The recurrent heat this summer has induced a certain idleness, which, as it turns out, I cherish. The absence of pressure to keep a tightly regulated schedule is one of the greatest gifts of retirement. You’ll find me happily nodding off in the lawn chair during the middle of the day until I wake with start, heart racing: it’s a sin!

Acedia, or idleness, was indeed counted among the deadly sins, number 8, to be precise, after pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and wrath. The concept dates back centuries to early monastic orders who needed structured rules and labor to maintain a functioning monastic life. Idleness was seen as threatening spirituality as well through restlessness, boredom and physical drowsiness.

By the end of the 13th century the concept was increasingly applied outside of the cloister walls to the population in general, in parallel with the development of a new commercial economy based on chronological clock-time, rather than the agrarian calendar ruled by the seasons and religious festivals. Sloth was attacked as the enemy of an orderly and productive life. For all, that is, except the aristocratic classes where idleness was equated with a space where creativity could flourish. Those not engaged in productive labor scored an exception again! And justified it by pointing back to the Greek philosophers who held a renowned antipathy to labor.

With the rise of industry, and its need for punctual and synchronized labor, the condemnation of  idleness became more intense; racist tendencies were fed by condemning the “idleness” perceived in (poor) criminals and less civilized nations, ethnographers joining the church and state representatives in this approach. Language picked up on it as well – in German, for example, the words Faulheit (laziness) and Fäulniss (putrefaction) share the same root. Order, thrift and industry became hallmarks of the rise of industrial production, serving capitalism regardless of the welfare of those it exploited. Children were deemed to be ready to work at age 9 (even by Karl Marx!) The one exception to this chorus of “reformers” was Marx’ son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who wrote a brilliant treatise on “The Right to be Lazy,” but he was the only 19th century socialist who did not bow before the altar of industriousness.

Eventually, towards the end of the 19th century resistance to labor would be conceptualized in a different way. Rather than seeing laziness as minds craving idleness, scientists started to understand that bodies experienced fatigue. To maximize productivity you had to understand what a human body could endure and how strength could be maintained. Although moralizing writers continued to preach about the pitfalls of sloth, it was the economy of energy that became central to industrialists. Fatigue became associated with physical and mental breakdown which threatened ever increasing productivity needed by a capitalist system.

Having now tried to condense several chapters of  Anson Rabibach’s riveting The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity into 502 words, fatigue sets in. So let me take a nap while you enjoy the link below!

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/desert-fathers-sins-acedia-sloth?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=198be7d221-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-198be7d221-66214597&ct=t(Newsletter_7_19_2017)&mc_cid=198be7d221&mc_eid=1765533648

Street photography of people who allowed themselves the pleasure of just standing, sitting or lying around.

One of my important goals in life is to be rational. I’ve always found irrationality to be a threat, leading to various forms of hysteria or ill-advised judgments, an impediment to being a scientist. I’ve always been drawn to role models that were rational or that had an interest in rationality, scientific or not. Freud belonged to that category.

I do not consider his work scientific, but I believe he was one of the great thinkers of our time; he alerted us to the weakness of human rationality and the need to understand the causes for that weakness so that we could strengthen rationality’s force against baser instincts.

(Confetti)

The classic biographies fill in the detail, from Ernest Jones in the 1950s, Peter Gay in the 1980s, (devoured by anyone who was in analysis at the point) and now one by Élisabeth Roudinesco, Freud: In His Time and Ours which I have on my reading list due to the review attached below.

Freud’s Discontents

(Artichoke)

All this comes to mind because I found myself wandering toute seule through a botanical garden in San Diego, filled with dying palm trees and cacti of all sorts, free associating at the sight of these strange and unfamiliar shapes. Yes, it was hot; yes, I had skipped breakfast. Still, I felt completely irrational in my inability to stick to the plain perceptions of what was there in terms of  botany.

(Cucumbers)

The plants, at times creepily, took on a life of their own. I tried to remind myself that free association was originally a process believed to be the sign of a creative mind.

(Octopi)

The poet Friedrich Schiller wrote in a (1788) letter concerning the impediments to creativity to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner: (excerpted and translated by me)…. it is not a good thing if reason examines the flow of ideas too restrictively at the doorstep. Seen in isolation, an idea can seem unimportant or too out-of-left field, but perhaps it will gain importance through the next one that follows. Perhaps the first idea can become meaningful if coupled with other equally feeble ones. Reason cannot make a judgement on this unless it has stood aside long enough to permit such a coupling that can then be assessed. I wonder if in creative minds reason has recused herself from guarding the doorstep, allowing ideas to flow in pell-mell, and only then the mind surveys and probes the mounting heap.  (Freud, by the way, acknowledges Schiller’s original idea of free associating, in multiple places in his books.)

So, let’s take my associations as proof of creativity, rather than heat stroke. Next time, I’ll visit the waterlily garden instead….

(Bunny Tail)

(Pincushions)

(Blue Figs)

(Your Turn….)

I figured we’d end the week that covered uncertain feelings with something more uplifting – laughter.

The photographs of friends and acquaintances speak for themselves, I hope.

And if you have the energy in this weather to read, here is a short article on research into laughter that you might – perhaps –  find funny.  And I quote: There is a long, semi-illustrious history of scholarly investigation into the nature of humor, from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which may well be the least funny book about humor ever written, to a British research group who claimed they had determined the world’s funniest joke. Despite the fact that the researchers sampled a massive international audience in making this judgment, the winning joke revolved around New Jersey residents: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, “OK, now what?”

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/laughter

The winning joke???????

One of the things I learned to my great satisfaction is that I am not the only one who produces my own tears of laughter when telling a joke, to the point of not being able to finish it, in front of my eye-rolling family. (I have long given up trying to tell jokes in public.) Apparently a lot of people think their stuff is funny when others do not.  And yet, the laughter often brings on laughter,  as a shared social activity rather than via agreement on the intended humor.

Laughter, just like tears, is a social affair after all, helping to bond people together, and to reduce their stress hormones to improve physical well being. It is indeed the case that laughter can heal. It is also true that it is really tricky to study……

https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/jul/10/joke-study-laughter-comedy-scientific

as well as difficult to photograph. Hard to hold the camera still when you are infected by the joy around you.

We’ve had sweat yesterday; we’ve had tears the day before; now all we need is blood, right?

Then they’ll sing to us about emotions – the spinning wheel of our existence….

Blood it shall be – the blood that gets curdled by fear.  Turns out that a good amount of fear does indeed increase the blood-clotting protein – factor VIII –  in your veins, making blood less likely to flow out in case your fear is justified and you find yourself bitten by that bear….. http://www.newsweek.com/horror-movies-can-be-bloodcurdling-406593

Don’t you love science?

Fear and anxiety are actually evolutionary adaptive, since they reduce risk taking and motivate us to take precautions. They also produce physiological changes in your body that help with the reaction to danger, the gift or light response. These feelings become problematic, however, when they are inappropriately intense in the face of non-threatening stimuli, if they last longer than necessary and if they interfere with daily functioning. Phobias come to mind, of something as harmless as public speaking, the wind, or birds, or spiders or, as in my case, turtles. Luckily, treatment of phobias is a success story.  It is not necessarily easy, but massively effective for most people who suffer from phobias. (Look who is photographing turtles….)

Anxiety disorders are another story.  We’re seeing a rough combination here of a high (and rising) prevalence and difficulties finding appropriate treatments. Medications have side effects, many are highly addictive, and the most promising approach of combining them with talk therapy is not easily available to many patients.

Some of the most exciting contemporary research in psychology is linked to problems with anxiety.  I am referring here to the field of epigenetics. People always wondered if a tendency towards anxiety is genetically transmitted, as in “Grandpa’s DNA carried the predisposition and you’ve inherited it.” It is more complicated than that (or perhaps we should say there are additional complications.)

We have discovered that methyl groups, a common structural component of organic molecules, attach to the outside of genes sometimes due to bad diet or hunger, or exposure to harmful chemicals, and they set of a cascade of cellular changes. Turns out that these changes can be passed down to the next generation. And we now know that they can be the result of traumatic experiences as well: severe stress of all kinds, be it persecution, child abuse, heavy drug use or anything else; these experiences  leave molecular scars, carved on the outside of our genetic skeleton, so to speak, and they can be passed on to future generations. You might have inherited your mother’s nose, but also her predisposition towards anxiety because she was bombed out as a child.

Before it gets all too depressing, let’s look at the bright side: a) epigenetic studies do no just find negative behavioral changes transmitted across generations.  People who lucked out to have ancestors with experiences that made them happy or resilient will benefit from that. And b): predisposition does not mean guaranteed experience as much research with identical twins has shown. Genes are not expressed all the time. They need to be turned on and if you’re lucky there is no trigger; you can also use cognitive tools to combat tendencies that make your life harder. You can literally reverse the change to your DNA that way. That, however, will be talked about in a week on thinking, not feeling……

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/10/epigenetics.aspx

In general I read pretty broadly, or, truth be told, skim pretty broadly. But once in a while an essay catches my attention that has me read deep, long and hard, or provides the pleasure of really expanding my horizon.

The Economist article below is such an instance: it describes how research into a basic human activity – crying – evolved over the years. Not so many years, as it turns out.

The concept of emotions themselves dates back only to the 19th century, when French philosophers tried to understand our feelings as reflexes, not “moral sentiments or accidents of the soul.” So many feelings, and so many of them culturally specific:

“basorexia, the sudden urge to kiss someone; or matutolypea, the ill-temper that flourishes between the alarm-clock and the day’s first cup of coffee. For Anglophone readers, some of her subjects are mysteries locked behind the door of someone else’s culture. Amae, a Japanese term that describes the comfort felt when you surrender, temporarily, to the care and authority of a loved one. Liget, an angry enthusiasm that buzzes in the Ilongot tribe of the Philippines, pushing them to great feats of activity – sometimes agricultural, sometimes murderous. Awumbuk, a feeling of emptiness after visitors have departed, is experienced by the Baining people of Papua New Guinea”

And so little we knew about crying.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-luxury-of-tears

Give me good old guilt, or anger, or surprise, any time…… Or a good cry, for that matter. My lachrymal life seems to have been severely curtailed with increasing age. More simply said, it’s very hard to cry these days.

And that despite the fact that I fall squarely into the group that, according to modern research, cries the most: those living in affluent, democratic, extroverted, and individualistic countries. I certainly do not belong currently in the category of people who are under severe stress  – physiologically, economically, emotionally – and who are much less likely to cry than the rest of us even though they would be most justified. The energy is simply not available to them.

(Photographs, by the way, come from visits to museums and cemeteries – I do not take picture of actual people crying….)

Darwin assumed that tears had no function. Modern psychologists assume the opposite – tears have an important role, they make us empathic, an important trait for our species which has a long, helpless childhood, a vulnerable period for survival. Tears elicit care, protection and love from adults (in theory)…. and silent tears aimed at the protecting parent do not give away weakness to predators, as vocal cries would do.

Loss, failure and helplessness produce tears, as do positive situations where tears help to bond relationships. How others react to tears matters as well – positive feedback or scorn will shift your own experience of crying. As will illnesses like depression – crying does not provide the relief it does when done for extraneous causes.  Thus, crying is not universally alike, nor is it always good or always bad – context will make all the difference.

Time to find a good tearjerker movie…..

This week’s musings will select from a grab bag of topics. IF I can muster the energy to write at all on those days that are predicted to be 108 degrees (42 in Celsius….) in Portland, OR!

Emotions ran high last week in the political realm and I thought it would be interesting to tackle the topic of emotions. Not that scientists agree on what emotions are. If anything, they strongly disagree and publicly scorn each other in often not so subtle ways. Here is a review by Carrol Izzard from a couple of years back that states the minimum consensus:

Emotion consists of neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated), response systems, and a feeling state/process that motivates and organizes cognition and action. Emotion also provides information to the person experiencing it, and may include antecedent cognitive appraisals and ongoing cognition including an interpretation of its feeling state, expressions or social-communicative signals, and may motivate approach or avoidant behavior, exercise control/regulation of responses, and be social or relational in nature.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1754073910374661

The major camps in the debate propose that there are

a) distinct emotions ( numbers vary from 5 – 21 with 7 being most frequently accepted), that they are innately rooted and that they are universally recognized in the respective facial expressions of joy, surprise, anger, fear, sadness and contempt. Paul Ekman is representative for this approach; he and his research group  also developed a theory of micro expressions that give fleeting hints to what a person is feeling and/or concealing. They have, in addition, developed tools that they claim can improve your ability to detect and correctly identify emotional expressions, which they are happy to sell you ( and, it turns out the CIA, FBI, and other three lettered organizations…) I always wonder when a scientist starts having a website .com….

http://www.paulekman.com

The work has led to all kinds of testing yourself how good you are at identifying emotions….https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/well-quiz-the-mind-behind-the-eyes/

You could also test your skills with the facial expressions of today’s photographs….

b) Margaret Mead was an early sharp critic of Ekmans et al.’s theory, but within the field of psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett an her colleagues provide the strongest alternative to the above claims. She questions that emotions are biologically basic and that there are universally alike. Emotions do not exist in a vacuum and context is everything – that can be the cultural context or the individual’s history guiding the interpretation of and reaction to stimuli that produce an affective response. (if this interests you, she has an interesting book out: How Emotions are made – The Secret Life of the Brain. Link below is to an earlier research article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1934613/

One thing,  though, is agreed upon, from Freudians to Neuroscientists: emotions, whatever they are, do organize and govern behavior. Without them we are toast. Best example comes from a patient of D’Amasio’s who had medically necessary brain surgery that removed any ability to feel emotions. He was paralyzed in everyday life for the simplest tasks, because decisions based on just gut level – do I prefer orange juice or coffee for breakfast –  were out of reach for him.

Today’s choice of visionary (the blog’s theme of the week, remember) is closer to home. It is someone I know well, have known for a long time in a variety of roles, including that of friend, temporary employer, and member of a shared community. It is a person who with singular vision, determination, engagement and insane amounts of work has managed to build a museum in town that has grown from an idea around the kitchen table to a modern, inclusive and smart institution that has finally found a permanent home in the park blocks.

I am, of course, talking about Judy Margles, the director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Before I turn to photographs of the new place, let me hasten to add that there were many helping hands, planning minds, engaged hearts and open checkbooks that made the transition from hole in the wall to shining flagship possible. I respect all of them, the talented and committed staff in particular, adore some of them and am grateful for a community that pulled through. However, let it be said, pulling teeth is also a term that comes to mind when thinking of the process, or pulling your hair out, when things, years back, faced obstacle after obstacle.

It takes a person with vision to pull it off, but also many other skills. It takes someone with patience, with the ability to persuade people, with a flexibility to change plans when necessary, with imagination regarding the asks, with smartness in choosing personell including curators, with a willingness to take risks where the rest of us would have long chickened out. We did not always see eye-to-eye when I worked at the museum, but I really want to express my boundless admiration for a lifetime work that generated something big, something important and something meaningful.

Hannah Arendt’s case for the Vita Activa included a philosophy of judgment as something that enables political actors to decide on actions in the public realm, on what goals to pursue and what actions, past or present, to praise or blame for their consequences. This is what you DO when you build a museum that ensures remembrance of Jewish history, including the Holocaust, out of practically nothing, investing most of your adult life. This is what Judy did.

Photos are of the museum in its new space; for detailed insight here is a link to a fitting review. http://www.orartswatch.org/a-bigger-bolder-jewish-museum/

A bigger, bolder Jewish Museum

The current Bruskin exhibit is wondrous; do yourself a favor and go look at it.

The café will open this week; an auditorium awaits lectures and discussions. The giftstore beckons.

DO GO!

Stumbling blocks, echoing the Stolpersteine you see all over Germany these days, inscribed with the names of those deported and killed, located in front of the houses they lived in.

Lesley Dill Vision Catcher – McNay Museum, San Antonio, Tx

I was strongly encouraged – hm, roundly scolded – hm, lovingly prodded –  last week to deal with my current pessimism regarding world affairs. Given that I take to the advice of my friends I decided to give myself a boost by looking at inspirational people this week.

And since it is Juneteenth today, I start with a memory of a man who I met during my volunteer days at Hospice. He was a small black man, shriveled to next to nothing in his last weeks of life, in his 90s, and of the sunniest disposition I have ever encountered in anyone. The range of laughter, sounds of mirth, clucking of amusement could have filled a whole symphony.

He was pain free – the gift of Hospice – and content with his life, ready to hang up his boots. We spent several afternoons talking about his life and all the adventures he had, growing up in Texas and eventually migrating to the North West.

He vividly remembered the Juneteenth celebrations – the holiday that commemorates the June 19, 1865 announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, and more generally the emancipation of African-American slaves throughout the Confederate South. The news came late to Texas – almost 3 years late, to be precise. And it did not go down well with the slave holders – at the time 250.000 slaves were seen as property in the state. The freedmen, however, started to celebrate the day in years to come, despite obstacles put in their path.

(Here is a link to a good article about how the day is memorialized:http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/18/1670962/-Juneteenth-and-the-memorial-to-black-history-in-Texas)

One such hurdle was the fact that state-sponsored segregation of facilities prohibited celebration in public parks. Freed people pooled funds to purchase land on which they held the Juneteenth celebrations in the larger cities, like Houston’s and Austin’s Emancipation Park. In smaller towns, folks like my guy instead went to the woods.

He described an annual frenzied week of preparation. The men would take a herd of swine to the woods. The pigs would root out all the poisonous snakes and eat them so that the place was made safe for the picnic to come. The women would prepare foods in advance and then every one would arrive for the celebration to sing and dance around the spits where those very life-saving pigs were now roasted for dinner. He swore that the meals of snake made the pig meat particularly tender and delectable. Hm, what do I know.

He had many stories to tell, some of them sad, but he always came up with a version that celebrated the good, focused on fierceness and overcoming. I’ll try and follow the model in the spirit of “Beat the Pessimism”!

Photographs are from Texas.

Then and now,

especially now: