Terra Forming Terra: May 2023

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

How John Keats Writes a Poem: A Line-by-Line Breakdown of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Contemplating this poem has always been a special pleasure. He was a contemporary of William Blake and surely influenced by Swedenborg as well. A strange time ahead of htr blossoming of science itself. It was a time in which the intellectual foundations of modernity were been poured.

There are few better poems and it joins a true handfull.

this is welcome.

How John Keats Writes a Poem: A Line-by-Line Breakdown of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

in Poetry |

May 25th, 2023

The Greek term ekphrasis sounds rather exotic if you seldom come across it, but it refers to an act in which we’ve all engaged at one time or another: that is, describing a work of art. The best ekphrases make that description as vivid as possible, to the point where it becomes a work of art in itself. The English language offers no better-known example of ekphrastic poetry than John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” from 1819, which pulls off the neat trick of taking both its subject and its genre from the same ancient culture — among other virtues, of course, several of which are explained by Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his new video above, “How John Keats Writes a Poem.”

Puschak calls “Ode on a Grecian Urn” “arguably the best poem from arguably the best romantic poet,” then launches into a line-by-line exegesis, identifying the techniques Keats employs in its construction. “The speaker craves the ideal, everlasting love depicted on and symbolized by the urn,” he says. “But the way he expresses himself — well, it’s almost embarrassing, even hysterical, feverish.”

Keats uses compulsive-sounding repetition of words like happy and forever to “communicate something about the speaker that runs counter to his words. It reminds me of those times when you hear someone insist on how happy they are, but you know they’re just trying to will that fact into existence by speaking it.”

In the course of the poem, “the speaker begins to doubt his own cravings for the permanence of art. Is it really as perfect as he imagines?” Throughout, “he’s looked to the urn, to art, to assuage his despair about life,” a task to which it finally proves not quite equal. “In life, things change and fade, but they’re real. In art, things may be eternal, but they’re lifeless.” The famous final lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” arrive at the conclusion that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and how literal an interpretation to grant it remains a matter of debate. It may not really be all we know on Earth, nor even all we need to know, but the fact that we’re still arguing about it two centuries later speaks to the power of art — as well as art about art.

The sonnet machine

Read this and understand that we are clearly missing something in our education on english language and it needs to be there.

It is also clear that all our poets practised it and all wanabes needed it to sharpen up their skills. This form of clear structuring is wonderful when you go to write a longer piece because you have learned to grab the whole, yet it is also small enough that you can possibly perfect it.

it is a great teaching tool and completely explains Dante as well. that is how he did it and it is why i cannot yet.

The sonnet machine

A sonnet contains an emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution, crafted to make us think and feel

Harvest Moon (1891) by George Innes. Courtesy the Corcoran Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Timothy Hamptonis professor of comparative literature and French at the University of California at Berkeley, where he holds the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M Burns Distinguished Professorship. His books include Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (2011), Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (2019) and Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History (2022).

Edited byMarina Benjamin

https://aeon.co/essays/sonnets-are-machines-for-thinking-through-complex-emotions?

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ The opening line of William Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet might lead you to think that you’re being prepared for a weather report. But that is only part of what awaits you. Shakespeare’s sonnet – like all sonnets – is a mechanism, a kind of a machine. Its parts work both together and against each other so as to exercise the mind of the reader. When you work with it, as you enter its world, you get the literary equivalent of a workout at the gym.

The history of poetry is a history of forms, many of which we learn in school. We learn about the ode, which praises a person or a thing; the elegy, which laments the loss of love or life; the haiku, with its limited syllable counts; the ballad, which tells a story. But none of these forms does as much cognitive work as the lowly sonnet. ‘Scorn not the Sonnet,’ wrote William Wordsworth. He knew whereof he spoke.

The sonnet first appeared in 13th-century Italy. A cleric named Giacomo da Lentini is usually credited as the first sonnet writer. His contemporary Dante Alighieri helped refine the form, before he turned his hand to his much longer Divine Comedy. Sonnet means ‘little sound’. It seems to have evolved out of an earlier Italian form called the strambotto, which consisted of stanzas of six or eight lines. The sonnet involved putting two of these stanzas together to produce a little poem of 14 lines, divided into eight lines and six lines – an octave and a sestet – with a break in the middle called a volta.

These numerical groupings may seem abstract, but they are what makes the sonnet work. They allow the writer to divide the poetic world in two – to depict two versions of the same event, or two emotional states that can co-exist only in a kind of tension. ‘I love you madly and swear eternal fealty [octave] but [volta] I see now that you are a scheming traitor [sestet].’ Or vice versa: ‘I know that you are a scheming traitor [eight lines] but I still love you madly [six lines].’ What happens in the octave will be contradicted in the sestet – or confirmed, or expanded, or parodied. In other words, the sonnet works through a double movement. Sometimes, the stakes are very high. John Donne berates his ‘black soul’ for its sinfulness – but then reassures it, through the volta, that not all is lost: ‘Yet [my italics] grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack.’

John Donne (c1595), unknown artist. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

To read through a sonnet is to be faced with an aptitude test, a questioning of your cognitive and moral capacities. It articulates the flexibility of the self. Shakespeare’s sonnet about the summer day takes us in surprising directions. Of his beloved summery friend, he writes: ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate …’ So far, so good. Yet, as the octave unfolds, he points out that even summer days are uneven, and natural beauty is variable: some days are too hot, others not hot enough:

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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.

We start to worry that being compared favourably to a summer’s day might not be such a great compliment after all. ‘Shall I compare thee? Well, OK, I will – but be aware that these days are not all perfect and that, in any case, autumn is coming and they won’t last long.’ The change wrought by the passage of time is, however, stopped short right at the volta, which recasts everything that has come before:

But [my italics] thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

A single well-placed switching mechanism – the word ‘but’ – stops time

The key word is ‘but’, right at the point where the octave gives way to the sestet. It tells us that the beloved doesn’t have to worry about growing old at all – summer day or no – since Shakespeare’s poem will live forever:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

A poem that first appeared to be about good weather, warm days and the rhythms of nature now turns out to be a celebration of the power of verse. A single well-placed switching mechanism – the word ‘but’ – stops time.

Once sonnet writers developed ways of pitting the two parts of the poem against each other, they experimented with breaking up each half into still more conflicting thoughts. You can pull the same trick with the sestet, giving us three lines that say one thing, then three that shift perspective. ‘If I would find deliverance anew,’ says the 16th-century French poet Louise Labé in the sestet of one of her most powerful poems: ‘I must live far beyond sight of me / or be sure to stay as far away from you.’ There’s no escape from love, not even in the wild.

Many of the greatest sonnets, like those of Shakespeare, or Donne, flip back and forth, shifting terms over and again as each line follows the one before it. ‘Oh make thy self with holy mourning black,’ says Donne to his grace-seeking soul. ‘Or wash thee in Christ’s blood,’ he adds, evoking the Saviour’s blood’s ability to make things white. The movement of the poem, line after line, mirrors the restlessness of the sinful soul, desperate for comfort. To read sonnets, then, is to be forced to hold different propositions in the mind, setting them against each other, seeing how they shape one another. The poem is a tool for the cultivation of judgment.

The first superstar sonnet writer was Dante’s literary heir, the 14th-century poet Petrarch, who wrote more than 300 sonnets, all dedicated to a woman named Laura. The sonnet form allowed him to describe the uniqueness of his love, while exploring the damage it was doing to his soul. Petrarch invented a new use for the sonnet by stringing together his poems to form a loose narrative. Later, poets such as Alexander Pushkin and Vikram Seth would construct entire novels out of strings of sonnets. It’s an approach that allows writers to play with continuity and rupture, imposing distinct viewpoints on the reader as we move through the story, breaking up the action with ironic commentary.

Petrarch was a master of this technique. He is the cartographer of the suffering soul. And what is emotional turmoil for the poet is a cognitive puzzle for the reader, who follows along intently. The presence of his lady, says Petrarch in an octave, calms his desires and relieves his torments, but the moment she is away (in the sestet) his soul is miserable. It leaves his body in misery as he thinks about her. The contrast between the two is not only biographical, it is spiritual and psychological. A war between duty and desire. Maybe he’s a fool to lie awake when he should be getting some much-needed shuteye. But to live life fully means sometimes losing sleep. We readers have to judge which is better, both for him and for us.

We’re challenged to place ourselves in the position of the poet as they work through stages of hope and grief

The theme of illusion versus reality, I suggest, is virtually built into the sonnet. It’s why sonnets have been particularly popular in contexts shaped by social anxiety – Renaissance Europe, with its elaborate courtly rituals, being one example. Petrarch was more or less a solitary practitioner of the form, but the great Renaissance sonneteers, such as Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney, use it to explore the emotional challenges of living at court, where rivalries and power games shape social life. They give voice to the disheartening contrast between their fantasies of power and pleasure (‘You’re as beautiful as a doe’) and their disappointments (‘But, alas, you’re the king’s mistress’). This theme of disappointment became something of an obsession in the 19th century, when the French poet Charles Baudelaire used the sonnet as a tool for raging against bourgeois society, with its fake pieties and deep corruption. Petrarch and Wyatt are wounded by love: Baudelaire is wounded by life itself. His sonnet ‘Beauty’ sets out the risks faced by anyone who writes, and falls for the way beauty ‘Inspires the poet with a love as lone / As clay eternal and as taciturn.’ Yet no revelation of truth ever comes, as Baudelaire’s figure of Beauty offers nothing but ‘pure mirrors’ to bewitch the poet with illusions.

Petrarch, Wyatt and Baudelaire enjoy a universal reach, since we’ve all been disappointed and deluded at some point. Their sonnets depict foil and counterfoil, illusion and reality, aspiration and disappointment, desire and deception. Reading them, we’re constantly challenged to place ourselves in the position of the poet as they work through progressive stages of hope and grief. It’s an exercise that jolts you out of your comfortable state and asks you, for the space of a line or two, to consider what happens when your world is turned upside down.

The cognitive challenges that I link to sonnet-reading are complicated further when thinking about rhyme. Many odes and elegies are written in rhyming couplets, or in blank verse. Not the sonnet. Because of its intricate, condensed form, it is a veritable wonderland of rhyming sounds. The trusty octave, with its balanced structure of two four-line stanzas, can give us enclosed rhymes (abba), or alternating rhymes (abab). Both patterns set up links between sounds, as we are called back from line 3 or line 4, to line 1, to consider their connections. Then, just as we are being lulled by the octave pattern, the wild sestet in the second part of the poem blows things open. It might give us three-line patterns (efg, efg) or reverse that and give us efg, fge, pulling us back as we try to move forward; forcing us to stop and consider what line 9 and line 14 might have in common, and why the poet chose to rhyme them. The intricate rhyming structures of the sonnet show us the poem in conversation with itself, echoing its own voices, responding to its own music.

French poets developed a novel technique of placing a pair of rhyming lines right in the centre of the poem, set off from everything else, after the octave, in lines 9 and 10. Often they appear to present a coherent, self-enclosed statement – a conclusion or point of rest, or a summing up, like the chorus of a popular song. We can look for it, wait for it, take a breath and relax with it, after the twisting turmoil of the opening lines. Labé anchors her poem about fleeing her lover by telling us, in the middle, that she’s found a solution to her anguish, ‘and distract myself from thoughts of love / a most lonely woodland grove I prove.’ She rhymes the word for ‘distraction’ (distraire) with ‘lonely’ (solitaire) – a summing-up that seems to resolve her emotional torment. If you’re unhappy, just leave town. But then we realise that we’re still in the middle of the poem, with four lines to go. Maybe leaving town is no solution after all? Will a new pattern of rhymes be set up? Will it echo what we’ve just read? What new complications will be introduced before we reach line 14?

The English sonnet solved this problem of how to make the second half of the poem rhyme by setting a rhyming couplet, not in the middle, like the French did, but at the very end. This turns the poem into a structure with three stanzas of four lines each, followed by two. Shakespeare used it to offer commentary or conclusion to the emotional drama we’ve just been reading about. After comparing his beloved to a summer’s day, only to reflect that this subjects them to the ravages of time, he concludes that being praised by him is a better deal for the beloved than just being beautiful: poetry, after all, lasts longer than good weather: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ It’s a couplet that you can extract from the rest. You can learn it by heart and carry it around in your head, even if you leave the rest of the poem behind. Shakespeare believes that poetry is eternal, and the rhyming English sonnet allows him to make his case, while tying everything together. No other poetic form does this.

Sonnets are mechanisms; machines that challenge our emotional states and cognitive powers. You can’t speed-read them. They slow us down. They push us this way and that, forcing us to reconsider our thinking at every turn. The apparently simple form of the 14-line poem contains within itself an entire emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution. Universes appear and pass away.

But if you can break the sonnet into four chunks – why not go further, as the American poet Ted Berrigan did in his collection The Sonnets (1964). Berrigan pasted together bits of original verse, lines from advertising jingles, fragments of telephone conversations, in such a way that you can’t tell whether you should begin reading at the top, bottom or middle. In a Berrigan sonnet, you can start at line 14 and then maybe jump to line 6, then to line 9, and so on.

In Joe Brainard’s collage its white arrow

He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.

Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white-

I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn

and ate King Korn popcorn,’ he wrote in his

of glass in Joe Brainard’s collage

Doctor, but they say ‘I LOVE YOU’

and the sonnet is not dead.

takes the eyes away from the gray words,

Diary. The black heart beside the fifteen pieces

Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie

washed by Joe’s throbbing hands. ‘Today

What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures

does not point to William Carlos Williams.

Indeed, the sonnet is not dead. But how do these parts make a whole? The phrase ‘Of Marilyn Monroe’ in line 3 seems to be the last part of line 13 (‘What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures’). The closed quotation marks after the word ‘popcorn’ in line 5 are opened way down in line 12, which ends with the word ‘Today’. The sonnet has a formal, recursive structure that folds in on itself; the sense emerges if you read line 1, then line 14; line 2 then line 13; line 3 then line 12, and so on.

What earlier poets like Shakespeare did with rhyme – asking us to hold a sound from early in the poem in our ears so as to hear it echoed later on – Berrigan does with syntax and grammar. It’s a new way of reading. The reader can combine and recombine at will, generating new versions of the story. The contemporary poet Jen Bervin goes a step further by placing a ‘net’ or filter over the text of Shakespeare’s sonnets, turning them into son-nets by blanking out some phrases and letting others shine through. Thus, she generates a new set of poems built on fragments of Shakespeare.

Reading poetry is a good way to spend time. It cleanses the mental palate and scrubs away the emotional cobwebs. Sonnets are particularly healthy because they challenge our judgment and cognitive capacity, knocking us about – from triumph to tragedy; misery to humour – in the space of a few lines. You won’t find the sublime or the tragic in your sonnet world, or the slow climaxes of the ode or elegy. But you will find a condensed drama of the movements of the heart as it trundles through life.

When I was much younger, before family responsibilities and faculty meetings, I did daily devotions in the religion of the sonnet. I bought a large hardbound notebook with blank pages – the kind they use for sketching. Each morning, as I drank my coffee and planned my day, I copied out a sonnet from one of my favourite poets. I wrote it out, word for word, in the centre of the page, and then wrote commentary around the edges. I drew lines between words that seemed to be related, added brackets, stars and circles, and tried to scribble in useful thoughts or questions. My daily sonnet became a form of training, like jogging, or meditation. It focused my mind and challenged my emotions. I’ve never enjoyed poetry more. I recommend it as a daily exercise.

The Solar Crust

The solar crust.

what we know is that the surface is around the temperature of all our elements at their maximum for molten material. I also presume pressure matters. At the same time, the core is outputting a steady supply of likely Neutral Neutron Pairs from what will look like an inner sun. This passes easily through such naturally expanded material such as the crust while sieving out decayed conglomerates or elements in the crust.

the surface then aloows the NNPs to decay to mostly Hydrogen while the pressure carries it all away as the solar wind. this also takes the heat, just as happens with a candle. thus we have the hyper hot solar corona..

so far we easily match up with the observed data.

Understand our observed data has no good explanation and our scholarship has as usual simply ignored it all. conversion of NNPs to hydrogen must produce heat, a larger scaled nuclei and an obviously larger hygrogen atom once it picks up an electron while also radiating a photon.

It is thus reasonable to think of all our stars as crustal rather like our own Earth which could follow hte same system of creation.

Is it possible that the asteroid belt represents the breakup of such a crust in the orbit of Jupiter and that the core then dropped down to form the planet of Venus which clearly has a cooling crust which is unique to our solar system? We are certainly operating toward stability limits around Jupiter and hte implied math could work..

This is an alternative explanation for Venus that is much easier than Jupiter successfully ejecting any matter. once you start thinking with this protocol, a lot of nifty outcomes are then plausible. again the evidence at hand supports is and such a break up would leave the crust mostly behind while venus would seek a new natural and stable orbit. this is kepler's observation as well on proportions.

Understand that long before we had nuclear physics, scholars only understood the possibility of a molten surface from what they knew. It was an obvious problem, but nuclear only solved the energetics problem. Just as the Big Bang converted nuclear into a process, but did nothing to discouver the act of creation. Yet everything has a real time line.

Meditation Wasn’t For Me—Until I Tried It While Hiking

This is interesting. i have observed contemplative meditation which i have practiced forever, and mind quelling meditation which allows the other side to show you things sort of. Not noticing, i have also developed walking meditation in which my other brain or self kicks in to contemplate a difficult problem in physics or math. Easy to swith in and out off and it may well be just contemplative meditation.

Yet it is noticible enough for others to note.

trying to be in the moment when walking is a great variation which will also take practice. Can been in the moment work sitting in the wilderness. Something to try.

Meditation Wasn’t For Me—Until I Tried It While Hiking

Reap all the physical and mental advantages of mindfulness without ever setting foot inside a class.

MAY 3, 2023

COREY BUHAY

About a year ago, amid the throes of an existential crisis, I signed myself up for a three-day silent meditation retreat. It sucked. It also changed the way I interact with the natural world—but not in the way I expected.

If you’re already raising your eyebrows, I don’t blame you. When I say the words “meditation retreat” to most people, they either take on a blank look or start grinding their teeth. A rare few lean in and ask how the retreat went. Those people are all raging hippies.

I personally identify as hippie-adjacent. I’m not into crystals or hard drugs, but do enjoy going a few days without a shower and, when the occasion calls for it, wearing paisley. Still, I suspect my decision to sit on a lumpy cushion in silence for three days had more to do with a temporary delirium brought on by too many emails and not enough life direction. Before this, I’d never been on a meditation retreat of any kind. My record for silence on solo hikes was about five hours. At that point, I usually started talking to myself.

Still, I’d heard some good things about mindfulness. Allegedly, sitting around in the woods listening to birdsong (i.e. “forest bathing”) can lower blood pressure and even boost your immune system. And meditation in general has been known to alleviate anxiety and depression and reduce chronic pain. All that sounded good to me.

Plus, the venue for the retreat looked pretty. The temple was perched amid the Colorado Rockies and the website said the cafeteria food was actually pretty good. Also, the temple administrator said I could save on lodging costs by sleeping in my car in the parking lot.

Thus, I spent three days wearing socks and sandals and listening to a bunch of sad people mouth-breathing in a tiny room with hard wooden floors. I was supposed to be focused on “letting go of intrusive thoughts,” but I spent most of the time focused on the fact that my left foot was asleep and scheming about how to move it without being noticed by our instructor. The hours crawled by. The three days were agonizing.

I fully believe that regular meditation is an effective tool for millions of people. I also know that there’s great power in being still. But for me, seated meditation seemed to amplify my anxiety rather than reduce it. I found the physical stillness excruciating. As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t get the habit to stick. I haven’t sat down to meditate since the retreat ended more than a year ago. But I did take away one thing that has more or less changed my life.

During the retreat, our instructor told us that very few people can sit on a hard floor for hours without suffering at least a few physiological consequences. So, she broke up our time on the cushion with periodic walking meditations.

We’d stand up and pace around the room, eyes lowered but open, watching our feet flash in and out of the bars of sunlight that came streaming in through the high windows. She told us to feel our feet gripping the floor, listen to the swish of moving clothing, and focus on the subtle shifts of pressure from heel to forefoot to toes. It was the only time all weekend when I really felt present.

While I’ve totally dropped the ball on actual meditating, I’ve started to incorporate some of these little tricks into my hikes ever since. And, I kid you not, I’ve felt time slow down.

If sedentary meditation isn’t your thing, try it while putting one foot in front of the other. (Photo: © Marco Bottigelli / Moment via Getty Images)

As life gets busier, the time I spend outdoors grows more precious. I can’t tell you how many hikes I’ve ended with a wistful look back at the trailhead, wishing I had time for just a few more minutes. The benefit of mindful hiking is that you don’t get so lost in thought that you miss whole miles. By being present for each step, you can squeeze more out of every hike.

Research suggests there could be other benefits. In a recent Brazilian study, participants were either assigned to a mindful meditation hike or a “mindlessness meditation” hike.

Those who did the mindful hike were told to pay attention to their surroundings and the sensation of movement. Those who did the mindless hike were instructed to think about upcoming tasks and life events.

Hikers who completed the mindfulness task experienced an “upward spiral” in mood. Basically, hiking made them happier, and because they were being mindful, they noticed that they were becoming happier. This created a positive feedback loop. Those who were mindlessly walking, however, ended their hikes in a worse mood than when they started.

The other perk of mindful hiking is that it can be way easier to do, especially for new meditators and people who identify as restless. Because it’s easier to get into, it’s an easier habit to maintain. That means people who engage in mindful walking may be more likely to reap the long-term benefits of mindfulness than those who engage in seated meditation alone.

So, what exactly constitutes a mindful hike? On your next backpack, dog walk, or stroll around the block, try these five tricks.

Mindful Hiking 101

Get more out of every mile with these tips for mindful hiking.

Walk at a natural pace with your hands free and shoulders relaxed. Take a moment to make sure your clothing and pack feel cozy and comfortable.

Now tune in to how your body feels. Do a quick check-in by doing a mental scan from head to toe. As you walk, try to focus on the feeling of strength in your muscles as they engage and lengthen. Focus on the quickness of your feet and ankles as they shift your weight over uneven terrain.

When you find your mind wandering, gently bring it back to the feeling of strength in your body, and the sensation of your feet touching the ground.

Periodically tune in to your environment: Try counting the sights, sounds, and smells around you. See if you can identify five different sights, four distinct sounds, and three smells.

Be kind to yourself. If you notice yourself getting tired or cranky, take a moment to reel it back in, take a deep breath, and name three specific things about this moment that you’re grateful for.

After 150 Years, Levi’s 501 Blue Jeans Are Still Kicking

This was really the first practical working clothing. it is still in the running and i have had them since i was a child. If you can believe it, we actually bought them at a local general store which also sported a craker barrel. this was the mid fifties or so. Trust me when i tell you i grew up with the nineteenth century ringing in my ears.

That was quaint even then. We even heard the distant steam engine honk miles away then. we were almost the last to shed our horses when i was four.

In the event, i have worn blue jeans long before they became everyone's uniform and they still serve well. Now if they could be treated to prevent wicking, they would be perfect.

After 150 Years, Levi’s 501 Blue Jeans Are Still Kicking

The iconic garment began as a practical piece of clothing for miners to wear during long, difficult shifts

Teresa Nowakowski

Daily CorrespondentMay 26, 2023 10:38 a.m.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/levis-jeans-150-years-180982241/?

Levi's 501 blue jeans were granted a patent 150 years ago. Blake Burkhart via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0

Back in 1871, Jacob Davis, a Latvian-born tailor in Reno, Nevada, was making pants for local miners. But the garments kept ripping; they weren’t durable enough for their owners’ long, difficult shifts.

To solve the problem, Davis added metal rivets to reinforce stress points. The new design was a hit in Reno, where workers scrambled to buy the trousers. Seeing how much potential his ideas had, Davis realized he needed to act to protect them.

“He had to rush, due to the fact that these worked really well,” Nancy Davis, then a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, told Smithsonian magazine’s Joseph Stromberg in 2011. “He realized he had something.”

Davis’ invention would become Levi’s blue jeans, which are celebrating their 150th anniversary this week. On May 20, 1873, Davis obtained a patent for his idea, thanks to the financial backing of Levi Strauss, a German-born immigrant who ran a dry goods store in San Francisco. The two went into business together, with Strauss running logistics and Davis managing production of the jeans, then advertised as “waist overalls,” because they were often worn as a protective outer layer, according to Levi’s.

Soon after, they began making the trousers with denim, a fabric that was already associated with labor. “Denim had been worn by enslaved African and African American descendants for generations,” says fashion historian Emma McClendon to NPR’s Michel Martin. “It was worn by Chinese immigrants who were building the Transcontinental Railroad. It was worn by women. It was worn by men.”

Still, adding metal rivets made denim more durable than ever. By the 1890s, Strauss and Davis had largely perfected the pants, which the company began referring to by the lot number 501. While small changes came in the years that followed—two pockets and belt loops were added—today’s 501s aren’t too different from the originals, says Paul O’Neill, Levi's design director, to Serena Altschul of CBS News.

“When we look at other fits, we've got, like, skinnies, flares, bell bottoms, you know, all bells and whistles,” he adds. “But the 501 always just remains very simple and classic.”

In the 1930s, Western movies featured cowboys wearing the jeans, which soon became popular even among those not doing manual labor, a phenomenon Levi’s capitalized on with cowboy-themed advertising.

A postcard shows the "Mechanial Rodeo" featuring cowboy puppets dressed in miniature Levi's jeans, which the brand made as an attraction for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

By the 1960s and ’70s, jeans became more than a practical garment; they were also a statement.

“[Denim] not only recalled the work clothes worn by African Americans during slavery and as sharecroppers, but also suggested solidarity with contemporary blue-collar workers and even equality between the sexes, since men and women alike could wear it,” wrote Brandon Tensley in Smithsonian magazine in 2020. They were also commonly worn by young participants in anti-war protests, per Refinery29’s Frances Solá-Santiago.

Jeans were also a symbol of American culture. While the Soviet government shunned them, many Soviet citizens wanted their own pairs. “The hunger for Western denim was memorialized in a 1980s Levi’s ad in which a young man fidgets as Soviet customs officials examine his luggage, but he makes it home with a smuggled pair of Levi’s in his suitcase,” writes NPR’s Jessica Green.

Today, jeans are ubiquitous in the fashion world, and Levi’s 501 cut remains popular.

“It really has become the global garment,” Tracey Panek, a historian for Levi’s, tells Lifestyle Asia’s Shatricia Nair. “I think that’s [a] massive testimony to how much it’s changed fashion.”

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Golden Heart Medicine

This is really important and it dovetails with work my daughter has pursued. we may well be able to solve these problems and better yet, it may be completely possible to physically confirm that healing has taken place.

pulling this all together will be one of the great discoveries of medicine. right now we are seeing the edges.

right now we are successfuly resolving mental trauma almost as a matter of course which makes our confidence level high. understanding and testing the physical components is wonderful news and completely unanticipated.

Golden Heart Medicine

Published on May 21, 2023

I am probably the only doctor in the world who lists the tears of the melting heart as Medicine. These tears are an integral part of my protocol and system of Medicine. I champion the vulnerability of the heart as the most precious thing in life. Yet, most people are busy hiding their vulnerabilities because of fear of being judged, because people do not listen anyway, and because people have too fast responses meaning they think they have the solutions to our problems, so we should take their advice seriously even though they have not listened to us on a deep enough level.

We collectively think/judge our vulnerabilities as our weaknesses even though the truth is that the most vulnerable person is the strongest. This kind of person is not afraid of anything, not afraid to fully show themselves as they are, not afraid of being judged, and not too scared of suffering.

There are hundreds of therapies to help people resolve their problems on emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, and many hundreds of medicines and medical procedures, both natural and pharmaceutical, to try to resolve issues in our bodies. My approach uses only natural interventions and concentrates on basic and essential substances that cannot be substituted with anything else. Statin drugs, for instance, are no substitute for magnesium.

One of the big problems with Allopathic Medicine is that it pretends there are no basic needs so that they can be ignored. That is as bad as a gas station attendant ignoring the basic needs of a car, like oil and gasoline, which would be incredibly stupid. For example, most sick people need magnesium, bicarbonates, iodine, selenium, glutathione, sunlight, hydrogen, oxygen, infrared heat, and superfoods to replenish the body’s nutritional deficiencies. Yet, most doctors do not recommend or prescribe these critical substances and get upset if you even mention using them.

However, even if we do all the right things for the body, what about our minds, emotions, and souls? My experience highlights that many people, if they do not resolve their inner conflicts, will still die from cancer.

Dr. Max Hamer states that every cancer and related disease starts with profound, acute-dramatic, conflict-shock experiences that manifest simultaneously on three levels, psyche, brain, and organ. I have always had a problem with their use of the word “every or all” cancers start this way because there are many causes, but his point should be well taken.

Dr. Hammer had an exceptionally high success rate with his cancer therapy. During one of several trials (witch hunts), a public prosecutor (Wiener-Neustadt in Austria) had to admit that after 4 to 5 years, 6,000 out of 6,500 patients with primarily advanced cancer were still alive.

Dr. Hamer started his cancer research when he developed testicle cancer after his son was shot dead. He wondered if his son’s death was the cause of his cancer. Subsequently, he investigated and documented over 15,000 cases and found the following characteristics present, which he termed the Iron Rules of Cancer.

At the moment of a conflict shock, a short circuit occurs in a pre-determined place of the brain. This can be photographed with computed tomography (CT) and looks like concentric rings on a shooting target or like water’s surface after a stone has been dropped into it. Later, if the conflict becomes resolved, the CT image changes. These conflict shocks often occur with the death of a loved one, but there are many possibilities.

When a person gets a cancer diagnosis, the same biological conflict shocks occur even if the diagnosis is wrong. Stress levels jump. There will be constant stress until the conflict is resolved, which may take years.

Dr. Hamer believed that most metastases or secondary tumors are caused by the fear of death resulting from the patient given the cancer diagnosis or an unfavorable prognosis. However, the resulting conflict shock may not be fear of death but rather anger, resentment, or a separation conflict from a partner or children.

Generally, hopelessness, despair, and meaninglessness create chronic stress, which prevents the healing from cancer and other diseases. According to Hamer, the real cause of cancer and other diseases is an unexpected traumatic shock for which we were emotionally unprepared.

Conflict and stress are common actual causes of disease, including cancer. They have their correspondence in the brain and all organ systems. Stress dominates our breathing patterns and how our hearts beat –beat for beat—meaning stress lays itself out in what is called Heart Rate Variability (HRV). The higher the stress, the tighter the variability between every heartbeat. Vulnerable hearts are flexible, dancing in each moment of life. The pathologies of the vagus nerve are measurable with HRV.

Western Medicine has no way of addressing problems and diseases on a “being” level. My approach to medicine routinely correlates a person’s physical problems with emotional disturbances and conflicts that are happening on a deeper level.

For each pain, there is a reason in the depths of consciousness.

Dr. Reinhold Voll

In my consultations, I practice spiritual and emotional medicine in addition to dealing thoroughly with the problems of the body. This kind of medicine demands that we penetrate and appreciate what is going on inside the world of the patient. This calls for deep listening abilities and the caring and compassion necessary for the inner worlds of others.

It is not easy to reach the soul level, but we approach this most sensitive area of life when we start paying attention to a person’s vulnerability. When we walk through the door of the heart, when the tears of the melting heart begin to flow, when we respond with our tears, when we use our tears to melt the heart of the other, we know we are playing in the deep rich fields of pure being.

Physical disease is often a mirror of our Achilles’ heel. As Shakespeare would have put it, it reflects something connected to a tragic flaw. It is always the one thing we do not want to look at that brings us to ruin in life. Yet there are certain life events like the sudden loss of a loved one, rape, or intense experiences in combat that bring on a trauma that is beyond the ability of well-adjusted people to deal with. In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman reported a similar process to what Dr. Hamer outlines in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Dr. Clancy D. McKenzie of Capital University says, “Enhancing the love energy of the patient is an effective way to increase the healing process. This holds true for both psychological and physical healing. Enhancement of love energy should be a part of every physical remedy because it is a vital ingredient to healing.”

I developed my HeartHealth system to provide a framework for direct penetrations into the heart center, into the level of emotions and feelings. My heart psychology is offered as a replacement for cognitive psychology, which has not benefited humanity in any meaningful way.

It is no coincidence that the thymus, the center and
director of our immune system, lies just above the heart
(“the high heart”) and within the heart chakra.
Jaquelyn McCandless

One of the main tasks with every cancer patient is to determine if there is an emotional shock experience, and there usually is. All one must do is ask, but most oncologists have no time, interest, or ability to understand such things. However, if one can ask, listen, empathize, and have compassion, one can direct a person to their vulnerabilities, helping them open their hearts thus helping heal emotional issues.

Nevertheless, prominent oncologists’ official response remains that it is absurd to assume emotions could be important in the cause and cure of cancer. That is absurd. It’s like saying stress has nothing to do with cancer or people’s immune systems.

Conclusion

Caring for people’s souls is usually relegated to the priests and pastors of the world. Still, there is the tradition of Pastoral Medicine, which is defined as a health care system that incorporates and attends to the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects while only using natural substances to treat disease in the body. I am a doctor of Pastoral Medicine, which to me means I am a doctor of the soul.

The Boston Brahmins, WASPs, and Nazis: The Pursuit of Eugenics

Of course eugenics has been rightly bad mouthed for a century for the excellent reason that it was hijacked by anyone with what we understand best as a racist agenda. Today, the inheritors are trues believers in much of the same along with a pathological desire to reduce the human population.

The whole MEME has sprung up in one genocidal form or the other. Not good.

Yet what about the science? Practically speaking, we are only talking about planned cattle breeding which has been wonderfully successful in agriculture and even proven itself. no farmer today avoids breeding choices and in fairness, this has been going on since mankind began herding animals.

the fact is that breeding choices do matter and hybridization even matters more. Yet preservation of types also matters to preserve variations of potential value. all this is not so easy as the Chinese have discovered upon their one child policy lowering the numbe of girls.

My central point is that we need to accept intelligent breeding choices and educate for it. Bit of a challenge and it has nothing to do with so called eugenics.

The Boston Brahmins, WASPs, and Nazis: The Pursuit of Eugenics

TAGS Media and Culture Progressivism U.S. History World History
10 HOURS AGODonavan Lingerfelt

https://mises.org/wire/boston-brahmins-wasps-and-nazis-pursuit-eugenics

During the progressive era, academia hastily adopted the inhumane pseudoscience of eugenics, and its results on the world were devastating. The influence of the Boston Brahmins in New England can explain the fervent adoption of this malignant belief. This elite and well-educated class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants reeked of pomp and snobbery.

The origin of the term “Boston Brahmin” came from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in his 1861 novel Elsie Venner. He chose the unique word “Brahmin” because in India they are the most distinguished caste. This is how the northeastern nobles wanted to be perceived in their neck of the woods.

There was no shortage of academics who propagated the eugenics movement. Richard T. Ely was a Columbia University graduate and persistently proselytized eugenic dogma. In 1901, he favored a bill proposed by an Indiana state senator, Thomas J. Lindley, to regulate marriage with the intent that the couple would not have “unfit” children. The state would examine their physical, mental, racial, and moral attributes to decide whether they could wed.

The US Army would conduct a test called the Army Alpha to evaluate soldiers’ intelligence. Richard Ely was pleased to learn the state could evaluate the hereditary status of human livestock. Ely blatantly disapproved of the “unfit” in his book Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society. He states, “The sad fact, however, is not that of competition, but the existence of these feeble persons.” When India was amidst a famine, Ely called for their starvation to continue for the sake of “race improvement.” He also claimed black people were “grown up children and should be treated as such.”

Ely’s academic prowess, heavily seasoned with racism and eugenics, would unfortunately be passed on to his students. While at Johns Hopkins University, Ely mentored Woodrow Wilson. Eventually becoming Princeton University’s president, Wilson excluded black students from enrolling. Having absorbed the skewed beliefs of Ely, New Jersey governor Wilson signed a sterilization bill targeting the “hopelessly defective and criminal classes.”

Wilson was not the only university president to accept these beliefs. Stanford’s David Starr Jordan, Harvard’s Charles William Eliot, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Charles Van Hise shared similar sentiments. Spewing his hate in San Francisco, Eliot told the crowd, “Each nation should keep its stock pure.” Van Hise declared that “human defectives should no longer be allowed to propagate the race.” Jordan believed entering into World War I was detrimental because the physically fit men would die and America would “breed only second-rate men.”

Serving on the board of trustees for the Human Betterment Foundation, Jordan was involved in this organization to observe potential benefits of forced sterilizations in California. Ezra Gosney, founder of this vile organization, coauthored a book with Paul Popenoe on the benefits of sterilization, which became popular enough to influence other states and countries to espouse eugenic legislation.

Sweden would sterilize over sixty thousand people from the 1930s to the 1970s. Their book would even be recognized and cited by Nazi party officials to enact their own program in 1933. Charles Goethe, a fellow eugenicist, wrote to Gosney congratulating him on his work being adopted by the Nazis:

You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler. . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life.

The Human Betterment Foundation would keep in contact with the Nazis, even mailing them a pamphlet to show the benefits Californians had experienced with forced sterilization. Their mutual admiration for each other was not a secret. While the Nazis adopted the American eugenic laws, US progressives were not bashful in promoting what Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were doing. In 1934, the Los Angeles County Museum displayed Nazi exhibits to boost support for eugenics. This promotion worked, and the southern California branch of the American Eugenics Society openly praised it: “It portrays the general eugenics program of the Nazi government, giving special attention to the need for sterilization. . . . Take the opportunity to see this while it is in Los Angeles. Tell your friends about it.”

At one point, the Nazis were sterilizing their people at a far greater rate than the Americans, causing Virginia’s director of the Western State Hospital, Joseph DeJarnette, to complain, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.” Popenoe pondered on how to exterminate the “unfit” in his book Applied Eugenics. In it, he talks about a race being improved through “the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold . . . or by bodily deficiency.”

For his final Stanford commencement speech, President Jordan talked about barring southern and eastern European immigrants from entering America due to their inferiority to Anglo-Saxons. Generally speaking, Jordan did not single out these particular Europeans but said all immigrants were “a menace to peace and welfare.” Jordan would also become the inaugural chair of the American Breeders Association where he would invite fellow academic Charles Davenport to join.

Within eugenics circles, Davenport was a prominent figure to get ahold of. Davenport realized the lucrative research funding opportunity and happily accepted. By collecting data on Stanford students through a questionnaire, Davenport sought to observe their heredity, racial origin, and other characteristics. Later in his career, Davenport would go on to start the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations to bring together eugenic scientists from across the globe. Writing to Benito Mussolini in 1929, Davenport stressed the importance of an Italian eugenics program.

Lobbying to Congress, Davenport was an anti-immigration activist wanting to hinder the “undesirable.” The Immigration Act of 1924 would be the result of Davenport’s constant requests to Congressman Albert Johnson, a eugenicist ally. This legislation would halt Asian immigration while also setting quotas on southern and eastern Europeans. Author Adam Cohen made a documentary detailing that this act barred Anne Frank’s father from escaping to America. Concerned about the threat of immigrants, Charles Davenport wrote to Madison Grant, another prominent eugenicist, asking, “Can we build a wall high enough around this country . . . so as to keep out these cheaper races.”

Grant would certainly agree with this proposal because of his famous book The Passing of the Great Race where he argues that the Nordic race is superior. He was worried “inferior” races were outgrowing the Nordic population, which is why he also supported the 1924 Immigration Act. The book was so popular that he received a letter from Hitler saying the book was his “bible.” During the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis referenced three pages of Grant’s book to defend Karl Brandt, their euthanasia program leader. By rationalizing this despicable practice, the Nazis wanted absolution from the sins the Americans had initially committed.

With their connections in government, the Boston Brahmins wanted the state to eradicate the “unfit” for them. Their abominable propaganda was exported to multiple states and countries while giving Hitler fuel to continue his merciless campaign. The elite and the state will always collude to destroy their peskiest enemy: you. May we never forget the atrocities this group circulated to the world, and may we always reject its evil, no matter what forms it may camouflage itself with.

Atlantis Reborn

Placing Atlantis properly into history has been one of my more interesting problems. The biggest problem was actually expanding my vision to correctly see the actual ocean of direct evidence that exists.

What we do have is three totally good dates to act as bench marks for dead reckoning navigation.

2400 BC

My first is 2400 BC or so. This date conforms to the building of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, Commencement of Mining at Grand Maanan in Wales for copper and commencement of mining for native copper in Leke Superior. This date has a small error factor of plus or minus whatever carbon dating can give us but not too much.

what it so totally important is that high quality bronze was needed at the Great Pyramid for cutting quality stone and this demanded a high quality sea going trade route. It also demanded a steady stream of cedar cants from the Levant as well and obviously control of the Mediterranean out of Crete.

all this imfers a sophisticated robust sea going culture centered on the Atlantic. We also suspect that the Huge islands of Atlantis, Lyonese, the Bahamsa and Cuba were all extant as well. These nicely compare to England, Ireland, France and Japan respectively. do look at the subsea maps please.

for the next thousand years, the Atlantean culture became global and surely introduced pyramid building anywhere their technical culture took hold. during this era, they also introduced various bforms of writing as well which culminated in our greek alphabet and also plausibly Chinese ideographs. Understand that one form preserved language for a century or two until we produced the king James bible in english to lock it down. The other prserved information such as TCM or traditional chinese medicine.

while the culture became global, command and control never did because it could not. Even if they used seven league boots, they still could not move armies.

understand also whenever they arrived, they first discovered a village living in the Stoneage and with little to offer commercially except surplus slaves and even that was not too welcome.

I should mention also that these folk all looked like native eastern natives simply because the White tribe dairy industry had not yet taken off yet at all. That really happened during the Iron Age with steel axes and out of the baltic region as well. and over ran europe and ultimately North and South America in our historic memory.

This Complex Bronze age society using copper ingots as currency lasted until 1159 BC when it abruptly collapsed leaving only independent stand alone trade stations.

I now conjecture that in 1159 BC, the mid atlantic ridge along with the cuban ridge subsided along its whole extent. This took down Lyonese, Atlantis, the Bahamas plateau and Cuba. It may well have been in whole or in part, but most likely it was a shearing event that propagated along the whole geological arc and served to bring it all down.

Understand that we had the Ice cap basin steadily rising for most of seven thousands of years and mosty if not all the ice was gone. A slow deep geological correction was taking place and the natural failure point would be along this particular arc. The actual geology hangs together.

1179 BC Trojan war

this date comes out of the starmap in the text. it is real

And the text properly understood also places it all in the Baltic. The community of Troy is in Finland and all the other town names are along the Swedish coast in proper order. We have a long string of war boat making folks in the baltic interfacing with the Bronze age somewhere. What is not happening is that they are not dealing with the concurrent Hittites, Cretan and the Egyptians or the Sea peoples. they are obviously on the distant fringes of something and otherwise safe enough. fish is the obvious food staple. this is worth a close read though.

1159 BC End of Atlantean World. ( Tree rings in Irish Bogs )

One day the Atlantis Arc finally subsided. Few if any survived and this also likely included the so called Greek Gods. Crops failed severely in europe but also lilely on a worldwide scale as we might expect. We certainly know that even the Levant was severely impacted. all this pushed populations trekking south the the meditterranean known as the Doric invasions. These folk overran greece and environs and made it their own. Their seamen sailed the long way around, likely picked up no end of refugees with boats and we have the sea peoples and a pretty good set point for dating egyptian history.

This is a bigger picture. fitting in biblical history is a bit fussy but also not an impossibility at all. many think that the philistines werre Sea Peoples but could easily have been a displaced tribe from the Levant where everyone was simultaneously displaced anyway. Modern Jesish history really begins with king David first and then with the Babylonian Return all pretty well inside 1000 BC to 79 AD..

the Moses story fits well enough inside the preceeding centuries around 1300 BC and has had plenty of speculation. All of which provides enough time to populate the hill country of judea in particular and to establish their city and their king. It must be noted that until the Sea Peoples, that the Atlantean world was very much held at bay either by choice or even conveneience. The Levant were customers but no one was marching at all.

The Atlantean world had a long build up prior to 2400 BC, then it arrived with the big contract that likely made it all truly worldwide. Little incentive until then. all that prehistory went down under the sea in 1159 BC.