The above image comes from a new study that comparatively mapped the brain activity of people on placebos (left) and psilocybin (right):
Each circle depicts relationships between networks — the dots and colours correspond not to brain regions, but to especially connection-rich networks — with normal-state brains at left, and psilocybin-influenced brains at right. In mathematical terms, said [researcher Giovanni] Petri, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There’s not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.
“We can speculate on the implications of such an organisation,” wrote the researchers, who were led by neurobiologist Paul Expert of King’s College London. “One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia” — the experience, common during psychedelic experiences, of sensory mix-up: tasting colours, feeling sounds, seeing smells, and so on.
The superb American poet Galway Kinnell, who was also a sweet, generous, gallant, much-beloved man, died peacefully in Sheffield, Vermont this past Tuesday. When The Book of Nightmares, long considered one of his best, was published in 1971, fellow poet John Logan wrote, “Each generation looks about to see who the great ones are in the arts, and in our time we can single out Galway Kinnell as one of the few consummate masters in poetry.”
His Selected Poems, published in 1982, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and shared the National Book Award that year with Charles Wright’s Country Music: Selected Early Poems. The reception of the book was extraordinary, exemplified by the praise of Richard Tillinghast in The Boston Review, “This book is proof that poems can still be written movingly and convincingly, on those subjects that in any age fascinate, quicken, disturb, confound, and sadden the hearts of men and women: eros, the family, mortality, the life of the spirit, war, the life of nations.” After September 11th, The New Yorker published his profound meditation, When the Towers Fell, which he read from the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to a public aching for poetic witness. A friend who was there told me, “Fighter jets flew overhead, the sky was as blue as it had been on 9/11, and it was as intense a civic moment as one could have. Or, put another way, the civic became intensely personal.” Up to the moment the magazine was to be printed, Galway’s revisions were sliding through the fax machine at a tremendous clip. The consummate master was a consummate reviser, too, which inspired the legions of students he taught over the decades.
“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014):
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
Christian Jarrett surveys research into heterosexual relationships in which one partner was “poached” from a previous lover. He notes two studies that found that poached partners “reported progressively lower levels of commitment and satisfaction in their relationships”:
It makes intuitive sense that people who were poached by their partners showed less commitment and satisfaction in their existing relationship. After all, if they were willing to abandon a partner in the past, why should they not be willing or even keen to do so again? This logic was borne out by a final study of 219 more heterosexual participants who answered questions not just about the way their current relationship had been formed, but also about their personalities and attitudes.
[Researcher Joshua] Foster and his team summarised the findings: “individuals who were successfully mate poached by their current partners tend[ed] to be socially passive, not particularly nice to others, careless and irresponsible, and narcissistic. They also tend[ed] to desire and engage in sexual behaviour outside of the confines of committed relationships.” The last factor in particular (measured formally with the “Socio-sexual Orientation Inventory-revised”) appeared to explain a large part of the link between having been poached by one’s partner and having weak commitment to the new relationship.
The practice isn’t just de rigueur for well-off Westerners; Linda Besner notes that Indian yoga televangelist Swami Ramdev has built a $250 million empire catering to India’s affluent. She’s not surprised:
It’s tempting to see an association between yoga and the rich, both in the West and in the East, as proof of the modern corruption of an old tradition. But it’s worth asking why we are surprised that yoga culture should be attractive to the wealthy. Asceticism largely appeals to people only when they have a choice. The Buddha was a prince, and early followers of his ascetic lifestyle were equally well-heeled. In Christian and Jewish culture as well, the documents left behind by early ascetic communities suggest that they were composed mainly of highly educated and comparatively wealthy believers. Voluntary simplicity is just that—voluntary. Eating bread and water when you can afford better is called asceticism; when you can’t, it’s just called starving.
Nonsense, asserts Zoë Heller, who declares that “[n]othing in my experience suggests that literary taste is a reliable guide to a person’s character, or that shared literary passions bespeak deeper spiritual kinship”:
I can see how disagreements about certain works of nonfiction might matter. If I were to come across a dear friend scribbling approving comments in the margins of “The Bell Curve,” that could be a game changer. And there are a few explicitly ideological novels (anything in the Ayn Rand oeuvre, for example) that I would be dismayed to find on a friend’s Favorite Books list. But the revelation in both these instances would be one of politics, of worldview, not of literary sensibility. Were a friend to tell me that he hated Jane Austen, my view of him and of our friendship would suffer not at all. I’ve known lots of fine men who did not “get” Austen and quite a few Janeites who were brutes. Besides which, my love of Austen is between Austen and me; it doesn’t need cheerleaders. …
Insisting that your loved one’s literary judgments be in harmony with your own suggests to me a rather dull and narcissistic notion of what constitutes intimacy. Do you really want to be one of those dreary couples who are always delivering their identical cultural opinions in the first person plural? (“Oh, we’re loving the latest volume of Knausgaard!”) One of the happiest romances I ever had was with a man who regarded George MacDonald Fraser’s “Quartered Safe Out Here” as the pinnacle of literary excellence. He also believed that Saul Bellow was a second-rate writer because “nothing ever happened” in his books. I thought he was mistaken in these matters, but I can’t say it bothered me much. Love is not love which alters when a man fails to appreciate “Herzog.”
Meanwhile, in another essay exploring literary intimacy, Helen Rosner suggests that “for a certain sort of person, sharing a book can be as intimate and exhilarating as sharing a kiss”:
Like a kiss, like a crush, like love itself, opening a book at someone else’s suggestion is simultaneously a solitary act and a shared one: We may travel these paths alone, but we visit common territory. When someone you love tells you about a book that he loves, it’s an act of revelation – intentional or not – that’s as intimate and vulnerable as being handed the keys to his childhood home. He’s telling you where he’s been, but even more than that, he’s trusting you to explore it on your own, knowing your steps will fall where his once did. (And oh, the thrilling signs and wonders that attend reading his own copy of the book: There’s a strange and profound power to holding the very same object in your hands that he once held and – by the same portkey – reaching, separately but identically, the same destination.)
Dwight Garner is fascinated by Jill Lepore’s complex, well-researched history of the comic-book icon:
On the one hand, the story it relates has more uplift than Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane or her eagle-encrusted red bustier. It’s a yea-saying tale about how this comic book character, created in 1941, remade American feminism and had her roots in the ideas and activism of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
On the other hand, The Secret History of Wonder Woman is fundamentally a biography of Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947). He was a Harvard graduate, a feminist and a psychologist who invented the lie detector test. He was also a huckster, a polyamorist (one and sometimes two other women lived with him and his wife), a serial liar, and a bondage super-enthusiast.
It turns out that decades of rumors were true: The red-white-and-blue heroine, conceived during World War II, had a decidedly bohemian progenitor. For one thing, it was no accident that Wonder Woman got chained up in every episode. Creator William Moulton Marston actually fought to depict her that way. He also led a highly unusual lifestyle, living with and fathering children by two women at once. And the sex parties? Yep. In the mid-1920s he, his wife and two of his lovers participated in a “cult of female sexual power” organized by his aunt.
Meanwhile, Sarah Kerr considers the icon’s cultural significance:
The superheroine, Lepore argues, has all along been a kind of “missing link” in American feminism – an imperfect but undeniable bridge between vastly distinct generations. Hiding in her kitschy story lines and scant costume were allusions to and visual tropes from old struggles for women’s freedom, and an occasional framing of battles like the right to a living wage and basic equality that have yet to be decisively won.
Wonder Woman stories showed women shackled in endless yards of ropes and chains – a constant theme in art from decades earlier demanding the right to vote. The traditional allegory of an island of Amazon princesses appears in feminist science fiction early in the twentieth century; the rhetoric of a nurturing, morally evolved strongwoman opposed to the war god Mars goes back even further. At the same time, the early comics often included a special insert, edited by a young female tennis champion and highlighting women heroes. Those chosen ranged from white suffragettes to Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, professional and sports pioneers, and a founder of the NAACP. It’s unlikely that any platform for American girls’ role models was as popular as this one until three decades later.
Staying far away from questions of foreign (or any other kind of) policy, Melzer has chosen as his subject Strauss’ notorious assertion that virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books “esoterically” — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it. This contention has been dismissed by most non-Straussian scholars, who have tended to suggest that Strauss projected the phenomenon onto most of the canonical authors he discussed in his many learned books and essays.
Melzer supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism. … It seems that up until roughly two centuries ago, almost every culturally educated person took for granted that books of philosophy (and sometimes also works of scripture and literature) were written in a style of deliberate obscurity.
Why the recovery of this way of writing – and reading – matters:
Toward the end of his book, Melzer urges scholars and other interested readers to undertake esoteric interpretations of the entire Western philosophical tradition, at least up through the end of the 18th century. If he merely meant to encourage careful, creative readings of old texts, the suggestion would be a little banal. But of course that isn’t all that Melzer has in mind. After all, his invitation follows an elaborate (and remarkably persuasive) effort to establish not only that pre-modern writers wrote esoterically but also why they did so — in part to shield society from truths that puncture the ersatz nobility of politics and point beyond it altogether, toward the fully examined life of philosophy.
A world in which readers regularly produced revisionist esoteric interpretations that exposed these truths to the light of day would be one in which our understanding of the Western philosophical tradition was radically transformed. It would, for one thing, look far more deeply skeptical, profoundly anti-utopian, and brutally realistic about the permanent problems of political and moral life than it is usually presumed to be.
The Dish 