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Biden announces top public health nominees, South Korea implements new measures, and the pandemic offers pathways to change. Here’s what you should know:
President-elect Joe Biden has announced his picks for several key public health postings in his administration. Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general and leader of a legal campaign to protect the Affordable Care Act, has been tapped to lead the Health and Human Services Department, and Harvard Medical School professor Rochelle Walensky has been nominated as the director of the CDC. If confirmed, both will assume massive roles during the nation’s greatest public health crisis in the last century.
South Korea is expanding its testing, tracing, and social distancing measures in response to a steep uptick in cases. Though infections were below 50 per day for much of the summer, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 615 new cases on Sunday and 8,311 patients in quarantine, the most ever for the country. President Moon Jae-in has even called for deploying the military and more people from the public service to help expand testing.
The trauma of this pandemic raises questions about how society can and should change
With vaccines on the horizon and the end of the pandemic just barely in sight, people are starting to ask: Who will we be when this is all over? Some psychologists underscore that the collective and individual traumas of this year can create the opportunity to think more deliberately about how our world can and should change. This pandemic has accelerated innovation, but it has also highlighted inequities that have long plagued our society, giving us a starting place for exactly where and how we can do better.
“Globalization is on its deathbed,” says economist Mike O’Sullivan. The question now is: What’s next? Tracing the historical successes and failures of globalization, O’Sullivan forecasts a new world order where countries come together over shared values rather than geography. Learn how big regional powers like the United States and China will be driven by distinct ways of governing trade, technology and people — while smaller nations will forge new alliances to solve problems.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Sycorax/ˈsɪkəræks/ is an unseen character in William Shakespeare‘s play The Tempest (1611). She is a vicious and powerful witch and the mother of Caliban, one of the few native inhabitants of the island on which Prospero, the hero of the play, is stranded. She is originally from ‘Argier,’ defined by geographer Mohamed. S. E. Madiou as “a 16th and 17th century older English-based exonym for both the 16th and 17th c. capital and state of ‘Algiers’ (Argier/Argier),”[1] from where Sycorax is banished.
According to the backstory provided by the play, Sycorax, while pregnant with Caliban, was banished from her home in Algiers to the island on which the play takes place. Memories of Sycorax, who dies several years before the main action of the play begins, define several of the relationships in the play. Relying on his filial connection to Sycorax, Caliban claims ownership of the island. Prospero constantly reminds Ariel of Sycorax’s cruel treatment to maintain the sprite’s service.
Scholars generally agree that Sycorax, a foil for Prospero, is closely related to the Medea of Ovid‘s Metamorphoses. Postcolonialist writers and critics see Sycorax as giving voice to peoples, particularly women, recovering from the effects of colonisation. Later versions of The Tempest, beginning with William Davenant‘s eighteenth-century adaptation, have given Sycorax a vocal role in the play, but maintained her image as a malevolent antagonist to Prospero.
Role in the play
Medea (1889) by Evelyn De Morgan; Scholars see parallels between Ovid‘s Medea and Shakespeare’s Sycorax.
In The Tempest, Prospero describes Sycorax as an ancient and foul witch native to Algiers, and banished to the island for practising sorcery “so strong / That [she] could control the Moon”.[2] Prospero further relates that many years earlier, sailors had brought her to the island, while she was pregnant with her bestial son, Caliban, and abandoned her there, as by some ambiguous reason, she was spared being put to death. She proceeded to enslave the spirits there, chief among them Ariel, whom she eventually imprisoned in a pine tree for disobedience. Sycorax birthed Caliban and taught him to worship the demonic god Setebos. She dies long before the arrival of Prospero and his daughter, Miranda. Caliban grows to hate Prospero’s presence and power on the island, claiming that the land belongs to him since it was his mother’s before Prospero appeared.
“I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) wrote to his law partner three weeks before his thirty-third birthday. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”
Pensive, sensitive, and compassionate by nature, Lincoln felt life deeply. As a child, he told his stepsister that an ant’s life is as sweet to the ant as ours is to us and ardently chided the other boys for setting sea turtles on fire with that unthinking cruelty children at play can have. As a teenager, he defied his family’s tradition of considering basic literacy sufficient education for their line of work, sneaking away from his farm duties to read and study, so that a cousin would later remember him as “very lazy… always reading — scribbling — writing — ciphering — writing poetry &c. &c.” As a young adult, he came to see himself as cursed with the “peculiar misfortune” of dreaming dreams too large not to explode with disappointment.
Abraham Lincoln
Five years after leaving his father’s farm, the first detonation of depression shook the young man’s world. His legal studies strained him beyond capacity. Reading day and night, he grew emaciated. Meanwhile, a typhoid epidemic swept the land with a tidal wave of death, taking with it the life of Ann Rutledge — a young woman who uniquely understood Lincoln’s sensitivity and about whom he had come to care deeply — so deeply that no one around them quite understood the nature of their bond, though generations have taken the liberty of qualifying it, manufacturing an entire romantic mythos around a brittle skeleton of spare facts.
Whatever the private reality of the relationship, it was in this period of strife and loss, surrounded by widespread death and stretched beyond his own creaturely limits, that Lincoln came to think seriously of suicide. The idea grew so intrusive, so actionable, that he no longer trusted himself to carry a pocket knife. Friends and neighbors watched his mental unraveling with growing concern, so alarmed to see him wander the woods aimlessly with his gun that they set up a suicide watch.
After that first rather public episode of suicidal depression, Lincoln learned to hide his heavy heart behind his famous humor, behind a facade of such cheerful levity that even those working most closely with him would never see him despondent or ill-tempered. But it spilled out obliquely, through the cracks of compassion: Reaching out to salve a friend’s savaging depression with his great gift of consolation, he wrote with a poignant familiarity of “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”
“Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death.” Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)
Unbeknownst to anyone, in the summer of his thirtieth year, Lincoln penned an intensely sorrowful poem titled “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” printed anonymously in a small Whig paper in Illinois alongside advertisements for whale oil and French cologne. It would take scholars 139 years to identify his authorship. With its haunting story-framing epigraph and its dramatic narration by a fictional character, it was Lincoln’s way of safely rehearsing in the darkest recesses of his imagination what it might be like to enact the central pull of suicide — the tempting illusion that total self-erasure is the only way to terminate the mental anguish nothing else has allayed.
THE SUICIDE’S SOLILOQUY
The following lines were said to have been found near the bones of a man supposed to have committed suicide, in a deep forest, on the flat branch of the Sangamon, some time ago.
Here, where the lonely hooting owl Sends forth his midnight moans, Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl, Or buzzards pick my bones.
No fellow-man shall learn my fate, Or where my ashes lie; Unless by beasts drawn round their bait, Or by the ravens’ cry.
Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do, And this the place to do it: This heart I’ll rush a dagger through, Though I in hell should rue it!
Hell! What is hell to one like me Who pleasures never knew; By friends consigned to misery, By hope deserted too?
To ease me of this power to think, That through my bosom raves, I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink, And wallow in its waves.
Though devils yell, and burning chains May waken long regret; Their frightful screams, and piercing pains, Will help me to forget.
Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night, To take that fiery berth! Think not with tales of hell to fright Me, who am damn’d on earth!
Sweet steel! come forth from your sheath, And glist’ning, speak your powers; Rip up the organs of my breath, And draw my blood in showers!
I strike! It quivers in that heart Which drives me to this end; I draw and kiss the bloody dart, My last — my only friend!
This blackest despair was more than a poetic image for Lincoln. Three years later, when another acute episode of depression subsumed him and he came to see himself as the most miserable man on Earth, he arrived at the ultimate equation:
To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.
He did get better. He did remember what we so frequently and dangerously forget when pressed under the leaden lid of depression — that the light of being returns. Like any great artist of life, Lincoln learned to transmute his suffering into fuel for building a more beautiful and light-filled world, turning the private anguish of his suicidal depression into a powerful political metaphor to mobilize his nation’s spirit. “If destruction be our lot,” he declaimed in one of his most powerful speeches, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” (Whitman — who reverenced Lincoln as “the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality” — echoed the sentiment with redoubled conviction across the epoch-stride of the Civil War in his prescient essay Democratic Vistas: “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.”)
Living with his own depression, Lincoln understood intimately that what is true of the spirit of a person is true of the spirit of a people — our undoing always serves an invitation to learn new modes of making: making beauty, making meaning, making the life we want to live and the world we want to live it in.
As we come up to the end of the year, many people feel their lives will be normal again if they have a vaccine.
The governments appear to promise travel and entertainment again if we do this. I cannot advise this, as having watched a lot of Klaus Schwab from the International Monetary Forum and The Great Reset, I believe we will become a very different kind of human.
What I do advise is to connect to your own health with daily practise. Connect to your own inner wisdom with spiritual practise. Connect with nature. Connect with your family and friends as the confusing laws, that are not laws under Common Law, keep us from the pure joy of actually being with people and celebrating life.
Do your own research about these faulty tests that they call cases. Research the actual fatalities. Go outside of the mainstream narrative and find out. Are you sure you want a rushed vaccine for a promise that will not be fulfilled?
There is another way with a completely different system that is run by us globally, as we all know the old way is no longer supporting us. I have followed this man Ronald Bernard and his new system, B of Joy. I hope you find them a ray of sunshine as I do.
I know we will come out of this phase. Be strong in your daily practise and dance with whoever you can. We as humans are built to touch each other, share food, dance, create and connect.
In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets enters into the memories he shares through touch and, in doing so, conjures a deep reverence for the spaces we remember. From a stubbled chin and stucco wall to bloody knees and tadpoles, the memories he shares are held in the physicality of the body. It is through what he calls “radical remembering,” which carries us across the time and space of existence, that he unfolds these “memory fields” through language and storytelling and offers this Diné perspective of time, memory, and land.
CBS News Lesley Stahl reports on the recently discovered phenomenon of “superior autobiographical memory,” the ability to recall nearly every day of one’s life.
(Contributed by Sarah Flynn)
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
THE SUICIDE’S SOLILOQUY
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