NAME AND CAREER SUCCESS; MURDERERS: BORN OR MADE? THE BEST HAS ALREADY HAPPENED; THE PRIEST AND THE JESTER; I COULD LOVE GOD IF HE WERE A DOG

Justus Juncker: Pear with Insects, 1765
 
*
BEFORE WISDOM

That last Polish August that glows
in my mind like a ruddy pear,
my mother would point and say,

“Take a good look: you may never
see it again” — a valley kneeling 
in the greenest green,

or a birch tree touched by the wind,
so delicate it seemed
about to tremble away —

while in school we learned by heart
My fatherland, you are like health;
only he knows your worth

who has lost you — but we hadn’t yet
lost fatherland or health, and the scent
of wild mushrooms was a prayer —

What if a prophet, a seer
were to rise from the spilled moon
in a boat on a Baltic bay,

point to everything and say, “Take
a good look: it’s your happiest year.
You will never see it again.”

And I was seventeen
on the stroke of fate.

*

Later, like a good-luck charm,
I carried these words in my mind:
The worst has already happened.
Then I chanced to read the reverse
of my amber amulet:
The best has already happened.
What, no more great love?
Only the bitter sage who taught,
Life is a cruel joke —

no greater lover and seer?
Where are my palaces of clouds?
Where is my will to believe?

*

Now I don’t even care to travel —
I say, too many stairs to climb.
I want to sleep in my own bed.

After the summer when I thought
I chose a larger destiny, no sleep
has seemed deep enough —

not the deepest granite cradle,
the High Tatras’ bluest lake. Dear
wisdom, what I’ve paid for you —

My fatherland, you are like health.
But I sing that gilded August
before wisdom,

before the wasps flew in
to feast on wounded pears.

~ Oriana


That last Polish August, that infinite pear . . .  But I'm no longer grieving over having lost that “fatherland” (an alien word, as in that loathsome phrase, “God and Fatherland”). Unreal country, mostly in my mind, a country that was both like health and like sickness. I didn’t know the name of that sickness until I learned that Joyce referred to Ireland as a “Catholic bog.” But poems glorify; they don’t debunk.

Yet this poem has a theme that’s larger than a lost paradise, half-real, half-imagined. Yesterday again I confirmed the thought I’ve had for a while now, along the lines of “the best has already happened.” Imagine: when I was what I’d call an “active poet” — defined arbitrarily as at least one new poem a month, on average — and steady work on older poems to perfect them — I used to worry that this time devoted to poetry was the wrong use of my life. After all, only the great poets matter — the minor ones are quickly forgotten.

I totally believed that. So I pestered a friend of mine, who happens to be a generation older — a multiple great-grandmother — I kept asking her, “When I'm eighty and look back at my life, will I regret having spent so much time on poetry? Shouldn’t I have been a teacher, or worked with animals at a rescue center, or . . . almost anything else that’s definitely useful?” And she’d firmly reassure me that I would never regret having been a poet. (She was already in her eighties then and writing some hush-inducing poems; she’s now a frail 92, but still manages a haiku every day, and a longer poem now and then — poetry is still her life.)

However, what happened to me next, after all that agonizing over whether I was wasting my life on poetry, is that my Muse departed. It happened a few years after the last poetry conference I attended, but I can’t really blame that brutal conference for it. True, having been told that I was old-fashioned instead of avant-garde, I lost hope for significant publishing — yet perhaps it was a positive development after all, rather than being tormented by false hope (as I recently said, “Hope is the thing with claws”). But less and less inspiration for new poems was its own phenomenon. 2009 was my last good year for new poems, but starting in 2010, I began to experience a deepening drought — almost in parallel with what was happening to California. 

Being abandoned by the Muse was a shock as deep as falling out of love for the first time. No one told me that love could end. Didn’t the songs promise “forever”? This in a way was worse: the talent was still there, and the mastery of the craft — after the years it took to hone it. It wasn’t writing poetry that was a waste — it was not writing it.

This decline in creativity has happened to some other poets around me, especially women — male poets seem to last longer by perhaps a decade, but it hits them too (so much for “once I retire”). I think it’s mainly a change in brain function, in energy, in hormone-fueled drive. In my case it was also a shift toward prose in both reading and writing — somehow I was tired of poetry. I wasn’t learning anymore, discovering, being surprised enough . . . above all, I felt I was repeating myself, always somehow circling back to my main themes, but less well than before. As Milosz foretold, I had run out of nostalgia and the immigrant experience — and out of myth and biography. And I didn’t want to settle on haiku, ekphrastics, or poems about aging and dying.

From nostalgia’s “morphine of beautiful lies” to the literal morphine in poems increasingly mentioning hospice — there was something displeasing about that arc. Though ceasing to write poems itself felt like a kind of dying, I didn’t want to undertake that journey into diminishment — from the magic of the early poems to constantly saying good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

And then, when I reached a point where a new poem became a miraculous exception, an unexpected event, I suddenly understood: The best has indeed already happened. Those years that I thought I was wasting my life being a poet? Those were my glory years. Regretting them now seems like the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever had. I feel an astonished delight that this had ever happened to me — that I really wrote poems like  All Souls or April Snow, Sex and the Gdańsk Express; Crossing the San Andreas (“rocks have consciousness, they are just slow”); Gypsy (“So this is fate. Holding hands, he and I / walk the blossoming boulevards”); Io (“I climbed too close to the gods”); Archaic Penelope (“It’s my waiting that creates you”)

I wasn’t just creating poems; I was creating myself. Sylvia Plath knew the excitement of self-creation — self-enlargement — when she wrote:

Mother, keep out of my barnyard:
I am becoming another.

Something greater starts speaking through you. What is it? The collective wisdom? The genius of  a particular language? The infinite music of images?

Mostly, I was creating my memories — “fairy tale of my life / with wolves in it.” I was singing not with the birds, and certainly not with the angels, but with my inner wolves. I was writing a mythic version of my early landscapes that seemed to unfold into something larger and darker and more mysterious. The same woman poet who told me I’d never regret having been a poet also said, “Your Polish poems go way beyond Poland.”

I am standing still forever
in the amber of late August;
in a rusty seaside landscape
a rooster crowing and crowing —
and a drunken Russian sailor,
weeping: See, you too
don’t know anyone in this town

~ or, writing about Krakow,

where the Vistula embraces
the city like shining laughter,
like a gleaming wheel.

I look at lines like these with astonishment: I wrote this? I, the little woman who shops at Costco and Walmart, cooks, scrubs the sink, the stove and the kitchen tiles; the woman who contemplates the latest travesty of her hopes for becoming able-bodied again — whose highest ambition nowadays often seems simply not to drown in the mundane? I, or perhaps my other self to whom the best once happened, the one who wrote:

So the echoes of us roll
in a widening ring —

of the song we sang,
and thought
that we were not heard.

*

And while the best was happening, I was daily struggling with despair.

*

I feel I can still contribute, but in that more ordinary, prosy way — I can write an insightful movie review, for instance. I can write a decent analysis of a famous or not-so-famous but worthy poem for my Poetry Salon. But — the high flights, like the mountain peaks, are in the past. I can weep, or I can feel gratitude that I’ve been granted those vistas.

There is a poem by Rilke, Remembrance, about how we are always waiting for something great that’s about to happen, and then we discover: it has already happened.

Would I have become a poet if I’d stayed in Poland? A Polish poet I know only from Facebook and a bit of personal correspondence (a good poet, and a very smart woman) answered “Yes — but of course as a completely different person.” She’s probably right — my interest in playing with words was irrepressible, and my lyrical gift was waiting to be awakened if not by nostalgia, then by first loves — but life is indeed too short to ponder the imponderable. That potential self died in a tragic accident, run over by a streetcar that disappeared “into the fog of all the bridges.”

*

I don’t think I'm kidding myself about “the best has already happened” — just as I'm not kidding myself anymore about a full recovery and being able to walk without pain for even a relatively short distance — what for a healthy person would be an easy distance. I’ve stopped waiting for that magical physical therapist. Isn’t it amazing how the Prince transforms into other figures we start longing for, including a publisher who loves the beautiful rather than the “experimental”; a handyman who returns phone calls; and finally a competent physician . . .

I still have more good days than bad days, and I hope this isn’t coming across as a lament. The best is behind me, but at least it has happened.  And I have no regrets over time “wasted” on writing poetry — not even when I remember having missed my exit offramp on the freeway because I suddenly knew the line, the word, the perfect beginning or ending.

Excited over a word — only another poet can understand what I mean, the happiness of it. To an outsider, that must seem ridiculous, but I don’t care. Why on earth did I ever care? True, I was asking if I myself would have this regret over having wasted my life on poetry, but what society values and doesn’t value lay coiled in that question. Never mind: there is no point blaming society for my having struggled with an unreal problem.

How can I be so sure that the best has already happened? Isn’t life a guesswork and constant surprise? Yes and no. Such is the way with all significant truths: the opposite is also true. In this case, stages of life are a huge factor. Both the physiology of aging and life circumstances enter the picture to influence creativity. Yes, there is a one-percent chance that something could rekindle mine, and, like Yeats in his twilight years, I’d write one great poem after another.  No, better make it a one-in-a-million chance. Theoretically, yes, a huge change in my life may happen, and yes, life can be strange. Yet I know the best has already happened the way I know that at present no one can live to be 150. And only if my generation could live many years beyond 100, and in vigorous health, could we regain the future tense.

*

It was Galway Kinnell, then at the height of his fame, who startled me by saying, “A poet knows when his best poems are already behind him.” I didn’t want to believe him. My poems were going to get better and better and better. Now I know that only a minority of people can understand what I'm trying to say and not immediately engage in “positive thinking” about how the best still lies ahead, of course you’ll recover completely, and oh, the fabulous poems you will yet write, the mountains you’ll yet climb, oh, oh, oh!

No, a flat-out no. A time comes when certain kinds of knowledge really do come to us, like a wave to the shore. Nor does one have to be eighty. Kinnell wasn’t yet sixty when he knew. He still went on to write some readable poems — but not great ones. And I shudder when I think of the poets who peaked already in their twenties. But that may be a misplaced shudder: after all, the best did happen to them.

Ignorance is bliss? No, I treasure my new knowing, even if there’s some unavoidable melancholy to it. Why? Gratitude. Gratitude for the best, but not only for the best that’s already in the past — for all the good things — the daily, ordinary blessings. Including, once in a while, a perfect pear.

Mary:

About poetry, and that perfect, golden pear...it has always been my experience that the act of creating, of composing, has been the most intense and pleasurable of all experiences, that the process is itself it's own best reward, and all that follows pales in comparison. Perhaps I am a person without much ambition, but I have never thought much in terms of career, whether in art, writing, or my work in nursing. It is certainly gratifying to be recognized,  to have your work admired, to be congratulated, to be published, to be heard and understood. Yet all those things follow the act of creation and are not central to it.

What sounds most true and most familiar to me is knowing that the essence of the creative process is the discovery and what you call the enlargement of the self. In writing the poet can, as Plath said, "become another." Both the self and the world are made anew. It can be an astonishing and transformative process, one I believe is common to all creative art.

Will it last? Will we be remembered? Is everything we make like that perfect pear — a sweetness intense and fleeting, perfect in the moment, then gone forever? Probably. Even the brightest stars burn out, and time, like the fly on that perfect pear, consumes us all. This is something too common for grief, too large for regret. The joy, the treasure, the true reward, is not in accolades and awards, but in that moment of transport when you find the perfect word, the perfect image, and all else falls away.

Oriana:

I totally agree with you. Alas, I did go through a period of bitterness over disappointed hopes for recognition. And I saw many of my peers suffer from the same bitterness. When we were beginners just starting to attend poetry conferences, our instructors were unquestionably better poets. But as our craft developed, we began to notice that the poems by participants were often as good or better than those of the instructors. We often spoke of “po-biz” and shared our unhappiness over being have-nots who did not have the right connections: “It’s totally about who you know.” I formed a consolation motto: “I’d rather have people ask  me why I'm not famous [this has indeed happened], then be famous and have people wonder how come.”

But I don’t want to rehearse our tiresome rants over the unfairness of “po-biz” — somehow or other I finally managed to drop career ambition and get back to the enjoyment of creative work for its own sake. I think most of us did; many turned to self-publishing and sharing with friends and local groups. Sharing with an audience is also a joy, but the audience can be small — as long as it is responsive. One of my best audience experiences has been reading my poems to a friend whom I visited in a convalescent home after she fell and fractured her hip. Her rapt attention and obvious enjoyment were reward enough; I did not find myself yearning for a packed auditorium.

But the greatest gift is what it always was: writing an inspired line, sustaining the music so that the poem “flows by itself,” finding the surprise ending, or simply the right word. Line breaks — I can spend a happy afternoon just playing with line breaks and stanza size. Prose is less demanding — you generally don’t polish every word — but at its most fulfilling, it also provides the esthetic delight of playing with words, musicality, and discovering insights. Enough of that joy remains that even if “the best has already happened,” that’s no tragedy. I'm grateful that the best has happened, and move on to new projects.

We are of the moment. Let’s live it joyfully, with gratitude for both the past and the present. 

*

I also agree with something else you said so beautifully:

“Sometimes it seems life is so terribly fragile, and losses come so fast they are tripping over each other. We have to remember, truly, not to despair over our losses, our fading powers, and all the failures of the flesh, but to rejoice in the glory of having had such gifts, like the gods themselves.”

Yes. I keep quoting my favorite lines by Hölderlin:

Once I lived as the gods:
More is not needed.

Luis Melendez: Still Life with Pears, c. 1772

You’ve wasted so much of your life
Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you
Do that again? I would, a thousand times.

~ Robert Bly
Oriana: Again, only a poet can understand this.

*

“There are cities outside and cities within, each with its own weather and rubble and stairs descending into darkness.” ~ Ryan Griffith

*
“no point being neurotic . . . I’m too far gone for that.” ~ James Kohn
Oriana: That’s precisely the insight that ended my depression: it’s too late in life to be depressed — even if night, rain, and the city are no longer mine (but once they were, and that is enough). 



“I re-watched Zombieland the other night. Great movie. A rule for killing zombies: Double-tap.

We learned the lesson from WWI: clean it up after you defeat. We double-tapped after WWII with the Marshall plan. But it's amazing how enemies to our democratic republic resurface. Russia, white nationalists. Apparently, surrender is temporary. We're bad at foreseeing inevitable backlashes.” ~ Jeremy Sherman

 Oriana:

Yes, we were supposed to be watching the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, not the deepening dusk lit by the torches of the Neo-Nazis. The hope is still the young — if they don’t get too distracted by video games and Twitter. The young, but especially the educated women of any age.

If I am lucky, I’ll live to see now only the demise of the current far right, but also a renaissance of a vision of a kinder world where everyone recognizes that we are all in it together.

TO SUCCEED, CHANGE YOUR NAME FROM “SUE” TO “CAMERON” — THE ASTONISHING EFFECT OF YOUR NAME ON CAREER SUCCESS
 
~ “A study found that female lawyers with more masculine names—such as Barney, Dale, Leslie, Jan, and Rudell—tend to have better chances of winning judgeships than their more feminine named female peers. All else being equal, changing a candidate’s name from Sue to Cameron tripled a candidate’s likelihood of becoming a judge; a change from Sue to Bruce quintupled it.

Names work hard: They can affect who gets into elite schools, what jobs we apply for, and who gets hired. Our names can even influence what cities we live in, who we befriend, and what products we buy since, we’re attracted to things and places that share similarities to our names.

A name is, after all, perhaps the most important identifier of a person. Most decisions are made in about three to four seconds of meeting someone, and this “thin-slicing” is surprisingly accurate. Something as packed full of clues as a name tends to lead to all sorts of assumptions and expectations about a person, often before any face-to-face interaction has taken place. A first name can imply race, age, socioeconomic status, and sometimes religion, so it’s an easy—or lazy—way to judge someone’s background, character, and intelligence.

These judgments can start as early as primary school. Teachers tend to hold lower expectations for students with typically black-sounding names while they set high expectations for students with typically white- and Asian-sounding names. And this early assessment of students’ abilities could influence students’ expectations for themselves.

On this year’s French baccalaureate, an exam that determines university placement for high school students, test-takers named Thomas (for boys) and Marie (for girls) tended to score highest. These are, you will note, typically white, French, middle- or upper-class names. One could imagine these students were given the advantage of high expectations and self-perception, whether or not they had the money and support that comes with the socioeconomic background associated with those names.

A 2004 study showed that all else being equal, employers selected candidates with names like Emily Walsh and Greg Baker for callbacks almost 50 percent more often than candidates with names like Lakisha Washington and Jamal Jones. Work experience was controlled and the candidates never met face-to-face with the employer so all that was being tested was the effect of the candidate’s name. The researchers concluded that there was a great advantage to having a white-sounding name, so much so that having a white-sounding name is worth about eight years of work experience. “Jamal” would have to work in an industry for eight years longer than “Greg” for them to have equal chances of being hired, even if Jamal came from a privileged background and Greg from an underprivileged one.” ~

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/who-wins-in-the-name-game/374912/?utm_source=SFFB

Oriana:

Women writers submitting under a male pen name know what they are doing — George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontë sisters (at first) — knew that they’d be taken more seriously if both publishers and readers pictured them as male. Colette let her loathsome husband Willy get the credit for her best-selling early novels — the “naughty” Claudine novels which might otherwise be rejected as indecent. And JK Rowlings knew better than to go by “Joanne.”

No, we are not talking about the past. Do you want your work to be called clever and exciting? Lyrical rather than sentimental? Change your name from Jane to Jordan. Fresh and original rather than trite? Change from Martha to Andrew.   

Of course the name isn’t everything. But it is a part of the first impression.

Michelangelo: Andrea Quaratesi , 1532


“The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes.” ~ Martin Luther
 
I know that Luther was in many ways a horrible person, anti-Semitic, obsessed with the devil, possibly even delusional at times. Still, ever since I first learned about him, I intensely admired his courage. Standing up to the totalitarian Catholic church was essentially a death sentence. Whenever I remember that he was willing to risk his life to oppose the corruption of the most powerful institution of his time, it takes my breath away.

But the reason I'm posting this particular quotation is because I admire craftsmanship — I admire excellence. Quality. Self-control and understatement, but without strangling creative impulses. Making good sentences — this sounds like a modest goal, but it’s in fact a challenge that guides me now with particular urgency.

WHY MANY SERIAL KILLERS CLAIM THEY KILLED MORE PEOPLE 
 
~ “Many killers who’ve claimed they had more victims than they were ever charged with, leaving people guessing as to who (or where) those victims might be. Israel Keyes said he had as many as eight more than the three to which he confessed—but he killed himself in prison before revealing where he’d buried them.

It's likely that compassion for families with missing loved ones is low on their list of motives—so why would serial killers admit further culpability? Data suggests that mostly, their reasons are self-serving.

1) Delight in Duping

After the police arrested Glen Rogers in 1995, wanted in connection with five murders, he took credit for seventy, including the brutal double homicide of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. He later said he was only joking. (He was ultimately convicted in two.)

The most infamous trickster-confessor was Henry Lee Lucas, arrested in 1983.  He estimated he’d killed 100 people, but eventually raised that number to over 350 in twenty-seven states. Dozens of law officers came to Texas to close their open cases, providing Lucas with outings and meals. He enjoyed it all, but then suddenly recanted. Then he confused everyone by insisting he’d been forced to recant. Then some of his confessions were proven false. He didn’t care—in fact, that appeared to be part of his goal, according to later testimony. "I set out to break and corrupt any law enforcement officer I could get,” Lucas said. “I think I did a pretty good job.”

2) Impression Management
 
H. H. Holmes was convicted in Philadelphia in 1896 for a fatal insurance fraud. He insisted he was innocent, but for $10,000 he proclaimed himself the world’s most notorious killer, claiming 100 victims before reducing that number to twenty-seven. “The newspaper wanted a sensation,” he said. Before stepping into the noose, he admitted to only two. The truth was somewhere in the middle—but he’d enjoyed his spotlight of fame, which has persisted to this day.

Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit interviewed Gary Ridgway. He’d initially confessed to 71, before settling on the official toll of 48 (now 49). She had this to say: “In my opinion, many of these people have an egotistical need to control and manipulate, and some like to be bigger and badder than the other guy.” Ridgway still insists there are many more than official records state.

3) Enhance Their Own Importance
 
Ted Bundy made several different victim estimates, from 30 to over 100. He told Hugh Aynesworth that for every “publicized” murder there “could be one that was not,” but he assured an attorney that 35 was right. He sought to prove his worth as a “scientific specimen” to Supervisory Special Agent William Hagmaier, from the FBI’s budding Behavioral Science Unit, offering him 30 homicides. Sometimes Bundy would suggest that he had a lot to say, but he’d need more time than his approaching execution date would allow. He pretended he wanted to help close cases, but he doled out information to serve his own ends. (Israel Keyes, who emulated Bundy, did the same thing.) Bundy might also have wanted to project an image of “badness” to other inmates in the prison, which puts him into the category above.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201808/3-reasons-serial-killers-claim-they-have-more-victims

Oriana:

Alas, men will compete in any category, including “Who’s the worst killer of them all?” Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, was trying to outdo Norway’s Anders Breivik. 

Lightning strikes Golden Gate Bridge. Photo: Charles Hall

 

MURDERERS: BORN OR MADE?

~ “There’s no doubt that parenting plays an enormous role in child development. Research has found that abuse, negative parenting, and prolonged malnutrition are linked to a proclivity toward physical violence.

But there is also important research pointing to the role biology plays in predisposing some individuals to psychopathy, including violence. The BBC reported that neuroscientist Adrian Raine discovered a decrease in activity of the pre-frontal cortex in the brains of murderers, suggesting a genetic predisposition.

And research by Elizabeth Cauffman and colleagues from the University of California found that good parenting doesn’t always lead to the outcomes we imagine. In fact, anti-social encouragement by a romantic partner was correlated with the highest level of offending in youth, even when warm relationships endured with parents.

NPR reported that there are additional factors that play into a person’s development, perhaps explaining why not all children raised by the same parents are violent. Children in the same families have distinct personalities and varied interests that elicit different parenting. Plus, children experience independent social environments outside the home.

Perhaps the complexity of the matter is described best by neurobiologist James Fallon, who studies the brains of psychopathic killers. He explained in a TED Talk that an interaction occurs between environment and genetics. When presented with a particular brain image, he noted it was clearly a psychopath’s brain. What was most shocking—it was his own brain. Fallon, though, is not a killer, and had a happy upbringing. But he has a family history of homicide. The first documented murder of a mother by a son was committed by a member of his family, several generations back.

Fallon said that, although some individuals, mostly male, have genes or brain damage that make them more susceptible to becoming murderers, their childhood experiences can make all the difference. For instance, the MAOA gene in particular can give rise to a violent individual if the gene is combined with experiences of brutality.
Where do murderers come from? Like all the big questions in mental health, an either-or perspective leaves little room for complexity. In the great genetics versus environment debate, the making of murderers — indeed, the making of us — requires that we look somewhere in-between.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma/201807/the-making-murderer
Since I'd rather not post a photo of a murderer, let me share this feline beauty instead. There was no caption, but I'm pretty sure it's a snow leopard. The tail is a classic. 

*


“Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.” ~ Bruno Bettelheim

*


THE PRIEST AND THE JESTER (the quest for the absolute and the flight from it)

 
~ “A Dionysian celebration of postmodern ideas is found in the early (1959) work of the Marxist revisionist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. His famous essay “The Priest and the Jester,” published in the early 60s, speaks about “chronic conflict in philosophy which seems to be able to marshal its history: the conflict between the quest for the absolute and a flight from it [dogmatism and skepticism].

In every era the jester’s philosophy exposes as doubtful what seems most unshakable, reveals the contradictions in what appears obvious and incontrovertible, derides common sense and reads sense into the absurd . . . The attitude of the jester consists in constant reflection about whether perhaps the opposite may not be right. . . . There are more priests than jesters in a king’s court.”

The jester, representing this postmodern flight, is puer eternus: a sceptic observer of social order, one who is active, critical, and questioning all that appears self-evident. He stands for imagination, pluralism, individuality, playfulness and points to the tension between ideals.

The priest is the senex, a believer in a harmonious system of values; he guards the absolute, defends orthodoxy, tradition and sanctity. “The priest and the jester both violate the mind: the priest with the garotte of catechism, the jester with the needle of mockery,” Kolakowski concludes.

“The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of truths accepted by tradition as ultimate and unquestionable. The jester is the impertinent upstart who questions everything we accept as self-evident. If he belonged to good society, he could at best be merely a purveyor of dinner-party scandal. In order to point out the unobviousness of its obviousnesses and the nonultimacy of its ultimacies, he must be outside it, observing it from a distance; but if he is to be impertinent to it, and find out what it holds sacred, he must also frequent it.”

The essay asks how we approach the facts and events of our everyday lives: as the absolute and final reality, to be taken at its direct, empirical value, or as sections of a broader path at the end of which lies peace and consolation: pennies in a piggy-bank, saved up toward our (or mankind’s) eternal retirement. In the latter case we run the risk of dismissing present facts and present values as insignificant; in the former, of dismissing those that go beyond the present and require, for their fulfillment, a certain amount of effort and preparation on our part.” ~

~ The Postmodern Challenge: Perspectives East and West
Oriana:

I think we have plenty of jesters. It’s much easier to be a jester. There are secular priests, e.g. those who are really serious about ecology — anyone devoted to a “holy cause.”

And maybe there is a priest inside every jester, though it may or may not work the other way. Some priests — and I include "secular priests" who fanatically serve a cause, ready to die and/or kill for it — seem to have no sense of humor. They are really scary. Jesters can be too much when you want to have a serious conversation, but they aren't scary the way "priests" can be.

By the way, an intelligent jester has to be a philosopher — we are not talking about juvenile humor here. I've met only 2 philosophical former priests, ex-Jesuits both. The church was an intellectual prison, so they left. Interestingly, neither became a jester, and the one I met in America was quite serious about abolishing mass — “let's see if anyone misses it.” (I certainly didn’t, and I never met a lapsed Catholic who did — especially now, that Vatican 2 ruined the liturgy. On the other hand, I’ve met former Protestants who said they missed the music.)
Laughing Jester, circa 1500 (note the prototype of eyeglasses the jester is holding)
 
FAT LITTLE PROFESSOR OR GRANDMOTHER?

~ In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as it happens in dreams, his soul turns into a “fat little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.

Jung says, “I too believe I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”

The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.” ~

(I found this in my notes, without source information.) The soul as a “fat little professor”? Why, this is rather everyone’s grandmother. I can’t imagine a childhood without the benefit of a grandmother setting before you a bowl of barley soup, enriched with sour cream (may grandmother put sour cream in all soups). If a guest happened to drop in, even a stranger, s/he would also be served soup. My grandmother’s motto was that if a guest steps through the door, they must be fed.

But she wasn’t just an archetypal earth-goddess or wise crone. If she woke up during the night (she was an Auschwitz survivor, and sometimes had nightmares), she’d simply reach for a book, e.g. Quo Vadis, about life in Ancient Rome, and read herself to sleep. She had only fourth-grade education, but she was a great reader. Dickens’s “Little Dorrit” was her great favorite, and became mine too.

So how did I turn out? I define myself as a soup-making intellectual.

an image from Jung’s Red Book

FOR ME TO LOVE HIM, GOD WOULD HAVE TO BE A DOG (or a cat)

 
I woke up from a dream about all kinds of practical burdens, including, at least in part, being a caretaker, cooking for a sick woman. I try to be both efficient and gracious, not a word of complaint, doing my duty to another human being in need of help. And then not too far off there is a neighbor’s cat (not any actual cat I know, but in the dream, it’s as if I recognized the animal). I pick up the cat and hold her in my arms, cooing (the owners are standing by), O my queen, how is she doing? Just cuddling her, feeling total love.

In the dream, the explosion of joy and love for the cat was so powerful that I woke up still feeling that love for the kitty I didn’t even truly know — it was simply the softness and beauty of a cat. But to be filled with so much love, so much love . . .

Next I wondered: could I love a child like that? Could I love a dependent, demanding human being the way I love not only cats but animals in general — not seeing them in terms of stress and demands. Their sweet faces. The way we grant them innocence — it would be supremely silly to be judgmental toward a cat, even if it makes a mess. The way we instantly understands when Walt Whitman says he could live among the animals and how none make them sick worrying about their sins. These days it’s other worries, but we get the drift.

And of course I know that yes, I could love a child. Nature takes care of that — bonding takes place, and the more you invest, the greater the bond. And still a little voice remains skeptical: could I really love a human being with such pure love? And I'm reminded of the women I’ve met who talk to their dogs — especially beautiful huskies and German shepherds — in a much more affectionate way than they talk to their husbands or children . . .

And now for something entirely different. The talk about the apocalyptic sects like the Adventists made me ponder that I said "Our Father" a gazillion times and never stopped to think that "Thy Kingdom come" meant praying for the end of the world and the Second Coming. As a child I assumed “the Kingdom” meant a world where everyone was kind, right here on earth — no Armageddon first, no Rapture, none of this — just people becoming kinder.

But this is the prayer that Jesus himself allegedly told his followers to recite, and being an apocalyptic preacher he meant the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, with the earth eventually to be consumed by fire etc. The earth was not seen as beautiful and magnificent — it was seen as sinful, corrupt. Not just humanity was fallen, but all of nature (this goes back to the story of Adam and Eve, and the odd failure of the Flood to correct this general corruption). The church didn't go much into the details of how the world would end, except for the Last Judgment, where Jesus would be the judge (after preaching no judgment, but those contradictions were too many to bother with), and no, there would be no mercy for those who happened to be born in India, the fools. Or, unforgivably, in China. Or even in Sweden for that matter — those heretics (my religion lessons took place before the church started growing toothless, and admitting non-Catholics to heaven).

And yet, in spite of the threat of hell (even if you were a Catholic), the first and supreme commandment was to “love god above all else.”

Perhaps this is my most heretical thought yet: for me to love god, god would have to be a beautiful cat or dog.

I love beautiful furry creatures that respond to nurturing with affection. But even if they are relatively aloof, their beauty can be rewarding enough. As for god, the only relationship the church presented to me was master-slave. I can't love anyone I fear. And constantly flattering god is also a form of fear (think of North Korea). It's not nurturing. The young Rilke had an interesting notion of a "neighbor god" to whom he, the poet, acted as a caretaker, but that's not a true love relationship either. It's quite interesting the way we as a society have become loving to pets as never before.

BIOLOGY: MYTH VERSUS KNOWLEDGE
 
~ “It is not in man’s ‘nature’ to be violent. It is in our nature to have empathy.
Perhaps one of the most persistent stereotypes about the nature of man that the research is constantly challenging is the notion that man is somehow wired for violence or “naturally” inclined towards conflict and warfare. In fact, what the research consistently identifies is that individuals—whether male or female—have to be systematically indoctrinated into a culture of violence before they can effectively engage in killing behaviors. Soldiers are conditioned, not born.

For a compelling and exhaustive account of this reality, I recommend On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War & Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. The research that he presents defies the traditional—and historical—way we are socialized to think about warfare and society.

While we are not naturally inclined towards violence, we are in fact wired for empathy. The discovery of the mirror neuron system in the brain presents some interesting and compelling notions of our capabilities as humans. And in fact, this system is not even exclusive to humans—it was first discovered in monkeys. Mirror neurons are a subset of neurons in the brain that fire not only when an individual is engaging in a given behavior but also when an individual is observing someone else engaging in a behavior. These neurons can’t tell the difference between seeing and doing—they fire either way. This reflects an inherently social system within the brain. The mirror neuron system wires us to connect with others socially, to learn through observation and imitation—and also to empathize with the experience of others.

Men are the more biologically vulnerable of the two sexes. 
 
An XX combination indicates a female; XY indicates a male. The male, from conception, is the more fragile of the two sexes. Estimates are that 160 males are conceived for every 100 females. However, so many males are spontaneously aborted that only 105 males are born for every 100 females. A similar pattern appears in neonatal life and continues throughout development, until women finally outnumber men, reversing the original ratio.

Structurally and functionally, females resist disease better than males; the male is more subject to hereditary disease and defect; Environmental elements expose the male to greater hazards; Females are born with and retain biological superiority over males.

Race is a social construct, not a biological one. 
 
If a perversity of basic facts regarding sex differentiation has been used to promote male dominance across the globe, a similar social hierarchy regarding race has also been rooted in junk science. While there are biological underpinnings to skin color, the notion of race is not in fact rooted in biology.

The body is self-healing.

Dr. Lissa Rankin (2013) author of the revolutionary Mind over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, does an exhaustive review of all the ways the body is equipped to repair itself. Moreover, she traces the significant role that our stress response and psychology play in the infections and diseases that we develop. In offering a summary of her work, she shares that, “the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms fully function when the nervous system is in relaxation response.”

Haters can experience reform.
 
We are living in a dangerous time where we are seeing the rise of hate groups — white supremacists, rebranded as “alt right” but still promoting the same old-fashioned hatreds are re-emerging all across the globe. Despite this, there are also organizations that are attempting to rehabilitate individuals who have been indoctrinated into a culture of hate.

The organization Life After Hate, for instance, attempts to counter hatred and discrimination through compassion and other pro-social techniques. This organization was founded by former violent extremists in 2011, and has reportedly helped more than 100 men and women who were affiliated with hate groups leave these organizations and seek a better life that is not defined by hatred or violence.

Happy people don’t plant bombs, and happy people don’t behead people, and happy people don’t paint swastikas on synagogues. Disenfranchised, lonely, self-loathing people do that. There is something missing from their life, something they didn’t get, whether it was as a child or maybe they were abused or maybe they came from a broken home or something was missing.

In summary, I would like to close with this quote taken from research on mirror neurons. Neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese shares that, “’It seems we’re wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different’” and concludes by identifying that, “’at the root, as humans we identify the person we’re facing as someone like ourselves’.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-first-impression/201807/facts-about-human-behavior-defy-our-assumptions



ending on beauty:
 
Dew-stained bamboo seems like jade,
and blown curtain-shadow like waves.

As I grieve over falling leaves, bright
moons in the courtyard grow countless.

Po-Chu-i, tr David Hinton
 

MILOSZ: PROSTITUTES WHO BELIEVE IN LOVE; COCO: A SECULAR LAND OF THE DEAD; MEMORY AND ETERNITY; THE FEAR OF THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO REMAIN SINGLE; MALARIA VACCINE FIGHTS CANCER

Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead, 1944
 
*
HALLOWEEN BIRCHES

Moonlight was silvering
the palm tree on my lawn.
It lit up the long arc of one frond.

After many years in California,
my first thought: A weeping birch?
I have a birch tree on my lawn?

And birch groves left behind a lifetime
ago came to me, bowed and flowed —
cloudy branches of that Celtic night

when the blindfold of time slips loose
and we see behind and beyond —
just as now that I can barely walk,

 memories of mountain hikes
alight on my mind: Angel’s Landing,
Never Summer, Dead Man’s Pass.

Surprised by the brilliant crescent,
I walked on. The last of Halloween
children dressed as flame-red

devilkins or pink ballerina angels
were shooed by mothers into cars.
Only the souls of trees walked with me —

birches and beeches, maples, pines.
I whispered to them: Remember me.
They replied: It’s not important to be

remembered — only to be beautiful.  
The moon flowed in the sky,
a slender canoe: Get in, not later but now.
 
~ Oriana

*

Mary:

As always I am most fascinated by concerns with memory and remembrance. We already know what a tricky and unreliable process remembering is, no two people living through the same set of circumstances, even in the same family, the same house, will remember things the same way. Often their memories, and the feelings associated with them, are widely divergent, astonishingly unlike, enough to make those involved wonder how such difference is even possible.

We also know suggestion can color or even implant false memories, and those false memories will seem as solid and authentic as any others, so real no one can convince the individual the events remembered never happened. And apparently we can conflate stories read or seen or heard with our memories, adopting and believing they are our own, cherishing them like cuckoo's eggs dropped into our nest, never questioning their shape or origin.

In the poem the speaker sees a shape, a movement, that triggers a cascade of memories — memories of beautiful lost things, the trees she knew in a long lost geography, the stations of glorious hikes enjoyed by a younger, able self. There is enormous grief here for the present, for the one who now “can barely walk.” She asks the souls of the trees she remembers to remember her, but with the wisdom of creatures who do not recognize time, they rebuff her, and state “it's not important/ to be remembered — only to be beautiful” — inviting her into that slender canoe the moon has become, the present moment, “not later but now.”

The lesson of the poem also answers that desire to “live on” in either what one has produced, or in the memories of the living. Memories are undependable, they shift and fade, and soon there will be no one left to remember you or what you may have said, done or created. Like the skeletons in the movie Coco [Oriana: see below], you will soon fade away entirely, like a puff of smoke.

Is this reason for despair, or for joy? Think of that moon, those trees, that slender silver canoe — all we can be certain of — the present moment. All that is beauty is created and apprehended in that present, not begging authentication from the past or justification from the future. The joy, the beauty, the meaning, all born and contained  in the present act — enough in itself, even without leaving echoes to reverberate through the future. This is not ‘all we have’ but the all we have. Like the universe in a grain of sand, there is eternity in the moment.

 
Oriana:

Thank you, Mary, for this thoughtful commentary.

Some may find this an odd poem, since it presents beautiful memories — those of mountains and trees, the great northern trees. And I’d be the last one to argue that such memories are not  important. But they are important “in the moment,” to the person experiencing them. The beauty of the world has always been of enormous importance to me, and I feel blessed to enjoy it more than once: first when encountering the actuality of it, and later, in memory — even the pale, inexact ghost of that beauty.

Dante claimed that there is no greater suffering than remembering happiness in times of misery. It’s not been that way for me. The mountains are now for me the “Mountains of No More,” as Rilke put it in The Moon (see “ending on beauty”). And at a superficial  glance, it may seem pure loss. But it is also the wealth I can view again and again in memory and dreams.

 It's so literal for me, those mountains of No More . . . I used to hike in the Eastern Sierra, in Lassen National Park, in Desolation Wilderness (near Lake Tahoe and Squaw Valley), in the Rockies, in Zion National Park . . . But of course Rilke means metaphorical mountains and abilities. I remember a woman with a neurological disorder telling of her grief when she came across photos of herself from just a few years back when she was still healthy, “traveling, lecturing at conferences, meeting people, laughing, blowing out birthday candles” — and more; the more things she mentioned, the more grievous it sounded. So many losses, almost all at once: it's not a raven who says Nevermore, it's your own body. If a raven, then with an MD after his name.

Still, I hope that even that woman will eventually look at the same photos and think how beautiful and energetic she used to be, how much she accomplished — and smile with pleasure. Her active life ended, perhaps too soon, but she did have what sounded like a rich, productive life. It ended, but it did happen. Likewise, who hasn’t seen the elderly in particular glow with pleasure when looking at old photographs? They don’t seem to be thinking that now they can no longer go fishing or camping. Once they did — and that was wonderful, and that is enough.

Being remembered after you are gone — that is a completely separate issue. We are no longer there to be having the experience. And that seems a good thing: we are spared the disappointment of seeing how little we are remembered by the living, busy as they are with the current demands of life. There is hardly enough time to cultivate deep friendships with the living; the dead get crumbs, scraps, bits of not-quite-right family stories and old jokes. And then not even that — life rushes on like a mountain stream that certainly can’t be stepped into twice.

But is that a tragedy? No, it’s part of the beauty and the flow, the eternal flow.
Here I am on Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park, on a rock bridge, a top of the arch, with sheer precipice on each side. That’s the closest I came to dancing on the head of the pin — though my secret desire was not to dance but to crawl on all fours for more balance (not that there was any real danger — the rock bridge is fairly wide). 


**

“COCO” (THE PIXAR MOVIE) AND REMEMBRANCE
Oriana:

Funny, I recently went to a free screening of a movie that was meant to be a “family event.” The movie was Coco, which uses the pre-Christian (or in any case, non-Christian) ideas of an afterlife, in a mostly comedic fashion (by the way, Coco is not the boy protagonist’s nickname, as I’d assumed, but that of his great-grandmother, who’s descending into dementia). Well, there wasn’t a single child in the sparse audience, only older adults. Perhaps people with children had already seen the movie and didn’t think it worth it seeing again (I agree). Or perhaps it’s precisely the older crowd who have an interest in this kind of subject matter. 

The skeleton humor was pretty pathetic, but there were some good touches. The guide dog’s name was Dante. The Land of the Dead was completely secular, with bureaucracy and law enforcement, concerts and fiestas. More important, there was the idea of a “second death” — a kind of vaporization of a skeleton that happened when the last living person who remembered the deceased one either forgot him or died.

“And then what?” asks Miguel, the movie’s young protagonist. “Nobody knows,” one of the skeletons replies. But visually it’s pretty obvious: it’s extinction without a trace.

So being remembered is of crucial importance in “Coco.” If you are to continue existing  —which appears to be an unquestioned good thing even in the Land of the Dead — your photo needs to be on the “ofrenda.” The word means an “offering.” It’s a family altar on which you place the photographs of your dead, along with fruit, drink, flowers, and candles. If the photo of the departed one is on the ofrenda, she or he is allowed to visit the family on the Day of the Dead.

No actual interaction with the living is possible, but the dead are said to enjoy sniffing the food and whatever else may be on the altar. They can’t talk, they remain invisible and untouchable; their touch cannot be felt by the living; but they get to see the family members as they are now. It seems that nothing in the Land of the Dead can compare to the thrill of visiting the living — possible only as long as at least one person remembers you. The movie’s theme song is “Remember Me.”

The idea that the “real death” is being completely forgotten is not unique, of course. Freud came up with the idea of an “immortality project” — accomplishing something that will assure you are remembered. At least as long as you are alive, you can enjoy the notion that you will “live on” in people’s memories, or your name and/or work will likewise “live on” after you are gone. Since Freud was an atheist, he didn’t believe in the survival of individual consciousness — once you are gone, you will not know whether or not you are remembered, and you will certainly not be happy or suffer accordingly. But in Coco, the skeletons do have consciousness and suffer greatly if they feel the memory of them is fading in the land of the living. They start feeling weaker and weaker  . . .  and then “poof” . . . they are gone. Perhaps being forgotten is one of the reasons why “oblivion” is one of the euphemisms for death: we forget everything, and also, soon enough, we are forgotten.  



WE ARE OF THE MOMENT; WE BELONG TO OUR MOMENT

Personally I don’t care if I'm remembered. When I was younger I used to feel sorrow at the thought of being quickly and totally forgotten, but then another thought arose and took hold: “We are of the moment.” Even before my mother died I fully reconciled myself to the idea of being forgotten — but so what? We are of the moment; we belong to the moment — our moment, now, not some time in the glorious future. The world changes so quickly that if we were to visit even as soon as ten-fifteen years after we die, we’d hardly recognize it — and we’d likely be disturbed by the changes. (Someone else’s furniture in MY house? The art I loved removed, the plants I nurtured replaced by cacti, my magnificent trees reduced to stumps . . . )

Nor would we necessarily feel any kinship with those we used to know — they too would be changed. And who are all these strangers all around, so ridiculously young, understanding nothing about what’s important in life?

And — this in particular has to be faced without wincing — all my writing tossed, forgotten. The supposed beauty and wisdom in my poems? Gone, gone utterly. True, there is some chance that something I said or wrote has anonymously gone forward, and still exists in someone’s consciousness — but I’ll never know it.

Being remembered is vastly overestimated, I think. Well, yes, if you happen to be Emily Dickinson, your literary afterlife is more exciting than your actual life has been. But she is an extremely rare case — and besides, she can’t know and enjoy her fame. The time to share friendship and work is now. Beauty and wisdom? The time to share them is now, in this moment whose children we are.

“To work is to live without dying” — this is one of Rilke’s powerful gifts to me, teaching me what to do if I that “orphaned” feeling ever descends on me. And I also believe, for no particular reason other than the beauty of the idea, that all the love we’ve received has to be “recycled,” or given back to others. I can listen with great attention; I can express empathy; I can make my neighbors glad when they look at my living, breathing plants — and I can — I must — do it now.
Matisse: Music, 1939

*

LOYALTY TO THE FAMILY OR TO ONE’S TRUE SELF?

Coco is a strange, haunting movie — and not only because much of it takes place in the Land of the Dead. It’s a movie that contradicts itself. On the one hand, it can be seen as a sentimental celebration of the idea that “nothing is as important as the family.” This includes remembering the departed family members and building a festive, generous ofrenda. On the other hand, Miguel’s family with their shoe-making business is presented as a prison in which it’s impossible to develop one’s true talents. That’s why Coco’s father, Hector, now a fading skeleton on the verge of forgetting-caused extinction, left the household — to become a musician. He is a charming picaresque character who at one point tries to fool the checkpoint guard by dressing as Frida Kahlo.

All ends well when the dead relatives give Miguel the permission and blessing to sing and play the guitar. Thus the importance of the family and the importance of “becoming who you really are” are simultaneously upheld. But why should Miguel need their permission? True, it’s better by far to have a family that’s supportive of your talents, but if you don’t have such luck, should you instead resign yourself to drudging in the family business? The real hero here is Hector, who rebelled and left.

True, he did pay a price — missing his little girl, Coco, to whom he used to play and sing at bedtime. There are no gods in this movie (though arguably there are goddesses — the family matriarchs), but I'm tempted to quote the saying that all gods are jealous gods and all gods require sacrifice. The god/goddess of the family is very powerful, but so are the gods of creativity. The family tradition is shoe making. But should the dead have power over the living?

For all its pious praise of the greater importance of the family, Coco’s message seems forced, contrived (just as making if an English-language movie is a built-in contradiction). The family is tyrannical and narrow-minded, an obstacle that would keep Miguel small in the small town of Santa Cecilia (an oxymoron right there, since this is patron saint of music). And is remembering the dead anywhere as important as engagement with the living — especially those who are your peers and companions following a similar path?

Sure, coming from a strong family culture myself, one in which visiting the graves is an important tradition, I know the wistful richness of immersing yourself for a while in the bygone lives and knowing the stories — a duel, perhaps, or wartime adventures. But I also know the greater importance of cultivating both your vocation and your friendship with your true family — what Kurt Vonnegut would call your “karass,” or soulmates.

Come to think of it, at one point in the movie, aren’t musicians called Miguel’s “true family”? The movie slides over this quickly, and next to, say, the abuelita’s loading Miguel’s plate with excess, unwanted tamales, that moment tends to dissolve in the overall imaginative spectacle of the skeletons, animal spirit guides, the uncovering of a past crime, and more, this “true family” statement may pass unnoticed. But the movie, like any work of art, presents the enchanted world of the imagination, and no plate of tamales can compete with that.

But really good chile rellenos . . . no, let me not go there. 



*

MATERNAL FEMINISM/CARE FEMINISM: THE THEFT OF WOMEN’S UNPAID WORK?
 
~ ““Ever since I became a mother (years ago now) and discovered that I really liked motherhood but that it was doing meaningful damage to my career, social status, and income, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a book about an idea sometimes called ‘maternal feminism’ and sometimes ‘care feminism,’” Shulevitz told me. “I didn’t want to write one of those dry public policy books calling for more family-friendly policies and such. I wanted to write about this old subject in a new way, and to figure out how to accomplish that quixotic task, I had to start reading. And I discovered a whole strain of feminist argument that had somehow gotten lost.”

It seemed to me that the focus on paid work was blinding us to what I was starting to see as a more fundamental basis of gender inequality: the theft of the value of women’s unpaid work that has been going on for centuries and centuries.”

“As it turned out, there are a lot of thinkers, male as well as female, who have fruitfully analyzed discrimination against care as a human activity, and caregivers in general, and many of these thinkers have been left out of the feminist canon, in part because they don’t fit into the narrative of women’s emancipation from the prison of domesticity,” Shulevitz continued. “And a great number lived in the nineteenth century, perhaps because it wasn’t assumed back then that domesticity necessarily was a prison.”

Ernestine Rose, a Jewish, communitarian socialist atheist was even more radical in her views on equality than many “ultraists” of the time, lecturing against the church and in favor of abolition, and lobbying successfully for The Married Women’s Property Act. Her socialist education helped Rose to see that husbands grew rich on womens’ unpaid labor. “To the Owenites,” Shulevitz said, “in theory anyway, domestic labor was just another kind of labor, as important as farm labor or craft work. And to other reformers, the home was just one part of the general apparatus of female oppression, and far from the worst part. (Sexual slavery through marriage was.)”

I wondered what more recent feminist actions or movements she felt inspired by. “I love the 1970s feminist Marxist group called Wages for Housework. These women called for the overthrow of a capitalist order that was subsidized, in their view, by the unpaid slog of homemaking and, yes, sexual services. ‘Not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work,’ they wrote in their most widely-read manifesto. ‘Slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.’

At the time, liberal feminists accused them of wanting to push women back into domestic drudgery, but they denied it.” When Shulevitz asked Silvia Federici, a founder of the New York chapter of Wages for Housework, what it was the movement actually wanted—wages? in what form?—she said the real aim of the movement was to make people ask themselves, Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?” ~

from “Judith Shulevitz and forgotten feminisms” — New York Book Review, November 3, 2018

Oriana:

Again, this is a very difficult topic. In modern age, motherhood is voluntary. As one young mother assured me, “it’s the hardest work in the world, but also the most fulfilling.” With adequate help, it doesn’t have to be as stressful, but all agree that it’s never easy. And many would agree that once a woman becomes a mother, her contribution to her professional field will be less.

But since motherhood itself is an enormous contribution, shouldn’t we seek a way out of this dilemma? Since I have no answer other than “make quality childcare widely available” — which I know is an important but only partial solution — I will stop right here. But yes, we should ask ourselves if producing cars is more valuable than producing children. 

WHY SOME FIND THE RISE OF SINGLE PEOPLE FRIGHTENING  
 
~ “All around the world, more and more people are living single. Even those who do eventually marry are often getting around to it later in life than ever before. That scares some people.

I think what frightens them is all that freedom that single people have. If single people are not tethered to other people by the obligations that come with marriage and family, who knows what they will do? Won’t they just run off and do nothing but play? Won’t they just care about themselves and pay no attention to anyone else?

Pundits like to issue dire warnings like that. For example, an opinion writer for the Washington Post said that we are now engaged in “a headlong . . . pursuit of individual freedom that demands no concern for the wants and needs of others, or of society as a whole.” Because of our ill-fated choices, she thinks that we are less happy and “desperately, desperately lonely.”

I’m tempted to make fun of her for all that, but at some level, I understand her trepidation. Single people — or at least the ones with sufficient resources — have choices about how to live their lives. They could have said to the rest of the world: “Screw you, I’m doing what I want, and I don’t care about you.”

But here’s the thing: They didn’t. On average, single people are the ones tending to their friends and neighbors and siblings and parents. They are the ones showing up when other people need help.

On average, it is the couples who move in together or get married who look at each other and say, “We are the world. Everyone else can just take care of themselves.” Again, these are just averages, and plenty of single people stick to themselves, and plenty of married people take care of people other than each other. But on the whole, it is marriage, not single life, that is a threat to “the wants and needs of others, or of society as a whole.”

Sociologists have a name for this. They call it “greedy marriage.” Marriage sucks up all the caring and the attentiveness and the resources for itself.
 
So freedom isn’t making single people selfish or uncaring. But is it making them miserable and lonely, as the critics claim?

You might think, intuitively, that the single people who are most likely to feel lonely are the ones who are living alone. But if you compare people who live alone to people who live with others, making sure that the two groups are similar to each other in important ways, such as how much money they have, the results are startling: It is the people who live alone who are less likely to be lonely. Maybe that’s because they make more of an effort to get out of the house and to stay connected to the people who matter to them.

What about the claim that all this freedom-seeking is making people miserable? For that, I can tell you about a study of more than 200,000 people from 31 European nations. They were all asked how much they valued things like being free, being creative, and trying new things. They were also asked about their happiness.

The researcher, Professor Elyakim Kislev, found three things: First, the single people in those 31 nations did value freedom more than married people. Second, the people who valued freedom more were not more miserable than those who did not care as much about it. Just the opposite — they were happier. That was true for both the single people and the married people. Third, and perhaps most interestingly, single people got even more happiness out of their valuing of freedom than married people did. 

The correlation between valuing freedom and being happy was even stronger for the single people than for the married people. The study did not tell us why that happened, but maybe it is because single people squeeze every last ounce of joy from their freedom. They recognize their freedom as a great opportunity to live their best life, and they are not about to squander it.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/201810/the-rise-single-people-why-some-find-it-scary

Chicago: Autumn in Millennium Park

Oriana:

The finding that I can’t get out of my mind is that married men are in general healthier and live longer, but that doesn’t hold for married women. On average, single women seem to do better. Also, married women become disillusioned with the marriage sooner then men; it’s mostly women who file for divorce (70%). That’s why we sometimes come across the notion that there is His marriage and Her marriage, and the two can be vastly different — sometimes the man has no idea how unhappy his wife is until he returns from work one day only to find a note on the table instead of dinner (I personally know one such story).

Not that single men are wretched losers. That’s a myth similar to that of a “dried-up spinster.” Single people of both sexes are the ones who do the most socializing. They spend the most time cultivating their human (and often animal) connections. Rather than going to grandchildren’s birthday parties they tend to their interests and hobbies.

Of course I'm not saying that everyone should be single. Some people do better living alone, while others prefer to live with a partner. And these preferences are not set in stone: they may change depending on the stage of life. The point is that there should be no fear of either marriage or staying single — no discrimination and no stigma. I am glad that terms like “spinster” (aka “old maid”) or “old bachelor” have fallen into disuse — a reminder of the archaic times when marriage was practically forced on everyone, the willing and the unwilling. 

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“Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.” ~ Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“Money bags”; Cathedral of St. Lazare at Autun, 12th century  

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MILOSZ: PROSTITUTES WHO BELIEVE IN LOVE, COMPENSATORY DREAMS OF SLAVES (redux)

 
~ “The division into soul and body was only one of many attempts at naming this condition that eludes naming [the “physiological-spiritual duality of man”]. This is where all the treatises on ars moriendi belong, on taking leave of the body and finding a haven in the soul, the dance of skeletons, the charnel houses of white bones that used to be one of the attractions of city strolls in Paris, and certainly the brothels on the ground floor of the Sorbonne’s theological schools. Eros and Thanatos: lovely words, but their association simply proves that they both signified something terrifyingly elemental — birth and death.

The question remains: To what extent can one think completely nakedly, that is, rejecting all imagination higher than physiology? One should ask the prostitutes about this, since they have a great fund of knowledge about the comedy and misery of the simplest instincts, but that would be fruitless since in general they are people entangled in their own ambitions and dreams and often sentimental. Simone Weil considered their profession the equivalent of slavery and attributed it solely to poverty, which would certainly have fit London in 1862 as described by Dostoyevski: hordes of prostitutes, many of them minors, the cult of Baal on whose altar England was sacrificing her lower classes. Simone Weil’s opinions, exaggerated though they are, still hit the mark when she speaks of the compensatory dreams that are peculiar to slaves; the slave’s incessant search for imaginary solace shields him from reality.
 
One way or another, consciousness of the body constructs its own fata morgana, and it is impossible to descend to an animal level. Nor is it possible to remain for long in the spiritual realm; the desire to spoil sublimity, to stick out one’s tongue, has belonged to literature for a long time. My favorite scene from Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”: during a theological dispute at the dinner table, a hot potato drops into someone’s codpiece.” ~ “A Year of the Hunter”

So perhaps Dostoyevski, always criticized for his supposedly sentimentalized prostitutes who believed in the power of love, was in fact being realistic?
Later Milosz also mentions the compensatory dreams of the terminally ill, and while he doesn’t condemn those who delude themselves with dreams, he’s not indulgent toward them either. I think that the brain deals with hardship in certain automatic ways not under our control (in extreme cases including hallucinations). Beautiful fantasies, images of a different life — of being loved and nurtured, of being held perhaps the way you’ve never been held in your life — may be a kind of automatic poetry that decides between life and despair.

Our unconscious determines if life is worth living. Amazingly, that decision need not be “evidence-based” — or we’d have much less survival. Or rather, should “evidence-based” exclude the visions created by the brain? They too have a certain reality. And even if the fantasy fails, and the freezing man who hallucinates a warm, welcoming house still ends up freezing to death, though he keeps walking (or thinks he is walking) toward the lit window of a house that isn’t there — even then, that’s an easier death than a “sober” waiting for the end — what Milosz might call “naked thinking.”

 I don’t disparage the body; I don’t believe in body/mind dualism. The idea of a soul independent of the body, wandering somewhere on its own soul feet or wings, belongs back in the era of tribal shamans (interesting that some cultures did not have the concept of a soul except as breath, e.g. ancient Israel). But I fully recognize that the source of my survival is the life of the mind, including my delight in beauty. That nourishment is as important to me as food.

Sunrise in Destin, Florida; Photo: Cristobal Serran-Pagan

Most dreams seem to be anxiety dreams. But now and then a person wakes up and says, “I had the most beautiful dream.” And that dream can create a sense of well-being for hours, sometimes days — we wake up with a smile, and the smile keeps returning. Perhaps the brain needs healing from the relentless harshness of life; perhaps a woman who’s never given flowers dreams of receiving the most extravagant roses. But a lot of the time it’s hardly that simple, whether it’s nightmares or beautiful dreams.

In his doctoral dissertation, Jung tried to explain the fusion of reality with psychic reality (which includes not only fantasies and dreams, but also stories we’ve heard from others, and books and movies that have deeply affected us) by positing an automatic, unconscious process that he calls “cryptomnesia.” Hence also unintended plagiarism. I wish Jung had pursued this line of research, but neuroscience hardly even existed back when the mentally ill were treated with cold baths (aka “hydrotherapy”).

So . . . what is this thing called mind, or consciousness? Above all, it’s not a thing — it’s a process: an emergent phenomenon that depends on brain function. At this point, we are not able to go further; saying that neurons fire together in certain brain regions doesn’t explain very much. But it explains enough to erase the idea of a soul as a thing that inhabits the body and then goes off somewhere after the body is gone. It is high time to say goodbye to thousands of years of that wishful thinking.

Yes, it’s all “physiology,” but physiology at the level that eludes our current comprehension. And given the stunning complexity of the human brain, perhaps we’ll never understand even a fraction of what goes on. Thankfully it’s still possible to take solace in using one’s mind, even if the process dies as the brain dies — it ceases as the flame ceases when the fuel is exhausted. The flame doesn’t “go” anywhere — it just ceases. But before then . . . it gives a lovely light.
An example of “skeleton art” that Milosz mentions: Ars bene moriendi, France, 1480

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If you wish to find out more about Jung's concept of cryptomnesia, please click on the link below:

https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/jung-in-land-of-dead.html


OLIVER SACKS ON HALLUCINATIONS 
 
“I think intense emotion of any sort can produce a hallucination” ~ Oliver Sacks
 
(In context) “With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing — in perception — have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination. But hallucination, in a way, simulates perception, and the perceptual parts of the brain become active. ... There's obviously a very, very strong passionate feeling of love and loss with bereavement hallucinations, and I think intense emotion of any sort can produce a hallucination.” ~ Oliver Sacks

Oriana:

I’ve experienced bereavement hallucinations: seeing the dead beloved in a crowd. For me it was always in a crowd, but one man I met told me of seeing his dead love walking in front of him on an empty sidewalk. In both cases, the person died by committing suicide, so emotions were particularly strong.

In case all this talk about dying and oblivion has gotten you down, let’s detox with a reliable image



MORE AMERICANS SUPPORTED HITLER THAN YOU MAY THINK
 
~ “Hart’s new book Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States argues that the threat of Nazism in the United States before World War II was greater than we generally remember today, and that those forces offer valuable lessons decades later — and not just because part of that story is the history of the “America First” idea, born of pre-WWII isolationism and later reborn as a slogan for now-President Donald Trump.

“There’s certainly a raw and visceral shock to seeing swastikas displayed in American streets,” Hart tells TIME. “But this is a topic I’d been working on for quite a while at that point, and while it wasn’t something I expected, it was a trend I’d been observing. I wasn’t terribly shocked but there’s still a visceral reaction when you see that kind of symbolism displayed in the 21st century.”

Hart, who came to the topic via research on the eugenics movement and the history of Nazi sympathy in Britain, says he realized early on that there was a lot more to the American side of that story than most textbooks acknowledged. Some of the big names might get mentioned briefly — the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, or the highly public German American Bund organization — but in general, he says, the American narrative of the years leading up to World War II has elided the role of those who supported the wrong side. And yet, American exchange students went to Germany and returned with glowing reviews, while none other than Charles Lindbergh denounced Jewish people for pushing the U.S. toward unnecessary war. In its various expressions, the pro-Nazi stance during those years was mostly focused not on creating an active military alliance with Germany or bringing the U.S. under Nazi control (something Hitler himself thought wouldn’t be possible) but rather on keeping the U.S. out of war in Europe.

So why was that past overlooked for so long?

In part, Hart theorizes, it’s because the American story of World War II is such a powerful national narrative. The United States, that narrative says, helped save the world. Rocked by Pearl Harbor, Americans stepped up to turn the tide for the Allies and thus solidified their nation’s place as a global superpower. That narrative doesn’t have much room for the relatively small, but significant, number of Americans who were rooting for the other side.

“It’s always been uncomfortable in this country to talk about isolationism, though the ideas are still out there,” he says, “It’s part of the American mythology. We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war.”

It was also possible for those who had participated in Nazi-sympathetic groups to later cloak their beliefs in the Cold War’s anti-communist push — a dynamic that had in fact driven some of them to fascism in the first place, as it seemed “tougher on communism than democracy is,” as Hart puts it. (One survey he cites found that in 1938, more Americans thought that communism was worse than fascism than vice versa.) Such people could truthfully insist that they’d always been anti-communist without revealing that they’d been fascists, and their fellow Americans were still so worried about communism that they might not press the matter.

 

“We still don’t totally know the scope of this,” he adds, noting that some important documents are still classified.

Plenty of the story’s beats have modern counterparts. For example, the Foreign Agents Registration Act that ensnared Paul Manafort was a product of that time. Hart’s book also covers controversy over whether those with extreme political views should be allowed to speak on college campuses, a debate that still rages today. The most interesting parallel to Hart himself is that between the type of social-media misinformation campaigns that popped up around the 2016 election and the use of propaganda by Nazi agents in the United States. (In one remarkable incident, a German agent and a sympathetic congressional aide were able to take advantage of franking privileges — free mailing services available for Congressional communication with constituents — to distribute a massive amount of official-looking propaganda.) In both cases, one major goal of those involved was simply to create a situation in which Americans weren’t sure what to believe. The takeaway, he says, is that the effect of unreliable news may be more important than the actual content of those stories.

“They weren’t trying to push the U.S. into an alliance with Nazi Germany. They see that as outlandish, though they would have loved it. What they want to do is confuse American public opinion. That’s what we’re seeing coming back in the era of social media,” he explains. “Confusion means there’s no public will to do anything and in a democracy we rely on the public will to take action.”

But perhaps the biggest reason why it’s possible for the U.S. to have forgotten about this history is that its worst potential — a sympathetic politician reaching the highest levels of power on an isolationist platform — was never realized.

“The real threat here, which the U.S. was fortunate to avoid, was a figure like Charles Lindbergh managing to bring all these groups together in time for an election,” Hart says. “The timing just never really worked out for that, fortunately.”

The real heroes of this story, as Hart sees it, are America’s political parties, and the establishment politicians who kept extreme isolationists off ballots. Today, now that primary elections generally make those decisions instead, that’s a role that falls to every American.

“The responsibility has passed from party elites down to primary voters,” Hart says. “That’s something that anybody who votes in a primary should think about: Is this person I’m voting for really the right person not just for the party but for the country?” ~

http://time.com/5414055/american-nazi-sympathy-book/?fbclid=IwAR2ws7UYCRoWJwJwosPVz1lyKJZk2Z4rP8UONhltTBvb_bAhiGGqhLeF1wo

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“During WWII, Jews in Budapest were brought to the edge of the Danube, ordered to remove their shoes, and shot, falling into the water below. 60 pairs of iron shoes now line the river's bank, a ghostly memorial to the victims.” ~ Rick Pantele



“GOD AND FATHERLAND”: CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM PREDICTS STRONG SUPPORT FOR TRUMP

~ “Christian nationalism is an ideology that fuses Christians’ love of God and country. It hinges on the narrative that the United States has a special covenant with the Christian God.

This ideology has emerged at various times in U.S. history, but a distinct, aggressive iteration seems to have materialized in the Trump era, according to a Think Progress report. This most recent version rejects secular society and seeks to restore America’s identity as a “Christian nation” by leveraging Christians’ influence in the public sphere. Some of Trump’s strongest evangelical supporters believe the president was divinely chosen by God to help them achieve the goal of a Christian nation.

Whitehead said his research indicates that Americans who believed in several key tenets of Christian nationalism had a strong likelihood of voting for Trump. This was true even when the research team controlled for other influences, like political ideology and party affiliation.

The findings suggest that Christian nationalism is a “unique and independent influence” that led to the Trump presidency.

“Christian nationalism provides a metanarrative for a religiously distinct national identity,” the researchers write in an article published in the journal Sociology of Religion in January. “And Americans who embrace this narrative and perceive threats to that identity overwhelmingly voted for Trump.”

The researchers used participants’ responses to six statements to measure affinity to Christian nationalism:

    “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”

    “The federal government should advocate Christian values.”

    “The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.”

    “The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.”

    “The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.”

    “The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.”
 
The researchers included a few control variables, including responses to the Baylor survey that measured participants’ economic satisfaction, sexism, racism, attitudes toward undocumented immigrants and views of Muslims. To make sure that Christian nationalism isn’t acting as a proxy for political conservatism or religiosity, the team also included controls for things like party affiliation, conservative religious beliefs and religious practice.

What they found was that, even after controlling for these other influences, Americans who supported five of those statements and rejected the one on church-state separation were much more likely to have voted for Trump.

While political identity and race were the overall strongest predictors of Trump votes, the researchers found that Christian nationalism was the most significant religious predictor. The ideology also had an effect across party lines.

For example, a Democrat who held views consistent with Christian nationalism was three times more likely to vote for Trump than a Democrat who didn’t hold such views. On the other hand, Republicans who scored low on the Christian nationalism index were less likely to vote for Trump.

Whitehead told HuffPost that voting for Trump was an outlet for what Christian nationalists perceived as the religious backsliding of the country. It also allowed them access to the most powerful position in the world: the U.S. presidency.

Before the election, the Trump campaign put together an advisory board of some of the nation’s top evangelical leaders to provide feedback on issues that are important to evangelicals. After the election, the group has taken on a more informal role, but key leaders maintain close ties to the administration and are regularly asked to provide their opinions.

Access to this type of power leads Christian nationalists to “forgive and forget all sorts of moral shortcomings,” Whitehead told HuffPost.

That’s why he’s doubtful that Christian nationalists’ support for Trump will be shaken by allegations of infidelity, such as those brought forward by adult film star Stormy Daniels.

“For Christian nationalists, the end goal is a society that favors Christianity in various aspects and at a number of institutional levels,” Whitehead told HuffPost. “How that project is achieved is of little consequence to them. They believe God can use anyone, ‘even a thrice married, non-pious, self-proclaimed public playboy,’ as we say in the paper.”

Robert Jones, CEO of The Public Religion Research Institute, told HuffPost that Whitehead’s study is consistent with his own research. In The End of White Christian America, Jones wrote that evangelicals have recently grown anxious about the declining dominance of white Christianity in America, both demographically and on such culture war issues as same-sex marriage.

It’s important to acknowledge that the nationalism Whitehead documents in the study is not just Christian, he said, but specifically white Protestant Christian.
 
“The idea of a Christian nation in American history has always been wrapped up with protecting the power of whiteness and Protestantism,” Jones said. “The KKK, for example, targeted not just African-Americans but also Catholics and Jews as threats to their ideal of American society. And this study presents one more important piece of empirical evidence that this idea is still with us.”

Another strong predictor of a vote for Trump in Whitehead’s study was anti-Muslim sentiment. Whitehead and the other sociologists involved in the study found that anti-Muslim sentiment was strongly correlated with Christian nationalism. 
 
Paul Froese, director of the Baylor Religion Surveys, told HuffPost that Christian nationalism has long been used as a pillar of anti-immigration sentiment in American politics. In the 1950s, Christian nationalists used this ideology to help inspire anti-Communist sentiment, arguing that communism threatened to make the U.S. both socialist and atheist.

“With anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. at an all-time high, I expect that Christian nationalism will be used to justify fighting Islam around the world (perhaps as we tried to battle communism during the Cold War),” Froese told HuffPost.

Rev. Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical activist, told HuffPost that Christian nationalism has done “tremendous damage” to the overarching mission of evangelical Christianity, which he believes is to bring “justice to the poor and oppressed.”

White evangelicals have a responsibility to make racial justice central to their faith, he said.

“Those of us who still identify as white evangelicals and don’t support white Christian nationalism need to lift up the voices of evangelicals of color and lift our own voices up to say that being a follower of Jesus means rejecting Christian nationalism and embracing care for the most vulnerable and the image of God in everyone,” Wallis said.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/researchers-discover-common-thread-between-evangelicals-who-voted-for-trump_us_5abbd15ae4b04a59a313c5ea
 
Who's stealing from whom here?

Oriana:

Pre-war Poland, that mythical land of which my parents spoke so often and with such warm feeling, was never the same to me after I spent some time contemplating its main slogan: “God and Fatherland.” And somehow or other I did manage to learn of parties such as the National Democrats ("Endecja") whose notorious pastime was beating up the Jews. The truth behind “God and Fatherland” could be reduced to one word: fascism. 

“Fact: Jews makes up 2% of the American population, yet are targets for 50% of all hate crimes.” ~ Igor Goldkind

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“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” ~ Isaac Asimov.

“Those who live in the myths of the glorious past always end up destroying the future.” ~ M. Kasprzyk

Oriana: I love what Jeremy said on a similar theme: “We didn’t fall from grace. We rose up from slime.”

This or that about the past really was good — people were more available to one another, they visited, had face-to-face contact. People sang more, played instruments — and there is much to be said for live music. Also, there was less environmental damage, more birds and other animals (but also more insects). Food was organic — there was no other kind. Autoimmune disorders were rare; food allergies were apparently as unheard of as they are now in the heart of Africa. But when you consider the existence of dire poverty and horrible infectious diseases, the ever-more deadly wars — even the clothes that people used to wear, especially the ghastly women’s clothes — the daily agonies and even mere discomforts, who wouldn’t rather live now, for all our problems?

Well, there are those who claim everything was better in the past — those are usually men who feel disappointed in their entitlements, e.g. men who feel wives should be totally subjugated and the majority of the population dedicated to serving their “betters.” That such men should have political power is downright frightening. True, this isn’t radical Islam wanting to go back to the seventh century, and groups advocating “radical Christianity” are too few to count — but it’s disquieting that the regressive mentality is alive and well in the twenty-first century, with millions of people spouting other-hating views, wanting to oppress and repress. And what always goes along with such regressive views is a completely false image of the past as a lost paradise. Already the story of Adam and Eve has done tremendous damage.

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“Useful movement oxymorons: Strive for the inevitable! Unite for diversity!” ~ Jeremy Sherman

 
Oriana:

I grew up with “Fight for peace!”

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LINUS AND THE GREAT PUMPKIN: “REALITY IS NO MATCH FOR A DETERMINED BELIEVER”
 
~ “. . . Linus van Pelt perennially [is] gushing about The Great Pumpkin, a fictitious being in whom apparently no one else believes except Linus. I’m not even sure who started the myth, but Linus is adamant about the Pumpkin’s existence no matter how scant the evidence to support his belief, nor how many years come and go without any presents appearing at all. Someone he trusted must have put him on the idea years ago, and now there’s no going back. He’s completely committed at this point no matter what the haters say.

What makes this little melodrama so instructive is the way that Linus has built up around his belief system a protective fortress made up entirely of excuses for why the Great Pumpkin never shows. Ultimately his thought processes tell us a lot about how we ourselves process our religious beliefs.

Why Linus’s Faith Can Never Die

First of all, Linus has completely internalized the responsibility for excusing the Great Pumpkin’s failures to appear.It doesn’t matter that year after year Linus comes to this pumpkin patch to see him but never does. There is always a good excuse, and more often than not it’s the fault of the observer himself. This of course is the most effective way to keep the believer from deconstructing the belief: he’s too busy processing his own guilt to think clearly.
 
In the faith in which I was raised, any failure of God to keep his promises always boiled down to me doing something wrong: I didn’t believe hard enough, or I harbored nagging doubts, or maybe I had some unconfessed sin in my life, or maybe God just didn’t feel like doing it because the timing wasn’t right. The excuse itself wasn’t important, what mattered most was that all responsibility for the failure of the promise had to be taken off of God and placed onto anyone and anything else. The Object of worship must be absolved from the matter.

    Linus: If the Great Pumpkin comes, I’ll still put in a good word for you!
                Good grief! I said ‘if’! I meant, ‘when’ he comes!
                I’m doomed. One little slip like that could cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by.

As long as Linus always blames himself, the Great Pumpkin can never be at fault.
 
Second, conditions for the Great Pumpkin’s appearance are so exacting that he need never appear at all to confirm Linus’s belief.
Everything has to be perfect (including Linus) and if he even blinks, he may miss him. Linus has so constructed his own belief system that no real confirmation is ever needed for it to survive. His belief is immune to falsification. No matter what the apparent contradiction, there is some excuse for why the Great Pumpkin doesn’t appear.
The belief is impervious to disconfirmation. This, too, feels familiar.

I was told to ask God to make certain things happen, but they never did happen at any rate greater than they would have if I had never asked him to do it. This went on for decades. And I don’t mean I asked for money or fame or an easier life. I asked for things the Bible told me to ask for, and when they didn’t happen I was told I was bad for expecting anything in the first place. Suddenly it was my fault, and I should be ashamed.

Some things I was told may not finally come to pass until after I die. Which being translated means: Don’t expect anything to confirm this. Your belief must be its own confirmation.
 

Finally, Linus’s unshakable faith caused him to see exactly what he wanted to see.
 
When Snoopy’s shadowy silhouette slowly rose out of the pumpkin patch, Linus was so convinced he was finally seeing the Great Pumpkin that he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he sincerely believed he had missed his chance. If Sally hadn’t have told him it wasn’t the Great Pumpkin, Linus would have gone to his grave believing that he really did “see” him once.

If a beagle could pass for a pumpkin, then anything could. And that’s the point: When a person wants to believe something badly enough, he will find a way to confirm his belief no matter how difficult the mental gymnastics to make it seem true. Reality is no match for the determined believer.

And that’s what makes Linus the perfect candidate for any religion. He’s a true believer, and no amount of disconfirmation could change his mind. He himself has already assumed all responsibility for both sides of the deal. It’s like a dysfunctional relationship in which one person keeps so busy covering both ends of the arrangement that the other side need never actually do a thing.” ~

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/10/31/what-the-great-pumpkin-teaches-us-about-faith/


MALARIA VACCINE MAY WORK AS A CANCER TREATMENT
 
~ “While developing a way to protect pregnant women from malaria, which attacks the placenta, Danish scientists found that “armed” proteins in the malaria vaccine also attack cancer. They then took the proteins and combined them with a “toxin” that would bury itself within the cancer cells, hoping it would release itself in a Trojan Horse-style attack, reverting the cancerous tissue back to normal.

From the Independent:

    The scientists have found that in both cases the [malaria] protein attaches itself to the same carbohydrate. It is the similarities between those two things that the cure could exploit.

    The carbohydrate ensures that the placenta grows quickly. But the team behind the new findings have detailed how it serves the same function in [tumors] — and the malaria parasite attaches itself to the cancerous cells in the same way, meaning that it can kill them off.

“For decades, scientists have been searching for similarities between the growth of a placenta and a tumor,” said Ali Salanti from University of Copenhagen.

“The placenta is an organ, which within a few months grows from only few cells into an organ weighing [approximately] two pounds, and it provides the embryo with oxygen and nourishment in a relatively foreign environment. In a manner of speaking, tumors do much the same: they grow aggressively in a relatively foreign environment.” ~

http://deadstate.org/scientists-may-have-stumbled-upon-a-possible-cure-for-cancer/

from another source:

~ “When we neutralize the sugars [that coat cancer cells] with our malaria vaccine, it’s as though the cancer cells suddenly lose their hands and can no longer interact with their surroundings and move,” says Clausen.

The sugar helps cancer cells to navigate and spread to other tissue [metastasize].

“We strike at this capability by putting the sugar out of action,” he says.

The results are published in the scientific journal Molecular Cancer Research.

http://sciencenordic.com/malaria-vaccine-halts-spread-cancer

 

Oriana:

As usual, we read of those “exciting developments” and then years pass . . . and more years pass . . .

I can’t help but remember what a certain MD said at a conference: “It’s not enough that a cure exists. Someone also has to be able to get very rich off it.”


ending on beauty:

THE MOON

The way that body, the moon, sublime,
suddenly steps out over the peak,
bringing the night to serene completion —
just so my voice rises purely
over the mountains of No More.

~ Rilke, Uncollected Poems