Music-making robot (Wikimedia Commons)
All posts by Mike Zonta
“Every Body” Doc Shines Spotlight on Intersex Community’s Fight for Recognition, Bodily Autonomy
Democracy Now! Jun 12, 2023 Latest Shows Transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/1..
June is Pride Month, a time to celebrate the LGBTQIA community, and today we look at those represented by the “I” which stands for “intersex.” In a broadcast exclusive, we are joined by the filmmaker and three stars of a new documentary, Every Body, which follows their work as intersex activists who share childhoods marked by shame, secrecy and nonconsensual surgeries. We speak with actor and screenwriter River Gallo, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel, scholar Sean Saifa Wall and Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning director Julie Cohen, who says she was able to document “a movement that’s in the midst of truly blossoming.” Weigel adds, “There is no one way to look intersex. There is no one way to be intersex,” emphasizing that the movement for informed consent and body autonomy is broad and intersectional. The film will be released in theaters on June 30.
Tarot Card for July 14: The Seven of Swords
The Seven of Swords
The Lord of Futility represents the times in life where we feel too overwhelmed and doubtful to act decisively toward our problems. It will usually appear when there are difficult decisions to be made, or when situations arise that require we take action. Because we are weary, feeling over-stressed and helpless, we do nothing. As a result, of course, things inevitably get worse.
Sometimes the card will come up because we have such a poor view of ourselves. We start to believe that nothing we do could possibly make a difference to the unhappy circumstances we find ourselves in. If not challenged, this attitude will lead us into being poor-little-me’s, when we adopt a victim mentality, and secretly expect everybody else to sort things out for us.
When feeling the effects of the Lord of Futility, we are often ready to make unsuitable compromises in order to try to ease the pressure we experience. We can be more easily impressed by other people’s opinions, seeking to please them – often at our own expense. We vacillate, unable to stick to any decision we make. And all of this does nothing much more than increase our problems.
Neither of these options is viable, if we are to live a happy love-filled life, is it? So when this card appears in a reading for ourselves, we need to be prepared to commit ourselves to a course of action and then follow through. Even if it transpires that the choice we make could have been bettered, any choice is better than no choice at all, when the alternative is total inertia.
Often fear will be a big issue – fear of doing something wrong, fear of taking responsibility, fear of being even more hurt and feeling worse than we already do. In the end, we simply have to take our courage in both hands and, like The Fool, take that leap forward. The fact that we have acted will help us to break from of the Lord of Futility and to move on.
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)
Covid’s Forgotten Hero: The Untold Story Of The Scientist Whose Breakthrough Made The Vaccines Possible
JENS KRISTIAN BALLE . JENS@JENSKRISTIANBALLE.COM
By Nathan Vardi, Former Staff
Following the money trail
Aug 17, 2021 (Forbes.com)
Without Ian MacLachlan’s innovative delivery system, Moderna and Pfizer couldn’t safely get their mRNA vaccines into your cells. So why does hardly anyone acknowledge the Canadian biochemist’s seminal contributions—or pay a dime in royalties?
In the summer of 2020, as the pandemic raged, infecting more than 200,000 people a day across the globe, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin boarded an executive jet en route to the hilly countryside of Klosterneuburg, Austria. Their destination: a small manufacturing facility located on the west bank of the Danube River called Polymun Scientific Immunbiologische Forschung. Bourla and Şahin were on a mission to get the company to manufacture as many lipid nanoparticles as possible for their new Covid-19 vaccine, which was on a fast track to receive emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had been engineered with messenger RNA technology that instructs the body’s immune system to combat the coronavirus. But to get it safely into human cells, the mRNA needed to be wrapped in microscopic fragments of fat known as lipids. The Austrian manufacturing plant was one of the few places on earth that made the required lipid nanoparticles, and Bourla insisted Şahin go with him personally to press their case.
“The whole mRNA platform is not how to build an mRNA molecule; that’s the easy thing,” Bourla says. “It is how to make sure the mRNA molecule will go into your cells and give the instructions.”
Yet the story of how Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer managed to create that vital delivery system has never been told. It’s a complicated saga involving 15 years of legal battles and accusations of betrayal and deceit. What is clear is that when humanity needed a way to deliver mRNA to human cells to arrest the pandemic, there was only one reliable method available—and it wasn’t one originated in-house by Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech or any of the other major vaccine companies.
A months-long investigation by Forbes reveals that the scientist most responsible for this critical delivery method is a little-known 57-year-old Canadian biochemist named Ian MacLachlan. As chief scientific officer of two small companies, Protiva Biotherapeutics and Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, MacLachlan led the team that developed this crucial technology. Today, though, few people—and none of the big pharmaceutical companies—openly acknowledge his groundbreaking work, and MacLachlan earns nothing from the technology he pioneered.
“I look at the news, and 50% of it is vaccines—it’s everywhere—and I have no doubt the vaccines are using the technology we developed.”
“I just wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life dealing with it, but I can’t escape it,” MacLachlan says. “I open my browser in the morning and look at the news, and 50% of it is vaccines—it’s everywhere—and I have no doubt the vaccines are using the technology we developed.”
Moderna Therapeutics vigorously disputes the idea that its mRNA vaccine uses MacLachlan’s delivery system, and BioNTech, the vaccine maker partnered with Pfizer, talks about it carefully. Legal proceedings are pending, and big money is at stake.
Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer are on their way to selling $45 billion worth of vaccines in 2021. They don’t pay a dime to MacLachlan. Other coronavirus vaccine makers, such as Gritstone Oncology, have recently licensed MacLachlan’s Protiva-Tekmira delivery technology for between 5% and 15% of product sales. MacLachlan no longer has a financial stake in the technology, but a similar royalty on the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines could yield as much as $6.75 billion in 2021 alone. In an ironic twist of fate, though, President Biden’s proposal to waive Covid-19 vaccine patents would make it unlikely that the intellectual property related to MacLachlan’s advances could be a source of riches.
Despite their denials, scientific papers and regulatory documents filed with the FDA show that both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccines use a delivery system strikingly similar to what MacLachlan and his team created—a carefully formulated four-lipid component that encapsulates mRNA in a dense particle through a mixing process involving ethanol and a T-connector apparatus.
For years, Moderna claimed it was using its own proprietary delivery system, but when it came time for the company to test its Covid-19 vaccine in mice, it used the same four kinds of lipids as MacLachlan’s technology, in identical ratios.
Moderna insists the preclinical formulation of the vaccine was not the same as the vaccine itself. Subsequent regulatory filings by Moderna show its vaccine uses the same four types of lipids as MacLachlan’s delivery system but with a proprietary version of one of the lipids and the ratios “slightly modified” in a still undisclosed manner.
It’s a similar story for Pfizer and BioNTech. FDA documents show their vaccine uses the same four kinds of lipids in nearly the exact ratios that MacLachlan and his team patented years ago, albeit with one of those lipids being a new proprietary variation.
Not everyone ignores MacLachlan. “A lot of credit goes to Ian MacLachlan for the LNP [lipid nanoparticle],” says Katalin Karikó, the scientist who laid the groundwork for mRNA therapies before joining BioNTech in 2013. But Karikó, now a frontrunner for a Nobel Prize, is angry that MacLachlan didn’t do more to help her use his delivery system to build her own mRNA company years ago. “[MacLachlan] might be a great scientist, but he lacked vision,” she says.
Seven years ago, MacLachlan quit his position at Tekmira, walking away from his brilliant discovery and any potential financial rewards. Messy legal battles and political infighting within the biopharma industry over the delivery system had taken a toll on him. His emotions are complex. He may be overlooked, but he knows that he helped save the world.
“There’s a team of people who gave a great deal of their lives to the development of this technology. They gave their heart and soul,” MacLachlan says. “These people worked like dogs and gave the best part of themselves to develop it.”
• • •
Perched on a hilltop, Hohentübingen Castle towers above the town of Tübingen, Germany. In October 2013, MacLachlan, then the chief scientific officer of Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, trudged up the hill to the castle to attend a cocktail party at the first International mRNA Health Conference. During the evening, MacLachlan struck up a conversation with Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of an upstart mRNA company called Moderna Therapeutics. MacLachlan suggested Tekmira and Moderna collaborate using his innovative drug delivery system. “You are too expensive,” Bancel told him.
The exchange gave MacLachlan a bad feeling. So did the presence of a former colleague, Thomas Madden, who had been fired by Tekmira five years earlier. By this point MacLachlan had spent more than a decade working on his delivery system, yet people like Bancel seemed more interested in working with the London-born Madden.
The rivalry between these two scientists is the root of the controversy over the delivery technology that today’s Covid-19 vaccines rely on. MacLachlan and Madden met 25 years ago, when they worked together at a small Vancouver-based biotech called Inex Pharmaceuticals. With a Ph.D. in biochemistry, MacLachlan joined Inex in 1996, his first job after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in a gene lab at the University of Michigan.
Inex was cofounded by its chief scientific officer, Pieter Cullis, now 75, a long-haired physicist who taught at the University of British Columbia. From his perch there Cullis started several biotechs, cultivating an elite community of scientists that made Vancouver a hotbed of lipid chemistry.
Inex had a small-molecule chemotherapy drug candidate, but Cullis was also interested in gene therapy. His goal was to deliver large-molecule genetic material, like DNA or RNA, inside a lipid bubble so it could be safely ferried as medicine to the inside of a cell—something biochemists had dreamed about for decades but had been unable to accomplish.
Using a new method that mixed detergent with liquid, Cullis and his team at Inex successfully encapsulated small pieces of DNA in microscopic bubbles called liposomes. Unfortunately, the system could not consistently deliver bigger molecules, the type needed for gene therapy, in medically useful ways. They tried other approaches, including using ethanol, but didn’t succeed.
“We assembled all the LNP [lipid nanoparticle] pieces at Inex, but we didn’t get it to work” for genetic material, Cullis says.
Inex was a business, not a research lab, so it shifted its emphasis to the more promising chemotherapy drug. The gene therapy group was largely disbanded. MacLachlan ran what was left of it until, in 2000, he too decided to quit. Rather than let him completely walk away, Cullis persuaded MacLachlan to take the firm’s delivery assets and spin them out in a new company. Thus was born Protiva Biotherapeutics (MacLachlan became chief scientific officer), in which Inex retained a minority stake. MacLachlan recruited Mark Murray, now 73, a longtime American biotech executive with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, to be CEO.
It wasn’t long before two Protiva chemists, Lorne Palmer and Lloyd Jeffs, made a crucial discovery that led to a new mixing method. They put lipids dissolved in ethanol on one side of a physical T-connector apparatus, and, on the opposite side, genetic material dissolved in saltwater, then shot streams of the two solutions at each other. It was the moment they had been hoping for. The collision resulted in lipids forming a dense nanoparticle that instantly encapsulated the genetic material. The method was elegantly simple, and it worked.
In the midst of all this furious legal fighting, Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó showed up at MacLachlan’s door. Karikó was early to grasp that MacLachlan’s delivery system was key to mRNA therapies.
“The various methods that had been used previously were all highly variable and ineffective,” MacLachlan says. “Completely unsuitable for manufacturing.”
The team he led quickly went on to develop a new lipid nanoparticle made of four specific kinds of lipids. Though these were among the lipids Inex had also been using in its experiments, MacLachlan’s LNP had a dense core that differed significantly from the sac-like liposome bubbles developed by Inex. MacLachlan’s team had figured out the specific ratios of the four kinds of lipids that worked best relative to one another. Everything was dutifully patented.
Moderna and Pfizer’s Covid vaccines use a type of gene therapy based on the messenger RNA molecule. Protiva’s scientists, though, initially gravitated toward a different type of gene therapy using RNA interference, or RNAi. While mRNA instructs the body to create therapeutic proteins, RNAi aims to silence bad genes before they cause disease. With MacLachlan’s delivery system in hand, Protiva started collaborating with Alnylam, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based biotech, to make RNAi therapy viable.
Meanwhile, MacLachlan’s old company, Inex, was imploding after the FDA denied accelerated approval to its chemotherapy drug. Inex fired most of its staff and then—despite having spun off Protiva only a few years earlier—looped back to drug delivery. It, too, started working in partnership with Alnylam. In 2005 Cullis quit, leaving none other than MacLachlan’s archrival Thomas Madden to run Inex’s delivery efforts.
In 2006, Protiva and Alnylam published a landmark study in Nature demonstrating the first effective gene silencing in monkeys. The study used the delivery system MacLachlan’s team had developed.
Alnylam went on to develop Onpattro, an RNAi drug used to treat nerve damage in adults with a certain hereditary condition. The drug would become the first RNAi medicine ever approved by the FDA. Regulatory filings show Alnylam used MacLachlan’s delivery system for Onpattro—with one exception. For one of the four kinds of lipids, Alnylam used a modified version it developed with Thomas Madden.
• • •
In October 2008, Mark Murray, the CEO MacLachlan had recruited to run Protiva, stood in a room at Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, a small publicly traded shell company he had just taken over. Like Protiva, Tekmira had been created by Inex, which had finally burned out a year earlier, but not before transferring all its remaining assets to Tekmira. Assembled before Murray were some 15 former Inex scientists who had come along in the deal, including Thomas Madden.
“Unfortunately, we are not going to be able to keep you guys any longer,” Murray told them.
Madden’s firing was one result of a massive legal brawl sparked by the fact that both Inex and Protiva had been working separately with Alnylam on drug delivery. The dispute would continue for years. In each iteration, Murray and MacLachlan would accuse Madden and Cullis of having improperly taken their ideas. Cullis and Madden, offended by the accusations, denied them. Sometimes they sued back, claiming Murray and MacLachlan had acted wrongly.
The first round of litigation resulted in a 2008 settlement that saw Protiva take over Tekmira, with Murray as CEO, MacLachlan as chief scientific officer and Madden soon fired. Despite the bruising, Madden and Cullis founded a new company in 2009 to continue working with Alnylam. Tekmira responded by suing Alnylam, claiming the Massachusetts biotech conspired with Madden and Cullis to cheaply gain ownership of the delivery system developed by MacLachlan. Alnylam denied wrongdoing and—of course—filed counterclaims, saying it simply wanted to work with Madden and Cullis, who had created an improved variation of one of the four kinds of delivery-system lipids.
That round of the legal brawl was settled in 2012, with Alnylam paying Tekmira $65 million and agreeing to assign dozens of its patents back to Tekmira. Those patents included ones for the improved lipid that Madden had developed for Onpattro. Under the deal, Cullis and Madden’s new company was granted a narrow license to use the MacLachlan delivery system to create new mRNA products from scratch.
Feeling defeated, MacLachlan quit Tekmira. He sold his stock, purchased a used Winnebago Adventurer for $60,000 and set off with his wife, two kids and their dog for a 5,200-mile road trip. “I was exhausted and demoralized.”
It was in the midst of all this furious legal fighting that Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó first showed up at MacLachlan’s door. Karikó was early to grasp that MacLachlan’s delivery system held the key to unlocking the potential of mRNA therapies. As early as 2006, she began sending letters to MacLachlan urging him to encase her groundbreaking chemically altered mRNA in his four-lipid delivery system. Embroiled in litigation, MacLachlan passed on her offer.
Karikó didn’t give up easily. In 2013, she flew to meet with Tekmira’s executives, offering to relocate to Vancouver and work directly under MacLachlan. Tekmira passed. “Moderna, BioNTech and CureVac all wanted me to work for them, but my number one choice, Tekmira, didn’t,” says Karikó, who took a job at BioNTech in 2013.
By this time, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel was also trying to solve the delivery puzzle. Bancel held discussions with Tekmira about collaborating, but talks stalled. At one point, Tekmira indicated it wanted at least $100 million up front, plus royalties, to strike a deal.
Instead, Moderna partnered with Madden, who was still working with Cullis at their drug delivery company, Acuitas Therapeutics.
In February 2014, MacLachlan turned 50. His life partner, Karley Seabrook, lured him to Vancouver’s Imperial theater, which was packed with friends and family. She surprised him in a wedding dress, and their two children greeted MacLachlan with cards that read WILL YOU MARRY MOMMY? Seabrook had never thought it important that they get married, but a brush with cancer had altered her perspective—and the wedding would alter his.
For the workaholic scientist, dealing with lawyers and endless corporate maneuvering had taken its toll. Feeling defeated, MacLachlan quit Tekmira in 2014. He sold his stock in the company, purchased a used Winnebago Adventurer for $60,000 and set off with his new wife, two kids and their dog for a 5,200-mile road trip across Canada.
“I was exhausted and demoralized,” he says.
With MacLachlan gone, CEO Murray renamed Tekmira, calling it Arbutus BioPharma, and decided the company should focus on creating hepatitis B treatments with New York drug development company Roivant Sciences. Yet he held on to the patents for the four-lipid drug delivery system.
Then Madden’s company, Acuitas, sublicensed the delivery technology to Moderna for the development of an mRNA flu vaccine. Murray was confident Madden had no right to do so, and in 2016 he gave notice that he intended to terminate Acuitas’ licensing agreement. Per custom, two months later, Acuitas sued in Vancouver, denying that it had violated any deal. On cue, Murray countersued, initiating a fresh round of legal combat. Importantly, though, this batch of lawsuits directly involved mRNA.
After battling for two more years, the parties settled. Murray terminated Thomas Madden’s license to MacLachlan’s delivery technology for any future medicines other than four products Moderna had already begun to develop (Murray also lost the rights to some of Madden’s technology). Murray and Roivant then created another company, Genevant Sciences, specifically to house the intellectual property related to the four-lipid delivery system and commercialize it.
Some companies were quick to come on board. Within a few months BioNTech CEO Şahin struck a deal with Genevant to use the delivery system for five of BioNTech’s existing mRNA cancer programs. The companies also agreed to work together on five other mRNA programs targeting rare diseases. There was no provision in the agreement about using the delivery technology for something completely unforeseen—something like Covid-19.
Moderna pursued a different strategy. It filed lawsuits with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seeking to nullify a series of patents related to MacLachlan’s delivery system, now controlled by Genevant. But in July 2020, as Moderna was pushing its vaccine through clinical trials, an adjudicative body largely upheld the most important patent claims. (Moderna is appealing.)
After the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were authorized, Drew Weissman, a prominent mRNA researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded in a peer-reviewed journal that both use delivery systems that are “similar to the Alnylam Onpattro product” but with a proprietary version of one of the lipids. Weissman noted both companies were using T-junction mixing.
Thomas Madden worked on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine delivery system and says he used enhanced versions of two of the four kinds of lipids. Madden says neither Onpattro nor the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would have been green-lighted by the FDA without his team’s improvements to the lipids.
MacLachlan dismisses the new variations as “iterative innovation.”
In a written statement to Forbes, Ray Jordan, Moderna’s corporate affairs chief, stated, “I can confirm that we did take a license to Tekmira’s IP for certain of our older products. But our newer products (including the Covid vaccine) have moved on with new technology.”
BioNTech declined to comment. Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, says the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is fully covered by patents and that in creating the first authorized mRNA product, Pfizer modified the delivery system to produce 3 billion doses annually.
“It’s different to have a process that may work for a very small scale than a large scale, and some of the assumptions that may look similar are based on how the scientific field evolved and [on] contributions from many different sources,” Dolsten says. “One needs to be careful in assuming that [if] things have similar names and similar molar ratios, it means it’s the same thing.”
Genevant declined to comment, but it could be fighting an uphill battle. In May, the Biden Administration backed waiving intellectual property protection on Covid-19 vaccines. Ironically, such a move might benefit, not hurt, Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer by preventing Genevant from making any claims on their gigantic vaccine cash pile.
That’s just as well for Ian MacLachlan, whose role in what may be the most important medical advance in a century has been all but erased by the biotech industry.
“I definitely feel I made a contribution,” he says. “I have mixed feelings because of the way it’s being characterized, and I know the genesis of the technology.”
I am a senior editor at Forbes who likes digging into Wall Street, hedge funds and private equity firms, looking for both the good and the bad. I also focus on the intersection of big… Read More
Word-Built World: salad days
salad days
A time of youth and inexperience; often, a better and more innocent time. The expression comes from William Shakespeare‘s Antony and Cleopatra, where Cleopatra says her early infatuation with Julius Caesar was foolish: “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.” (“Green” refers both to inexperience and to the color of a salad.)
(Dictionary. com)
Word-Built World: heuristic
adjective: heuristic
- enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves.”a “hands-on” or interactive heuristic approach to learning”
- COMPUTING proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.
noun: heuristic; plural noun: heuristics
- a heuristic process or method.
- the study and use of heuristic techniques.noun: heuristics
Origin
late 18th century: from modern Latin heuristicus, formed irregularly from Greek heuriskein ‘find’.
Book: “Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness”
Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness
Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism is Evelyn Underhill’s seminal work on the subject. The book is divided into two parts, “The Mystic Fact” and “The Mystic Way.” In the first part Underhill explores the theological, psychological, and philosophical underpinnings of mysticism from a historical perspective. In the second part Underhill examines the application of mysticism in one’s life as a means for spiritual growth. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism is both a fantastic introduction to the search for spirituality through mysticism and an almost encyclopedic examination of the subject.
About the author
Evelyn Underhill
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Evelyn Underhill was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism.
In the English-speaking world, she was one of the most widely read writers on such matters in the first half of the twentieth century. No other book of its type—until the appearance in 1946 of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy—met with success to match that of her best-known work, Mysticism, published in 1911.
Read more:
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_U…
Liza J. Rankow on mystics
“There is a stereotype of mystics seeking to escape the world, concerned only with the ecstasy of their own experience of union with the Divine; yet in that union is a doorway that opens out into everything and everyone.”
–Liza J. Rankow
Dr. Liza J. Rankow is an interfaith minister, educator, activist, and writer. Her work centers the healing that is essential to personal and social transformation. Liza is the founder and former Executive Director of OneLife Institute, an organization that served for 17 years to support the wellbeing of frontline change-makers.
The sign Julian Lennon received after his father’s death
Julian Lennon with his father in London in 1968. CREDIT:GETTY IMAGES
Published on 08/31/2022 (rockandrollgarage.com)
Julian Lennon is the oldest son of the late legendary Beatle John Lennon and he recalled in an interview with USA Today that he received a sign of his late father some years after his passing. That inspired him to create the White Feather Foundation that helps in the support of environmental and humanitarian causes.
The sign Julian Lennon received after his father’s death
Julian told USA Today that it was 2 decades ago when he was touring as musician in Australia that he met a group of aboriginal leaders. They asked him to use his voice and fame to help their cause and then they presented him with a white swan’s feather.
“Dad had said to me that if there was a way of letting me know that he was going to be all right, or that we were all going to be all right, it would be in the form of a white feather.”
“I just thought, well, it really is time to step up to the plate. Let me do what I can,” Julian Lennon said.
Ever since that meeting he has been raising money for the White Feather Foundation. His latest project is a children’s book called “Touch The Earth”. Written for ages 3 to 6, the book talks about the importance of clean water and protect the earth.
“It’s been the most bonkers existence,” Lennon says of his career. CREDIT:ROBERT ASCROFT FOR FOURELEVEN.AGENCY
Born back in 1963, Julian Lennon is a musician, photographer and philanthropist. His first album “Valotte” was released in 1984 and had the hit “Too Late For Goodbyes”. Since then he had made 5 records. He recently announced “Jude”, that will be his seventh album, and released the tracks: “Freedom” and “Every Little Moment“.
Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Emerson wrote in contemplating the key to personal growth. Hardly anything does this for us more powerfully than art — it unsettles us awake, disrupts our deadening routines, enlarges our reservoir of hope by enlarging our perspective, our grasp of truth, our capacity for beauty.
This singular function of art is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) reflects on in an interview by the polymathic marine conservationist Jonathan White, included in his wonderful Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity (public library).
Ursula K. Le Guin (Photograph: The Oregonian)
In a roaming conversation over tea, “with only momentary interruptions by Lorenzo the cat or chimes from the grandfather clock,” Le Guin tells White:
The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.
Art, Le Guin suggests a century after Kandinsky extolled its spiritual element and a decade after Susan Sontag considered its ethical responsibility, restores to secular culture the sense of sacredness and moral purpose:
In a sentiment reminiscent of Albert Camus’s reflection on the lacuna between truth and meaning, Le Guin — who spent the last sixty-five years of her life married to a historian — considers the lacuna between the events of the past and their selective retelling in what we call history:
Illustration by Jim Stoten from Mr. Tweed’s Good Deeds
The paradox, of course, is that because our notion of history is rooted in the written record, words are both our instrument of truth and our weapon of distortion. We use them both to reveal and to conceal — a duality which Hannah Arendt so memorably dissected in her meditation on lying in politics. Le Guin — who has written beautifully about the transformational potential of words — echoes Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the power and responsibility of language, and reflects on the challenging task of those who limn reality in words:
With a concerned eye to how our metaphors shape our thinking, Le Guin adds:
What literature does, Le Guin points out, is enlarge our understanding of our own experience by enriching its container in language:
Art by Maurice Sendak for The Big Green Book by Robert Graves
In a sentiment evocative of James Baldwin’s assertion that “an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” she adds:
Complement this particular portion of the splendid Talking on the Water with Le Guin’s immortal wisdom on the artist’s task, growing older, storytelling as an instrument of freedom, her feminist translation of the Tao Te Ching, and her classic unsexing of gender.