by Brooks Riley

by Joan Harvey

1) invisibility

I’ve been pondering how, in all the Covid-19 turmoil, so many who believe in an invisible God have become the last to give credence to actually existing but invisible substances. There is some irony in people risking their lives by crowding together to pray to something for which there is no evidence. Pray for what? Long life? Their mothers’ health? People can imagine some great dude in the sky, but not that something unseen but proven by science can actually hurt them, or that by carrying it unknowingly they could accidentally hurt others. In some cases, of course, they believe that because of Jesus, they are immune.

Barbara Adam points out that imagination is a necessity when considering the latent effects of invisible forces over time:

Since we have no sense organ for time, we need. . . the entire complement of our senses working in unison with our imagination before we can experience its workings in our bodies and the environment. Such an effort at the level of imagination is needed if we are to be able to take account in our dealings with the environment of latency and immanence, pace and intensity, contingency and context dependence. . . the influence of the past and the projection into an open future.[i]

The majority of infectious diseases are at their most infectious before symptoms appear. Meanwhile, as I write, Florida and Texas still consider worship an essential activity. Even if one lacks imagination, one can believe in God, I suppose, because of lifetimes of indoctrination. We are certainly a gullible nation and apparently at least half of Americans “are absolutely certain Heaven exists, ruled over by a person God—not some vague force or universal spirit but a guy.”[ii] I don’t mean to dismiss those who believe deeply in God and yet also take science seriously. But those are generally not the ones who have been crowding megachurches and claiming the virus is a hoax. And, of course, believers are being grossly manipulated for both economic and political aims. Read more »

Mother Writes to Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born Prince Louis of Battenberg), Last Viceroy of India, Cuckolded by Nehru,  Assassinated by the IRA.

27 August 2019

Dear Lord Louis,

Last night I dreamt we were flying
on an Oriental rug above graveyards

of the Kashmir valley
your hand clasped securely in mine.

We chased our own shadows
over the barbed wire architecture

of the Line of Control
into Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

“My sixth child was born here just
years after the Partition,” I said,

but the wind dispersed my words
as we swirled above shiny rivers.

“The Punjab!” you said. “Land
of five rivers dressed in wheat.

Here, feudal landlords pressed
Jinnah to demand Partition.”                 

You steered us through
battalions of monsoon clouds

to the land’s edge —— Karachi.
“We created Pakistan,” you said,

smirking, “in order to prevent the
Soviets from using this warm port.” Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

For the same reason as large parts of the world, I spend even more time indoors these days than I already would. One thing I have been doing is rereading the Harry Potter books – or paying Stephen Fry to read them to me.

I will have you know that I ‘grew up with the books’; if you are only even a few years younger than me, I will act as if I were the only living person to actually remember what it was like to wait, years and years, for the next part of the story. Not that I am not thrilled to see how many teenagers are still reading the books and watching the movies. When a student informs me that she hasn’t done her math homework “because I am a witch, and didn’t want to waste my time with Muggle subjects”, my nostalgia loses its solipsistic edge: right, yes, there are other people, whole generations even, to whom Hogwarts means no less than it does to me. They also want to live there.

Hogwarts is a curious place to want to live, even disregarding all the health and safety issues. Re-reading the books as an adult also provides an opportunity to read them with present-day societal and cultural issues in the back of your mind, and to contrast and compare the times in which they were written with our current condition. I don’t mean the corona crisis – my mind works too slow to have anything to say about that; I mean (cultural) politics. What, if anything, do the books have to say to us today? Spoilers ahead. Read more »

The empty A22 Autobahn snakes past the town of Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol on its way to Austria during lockdown in April of 2020.

by Susan D’Aloia

In the memoir, Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life, the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi chooses to become a monk at the peak of his youthful potential. He rejects the spiritual path as a mere life enhancer and encourages readers to embark on a more totalizing journey of self-actualization. By embracing mystery, as opposed to cultural explanations, we can arrive at deeper questions. This wish bookends this carefully written memoir, which is co-authored by Zara Houshmand.  Despite an already crowded landscape of books depicting religious quests and spiritual advice- both classics and new works – this book is bound to be widely read if for no other reason than Priyadarshi’s current role as a thought leader while serving as the first Buddhist chaplain at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There are other reasons to read it, however. The book’s prose captures Bengal with earthy affection as it paints family, guides and mentors with a vibrance that at times overshadows Priyadarshi’s steadfast determination to become a monk. The book also provides geographical understanding of Buddhism’s historicity in modern India, including Nehru’s cultural support of Buddhist monasteries in neighboring countries, as well as the supporting role the monk’s extended family played to assure the Dalai Lama’s protection out of Tibet.  Such highlights make up for writers’ reticence to more profoundly negotiate karma or provide substantial insight regarding the technological direction that has penetrated our lives. The authors mention both themes to be of concern, but don’t address either of them directly with much follow through. This falls in line with the book’s gentle suggestion to prioritize self-imposed inquiry as opposed to relying on cultural explanations for spiritual answers.  Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

When I think back on when I realized that I think differently than most people, what surprises me most is that I didn’t realize it sooner.

The earliest indication that I can explicitly recall would have occurred to me some time in the 1990’s. It was around then that I’d learned about the “method of places” technique for memorization — also known as the “memory palace” technique.

The technique works like this. Choose a location that you know very well from memory — say, the street where you grew up. Visualize yourself walking down the street, observing landmarks along your walk. Now, when you want to memorize items in a list in order, simply visualize those items at locations along the familiar path in your mind.

I could pretend that I first learned about the method of places from Jonathan Spence’s 1984 book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, but it’s likely that I actually encountered it first in Thomas Harris’s 1999 novel Hannibal. Harris would have led me to Spence’s book — as well as to Frances Yates’s 1966 book The Art of Memory.

The technique is one of the most widely used strategies by mnemonists — like the journalist Joshua Foer, who wrote about how he employed the technique to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship in his 2011 book Moonwalking With Einstein.

Now, the technique is not easy. It took Foer a year of concentrated effort to prepare for the Memory Championship, for example. But when I set out to try it for myself, I found that I was unable even to get started.

The problem was that first step: visualization. I can’t do that. I’ve never been able to. Read more »

On the Edge of a Joke

on the tip of my tongue
a funny thing is on edge

an ambivalent thing I think,
as if a comedian on a brink
in a no-nonsense universe
of serious laughs is set to sail or sink

but all anticipation feels this way
in the space before a punch line,
in the knot between chuckle or groan,
waiting for a laugh or its dark doppelganger
in the world between cozy dream and
I-really-need-to-wake-up-now-unalone

Jim Culleny
5/6/18

Thanks to A. R. for a dream he shared which included the line,
“…on the edge of a joke,“ which now seems even more apropos.

by Abigail Akavia

A few thoughts about working from home, about “home”, about writing and about not-writing. About myself, with full realization of the incredible privilege that allows me to write—in normal days and, a fortiori, in days of pandemic.

When the reality of the COVID19 tsunami began to hit us here in northeast Germany, my husband suggested we should pack a suitcase or two and go to Israel, or “go back” to Israel, where we both grew up, where most of our immediate relatives and many of our closest friends live. But where—I repeatedly countered in the anxiety-ridden conversations we had in those faraway times of three weeks ago—we don’t live anymore. We haven’t lived there for over a decade. We don’t have a house or an apartment there, we don’t have a home there. The thought of living in a rented space for the foreseeable future without most of my stuff, without my routines, however blanched-out they are these days, forbidden by law to see my kids’ grandparents and my friends, was panic-inducing to me. I’d rather stay here, where I don’t have to relearn where the coffee mugs are shelved.

It was around the time that videos of quarantined neighbors singing from their windows and balconies starting pouring out of Italy. This was never explicitly said between us, but if I had to explain the terror my husband (and even if to a lesser extent, definitely I, too) felt at staying confined and socially isolated in Germany, I would put it like this: the thought that our neighborhood would start singing—a song we don’t know, in German—and that we would feel a sense of alienation and exclusion, rather than solidarity and belonging. So far, this hasn’t happened (partially, but certainly not only, because the restrictions here are less severe than elsewhere, and people are still allowed to leave their houses to take walks, for example). And who knows, maybe if it does happen, the hipsters of our block will opt for some internationally beloved civil rights movement anthem in which we can join. Either way, like all anxieties, this one too—being cooped up in our apartment, fearing that food will soon run out, surrounded by East-Germans—tells us more about our psyche than about the likelihood of an actual scenario in the world.  Read more »

by Thomas Wells

Among other things Covid-19 is a moral crisis. It requires suspending the usual rules about who deserves what, firstly because it is impossible for many of us to pay what we owe in these conditions, and secondly because of the priority of the humanitarian duty to save as many lives as possible. Nevertheless we must not forget about justice. In particular we must make sure that the costs of this crisis are not born disproportionately by the poor, those least able to afford the burden but also least able to escape it.

An economy is a complex web made up of the promises we are continually making to each other. Those promises may not always be perfectly fair, but they are generally quite precise. They tell us what is expected from us and what we have the right to expect from others, from what time to take our kids to school to how many months of unemployment insurance we can count on if we lose our job. The trouble is that our ability to keep our promises depends on other people and organisations keeping their promises to us. If any particular link fails, it can be repaired, compensated, worked around, and so on. But if multiple links fail at the same time we are plunged into a moral crisis wherein our usual moral scripts cannot provide guidance. We need suddenly to look up from our tidy little life-worlds and think from the perspective of the whole (even global) society.

Many people, including leaders of government agencies and firms, have clearly struggled to get their heads around this breakdown of business-as-usual morality. They still see things in terms of what is fair or not under the old rules about what people deserve. Hence their slowness to recognise that gig workers need unemployment benefits even if they never paid the premiums, and that the uninsured need to know their medical care will be (almost) free. This is perhaps not so strange. As leaders well know, humans are very sensitive to promise-breaking and free-riding, and in normal times there is nothing more toxic to the functioning of any organisation or community. Fortunately most governments and even some businesses have recognised the need for a more humanitarian moral compass. Read more »

Valeriya Zvereva. Slime Mold.

Macro photography.

More here.

by Brooks Riley

by Robert Frodeman

The coronavirus amounts to an ongoing, real-world experiment in societal response to an international calamity. The pandemic will be studied for decades, but COVID has already taught us much about the relationship between science and decision-making.

Two recent essays begin the process of making sense of our predicament. In Pandemic Science and Politics, Dan Sarewitz claims that the unique features of the COVID-19 virus reveal central truths about the connection between facts and values. In COVID-19: the Medium is the Message, Laurie Garrett believes that in an age of misinformation, underfunding communication staffs at agencies like WHO becomes a deadly mistake.

For Sarewitz, COVID reveals the nature of the relation between science and politics. The virus brings clarity that stands in contrast to our usual “disagreements around climate change, nuclear energy, mammograms, K–12 public education, chemicals in the environment…” For in the case of COVID,

• We all have the same value – to save lives
• Causality is clear – everyone agrees about what’s causing illness
• Facts are sufficient to create a plan of action – even if they turn out to be wrong

COVID highlights the fact that “science’s place in politics is determined not by the logic of facts, but by the fundamental influence of human values.” Science gains its centrality in the current crisis because we already line up on questions of value. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

“Will we survive this?” my husband asks me as we lounge around the living room, glued to our laptops. “We are in the vulnerable group.” I look up at a bald man with thinning gray tufts over his ears, peering anxiously at me over black-rimmed glasses. Yes, we are certainly in the vulnerable group. What happened to that bright-eyed young man with fifteen pounds of black hair on his head, the one sporting sideburns that put Elvis to shame? Over his shoulder I see our son also looking expectantly at me, Camus’s The Plague in hand, open halfway.

“Dr. Rieux was only too well aware of the serious turn things had taken.” I think of our other boy, locked down in New York where the virus is on a vicious rampage. I send my child a panic-stricken WhatsApp message even though it is the middle of the night there. He answers, “I am fine ma, don’t stress,” and goes back to sleep. He is brave, that one, and sensible too.

So finally it has come marching in, with remarkable audacity and crackling energy, generating fear, closing down schools, colleges, businesses, shops, restaurants, hotels. Blowing away vendors and hawkers, leaving streets deserted and even the public parks locked. It comes, this COVID-19, not with the saints but with spring. Those glorious, wondrous, fragrant, colorful couple of weeks in Punjab when normally you can imagine that all is well with the world. A time when gulmohar trees burst into brilliant red flaming flowers, regular ordinary vegetation replicates itself overnight, as if possessed of some wild crazy RNA, in places you could not think possible. Rows upon rows of bluish-purple petunias, golden nasturtiums, hollyhocks, snapdragons, gleeful sunflowers, bold dahlias, and lush bougainvillea laden with voluptuous bunches of magenta, violet, and burned-orange clusters draped over walls. And roses! Read more »

Self-portrait with my wife in a reflection from a car window during a brief walk in the sun just outside our house three days ago.

by Mindy Clegg

The taste for the end times as a dramatic backdrop well preceded our current pandemic lock-down, but now seems as good a time as any to explore the popularity of end-of-time dramas as any other. Perhaps we can take some solace from a discussion of others surviving worse situations than our own, even if fictional. Philosopher and pop culture theorist Slavoj Žižek (or it might have been Fredrick Jameson) once noted that the popularity of apocalyptic culture tended to be driven by the all-encompassing power of our current global system, noting that it’s easier for us to imagine the world’s end rather than it’s transformation.¹ This seems to break with earlier popular culture that imagined some level of continuity between our present and the future, such as Star Trek. If today we have a harder time imagining productive change to our globalized system, at least our visions of its collapse are numerous and offer compelling viewing. The Walking Dead comic and TV series are a prime example of that sort of entertainment. I argue here that although the series and comic seem on the surface to explore only the collapse of our modern systems of governance and our globalized economy, the focus instead rests on what we keep and what we leave behind as we rebuild in the wake of some kind of wide-spread devastation. In many ways, the Walking Dead offers an alternative to ideologies like the Milton Friedman “shock doctrine” that turns disasters into fodder for privatization.²

Just a note for fans of the show or comic: I’ll include spoilers here for what I’ve watched thus far and for the comic, as that has recently concluded. Read more »