[Thespiritexpress] Alan Watts on love, the essence of freedom, and the antidote to fear
Danleigh
grokme at mcn.org
Sun Mar 21 11:14:01 PDT 2021
I have recently rediscovered him -- you may resonate with his philosophy.
Dani
Brain Pickings
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Alan Watts on Love, the Meaning of Freedom, and the Only Real Antidote
to Fear
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alanwatts_thewisdomofinsecurity.jpg?fit=320%2C494
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“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb
1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of
loss
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=08b170b74a&e=abb58e6917>.
“Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer
be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense
is the present, the Now.”
Half a century before her, Leo Tolstoy — who befriended a Buddhist monk
late in life and became deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy —
echoed these ancient truths as he contemplated the paradoxical nature of
love
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d4c4605db9&e=abb58e6917>:
“Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only.”
That in love and in life, freedom from fear — like all species of
freedom — is only possible within the present moment has long been a
core teaching of the most ancient Eastern spiritual and philosophical
traditions. It is one of the most elemental truths of existence, and one
of those most difficult to put into practice as we move through our
daily human lives, so habitually inclined toward the next moment and the
mentally constructed universe of expected events — the parallel universe
where anxiety dwells, where hope and fear for what might be eclipse what
is, and where we cease to be free because we are no longer in the direct
light of reality.
The relationship between freedom, fear, and love is what *Alan Watts*
(January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) explores in one of the most
insightful chapters of */The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age
of Anxiety/*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=49b4b4223e&e=abb58e6917>
(/public library/
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3df3be0320&e=abb58e6917>)
— his altogether revelatory 1951 classic, which introduced Eastern
philosophy to the West with its lucid and luminous case for how to live
with presence
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2739f6814e&e=abb58e6917>.
alanwatts.jpg?zoom=2&w=680
Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)
Drawing on his admonition against the dangers of the divided mind
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f55fa02389&e=abb58e6917>
— the mindset that divides us into interior self-awareness and external
reality, into ego and universe, which is the mindset the whole of
Western culture has instilled in us — he writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe meaning of freedom can
never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my
experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent
to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which
the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no
contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and
it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it
creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my
little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is
being fated.
This model of freedom is orthogonal to our conditioned view that freedom
is a matter of bending external reality to our will by the power of our
choices — controlling what remains of nature once the “I” is separated
out. Watts draws a subtle, crucial distinction between freedom and choice:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngWhat we ordinarily mean by
choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated by
pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose
of getting “I” into pleasure and out of pain. But the best pleasures
are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is
expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You
cannot plan to be happy. You can plan to exist, but in themselves
existence and non-existence are neither pleasurable nor painful.
thomaswright6.jpg?resize=680%2C753
Art by Thomas Wright from his /Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the
Universe/
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=340930c33b&e=abb58e6917>,
1750. (Available as a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=775e320975&e=abb58e6917>
and as a face mask
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=540b915573&e=abb58e6917>.)
Stripped of the paraphernalia of circumstance and interpretation, our
internal experience of being unfree stems from attempting impossible
things — things that resist reality and refuse to accept the present
moment on its own terms. Watts writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe sense of not being free
comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even
meaningless. You are not “free” to draw a square circle, to live
without a head, or to stop certain reflex actions. These are not
obstacles to freedom; they are the conditions of freedom. I am not
free to draw a circle if perchance it should turn out to be a square
circle. I am not, thank heaven, free to walk out of doors and leave
my head at home. Likewise I am not free to live in any moment but
this one, or to separate myself from my feelings.
Without the motive forces of pleasure and pain, it might at first appear
paradoxical to make any decisions at all — a contradiction that makes it
impossible to choose between options as we navigate even the most basic
realities of life: Why choose to take the umbrella into the downpour,
why choose to eat this piece of mango and not this piece of cardboard?
But Watts observes that the only real contradiction is of our own making
as we cede the present to an imagined future. More than half a century
before psychologists came to study how your present self is sabotaging
your future happiness
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c7b41a9f2b&e=abb58e6917>,
Watts offers the personal counterpart to Albert Camus’s astute political
observation that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all
to the present,”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1153a0c55f&e=abb58e6917>
and writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngI fall straight into
contradiction when I try to act and decide in order to be happy,
when I make “being pleased” my future goal. For the more my actions
are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of
enjoying any pleasures at all. For all pleasures are present, and
nothing save complete awareness of the present can even begin to
guarantee future happiness.
[…]
You can only live in one moment at a time, and you cannot think
simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are
enjoying listening to the waves. Contradictions of this kind are the
only real types of action without freedom.
margaretcook_leavesofgrass25.jpg?resize=680%2C851
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e8901b4feb&e=abb58e6917>
of Walt Whitman’s /Leaves of Grass/. (Available as a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=62b84a9a80&e=abb58e6917>)
Only with such a recalibration of our reflexive view of freedom does
James Baldwin’s insistence that “people are as free as they want to be”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bf28356050&e=abb58e6917>
begin to unfold its layered meaning like a Zen koan, to be turned over
in the mind until the deceptively simple shape unfolds its
origami-folded scroll of deep truth.
In what may be the most elegant refutation of the particular strain of
hubris that embraces determinism in order to wring from it the
self-permission for living with delirious freedom from responsibility,
Watts writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThere is another theory of
determinism which states that all our actions are motivated by
“unconscious mental mechanisms,” and that for this reason even the
most spontaneous decisions are not free. This is but another example
of split-mindedness, for what is the difference between “me” and
“mental mechanisms” whether conscious or unconscious? Who is being
moved by these processes? The notion that anyone is being motivated
comes from the persisting illusion of “I.” The real man*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f2aef5b3ec&e=abb58e6917>,
the organism-in-relation-to-the-universe, /is/ this unconscious
motivation. And because he /is/ it, he is not being moved /by/ it.
[…]
Events look inevitable in retrospect because when they have
happened, nothing can change them. Yet the fact that I can make safe
bets could prove equally well that events are not /determined/ but
/consistent/. In other words, the universal process acts freely and
spontaneously at every moment, but tends to throw out events in
regular, and so predictable, sequences.
Only by such a misapprehension of freedom, Watts observes, do we ever
feel unfree: When we enter a state that causes us psychological pain,
our immediate impulse is to get the “I” out of the pain, which is
invariably a resistance to the present moment as it is; because we
cannot will a different psychological state, we reach for an easy
escape: a drink, a drug, a compulsive scroll through an Instagram feed.
All the ways in which we try to abate our feelings of abject loneliness
and boredom and inadequacy by escaping from the present moment where
they unfold are motivated by the fear that those intolerable feelings
will subsume us. And yet the instant we become motivated by fear, we
become unfree — we are prisoners of fear. We are only free within the
bounds of the present moment, with all of its disquieting feelings,
because only in that moment can they dissipate into the totality of
integrated reality, leaving no divide between us as feelers and the
feelings being felt, and therefore no painful contrast between preferred
state and actual state. Watts writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngSo long as the mind believes
in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there
can be no freedom.
[…]
It /sounds/ as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit
that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It
seems that if I /am/ afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in
fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get
away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I
discover that there is nothing “stuck” or fixed about the reality of
the moment. When I am aware of this feeling without naming it,
without calling it “fear,” “bad,” “negative,” etc., it changes
instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead. The
feeling no longer perpetuates itself by creating the feeler behind it.
thomaswright_galaxies3.jpg?resize=680%2C977
Art by Thomas Wright from his /Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the
Universe/
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7ca02fcd7d&e=abb58e6917>,
1750. (Available as a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=dfe603dab1&e=abb58e6917>
and as a face mask
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To dissolve into this total reality of the moment is the crucible of
freedom, which is in turn the crucible of love. In consonance with Toni
Morrison’s insistence that the deepest measure of freedom is loving
anything and anyone you choose to love
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cc38ed491b&e=abb58e6917>
and with that classic, exquisite Adrienne Rich sonnet line — “no one’s
fated or doomed to love anyone”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e2119d37e4&e=abb58e6917>
— Watts considers the ultimate reward of this undivided mind:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe further truth that the
undivided mind is aware of experience as a unity, of the world as
itself, and that the whole nature of mind and awareness is to be one
with what it knows, suggests a state that would usually be called
love… Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the
world a /uni/verse and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the
very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action
when the mind is whole… This, rather than any mere emotion, is the
power and principle of free action.
Complement this fragment of the timelessly rewarding */The Wisdom of
Insecurity/*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=464ef1fa8c&e=abb58e6917>
with Watts on learning not to think in terms of gain and loss
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aec3eaf38f&e=abb58e6917>
and finding meaning by accepting the meaninglessness of life
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=564cf7ee4d&e=abb58e6917>,
then revisit Seneca on the antidote to anxiety
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and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s almost unbearably beautiful poem
“Antidotes to Fear of Death.”
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Forward to a friend
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donating=loving
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The Herd, the Hive, and the Human Spirit: Eula Biss on Immunity,
Sanity, and Health as Communal Trust
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f7b3681d59&e=abb58e6917>
eulabiss_onimmunity.jpg?fit=320%2C480
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Months after Rachel Carson’s /Silent Spring/ awakened humanity to the
delicate interdependence of nature
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bfa200c961&e=abb58e6917>,
Dr. King awakened humanity to our delicate dependence on each other. “We
are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality [and] whatever affects
one directly, affects all indirectly,”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f7e554fa6e&e=abb58e6917>
he wrote from his cell at the Birmingham City Jail.
When Robert Hooke looked at a piece of cork through an early handcrafted
leather-and-gold microscope in 1665, he named the strange irregular
“pores” of its honeycomb-like tissue structure /cells/, after the small
adjacent spaces in which monks spend their voluntary solitary
confinement. It would take another two centuries for scientists to
discover that cells are the basic biological units of life, that they
are in constant osmotic communication with one another, and that they
replicate themselves to become new cells, each a whispered word from the
language in which life talks to the future.
RobertHooke_Micrographia_cork.jpg?resize=680%2C1007
Cork structure from Robert Hooke’s /Micrographia/, 1665. (Available as a
print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6042f0ccfe&e=abb58e6917>.)
Biological and social, our interdependence is a defining feature not
only of our civilization, not only of our species and all living
species, but of life itself — life the physiological process and life
the psychosocial phenomenon. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs
to you,”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=055786d7c2&e=abb58e6917>
Walt Whitman exulted in the golden age of chemistry — the new science he
saw as “the elevating, beautiful, study… which involves the essences of
creation.” Meanwhile, the development of cell theory was revolutionizing
biology, making of this philosophical field as old as Aristotle an even
newer science that illuminated the essence of life. Cells became to
biology what atoms were to chemistry. Biology ushered in the revelation
that every cell belonging to me as good — as healthy, as vital, as fit
for replication — belongs to you.
That delicate interdependence of life and lives, with its tangled roots
in biology and cultural history, is what *Eula Biss* explores in */On
Immunity: An Inoculation/*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e4d6f47d38&e=abb58e6917>
(/public library/
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1e70ed4014&e=abb58e6917>)
— a book of penetrating and poetic insight, drawn with that rare
scholarship capable of correcting the warped cultural hindsight we call
history; a book of staggering foresight, conceived in the wake of the
H1N1 flu pandemic, yet speaking with astonishing prescience to the
complex epidemiological realities and social dynamics of the COVID-19
pandemic unfolding more than five years after its publication.
For Biss — the daughter of a medical scientist and a poet — even her own
biological inheritance as a universal donor with type O negative blood
becomes a potent metaphor for the mechanism of vaccination, a lens
through which to view the permeable membrane between the biological and
social realities of immunity. With an eye to the blood banks that
collect her donations to save other lives, she writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIf we imagine the action of
a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but
also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community,
it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity.
Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will
not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of
/herd immunity/, and it is through herd immunity that mass
vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.
It is a rather unfortunate term for an unassailable scientific principle
— we humans, especially in this culture of rugged individualism nursed
on the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3e4cd26a21&e=abb58e6917>,
bristle at thinking of ourselves as members of a herd. In our long
history of thinking with animals
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0f74059735&e=abb58e6917>,
herd animals have been the butt of our derogatory metaphors for mindless
conformity.
louisi_tallec00.jpg?zoom=2&w=680
Art by Olivier Tallec from /Louis I, King of the Sheep/
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=593bf1aeac&e=abb58e6917>
And yet inside the unfortunate linguistic container, an unfaltering
biological reality resides: On large enough a scale, even a fairy
ineffective vaccine that fails to produce immunity in some individuals
will slow down the spread of infection in the community; as the virus
fails to replicate itself in more and more new hosts, the vaccine will
eventually halt it altogether. In consequence, even such a mediocre
vaccine will protect all members of the community, even those for whom
inoculation has not worked as intended on the individual level. This is
why it is more dangerous to be the vaccinated animal amid a largely
unvaccinated herd than the other way around. Biss writes:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe unvaccinated person is
protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is
not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that
host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading
immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what
is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve
here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one
body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a
common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who
draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.
With an eye to the origin of herd immunity theory — a theory developed
in the 1840s by a doctor treating smallpox, which has taken manyfold
more human lives than any other infectious disease in the history of our
species and which has since been eradicated — Biss proposes an
alternative, both more poetic and more precise, to the imperfect term
that so perfectly describes the biosocial reality:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngHerd immunity, an observable
phenomenon, now seems implausible only if we think of our bodies as
inherently disconnected from other bodies. Which, of course, we do.
The very expression /herd immunity/ suggests that we are cattle,
waiting, perhaps, to be sent to slaughter. And it invites an
unfortunate association with the term /herd mentality/, a stampede
toward stupidity. The herd, we assume, is foolish. Those of us who
eschew the herd mentality tend to prefer a frontier mentality in
which we imagine our bodies as isolated homesteads that we tend
either well or badly. The health of the homestead next to ours does
not affect us, this thinking suggests, so long as ours is well tended.
If we were to exchange the metaphor of the herd for a hive, perhaps
the concept of shared immunity might be more appealing. Honeybees
are matriarchal, environmental do-gooders who also happen to be
entirely interdependent. The health of any individual bee, as we
know from the recent epidemic of colony collapse, depends on the
health of the hive.
sougy_bee.jpg?resize=680%2C879
Diagram of bee anatomy by French artist Paul Sougy, 1962. (Available as
a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ff1df1b8e5&e=abb58e6917>.)
Biss quotes a succinct summation by her father, a doctor:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngVaccination works by
enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.
No one person has done more to undermine this vital mutuality of
protection than Andrew Wakefield — the British gastroenterologist who,
in the 1990s, infected the hive mind with his causal claims linking
vaccines and autism. Preying on the understandable human impulse toward
concretizing blame for amorphous and ambiguous problems, the theory went
viral before multiple subsequent studies debunked his results, before it
was exposed that Wakefield was paid for his research by a lawyer
readying a lawsuit against a vaccine maker, before the General Medical
Council of the United Kingdom concluded its investigation with the
verdict that Wakefield had been “irresponsible and dishonest” in
conducting and publishing his work.
Despite the scientific and ethical denunciation of Wakefield’s study,
its ideological meme had already spread beyond retrieval. (Richard
Dawkins coined the word /meme/ in 1976 by borrowing from biology
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1a61935e8d&e=abb58e6917>
— a word that came alive anew a quarter century later in the context of
“viral” content on the internet, which has its own roots in
epidemiology.) A quarter century later, echoes of Wakefield’s disproven
falsehoods bellow with formidable vocality. That group of voices is
often referred to as the anti-vaccination movement, but I find the term
/movement/ extremely ill-suited — such groupthink is not in movement but
static, frozen in time and frozen with fear, petrified in the cultural
amber of a time before the Age of Reason and lashed about by the same
errors of magical thinking, willful blindness, and confusion of
causation and correlation that made our medieval ancestors take comets
for indisputable omens of future events and left-handedness for
indisputable evidence of possession by the Devil.
comet9.jpg?resize=680%2C798
Art from /The Comet Book/
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=50a05a98fd&e=abb58e6917>,
1587. (Available as a print
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ca6d7a96ec&e=abb58e6917>).
Biss is more generous in her own assessment of anti-vaccination:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThose who went on to use
Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines
cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so much
as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always been used
— to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for
other reasons.
Writing shortly after the birth of the Occupy movement — the
self-described “99%” launching “an ongoing global protest of capitalism”
— she considers a friend’s half-joke, half-koan about vaccination as a
matter of “occupy immune system,” and reflects on the basic moral
syllogism of anti-vaccination as a political stance claiming to protest
the capitalist forces behind modern medicine:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngImmunity is a public space.
And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity.
For some… a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to
capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience
bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy
movement seeks to disrupt — a privileged 1 percent are sheltered
from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.
[…]
We are justified in feeling threatened by the unlimited expansion of
industry, and we are justified in fearing that our interests are
secondary to corporate interests. But refusal of vaccination
undermines a system that is not actually typical of capitalism. It
is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are shared
across the entire population. Vaccination allows us to use the
products of capitalism for purposes that are counter to the
pressures of capital.
honeybee_MariaPopova.jpg?resize=680%2C680
/Emissary/ by Maria Popova
In a lovely antidote to the tragic human tendency toward cynicism — that
touchingly misguided and ineffective effort at self-protection
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aa5b8aec46&e=abb58e6917>,
that particularly virulent strain of cowardice
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=efa1ffb65f&e=abb58e6917>
to which our culture has grown increasingly hospitable as it has grown
increasingly impatient with the slow and vulnerable work of nuance —
Biss adds:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThat so many of us find it
entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health
officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for
money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us.
Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate
wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us
culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin
to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human
motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we
are truly impoverished.
Complement */On Immunity/*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3b3663b4e0&e=abb58e6917>
— a redemptive and salutary read in its entirety — with Virginia Woolf
on illness as a portal to self-understanding
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2aee7a9cb0&e=abb58e6917>
and Bessel van der Kolk on the science of how our minds and our bodies
converge in healing
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c124318721&e=abb58e6917>,
then revisit Adrienne Rich on resisting capitalism through the arts of
the possible
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e63d66c5f9&e=abb58e6917>.
Forward to a friend
<http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b3f29a7027&e=abb58e6917>/Read
Online
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=48a80f1d24&e=abb58e6917>/
Like
https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/19/eula-biss-on-immunity/ on
Facebook
<https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/alan-watts-eula-biss-newton?fblike=fblike-bbe18e98&e=abb58e6917&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Db3f29a7027%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2021%252F03%252F19%252Feula-biss-on-immunity%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2021%252F03%252F19...>
A Cenotaph for Newton: The Poetry of Public Spaces, the Architecture
of Shadow, and How Trees Inspired the World’s First Planetarium Design
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3a1e0fbdbd&e=abb58e6917>
boullee_architectureart.jpg?fit=320%2C417
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8bfb31be84&e=abb58e6917>
Nineteen years after the publication of Isaac Newton’s epoch-making
/Principia/ — in England, in Latin — the prodigy mathematician Émilie du
Châtelet
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=531b3dd63a&e=abb58e6917>
set out to translate his ideas into her native French, making them more
comprehensible in the process. Her more-than-translation — which
includes several of her mathematical corrections and clarifications of
Newton’s imprecisions, and which remains the only comprehensive edition
in French to this day — popularized his ideas in France and, from this
epicenter of the Enlightenment, spread them centripetally throughout the
rest of the Continent, rendering Newton himself an emblem of the
Enlightenment the sweep of which he never lived to see.
blake_newton.jpg?zoom=2&w=680
/Newton/ by William Blake (Tate Britain)
Not long after Du Châtelet’s untimely death, her legacy reached one of
her most gifted compatriots — the visionary architect *Étienne-Louis
Boullée* (February 12, 1728–February 4, 1799), who fell under Newton’s
spell. Determined to honor Newton with a worthy cenotaph — a memorial
tomb for a person buried elsewhere — he designed a sphere 500 feet in
diameter, taller than the Pyramids of Giza, nested into a colossal
pedestal and encircled by hundreds of cypress trees, giving it the
transfixing illusion of being both half-buried into the Earth and
hovering unmoored from gravity. It was also, in essence, the world’s
first domed planetarium design.
boullee_newtoncenotaph7.jpg?resize=680%2C411
Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The cenotaph was a touching gesture in the first place — a Frenchman
honoring a genius born of and interred in England, a nation with which
Boullée’s own had been in near-ceaseless war for centuries, with those
tensions at an all-time high at the time of his design, thanks to the
American Revolutionary War. Doubly touching was his choice of a sphere:
One of Newton’s most revolutionary contributions — the mathematical
inference that because gravity is weaker at the equator, the shape of
the Earth must be spherical — had defied France’s greatest son, René
Descartes, who maintained that the Earth was egg-shaped. When Boullée
was still a boy, a young Frenchman — Émilie du Châtelet’s mathematics
tutor — had joined a perilous Arctic expedition to prove Newton correct.
Two centuries later, in the wake of the world’s grimmest war yet, a
queer Quaker Englishman would do the same
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9096933894&e=abb58e6917>,
risking his life to defend the epoch-making theory of a German Jew — the
theory of relativity that ultimately subverted Newton. Another world war
later, Einstein himself would appeal to what he called “the common
language of science”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cc7d3ebeb1&e=abb58e6917>
— that truth-seeking contact with nature and reality that transcends all
borders and all nationalisms, the impulse that animated Boullée’s bold
homage to Newton.
boullee_newtoncenotaph5.jpg?resize=680%2C655
Cenotaph side cross-section. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
While governed by the credo that “our buildings — and our public
buildings in particular — should be to some extent poems,” Boullée also
believed that science could magnify the poetry of public spaces, which
must at bottom reflect the principles of the grand designer: Nature. A
century before the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote that “all the Arts…
imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see,”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8427116b16&e=abb58e6917>
Boullée insisted:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngNo idea exists that does not
derive from nature… It is impossible to create architectural imagery
without a profound knowledge of nature: the Poetry of architecture
lies in natural effects. That is what makes architecture an art and
that art sublime.
Architecture in the modern sense was then a young art, because the
art-science of perspective was so novel
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=af86805e4f&e=abb58e6917>.
Newton’s optics, derived directly from the laws of nature, had
revolutionized it all. Boullée came to define architecture as “the art
of creating perspectives by the arrangement of volumes,” but a highly
poetic art:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe real talent of an
architect lies in incorporating in his work the sublime attraction
of Poetry.
The poetry of architecture, he argued, resides in using perspective and
light in such a way that “our senses are reminded of nature.” He
interpreted the laws of nature, as clarified by Newton’s optics and
mathematics, to intimate that no shape embodies this serenade to the
senses with greater power and precision than the sphere:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngA sphere is, in all
respects, the image of perfection. It combines strict symmetry with
the most perfect regularity and the greatest possible variety; its
form is developed to the fullest extent and is the simplest that
exists; its shape is outlined by the most agreeable contour and,
finally, the light effects that it produces are so beautifully
graduated that they could not possibly be softer, more agreeable or
more varied. These unique advantages, which the sphere derives from
nature, have an immeasurable hold over our senses.
boullee_newtoncenotaph2.jpg?resize=680%2C404
Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
And so Boullée predicated his cenotaph for Newton on an enormous sphere
that would convey his ultimate intent for the temple — to arouse in the
visitor’s soul “feelings in keeping with religious ceremonies,” a sense
of grandeur leaving them “moved by such an excess of sensibility… that
all the faculties of our soul are disturbed to such an extent that we
feel it is departing from our body” — an effect always best achieved not
by an enormity of sheer size and space but by a considered contrast of
scales. No building, he observed, “calls for the Poetry of architecture”
more than a memorial to the dead. Believing that architecture, like all
art, should ultimately serve to enlarge our sense of aliveness, and that
we are never more alive than when we are rooted in our creaturely
senses, Boullée insisted that the key to this sense of grandeur lies in
applying the principles of nature’s mathematics with poetic subtlety —
the principles laid bare in the /Principia/, the principles that “derive
from order, the symbol of wisdom.” He wrote:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngSymmetry… is what results
from the order that extends in every direction and multiplies them
at our glance until we can no longer count them. By extending the
sweep of an avenue so that its end is out of sight, the laws of
optics and the effects of perspective given an impression of
immensity; at each step, the objects appear in a new guise and our
pleasure is renewed by a succession of different vistas. Finally, by
some miracle which in fact is the result of our own movement but
which we attribute to the objects around us, the latter seem to move
with us, as if we had imparted Life to them.
boullee_newtoncenotaph1.jpg?resize=680%2C667
Aerial cross-section. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
But my favorite part of the story is that Boullée found his formative
inspiration, not only for the Newton cenotaph and but for his entire
creative philosophy, in an unusual encounter with trees — those
profoundest of teachers
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c491abed79&e=abb58e6917>.
One evening, heavy with grief, Boullée went for a walk along the edge of
a forest. Under the moonlight, he noticed his shadow. He had seen his
shadow a thousand times before, but the peculiar lens of his psychic
state rendered it entirely new — a living artwork of “extreme
melancholy.” Looking around, he saw the shadows of the trees in this new
light, too, etching onto the ground the profound drama of life. The
entire scene was suddenly awash in “all that is sombre in nature.” He
had seen the state of his soul mirrored back by the natural world, as we
so often do in those rawest moments when we are stripped to the base of
our being, grounded into our creaturely senses.
This was the moment of Boullée’s artistic awakening — that moment of
revelation when, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her exquisite account of her
own artistic awakening
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9d88eef4bc&e=abb58e6917>,
something lifts “the cotton wool of daily life” and we see the familiar
world afresh. Boullée recounted:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe mass of objects stood
out in black against the extreme wanness of the light. Nature
offered itself to my gaze in mourning. I was struck by the
sensations I was experiencing and immediately began to wonder how to
apply this, especially to architecture. I tried to find a
composition made up of the effect of shadows. To achieve this, I
imagined the light (as I had observed it in nature) giving back to
me all that my imagination could think of. That was how I proceeded
when I was seeking to discover this new type of architecture.
He called this new architecture “the architecture of shadow.” His vision
for Newton’s cenotaph was its grand testament:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngI attempted to create the
greatest of all effects, that of immensity; for that is what gives
us lofty thoughts as we contemplate the Creator and give us
celestial sensations.
He attempted, more than that, to honor Newton on his own terms, by the
essence of his genius:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngO Newton! With the range of
your intelligence and the sublime nature of your Genius, you have
defined the shape of the earth; I have conceived the idea of
enveloping you with your discovery… your own self. How can I find
outside you anything worthy of you?
boullee_newtoncenotaph4.jpg?resize=680%2C411
Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
In a further homage to Newton’s legacy, with Boullée regarded as a
“divine system” of laws, he chose to suspend a sole spherical lamp over
the tomb as the only decoration in the entire monument — anything else,
he felt, would be “committing sacrilege.” The contrast of scales — the
smaller sphere of the lamp inside the enormous sphere of the building —
would dramatize the contrast of light and shadow, just as the moonlight
had done that fateful night of artistic revelation by the trees. This
would give the visitor the sense that they are “as if by magic floating
in the air, borne in the wake of images in the immensity of space.”
Boullée considered the play of light the vital element in this enchantment:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIt is light that produces
impressions which arouse in us various contradictory sensations
depending on whether they are brilliant or sombre. If I could manage
to diffuse in my temple magnificent light effects I would fill the
onlooker with joy; but if, on the contrary, my temple had only
sombre effects, I would fill him with sadness. If I could avoid
direct light and arrange for its presence without the onlooker being
aware of its source, the ensuing effect of mysterious daylight would
produce inconceivable impression and, in a sense, a truly enchanting
magic quality.
At a time long before readily available electric light and
light-projection, he leaned on Newton’s optics to envision something
that was part Stonehenge and part Hayden Planetarium. A century and a
half before the first modern planetarium dome, Boullée dotted the black
interior of his dome with an intricate arrangement of tiny holes
reflecting the positions of the constellations and the planets,
streaming in daylight to create an enchanting nightscape inside. But
unlike the modern counterpart, Boullée’s was a reversible planetarium —
at night, the sole spherical light would irradiate the tiny holes from
the other direction, making the dome appear as a self-contained universe
if viewed from above. This, lest we forget, was the golden age of
aeronautics, when hot-air balloons first defied gravity to lift the
human animal into the sky.
boullee_newtoncenotaph6.jpg?resize=680%2C412
Side cross-section. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Too visionary for its era, the cenotaph was never built, but Boullée’s
ink-and-wash drawings circulated widely in the final decade of his life,
eliciting both gasping admiration and merciless derision — the fate of
the true visionary. With the publication of his impassioned and
insightful writings
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=609b62cf49&e=abb58e6917>
nearly two centuries after his death, translated by Helen Rosenau, his
vision went on to inspire generations of modern artists and architects
with a new way of thinking about the poetry of public spaces and the
relationship between nature and human creativity.
In a sentiment evocative of another pioneer’s lamentation — Harriet
Hosmer’s astute remark that “if one knew but one-half the difficulties
an artist has to surmount… the public would be less ready to censure him
for his shortcomings or slow advancement”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=570a920527&e=abb58e6917>
— Boullée wrote of his critics:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngNo one is more exacting than
a man who is not conversant with a given art for he is unable to
imagine all the difficulties the artist has to overcome.
His ultimate satisfaction was not the reception or execution of his
designs, but the inexhaustible source of their inspiration — the
elemental wellspring of the creative impulse behind all art and all
science, that richest and readiest reward of our aliveness:
2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe artist… is always making
discoveries and spends his life observing nature.
Forward to a friend
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