skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Soviet sculpture studio, 1953
CUCUMBER SOUP
I know I’ll never meet anyone
who’s had my childhood,
surrounded by portraits of Lenin
and Karl Marx, with Engels tossed in
for the sake of the Trinity.
We all knew who God the Father was,
who the Son with slant Siberian eyes,
Engels the long-suffering Ghost.
I’ll never meet anyone
who’s heard about the Tzar’s
Winter Palace, the first salvo fired
from the battleship Aurora,
the Finland Station, Smolny Institute.
Those were family names;
it didn’t matter that they stood
for shattered dreams.
You love what you grew up with:
not the moronic regime
but the springtime of blossoming emblems,
the lilacs of ideals, the enormous width
of The International. When you sang it,
you sang with a million mouths.
Aren’t all poems about forbidden love?
The swooning lilacs instead of suicide?
Marx’s beard like a wild shrub
grew on every wall. In summer we ate
cucumber sandwiches, in winter
cucumber soup — it was the humble
potato soup with finely chopped pickle.
What can you expect from reality,
that fat woman who opens a can
of Campbell’s chicken noodle.
~ Oriana © 2015
RUSSIAN NOSTALGIA FOR THE SOVIET ERA
I'm fascinated by the amount of Soviet-era nostalgia that the Russians are experiencing. There is a bad side to this — nationalism, the yearning to regain lost power. Russia adores Putin, the latest incarnation of a Tzar-like autocrat. But then there is a purely emotional and universal aspect of this nostalgia: you love what you grew up with. You love the familiar. You see certain faces around you, and they become your family. Marx: a great-grandfather. Lenin: the smart, successful uncle. Engels: the eccentric “old bachelor” uncle, somewhat pitied.
The loss of the familiar is traumatic. It’s at the core of what I call the “immigrant trauma.” It doesn’t matter that by objective standards the new country has a higher standard of living. The new country is all wrong simply because it is different.
I never wrestled with Marxism as a set of doctrines. My struggle was with religion. I just replied to someone who used the worn-out “gaps in knowledge” argument a scientific worldview:
“The god of the gaps” is a last-ditch defense that's crumbling almost every year — every decade for sure. We'll never run out of mystery, but already the 19th century was ripe for tossing the archaic myths — fascinating as myths, but hardly as a way to describe reality. Still, I can see that some people have an emotional need for a parent in the sky, and that prevails. To them I say, “I can to some extent empathize with your need, and you are welcome to say, ‘I don't care about the truth. We can’t know the truth in any absolute sense anyway, so I'll just stay with what is emotionally fulfilling to me.’ I respect that emotional need. We agree on other things, so let’s build on that, and keep silent about that ancient 24/7 surveillance system, the old Eye-in-the-sky (a fiction that caused me so much suffering, it still hurts to remember).”
And I can see that one can grow attached to the holy icons and have favorite saints (I speak of Catholicism). Unlike the god of punishment, the saints were kind. Mary was kind, grace streaming from her porcelain palms. In a small town with little going on, the church and its festivals can be the center of a life, an enriching element of experience, imaginary or not, that goes beyond the pedestrian chores. And the church is likely to be the most beautiful building in town, and being part of the choir the only opportunity to make music.
In a city, one can go to the opera and experience something akin to the ecstatic worship of ancient Greeks. In a small town before TV and Twitter and video games, there was soccer and church.
Again, my struggle was never with Marxism; my great personal battle was with Catholicism. Both the school and the church stuffed my young head with nonsense. But my indoctrination into the Soviet doctrine (I think it’s incorrect to call it “Marxism” or even “Marxism-Leninism”) was not a fraction as intense as my Catholic indoctrination — and there were our parents, too, who vigilantly counteracted propaganda that might be brought home from school (history lessons were an outstanding example). Still, it is my Catholic indoctrination that makes me understand why some people fell apart emotionally or even committed suicide when they could not make any sense of life once the Soviet Union was dissolved, its founding principles revealed as mistaken, and nothing convincing offered in their place.
Here is the Nobel Prize-winning Svetlana Alexievich writing about about a doctoral student who committed suicide — the memories of a friend of his:
“From the account of his friend, Vladimir Staniukevich, graduate student in the Philosophy Department:
I think that he was a sincere Marxist and saw Marxism as a humanitarian idea, where “we” means much more than “I.” Like some kind of unified planetary civilization in the future . . .
All the pages [of his dissertation on Marxism and religion ] were crossed out. Diagonally, in red pencil, he’d written furiously: “Nonsense!! Gibberish!! Lies!!” It was his handwriting… I recognized it…
His dissertation didn’t pan out. Well, to hell with it! You have to admit you’re a prisoner of utopia… Why jump from the twelfth floor on account of that? These days how many people are rewriting their master’s essay, their doctoral dissertation, and how many are afraid to admit what the title was? It’s embarrassing, uncomfortable…
He and I once talked about socialism not resolving the problem of death, or at least of old age. It just skirts it…
I saw him make the acquaintance of a crazy guy in a used bookstore. This guy, too, was rummaging around in old books on Marxism, like we were. Then he told me:
“You know what he said? ‘I’m the one who’s normal—but you’re suffering.’ And you know, he was right.”
“The phenomenon of Hitler will trouble many minds for a long time to come. Excite them. How, after all, is the mechanism of mass psychosis launched? Mothers held their children up crying: ‘Here, Führer, take them!’
“We are consumers of Marxism. Who can say he knows Marxism? Knows Lenin, knows Marx? There’s early Marx… And Marx at the end of his life… The halftones, shades, the whole blossoming complexity of it all, is unknowable to us. No one can increase our knowledge. We are all interpreters…
“At the moment we’re stuck in the past like we used to be stuck in the future. I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!
“I proposed a new dissertation topic to our professor: ‘Socialism as an Intellectual Mistake.’ His response was: ‘Nonsense.’ As if I could decipher the Bible or the Apocalypse with equal success. Well, nonsense is a form of creativity, too… The old man was bewildered. You know him yourself—he’s not one of those old farts, but everything that happened was a personal tragedy for him. I have to rewrite my dissertation, but how can he rewrite his life? Right now each of us has to rehabilitate himself. There’s a mental illness—multiple, or dissociated, personality disorder. People who have it forget their names, social positions, their friends and even their children, their lives. It’s a dissolution of personality… when a person can’t combine the official take or government belief, his own point of view, and his doubts… how true is what he thinks, and how true is what he says. The personality splits into two or three parts…
There are plenty of history teachers and professors in psychiatric hospitals… The better they were at instilling something, the more they were corrupted… At the very least three generations…and a few others are infected… How mysteriously everything eludes definition… The temptation of utopia…”
Marx as Prometheus, engraving, 1843
**
This is of course a truly tragic story, but it reminds me of a conversation I had at Yaddo Artist Colony in the early nineties, when the fall of the Berlin Wall was a relatively fresh event. I casually remarked (I forget the context) that “anything is possible. Look, who ever thought that Communism would fall?” A young woman looked up at me with tremendous resentment in her face, and exclaimed, “Yes, and now there are thousands of New York intellectuals with nothing to believe in!”
~ “My heart bleeds for them,” I replied. But my sarcasm wasn’t completely sincere. I did feel some empathy for those New York intellectuals. I knew the experience of shattered dreams, of idealism crudely destroyed.
Asked why she returned to China, a woman who once had a successful career in finance in New York and London replied, “I missed the idealism.”
But that idealism is all lies, I can imagine someone reply. That would not be incorrect either. The theory is mostly erroneous and it doesn’t work in practice; there is a lot of corruption. This woman was smart enough to know that. Yet she still missed the idealism, or at least the aura of it. Of having a “we” that’s greater than the “I.” Of hearing about how “we” are building a more just society, even if it’s not true.
Idealism. Ah, those humans, those prisoners of utopia . . .
We love what we grow up with. As the graduate student said, “I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!”
This was only slightly true for me. But whatever you grow up with has a power. Some might say that it’s perverse that I grew to hate the Catholic church as a much worse totalitarian regime, while preserving a sentimental nostalgia for the International, the images of Marx, Lenin, and Engels on the walls of public buildings, carried in May First parades.
But for the pre-revolutionary generation, the nostalgia was for their own childhood and youth — for the Tzarist splendor, the ladies in magnificent furs descending from sleighs to attend a ball at the Winter Palace . . .
The gate of the winter palace. The gilded emblems of Tzarist Russia, removed in 1917, are now fully restored
*
And there is something else I can’t quite label, but it came to my mind because of certain dreams I had after my recent stem-cell treatment. Stem cells carry the promise of promise of regeneration. I woke up in the wee hours feeling radiantly happy, vaguely recalling dreams in which I was overflowing with a sense of youthful health and energy. It was a triumphant feeling.
I lay in the dark, smiling, so energetically happy that I had trouble falling back asleep. My first thought was: those dreams were like the Soviet propaganda, especially the glossy magazines like The Soviet Life, which always showed the young who radiated health and good cheer. Their red Pioneers neck scarves, their shiny eyes and perfect teeth!
I don’t remember any other time when I thought that my dreams resembled the Soviet propaganda. The image of youth is of course powerful in itself, carrying the connotations of health and optimism, of being yet untouched by death. Everything is possible.
(I realize I must be the only writer in the world to have said, “I woke up feeling like the Soviet propaganda.” Why not the American propaganda? To me, American propaganda is consumerist. It’s about finding the right toothpaste. It doesn’t have the well-scrubbed Mormon missionary look with victory in one’s eyes.)
Youth is an image of victory, of having a future. Those tend to be the most difficult years of one’s life, marked by a lot of struggle and heartbreak. Many young people are not at all happy — this is a prime time for suicide — but the attractive image prevails over the complicated reality.
(PS. True, there is an element of the heroic in the American Western, but those movies were not a significant part of my growing up. Nor was Superman — I never even heard of that figure before I came to the US. But speaking of the “Wild West” — both Lenin and Stalin were very impressed by the US as a pioneer country and saw it as a model for developing the great expanse of Asia under their control, the Soviet Union also being a pioneer country.)
I hasten to say that I did not feel sad when the Berlin Wall fell down. On the contrary, I felt happy. The system was rotten and deserved to collapse. Only much earlier than that, and only for brief periods of time, I felt some sadness when I thought that the dream of a just society not based on greed simply could not work.
But I had such thoughts rarely at best. First of all, what mattered most to me was not political theory but beauty. I drew my sustenance from the beauty of nature and whatever beauty I could find in culture: music, the visual arts, literature. Then there was the world of ideas in its infinite variety, not merely the ideas of economic order. And, secondly, I have gradually acquired a measure of realism: the knowledge that nothing is perfect, that social progress is slow and full of setbacks. My creative work has taught me patience.
At the same time, my sentimental affection for the portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Engels is not something I’d deny. But that’s like the remnant affection for the images of Madonna and Child. It’s about familiarity. It’s not about belief. (Familiarity CAN be a large component of belief, but it doesn't have to be.)
MARXISM GOES BACK TO THE ERA OF A LARGE WORKING CLASS
Marx correctly pointed out that capitalism created with the urban working class — which was supposed to destroy capitalism. He never imagined that capitalism would eventually destroy — or almost destroy — the working class. As it became obvious that capitalism was winning, Marxism became largely archaic, irrelevant. Only the young Marx is still appreciated, especially his observations on alienated labor versus the right to meaningful work.
Karl Marx in his youth
Marxism is easy to parody. Its similarity to religion has been noted endless times. Here is Zbigniew Herbert’s witty vision of that similarity:
REPORT FROM PARADISE
In paradise the work week is thirty hours
salaries are higher prices always dropping
physical labor is not tiring (because of lower gravity)
chopping wood is like typing
the social system is stable the government moderate
it's certainly better in paradise than in any country
At first it was supposed to be different
luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction
but one couldn’t separate body from soul
precisely enough and the soul would arrive
with a drop of blubber a thread of muscle
one had to compromise
mix the grain of the absolute with the grain of clay
still another falling away from the doctrine the ultimate one
only John foresaw it: the resurrection of the body
God is seen by few
exists only for those made of pure pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about floods and miracles
in time all will see God
when this is to take place nobody knows
In the meantime Saturday at noon
the sirens roar sweetly
and heavenly proletarians come out of the factories
carrying their wings awkwardly like violins
~ Zbigniew Herbert, tr. Oriana Ivy © 2015
“Saturday at noon”? Herbert wrote this when work on Saturday, at least for half a day, was standard, as was the six-day school week. Even though he postulates the thirty-hour work week, he can’t quite make the leap beyond what was his reality at the time this poem was written (in the nineteen sixties, I think).
And the roar of sirens signified the beginning and end of the work day. When I lived in Łódź, a city with large textile industry, that was my reality for three years, as much as the church bells. It was all fused: the bells of St. Andrew’s and the sirens of the Textile Works of the October Revolution.
Herbert was no indifferent to this fusion, so characteristic of the life in Poland before the fall of communism. But he’s more interested in metaphysics. In this poem he solves the central problem of heaven: the eternal boredom of not having work to do. “Luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction” would hardly satisfy. Not even the most refined intellectuals and estheticians could endure an abstract, do-nothing heaven. Maybe singers would be fulfilled for a century or two — but even they might start wanting new songs.
Herbert’s solution: factory work, the kind extolled by the Soviet propaganda. Factory work is so orderly, so concrete. You actually produce something considered useful — cars, for example. (Cars in heaven? Well, why not — the kind that work best in low gravity.)
Just as few people are capable of becoming violin virtuosos, so few can be either pure altruistic Marxists or otherworldly Christians. Herbert is concerned with the happiness — or at least reasonable contentment — of the many. After all, it’s the “masses” or the “sheep” whose needs are supposed to be fulfilled by ideologies or religions. What are people to do with their time? A non-tiring factory job is a practical solution. Hence the fusion of the heavenly paradise and the workers’ paradise.
Pointing out the similarities between Marxism and religion has become a cliché — the prophets, the sacred books, salvation (though here the proletariat is to be the Messiah), the need for a dictatorship, whether earthly or celestial. But to my knowledge no one has gone as far as Herbert in presenting the fusion of the two — in the afterlife at that. Human nature wins over idealism! ~ though perhaps we need both Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa to be complete human beings.
This poem has charm whether or not the reader has the historical and ideological background. Ultimately, it works by being charming.
A
mural by Diego Rivera
MEMORIES, MEMORIES . . .
FACTORIES IN ŁÓDŹ
Sirens roared a hoarse hunger.
The walls thudded a thick pulse,
brick crusted with centuries of soot,
the looms’ horizontal
music of massive shafts:
axis and thrust,
the surge and ebb of shuttles.
Behind the wire-paneled glass,
the trembling strings of cotton dust,
women in gray scarves like nuns
lifted and lowered their arms
under rows of spidery lamps.
The old owners’ names
over the wing-like gates
were supplanted with red-lettered signs:
“Lenin Thread Manufacture,”
“Textile Works
of the October Revolution.”
But for me the factories
had no names as I passed
through the black-walled streets,
narcotic with ugliness and rhythm,
the knocking of returning shuttles:
More! More! Again! Again!
Multiple metal hearts
hammered my lullaby at night.
They repeated like an iron god:
I am that I am that I am.
~ Oriana © 2015
**
Ah, the October Revolution that actually took place in November . . . One of the good reforms was that of the calendar: Russia finally caught up with the rest of Europe by adopting the Gregorian Calendar, which goes back to 1582. Spelling was also simplified, though the Cyrillic alphabet was retained (unfortunately, in my opinion).
The last line surprised me as it welled up. I was merely describing the factories, I thought, trying to render the experience of a child caught up in their huge rhythm. I wasn’t trying for any statement linking the industrial (or Russian) revolution with religion. But poems come from the unconscious, which makes these hidden connections. One “supreme dictator” (here presumably the industrial looms) reminded me of the alleged supreme dictator of the universe.
Pope Innocent X by Diego Velasquez, 1650. How come I'm vaguely reminded of Lenin?
“If your god is real, then my non-belief is part of its divine plan.”
Nevertheless, I love papal haute couture. Pope Francis has been trying to cut back on the splendor, I know. I think it’s a mistake, like making churches more like the Protestant ones, severe and ugly. The only excuse for Catholicism is the esthetics of excess.
BUT DOESN’T IT ALWAYS COME DOWN TO A MALE-DOMINATED SYSTEM RUN BY BULLIES?
From Robert Sapolsky’s lecture on hierarchy as a destructive force:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY
The central discovery made by Sapolsky when he worked as a primatologist concerned the social and biological effects of removing aggressive males. As is often the case with important discoveries, a lucky accident played a part. Sapolsky studied a troop of baboons where the alpha males fed at the garbage dump of a nearby hotel. When the aggressive male baboons died after eating TB-infected meat, the culture of the surviving baboons changed dramatically. All the alpha males were gone; the the troop now had twice as many females, and the surviving males were less aggressive and more “socially affiliative.”
The levels of stress hormones decreased and individual health improved. Males started carrying baby baboons, which was never observed before. Troop members sat closer to each other without fear. No male aggression was directed at females. More time was spent grooming. Males began to groom other males, which is “as unheard of as a flying baboon.” And a newly introduced adolescent male would gradually acquire the new culture, so the transformation of culture that happened in one generation proved lasting. And the troop not only survived; it thrived.
And that reminds me of other studies where bullies were removed from animal or human groups, and the improvement in health and sociability that followed. Fear is not good for us; love is. As Sapolsky says: “Affiliation has enormous power.” Connection. Cooperation.
It’s a truism that some women begin to thrive only after a divorce or the death of a domineering spouse. The explanation is simple: stress levels go down. The woman is now free to lead her own life without constant criticism or another form of harassment. Of course sometimes it’s the woman who is the dominator, and then the man begins to blossom as soon as he separates. The positive changes in health and behavior may begin as soon as the decision to separate is taken.
A stray thought: the culture can go the other way just as quickly. An American woman doctor who worked for a while in Saudi Arabia noted that her Western male colleagues quickly became comfortable with the denigration of women, and behaviors such as opening a door for a woman disappeared.
Robert Sapolsky and one of his research subjects
GOD AS THE DOMINANT APE
“Our primate ancestors passed onto us certain social protocols, and we have passed them onto God. In primate cliques subordinates will often shrink down before the dominant male, thus accentuating his largeness and superiority. The god of the Abrahamic religions, in company with gods of other traditions, is often portrayed as a large male who requires that subordinates lower themselves before Him.
Larger size often equates to dominance in many other species, and plays an important role in the rank structures of men. As cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker has pointed out, the “Big-men” who ruled over hunter-gatherer societies were often literally big men.
Lip smacking — the nonhuman primate equivalent of kissing — is a common appeasement display in monkeys and apes, and may be intended to emulate infant suckling noises. It is understandable how sounds associated with nurturing might appease aggression. Like other infantile behaviors, this gesture may also communicate, “Like an infant, I pose no threat.”
Hand kissing is a customary way of showing submission to a king, typically while bowing one’s head or kneeling down. Often the custom was — and is, in the remaining monarchies of the world — to kiss the king’s signet ring. This custom remains strong in the Catholic Church, a monarchic hierarchy in which the pious kneel before the pope and kiss his ring. Other Church customs would suggest that this gesture is rooted in ancient primate displays intended to connote infanthood — for instance, the pope is referred to as father, and his flock are considered his children.
Foot kissing, a behavior observed widely in primatology, is another way submissive monkeys and apes demonstrate acquiescence to dominant members of their societies. This behavior carries forward to human societies that are highly rank structured, such as monarchies. For instance, kissing the king’s foot has always been synonymous with supplicant behavior — e.g., showing him extreme deference, begging for his mercy, or even recognizing that he represents God.
Christ — who is sometimes referred to as Christ the King — is also greeted with foot-kissing, as are his proxies. At the Basilica in Rome stands a large bronze statue of St. Paul, built in the fifth century. Though the statue has stood stalwart now for fifteen centuries its feet have been worn thin by the lips of pilgrims. There was even a custom in the Catholic Church of kissing the feet of the pope.
It is worth reiterating that such displays are fundamentally submissive in nature, intended to secure the favor of a more powerful being.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/03/10/god-is-the-ultimate-alpha-male/
MY STEM CELL ADVENTURES, PART I
I was facing the nightmare of total knee replacement surgery. I already had one knee surgery, in medicine’s Dark Ages. My lateral meniscus was removed due to a tear. The surgery, including the recovery, was indeed a nightmare of pain and disability. But the worst was ahead: within several years it became known that removing the meniscus leads to severe arthritis in 100% of the cases. Far from being pretty useless, as assumed by the surgeons, and easily replaced by scar tissue, the meniscus turned out to be critical for shock absorption.
100% severe arthritis. I wasn’t going to be a miraculous exception. Soon enough that became quite obvious. I could still walk — but every year more slowly and for shorter distances.
The more I read about the total knee replacement, the more videos I watched, and the more I talked with former patients, the more disastrous it appeared, horrifically stressful on the body — and yet it seemed the only solution. Then through a series of happy coincidence I found a place that did stem cell therapy for joint injuries. And — another happy coincidence —- it turned out that the surgeon I consulted, the third one this year, regarded as one of the two top joint specialists in San Diego, actually performed the stem-cell procedure.
A big breakthrough that allowed the treatment to become more widespread and affordable was the discovery that the human body fat is a rich source of stem cells. There is roughly one adipose stem cell per 100 fat cells. (By comparison, bone marrow contains one per 250,000 to 400,000 cells. Nevertheless, some centers still rely on the more established procedure using bone-marrow stem cells, which requires more difficult harvesting from the hip or femur).
(Blood is another good source of stem cells. Since blood can be frozen for future use, more potential opens up.)
From the Stemgenex website: https://stemgenex.com
“Adipose (fat) tissue contains a concentrated amount of cells known as mesenchymal stem cells which are capable of replication or becoming different types of cells throughout the body such as neurons, bone, cartilage, muscle, tendon, etc
The advantage of using mesenchymal stem cells from your adipose fat is that they are one of the richest sources of stem cells in the body (2500 times more stem cells reside in fat vs. bone marrow) and they are very easy to harvest via a mini-liposuction procedure.
Adipose derived stem cells also have a much higher immunomodulatory capacity than those of bone marrow derived stem cells which can greatly benefit patients with auto-immune conditions.”
**
The results of stem cell therapy depend largely on the quantity of stem cells injected. The age of the patient is also a factor: younger patients have more effective stem cells — no surprise.
Here are two stories I heard at my stem-cell clinic in Sorrento Valley near San Diego (Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles is another stem-cell pioneer in Southern California. At this point there are stem-stem clinics everywhere in the US, especially in and around large cities — and yet the public remains largely unaware of this alternative).
1. An NFL quarterback came for his treatment (sports injuries provide a “rich target environment” for stem cell repair in lieu of surgery). The plastic surgeon who does the liposuction (so “mini” that only a local anesthetic is used) was in despair: there was no visible fat on this patient. He appeared to be all muscle. Yet eventually the surgeon managed to get enough fat from the buttocks, and the treatment was performed.
2. A 92-year-old woman came asking for stem-cell treatment for her arthritis. The staff first refused, saying that her stem cells would not be effective. But the feisty old woman refused to be discouraged. “What else am I supposed to do with my money?” she asked — and got the treatment.
(Alas, I blew my opportunity to ask about her results. In any case, that question can be easily deflected with “It’s still too early to know.” It takes about five months for the evidence of cartilage regeneration to show up on X-rays, though functional improvement can become evident within weeks.)
*
There is a difference in the way you are treated — even in the way you are touched — when you pay out of pocket. It’s not so much the $20 coupon for Starbucks — what hospital would ever think of it? — it’s simply how you are spoken to: the tone of voice, the politeness. A stem-cell clinic is no Walmart medicine. To establish a good reputation, they need to cater to the patient.
The patients were almost all older men. “They look like rich CEO’s,” my friend observed. “The kind not afraid to take a risk.” One could read that in their self-confident bearing. Just the way they sat in the waiting room was subtly different. Suddenly I was in the company of such men, for the first time in my life.
Speaking to me in the soothing way one speaks to child or a pet, the plastic surgeon described each step of the mini-liposuction: “And now you will feel a tiny sting, but it won’t last long.” The discomfort was less by far than during a typical dental visit.
“You’ve got great-looking fat,” I was told. “Want to see it?” There it was in a large syringe, pinkish, with small fluffy yellow cloudlets. “So pink?” I exclaimed, amazed.” “A bit of blood gets in,” the surgeon explained. “The yellow is the fat. We do it slowly and gently, because the idea is to keep the fat alive, not like during ordinary liposuction, where you’re going to throw the fat away.”
Now that I knew the fat was a source of stem cells, throwing out fat seemed almost a sacrilege.
The fat was then transferred to a device that looked like a modest little box, but apparently centrifuged and processed the stem cells. It was a holy of holies approached only by the staff with little masks on their faces.
An hour later I was back from Starbucks, and the stem cells were ready for “deployment” — a term that entered the language during the first Gulf War. Stem cells are “deployed” via an ultrasound-guided injection.
“Your stem cells look really good,” a technician remarked. I can’t deny the warm feeling that suffused me, though not much later I reflected that she probably says it to every patient. But then, who knows, perhaps one can tell by the color or density of the special solution (which also contains amniotic-fluid growth factors).
(I don’t remember seeing a microscope anywhere, but then I didn’t look for it. Perhaps they do check the cells, but then perhaps they don’t. Can one even check the vitality of stem cells as one can easily check the quality of sperm?)
Then I proceeded to the “deployment” room. First I got an IV infusion of the left-over stem cells: “We just let them into the general circulation. It might do some good,” the technician said. Finding the right vein took longer than the infusion itself. Then the technician disappeared and the high priests entered the room — the surgeon and his specially trained assistant, Patrick, the one who had previously told me, “Ten years from now, there won’t be knee replacement surgery. Stem cells will be the standard treatment for arthritis. This is the future.”
This is the future. It took about two minutes. “That’s it,” Dr. Hanson said, applying a small gauze pad to the injection site.
But there was a bit more. 90% of the stem cells were given to the knee, and then I was asked if there is another joint I might want to heal. I said my left shoulder often aches after typing.
“Let’s take a look,” Dr. Hanson said, and put the ultrasound gizmo to my left shoulder. “There is bursitis and a small tear,” Patrick announced, looking at the screen. So that shoulder got injected too. About an hour later, on the way back, I became aware that the soreness was gone. It’s as if I took naproxen (Aleve) and it took effect — with naproxen there is there is almost a distinct moment when the pain lifts off and is no more, like a quantum leap. That’s the anti-inflammatory effect, but I wonder if the neural pain pathways also get switched off. That’s very distinct with two gel acetaminophen caps too — the pain is suddenly gone, like flipping off a light switch.
The following day I did some typing, and the shoulder did not hurt. The right shoulder didn’t feel so good in the evening, though it’s a mild ache. But I bet that shoulder has some damage too. I’d love to check out my hips too, and maybe ankles. But first let’s see the results.
Sunday morning the knee caught up to feeling better, though it’s supposed to take a month before I really can tell the difference (or longer, depending on age and amount of damage). Later I could feel some referred pain below and above the knee —- a brief, transient ache. But nothing I’d call real pain (and I’ve had a lot of experience with “real pain”). This is great news because one is not allowed non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (ibuprofen, naproxen) for a week before and two weeks after the procedure. By blocking certain enzymes, they interfere with tissue repair.
X rays in May will tell us how much cartilage will have grown back from the pretty-much bone-on-bone condition.
The Los Angeles area has much more choice when it comes to stem cells clinics — Beverly Hills has a center, West LA — there’s online information. For the knee, there should be amniotic-fluid growth factors, not enriched platelets.
*
Perhaps the greatest promise of stem cells is in the area of heart disease, the #1 killer. In fact all kinds of horrific surgeries could be avoided if stem cells, the body’s own regenerative mechanism, were to be given the research priority that’s long overdue.
At the same time, we need to admit that conservative physicians regard stem cells as the unproven Wild West of medicine. At this point it is a leap of faith, with results based both on animal studies and what is classified as “anecdotal” human evidence (e.g. X-rays showing a regrowth of cartilage). Many will say that we need another 5-10 years before we can say anything definite about the effectiveness of these treatments (which are actually widely available right now).
If only we could have the equivalent of the Race to the Moon in this area, and in regenerative medicine in general! Dream on . . .
Do I recommend stem cells in lieu of knee replacement, or any other joint surgery? It’s too early for me to say anything about the effectiveness of the treatment: I had it only last week (December 11, 2015). Watch this blog for a later report.
ending on beauty
John Guzlowski quoted me on his page. He selected this:
Life should be a joy: not a ledger of sins and failures to live up to impossible standards, but an iridescent beauty like a dragonfly. ~ Oriana
This is probably a bull moose — the closest I had to that “waterfalling.”
THE MOST OF IT
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush — and that was all.
~ Robert Frost
Here is Milosz’s response to the poem:
“[It shows] how very alone man is in relation to nature, which is absolutely indifferent to him, even though he wishes to receive some sign of understanding. Alone, not only in relation to nature, because each “I” is isolated from all others, as if it were the sole ruler of the universe and seeks love in vain, while what it takes to be a response is only the echo of his own hope.” (“Robert Frost” in Selected Essays).
When it comes to the first two-thirds or so of the poem, I am with both Milosz and Frost himself. “He thought he kept the universe alone” — such a thought never occurred to me, and it strikes me as masculine and “dominionist,” but we have to take the speaker — who seems similar to the speaker in Stevens’s “Snowman” — at face value. As Milosz himself observed elsewhere, man has a great sense of solitude as a species — there is no “soulmate” species anywhere else on earth.
Cats and dogs? They can respond to us emotionally, but not on an intellectual level. (Would we want them to? Can you imagine being criticized by your cat?)
The speaker yearns for a conversation. “He thought he kept the universe alone” can be interpreted not as an arrogant expression of dominion, but rather as a lament about being the most intelligent species with no equal with whom to carry on a conversation.
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
All he gets is an echo. Personally I enjoy the phenomenon of the echo, and love to hear it. But if you live in the country and are used to the echo, maybe the magic of it wears off.
Rather than hearing an echo of his own voice, the speaker wants an “original response” he can’t predict:
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
Again, I am not sure I’d want the cliff to say something like, “A beautiful day, isn’t it?” Also, even if rocks had intelligence, the cliff would reply in its own rock language, with, I assume, hard, dense sounds. No, I'm not mocking the speaker, only trying to imagine the possibilities.
The speaker does not feel a union with nature; he feels separate, alone. And yet, doesn’t he love nature? Don’t we know it from Frost’s other poems? He is not indifferent to the beauty of the forest, for instance. But he wants “counter-love.” He apparently wants nature (or some being out there in nature) to love him back. Yet nature is notoriously indifferent and responds only with beauty. Worse, its indifference to the joy or suffering of living things (though living things also ARE nature, so there is a complication here) can show itself in blatant light: in this poem, the speaker cries out from “the boulder-broken beech.” A boulder fell and broke a tree — it happens.
Note how the triple alliteration — “boulder-broken beech” — calls attention to this image. Until the masculine “great buck” appears, that (feminine?) boulder-broken tree stands for life in nature, and the harm that nature casually inflicts (maybe the broken tree also stands for the speaker’s wife, but that’s a more remote connection).
So we have a love-hate relationship with nature. But later in the poem we learn that the speaker is actually thinking of a human counter-response. If nature can’t be humanized and remains indifferent, at least there could be another human out there, a lively companion.
But there is no Eve for this lonely Adam. Yet one time another being did emerge: a large deer swam in the speaker’s direction, and then disappeared in the brush:
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush — and that was all.
Excuse me, Mr. Frost, I want to say. You watch a powerful buck swim toward you and come ashore, the water “pouring like a waterfall” from the antlers and the whole magnificent body — and your response is “And that was all”?
That’s it. That’s all. There ain’t no more. Atheists are forever being confused with nihilists because they don’t believe in the afterlife, the pie in the sky, a detachable immortal soul independent of the brain (never mind the brain no longer exists; the soul is brain-free). No, the atheists have the nerve to claim that when brain function ceases, consciousness ceases. It doesn’t “go” anywhere; it simply ceases the way flame doesn’t go anywhere, but ceases to be when the fuel that supported it is gone.
To atheists, this world and this life is indeed all there is — but then the universe seems more than enough. Just the earth is almost too much, overwhelming in its beauty and variety. Just the whirl of perceptions seems to be enough to make life worth living, out of simple curiosity. But to see a “great buck as it powerfully appeared” — the marvelous animal swimming, then climbing out, water pouring from his body” — that is more than enough. That is a feast.
*
“As a great buck it powerfully appeared”
~ when I read the poem for the first time, for a moment I was confused. Was it a buck, or something like [“as”] a buck? But the lines that follow leave no doubt that it was a spectacular buck:
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush
So yes, that noise was not a rock falling into the water, but a full-grown buck that swims across, then lands “pouring like a waterfall” — and the speaker feels no sense of wonder and delight? Instead, he’s disappointed: “And that was all.”
And yet, the contradiction: the magnificent poetic language used to describe the buck, e.g. “pushing the crumpled water up ahead,” belies the dismissive last phrase. And the more times I read those lines, the more I sense the concealed wonder. Should we take Frost at face value, or yield to the power of the poetic language? It seems to convey a message that is directly contrary to what the poem is ostensibly trying to say.
In summary: Frost’s language and imagery contradict the explicit final statement. The language and the imagery — the “poetry” of the poem — reveal the grandeur of nature. And that, indeed, is all — but that is more than enough. It’s not possible to experience that grandeur and be disappointed.
Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest
*
But let’s try a psychological approach here. Of course if someone is used to seeing swimming bucks climb on shore, that sight might get to feel ordinary. But this seems to have happened only once. “And that was all”?
I have only one psychological guess to offer: the speaker is suffering from depression and can’t — or isn’t willing to — rise above bitterness. We need to take a look at Frost’s personal life. I do it with reluctance, since in college we were taught to stay away from biography and try to read the poem as a purely esthetic product, but here biography forces itself on us like a large boulder.
Frost’s father drank and bullied his wife. The biography in the Norton Anthology refers to “sporadic brutality.” The father died young, leaving his wife and children in financial hardship. Depression ran in Frost’s family. Both his mother and Frost himself suffered from it. His younger sister became mentally ill and had to be committed to a hospital. His wife Elinor also had bouts of depression and died relatively young. One son committed suicide; one daughter became mentally ill. Of the six children, only two outlived the poet.
Various business ventures, such as poultry farming, all failed (though Frost later secured a university teaching job and gained increasing fame). Elinor was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1937. A year later she died of heart failure. Frost began to drink heavily; the teaching job at Middlebury College seems to have rescued him.
At Middlebury, he appears to have had an affair with the wife of a faculty member, and to have proposed to her. But she refused to leave her husband, though she remained the poet’s confidante. Frost lived alone until his death in 1963.
Frost was intensely private, but we can safely say that he had an unhappy childhood and later an unhappy marriage. There is stoicism in his poems, and only sometimes bitterness or immense sadness. There is wisdom, as in all great poetry. There is lyricism (“the woods are lovely, dark and deep”). But a true sense of joy is rare.
Having said all this, I am still astounded that in the poem Frost does not celebrate seeing the buck. True, the poem sets out to develop a certain theme, that of complete human loneliness and not receiving a “counter-love, an original response.” Nevertheless, it’s still imaginable that even a short poem can make a turn from dejection to a sense of wonder and excitement. Wordsworth might start “lonely as a cloud,” but would certainly not dismiss seeing a magnificent buck with “and that was all.”
Only Stevens, perhaps, might be equally dismissive of the so-called “grandeur of nature.” Stevens too seemed to yearn for a soul-mate, but settled for an imaginary lover, an “interior paramour.” Stevens, who had a terrible marriage, perhaps the worst one on record as poets’ marriages go. When the marriage is bad, nothing can quite make up for it.
THE NOISY BUCK AND THE SILENCE OF GOD
All this, a reader might argue, is an evasion of the modern man’s despair at the silence and apparent absence of god. Frost was baptized in a Swedenborgian Church of New Jerusalem, but left it when he reached adulthood. No one would call Frost a religious poet.
Not in the traditional sense. He was a poet of this world, but not quite in the sense of celebrating the world. He comes close to being the American Larkin, seeing darkness more often than light.
Still, when the speaker calls out and only the echo of his voice comes back to him, does it not sound like “calling out to god” to give some sign, even the slightest, of his existence and — dare we say it? — not just existence, but caring for the speaker? Some capacity for a personal relationship?
The Swedenborgian version of Christianity is Christ-centered. Yahweh has somehow disappeared. It’s Christ, the “human form divine,” who rules the universe. Swedenborgian heaven and hell reflect states of mind, and a soul in hell (which has no fire, but looks rather like a dilapidated section of town) is not doomed to remain there. Though Frost left the Swedenborgian church, it’s not likely that he found the doctrines emotionally and morally abhorrent — they simply aren’t.
If anything, the doctrines are emotionally appealing — just improbable. I suspect Frost left simply because he could find no evidence of a benevolent supra-personal ruler. Unlike Swedenborg with his mystical visions, Frost sensed no such presence. Nor could he perceive events such as his mother’s death or his sister’s insanity as simply a reflection of his own negative states of mind (not that Swedenborg is ever as extreme as some New Age writers).
Still, there is human love, and there is the beauty of nature. But the beauty of nature may not be enough if the failure of love goes deep enough. Can a bad marriage blot out even the Wow! response that the average person would have if a large buck suddenly climbed out not far from them, water not just dripping but pouring from his antlers and his body — “landed pouring like a waterfall”?
I am not entirely convinced. On the esthetic level, I realize that the poet wished to maintain a consistently bleak tone throughout. Whether he wants a deity or a human lover, and gets “only” a powerful buck, we must accept the disappointment of “And that was all.” No transcendentalism for Frost, no Wordsworthian Nature worship (Nature needs to be spelled with a capital N when mentioned in relation to Wordsworth). Wordsworth would find the buck sublime; Frost acknowledges that the buck is powerful, but — a deer is only a deer, and not a “dear” (groan, yes; well, I just had to). It is not “another self” that the speaker craves.
Are we to universalize from this poem and conclude that we are alone — and I mean really ALONE? Are we to ponder morosely how every person is an isolated individual, and nature can offer only the echo of our voice and, instead of soft, responsive lover, the brute roughness of a buck crashing through the underbrush (the buck “forces” the underbrush, as if a rape were involved)? That’s perhaps the “moral” of this poem, but we need not accept it.
I know depression well. It’s a rare human being who manages to live through life without “getting acquainted with the night,” to use another of Frost’s tropes. Depression can get so deep that all positive memories are blocked and thinking becomes downright delusional under the burden of sadness.
And yet a part of our consciousness (some select neural pathways, if we want to turn to brain function here) is not depressed. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and I know I'm not the only one who’s experienced it. A part of you is never depressed, but simply watches the drama of spiraling down and down. I call that part of consciousness the Witness (by interesting coincidence, I came up with the name myself, before learning of the Buddhist terminology of the Witness).
The Witness knows all along that human love and caring exist, and life is worth living no matter what. The Witness could never dismiss the buck’s swimming and climbing out, “pouring like a waterfall,” as nothing remarkable — in fact a disappointment. But it cannot be a disappointment — it is a magnificent once-in-a-lifetime sight. Besides, most of us have at least some human love in our lives, so we can appreciate the non-human nature for what it is.
And yet I am still grateful to Frost for having described the incident. Thanks to the poem, the buck is now part of my psyche, along with all the actual deer I’ve enjoyed seeing. They can indeed be noisy moving through the underbrush, but does anyone mind that? And regardless of what the poem says, I am sure that the memory of that buck was special to Frost. He chose to cultivate a bleak persona. But to be a real poet, as Frost certainly was, you need to have a sense of enchantment. So I can pity Frost only so much. Rather, I admire his artistry and feel grateful for all that he gave us.
MILOSZ ON SWEDENBORG (A shameless digression)
Milosz, a public Catholic (after a period of atheism and disgust with the reactionary, anti-Semitic Polish Catholic right wing), was fascinated by all kinds of heresies, chiefly Gnosticism and the system dreamed up by Swedenborg — who is almost like Dante, traveling through heaven and hell, but without Dante’s literary genius.
Swedenborg, though regarded as an eminent geologist and naturalist, turned away from the scientific worldview and became preoccupied with his visions of the spirit world. Let me quote from Milosz’s essay, “Dostoyevski and Swedenborg” in Emperor of the Earth:
[According to Swedenbog], “man has withdraw himself from heaven by the love of self and love of the world.”
But the “world” that Swedenborg refers to is presumably not nature but civilization, and the negative aspects of civilization at that — not palaces and gardens, not art, music, and literature, but “worldly ambition,” greed, and deceit. Swedenborg had a religious orientation, and religions tend to focus exclusively on the negative aspects or the self and the world. They don’t find “the world” to be heaven the way so many solitary people do (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Thoreau), finding joy and companionship in nature.
Swedenborg and Blake humanized and hominized God and the universe to such an extent that everything, from the smallest particle of matter to planets and stars, was given but one goal: to serve as a fount of signs for human language. [Oriana: a large buck would be a very abundant fount — and indeed it becomes that for Frost. It’s just that instead of being thrilled to have received this occasion for poetry, he claims to be disappointed.]
Here is the really fascinating part:
“When [a man] dies, he finds himself in one of the innumerable heavens or hells which are nothing other than societies composed of people of the same inclination. Every heaven or hell is a precisely reproduction of the states of mind a given man experienced when on earth and it appears accordingly — as beautiful gardens, groves, or the slums of a big city. Thus everything on earth perceived by the five senses will accompany a man as a source of joy or suffering.”
This is certainly an interesting vision of the afterlife, but isn’t it essentially true of THIS life? A person in a negative state of mind is more likely to see ugliness rather than beauty, though the opposite also holds true: living in beautiful surroundings is more likely to result in a pleasant state of mind.
Finally, people also transform their surroundings. Put artists in abandoned industrial buildings, and watch a fantastic transformation. People can create their heaven and hell. It’s not completely under their control, no. Yet even during the war, a piece of heaven can be created. Here the Syrian artist Tammam Azzam painted Klimt's Kiss on a ruined buildling:
Frost’s bleak vision reflects reality as he sees it. Someone else in the same spot might experience thrill and joy.
THE SENSE OF ABSENCE
There seems to be a new argument for the existence of god, and that’s the argument from presence. According to some religious apologists, everyone senses god’s presence. Atheists only pretend not to sense it.
To me the only constant in regard to god has been his total and absolute absence. God didn’t exist for me before religion lessons, and I was quite happy and unaware that anything was missing. Then came the heavy Catholic indoctrination and the Invisible Man in the Sky acquired some degree of psychological reality.
I want to emphasize “some degree” — though, oddly enough, I seemed to have certainty as to the reality of hell. Otherwise, especially during prayer, experience constantly confronted me with the absence of that Invisible Man. I couldn’t help suspecting that I was talking to empty air. Looking up, I saw only clouds. Then, at fourteen, I stopped lying to myself under the pressure of the church, and acknowledged that my true personal experience was that of absence of anyone up there or anywhere.
The Emperor had no clothes! Or rather, it could be argued, it was all clothes and no Emperor. No Emperor, King of Kings, Creator, the Almighty. No such being has ever existed except as one of the hundreds of fictional deities made up by humans over the millennia.
Though long in making, my final epiphany took essentially a moment. After some minutes of terror when I literally waited to be struck by lightning for daring to declare that god didn’t exist, I began to breathe freely and was no longer afraid to think for myself. Fuller recovery from the Big Lie (and the intricate web of related lies, e.g. suffering is good for you) has been the journey of a lifetime.
But I don’t feel an iota poorer for not seeing a tree as a manifestation of the divine rather than a tree. Looking at a tree, I don’t generally think of it as a product of evolution, though of course it is that; rather, I respond to the tree’s beauty. I love it just for being a tree, and a deer for being a deer.
The enormous mental revolution of modernity has been precisely about loving the self and loving this world. Loving animals has been a part of this evolution.
(Loving children the way we moderns love them has been relatively recent. That is why we are so appalled that a mother nursing her baby daughter would choose to abandon the child in the most final of ways, that of dying for the promise of paradise as reward of killing the infidels. That a toxic theology could prove more powerful than the strongest of human bonds shakes us to the core.)
ELIZABETH BISHOP’S JOY AT SEEING A MOOSE
Frost’s poem is an anomaly. One of the best-known modern poems about a wild animal is Elizabeth Bishop’s The Moose. Let me quote the most memorable part of it:
—Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless....”
Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”
Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
~ now this is the normal human response to seeing a large wild animal that does not represent a threat. Children tend to adore animals. Note that in this poems, the adult passengers become like children — as they should. An animal stands for innocence.
Also, there are no Christian, Jewish, or Muslim animals. Animals do not celebrate holidays because every day is a holiday — a feast of existence.
*
Finally, I can’t resist quoting my own poem about my most memorable encounter with a large male deer. Walking on forever is of course wishful thinking, but my sense of awe at the beauty of nature is not.
Hurricane Ridge is in Olympic National Park in the state of Washington.
HURRICANE RIDGE
The glaciers tongue me, cliffs of ice,
pools of polar green.
Across eternal snow, a deer
steps out on the trail.
His antlers hold the flame-blue sky,
his crown of shining branches.
He stares at me without fear,
then climbs straight up,
barely nudges the slippery scree.
How could I know it would be
neither a lover nor a holy sage,
but a deer in a tundra of clouds —
this messenger making me feel
one day I’ll walk forever —
when thirsty, eating snow,
when tired, leaning on the wind.
My shadow compassing late sun,
I want one wish granted to me:
to hike again along the crest
here on Hurricane Ridge,
and let a deer like that once more
step out before me on the path,
look at me calmly, and walk on.
Let the wind wave a branch.
~ Oriana © 2015
The joy at seeing a beautiful wild animal is no surprise. It’s part of the joy of being alive. Beauty is reason enough.
photo: Huib Peterson
THE FAR NORTH
It’s been snowing all night.
My mother and I take turns
pushing father’s wheelchair.
He dozes. He’s already part of the snow.
Mother remembers that he used to have
“an excellent sense of direction.”
No use now.
Only night and snow.
A ship is waiting in the harbor.
It could still be a hundred miles.
The stars look blurred, as if caught
in a long photographic exposure.
We don’t even notice the cold.
~ Oriana © 2015
This poem was inspired by a dream I had when my father was nearing the end. Parkinson's is a very cruel disease. It also tends to last a long time, so you get used to this new reality (“we don't even notice the cold”). When you are a caretaker, it may seem that the sick person will never die, even though there is progressive deterioration. Things will just keep on getting worse and worse, you’re trudging in the snow farther and farther north — but that’s just how it is and will be.
Now this poem reminds that “this too shall pass” — both the good and the bad shall end.
The phrase “far north” makes me think of Longfellow’s famous poem, “Ultima Thule” — referring to the northernmost region of the earth as imagined by ancient geographers.
ULTIMATE THULE
With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.
How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!
Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?
Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Youth’s “land of dreams” versus finding yourself in Ultima Thule — yes, much has been written about that, and I'm not going to repeat it. What I repeat to myself in my mind is “Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!” It’s the sheer music of the words that enchants me, and obliterates the negative meaning.
MILOSZ AND OTHERS ON HUMAN SOLITUDE IN THE UNIVERSE
Milosz: “Our epoch began somewhere around the end of the eighteenth, the beginning of the nineteenth century, and should be viewed as a whole. It is distinguished by a central philosophical problem ripening slowly as a result of the criticism directed at traditional Christian beliefs and aristocratic institutions, monarchy chief among them. . . . The true revolutionaries were the poets and the artists, even the most ethereal and least bloodthirsty of them, because they cleared the way; that is, they acted as the organizers of the collective imagination in a new dimension, that of man’s solitude as a species.”
Milosz also says: “The common feature of the teachings of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche is their portrayal of the stupefaction of man when he recognizes that BEYOND HIM THERE IS NOBODY IN THE UNIVERSE, and that he does not owe his attributes to any deity.” (“Speaking as a Mammal”)
Milosz may be overestimating the revolutionary role of the arts; economic and technological forces doubtless play a huge role in cultural evolution, and the failure (so far) of the SETI project to find intelligent extra-terrestrial life has no doubt had an impact (such life may exist, but so far away that communication is impossible). If anything, one could argue that it’s writers and artists (especially movie makers) who keep alive the yearning for meeting “someone out there.” But that “someone” is no longer imagined as a deity, but rather as an equal.
Indeed, in another essay Milosz does acknowledge the central role of technology in the process of secularization. But if I read Milosz correctly, he posits “man’s solitude as a species” as the central problem of modernity. He may be right; the explosion of science fiction, the most visionary branch of literature and film, seems to express a yearning for (and sometimes a fear of) intelligent extraterrestrial beings who could communicate with us. As angels and demons become increasingly implausible, ETs (wise as Yoda, or primitive as Chewbacca) rush into the mythological vacuum.
Yet all we have is science fiction (and the emphasis here should be on FICTION) and the notion that the universe is so vast that earthlike life is likely somewhere — but most likely too far away for contact.
From a recent article in The Guardian:
“In the very long run, as the sun gets hotter, the only way for humans or our successors to survive may be to move off-planet; it actually makes sense to start thinking about this now. Such a vision – "often implied but rarely acknowledged explicitly for fear of cynical ridicule" according to Billings – has guided space exploration since its inception when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky dreamed up the first space rockets in a remote log cabin in the late 19th century. It explicitly informs Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, a recent volume in which distinguished scientists explore the feasibility of initiating interstellar travel by 2100.
In "The Light Years", one of the Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, the narrator sees with his telescope a sign on a galaxy a hundred million light years away that says "I saw you". Aghast, he checks his diary and finds that on that very day 200 million years before he had done something that he had always tried to hide. He casts around frantically for a response, contemplating "Let me explain" and "I'd like to have seen you in my place" before settling for "What of it?" A conversation unfolds between the narrator and his distant interlocutor, with even more remote observers pitching into an exchange in which each comment takes hundreds of millions of years to arrive.
Calvino was writing in the 1960s, shortly after the discovery of quasars and at a time when the nature of the universe as we now understand it was coming into view. He turned this to delightful comic effect. But speculation that life exists across huge distances inthe cosmos is not new. In the sixth century BC Anaximander suggested that other worlds were endlessly forming and disintegrating in a universe of infinite extent. A century later Democritus, the laughing philosopher, argued that the never-ending dance of atoms would inevitably lead to countless other worlds and other lives. In the 12th century AD, citing a verse in the Qur'an that describes Allah as Lord of the Worlds, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi wrote of a thousand thousand worlds.
In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens and others began to wonder if improvements to the recently invented telescope would one day enable humans to actually examine some of those other worlds. "There may be yet created several other helps for the eye," wrote Robert Hooke in 1665, "such as by which we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets.”
And yet in at least one respect we are no further along than Democritus or Hooke. We have found no trace of other life. This seems strange. Given the age of the universe and its vast number of stars, extraterrestrial beings should be common. As Enrico Fermi put it tersely in 1950: where the hell are they?
In Five Billion Years of Solitude, Lee Billings tells the stories of those who have tried and are trying to answer Fermi's question.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/21/five-billion-years-solitude-lee-billings-review
Why didn’t the atheist cross the road? — Because there is no other side. ~ Dan Barker
SPIRITUAL NO MORE: THE SHALLOWNESS OF MYSTICISM
Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial. ~ Nietzsche
It still takes Nietzsche to say something as politically incorrect as this, and as exhilarating. Do we need “mystical” explanations of the universe? I think we can enjoy the mysterious without multiplying useless metaphysics.
I don't deny the interconnectedness of things, but see no reason to call it mysticism. Do we gain anything by using this word? We might as well call interconnectedness exactly what it is — “interconnectedness”— and gain precision. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon — no supernatural explanation is necessary.
Personally I have never found any depth or strength through religion, nor have I found religious people to radiate love and peace the way a profoundly happy person does — say, someone who is in love, or someone who is very deeply devoted to their work (which is like being in love, but much more lasting). All that talk about the afterlife was vague and abstract and ultimately a bunch of platitudes about something invisible for which there was no evidence — unlike a tree or an animal, or a a painting or a poem. I have found depth through art and simply hard work -- which taught me humility, patience, and all the other virtues that going to church never imparted. Fear of god only taught me to hate the invisible monster in the sky who spied on everyone's thoughts, beyond any Orwellian nightmare.
I appreciate the part of Ecclesiastes that says two things 1) whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might 2) at other times, put on nice clean clothes and enjoy life while there is still time. That's all the wisdom I learned from the bible, finding most of it insufferably boring and/or vicious and archaic, with lots of violence but little understanding of human psychology, esp child abuse which leads to so much aggression and suffering later. I've learned a bit from Buddhism -- but that bit about desire and suffering has been extremely important. The rest I learned from life itself and from grappling with something very difficult — poetry and challenging intellectual work in general.
I am thrilled that it's finally OK to reject mysticism and not provoke a storm by saying there is no soul nor the "beyond." When someone dies, he remains in the memory of others -- and that to me is an awe-inspiring neurobiological mystery. The inner world of our dreams is stranger and more fascinating than any idea of the afterlife.
This morning I had a dream vaguely set in Italy — an artist colony, perhaps. There is a dog ambling about, and I decide it’s “my dog” (I'm certainly going to pet it and spoil it). “I have an Italian dog,” I say to a man who happens to be standing there. “Her name is Correggio.” In the dream I believe that this mean courage. My Italian is imperfect, to put it mildly — the word for “courage” is “coraggio.” “Correggio” isn’t even a word, but seems to derive from the word for correcting. (Also, there was a Renaissance painter who was known by that name, after the small Italian town where he was born)
I could see it as a mystical dream — it takes courage to correct a mistake, right? A message from heaven, divine wisdom sent to guide me! To me, it’s simply my unconscious rearranging bits and pieces (I know where Italy came from, and the fantasy of having a dog; I know which act of courage I recently decided on, and another one which would actually be more difficult). And the startling fusion of the words? I’ve always loved languages, learning a word here, a phrase there, and know how easy it is to fuse and confuse.
We are hard-wired to seek patterns and meaning. On the whole this is a good thing, but it can result in the mistake of seeing a pattern where none exists, assuming that “everything happens for a reason,” and manufacturing supernatural explanations.
As Matt said, “Mysticism throws everything back in the formless cauldron so it can be endlessly prated about without logical restrictions.”
You may object that the shallowness I speak about is that of the commercialized “spiritual” movement which sells the trappings — crystals, incense, little altars — but of course can’t sell the alleged depth of the “holy men.” Many of them strike me as charlatans, pure and simple. As for monks and nuns, up close they turn out to be just ordinary human beings who happen to be dressed in strange clothes (which used to be ordinary street clothes in the Middle Ages) and who live in communes rather than in family or single households. Those who do well in communal living are extraverts rather than deep thinkers.
Yet once you delve into physics, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the true mystery is all around us. As Nietzsche also said, once you look at something in sufficient depth, an infinity opens up. And that infinity may be frightening to some, but a source of ecstatic joy to others.
One of my discoveries in life has been that it’s happy people who exude peace and love. The easiest way to be happy is to be in love. Now, that love need not be erotic. To me, the most important thing is to be in love with work. I mean not the work you do for a living, though in the luckiest cases there is an overlap, but what you feel is the true work of your life. Daily communion with such work leads to a sense of fulfillment and deep and lasting happiness.
Contrary to Nietzsche, I claim that happiness is the source of strength and virtues such as as kindness, humility, and serenity. How do we become happy? Freud gave the perfect answer: love and work. A gardener happy among flowers, a chef happy in her kitchen, a mother enjoying her child, a father shooting baskets with his youngsters, a scientist in his lab, an artists in his studio — these are the true benefactors of humanity, rather than preachers with their platitudes, or the so-called mystics with theirs.
Though my examples tend to be those of meaningful work, in a way, it all comes down to love: the work you love will usually lead you to people you love — and will make it easier to at least like others. In my experience, I like people best when I am able to do the work I love. My connection to my work gives me the foundation and security so that I can also be spontaneously affectionate.
You may ask, “But what about those nuns who claim to be in love with Jesus?” Yes, a few among them, like Teresa of Avila, may even have hallucinations that make Jesus seem an actual man, and a handsome one at that. But an imaginary lover is just that — a rather limited and one-sided experience, a longing for a soul-mate that can find no outlet in a real person. An idealized imaginary lover has some advantages over a real lover, but — a real lover is always more interesting. Reality is richer. I pity those who, perhaps in order to survive deprivation, settle for the imaginary.
Falling in love in the usual meaning of the term? Yes please. It’s turbulent, scary, and difficult, but it can be ecstatic. At the very least, it’s always interesting. It’s not the same as a deep attachment to the right person, which takes years, but love in any form can be a source of happiness. Good things come from happiness.
As for the feeling of awe, which is supposed to be central to mysticism, again I say yes. Religion is not necessary for the feeling of awe. For me the beauty of nature is enough. A combination of the beauty of nature and the collective human genius is a source of inexhaustible awe for me. An great art and music, including sacred art and music. I am open to whatever poetry religion can offer, the esthetic-sensual aspect. The “holy hush” one can experience in beautiful churches when they are empty, yes. Anything that leads to a deep sense of happiness, the joy of being alive and experiencing all manner of perceptions.
Correggio: Jupiter and Io
THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE FEELS COMFORTABLE TO ME
Pascal complained that the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces” frightened him. I had the opposite reaction, even as a child. The hugeness of the universe pleased me immensely -- it was so clearly not about reward and punishment for using a profanity or spilling the soup (my idea of what "sin" meant).
The universe was so much bigger than all our petty struggles, or causes like nationalism. Nature simply was, without moral justification of any sort. When I looked at the night sky, I knew early on that this was beyond any naive biblical account written by men who had no idea where the sun went during the night.
To me the stars at night — my abbreviated image for “the universe” — just the world thrilled me — were nature that did not appear to need the existence of the god of punishment. Looking at the stars, I did not feel like a sinner, but like someone privileged to behold wonders. I did not feel judged.
This, by the way, was the advantage of the New Age movement over Christianity — its sundry teachings were non-judgmental. It was truly emotionally supportive. For some, it was the dream of a completely supportive religion come true. It was like liberal Protestantism, but without the burden of the Old Testament dragging it down. (To emphasize this, New Age spoke of the Spirit, or even The Holy Spirit; “Christ Consciousness” was occasionally mentioned and equated with “Buddha Consciousness”; Yahweh, however, was deleted, except for occasional short paragraphs of rage against the toxic old-time religion with its vengeful god.)
One touch of badness came during the years that the ruling motto was “You create your own reality” — meaning, if you got cancer, it wasn’t your genes and/or carcinogens or aging. It was your negative thinking. This kind of talk got profoundly trashed as the ultimate in “blaming the victim,” and faded relatively quickly. But if you didn’t “create your cancer” — or, “attracted cancer into your life” — then what about your ability to create good things in your life by having positive thoughts? Doubt crept in. The absurd, shallow side of this mysticism lay exposed — see the “Spiritual No More” section of this blog.
photo: Luigi Chiriaco
ENTER
I looked down at my keyboard and saw one key:
Enter, with its backward arrow.
Enter, meaning Return.
**
I'm not sure if I wrote this. I remember that a friend pointed out that the “Enter” key used to be called “Return” back in typewriter days. So arguably the other name of “Enter” is “Return.”
I'm content to let the author be the “collective psyche.”
**
It’s been true many times in my life: going back to something begun a long time ago has yielded rich “returns.” Every day I start something new, and almost every day I discover something seeded in the past. Often it’s mainly return: I rework an older piece of writing. It gives me joy to have all these riches to return to.
I know this won’t go on indefinitely. As Jane Kenyon put it, “One day it will be otherwise.” But if it could go on, I wouldn’t mind living like that for centuries.
And if there is a gate of paradise, I think it may have a sign over it that says RETURN.
**
You say returning is an illusion? “You can't go home again.” True. In another poem I say:
Odysseus only thought he returned.
By then, Ithaca
was another country.
But a partial return is possible, as to a favorite vacation spot — and if that's the best we can have, that's fine with me. Meanwhile we will always fantasize about those big and impossible returns — the thrill of the first love, for instance (never mind how it ended). It existed; it happened. The most important thing about love is simply that it happens.
The gate of the winter palace. The gilded emblems of Tzarist Russia, removed in 1917, are now fully restored
Karl Marx in his youth
