by William Benzon

If Harold Bloom is correct in asserting that, in some sense, Shakespeare invented the human, not in the sense that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison the light bulb, Hedy Lamar got a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, not to mention Yahweh’s work on Adam and Eve, but in the modest sense that he bequeathed us a deeper understanding of ourselves through giving voice to aspects of human behavior that had hitherto gone unremarked. Bloom singles out Hamlet for special consideration, arguing that he is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest gift – though Falstaff is in the running. Hamlet has come down to us as the melancholy Dane. Accordingly, let us conjecture that modern man was born in melancholy.

A few years later Robert Burton would publish The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was a smash hit and went through five more editions during Burton’s life. It made Burton’s printer a fortune. While the book is indeed about melancholy, it is also about damned near everything else under the sun. It was subsequently parodied in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, no mean feat as the original has something of a parodic character unto itself.

Here is how Burton defined melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

To live is to know melancholy. We post-moderns are more likely to call it depression.

That’s what this post is about, depression, but also growth. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Science Experiment as Painting. April, 2017.

Digital photograph.

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Purse Strings

My mind’s a purse in which
I keep my stash
if its purse strings are loose
I might add to its load
when new coin comes to town
but if I tighten down
the purse strings of my mind
they’ll garrote its capaciousness
and all that God might have me be
may be hopelessly consigned
to dangle from their noose

Jim Culleny, 2014

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by David Greer

My friend R is a man who takes his simple pleasures seriously, so I asked him to name one for me. Boathouses, he said, without hesitation.

To the best of my knowledge, R has never owned a boat. No canoe or coracle, not a dinghy or dory, nor even a yacht. His abiding passion has always been small planes, especially the four-seat Beech Bonanza he likes to fly to tiny airstrips scattered about the continent, which serve in turn as starting points for terrestrial excursions (folding bicycle) to the back of beyond with his lady love, B.

So why boathouses?

“Well,” said R, “I love the light of the water reflecting on the walls and ceiling of the boathouse. And it’s hard to imagine a more relaxing sound than the gentle lapping of waves against a boathouse slip. It’s a sound that accentuates the pleasure of writing or reading or simple conversation. If you’re inclined to nap, as one does on holiday, there’s nothing more conducive to drifting off to sleep, and then you have the pleasure of a gentle awakening to a charming view of lake or ocean. All nicely framed by the boathouse doors.”

All of which explains why R and B, on their forthcoming trip to Austria to ride motorcycles on winding mountain roads, plan to rent a lake boathouse (mod cons included) as their base. It will be a peaceful counterpoint to the frenetic ecstasy of navigating the “twisties”, as they call the alpine hairpin turns.

Once upon a time, boathouses were simple affairs, erected for the sole purpose of providing safe haven to boats, the kind operated by sweep of arm and sweat of brow. As with all things simple, times changed. Complexities ensued. The two-stroke engine was invented, so boathouses expanded to accommodate motorboats. Motorboats got bigger, and boathouses got larger still. That gave someone the notion to take advantage of the swelling footprint and add a second storey with a bedroom or two, maybe throw in a bathroom, above the boat slips, to the point that many lakeshore boathouses today are more guesthouse than boathouse. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

A pen between God-fingers, a walking stick dragon,
my blind mind taps along its cane of thought. Rumi (trans. Barks)

Saturday morning. Not quite ready for coffee from the espresso machine. Eyes closed. Brooding over the thises and thats. Remembering the start of a thread of thought that wove forward and backwards over the last couple of days. Now trying to remember and writing some of it down.

Here’s the poem which started it.

Map of the New World

1. Archipelagoes

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of the islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbors
of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.
Helen’s hair, a grey cloud.
Troy a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey. Derek Walcott

Reading it touched something that’s been on my mind. I found myself wondering how long it would be before the Homer in the last lines would go unrecognized by everyone except scholars. I fear the loss of the mythologies of Greece and Rome that provided a binding field of imagery and felt-meaning to centuries of poets of the West. Yes, it is part of the general down grading of the humanities but also an understanding that one can no longer be well-educated and eurocentric. And we are finite. We do not have “world enough and time,” memory enough and time. So much must be lost, replaced, Forgotten. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Paradise Lost

BOOK I

Editor’s Synopsis – As the narrative of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad begins, the Trojan War whose violence it recounts is nearly at an end. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and the rest of the invading Greeks had already been arrayed about the besieged city for a decade at the point where Homer invokes the muses. Homer’s other great epic, The Odyssey, similarly begins in the middle of things; not with brave Ulysses having left Troy to return home to Ithaca, but rather with the hero imprisoned on the idyllic isle of the nymph Calypso. Because Milton was a keen reader of the Greek and Latin classics, he too begins his epic in the middle – in media res – not with the epic War in Heaven whereby Lucifer and a third of the angels who had chosen to rebel against God were caste out, but instead after they’ve already been exiled into the inferno, regrouping following their defeat by the divine host. As a rhetorical gambit, in media res engages the reader by rearranging the chronological expectations of the epic, understanding that implication can often be more effective than straightforward recounting. Arguably the most eminently quotable books of Paradise Lost, with some of Milton’s most familiar turns of phrase, the beginning of the epic lays out its authors purpose – to tell tale of humanity’s initial disobedience and the nature of our fall, to justify the ways of God to man, and to do all of this in a language that had never before been accomplished. What follows is Satan’s rallying of his demonic troops, his justifications for their coming assault on God’s new creation of humans, and his self-serving philosophy of greatness. – E.S. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

The gym I was trying to like last year had a manic male trainer who wore tight shorts and had a microphone attached to his head. He ran around on a firm mattress-like floor giving members high-fives like the good participants we were supposed to be, and even telling us to high-five each other or clap for ourselves after each section. I introduced myself to him before the session started and told him about my knee issues. He looked at me and then looked away, and said “Only do what feels comfortable because you don’t want to get hurt.” Then he added with enthusiasm ”You will rock this”, giving me a high five. I was secretly worried that I wasn’t going to rock much, given that I was one of the older participants. I felt overwhelmed by the loud music pumping through the big open space, but as I usually do with gyms in general, I thought I had found a place where I could attend the least number of times and get the most amount of benefit, so I signed up for one month to give it a try. This is a gym that offers free childcare and is geared towards women, most of them moms who really like the day care option. The club advertised itself as a place where you give them a week and you will fall in love with the process. When asked if I loved the place during my second visit, I replied “I am trying to figure out if I like it” but the over-enthusiastic receptionist didn’t care for my answer. She asked what I wasn’t sure about and I told her the noise level was too high for me. She had an even louder laugh than the music and the trainer on the microphone combined, and said “Hahaha, you will get used to it. It motivates people to work out longer”.

Another gym I tried for a few months was a high intensity place that was run by very kind people; for most of them, this was their second job and for some, it was their religion. I felt seen and accepted, and the trainers made a lot of accommodations for me. I didn’t have to jump over high black boxes, or climb the wall, or run. For the warm up, I was allowed to walk or use the stationary bike. It was all too good to be true, and everyone would call me by my name, as in “Azi, you are doing great” or “Azi, you are strong today.” Soon enough though, about five weeks in, I hurt my right knee and couldn’t participate anymore. Someone there told me there is no shame in getting hurt and I could still participate in the Murph, even if I don’t complete it. I shook my head in agreement and when I got home, I googled The Murph to see what she was saying. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Continuing my previous 3QD post about Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva, and an earlier piece contextualizing literary representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, today I want to discuss the work of Sindiwe Magona. She is one of South Africa’s most renowned Black women writers, and her autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) is required reading about apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s. Magona went on to publish Beauty’s Gift in 2008, a novel dealing with the devastation of AIDS in South Africa during the early twenty-first century. The protagonist is called Beauty and she lives up to that name, being beautiful inside and out. But she exists off-stage, so to speak, since the novel narrates in a non-linear manner some events from August to December 2002.

These are recounted from the perspectives of Beauty’s four closest friends, Amanda, Edith, Cordelia, and Doris, all women in their early to mid-thirties. The novel opens on Beauty’s funeral, described in free indirect discourse through her oldest friend Amanda’s focalization. We find out quickly that Amanda hates Beauty’s surviving husband, Hamilton, as ‘a silent message of loathing’ is exchanged by the two. The reason for this hatred, readers discover, is that the suave ‘man of substance’ Hamilton had conducted multiple love affairs. As a consequence he had infected his wife with HIV, which in her case leads to rapid physical deterioration and death from AIDS soon afterwards. In her ‘Introduction’ to the ten-year anniversary edition of the novel, Magona writes of ‘the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life – especially young life. Absolute devastation’. She also explores the initial assumption that this was a plague affecting gay men, and her horror on realizing that hardly a home in South Africa would be unaffected by the disease. Accordingly, even as they mourn her, Beauty’s friends start looking at their own marriages, discovering husbands’ infidelities, and worrying about tests and HIV status.

Early on, Magona presents readers of Beauty’s Gift with a startling image: the beautiful and ‘beloved’ Beauty laid to rest in an opulent casket, which is then fixed in the earth with cement to prevent theft. Her friends’ memories of Beauty’s charisma and kindness are concretized by the weight of her death from AIDS. From the outset, funerals emerge not merely as a plot point but a structuring device for understanding the social and political implications of the AIDS crisis in South Africa. After opening her novel with Beauty’s funeral, Magona continues with vignettes about various stages of illness, death, and grief. These include a wake, the mourning period, Beauty’s posthumous ceremony of drinking water and the spade-washing rite, followed by other people’s funerals. Through this framework, Magona creates a narrative of gendered suffering and resilience. Read more »

Broken symmetry: a high-altitude airliner above Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Jeroen van Baar

Humans are beings of staggering complexity. We don’t just consist of ourselves: billions of bacteria in our gut help with everything from digestion to immune response.

In recent years, scientists have started to uncover how this ‘gut microbiome’ shapes a variety of health outcomes including obesity and depression. For instance, when researchers transplanted fecal matter from depressed humans to rats, those rats started showing signs of depression themselves. We’re still unsure why this happens—it could have to do with the production of neurotransmitters, which depends on how food is processed—but the gut microbiome forms a promising horizon of health science.

This has raised the obvious question why the biome in your belly looks the way it does. Where did it come from? We normally assume that the microbiome is mostly shaped by the food we eat. But a new Nature study provides a radical refinement of this story: our social interactions can shape the microbial communities living inside us.

The study involved mapping the social networks and sequencing the microbiomes of 1,787 adults in 18 isolated villages in Honduras. Participants were asked to self-collect stool samples, which were stored in liquid nitrogen and shipped to the USA for analysis. A detailed survey and photographic census helped participants identify their social connections, including their friends and family.

Analyzing the data, the research team found that the gut microbiome looked the most similar between members of the same household: they shared up to 14% of the microbial strains in their guts. However, even friends who see each other regularly shared about 8% of strains, while strangers from the same village shared only 4%. Microbiome similarity even extended to friends of friends, forming potential transmission chains that spread strains within communities. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Self Portrait Against Table Mountain. August, 2019.

Digital photograph.

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by Tim Sommers

Why have a democracy? Because democracy is always right.

There are two kinds of arguments in favor of democracy: intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsic arguments try to show that democracy is good in-and-of-itself – and not as simply a means to some other end or ends. Instrumental arguments try to show that democracy is good because it leads to some good.

There are two main kinds of intrinsic arguments: those based on liberty and those based on equality. The most straight-forward kind of liberty argument says that we should be free, but to be free means not only to govern ourselves, but to have some control of our larger social and material environment. Democracy gives us that control. The trouble is that in actually existing democracies very, very few people are able to exert any real influence on society or their material conditions via the political process. Democracy does not make most of us free, at least in this way.

Here’s a different kind of liberty argument. We all have certain basic rights. Among the basic rights, liberties, and freedoms we possess in a liberal democracy – freedom of religion, free speech, the right to the rule of law, etc. – there are also rights of political participation – political speech, a right to free assembly, etc. What does this kind of pro forma right to some kind of political participation really amount to, though?

There’s no right to vote in the US Constitution. And Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem shows there is no way of counting votes that can satisfy all of the seemingly simple and reasonable conditions voting must bear. To oversimplify a bit, there is no way of voting that always gives us an answer, always depends on the input of more than one person, gives a way of deciding between candidates based on voting (and nothing else), and insures that the choice between any two candidates is independent of how the voter feels about other candidates.

Fortunately, there are also equality-based arguments for democracy. Many political philosophers have argued that democracy is a way of treating people equally. But lotteries treat people equally too. Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

Much philosophical writing about food has included discussions of whether and why food can be a serious aesthetic object, in some cases aspiring to the level of art. These questions often turn on whether we create mental representations of flavors and textures that are as orderly and precise as the representations we form of visual objects.

The claim that we do not form such ordered, mental  representations is central to the view that food and drink cannot be serious aesthetic objects or works of art. The reason is that genuine aesthetic experience requires the apprehension of form or structure. In the absence of structured representations there is no form to apprehend. (See Part 1 of this essay for a more detailed account of mental representations of aroma.)

I want to argue that the skeptics have a point although they draw the wrong inference from it. Our flavor experiences do, in fact, rest on weak representations. They lack the stable, detailed, clearly identifiable objects that vision typically yields. However, these weak representations allow for the apprehension of a different kind of structure, what I shall call a nomadic distribution (or continuously changing structure), and it is in fact this nomadic distribution of flavor that enables the aesthetic experiences characteristic of our engagement with food. The main point to draw from this is that cuisine is about transformation, one thing becoming another, and it is ill served by theoretical perspectives that rely on mental representations with firm identity conditions.

The explanations for why flavor and aroma are weakly representational fall into three categories—flavors are ephemeral, ambiguous, and difficult to remember with precision. Read more »

Damocles

In perilous times we join the otherworld,
the one that’s outside
our bubble

who’s driving this bus?
who’s at the helm?
who jiggles the joystick?

we man our posts
we soothe ourselves
but one day must come to terms:

I saw a cormorant, wings spread
drying herself in the wind after lunch
oblivious to the dilemma of our recklessness
but snared nevertheless in its reach

but time itself is oblivious,
and space

so, who?

Jim Culleny
7/10/19

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by Mike Bendzela

I lie on a futon in a little room tucked in a turret of an old funeral home-turned-apartment building in Binghamton, New York, listening to election returns coming in over my clock radio. It is a Tuesday night in 1984, the year of Orwell’s never-ending fever dream. Madonna and Prince and Michael and Bruce play incessantly on the radio between election reports. The unfolding AIDS epidemic is a thing no one wants to talk about: A friend, a PhD candidate in poetry, is sick in faraway Florida, but none of us in the department even knows about it yet. He will be dead in six months.

I am a year into my stint in graduate school. (Two years will be more than enough for me.) The path to my master’s degree in English has been a circuitous one, even tortuous: As an undergraduate, I started out in geology with a little climatology, detoured into art and design for two years, then ended up studying American literature. But I have never lost my love of the Earth sciences.

Ronald Reagan, at 73, is the oldest candidate ever to run for election — or, in this case, re-election — as President of the United States, against . . . What’s his name again? This election marks (I firmly believe) our last chance as a civilization to change course and sail towards a Green Future, an inkling of which we saw with President Jimmy Carter. I do not know if What’s-his-name is the answer, but we all know Reagan ain’t. One term could be a fluke. A second, collective suicide.

Several months hence, the great science communicator, Carl Sagan, will say to the United States Senate, “If you don’t worry about it now, it will be too late later on.”* His talk is a plea to those in power to start controlling carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. The concentration of atmospheric CO2 in 1984 is 344 parts per million and the global temperature anomaly a barely noticeable +0.40° Celsius.* Carbon dioxide concentration MUST be kept below 350 ppm, or the planet will heat up, creating havoc. And there are other pollutants to worry about. And also oil depletion, deforestation, ocean acidification, wildlife habitat loss, over-population. A collapsing civilization does not seem far-fetched.

False alarm! It is Morning in America.* Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Recently I stepped into the underworld of fungi in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures. His book took me to an ancient world, tirelessly and inconspicuously working away and doing its vital job of literally interlacing the planet and holding it together to make life sustainable. The entry into this curious world was through the rather unassuming life form that most of us are more accustomed to eating than we are to learning about its existence: the mushroom.

Mushrooms are, for most of us,  just another source of food, or indeed choose the wrong kind to consume and the adverse effects are likely to be more dangerous than delicious. They are though, fruiting bodies of fungi whose appearance on the surface is aimed at the reproductive role of dispersing millions of spores into the atmosphere to secure their existence.

Colourful mushrooms of all sizes and shapes poking their heads up from the leafy undergrowth of a woodland or forming colonies of various architectural designs on dead trees, have never failed to draw my attention during my wanderings through wooded areas. Fascinated by these humble looking elegant protuberances that decorate the forests, on some occasions I have taken the time to count the varieties I have seen and found several different types on any one day. But as I learned from Sheldrake, my enthusiasm for the diversity of the mushrooms I observed was quite trivial in comparison with the numbers of fungi on the planet: there are, literally, millions of species throughout the world. Read more »