Bert van der Waal van Dijk Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) – Symphony No. 1 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam. Conductor Daniel Harding. Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Movement 1: 01:00 Movement 2: 18:30 Movement 3: 26:50 Movement 4: 38:05
What did Trump and his mob think success looked like last Wednesday? Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat,” but did they think that sheer violence would settle the matter of the election for the nation and the world? Did they think that all the apparatus of local, state, and national government (including all the bureaucracies, such as the judiciary, that need to function for there to be a federal government), as well as civil society, would just shrug and fall in line if they’d hanged Pence and murdered a number of other elected officials? That would have been terrible, but it would have only begotten a bigger backlash from a more wounded government and nation, and more peeling away from the Republicans who haven’t gone full radical-right. Even the abominable Ted Cruz might have looked askance at Vice President Pence dangling from the gallows (though he and Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz would have quickly figured out why it was the Democrats’ fault).
Had they succeeded in holding the Capitol and taking hostages or killing some of the legislators within, that might have triggered further violence by the right around the country (and there is a real and alarming possibility of further right-wing violence in the coming weeks). But their capacity is limited to intimidation and inflicting destruction. Despite what the tearful Elizabeth from Knoxville said in the now famous video—“We’re storming the Capitol, it’s a revolution!”—even “insurrection” was an intention by a mob that apparently aspired to be a lynch mob.
The mostly white, mostly men who invaded the Capitol were not the Confederate Army, even if they were hot for its flag: they posed no real threat to overthrow the US government. They are not the military (or a military), and lack the ability to conquer or to dominate the way the forces behind a coup dominate a country. As others have pointed out, for a serious full-on standard-issue coup you need the military on your side, and ten former Secretaries of Defense made it clear Trump and his disgruntled minions would not have it—a somber note, just before January 6, as to how much of a threat they perceived, followed by yesterday’s letter from the eight Joint Chiefs of Staff condemning the “violent riot” and reaffirming that Joe Biden is the incoming president.
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris talk to Nicola Davies at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend00:00/53:47Next VideoHelen Macdonald and James Rebanks talk to Andy Fryers at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend48:34×Next VideoHelen Macdonald and James Rebanks talk to Andy Fryers at the Hay Festival Winter WeekendCancelAutoplay is pausedTrump seems to genuinely believe he’s risen to at least the status of absolute monarch or maybe demigod.
This was and is a slob coup, an attempt to discredit and undermine the incoming administration and keep Trump in the spotlight after his presidency is over and exact some sore-losers’ vengeance. You could also call it an underachievers’ coup, since some of its participants and supporters count the hours of chaos and violence as a victory. It is a propaganda victory for both sides. It has convinced the far-right of their own capacity and convinced a lot of the rest of the world to take them seriously. It also made the case to everyone else of the real dangers they have long posed and the necessity of responding more strongly than we have. Warnings that far-right white extremists are the greatest terrorist threat in this country have been ignored for decades, and perhaps that denial has come to an end.
The underlying question is, did they think at all? Trump is notably shortsighted, always focused on the next grift and not the long game—which is why he’s in deep legal trouble and financial meltdown now, repudiated and isolated as a result of his most recent actions. In some ways his behavior since the election was more an emotional meltdown than a strategic plan, or a muddle of the two. It’s not working out well for him—or them—at this point. His followers have played too many video games or watched too many dumb superhero movies if they thought even several hundred violent mostly middle-aged white men with, at the time, modest amounts of weaponry, were somehow going to convince 340 million people domestically and eight billion abroad that a mob gets to choose the next president of the USA. Had they succeeded to any extent, there would have been at minimum immediate international sanctions and refusal to recognize such a regime, as well as noncooperation around the country of many kinds.
It would have generated more violence and chaos, but it would not have been the kind of victory they fantasize about, which is the domestic-violence perpetrator’s unthinking fantasy that by further harassing his ex-wife he can make her love him again. (Possibly because he thinks of this as a display of manly power.) Many among them apparently thought they could beat the nation into submission, specifically the submission to minority rule that overturning the results of the election would have meant. I think it likely that with slightly different circumstances there could have been far more beating, but that too would not have produced submission, but its opposite.
As it is, the main result has been a backlash leading to the disassociation of a lot of powerful institutions from the elected coconspirators, calls for some of them to resign, social-media shutdown of Trump and a lot of QAnon followers, loss of jobs and criminal charges for some of the participants who entered the Capitol, and a host of consequences for Trump, possibly spelling financial ruin and pariah status. For those who had dismissed the violence, the racism and antisemitism, and the delusions of the MAGA crowd to date, it was also a wake-up call (how anyone could sleep through four years of that neofascist racket or hear it as crickets is another question).
One thing that has been striking for me about Trump and his followers is that they have a devout medieval fantasy that power somehow reposes in the ruler rather than in the systems he heads. . But the systems we have here can withdraw cooperation if they find the leader illegitimate or in violation of the law. That the judiciary overruled or threw out more than 60 lawsuits brought over the election is one sign that power is dispersed in the system; that Trump believes it’s concentrated in him was evident in his mad scramble not merely to put in a Supreme Court justice just before the election but his repeatedly expressed belief that the Supreme Court would then obediently obtain an election victory for him on command.
Warnings that far-right white extremists are the greatest terrorist threat in this country have been ignored for decades, and perhaps that denial has come to an end.
Trump seems to genuinely believe he’s risen to at least the status of absolute monarch or maybe demigod, and some of his followers call him God-Emperor, or GEOTUS, apparently non-ironically, which is part of why it’s appropriate to call at least part of MAGA-land a cult. His whole life as a rich white man has been about surrounding himself with sycophants and avoiding consequences, and the protected presidency he enjoyed furthered that. Of course authoritarianism (and most cults are authoritarian) is always inclined this way: to make the leader infallible, flawless, oracular, unquestionable, to suppress and punish dissent and hold that infidels must die.
All photos by Rachel Cobb.
The Trumps had the White House, but that house was only a center of power as long as it was connected to systems of government, finance, and information circulation as it was connected to water, power, wifi, cable, and goods coming in and out. The fantasy of autonomy is a fantasy of masculinity and conservatism, or rather exists at the point where they intersect, which is why idiots with guns and jacked-up trucks who rely on the utility grid, food growers, road maintenance, and a host of less overt systems (including truck and gun factories) think they’re autonomous survivalists or wild west frontiersmen. They have been fed on the lead-filled diet of cowboy movies and lone-cop-whose-violence-is-sanctioned action movies and the National Rifle Association’s idea that a gun is the ultimate arbiter of authority.
It is, but only the authority to kill and dominate, and not the capacity to make the systems of cooperation work for you, to be part of the cooperative enterprise that is society, government, productivity and the rest, let alone the cooperative enterprises that are personal relationships. Of course many in the government fetishize guns and misunderstand or misrepresent the nature of power too; this stupid machismo is a rot throughout the system. Authority can look bland and benign when obedience is a given; it’s in being challenged, in fear of losing, that it lashes out, and in so doing it can delegitimize itself, whether it’s the head of a family or the head of a nation. White male Christian authority could posture as gracious and beneficent as long as it was unquestioned.
Minority rule, which was the law of this land when only white men voted, and long after women officially got the vote but nonwhite votes were suppressed, is what this insurrection sought to reimpose. Through violence, they sought aggrandizement of power for white men, for the loser of the election, and for delusions supported by (largely white) millions who are nevertheless a minority. There is a striking consistency through all this: a passion for inequality. For some people counting for more than others. For a small group of people getting to determine the fate of this nation. For the authoritarianism that is violence, the idea that I get to choose whether you live or die, that I get to have the power to inflict harm upon you, that I get what I want because of my capacity to damage. It’s a destructive and not a creative power. “What claim will you have? That you rule over a destroyed society? That the ashes belong to you?” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez demanded of the mob.
There are short-term legal responses to the attempted coup of January 6, but one of the longterm responses that will matter is the discrediting of violence. By this I mean not just the legitimacy of violence but the efficacy of it, what it does. When you idealize violence, you idealize inequality, and vice-versa; you effectively declare that some people matter more than others. All last summer’s Black Lives Matter and #defundthepolice activism was about how often giving people license to commit violence goes horribly awry, how using violence in the name of keeping the peace and enforcing the law too readily turns into a sordid brutality enforcing inequality. Which is a reminder that the case for equality has been stepped up mightily in recent years, as racial justice, voting rights, immigrant rights, trans and queer rights, feminism, and climate justice, just as the case against all these things and for reinstatement of the old inequalities has been amplified in response.
Trumpism has relied on the clannish sense that my people matter and yours do not, that violence is how we get stuff done, and that power consists of the capacity for violence and is the ultimate admirable skill. This stuff is woven deep into our society and we are reminded of it every day. Every problem is in part a storytelling problem. We just barely survived the result of some very stupid stories, and the longterm response has to include better stories at the substrata of our imaginations and our lives, personal and political. We have them, but amplifying them, celebrating them, circulating them, arguing their logic in our conversations and speeches and teaching is part of the work all of us can do.
Rebecca Solnit’s first media job was in fact-checking and her last book is the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence. She’s sent a lot of mail to her nieces and nephews during the pandemic.
Although Scorpio philosopher and writer Albert Camus said some people “expend tremendous energy merely to be normal,” Scorpios are advised to revel in being individual and unconventional. (Shutterstock)
Scorpios celebrating unconventionality in coming weeks will have enhanced health, sharpened wits
ARIES (March 21-April 19): As you ripen into a more fully embodied version of yourself, you will summon ever-greater discrimination about where to seek your inspiration. I trust that you will increasingly divest yourself of any tendency you might have to play around with just any old mediocre fire. More and more, you will be drawn to high-quality blazes that provide just the right amount of heat and light—neither too much nor too little. And you will steadfastly refrain from jumping into the flames, as glamorously dramatic as that might seem — and instead be a master of deft maneuvers that enable you to get the exact energy you need.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Denstu is a major Japanese advertising agency headquartered in Tokyo. Annually since 1925, its new employees and freshly promoted executives have carried out a company ritual: climbing 12,388-foot-high Mount Fuji, Japan’s tallest peak. The theme of the strenuous workout is this: “We are going to conquer the symbol that represents Japan more than anything else. And, once we do that, it will signify that we can do anything.” In anticipation of what I suspect will be a year of career gains for you, Taurus, I invite you to do the following: Sometime in the next six weeks, go out in nature and perform an equivalent feat.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Today I received a new email from a Gemini friend who lives in London. It was date-stamped Jan. 15, 2015. Weird! In it, she talked about applying for a new job at a publishing company. That was double weird, because February 2015 was in fact the time she had gotten the editing job that she still has. Her email also conveyed other details about her life that I knew to be old history. So why did it arrive now, six years late? I called her on the phone to see if we could unravel the mystery. In the end we concluded that her email had time-traveled in some inexplicable way. I predict that a comparable event or two will soon happen in your life, Gemini. Blasts from the past will pop in as if yesterday were today.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Eugene Sue (1804–1857) was a popular French author whose stories often offered sympathetic portrayals of the harsh living conditions endured by people of the lower economic class; writing generously about those downtrodden folks made him quite wealthy. I’d love to see you employ a comparable strategy in the coming year. What services might you perform that would increase your access to money and resources? How could you benefit yourself by helping and uplifting others?
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The beautiful and luxurious fabric known as silk comes from cocoons spun by insect larvae. Sadly for the creatures that provide the raw material, they’re usually killed by humans harvesting their handiwork—either by being stabbed or boiled alive. However, there is a special kind of silk in which manufacturers spare the lives of their benefactors. The insects are allowed to mature into moths and escape. I propose that we make them your spirit creatures in the coming weeks. It’s an excellent time for you to take an inventory of everything you do, and evaluate how well it upholds the noble principle of “Do no harm.”
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Any time that is not spent on love is wasted,” declared the Italian poet Torquato Tasso. Although I am sympathetic with his sentiment, I can’t agree that acts of love are the only things ever worth doing. Sometimes it’s healthy to be motivated by anger or sadness or skepticism, for example. But I do suspect the coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to be in intense devotion to Tasso’s counsel. All the important successes you achieve will be rooted in an intention to express love and compassion.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I heard a story about how a music aficionado took a Zen Buddhist monk to a performance of Beethoven’s *Symphony No. 5*. The monk wasn’t impressed. “Not enough silence!” he complained. I’m puzzled by that response. If the monk were referring to a busy intersection in a major city, I might agree with him, or the cacophony of a political argument among fanatics on Facebook. But to want more silence in one of history’s greatest pieces of music? That’s perverse. With this in mind, Libra, and in accordance with astrological omens, I encourage you to seek extra protection from useless noise and commotion during the coming weeks — even as you hungrily seek out rich sources of beautiful information, sound and art.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “Some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal,” wrote Scorpio author Albert Camus. If you’re one of those folks, I’m happy to inform you that you have cosmic permission to relax. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to explore the pleasures of NOT being conventional, standard, ordinary, average, routine, prosaic or common. As you expansively practice non-normalcy, you will enhance your health, sharpen your wits, and clarify your decisions.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Our lives tend to be shaped by the stories about ourselves that we create and harbor in our imaginations. The adventures we actually experience, the problems we actually face, are often (not always) in alignment with the tales we tell ourselves about our epic fates. And here’s the crux of the matter: We can change the stories we tell ourselves. We can discard tales that reinforce our pain, and dream up revised tales that are more meaningful and pleasurable. I believe 2021 will be an excellent time for you to attend to this fun work. Your assignment: Be a self-nurturing storyteller.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn author Edgar Allen Poe named “four conditions for happiness: life in the open air; love of another human being; freedom from all ambition; creation.” I’m accomplished in three of those categories, but a failure in being free of all ambitions. In fact, I’m eternally delighted by all the exciting creative projects I’m working on. I’m VERY ambitious. What about you, Capricorn? I’m going to contradict Poe and speculate that your happiness in the coming months will require you to be at least somewhat ambitious. That’s what the planetary omens are telling me. So what are the best goals and dreams for you to be ambitious about?
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): It’s time to launch Operation Supple Watchdog. That means you should be tenderly vigilant as you take extra good care of everyone and everything that provide you with meaning and sustenance. It means you should exercise rigorous but good-humored discernment about any oppressive or demeaning ideas that are flying around. You should protect and preserve the vulnerable parts of your life, but do so with tough-minded compassion, not ornery overreactions. Be skeptical, but warm; breezily resilient but always ready to stand up for what’s right. (P.S. The better you shield yourself against weird surprises, the more likely it is you’ll attract interesting surprises.)
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The atoms that compose your body have existed for billions of years. Originally created by a star, they have been part of many forms before you. But they are exactly the same in structure as they have ever been. So in a very real sense, you are billions of years old. Now that you know that, how do you feel? Any different? Stronger? More expansive? More eternal? I bring these thoughts to your attention, Pisces, because 2021 will be an excellent year for you to come to a more profound and detailed understanding of your true nature. I hope you will regularly meditate on the possibility that your soul is immortal, that your identity is not confined to this historical era, that you have been alive and will be alive for far longer than you’ve been taught to believe.
ARTESIA, NM—Still shaken after a surprise encounter with the 37-year-old educator, local first-grader Micah Dunn was reportedly weirded out Tuesday after bumping into his teacher outside of his laptop. “Mrs. Evans was walking around without moving out of frame—it was super weird,” said Dunn, who recalled feeling dumbfounded after a recent trip to the grocery store in which he spotted the woman standing in line occupying three-dimensional space. “She looked 10 times bigger than she normally does on screen, and had a baby with her that was also in 3D. I was so confused. I can’t believe she has a whole entire body. I guess it makes sense that she would live outside my computer, but I’m still surprised. I can’t wait to FaceTime my friends about this.” At press time, Dunn added that though the experience was strange, he was comforted by the familiar sight of his teacher glitching.
HHS Authorizes the use of all available doses, the head of Operation Warp Speed resigns, and Sinovac’s vaccine goes into use despite dubious data. Here’s what you should know:
On Tuesday, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar said that all Covid-19 vaccine doses held by states can now be given out. This is one of several solutions that have been proposed to speed up the US’ slow vaccine rollout. However, releasing all available vaccines means people may have to wait longer than intended before receiving their second dose. As the FDA pointed out in a statement last week, there’s no data to support any changes to dosing—including how long people have to wait between doses.
| Professor of Philosophy at University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University
On November 9, 2017, more than 500 people gathered at the Flat Earth International Conference in Cody, North Carolina. Attendees agreed that the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee, with the North Pole as its centre and Antarctica running around the edge.
Shocking as all this may sound, this gathering was not stupidest collective act that occurred this month. In the noble competition for collective stupidity, it only took the silver medal. The clear winner is the recent decision by Tory MPs in the UK to remove any reference to animal sentience from the EU Withdrawal Bill.
This decision has been often misreported for clickbait purposes, so the facts first. In 2009 all countries of the EU signed the Lisbon treaty, which recognized that animals are sentient beings: they feel pain and have emotions. If the UK is no longer part of the EU, there will be no legal recognition of animals as sentient beings. Green MP Caroline Lucas proposed an amendment that would rectify this. It was voted down 313 to 295.
Does it matter that there was no actual discussion in Parliament whether animals feel pain? Not really. Does it matter that environment secretary Michael Gove was trying to backpedal on this decision a couple of days later? Again, not really. What matters is that 313 members of the British Parliament thought it was better not to have any traces of the claim that animals are sentient beings in the UK legal code.
It is really the Flat Earth gathering that is the only apt comparison that comes to mind. The difference is that while the 500 attendees in North Carolina included a man who measured the curvature of the Earth with a ruler from an airplane window and another one who is now preparing to gather evidence for the flatness of the Earth from his homemade rocket, the 313 people who voted in the Parliament were Tory MPs, presumably many of them with university degrees (and without doubt most of them with very expensive public-school education).
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“How can we then explain that allegedly intelligent people would question that animals feel pain? I’m afraid here most of the blame should go to my very own discipline, philosophy.” ___
The process of pain perception is as well-understood as any other perceptual process. We know that in our visual system the retinal signal is sent to the primary visual cortex (V1) via the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) in the thalamus; outputs from V1 are fed forward to a range of extrastriate areas (V4/V8, MT). Animals also have retinas. Their retinas also send signals to the V1 via the LGN, and so on. So doubting that animals see would be crazy.
But we have the same level of understanding of how pain perception works. The receptors of pain perception in our skin are called nociceptors (they would be the equivalent of retinal cells). When these nociceptors are activated, they send signals to the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices and the anterior cingulate cortex. This happens in humans and in other mammals (and also almost in the same way in other vertebrates). So doubting that animals feel pain is as crazy as doubting that animals see.
At this point someone may object that while animals may process pain, they don’t feel pain. Or they don’t feel feel pain. Having a certain neural circuitry, after all, is different from having the experience of pain. And it’s the experience of pain we should really care about, isn’t it.
There are huge theoretical problems with this line of thought, but there is also straightforward empirical refutation. Rats and chickens systematically choose and self-administer painkillers when and only when they are distressed. I am not sure how this finding could be made consistent with the ‘animals don’t really feel pain’ line short of some maneuver worthy of the Flat Earth crowd.
How can we then explain that allegedly intelligent people would question that animals feel pain? I’m afraid here most of the blame should go to my very own discipline, philosophy.
Philosophers have always been big on denying that animals feel much. Almost all the heavy hitters of Western philosophy – Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant – found it important to stress this, Descartes taking the cake for his insistence that animals are really just machines. But there is a more direct reason for this skepticism about animal pain, the recent obsession with consciousness and what came to be known as the ‘explanatory gap’ between what natural sciences tell us about the mind and about what we feel.
Consciousness and pain are natural phenomena, so the default should be that it is the natural sciences that could tell us something about them. Philosophers of a certain persuasion find this stance threatening. Science has taken so much away from philosophy, not consciousness now! And that’s where it’s convenient to talk about our ‘privileged access’: we know more about our own conscious state than any scientist could. The general line of argument is that even if we know everything that can be known about the neural and psychological apparatus of our brain, this will not explain what it is like to feel pain (or anything else).
This new mysticism about consciousness may sell books, but it is not very helpful when it comes to animal sentience, as it fuels a form of skepticism about the subjective experiences of any other creatures (animals or even humans other than yourself). These new mystics take consciousness out of the domain of scientific study, and of course once something is outside that domain, all hell breaks loose – just ask the guy with the ruler on the airplane…
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“This new mysticism about consciousness may sell books, but it is not very helpful when it comes to animal sentience, as it fuels a form of skepticism about the subjective experiences of any other creatures” ___
Animals are sentient and the Earth is not flat. There are some pragmatic implications of both of these truths. We can fly from Sydney to Buenos Aires via the Antarctic (that would not be an option for Frisbee Earth). But the consequences of animal sentience are not all unproblematic.
There is the inconvenient fact that the behavioral and brain sciences are heavily relying on experimentation with animals. The elegant experiments I mentioned earlier about rats and chickens self-administering painkillers – well, they may not have been that much fun for the rats and chickens involved. If animals are sentient, should we then stop all these experiments? No, we should not, but we should know that we’re experimenting on sentient beings (and adjust the experimental methods accordingly).
Also, should the recognition that animals feel pain make us all vegetarian or even better, vegan? This is obviously an ethical decision everyone needs to make for themselves, but denying that animals are sentient is nothing but a cop-out. Vegetarianism and animal experimentation are difficult ethical dilemmas, but addressing them needs to start with acknowledging that animals feel pain.
Here’s an image I found on the Internet during the George Floyd protests. I think it was shot in Philadelphia and it just said so much to me.
The sign I carried during those marches — I didn’t really march due to Covid and my age even though there were several marches in my little town of Decatur. But I did stand on a street corner for a few days with a cardboard sign that read END QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. I’ll post a photo of my messy bureau with that sign later maybe. But this image I looked at for a long time and hope you do too.
CIM Lesson 11 — My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.
It’s a Joan Baez morning.
I have just written the most intimate letter I have ever written in my life. And I feel vulnerable and open and raw and free and responsible and exposed. But I also feel loved and understood and cared for and released and safe. Very deep connection. The archetype Mary Magdalene come to my mind.
“Jungian archetypes are defined as universal, archaic symbols and images that derive from the collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung. They are the psychic counterpart of instinct. It is described as a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human history, which prefigures and directs conscious behavior.” From Wikepedia. There is tons more there if you want to go explore Archetypes.
Archetypes are very important to human beings. They are like guideposts for us to help us understand our behavior — our mistakes our triumphs. Why we do what we do and they give us clues about how we as individuals can take more responsibility for ourselves, have more choice, more conscious choice rather than just being reactionary, reacting with the same old behavior patterns. I am taking an old Prosperos class this weekend that is largely about archetypes. I won’t take the whole thing — I’ve been through it many times before and don’t need to hear the same old shit — but if there are insights to be found, I am ready to find them especially now. Cancer and all. I wrote the teachers today and told them the archtype stories I wanted to explore were The Prodigal Son and the Tower of Babel. They might just be covering the same old tired Moses story and others I don’t need to hear again. The Joseph story is central to the class. If you don’t know about archetypes, there’s a movie to go see. Pretty sure it on Netflix. Let’s me go see. The movie is Beowulf made in 2007 by Zemeckis. Well it’s not on You Tube but it’s available. When it first came out I went to the theater watched it at least 7 times or so with a buddy, Guy from the chorus. Sometimes we smoked pot first sometimes we didn’t. We saw it in 3D and not in 3D. We even saw an IMAX version of it. Now it’s a good film and a good story and it’s kind of animationish but it’s not an animated film. It’s a story from the 4th century. Archetypes are old old stories that mirror our collective unconscious back to us. We SEE ourselves in the Archetypes. It is a crucial piece of self understanding. It is why bible stories resonate so much with so many of us. We feel like we have lived them on some level. We get them on a visceral level not just an academic one.
Beowulf was that way for me which is why is went back to the movie over and over and over again. The more I watched it, the more I saw myself in it. I was literally every single character in the movie — all of them — the major ones and the minor ones. It was an incredible experience. I’m not gonna tell you what the story is — you can cheat and go google it and read a synopsis. Here I’ll post the Wikepedia page here but I hope you DON’T read it before you watch the movie.Beowulf (2007 film)Beowulf is a 2007 3D computer-animated fantasy action film directed and co-produced by Robert Zemeckis, written by Neil…en.wikipedia.org
Joannie sings on with that angel voice. Farewell Angeline is echoing in the room. I am going to see if I can get a nap. It’s been an early morn and I want to see if I can catch a few winks. No nap. bummer. So I’ll just take my shower treat that wound that won’t heal and start again later this afternoon. I’ll leave you the this for now.
My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.
Slept good. Feet a little cold but that little electric blanket is good. Took and ambien last night. Slept till 8:30 and made coffee. put on some baroque. Having a little trouble with constipation so I’ll take more colace. Anyway, went back to bed to lie down listen to the music and fell asleep again and slept til 11:30 with music kinda loudish. Very peaceful so here I am back at the desk. But it’s already noon.
CIM Lesson 9 — I see nothing as it is now.
An idea that came up in this lesson is important. It says “understanding is not necessary at this point…These exercises are concerned with practice, not understanding.” Practice not understanding. There is such a thin edge there. Prosperos seemed all about understanding to me. And Shambhala was all about practice to me. So I spent some time pursuing both almost exclusively. And then pursuing nothing for years like hedonism and fantasy. Cancer has changed that. Don’t know how yet and don’t know how long term but something is happening. And I think for me I am learning that understanding is not really all that important as long as you strive to be be present and to be kind. And that takes practice. Constant conscious practice.
CIM Lesson 10 — My thoughts do not mean anything.
The lesson says to practice this one for no more than 5 times today each time for 1 minute or less.
So I have a pretty easy week on the medical front. No appointments except a zoom with palliative care. I don’t know if they can do anything for me or if insurance would cover it but we’ll see. So far Medicare has taken care of almost everything. I’ll find out what services and support they offer. If they would send someone here to clean the house, I’d jump on it. LOL. I also just called the nutrition services at Winship to see what they might be able to offer and if it might be covered by insurance. Left a message and hope they call back. So that’s it on the medical front. Just those 2 things. It heats up again next week with Round 2 of Chemo. Pete is going to bring me a meal (it doesn’t have to be gourmet but he is a gourmet cook by practice only) over the weekend so I can build up my strength before chemo. I know he is not reading this. This would be way too much for Pete. I hope I get to chat with him though on the deck this weekend. He voted for Trump and Purdue and Leoffler. When I texted him that I was delighted with the results of the run off, he wrote back that he was skeptical about what they would do with the their new power. I know Pete is very conservative on right to life issues and taxes and stuff like that. We don’t try to change each other’s postions and we rarely talk politics at all since we know we don’t agree and don’t really see the point in destroying a friendship over it. We enjoy what what enjoy with each other — football, golf, family, parties, friendships. Some of my very closest friends here are in this circle. We just don’t agree and it’s OK. But I do think it is important for all of us to try to understand why people that don’t think like us think the way they do. Not to change their mind or anything but to broaden our own perspective. I think that has to be a part of this whole idea of “coming together” as a nation. It’s gotta be more than a Kumbaya moment and a lot lot more than more than a na-na-na my side won moment. We’ve done that for the last 4 years and look where it got us. So when Pete asked when he could feed me again I jumped. Did I mention that he is a good cook. Way better than me and I am no slouch.
My dear sister Terri grabbed me for a minute this weekend before everyone got on the Sunday call and wanted to tell me that I shouldn’t say something on this blog about someone. Doesn’t matter what. I told her in no uncertain terms that this was my life and my memories of it and my process of dealing with my cancer and my future and that she had no right to suggest to me what I decide to write. Now Terri is the most generous and caring of all my sisters. She would do and give me anything and she is energetic and kind and recently remarried to a wonderful guy who has actually been in the family for the last 15 years. But and this is for all of you. I am going to say what I need to say here. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to read it, you can take it personally if you want or you can just let it flow off your back like water off a duck. Remember the CIM lesson today — My thoughts do not mean anything.
Jan and I talked for a minute after the family call and she recalled something that had happened when we were kids and how Nancy’s memory of it and her memory of it were completely OPPOSITE. That’s how out minds work. We build our world out of our memories and our memories are not objectively true. So we build on that perverbial sand foundation. I have been having a very deep and thoughtful email correspondence with someone I love deeply about all this. She is going to visit me this Spring. The ball’s in my court right now to answer her last letter and I’m still figuring out what to say next in this exchange. Suffice it say that the letter I got from her yesterday was the most thoughtful letter I have ever received in my life. There’s no rush to write back. She is reading this.
Sirius XM expires tomorrow. I have to cancel the subscription since I’m like spending no time in the car. Or better, see if can negotiate with them a way that I can keep it on my phone for the low low price of whatever they’ll give me. I mostly listened to the fantasy football channel, CNN and MSNBC and The Grateful Dead channel this past year when I was in the car. Not much else. NPR maybe.
Listening to baroque today. All day. I once took a class called proprioceptive writing. Liz still takes these classes every week. Pretty sure she is still reading. I know her from Shambhala and she has me over every Christmas eve and prepares and serves this very traditional Scandinavian Christmas eve feast. Like 6 courses. Not this year. Covid. And I didn’t go last year because I was sick with a bad flu or something and didn’t want to pass it on. It’s a small group her kids and a few friends. Bob and Carol used to come. The first course is and I am going to try using phonics to come up with this word — risingere — No spell check that had the right word. Liz text it to me. She did — it’s risingrot. I wasn’t even close. Anyway it is a rice porridge kind of stuff. And you serve it with soft, (what an interesting word that is. I mean seriously. My dictionary is a good one and it has dozens of entries for soft but not this one) which is a is a kind of thin syrup made from lingonberries I think. And you put cinnamon on top as well. By the way Liz correctly spelled it saft so I looked that up and it’s the Scottish word for soft. But nothing about the syrup. Risingrot is the ultimate in comfort food. And in every pot of there is one marzipan pig. And if you get the pig in your bowl, you’ll have good luck all year long. The courses are the cheese and fish course, a pasta course, cucumber salad, sweedish pancakes — you know those real thin ones like crepes. And it ends with a cake Liz makes with rasberries and whipped cream. Many great memories of those evenings every Christmas eve with Liz and her family and a few people I didn’t even know in this small group of maybe 10. Lucy is her daughter — a yoga teacher. She sent me the sweetest note when Liz told her I had cancer. Her email sign off is “Big Love.”
So it done for set periods of time say 20 minutes by a small group — say 10 people. The idea is that you listen to yourself and you must keep the pen moving at all times. No stopping to think what am I going to say now. You know like when you put the pencil in your mouth and think about what to say next. That is not allowed. You must keep the pen moving even if all you are writing is “I am keeping the pen moving because I know I have to and I don’t know what to say next so I keep writing and just keep going and on and on….” It is done to baroque music. The baroque music helps keep the pen (consciouness) flowing. After the writing period is over (a timer goes off), the group, which needs to be an intimate group — intimate in the sense of total trust — reads their writing to the rest of the group and Sandra would offer brief comments to the group. Jane never did this. Wasn’t her thing. She was busy out there being kind. But Liz and I did for a while and Liz still does. I haven’t done it in years. But I’ll bet Liz has been doing it for 25 years once a week. I would take it up again if I could find a group that intimate but working with people has always been the most difficult of the 3 paths for me. I can work on self and I can work for the world in general. It’s the second one — working with people that has been the hardest. Proprioceptive writing can be done alone but it is most powerful when done in a small close group. You’d finish each meeting with another writing session usually shorter — maybe 15 minutes that you would not share with the group. Here’s another website I found about it.Pwriting.orgProprioceptive Writing is a method for exploring the mind through writing.pwriting.org
I did it again. And email popped up from someone I know saying they meant to send me this picture. And I clicked the link and it took me to some story about Megyn Kelly. I closed it immediately, deleted the email, rebooted to clear cache, but shit I hate it when I act automatically like that. I restarted the baroque music to help me keep the thoughts flowing. I am not doing proprioceptive writing here btw but I am writing and for the first time in a long long time. And it is helping me even if it’s just stream of consciousness. It’s 41 today here. Too cold for an outdoor walk.
So this is the picture of the family on my mother’s side on Troop Street when we were all kids. I’m wearing a tie next to my dad behind my mom. All the uncles and Aunt Sally are in the back row. And all of Grandma and Grandpa’s kids are sitting in front of them. 6 women — Rosemary, Fran, Helen, Jean, Mary, Virginia and Uncle Jack. And then all the kids. And there would be lot more kids to come. This was way before the Henry’s moved to California. So you see I have a very big big family and many in this picture have shown up for me this past month in a big way. Each one has a unique story and some are painful and some are joyful but most of them are both. Mine is that way.
And this is all of us at my parents 50th (wait…now that I think about it I think this is the 60th) wedding anniversary. I’m just over my dad’s head. Now some of those little ones in the front have kids of their own.
Here is a picture of the last time I think all 14 of us were all together. It’s very difficult to get 12 kids and 2 parents all in the same place at the same time. So this is my entire immediate family.
Look up the word. It’s a very interesting word. One of THE most important terms in music especially choral singing. I am going to ruminate on this word for a while. brb. I hope you took a little time with that word. The conclusion I came to on the last translation I did about a week ago was “Power is flowing through my being always.”
So here are the Leahy and Henry cousins sitting the steps at the big Troop street house. I do wish these pictures did not look so distorted. That beaming young girl in the middle (Mary) and I had a long talk the other night on the phone. And I have a precious symbol of her love for me on my refrigerator right now. We spoke about a lot things but we also spoke about Johnny and Jan dug out some pictures of
Johnny out of her attic. This is John nearing the end. That’s my folks and Jack with him. I don’t think I was on that visit. He was something. Wouldn’t know what a dictionary was let alone how to open one up. All he did was just try to make the people around him happy. He is dying in this picture wasting away from ALS and he is chuckling with my folks and with Jack. What a guy. How Ya’ Doing John? I miss you. Am so glad that Jan went into her attic and started digging around for some photos and sending them to me. John is as inspirational a person as I have ever met. More than any teacher I ever had — more than anyone really. He just exuded love all the time 24/7 non stop eternal. Uncomplicated and indiscriminate. Just a truck driver.
Jack bringing me back after that really rough night a few nights ago reminded me of coming back from seizures. I think I mentioned that I have a siezure disorder which started from a motorcycle accident in my early 20’s. And over years since I have had a few of them. Not many but a few. When someone has a siezure they do not need an ambulance, they just need someone there in front of them starinng them in the face and telling them they had a siezure, that it’s OK and here’s where we are and just rest and breathe and it’s going to come back to normal again soon. Within a couple of minutes I always figured it out even if I was alone. But Jack that night was that reassuring presence telling me that this was a reaction to the chemo and it sucked but that was all it was.
