MARX WAS WRONG: CAPITALISM DESTROYS THE WORKING CLASS; WAS HUME INFLUENCED BY BUDDHISM; FUSING GOD AND SATAN; BENEFITS OF GALACTOSE

GRAY CITY

I am walking in gray Warsaw,
past the swan parks, helmet gates,
the pale angels in cathedrals,
wild archangels in the clouds —
but there are no leaves.

Not one chestnut leaf is left,
crimson, crimped by frost.
And the ivy called wild wine
is spread leafless on the walls
like a crown of thorns.

Not even the last ghost leaf
to reach to me its small hand.
Leafless sidewalks, leafless sky —
bridges leading into fog
for the final time.

Gone, that cloud-dream of returning,
looking out of my high window
on my poplars greening, passing
silver rumors of the wind —
and then golden lies. But the girl

who knew them smiles.
The gray city in me weeps not
cold November rain, but tender
eggs from centuries of stone.
“Pigeons,” I coo. “My pigeons.”

~ Oriana © 2015

BETWEEN PROSE AND DESPAIR

I was told that my poems are from another century. I think of them as rather than another realm — one in which beauty is a supreme value.

This one was written toward the end of the period when the past was still a radiant presence in my life. I’d already lost the future — hence my self-description as “postshumous.” But it’s only recently that I realized that the past has left me also.

Contrary to the New Age rhetoric, living in the now is not necessarily blissful. The pressing concerns are mostly pedestrian, draining. Memory is nicely edited — you don't reminisce about dental visits or car repairs. I don't mean to say that the past was paradise. But to me it was another layer of time and reality, another world enriching this one.

Yes, this is another instance of diminished brain function. It occurs together with the decline in creativity: memory and writing went together. I was very much a poet of memory. Memory, mother of the muses.

I mean the kind of memory that occurs spontaneously, that is elicited by a glance at something — what Proust called “involuntary memory.” It can still happen — it just doesn’t happen as it used to. So the past isn’t with me much . . . which all the masters assure us is a good thing. I live in the now without really trying. I am glad not to be brooding about the bad things; I just didn’t know that the good things would leave as well. Not irretrievably, no; but their radiant, effortless presence is no more.

The decrease in creativity didn't bother me at first, because quality kept going up. Then I reached a limit; then it was a choice between despair and prose. I realize it's not only aging but also circumstances, esp a huge increase in practical chores. But the process started way before the recent change in my life circumstances, so I sadly conclude that in my case at least aging is taking its toll.

What can be done? We cope somehow. I practice “harvesting” — the perfecting of older poems. And I do enjoy prose, which is always there for me. There are worse fates.

 
MARX WAS WRONG: THE TWILIGHT OF THE WORKING CLASS (Ryszard Kapuściński)

Marx believed that the working class will liquidate capitalism. The Communist Manifesto proclaimed, “The bourgeoisie creates its own grave-diggers: the workers.” But in reality it’s capitalism that gradually liquidates the working class.

It started with the peasants. The peasants, understood as the numerous and impoverished community of intimidated, illiterate small farmers has virtually disappeared in the developed world. The more modern the country, the fewer people are employed in agriculture. The same fate is currently catching up with the working class. In highly developed societies it’s a disappearing social class. The economy of the future will need minds rather than hands.

Two forces have become the grave-diggers of the workers: modern technology and international finance. The first one makes production more efficient and profitable. The second one directs investment wherever labor is cheapest and most submissive. In Asia labor costs one tenth of what it costs in America, and labor unions are prohibited.

The modern world is the world of the rich. Whoever does not belong to the privileged class is doomed to being subordinate, to mere subsistence and obedience. Whoever rebels will be defeated. In any case, the spirit of rebellion among the exploited and marginalized (the “excluded,” as the French say) grows weaker and weaker. Among them, the spirit of resignation is universal: you won’t break through the wall by ramming it with your head.

A few economic dogmas have been shattered. The most important one — that increased investment, commerce, and technology will increase the well-being of the entire society. Now it’s obvious: it’s those who are already rich who get richer. In each country and in the whole world, humanity can be divided into two groups: the winners and the losers. One man feels he’s climbing higher and higher, while another sees that he’s not even in the game, far away from the banquet table.

Those are the two divisions of the human family. It has always been that way, but the modern mass media made it more and more obvious.

There is increasing unemployment. In the developed countries, in 1974 there were 18 million unemployed; twenty years later, in 1994, there are 34 million. As a rule, if the unemployed person finds a new job, that job will be lower-paid. Unskilled labor is worst-off. It’t a great economic and humanitarian problem. What kind of work can these people do? One solution is to invest in culture and education in order to prepare people for life in the modern world which rewards skills and education. But governments tend to cut spending precisely in the areas of education and vocational training.

The twilight of the working class in the developed world doesn’t mean the total disappearance of the working class. Traditional industries are flourishing in the Third World. The international capital has liquidated the expensive working class of rich countries with the hands of the cheap workers in the Third World. ~ Ryszard Kapuściński, Lapidarium III, 1997, tr. Oriana Ivy

Fifty years ago, young Bob Dylan sang about the beginning of this “liquidation of the working class” in the developed countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GgrMA1B3nw


THE EYE IN THE SKY: FUSING GOD AND SATAN

This morning I had a naughty thought, “If I were god, I would do good things for people.” This morning, an even more subversive thought arose (I take no responsibility for my thoughts. They simply arise). Remembering how god was presented to us as the eye in the sky, spying on everyone’s sins, I realized that in the book of Job there was a hint that this was the function of one of the sons of god, Satan (ha Shatan) -- THE ADVERSARY. The Prosecution. It was Satan who “walked up and down the earth,” building the case against this or that human being.

It was bad enough that god would make bets with Satan. There was no need for the fusion of the two entities. God was unlovable enough as judge and executioner. To make him also collect the evidence for the Prosecution was really going too far.

In Rogier van der Weyden’s painting, the task of “weighing the souls” (the heavier ones went to hell) seems to have been delegated to Archangel Michael. In the town where I was born, right under the “ambona” (from where the priest preached the sermon) there was a baroque naked angel (with a loincloth billowing about) weighing the souls, one scale dipping down: a new meaning to “heavy soul.

Rogier Van Der Weyden, Archangel Michael Weighing the Souls

“FAITH MOVES MOUNTAINS”: DOES IT?

When I first heard the statement that faith moves mountains, I was a child and thought as a child — literally. So my immediate question was, "Really? Has anyone tried it? Has any mountain ever been moved that way?" I was fascinated by the possibility — imagine, no bulldozers needed!

Later I realized that the statement was  symbolic, but even at that level, I had my doubts. I didn't know anyone who's accomplished anything difficult by faith alone, though I knew of some who perished that way (wartime stories). Any examples of accomplishment I knew relied primarily on very hard work, the "miracle" being that the people were willing to put in much more effort than average.

To do that kind of work you had to be obsessed with your goal, single-minded, ruthlessly casting off distractions, and compulsive. Maybe obsession is a kind of faith, but obsession — having the obsessive/compulsive personality — was a more accurate description.

I first experienced it in my late teens, when I devoted myself to acquiring a mastery of English. At 17 I was beginning to read Shakespeare in the original while my peers found the language sheer hell to learn (it was that, too). I dare say it had nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with my greed to pick up new words and phrases (I was past the age of effortlessly learning a new language — that ends at puberty).  

(As an aside: While no one has as yet moved a mountain by faith alone, many have died as a result of faith. Often it was having too much faith in a psychotic religious leader or in bizarre ideas, e.g. the true believers can’t be harmed by poison or dangerous snakes. Faith healers can claim an occasional success, but let’s not forget that faith can kill.)

Mount Denali, Alaska

WAS DAVID HUME’S “NO-SELF” EMPIRICISM INFLUENCED BY BUDDHISM?

In 1734, in Scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart.

As a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today, with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was suffering from anxiety and depression. The doctors told him not to read so much and prescribed antihysteric pills, horseback riding, and claret—the Prozac, yoga, and meditation of their day.

The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book. Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.

In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no soul, no coherent self, no “I.” “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he wrote in the Treatise, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”

Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise.

Hume articulates a thoroughgoing, vertiginous, existential kind of doubt. here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.

In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.

PARALLELS WITH BUDDHISM

The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of “emptiness,” he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of perceptions and emotions.

“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”

That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.

Or could he have?

[The author goes on to establish that Hume had the opportunity to learn about Buddhism during his stay in France, when he was in contact with the Jesuits, who were aware of Buddhism because of Jesuit missionaries to Tibet and Siam.]

Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure what Hume learned at the Royal College, or whether any of it influenced the Treatise. Philosophers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle had already put Hume on the skeptical path. But simply hearing about the Buddhist argument against the self could have nudged him further in that direction. Buddhist ideas might have percolated in his mind and influenced his thoughts, even if he didn’t track their source. After all, contemporary philosophers have been known to borrow ideas without remembering exactly where they came from.

I published an article about Hume, Buddhism, and the Jesuits. As I was doing my research, many unfailingly helpful historians told me that my quirky personal project reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous). . . . New links between Eastern and Western philosophy keep emerging.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-david-hume-helped-me-solve-my-midlife-crisis/403195/
  
“SEE NO GOOD, HEAR NO GOOD, SPEAK NO GOOD”

“I look at the twentieth century, which in many ways was a secular humanist century… in that very century, the emancipation of women occurred, the end of colonial domination of the less developed third world nations was largely ended, the civil rights movement broke the back of segregation, and homosexuals began to overcome the prejudice that has prevented them from achieving full membership and justice in the social order. Each of these is a powerful achievement….” ~ Bishop John Shelby Spong

The paragraph continues, but I want to stop right there — just to thank Bishop Spong for enumerating some of those achievements. There is a toxic tendency some people have to “see no good, hear no good, speak no good” when it comes to the collective human accomplishments, the collective human genius that has given us so much. All they see is that we are a rotten bunch, prone to violence. Yet this list is just a beginning. Science (especially physics and biology), technology (jet travel and computers — think how recent those are), and medicine really took off in the twentieth century. The social safety net increased considerably, and the European and American working class rose from wretched misery. The progress continues to stun me.

There has also been a lot more questioning and free discussion. The literal belief in Bronze-Age and Iron-Age mythologies has continued its decline even in the US. Ecological awareness began to emerge. On and on, there is so much GOOD that could be said about the twentieth century that those who utterly omit that good, always dwelling on the dark spots, are in my eyes guilty of prejudiced perception. As Jack Gilbert said, “To see only evil is to praise the devil.”

Such people seem to take secret joy in negative developments. Maybe it’s not so much a psychological quirk as simply a bad habit, like chewing one’s nails or hair pulling. Maybe it can be stopped. Gently. Gentleness has also been one of the developments of the twentieth century, especially when it comes to child rearing, but also in how people treat one another, recognizing the dignity of simply being human as never before.


HEALTH

GALACTOSE PROMOTES CELL COMMUNICATION, A HEALTHY IMMUNE SYSTEM, AND AMMONIA REMOVAL

Galactose is a simple sugar that is produced naturally in the human body in the range of 2 -10 g. It’s also part of lactose, the “milk sugar”. Lactose is composed of glucose and galactose. (Note that unlike sucrose, the table sugar, lactose contains no fructose.) A nursing mother converts some of the glucose in her body to galactose, the “brain sugar” for the baby. By being converted to aminoacids such as GABA and glutamine, galactose helps remove toxic ammonia from the brain.

Galactose is one of the eight “essential sugars.” Without galactose, you would not be able to function. Your body needs galactose to function properly.

Galactose contributes directly (as well as through bonds by way of contact points on cells) to vital information and control processes in the body. It also functions as a fundamental and structural substance for cells, cell walls, and intracellular matrix. Your immune system wouldn’t be able to function without galactose either. Your body wouldn’t know which cells are “good” and what cells are “bad.” Your body wouldn’t know who the invaders were and which ones should be attacked by antibodies.

Interestingly, galactose is known as the “brain sugar” and supports the brain development of babies and children. Studies indicate that the monosaccharide sugar helps triggers long-term memory formation. Galactose also has been shown to inhibit tumor growth and stop its spread, or metastasis, particularly to the liver. This beneficial sugar can also enhance wound healing, decrease inflammation, enhances cellular communication, and increases calcium absorption. Getting a proper amount of galactose can also help to protect against exposure to X-ray radiation, and developing cataracts. Oddly enough, its been shown that galactose levels are usually lower in people with arthritis and in those with lupus.

Interestingly, lactose also has less significant metabolic effects than other sugars. Sugars can be compared on how quickly a specific sugar will cause a rise in blood sugar level. This measurement is called the Glycemic Index. Certain sugars and carbohydrates cause a spike, or rapid rise, in blood sugar level. This spike causes an insulin response and may over time lead to health problems such as diabetes, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and other issues. Maintaining a more even blood sugar level is ideal and appears to be beneficial. Lactose’s glycemic index number (45) is much lower than glucose (100), and galactose is much lower at (25).

LACTOSE CAN FUNCTION OF A PRO-BIOTIC

In order to break down lactose in the digestive system, your body manufactures an enzyme called lactase. As we get older though, our ability to produce this enzyme declines. If your body doesn’t break down all the lactose, it will continue to pass through your digestive system. The “good” bacteria in your digestive system will take advantage of this undigested sugar, and use it as energy so it can grow and flourish. Lactose can help establish and maintain a healthy micro flora in your gut.

Oriana: BUT ISN’T DAIRY A CANCER RISK?

Early studies found that high consumption of dairy products to be associated with increased risk of ovarian and prostate cancer; galactose in particular was singled out. This was a correlation, which need not imply causation. Ovarian cancer has a strong genetic component. The correlation has not been found when the consumption of skim milk products was studied. Later studies questioned the validity of the early studies even in terms of full-fat dairy.

Recent studies found no correlation between dairy consumption and the risk of ovarian cancer; in fact a high intake of calcium and Vitamin D (both amply found in dairy) correlated with a lower risk. 2012 study: “We found no evidence that lactose intake influenced ovarian cancer risk, or that risk varied by tumor aggressiveness in the analyses of intake of dairy foods and nutrients. The overall inverse association with high intake of calcium, and the inverse associations of calcium and vitamin D with specific histological subtypes warrant further investigation.”


Excess galactose is converted into glucose. A rare (1:60,000) genetic defect results in a deficiency of a necessary enzyme, leading to excess levels of galactose in the blood and urine. This defect can be detected prenatally, or later in newborns (who cannot be breast-fed or utilize any other animal milk, and are given soy milk instead). In the US the screening is routine.

There are legitimate concerns about the safety of drinking milk (for instance, for the best composition of milk, cows should eat grass rather than commercial feed). The presence of galactose should not be one of those concerns. It makes sense that nature would provide an extremely beneficial sugar in breast milk.

Next blog: fucose, usually part of the fucoidan polysaccharide. Protects against auto-immune disorders. Think seaweed, certain mushrooms. It's all more complex than in our wildest dreams.

(multiple sources)

Jean Dubuffet, Cow with a Subtile Nose, 1954

***

ending on beauty and humor:

INFINITIES WILL MAKE YOU CRY

about gravity, quantum physics, and string theory — and it sounds like a sacred chant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc#t=371

Sunset on Pluto

Charles:

With Marxism, socialism or income equality, where is the talk of how do we create wealth? The past seven years of politicians has encouraged non-work like never before.

Love the paintings of weighing the souls.

Best lines: “Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.”

Oriana:

Maybe work in the sense of making a living in a single job 8 hrs a day will become obsolete due to technology. Marx actually had a vision of more fulfilling work, and a variety of work rather than something monotonous. The young Marx, before he turned into a prophet of the revolution, was a lot more interesting. In some ways he remains relevant. What about the constant recessions? It’s difficult on people to be getting laid off. The job they manage to get later — if they succeed — usually pays less.

Capitalism will evolve, but we don’t know into what. Marx would be astonished to discover the decline of the working class in the developed countries, even though he correctly described the decline of the peasants. This is so ironic now that we can see what’s happening — but just fifty years ago, who would ever have guessed? True, there were some people voicing their concern over the high wages of the American worker, and also over the use of industrial robots, the increasing mechanization of the assembly line. But those were outliers.

In mid-twentieth century, every prediction about the 21st century started with space travel. We were supposed to be colonizing Mars. Religious wars? No one would have guessed.

We live in tremendously interesting times . . .
 

THE LAST ANGEL: DISAPPEARANCE OF GOD IN THE BIBLE; FRUCTOSE PROMOTES OBESITY AND KIDNEY DAMAGE; HITLER: REASON IS JEWISH

HOW TO JUMP FROM A MOVING TRAIN

Backwards. If you jump forward,
you’ll be sucked down under the wheels.
Backwards, blindly, rolled into a ball,
hands cradling the back of your neck.

Note the terrain where you’ll be thrust
away from the speeding locomotive.
On a soft meadow, you might get up;
on hard gravel, bones will break.

I’m doomed to carry these instructions
in the fragile planet of my skull.
Sometimes, after meeting someone new,
I suddenly think, “She could hide me.”

Why did I shudder when a Buddhist monk
said, “There’s no doubt: in your past life,
you died at Auschwitz.” Now I know
it’s enough to be a child of survivors,

to whose cunning and whose luck I owe
life — but an old movie is bleeding
through, of jumping backwards, away
from the transport — half-broken

crawling on sharp gravel until
the trees, a house, a stream — until
warm clothes, warm food, cool wind
of the springtime of my birth. Forward.


~ Oriana © 2015



HITLER’S WORLD: REASON IS JEWISH

“Hitler exploited images and tropes that were familiar to Christians: God, prayers, original sin, commandments, prophets, chosen people, messiahs—even the familiar Christian tripartite structure of time: first paradise, then exodus, and finally redemption. We live in filth, and we must strain to purify ourselves and the world so that we might return to paradise. To see paradise as the battle of the species rather than the concord of creation was to unite Christian longing with the apparent realism of biology. The war of all against all was not terrifyingly purposeless, but instead the only purpose to be had in the universe. Nature’s bounty was for man, as in Genesis, but only for the men who follow nature’s law and fight for nature. As in Genesis, so in My Struggle, nature was a resource for man: but not for all people, only for triumphant races. Eden was not a garden but a trench.

Knowledge of the body was not the problem, as in Genesis, but the solution. The triumphant should copulate. After murder, Hitler thought, the next human duty was sex and reproduction. In his scheme, the original sin that led to the fall of man was of the mind and soul, not of the body. For Hitler, our unhappy weakness was that we can think, realize that others belonging to other races can do the same, and thereby recognize them as fellow human beings. Humans left Hitler’s bloody paradise not because of carnal knowledge. Humans left paradise because of the knowledge of good and evil.

When paradise falls and humans are separated from nature, a character who is neither human nor natural, such as the serpent of Genesis, takes the blame. If humans were in fact nothing more than an element of nature, and nature was known by science to be a bloody struggle, something beyond nature must have corrupted the species. For Hitler the bringer of the knowledge of good and evil on the earth, the destroyer of Eden, was the Jew.

It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves. It was the Jew who introduced the false distinction between politics and nature, between humanity and struggle. Hitler’s destiny, as he saw it, was to redeem the original sin of Jewish spirituality and restore the paradise of blood. Since Homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

Hitler’s basic critique was not the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly Jewish civilization. It was rather that humans were animals and that any exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption. The very attempt to set a universal ideal and strain toward it was precisely what was hateful.

Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism of Jewish dominion. Both capitalism and communism were Jewish. Their apparent embrace of struggle was simply cover for the Jewish desire for world domination. Any abstract idea of the state was also Jewish. “There is no such thing,” wrote Hitler, “as the state as an end in itself.” As he clarified, “the highest goal of human beings” was not “the preservation of any given state or government, but the preservation of their kind.” The frontiers of existing states would be washed away by the forces of nature in the course of racial struggle: “One must not be diverted from the borders of Eternal Right by the existence of political borders.”

Insofar as universal ideas penetrated non-Jewish minds, claimed Hitler, they weakened racial communities to the profit of Jews. The content of various political ideas was beside the point, since all were merely traps for fools. There were no Jewish liberals and no Jewish nationalists, no Jewish messiahs and no Jewish Bolsheviks: “Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.” Hitler saw Jesus as an enemy of Jews whose teachings had been perverted by Paul to become one more false Jewish universalism, that of mercy to the weak. From Saint Paul to Leon Trotsky, maintained Hitler, there were only Jews who adopted various guises to seduce the naive. Ideas had no historical origins and no connection to the succession of events or to the creativity of individuals. They were simply tactical creations of the Jews, and in this sense they were all the same.

Hitler understood that agricultural science posed a specific threat to the logic of his system. If humans could intervene in nature to create more food without taking more land, his whole system collapsed. He therefore denied the importance of what was happening before his eyes, the science of what was later called the “Green Revolution”: the hybridization of grains, the distribution of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the expansion of irrigation. Even “in the best case,” he insisted, hunger must outstrip crop improvements. There was “a limit” to all scientific improvements. Indeed, all of “the scientific methods of land management” had already been tried and had failed. There was no conceivable improvement, now or in the future, that would allow Germans to be fed “from [their] own land and territory.” Food could only be safeguarded by conquest of fertile territory, not by science that would make German territory more fertile. Jews deliberately encouraged the contrary belief in order to dampen the German appetite for conquest and prepare the German people for destruction. “It is always the Jew,” wrote Hitler in this connection, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.”

In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and were to be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.

Hitler in Potsdam, 1933

Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. Hitler’s point was not at all that the desirable end justified the bloody means. There was no end, only meanness. Race was real, whereas individuals and classes were fleeting and erroneous constructions. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/hitlers-world/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Fear+Hitler+Trump&utm_content=NYR+Fear+Hitler+Trump+CID_6588996224c2d378b705e4fa0be94f73&utm_source=Email+marketing+software&utm_term=Hitlers+Worl

When I came across a copy of Mein Kampf I was very curious. In my college years I still thought that Hitler had been an evil genius, and I thought the "genius" part would be reflected in his writing. Instead it was an incoherent, crazy anti-Semitic rant. Irrational obsession. I got a strong whiff of psychosis. I couldn't read for very long because actually it was very bad writing, just as writing goes. And it did seem psychotic.

One thing that strikes me in this eye-opening essay is that Hitler was not only anti-Reason but also specifically anti-science, even though the Nazis (as well as the Stalinist Communists) claimed to be “scientific.” Science was to be twisted to serve ideology. No results that didn’t confirm the ideology would be tolerated. Actually, Reason as such was not to be tolerated. In the future, education was to be limited — the Nazis realized that “too much education” was a threat. Just as education and reason are seen as the greatest enemies of religion, they are also the greatest enemies of secular ideologies — since any ideology is bound to be flawed. 



Nazi and Soviet military personnel, victory parade, Brest-Litovsk, September 22, 1939


THE GRADUAL DISAPPEARANCE OF GOD IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

“God disappears in the Bible. Both religious and non-religious readers find this impressive and intriguing. Speaking for myself, I find it astonishing. The Bible begins with a world in which God is actively and visibly involved, but it does not end that way. Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible, the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease. In the last portion of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known ways apparent in the earlier books. Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be” (Deut 31:17, 18; Deut 32:20). By the end of the story, God does just that. The consequences and development of this phenomenon in the New Testament and in the post-biblical Judaism are extraordinary as well.

As the people settle in their promised land, the remaining signs of divine presence and communication begin to diminish gradually. In the book of Joshua, the column of cloud and fire is no longer present, the glory of Yahweh no longer appears, and the text notes tat the manna ceases on the day after the people first eat naturally grown food in the land. The disappearance of the signs of divine presence is gradual.

In the book of Judges, the judge Gideon says, “If Yahweh is with us, then . . . where are all His miracles that our fathers told us about? (Judg 6:13) Gideon in fact gets his miracle, but miracles are fewer and farther between after this. . . . The diminishing apparent presence of God continues and even accelerates from this point. [Elijah on Mount Carmel] is the end of public miracles in the Hebrew Bible.

~ Richard Elliott Friedman, The Disappearance of God

From a review:

“Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end? How is it possible that the Bible, written over so many centuries by so many authors, depicts this diminishing visible presence of God - and the growing up of humankind - so consistently? Why has this not been common knowledge?”

(Me): This is an excellent question. Why has there been hardly any comment on the diminishment of god’s presence not only in modern times, but in fact in biblical times? Is it only now that we are bold enough to see what has always been in plain sight?

The first part of Friedman’s book, “The Disappearance of God,” is by far the best. Of course he isn’t the only biblical scholar to have noticed the initial high involvement and then the gradual disappearance of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, but he writes in an accessible manner reminiscent of Jack Miles, who notes the same phenomenon in his prize-winning “God: A Biography.”

Still, the speculation on the causes of this disappearance is rather disappointing: yes, we can trace the narrative of how humans take more and more responsibility for themselves and are moving toward a “loyalty to the species” as the basis of morality, but the mechanism remains unclear. I think only Julian Jaynes was bold enough to offer an answer, which makes perfect sense to some (e.g. the lack of “mentalistic” vocabulary in the first five books of the Hebrew bible).

And then there is the disquieting statement by Yahweh himself: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” What kind of deity would behave in this way? One who satisfies his own curiosity with no regard for human suffering?

We are finally utterly on our own. ~ Nietzsche. Humanity has to rely on itself. But hasn't this always been reflected in sayings such as, "God helps those who help themselves"? And haven't military pointed out, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," and "God is on the side of whoever has more battalions"?

Blake, Adam and Eve

 The more civilization advances, the more religion becomes a denial of reality. Every century, the gap keeps growing. The fight against reality becomes more and more desperate — or else the clergy try to change the dogma, which has been true of non-fundamentalist Christianity. Yet another accommodation is the disappearance of god. This is usually called secularization.

This is easy enough to see in modern times. Friedman’s achievement is documenting this happening already in the Hebrew bible. “In the Book of Esther, God is never mentioned” — this simple sentence says it all.

*
 
If we take the point of view that god is a human creation, then more and more humans cease creating him as the culture evolves. And indeed we see the growing importance of secular laws and, as greatest love object, our partner and children and pets (pets are not trivial here). But the lethal developments within Islam point to more entanglements between religion and power than we understand. 

Also, there is Nietzsche's own surprise: "What? Two thousand years, and not a single new god?" Nietzsche perfectly understood that gods evolve and die, and the vengeful old Yahweh is dead, at least in the West (Islam is similar to ancient Orthodox Judaism). But where is a new cult that would be the equivalent of emerging Christianity? — unless of course that cycle is exhausted by now, and babies and pets satisfy the need for devotion, being love objects that the snarly, uncuddly Yahweh could never be (arguably, Jesus remedied this situation for Christians, as long as they cherry-picked the text; I call this “sanitizing Jesus” to fit with our more advanced ethical principles, in effect making him more Christian than he was).

Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel: Noah’s family disembarking after the Flood
 
I wasn’t the only child who was unnerved by the perception that at the beginning god used to walk and talk and do things — then less and less — then nothing. One brave little boy actually asked the catechism nun how come god used to talk to people, and now he doesn’t. I’ll never forget the sad smile when she slowly replied: “Times were different back then . . .” Did she also say, “People were different”? I can’t swear to it, but later that became my understanding: We have moved far away from the mythologizing archaic mentality. True: new cults are still periodically born, but they don't spread as they used to. Some are downright tiny. Perhaps people are finally more able to see that they are being sold a bill of goods, and cult leaders are charlatans, expert manipulators, and are often mentally ill, making it up as they go along? (I'm thinking of Scientology in particular.)

One hypothesis about the disappearance of an active god is the Julian Jaynes theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. There is a notable lack of "mentalistic" terms (like think, believe, imagine) in the early stages of a language. Thoughts were experienced as voices, Jaynes claims. Later only the prophets had that kind of consciousness (suggestive of schizophrenia, and some certainly were, e.g. Ezekiel is a classic schizophrenic).

It's been said that Jaynes is either a looney or a genius. Perhaps we'll never know. Anthropologists studying tribes did report a different mentality, but their very presence was contaminating that mentality. We can't even define consciousness, much less describe how it evolved. The closest is child development studies. But children are influenced by parents, who say things like, "That was only a dream." "No, that didn't happen; you imagined it." However, implanting false memories is notoriously easy, even in adults. Perhaps that's one clue about how mythologies arose. Note also that it's preliterate societies that were most prolific mythologizers. Once writing enters, enforcing slowness and reflectiveness as opposed to spontaneous flow, thinking is never the same.

By the way, Joseph Campbell was also asked how come humanity went through an era of producing rich, complex mythologies, and then it all ceased (or got reclassified as fiction, but ours is not a great age of fiction). Campbell replied that mythologies are collectively created when conditions are right, and conditions have not been right for the creation of new mythologies for a long time now.

I suspect the very nature of consciousness has evolved as culture has evolved, including information technology. Another factor is that as we become less helpless we have less need of a parent or ruler in the sky —“fear creates gods.” But the fact that god becomes less and less active already in the course of the bible (using the Hebrew arrangement) should already give us a pause. The first five books, where god is active, reflect a different mentality than the later books. Even some Orthodox rabbis admit that the Torah is mythology. But that mythology apparently comes from the Bronze Age. After that, you don't have the kind of mythology creation that was once prevalent.

**

Richard Friedman is a Hebrew scholar at UC San Diego. He tries very hard to salvage the idea of god, and even states, “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

 Alas, Friedman does not consider either Jaynes's radical theory of the disappearance of the “voice of god(s)” or Joseph Campbell's quiet observation that it takes special conditions for a society to engage in actively creating a mythology. Pre-literate societies are prolific myth-makers. Then the very structure of human consciousness seems to shift — here it's possible to return to Jaynes, at least in part. But Friedman may be correct in sticking to what he does best, i.e. the close analysis of the Hebrew text.
 




THE LAST ANGEL

Friedman points out that even angels cease to appear in the course of the Hebrew bible. The last appearance of an angel is in the story of Elijah.
(Yes, the “correct” title should be “The Last Angel to Appear in the Hebrew Bible.” But the older I get, the more shameless I become — a phenomenon widely noted in women, the rise of the shameless old ladies. “The Last Angel” sounds more dramatic.)

Elijah and the Angel by Godfrey Kneller, 1672


“THE IDEA THAT ANY BOOK WAS INSPIRED BY THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE IS POISON — intellectually, ethically, and politically. And nowhere is this poison currently doing more harm than in Muslim communities, East and West. Despite all the obvious barbarism in the Old Testament, and the dangerous eschatology of the New, it is relatively easy for Jews and Christians to divorce religion from politics and secular ethics.

A single line in Matthew—“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”—largely accounts for why the West isn’t still hostage to theocracy. The Koran contains a few lines that could be equally potent—for instance, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256)—but these sparks of tolerance are easily snuffed out. Transforming Islam into a truly benign faith will require a miracle of re-interpretation. And a few intrepid reformers, such as Maajid Nawaz, are doing their best to accomplish it.”

“Religion produces a perverse solidarity that we must find some way to undercut. It causes in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths. [Oriana: Will the kind of religion that proclaims it's the only true religion be eventually seen in the same category as racism?]

We can build strong communities and enjoy deeply moral and spiritual lives, without believing any divisive nonsense about the divine origin of specific books.”

“But it remains taboo in most societies to criticize a person’s religious beliefs. Even atheists tend to observe this taboo, and enforce it on others, because they believe that religion is necessary for many people. After all, life is difficult—and faith is a balm.

Most people imagine that Iron Age philosophy represents the only available vessel for their spiritual hopes and existential concerns. This is an enduring problem for the forces of reason, because the most transformative experiences people have—bliss, devotion, self-transcendence—are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.”

“More British Muslims have joined the ranks of ISIS than have volunteered to serve in the British armed forces. In fact, this group has managed to attract thousands of recruits from free societies throughout the world to help build a paradise of repression and sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq. This is an astonishing phenomenon, and it reveals some very uncomfortable truths about the failures of multiculturalism, the inherent vulnerability of open societies, and the TERRIFYING POWER OF BAD IDEAS.

No doubt many enlightened concerns will come flooding into the reader’s mind at this point. I would not want to create the impression that most Muslims support ISIS, nor would I want to give any shelter or inspiration to the hatred of Muslims as people. In drawing a connection between the doctrine of Islam and jihadist violence, I am talking about ideas and their consequences, not about 1.5 billion nominal Muslims, many of whom do not take their religion very seriously.

But a belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels, and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world. These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith. That is why the popular Saudi cleric Mohammad Al-Areefi sounds like the ISIS army chaplain. The man has 9.5 million followers on Twitter (twice as many as Pope Francis has). If you can find an important distinction between the faith he preaches and that which motivates the savagery of ISIS, you should probably consult a neurologist.

Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture.

A HATRED OF INFIDELS IS ARGUABLY THE CENTRAL MESSAGE OF THE KORAN. THE REALITY OF MARTYRDOM AND THE SANCTITY OF ARMED JIHAD ARE ABOUT AS CONTROVERSIAL UNDER ISLAM AS THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS IS UNDER CHRISTIANITY. 

It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.

~ Sam Harris, “Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon”

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armageddon 

Sam Harris, TED talk, 2010


Health

FRUCTOSE PROMOTES OBESITY AND KIDNEY DAMAGE

 After eating fructose, 100 percent of the metabolic burden rests on your liver. But with glucose, your liver has to break down only 20 percent.

    Every cell in your body, including your brain, utilizes glucose. Therefore, much of it is "burned up" immediately after you consume it. By contrast, fructose is turned into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat.

    The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Insulin resistance progresses to metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes.

    Fructose is the most lipophilic carbohydrate. In other words, fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn FFAs into triglycerides. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this.

    When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat.

   The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout.

    Glucose suppresses the hunger hormone ghrelin and stimulates leptin, which suppresses your appetite. Fructose has no effect on ghrelin and interferes with your brain's communication with leptin, resulting in overeating.

If anyone tries to tell you "sugar is sugar," they are way behind the times. As you can see, there are major differences in how your body processes fructose and glucose. The bottom line is: fructose leads to increased belly fat, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome — not to mention the long list of chronic diseases that directly result. And eating sugar may accelerate the aging process itself.

FRUCTOSE PROMOTES URIC ACID PRODUCTION INTO THE ABNORMAL RANGE

One of the most potent ways to raise uric acid is by consuming large amounts of fructose. Uric acid is a byproduct of fructose metabolism. In fact, fructose typically generates uric acid within minutes of ingestion.

Uric acid is a normal waste product found in your blood. High levels of uric acid are normally associated with gout, but it has been known for a long time that people with high blood pressure, overweight, and people with kidney disease, often have high uric acid levels as well.

It used to be thought that the uric acid was secondary in these conditions, and not the cause - but Dr. Johnson's research indicates that it could be a lead player in the development of these conditions, rather than just a supporting actor, when its levels in your body reach 5.5 mg per dl or higher.

At this level, uric acid is associated with an increased risk for developing high blood pressure, as well as diabetes, obesity and kidney disease.

Interestingly, uric acid functions both as an antioxidant, and as a pro-oxidant once inside your cells. So, if you lower uric acid too much, you lose its antioxidant benefits. But if your uric acid levels are too high, it tends to significantly increase inside your cells as well, where it acts as a pro-oxidant.

Over the last 20 years, we've seen a dramatic increase in fatty liver disease throughout the world, and studies done by Dr. Johnson and a group of researchers at Duke University showed that people who develop fatty liver drink a lot more soft drinks, and ingest far more fructose than the average person in the community.

Fructose consumption clearly causes insulin resistance, whereas straight glucose does not. Insulin resistance can eventually lead to full blown diabetes. Interestingly, glucose actually accelerates fructose absorption. So when you MIX glucose and fructose together, you absorb more fructose than if you consumed fructose alone.

Oriana: Yes, you can obtain inexpensive glucose as a sweetener; I suggest using glucose when you need an energy pick-up, and xylitol when you simply can’t stand the bitterness or tartness of something that’s good for you, e.g. pure cranberry juice.

Glucose is usually sold as DEXTROSE. The cheapest source of pure dextrose is available from NOW, a brand available online from IHerb. I mention IHerb because they give you a discount and free shipping, so “you’ve got to love them,” and I do.

Mannose, ribose, etc are beneficial sugars that can also be bought online, if you have money to burn. Ribose is very sweet and is supposed to be very good for the heart muscle, protecting it from enlarging and stiffening as we age. Ribose is part of  ATP, the “energy molecule” in every cell.

ending on meditative quiet and beauty

THE BLACK MADONNAS

We don't choose what we write about. That’s one of the exciting things about writing: seeing what wells up from the unconscious, what your central themes are. You can’t escape from your central themes. But at some point I realized I was repeating myself: lilacs, streetcars, cemeteries with white gravel paths. It felt played out. And still not really conveyed, because it's impossible to convey to someone who hasn't walked into a small-town church and there's a Black Madonna in all her strange darkness just how that feels.

~ Oriana © 2015


A HAND RAISED, WAVING A LETTER

the god is serene.  people and
trees and the rain on the streets
come to their most fervent life right
after death.  we buried a generous woman;
we’ll take ourselves back into selfishness
now.  we’ll rush past our own coming endings
as if we are sure they won’t hurt.  maybe

they won’t.  maybe at just the last moment,
nothing goes wrong.  simpler and easier
lines find our poems.  there is less and
less waste. Orpheus understands mourning,
its dry, stinging lungs, and the opposite,
too:   once in a while, a procession.
the alphabet full of respect.

~ Holly Prado, Esperanza: Poems for Orpheus

Now and then, I can't help but imagine my own dying. I repeat the wish I formed during my first year in the US: not to be a victim of a senseless murder. Or of an “act of god” like a giant earthquake, which later the televangelists will call divine punishment for California's godlessness. No. I imagine myself descending into a delirium, desperately trying to write a poem. But maybe not desperately. Maybe the lines will come easily, and all of them will be simple and perfect, the music flawless, Orphic. Maybe in the distance there'll be the sound of a flute.

MARK STRAND: OLD MAN LEAVES PARTY

OLD MAN LEAVES PARTY

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection.  The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

~ Mark Strand, “Blizzard of One”

I found this poem among my recycled sheets of paper, and I was totally stunned. Not the kind of poem you read every day and then forget, so how could I have forgotten it? Ah, memory, if only you were a more intelligent resource . . .  And another thought joins in: perhaps when I first read the poem, I was too young to really understand it.

At the literal level, the poem is astonishing enough, though it could be dismissed as not especially credible — surreal even. There’s a mirror somebody left leaning against a tree? And the octogenarian speaker, reflecting that he still had a beautiful body, simply begins to strip in the moonlight, to the applause of nature? Hmmm, we could say, perhaps some old people really are that eccentric.

Of course the poem needs to be read symbolically. It is an astonishing poem, as poems about old age go. It is not an elegy, not a meditation on diminishment and dying. I think it outdoes any of Jack Gilbert’s poems on the subject, though Gilbert also takes a very affirmative stance toward aging. The title is very much what we might expect from Gilbert, except that Gilbert would continue in the third person. But this poem is much more startling as the first-person confession. For the sake of authenticity and intimacy, it has to be in the first person. The speaker needs to make us believe him.

Just the title, “Old Man Leaves Party,” can have multiple meanings. But first, let’s note the omission of articles: it’s not “An Old Man Leaves the Party.” The terseness of “Old Man Leaves Party” suggests a newspaper headline, like “Man Shoots Family, Self” — men do those things, such a headline suggests. It’s not a special old man who leaves a special party. It’s everyman. Leaving the party is the human condition. 

 OK, let’s discuss the party. It can be a literal party, maybe in honor of the speaker’s most recent prize (and Strand has certainly had a few). But then there is always that memory of a party that we had to leave as children just because it was bedtime. But now, over the age of eighty, that big party is life itself. Others are still having a good time, but for a few guests it’s already time to leave. Or the “party” could mean the active part of life, when the future tense still made sense. One could argue that we become posthumous even before the ultimate leave-taking.

Now, Mark Strand (1934 -2014) really was quite a handsome man, even in his seventies (he didn’t live past eighty, alas). Not even Robert Pinsky was as handsome as Strand managed to be at any age (oh well, perhaps equally handsome; we don’t have to choose, though I'm somewhat pleased at the fantasy of a male poet beauty contest). As if his many prizes and jobs at prestigious universities were not enough, Strand was tall and had good hair. But let’s not be literal. The point is that the human body is endlessly interesting. We never tire of looking at paintings of nudes, though we’ve seen thousands of such paintings. The human body is a marvel, for all the sagging, brown spots, and other signs of aging. I keep thinking of a white-haired old Chinese woman painter I met in Vermont. She was so beautiful I couldn’t stop staring at her.

But let’s linger a bit on that shocking beginning:

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body.

In our much-bewailed “culture of youth,” the statement “I still had a beautiful body” is indeed shocking. The speaker is totally self-accepting. Perhaps the word “narcissistic” comes to mind, but is that not a culturally conditioned judgment? How dare he perceive himself as beautiful in old age? How dare he not apologize for being old, stating he’s no longer handsome, strong, sexy? Yet there it is: he finds his body beautiful. He doesn’t just accept his body; he celebrates it.

There is also an inescapable symbolism of taking off one’s clothes. Just as a party is a contrived social situation, so the clothes are a mask. They conceal. The old man is naked now, authentic, completely himself.

And nature approves. As is typical in poetry, the speaker projects his own mental state on nature. Thus, “the wind held its breath.” And when the speaker takes off his shirt, the flowers of bear grass nod with seeming approval (“moonwashed heads” is lovely). When the pants come off, magpies circle the redwoods — never mind that it’s night time. Even more dramatically, the previously frozen or half-frozen river is flowing once more!

It is a winter night — need we talk about symbolism? Yet as the man admires his own beautiful body, entirely without lamentations about aging, birds begin flying and the “creaking” river starts flowing.

If you’re thinking, “What??” the speaker has anticipated that too. He assumes you, the reader, are younger and know nothing about what it’s like to be in the last years of life — “I was like you once.”

And here comes the most marvelous and affirmative part of the poem:

. . . But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

This is perhaps the best “comfort poem” I’ve come across. The speaker, though at the end of his life, does not feel old and pathetic, inadequate, fit only for dying. Again he startled us by saying he has “so much before me.” He doesn’t have much time, but he has a wealth of moments, and the beauty of nature to take in. He feels rich beyond compare.

Ambition is over; one more prize doesn’t mean anything. Simply existing is transcendent.

I will not babble about the power of now and living in the moment. Strand’s final lines are exquisite. It’s amazing that one needs to be past a certain age — past ambition — to be able to

Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment

 

 **

There is another Strand poem that I love. It’s interesting that Strand started out “on the dark side:  — even the title of his early volume, the one that made him famous, announces it: “Darker.” It’s not his best volume. Strand become better the older and less trendy he grew, the more delighted with simply being alive, the joy of having a body, of being, in a way, the same boy that his mother used to kiss, her love never erased by time. I don’t know if any other poet wrote with greater affirmation about aging, though Jack Gilbert comes close.

THE COMING OF LIGHT

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

~ Mark Strand

All this year I’ve dealt with the dust of many yesterdays — which also made me aware that today’s wonders will also be dust in the infinity of tomorrows. As for the coming of love, there is nothing like love late in life: drop everything and dance that last dance. 

Addendum, 1-5-2016

Cats know they need no self-improvement. And talk about "this dream of flesh, from moment to moment" . . .

LOVE CHEMICALS; MILOSZ: HOW GOD BECAME CRUEL; PLATO VERSUS ARISTOTLE; ALCOHOL, HEART, ARTHRITIS

HOMELAND

Twenty years later I’m told I am foreign.
How naïve to have thought
I’d grow out of it. As if I could erase
my Columbus Day:

in the morning
I had a homeland;
in the evening
I had two suitcases.

Twenty years later under desert sky,
I remember the stencil
of drizzle in Warsaw.
On the sill of our old kitchen,

pigeons ruffle like small gray clouds.
My uncle and my father
raise a toast with żubróvka,
the buffalo vodka, the bottle lit

with a blade of buffalo grass.
I ought to remember
in more vivid color,
but I was carelessly young.

I tried so hard: changed my name,
ate only with my right hand —
eager to throw away extra vowels
and hands. Twenty years later

men still want me to touch them
in French, slide toward them
on slow Slavic looks:
“You know how to treat a man —

you’re from the Old World.”
I must be centuries old —
I am river and rain.
And the half-remembered

Warsaw park, a chapel of green dusk;
through a fence of shadows
I call after the long lost child.
Yet my homeland is not lilac

gardens, nor childhood’s palaces
of clouds — my true
homeland is the undefeated
republic of the mind.

Among statues in a museum,
no one says, as I used to,
“Excuse me, I’m foreign.”
No one is foreign.

~ Oriana © 2015

Yes, I'm willing to state it plainly: my true homeland is the republic of the mind, the world of ideas, of art, music, and literature. And yet, and yet . . . there is a power of the first landscape we came to know: it’s those trees that become the “real trees.” Palm trees and eucalypts can never their place — those are not “real trees.” There is supposed to be a river in the middle of the city, and lush parks and statues, and schools named after great writers, not generals. Not that this is objectively better; only normative; it’s what you grow up with that becomes your matrix, your model for what the world is supposed to be. There is no healing of that incongruency. If it’s May or June, then where are the lilacs?


THE HAPPY CHEMICALS OF LOVE
I especially liked the part about oxytocin, which has been dubbed the “love hormone.”  So, both watching sports and participating in religious rituals releases oxytocin . . . Soccer instead of mass (especially now that the beautiful Latin liturgy is gone)? It’s happening.

And no wonder I love holding hands so much . . .  No wonder many women say that holding hands is more important than having sex. And even a handshake cause a small release of oxytocin. Call it the “magic of touch.” Oxytocin is also the reason we adore petting dogs and cats so much.

Falling in love has been called dopamine addiction. I find that now there is more general interest in feel-good long-term relationships, and that’s where oxytocin becomes the most important neurochemical.

“Love triggers dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. That's why it's so motivating. But happy chemicals come in spurts. They do their job by turning off after they turn on. When your happy chemicals dip, you might interpret it as a loss of love. That turns a natural fluctuation into a crisis. You are better off knowing why love makes happy chemicals go up and down.

DOPAMINE brings about that great feeling you get when you find your missing keys. It's the neurochemical that evolved for seeking and finding. Animals sniff around for food and mating opportunities, and when they find something that meets their needs, dopamine surges. But the surge is brief. Dopamine does its job by dropping after it rises, so it'll ready to alert you to the next chance to meet your needs—and so you'll be sure to pay attention.

When you find your keys, you don't expect that great dopamine feeling to last. But when you find "the one," your body may produce so much dopamine that you assume you'll soar forever. When it finally subsides, you wonder what's wrong. You might even blame "the one" for having changed.

OXYTOCIN is the neurochemical that causes trust. It's released during orgasm, and in smaller amounts when you hold hands. In animals, it's released when mothers lick their babies. Oxytocin is the good feeling of a common cause, whether a political rally, a football huddle, or thieves with a plan.

Reptiles release oxytocin during sex, but mammals produce it all the time. That's why reptiles stay away from other reptiles except when mating, while mammals form long-term attachments to relatives and herds. The more oxytocin you release when you're with a person, the more attached you'll feel. More touch = more oxytocin = more trust.

Getting respect feels good because it stimulates SEROTONIN. In the animal world, social dominance brings more mating opportunity—and more surviving offspring.

Your brain always wants more respect to generate more serotonin. Your loved one may give you that feeling at first, by respecting you or helping you feel respected by others. But eventually your brain begins to take the respect you already have for granted. It wants more, so it can get more good feelings. That's why some people constantly make more demands on their loved ones, and why others constantly seek out higher-status partners.

Happy chemicals give us information that's hard to interpret. For example, if I watch a football game and burst with excitement when my team scores, I see thousands of others share my reaction. It feels like they understand me. Why doesn't my partner understand me when thousands of others do? The answer is simple. SPECTATOR SPORTS TRIGGER OXYTOCIN, AS DO POLITICS, RELIGION, AND OTHER GROUP ACTIVITIES. You get a good feeling of trust. Of course, trusting a large number of people in a limited way is not the same as trusting one person in a comprehensive way. But to your mammal brain, it's all the same oxytocin.

We want all the happy chemicals we can get. You expect some from romance, and some from other aspects of life. But no matter where you get them, happy chemicals sag after they spurt. When you know why, you can manage your behavior despite the confusing neurochemical signals.

There's good news here. Don't blame yourself or your partner if you're not high on a happy chemicals all the time. Maybe nothing is wrong. You are just living with the operating system that has kept mammals alive for millions of years.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201203/why-love-is-roller-coaster

MORE ON OXYTOCIN

http://io9.com/5925206/10-reasons-why-oxytocin-is-the-most-amazing-molecule-in-the-world

 
Caveat: the effects of externally administered oxytocin seem to vary according to how close we were to our parents. Adults who were harshly disciplined as children typically have relationship problems, and their oxytocin system may not be as reliable. Fortunately, change to the oxytocin system is possible, and may be as simple as getting a dog (an affectionate breed, that is).

ATLANTIS

We’re wreathed in robes of seaweed,
air bladders’ amber beads,
the hood of water
over the face of things.

Fish weave in rainbow veils.
Kelp sways like soundless bells.
we cannot tell one day
from a thousand years.

Here are our amulets, good-luck
crystals, diadems and crowns.
Here tilts the headless
statue of our god,

Lord of Mercy in whose name
we killed. Mudworm burrows
in palaces of our rare marble.
Our purses fill up with silt.

We remember pine forests,
resin scent of the wind.
We remember having held
someone’s hand.

This glitter on the waves
like bent echoes,
those are our last words:
Hold hands. Hold hands.


~ Oriana © 2015
Minoan town, a Bronze Age fresco from Akrotiri
 
MILOSZ: HOW AND WHEN GOD CAME TO BE SEEN AS CRUEL

In one of his essays, Milosz says that “if, from one generation to the next, there is an increase in the purely human need for justice and order,” then human perception of god changes. “God changed into a malevolent, cruel demiurge, the tyrant Zeus, the tyrant Jehovah, because he was the god of nature, which contradicts and dissatisfies us; many people have opposed that god with a divine hero, a leader of men, namely, the rebel Prometheus, Lucifer (who often had the face of Christ), as did the Romantic poets. (Blake famously said, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” The literary critic William Empson argued that "Milton deserves credit for making God wicked, since the God of Christianity is a wicked God.")

(my paraphrase:) It seems to me that if Milton had to strive at epic length to “justify God’s ways to man,” he must have felt that such justification was needed; he spared no effort trying to rationalize what must have begun to be perceived as god’s cruelty. The twisted logic of “felix culpa” that created the need for a “bloody ransom” also required complicated theological maneuvers.

But it wasn’t just the Romantics who had problems with the unpleasant character of Yahveh. To the Marxists, “the market [was] an extension of the struggle for existence and nature’s cruelty . . . The enemies of revolution loved to appear as the defenders of a religion threatened by atheists, while those atheists hated them as the priests of an inferior god, Zeus, Jehovah, otherwise known as the Devil.”

The Marxists advocated an economy based on cooperation, not competition. Milosz saw the opposing movement as “Americanization” -- a brilliant insight, I think, that goes beyond the outmoded duality of capitalism and communism. He also pointed out that certain intellectuals take perverse delight in visions of catastrophe and apocalypse. In my observation, it’s mainly Christian fundamentalists who are very big on apocalypse, and here again we see torture porn in the form of vividly imagined “tribulations.”

The Romantics’ sympathies with revolutionary movements, and Romanticism as part of the larger rebellion against the cruel god so vividly portrayed by Milton who was trying to “justify” him -- much material for thought there. (Milosz, Selected Essays, pp. 235-245.)

Oriana: I think that as the West continues to progress in ethical thinking, god will be seen as more and more cruel. Some have observed that Christianity should have dropped the Old Testament and made Jesus the only god, more plausibly merciful. And perhaps it's not too late, given the daring theological maneuvers in new definitions of heaven and hell proclaimed by JP2.

Culture and the concept of god: cruel men invent a cruel god, and then the cruel god makes men cruel — a vicious circle. Robert Wright wrote a fascinating book, The Evolution of God. The stress of hard times correlates with cruel deities; as life gets easier, god “mellows.” The higher the standard of living, including the social safety net, the less emphasis on hell, usually, until progressive denominations approach the hell-free status. As the need for revenge and punishment diminish, and our understanding of evil becomes more psychological and we view the perpetrators not as sinners but as emotionally damaged human beings in need of healing, not more cruelty dealt out to them, hell as pointless eternal torment becomes repugnant.

But can Christianity survive without hell, and thus no obvious need for salvation? Can the cruelty of the crucifixion remain its basis? It will be interesting to see.

For a fascinating essay about Christianity and the concept of eternal torture, see

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2014/10/07/absolving-god-from-hell-2/

 (By the way, “Godless in Dixie” is one of the best blogs out there.)

ATHENS AND JERUSALEM MUST BE RECONCILED OR JERUSALEM WILL FALL OFF THE MAP. ~ Robert Wright

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian . . . Having received the revealed truth via Christ, “we want no curious disputation.” Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can’t casually dismiss secular knowledge. Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. ~ Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

That’s why the more enlightened religious leaders such as Pope Francis say it’s OK to believe in evolution. The worst possible mistake they could make is threaten excommunication if you believe in evolution, thus losing what educated followers they still have.


PLATO VERSUS ARISTOTLE IN WESTERN HISTORY
 
One of the most provocative books I’ve read is Arthur Herman’s The Cave and the Light, which presents the entire history of the West in terms of the competing ideas of Plato or Aristotle.

Plato gave us the myth of the cave (Book VII of The Republic). It encourages man to find a path out of the darkness of the cave of material existence, of being “merely human,” into the light of pure “ideas,” everlasting and changeless. Aristotle, the pragmatist, wants us to explore the world — which is not a dark cave, but is magnificent. Reality is “multiform and constantly evolving.”

Aristotle gave us “the US constitution, the Manhattan Project, and shopping malls. Plato gave us “the Chartres Cathedral, but also the gulag and the Holocaust.”

But the great cathedrals were not built because of religion alone; they were great feats of architectural engineering. So the easiest criticism of Herman’s book is that everywhere we see the fusion of both the Platonic and Aristotelian approach. He doesn’t deny it — in fact he instantly acknowledges this fruitful interaction. But he still wants to trace the two currents.

My instant reaction: the dark cave is religion, the recitation of invariant scriptures that are increasingly out of touch with the modern world; an insistence on blind obedience to doctrine in spite of lack of evidence, and denial of free debate. Science and rationality are the light — the candle in the dark. I don’t deny that this is a simplified picture: nothing is all good or all bad. Or almost nothing.

The phrase “merely human” has been a disaster, exemplifying religion’s contempt for humanity. We need to see the word “human” as the highest praise. Part of the meaning of life is to become more fully human.



LEONARDO DISCOVERED THE ROTATIONAL MOVEMENT OF THE HEART

During his investigations, Leonardo discovered several extraordinary things about the heart. “Up until and after his time, because of course he never published, the heart was believed to be a two-chambered structure,” Wells explains. “But Leonardo firmly stated that the heart has four chambers. Moreover, he discovered that the atria or filling chambers contract together while the pumping chambers or ventricles are relaxing, and vice versa.”

In addition, Leonardo observed the heart’s rotational movement.“If you look at a heart, it is cone-shaped,” says Wells. “But it’s a complex cone in a geometric sense, because it’s a cone with a twist. This is because the heart empties itself with a twisting motion – it wrings itself out, a bit like the wringing out of a towel. In heart failure it loses this twist.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130828-leonardo-da-vinci-the-anatomist

 

ALCOHOL, HEART, ARTHRITIS
“In 1986, researchers surveyed a group of more than 50,000 male doctors in the US about their drinking and eating habits, their medical history and state of health over two years. They found that the more alcohol the doctors reported drinking, the lower their chance of developing coronary artery disease, despite their dietary habits.

Another large study published in 2000, also in male doctors, found a ‘U’ shaped relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and – in this case – death, rather than coronary artery disease. Subjects who drank one standard drink a day were less likely to die within the 5.5-year-long study than those who drank less than one a week, or those who drank more than one a day.

This suggested there was a ‘sweet spot’ for alcohol consumption; a healthy middle ground between too little or too much, where the benefit for cardiovascular health balanced the risk of death from all causes.

In 2005, yet another study in medical professionals – this time 32,000 women and 18,000 men – attempted to answer this question by looking at how their drinking habits affected not only their risk of heart attack, but also their physiology.

The people who drank one to two glasses of alcohol, three to four times a week, had a lower risk of heart attack, which the researchers hypothesized could be due to beneficial effects of alcohol on HDL cholesterol – the so-called ‘good’ cholesterol – as well as haemoglobin A1c (a marker of diabetes risk) and fibrinogen, an agent that helps the blood to clot. These three factors all play an important role in ‘metabolic syndrome’; the cluster of abnormalities that often heralds cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Other studies have found hints that alcohol might alter the balance of these factors for the better, which pointed to a possible mechanism by which alcohol in moderation could improve health.”

But later findings took a closer look at “tee-totalers,” and discovered that it was ex-drinkers who were the unhealthy ones; those who had always abstained for religious reasons, for instance, showed no increased risk of heart disease. So we are still not entirely sure about the benefits of alcohol. But this much has been confirmed

1. alcohol increases HDL, the protective cholesterol

2. alcohol decreases platelet aggregation, lowering the risk of clots

3. alcohol may have anti-inflammatory effects, as shown by reduced levels of inflammatory markers, and the benefits of light drinking for people with rheumatoid arthritis.

Since all arthritis is an inflammatory disease, and since alcohol tends to suppress the immune system, this makes sense.

And this last point brings us to this article:

“X-rays showed there was less damage to their joints, blood tests showed lower levels of inflammation, and there was less joint pain, swelling and disability in those patients [who drank frequently rather than infrequently or never], the researchers found.

Previous studies have shown that alcohol may reduce the risk of developing the disease in the first place.

Similarly, in the current study non-drinkers were four times more likely to develop RA than people who drank alcohol on more than 10 days a month.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-10776758

A (very) moderate intake of alcohol has also been found to lower the risk of osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s Disease. Is it really true that half a glass of wine a day can extend your life by five years? Future research may finally yield the answer. Of course dose is extremely important, since past a certain level, the toxicity of alcohol overwhelms its benefits.

**

THIS WOULD BE THE PRICE OF IMMORTALITY
 From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams:

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

Dali design for a set curtains for Bacchanale, 1939