Caiman, Equador. “It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.” ~ Lionel Trilling
*
A LITTLE CLOUD MUSIC
Frazier Park, California
Clouds rest in the cradle of passes.
We debate the eternal question:
will it rain?
The Brahms Second Piano Concerto
swirls above our heads.
“Gypsy – nineteenth century –
one feels it,” my mother says.
One yellow rose petal
drops on the tablecloth.
I feel a sudden gratitude
for whatever remnant elegance
my mother manages —
flowers in a crystal vase,
serving bowls and platters,
big forks and little forks.
We keep glancing at the clouds,
dark but mute, thunderless.
Father remembers Narcyz Gryzel,
a factory worker who shot
the Tzarist Chief of Police —
The Police Chief in great hurry,
in a horse-cab at full gallop
to the railroad station.
Gryzel jumped onto the carriage
and emptied his revolver.
His granite tombstone,
heavy with Fataherland.
Now my musical mother recounts
how, after a concert,
on a silver tray, with a silent
bow, Paderewski was handed
a telegram from the Tzar:
“His Imperial Majesty is pleased
that the greatest pianist in the world
is a Russian.” Paderewski
telegraphed back: “His Imperial
Majesty is mistaken. I am a Pole.”
I live by a different story.
An admirer said to the maestro,
“I’d give my life to play like that.”
Paderewski replied, “I did.”
Gypsies, the world calls artists.
Lightning crazes the western sk.
It rains —
but the drop are so few,
father calls it a “dry rain.”
Sweaty smell of hot ground.
I crave crescendos
of thunder, a grand
romantic concerto of rain,
and I laugh:
like a Gypsy scherzo,
the sun is shining.
~ Oriana
Ignacy Paderewski at the piano
Mary:
"Cloud Music" is a lovely poem, a tribute to your parents, your mother's retention of elegance, your father's story of a wildly brave assassin...The question raised by those very memories: what has been lost, what gained by such endeavors? The talk is of the weather, rain, and music, and at the heart of all those two stories about Paderewski: his reply to the Tzar that he is a Pole, not a Russian, and his reply to the admirer who says he would give his life to play so well, by saying: “I did.”
That's the story you choose to live by, not that of a proud nationalist, but of the dedicated artist, the ones the world calls "Gypsies," who long for the wild ecstasy of the storm, the crescendo of thunder and lightning, the exaltation of the creative act, and who will spend their lives to get it. Of the two, the wiser choice, I think, unlikely to result in any need to elaborate patriotism into war.
*
ZOO, OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE
~ In 1922, Berlin was the literary capital of the Russian émigré community. Driven away by political instability following the revolution, some of the greatest Russian writers and thinkers of the era — including Vladimir Nabokov, Marc Chagall, Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak — descended on the German capital, setting up publishing houses, cultural associations and émigré journals. One of those journals, Beseda (Colloquy), was still trying to get off the ground when a public tantrum by a literary critic named Viktor Shklovsky threatened to derail the entire project. At a lecture sponsored by the journal, Shklovsky had become unhinged and harangued the speaker, a young poet Beseda was excited to have just persuaded to come on board. The editors were, understandably, furious. Shklovsky, tail between his legs, sent a note afterward to beg forgiveness. “I’m certainly in the wrong,” he conceded, but there was an explanation: “In short, I’m in love and desperately unhappy.”
Along with his apology, Shklovsky included the manuscript of a new book he was working on, an epistolary novel called “Zoo, or Letters Not About Love” that chronicled his unrequited romance with Elsa Triolet, a Russian living in Berlin. “Zoo,” which takes its title from the Berlin zoo (near which many Russian émigrés lived), was initially meant to be a portrait of Russian writers living in the city. “I needed to write a book about people, something along the lines of ‘A Hundred Portraits of Russian Writers.’ But I was in love,” Shklovsky wrote years later. “Perhaps I chose love,” he postulated, “the way a weakened organism chooses diseases.”
Here, Shklovsky refers to his struggles to adjust to life outside of Russia; in fact, the last letter of the original edition of “Zoo” is addressed not to Elsa (renamed Alya in the book) but to the Russian government, asking to be allowed back in. He experienced exile as a kind of unrequited love, and thus “Zoo” is really a story of mirrored longings — for a lover, for a country or some combination of the two. “I was bound to be broken while abroad,” he wrote, “and I found myself a love that would do the job.”
In later decades, Elsa Triolet would move to France, marry the Surrealist Louis Aragon and become the first woman to win the Goncourt Prize (for a book of novellas about the French Resistance, in which she also participated). But in 1922, she just wanted Shklovsky to lay off. She found his letters, which arrived daily, overwhelming, effusive, tediously literal — in sum, what we expect from love letters. “I love you very much,” he wrote in an early one. “You are the city I live in; you are the name of the month and the day.” Elsa, flummoxed, told him he could continue to write her only under one condition: that he not write her about love. “My dear, my own,” she implored him. “Don’t write to me about love. Don’t. I’m very tired.”
“Zoo” is the literary experiment that resulted. The letters between Triolet and Shklovsky, reprinted in “Zoo” with some minor fictionalizations, avoid addressing love directly. Instead, they delve into topics as far-ranging as Tahiti, wet nurses, “Don Quixote,” internal combustion engines and the Russian avant-garde. These “letters not about love,” perhaps precisely because they are not about love, achieve an unmistakable intimacy and in doing so, upend our assumptions about what it means to convey affection through language. Through its digressive register, “Zoo” makes the case that our ultimate desire in love is to share not our romantic feelings, but rather our sense of the world, our impressions of life — from the mundane to the poetic — with another person.
Elsa’s prohibition proved to be a creative boon, both for her (the editors loved Triolet’s letters best and encouraged her to publish a novel) and for Shklovsky. “You gave me two assignments. 1.) Not to call you 2.) Not to see you,” he wrote her. “So now I’m a busy man.”
Shklovsky, one of the most brilliant literary theorists of his era, used Elsa’s ban as an occasion to think through and expound upon some of his ideas about art. His famous theory of “estrangement” — the act of representing ordinary events in strange, unexpected ways to jolt the reader into recognition — finds fresh expression here: Art “must be changed, ‘estranged,’” he insists to her.
He also voiced his frustrations with censorship in their home country, telling Elsa/Alya about a Russian publisher in Berlin whose books were continually blocked from entering Russia: “Writing about love is forbidden, so I’ll write about Zinovy Grzhebin, the publisher. That ought to be sufficiently remote.” However, Shklovsky cannot help comparing his romantic fate to Grzhebin’s literary one — each is a “rejected suitor.”
Occasionally, though, Shklovsky falls short and breaks the rules, sometimes merely in spirit — telling Alya, “You have turned my life the way a worm screw turns a rack.” Other times, he utters the forbidden word itself. When a flood hits Berlin, he writes a letter containing a dialogue between the water he imagines rushing into Alya’s bedroom and the slippers at the foot of her bed:
“Slippers: O, water, you have flowed into the wrong mill. That’s not nice. In matters of love, might does not make right.
“Water: Not even a mighty love?
“Slippers: No, not even a mighty love.”
Elsa/Alya chastises him for his clear violations of their code, telling him, “You certainly don’t know how to write a love letter.” She tells him to “quit writing about how, how, how much you love me, because at the third ‘how much,’ I start thinking about something else.”
Indeed, the most palpable that love feels to us in the novel is when the correspondents are not discussing it explicitly, but when they are sharing the minutiae of their lives — when Shklovsky writes, “I have to run over to the Mierike bakery for a cake,” or when Alya recounts childhood stories about her beloved but absent-minded wet nurse who “managed to poison me by gorging herself on the pits from the cherry preserves that were being made at our summer cottage.” Alya catches herself here, wondering “what made me inflict Stesha on you?” as if she is recognizing that sharing this intimate detail, this buried memory about cherry pits and breastfeeding, is an admission of feeling.
That love could best be relayed indirectly became an aesthetic principle for Shklovsky. In a later work, “Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar” (1970), he reflected on his time writing “Zoo,” admitting that it “was also called ‘Letters Not About Love’ because it was a book about love.” ~
~ “Zoo” makes the case that our ultimate desire in love is to share not our romantic feelings, but rather our sense of the world, our impressions of life — from the mundane to the poetic — with another person. ~
The essay makes the case that love is primarily the union of the minds, of the souls — even without the union of the bodies.
It reminds of a short story by Thomas Hardy, in which a rich, emotionally starved wife starts writing letters to her servant's one-time (educated — I think he's a lawyer) seducer, pretending to be that servant, but not concealing her own refined mentality. When the scheme is uncovered, he says to the rich wife, “Then you and I are the real lovers.”
I think this story is not unique — there are other examples in life, not just literature, where the "surrogate" who writes love letters becomes the real love object.
(I don’t recall the title, but I think of it as “Beloved” — because each of the wife’s letters begins with that salutation.)
ELSA TRIOLET
~ Ella Yuryevna Kagan was born into a Jewish family of Yuri Alexandrovich Kagan, a lawyer and Yelena Youlevna Berman, a music teacher in Moscow. She and her older sister Lilya Brik received excellent educations; they were able to speak fluent German and French and play the piano. Ella graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture.
Ella soon became associated with the Russian Futurists via Lilya, who was in 1912 married to the art critic Osip Brik; she befriended people of their circle, including Roman Jakobson, then a zaum poet, who became her lifelong friend. Elsa enjoyed poetry, and in 1911 befriended and fell in love with the aspiring futurist poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky. When she invited him home, the poet fell madly in love with her sister, marking the start of a series of artistic collaborations involving the two that lasted until the poet's death. Ella was the first to translate Mayakovsky's poetry (as well as volumes of other Russian-language poetry) to French.
In 1918, at the outset of the Russian Civil War, Ella married the French cavalry officer André Triolet, and emigrated to France, where she changed her name to Elsa, but for years admitted in her letters to Lilya to being heartbroken. She later divorced Triolet.
In the early 1920s, Elsa described her visit to Tahiti in her letters to Victor Shklovsky, who subsequently showed them to Maxim Gorky. Gorky suggested that the author should consider a literary career. The 1925 book In Tahiti, written in Russian and published in Leningrad, was based on these letters. She published two further novels in Russian, Wild Strawberry (1926) and Camouflage (1928), both published in Moscow.
In 1928 Elsa met French writer Louis Aragon. They married and stayed together for 42 years. She influenced Aragon to join the French Communist Party. Triolet and Aragon fought in the French Resistance.
In 1944 Triolet was the first woman to be awarded the Prix Goncourt.
She died, aged 73, in Moulin de Villeneuve, Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, France of a heart attack.
In 2010, La Poste, the French post office, issued three stamps honoring Triolet. ~ (Wiki)
My, how interconnected this is. Elsa's sister, Lili Brik, became the famous muse of Mayakovsky. One of the sentences in Mayakovsky's suicide note is "Lili, love me.”
That one sentence touched me very deeply. That's why I remember it forever.
Mary:
Artists, as demonstrated by the story of the non-lovers Elsa Triolet and Shklovsky, are very much involved in the fate of nations and their wars. Certainly those huge struggles of the 20th century demanded action, and refugees from the oppressive regimes of Stalin and Hitler, refugees who were also intellectuals and artists, risked everything to oppose those regimes. The ordinary, the people who fell in and out of love, picked up cakes at the bakery, teased each other into non-love stories, also became, like Elsa, heroes of the resistance.
It is important to note that the refugee also is in constant mourning for the loss of his Home…his homeland. In exile, the artist does not choose one answer to live by, but must somehow strive both as patriot longing to restore the homeland and enable his own return, and as an artist who embodies and gives expression to all of these feelings — of longing, abandonment, betrayal, resistance, struggle, and hope. The situation of the artist in a world at war is both a challenge and a spur to invention, a source of meaning and inspiration.
*
RUSH LIMBAUGH AND THE LESSON FROM THE TALMUD
~ One of the best-known stories in the entire Babylonian Talmud is that called the “oven of achnai” (Bava Metzia 59b). It’s a very popular tale in liberal Jewish circles, because it seems to suggest that God approves of human beings determining what Jewish law (Halakhah) should be, even over the objections of God Himself.
Here’s a synopsis of what happens. There’s an argument between Rabbi Eliezer and the sages about whether a certain type of oven (an “achnai” oven) should be declared pure or impure. Rabbi Eliezer said it was pure, and the sages disagreed. So Rabbi Eliezer brought numerous proofs for his argument,
But the sages rejected them all. (Interestingly, we don’t know why.) Then Rabbi Eliezer resorted to miracles. He said, “If the Halakhah agrees with me, let this stream prove it,” and the stream flowed backwards. That surely seemed to indicate that God agreed with him, but the sages were unmoved. He said, “If the Halakhah agrees with me, let this carob tree prove it,” and the carob tree was uprooted and moved from its place. Again, God seems to have signaled that Rabbi Eliezer was right, but it didn’t matter — the sages refused to budge. Rabbi Eliezer tried again with a third miracle involving the walls of the house of study, but again, the sages could not be convinced.
Suddenly, a voice came from the heavens and said, “Why are you disagreeing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the Halakhah always follows him?” Rabbi Yirmiyah, though, speaks to God, essentially saying, “You stay out of this.” After all, the Torah says, “It is not in heaven” (a phrase Rabbi Yirmiyah takes wildly out of context), so “this isn’t Your business anymore.” How did God react? The prophet Elijah said that when God was pushed out of the argument, He laughed and said, “My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me.”
And that’s where we often stop telling the story. After all, the point has been made, no? Determining the Halakhah is no longer God’s role — it is the role of human beings.
Now, that claim is obviously highly controversial in a variety of Jewish circles, but let’s leave aside the questions of whether that’s the correct reading of the story and whether any story matters at all in determining Jewish law. What matters for us is what happens later in the story, in a part of the tale that we study much less frequently.
The story is long and a bit complex, but the gist is as follows. After they reject his view, the sages declare impure everything that Rabbi Eliezer had ever declared pure, and they essentially excommunicate him. (In today’s language, we’d say they “canceled him.”) Rabbi Akiva goes to share the horrifying news with his teacher, Rabbi Eliezer. The love that Rabbi Akiva shows his master and the heartbreak that Rabbi Eliezer feels literally move you to tears, no matter how many times you study the story.
What happens? Rabbi Akiva can barely say what has been done to him, but Rabbi Eliezer understands. He begins to weep, rends his garments and sits on the ground like a mourner. He is shattered. Immediately, the Talmud relates:
God’s punishment comes. A third of the olive crop is destroyed, as is a third of the wheat, and a third of the barley. The sages also said, “There was great anger on that day, as any place that Rabbi Eliezer fixed his gaze was burned.” Much later in the story, Rabbi Eliezer’s prayer for vindication causes the death of Rabban Gamliel, the “nasi,” the head of the community.
Now we can see why reading only the first half of the story destroys it. The point of the story is to be found in the comparison between God’s two reactions. Kick God out of the process of determining Jewish law, the Talmud says, and God laughs. Treat a human being the way that the rabbis treated Rabbi Eliezer, and God’s wrath knows almost no limit. Legal views (or political views, or moral views) are one thing, the story seems to suggest, and on those, reasonable minds can differ. But when it comes to “trashing” another human being, that God will not abide.
This brings us back to Rush Limbaugh.
Let me be clear. I do not celebrate the fact that Limbaugh suffered from cancer; that’s a horrible fate for anyone. I do not celebrate his death at a relatively young age; I feel for his family’s loss. But let me be equally clear: the world is a much, much better place now that Rush Limbaugh is off the air.
That view will run afoul of many in the Jewish community, for Limbaugh was a staunch defender of Israel, as our prime minister was quick to point out. But what kind of human being was he? The well-known columnist Caroline Glick, joining our august prime minister in mourning Limbaugh, tweeted, “Rest in peace, Rush Limbaugh. You were already an angel in life.”
Really? Rush Limbaugh was an angel in life? Here are a few of his choice quotes from over the years.
On race: “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”
On women: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”
On gays: “When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation.”
An angel, right?
Ah, you might say, at least he didn’t take on specific people when he demeaned those groups.
Ah, but you’d be wrong.
When Barack Obama was a little-known senator gaining popularity, Limbaugh started airing his parody song, “Barack, the Magic Negro.” An angel, that Rush.
Remember Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified before Congress about why it was critical that health insurance cover birth control? Here’s what Rush had to say about this very-much-identified woman: “What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.”
Yup, an angel.
But Rush wasn’t done with Ms. Fluke. He later had this to say: “So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”
Now, where does one begin, in describing how sick that is, on more levels than one can name? Yes, his fans will point us, Rush apologized for that one, for he’d gotten himself into some very hot water. What did he say? “I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.”
But Rush did much worse than choose wrong words, day after day in his attacks on her. And he didn’t mean a personal attack? What, then, did he mean? He was sorry, that’s true; but he was sorry there was a backlash, that’s all.
After Caroline Glick tweeted that Limbaugh was “an angel,” I tweeted a response that he was actually a disgrace. And I stand by that. Some of his positions I disagreed with, a few I agreed with. But the way he spoke about people? Rush Limbaugh was a disgrace.
Glick’s response to me? “I’d like to believe that you’re being this dishonest because you’re ignorant. The other option, that you know this is a lie and repeat it to win points with hateful leftists, is also a possibility, of course.”
Ignorant? I’m sure that’s true; I’m ignorant of lots of things. But dishonest? Where was I dishonest, if I genuinely believe he was a disgrace? But then, of course, came Glick’s real issue. Rush was beyond reproach because he was a conservative, and I must have said what I’d said “to win points with hateful leftists.” I’m sure some of those “hateful leftists,” who usually do not like very much of what I write, are chuckling, hearing that I was trying to win points with them. That’s good. These days, we can all use a chuckle.
But there’s really nothing to chuckle about. Have we really become a Jewish world in which, because someone espouses our political or religious viewpoint they are beyond reproach? How many traditional Jewish institutions critiqued the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, but just happened to omit any mention of the president? A lot; the examples are easy to find online. And how many liberal Jewish leaders and institutions are willing to call out the hateful side of Black Lives Matter, its attitudes to Jews and Israel in particular? Very few, actually. Why?
Why this binary view of the world? Rush loves Israel, so we love everything he said? Trump did some good things for Israel, so we can’t mention what he did to American democracy? Black Lives Matter is about correcting a longstanding horrific wrong, so we can’t call them out on their intolerable anti-Semitism?
Do we really want the Jewish state’s prime minister lauding someone who said such vile things about so many different people? Are we not mortified when a high-profile Jewish writer calls Limbaugh an “angel”?
There aren’t a lot of “achnai ovens” to be found these days, so it doesn’t really matter whether they are declared pure or impure. But the categories of pure and impure still matter. There are ways of speaking that come close to pure, and ways that reek of impurity. Jewish communities worth their salt — whether liberal or conservative, observant or not, Israeli or American — ought to be able to tell the difference and to embrace some nuance.
If we cannot do that, we really have no reason for being. If we cannot do that, then we really would merit Rabbi Eliezer’s returning to earth, gazing at what we have created, and burning everything he saw with his agonized eyes. ~ Daniel Gordis
Oriana:
I love the Talmudic story. The first half of it has a different message than the second half. The first half could be compared of Jacob wrestling with an angel (or was it just a man? or was it god himself?). Unexpectedly, Jacob prevails over his divine (most likely) assailant, and forces him to bless him (Jacob). The angel/god both blesses Jacob and injures him. More important, while refusing to reveal his own name, the mysterious being announces that Jacob’s name is from now on not Jacob, but Israel, he who contends with God.
(As for Jacob’s wrestling prowess, you may recall that he and Esau started wrestling while still in the womb.)
But the second half of the Talmudic story is totally different. It’s not about contending with god, but about the hateful behavior of the dissenting rabbis toward Rabbi Eliezer. That, the story says, can’t be tolerated.
The way Rush Limbaugh’s hate speech is compared to the bad rabbis trashing a Talmudic sage and declaring that what he viewed as pure is now impure is a deft surprise. It echoes the "purists" (or call them puritans) of both the extreme Right and the extreme Left, both side fanatically eager to declare certain things “impure.”
As Jesus said, it's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, but what comes out of it.
(“The oven of Achnai”: A new type of oven is brought before the Sanhedrin, consisting of tiles separated from one another by sand, but externally plastered over with cement. The rabbis debate whether or not this oven is susceptible to ritual impurity ~ wiki.)
Mikhail Iossel:
Rush Limbaugh always, until the very end, prided himself on being shameless, cruel and vile. He probably (make it "certainly") would consider it a compliment to have someone like me — an immigrant, a Jew, a liberal — say this about him.
Rabbis debating the Law.This kind of thinking is dangerous and morally corrupt. It sells itself to whatever helps consolidate its political power, even if all principles must be sacrificed as part of the deal. I love to think of Rabbi Eliezer, in his grief and anger, incinerating all these power hungry, power brokering hypocrites, showing them a little of that wrath of god they're so ready to mete out to others.
Memory is a form of continually ongoing, ever-evolving storytelling. ~ M. Iossel
"For an experienced event is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it."—Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust
photo: Joan Houlihan
*
RUSSIA’S IMPERIAL PRETENSIONS AND THE “THIRD ROME”
~ Didn’t one of them, another Selim, say during the conquest of Egypt that he, as Lord of Constantinople, was heir to the Roman Empire and therefore had a right to all the lands that had ever belonged to it? Do these words sound like justification or do they sound like prophecy, or both? And does not the same note ring four hundred years later in the voice of the Third Rome [Russia] latter-day Slavophiles, whose scarlet, Janissary’s clocklike banner neatly combined a star and the crescent of Islam? And that hammer, isn’t it a modified cross? ~ Joseph Brodsky, Flight from Byzantium
(Third Rome refers to the doctrine that Russia or, specifically, Moscow succeeded Rome and Byzantium Rome as the ultimate center of true Christianity and of the Roman Empire. ~ Wiki) Thus, Russia is the successor of the Roman Empire. Of course there are those who claim that America is the closest to being like the Roman Empire (cf Pax Romana and Pax Americana).
Top image: the flag of the Ottoman Empire. The Soviet flag "needs no introduction." And yes, now that Brodsky has pointed that out, the sickle could be seen as echoing the crescent.
Brodsky's larger point is the East versus the more individualistic West.
This too made me think that the word “Israel” means "wrestles with God" -- what a difference from "Islam," meaning "submission"!
*
“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.” ~ Aldous Huxley
Oriana:
Note the inclusion of idealism. We tend to think of idealism as a positive phenomenon, but it's a distorted view of reality and our ability to change that reality for the better. Idealism pushed to the extreme generally results in a disaster, typically a reign of terror.
Matt:
People mostly kill in the name of abstractions. Humans generally aren't good at abstract thinking, which is why when they try, it ends badly.
Oriana:
Something Dostoyevsky tried and tried to warn against: trusting abstractions, ideologies. Dostoyevsky wasn't timid in his warnings: This leads to murder, he kept pointing out.
Matt:
As someone said: “Gods don’t kill people, people with gods kill people.”
**
“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.” ~ Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet
Oriana:
Perhaps when distant beings on other planets pick some visual signal of ours, all they see is cats.
MARY ANNING, THE GREAT FOSSIL HUNTER
~ The phrase "she sells seashells by the sea shore" isn't just a tongue twister; many people believe it refers to the trailblazing English paleontologist Mary Anning! When she was only 12 years old, Anning discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton and she spent the rest of her life searching out fossils that helped change humans' understanding of prehistoric life and natural history. Sadly, because she was a woman, she was rarely credited for her critical discoveries, and only in recent years have her wide-ranging contributions received the recognition they deserve.
Mary Anning was born on May 21, 1799 in Lyme Regis in Southwest England. Her father was a carpenter who supplemented his income by selling fossils from the Dorset cliff beds. Local folklore says that, when Anning was 15 months old, a neighbor was holding her and chatting with two other women when lightning struck the tree above them. All three women died, but onlookers rushed Anning home and revived her with warm water. Reportedly, she was a sickly baby, but after the lightning strike, she grew healthy and strong and demonstrated a quick and curious mind.
Anning had almost no formal schooling; she often had to join her father and brother Joseph — her only surviving sibling — searching for fossils to sell. Visitors were eager to buy curios like "snake-stones" (ammonites), "devil's fingers" (belemnites), and "verteberries" (vertebrae) that eroded out of the cliffs. The work could be dangerous, but finding a major fossil could mean the difference between eating well and starving, particularly after her father died in 1810. Anning had a knack for hunting down good specimens, and the sure-footed girl was often able to get to places others couldn't reach.
She made her first well-known find in 1811 at age 12; her brother had found an ichthyosaur skull and Anning discovered the rest of the 17-foot (5.2 m) long skeleton of the giant extinct marine reptile. The family sold it to a local lord for £23, the equivalent of about $1,870 today, who then sold it to a major collector who displayed it in London.
There the fossil caused a sensation as the strange creature appeared to be older than the Biblical account of creation would allow and it proved that animals could become completely extinct. This flew in the face of the scientific wisdom of the day, and required scientists to reevaluate both the age of the Earth and the history of life upon it. Anning's discoveries and the scientific questions they raised also set the stage for Charles Darwin's articulation of the theory of evolution a generation later.
But this shift in scientific thinking didn't do much for the Annings; they were still eking out what money they could with smaller fossil finds. By 1820, the family had made no major discoveries for a year, and were on the verge of selling their furniture to pay their rent. A collector and long-time customer, Lietuenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch, auctioned the fossils he had bought from them on their behalf. He raised enough money to put the Annings in a more stable financial position. The auction also brought them to the attention of the growing geological community.
As she made more discoveries, Anning's reputation continued to grow. In 1823, she discovered the first complete plesiosaurus skeleton, and then in 1828, the first British pterosaur fossil. Despite her limited education, she read scientific papers, trained herself in geology and paleontology, and even taught herself anatomy through dissection. Many scientists praised the quality of her scientific illustrations. By 1826, she had saved enough money to buy a home with a storefront window where she opened a shop named Anning's Fossil Depot and sold fossils to collectors and museum curators from around the world.
Still, the gender and class barriers of the time held her back from both the recognition and compensation that her unique discoveries should have afforded her. When geologists published papers about scientifically important fossils, they rarely mentioned who discovered them. Although she was considered one of Britain's most knowledgeable paleontologists, women were not permitted to join the Geological Society of London.
The only writing she ever had published in a scientific journal was a letter to the Magazine of Natural History in 1839, questioning their claim that a recently discovered shark fossil represented a new genus, since she had discovered similar fossils long before. Anna Pinney, a young woman who sometimes joined Anning on fossil hunts, once wrote, "She says the world has used her ill... These men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages."
In 1830, Anning was struggling again; major finds were few and far between, and Britain's struggling economy had reduced the demand for smaller fossils. The risks of her profession were also laid bare when, in 1833, her constant companion when she went collecting, her small terrier Tray, was crushed to death by rock falling from a cliff. Then, in 1835, she lost her life savings to a bad investment. William Buckland, a prominent British geologist and a friend of Anning's, convinced the British government to grant her an annual pension in honor of her contributions to science. By the mid-1840s, her work tailed off; she had developed breast cancer and was unable to go looking for fossils because of the pain. She died on March 9, 1847 at the age of 47 and was buried at the local parish church.
After her death, and particularly in recent years, appreciation for her contributions grew. Several major scientists, British geologist Henry De la Beche and British paleontologist Gideon Mantell, credited her fossil discoveries in their papers, and her obituary was published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society — even though they had refused to admit her to the society and wouldn't admit any woman until 1904.
Historians agree that we may never know just how many specimens she discovered, but today, she's hailed as one of the great early paleontologists and is now the subject of numerous books. Britain's Natural History Museum has described her as the greatest fossil hunter ever known and, in 2010, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science. "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself," Charles Dickens once noted, "and has deserved to win it.” ~
https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=28556&fbclid=IwAR0uqFkXOAY5mw0oxs-iQsCry6gq0Wz5MB2h6LZ8F75Du2qm7-5shTb2ix8
Oriana:
There is a movie, Ammonite, that portrays Anning and another female paleontologist, Murchinson. Though the two women had met, there appears to have been no romantic relationship between them. That was invented to make the movie more titillating. The real drama lies in Anning's struggle as a "carpenter's daughter" who at first is simply struggling to survive, and secondly to educate herself — even though she'd never be given credit for her discoveries.
Another part of the larger drama is that those discoveries were part of the evidence that eventually led Charles Darwin to formulate the theory of evolution.
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SERMON TO THE FISH
"Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish" (Portuguese: Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes)- The story goes that one day Anthony went to Rimini where there were a lot of heretics. He started to preach, but they did not want to listen to him, and they even mocked him. In a dramatic gesture, Anthony went to the seashore, saying, “Because you show yourself unworthy of God’s word, behold, I turn to the fishes so that your unbelief may be shown up more clearly”. As he spoke of God’s care for those creatures that live in the waters, a shoal of fish swam near to the bank, partly thrusting themselves out of the water and appearing to listen carefully. At the end of his sermon, the Saint blessed them and they swam away.
In the meantime, so deep was the impression made upon the onlookers that many hurried back to the city imploring their friends to come and see the miracle, while others burst into tears asking forgiveness. Soon after a great multitude gathered around the Saint, who exhorted them to turn back to God. So through this sermon, the city of Rimini was purged of heresy. ~ Teresa Adelson
Saint Anthony preaching to the fish
Oriana:
Evolution may seem charming to the specialist, but let's face it, there is a lot of extinction, and the average person has little interest in something that seems so cold-hearted. We'd rather cling to the sentimental half-belief about doggie heaven and kitty heaven. Never mind that Darwin used examples of animal breeding to show how changeable a species can be.
Still, there is no denying that we have seen those dinosaur skeletons in natural history museums, and our worldview has been irreversibly affected. The story of a saint preaching to the fish may strike us as charming, but we can't believe it the way medieval listeners believed.
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IS GOD CRUEL? Just another interchange on Facebook:
Sandy: As some say God knocked off all of humanity except a small family, the "wrongness" of God might be rather probable. But maybe that's only one out of thousands of gods.
Andromeda: God didn’t do that.
Some of the Bible is wackadoodle
Carol: If you talk to God (through prayer) it's considered normal. If God talks back, it's mental illness. Or you might (also) be a prophet, so get ready to rake in the big bucks.
Oriana:
But how can we know for sure which passages are wackadoodle? I'd like to have a version of the bible with the wackadoodle parts printed in red. Or would that be too hard on the eyes?
By the way, Andromeda isn’t the only advocate of “selective belief.” You just ignore those nasty stories and focus only on those that you find inspiring. And to some extent that is already practiced by various churches, which are more sensitive to our changing moral sensibilities and don't want to present god as a cruel monster, a Godzilla. Noah's FLood, though, is a major story, arguably one of the Founding Stories. My nuns chose to concentrate on the animals — isn't it wonderful how the animals enter the Ark, male and female of each species, and are saved? The ecological relevance is just perfect, though same-sex advocates might grumble.
John:
The whole Noah story is nuts. Why would anyone trust a God who kills everyone on earth except for a single family? Weird.
Oriana:
That was Sandy's original point. We want a benevolent deity. The past ages seemed to prefer a wrathful, vengeful god.
Now, true believers might say that the living creatures (at least those on land) needed to be destroyed because they have become corrupt. But as Una liked to point out, the Flood didn’t fix the problem. Noah’s descendants (that’s all of us) soon start misbehaving again.
One of Noah's actions in the post-flood world is getting drunk, leading to indecent exposure. That would be minor (in our eyes, at least) except that Ham, the son who, through no fault of his own, does see him naked, gets cursed, along with all descendants in future generations, setting up a lame excuse for bigotry and worse. Ham's son is called Canaan, which sets the scene for historical consequences.
John:
Noah was just doing what god would have done.
Oriana:
Yes, the cursing of one son and his progeny for all generations was a foremost example of what god would have done. And the whole shame around nudity — we moderns have become more Greek in our attitudes.
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As for Carol’s digression about how to tell religion from mental illness — I once knew a woman whose husband had the psychotic insight that he was really an extra-terrestrial. Once when the wife was out of town, the husband emptied out their bank account, sold everything he could (including the wife’s underwear) at a garage sale, and flew to Australia. She heard was that he announced he was an extraterrestrial from the Andromeda Galaxy and formed a religious cult, with himself as the leader. They may be roaming the Australian wilderness still.
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Seriously, as humanity advances not just in science and technology, but also in moral development — the willingness to see value in other humans, not regarding human life as “cheap” — the biblical god seems more and more cruel. Milosz pondered this phenomenon, and concluded that to modern humans Yahweh seems as cruel as nature — though a more accurate word would be “indifferent.”
We realize that nature acts in accordance with the laws of physics and biology, and doesn’t choose who should be stricken with lightning, a plague of locusts, flood, earthquake, etc, based on moral qualifications. The so-called “acts of God” are in fact acts of nature. But the notions of randomness, sheer luck, and innocent suffering go against the human notions of justice, so the “true believers” come up with their explanations: earthquakes are caused by gay marriage; god sent the shooter because prayer was banned in public schools.
The New Age “true believers” simply substitute the concept of karma, which, like Yahweh’s punishment, can be instant or seriously delayed. Perhaps your great-great-grandfather killed a child? That’s why your child got killed — because cosmic justice has to prevail and “karmic debt” must be paid. I even heard the claim that “until you’re forty, your life is just karma for your previous life.”
Or it could simply be your “negative thinking.”
These are logically desperate attempts to explain why bad things happen to good people. The scientific worldview gets rid of the entire “problem of evil.” But, as Milosz deftly observed, when we encounter old mythologies, the gods appear to be cruel monsters. Century by century, the gap between archaic morality and modern understanding increases. Likewise, the primacy of kindness as a human value is a relatively recent (and fragile) development. (more on this in an upcoming blog)
Michelangelo: Noah Disembarks
JOE: NOAH’S FLOOD — LITERAL OR METAPHORICAL?
Religious leaders teach us to read the Holy Book as historically factual. Thomas Jefferson asked himself the question, can a metaphorical work be read literally? Then he removed sections of the Book that did not support a metaphorical interpretation. Although some things are historically correct in the Biblical stories, the Bible is no more literally authentic than Tess of D’Urbervilles.
It might be a better idea to read the Bible as a spiritual book written for spiritual purposes. Otherwise, it would be a book about sanctified murder. Interpreting the scripture literally serves two purposes: it acts as thought control and denies personal responsibility. These conditions make the Bible an excellent tool for the rich and powerful to control the believers and their money. The Roman Emperor Constantine realized this. He used the Council of Trent to organize the old and new testament to sanctify The Roman Empire.
To read the Biblical stories as metaphors acknowledges the connection between the reader and the characters in the story. The reader has the same weaknesses and strengths as the characters. From a spiritual perspective, the reader learns that human life is composed of a succession of success and failure in the spiritual realm.
The story of the Great Flood is not about world destruction. It is about baptism and being reborn to a new life dedicated to supporting creation. In the story of Noah, his family represents the new world. The old world has died to its old, vain, selfish nature and has been reborn into a community that respects and cares for the animals and the community. His family dedicates themselves to caring for the animals and working together.
To live, the family must develop empathy and compassion for the animals and each other. The Great Flood is a story about people who renew their empathy and compassion for creation. In the Bible, the Hebrews fall away from this ideal and have to be reborn several times. In Moses story, he leads the Hebrews into the Red Sea and symbolically, they have a group baptism. When they enter the Red Sea, they’re slaves and exiting they’re free people.
Egypt is a symbol of vanity, and the desert of renewability. The difference between a literal and metaphysical interpretation is that if it is historically true, it relieves Christians from responsibility because they were not personally involved in the historical event. In a metaphorical interpretation, a person’s duty is to reflect on the story if the story is true to the human condition.
Oriana:
This is quite exciting — ideas I’ve never heard before. As you can imagine, my teaching nun dealt with the story literally — it rained 40 nights and 40 days (40 is a number beloved of the bible writers) etc. Cute animals walking in pairs like kindergarten children.
Sermons never touched the story. Much easier to deal with one of the healing miracles.
Jungians would be excited by the baptism/rebirth symbolism of water.
I especially like this paragraph:
To read the Biblical stories as metaphors acknowledges the connection between the reader and the characters in the story. The reader has the same weaknesses and strengths as the characters. From a spiritual perspective, the reader learns that human life is composed of a succession of success and failure in the spiritual realm.
Now I’d love to see how all major biblical stories could be interpreted, e.g. Abraham and Isaac (I suppose it might be: can you sacrifice that which you most love?) This enterprise is akin to literary analysis, the way critics can feast on The Great Gatsby.
I’m thrilled and grateful that you can throw new light on bible stories.
I’ve taken Bible as Literature; I wish that Bible as Psychology had also been available.
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Causes of deaths in 1632 London
“Rising of the lights” is perhaps the most mysterious term here. It refers to lung diseases, e.g. pneumonia, asthma, anything that caused difficulty breathing. The origin of the term remains a mystery.
Mary:
I remember a phrase "liver and lights" i think "lights" meant lungs.
Oriana:
Thank you. That certainly fits the meaning.
"Planet" likely meant a disease caused by an unfortunate alignment of the planets.
By the way, the current data show that the three most common causes of death in the US are heart disease, cancer, and Covid.
For more explanation of certain terms, see https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67247/15-historic-diseases-competed-bubonic-plague
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WHY ARE WE SO PRONE TO INFLAMMATORY DISORDERS? WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MODERN IMMUNE SYSTEM?
~ There’s a good evolutionary answer to that query, it turns out. Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do.
Generally speaking, autism also follows this pattern. It seems to be less prevalent in the developing world. Usually, epidemiologists fault lack of diagnosis for the apparent absence. A dearth of expertise in the disorder, the argument goes, gives a false impression of scarcity. Yet at least one Western doctor who specializes in autism has explicitly noted that, in a Cambodian population rife with parasites and acute infections, autism was nearly nonexistent.
For autoimmune and allergic diseases linked to autism, meanwhile, the evidence is compelling. In environments that resemble the world of yore, the immune system is much less prone to diseases of dysregulation.
Generally, the scientists working on autism and inflammation aren’t aware of this — or if they are, they don’t let on. But Kevin Becker, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, has pointed out that asthma and autism follow similar epidemiological patterns. They’re both more common in urban areas than rural; firstborns seem to be at greater risk; they disproportionately afflict young boys.
In the context of allergic disease, the hygiene hypothesis — that we suffer from microbial deprivation — has long been invoked to explain these patterns. Dr. Becker argues that it should apply to autism as well. (Why the male bias? Male fetuses, it turns out, are more sensitive to Mom’s inflammation than females.)
More recently, William Parker at Duke University has chimed in. He’s not, by training, an autism expert. But his work focuses on the immune system and its role in biology and disease, so he’s particularly qualified to point out the following: the immune system we consider normal is actually an evolutionary aberration.
Some years back, he began comparing wild sewer rats with clean lab rats. They were, in his words, “completely different organisms.” Wild rats tightly controlled inflammation. Not so the lab rats. Why? The wild rodents were rife with parasites. Parasites are famous for limiting inflammation.
Humans also evolved with plenty of parasites. Dr. Parker and many others think that we’re biologically dependent on the immune suppression provided by these hangers-on and that their removal has left us prone to inflammation. “We were willing to put up with hay fever, even some autoimmune disease,” he told me recently. “But autism? That’s it! You’ve got to stop this insanity.”
What does stopping the insanity entail? Fix the maternal dysregulation, and you’ve most likely prevented autism. That’s the lesson from rodent experiments. In one, Swiss scientists created a lineage of mice with a genetically reinforced anti-inflammatory signal. Then the scientists inflamed the pregnant mice. The babies emerged fine — no behavioral problems. The take-away: Control inflammation during pregnancy, and it won’t interfere with fetal brain development.
For people, a drug that’s safe for use during pregnancy may help. A probiotic, many of which have anti-inflammatory properties, may also be of benefit. Not coincidentally, asthma researchers are arriving at similar conclusions: prevention of the lung disease will begin with the pregnant woman. Dr. Parker has more radical ideas: pre-emptive restoration of “domesticated” parasites in everybody — worms developed solely for the purpose of correcting the wayward, postmodern immune system.
Practically speaking, this seems beyond improbable. And yet, a trial is under way at the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine testing a medicalized parasite called Trichuris suis in autistic adults.
First used medically to treat inflammatory bowel disease, the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.
And really, if you spend enough time wading through the science, Dr. Parker’s idea — an ecosystem restoration project, essentially — not only fails to seem outrageous, but also seems inevitable.
Since time immemorial, a very specific community of organisms — microbes, parasites, some viruses — has aggregated to form the human superorganism. Mounds of evidence suggest that our immune system anticipates these inputs and that, when they go missing, the organism comes unhinged.
Future doctors will need to correct the postmodern tendency toward immune dysregulation. Evolution has provided us with a road map: the original accretion pattern of the superorganism. Preventive medicine will need, by strange necessity, to emulate the patterns from deep in our past. ~
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.”
(I no longer have the original link, but the article first appeared in the New York Times sometime in August 2012)
FAT CELLS STORE MORE THAN JUST FAT
~ If cells were personified, each fat cell would be an overbearing grandparent who hoards. They’re constantly trying to make you eat another serving of potatoes, and have cabinets stacked with vitamins they never take.
Like that grandparent, your fat cells are always trying to store stuff. Fats? Of course. Vitamins? Heck yeah. Hormones? You bet. Random pollutants and toxins? Sure. Adipose tissue will soak all that up like an oily little sponge and keep it safe until you need it again. That’s the whole point of body fat—to store energy for you. When you lose weight, your fat cells start shrinking, releasing lipids and other fats into your bloodstream. These get broken down, and eventually the smaller molecules exit via your urine or breath.
But adipose cells release all the other molecules they've hoarded, too. That includes key hormones like estrogen, along with fat-soluble vitamins and any organic pollutants that found their way into your bloodstream as you gained weight.
Adipose tissue’s tendency to store things is an unfortunate side-effect, because often we need those things to be circulating, not sitting around. Take hormones, for instance. Female body fat actually produces some of its own estrogen in addition to storing it, and the more adipose tissue a person has, the more estrogen they’re exposed to. This is why being overweight puts you at an increased risk of getting breast cancer. Many types of breast cancer are caused by malfunctions in estrogen receptors, which are more likely to go haywire when more estrogen is around to stimulate them.
Vitamins pose the opposite problem. Adipose sucks up available fat-soluble vitamins (those stashed in adipose tissue instead of being excreted in your outgoing urine)—A, D, E, and K—and often doesn’t leave enough for the rest of your body. Studies suggest that obese people tend to suffer from vitamin D deficiencies because it’s all lurking in their adipose tissue. These vitamins can come back out as you lose weight, and as you decrease your body fat, you also allow more of your new vitamin D to stay in your bloodstream. Water-soluble compounds can just be peed out if you take too much of them, but because the vitamins stored in your adipose tissue can continue to build up you can eventually overdose on them. It’s rare, but it does happen.
Fat is also a (temporarily) safe space to store pollutants and other organic chemicals that might otherwise pose a threat. Organochlorine pesticides build up in fat, as do the polychlorinated biphenyls in coolant fluids and other chemicals from the “dirty dozen” of environmental contaminants. These banned chemicals can get into your food supply in small quantities and are stored in your fat, possibly because your body wants to sequester them away from your organs. Bodies don’t seem to store enough of these to become toxic, but the constant build-up leaves you vulnerable to exposure. And they do start to re-emerge when you lose weight.
Since you’re not eliminating all of your body fat at once, this doesn’t seem to pose a problem for most people. You’re dumping toxins into your bloodstream, but you’re also eliminating them through your pee. There’s some evidence that certain pollutants—so-called “persistent organic pollutants”—can stick around in your body fat for years, but so far it seems that natural toxin-elimination methods (also known as peeing) work well enough to get rid of them.
Safe or not, it’s best not to give your body a spot to stash all the hormones and vitamins it can hoard. Our bodies aren’t designed to hold onto excess body fat and stay healthy—that's why obesity is a risk factor for so many diseases. Getting rid of fat storage is just another reason to try and cut down on your own adiposity this year.
Just think: every time you lose a pound of fat, you’ve also literally detoxed yourself without ever having to do one of those terrible juice cleanses (which, by the way, do not work). You’ve used the power of your own body’s filtration systems to get rid of them—and it will thank you for it.
ending on beauty:
BASHO
What saves you? I mean, what undoes your anguish and despair, despite the rain, the broken pipes, the broken people. Poetry’s my holy. Some days every word I write is like a light that works.
Sweet friend, hear me. There will always be trouble. And fear, like a tapeworm, may uncoil inside any day. But right now, the girl with hazel eyes is strumming her guitar, so let’s not summon sorrow or traffic in panic and grief. Let’s follow Basho’s bee — as he stumbles out of the peony.
~ Deborah Bogen
