ALZHEIMER'S IS AUTOIMMUNE, FLUORIDATION HAS NO BENEFITS, MICHELANGELO'S REVENGE; INTROVERTS AND HIGHER AROUSAL

LAST NIGHT OF THE LEONIDS

No moon. The pines like black wind
brushed the tips of stars.
Horses stood in their corral,
carved as if outside of time.

You said, “They are sleeping.”
But suddenly one horse
at full gallop
ran toward us, a rift in the dark.

The other horses never stirred.
They slept, eternal statues. Only he
shot through heavens
like a marble flame.

We almost
stopped breathing, struck
with pure rhythm,
muscle and mind —

that shining horse waking up —
then standing still,
the frost of stars
braiding his tall outline —

And we too stood still,
in the shivering starlight.

~ Oriana © 2015

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HEALTH AND SCIENCE 

Science starts with puzzlement. The Middle Ages had all the answers: if steam went upward and a heavy thing fell down, that was due to things seeking their proper place. If certain things repelled or attracted each other, that was due to their mutual antipathy or sympathy. It was Galileo who realized that we didn’t have any answers.  (Was it Chomsky who said it?)

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Not just another pretty face: the fungus carried in sloth fur shows promise in the treatment of cancer.

ALZHEIMER’S IS AN AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE THAT MIGHT BE TREATED WITH NASAL IBUPROFEN

“Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are widely and successfully employed to treat autoimmune inflammatory disease and dramatically relieve symptoms. Moreover, oral NSAIDs consistently reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease, although they have been totally ineffective as a treatment in multiple failed clinical trials. A basis for this failure might well be that the brain dose after oral administration is too small and not sufficiently early in the pathogenesis of the disorder. But NSAID brain dose could be significantly increased by delivering the NSAIDs intranasally.’

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25100747

Ibuprofen (but not other NSAIDs) also lowers the risk of Parkinson's, which likewise is most likely an autoimmune disease.

Immunosuppressive drugs have been successfully tried in the treatment of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Since those drugs are immensely lucrative, I expect more developments. Meanwhile, let's remember the two most important preventive measures: ibuprofen and physical exercise. Socializing also helps. Now if only we could get rid of the idea that preventing Alzheimer's depends on doing crossword puzzles . . .

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FLUORIDATION SHOWS NO BENEFITS, HAS RISKS

~ Practically all European countries have dropped fluoridation. Rates of dental decay have not gone up but have continued to decline (for reasons we don’t quite understand, they had been in decline even before fluoridation began).

Just the fact that the body does not fully excrete but partly retains fluoride, a toxic, mutagenic compound, is a huge red flag. ~

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BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF INTROVERSION/EXTRAVERSION

~ Several decades ago, German psychologist Hans Eysenck came up with a more biologically based model for E/I. According to Eysenck's theory, the behaviors of introverts and extroverts are due to differences in cortical arousal (the speed and amount of the brain's activity). Compared with extroverts, introverts have naturally high cortical arousal, and may process more information per second.

This means, essentially, that if you put introverts into an environment with a lot of stimulation, such as a loud restaurant, they will quickly become overwhelmed or overloaded, causing them to sort of shut down to stop the influx of information. Because of this fact, introverts tend to avoid such active environments. Extroverts, on the other hand, are only minimally aroused, so they seek out highly stimulating environments to augment their arousal levels.

Other theories for E/I also exist. One prominent idea stresses the involvement of people's brain reward systems, suggesting that extroverts' brains are more sensitive to rewards — such as those inherent in social interactions — than introverts' brains. This sensitively leads extroverts to gravitate towards certain situations and events.

Given that some theories behind E/I invoke a neurobiological explanation, scientists have long tried to find experimental evidence for these theories. And let's be clear: There have been tons of neuroscience studies conducted on E/I over the years, many of which show that the brains of introverts and extroverts really are different.

Back in 1999, scientists measured the cerebral blood flow of introverted and extroverted people with positron emission tomography (PET) scans while they thought freely. They found that the introverts had more blood flow in their frontal lobes and anterior thalamus — brain regions involved with recalling events, making plans and solving problems. Extroverts had more blood flow in brain areas involved with interpreting sensory data, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, the temporal lobes and the posterior thalamus. The data suggested —as Jung believed — that the extroverts' attention focused outwards and the introverts' attention focused inwards.

Various studies have supported Eysenck's arousal model of E/I — the research shows that the reticular activating system (RAS), which is responsible for regulating arousal, has higher basal activity for introverts than for extroverts. Interestingly, the "lemon juice experiment" also lends credence to the arousal theory. The RAS responds to all types of stimuli, including food — because introverts have increased RAS activity, they salivate more in response to lemon juice.

Scientists have found numerous other behavioral traits that are influenced by E/I. In 1990, a study suggested that extroverts wear more decorative clothing, whereas introverts are more practical in their clothing choice. More recently, researchers found that unlike introverts, extroverts tend to go for immediate gratification and pass up on potential future opportunities.

Perhaps one of the most important (and consistent) findings in E/I research is that extroverts are overall happier than introverts, and this increased happiness lasts for decades. Scientists have struggled to pinpoint the cause of extroverts' happiness, though they are certainly not without ideas.

Researchers have proposed that extroverts may feel greater happiness than introverts because they are more sensitive to rewarding social situations (as seen above). On the other hand, others have suggested that extroverts are happier because they engage in more social activities. Some scientists think that extroverts' perpetual happiness stems from their greater mood regulation abilities. Or maybe they're happy because they hold on tightly to all of those good memories.

At the same time, however, scientists have questioned whether extroverts really are happier, or if they're just more declarative with their feelings. There's also the issue of how, exactly, you define and measure "happiness." Whatever the case, extroverts and introverts likely benefit from different happiness increasing strategies, given the inherent differences in the personality types.”

http://io9.com/the-science-behind-extroversion-and-introversion-1282059791

 

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ANYTHING BUT AN ANGEL

If after our death they want to transform us into a tiny withered flame that walks along the paths of wind — we have to rebel. What good is eternal leisure on the bosom of the air, in the shape of a yellow halo, amid the murmur of two-dimensional choirs?

One should enter rock, wood, water, the cracks of a gate. Better to be the creaking of a floor than a shrill and transparent perfection.

~ Zbigniew Herbert (tr. John and Bogdana Carpenter)

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“The promise of paradise has been an even greater disaster for humanity than the threat of hell.” ~ me, thinking about ISIS

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MICHELANGELO’S REVENGE

In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Minos was widely known to be a portrait of the papal master of ceremonies, Cardinal Bagio da Cesena (1463-1544). Bagio alienated Michelangelo by criticizing the amount of nudity in the Last Judgment, saying the fresco was more suitable for a tavern. Michelangelo gave him donkey's ears to indicate stupidity. Bagio complained to the pope, who replied that he had no jurisdiction over hell, and the portrait would have to stay.

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And here is the fuller scene of the cruise to hell
 

VONNEGUT ON “NO ATHEISTS IN THE FOXHOLES”

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Most interesting Facebook comment on religion: The greatest mistake was the invention of a god who created the universe (Matt Flumerfelt, paraphrase). Yes, a sexless Superman figure tries to impose tyrannical human order and emotions on nature. The Greeks had everything emerge from primordial Chaos. Then the Earth gave birth to the first gods. The religion wasn’t alienated from nature and the body. 

It’s interesting to ponder the fact that the Greeks didn’t have a creator god, no superman absolute dictator. Perhaps that did have something to do with Athens having had the first democracy ever.

In Hesiod’s version, one of the first deities to emerge was Eros. Eros means “longing.” It’s an interesting choice — Eros, and not Logos. In the beginning it was Eros, not Logos.

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80% of death-row inmates share the same basic life story — starting with being born into a dysfunctional family. Free will, anyone?

SELF-DOMESTICATION happens when animals self-select for less aggression. This usually requires levels of stress to be low. Example: Bonobos, as opposed to the super-aggressive chimpanzees. But I think the most outstanding example is Homo sapiens. Yes, we domesticated ourselves, though the male of the species remains less domesticated than the female, which presents a constant threat to the continuation of civilization.

THE DISCOVERY OF CHILDHOOD

~ “Traditionally, for Christians at least, humans were thought to be born with corrupted souls and harbored within them the nastiest and meanest of instincts. Childhood, as a time of innocence, is a modern creation. As pointed out by French historian Phillipe Aries, in Centuries of Childhood, before the 17th century children were thought to be merely small adults, possessing the same qualities and natures as grownups. Children weren't little darlings or cute cherubs, as we often refer to children today. Rather they were fallen angels, like Lucifer.

[As the feudal system crumbled] a person as a being defined externally by inherited and static roles gave way to an understanding of the person as an individual. And just as a change in the structure of houses allowed for the newly discovered value of privacy, a change in the political economy made it so that it wasn't any longer necessary for small children to be sent out to work away from the home. Out of this conjunction of events childhood was born. People could now look at children as never before. What they saw and how they understood them had altered. Children weren't any less egotistical in the 18th century. It was a shift in perspective on the part of adults. Along with an emphasis upon the self came a respect for other people as such. Children could now be seen as people, not as little monsters waiting to be made into human beings.” ~

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LIVING WATER

I hurried to the greenest spot
among the lilies, followed

the shiny trail of water back
to the ancestral boulder:

from underneath the vertical face,
water as pure as inner stone

pulsed forth to braid with light.
In the newborn stream,

deep fur of moss covered the rocks.
Moss! I was so used to desert, drought,

the gray-beige hillsides where I live
spiky with thorn-brush, chaparral,

thirsty, armored survivors —
Here I stood among the moist

corn lilies greener than green:
I will give you living water to drink.
I looked at the living water,
its endless giving of itself,

and memory of my younger self
pulsed in me, my onward will.

If it were the fertile north,
this shining brook

could become a great river —
not perish in the desert,

the monotonous miles
in the rain shadow of the Sierra.

Then I thought: They also serve
who perish in the desert.

~ Oriana © 2015

THE SOUL WANTS A LOVE AFFAIR

Sunset, Coronado Bridge, San Diego. Photo by Thad Roan

The soul wants not an altar, but a love affair. ~ Lucrezia (a friend of mine in Florida)

VITA NOVA

The best-selling author, a former monk,
has promised to speak about sex.
The end of the lecture is drawing near:
he’s still trying to define
the difference between spirit and soul.
A middle-aged, conservatively dressed
woman in the front row
begins to rock back and forth,
demanding, “Sex! Sex! Sex!”

The ex-monk blushes. He begins:
“Sex is the archetype of life.
‘I feel totally alive,’ you say
as the world wakes up in your arms.
Sex is a messenger of life,
announcing that despair

is beside the point;
it continues, the banquet of life.
You think you want a new lover,
but what you really want
is a new life.” 

He quotes Dante’s lines:
“In the book of my memory
stands a chapter headed
Incipit vita nova:
Here begins the new life.”

Vita nova. Enter Beatrice.
The hunger for a lover
is the hunger for a new life.

“But,” the speaker cautions,
“there is the drive to couple,
and the drive to uncouple.
It’s possible to be married
and yet to satisfy
the need not to be married.”

He continues: “I strongly advise
against communication in marriage.
Marriage is a great mystery;
sex is always transgressive.
You need to invoke Aphrodite.
She is the Muse of Sex.
She’s also the goddess of affairs.
A new lover may or may not
be the entrance to a new life.”

Will we share a private language,
will we need an alibi?
This is what Aphrodite sings,
faithful only to herself.

I wonder: what is Aphrodite,
that glistening metaphor?
Aphrodite the lover of laughter,
subtle serpent and the dove?
Always faithful to herself,
Aphrodite is the soul.

A tall, skinny man in the back row
rises like a steeple:
“You are speaking totally
from a male point of view.”
“Of course,” the ex-monk replies.
“I wouldn’t presume
to speak from a female point of view.”

A tiny gray-haired lady stands up:
“Thank you for a wonderful lecture.
I also love the way you blush.”
 – “Freud said that blushing
is an erection of the head,”
the speaker jokes. Laughter and applause.
Crashing echoes of departure
from the wooden pews.
We walk out of the soulless cathedral
of Saint Paul into the blushing,
Aphroditic sunset,
and set off in search of a new life.

~ Oriana © 2015

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This is a poem from an unpublished chapbook, LETTERS TO LUCREZIA. True to my pattern, I sent the chapbook manuscript to only one place, which promptly sent it back. It was the wrong year; that year, they were judging only fiction. So the Letters to Lucrezia became letters to myself, a throwback to the year when Thomas More’s Care of the Soul became a huge bestseller — and then pretty much disappeared from public attention.

More’s message is simple, though he’s found a myriad ways of phrasing it: make taking care of the soul a priority. By “soul” he means the inner life, but with emphasis on feelings and the need for beauty. Oddly, what I remember best from that book is the advice to get a beautiful cup or mug for tea and coffee, and making a nook in the house as beautiful as we can — that will be the temple of our soul.

Now if only writing weren’t so devouring . . .  but then to a writer it’s more satisfying than finding a beautiful coffee mug.

Still, More’s advice was important since it gave me the idea that something outrageously beautiful is indeed worth the money. Keats put it best: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

And that of beauty — an exquisite little cup — may be more important than ever, since we live in a world threatened by ugliness, littered with cheap plastic goods. But, as if to prove Hölderlin’s motto that “where danger is, that which saves us grows also,” there is a relatively new trend: the emergence of artisanal communities. Groups of creative people rent abandoned old factories and set up their workshops. Amateur chefs are drawn to these places and start preparing wonderful meals, using organic vegetables grown in the eco-garden just outside. Since fulfilling work remains an emotional necessity, and traditional jobs are shrinking, arts and crafts are blossoming.

This, too, reflects the soul’s yearning for love affairs — not always with a person, but with a new enthusiasm in life, the kind that is deep and lasting rather than fleeting. Find your craft, find your vocation, and you will find soulmates.

In an interesting back, all this harkens back both to William Morris and Karl Marx. Both warned against alienated labor. Both wanted to substitute creative and scholarly pursuits. Morris wanted to achieve this goal by setting up arts and crafts communities. That takes love. Let’s hope that love wins over greed and soullessness.

Aphrodite was not only the goddess of erotic love. One of her forms was Aphrodite Urania, the "heavenly Aphrodite," the goddess of beauty and inspiration, the patron goddess of the arts. That's why Jean Shinoda-Bolen chose her to be the goddess of creativity, a choice that at first seems unexpected. Shinoda-Bolen expains that a person embarking on a creative project needs to fall in love with that project, to have a love affair with it.


TRIANGLES IN THE SERVICE OF LIFE

Thomas More returns to one of his central messages — have a love affair, but not necessarily with a person — in his new book on creating your personal religion.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that soon after people get married some new thing comes threatening the status quo. Hillman and Pedraza talk about a triangle as a dynamic force that would be both challenging and life-giving. The triangle might be the typical pattern of a married couple challenged by a third person who may be a lover, a friend, or even a business associate. The third intruding factor might not be a person but a job, a hobby, or an intellectual interest. I’ve known a few married couples dealing with a new religious or spiritual fascination that captured one of the people.

Hillman’s comments on marriage may sound extreme. He says that the fantasies married people have at the beginning, fantasies of togetherness symbolized by an unbroken ring, are delusional and defensive. They keep eros out. They’re rooted in anxiety about the stability of the marriage being threatened. Such an arrangement can’t hold, because life wants to break in on that deathly demand for absolute stability.

Hillman offers a rule of thumb: “The more we rigidly insist upon unity the more diversity will constellate.” He was always in favor of diversity, or psychological polytheism, making it one of the foundational planks in his archetypal psychology. For myself, whenever I hear someone insisting on unity, in whatever context, I worry about the suppression of the soul, which is many-sided and full of the richness and the tension of multiple urges.

So the third factor, whatever it is — the desire for another person, a new job, interest in another country, a new art — will probably disturb the status quo. For me this insight about the delusion of unity and the necessity of a triangle has been a breakthrough idea.

A similar pattern may arise in a person’s religious life. You may grow up in a family in which a certain religious understanding and practice are taken for granted. Then you go to college and discover a larger world. You come home with new ideas, and your family worries about you. In their anxiety, in their delusion of unity and assumption that there is only way to be religious, they find it difficult to embrace their wayward child.

The secret is not to be too literal about a new passion. A triangle is an opportunity for a new vision of life and not necessarily about a new relationship or love interest.”
~ Thomas More, A Religion of One’s Own
 
More correctly points out that taking a strong new interest in anything is like having an affair: our partner may feel neglected and disvalued. Conflicts may arise: the spouse wants to travel while we are in the midst of a creative project. But the marriage (or any relationship) may also gain in stability, because now there is a potent source of satisfaction that frees us from demanding too much from the partner.  


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I agree with the need for “polytheism of the soul.” The most rewarding part of love is “personality expansion” — what used to be called “personal growth.” The soul needs a love affair because the soul longs to grow. 

BORGES: WE ARE BOTH MORTAL AND IMMORTAL, INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. ~ Saul Bellow

ARS POETICA

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river
To know we stray like a river
And our faces vanish like water

To feel that waking is another dream
That dreams of not dreaming and the death
We fear in our bones is the death
That every night we call a dream

To see in every day and year a symbol
Of all the days of man and his years
And convert the outrage of the years
Into a music, a proverb, and a symbol

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
A golden sadness, such is poetry
Humble and immortal, poetry
Returning, like dawn and the sunset

Sometimes at evening there is a face
That sees us from the deep of a mirror
Art must be that kind of mirror
Disclosing to each of us his face

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders

Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing

~ Jorge Luis Borges

This is an enchanting poem, resplendent with repetitions (yes, I used “resplendent” because of the alliteration; I just had to). The same simple words, repeated just right, create an ecstatic music. My congratulations to the translator, whose name was not given in my online source — an excellent version. It seems to read itself, the words inevitable. 

OH-OH!

~ except for the second stanza. The translation of the second stanza troubled me in that the word “sueño” means both sleep and dream in Spanish. Since Borges uses “el sueño” in a later stanza that starts “Ver en la muerte el sueño” — note the definite article — I lean toward “sleep.”

Harold Morland translates as follows:

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

My thanks to Hyacinth for drawing my attention to that stanza.
 

 

 OUR FACES VANISH LIKE WATER

So many wonderful lines here, but I love best the first line of the poem — the idea that a river is made not just of water, but of time and water. The river is always beginning and ending, all at the same time. A river is both its hidden spring and its dissolution upon meeting with the sea. And in between — memory.

And memory, strangely enough, has no past tense. It springs back to our mind, simultaneous with  our present life. The old, remembering their childhood, are at the beginning again. They are skipping rope in their hometown while driving to see an orthopedic surgeon about knee replacement.

“It passes, yet remains” — that’s the paradox of river. “Our faces vanish like the water” — yet the river of humanity continues. (It’s interesting that poetry makes beautiful what would otherwise be extremely painful: “our faces vanish like the water.”)

Let’s consider the sheer beauty of that first stanza again (and oh, what a disappointment the second stanza is — mainly because the first one is so wondrous):

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river
To know we stray like a river
And our faces vanish like water

 A RIVER AS ETERNITY; THE OUTRAGE OF THE YEARS TURNED INTO MUSIC

Though it’s not true of geological time, in human time a river is an example of eternity. And there is nothing static about this eternity: it keeps on flowing, and you “never step twice into the same river.”  But you are never exactly the same person as the one who stepped into that river at an earlier time. We are that “inconstant Heraclitus, the same and another.”

Our faces pass away like water, our names are writ in water with extremely few exceptions — yet the endless river of humanity flows on. Is this a consolation for our mortality — what Borges wonderfully calls “the outrage of years”? Only if we gain a great connection to the river of time and humanity thanks to art, especially poetry, able as it is to transform the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” into music and image:

To see in every day and year a symbol
Of all the days of man and his years
And convert the outrage of the years
Into a music, a proverb, and a symbol

In the next stanza we have sunset as a “golden sadness.” The day is ending, but the sunset is so beautiful. Here I am reminded of Plato’s Symposium, where love is the offspring of wealth and poverty. Borges makes poetry the offspring of immortality and mortality. If mortality is our poverty, our wealth is immortality: the continuing river of humanity and art.

Thus, when we see our face in the mirror of poetry, it should be a universal face in that larger sense of humanity. We recognized ourselves in others. No person is an isolated individual; each is a part of humanity. Each story matters because it’s part of the greater story of humanity. Each suicide saddens us; each story of endurance encourages us. That’s because everyone’s story is also OUR story. 

ART AS A GREEN ETERNITY, NOT WONDERS

The penultimate stanza is my special favorite. At first it seems to veer away from the main theme of how things are mortal and immortal at the same time. But on closer look, it’s precisely an instance of that phenomenon: it’s ordinary and transient events that add up to immortality, an ordinary island that becomes someone’s Holy Land.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders

Here we may protest that poetry sometimes speaks of wonders, of the extraordinary as well as the ordinary. But Borges wants the emphasis on continuity, found in the ordinary, “humble and green,” rather than in  the exceptional.

After this magnificent detour into the Odyssey and “green eternity,” we return to the river “that passes and remains.” The poem returns to its beginning, and we can contemplate the rich symbolism of the river, “made of time and water” again and again, in our own flowing. 

“INCONSTANT HERACLITUS”: THE SAME SELF, YET ALWAYS DIFFERENT 

To Heraclitus’s famous saying that you can’t step into the same river twice we need to add another insight: that when you step into the river for the second time, you are not exactly the same person as the one who stepped into it before. Yet if we didn’t maintain some notion of continuity, we’d be unable to carry on, carried off by a tornado of constant change.

Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing

Art too evolves, and what is modern today will be old-fashioned fifty years from now, no longer a useful mirror to — and maker of — the new generations.

And perhaps there is something to praising a person for dying just at the right time — though of course we can’t control it. But for me there is some consolation in thinking that as the world I loved ends for me, it just begins for another little girl somewhere, transfixed with wonder as she sees mountains or the ocean for the first time. And there will be pain too, the same eternal discovery that romantic love must end, its spell broken — and we are changed, we go on like a river.

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water” could be the inscription on any tomb.

MORTAL AND IMMORTAL

Speaking of inscriptions on tombs, here is another Borges poem I treasure:

INSCRIPTION ON ANY TOMB

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breach of omnipotent oblivion,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass beads are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men don’t speak about.

The essentials of the dead man’s life —
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain,
the wonder of sensual delight —
will abide forever.

Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others.
You yourself are the embodied continuance*
of those who did not live into your time
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, tr. W.S. Merwin

* Borges: tu mismo eres el espejo y la réplica

= “you yourself are the mirror and the reply”

I don’t know why Merwin chose to “explicate” the poetry of that line in the original. He made it the meaning more clear, but at the cost of abstraction.

Willful soul is in Borges “arbitrary soul” — which carries the connotation of “accidental.” 

This poem presents a profound answer so often missing in poetry,  much of which deals with mortality, but not in a very satisfying way. We'd like to be immortal, but the old religious answers are not credible anymore. In any case, it's high time to be rid of the cruel archaic god whose power rests on the fear of hell, and whose heaven, let's face it, is utterly unattractive (a reminder: no internet there).

Borges provides a secular answer, and it's not the cosmic union. He does not warble that "we become stardust again.” After the richness of being human, that's not terribly attractive either. Even being ecologically buried in a biodegradable shroud so that we can efficiently feed the plants is not terribly satisfying, especially now with the drought and the prospect of becoming part of a prickly pear cactus rather than a rose bush.

Borges disregards the whole idea of “returning to nature” or the vague spirituality of “going home.”  He says that our immortality is the lives of those who come after us, just as our ancestors continue in us. It may not be exactly what we want, but that's what we get. There is a senses of honesty here that's exhilarating in itself. It’s like a former pastor (Ryan Bell) realizing that a “relationship with reality” is more rewarding than a relationship with an imaginary omnipotent being who for some perverse reason won’t answer his prayers or give the slightest sign of his existence.

Or — trust me, this will bring us to Borges again — it’s like Milosz admitting in a late poem that for decades he prayed for a sign of the supernatural: namely, that a statue in church would move its hand. In the end Miloz admits his disappointment: the statue would remain motionless forever. But people outside the church would shake hands with him, talk with him, smile at him. This, he decides, is the sign of the divine. To me, it’s the sign of the human, and that is enough. Borges, too, finds being human sufficiently rich. When we have the affectionate interaction with others, an imaginary “Lord” is neither needed nor missed. 

 

WE ARE BOTH INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE

Borges was such a “singular” man (I mean it in the sense of unusual, exceptional — but the word insists on its most common meaning) that it’s striking how he doesn’t buy “individualism.” He does not insist on his “exceptionalism.” He does not announce that his verse will be immortal, or will make anyone immortal. No, we are all destined for “ominipotent oblivion.” But . . . simply because we are human, we are not isolated individuals; we are humanity. We pass as the water in the river passes, but the river remains.

Forget the particulars of a person’s life; they will be forgotten anyway. They are the worthless “glass beads.” What matters is the treasure of continuity, of being part of humanity. No one is just an isolated person, but a portion of humanity.

This realization may have come to Borges in part from his life among books. He realized that his mind is a tapestry of the endless volumes he’s read, influences he’d absorbed. From there it’s only a step to seeing oneself as part of the larger human community across time, and of the human continuum.

His acceptance of the collective mind set Borges apart from those writers in his generation who insisted on the cult of the artist as “separate, different, and superior” — alienated from the culture at large, and basically from all others. But Borges communed not only with his peers, but also, to a great extent, with great writers of the past, and knew he was part of a continuum.

It reminds me of Rilke’s idea that we love not just a single person, but, within that person, multitudes of others who’ve gone before — mothers and fathers, those crumbled mountains and dry riverbeds who shaped the landscape of the beloved.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of each of us, something we bring to the universe only once: “there will never be another you.” That’s astonishing too; we tend to celebrate the uniqueness of an individual, those aspects that stand out as different. This individualism can make us forget how typical we are in most ways, children of our age and culture. In the West in particular, almost everyone has had at least moments of feeling so different from others that loneliness threatens to overwhelm: no one really knows me, so how can they love the “real me.” Never mind that the “real me” is so elusive, so . . . non-existent. Even our memories are not fully ours, but a collage of we absorbed in all kinds of ways, including books and movies and the stories we heard, eventually conflating them with our own.

If we were words, each person would be an oxymoron. We are both individual and collective. A single individual has no meaning apart from his social context. As Christian Wiman said, “Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others.”

Pondering how deeply I agree with this reminds me that it wasn’t always that way. At some point in my late teens and early twenties I felt a deep alienation and wanted to be as independent and unconnected as possible, not needing others. That is of course not infrequent in early youth, this wanting to be a lone hero — I’ve definitely seen it in others, especially young men. The culture enshrines the apparently self-sufficient frontiersman who  builds his own house, grows his own food, hunts, and so on. It may seem humbling to realize how dependent on others we are. Even the lone frontiersman has the benefit of tools designed and produced by others.

And experience quickly shows us that a lot more can be done by cooperating with others. As for writers, they may say it’s between them and the language, but that’s true only during the creative process. Writers needs readers, and they need their peers. And even the most reclusive of them (think of Emily Dickinson) rely on the collective psyche, that “greater mind” that resides in the language and culture. And that greater mind is so rich that even a recluse has enough to write about — especially an educated recluse surrounded by books.

So, in the most radical sense, there should be no inscription upon any tomb. This was once a human being; that is enough. And yet, and yet . . . I confess I love to read inscriptions on old tombs, the little that remains of that “individual” part. Now, however, cremation followed by the scattering of ashes is becoming standard, so the dead live only in our memory, as well as in the anonymous ways in which the words they said, the pain and delight they felt, are now said and felt by others. We are both mortal and immortal, individual and collective, Borges says. In this poem, his emphasis is on the collective. This is quite striking coming from Borges, who seems deeply “individuated,” as Jungians would say. Perhaps that’s why he feels completely at ease insisting on the collective dimension as the one that’s more essential. 

And indeed, treasured reader (I say this without a grain of irony or condescension; I am touched that people want to read my posts), the very fact that you are reading these words on an electronic screen is testimony of the collective human genius that creative the great collective mind known as the Internet. And before the Internet could come into being, countless developments in science, mathematics, and civilization as a whole had to happen. 

TWO SIDES OF THE COIN AND THE GOD WHO FORGETS

I won’t go through yet another poem by Borges, but the post would be incomplete without mentioning it. It’s “The Iron Coin.” It describes two sides of a metaphoric coin. Here is an excerpt:

On the upper sphere are interwoven

The fourfold firmament borne up by the flood

And the unalterable planets.

Adam, the young father, and the young Paradise.

The evening and the morning.
God in every creature.
In this pure labyrinth is your reflection.


Let us toss again the iron coin

Which is also a magic mirror. 
Its reverse side
Is no one and nothing and darkness and blindness.

That is you.
The two faces forge a single iron echo.

Your hands and your tongue are unfaithful witnesses.

God is the ungraspable center of the ring.
He neither praises nor condemns.
He behaves better: he forgets.

The “god in every creature” on the paradise side of the coin could be interpreted as “immanent divinity” of the sort that Spinoza proposed. Or he could be seen as the young, active, interested god of Genesis — not the silent, sullen, hidden god of the later books of the Hebrew Bible, eventually transformed by the Enlightenment thinkers into a creator who made the world, then abandoned it to its own workings. The god who neither praises nor condemns is the indifferent god of the Deists. It is the universe. It is nature.

Every coin is just one coin — but it has two sides. One side of the coin shows the young Adam in the “young Paradise.” The other side, “no one and nothing and darkness and blindness.” (Su reverso / es nadie y nada y sombra y ceguera. Eso eres.)

Eso eres: You are that — no one and nothing and darkness and blindness. Borges does not write “inspirational” verse. He doesn’t spare us the news: you have already lived in paradise. No other paradise awaits.

Great writers don't shrink from staring at the abyss (which, as Nietzsche observes, stares back at you).

(A shameless digression: did Dostoyevski shrink from the abyss after all? Through Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevski condemned god as evil. But even Dostoyevski did not deal with “no one and nothing and darkness and blindness.” Perhaps it can be done only in poetry because the beauty of the language is a redeeming affirmation.)

(Another shameless digression: Borges did not really have a relationship with nature. Hence also his limitation as a poet and thinker. It’s extremely important to have a connection with humanity, but it’s also important to have a connection with trees and flowers and stars and birds. Borges gives us a start in one area; we must venture into more connectedness on our own; we must dance with the wolves.)

A BIT OF TALMUDIC WISDOM

This reminds me of [Talmudic?] wisdom says that in one pocket we should carry a note that says something like, "You are a magnificent being for whom the world was created," and in the other pocket a note that says, "You are nothing." And we should reach for whichever note/reminder is right for the occasion.

Two sides of the coins, or two pockets, each with a different note in it. Sometimes it’s very important to remember that we are mortal — there is only so much time in which to be happy and productive. “If not now, when?”

And at other times it’s important to glory in the continuity of the human culture and progress. Since Jesus is never coming back, it’s entirely up to us to keep on building a more compassionate, humanitarian society.

It’s up to us the living to help shape the kind of immortality we will have.

Photo: Maja Trochimczyk; the opening image is also by Maja Trochimczyk

DYING FOR NON-BELIEVERS

When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not. ~ Epicurus

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

WOLF TRAIN

December, a shopping mall,
above the traffic snarl I saw
an empty trolley on the bridge,

its windows lit with moonlike glow —
reminding me how much I loved
taking a train in Warsaw at night —


how I would enter the train’s rhythm,
the knocking of the wheels against
the shifting and dividing tracks;

blind backs of buildings,
unknown streets –- an underworld
passing across my face

reflected in the dark, drizzled glass.
If I had known
what station would be next —

if I had known the doors of life
close quickly, and we watch the past
through time’s prison bars —

in the cramped Warsaw apartment,
at fifteen, when I made up my mind
to live in the West,

would I have danced as if
we never lose anything we love —
just keep adding beauty to beauty.

The trolley flying overhead
like a luminous ghost
brought back an unreal city,

in the same instant of stone and breath
arriving and departing,
falling and rising from its ruins.

The same moon moved between
darkness and light-wounded clouds,
winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,

adding phantom beauty to beauty.
“That is all,” the master said.
That is all but it is splendid.”


~ Oriana © 2015

I hear you, Impatient Reader: “This is not a poem about dying, and this blog post is supposed to be about dying.” But almost all poetry is about loss, and consequently about mortality. And about beauty — a poem without beauty is not really poetry.

Any significant loss prefigures the ultimate loss — and losing Warsaw was a great loss to me. It took me at least a decade to realize that I would never again have the kind of magical intellectual milieu I had in Warsaw, and two more decades to come to terms with that loss rather than live in perpetual mourning. Life teaches, but sometimes we learn very slowly. Suffering is a bad habit, and if not for the shortness of life suddenly revealing itself, I might still be sunk in it like a paralyzed swan. 

 
And what did I learn? That, after all, beauty is precisely that which we do not lose: thanks to memory and the unfailing cycles of nature, we keep adding beauty to beauty.

A time will come when this feasting on beauty will stop. But meanwhile, it is splendid. It is much better to live with gratitude for that splendor than to worry about dying.


Here is a poem that speaks more explicitly about dying:

LOVING THE SKY

This evening, far from here, 

a friend is entering his death, 

he knows it, he walks 

under bare trees alone, 

perhaps for the last time. So much love, 

so much struggle, spent and worn thin. 

But when he looks up, suddenly the sky

is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.

~ Jean Joubert, from “Brilliant Sky,” tr. Denise Levertov

This poem by Jean Joubert is a minor example of what I call the “comfort poem.” You may object that it’s not very comforting, since we are not promised a “better place” — but it’s about the best modern poets manage, and maybe it’s time to admit that better this comfort than none.

First, the magnitude of the loss is fully faced. The setting is desolate:

This evening, far from here, 

a friend is entering his death, 

he knows it, he walks 

under bare trees alone, 

perhaps for the last time.

The consolation of lush nature is absent: the trees are bare, so it’s late autumn or winter. The consolation of sunshine is absent: it’s evening. The speaker’s friend is alone, so the consolation of affectionate human company is absent. This is a minimalist landscape out of Kafka or Beckett. And the landscape seems to match the human element, and the approaching entry into no landscape at all.

Perhaps worst of all, the man knows he’s dying. Perhaps he’s not yet very old and “tired of life” after having lived a long time and done pretty much everything he’d wanted to do and richly enjoyed it, so he’s now filled with gratitude for having had this privilege. He’s certainly still able to take a walk — “perhaps for the last time.” It could be a middle-aged man with the diagnosis of terminal cancer (“thin” reminds me how emaciated cancer patients tend to be in the last phase). The poet is merciless in presenting the loss:

So much love, 
 
so much struggle, spent and worn thin. 


First, we must note that there is something unusual and significant about “So much love” being on the same line with “for the last time.” Love is immediately juxtaposed with the finality of the last walk. The man is dying, but there has been “so much love.” 


But what follows is “So much struggle, spent and worn thin.” Not victory, but the fatigue of being “spent.” In the end, no one wins — we simply exit, spent, worn-out. The reminder that much of life is struggle makes the man not fate’s darling, but essentially one of us: we struggle, we suffer, and it seems that the best we can say is, “There are the good days, and there are the bad days.” So much love, so much struggle, and soon it will all be gone, except for the fickle memories of those who knew him — hardly a “better place.”

Yet just as the poem reaches its darkest point, there is a “turning” (to use the term scholars apply to sonnets):

But when he looks up, suddenly the sky 

is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.

Already “but” announcing a turning point. Now there is the “vertiginous” (stunning, overwhelming, immense — note the suggestion of “vertical” in the word) sky, and the sky is beautiful. It’s beautiful simply by virtue of being the sky, just as it is beautiful to be able to take this walk, to feel the earth underneath one’s feet. The last comfort is having had the beauty of the world, continuing up to the last moment that we can still perceive it.

“Clarity” could be seen also in a negative sense here: it’s clear that this is all. Yet the words around it (especially “arrayed” — true, this is a translation, but “arrayed” is a wonderful choice) suggest a consolation: it is all, but it is splendid.

Imagine: it’s the last walk of your life. Tomorrow you check into the hospital, and you’re not expected to recover. What would that walk be like?

I can’t predict the thoughts I might have. I know only one thing: probably the first thing I’d do it look at the sky. I have always loved the sky.

**

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything. ~ Saul Bellow
Why is so much poetry concerned with dying? Billy Collins said that poetry is “one long funeral.” It’s not because poets are morbid. Rather, perhaps they are the not in denial or mortality to the degree that the rest of us are. Poets more so than prose writers try to deal with the greatest sorrow of life: the knowledge of mortality and our ultimate helplessness in the face to it. How do we manage to carry on without howling in grief and protest against the non-human nature that says, “That’s it, you’ve had your time at the feast of life, and now you’re out of time.”

One common solution has been to imagine that consciousness goes on without the body. You remain Jimmy or Jane, Mark or Michelle, your memories and identity intact — just floating about for a quadrillion years — or else your permanent self enters a new body and reincarnates, going through the same tiresome process of being a colicky baby, then a toddler, a preschooler, etc. Neither scenario is likely or particularly consoling, aside from taking away the immediate terror of loss.

But the interesting thing is that even before religion started crumbling, a lot of poetry did not seem to “buy” the afterlife. Sooner “carpe diem” — or simply mourning the brevity of life. Starting with the Romantics, poets have paid increasing attention to Nature (the Romantics spelled it with a capital N) and to beauty. Modern poets have adopted it as the main answer of sorts: we can’t deny mortality, but we have the consolation of beauty. That beauty has a melancholy cast, but it is the best we can do.

Jack Gilbert states, “you must risk delight” without denying that bad things will happen and life will not last. He himself was counting on old age in which he’d feast on the memories of a rich life — no such luck, as he descended into dementia. We need to enjoy the moment, and the memories of moments, without any hope for joy “later.” Gilbert himself affirms this:

We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
~ ending of “A Brief for the Defense,” from “Refusing Heaven”

“We must admit there will be music despite everything.” That is certainly true. Poetry was supposed to be impossible after Auschwitz, but many magnificent poems have been written since. In fact, the Golden Age of Polish poetry unfolded in the shadow of Auschwitz — you could say “within an easy commute.” Music goes on, beauty goes on — perhaps with more urgency than before, now that we know the fragility of human civilization, and also that which is most precious. 

 

But not everyone would agree with the assertion that concludes Gilbert’s poem:

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Outrageous! some may say. Maybe most people are not so exquisitely attuned to the sounds of the world. You have to substitute our own special delight. Even the morning coffee may be reason enough to go on living.

More seriously, many people see primary value in relationship with others, especially one’s family. For them, it’s not beauty that makes life worth living, but family love.

Freud said that the two most important things in life are love and work. In my observation, for most people it’s “love” in the loose sense of connection with significant others.

*

Recently, another value has come to the fore: living to the fullest — richly, intensely. In another poem, Gilbert asks the gods (who tell him that they’ll grant one more wish):

Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present.

Until we are “frightened into the present,” we remain frozen in the future tense of youth, always fantasizing about the future, even though, like the horizon, it fails to get any closer — until all of a sudden it is much closer, and we can finally read the words out there: THE END. Yes, now we are “frightened into the present.” And as if by magic we “get it.” We don’t have to read vapid New Age books to understand that it’s only by dropping the constant “living for the future” and instead paying attention to the astonishingly vivid present that we can enjoy the richness of experience, which we can later re-live “in the mind’s eye.”

Hayden Carruth admits the difficulty of living with the knowledge of mortality, and then asks for the consolation of beauty (we can’t really expect a poet to ask for the consolation of family love):

Reality is an impasse. Tell me again
How the white heron rises from among the reeds and flies forever
    across the nacreous river at twilight
Toward the distant islands.

(last lines, “Of the Distress on Being Humiliated by the Chinese Poets”)

**

WORK AND BEAUTY

Again, Freud said that the two most important things in life are love are work. For the majority of people, that’s no doubt true. For creative people, however, I suspect that it’s simply work. Not that love is unimportant; it’s just that work is more important by far. This old saying that an artist is married to his or her work? It’s true. An artist is someone for whom his or her creative work is the most important thing in life. That’s the very definition of an artist.

Taslima Nasrin, a best-selling Bengali writer, said, “I do not believe in prayers. I believe in work.”

Rilke said, “To work is to live without dying.” There is simply to time to worry about dying. True, Rilke wrote a great deal on the subject of death, and has even been called the great poet of death, but his own life was about turning out a prodigious amount of writing.

For me, it’s work and beauty. Sometimes I wonder if beauty alone could be enough, in case I lost the ability to write (due to stroke, say). Maybe. I can never have enough of Pacific sunsets, though in memory I also cherish the blossom of Polish winter sunsets, roses in snow. 


Can beauty be enough? The sight of a heron rising into flight, the splash of dark water from an oar at night? Sometimes I am sure it would be enough. But I can state with greater certainty that I feel inspired by stories of how the great achievers worked until practically the last conscious breath — in spite of the pain. They might even refuse pain killers just so they could still finish their last project. Because “when you have the why of life, you can endure almost any how” — even terminal illness.

Recently, Christopher Hitchens died this kind of death: writing for as long as he could, fully engaged with the world and ideas. I wasn’t fond of Hitchens when he was alive; it was only the interviews he did while undergoing the toxic cancer treatments that made me understand his courage and dedication, his warning that any rumor of a “deathbed conversion” will be either false and due to dementia.

But then he was only “pursuing his bliss.” It can take great stoicism to do that.

Finally, here is a fascinating video about how we can (almost) overcome the fear of dying. Not surprisingly, it concludes that living a rich life is the only remedy.

“We are characters in a story. Long John Silver is not afraid that you will close the book. The only thing we should be concerned about is whether we are living a good story.” ~ Stephen Cave

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/23/312544032/should-we-be-afraid-of-death

Charles:

Love quotes by Epicurus and Wittgenstein. So refreshing to talk about death without religion. In fact the word God was not mentioned once in the entire blog.

You have come so far in understanding beauty as God as opposed to God as death and religion.

And the moral of the blog is to take in as much beauty as possible whenever we can.

PS. “Wolf Train” is an excellent title. Talk about the unexpected.
Oriana:

That gives me a shiver, God as beauty rather than God as death. And indeed, if I were to call anything divine, my first choice would be beauty.

The Christian god is basically a kind of Hades, the god of the dead, who are imagined as bodiless entities up there in the sky with him, and down inside the earth, in hell, aware they will never meet him (I'm not sure this bothers the Buddhists, but it might bother the Muslim).

But beauty, yes. One secular answer to religious is “graceful life philosophies,” which cultivate beauty. And work so absorbing that we lose the sense of self and of time is also magnificent. That’s why Rilke said that to work is to live without dying — possibly the wisest thing he ever said. He learned that from Rodin.

P.S. I also like your other definition of god: “God is baggage.” Yes, it’s become that: archaic baggage. A stone around the neck of the modern culture.

P.S. “Wolf Train” used to have a different ending:

The same moon moved between
darkness and light-wounded clouds,
winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,

adding phantom beauty to beauty —
the Wolf Train riding across the sky
with a silent aria of howl.

I am still attracted to this ending, its inaudible protest that perhaps isn’t exactly a protest — the howling of wolves has a pure-voiced beauty. If so, perhaps I could even preserve the uplifting final lines:

“That is all,” the master said.
That is all but it is splendid.”

But the purist in me rebels against it. The greatest positive message is the line “adding phantom beauty to beauty.” If I restore the former ending, the tacked on “master” needs to go. The poem would remain a celebration of life’s beauty amid the inevitable sorrows. 

Michael:

OH DEATH, WHERE IS THY STING,
And oh Grave, thy victory?

Pretty brave questioning from the Apostle Paul. Rhetorical questions to be sure — he wasn't inviting his readers to engage in a discussion. He was certain he had death figured out. He was covered. No need to fear. No worries. Die. Resurrect. Live forever.

Stephen Cave also reduces the issues and complexities of death too much. Surely the good story of life in "The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story" must include our circuitous bumbling toward death, our anticipation of it, and our eventual coming to terms with it (if we ever do). I find his parsing unhelpful.

Some years are for questions, some for answers. The answer I have found, after years of questions, is that it is very useful to have a philosophy of death, not just the years between birth and death. I can't go with Rilke who thought of death as some kind of fruit to be plucked, an accomplishment of sorts. In good yin-yang fashion death is foremost a pole against which to estimate and value life, a sort of "teach me to number my days" kind of thinking, as King David prayed.

Knowing the fact of death has pushed me into the present. Demanded of me that I live meaningfully. And I'm grateful. But there are yet things I fear about death and I see no reason to apologize for these fears. They are not knowing when, how, and where. And there are worries. Who will clean up my unfinished business? How much pain will my mourners feel (I mean I can hope, right?)?

The following is an excerpt from a story I wrote:

               I had noticed that when I contemplated death the most, the world seemed most alive. Taunting, I supposed. Or calling. It wasn't that long ago I had driven into the foothills, the so-called Gold Country, with death on my mind. With a heavy heart and cloudy vision I found my way to Oak Flats Cemetery, a graveyard as old as the gold rush. Now neglected, nearly forgotten, the gate lay to one side in the grass, hanging by a single hinge. There was a sense that the second and third generations, the mourners, the buriers, the weeders, the mowers, the flower bringers, had also aged and died, buried in other cemeteries, families now eternally scattered. The weather beaten stone markers felt cold--mossy cold, lichen colored. I didn't know anyone buried there but it seemed like a good place to contemplate death. I imagined myself in the earth, cold and dark. Silent. Alone. Drawn to that rest of the most final sense, I could hear that first shovel of earth that signaled all is done. On a god perch, I looked down through the years. There would be time for my life to be edited, the final chapter written by my children, the book closed and shelved, and then for memories to fade. My children would think of me less and less often until I was not more than an unread footnote. To the next generation I would be that middle-aged man who took his life. There would be a sad, serious face in the telling, a little speculation as to why, then a moving on. That's it. Life comes, it goes. The world didn't slow its orbit for my arrival and certainly won't miss a turn at my exit. Why do I take it all so seriously?

I continue to take it seriously but in helpful ways. I do measure the probable years remaining. I make certain to treasure and nourish my loves. I work to rid me myself of burdens that are not worthy of taking this journey perched on my shoulders. I try to laugh more, to see more, to name my feelings. I slow to savor food. I pause for fragrances. I record a touch with a conscious thought that I am loved.

So I am making it a good story, but death is responsible for that.

Thanks for a thoughtful piece. Loving what you do.

Oriana:

I'm not sure that St. Paul was entirely free of death anxiety. He staked everything on the factuality of the resurrection. If Christ did not rise, then our faith is worthless, and we are doomed to never living again (apparently life — being sentient forever — was Paul’s greatest value). But the evidence for the resurrection was weak. It would not stand in court now, and probably not then either. There were no eye witnesses. Accounts were contradictory. Paul was smart and educated, and must have known he was not on firm ground.

Cognitive dissonance could have fueled an extra zeal in trying to spread the new religion. Paul didn’t do well among the Greek skeptics, but illiterate Roman slaves and others who suffered from hardship and oppression were open to the attractive promise of the meek inheriting the earth and the last becoming the first. Never mind the lack of evidence . . .

All this rested on whether or not the resurrection actually happened. The Roman custom was to leave the body on the cross to rot. That was an essential part of why crucifixion was regarded as the worst possible punishment. Bart Ehrman and many other scholars presents convincing other scenarios, even assuming an empty tomb, for which the evidence is also weak. Rising from the dead was certainly the least likely of these scenarios.

Only the Second Coming within a generation was even less likely, and indeed it did not happen, nor ever will. Friends have suggested that I go in business selling bumper stickers that say JESUS IS NEVER COMING BACK. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER.

(A shameless digression: Alfred Loisy, a French theologian, remarked, “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but it was the church that arrived.” 1902 was much too early to get away with such insights. Loisy was fired from his teaching posts and excommunicated. But then theologians don’t believe in god; they have defined him away in metaphors of metaphors.)

*

But back to your critique of Stephen Cave’s consolation. Life is a good story, an interesting story — until the years of pathetic decline. “Life is a play with a poorly written last act” — this saying has been ascribed to several writers. Already Shakespeare in As You Like It, in the notorious Seven Ages of Man soliloquy, presented a terrible picture of typical old age: “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Dentistry has made progress, and now we can have implants as well as preserve most of our own teeth — but otherwise things remain as the Bard described them.

But now the last phase of aging — that bumbling descent you mention — begins significantly later. And that IS progress. In the West, “old” doesn’t start at fifty, or even sixty. Those extra two decades or so, before the accelerated aging inevitably sets in, are priceless. And the pathetic stage  need not be the part of the story if we become enlightened enough to make research on aging a priority. The ideal is maturation without debilitating illness. People would stay mentally sharp and healthy almost until the end, and then die quickly.

What we have right now is the hospice movement, and that too is progress against dysfunctional medicine. Nor is there a stigma attached to suicide after a diagnosis of terminal illness, if the enjoyment of life is no longer possible. Serious thinking about the end of life issues remains to be done, and the hospice movement shows that such thinking has begun.

(For another look at this, please read my blog post http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html)

As for the existence of death being responsible for a much greater appreciation of life, I have commented on this many times. If I hadn’t been cornered by mortality and realized at long last how little time is left, I’d probably be still stuck in depression, bewailing my shattered dreams.

That why I see the vague promises of afterlife as destructive. If paradise awaits, why bother trying to make much of this life, a brief episode before trillions of years of bliss? Yet out of the corner of my eye I see that even those who claim to be religious don’t seem to bet too strongly on everlasting paradise (now downgraded to “a better place”). They too seem interested in drinking the sweetness of this life down to the last drops, even if it means no more than dozing in front of the TV. Dozing is also sweet, also a message of “I am loved.”