Little Richard photo via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Little Richard has died, as Rolling Stone reports. According to his son Danny Jones Penniman, speaking to The New York Times, Little Richard died of cancer. The rock ‘n’ roll original was 87 years old.
Known for his wild, flamboyant performing style, Richard Wayne Penniman inspired young musicians all over the world. Born in Macon, Georgia—the second of 12 children—he was kicked out of his family’s home as a teenager and taken in by a white family, who ran the club where he first performed. He got his start performing jump blues, but his most famous and successful work—songs like “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” and “Good Golly Miss Molly”—came in the mid-1950s.
His music was covered by contemporaries like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Bill Haley. A wave of young British musicians—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, and Lemmy Kilmister, to name a few—cited Little Richard as an influence. Elsewhere in the world, Richard was being studied by soul stars (Otis Redding, James Brown, Michael Jackson) and rock icons (Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, AC/DC).
In the late 1950s, he abandoned the raucous style of his early singles to pursue a career as a gospel artist. He would eventually return to rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s. Later in life, Richard made appearances in children’s programming and recorded a children’s album. He sang the theme song to The Magic School Bus, sang “Rubber Ducky” inside a bath tub on Sesame Street, and was a guest star on Pee-wee’s Christmas Special.
Little Richard was among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s first class of inductees in 1986. He received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy and performed at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration in 1992. The Library of Congress added “Tutti Frutti” to the National Recording Registry in 2010.
Rebel Wisdom Jordan Peterson is often described as doing for the western religious tradition, what Alan Watts did for the East in the 50s and 60s, explaining and demystifying it for a new audience. Tim Lott is a novelist and journalist, who wrote the first mainstream magazine article on Jordan Peterson in 2017. He is also an expert on Alan Watts. In this film he discusses with Rebel Wisdom’s David Fuller and Alexander Beiner about the similarities and differences between them. This film was recorded in 2018, and was a member exclusive until now. To get access to more exclusive content and to join this evolving conversation, become a Rebel Wisdom member: https://www.rebelwisdom.co.uk/plans You can listen to a podcast versions of our films on Spotify or Apple Podcasts by searching ‘Rebel Wisdom’ or download episodes from our Podbean page: https://rebelwisdom.podbean.com/ We also have a Rebel Wisdom Discord discussion channel: https://discord.gg/RK4MeYW
Gibran Khalil Gibran (Arabic: جبران خليل جبران, ALA-LC: Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, pronounced [ʒʊˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒʊˈbraːn], or Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān, pronounced [ʒɪˈbraːn xaˈliːl ʒɪˈbraːn];[a] January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran[b] (pronounced /kɑːˈliːl dʒɪˈbrɑːn/kah-LEEL ji-BRAHN),[3] was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title.[4] He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.[c] Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister’s death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister’s income from her work at a dressmaker’s shop for some time.
In 1904, Gibran’s drawings were displayed for the first time at Day’s studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly-met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in the Ottoman Empire after the Young Turk Revolution;[6] some of Gibran’s writings, voicing the same ideas as well as anti-clericalism,[7] would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities.[8] In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, would be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918 with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods also underway.[9] His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914,[10] and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912.[8] In 1920, Gibran re-founded the Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets. By the time of his death at the age of 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis in one lung, he had achieved literary fame on “both sides of the Atlantic Ocean,”[11] and The Prophet had already been translated into German and French. His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri (in present-day Lebanon), to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands.
As worded by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Gibran’s life has been described as one “often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakeanpantheism and Sufimysticism.”[8] Gibran discussed different themes in his writings, and explored diverse literary forms. Salma Khadra Jayyusi has called him “the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century,”[12] and he is still celebrated as a literary hero in Lebanon.[13] At the same time, “most of Gibran’s paintings expressed his personal vision, incorporating spiritual and mythological symbolism,”[14] with art critic Alice Raphael recognizing in the painter a classicist, whose work owed “more to the findings of Da Vinci than it [did] to any modern insurgent.”[15] His “prodigious body of work” has been described as “an artistic legacy to people of all nations.”[16]
Gibran was born January 6, 1883, in the village of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Lebanon).[17] His parents, Khalil Sa’d Gibran[17] and Kamila Rahmeh, the daughter of a priest, were Maronite Christians. Kamila was thirty when Gibran was born, and Gibran’s father, Khalil, was her third husband.[18] Gibran had two younger sisters, Marianna and Sultana, and an older half-brother, Boutros, from one of Kamila’s previous marriages. As a result of his family’s poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling for his first twelve years in Lebanon: in 1888, Gibran entered Bsharri’s one-class school, which was run by a priest, and there he learnt the rudiments of Arabic, Syriac, and arithmetic.[19][20][21]
Gibran’s father Khalil initially worked in an apothecary, but he had gambling debts he was unable to pay. He went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator.[22][23] In 1891, while acting as a tax collector, he was removed and his staff was investigated.[24] Khalil was imprisoned for embezzlement,[25] and his family’s property was confiscated by the authorities. Kamila decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although Khalil was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New York on June 25, 1895, taking Boutros, Gibran, Marianna and Sultana with her.[22]
Kamila and her children settled in Boston’s South End, at the time the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community[26] in the United States. Gibran entered the Josiah Quincy School on September 30, 1895. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English. His name was registered using the anglicized spelling ‘Kahlil Gibran’.[2][27] His mother began working as a seamstress[24] peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from door to door. His half-brother Boutros opened a shop. Gibran also enrolled in an art school at Denison House, a nearby settlement house. Through his teachers there, he was introduced to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer and publisher F. Holland Day,[25] who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors. In March 1898, Gibran met Josephine Preston Peabody, eight years older than him, at an exhibition of Day’s photographs “in which Gibran’s face was a major subject.”[28] Gibran would develop a romantic attachment to her.[29] The same year, a publisher used some of Gibran’s drawings for book covers.
Kamila and Boutros wanted Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to.[24] Thus, at the age of 15, Gibran returned to his homeland to study for three years at the Collège de la Sagesse, a Maronite-run institute in Beirut. In his final year at the school, he created a student magazine with other students, including Youssef Howayek (who would remain a lifelong friend of his),[30] and he was made the “college poet.”[30] Gibran graduated from the school at eighteen with high honors, then went to Paris to learn painting, visiting Greece, Italy, and Spain on his way there from Beirut.[31] On April 2, 1902, Sultana died, aged 14, from what seems to have been tuberculosis.[30] Upon learning about it, Gibran returned to Boston, arriving two weeks after Sultana’s death.[30][e] The year after, on March 12, Boutros died of the same disease and his mother died of cancer on June 28.[33] Two days later, Peabody “left him without explanation.”[33] Marianna supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmaker’s shop.[25]
Youth Sitting on a Stone, by F. Holland Day (1907)
Portrait of Edward Carpenter, the early gay rights activist, by F. Holland Day
Fred Holland Day (July 23, 1864[1] – November 12, 1933) was an American photographer and publisher. He was the first in the United States to advocate that photography should be considered a fine art.[citation needed]
Life
Day was the son of a Boston merchant, and was a man of independent means for all his life. He was a descendant of Ralph Day of Dedham.[2]
Day’s life and works had long been controversial, since his photographic subjects were often nude male youths. Pam Roberts, in F. Holland Day (Waanders Pub, 2001; catalog of a Day exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum) writes: “Day never married and his sexual orientation, whilst it is widely assumed that he was homosexual, because of his interests, his photographic subject matter, his general flamboyant demeanor, was, like much else about him, a very private matter.”
Day spent much time among poor immigrant children in Boston, tutoring them in reading and mentoring them. One in particular, the 13-year-old Lebanese immigrant Kahlil Gibran, went on to fame as the author of The Prophet.
He is known to have traveled. Beaumont Newhall states that he visited Algiers, possibly as a result of reading Wilde and Gide. There is a photo “Portrait of F. Holland Day in Arab Costume, 1901” by Frederick H. Evans.
He was also a lifelong bibliophile and collector. Most notable among his collections was his world-class collection on the poet John Keats.
Work
At the turn of the century, his influence and reputation as a photographer rivaled that of Alfred Stieglitz, who later eclipsed him. The high point of Day’s photographic career was probably his organization of an exhibition of photographs at the Royal Photographic Society in 1900. New School of American Photography presented 375 photographs by 42 photographers, 103 of them by Day, and evoked both high praise and vitriolic scorn from critics. The popularist “Photographic News” saw it as the result… “of a diseased imagination, of which much has been fostered by the ravings of a few lunatics… unacademic …and eccentric”.
The Seven Last Words, by F. Holland Day
Day belonged to the pictorialist movement which regarded photography as a fine art and which often included symbolist imagery. The Photo-Secessionists invited him to join, but he declined the offer. As was common at the time, his photographs allude to classical antiquity in manner, composition and often in theme. From 1896 through 1898 Day experimented with Christian themes, using himself as a model for Jesus. Neighbors in Norwood, Massachusetts assisted him in an outdoor photographic staged photography re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. This culminated in his series of self-photographs, The Seven Last Words, depicting the seven last words of Christ.
He often made only a single print from a negative. He used only the platinum process, being unsatisfied with any other, and lost interest in photography when platinum became unobtainable following the Russian Revolution.
Legacy
Day became all but forgotten for a number of reasons. He was eclipsed by his rival, Stieglitz. The pictorial and symbolist photographic style went out of fashion in the face of the radical shift towards early modernism in the art world. Two thousand of his prints and negatives were lost in a 1904 fire. The few hundred that survived were sent to the Royal Photographic Society in the 1930s.
Since the 1990s Day’s works have been included in major exhibitions by museum curators, notably in the solo Day retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2000/2001 and similar shows at the Royal Photographic Society in England and the Fuller Museum of Art. Art historians are once again taking an interest in Day, and there are now significant academic texts on Day’s homoerotic portraiture, and its similarities to the work of Walter Pater and Thomas Eakins.
Day’s house at 93 Day Street, Norwood, Massachusetts is now the F. Holland Day House & Norwood History Museum. It also serves as the headquarters of the Norwood Historical Society.
In France, May 1968 has become a symbol of young people and workers in revolt. But how were the events viewed outside the country? FRANCE 24 looks back at the international impact of this historic protest movement, and the sometimes surprising hopes and fears it engendered for the world’s youth and its leaders.
France is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the May 1968 movement with numerous books, exhibitions and documentaries. But how were the events viewed and experienced overseas?
In May 1968, France’s student protests resembled those of neighbouring countries. But once a general strike paralysed the country, things changed dramatically. In Paris, foreigners were caught off guard by the events. We spoke to three of them: Tewfik Allal, who was an Algerian cinema student; Vasco Martins, a Portuguese conscientious objector at the time; and George Ross, an American teacher and researcher who lived near the occupied Odeon theatre. We also met Maurice Vaïsse, a historian who has combed through the diplomatic archives from the time.
Diplomats worried
Telegrams and dispatches from 1968 reveal that no one was interested in student demonstrations, which bore similarities to those in Italy, the United States and West Germany. But when the country was brought to a standstill by eight million striking workers, the Quai d’Orsay suddenly received panicked messages from its embassies abroad.
And France’s diplomatic partners were not the only ones who were concerned: the 12,000 immigrant workers at Renault’s Billancourt car factory outside Paris were also taken by surprise and even reluctant to strike.
Revolutionary movement spreads to Africa
In May 1968, revolutionary ideas were contagious. In Senegal, a protest movement began at the University of Dakar and soon spread across the country. Maurice Vaïsse, who taught in Senegal at the time, even calls it a “mirror effect” between Paris and Dakar.
In other French-speaking African countries, it was full-blown panic. This mood was encapsulated in a letter from General Bokassa, President of the Central African Republic, to French President Charles de Gaulle, in whom he saw “the only remedy” to the unrest. Bokassa wrote: “The entire Central African people, under my leadership, beg your Excellency to remain in power until the end of their mandate”.
FRANCE 24 looks back at a crisis that changed France’s image around the world.
Two leading candidates are headed for mass clinical trials, and everything’s on the table—including deliberately infecting healthy vaccine volunteers.
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES
IT’S BEEN FOUR months since researchers in China sequenced the novel coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2. In those four months, at least 3.8 million people around the world have been diagnosed with Covid-19, the deadly respiratory disease it causes. As of Friday morning, more than 267,000 people have died. Doctors have been trying lots of existing drugs—from malaria medications to anti-influenza pills to Ebola treatments—in an effort to save patients from the ravages of the disease, which can damage the heart, kidneys, brain, and lungs. But so far, no blockbusters have emerged. Researchers are still testing hundreds of potential candidates in search of a cure.
A vaccine, which would teach people’s immune systems to recognize and fend off the virus before an infection can take hold, would be even better. An inoculated public could get back to work, stop sheltering in place, resume normal life. Developing a safe, effective vaccine against a new pathogen typically takes years, if not decades. That’s because, unlike with experimental treatments, it’s impossible to know right away if a vaccine has worked. During testing, researchers have to wait for participants to encounter the real virus in the wild, which if people are sheltering in place or an outbreak has ended, can take a very long time.
Clinical testing generally has three stages: Phase I involves a few dozen healthy volunteers, Phase II expands to several hundred in an outbreak area, and Phase III repeats the experiment with several thousand. Then US Food and Drug Administration officials must review the data and decide if the shot is safe and effective enough to approve.
But in the face of the current global pandemic, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and regulators are sprinting at record-shattering speeds to test hundreds of vaccine candidates. Without clinical trial data, it’s impossible to predict which contenders will emerge from the onslaught of experiments as the most successful. For the front-runners, that information could arrive as early as this fall. Here’s what you need to know:Phase II candidates: Moderna gets the green light, joining Oxford group and CanSino Biologics
On Thursday, Boston biopharma company Moderna announced that its vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, had been cleared by the FDA to move into a Phase II trial. The study, which will begin enrolling 600 participants in the coming weeks, is designed to begin assessing whether or not the potential vaccine can induce a person’s immune system to produce antibodies that recognize SARS-CoV-2.
With the news, Moderna pulls neck and neck with the current coronavirus vaccine leader: Oxford University’s Jenner Institute. Scientists there had a head start, as The New York Timesreported last month. Having already acquired safety data from human trials of similar vaccines for the related coronavirus that causes MERS, Oxford researchers convinced British regulators to push forward with a large Phase II study involving 6,000 people while the outbreak in the UK is still raging. The vaccine is based on a technology that involves genetically modifying a harmless virus to create a SARS-CoV-2 look-alike that doesn’t cause disease but does trigger an immune response.
Moderna’s vaccine candidate, which was developed in collaboration with scientists at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, is made out of messenger RNA, hence the phrase mRNA in the vaccine’s name. This molecule is responsible for carrying the genetic recipes for making different proteins to a cell’s protein production factories. The version inside Moderna’s vaccine carries the instructions for making a little bit of the spike protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect human tissues. The idea is that a vaccine recipient’s cells will produce this partial spike protein, which will train their bodies’ immune systems to recognize the virus and attack it the next time it shows up.
Still a new strategy, this kind of vaccine has never been approved for use or manufactured at scale. But Moderna’s safety trial, which began in March—the first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to be injected into human volunteers—appears to have gone well enough that the FDA has greenlit the next phase. In a statement to WIRED, Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, called this a “crucial step” that puts the company on track to start its pivotal Phase III study sometime this summer. It hopes to gain approval as soon as 2021. But Moderna’s not waiting for those results to start ramping up manufacturing. Last week, the company announced a 10-year partnership with Swiss drugmaker Lonza, which it expects to boost its production to tens of millions of doses per month in 2020 and hundreds of millions per month in 2021.
On the same day Moderna administered its first-out-of-the-gate vaccine, a company in China called CanSino Biologics got the green light to begin Phase I tests of two of its vaccine candidates. Like Oxford’s, they consist of a harmless viral vector that’s been genetically tweaked to look just enough like SARS-CoV-2 to trigger an immune response. In April, one of these vaccines entered Phase II, and researchers in Hubei province are now trying to recruit 500 people for the study.Phase I candidates: Safety testing begins on two other genetic vaccines
Other vaccine efforts are also showing early promise. On Monday, 15 healthy volunteers in New York received the first doses of an mRNA-based vaccine similar to Moderna’s, called BNT162. Produced by Pfizer and a German pharma company called BioNTech, BNT162 is one of four genetic vaccine candidates the two companies are jointly developing to fight SARS-CoV-2. Over the next few weeks, the Phase I trial will enroll 360 people in four different research hospitals to see how safe these different variations are compared to a placebo.
Researchers will monitor patients for the next two years, looking for signs of side effects as well as any antibodies their bodies produce against SARS-CoV-2. But since most bad reactions happen right away, the scientists should know in three to four months if the vaccine candidates are safe. They’ll also have an idea of which one of the four works best. That’s the one they’ll move into a larger study with more people, which could happen as soon as this fall, says Mark J. Mulligan, director of the Vaccine Center at NYU Langone Health. Mulligan is leading the NYU Langone Tisch Hospital trial site. “We’re doing in months what typically takes years,” he says.
A few hours away, at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers are also testing the safety of another genetic vaccine, produced by the nearby biotech company Inovio. Codenamed INO-4800, the vaccine is made out of synthetic DNA instead of RNA, though the principle is the same. Packaged into the DNA is a section of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Inovio is testing two doses of INO-4800 in 40 healthy volunteers split between UPenn and the Center for Pharmaceutical Research in Kansas City, Missouri.
Because it’s a bit tricker to get DNA into cells, doctors have to deliver a tiny electrical impulse following the injection. That little jolt opens the pores of the cell membranes, allowing the DNA to slip inside. The first volunteer for this Phase I trial received the shot and subsequent zap on April 6. Though the other 39 participants have now also received at least the first dose, it will take another few weeks for everyone in the study to hit the point where you’d expect to start seeing a surge in antibodies, says Pablo Tebas, an infectious disease doctor at UPenn and the trial’s principal investigator.
But the researchers and Inovio are already starting to plan a Phase II trial for later this summer that would primarily enroll doctors, nurses, police officers, and other essential workers with a high chance of Covid-19 exposure. “Traditionally, these would not be done in parallel,” says Tebas. “But all the prevailing ideas about taking the time to do them in sequence have gone by the wayside with this epidemic. Making antibodies is one thing, but we really need to know if those antibodies protect you from infection.”
In addition to these vaccine candidates, there are also two others currently in human trials in China. Both are chemically inactivated versions of the virus, one developed by Sinovac and one developed at the Beijing Institute of Biological Products. According to a list assembled by the World Health Organization, there are a further 71 vaccine candidates that could soon follow.World Health Organization sees a speedier way forward with “challenge trials”
Another way to accelerate vaccine development is by skipping the step of waiting around for trial participants to have a chance encounter with the pathogen in the wild in order to prove how effective the vaccine is. Instead, so-called challenge trials involve inoculating healthy participants and then deliberately infecting them in a controlled environment. Since some of the participants will get a placebo vaccine, ethics rules typically dictate that challenge studies be reserved for diseases that aren’t that serious or for which effective treatments exist.
Covid-19, with its devastating death toll, unpredictable symptoms, and many remaining unknowns, has some bioethicists questioning this conventional wisdom.They have proposed the consideration of challenge trials for Covid-19, although no such tests have yet been authorized. “This pandemic feels unprecedented in many ways,” says Seema Shah, a medical ethicist at Northwestern University and Laurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and an author of a new paper in the journal Science that lays out an ethical framework for how challenge trials might be used to combat Covid-19.
Shah is also part of a working group for the World Health Organization that published a similar report Thursday detailing the prerequisites required to move forward. The eight conditions that would need to be fulfilled include ensuring that the scientific benefit is worth it and minimizing risks as much as possible for trial participants. That would mean limiting recruitment to young healthy people and those who already face a higher probability of infection, like health care workers. While not a stance on whether or not challenge trials should take place, the WHO report offers guidance to any researchers and vaccine developers considering the option.
Shah is more convinced they’re worth doing. “The potential value of doing them is amplified above almost any other case you can think of,” she says. Beyond assessing a single vaccine candidate’s efficacy, she believes such studies could help scientists better understand the course of the disease and develop immune system markers that could be helpful in evaluating and accelerating other candidates. Or challenge trials could be used to narrow down a field of promising candidates quickly, so that only the best one moves into full Phase III trials. “So even though we’d be crossing a boundary that has been in place for a very long time, we think there’s enough reason to start investing in laying the groundwork for them now,” says Shah.
No such trials are planned yet, but more than 14,000 people who signed an online call for volunteers, organized by a grassroots group of researchers called 1 Day Sooner, have said they’d participate in one if given the opportunity. The effort isn’t actually recruiting study participants, just demonstrating to legislators and regulators that the idea has public support. Any trials that adopted a design that includes intentionally infecting participants would still have to obey all the existing constraints of normal safety and efficacy trials, which remain governed by the FDA.
In the US, the decision of whether to allow such trials will ultimately rest with the FDA. Michael Felberbaum, a spokesman for the agency, told WIRED in an email that challenge trials are one of the methods the FDA is considering to speed up the development of Covid-19 vaccines and that the agency will work with anyone interested in conducting them to consider the potential scientific, logistical, and ethical challenges. “A formal determination about any specific human challenge trial proposal would be made by the FDA in the context of all the information that is available at that time,” he wrote.
Update: This story was updated on 5-8-2020 at 10:48am EST to correct Mark J. Mulligan’s affiliation, which is NYU Langone Health, not New York University.
Megan Molteni is a staff writer at WIRED, covering biotechnology, public health, and genetic privacy. Previously, she freelanced as a reporter, audio producer, and fact-checker. Her work has appeared in Popular Science, Discover, Undark, Nautilus, and Aeon. She studied biology and ultimate frisbee at Carleton College and has a graduate… Read more
“The question in each and everything, Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” announces Nietzsche in The Gay Science. What does this mean exactly?
Nietzsche’s push for a revaluation of values was one of the central ideas of his philosophy. Instead of taking things that we deem good or right as is, such as treating your neighbour with kindness or being humble, he took on the role of an archaeologist and attempted to dig up the histories that led us into thinking these actions and moral laws were right to begin with. Of course, such an undertaking soon reveals that our moral laws weren’t given in some sort of absolute or universal manner. This is of course disturbing, to imagine that the ethics of ones world could have been otherwise. Where do we go from here, with nowhere to turn to point us towards the right decision?
Of course we can’t just throw away history entirely. “We need history, inasmuch as the past wells up in us in hundred of ways. Indeed we ourselves are nothing other that what we sense at each instant of that onward flow” writes Nietzsche. In a sense, we are always and forever carried by the momentum of that which came before.
John Kagg, author of Hiking With Nietzsche, describes a pyramidal stone in the Swiss Alps that Nietzscherefers to in his work. It is this exact rock where “the idea of eternal recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation” was conceived. So what is this highest formula? It’s terrifying and brilliant all at once.
Nietzsche asks you to imagine a moment when you are completely and entirely alone. At this moment, a demon appears and announces that the life you are currently living and will continue to live will reoccur again and again and again. Everything good and bad that has happened to you, every kiss and every heartbreak, every moment of dread and sublimity, will be experienced infintely.
For many of us, this would suck. A lot. Schopenhauer even notes that “he who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurers booth at a fair and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone”. Certainly living the same life over and over would be boring and, likely, uncomfortable.
However, Kagg rightfully observes that such a what-if scenario is to be taken as a challenge. “A challenge — -or better, a question, that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life”. Suddenly every action would become meaningful and heavy. Such a way of life requires one to be well adjusted, as in “to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning”. If you’re going to end up doing the same thing for eternity you probably want to choose the right thing to do.
It should also be noted that the demon comes when you are entirely alone. Hence, we have no choice in appealing to any institution or person or ideology. Only you can choose what is right in the end. This burden, to weigh ones binding to history against the unique potentials of individual will, is arguably that which marks our existence with value.
Nietzsche also states that, in order to master this form of living, one must learn to love even the most uncertain and undesirable conditions of life. Through embracing suffering, we become the captains of our being. “Before fate strikes us, we should guide it”.
This complex interplay of the past and future as one and the same interrogates us at each moment, asking why we continue to sell away our precious time to mediocrity and conformity. Perhaps the words of Victor Frankl illuminate this best: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.”
Julian of Norwich is a medieval English mystic who celebrated “Mother Jesus.” Her feast day, May 8, always falls near Mother’s Day.
It’s not known if Julian herself was queer, but some of her ideas were. Julian is often listed with LGBTQ saints because of her genderbending visions of Jesus and God. She wrote, “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.”
Her discussions of Jesus as a mother sound radical even now, more than 600 years later. Her omnigendered vision of the Trinity fits with contemporary feminist and queer theology.
Mother’s Day is also a great time to honor mothers whose love for their LGBTQ children helped launch organizations such as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), founded by Jeanne Manford and Adele Starr.
Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416) is the first woman to write a book in English. The book, “Revelations of Divine Love,” recounts a series of 16 visions that she experienced from May 8-13, 1373 during a severe illness when she was 30 years old. The book includes Julian’s most famous saying, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” — words spoken to her by God in one of Julian’s visions.
She appears with this quote and her cat companion in the icon at the top of this post. It comes from Holy Spirit Art at Etsy and is available for purchase as a wooden icon plaque.
Later Julian went on to become an anchoress, a type of recluse who lives in a cell attached to a church and does contemplative prayer. Her hermit’s cell was at the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. The cell had two windows, one opening to the church and the other opening to the street. She became known throughout England for the spiritual counseling that she gave there.
The queer side of Julian is explored in the chapter “Queer Touch Between Holy Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Birgitta of Sweden, and the Visitation” by Laura Saetveit Miles of the University of Bergen, Norway, in the 2019 scholarly book “Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages.” It “takes a new approach to the well-known meeting between two late-medieval English visionary women, Margery Kempe and the anchoress Julian of Norwich,” thereby revealing “the full transgressive effect of queer touch between women—or even its unspoken possibility,” according to the chapter summary.
Julian wrote of God as mother
Julian is considered the first Catholic to write at length about God as mother. Her profound ideas speak powerfully today to women and queer people of faith.
Here are a few short quotes from Julian’s extensive writings about “Mother Jesus”:“So Jesus Christ who sets good against evil is our real Mother. We owe our being to him–and this is the essence of motherhood! –and all the delightful, loving protection which ever follows. God is as really our Mother as he is our Father.“ (Chapter 59)“So Jesus is our true Mother by nature at our first creation, and he is our true Mother in grace by taking on our created nature.” (Chapter 59)“A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most courteously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament, which is the precious food of life itself… The mother can lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly lead us to his blessed breast through his sweet open side….” (Chapter 60)
“Dame Julian’s Hazelnut” by Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, Prints available at Amazon or TrinityStores.com
Julian saw God’s love in ordinary life
The sacred feminine is just one of the many revelations that have endeared Julian to the public. She also uses objects from ordinary life to illustrate God’s loving, forgiving nature. For example, in one vision God shows Julian a small object like a hazel-nut in the palm of her hand. Julian writes:“I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God’.” (Chapter 5)
A longstanding legend tells of Julian’s friendship with her cat companion, depicted in the painting at the top of this post. As an anchoress, Julian probably lived alone. It is said that the only other being to share her room was a cat — officially for the practical purpose of keeping it free from rats and mice.
“Julian of Norwich,” a memorial drawing for his cat Betty, by Douglas Blanchard
New York painter Douglas Blanchard shows the saint with the artist’s own cat Betty in a drawing done as a memorial tribute to a beloved feline companion who died in 2013. He includes a favorite quote from Julian:
“He that made all things for love, by that same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end.”
Blanchard is best known for his epic series “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision,” which is now available as a book. He teaches art and art history at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York.
“Julian of Norwich” by Brother Robert Lentz, OFM, Prints available at Amazon or TrinityStores.com
Another icon of Julian and her cat was created by Robert Lentz, a Franciscan friar based in New York. Known for his innovative icons, he was rebuked by the church for painting LGBTQ saints and God as female.
An elderly “Julian of Norwich” was sketched against a lavender background by Tobias Haller, an iconographer, author, composer, and vicar of Saint James Episcopal Church in the Bronx. He is the author of “Reasonable and Holy: Engaging Same-Sexuality.” Haller enjoys expanding the diversity of icons available by creating icons of LGBTQ people and other progressive holy figures as well as traditional saints. He and his spouse were united in a church wedding more than 30 years ago and a civil ceremony after same-sex marriage became legal in New York.
Julian lived a long life. The date of her death is unknown, but records show that she was still alive at age 73 to receive an inheritance. She was never formally canonized, but Julian is considered a saint by popular devotion. The Episcopal and Lutheran Churches keep her feast day on May 8.
Many important writers have been influenced by Julian, including 20th-century British poet T.S. Eliot. He quotes her in his masterpiece “Four Quartets,” which led to him receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
Julian of Norwich in song and prayer
“Julian of Norwich, pray for gender fluidity” by Avery Smith of Sapphic Stiches
Various prayers related to Julian of Norwich are in circulation, including “Julian of Norwich, pray for gender fluidity.” The prayer was hand-sewn onto embroidered patch by artist Avery Smith of Louisville, Kentucky. Smith runs an Etsy shop called Sapphic Stitches that offers a variety of patches on LGBTA+ Christian and other themes.
“LGBTA+ Christians who choose to pray for the intercession of Saints deserve to have patrons whom they trust understand and support them,’ Smith affirms. “Whatever Saint or paired-Saint couple resonates with you as an LGBTA+ Christian can be made into a customizable patch.”
Julian’s famous words are set to music in the song “All Will Be Well” by Meg Barnhouse, a Texas-based Unitarian minister and singer/songwriter. The moving song comes from her album “Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town” and is available on YouTube.
A longer quotation from Julian, again including “All will be well,” was set to music by 20th-century Welsh composer William Matthias in his piece “As Truly as God is Our Father.” it is sung on video by Plymouth Choir of First Plymouth Church, Lincoln Nebraska.
___ Top image credit: Julian of Norwich icon from Holy Spirit Art at Etsy. Available for purchase as a wooden icon plaque.
___ This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBTQ martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
Founder at Q SpiritKittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
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