PURITANS’ WAR ON CHRISTMAS; MOTHER TERESA’S CULT OF SUFFERING; GABA AND AGING

Christmas in Kraków


COLD FIRES

My last Christmas Eve in Warsaw —
the gray, uncertain day
dying into the early dark,
we wait for the first star, then light
the twelve skinny candles on the tree
and break the wishing wafer. 

Holding a jagged shard of a wish,
mother intones: “Health and success,
fulfillment of all dreams.”
Kissing on both cheeks,
we break the wafer each with each.
So begins Wigilia,
the supper of Christmas Eve.

The number of the dishes
has to be odd: spicy red borscht
with uszka, “little ears” —
pierogi with cabbage and wild mushrooms
soaked back to dark flesh
from the pungent wreaths;
fish — the humble carp;
potatoes, a compote from dried fruit,
and poppy-seed cake.
Father counts: “If it doesn’t
come out right, we can always
include tea.”

He drops a pierog
on the starched tablecloth.
I stifle laughter as he picks it up
solemnly like a communion host.
On the fragrant, flammable tree,
angel-hair trembles in silver drafts.

Then we turn off the electric lights.
Now only candles in the dusky hush.
Father sets a match
to the “cold fires.” Icy starbursts hiss
over the staggered pyramid of gifts:
slippers and scarves, a warm skirt,
socks and more socks,
a book I will not finish.
We no longer sing carols,
mother playing the piano —
the piano sold by then,
a TV set in its place. 

Later, unusual for a Christmas Eve,
we go for a walk. The streets
are empty; a few passers-by
like grainy figures in an old movie.
It begins to snow.

I never saw such tenderness —
snowflakes like moths of light 
soothing bare branches,
glimmering across
hazy halos of street lamps.
Each weightless as a wish,
snowflakes kiss our cheeks.
They settle on the benches and railings,
on the square roofs of kiosks —
on the peaceful,
forgiven city.


THE PURITANS’ REAL WAR ON CHRISTMAS
 
“When the Puritans took control of government in the mid-1640s they made a concerted effort to abolish the Christian festival of Christmas and to outlaw the customs associated with it but the attempt foundered on the deep-rooted popular attachment to these mid-winter rites.”

(and the Roman feast of Saturnalia as the origin of Christmas was used in the attack on traditional observance)

“In addition to the association with immorality and the concept of misrule, another of the central objections to the feast for the stricter English Protestants between 1560 and 1640 was its popularity among the papist recusant community. Within the late medieval Catholic church, Christmas had taken a subordinate position in the liturgical calendar to Easter. Its importance, however, had been growing and was further enhanced by the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century, for whereas, as John Bossy has recently pointed out, the more extreme Protestants had little time for Christ's 'holy family', reformed Catholicism laid great stress on this area. The Tridentine emphasis on devotions to the Virgin Mary in particular elevated the status of the feast during which she was portrayed as a paragon of motherhood.

Certainly, English recusants seem to have retained a deep attachment to Christmas during Elizabeth I's reign and the early part of the seventeenth century. The staunchly Catholic gentlewoman, Dorothy Lawson, celebrated Christmas 'in both kinds... corporally and spiritually', indulging in Christmas pies, dancing and gambling. In 1594 imprisoned Catholic priests at Wisbech kept a traditional Christmas which included a hobby horse and morris dancing, and throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Benedictine school at Douai retained the traditional festivities, complete with an elected 'Christmas King'. The Elizabethan Jesuit, John Gerard, relates in his autobiography how their vigorous celebration of Christmas and other feasts made Catholics particularly conspicuous at those times and, writing on the eve of the Civil War Richard Carpenter, a convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, observed that the recusant gentry were noted for their 'great Christmasses'. As a result, by the 1640s many English Protestants viewed Christmas festivities as the trappings of popery, anti-Christian 'rags of the Beast'.

The celebration of Christmas thus became just one facet of a deep religious cleavage within early seventeenth-century England which, by the middle of the century, was to lead to the breakdown of government, civil war and revolution. When the Puritans took control of government in the mid-1640s they made a concerted effort to abolish the Christian festival of Christmas and to outlaw the customs associated with it but the attempt foundered on the deep-rooted popular attachment to these mid-winter rites.

The following December the issue led to violence in London when a crowd of apprentices attacked a number of shops in Cheapside which had opened for trading on Christmas Day and forced their owners, 'diverse holy Londoners', to close them. In reporting the incident Mercurius Civicus sympathized with the shopkeepers but argued that to avoid 'disturbance and uproars in the City' they should have waited 'till such time as a course shall be taken by lawful authority with matters of that nature'.

The following year, when Christmas Day fell on the last Wednesday in the month, the day set aside for a regular monthly fast, Parliament produced the anticipated legal rulings. On December 19th an ordinance was passed directing that the fast day should be observed in the normal way, but:

With the more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights…

Both Houses of Parliament attended fast sermons delivered by Presbyterian ministers on December 25th, 1644, the Commons hearing from Thomas Thorowgood that:

The providence of heaven is here become a Moderator appointing the highest festival of all the year to meet with our monthly fast and be subdued by it.

In January 1645 the newly-published Directory of Public Worship, which outlined the basis of the new Presbyterian church establishment, affirmed bluntly that 'Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days, having no Warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued'.

During the Christmas of From 1646 onwards, with Parliament victorious over Charles I, the attack on the old church festivals intensified; as the Royalist author of the ballad The World is Turned Upside Down put it, 'Christmas was killed at Naseby fight'. In June 1647, a further Parliamentary ordinance abolished the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, and substituted as a regular holiday for students, servants and apprentices, the second Tuesday of every month. During the Christmas of 1647a number of ministers were taken into custody by the authorities for attempting to preach on Christmas Day, and one of them subsequently published his intended sermon under the title The Stillborn Nativity. Despite this government pressure, however, Christmas festivities remained popular, and successive regimes throughout the 1650s felt obliged to reiterate their objection to any observance of the feast.

n December 1650 the republican council of state urged the Rump of the Long Parliament to consider increasing the penalties for those caught attending 'those old superstitious observations', and in 1652 a proclamation published on Christmas Eve ordered that shops should be open and the markets kept on 25th, and that shopkeepers should be protected from violence or intimidation. Four years later, sitting on Christmas Day 1656, Oliver Cromwell's second Protectorate Parliament discussed a bill to prevent the celebrations in London. In 1657 the Council of State again urged the mayor and aldermen of London to clamp down on all celebrations in the capital, and a number of people attending church services on December 25th were held in custody and questioned by the army. Richard Cromwell's council repeated the injunctions to the mayor in December 1658. Insistent Puritan pressure, therefore, for the abolition of Christmas was kept up to within a few months of their fall from power at the Restoration, but it is clear even from the constant repetition of the government injunctions that it met with anything but willing acquiescence. In fact, the attack on Christmas produced instead a heated literary controversy and active, and on occasions violent measures to protect the traditional customs associated with the feast.
 

 The counter-attack upon [pro-Christmas] opinions began with the publication of Christs Birth Mistimed by Robert Skinner, and of Certain Queries Touching the Rise and Observation of Christmas by Joseph Hemming, a Presbyterian minister in Staffordshire. Hemming presented sixteen questions or 'queries', which attacked Christmas on the grounds that the date of Christ's birth was uncertain, that the feast had no scriptural basis but was purely a human invention, and that it was a superstitious relic of popery. He argued that Christmas had begun as a Christian version of the Roman mid-winter feast of the Saturnalia and that customs such as Yule games and carols were relics of these pagan rites. The following November this point was repeated in greater detail by Thomas Mockett, rector of Gilston in Hertfordshire, in his work Christmas, The Christians Grand Feast. In order to encourage the citizens of ancient Rome to convert, argued Mockett, the early Christians came up with their own equivalent of the Saturnalia, thus bringing:

...all the heathenish customs and pagan rites and ceremonies that the idolatrous heathens used, as riotous drinking, health drinking, gluttony, luxury, wantonness, dancing, dicing, stage-plays, interludes, masks, mummeries, with all other pagan sports and profane practices into the Church of God.

By perceiving these essentially harmless and deeply cherished folk customs to be a threat, the Puritans succeeded only in alienating large numbers from the new regime they had established. The attack on Christmas was thus one of the Parliamentarians' biggest mistakes, and one which was ironically the result of anxieties, originally misconceived but ultimately self-fulfilling.

http://www.historytoday.com/chris-durston/puritan-war-christmas

 
 1.Christmas was once against the law in America. When the Puritans came to this continent they brought their objection to Christmas with them. They believed it was a creation of man, not Christ, so it should not be considered a holy day. They weren’t too keen on the revelry that went along with the holiday, either. Christmas was celebrated in America by Anglicans but most Protestant groups forbade it. It wasn’t until June 26, 1870 that Christmas took its official place on the American holiday calendar.

2. Christmas trees were forbidden as a part of the celebrations until as late as 1640. Since the tradition of bringing evergreen boughs or trees into the home at the Winter Solstice was pagan in origin, the early Church forbade them. The first recorded instance of a Christmas tree dates to 1510 when the town of Riga in Latvia brought a tree into the town square, decorated it and then burned it. Thankfully, we have relegated the burning part to the Yule log. Approximately 30-35 million Christmas trees are sold each year in the U.S.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/12/10/ten-things-you-might-not-know-about-christmas/
 
WILL CHRISTMAS SURVIVE? Christmas has always been the most JOYFUL holiday, and there is much to be said for the power of joy. So I predict that secularized Christmas will still be around even a hundred years from now — perhaps hardly recognizable, just as our Christmas would already shock true believers just a century ago.

Will religion be around? Reform Judaism, the most evolved of the Abrahamic religions, is heavily leaning toward agnosticism, as is Unitarianism. Liberal Protestantism in general will be the next to fade away. The metaphorical readings will inevitably give rise to the question: “So god is a metaphor for WHAT?” We simply don't need this archaic metaphor as a complicating layer of reality. We need ethics, and examples of ethics. This is where some of the old stories may still be useful. But the story of Jonas Salk not patenting the polio vaccine has a greater power for me.

I’ve had an interesting debate on Facebook about which holiday is more central and is more likely to survive a hundred years from now: Christmas or Easter? Theologians insist that Easter is more important. But Christmas has a universal appeal. Once people recognize that they don't need to be saved, the whole salvationist theology falls down like a house of cards. But the motif of parental love, present in nativity, is ever-lasting. Take that away, and you have Harlow's self-destructive, "crazy" maternally deprived monkeys. That is the rock, the foundation: the bond between parent and child. Mysticism is b.s. next to the power of that.

That, ultimately, is the “rock” on which all human culture is built. It’s “rock-a-by baby.” A human infant cannot survive without a certain minimum of love — not just physical care, but emotional love. And the need to be loved, to be touched, to be completely accepted by at least one person (or being — dogs make great therapists) remains a great human universal.

True, there has been less and less emphasis on Baby Jesus in Christmas. Maybe eventually Baby J will go. But we will need to have some kind of love fest that’s not strictly about romantic love, but more about cheer and good will and peace, at least temporary.


MOTHER TERESA’S CULT OF SUFFERING

“MOTHER TERESA OFTEN TOLD US THAT AS MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY WE DID NOT SERVE THE POOR TO IMPROVE THEIR LOT, BUT BECAUSE WE WERE SERVING JESUS, who said that whenever service was rendered to one of the least, it was rendered to him. Jesus promised eternal life to those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked. . . . I do believe that Mother Teresa had a great deal of compassion for the poor, but it’s hard to deny that she was more interested in improving everyone’s lot in the next life than in this one.”

By even her own words, Mother Teresa’s view of suffering made no distinction between avoidable and unavoidable suffering, and instead cultivated passive acceptance of both. As she put it, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”  Or consider this anecdote from her life:

     One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, “You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.” And she joined her hands together and said, “Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.”

Mother Teresa’s outlook on suffering played out in her order’s homes for the sick and dying, which doctors have described as deficient in hygiene, care, nutrition, and painkillers. Miami resident Hemley Gonzalez was so shocked by his volunteer experience that he has founded an accountable charity to provide better care. “Needles were washed in cold water and reused and expired medicines were given to the inmates. There were people who had chance to live if given proper care,” . . . “I have decided to go back to Kolkata to start a charity that will be called ‘Responsible Charity.’ Each donation will be made public and professional medical help will be given,” Gonzalez said after returning to the U.S. He also launched a Facebook page called, “Stop the Missionaries of Charity.”

Mary Johnson is a former nun who joined Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, at age 19. For the next twenty years, she lived a life of service and austerity among the sisters, which she has described in her memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. But beneath the stark simplicity of her daily routine stirred a host of emotional, interpersonal and spiritual complexities, including the order’s tangled view of love and pain. Johnson’s thoughtful observations offer a window into the woman who inspired her spiritual vows and who ran her order of women religious.

Johnson:

The Mother Teresa I knew was a remarkably dedicated, self-sacrificing person, but not one of the wisest women I’ve known. Both empowered and shackled by religious faith, Mother Teresa was generous and unreasonable, cheerful and never content, one of the world’s most recognized women and one of its loneliest and most secretive.

Q: As a postulant in the Missionaries of Charity, one of your superiors, Sister Dolorosa, told you, “Mother always says, love, to be real, has to hurt.” Did you believe that?

Johnson: In the beginning of my life as a sister, I tried my best to believe what I was told, including that the greatest sign of love was Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. I’d never known the sort of mutual love in which two people rejoice in each other, strengthen each other, enjoy each other. I do believe that true love is willing to suffer for the beloved when necessary, but I don’t believe that suffering is the truest or best sign of love. I certainly now reject the notion that love demands the immolation of self for the beloved, though that’s something Mother Teresa seemed to believe all her life.

Q: During your time with the sisters, you gave up all possessions—your hair, which had to be shorn every month, an audiotape sent by your parents, even photographs. How does this relate to the fusion of love and pain?

Johnson: The Missionaries of Charity set out to live like the poor they serve. We each had two sets of clothes, which we’d wash by hand every day in buckets. We are rotting vegetables and stale bread that we’d begged from wholesale grocers. We slept in common dormitories, without any privacy, on thin mattresses we’d made ourselves. Living poorly day by day convinces you that life is hard. For a Missionary of Charity, ideal love was self-sacrificing, even to the practice of corporal penance.

Q: Your first session of self-flagellation is imprinted in my mind: “My knees shook. I took the bunch of knotted cords into my hands. From Sister Jeanne’s stall, I heard the beating sounds, one, two, three. . . . I swung harder. The skin of my lower thighs turned red, then red with white streaks as I hit harder.”

Johnson: When I took that rope whip into my hands, I was scared, I was excited, I hoped that I was on my way to conquering my selfishness and becoming a holy person. When you visit the homes and shrines of various saints, you often see hair shirts or whips or spiked chains on display. This is a religion in which nearly every house of worship, classroom, and private home has as its most prominent feature the image of a bloodied, tortured man. We were taught that wearing spiked chains and beating ourselves allowed us to share in his work of redemption. I know it doesn’t make much sense when you say it just like that, but within that entire system it had its own weird logic.

Q: After Mother Teresa’s death, the public learned of her struggles with anguishing doubt. You quote the words of a priest who comforted her with words that glorified her pain: “Your darkness is the divine gift of union with Jesus in his suffering. Your pain brings you close to your Crucified Spouse, and is the way you share His mission of redemption. There is no higher union with God. 

Johnson: I often wish that Mother Teresa had found someone who would have encouraged her to look at her doubts honestly, to examine them, to confront them. But instead of finding someone who encouraged her to think for herself, she found Father Joseph Neuner, SJ, who spun Mother Teresa’s doubts in such a way that the doubts themselves were deemed a sign of her holiness. I believe that the anti-intellectual bias of the Missionaries of Charity can be traced to the day that Mother Teresa was told that the content of her doubts was something she ought never explore. We all tell ourselves stories that help us cope; wisdom looks at those stories and knows how to distinguish the true stories from the coping mechanisms. Mother Teresa swallowed the stories whole.

Help us to understand the theology under this mindset.

Johnson: Ah, Valerie, theology is a story that seeks to explain things. In the Catholic Church, official theology is determined by the hierarchy, who have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. When Mother Teresa admitted to the priests and bishops who were her spiritual directors that she was tormented by feelings of distance from God and by doubts in God’s existence, these priests and bishops didn’t want to encourage real questioning; they probably didn’t even give themselves permission to question deeply. Unquestioning faith enables the system to continue undisturbed. Official theology often serves politics.

In this particular case, Father Neuner taught Mother Teresa to reframe doubt as a sign that she had drawn so close to God that she shared the agony of Jesus, who cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mother Teresa’s doubts did not therefore require examination, but a greater, unquestioning faith. The adoption of such a dogmatic stance proscribed any questioning of the Church’s teachings, including those that caused such suffering to those Mother Teresa served—like prohibitions against birth control and the effective relegation of women to second-rate status in the Church. When these priests convinced Mother Teresa never to question, they were molding her into one of the most outspoken proponents of official Church teaching. The same thing happens on a smaller scale whenever a member of the faithful is taught that reason must be subjugated to belief.

Q: Because of her opposition to contraception and her seeming disinterest in modern medicine, some have called Mother Teresa a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor. How do you see that?

Johnson: Most people today would say that we help the poor by helping them out of poverty. That was never Mother Teresa’s intention. Mother Teresa often told us that as Missionaries of Charity we did not serve the poor to improve their lot, but because we were serving Jesus, who said that whenever service was rendered to one of the least, it was rendered to him. Jesus promised eternal life to those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked. Mother Teresa was undeniably interested in reserving a really good spot for herself behind the pearly gates. I remember once when we were having dinner and a sister was serving water for the other sisters. Mother Teresa stopped the table conversation to point to that sister and tell us, “Jesus knows how many glasses of water you’ve served to the poor. He’s counting. When you get to heaven, he will know.” I do believe that Mother Teresa had a great deal of compassion for the poor, but it’s hard to deny that she was more interested in improving everyone’s lot in the next life than in this one.

Q: Why don’t supporters hold the Missionaries of Charity accountable?

Johnson: Supporters of the Missionaries of Charity are often theologically similar to the sisters, interested not so much in the (to their minds) short-term goal of helping the poor as in the long-term goal of getting everyone to heaven. It’s a little bit like certain evangelical Christians who look forward to nuclear holocaust in the Middle East because they believe devastating war will herald the end of the world and the union of all the good with God.

http://valerietarico.com/2013/04/29/self-flagellation-and-the-kiss-of-jesus-mother-teresas-attraction-to-pain/

Oriana:

Of course Catholicism teaches that as a human being you are a wretched sinner who DESERVES to suffer. This is my chief grudge against the church: how could you convince an innocent little girl that she was evil? I was a reasonably happy normal child until the indoctrination; then I was redefined as a sinner who deserved to be thrown into hell. How could you do this to a child??!!

But of course they don't see even rape as anything esp terrible because suffering is good for you. I picked up the idea of self-inflicted suffering mainly from the lives of the saints — but that's a conscious memory. I may have picked it up also from the church culture in general.

One surprising thing about Mother Teresa was her chronic doubt. It would be easy for me to imagine her drawing strength from the certainty of her belief, the way I draw strength from the certainty of my knowledge that there are no gods. Her letters reveal that Mother Teresa wasn’t at all sure if god existed. Unfortunately the priest who was her spiritual advisor persuaded her not to examine the doubt, but to accept it as part of the suffering that was god’s gift to her, the way a disease would be.

It can be difficult to explain to a non-Catholic: the more you suffer here, the shorter your time in Purgatory (possibly even none) — and off you go to heaven, to live into eternal bliss! (but since pleasure is so bad, will you be able to enjoy that bliss? Or is "bliss" simply peacefulness, attainable without self-flagellation?)

Somewhat tangential: I see America as a profoundly anti-Christian country (despite all the fundamentalist sound and fury). I think it’s due to the Protestant stamp on the culture, a lot less (and not at all when in the liberal denominations) into damnation, and not at all into suffering. Not that Americans are exactly known for their devotion to la dolce vita, but are in my observation actually in that direction, yes. “You only live once” is something I hear all the time, and not just from avowed atheists! (But then only 5% of atheists admit to being atheists.) And note that it's the Catholics who use the crucifix with all the gory detail of the tortured naked body — the Protestants use the bare cross.

Should I add that the liberal Protestants are increasingly more and agnostic, with some openly agnostic ministers? As are the Reform rabbis? And even the fundamentalists — I can’t say I know that many, but those I do — they never worry about going to hell. Take paradise for themselves for granted. Sin away — all is forgiven. Nothing can separate you from the Lamb. Ah, if only someone said this to me when I was growing up, in the anguish of repression and scrupulosity!

HOW CAN RELIGION GENERATE BOTH SAVAGERY AND NOBILITY? DOGMATIC VERSUS SPIRITUAL RELIGION
 
There’s something very strange about religion. There have been recent appalling acts of terrorism, allegedly carried out in the name of religion. However, we also know that some of the most virtuous and noble human acts are carried out in the name of religion. How can religion generate both such savagery and such nobility? How can the principles of religious faith be used to justify terrorism, and at other times encourage acts of great altruism and justice?

To make sense of this, we need to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of religion: dogmatic religion and spiritual religion.

Dogmatically religious people are those who think that they’re right and everyone else is wrong. For them, religion isn’t about self-development or experiencing the transcendent, but about adhering to a set of rigid beliefs and following the rules laid down by religious authorities. It’s about defending their beliefs against anyone who questions them, asserting their "truth" over other people’s, and spreading those beliefs to others. For them, the fact that other people have different beliefs is an affront, since it implies the possibility that their own beliefs may not be true.

Dogmatic religion stems from a psychological need for group identity and belonging, together with a need for certainty and meaning. There is a strong impulse in human beings to define ourselves, whether it’s as a Christian, a Muslim, a socialist, an American, a Republican, or as a fan of a sports club.

At the root of these impulses is a fundamental anxiety and sense of lack, caused by our sense of being distinct individuals, existing in separation to other people, and a world "out there." This generates a sense of being "cut off," like fragments that were once part of a whole. There is also a sense of vulnerability and insecurity, caused by our insignificance in the face of the world. As a result, we need to "bolster" our sense of self, to strengthen our identity. And religion, and other belief systems, helps us to do this.

Dogmatic religion is dangerous because it creates an in-out group mentality. It encourages people to withdraw empathy and morality from other groups, to see them as inferior and ignorant.

"Spiritual" religion promotes the higher attributes of human nature, like altruism and compassion, and fosters a sense of the sacred and sublime. "Spiritually religious" people don’t feel any animosity to other religious groups; in fact, they’re happy to investigate other beliefs, and may even go to other groups’ temples and services. They usually aren’t evangelical; their attitude is that different religions are suited to different people, and that all religions are different manifestations or expressions of the same essential truths.

This is why religious people are capable of the most appalling acts, but also of some of the most noble. This is why religion produces both good and evil, both Osama Bin Laden and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-darkness/201412/dogmatic-and-spiritual-religion
 
The division between dogmatic and spiritual religion seems the best answer to the old puzzle: how can religion inspire both evil and good? In reality there is of course some overlap between the dogmatics and spirituals, but seeing the polarity helps clarify the persistent mystery.

Another important distinction is that dogmatics believe in a vengeful god, while spiritual people see a loving and merciful god or “cosmic consciousness” (Christ consciousness, Buddha consciousness). They see the necessity of rejecting certain parts of the bible or other “holy” scriptures. Ethics trumps the literal interpretation.

Note Yahweh in the little window in the sky

SCHOLARS OFFER NEW THEORIES OF THE ORIGINS OF THE KORAN

In 1977 two other scholars from the School for Oriental and African Studies at London University -- Patricia Crone (a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) and Michael Cook (a professor of Near Eastern history at Princeton University) -- suggested a radically new approach in their book ''Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World.''

Since there are no Arabic chronicles from the first century of Islam, the two looked at several non-Muslim, seventh-century accounts that suggested Muhammad was perceived not as the founder of a new religion but as a preacher in the Old Testament tradition, hailing the coming of a Messiah. Many of the early documents refer to the followers of Muhammad as ''hagarenes,'' and the ''tribe of Ishmael,'' in other words as descendants of Hagar, the servant girl that the Jewish patriarch Abraham used to father his son Ishmael.

In its earliest form, Ms. Crone and Mr. Cook argued, the followers of Muhammad may have seen themselves as retaking their place in the Holy Land alongside their Jewish cousins. (And many Jews appear to have welcomed the Arabs as liberators when they entered Jerusalem in 638.)

 Mr. Cook and Ms. Crone have revised some of their early hypotheses while sticking to others. ''We were certainly wrong about quite a lot of things,'' Ms. Crone said. ''But I stick to the basic point we made: that Islamic history did not arise as the classic tradition says it does.''

Ms. Crone insists that the Koran and the Islamic tradition present a fundamental paradox. The Koran is a text soaked in monotheistic thinking, filled with stories and references to Abraham, Isaac, Joseph and Jesus, and yet the official history insists that Muhammad, an illiterate camel merchant, received the revelation in Mecca, a remote, sparsely populated part of Arabia, far from the centers of monotheistic thought, in an environment of idol-worshiping Arab Bedouins. Unless one accepts the idea of the angel Gabriel, Ms. Crone says, historians must somehow explain how all these monotheistic stories and ideas found their way into the Koran.

 ''There are only two possibilities,'' Ms. Crone said. ''Either there had to be substantial numbers of Jews and Christians in Mecca or the Koran had to have been composed somewhere else.''

Indeed, many scholars who are not revisionists agree that Islam must be placed back into the wider historical context of the religions of the Middle East rather than seeing it as the spontaneous product of the pristine Arabian desert. ''I think there is increasing acceptance, even on the part of many Muslims, that Islam emerged out of the wider monotheistic soup of the Middle East,'' says Roy Mottahedeh, a professor of Islamic history at Harvard University.

Christoph Luxenberg’s work, based on the earliest copies of the Koran, maintains that parts of Islam's holy book are derived from pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the editions of the Koran commonly read today.

Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd-R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg's radical theory is that many of the text's difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.

For example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply ''white.'' Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for ''houri,'' which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means ''white raisin.''

 Mr. Luxenberg has traced the passages dealing with paradise to a Christian text called Hymns of Paradise by a fourth-century author. Mr. Luxenberg said the word paradise was derived from the Aramaic word for garden and all the descriptions of paradise described it as a garden of flowing waters, abundant fruits and white raisins, a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East. In this context, white raisins, mentioned often as hur, Mr. Luxenberg said, makes more sense than a reward of sexual favors.

In many cases, the differences can be quite significant. Mr. Puin points out that in the early archaic copies of the Koran, it is impossible to distinguish between the words ''to fight'' and ''to kill.'' In many cases, he said, Islamic exegetes added diacritical marks that yielded the harsher meaning, perhaps reflecting a period in which the Islamic Empire was often at war.

A return to the earliest Koran, Mr. Puin and others suggest, might lead to a more tolerant brand of Islam, as well as one that is more conscious of its close ties to both Judaism and Christianity.

Some Muslim authors have begun to publish skeptical, revisionist work on the Koran as well. Several new volumes of revisionist scholarship, ''The Origins of the Koran,'' and ''The Quest for the Historical Muhammad,'' have been edited by a former Muslim who writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Mr. Warraq, who heads a group called the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about having a political agenda. ''Biblical scholarship has made people less dogmatic, more open,'' he said, ''and I hope that happens to Muslim society as well.''

 Andrew Rippin, an Islamicist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that freedom of speech in the Islamic world is more likely to evolve from within the Islamic interpretative tradition than from outside attacks on it. Approaches to the Koran that are now branded as heretical -- interpreting the text metaphorically rather than literally -- were widely practiced in mainstream Islam a thousand years ago.

''When I teach the history of the interpretation it is eye-opening to students the amount of independent thought and diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries of Islam,'' Mr. Rippin says. ''It was only in more recent centuries that there was a need for limiting interpretation.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/scholars-are-quietly-offering-new-theories-of-the-koran.html?pagewanted=all

THE CHOLORIDIAN TRINITY
 
John Edward Wansbrough (February 19, 1928 – June 10, 2002) was an American historian who taught at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Wansbrough's emphasis was on the critique of traditional accounts of the origins of Islam. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Wansbrough completed his studies at Harvard University, and spent the rest of his academic career at SOAS.

He caused a furor in the 1970s when his research on early Islamic manuscripts, including the analysis of the repeated use of monotheistic Judeo-Christian imagery found in the Qur'an led him to posit that the rise of Islam was a mutation of what was originally a Judeo-Christian sect trying to spread in Arab lands, rather than by simple cultural diffusion. As time evolved the Judeo-Christian scriptures were adapted to an Arab perspective and mutated into what became the Qur'an which was developed over centuries with contributions from various Arab tribal sources. Wansbrough's research suggests that a great deal of the traditional history of Islam appeared to be a fabrication of later generations seeking to forge and justify a unique religious identity. Within this context, the character of Muhammad could be seen as a manufactured myth created to provide the Arab tribes with their own Arab version of the Judeo-Christian prophets.

Interestingly, the Koranic concept of the Christian Trinity is the Father, the Mother (i.e. Mary), and Jesus. There was an early Christian sect, the Choloridians, who did believe in this kind of Trinity.


AN INHIBITORY NEUROTRANSMITTER MAY BE KEY TO SLOWING DOWN AGING

As we age, the firing of neurons becomes more chaotic, in proportion to the decline in the levels of GABA, the neurotransmitter that makes the firing more selective. The article points not only to the potential anti-aging use of benzodiazepines, but also of meditation, which increases GABA-ergic inhibition, thus improving cognitive function and emotional regulation.

“The slowdown of the brain with old age is due to the lack of a brain chemical which helps neurons to be selective about what they respond to, reveals research involving the world's oldest monkeys.

The reason GABA is so important in the brain is that it works as a "gating" mechanism, explains Leventhal. By helping neurons to respond only to specific stimuli, it enables the brain to make sense of the vast quantity of incoming information.

However, as people get older the neurons in their brains increasingly fire non-selectively. Interpreting information then becomes like listening to "whispering in the discotheque as opposed to shouting in a quiet room," Leventhal says.

Higher brain functions, such as visual recognition or understanding language, require the processing of information in the brain but decline as people get older. This decline appears to be due to a reduction in a neurotransmitter called GABA, say researchers, which means neurons with specific tasks become more easily fired by some other stimulus.

Macaque monkeys, with an age equivalent to 90-years in humans, were not as sharp as their younger counterparts in visual tests despite having perfect eyesight. But when they were given drugs to increase levels of GABA in the brain they improved vastly, say the team.

Delivering GABA calms the neurons down and they become more selective, says neuroscientist Audie Leventhal, at the University of Utah School of Medicine, who led the study. "They look the same as they did 20 years ago," he says.

When GABA and a GABA-enhancing drug were delivered to the brain cells, the team saw an improvement in the selectivity of neurons in the older animals within a couple of minutes.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/904174/posts

Oriana: I am not happy with the article’s recommendation of benzodiazepines (benzodiazepenes don’t increase GABA levels, a common misconception; they increase the sensitivity of GABA receptors). But there is an interesting drug that’s an analog of GABA: gabapentin. It also happens to be inexpensive and remarkably safe.


ending on beauty:

THE ONLY DEITY I COULD RESPECT

In Catechism classes I was told that after death there is immediate judgment (as opposed to the Last Judgment), and all my sins will be reviewed (something like, "On January 5, 1982, 3:12 pm, envied a neighbor her nice new car"). Only this morning, i.e. decades later, it occurred to me that the only kind of deity I could respect would be one that instead asks a different question: WHAT GOOD HAVE YOU DONE?

I think my answer would consist of several parts, including the good I think I’ve done as a teacher, as a friend and lover, and as a poet (yes! a stranger coming up to me after a reading, obviously affected by an insight in a poem of mine, uplifted — that counts, doesn’t it?) But I’d start with beauty — I have tried to nourish people with beauty.

And I think the deity that I could respect would have not only an ethical aspect, and be friendly and cuddly, but also have the attribute of beauty (am I thinking of a feline deity?) Just indulging in flights of fancy here — but if one can create a god, but create a cruel, punitive one? For social control through guilt, yes, but at the individual level, there is a need for a beautiful friend . . . 

 

SOVIET NOSTALGIA, STEM CELLS, GROWING UP WITH MARXISM AND CATHOLICISM, EFFECTS OF REMOVING BULLY ALPHA MALES

 
Soviet sculpture studio, 1953

CUCUMBER SOUP

I know I’ll never meet anyone
who’s had my childhood,
surrounded by portraits of Lenin
and Karl Marx, with Engels tossed in

for the sake of the Trinity.
We all knew who God the Father was,
who the Son with slant Siberian eyes,
Engels the long-suffering Ghost.

I’ll never meet anyone
who’s heard about the Tzar’s
Winter Palace, the first salvo fired
from the battleship Aurora,

the Finland Station, Smolny Institute.
Those were family names;
it didn’t matter that they stood
for shattered dreams.

You love what you grew up with:
not the moronic regime
but the springtime of blossoming emblems,
the lilacs of ideals, the enormous width

of The International. When you sang it,
you sang with a million mouths.
Aren’t all poems about forbidden love?
The swooning lilacs instead of suicide?

Marx’s beard like a wild shrub
grew on every wall. In summer we ate
cucumber sandwiches, in winter
cucumber soup — it was the humble

potato soup with finely chopped pickle.
What can you expect from reality,
that fat woman who opens a can
of Campbell’s chicken noodle.


~ Oriana © 2015


 
RUSSIAN NOSTALGIA FOR THE SOVIET ERA

I'm fascinated by the amount of Soviet-era nostalgia that the Russians are experiencing. There is a bad side to this — nationalism, the yearning to regain lost power. Russia adores Putin, the latest incarnation of a Tzar-like autocrat. But then there is a purely emotional and universal aspect of this nostalgia: you love what you grew up with. You love the familiar. You see certain faces around you, and they become your family. Marx: a great-grandfather. Lenin: the smart, successful uncle. Engels: the eccentric “old bachelor” uncle, somewhat pitied.

The loss of the familiar is traumatic. It’s at the core of what I call the “immigrant trauma.” It doesn’t matter that by objective standards the new country has a higher standard of living. The new country is all wrong simply because it is different.

I never wrestled with Marxism as a set of doctrines. My struggle was with religion. I just replied to someone who used the worn-out “gaps in knowledge” argument a scientific worldview:

“The god of the gaps” is a last-ditch defense that's crumbling almost every year — every decade for sure. We'll never run out of mystery, but already the 19th century was ripe for tossing the archaic myths — fascinating as myths, but hardly as a way to describe reality. Still, I can see that some people have an emotional need for a parent in the sky, and that prevails. To them I say, “I can to some extent empathize with your need, and you are welcome to say, ‘I don't care about the truth. We can’t know the truth in any absolute sense anyway, so I'll just stay with what is emotionally fulfilling to me.’ I respect that emotional need. We agree on other things, so let’s build on that, and keep silent about that ancient 24/7 surveillance system, the old Eye-in-the-sky (a fiction that caused me so much suffering, it still hurts to remember).”

And I can see that one can grow attached to the holy icons and have favorite saints (I speak of Catholicism). Unlike the god of punishment, the saints were kind. Mary was kind, grace streaming from her porcelain palms. In a small town with little going on, the church and its festivals can be the center of a life, an enriching element of experience, imaginary or not, that goes beyond the pedestrian chores. And the church is likely to be the most beautiful building in town, and being part of the choir the only opportunity to make music.

In a city, one can go to the opera and experience something akin to the ecstatic worship of ancient Greeks. In a small town before TV and Twitter and video games, there was soccer and church.

Again, my struggle was never with Marxism; my great personal battle was with Catholicism. Both the school and the church stuffed my young head with nonsense. But my indoctrination into the Soviet doctrine (I think it’s incorrect to call it “Marxism” or even “Marxism-Leninism”) was not a fraction as intense as my Catholic indoctrination — and there were our parents, too, who vigilantly counteracted propaganda that might be brought home from school (history lessons were an outstanding example). Still, it is my Catholic indoctrination that makes me understand why some people fell apart emotionally or even committed suicide when they could not make any sense of life once the Soviet Union was dissolved, its founding principles revealed as mistaken, and nothing convincing offered in their place.

Here is the Nobel Prize-winning Svetlana Alexievich writing about about a doctoral student who committed suicide — the memories of a friend of his:

“From the account of his friend, Vladimir Staniukevich, graduate student in the Philosophy Department:

I think that he was a sincere Marxist and saw Marxism as a humanitarian idea, where “we” means much more than “I.” Like some kind of unified planetary civilization in the future . . .

All the pages [of his dissertation on Marxism and religion ] were crossed out. Diagonally, in red pencil, he’d written furiously: “Nonsense!! Gibberish!! Lies!!” It was his handwriting… I recognized it…

His dissertation didn’t pan out. Well, to hell with it! You have to admit you’re a prisoner of utopia… Why jump from the twelfth floor on account of that? These days how many people are rewriting their master’s essay, their doctoral dissertation, and how many are afraid to admit what the title was? It’s embarrassing, uncomfortable…

He and I once talked about socialism not resolving the problem of death, or at least of old age. It just skirts it…

I saw him make the acquaintance of a crazy guy in a used bookstore. This guy, too, was rummaging around in old books on Marxism, like we were. Then he told me:

“You know what he said? ‘I’m the one who’s normal—but you’re suffering.’ And you know, he was right.”

“The phenomenon of Hitler will trouble many minds for a long time to come. Excite them. How, after all, is the mechanism of mass psychosis launched? Mothers held their children up crying: ‘Here, Führer, take them!’

“We are consumers of Marxism. Who can say he knows Marxism? Knows Lenin, knows Marx? There’s early Marx… And Marx at the end of his life… The halftones, shades, the whole blossoming complexity of it all, is unknowable to us. No one can increase our knowledge. We are all interpreters…

“At the moment we’re stuck in the past like we used to be stuck in the future. I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!

“I proposed a new dissertation topic to our professor: ‘Socialism as an Intellectual Mistake.’ His response was: ‘Nonsense.’ As if I could decipher the Bible or the Apocalypse with equal success. Well, nonsense is a form of creativity, too… The old man was bewildered. You know him yourself—he’s not one of those old farts, but everything that happened was a personal tragedy for him. I have to rewrite my dissertation, but how can he rewrite his life? Right now each of us has to rehabilitate himself. There’s a mental illness—multiple, or dissociated, personality disorder. People who have it forget their names, social positions, their friends and even their children, their lives. It’s a dissolution of personality… when a person can’t combine the official take or government belief, his own point of view, and his doubts… how true is what he thinks, and how true is what he says. The personality splits into two or three parts…

There are plenty of history teachers and professors in psychiatric hospitals… The better they were at instilling something, the more they were corrupted… At the very least three generations…and a few others are infected… How mysteriously everything eludes definition… The temptation of utopia…”

Marx as Prometheus, engraving, 1843

**

This is of course a truly tragic story, but it reminds me of a conversation I had at Yaddo Artist Colony in the early nineties, when the fall of the Berlin Wall was a relatively fresh event. I casually remarked (I forget the context) that “anything is possible. Look, who ever thought that Communism would fall?” A young woman looked up at me with tremendous resentment in her face, and exclaimed, “Yes, and now there are thousands of New York intellectuals with nothing to believe in!”

~ “My heart bleeds for them,” I replied. But my sarcasm wasn’t completely sincere. I did feel some empathy for those New York intellectuals. I knew the experience of shattered dreams, of idealism crudely destroyed.

Asked why she returned to China, a woman who once had a successful career in finance in New York and London replied, “I missed the idealism.”

But that idealism is all lies, I can imagine someone reply. That would not be incorrect either. The theory is mostly erroneous and it doesn’t work in practice; there is a lot of corruption. This woman was smart enough to know that. Yet she still missed the idealism, or at least the aura of it. Of having a “we” that’s greater than the “I.” Of hearing about how “we” are building a more just society, even if it’s not true.

Idealism. Ah, those humans, those prisoners of utopia . . . 

We love what we grow up with. As the graduate student said, “I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!”

This was only slightly true for me. But whatever you grow up with has a power. Some might say that it’s perverse that I grew to hate the Catholic church as a much worse totalitarian regime, while preserving a sentimental nostalgia for the International, the images of Marx, Lenin, and Engels on the walls of public buildings, carried in May First parades.

But for the pre-revolutionary generation, the nostalgia was for their own childhood and youth — for the Tzarist splendor, the ladies in magnificent furs descending from sleighs to attend a ball at the Winter Palace . . .
The gate of the winter palace. The gilded emblems of Tzarist Russia, removed in 1917, are now fully restored

*

And there is something else I can’t quite label, but it came to my mind because of certain dreams I had after my recent stem-cell treatment. Stem cells carry the promise of promise of regeneration. I woke up in the wee hours feeling radiantly happy, vaguely recalling dreams in which I was overflowing with a sense of youthful health and energy. It was a triumphant feeling.

I lay in the dark, smiling, so energetically happy that I had trouble falling back asleep. My first thought was: those dreams were like the Soviet propaganda, especially the glossy magazines like The Soviet Life, which always showed the young who radiated health and good cheer. Their red Pioneers neck scarves, their shiny eyes and perfect teeth!

I don’t remember any other time when I thought that my dreams resembled the Soviet propaganda. The image of youth is of course powerful in itself, carrying the connotations of health and optimism, of being yet untouched by death. Everything is possible.

(I realize I must be the only writer in the world to have said, “I woke up feeling like the Soviet propaganda.” Why not the American propaganda? To me, American propaganda is consumerist. It’s about finding the right toothpaste. It doesn’t have the well-scrubbed Mormon missionary look with victory in one’s eyes.)

Youth is an image of victory, of having a future. Those tend to be the most difficult years of one’s life, marked by a lot of struggle and heartbreak. Many young people are not at all happy — this is a prime time for suicide — but the attractive image prevails over the complicated reality. 

(PS. True, there is an element of the heroic in the American Western, but those movies were not a significant part of my growing up. Nor was Superman — I never even heard of that figure before I came to the US. But speaking of the “Wild West” — both Lenin and Stalin were very impressed by the US as a pioneer country and saw it as a model for developing the great expanse of Asia under their control, the Soviet Union also being a pioneer country.)


I hasten to say that I did not feel sad when the Berlin Wall fell down. On the contrary, I felt happy. The system was rotten and deserved to collapse. Only much earlier than that, and only for brief periods of time, I felt some sadness when I thought that the dream of a just society not based on greed simply could not work.

But I had such thoughts rarely at best. First of all, what mattered most to me was not political theory but beauty. I drew my sustenance from the beauty of nature and whatever beauty I could find in culture: music, the visual arts, literature. Then there was the world of ideas in its infinite variety, not merely the ideas of economic order. And, secondly, I have gradually acquired a measure of realism: the knowledge that nothing is perfect, that social progress is slow and full of setbacks. My creative work has taught me patience.

At the same time, my sentimental affection for the portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Engels is not something I’d deny. But that’s like the remnant affection for the images of Madonna and Child. It’s about familiarity. It’s not about belief. (Familiarity CAN be a large component of belief, but it doesn't have to be.)


MARXISM GOES BACK TO THE ERA OF A LARGE WORKING CLASS
Marx correctly pointed out that capitalism created with the urban working class — which was supposed to destroy capitalism. He never imagined that capitalism would eventually destroy — or almost destroy — the working class. As it became obvious that capitalism was winning, Marxism became largely archaic, irrelevant. Only the young Marx is still appreciated, especially his observations on alienated labor versus the right to meaningful work.
Karl Marx in his youth

Marxism is easy to parody. Its similarity to religion has been noted endless times. Here is Zbigniew Herbert’s witty vision of that similarity:

REPORT FROM PARADISE

In paradise the work week is thirty hours
salaries are higher prices always dropping
physical labor is not tiring (because of lower gravity)
chopping wood is like typing
the social system is stable the government moderate
it's certainly better in paradise than in any country

At first it was supposed to be different
luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction
but one couldn’t separate body from soul
precisely enough and the soul would arrive
with a drop of blubber a thread of muscle
one had to compromise
mix the grain of the absolute with the grain of clay
still another falling away from the doctrine the ultimate one
only John foresaw it: the resurrection of the body

God is seen by few
exists only for those made of pure pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about floods and miracles
in time all will see God
when this is to take place nobody knows

In the meantime Saturday at noon
the sirens roar sweetly
and heavenly proletarians come out of the factories
carrying their wings awkwardly like violins

~ Zbigniew Herbert, tr. Oriana Ivy © 2015

“Saturday at noon”? Herbert wrote this when work on Saturday, at least for half a day, was standard, as was the six-day school week. Even though he postulates the thirty-hour work week, he can’t quite make the leap beyond what was his reality at the time this poem was written (in the nineteen sixties, I think).

And the roar of sirens signified the beginning and end of the work day. When I lived in Łódź, a city with large textile industry, that was my reality for three years, as much as the church bells. It was all fused: the bells of St. Andrew’s and the sirens of the Textile Works of the October Revolution.

Herbert was no indifferent to this fusion, so characteristic of the life in Poland before the fall of communism. But he’s more interested in metaphysics. In this poem he solves the central problem of heaven: the eternal boredom of not having work to do. “Luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction” would hardly satisfy. Not even the most refined intellectuals and estheticians could endure an abstract, do-nothing heaven. Maybe singers would be fulfilled for a century or two — but even they might start wanting new songs.

Herbert’s solution: factory work, the kind extolled by the Soviet propaganda. Factory work is so orderly, so concrete. You actually produce something considered useful — cars, for example. (Cars in heaven? Well, why not — the kind that work best in low gravity.)

Just as few people are capable of becoming violin virtuosos, so few can be either pure altruistic Marxists or otherworldly Christians. Herbert is concerned with the happiness — or at least reasonable contentment — of the many. After all, it’s the “masses” or the “sheep” whose needs are supposed to be fulfilled by ideologies or religions. What are people to do with their time? A non-tiring factory job is a practical solution. Hence the fusion of the heavenly paradise and the workers’ paradise.

Pointing out the similarities between Marxism and religion has become a cliché — the prophets, the sacred books, salvation (though here the proletariat is to be the Messiah), the need for a dictatorship, whether earthly or celestial. But to my knowledge no one has gone as far as Herbert in presenting the fusion of the two — in the afterlife at that. Human nature wins over idealism! ~ though perhaps we need both Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa to be complete human beings.

This poem has charm whether or not the reader has the historical and ideological background. Ultimately, it works by being charming.

A mural by Diego Rivera


MEMORIES, MEMORIES . . .


FACTORIES IN ŁÓDŹ

Sirens roared a hoarse hunger.
The walls thudded a thick pulse,
brick crusted with centuries of soot,
the looms’ horizontal

music of massive shafts:
axis and thrust,
the surge and ebb of shuttles.
Behind the wire-paneled glass,

the trembling strings of cotton dust,
women in gray scarves like nuns
lifted and lowered their arms
under rows of spidery lamps.

The old owners’ names
over the wing-like gates
were supplanted with red-lettered signs:
“Lenin Thread Manufacture,”

“Textile Works
of the October Revolution.”
But for me the factories
had no names as I passed

through the black-walled streets,
narcotic with ugliness and rhythm,
the knocking of returning shuttles:
More! More! Again! Again!

Multiple metal hearts
hammered my lullaby at night.
They repeated like an iron god:
I am that I am that I am.


~ Oriana © 2015

**

Ah, the October Revolution that actually took place in November . . .  One of the good reforms was that of the calendar: Russia finally caught up with the rest of Europe by adopting the Gregorian Calendar, which goes back to 1582. Spelling was also simplified, though the Cyrillic alphabet was retained (unfortunately, in my opinion).

The last line surprised me as it welled up. I was merely describing the factories, I thought, trying to render the experience of a child caught up in their huge rhythm. I wasn’t trying for any statement linking the industrial (or Russian) revolution with religion. But poems come from the unconscious, which makes these hidden connections. One “supreme dictator” (here presumably the industrial looms) reminded me of the alleged supreme dictator of the universe.

Pope Innocent X by Diego Velasquez, 1650. How come I'm vaguely reminded of Lenin?

“If your god is real, then my non-belief is part of its divine plan.”

Nevertheless, I love papal haute couture. Pope Francis has been trying to cut back on the splendor, I know. I think it’s a mistake, like making churches more like the Protestant ones, severe and ugly. The only excuse for Catholicism is the esthetics of excess. 

BUT DOESN’T IT ALWAYS COME DOWN TO A MALE-DOMINATED SYSTEM RUN BY BULLIES?

From Robert Sapolsky’s lecture on hierarchy as a destructive force:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY

The central discovery made by Sapolsky when he worked as a primatologist concerned the social and biological effects of removing aggressive males. As is often the case with important discoveries, a lucky accident played a part. Sapolsky studied a troop of baboons where the alpha males fed at the garbage dump of a nearby hotel. When the aggressive male baboons died after eating TB-infected meat, the culture of the surviving baboons changed dramatically. All the alpha males were gone; the the troop now had twice as many females, and the surviving males were less aggressive and more “socially affiliative.”

The levels of stress hormones decreased and individual health improved. Males started carrying baby baboons, which was never observed before. Troop members sat closer to each other without fear. No male aggression was directed at females. More time was spent grooming. Males began to groom other males, which is “as unheard of as a flying baboon.” And a newly introduced adolescent male would gradually acquire the new culture, so the transformation of culture that happened in one generation proved lasting. And the troop not only survived; it thrived.

And that reminds me of other studies where bullies were removed from animal or human groups, and the improvement in health and sociability that followed. Fear is not good for us; love is. As Sapolsky says: “Affiliation has enormous power.” Connection. Cooperation.

It’s a truism that some women begin to thrive only after a divorce or the death of a domineering spouse. The explanation is simple: stress levels go down. The woman is now free to lead her own life without constant criticism or another form of harassment. Of course sometimes it’s the woman who is the dominator, and then the man begins to blossom as soon as he separates. The positive changes in health and behavior may begin as soon as the decision to separate is taken.

A stray thought: the culture can go the other way just as quickly. An American woman doctor who worked for a while in Saudi Arabia noted that her Western male colleagues quickly became comfortable with the denigration of women, and behaviors such as opening a door for a woman disappeared. 

Robert Sapolsky and one of his research subjects
 
GOD AS THE DOMINANT APE

“Our primate ancestors passed onto us certain social protocols, and we have passed them onto God. In primate cliques subordinates will often shrink down before the dominant male, thus accentuating his largeness and superiority. The god of the Abrahamic religions, in company with gods of other traditions, is often portrayed as a large male who requires that subordinates lower themselves before Him.

Larger size often equates to dominance in many other species, and plays an important role in the rank structures of men. As cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker has pointed out, the “Big-men” who ruled over hunter-gatherer societies were often literally big men.

Lip smacking — the nonhuman primate equivalent of kissing — is a common appeasement display in monkeys and apes, and may be intended to emulate infant suckling noises. It is understandable how sounds associated with nurturing might appease aggression. Like other infantile behaviors, this gesture may also communicate, “Like an infant, I pose no threat.”

Hand kissing is a customary way of showing submission to a king, typically while bowing one’s head or kneeling down. Often the custom was — and is, in the remaining monarchies of the world — to kiss the king’s signet ring. This custom remains strong in the Catholic Church, a monarchic hierarchy in which the pious kneel before the pope and kiss his ring. Other Church customs would suggest that this gesture is rooted in ancient primate displays intended to connote infanthood — for instance, the pope is referred to as father, and his flock are considered his children.

Foot kissing, a behavior observed widely in primatology, is another way submissive monkeys and apes demonstrate acquiescence to dominant members of their societies. This behavior carries forward to human societies that are highly rank structured, such as monarchies. For instance, kissing the king’s foot has always been synonymous with supplicant behavior — e.g., showing him extreme deference, begging for his mercy, or even recognizing that he represents God.

Christ — who is sometimes referred to as Christ the King — is also greeted with foot-kissing, as are his proxies. At the Basilica in Rome stands a large bronze statue of St. Paul, built in the fifth century. Though the statue has stood stalwart now for fifteen centuries its feet have been worn thin by the lips of pilgrims. There was even a custom in the Catholic Church of kissing the feet of the pope.

It is worth reiterating that such displays are fundamentally submissive in nature, intended to secure the favor of a more powerful being.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/03/10/god-is-the-ultimate-alpha-male/

MY STEM CELL ADVENTURES, PART I
 
I was facing the nightmare of total knee replacement surgery. I already had one knee surgery, in medicine’s Dark Ages. My lateral meniscus was removed due to a tear. The surgery, including the recovery, was indeed a nightmare of pain and disability. But the worst was ahead: within several years it became known that removing the meniscus leads to severe arthritis in 100% of the cases. Far from being pretty useless, as assumed by the surgeons, and easily replaced by scar tissue, the meniscus turned out to be critical for shock absorption.

100% severe arthritis. I wasn’t going to be a miraculous exception. Soon enough that became quite obvious. I could still walk — but every year more slowly and for shorter distances.

The more I read about the total knee replacement, the more videos I watched, and the more I talked with former patients, the more disastrous it appeared, horrifically stressful on the body — and yet it seemed the only solution. Then through a series of happy coincidence I found a place that did stem cell therapy for joint injuries. And — another happy coincidence —- it turned out that the surgeon I consulted, the third one this year, regarded as one of the two top joint specialists in San Diego, actually performed the stem-cell procedure.

A big breakthrough that allowed the treatment to become more widespread and affordable was the discovery that the human body fat is a rich source of stem cells. There is roughly one adipose stem cell per 100 fat cells. (By comparison, bone marrow contains one per 250,000 to 400,000 cells. Nevertheless, some centers still rely on the more established procedure using bone-marrow stem cells, which requires more difficult harvesting from the hip or femur).

(Blood is another good source of stem cells. Since blood can be frozen for future use, more potential opens up.)

From the Stemgenex website: https://stemgenex.com

“Adipose (fat) tissue contains a concentrated amount of cells known as mesenchymal stem cells which are capable of replication or becoming different types of cells throughout the body such as neurons, bone, cartilage, muscle, tendon, etc

The advantage of using mesenchymal stem cells from your adipose fat is that they are one of the richest sources of stem cells in the body (2500 times more stem cells reside in fat vs. bone marrow) and they are very easy to harvest via a mini-liposuction procedure.

Adipose derived stem cells also have a much higher immunomodulatory capacity than those of bone marrow derived stem cells which can greatly benefit patients with auto-immune conditions.”

**

The results of stem cell therapy depend largely on the quantity of stem cells injected. The age of the patient is also a factor: younger patients have more effective stem cells — no surprise.

Here are two stories I heard at my stem-cell clinic in Sorrento Valley near San Diego (Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles is another stem-cell pioneer in Southern California. At this point there are stem-stem clinics everywhere in the US, especially in and around large cities — and yet the public remains largely unaware of this alternative).

1. An NFL quarterback came for his treatment (sports injuries provide a “rich target environment” for stem cell repair in lieu of surgery). The plastic surgeon who does the liposuction (so “mini” that only a local anesthetic is used) was in despair: there was no visible fat on this patient. He appeared to be all muscle. Yet eventually the surgeon managed to get enough fat from the buttocks, and the treatment was performed.

2. A 92-year-old woman came asking for stem-cell treatment for her arthritis. The staff first refused, saying that her stem cells would not be effective. But the feisty old woman refused to be discouraged. “What else am I supposed to do with my money?” she asked — and got the treatment.

(Alas, I blew my opportunity to ask about her results. In any case, that question can be easily deflected with “It’s still too early to know.” It takes about five months for the evidence of cartilage regeneration to show up on X-rays, though functional  improvement can become evident within weeks.)

*

There is a difference in the way you are treated — even in the way you are touched — when you pay out of pocket. It’s not so much the $20 coupon for Starbucks — what hospital would ever think of it? — it’s simply how you are spoken to: the tone of voice, the politeness. A stem-cell clinic is no Walmart medicine. To establish a good reputation, they need to cater to the patient.

The patients were almost all older men. “They look like rich CEO’s,” my friend observed. “The kind not afraid to take a risk.” One could read that in their self-confident bearing. Just the way they sat in the waiting room was subtly different. Suddenly I was in the company of such men, for the first time in my life. 

Speaking to me in the soothing way one speaks to child or a pet, the plastic surgeon described each step of the mini-liposuction: “And now you will feel a tiny sting, but it won’t last long.” The discomfort was less by far than during a typical dental visit.

“You’ve got great-looking fat,” I was told. “Want to see it?” There it was in a large syringe, pinkish, with small fluffy yellow cloudlets. “So pink?” I exclaimed, amazed.” “A bit of blood gets in,” the surgeon explained. “The yellow is the fat. We do it slowly and gently, because the idea is to keep the fat alive, not like during ordinary liposuction, where you’re going to throw the fat away.”

Now that I knew the fat was a source of stem cells, throwing out fat seemed almost a sacrilege.

The fat was then transferred to a device that looked like a modest little box, but apparently centrifuged and processed the stem cells. It was a holy of holies approached only by the staff with little masks on their faces.

An hour later I was back from Starbucks, and the stem cells were ready for “deployment” — a term that entered the language during the first Gulf War. Stem cells are “deployed” via an ultrasound-guided injection.

“Your stem cells look really good,” a technician remarked. I can’t deny the warm feeling that suffused me, though not much later I reflected that she probably says it to every patient. But then, who knows, perhaps one can tell by the color or density of the special solution (which also contains amniotic-fluid growth factors).

(I don’t remember seeing a microscope anywhere, but then I didn’t look for it. Perhaps they do check the cells, but then perhaps they don’t. Can one even check the vitality of stem cells as one can easily check the quality of sperm?)

Then I proceeded to the “deployment” room. First I got an IV infusion of the left-over stem cells: “We just let them into the general circulation. It might do some good,” the technician said. Finding the right vein took longer than the infusion itself. Then the technician disappeared and the high priests entered the room — the surgeon and his specially trained assistant, Patrick, the one who had previously told me, “Ten years from now, there won’t be knee replacement surgery. Stem cells will be the standard treatment for arthritis. This is the future.”

This is the future. It took about two minutes. “That’s it,” Dr. Hanson said, applying a small gauze pad to the injection site.

But there was a bit more. 90% of the stem cells were given to the knee, and then I was asked if there is another joint I might want to heal. I said my left shoulder often aches after typing.

“Let’s take a look,” Dr.  Hanson said, and put the ultrasound gizmo to my left shoulder. “There is bursitis and a small tear,” Patrick announced, looking at the screen. So that shoulder got injected too. About an hour later, on the way back, I became aware that the soreness was gone. It’s as if I took naproxen (Aleve) and it took effect — with naproxen there is there is almost a distinct moment when the pain lifts off and is no more, like a quantum leap. That’s the anti-inflammatory effect, but I wonder if the neural pain pathways also get switched off. That’s very distinct with two gel acetaminophen caps too — the pain is suddenly gone, like flipping off a light switch.

The following day I did some typing, and the shoulder did not hurt. The right shoulder didn’t feel so good in the evening, though it’s a mild ache. But I bet that shoulder has some damage too. I’d love to check out my hips too, and maybe ankles. But first let’s see the results.

Sunday morning the knee caught up to feeling better, though it’s supposed to take a month before I really can tell the difference (or longer, depending on age and amount of damage). Later I could feel some referred pain below and above the knee —- a brief, transient ache. But nothing I’d call real pain (and I’ve had a lot of experience with “real pain”). This is great news because one is not allowed non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (ibuprofen, naproxen) for a week before and two weeks after the procedure. By blocking certain enzymes, they interfere with tissue repair.

X rays in May will tell us how much cartilage will have grown back from the pretty-much bone-on-bone condition.

The Los Angeles area has much more choice when it comes to stem cells clinics — Beverly Hills has a center, West LA — there’s online information. For the knee, there should be amniotic-fluid growth factors, not enriched platelets.

*

Perhaps the greatest promise of stem cells is in the area of heart disease, the #1 killer. In fact all kinds of horrific surgeries could be avoided if stem cells, the body’s own regenerative mechanism, were to be given the research priority that’s long overdue.

At the same time, we need to admit that conservative physicians regard stem cells as the unproven Wild West of medicine. At this point it is a leap of faith, with results based both on animal studies and what is classified as “anecdotal” human evidence (e.g. X-rays showing a regrowth of cartilage). Many will say that we need another 5-10 years before we can say anything definite about the effectiveness of these treatments (which are actually widely available right now).

If only we could have the equivalent of the Race to the Moon in this area, and in regenerative medicine in general! Dream on . . . 

Do I recommend stem cells in lieu of knee replacement, or any other joint surgery? It’s too early for me to say anything about the effectiveness of the treatment: I had it only last week (December 11, 2015). Watch this blog for a later report.


ending on beauty

John Guzlowski quoted me on his page. He selected this:

Life should be a joy: not a ledger of sins and failures to live up to impossible standards, but an iridescent beauty like a dragonfly. ~ Oriana

ROBERT FROST “THE MOST OF IT”; MILOSZ ON SWEDENBORG; ELIZABETH BISHOP’S MOOSE

This is probably a bull moose — the closest I had to that “waterfalling.”
 
THE MOST OF IT

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush — and that was all.

~ Robert Frost

Here is Milosz’s response to the poem:

“[It shows] how very alone man is in relation to nature, which is absolutely indifferent to him, even though he wishes to receive some sign of understanding. Alone, not only in relation to nature, because each “I” is isolated from all others, as if it were the sole ruler of the universe and seeks love in vain, while what it takes to be a response is only the echo of his own hope.” (“Robert Frost” in Selected Essays).

When it comes to the first two-thirds or so of the poem, I am with both Milosz and Frost himself. “He thought he kept the universe alone” — such a thought never occurred to me, and it strikes me as masculine and “dominionist,” but we have to take the speaker — who seems similar to the speaker in Stevens’s “Snowman” — at face value. As Milosz himself observed elsewhere, man has a great sense of solitude as a species — there is no “soulmate” species anywhere else on earth.

Cats and dogs? They can respond to us emotionally, but not on an intellectual level. (Would we want them to? Can you imagine being criticized by your cat?)

The speaker yearns for a conversation. “He thought he kept the universe alone” can be interpreted not as an arrogant expression of dominion, but rather as a lament about being the most intelligent species with no equal with whom to carry on a conversation.

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

All he gets is an echo. Personally I enjoy the phenomenon of the echo, and love to hear it. But if you live in the country and are used to the echo, maybe the magic of it wears off.

Rather than hearing an echo of his own voice, the speaker wants an “original response” he can’t predict:

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.

Again, I am not sure I’d want the cliff to say something like, “A beautiful day, isn’t it?” Also, even if rocks had intelligence, the cliff would reply in its own rock language, with, I assume, hard, dense sounds. No, I'm not mocking the speaker, only trying to imagine the possibilities.

The speaker does not feel a union with nature; he feels separate, alone. And yet, doesn’t he love nature? Don’t we know it from Frost’s other poems? He is not indifferent to the beauty of the forest, for instance. But he wants “counter-love.” He apparently wants nature (or some being out there in nature) to love him back. Yet nature is notoriously indifferent and responds only with beauty. Worse, its indifference to the joy or suffering of living things (though living things also ARE nature, so there is a complication here) can show itself in blatant light: in this poem, the speaker cries out from “the boulder-broken beech.” A boulder fell and broke a tree — it happens.

Note how the triple alliteration — “boulder-broken beech” — calls attention to this image. Until the masculine “great buck” appears, that (feminine?) boulder-broken tree stands for life in nature, and the harm that nature casually inflicts (maybe the broken tree also stands for the speaker’s wife, but that’s a more remote connection).

So we have a love-hate relationship with nature. But later in the poem we learn that the speaker is actually thinking of a human counter-response. If nature can’t be humanized and remains indifferent, at least there could be another human out there, a lively companion.

But there is no Eve for this lonely Adam. Yet one time another being did emerge: a large deer swam in the speaker’s direction, and then disappeared in the brush:

Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush — and that was all.

Excuse me, Mr. Frost, I want to say. You watch a powerful buck swim toward you and come ashore, the water “pouring like a waterfall” from the antlers and the whole magnificent body — and your response is “And that was all”?

That’s it. That’s all. There ain’t no more. Atheists are forever being confused with nihilists because they don’t believe in the afterlife, the pie in the sky, a detachable immortal soul independent of the brain (never mind the brain no longer exists; the soul is brain-free). No, the atheists have the nerve to claim that when brain function ceases, consciousness ceases. It doesn’t “go” anywhere; it simply ceases the way flame doesn’t go anywhere, but ceases to be when the fuel that supported it is gone.

To atheists, this world and this life is indeed all there is — but then the universe seems more than enough. Just the earth is almost too much, overwhelming in its beauty and variety. Just the whirl of perceptions seems to be enough to make life worth living, out of simple curiosity. But to see a “great buck as it powerfully appeared” — the marvelous animal swimming, then climbing out, water pouring from his body” — that is more than enough. That is a feast.

 *

“As a great buck it powerfully appeared”

~ when I read the poem for the first time, for a moment I was confused. Was it a buck, or something like [“as”] a buck? But the lines that follow leave no doubt that it was a spectacular buck:

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush

So yes, that noise was not a rock falling into the water, but a full-grown buck that swims across, then lands “pouring like a waterfall” — and the speaker feels no sense of wonder and delight? Instead, he’s disappointed: “And that was all.”

And yet, the contradiction: the magnificent poetic language used to describe the buck, e.g. “pushing the crumpled water up ahead,” belies the dismissive last phrase. And the more times I read those lines, the more I sense the concealed wonder. Should we take Frost at face value, or yield to the power of the poetic language? It seems to convey a message that is directly contrary to what the poem is ostensibly trying to say. 

In summary: Frost’s language and imagery contradict the explicit final statement. The language and the imagery — the “poetry” of the poem — reveal the grandeur of nature. And that, indeed, is all — but that is more than enough. It’s not possible to experience that grandeur and be disappointed.

Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest

 
*

But let’s try a psychological approach here. Of course if someone is used to seeing swimming bucks climb on shore, that sight might get to feel ordinary. But this seems to have happened only once. “And that was all”?

I have only one psychological guess to offer: the speaker is suffering from depression and can’t — or isn’t willing to — rise above bitterness. We need to take a look at Frost’s personal life. I do it with reluctance, since in college we were taught to stay away from biography and try to read the poem as a purely esthetic product, but here biography forces itself on us like a large boulder.

Frost’s father drank and bullied his wife. The biography in the Norton Anthology refers to “sporadic brutality.” The father died young, leaving his wife and children in financial hardship. Depression ran in Frost’s family. Both his mother and Frost himself suffered from it. His younger sister became mentally ill and had to be committed to a hospital. His wife Elinor also had bouts of depression and died relatively young. One son committed suicide; one daughter became mentally ill. Of the six children, only two outlived the poet.

Various business ventures, such as poultry farming, all failed (though Frost later secured a university teaching job and gained increasing fame). Elinor was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1937. A year later she died of heart failure. Frost began to drink heavily; the teaching job at Middlebury College seems to have rescued him.

At Middlebury, he appears to have had an affair with the wife of a faculty member, and to have proposed to her. But she refused to leave her husband, though she remained the poet’s confidante. Frost lived alone until his death in 1963.

Frost was intensely private, but we can safely say that he had an unhappy childhood and later an unhappy marriage. There is stoicism in his poems, and only sometimes bitterness or immense sadness. There is wisdom, as in all great poetry. There is lyricism (“the woods are lovely, dark and deep”). But a true sense of joy is rare.

Having said all this, I am still astounded that in the poem Frost does not celebrate seeing the buck. True, the poem sets out to develop a certain theme, that of complete human loneliness and not receiving a “counter-love, an original response.” Nevertheless, it’s still imaginable that even a short poem can make a turn from dejection to a sense of wonder and excitement. Wordsworth might start “lonely as a cloud,” but would certainly not dismiss seeing a magnificent buck with “and that was all.”

Only Stevens, perhaps, might be equally dismissive of the so-called “grandeur of nature.” Stevens too seemed to yearn for a soul-mate, but settled for an imaginary lover, an “interior paramour.” Stevens, who had a terrible marriage, perhaps the worst one on record as poets’ marriages go. When the marriage is bad, nothing can quite make up for it.

THE NOISY BUCK AND THE SILENCE OF GOD

All this, a reader might argue, is an evasion of the modern man’s despair at the silence and apparent absence of god. Frost was baptized in a Swedenborgian Church of New Jerusalem, but left it when he reached adulthood. No one would call Frost a religious poet.

Not in the traditional sense. He was a poet of this world, but not quite in the sense of celebrating the world. He comes close to being the American Larkin, seeing darkness more often than light.

Still, when the speaker calls out and only the echo of his voice comes back to him, does it not sound like “calling out to god” to give some sign, even the slightest, of his existence and — dare we say it? — not just existence, but caring for the speaker? Some capacity for a personal relationship?

The Swedenborgian version of Christianity is Christ-centered. Yahweh has somehow disappeared. It’s Christ, the “human form divine,” who rules the universe. Swedenborgian heaven and hell reflect states of mind, and a soul in hell (which has no fire, but looks rather like a dilapidated section of town) is not doomed to remain there. Though Frost left the Swedenborgian church, it’s not likely that he found the doctrines emotionally and morally abhorrent — they simply aren’t.

If anything, the doctrines are emotionally appealing — just improbable. I suspect Frost left simply because he could find no evidence of a benevolent supra-personal ruler. Unlike Swedenborg with his mystical visions, Frost sensed no such presence. Nor could he perceive events such as his mother’s death or his sister’s insanity as simply a reflection of his own negative states of mind (not that Swedenborg is ever as extreme as some New Age writers).

Still, there is human love, and there is the beauty of nature. But the beauty of nature may not be enough if the failure of love goes deep enough. Can a bad marriage blot out even the Wow! response that the average person would have if a large buck suddenly climbed out not far from them, water not just dripping but pouring from his antlers and his body — “landed pouring like a waterfall”?

I am not entirely convinced. On the esthetic level, I realize that the poet wished to maintain a consistently bleak tone throughout. Whether he wants a deity or a human lover, and gets “only” a powerful buck, we must accept the disappointment of “And that was all.” No transcendentalism for Frost, no Wordsworthian Nature worship (Nature needs to be spelled with a capital N when mentioned in relation to Wordsworth). Wordsworth would find the buck sublime; Frost acknowledges that the buck is powerful, but — a deer is only a deer, and not a “dear” (groan, yes; well, I just had to). It is not “another self” that the speaker craves.

Are we to universalize from this poem and conclude that we are alone — and I mean really ALONE? Are we to ponder morosely how every person is an isolated individual, and nature can offer only the echo of our voice and, instead of soft, responsive lover, the brute roughness of a buck crashing through the underbrush (the buck “forces” the underbrush, as if a rape were involved)? That’s perhaps the “moral” of this poem, but we need not accept it.

I know depression well. It’s a rare human being who manages to live through life without “getting acquainted with the night,” to use another of Frost’s tropes. Depression can get so deep that all positive memories are blocked and thinking becomes downright delusional under the burden of sadness.

And yet a part of our consciousness (some select neural pathways, if we want to turn to brain function here) is not depressed. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and I know I'm not the only one who’s experienced it. A part of you is never depressed, but simply watches the drama of spiraling down and down. I call that part of consciousness the Witness (by interesting coincidence, I came up with the name myself, before learning of the Buddhist terminology of the Witness).

The Witness knows all along that human love and caring exist, and life is worth living no matter what. The Witness could never dismiss the buck’s swimming and climbing out, “pouring like a waterfall,” as nothing remarkable — in fact a disappointment. But it cannot be a disappointment — it is a magnificent once-in-a-lifetime sight. Besides, most of us have at least some human love in our lives, so we can appreciate the non-human nature for what it is.

And yet I am still grateful to Frost for having described the incident. Thanks to the poem, the buck is now part of my psyche, along with all the actual deer I’ve enjoyed seeing. They can indeed be noisy moving through the underbrush, but does anyone mind that? And regardless of what the poem says, I am sure that the memory of that buck was special to Frost. He chose to cultivate a bleak persona. But to be a real poet, as Frost certainly was, you need to have a sense of enchantment. So I can pity Frost only so much. Rather, I admire his artistry and feel grateful for all that he gave us.


MILOSZ ON SWEDENBORG (A shameless digression)

Milosz, a public Catholic (after a period of atheism and disgust with the reactionary, anti-Semitic Polish Catholic right wing), was fascinated by all kinds of heresies, chiefly Gnosticism and the system dreamed up by Swedenborg — who is almost like Dante, traveling through heaven and hell, but without Dante’s literary genius.

Swedenborg, though regarded as an eminent geologist and naturalist, turned away from the scientific worldview and became preoccupied with his visions of the spirit world. Let me quote from Milosz’s essay, “Dostoyevski and Swedenborg” in Emperor of the Earth:

[According to Swedenbog], “man has withdraw himself from heaven by the love of self and love of the world.”

But the “world” that Swedenborg refers to is presumably not nature but civilization, and the negative aspects of civilization at that — not palaces and gardens, not art, music, and literature, but “worldly ambition,” greed, and deceit. Swedenborg had a religious orientation, and religions tend to focus exclusively on the negative aspects or the self and the world. They don’t find “the world” to be heaven the way so many solitary people do (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Thoreau), finding joy and companionship in nature.

Swedenborg and Blake humanized and hominized God and the universe to such an extent that everything, from the smallest particle of matter to planets and stars, was given but one goal: to serve as a fount of signs for human language. [Oriana: a large buck would be a very abundant fount — and indeed it becomes that for Frost. It’s just that instead of being thrilled to have received this occasion for poetry, he claims to be disappointed.]

Here is the really fascinating part:

“When [a man] dies, he finds himself in one of the innumerable heavens or hells which are nothing other than societies composed of people of the same inclination. Every heaven or hell is a precisely reproduction of the states of mind a given man experienced when on earth and it appears accordingly — as beautiful gardens, groves, or the slums of a big city. Thus everything on earth perceived by the five senses will accompany a man as a source of joy or suffering.”

This is certainly an interesting vision of the afterlife, but isn’t it essentially true of THIS life? A person in a negative state of mind is more likely to see ugliness rather than beauty, though the opposite also holds true: living in beautiful surroundings is more likely to result in a pleasant state of mind.

Finally, people also transform their surroundings. Put artists in abandoned industrial buildings, and watch a fantastic transformation. People can create their heaven and hell. It’s not completely under their control, no. Yet even during the war, a piece of heaven can be created. Here the Syrian artist Tammam Azzam painted Klimt's Kiss on a ruined buildling:


Frost’s bleak vision reflects reality as he sees it. Someone else in the same spot might experience thrill and joy.

THE SENSE OF ABSENCE
There seems to be a new argument for the existence of god, and that’s the argument from presence. According to some religious apologists, everyone senses god’s presence. Atheists only pretend not to sense it.

To me the only constant in regard to god has been his total and absolute absence. God didn’t exist for me before religion lessons, and I was quite happy and unaware that anything was missing. Then came the heavy Catholic indoctrination and the Invisible Man in the Sky acquired some degree of psychological reality.

I want to emphasize “some degree” — though, oddly enough, I seemed to have certainty as to the reality of hell. Otherwise, especially during prayer, experience constantly confronted me with the absence of that Invisible Man. I couldn’t help suspecting that I was talking to empty air. Looking up, I saw only clouds. Then, at fourteen, I stopped lying to myself under the pressure of the church,  and acknowledged that my true personal experience was that of absence of anyone up there or anywhere.

The Emperor had no clothes! Or rather, it could be argued, it was all clothes and no Emperor. No Emperor, King of Kings, Creator, the Almighty. No such being has ever existed except as one of the hundreds of fictional deities made up by humans over the millennia.

Though long in making, my final epiphany took essentially a moment. After some minutes of terror when I literally waited to be struck by lightning for daring to declare that god didn’t exist, I began to breathe freely and was no longer afraid to think for myself. Fuller recovery from the Big Lie (and the intricate web of related lies, e.g. suffering is good for you) has been the journey of a lifetime.

But I don’t feel an iota poorer for not seeing a tree as a manifestation of the divine rather than a tree. Looking at a tree, I don’t generally think of it as a product of evolution, though of course it is that; rather, I respond to the tree’s beauty. I love it just for being a tree, and a deer for being a deer.

The enormous mental revolution of modernity has been precisely about loving the self and loving this world. Loving animals has been a part of this evolution.

(Loving children the way we moderns love them has been relatively recent. That is why we are so appalled that a mother nursing her baby daughter would choose to abandon the child in the most final of ways, that of dying for the promise of paradise as reward of killing the infidels. That a toxic theology could prove more powerful than the strongest of human bonds shakes us to the core.)

ELIZABETH BISHOP’S JOY AT SEEING A MOOSE

Frost’s poem is an anomaly. One of the best-known modern poems about a wild animal is Elizabeth Bishop’s The Moose. Let me quote the most memorable part of it:

—Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless....”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

~ now this is the normal human response to seeing a large wild animal that does not represent a threat. Children tend to adore animals. Note that in this poems, the adult passengers become like children — as they should. An animal stands for innocence.

Also, there are no Christian, Jewish, or Muslim animals. Animals do not celebrate holidays because every day is a holiday — a feast of existence.



*

Finally, I can’t resist quoting my own poem about my most memorable encounter with a large male deer. Walking on forever is of course wishful thinking, but my sense of awe at the beauty of nature is not.

Hurricane Ridge is in Olympic National Park in the state of Washington. 

 HURRICANE RIDGE

The glaciers tongue me, cliffs of ice,
pools of polar green.
Across eternal snow, a deer
steps out on the trail.

His antlers hold the flame-blue sky,
his crown of shining branches.
He stares at me without fear,
then climbs straight up,

barely nudges the slippery scree.
How could I know it would be
neither a lover nor a holy sage,
but a deer in a tundra of clouds —

this messenger making me feel
one day I’ll walk forever —
when thirsty, eating snow,
when tired, leaning on the wind.

My shadow compassing late sun,
I want one wish granted to me:
to hike again along the crest
here on Hurricane Ridge,

and let a deer like that once more
step out before me on the path,
look at me calmly, and walk on.
Let the wind wave a branch.

~ Oriana © 2015

The joy at seeing a beautiful wild animal is no surprise. It’s part of the joy of being alive. Beauty is reason enough.

photo: Huib Peterson