Jackson Arn at Art in America:

The first thing I noticed about Le Cirque when I saw it at Pace was its clumsiness. The sculpture is comically, endearingly big: thirteen feet tall and almost a hundred feet in circumference, with elephant legs and zebra stripes like scribbles blown up a thousandfold. Since it didn’t have to compete for attention (the only other work in the exhibition was a 1968 maquette of Dubuffet’s equally sprawling Jardin d’émail), it seemed even bigger. As you walk through it, Le Cirque suggests the organic and the architectural all at once, as though the big top has somehow merged with the animals. For all its maker’s prestige, there’s still a whiff of third-grade daffiness in the air—I suppose there are higher compliments for the father of Art Brut, but I’m not sure what they’d be.

I’ve got nothing but love for this monster; its cage is a different story. Dubuffet’s late, large sculptures look their best—and were, in many cases, designed to be looked at—en plein air.

more here.

Dexter Filkins at The New Yorker:

In the final days of the Second World War, a train loaded with relics of the collapsing Third Reich was speeding toward the Czech border when American pilots, flying P-47 fighters, spotted it and opened fire. The train ground to a halt in a forest, where German soldiers spirited the cargo away. They were pursued, not long afterward, by Gordon Gilkey, a young captain from Linn County, Oregon, who had been ordered to gather up all the Nazi propaganda and military art he could find. Gilkey tracked the smugglers to an abandoned woodcutter’s hut, where he pried up the floorboards and found what he was looking for: a collection of drawings and watercolors belonging to the German military’s high command. The cache had survived the strafing, only to be afflicted by mildew and a family of hungry mice. “They had eaten the ends off many pictures, large holes in a few, and gave all the cabin pictures an uneven deckle edge,” Gilkey wrote.

more here.

Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I’m doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son’s room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal’s name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

by Michael Ondaatje
from bestpoems.net

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Although the literary theorist and anthropologist René Girard has many Silicon Valley disciples, surely the most notable of them is the German-born venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. A student of Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel would go on to report, in several interviews, and somewhat more sub-rosa in his 2014 book, From Zero to One, that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration. He is in the habit of recommending Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978) to others in the tech industry.

Girard has two big ideas, each intertwined with the other: the theory of mimesis, and the theory of the scapegoat. Michel Serres, another French theorist long resident at Stanford, and a strong advocate for Girard’s ideas, has described Girard as the “Darwin of the human sciences”, and has identified the mimetic theory as the relevant analog in the humanities of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

For Girard, everything is imitation. Or rather, every human action that rises above “merely” biological appetite and that is experienced as desire for a given object, in fact is not a desire for that object itself, but a desire to have the object that somebody else already has.

More here.

Radek Vana in Inquiries:

We are never alone. And by this statement, I do not intend to argue for existence of some supernatural entities, aliens or God. We are never alone because we all share our bodies with trillions of symbiotic microorganisms that perform various physiological functions crucial for our health. In fact, they may be responsible for even more than that. Here, I present a view that the symbiotic microbiota is an important part of the complex system constituting our consciousness. By consciousness, I mean the type called phenomenal consciousness (Block 2002) which stands for the subjective experience of what is it like to be someone (see Nagel 1974).

If we look at the contemporary literature on consciousness (e.g. Dehaene 2014; Northoff 2014; Graziano 2015; Feinberg and Mallatt 2017), we can see that the current trend in philosophy of mind is to focus on the role of the brain. This seems quite reasonable since for so long we thought that it is just the brain that creates our mind. However, new biological discoveries in the last decade suggest that we were wrong and there are also other actors at play with a causal impact on our mental states1.

In this paper, I first introduce the concept of holobiont and explain what it signifies for the study of consciousness. Next, I focus on the role of the brain-gut-microbiome axis and its importance for the future research in philosophy of mind. Then, I discuss whether the brain is a necessary condition for the existence of consciousness at all, and finally I conclude that our consciousness is our emergent property caused by the brain-gut-microbiome axis.

More here.

Fran Quigley in Jacobin:

“As the World Turns” is not just the title of an old TV soap,
but a thing that happens year by year.” — Sean O’Saical

Letter from My Ancestors

We wouldn’t write this,
wouldn’t even think of it. We are working
people without time on our hands. In the old country,

we milk cows or deliver the mail or leave,
scattering to South Africa, Connecticut, Missouri,
and finally, California for the Gold Rush—

Aaron and Lena run the Yosemite campground, general
store, a section of the stagecoach line. Morris comes
later, after the earthquake, finds two irons

and a board in the rubble of San Francisco.
Plenty of prostitutes need their dresses pressed, enough
to earn him the cash to open a haberdashery and marry

Sadie—we all have stories, yes, but we’re not thinking
stories. We have work to do, and a dozen children. They’ll
go on to pound nails and write up deals, not musings.

We document transactions. Our diaries record
temperatures, landmarks, symptoms. We
do not write our dreams. We place another order,

make the next delivery, save the next
dollar, give another generation—you,
maybe—the luxury of time

to write about us.

by Krista Benjamin
from The Best American Poetry, 2006
Scribner, 2006

Joanna Blythman in The Guardian:

The investigative journalist Gary Taubes is known for his painstakingly researched and withering demolitions of the “eat less, move more” diet orthodoxy, but his latest book is personal. The Case for Keto is aimed at “those of us who fatten easily”. Taubes locates himself in this beleaguered group, “despite an addiction to exercise for the better part of a decade” and a diet of “low-fat, mostly plant ‘healthy’ eating”. “I avoided avocados and peanut butter because they were high in fat and I thought of red meat, particularly steak and bacon, as an agent of premature death. I ate only the whites of egg.” Yet still he remained overweight.

Taubes started to shed those pounds when he realised that one-size-fits-all diet advice fails, among other reasons, because people are metabolically different. Some of us can eat fattening carbohydrates and sugar and get away with it; others can’t. Those who claim to have “a sluggish metabolism” are too often seen as making lame excuses for their weakness and indulgence. This punitive view – that fat people could easily be thin people if only they would eat less and exercise more diligently – is wrong, says Taubes. It amounts to what the philosopher Francis Bacon called “wishful science”, based on “fancies, opinions and the exclusion of contrary evidence”.

More likely, people who are perpetually fighting to lose weight have “a metabolic disorder of excess fat accumulation”. They store fat when they ought to burn it for energy. They become “insulin-resistant”, meaning that their insulin levels stay higher for longer in a day than is ideal. These people are predisposed to hold on to fat, notably above the waist, rather than to mobilise it. The only solution for them, Taubes says, is keto.

More here.

Edward Sorel in The New York Times:

Priya Satia in Aeon:

After the Second World War, historians asked us to shift our focus from great men to the actions and experiences of ordinary people, to culture rather than institutions. This methodological shift to ‘history from below’ was political, supporting a democratic vision of political, social, intellectual and cultural agency as the Cold War stoked authoritarian impulses in the East and West. It sought to rectify historians’ paternalistic habit of writing about the people ‘as one of the problems Government has had to handle’, as E P Thompson put it, as objects rather than subjects of history. Influential as this trend was, great-man history retained a cultural hold too and, today, the would-be ‘great men’ dominating political stages around the world, however caricature in form, challenge democratic visions of how history has been and should be made. ‘History from below’ succeeded in throwing out the chimera of great men while preserving the chimera of the nation that was the most common excuse for their invocation. Revisiting its origins might reveal why.

Thompson is perhaps the figure most popularly associated with ‘history from below’, specifically his totemic work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Expansive as its cast is, its geographical scope is constricting. Though set in the era of British conquest of vast swathes of the world, it barely acknowledges that reality. This is doubly strange, given that Thompson wrote it while decolonisation was forcing Britons to contend with the ethics of empire, and was himself descended from a line of colonial missionaries deeply engaged with such matters. His classic text created an island template for the most progressive British history of the late-20th century, unwittingly legitimising the nostalgic view of ‘Little England’ that has culminated in Brexit. The book’s enormous impact also ironically endowed Thompson with fairly robust great-man status himself, as the iconic historian-activist of his time.

More here.

Peter Gordon in The New Statesman:

Marxism has had a long and troubled relationship with religion. In 1843 the young Karl Marx wrote in a critical essay on German philosophy that religion is “the opium of the people”, a phrase that would eventually harden into official atheism for the communist movement, though it poorly represented the true opinions of its founding theorist. After all, Marx also wrote that religion is “the sentiment of a heartless world” and “the soul of soul-less conditions”, as if to suggest that even the most fantastical beliefs bear within themselves a protest against worldly suffering and a promise to redeem us from conditions that might otherwise appear beyond all possible change. To call Marx a “secularist”, then, may be too simple. Marx saw religion as an illusion, but he was too much the dialectician to claim that it could be simply waved aside without granting that even illusions point darkly toward truth.

In the 20th century the story grew even more conflicted. While Soviet Marxism turned with a vengeance against religious believers and sought to dismantle religious institutions, some theorists in the West who saw in Marxism a resource for philosophical speculation felt that dialectics itself demanded a more nuanced understanding of religion, so that its energies could be harnessed for a task of redemption that was directed not to the heavens but to the Earth. Especially in Weimar Germany, Marxism and religion often came together into an explosive combination. Creative and heterodox thinkers such as Ernst Bloch fashioned speculative philosophies of history to show that the religious past contained untapped sources of messianic hope that kept alive the “spirit of utopia” for modern-day revolution. Anarchists such as Gustav Landauer, a leader of post-1918 socialist uprising who was murdered by the far-right in Bavaria, strayed from Marxism into an exotic syncretism of mystical and revolutionary thought.

This strange chapter in the history of Marxist thought is of special relevance when we consider the ambivalent status of religion among the leading theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, also known as the “Frankfurt School”.

More here.

Mahmood Mamdani in Lapham’s Quarterly:

In the early period of American colonization, there was no reference to a place called Indian country. That is because every place was Indian country. Settlers in Maine rented land from Indians. In the Dutch and English colonies, settlers purchased land from Indians, either wholesale or piecemeal.

The term Indian country was first used in King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763. Under the system delineated by the Crown, Indian country was territory that Indians had the right to use but over which they did not have domain. The Crown retained the title to all colonized lands occupied by Indian tribes and granted the tribes use rights, which the king could revoke at will. Because the land belonged to the Crown, Indians who wished to sell their use rights could sell only to the Crown. After the War of Independence, the United States adopted the same scheme, and to this day Indians on reservations retain only “Indian title” or “right of occupancy.” Their holdings can be dissolved by congressional action.

The original language of the Constitution makes clear that Indians are aliens in the United States. The document makes just one substantive reference to Indians. In article 1, section 8, Congress is granted power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with Indian Tribes.” Leading theorists of the early republic also understood the Indians as a foreign challenger to settlement. In Federalist 24 Alexander Hamilton described “the savage tribes on our western frontier” as natural enemies of the United States and natural allies of the British and Spanish, and he cited Indian tribes as justification for maintaining a national defense force. In Federalist 25 Hamilton reiterated his view that Indians were foreign enemies, raising the specter that Britain and Spain would join forces with Indian tribes to encircle the union from Maine to Georgia. Later arguments for the Second Amendment right to form armed militias for collective defense of the “free state” are easily understood from the perspective of settlers who feared attacks by natives perceived to be enemies of that state.

The view of Indian tribes as enemies and aliens had to be squared with the undeniable fact that Indians lived in territories claimed by the nascent United States.

More here.

Via Open Culture: