neocortex in non-anesthetized mice.”
The researchers also measured electrical activity in the brain to identify REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and wakefulness, and looked for differences in blood flow between these phases.
"We were surprised by the results," explains Professor Hayashi. "There was a massive flow of red blood cells through the brain capillaries during REM sleep, but no difference between non-REM sleep and the awake state, showing that REM sleep is a unique state.”
The research team then disrupted the mice's sleep, resulting in "rebound" REM sleep — a stronger form of REM sleep to compensate for the earlier disruption. Blood flow in the brain was further increased during rebound REM sleep, suggesting an association between blood flow and REM sleep strength. However, when the researchers repeated the same experiments in mice without adenosine A2a receptors (the receptors whose blockade makes you feel more awake after drinking coffee), there was less of an increase in blood flow during REM sleep, even during rebound REM sleep.
"These results suggest that adenosine A2a receptors may be responsible for at least some of the changes in blood flow in the brain during REM sleep," says Professor Hayashi.
Given that reduced blood flow in the brain and decreased REM sleep are correlated with the development of Alzheimer's disease, which involves the buildup of waste products in the brain, it may be interesting to address whether increased blood flow in the brain capillaries during REM sleep is important for waste removal from the brain. This study lays preliminary groundwork for future investigations into the role of adenosine A2a receptors in this process, which could ultimately lead to the development of new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210825113638.htm
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CHINA’S NEW THREE-CHILDREN POLICY
~ When first announced, China’s new procreation policy of increasing the allowable number of children from two to three boggled my mind. Now I’m for it. Probably not for the reasons you might think.
Like many westerners, I squirmed when One Child went into effect in the 1980s. I thought that was pretty heavy-handed. When Two Babies was announced in 2015, I was nonplussed. This week, China’s announcement of Three Kids got my attention.
By fiddling with how many kids its citizens could have, China pragmatically acknowledged the fact that some people would never have any at all. In the beginning, I suspect those folks were even held in high esteem for their forbearance.
Coincident with restricting family size came booming growth of China’s cities and its economy. The relative value assigned to male children over females resulted in a dearth of marriageable potential mothers. Immigration and increasing allowable progeny addressed the need for fertile females, now and for generations to come.
The proverbial cat was now out of the bag, however. Today Chinese women have more access to the workplace and weigh the merits of career over motherhood. These days, an old descriptor from the 1980s, “Double Income, No Kids,” has taken root in China.
Living childfree has caught the attention of Chinese males, too. Vasectomies are in high demand as young singles and couples weigh their procreative options.
Joining them, both in China and in every other nation on earth, are those who unwittingly go through life without having children of their own. Their reasons are many, including infertility, lack of a viable partner, economic resources, disability, and illness.
There’s a worldwide, largely invisible subculture of adults who will never have kids, more of us than ever before. While in years past we may have talked furtively and sometimes tentatively among ourselves, today there’s swelling recognition of and appreciation for childfree and childless living. We’re finding voice and validation while living in the midst of a world high on family.
Books about childlessness were few as little as a decade ago. Today top-quality work is being picked up by big publishing houses and small presses alike, as well as self-published by authors around the globe. Goodreads lists over 200 current titles for books about the childless and childfree.
Brainchild of voracious reader Lisa Kissane, the NoMo Book Club includes detailed reviews that are designated with color-coded trigger warnings for those childless not by choice.
The Childfree by Choice website lists over 30 movies that are childfree. A growing number of documentaries cover the topic, including To Kid or Not to Kid and The Guardian’s Childfree series.
There’s even a dating site dedicated for our kind to find childfree partners. CFdating was founded in 2018 by a childfree Atlanta couple. In less than three years, membership has taken off, with steady growth all over the world, including China. Users range in age from 18 to 57, most in the 40+ category.
When you sign up, CFdating asks why you chose to be childfree. Overpopulation is one of the most frequently cited reasons, with concerns that contributing another child isn’t in the planet’s best interest.
When China proclaims its need for more children, the ensuing media coverage and pushback gives impetus to counterpoints raised by those who occupy our adulthood without having kids —lives some of us chose, others unintentionally childless. May we all create lives of meaning, connection, and joy and revel in the different routes each of us ultimately follow. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unapparent/202106/how-chinas-three-kid-policy-impacts-those-who-have-none
Mother is the name of God in the lips and hearts of little children. ~ W.M.Thackeray
Picasso: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1896
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SPOUSAL HOMICIDE GENDER RATIO IS DIFFERENT IN THE U.S.
~ Results revealed that for every 100 men who killed their wives in the United States during 1976-85, about 75 women killed their husbands. Women committed a substantially larger proportion of spousal homicides in the United States than elsewhere. In fact the spousal sex ratio of killing (SROK) is more than twice that in the other Western countries. However, this contrast cannot be attributed to greater gun use in the United States nor to a general behavioral and psychological convergence of males and females in the United States. Instead, significant predictors of the SROK include registered versus de facto marriage, co-residency versus separation, ethnicity, and age disparity. However, the impacts of these variables are not sufficient to explain the difference in the victim sex ratios in the United States and other countries. ~
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/who-kills-whom-spouse-killings-exceptional-sex-ratio-spousal
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THE PUZZLE OF OBESITY
~ The energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel-partitioning. Because these hormonal responses are dominated by the insulin signaling system, which in turn responds primarily (although not entirely) to the carbohydrate content of the diet, this thinking is now known as the carbohydrate-insulin model.
Its implications are simple and profound: People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.
fat cells
A century ago, the general thinking on obesity still allowed for two equally commonsensical ways to conceive of the pathology of the disorder. “The medical profession in general believes that there are two kinds of obese persons,” is how Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan described this schism in 1930 in the first of two papers in which he claimed to have settled the issue, “those who have become fat because they overeat or under-exercise; and those composing a second group whose adiposity is not closely related to diet, but is caused by an endocrine or constitutional disorder.”
This endocrine (hormonal) or constitutional concept may have been best phrased not by a scientist or physician but by playwright George Bernard Shaw in his 1910 work “Misalliance.” “It’s constitutional,” says the character John Tarleton. “No matter how little you eat, you put on flesh if you’re made that way.”
By this thinking, promoted in the decades between the World Wars by prominent German and Austrian physician-researchers, some people are born predisposed to accumulate excess fat just as some are predestined to grow tall. However hungry or physically inactive they might be is an effect of the manifestation of this predisposition, not a cause.
That the environment plays a critical role is a given. The undeniable evidence is the enormous increase in the prevalence of obesity worldwide. In the U.S., 12% of Americans lived with obesity 60 years ago; more than 40% do today. Something has changed in the environment — in diets or lifestyles — to trigger such a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity. But is it nature or nurture that the environment triggers, behavior or physiology, minds or bodies?
Ask a simple question, like “Why is it that some of us fatten easily and some of us don’t — just as some breeds of livestock fatten easily and others don’t?” and obesity researchers can’t answer it because, curiously enough, that’s not what they study.
Positive energy balance — more calories consumed than expended — is a description of what happens when people gain weight. As the energy stored in their bodies increases, so does their body mass. The increase in body mass is the positive energy balance. This reality says nothing about why it happens. After all, children are in positive energy balance when they’re growing — as Gustav von Bergmann, the leading German authority on internal medicine in the pre-World War II decades argued then — but that’s not why they’re growing. Women during pregnancy are in positive energy balance, as is the child in their womb, but that’s no explanation for why their body mass is increasing.
Among the most troubling [problems of the energy balance theory] is that it inescapably transforms a physiological disorder — the accumulation of excess body fat — into a behavioral disorder, a character flaw. This makes fat-shaming a seemingly unavoidable consequence.
Here it helps to quantify exactly what energy imbalance implies. To maintain a healthy weight, by this thinking, requires that people match their intake to their expenditure perfectly.
Overshooting on average by just 10 calories a day — the calories in a single potato chip — translates into gaining a pound of fat yearly, 10 pounds of excess fat per decade. In just 30 years, that tiny imbalance will transform anyone from lean to obese. Those 10 calories a day of positive energy balance are less than half of 1% of the calories a typical American consumes daily. That’s the overeating that has to be explained.
It’s easy to imagine why already obese individuals might not be able to exert the concerted effort necessary to become lean. But why didn’t they prevent themselves from becoming obese initially? If obesity is caused by a positive energy balance, avoiding or preventing it should be effortless.
Because the energy-balance logic demands an answer, Newburgh offered up the implication in his articles and, by doing so, catalyzed the transformation of the scientific perception of obesity from a chronic, disabling physiological disorder into a character or psychological defect.
Children get fat, Newburgh wrote, not because of a constitutional predisposition but because they’d “been deliberately trained to overeat by their parents”; and most adults get fat because they suffer from “various human weaknesses such as over-indulgence and ignorance.” If they didn’t, wouldn’t they have eaten less and not become obese?
This problem is solved by simply defining obesity as what it clearly is: a disorder of excessive fat accumulation. This perspective was argued in the 1920s and 1930s first by the German internist Gustav von Bergmann and then by University of Vienna endocrinologist Julius Bauer, the “noted Vienna authority on internal diseases,” as the New York Times then described him.
This conception focused on what Bauer called the “exaggerated tendency of some tissues to store fat.” Men and women fatten differently, he pointed out; and both in very specific areas. Sex hormones clearly influence fat accumulation independent of energy balance. Whatever mechanisms are at work locally, Bauer argued, should be the prime suspects systemically in causing obesity.
“Like a malignant tumor or like the fetus, the uterus or the breasts of a pregnant woman,” Bauer wrote in 1929, the fat tissue in a person predisposed to obesity “seizes on foodstuffs, even in the case of undernutrition. It maintains its stock, and may increase it independent of the requirements of the organism. A sort of anarchy exists; the adipose tissue lives for itself and does not fit into the precisely regulated management of the whole organism.”
While researchers have since created many animal models of obesity — genetically, surgically, or manipulated by diet — one observation is remarkably consistent. Although researchers have rarely thought to control for energy intake in their experiments, when they did, testing whether their animals get fatter than lean controls even when eating as little or less food, they almost invariably report that they do.
“These mice will make fat out of their food under the most unlikely circumstances, even when half-starved [my italics],” as Jean Mayer wrote about obese mice he studied in the 1950s. This fundamental observation directly challenges the notion that obesity is caused by poorly regulated eating behavior. It supports the hypothesis that poorly regulated eating behavior is a consequence of an animal’s constitutional drive to accumulate excess fat. These observations, too, have been ignored.
The most conspicuous example of the disconnect between the energy-balance model and the actual evidence from animal models comes from the most famous mutant mice — named the ob/ob mice — ever discovered. The first appeared in a litter at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine in 1949. It was ob/ob mutants that led Jeffrey Friedman and his Rockefeller University colleagues to discover the hormone leptin and identify defects in the leptin gene as responsible for the animal’s obesity.
Leptin’s discovery in 1994 was hailed as the holy grail of obesity research: the “putative signal” secreted by fat tissue to inform the hypothalamus that fat is accumulating, and so eating and expenditure must be adjusted to compensate. Tens of thousands of articles have since been published relevant to leptin’s role in obesity.
But even the ob/ob mutants make fat out of their food when, quite literally, half-starved.
Friedman’s research was based on Douglas Coleman’s research at the Jackson Laboratory and Coleman, who shared a Lasker Foundation Award in 2010 with Friedman, dedicated two papers to this observation: “Even when maintained on 50 percent of normal food intake,” Coleman reported in 1985, “mutants still become obese.”
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By the mid-1960s, researchers studying fat storage and metabolism had established unambiguously that the hormone insulin dominated the regulation of fat storage. While insulin works conspicuously to control blood sugar — defects in insulin production and responsiveness are primary causes of diabetes — it does so partly by stimulating the uptake of fat into fat cells, inhibiting its release and inhibiting its use as energy in non-adipose tissue. No tissue in the body is as sensitive to insulin’s action as fat tissue — “exquisitely sensitive,” as these researchers often described it.
With the invention of a technique to measure circulating levels of insulin — the radioimmunoassay, developed by Solomon Berson and Rosalyn Yalow in 1960 (for which Yalow, after Berson’s death, won a Nobel Prize in 1977) — researchers learned that animals with hypothalamic lesions and ob/ob mice are both hyperinsulinemic, as are people with obesity and with type 2 diabetes, offering a parsimonious explanation for the mechanism of their excessive fat accumulation.
The hormonal/constitutional hypothesis also encountered dogmatic resistance in response to its single most direct practical implication: Diets that can successfully resolve obesity are not those that induce us to eat less, per energy-balance thinking, but those that reduce circulating levels of insulin, accomplished most effectively by replacing dietary carbohydrates — sugars, starchy vegetables and grains, and the like — with fat.
Physicians and diet book authors have been promoting carbohydrate-restricted, high-fat diets — ketogenic diets, now commonly known as keto — for going on 200 years, most famously Robert Atkins, a New York cardiologist. By arguing, as Atkins and others did, that fat could be lost without limiting calories by fixing the hormonal dysregulation of fat storage — restricting what one eats, not how much — these books were treated as de facto quackery. By advocating that we eat fat-rich foods, they were considered dangerous.
While researchers continue to study fat metabolism and its role in obesity, they typically assume that whatever they’re observing plays a subordinate role to that of energy imbalance. This, again, is a danger of dogmatic thinking. In Stockholm, for instance, Karolinska Institute researchers have reported that fat is stored longer in the fat cells of people who are obese than it is in those who are lean. Mobilization of fat from fat cells in these people is inhibited, precisely as would be predicted by Bauer and von Bergmann’s thinking that the fat tissue in those predisposed to obesity is dysregulated.
In 2019, the Karolinska researchers reported that the older we get, the more fat “turnover” in fat cells slows, a phenomenon that they estimate could account for a 200-pound person adding 30 pounds of excess fat in a decade without eating any more than he or she ever did. Still, they could not or would not shake the energy-balance context, suggesting that because overeating was the “main driver for obesity,” it might be the “failure to reduce calorie intake in aging” to compensate for this de-accelerating fat turnover that leads to weight gain.
The researchers most willing to question the energy balance logic are those who still practice as physicians and regularly treat patients with obesity. These physicians, an ever-growing but still small minority, find that when they induce their patients to restrict carbohydrates but not calories, their patients can achieve and maintain a healthy weight with relative ease and get healthier in the process. When this approach has been used for people with type 2 diabetes, as the San Francisco-based start-up Virta Health has been doing, the results have been unprecedented. ~
https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/13/how-a-fatally-tragically-flawed-paradigm-has-derailed-the-science-of-obesity/
Oriana:
Any discussion of obesity that omits the critical role of the microbiome is inadequate. And beneficial bacteria require their favorite food, soluble fiber. Vegetables provide it. Unlimited broccoli, anyone?
Atkins did the world a terrific favor by publicizing the need to lower insulin, the fat-forming hormone. While carb restriction remains primary, too much protein is harmful as well, since the body can convert protein into glucose. The only type of food that can’t be converted into glucose is fat.
(By the way, Atkins acknowledged that he had predecessors. The low-carb diet was known already in the 19th century. But the early carb restricters, including Atkins, didn’t seem to realize that protein intake also needed to be controlled.)
“Weight gain and obesity are driven by hormones—in everyone—and only by understanding the effects of the hormones insulin and insulin resistance can we achieve lasting weight loss.” ~ Jason Fung M.D. This is correct in the main, but more hormones than insulin are involved, sex hormones and growth hormone for example. Still, insulin is #1.
In addition, it seems that constant snacking and even frequent eating contributes to obesity. Tea (without snacks) is an excellent appetite suppressor that can make less frequent eating quite easy.
Also, something has dramatically changed in the environment, since now we see obesity even in wild animals. Main suspicion falls on hormone mimics.
And we need to remember that the obese are often children of obese parents. Diabetes during pregnancy also increases a child's risk of obesity.
All in all, I have to admit that the author has a point. My neighbor across the street had two huskies. They ate the same amount of the same kind of dog food. Only one of them became obese. Genetics? Most likely, but which genes acting through which mechanisms? It sounds so lame to end on “more research is needed,” but it’s the truth.
But one conclusion one can already draw is that obesity should be treated basically like diabetes: use Metformin to lower the blood sugar, and sensitize the patient to insulin; and a carb-restricted diet that's nutritional too (as opposed to soda and chips).
Obese marmoset
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FOODS THAT LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE
High blood pressure affects 1 in 3 adults in the United States.
Having high blood pressure increases a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease.
A diet high in certain food can help lower blood pressure.
BERRIES
Blueberries and strawberries contain antioxidant compounds called anthocyanins, a type of flavonoid.
Researchers conducted a large study with more than 34,000 people with hypertension.
They found that those with the highest intake of anthocyanins — mainly from blueberries and strawberries — had an 8 percent reduction in the risk of high blood pressure, compared to those with a low anthocyanin intake.
According to the American Heart Association, potassium reduces the effects of sodium and alleviates tension in the walls of the blood vessels.
BANANAS
One medium-size banana contains around 420 mg of potassium.
According to the American Heart Association, potassium reduces the effects of sodium and alleviates tension in the walls of the blood vessels.
Adults should aim to consume 4,700 milligrams (mg) of potassium daily. Other potassium-rich foods include:
avocado
cantaloupe and honeydew melon
halibut
mushrooms
sweet potatoes
tomatoes
tuna
beans
People with kidney disease should speak to their doctors about potassium, as too much can be harmful.
BEETS
Beet’s high levels of inorganic nitrate caused the reduction in blood pressure.
Drinking beet juice can reduce blood pressure in the short and long terms.
In 2015, researchers reported that drinking red beet juice led to lower blood pressure in people with hypertension who drank 250 milliliters, about 1 cup, of the juice every day for 4 weeks. The researchers noticed some positive effects within 24 hours.
DARK CHOCOLATE
This sweet treat may lower blood pressure. A review of 15 trials suggests that cocoa-rich chocolate reduces blood pressure in people with hypertension or prehypertension.
Choose high-quality chocolate that contains a minimum of 70 percent cocoa, and consume a single square, or a piece measuring about 1 ounce, each day.
WATERMELON
Watermelon contains an amino acid called citrulline, which may help to manage high blood pressure.
Citrulline helps the body to produce nitric oxide, a gas that relaxes blood vessels and encourages flexibility in arteries. These effects aid the flow of blood, which can lower high blood pressure.
Researchers have also found that animals given a diet rich in watermelon had better heart health. In one study, mice who drank a solution containing watermelon juice had 50 percent less plaque in their arteries than the control group.
The mice who drank the solution also had 50 percent less low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which many describe as bad cholesterol, and they showed 30 percent less weight gain than the control animals.
LEAFY GREEN VEGETABLES
Leafy green vegetables are rich in nitrates, which help to manage blood pressure. Some research suggests that eating 1–2 servings of nitrate-rich vegetables every day can reduce hypertension for up to 24 hours.
Examples of leafy greens include:
cabbage
collard greens
fennel
kale
lettuce
mustard greens
spinach
Swiss chard
GARLIC
Garlic is a natural antibiotic and antifungal food. Its main active ingredient, allicin, is often responsible for associated health benefits.
Some studies suggest that garlic increases the body’s production of nitric oxide, which helps the smooth muscles to relax and the blood vessels to dilate. These changes can reduce hypertension.
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Lentils, unsweetened yogurt, pomegranate juice, cinnamon, nuts such as almonds and pistachios have also shown a beneficial effect on blood pressure. ~
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322284#outlook
Oriana:
One excellent thing I've just learned is to add chopped walnuts to various dishes. Walnuts add taste and nutrition to practically everything.
And never underestimate lettuce and cabbage.
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ending on beauty:
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. . .
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
~ Wallace Stevens, To an Old Philosopher in Rome (excerpts) 
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