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NOT EVEN IN THE AFTERLIFE
I always thought it would be him
my great love my cruel one
he with a luminous mind
body of a wingless dragonfly
rounded at the edges but I thought
dying would improve him
he’d be the radiant spirit
waiting for me on the other side
with his inaudible stutter
his invisible scars
growing up in the mean streets
small weak lying to survive
but I thought that improved by dying
he’d take me by the hand
and we’d walk forever across
the black velvet of infinity
I thought like Dante and Beatrice
we’d stand on a ring of Saturn
his hair still mahogany
a Conquistador’s burning eyes
I thought that improved by death
he’d shimmer like a crystal butterfly
but instead this empty room
blank walls only he and I
he doesn’t take me by the hand
only starts scolding me
for something so long ago
so small I don’t remember it at all
the searing flame of his mind
pours into putting me down
he is carrying on and on
and will never stop
the room has no door
there is no welcoming white light
so this is hell a small room
alone with my great love
~ Oriana © 2015
I remember that after waking up from the dream I felt shattered all day. It took me a few days to recover. It was the final loss of a great love even in its ghostly form. As Anna Akhmatova said in “The Last Toast,” “ [I drink] to my life too awful to tell about.”
He was a narcissist, but not entirely unaware of how unworthy he was of my love. He was the one who said, “People will despise you for having wasted yourself on me.” In another poem I had another lover say that — yes, poets do lie to make the poem simpler and thus better. Art relies on the simplification of messy complexities.
It was no revelation to me that that particular man was a sadistic narcissist and it had been an emotionally abusive relationship — I didn’t need a nightmare to tell me that. I thought I had already gotten over the realization that my greatest (or at least the most intense) love had been for a man of that sort — that was just one of the misfortunes of my life. But apparently my love for him had been so great that in my wishful imagination I transformed him into a future good person, a brilliant talker I could enjoy without the pain. The fantasy still lingered in my mind for decades until the dream of hell killed it. And I did feel shattered for a while, never mind the unreality of it all.
But nothing compares to the shattering I experienced when I truly, truly understood that I wouldn’t have not just the national recognition I first dreamed about but any recognition whatever, aside from a few poet friends (whose luck wasn’t any better). I’ve recovered considerably, but is there a true recovery from that kind of emotional crash — losing the dream that guided my life during my so-called best years? I survive mainly by not thinking about it, concentrating on small goals and pleasures, counting my blessings, etc. I am in fact happier than in a long time. Except for the last years in LA when I was rapidly developing as a poet and each new poem seemed a miracle, these are the happiest years of my life. Right now I feel blessed. I feel lucky — I, who was officially pronounced as “having been born under an unlucky star.”
As I revised the poem this came together: the greatest love of my life and the greatest dream of my life (in a more legitimate form: to be a great poet) — both such sad ruins . . . The misfortune of passionate love for a man with whom a real partnership was impossible, and life circumstances that stranded me away from potential mentors . . . All in the past now, with nothing to be done about it except to live every day that remains. Well, most people don’t get what they most want in life, do they? The Buddha had something to say about that.
An aside: The dream was a compelling depiction of hell as non-stop put-downs from the man you loved madly in your youth — the way you can love only once. There is still some romantic glow smoldering in your psyche because he was your “great love,” however misguided or downright disastrous it turned out to be. The trembling, the held breath when you merely heard his voice in the hallway in the distance. And then waking up to reality — forever. Yes, that would be hell, that kind of ultimate disillusionment and denial of romantic fantasy. In my twenties and thirties I was already fully aware that it was the fantasy I needed, never mind the reality; the fantasy of loving and being loved was enough to keep me going.
But a simpler vision of hell was provided by a vision described by Teresa of Avila: each soul is cramped into a cubicle, alone, tearing itself to pieces. That’s the self-loathing so masterfully imparted by the Catholic church and other fundamentalist religions — and/or by having experienced an abusive childhood or abusive relationships. You don’t need an outside tormentor — you internalize the put-downs and very efficiently torment yourself.
Another aside: some have famously imagined hell as the inability to get away from people. Sartre didn’t go for the perennial joking about hell being a place where you meet all your friends and all the interesting people besides — all the freethinkers and creatives and eccentrics. No, for Sartre it was being locked up with people with whom you can’t forge a connection, people who reject you and despise you. But others have suggested that hell is solitary confinement. Perhaps in the end there would be an equivalence: we’d grow numb, stop hearing the nagging voices of others, and feel entirely alone. That’s what happened in my dream: even though I was with my former great love, after a while I automatically tuned him out, and felt completely alone.
George Bellow, The White Horse, 1922
DO NOT PUT DOWN OTHERS, DO NOT PUT DOWN YOURSELF
The dream also seemed to comment on the viciousness of constantly criticizing someone. Neither suffering or being criticized improves people. Centuries of being brainwashed to the contrary need to be overcome. This is the propaganda of bullies, and the generational chain of giving and receiving verbal abuse.
Perhaps the most awful part is the fact that we internalize this abuse, believe it, and continue to put down ourselves long after the abuser is gone — sometimes dead. A lifetime of self-loathing can follow unless the chain is broken by awareness and conscious action to liberate oneself from this pattern of un-love.
A teacher I knew once said that she can walk into a classroom and tell at a glance which children are receiving a lot of love, and which not enough. Indeed I am tempted to divide people into those who have been treated lovingly and received more praise than criticism, and those who received mainly put downs and verbal bullying. For most, it’s a mixed pattern. But the extremes stand out.
The man in my dream fell into the first group. He had the misfortune of growing up in a family that belong to that underclass that’s dismissed with the particularly cruel label: “white trash.” Being bright, and being born at the right time in history, he availed himself of the GI bill to get educated and ultimately do well in life — at the financial level. He also learned how to appear charming and seductive. But the love he received from the women he manipulated into loving him never seemed to heal the deep wounds of childhood. He was always compulsively showing off — or, if angered, and he was easily angered, using his intelligence to put down others.
Eventually I lost touch with him, so I can’t say with certainty with recovery never happened. It happened for me, so perhaps some degree of recovery happened for him too. Perhaps.
Not all stories have a happy ending. Sometimes hell is permanent. Some people live and die never having experienced what it’s like to love and be loved. But we need happy endings because no one’s story is just an individual story. It’s part of our collective human story. The more we move away from abusive child rearing (which used to be the norm in the past — think Dickens), the more we can hope for a kinder world.
Chagall: I and the Village, 1911
JOHN LENNON’S “IMAGINE THERE’S NO HEAVEN” — THE EQUIVALENT OF NIETZSCHE’S “GOD IS DEAD”?
Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky.
Imagine all the people
Living for today.
Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for,
And no religion, too.
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace--
You may say I'm a dreamer.
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us,
And the world will be as one.
~ Words and music by John Lennon. 1971 Northern Songs Ltd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwUGSYDKUxU
Someone commenting on Facebook said that Lennon was imagined a world without cultural diversity (“no countries”). I don't think he was imagining a world without different cultures — just without nationalism. And I'm sure he felt passionate about music and beauty — it's just that you wouldn't kill for those things, as people have for country and religion. For me it's mainly: no religion, no nationalism, no predatory capitalism. But it's interesting that it starts with “no heaven” = no afterlife. Imagine, people living for today. That's the truly visionary part, especially back in the seventies when saying "There's no heaven" was still a pretty daring thing. Without going to a “better place,” you have to make this world a better place. Or, without such grand goals, at least to cultivate your own garden.
I remember that when I first heard the song, I couldn't believe I heard it right: "no heaven"?? I kept replaying the opening to make sure. It struck me as equivalent of Nietzsche's “god is dead.” But people (at least in the US) wouldn't talk about it. It was ahead of its times.
"Above us, only sky" is the motto of the Liverpool Airport. And I'm amazed, frankly, that the American fundamentalists have not objected to the song. I guess they pretend it doesn't exist. And a lot of "spiritual but not religious" people cling to the idea of the spirit world — the astral realm — as a kind of heaven, at least between incarnations. I think those who like the song say it's about world peace, and pretend the part about "no heaven" isn’t there.
“Above us, only sky” is the motto of the Liverpool Airport — in post-Christian Europe, that’s a natural thought. But I'm amazed, frankly, that the American fundamentalists have not objected to the song.g. I guess they pretend it doesn't exist. And a lot of "spiritual but not religious" people cling to the idea of the spirit world — the “astral realm” — as a kind of heaven, at least between incarnations. I think those who like the song say it's about world peace, and pretend the part about "no heaven" isn't there. Saying "There is no heaven" is even more radical than saying "There is no god." The promise of heaven has been the most attractive promise of religion, even if Christian heaven is rather tepid next to the sensual Islamic paradise. And the threat of hell has of course been the greatest tool of keeping people afraid and blindly obedient.
FROM THE TENDER ARIEL TO THE TOUGH CALIBAN
Come downe and sit in the dust; a virgine, daughter Babel, sit on the grounde: there is no throne. O daughter of the Chaldeans: for though shalt no more be called Tendre and delicate.
[Geneva Bible, Isaiah 47:1]
This unexpected quotation in Harold Bloom’s chapter on the Temptest (“Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”) moved me profoundly.
“Tender and delicate” — that’s how people used to see me. But the “tender and delicate” was some years ago — the princess years of being physically attractive. A fairy child, a “little doll.” That’s when it was enough to just sit there looking pretty. Age dethrones women; now they tough “nasty women” and they “can take it” (whatever coarseness is dished out to them).
Age, which often coarsens one’s features, can create a deceptive appearance of sturdiness. “What! Martha had a heart attack? But she was tough as nails! She could take anything!”
A man is strong, an admirable trait; a woman is “tough as nails.” Interesting that the imagery is macho-shop. Did a carpenter come up with this phrase?
And anything can indeed dished out to that tough woman — no tenderness and delicacy. That’s for children and young girls. A young mother might at first encounter some protectiveness. Later, middle-aged, you’re on your own, O daughter of the Chaldeans. Tired? No man will rush toward you with a chair, much less several men, as they used to. Just be glad the ground will still accept you.
You’ve been demoted from Ariel to Caliban, who is of course expected to fend for himself without receiving any affection. Even if you were once a loved child and adored bride, who loves you now, immigrant from the past, that unknown world?
But let us end on something magical from that play. I was struck not by the famous “Our revels now are ended” — though that expresses the theme of life’s dissolution in lyrical eloquence — but by Caliban’s tenderness in explaining to the castaways that the island is enchanted:
Be not afeared; the isle if full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.
There is something tender about telling someone not to be afraid — one’s voice naturally becomes soft. No need to invoke Ariel’s spirits making music. It’s enough to think of a forest — a true forest, with huge oaks and pines — and all the magical sounds you get to hear, be it only a bird, unseen, rustling in the brush.
This speech is full of such delicacy that I get sentimental and think of Hans Christian’s Andersen’s “Little Match Girl” freezing to death on Christmas Day, but in her last vision, having decided to light all her remaining matches, she sees a vision of a warm room with a beautiful Christmas tree in it. A tear-jerker, yes, along with countlesss movie scenes in which the protagonist dies seeing in delirium the wish-fulfilling scene of love and beauty.
Here it’s the dispossessed orphan Caliban, the dark-skinned outcast — “the beast Caliban,” as Prospero calls him — who has dreams of riches about to his as he lies penned in the hollow of a rock (“here you sty me / In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me / The rest o’ the island”).
But: be not afeared — there is much beauty in life to make up for the sorrows, and tenderness to make up for the coarseness. The human world may reject us, but never the ground — never the forest.
And those are the sacred places — not the ones “consecrated” by a priest with some absurd “holy water.” The earth is sacred, and so are its children — both Ariels and Calibans.
THE SURPRISING HEALTH BENEFITS OF WHISKEY (IN SMALL AMOUNT)
Whiskey is a distilled alcoholic beverage that is made of some type of grain mash. There isn’t much to whiskey except for alcohol, but whiskey is also exceptionally rich in ellagic acid, which is a very powerful antioxidant, and is responsible for a great deal of the health benefits from whiskey.
Dementia: Studies have actually shown that whiskey can successfully boost your cognitive performance and reduce your chances of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Although studies are ongoing and there is quite a bit of controversy regarding alcohol as a treatment/preventative method, there is no denying that ellagic acid is extremely powerful in terms of fighting against free radicals within the body. These free radicals are often associated with interrupting neural pathways and contributing to the slow decline towards dementia. Whiskey can reduce that mental decline and improve our quality of life as we get older. Once again, this is useful when consumed in moderation; too much alcohol kills brain cells and does the precise opposite of protecting our cognitive activity.
Heart Health: A number of studies have shown whiskey to be a major player in protecting heart health. As our bodies get older, our systems become more frail, resulting in less efficient functioning of various organ systems, and weakness of our cardiovascular system. However, a study has recently revealed that those who consume a moderate amount of whiskey on a regular basis have almost a 50% lower chance of experiencing a stroke or heart attack, which is exceptional news for those at risk of cardiovascular issues.
Blood Clots: In a related note for heart health, whiskey has been shown to significantly reduce blood clotting. Blood clotting is important when you are wounded so you stop losing blood, but internally, if your blood clots at key junctures in your blood vessels or arteries, it can be disastrous. Atherosclerosis, which usually occurs due to a large build-up of cholesterol, can combine with blood clots to result in thrombosis, heart attacks, strokes, and death. Whiskey is a blood-thinner, so it significantly lowers your chances of excess clotting. It also increases the amount of “good” cholesterol, which counteracts the effects of “bad” cholesterol, further protecting your heart.
Cancer Prevention: Cancer is one of the most devastating and globally relevant diseases known to man. We are also constantly looking for ways to prevent and slow down the disease. There are new anti-cancer schemes and fads all the time, but many of them are just that, popular fads with very little medicinal information to back it up. However, whiskey has an extremely high level of ellagic acid, one of the most powerful antioxidant compounds that we can consume. An antioxidant is a compound that neutralizes free radicals, the harmful byproducts of cellular metabolism that cause a wide range of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and premature aging. This powerful antioxidant makes whiskey a very effective preventative measure against cancer.
Immune System Boost: There have been certain studies that have argued for the immune system-boosting capacity of whiskey. Alcohol does have a traditional role in preventing illness and improving the function of the immune system, but firm evidence was never in hand. Now, we see that the antioxidants and trace levels of vitamins in whiskey do in fact stimulate the immune system, thereby helping to fight off normal colds, illnesses, and infections. All of those old movies where they would pour whiskey on a wound to disinfect it is not just fiction! You can pour whiskey on a fresh wound to make sure it does not get infected!
Diabetes Control: Whiskey has been consistently shown to reduce the chances of diabetes, sometimes by as much as 30-40%. A moderate amount of whiskey can significantly improve your body’s ability to regulate insulin and glucose levels, thereby lowering the possibility of developing diabetes.
Note: Oddly, whiskey delivers antioxidants more efficiently than wine, so arguably it’s more beneficial. The whiskey used in the studies was matured in oak for 12 years. This will of course be reflected in the price.
Warning: If you show even a slight tendency to alcoholism, you have to forget all about these benefits, and substitute . . . raspberries, pecans, walnuts, strawberries. These are good for you regardless. It's just that whiskey matured in rye is a particularly rich source of ellagic acid.
But you MUST be sure you are not genetically susceptible to alcoholism before you decide to avail yourself of the health benefits of small amounts of whiskey. Since alcoholism runs in families, and since first experiments with alcohol tend to take place in one’s teens, adults generally do know.
Please note: Ellagic acid supplements appear to be useless. They simply aren't absorbed. So we need to get ellagic acid from food and . . . surprisingly enough, whisky.
ANGEL WITH THE SUNDIAL
In the storm that rages round the strong cathedral
like a denier thinking on and on,
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you.
O smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
do you not mark how from your always-full
sundial our hours slide off one by one —
that so impartial sundial, upon which
the day’s whole sum is balanced equally
as though all our hours were rich and ripe?
What do you know, stone-born, of our plight?
And does your face become more blissful still
as you hold the sundial out into the night?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, tr, J. B. Leishman
(slightly modified by Oriana; the poem is also known as “Angel of the Meridian”)
**
I fell in love with this poem at first reading, when I first discovered Rilke in my late twenties — so many years ago that it seems like another lifetime. Unpredictable, the words that may connect one stage of our life with another; timeless ripples in time.
There are so many great lines here, and the poem works so well in English (including the rhymes, often a translator’s downfall — but here we see Leishman at his best) that I am surprised that this exquisite piece from The Book of Images is little known. You’d think that many Rilke lovers could recite the second stanza by heart:
O smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
do you not mark how from your always-full
sundial our hours slide off one by one —
**
The poem flows by itself, each word inevitable, even in translation. But this sublime angel remains largely undiscovered, obscured by its larger, lethal kin perched in the Duino Elegies.
Let’s “take it from the top,” as a quirky (but aren’t they all?) professor of mine used to say. The first stanza is interesting in itself. What is this “storm that rages round the cathedral”? I no longer remember my source for this information, but one explanation may be biographical. When Rilke and Rodin visited Chartres together, Rilke, for whom it was his first visit, was surprised by the wind around the cathedral — “the wind in which we stood like the damned.” Rodin replied that there is always a wind around the great cathedrals.
Before we go into the metaphorical meaning of the “storm around the strong cathedral,” let me dispose of a more literal interpretation. The stone walls of medieval cathedrals (which used to double as fortresses in wartime) are massive not only in height, but in thickness. That’s why it’s always cold inside, even on a hot summer day. But I never noticed much of a draft of coldness seeping out from the inside. The turbulence noted by Rilke may have been due to the complicated air currents as the wind pushes against and flows around the giant walls.
Also, Rilke might have known the legend of the wind around the Strasbourg cathedral: the wind there waits for the devil (trapped inside god’s fortress) to ride it again. Hence the “denier” might refer to the “spirit that always denies [or “always says No”), a line from Goethe’s Faust.
But let’s assume that the denier refers to an atheist who feels enraged against religion, but rather than express his hatred in a purely emotional outpouring, tries for rational arguments. Though Rilke was influenced by Lou Andreas-Salomé’s belief that all religions were human invention, like Lou he shared a longing for a “real god,” one who does not divide humanity into the saved and the damned. This “real god” understands our wounds (rather than condemn our “sins”) and accepts everyone. Nothing could separate us from that loving essence of the universe (now if we could only find even the slightest evidence that the “real god” exists . . . )
Rilke felt that it was possible to experience this kind of divine presence, with no need for either rationalized doctrine or blind belief in what we suspect (or even know) isn’t there. Though outwardly hostile toward Catholicism (he forbade the presence of a priest at his funeral), he was drawn to the poetics of Catholicism, the tenderness embodied in Mary and, now and then, other figures — in this case an angel. In spite of the literal as well as emotional and intellectual storm around the cathedral, the angel greets us as a beautiful, loving, and all-accepting being:
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you
*
I especially love the lines that open the second stanza:
O smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
The sculptor made the angel in man’s image. It’s a collective image: “your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths.” An angel is a human self-portrait. But it’s a wishful self-portrait, with wings. That’s how beautiful and serene we’d look if we’d known nothing but affection instead of being screamed at and punished. This is how we’d smile if we knew nothing about abandonment or betrayal. This is how smooth and soft our faces would be if we never experienced stress and suffering (mentally handicapped people sometimes have that soft and smooth look long past childhood — they generally encounter nothing but kindness, since no one judges them; they are granted innocence, so their faces stay unmarked by stress).
The angel, a stone man-bird, cannot know that all our hours are not “rich and ripe.” It can know nothing of the human life, and yet
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you
That happens thanks to the power of art and the power of a smile, whether on someone’s face or in a painting or on a statue. A smile expresses affection and trust. When we see a smile, we tend to relax and smile back, which automatically makes us feel better.
And then the final irony:
What do you know, stone-born, of our plight?
And does your face become more blissful still
as you hold the sundial out into the night?
The angel is blissful because he is blind and innocent — innocent in the sense of “ignorant.” He doesn’t even know night from day. Alas, we can’t recommend ignorance as a prescription for happiness, though “ignorance is bliss” holds in enough cases to remind me of Esther Perel’s admonition: “Not all truth needs to be told.”
The angel doesn’t know our sorrows (or any sorrow), and that's why it is blissful. I’ve come to see that Nietzsche was wrong when he wrote “What doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger.” This is so often quoted and assumed to be true. But most suffering damages us, physically and mentally. What makes us stronger is happiness: both the happiness of being loved and the happiness of work, of accomplishing something and loving the work we do.
What we can recommend, looking at the angel — and also at the joyful of most dogs, for that matter — is that children can be raised without constant judgment and condemnation. I HAVE seen much progress in this area, and a decline in toxic, punitive religion that encourages child abuse. Minimal punishment combined with a lot of affection seems to produce happy, friendly children to whom self-control comes more easily because they aren’t filled with hate and anger.
ANGELS IN ART: THE UPLIFT
In “The Believing Brain”, Michael Shirmer states that “we can’t help believing” for two main reasons: what he calls “patternicity” (seeking patterns) and “agenticity” (an agent must have caused this for a purpose). The human brain is wired to seek meaning, so anything perceived as meaningful, as conveying a relevant message, can serve as an angel/messenger. For instance, in Milosz’s poem “On Angels,” an angel (or a message) resides in birdsong as well as in the smell of apples.
It could be argued that anything that makes life seem worth living falls into the angelic category. It was the literal belief in angels in America that astonished me completely. In Europe, with churches and castles crowded with angels and plump-buttocked cherubs, it’s difficult to see angels as anything but art. And art means both the aesthetic distance and a human perspective. Those who carve an angel’s smile are undeniably human.
It was cunning to forbid “graven images.” It is a danger to religion to allow humans to be such obvious creators. As soon as it allowed images, dissident Christianity was already on its way to “secular humanism.” Images makes religion less abstract and more human, but eventually they also reveal religion’s mythological, man-made nature, full of human fears and longings. “Fear makes the gods.” And also the human craving to be loved and protected.
But wishful thinking will never disappear. We want the universe to love us. Or, if not the whole universe, then some element of it, kind and supportive. Guardian angels, beings of light. With luck, kindness and protectiveness is what we get from other human beings. What the universe gives us instead is beauty.
Yet even those of us who don’t believe in angels smile back at at the statue of a smiling angel. After reading Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, a book I cannot praise enough, I came to see how any theist religion is a matter of universal cognitive illusions that stem from teleological (purpose-oriented) bias (again, Michael Shirmer’s “patternicity” and “agenticity”).
And still, when I think that the great cathedrals were built in honor of a cognitive illusion, I’m stunned. And I’m willing to honor the deep delight that can be provided by “human, all too human” religious art.
(Shameless digression: I just remembered how teenage St. Thérèse of Lisieux (“The Little Flower”) allegedly looked at a dazzling meadow of wildflowers (before she entered Carmel, of course; no more meadows after the doors of the convent closed), and said, “So much beauty wasted on mere earth.” This, to me, is one of the horrors of old-time religion: the rejection of this world in expectation of the future one, the only one that mattered. “Mere earth”! How far we have traveled, in the space of one century, from that dismissal to Mary Oliver’s famous question: “What is it that you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”)
My own encounter with a “smiling angel, sympathetic stone” took place in the vestibule of an ugly church in San Francisco. I forget the name of the church, but I distinctly remember that it was ugly, a stain on the beautiful city. The one beautiful object in the church was the holy-water angel near the entrance.
THE ANGEL IN SAN FRANCISCO
for Sutton Breiding
In San Francisco an angel
bears a fluted holy water conch —
a marble smile, celestial.
The Golden Gate opens into fog
on the bones of builders and suicides.
Cloud-eaten hills, views of Alcatraz;
drunks grinning to themselves
in Victorian doorways . . .
Angel, you smile as if you knew
beauty is the sole excuse.
The city like a dream rises out of fog,
falls again into fog here at the slippery
ledge of the continent.
Seagulls blur with white sails.
In the Palace of Fine Arts,
a bronze Perseus lifts
the head of the Medusa,
though he himself is headless.
But you, mild angel, bless
all who enter the dim vestibule.
At the tomb of the dead god,
you change stone into hope.
~ Oriana (c) 2012
**
Stone into hope? Me, a committed atheist, saying that?
Yes, because I need a word that’s more emotionally powerful than “uplift.” Religion can produce that uplift with its promise of heaven, but once we know it’s a lie, then religion becomes psychologically dubious at best, a form of denial. But there is an automatic response to a smile. It would be a better world if more people smiled.
And we do want a “better place” — right here, while we are alive. Nietzsche said, “Truth is ugly. We have art so we don’t perish of the truth.” Great art takes us to another plane: away from the ugly pedestrian cares, away from whatever chronic diseases are gnawing at us, the inflammation slowly eating us alive. Real art is about affirmation and uplift — not in the sense of the Pollyanna sentiments we find in greeting cards, but even simply in producing wonderment at the artist’s ability to create such visionary magic.
Paul Klee, Ceremony and Sunset, 1920
*
ANIMULA
What do you look like, my soul,
the one left behind on a drizzle-wet
park bench in Warsaw in eternal October?
Do you have big eyes and small breasts?
Horizons that weep after you, arms that stretch
across an ocean and two continents?
A childless woman is always a virgin,
weaving a shroud, pregnant with herself.
You made my life a foreign language,
homeless without endearments.
When did you teach me to dress in the wind?
To carry speech like loose change?
Death will come to me in Spanish,
La Muerte with its music,
its slow kiss of vowels —
long returns of the Baltic,
where I swam in your cold love
like the tears of the bronze mermaid
who remembers no one’s name.
I cannot bear to think of my face
becoming ashes, but you, my
fugitive soul, say you are
most beautiful before
vanishing. Don’t kill yourself,
you whisper, and one blue eve
you’ll see me flame
then go out like the sun
and the other stars. But having been.
~ Oriana © 2015
THE SOUL IS A PROCESS LIKE FLAME
I realize that this is really yet another immigrant poem, with soul/flame just smoke and mirrors veiling the homelessness. But let’s ignore all the aquamarines and indigos of ocean that are a pure indulgence in this poem, and pay attention to dressing in the wind. The wind is more fitting here, being likewise a process, a movement, but not a thing. Nor is there such a “thing” as the soul. It is not a little being that inhabits us only to leave for a “better place,” all memories intact — and, if we are to believe psychics, it’s wearing our clothes! (some spirit form of a shirt and pants, we presume — but it’s not nice to inquire into those mysteries). (Is there a spirit swimsuit, or do we at last get to skinny dip?)
I was very impressed with Sean Carroll’s discussion of consciousness (“soul”) and his candle flame analogy. The flame is not a thing; it's a process. When the supply of wax ends, the flame ceases. It doesn't go anywhere, it just ceases happening. And consciousness — or call it soul — is likewise a process that ends when the neurons are no longer firing. The soul is not a thing and it doesn't “go” anywhere; it ceases happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=607&v=SQ4OFAFfFrY
I'm so glad to have the analogy. When I said, "What you call soul is brain function," to most people it was too abstract. They couldn’t visualize it. The neurons generating electricity — it takes a bit of background. But everyone has seen flame.
The same with being in love; when love ends, it doesn't “go” anywhere; certain brain areas cease to be activated, certain “love chemicals” are no longer produced. If people understood the flame analogy — that the “soul” is a process, and not a thing” — I think it would be the end of religion. Without afterlife, who needs religion?
Imagine, no more violence because someone drew a cartoon of the Prophet! Churches being transformed into art galleries and concert halls . . . The earth finally being cherished because we don't go anywhere later . . .
CONSCIOUSNESS AS AN EMERGENT QUALITY
This is a trendy new label for a behavior or pattern that “emerges” when a system becomes complex enough. Thus a flock of birds organizes itself into a certain shape and exhibits various behaviors that make migration possible. A single bird cannot give us any answers about migration. It takes a sufficient number of birds getting together and forming a complex new whole, a flock. Likewise, examining a single heart cell cannot explain the action of the heart. But heart cells working together produce the action of pumping blood. Likewise, a single neuron will generate an electric impulse, but that’s a long way from consciousness. When we get a lot of neural networks firing and interacting, then consciousness becomes one of the emergent qualities.
JESUS DIDN’T BELIEVE IN THE SOUL APART FROM THE BODY
Here some might try to save the idea of the afterlife by citing religions like ancient Judaism: there was no soul apart from the body. Jesus did not appear to believe in the soul in the Western sense of the word (which came to us from Greece, but originated probably in Egypt). Rather, the body could be resurrected, the breath of life animating it again. That was the promise of the Second Coming: physical, bodily resurrection.
Otherwise, why bother resurrecting the body and all its troubles? Even assuming a perfect body, and one presumably without a sex drive (I don’t think Christians want any sex drive; Muslim men do), there’d still be the need to eat and brush one’s teeth afterwards. And if you eat and drink, there is “body waste” afterwards. Sewage in heaven? I could go on . . .
RE-CREATING THE BODY ON THE BASIS OF DNA
We could preserve a person’s DNA. Even today the technology exists — not yet perfected — that makes it imaginable that we could use that DNA to “recreate” that person. But would we really be recreating Tom or Dick, or Alice or Jane, as they were during their natural lifetime? No.
Genes are only one component that goes into the making of a human being. It’s the complex interaction with the environment that determines how those genes are expressed. The new “Tom” would grow up in a different environment. We might get someone reasonably similar to the old Tom in terms of physical traits like height, hair color and eye color, but otherwise? The new Tom would not have old Tom’s memories, nor his education, income, spouse, and a myriad other things that life is composed of. He’d be living in the world of the future, with things like the Vietnam war, which perhaps was quite formative in old Tom’s life, no longer of interest to anyone except historians.
True, a video of the old Tom could be made where he conveys his memories, but listening to someone tell a story of his life is not in the least like having lived that life (or reading someone’s autobiography — besides, we know how completely inaccurate those are). The new Tom might not even be interested. And why should he be? He’d want to live his own life, not that of someone who lived before. Even with the same DNA, he would not be the same person.
Given how expensive the process would be, there is much to be said for old-fashioned natural reproduction: each child his or her own person, unburdened by some former identity.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ENERGY GOING OFF SOMEWHERE?
To counter the argument that the flame doesn’t go anywhere, someone might argue that after all the energy of the flame goes off into space. Might it not be inconceivable that the energy of Tom’s thoughts, having gone off into cosmic space, might somehow reassemble to give us “Tom as he was during the lunar eclipse of September 28, 2015”? Maybe a moment-by-moment reading is happening somewhere off in the vastness, or in another dimension of space, so that our life is also happening elsewhere?
But what use would be that, really, if we’d likewise cease to happen elsewhere as well? And besides, the whole context, the entire environment would have to recreated — at least in the form of energy. And when we start pondering the meaning of “environment” here, the energy patterns of the entire universe would have to be recreated precisely as they were on September 28, 2015 (I chose the date of the blood-moon lunar eclipse because the world was supposed to end — yet again).
It’s a sweet idea, I know, that a person could be translated into “energy” and that energy might then cohere somewhere in outer space, strolling about the galaxies — but think what it would take for that energy to cohere. It’s dubious that even something relatively simple like a candle flame could be transmitted without loss, stored, and then reassembled nanosecond by nanosecond. But let’s assume a fantastically “smart” multiverse that could achieve an energy-form reassembly. The physical brain would also have to be recreated, and the body with the muscles to react to the brain’s commands. Even if the enormously complex coherence of a re-created human being could be attained, without a brain to react to new events, only sheer repetition would be possible, an ongoing recreation of what has already happened.
It’s time for humanity to grow up and face reality: the only heaven and hell are right here on earth, in this life. If we are lucky, then before ceasing we’ll feel happy to have lived at all, in this one and only imperfect paradise.
Some years ago when I was writing mainly health news and biomedical conference reports, I did write a collection called “Letters to Lucrezia.” It was loosely inspired by Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul.
THE SOUL IS A VERB
As new and rosy as the fingertips of Dawn,
the soul is an infinite verb.
It souls in the brain, creating
the world and the self. “Shall we
dance?” I ask Heraclitus. But he
just stands on the shore of time,
not even dipping his toes
in the river to test if it’s the same.
Nor can you step into the same soul
twice, for the soul is a living flame —
now kindling, now going out.
One portion of it, whirlwind;
another, deepest calm.
“Note Hera in Heraclitus,”
says Lucrezia. “There’s a goddess
dancing in those flames.”
Hera and not Aphrodite.
Because marriage is not passion
but patience. “I forgive you,”
I say to Heraclitus the timeless,
the obscure. Arm around
the Goddess of Partial Truth,
my soul goes off to dance
with other splendid verbs.
~ Oriana © 2015
**
To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevski
So true. One of the wisest things he said, it's little known. What this quotation hints at is sheer torment. There is such a difference between being in love with the wrong person and loving the right person.
Also, let’s remember that the word “passion” also means suffering. Intense suffering.
Attachment-love rather than being-in-love is characterized not by high dopamine but by high oxytocin, the “love hormone.” Easiest way to increase oxytocin? Hold hands. If that's not possible, think of someone you love. No such person? Interact with your pet. Gaze at your beautiful houseplant. (Rejected by your houseplants? Try orchids.)
Dostoyevski Day, St. Petersburg, July 5, 2014
Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us. ~ Pablo Neruda
Vermeer: Mistress and Her Maid with a Letter, 1667
“THE SATAN IN US”
People who love to point to all that’s wrong with humanity often say, “There’s Satan in all of us.” Pondering that “Satan in us,” I can’t help but think of the habit of self-loathing instilled by the church’s talk of sin and how we, weak and fallen humans, are in the power of Satan.
All my life until recently I acted according to the childhood command to keep putting myself down and see myself as a sinner: evil, worthless, full of moral failings, etc. How slowly liberation comes . . . in part thanks to friends and strangers, who surprised me statements like, “I was inspired by your generosity”; “You really care”; “You really listen”; “People like you because you have a warm personality”; etc — statements to the effect that I was a good person. A good, generous, hard-working, dedicated person.
It was immensely difficult for me to accept the idea that I was a good person rather than a sinner. The church taught me to concentrate only on my failings and imperfections. I don't mean to say that now I see myself as a saint. But I finally — a tremendous victory! — I don’t see myself as evil.
I also see a lot of misguided behavior as coming from the frustrated desire to be loved, especially in those who had emotionally abusive, authoritarian parents; the church was just an extension of the abusive parents. Especially in families stressed by poverty, some people never truly experienced being fully accepted, valued, and loved (nor did they parents -- "we are the victims of victims”). And those who were abused tend to become abusers or perpetual victims of abusers, until someone breaks the generational chain. It’s our wounds that are the “Satan within us.”
Once we become aware of it, we don’t have to live out of our wounds, but out of our goodness.
Gustave Doré, Satan and the Lake of Ice, Dante’s Inferno
WHY ARE THERE MORE MASS SHOOTINGS IN THE US THAN IN THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED?
Australian journalist: “Obama is wrong, we are not like the US, we value life.” Australia “decided to grow up.” The US “never shed its Wild West mythology.”
“Obsessed with revenge, those aspiring to mass murder draw from the archetypal US hero who relies on gun violence to right wrongs and overturn oppressive institutions. Those who transition from fantasy to action are those who rationalize no other option than murder-suicide by ‘going out in a blaze of glory’. No doubt this rationalization represents a distinct kind of tunnel vision, distorting the traditional US hero into an anti-hero who regards society as the enemy. But in creating enemies in one’s mind, perception can be reality and moral justifications are subjective. As the saying goes: ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.’
In psychiatry, a ‘culture-bound syndrome’ is an idiosyncratic, locale-specific pattern of behavior that represents a culturally sanctioned expression of distress if not a mental illness per se. In Malaysia, for example, the culture-bound syndrome amok involves episodes of mass violence committed by an individual following a period of brooding. Unfortunately, in addition to borrowing the word amok in our own lay speech, it would appear that the US, along with other Western societies, has developed our own brand of running amok in the form of mass shootings. Once the cultural mythology of such mass murder has been firmly planted into public consciousness, a select few distressed individuals will look to this model to guide their own behavior, creating the problem of copycat killings.
Perhaps we need to look at these elements within the context of the culture itself. The US was born out of violent revolt, and the idea of the underdog responding with force to defeat an aggressor has been an archetype for the US hero ever since. As a nation, Americans see themselves as promoters of armed rebellion in the name of freedom and democracy around the globe.
In defiance of stereotypes, most mass shooters are not psychotic, delusional, ‘crazy’, or ‘insane’. A 2002 US Secret Service report found that the majority of school shooters have had a history of ‘feeling extremely depressed or desperate’ (not the same as having a clinical diagnosis of major depression) and nearly 80 per cent had considered or attempted suicide in the past. Almost all had experienced a major loss such as a perceived failure, loss of a loved one or romantic relationship, or a major illness prior to the shooting, and about 70 per cent perceived themselves as wronged, bullied or persecuted by others.
Revenge was a motive in the majority of incidents. Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida whose work has contributed to the debunking of the link between violent video games and violence, recently summarized the most salient features of a typical mass shooter, noting that risk factors for mass murder are similar for both adults and children. These include antisocial traits, depressed mood, recent loss, and a perception that others are to blame for their problems.
And herein lies the rub – while this kind of profile implies that mental illness could be an important risk factor, what we’re really talking about are negative emotions, poor coping mechanisms and life stressors that are experienced by the vast majority of us at one time or another. These risk factors are not necessarily the domain of mental illness, but rather the ‘psychiatry of everyday life’.
Therefore, it appears that the most important risk factors aren’t those that set mass murderers apart from the rest of us; instead, they are simply appropriated from culturally sanctioned patterns of aggression.
If mass shootings are difficult to predict, potentially self-perpetuating, and result not from easily eliminated sources but rather from untimely interactions between normal instincts, culturally sanctioned patterns of behavior and entrenched features of modern society, is there a rational approach to prevention? Inasmuch as marginalization seems to lie at the heart of the mass murderer’s grievances, further attempts to screen, identify, remove and effectively punish those with the potential to commit such violence are doomed to fail. [Instead,] we should reach out to those who have fallen away from mainstream society, bringing them back to the herd before they come to see only a single, deadly alternative.
Let’s also consider re-assessing some of our cultural values and teach our children about different kinds of heroes, how to resolve conflicts, and cope with loss. And, as a recent report from the Making Caring Common Project suggests, let’s prioritize raising children who are kind. The real solution is not about blame, but opportunity. According to the 2002 Secret Service report, mass shootings are not sudden, impulsive acts. They occur with planning that is known to at least one other person in more than 80 per cent of cases. This means that there’s time to reach out – not to a murderer, loser or weirdo; but to someone’s son, student, classmate and neighbor”.
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/what-explains-mass-shootings-in-the-us/
Richard Pousette-Dart, The Blood Wedding, 1958
I'm struck by the similarity of mass shooters to ordinary killers. The police report that killers typically feel they are victims; they are only seeking “justice.” And the culture tells them that justice is to be sought with a gun.
SPEAKING OF MASSACRES: Numbers 31:13-18
“13 Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
**
So only female virgins get to survive as sex slaves. Now, maybe similar things took place and it was just the military custom of the times, but if we classified the Torah as mythology (as even some Orthodox rabbis do) then at least we wouldn't try to sanctify this sort of thing as piety. We wouldn't have to try to justify Moses in his anger that women and young boys were not killed.
I am not the only one who left religion after realizing it’s mythology. I found a great video by an ex-Muslim, Muhammad Syed, where he explains that he started studying Islam in the hope of becoming a better Muslim. After a year of study, he concluded it was just 7th century mythology.
He also points out that both the bible and the Koran are violent texts, reflecting the culture of the time. Many Christians don’t realize just how filled with violence and cruelty the bible is.
Islam is now where Christianity was several centuries ago. The great difference, Syed points out, is the Internet. Information can spread as never before. Networking can take place more rapidly, across countries. That’s why the “apostates” from Islam (you are forbidden ever to leave Islam), some of them living in hiding, can obtain not only emotional support but actual, physical help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=xDIR3GhXszo
“THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED” ( but was continued by the Catholic church ~ P. K. Dick)
“To my thinking Roman Catholicism is not even a religion, but simply the continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinated to that idea, faith to begin with. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne, and grasped the sword; everything has gone on in the same way since, only they have added to the sword lying, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy. They have trifled with the most holy, truthful, sincere, fervent feelings of the people; they have bartered it all, all for money, for base earthly power. And isn't that the teaching of Antichrist?
How could Atheism fail to come from them? Atheism has sprung from Roman Catholicism itself. It originated with them themselves. Can they have believed themselves? It has been strengthened by revulsion from them; it is begotten by their lying and their spiritual impotence! Atheism! Among us it is only the exceptional classes who don’t believe, those who, as Yevgeny Pavlovitch splendidly expressed it the other day, have lost their roots. But over there, in Europe, a terrible mass of the people themselves are beginning to lose their faith — at first from darkness and lying, and now from fanaticism and hatred of the church and Christianity.”
~ Dostoyevski, The Idiot, 1868
This may seem too extreme (remember, this is D’s character speaking, not the writer himself, whose mind was more subtle and who could see many sides of the questions; still, there is no question that D hated Catholicism) — but it brings to mind the view that former Catholics are often particularly passionate atheists. It’s so easy to hate the Catholic church because of the emotional child abuse it practices (maybe less so these days, when talk of hell isn’t what it used to be). Only beauty of the old churches partly redeems Catholicism, if we omit the darker chapters in its history. And now that beauty is diminished, fifteen centuries of splendid Latin liturgy discarded, many paintings and statues removed in an effort to please the Protestants. They weren’t pleased. Possibly they were amused at the thought that any Pope could believe they’d rejoin the Catholic empire.
an abandoned church in Chicago (St. Boniface)
I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam . . . ~ Gore Vidal in a letter to Warren Allen Smith, 1954, Who’s Who in Hell
**
LIVING NEAR TREES HAS HEALTH BENEFITS
“Controlling for income, age and education, we found a significant independent effect of trees on the street on health,” said Marc Berman, a co-author of the study and also a psychologist at the University of Chicago. “It seemed like the effect was strongest for the public [trees]. Not to say the other trees don’t have an impact, but we found stronger effects for the trees on the street.”
Indeed, given the large size of the study, the researchers were able to compare the beneficial effect of trees in a neighborhood to other well-known demographic factors that are related to improved health, such as age and wealth. Thus, they found that “having 10 more trees in a city block, on average, improves health perception in ways comparable to an increase in annual personal income of $10,000 and moving to a neighborhood with $10,000 higher median income or being 7 years younger.” (Berman notes that self-perception of health is admittedly subjective, but adds that it “correlates pretty strongly with the objective health measures” the study considered.)
Indeed, the finding wasn’t limited to self-perceived health. For cardio-metabolic conditions — a category that includes not only heart disease but stroke, diabetes, obesity and more — the study similarly found that an increase of 11 trees per city block was “comparable to an increase in annual personal income of $20,000 and moving to a neighborhood with $20,000 higher median income or being 1.4 years younger.”
[Improvement in air quality] is not the only possible explanation. Others, says Berman, include stress reduction that comes from being around greenery — a mental effect that translates into physical benefits — or the possibility that being around trees somehow increases one’s propensity to exercise.
The researchers are not shy about using these results to make policy prescriptions — they think it would be well worth the cost to plant more urban trees. “Ten more trees in every block is about [a] 4% increase in street tree density in a dissemination area in Toronto, which seems to be logistically feasible,” the study notes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/07/09/scientists-have-discovered-that-living-near-trees-is-good-for-your-health/
I have to keep reminding myself that the opening words here are “controlling for income.” In California, it’s the richest neighborhoods that have the most trees. Trees — including palm trees — are a synonym of wealth, and wealth and health are closely linked.
Trees are beautiful, and beauty is not cheap. The poorest neighborhoods are the ugliest. Beauty itself is health-giving.
So let us end on beauty. I look at this tiny prose poem and wonder: do I dare call it beautiful? Not quite, but it does invoke the woods, the trees.
My childhood theory about why prayers weren’t answered was that Yahweh didn’t speak Polish. So what did it matter if we politely called him Mr. God in a language he didn’t understand. The gods who knew Polish were hiding in the woods like the partisans. I wondered how they survived the winter. Their drinking songs could sometimes be heard.
THE ROOSTER IN CHULA VISTA
It’s a shy rooster —
an immigrant, perhaps,
embarrassed about his accent —
his crowing muted, as if he came
from a fog-laden century.
No roosters to reply.
If not for the neighbors,
I’d crow back, out of charity.
Maybe this displaced rooster
crows a warning. Location,
he crows, location.
Here even an archangel
would be muted by the stench
of burnt barbecue. Save yourself —
he struggles to sustain
the last unraveling note —
Go to New York and network
with the gilt-throated Pavarottis.
Here there is no one to listen
to the aria I send out at dawn,
creating the world, no one.
I feel sorry for the rooster,
but I’m waiting for the owl
bringing me message
from the Goddess of Wisdom.
Will it arrive in soundless flight,
an overlap of cunning feathers?
Or is the rooster, a priest of Light,
the wise one, not posing over and over
the same question to the dark?
He practices his sacred art
so we don’t die of the answer.
~ Oriana © 2015
When I came to the U.S., I was so young and naive that it took me a while to realize I would be an immigrant for the rest of my life. True, immigrant “Americanize” to a various extent. The more you “adjust,” the more you realize that the price is giving up your own soul. It’s not just the culture of your native country that you give up (some immigrants try to cling to it, but the culture in exile is artificial, already hybridized, a poor substitute) — it’s also the person you used to be. The pressure and power of popular culture are tremendous. And the people you meet are mainly the product of popular culture, and not, say, of reading Shakespeare.
There is also the pressure to be more extraverted, semi-manic (what used to be called “perky” — now it’s just perpetually busy), and shallow. It takes a while to create a refuge where you can be quiet and not feel bombarded by incessant advertising and other interruptions. Meanwhile it can feel like being destroyed. There is only one word I want to say to those who are considering immigration, but whose lives in the native country are not really all that bad: “Don’t.”
Nothing is all good or all bad. The upside is the mental enlargement that comes from the exposure to a different culture. And yes, I did get to read Shakespeare in the original, and it was not a disappointment.
ESTHER PEREL: DON'T EVEN THINK OF CONFESSING YOUR AFFAIR
In the past we derived our sense of security and of self not just from marriage, but from our bonds with the wider community, she says. Consequently, marital intimacy has become burdened with expectations, some of them highly contradictory. In short, love and security need closeness; passion and desire need space.
“This wholesale sharing and constant transparency deprives us of a certain mystery, of an ability to remain curious about one another,” says Perel. “It is a real experiment to try to bring together two fundamental human needs – our need for security, and our need for adventure – in one relationship, to ask the same person to make us feel safe and stable, and make us feel playful, mischievous and adventurous.”
So, are the two fundamentally incompatible? “Not incompatible, no. It is a tension, a finely calibrated balance. It is a paradox to be managed, not a problem to be solved.”
Furthermore, we have come to see sex as the barometer of the health of a relationship – for the first time in history it has become not a function for procreation, but a defining factor in marital happiness. “And happiness has, in turn, become the defining feature for staying in a marriage or not. Before, happiness was in the afterlife,” she says.
The only real backlash over the book [Mating in Captivity] – which has been published in 25 languages – concerns her assertion that infidelity doesn’t need to be confessed. “There is a moralistic aspect to infidelity in America, that is not universal,” says Perel. “There is more emphasis on the lying, on the definition of honesty as confession.”
How she approaches it with patients sounds unorthodox. “Several times already this week I’ve asked [male] clients, ‘Why did you tell her?’ They say, ‘I wanted to be honest,’” she cries, slapping her palm on the table in frustration. “I say to them, ‘For what? Who benefited from this? You? Your conscience? Your marriage, which is completely in shambles? Couldn’t you just finish this [infidelity] off and move on?’”
Our increasing life expectancy, Perel believes, also complicates matters, and raises questions about whether lifelong monogamy is a culturally constructed ideal. “It is something we have never had to consider before: 60, 70, 80 years with someone,” she says. “Many of us are going to have two or three marriages in our lives. Either we will reinvent ourselves with the same person, or we will reinvent ourselves with another.”
And while she emphasizes that she does not spout tips on putting the sizzle back into their sex lives, she does have some simple suggestions about how space and closeness can begin to co-exist within a relationship. Go to the cinema solo, to see the films you want to see, not only those that both of you agree on, she advises. If your partner loves to stay longer at parties than you, take two cars, or let him arrange a lift home for later. If he hates to travel, go away for a long weekend with some friends instead.
“It is about not being threatened by the difference of the other, not being threatened that if you don’t do everything together, then it means that you’re not close, that you are not intimate. We need multiple connections, multiple attachments. If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/10857870/The-closer-the-couple-the-better-the-sex-Not-so.html
Perel is careful not to sound in favor of infidelity. But she asks her readers to understand the reasons for it, the complexity of it, the benefits as well as the price. She encourages tolerance.
Here is some more from Esther Perel:
In America, infidelity is described in terms of perpetrators and victims, damages and cost. We are far more tolerant of divorce with all the dissolutions of the family structure than of transgression . . . Adultery becomes a moral failing as we move to a description of character flaws: liar, cheater, philanderer, womanizer, slut. In this view, understanding an act of infidelity as a simple transgression or meaningless fling, or a quest for aliveness is an impossibility.
An affair sometimes captures an existential conflict within us: We seek safety and predictability, qualities that propel us toward committed relationships, but we also thrive on novelty and diversity. Modern romance promises, among other things, that it’s possible to meet these two opposing sets of needs in one place. If the relationship is successful, in theory, there is no need to look for anything elsewhere. Therefore, if one strays, there must be something missing. I’m not convinced.
The lamentations I hear most include feelings of loneliness and emotional deprivation. There comes a point when one no longer can tolerate feeling devalued and taken for granted. Lack of attention and the sense of having become a function rather than a person can instigate a wish for escape. Sexual boredom and frustration, or plain sexlessness, can lead to what Steven Mitchell dubs “acts of exuberant defiance.”
Sometimes, we seek the gaze of another not because we reject our partner, but because we are tired of ourselves. It isn’t our partner we aim to leave, rather the person we’ve become. Even more than the quest for a new lover we want a new self.
The men and women I work with invest more in love and happiness than ever before, yet in a cruel twist of fate it is this very model of love and sex that’s behind the exponential rise of infidelity and divorce. We ask one person to give us what an entire community once provided —and we live twice as long. It’s a tall order for a party of two.
http://www.estherperel.com/2014/03/changing-the-view-on-infidelity/#sthash.mUACdrFA.dpuf
It’s interesting that Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, said something similar: We often seek not so much a new partner, as a new life. We become a different person with the lover, someone we rather like. The alternative can be emotional deadness.
Moore also observed, “Relationship at a distance can do things for the heart that a closer, day-to-day relationship cannot.”
Neither Perel nor Moore advocate “open marriage.” At best they hint at a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — taking great care not to hurt either partner.
**
I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt. ~ Maya Angelou
*
Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find out.
~ Roger Ebert (1942-2013)
*
ARE YOU NARCISSISTIC ENOUGH? IS THERE GOOD AND BAD NARCISSISM?
“They’ll never make it,” a friend said, pointing to two women poets at Beyond Baroque. “Not brains enough.” “Now, you have brains enough,” she continued. “What you don’t have is experience. You need to travel and have affairs.”
The two women indeed never “made it.” Neither did I, in the sense of wider recognition — though when a stranger says to me, “I love your work,” I feel the reward is sufficient. Still, some people feel puzzled about my obscurity. I no longer do. There is also another question: “Are you abnormal enough?” Friends agree I meet that criterion as well. I fail when it comes to connections and living “in the right place at the right time.” But most of all, there is yet another question: “Are you narcissistic enough?”
Perhaps narcissism isn’t monolithic either. Could there be good narcissism — or at least the kind that’s absolutely necessary if you are to get ahead as an artist? Or even simply “succeed in life,” however we define it?
**
“Freud, who considered narcissism primarily a female matter, used it as part of his question about what women want, and his answer: a penis. Women adorned their faces and figures—that is, became narcissistic—to compensate for the lack of the desired organ. This focus on their physical charms made them self-satisfied and, therefore, emotionally impoverished.
The primary characteristic of narcissism is grandiosity. Narcissists exaggerate their achievements and what they are certain will be their future triumphs. They believe that they are special and can be understood only by special people, of high status. They feel entitled to extraordinary privileges. (They have the right to cut in line, to dominate the conversation, etc.) They show no empathy for other people. They envy them, and believe that they are envied in return. They cannot tolerate criticism. In life, we make moral judgments about such behavior.
Elizabeth Lunbeck, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has just written a book, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard), in defense of this condition. Her argument is an attack on the “cultural critics,” as she calls them, who wrote about the American society of the nineteen-fifties through the seventies. To her, that means, above all, Christopher Lasch, whose best-selling “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978) was a scorching denunciation of what seemed to him the moral emptiness of life in the postwar United States.
Lunbeck finds Lasch’s complaints ridiculously exaggerated, but what annoys her most is that he tied his critique to the psychiatric definition of narcissism, with the whole range of disabilities that this entailed. A new kind of person was being born on our shores, Lasch proclaimed. Literally, he said, the “underlying structure of personality” was changing. Americans, formerly stoical and severe—Grant Wood types—had become addicted to instant gratification. They were mouths, sucking and whining.
Lasch, needless to say, was not an admirer of the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties, but neither did he like the better-behaved bourgeois—the counterculturalists’ parents—with their insatiable consumerism. Modern technology, he claimed, had made Americans, especially women, dependent on commercial products, and thus deprived them of self-reliance. He disapproved of washing machines and birth control.
Freud claimed that an analyst’s position with regard to [narcissistic] patients—indeed, to all patients—should be one of “abstinence.” The analyst should say little, just listen. Sandor Ferenczi’s view was the opposite: what patients, especially narcissistic patients, needed was empathy and affection. They had not got this from their parents, and that was their problem. Ferenczi wrote that with difficult patients he wanted to be like “an affectionate mother.”
But Lunbeck’s discussion of Ferenczi is only a lead-up to her portrait of Heinz Kohut, a Viennese doctor who, fleeing the Nazis, immigrated to the United States in 1940. It was partly because of Kohut that narcissistic personality disorder became a live issue in American psychiatry in the seventies. In that decade, Kohut was building a new theory of the disorder, based, in large part, on Ferenczi.
Like Ferenczi, Kohut claimed that narcissism was due to low self-esteem, the product, in turn, of a mother’s failure to support her child’s natural sense of omnipotence, his conviction that his finger painting was the best finger painting in all the world. (Lunbeck says that Kohut blamed this maternal negligence, in part, on the women’s movement.) The child’s grandiosity, Kohut believed, would diminish in time, but it would still be there—in the bank, as it were—to protect him later, in the face of disappointment and failure.
Kohut acknowledged that there was such a thing as “bad narcissism,” akin to the DSM definition: arrogant, demanding, and so forth. But from this bad narcissism he split off a new “good narcissism,” the feeling that brings color to your cheeks, boosts your self-esteem, makes you vivacious and creative. It also makes you loving, he claimed. Whatever else people said about narcissism, the essence of it, most of them agreed, was selfishness. Kohut ridiculed this idea. The problem with selfish people, he said, was not that they were narcissistic, but that they were “not narcissistic enough.”
Kohut had a huge influence on child-rearing, which is still in force.
The charismatic leaders, possessors of good narcissism, [are] “attractive, successful, lovable, and good in bed.” The victims, on the other hand, are characterized as “deficient in self-esteem, perpetually seeking care, protection, and love” from these alluring folk.
Simon Blackburn, author of “Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love,” counsels a golden mean. We should be reasonably kind to ourselves, he says, but we should not make our decisions in “pure and lofty indifference to the world.” We should care what others think. “Good manners are a small but constant adjustment to the reasonable expectations or needs of others, little tokens acknowledging their right to a certain space.”
He doesn’t regard sin as a big, Faustian choice. He thinks that if you fall it’s in the direction that you were leaning, and that whether you fall or not depends mostly on what your parents taught you. He suspects that there is no such thing as the “self”—bad news for narcissists. Like many philosophers and psychologists, he believes that what we call the self may be not a wonderful inner thing that is ours alone, and the framer of our destiny, but just the sum of our experience.
[Blackburn takes] a middle position on narcissism. Be nice to your narcissism, he says, but not too nice. Think of others.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/selfie
Oriana:
The most provocative statement here is no doubt: The problem with selfish people, Kohut said, was not that they were narcissistic, but that they were “not narcissistic enough.” I think this is pretty much the current view as long as we substitute “self-esteem” for “narcissism.”
It’s commonly noted that in women, not being “narcissistic enough” often translates into the martyr or victim syndrome. One way or another, a healthy self-love is needed for a healthy, non-self-destructive generosity to others. And when it comes to artists, some degree of grandiosity may simply be a necessity.
I also heard the view: “Teach your child to esteem others, and he’ll have good self-esteem.” There is much to be said for the view that if we teach a child how to value others, the child will also come to value himself.
By the way, I don’t think supportive love is needed only in childhood. We need it in every stage of life. And any supportive love is therapy for what we may have lacked before. It doesn’t even have to come from a human being. I’ve seen a woman transformed from a bitter sarcastic type to a perfect sweetheart after she acquired a husky. It was stunning to see her become a different person once love entered her life — never mind it was a dog. With another friend, not quite as dramatically, it was the stray two kittens she took in.
And now for bad narcissism:
DUALISM: THE STRONGEST PREDICTOR OF SUPERNATURAL BELIEFS
~ "In recent years, psychologists have come to understand religion and paranormal belief as resulting, in most people, from simple errors in reasoning. You believe in God or astrology or a purpose in life because you apply ideas about people—that they have thoughts and intentions—to the natural world. Some display this tendency more than others, but it’s there in everyone.
Dualism was the strongest predictor of the three types of supernatural belief. It’s the foundation for belief in God, a disembodied mind. It’s also necessary for belief in spirits, part of the paranormal package. And it may encourage belief in life’s purpose because people see disembodied intentionality acting everywhere, or because belief in the afterlife enhances life’s meaning. . . . Cartesian mind-body dualism, the idea that a mind can exist independently of a body, allows for souls, ghosts, spirits, and Gods, all made of disembodied mind-stuff.
Another psychological process related to mysticism is anthropomorphism, the tendency to apply human-like traits to non-human entities or concepts. (See chapter 6 of my book: “The World is Alive.”) God or the Universe is hearing your prayers. Your laptop meant to crash during your presentation. Your dog understands you. Anthropomorphism can be motivated by loneliness or the need to predict and control our environment. It’s a form of pattern-seeking in which the pattern is another coherent mind.
Anthropomorphism could lead to paranormal belief if you see the world as alive and receptive to your thoughts or spells, or predictable through astrology. It might lead to belief in life’s purpose if one sees the whole world as conspiring to help or harm you.
“Anthropomorphism of ‘life’ or ‘the universe’ shouldn’t be any different from anthropomorphizing the ocean, albeit a little bit more abstract,” Willard tells me. “Life has intentions for you.” Anthropomorphism does not increase belief in God, however. Somehow seeing the world as alive doesn’t translate into conceiving of one central personality pulling all the strings."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201309/all-paths-lead-magical-thinking?tr=HomeEssentials
Poznań, Poland: Before and after the mural. Photo: Beata Kowalczyk
***
Clouds are so wonderful, who needs god? One of the great pleasures of atheism is being able to look at the sky and loving the sky; to look at a tree and loving that tree; of loving beauty and nature in general, without the barrier of inserting an invisible man into everything and worrying about your salvation. The world becomes so rich and enlivened once you know that that disastrous figment of human imagination truly doesn't exist.
Then suddenly I remembered: it’s about fear. The early man didn’t understand clouds and thunder, so there had to be a malignant storm god up there casting the lightning, a cruel deity to be appeased with lots of animal slaughter.
IS IT NECESSARY TO BELIEVE IN GOD? ONE REFORM RABBI’S REPLY
After this year’s Yom Kippur services, a friend of mine approached his rabbi with this question: “Is it necessary to believe in God?” He expected the rabbi to dance around the question, but what came back was straightforward: “No. What is important is how we treat people.”
And if it's not necessary to believe in god to be a good person, and prayers aren't answered unless already part of the Master Plan, then god is entirely useless, even as a fictional entity. These days the only use may be to justify the horrors commonplace in the most religious countries, and sectarian warfare.
And those who delight in the thought of hearing from heaven the screams of non-believers in hell (I just read a comment that expressed precisely that joyful anticipation as the chief -- in fact, for that commentator, sole and sufficing pleasure of heaven) should be further disappointed to learn that according to the more recent teachings, the elect will not be aware of those in hell, not even their family members. I say “more recent,” since Tertullian, one of the earliest Christian theologians (1555-240 AD), wrote that watching those in hell would far surpass the pleasures of going to the circus.
ONLY 58% OF AMERICANS STILL BELIEVE IN HELL
It doesn’t surprise me that the belief in hell is waning, since there is less and less tolerance for cruelty, and besides, as soon as I arrived, I noticed that Americans don’t see themselves as sinners (a huge change after Polish Catholics) deserving any kind of punishment, much less eternal. The most recent (2013) Harris poll found the belief in Satan and hell down to 58%. I expect this to slide below 50% soon.
“It is increasingly difficult to convince educated people that they and their friends and children deserve infinite suffering for finite failings—or that a god who acts like an Iron Age tyrant (or domestic abuser) is the model of perfect love. A group called Child Evangelism Fellowship aroused intense opposition in Portland last summer in part because outsiders to biblical Christianity were appalled that insiders would try to convert small children by threatening them with torture.
The appeal of hell as a part of the faith package appears to be in decline, even among Evangelicals. According to a 2011 survey, while 92% of Americans claimed some sort of belief in God, only 75% believed in hell. A 2013 Harris poll put belief in the devil and hell at 58 percent. As one theology professor, Mike Wittmer, put it: “In a pluralistic, post-modern world, students are having a more difficult time with (the idea of) people going to hell forever because they didn't believe the right thing.”
The decline of hell-belief may be due to the same factors that may be causing the decline in bible belief more broadly — globalization and the internet. It gets harder to imagine oneself blissfully indifferent to the eternal torture of Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and atheists when those people have names and faces and are Facebook friends.
http://www.alternet.org/belief/what-happens-christianity-when-people-stop-believing-hell?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
Luca Signorelli
THE DEVIL EXPLAINS HEAVEN
The last man pats the devil’s furry paw.
There, there, he says.
And they embrace.
The devil feels the warmth of human arms;
he receives affection for the first time
in eternity. He smiles, and his face becomes
beautiful: angelic!
And confides what heaven really is:
a replica of Circus Maximus,
just larger, almost infinite.
The devils were bred like pitbulls,
for fights, bets, entertainment.
Angels abuse them
to keep them mean.
They love to throw a human
like a bone into the pit,
and watch the devils
go for it.
(~ Anonymous)
**
FUCOSE AND FUCOIDAN
Fucose (6-deoxy-L-galactose) is another important simple sugar, one of the eight essential sugars. It exists in our cells mostly in the form of a fucoidan.
Fucose and fucoidan are found throughout the body. “Fucose is found in the photoreceptor layer of the retina of the eye. Fucose is also found in the skin, brain cells, and kidneys. Fucose is also excreted in breast milk and may play a part in the transfer of immunity to the newborn. In addition, fucose has an active role in the immune system and in red blood cell function.
According to research, fucose is important in regulation of the immune system, which may affect the activity of inflammatory diseases in the body. Fucose has also been found to inhibit the ability of bacteria to adhere to cells, without which infection cannot occur. In addition, research has also shown fucose to inhibit the growth and spread of cancer cells.”
Fucoidan is a sulfated polysaccharide of fucose; it may also contain some glucoronic acid, xylose, or glucose It’s commonly found in brown marine algae and in shiitake. Fucoidan has aroused interest because of the exceptional health and life expectancy typical of people who consume a lot of seaweed — mainly the Japanese.
Immunosupportive Properties
Eating foods rich in fucoidan can help your immune system fight off infection and disease. One of the most powerful health benefits claimed for fucoidan is its functional support of the body’s immune system. Numerous studies have focused on this aspect of fucoidan’s medicinal properties. The polysaccharide gives the immune system a big boost by enhancing phagocytosis, the process through which white blood cells attack and destroy pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses. Fucoidan also increases the number of mature white blood cells that are circulating in your body, thus bolstering the first line of defense against infection and disease.
Fucoidan helps activate specialized immune cells called dendritic cells, whose function is to present information to other immune cells and prepare them to mount an attack against a pathogen. Fucoidan also activates T cells, as well as enhances the antiviral and anticancer response of the immune system.
Thus, fucoidan can stimulate acute immune response, but it also dampens immune over- activation that can lead to autoimmune diseases.
Anti-cancer properties
Fucoidan can also hinder the migration of of cancer cells by inhibiting molecules called SELECTINS. Cancer cells can use these molecules to spread to other parts of the body.
It’s also by inhibiting selections that fucoidan prevents inflammation (which relies on the migration of white blood cells) from becoming excessive.
Due to its anti-inflammatory properties, fucoidan helps reduce the pain of arthritis, including rheumatoid arthritis. It also shows promise in multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease.
In summary: “Fucoidan blocks action of selecting molecules that promote adhesions between cells and blood vessel walls. This prevents excessive infiltration of inflammatory cells into tissues, helping to prevent and mitigate arthritis and other autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Selectin-blocade is one of the anticancer properties of fucoidan. Blocking selectins helps prevent metastatic spread of many types of cancer.
Fucoidan promotes better response to vaccines, improves immune competence, and suppresses chronic inflammatory reactions.”
(multiple sources)
