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4
Feb
Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop. When a dog barks late at night and then retires again to bed, he punctuates and gives majesty to the serial enigma of the dark, laying it more evenly and heavily upon the fabric of the mind.
19
Jan
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
17
Jan
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
12
Jan
“Life begins at forty” is a well known saying that slips easily off the tongue. More profoundly Macbeth says “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more“. Yet life must have begun somewhere, though its origin and essence remain elusive. Early in the King James version of the Bible, in Genesis, there is a description of how all the plants and animals were created and following that is written “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life“. Soon after that one reads “so God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them“. It is wonderful imagery and it involves something I want to investigate more, viz; replication. Crucially, I also want to consider the importance of the accuracy of that replication.
Regardless of your faith you may or may not believe in the literal words in the Bible. I myself was brought up to become a member of the Roman Catholic Church and so my early indoctrination was obviously coloured by its teachings. Over time I have grown at times closer to, but at other times further away from that institution. My main problem relating to all faiths has mainly been with their churches and clerics rather than with their holy scriptures. The Bible is inherently difficult because so much of it is written using parables and metaphors. It has also been translated and edited many times, thus leading to different versions.
The scriptures (as with all good books) contain much wisdom. I commend people to read them but advise caution in preaching interpretations to others and to also be wary of quoting them, often out of context, to try and make a point. Having said that, the opening words of Genesis are “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth“. In parallel with this I was taught by Benedictine monks that the first question in the Catholic penny catechism was “1. Who made you?” and that the response should be “God made me“. The next question was “2.Why did God make you?” and the rote response was “God made me to know him, to love him and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next“. All very well I suppose except that, by my own logic, the second question should have been (and remains): “… then who made God?“
If I had asked the monks that question back in the fifties I would have been sure of a good whacking, just as much as if I had asked “We are told that God is omnipotent, so can he make a stone so big that he cannot lift it?” I know this is a type of “have you stopped beating your wife?” question, yet it is not invalid, other than we were not supposed to question anything. Just learn and believe what one was told. To simply submit, just as Joan of Arc, for example, was told to do before her demise. Children are wonderfully natural inquisitors – (so very different from the many hideous men who were the examiners and torturers within the Catholic Inquisition) – and which makes me remark:
JOYOUS KIDS
Watch children play,
Experimenters all,
Hear an adult talk,
And say I know it all.
The only line that I have found in the Bible that makes any effort about the origin of God is in Revelations (the Apocalypse of St John of Patmos), the very last book of the New Testament and which is not accepted as Canon by all Christian denominations. It goes “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” That still leaves a substantive answer ‘up in the air’. It is the sort of answer a clever politician might come up with. The creation and the origin of everything is thus so paradoxical and problematic, that I now use the word God less and less and tend to substitute the word Creator. Calling ‘God the Creator’ the ‘Alpha and the Omega’ does not help my understanding any more than the Big Bang theory does. Perhaps the word God could actually mean all that cannot be explained rather than being the personification of any entity, with or without any particular form. As for atheism, the spiritual Simone Weil said this: “An Atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God”.
What is so really amazing is that stuff exists at all and my puny mind can only conceive of two alternatives of how that happened; either there was a time when there was nothing and some stuff came from nowhere or else stuff has always existed. Neither option seems knowable particularly without being able to grasp the intrinsic nature of time. It is not a major problem for me, because it is actually a wonder that there is an existence at all. Magic too is most wonderful when it remains unexplained.
When I was a teenager in Ireland I used regularly to cycle from home at Killegar via the “Rough Hill” to go ‘a cèilidh‘ at Kilbracken, where I would spend the evening before returning the same way after nightfall. Long parts of the road were quite straight. Thus whilst cycling (or pushing my bike up a hill) I would look upwards and night after night see the same star-patterns in the sky. I remember learning to recognise the standout constellations of Orion and Cassiopeia and, on those dark autumn nights when there was neither moon nor light-pollution, gaze at Cygnus flying to the West in the heart of the galactic haze that is our Milky Way. It’s said that Zeus placed Cygnus in the sky after the birth of his daughter Helen because her mother was Leda, whom he had seduced in the guise of a swan. Not the only time, of course, that a human conception arose from the intervention of a god.
I remember, vividly, the moment one night, when I paused, transfixed, on top of a hill at Kilnamar having suddenly become aware of the enormity of the visible universe; those countless points of light. It was both wonderful and deeply terrifying. How much space and light and how big the universe was and how small and insignificant I was in comparison. It was a crushing moment. Yet, sometime after, I realised that as insignificant as I felt, I was still a finite part of the whole. Really and truly. I was part of this huge universe; this creation and most pertinently this planet too. I was part of the ‘grand plan’. That means as much to me now as it did at that very special moment. And no one had taught me this. It was not from indoctrination that my perception and knowledge had grown. It was also a valuable lesson in humility.
Si I find myself unable to believe the literal biblical description of creation and in particular how Eve was formed from Adam’s rib. That inherent misogyny, so early on in ‘the good book’, looks much more like human than divine will. Adam and Eve’s adventure in the Garden of Eden reads like a metaphor for a child growing up. Not doing what it is told, losing its naivety and gaining the knowledge of good and evil as well as of mortality itself. Only mankind excludes itself from the Garden of Eden, which for me still exists as our own beautiful planet. Unlike the rest of nature I concur with D.H. Lawrence that only man “can slip entirely through the fingers of the hands of God” and only mankind is replicating itself out of all proportion to everything else on Earth. Going forth and multiplying has become an anathema. Too much replication and so consider:
POPULATION CONTROL
Lemmings are like pontiffs
When controlling population.
Instead of jumping off tall cliffs
They should have safe copulation.
I first began to seriously consider the question “What is life?” after Crick and Watson laid bare the structure of DNA and RNA with their description and understanding of the double helix and how genes are coded using only four simple chemicals (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine). It is the ability of these four nucleotide bases to replicate themselves that has allowed species to come into existence and replicate; to conceive and give birth; to grow from a seed or a spore and thus to multiply. A reasonable starting point for defining the essence of life could be the inherent ability to replicate.
Now the fact that replication is not always exact turns out to be quite amazing because it is these little flaws, these mutations, that underpin biodiversity and evolution as well as contributing to the uniqueness of every human being. I simply cannot believe that the universe was created in seven literal days and that all the land species in the world came out of the ark after the flood. I do not want to make ‘creationists’ bend to my thinking but nor should they try and force their beliefs on others. I am always a sceptic when it comes to any form of evangelism with its smack of moral indignation and self righteousness and from where hypocrisy is only a step or two away. I try and use my own eyes and ears and brain to see and know what is around us, what is disappearing and what is self-evident in the fossil record. The ten commandments may have been written in stone, but literally written in geological stone, in layer upon layer of bygone days, is the see-able evidence that many creatures have come and gone and that man’s presence came very late and now has so much impact.
There are two fundamental ways by which species propagate life. Sexually and asexually. An accepted definition of a species is an organism that is capable of reproducing its own kind. Thus, for example, the two different species of a horse and a donkey can produce a mule, but because two mules cannot reproduce another mule, they are not a species; they are hybrids. Genetically, a horse has 32 pairs of chromosomes compared to a donkey’s 31 pairs. The mule is an aberration, a mélange and is not the result of a mutation. It receives 32 chromosomes from its mare mother and 31 from its jackass father which means that there can be no full pairing of its inherited genetic material. On the other hand a horse with cloven hooves or six legs would be a mutant and this would be confirmed if its offspring maintained the characteristics through generations.
Normal body cells multiply by mitosis, a process where there is an attempt to make exact copies of the parental DNA that had been formed at conception. That parental DNA is a mixture of genetic material originating from the four grandparents, but depending on which genes are dominant, only half of that DNA is expressed. The other half is still there, but it is dormant or recessive.
Germ cells or gametes (the sperm, ova, pollen, etc that will be involved in sexual reproduction) are formed by meiosis, a different process that deliberately shuffles the DNA (using a process known as cross-over) so that each and every germ cell is genetically unique. Not only unique, but also capable of atavism, which means they will be able to display traits that the grandparents had, but which may have lain dormant in the parents. Meiosis most commonly results in gamete cells that are haploid (having only one set of chromosomes). These are paired-up at conception by the fusion of two compatible gametes such as a sperm and an ovum. The normal end result is a new diploid individual with a full set of paired chromosomes.
Note that mitosis, meiosis and conception itself can all result in mistakes. For example; the creation of an individual with one missing or one extra chromosome or the creation of individuals that are neither 100% male nor 100% female. It is even possible for two sperm to fuse together in a fertilised ovum with catastrophic results. When a mother produces two eggs, which are then fertilised, twin embryos can be formed inside her. Occasionally these two individuals can fuse together early in pregnancy to form a single individual. Such chimeras (hidden twin syndrome) have cells in different parts of their bodies that contain completely different DNA. Conversely, a single fertilised egg can result in two individuals. The identical or Siamese twins that result from the full or partial splitting of an embryo some time after conception.
These anomalies of conception are beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth pointing out that things are not always ‘black and white’. There are some who take up a rigid position on the determination of when a soul enters (and later leaves) a human body and there is the related question of when the essence of an individual life (or ‘personhood’) begins. Such things are complex and have huge legal and philosophical implications. There are also people who believe in ghosts, spirits, fairies and witches. I have no fixed opinion on such entities, merely noting how good quality electric light has made many of them redundant in my lifetime.
Normal sexual reproduction occurs with the fusion of two gametes (the germ cells such as sperm, ova, pollen, ovules, etc) to form a zygote (the single cell that is destined to become an embryo, a foetus and then a baby) . The resultant life form, as already outlined, is not formed simply from its parents’ genetic material, but more pertinently, from all of its four grandparents. Equally important is the fact that since each germ cell is unique then, leaving identical twins and other anomalies aside, each individual is also unique.
Asexual reproduction happens widely in the plant world. A potato tuber planted in the ground grows into another plant that is an effective clone of the original potato. A willow branch that falls into the ground can take root there and will be a clone of the original tree. Most dandelions produce embryos asexually by a process known as apomixis so most dandelion seeds, unlike pollen, are clones of their parent flower and which one can gaze at as they float away on the wind.
Asexual reproduction also happens in the animal world. This happens quite naturally when some animals are cut in half or break into fragments (such as flat worms) and also with ants and bees, where the males may be formed from unfertilised eggs. A queen honey bee can fertilise her own eggs, or not, with sperm she obtained on her honeymoon flight. The eggs that she fertilises turn into diploid females (with paired chromosomes) and the unfertilised ones become haploid males (the drones with just one set of chromosomes). The queen bee is in reality a slave as it is the workers who “instruct” whether she should make males or females by the size of the wax hexagons that they make. The queen only fertilises her eggs in the smaller of two different sized wax hexagons. The workers (all females) must replace (or supersede) a queen before her supply of sperm runs out or she will only be able to create drones and the hive would die. Before or just after they kill their queen, the workers can turn an immature worker grub into a queen by modifying its wax cell and feeding it royal jelly. Drone bees are thus de facto virgin births having arisen without sex and without the fusion of any gametes. Certain unfertilised amphibian eggs can also be stimulated into growth by pricking them with a pin instead of them being penetrated by a sperm and these too turn into males. My biology tutor once jokingly postulated that there could thus be a scientific basis for Jesus being a man, having been the result of a very famous virgin birth! This is not actually born out because the determination of sex (and intersex states) is much more complicated in nearly all mammals, including us. That will be the subject of a different essay.
Mutations are formed when DNA-copying goes astray and this is most common during the meiosis of sexual reproduction. Mutations can result in early death or malformation and some 25% of pregnancies miscarry because of such mutations. Yet mutations can also result in individuals with enhanced features. The great ability of viruses and bacteria to mutate is why our antibiotic strategies are coming under increasing strain as those microbes so cleverly adapt themselves to survive (and even prosper) in the killer environments that we try to create for them.
‘What is life?’ and ‘what is alive?’ are distinct questions. Individual animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc can be alive or dead but even dead individuals can still contain life if the genetic material within them can be stimulated to grow. It is one thing to bring back extinct animals theoretically, as in the movies, but in fact dead dogs have been used to create clones in Korea in a way analogous to Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. The process of taking the nucleus from a somatic (body tissue) cell with its full complement of parental DNA and using it to replace the nuclear material in an ovum or immature embryo can result in clones; entities which are effectively identical twins with their “parent”. One could argue that the vast majority of cells in our body tissues are thus just as much imbued with individual life as are our sperm and ova. The irreverent lyrics of Monty Python’s “Every sperm is sacred” might need to be rewritten to include all organisms and every single cell.
My starting-point definition for the essence of life is thus; “material that is capable of replicating itself”. Most commonly, in nature, this is achieved when the DNA inside a cell starts making copies of itself in such a way that a new individual is formed. Viruses are a special case because they themselves are not cells in the conventional sense. They contain DNA or RNA inside a protein coat but can only replicate once entry to a host cell has been achieved, and which thus parasitised does the virus’s bidding. For me they are a form of life, even if they can only replicate inside their hosts. The question has been posed as to whether or not computer viruses are any different. They too infect their hosts, replicate and “fly off” to infect another computer. I believe that there is a fundamental difference and that is that viruses can quite naturally mutate but this doesn’t happen with those in a computer. Computer virus codes can only be changed by programming; they don’t have the capability to evolve on their own.
There is an interesting group of replicators that have nothing to do with genetic material. They are the prion diseases (infections?) such as mad cow disease and Kuru. These agents are a special class of brain proteins that have a certain shape. When a prion protein gains entry to the brain (usually having got into the body in a diet involving cannibalism) and makes contact with chemically identical normal brain proteins, it then causes the normal ones to change their shape (but not their composition) to that of the prion. A domino effect begins and when there are enough prions present, the brain becomes spongiform and the person or animal eventually dies. Such proteins are thus an abnormal component of living tissue that can replicate. However, as with computer viruses, they have no way to evolve or change.
Thus the essence of life for me is not only the ability to replicate but also the potential to evolve. René Descartes is credited with the phrase “I think therefore I am“. An alternative might be “I evolved therefore I am“. If, as some postulate, the first genetic material on earth was formed from nucleotides (the basic building blocks of DNA and RNA) in conjunction with simple proteins that arose spontaneously in a chemical soup made from earthly minerals and water stirred up by electrical storms, then perhaps life has always inherently existed in the otherwise inanimate molecules that form the Earth. From the Earth’s inception there would therefore always have been the potential for life to evolve. I now look out at the natural world and can see tiny precursors of our DNA everywhere. A supposed inanimate universe being actually a dead phoenix lying in wait for its resurrection. Piles of dust, some even in human form, waiting for the breath of life to be inhaled.
12
Jan
From my window I can see a white mulberry tree, a tree that fascinates me and was one of the reasons why I moved here. Mulberry is a generous plant - it feeds dozens of bird families with its sweet and healthy fruit all spring and summer. But now the mulberry has no leaves, so I see a piece of a quiet street, which is crossed now and again by someone walking towards the park. The weather in Wrocław is almost summer, the sun is blinding, the sky is blue and the air is clear. Today, while walking with my dog, I saw two magpies chase an owl away from their nest. They looked at each other in the eye just a meter apart. I have the impression that the animals are also waiting for what will happen.
For me, the world has been too much for a long time. Too much, too fast, too loud.
So I don’t suffer the “trauma of isolation”, but I hate not meeting people. I don’t regret that they closed the cinemas. I don’t care that the shopping malls are shut. My only concern is when I think about all those who have lost their jobs. When I found out about preventive quarantine, I felt a kind of relief, and I know that many people feel the same, though they feel ashamed of it. My introversion, long suffocated and mistreated by the dictates of hyperactive extroverts, dusted itself off and left its wardrobe.
I look out the window at my neighbour, a busy lawyer whom I saw until recently leaving for court in the morning with his “toga” slung over his shoulder. Now, in a baggy tracksuit, he fights with a branch in the garden, which I think he has started cleaning. I see a couple of young people walking an old dog that has barely walked since last winter. The dog wobbles on its feet, and they patiently accompany him, walking at the slowest pace. A garbage truck picks up the garbage with a lot of noise.
Life goes on, of course, but with a completely different rhythm. I cleaned up the closet and took the newspapers that I had read to the paper waste bin. I replanted the flowers. I picked up the bike from repair. I enjoy cooking.
I keep coming back to my childhood images, when there was much more time and it could be “wasted”, staring out the window for hours, watching the ants, lying under the table and imagining that this is the ark. Or reading an encyclopaedia.
Is it not that we have returned to the normal rhythm of life? That it is not the virus that is a disorder of the norm, but just the opposite - that hectic world before the virus was abnormal?
After all, the virus reminded us of what we so passionately denied - that we are fragile creatures, made of the most delicate matter. That we are dying, that we are mortal.
That we are not separated from the world by our “humanity” and uniqueness, but the world is a kind of great network in which we are stuck, connected with other beings, invisible by threads of dependence and influences. That we are dependent on each other and no matter how distant are the countries that we come from, what language we speak and what the colour of our skin is - we fall ill, we fear and die in the same way.
It’s made us realize that no matter how weak and defenceless we feel, there are people around us who are even weaker and need help. It brings back how gentle our old parents and grandparents are and how much they should be cared for.
It’s shown us that our hectic mobility threatens the world. And it’s brought up the same question we rarely had the courage to ask ourselves: What are we actually looking for?
So the fear of being sick has turned us back from a winding path and reminded us, of necessity, of the nests we came from and in which we feel safe. Even great travellers, in a situation like this, will try to get home.
The sad truth revealed is - that in a moment of danger – thoughts turn inwards and exclude the categories of nations and borders. At this difficult moment, it turned out how weak the idea of a European community is in practice. The EU actually forfeited the game, handing over decisions in times of crisis to the nation states. I consider the closing of state borders to be the greatest failure of this wasted time - the old egoisms and the categories of “home” and “foreign” returned, that is, what we have been fighting over the last few years, hoping that it will never again format our minds. The fear of the virus automatically evoked the simplest atavistic belief that some strangers are to blame and that they always bring a threat from somewhere. In Europe, the virus is “from somewhere”, it is not ours, it is alien. In Poland, all those who return from abroad have become suspects.
The wave of borders slammed-closed and the monstrous queues at border crossings must have been a shock for many young people. The virus reminds one: the borders are there and they are doing well.
I am also afraid that the virus will soon remind us of yet another old truth; how unequal we are. Some of us will be taken by private planes to our home on an island or in a secluded forest, while others will stay in the cities to operate power plants and water supplies. Still others will risk their health by working in stores and hospitals. Some will make money from the epidemic, others will lose their achievements. The looming crisis is likely to undermine these principles, which seemed stable to us; many countries will not cope with it and in the face of their decomposition, new orders will wake up, as is often the case after crises. We sit at home reading books and watching series, but in fact we are preparing for a great battle for a new reality that we cannot even imagine, slowly realizing that nothing will ever be the same as before. The situation of compulsory quarantine and the strictures of the family at home may make us realize what we would not like to admit: that the family is tormenting us, that our marriage ties have long since melted. Our children will come out of quarantine addicted to the Internet, and many of us will realize the nonsense and sterility of a situation of enforced inertia. What if we increase the number of homicides, suicides and mental illness?
Before our eyes, the civilization paradigm that has shaped us over the last two hundred years is blowing away: the myth that we are the masters of creation, we can do anything and the world belongs to us.
New times are coming.
Translated by me from an article by Olga Tokarczuk (in Kobieta.pl 04.03.2021)
31
Dec
THEY must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
21
Dec
Last year a really huge dragonfly flew in through a window in the car giving everyone inside a fright. I made a mental note that seeing an animal like that had become a rarity and this followed a winter when all my honey bees, those stoical workers in their seven hives, had perished.
Dragonfly
The main thrust of an article by Anthony King (“The altered flight of the humble bee” Irish Times 2nd March 2017) was aimed at the neonicotinoid insecticides. His article made me remember DDT because it took far too long before the invidious effects of its widespread use as an insecticide became apparent. The poor birds of prey at the top of the food chain, which had fed on birds and rodents, which had fed on insects poisoned by DDT, trying to hatch eggs so soft that they would collapse. So perhaps it should be no surprise that another substance with zoocidal properties released into the environment in substantial amounts might be at the heart of the ongoing threat to the insect pollinators and to many other insects and arthropods, as well as to those animals that feed on them. It is, for example, now postulated that the massive decline in the once ubiquitous and cheeky house sparrow may have resulted from the lack of insects needed in the diet of the hatchlings during their first few days of life. Indeed so common and widespread were they that one of the collective terms to describe the group was the very word ‘ubiquity’.
Sparrows
A ubiquity or quarrel or host or flock of sparrows.
When I was a child growing-up in the fifties I remember how, at our family home in County Leitrim, crickets and grasshoppers, many varieties of butterflies and moths, dragonflies, earwigs and pissmires (both the walking and flying varieties) were all commonplace. The sometimes sultry summers were punctuated by much bird and insect noise and the buzz of a humble bumble bee searching to escape through a window or tangled in a spider’s web was a signature sound of a sunny day. The same countryside nowadays seems so sterile and the rivers, once so full of fish, also much diminished in life.
Something really rotten is going on. Perhaps it really is too late for many species but repeated comprehensive audits of the insect world would seem to be a useful prognostic tool for measuring the future health of both the environment and ourselves, just as a miner’s canary warns of impending asphyxia or an explosion. The global threats to large land mammals are much easier to transmit to the public than threats to the relatively inconspicuous insect world but the destruction of the latter may have much more serious consequences for us all. We are the inheritors of the Garden of Eden and even though the mortal taste of its forbidden fruit is supposed to have opened our eyes to the knowledge of good and evil our eyes seem almost totally blinkered to the ongoing and almost wilful desecration of that inheritance.
There are other threats of course but it is perhaps corporate and individual greed that ultimately are changing not only the environment but also rural society so much. Just a half a century ago milk would have cream on the top of it in the morning and usually came from hand-milked cows, which had come in from flowery pastures and which was distributed through small farmer-owned cooperatives, where neighbours met each day. Now there is a move towards zero-grazing of cows, which seldom leave their sheds, fed from monoculture prairies, milked automatically and distributed centrally, even internationally, and onto the supermarket shelves as a watered-down and homogenised product in plastic containers. “Every little counts”. Really? Every little insect does however count.
I would love to be able to wander through wild flower meadows down to the lake’s edge, once again, in the certain knowledge of catching some perch or a pike for supper. Watching rabbits hopping into their burrows and rising snipe, curlew and lapwing on the way there. To watch cranes and coots and moorhens busy themselves at the mouth of the river, while my float, made from a cork from a bottle of Guinness and a match stick, bobbed up and down on the rippling waters of Dunaweel Lough. But, alas, all I have now are these little pearls of distant memories. I ponder can suchlike ever return, just as I mourn the almost complete loss of the jarring corncrake’s call, the twit-twooing of barn owls flying, like white-faced ghosts, past a window and even the terror caused by a bat circling round my candlelit bedroom not unlike what that dragonfly did, in the daytime, last summer as I was driving leisurely through the lakelands of Ireland.
Bat in bedroom
April 7 2017
21
Dec
I have a cousin to whom I had been explaining how Roman Catholicism in Ireland is going through a crisis. The hypocrisy that underlay Bishop Casey’s love affair and then the problem he had in fully acknowledging and supporting his son may have been a starting point for many on this green island.
The protection of paedophile priests by the clergy up to the level of Abbot Kevin Smith and Cardinal Desmond O’Connell and the lack of support for their victims was another huge saga that alienated more and more of both the faithful and the secular in Ireland.
Another huge scandal that has become more and more apparent is how “Industrial Schools” and “Mother and Baby Homes” run by religious orders of Nuns operated both before and then for the most part of the 20th Century. The fire in Cavan that killed 35 girls and one adult in 1943 was bad enough in itself but the truth about how the children lived from day to day and the circumstances of their deaths was suppressed for a very long time.
The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland became an object of review in 1993 when a mass grave containing 155 corpses was uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. In the past 20 years or so it has become abundantly clear that the “fallen women” kept in these institutions were mistreated and used as slave labour. The last of these institutions was only closed in 1996.
The latest scandal is that of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, where “significant numbers” of infant corpses (from premature to 3 years old) have been found following research by a historian who found a
discrepancy between approximately 800 death certificates issued and the number of official burials in the town. The investigation into this is on-going. There will also be a review of all the other similar homes that operated in Ireland with some saying thousands of bodies are yet to be discovered in the country as a whole.
After I had related some of the above to my cousin, she retorted “it is lies; it is fake news”. I was simply astounded to hear this but I looked up ‘Tuam Fake News’ on Google to discover the almost certain source as the American president of the Catholic League. I am sorely afraid that it his statement that is fake. Respectable politicians, the mainstream press and the public in Ireland do not doubt that some very disturbing things happened in association with these homes and that it relates to a very sad and scandalous episode that has been kept largely hidden from the public view for too long.
In this day and age of social media and information technology it may be ironic that it is so hard to tell fact from fiction, real from virtual and lies from truth. Whatever the truth about the actual numbers interred in Tuam, what is quite clear from interviews with living survivors (both children and mothers) was that to be kept in such “caring” institutions was an almost complete misery. The death rates were much higher than the national average; the children were marched to school, en bloc, and kept segregated from the other children before being marched back to the home again; the mothers were encouraged to have the children adopted and even encouraged to give them names that would be most attractive to potential adopters.
The general attitude towards such mothers was made clear to me by a story recently told to me by a close friend. Her aunt had had a neighbour who was not the most intelligent of girls but who, after she became pregnant, asked her if she could live with her along with her new born child and that in return she would work for her for nothing. The parish priest heard of this and said it was impossible and that she must go into one of these homes. Subsequently, after the birth of the baby, the young mother wrote to my friend’s aunt asking again if she and her baby could live with her. The aunt was quite happy to do so but again the priest intervened. He was furious saying that it would be a complete scandal to have such a woman and her baby living in the parish. In the end the girl came home but never saw her child again. This was not a million years ago but it is just one real case that I know about personally and that shows the total lack of humanity and the total abuse of power of such clerics.
For sure, something is rotten in the current state of Catholicism in both Ireland and the Vatican. Pope Francis set up a “Commission into the Protection of Minors” to which one of the victims, Marie Collins, was appointed. The inaction by this commission has resulted in her resignation from it in protest. It seems that even the Pope cannot overcome the entrenched, retrograde and reactionary position taken by the Vatican elite.
The title of this essay is taken from a face to face interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russel after he was asked what message he would offer to people living a thousand years hence. It is of an additional relevance to me because just before my cousin told me that Tuam was false news she had stated that “God is Love” and I had added Bertrand Russel’s statement that “Love is Wise”. His full reply goes like this:
I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral:
The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
April 16 2017
21
Dec
The phenomenon of suicide bombers and suicide pilots came up in a recent conversation. There are similarities between today’s Islamofascist suicide killers and the Kamikaze pilots of the second world war, but there are significant differences too. It thus seemed worth examining indoctrination, brainwashing and how the mind can be manipulated as well as reviewing suicide itself. There is also the vexed question of whether killing can ever be justified. One of the ten commandments is often stated in English as “thou shalt not kill” but in other translations it becomes “thou shalt not murder“. Many things are not black and white even when it involves causing death.
We are all indoctrinated from childhood – especially within the family and the culture we were raised in. There is no such thing as a Muslim or a Christian child but there are children who are the offspring of Muslim and Christian parents. It is strange that people can say, for example, “those are Muslim or Catholic or Jewish children” but people do not say “those are Socialist or Republican or Democratic children”. Faiths, Religions and Creeds are the primary indoctrinators of most people and the seeds that they sow are, too often, allowed to grow unquestioned. Some of those seeds will lie dormant in the unconscious and can be reactivated in the future depending on certain actions and by propaganda.
My own skepticism about faith began in one memorable moment. One day I suddenly realised that I was saying the creed for the umpteenth time without ever having considered what I was saying. How had that happened? How had words been simply put into my mouth? How dare they have induced me to say “I believe” no better than a parrot.
Religious indoctrination is one thing but there are other forms that are harder to define and these relate to tribalism, race and nationality. There are very many tribes. Some are nations (the English and the British and the Irish and the Japanese and the French); some are class-based (the proletariat and the bourgeois and the aristocracy); some are conflations of faith and inheritance (Hasidic Jewry and the descendants of Mohammed); some are simply racist (white or yellow or black supremacists); some are religious sects and organisations (Orange order protestants and Mormons and Scientologists) and some are, often bizarre, cults (formed under such people as The Rev. Jim Jones or Aum Shinrikyo or Charles Manson). You can make your own list, but the point is that if one comes from any “pure” tribe there is a tendency to identify with that tribe and to rebuke and repel outsiders. In Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan”, the maid of Orleans makes such a point when she says, about liberation from the English, “… for a France free and French”. One of the problems for a mongrel like me (a mélange of Anglo-Irish, Scottish & Polish ancestry and a mixed Catholic & Protestant upbringing) is where to find my tribe. Possibly my tribe is everyone who is outside a tribe, but let no one forget the parable of the Good Samaritan. To embrace the stranger, the dispossessed, the other and even the leper is a deep Christian message that, hypocritically, is neglected far too much by far too many.
We are all thus inherently indoctrinated even though we had no choice about being born in the first place, but becoming “brainwashed” involves deeper consideration. It involves wiping the blackboard clean and then rewriting it. It is surprising that the recent suicide bombers in Sri Lanka were mostly well-educated and well-off people and not the more common religious freaks. Richard Dawkins (whom I much admire but also dislike) believes that our religious upbringing predisposes or augments an ability to consent to the killing of non-believers in later life. He also sees close parallels between the intolerance of today’s islamofascists and the white supremacist evangelicals of the deep south of the USA. Not for the first time, a “radicalised evangelical” shot Jews in America last week, whilst quoting such well-worn stories of how the Jews killed Christ. Many within Islam agree that apostasy and blasphemy can or even should be punished by death. Such beliefs make my blood run cold and yet these punishments are not so different from those of the Roman Catholic Church in the not very distant past. Any faith that does not allow someone to change their belief is inherently hollow. Any faith that cannot withstand satire is similar. We are told that the God of Islam is merciful and compassionate. It is not without irony that many of its followers are not.
One of the problems with any form of fundamentalism is that it does not encourage changing one’s mind freely. It thus subverts science and harms the intellect. Kathleen Taylor has shown that, once brainwashed, those same neural pathways become resistant to change and although it is often credited to the Jesuits, it was Aristotle who originally said: “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man”.
Is brainwashing any different from indoctrination? I don’t know but they are not miles apart. Possibly brainwashing involves attempting to bend another to one’s own will in a more aggressive or systematic way. It very often starts with propaganda from media that is servile to a dictator, to a religious leader/idea and even to the great god, greed. Nowadays such propaganda much too freely permeates all our lives through television and the internet. It nearly always progresses with distortions of truth and the demonization of “those outside the tribe”. There may be promises of a reward after death or with the much simpler reward of just becoming notorious. Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, hit the mark when she refused to name the Christchurch mass murderer and concentrated her talk about the lives of those who were killed or were suffering thus denying the desired news-exposure of the killer.
Radicalisation in the UK is known to often start in prison with people who are dropouts with low self-esteem and who find themselves in an environment from where they cannot escape being prey to radicalising predators. The attackers in Sri Lanka had a different background. They came from a background of wealth and privilege just as did Osama Bin Laden and an easy-going professional man (a Palestinian that I once knew) who went away for a holiday to the Middle East and came back with his wife in a burka, cursing the USA and a very much changed man. Such radicalisation/brainwashing/indoctrination of people who are far from being fools is hard to grasp but it perhaps illustrates that immunity from indoctrination seems to be rare.
The study of psychology can be useful because it can awaken us to our own susceptibilities and abilities to think clearly. One of the most interesting experiments about group pressure is the use of a lift with one normal door. The subject enters a lift full of people but after it starts to move everyone else inside turns to face the back of the lift. Only very rarely does the subject remain facing the door.
The term brainwashing was first used in the context of the Korean war by the Chinese and it almost certainly continues to this day in North Korea. I have read an analysis of brainwashing techniques and it is fairly easy to understand why an isolated person with low self-worth is open to manipulation. However, also of importance is the emphasis of the difference between “us and them”. These differences are then magnified and distorted by smothering the novitiate within a group of like-minded people. The concept of “love bombing” is new to me but I can see how it could be an effective tool for a manipulator. “We all love you and the rest of the world is bad so you should join us” could be the refrain.
Radicalisation, for want of a better word, is one thing. Everything that deals with suicide is another. When both are combined – producing the deadly effects of pilots flying into the twin towers, the recent killing of hundreds in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka and Kamikaze pilots dive-bombing the US fleet – then some new thinking is needed. It is one thing to commit suicide out of depression or to abolish pain or even to make a political point (the monks who burned themselves in Vietnam or the Czech students, when the Soviets invaded their country). It is a different thing to want to harm others as part of the act. I can understand (but not get into) the mind of a miserable person (usually a man) who wants to kill both himself and his spouse and children (out of shame for example) and even a suicide whose real aim is to hurt another by hoping to make them believe they were the cause of the death (a final selfish act) but I find it much harder to grasp how anyone justifies and wants to indiscriminately murder huge numbers of people – whether it includes their own suicide or not.
One should never gloss over horrific events that are indiscriminate because this is often the hallmark of fascism. As the SS developed it did not only target Jews, Slavs & communists. It also targeted ordinary Germans in a completely arbitrary way. This terrorism created an environment of fear that helped the perpetrators achieve their ends. The silent majority in Ireland failed to speak out enough against the paramilitaries during “The Troubles” and it was eventually (in the aftermath of the Omagh bombing) the words of John Hume that sounded the truth in public. He gave the perpetrators of the appalling crime their proper name. They were not just murderers. They were, in the literal sense of the word, fascists, seeking to overthrow the wishes of the people through terror. And, as with all fascists, they were skilled at utilising violence to give themselves an influence and power which they were unable to secure at the ballot box.
The thoughts inside the mind of any intended suicide are complex. One must also raise the question whether there is any difference between killing soldiers or civilians. Which was worse? To kill the almost defenseless soldiers trying to escape at Dunkirk or to firebomb the militarily unimportant Dresden (and which included that day of love, St Valentine’s day, in 1945 in the last days of WWII in Europe). I spent last Christmas night in Dresden and, knowing its history, I couldn’t get rid of the same sort of thoughts and gloom that flood into my mind when visiting Auschwitz. Is there any difference in suicidal bombers massacring churchgoers and those dive-bombing naval vessels, when one’s country is at risk? I don’t think there are easy answers.
Leaving ISIS to one side as an anomaly, it is interesting to note that suicide rates in the Middle East tend to be low. Not as low as in most of the Caribbean, where it can be as low as 1 in 200,000 but not nearly as high as most of the countries of the former Soviet Union, where it is usually about 1 in 3,000 per year. Such great divergences are quite peculiar and hard to understand but it also shows that suicide statistics are very mixed and must therefore have many different causes.
So today’s Islamist bombers (from the Twin Towers to the recent massacres in Sri Lanka) have been spawned in a culture where suicide has long been condemned (by both the state and the majority of the faithful) whereas the Kamikazes came from a nation, where loss of honour and any defeat had traditionally been resolved by committing suicide. The former usually do not discriminate who they kill but the latter only targeted the military. So there are similarities, but these are two significant differences between the two.
When any mass murder or genocide is planned the targeted victims must first be dehumanised. This is almost beyond question when it comes to the genocide as was carried out by the Nazis in Europe and by the Hutus in Rwanda. It is also why the Irish Journalist Fintan O’Toole is perceptive when he says that “there is no safe dose of fascism” for any such demonization starts in small increments. He has also analysed Trump by pointing out that he makes deliberate outlandish comments just to see what the reaction is. He can then either expand them or retract and modify them until his base is even more encouraged. He refers to this real danger in this way: “Forget post-fascist – what we are living with is pre-fascism”. This pre-fascism in America is sadly being ignored by most of the Republican party and if things go very sour that legacy must not be forgotten. I have just enjoyed reading a “Dear GOP” article by Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter.
Fintan O’Toole also recently made a point that we must learn (and indeed practice) the art of political dentistry: “For even in this age of social media, conversation is still a moral arena. People form their prejudices in all sorts of ways but they test them in ordinary talk, at work, in the cafe, on the bus, in the pub, over the dinner table, at the match, after Mass. It is in these unremarkable encounters that we establish what is and is not okay to say about others. It is here that prejudices either spread and become normal or are checked and exposed. It is here that political dentistry must be practised and the bad teeth of sweeping generalisations, paranoid conspiracy theories and mendacious “facts” pulled out. It requires a willingness to overcome embarrassment and break the uncomfortable silences that are taken for assent”. It appears that not enough bad teeth are pulled out in mosques nowadays.
So it could be argued that The Kamikazes did have a legitimate military target and that there was a tradition of death instead of defeat, capture and shame deeply entrenched in Japanese military culture. I think it is too simple to say that the suicidal Islamofascists killed the infidel so that they would be gifted with virgins in heaven. They must have been made to believe that their intended victims were less than human or at least so “lacking in the true faith” that they did not deserve to live. Such ideology is just as warped as that which must go on in the mind of a white supremacist mass murderer. The murderous zeal of ISIS is however very alarming and has parallels with the way the SS operated. It was not enough to kill as many as possible but also to do so in the most shocking way and with the most cynical methods.
Socrates was forced to commit suicide as a death penalty even though he had spoken against suicide in a parable that I paraphrase: “just like a farmer with his animals, the gods had put us in a field with a locked exit gate to which only the gods should hold the key”. Suicide is in fact so common that in the West it is the third most common form of death in people under the age of 45. Most “normal” suicides appear to result from despair or a lack of hope or a need to escape from pain, although some are also involved in the infliction of pain or death on others. The controlling partner who kills himself (nearly always a him) along with his wife and children is usually about to suffer some form of shame. What is probably more important from a pragmatic standpoint is how to prevent suicide and of how to prevent the radicalisation of mainstream Muslims (or anyone for that matter). Probably it can only be brought about from within Islam. Perhaps Islam is in need of its own “age of enlightenment” even though the European enlightenment of the 17th century was a forerunner of the French revolution and much else.
So suicide is interesting and very incompletely understood. Freud talked about a desire for death that later became called Thanatos. He noted, if I am right, that thoughts about past bad events can become very dominant and repetitive in both the conscious and the unconscious and that this tendency to keep reliving a horrible past can take precedence over the desire for life and happiness! Of course there can also be repression, which usually makes matters worse. I think that such observations make much sense but the reasoning behind them is not deeply understood. It is my observation that individuals (and animals such as dogs and cattle for sure) have innate personalities that don’t fundamentally change over time – that is unless an individual undergoes some significant trauma. Both Bruno Bettelheim and Primo Levi bore testament to this. Both were deeply affected and changed by their treatment by the Nazis, despite their knowledge of both science and the psyche.
Other paradoxes about suicide are that the rates commonly go down when there is war or revolution but that they also can go down in places that are peaceful. There is no constant. Suicide is also more common in men, but attempted suicide is more common in women.
I was going to write about the pointlessness of revenge, but this essay deals with different matters and is long enough. The effects of revenge are well laid out in Esther in the Old Testament. Writing helps to clarify my thoughts. They are not “written in stone” and I hope I am always open to change. I hope that my neural pathways are not fixed in time. We should never forget the past but not live there too much. We can always make progress by asking questions and by realising how little we know. Most children start out as experimenters with an open mind but too many of them are driven or sucked into the beliefs of their educators with an indoctrination that can quench that zeal for true knowledge. The other terrible thing that happens to children who suffer sexual abuse or violence is that, having been exposed to such behaviour, they then so often repeat it themselves in later life. This too is a form of indoctrination.
Back in the sixties, Mary Whitehouse was a prominent campaigner against the permissive society. Often portrayed as a prude, she campaigned about too much sex and violence being portrayed in the media. I am not going to defend her but things have gone too far. Too many people (especially children) are now indoctrinated in another malign way. Historically films were given age categories but the almost unlimited and uncensored exposure to the most lurid and extreme pornography on the internet and the profusion of video games with themes of sex and violence must be part of some of today’s problems. Is there much difference between children coming from a home where there is incest and violence, compared to very early exposure to uncensored access of the internet? Another growing phenomenon is the huge amount of bullying via social media. Probably the bullied are more likely to become bullies themselves.
Don’t forget, at difficult moments in life, that the past and the present can contain bright pearls that, without any nostalgia, can be brought into the open and enjoyed. I always hope for a sunny future even though, in these uncertain times, there are many dark clouds on the horizon. Be wary of trying to influence others too much. I say this because all examples of what I would call evil have resulted from the imposition of the will of one entity on another. The free will granted by the creator is thus, for me, the very opposite of evil. It is Lucifer, that brightest star, who would entice you down his path. Know false prophets by their fruits and be wary of idols. Not because it is commanded, but because a falling statue may crush you.
May 1st 2019
21
Jan
Nought loves another as itself
Nor venerates another so.
Nor is it possible to Thought
A greater than itself to know:
And Father, how can I love you,
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.
The Priest sat by and heard the child.
In trembling zeal he seiz’d his hair:
He led him by his little coat:
And all admir’d the Priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
Lo what a fiend is here! said he:
One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy Mystery.
The weeping child could not be heard.
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They strip’d him to his little shirt.
And bound him in an iron chain.
And burn’d him in a holy place,
Where many had been burn’d before:
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion’s shore.
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