"Do I want to live with this feeling for the rest of my life, or is it better to just finish it off?"

NYT

"Beginning in 2005, suicide rates among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans started to climb sharply, and the military and Veterans Affairs created a number of programs to fight the problem. Despite spending hundreds of millions on research, the department and the military still know little about how combat experience affects suicide risk, according to suicide researchers focused on the military.

Many recent studies have focused on whether deployment was a risk factor for suicide, and found that it was not.

The results appeared to show something paradoxical: Those deployed to war were actually less likely to commit suicide. But critics of the studies say most people deployed in war zones do not face enemy fire. The risk for true combat veterans is hidden in the larger results, and has never been properly examined, they assert.

“They may have 10 times the risk, they may have 100 times, and we don’t know, because no one has looked,” said Michael Schoenbaum, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

... 

The men of the 2/7 overwhelmingly see a tie between combat and their suicide problem. Not only were all of the men who committed suicide young infantrymen who struggled with experiences of killing and loss, they say, but it is possible to trace one traumatic moment forward and see how those involved are now struggling.

Noel Guerrero and Manny Bojorquez were best friends in the battalion. As two Mexican-Americans from the Southwest, they bonded in infantry school over a love of Mexican hot sauce. In Afghanistan, they would share bottles sent from home.

On one mission, Mr. Guerrero, then a 20-year-old lance corporal, was a machine-gunner atop a truck at the lead of a supply convoy. He said he was good at finding I.E.D.s and over six months had spotted almost a dozen that the battalion was able to avoid. But one day, the truck hit a big one, and the explosion flung him against his gun turret. 

Mr. Guerrero crawled from the smoking vehicle, his head spinning. He watched his sergeant’s Humvee roll in to help. Then suddenly, another blast swallowed the sergeant’s truck in smoke. The truck shot up 10 feet and came down with a crash, falling to its side. Then, chaos. The driver was trapped and screaming, with his arm caught under the wreckage. A medic in the back was pinned by a seat crushed against the truck’s ceiling. The sergeant was dead.

Before Mr. Guerrero could get to his feet to help, enemy fire started thudding into the ground around him. He spotted his machine gun in the dirt, where it had landed after being blown out of the truck, and with his vision still blurred, he began to return fire.

Two other Marines, Cpl. Jastin Pak and Lance Cpl. Tanner Cleveland, scrambled into the wreckage. Mr. Pak crouched over the driver, shielding him until a line of Marines could lift the truck enough to free his arm. Mr. Pak and Mr. Cleveland emerged covered with blood, clutching the wounded, then went back for the remains of the sergeant. The platoon was out of body bags, so they stuffed the sergeant’s remains into a sleeping bag.

When it was all over, Mr. Guerrero picked up a cigarette that had been blown out of one of the trucks and lit it. After he exhaled, he noticed it was spotted with blood. He smoked it anyway.

Since that day, Mr. Guerrero has blamed himself for the ordeal and has tried to kill himself three times. Mr. Cleveland, 26, of Chicago, also tried suicide, and Mr. Pak, of Oceanside, Calif., hanged himself in November.

“You come back and try to be a normal kid, but there is always a shadow on you, a dark shadow you can never take away,” Mr. Guerrero, now 28, said in an interview at his home in San Diego.

“Now, when I meet someone, I already know what they look like dead. I can’t help but think that way. And I ask myself, ‘Do I want to live with this feeling for the rest of my life, or is it better to just finish it off?’ ”"

On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane -- Philip Levine (1992)

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s

been drinking and has no idea who

this curious Andalusian is, unable

even to speak the language of poetry.

The young man who brought them

together knows both Spanish and English,

but he has a headache from jumping

back and forth from one language

to another. For a moment’s relief

he goes to the window to look

down on the East River, darkening

below as the early night comes on.

Something flashes across his sight,

a double vision of such horror

he has to slap both his hands across

his mouth to keep from screaming.

Let’s not be frivolous, let’s

not pretend the two poets gave

each other wisdom or love or

even a good time, let’s not

invent a dialogue of such eloquence

that even the ants in your own

house won’t forget it. The two

greatest poetic geniuses alive

meet, and what happens? A vision

comes to an ordinary man staring

at a filthy river. Have you ever

had a vision? Have you ever shaken

your head to pieces and jerked back

at the image of your young son

falling through open space, not

from the stern of a ship bound

from Vera Cruz to New York but from

the roof of the building he works on?

Have you risen from bed to pace

until dawn to beg a merciless God

to take these pictures away? Oh, yes,

let’s bless the imagination. It gives

us the myths we live by. Let’s bless

the visionary power of the human—

the only animal that’s got it—,

bless the exact image of your father

dead and mine dead, bless the images

that stalk the corners of our sights

and will not let go. The young man

was my cousin, Arthur Lierberman,

then a language student at Columbia,

who told me all this before he died

quietly in his sleep in 1983

in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,

Arthur, he survived graduate school,

later came home to Detroit and sold

pianos right through the Depression.

He loaned my brother a used one

to compose hideous songs on,

which Arthur thought were genius.

What an imagination Arthur had!

I Hate Rock n Roll -- Beverly Kenney (1958)

I'm growing weary of teenaged hoods
motor bikes blue jeans and Natalie Woods
I'm tired of rebels without a cause
say what ever happened to Santa Claus

roo to the rose and the baby roo
I for one must tell the tru-ee-u-do do

I don't care who knows it. I hate rock n roll
I don't care who knows it. I hate rock n roll

I want to sing I love you in a natural way
I don't want to sing I-la-hov you, not that way
I don't care who knows it. I hate rock n roll

Young love, true love
is overrated
and blue suede shoes
they should be confiscated
What is the answer to a teenaged prayer?
Frankly speaking I don't care I don't care

I don't care who knows it. I hate rock n roll
I don't care who knows it. I swear that I hate rock n roll

Don't want to slip skip or swing a guitar
or anything to do with that vernacular
I don't care who knows
so I'm last on the hit record polls
because I hate rock n roll. do ba do ba dee
I hate rock and roll

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More from the New York Times USMC suicide article

Holofernes, choking on his own blood

NYT

"By the end of the deployment, 20 Marines in the battalion had been killed and 140 had been wounded. Many lost limbs. Some were badly burned; others were so battered by blasts that they can scarcely function day to day.

Others returned unscathed, but unable to fall in with civilian life. Members of the battalion say what they brought home from combat is more complex than just PTSD. Many regret things they did — or failed to do. Some feel betrayed that the deep sacrifices made in combat seem to have achieved little. Others cannot reconcile the stark intensity of war with home’s mannered expectations, leaving them alienated among family and friends. It is not just symptoms like sleeplessness or flashbacks, but an injury to their sense of self.

“Something happens over there,” said Mr. Havniear, whose best friend from the battalion tried suicide by cutting his wrists after returning home, but survived. “You wake up a primal part of your brain you are not supposed to listen to, and it becomes a part of you. I shot an old woman. I shot her on purpose because she was running at us with an RPG. You see someone blown in half, or you carry a foot. You can try, but it is hard to get away from that.”

After Mr. Bojorquez returned home, he started having a recurring nightmare. He was patrolling with his squad when bomb blasts killed everyone but him. As the dust cleared, he looked up to see enemy fighters surging forward. He often sat up in bed, thinking he was choking on his own blood."

Suicide Stalking 2/7 Marines

"Promise me, she said to him, that you will never put your mother through this."

NYT

"Mr. Bojorquez, 27, served in one of the hardest hit military units in Afghanistan, the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment. In 2008, the 2/7 deployed to a wild swath of Helmand Province. Well beyond reliable supply lines, the battalion regularly ran low on water and ammunition while coming under fire almost daily. During eight months of combat, the unit killed hundreds of enemy fighters and suffered more casualties than any other Marine battalion that year.

When its members returned, most left the military and melted back into the civilian landscape. They had families and played softball, taught high school and attended Ivy League universities. But many also struggled, unable to find solace. And for some, the agonies of war never ended.

Almost seven years after the deployment, suicide is spreading through the old unit like a virus. Of about 1,200 Marines who deployed with the 2/7 in 2008, at least 13 have killed themselves, two while on active duty, the rest after they left the military. The resulting suicide rate for the group is nearly four times the rate for young male veterans as a whole and 14 times that for all Americans.

The deaths started a few months after the Marines returned from the war in Afghanistan. A corporal put on his dress uniform and shot himself in his driveway. A former sergeant shot himself in front of his girlfriend and mother. An ex-sniper who pushed others to seek help for post-traumatic stress disorder shot himself while alone in his apartment.

The problem has grown over time. More men from the battalion killed themselves in 2014 — four — than in any previous year. Veterans of the unit, tightly connected by social media, sometimes learn of the deaths nearly as soon as they happen. In November, a 2/7 veteran of three combat tours posted a photo of his pistol on Snapchat with a note saying, “I miss you all.” Minutes later, he killed himself.

The most recent suicide was in May, when Eduardo Bojorquez, no relation to Manny, overdosed on pills in his car. Men from the battalion converged from all over the country for his funeral in Las Vegas, filing silently past the grave, tossing roses that thumped on the plain metal coffin like drum beats.

“When the suicides started, I felt angry,” Matt Havniear, a onetime lance corporal who carried a rocket launcher in the war, said in a phone interview from Oregon. “The next few, I would just be confused and sad. Then at about the 10th, I started feeling as if it was inevitable — that it is going to get us all and there is nothing we could do to stop it.”"

New Pavlov Biography Rescues Him From Behaviorism

TLS

"In the West, [Ivan Pavlov] has often been taken to have adopted an extremely mechanistic stimulus–response model of mental processing. He himself played his part in constructing this image, not least through the anthropomorphism of much of his research on dogs. But, as [recent biographer Daniel P.] Todes notes, the biggest contribution to this misapprehension was made by his first translators, who erroneously rendered his key experimental concept as “conditioned” rather than “conditional” reflex. In combination with the stereotype of dogs salivating to bells, this has made Pavlov come across as a narrow determinist and as a scientist preoccupied with external phenomena rather than underlying causes. In America, he has been domesticated as a variety of behaviourist. But this is a very misleading view.

One part of the stereotype is correct: Pavlov and his co-workers spent a great deal of their time getting dogs to salivate (though their preferred stimuli were the buzzer and the metronome, not the bell). But, as Todes shows in an exposition both lucid and nuanced, that was merely the starting point. Dogs for Pavlov were experimental subjects rather than machines for replicating results. He and his colleagues developed close working relationships with their animals (even as they tortured them). Control groups were unthinkable: all the dogs were individuals. This allowed Pavlov to conduct elaborate sequences of experiments on the same dog, with multiple combinations of stimuli, but quickly forced him to confront an inconvenient fact: dogs, like human beings, were different. Excitation and inhibition were not universal mechanisms, but varied in their intensity and interrelations from one animal to the next. By 1924, Pavlov enjoyed excellent lab conditions, including the purpose-built “Towers of Silence” where dogs could be isolated from extraneous stimuli, but even this apparently most neutral of environments affected dogs in profoundly different ways. A psychiatrist, perhaps, would have welcomed this evidence of irreducible psychic variation, but a physiologist and determinist, such as Pavlov always remained, badly needed to find a way of accounting for it. The second half of Pavlov’s life may be regarded as one long search for a way of embracing the complexity without abandoning core mechanistic positions.

... 

The underlying irony was that, from approximately the mid-point of his life, this world-renowned physiologist was in fact going after the psyche. Even if he still thought nervous impulses the best way of explaining the mind’s functioning, he was starting to push against the limits of his earlier explanatory models. In earlier days, he had taken “conditional reflexes” as a synonym for what the psychologists called “associations”. He attempted to prove the point by establishing in dogs longer chains of reflexes: not just light-equals-meat, but also metronome-equals-light-equals-meat. But these experiments did not yield satisfactory results: Pavlov had to admit that associations were broader than reflexes, and that the cumulative study of individual reflexes could not account for the “systematicity” of the nervous system. 

In the last decade of his life, as he came to acknowledge that the psychic whole was more than the sum of its nervous parts, his work took a distinctly psychiatric turn. No doubt this was partly the result of intellectual one-upmanship: he wanted to use his physiological toolkit to show the established specialists in the human mind the limits of their own aetiological speculations. But Pavlov’s interest in psychiatric abnormalities was also born of the sheer opportunism of any good researcher. Quite simply, a number of his dogs were nervous wrecks. In 1924, at least a couple of the animals were traumatized by their narrow escape from drowning during the Leningrad flood. Others were broken by the programme of experiments to which they were subjected – vivisection, isolation, electric shocks, jarring sounds. Earlier in his career, Pavlov might have discarded such animals as no longer “normal” and fit for purpose. Now they had become his most intriguing subjects: he analysed mental illness as a “break” caused by intolerable burdens on the nervous system. He was also more explicitly extrapolating from animals to humans. In the mid-1930s, he held court at “Clinical Wednesdays”, where he examined two or three patients [human or canine?] and then delivered a diagnosis, with psychiatrists in silent and sceptical attendance.

Pavlov’s dogs also drew him into the nature-versus-nurture debate. It was plausible to suppose that variation in dogs’ nervous types could be explained by heredity and by their different life experiences before entering the clutches of his lab assistants. In the early 1920s, Pavlov endorsed research on mice that seemed to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characteristics, only later to have to retreat from this position when the experimental results were shown to be flimsy. A few years later, with the creation, thanks to Bolshevik largesse, of a bucolic experimental station outside Leningrad, he had the opportunity to investigate heredity in a more controlled and convincing manner. Dogs could be reared in controlled environments as “free” or “imprisoned”, and multiple generations could be studied to investigate inherited characteristics."

Captagon - Drug of Choice for Syrian fighters

The Guardian

"As Syria sinks ever deeper into civil war, evidence is starting to emerge that a brutal and bloody conflict that has left more than 100,000 people dead and displaced as many as two million is now also being fuelled by both the export and consumption of rapidly increasing quantities of illegal drugs.

Separate investigations by the news agency Reuters and Time magazine have found that the growing trade in Syrian-made Captagon – an amphetamine widely consumed in the Middle East but almost unknown elsewhere – generated revenues of millions of dollars inside the country last year, some of which was almost certainly used to fund weapons, while combatants on both sides are reportedly turning to the stimulant to help them keep fighting.

Captagon, the trademark name for the synthetic stimulant fenethylline, was first produced in the 1960s to treat hyperactivity, narcolepsy and depression, but was banned in most countries by the 1980s as too addictive. It remains hugely popular in the Middle East; Saudi Arabia alone seizes some 55m tablets a year, perhaps 10% of the total thought to be smuggled into the kingdom.

The drug is cheap and simple to produce, using ingredients that are easy and often legal to obtain, yet sells for up to $20 a tablet. A Lebanese psychiatrist, Ramzi Haddad, said that Captagon had "the typical effects of a stimulant", producing "a kind of euphoria. You're talkative, you don't sleep, you don't eat, you're energetic."

Those effects explain why fighters from most of the warring parties in the conflict – with the exception of al Qaida-linked groups, which mostly hold to a strict interpretation of Islamic law – are now said to be making extensive use of Captagon, often on night missions or during particularly gruelling battles. But doctors and psychiatrists say use of the drug is also becoming widespread among Syria's increasingly desperate civilian population."

Middle Passage -- Robert Hayden

I

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

       Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,

       sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;   

       horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:

               voyage through death

                               to life upon these shores.

       “10 April 1800—

       Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says   

       their moaning is a prayer for death,

       ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.   

       Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter   

       to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.”

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

       Standing to America, bringing home   

       black gold, black ivory, black seed.

               Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,   

               of his bones New England pews are made,   

               those are altar lights that were his eyes.

Jesus    Saviour    Pilot    Me

Over    Life’s    Tempestuous    Sea

We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,   

safe passage to our vessels bringing   

heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus    Saviour

       “8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick

       with fear, but writing eases fear a little

       since still my eyes can see these words take shape   

       upon the page & so I write, as one

       would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding,

       but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune

       follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning   

       tutelary gods). Which one of us

       has killed an albatross? A plague among

       our blacks—Ophthalmia: blindness—& we   

       have jettisoned the blind to no avail.

       It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.

       Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes   

       & there is blindness in the fo’c’sle

       & we must sail 3 weeks before we come

       to port.”

               What port awaits us, Davy Jones’

               or home? I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting,   

               playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews   

               gone blind, the jungle hatred

               crawling up on deck.

Thou    Who    Walked    On    Galilee

       “Deponent further sayeth The Bella J

       left the Guinea Coast

       with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd   

       for the barracoons of Florida:

       “That there was hardly room ’tween-decks for half   

       the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;   

       that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh   

       and sucked the blood:

       “That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest   

       of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;   

       that there was one they called The Guinea Rose   

       and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

       “That when the Bo’s’n piped all hands, the flames   

       spreading from starboard already were beyond   

       control, the negroes howling and their chains   

       entangled with the flames:

       “That the burning blacks could not be reached,   

       that the Crew abandoned ship,

       leaving their shrieking negresses behind,

       that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

       “Further Deponent sayeth not.”

Pilot    Oh    Pilot    Me

       II

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,   

Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;

have watched the artful mongos baiting traps   

of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.   

Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity

and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,   

Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one—King Anthracite we named him—

fetish face beneath French parasols

of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth

whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He’d honor us with drum and feast and conjo   

and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,   

and for tin crowns that shone with paste,   

red calico and German-silver trinkets

Would have the drums talk war and send   

his warriors to burn the sleeping villages   

and kill the sick and old and lead the young   

in coffles to our factories.

Twenty years a trader, twenty years,

for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested   

from those black fields, and I’d be trading still   

but for the fevers melting down my bones.

       III

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,   

the dark ships move, the dark ships move,   

their bright ironical names

like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth;   

plough through thrashing glister toward   

fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,   

weave toward New World littorals that are   

mirage and myth and actual shore.

Voyage through death,

                               voyage whose chartings are unlove.

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death   

spreads outward from the hold,

where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,   

lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

       Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,   

       the corpse of mercy rots with him,   

       rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

       But, oh, the living look at you

       with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,   

       whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark   

       to strike you like a leper’s claw.

       You cannot stare that hatred down

       or chain the fear that stalks the watches

       and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;   

       cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,   

       the timeless will.

               “But for the storm that flung up barriers   

               of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,

               would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,   

               three days at most; but for the storm we should   

               have been prepared for what befell.   

               Swift as the puma’s leap it came. There was   

               that interval of moonless calm filled only   

               with the water’s and the rigging’s usual sounds,   

               then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries   

               and they had fallen on us with machete   

               and marlinspike. It was as though the very   

               air, the night itself were striking us.   

               Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,

               we were no match for them. Our men went down   

               before the murderous Africans. Our loyal   

               Celestino ran from below with gun   

               and lantern and I saw, before the cane-

               knife’s wounding flash, Cinquez,

               that surly brute who calls himself a prince,   

               directing, urging on the ghastly work.

               He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then   

               he turned on me. The decks were slippery

               when daylight finally came. It sickens me   

               to think of what I saw, of how these apes   

               threw overboard the butchered bodies of

               our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.   

               Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:   

               Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us   

               you see to steer the ship to Africa,   

               and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea   

               voyaged east by day and west by night,   

               deceiving them, hoping for rescue,   

               prisoners on our own vessel, till   

               at length we drifted to the shores of this   

               your land, America, where we were freed   

               from our unspeakable misery. Now we   

               demand, good sirs, the extradition of   

               Cinquez and his accomplices to La   

               Havana. And it distresses us to know   

               there are so many here who seem inclined   

               to justify the mutiny of these blacks.   

               We find it paradoxical indeed

               that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty   

               are rooted in the labor of your slaves

               should suffer the august John Quincy Adams   

               to speak with so much passion of the right   

               of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters   

               and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s   

               garland for Cinquez. I tell you that   

               we are determined to return to Cuba

               with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez—

               or let us say ‘the Prince’—Cinquez shall die.”

       The deep immortal human wish,   

       the timeless will:

               Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,   

               life that transfigures many lives.

       Voyage through death

                                     to life upon these shores.

Old Man River -- Frank Sinatra (1967)

I gets weary and so sick of tryin'
I'm tired of livin' and I'm feared of dyin'

Here we all work 'long the Mississippi
Here we all work while the white folk play
Pullin' them boats from the dawn 'til sunset
Gettin' no rest 'til the judgment day

Don't look up and don't look down
You don't das make the white boss frown
Bend your knees and bow your head
And pull that rope until you're dead

Let me go 'way from the Mississippi
Let me go 'way from the white man boss
Show me that stream called the River Jordan
That's the old stream that I long to cross

Ol' Man River, that Ol' Man River
He must know somethin' but he don't say nothin'
He just keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along

He don't plant tatters and he don't plant cotton
And them what plants 'em is soon forgotten
But Ol' Man River, he just keeps rollin' along

You and me, we sweat and strain
Body all achin' and racked with pain
Tote that barge, lift that bail
Get a little drunk and you lands in jail

I gets weary and so sick of tryin'
I'm tired of livin' and I'm feared of dyin'
And Ol' Man River, he just keeps rollin' along

Songwriters
BUTLER, HERBERT/GIVENS, OTHA LEE/JOHNSON, TONY LEE /

CPB Classic: A Modest Proposal for a College Curriculum

From August, 2013


A Modest Proposal for a College Curriculum


"A "return to rigor" in the college experience is certainly in order. College graduates should differ from non-graduates in more ways than just their projected lifetime earnings, SAT scores, and high school GPAs. They should actually know things that non-grads do not, and they should behave in ways that non-grads do not. In my view, a college graduate should be readily discernible from the non-grad in his appearance, presentation, manner of speech, work habits, leisure activities, physical fitness, morals, and social relations. Graduates should be different from when they matriculated four years earlier."


Freshman Year


"The fall seminar would cover, at a minimum, Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The spring seminar would add Aristotle, Euripedes, and Sophocles. See here to see how all these works can be read in a year."


No Latin?


"Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education....Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos)."


What about athletics?


"Seniors will compete in Modern Penathlon, endurance running, open water swimming, and multi-day wilderness trekking."


The End Product


"How would a graduate of such a program differ from typical college graduates? This would not be a person to trifle with, a person inured to hardship and possessing extremely strong self-discipline. They can read Ancient Greek and French, paint a portrait, and ride a horse. They have extraordinary mental and physical endurance. They have mastered both elements of the liberal arts and sciences."

"Leave them only their eyes with which to weep."

Yale Open Courses

"Now, out West. Where's Sherman? There he is. Can we see this? Now, the other major campaign of the war that of course will ultimately lead to Union victory — and I won't get us quite to the dead-end of the war today by any means — but it is, of course, William Sherman's Atlanta Campaign through northern Georgia, the fall of Atlanta by September of '64. The campaign lasted all that summer. At the same time this stalemate sets in in Virginia, around Petersburg, with these thousands of casualties. And you must try to, if you can imagine Northerners standing in post offices and telegraph offices all over the towns of the Midwest, New England, waiting for casualty reports, and the adjutants of regiments writing the lists. Standing in a small town post office and a telegraph comes through with a list of the dead; a dozen, two dozen, three dozen, men, from a town that only had 1000 people. It was beginning to destroy Northern morale.

...

It was then that Sherman, based on this strategy of conquest, destruction of resources and war upon people, made the decision, really quite quickly, to launch his march to the sea. It took him a couple of months to organize it but from November 15^th to Christmas Eve — that's about five weeks — Sherman's army marched 285 miles from Atlanta to Savannah with 62,000 troops. They were almost unopposed. General John B. Hood's Confederate Army, that had surrendered — in effect given up — Atlanta, had retreated south to fight again. And Hood's idea, but actually without Jefferson Davis's approval — well if Sherman was going to invade toward the East, toward the sea and destroy Georgia, Hood took an army of about 30,000 men and invaded back up into Tennessee, hoping that Sherman would stop and come after him. Sherman said, "Let him go." It was a kind of a game now, of time, resources, destruction, and who would give up. "We are not fighting a hostile army anymore," Sherman said, I'm quoting him, "we are fighting a hostile people. His aim and objective now was the civilian population, and Americans had never made war on civilians quite like Sherman would in Georgia. "We cannot change the hearts of those people," Sherman wrote of the South, "but we can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations will pass before they will ever again appeal to it." Now up in the Shenandoah Valley, Philip Sheridan's Union Army, under similar orders, to make war on society, gave a simple order to his officers; and most of that army was cavalry. His order was put in the starkest of total war terms. He said, quote, "Leave them only their eyes with which to weep." This was now savage war.

Not everyone likes Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life



NY Review of Books 

"But what are we to say of the likes of Haruki Murakami? Or Salman Rushdie? Or Jonathan Franzen? Or Jennifer Egan, or recent prize-winners like Andrés Neuman and Eleanor Catton, or, most monumentally, Karl Ove Knausgaard? They are all immensely successful writers. They are clearly very competent. Knausgaard is the great new thing, I am told. I pick up Knausgaard. I read a hundred pages or so and put it down. I cannot understand the attraction. No, that’s not true, I do get a certain attraction, but cannot understand why one would commit to its extension over so many pages. It doesn’t seem attractive enough for what it is asking of me.

Take Elena Ferrante. Again and again I pick up her novels and again and again I give up around page fifty. My impression is of something wearisomely concocted, determinedly melodramatic, forever playing on Neapolitan stereotype. Here, in My Brilliant Friend, the narrator is remembering a quarrel between neighbours:

As their vindictiveness increased, the two women began to insult each other if they met on the street or the stairs: harsh, fierce sounds. It was then that they began to frighten me. One of the many terrible scenes of my childhood begins with the shouts of Melina and Lidia, with the insults they hurl from the windows and then on the stairs; it continues with my mother rushing to our door, opening it, and looking out, followed by us children; and ends with the image, for me still unbearable, of the two neighbors rolling down the stairs, entwined, and Melina’s head hitting the floor of the landing, a few inches from my shoes, like a white melon that has slipped from your hand.

What can one say? Making no effort of the imagination, Ferrante simply announces melodrama: “Harsh, fierce sounds”; “One of the many terrible scenes of my childhood”; insults are “hurled.” The memory is “for me still unbearable” though in the following pages the incident is entirely forgotten. Is “entwined” really the right word for two people locked in struggle on the stairs? As in a B movie, a head hits the floor a few inches from our hero’s shoes. Then comes, the half-hearted attempt to transform cartoon reportage into literature: “like a white melon that has slipped from your hand.”

I can’t recall dropping a melon myself, but if the aim of a metaphor is to bring intensity and clarity to an image, this one goes in quite a different direction. The dull slap of the soft white melon hitting the ground and rolling away from you would surely be a very different thing from the hard crack of a skull and the sight of a bloody face. I’m astonished that having tossed the metaphor in, out of mechanical habit one presumes, the author didn’t pull it right out again. And even more I’m astonished that other people are not irritated by this lazy writing.

It’s not only fiction that does this to me. I am told, for example, that Stephen Grosz’s book The Examined Life—a psychoanalyst giving us his most interesting case histories—is a work of genius and is selling like hotcakes. I buy a copy, and halfway through I toss it away, literally, at the wall, in intense irritation. How can people like these stories, with their over-easy packaging of what are no doubt extremely complex personal problems, their evident and decidedly unexamined complacency about the rightness of the analyst’s intervention?"

Suicide by snake bite

I'd never heard of anyone besides Cleopatra using snake bite as a suicide method. But, you know, humans -- we get up to all sorts of crazy things.

Time

"A Texas medical office has ruled that a teen’s July death from snakebites was suicide, according to the examiner’s report. 

The 18-year-old was found dead in an SUV with “several bites” from a deadly monocle cobra on each arm, KVUE reports. The autopsy found that Thompson first had bites on his left shoulder, consistent with a right-handed person intentionally receiving a snakebite. The venom would have led to paralysis and death in as few as 30 minutes. 

The teen loved reptiles and had a “history of suicidal ideation,” according to the medical report. He was found in the SUV with its door open and an empty cobra container, though the snake was gone.  

Animal control conducted a large-scale search until the snake was found dead by a road."

Nervenarzt. 2008 May;79(5):604-6. doi: 10.1007/s00115-008-2431-4.

[Attempted suicide by snake bite. Case report and literature survey].

[Article in German]

Strubel T¹, Birkhofer A, Eyer F, Werber KD, Förstl H.

Author information

• ¹Klinik und Poliklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie der TU München, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Ismaningerstrasse 22, München, Germany. strubel@lrz.tu-muenchen.de

Abstract

Unusual suicide attempts often remain undetected, and bizarre methods can be a clue to psychotic origin. We report a suicide attempt by proxy--the bite of a puff adder--and provide a brief literature survey about further archaic self-injurious behaviour. Due to the easy availability of venomous snakes and the close networking of suicidal patients via the Internet, an increase in similar cases can be anticipated. A failed suicide attempt should always be considered in patients surviving bizarre accidents.

Med Sci Law. 2012 Jan;52(1):40-3. doi: 10.1258/msl.2011.011020. Epub 2011 Nov 25.

Homicide by direct snake bite: a case of contract killing.

Ambade VN¹, Borkar JL, Meshram SK.

Author information

• ¹Department of Forensic Medicine, Government Medical College, Maharashtra State, India. vipulambade@rediffmail.com

Abstract

It has been estimated that five million snake bite cases occur worldwide every year, causing about 100,000 deaths. Snake bite is exclusively accidental in nature. Suicide by snake bite is very rare and homicidal snake bite is not reported. In the present case, a contract killer was hired, who used a poisonous snake to kill an elderly couple by way of direct snake bite. We believe this to be the first case reported where a snake was directly used for the murder of two victims through a contract killer.

René Girard, RIP

Real Clear Religion

"René Girard, one of the most influential Catholic philosophers in the world, died last week at the age of 91. Born in Avignon and a member of the illustrious Academie Francaise, Girard nevertheless made his academic reputation in the United States, as a professor at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University.

There are some thinkers that offer intriguing ideas and proposals, and there is a tiny handful of thinkers that manage to shake your world. Girard was in this second camp.

In a series of books and articles, written across several decades, he proposed a social theory of extraordinary explanatory power. Drawing inspiration from some of the greatest literary masters of the West-Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Proust among others -- Girard opined that desire is both mimetic and triangular. He meant that we rarely desire objects straightforwardly; rather, we desire them because others desire them: as we imitate (mimesis) another's desire, we establish a triangulation between self, other, and object.

If this sounds too rarefied, think of the manner in which practically all of advertising works: I come to want those gym shoes, not because of their intrinsic value, but because the hottest NBA star wants them. Now what mimetic desire leads to, almost inevitably, is conflict. If you want to see this dynamic in the concrete, watch what happens when toddler A imitates the desire of toddler B for the same toy, or when dictator A mimics the desire of dictator B for the same route of access to the sea.

The tension that arises from mimetic desire is dealt with through what Girard called the scapegoating mechanism. A society, large or small, that finds itself in conflict comes together through a common act of blaming an individual or group purportedly responsible for the conflict. So for instance, a group of people in a coffee klatch will speak in an anodyne way for a time, but in relatively short order, they will commence to gossip, and they will find, customarily, a real fellow feeling in the process.

What they are accomplishing, on Girard's reading, is a discharging of the tension of their mimetic rivalry onto a third party. The same dynamic obtains among intellectuals. When I was doing my post-graduate study, I heard the decidedly Girardian remark: "the only thing that two academics can agree upon is how poor the work of a third academic is!" Hitler was one of the shrewdest manipulators of the scapegoating mechanism. He brought the deeply divided German nation of the 1930's together precisely by assigning the Jews as a scapegoat for the country's economic, political, and cultural woes. Watch a video of one of the Nuremberg rallies of the mid-thirties to see the Girardian theory on vivid display.

Now precisely because this mechanism produces a kind of peace, however ersatz and unstable, it has been revered by the great mythologies and religions of the world and interpreted as something that God or the gods smile upon. Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of Girard's theorizing is his identification of this tendency. In the founding myths of most societies, we find some act of primal violence that actually establishes the order of the community, and in the rituals of those societies, we discover a repeated acting out of the original scapegoating. For a literary presentation of this ritualization of society-creating violence, look no further than Shirley Jackson's masterpiece "The Lottery."

The main features of this theory were in place when Girard turned for the first time in a serious way to the Christian Scriptures. What he found astonished him and changed his life. He discovered that the Bible knew all about mimetic desire and scapegoating violence but it also contained something altogether new, namely, the de-sacralizing of the process that is revered in all of the myths and religions of the world. The crucifixion of Jesus is a classic instance of the old pattern. It is utterly consistent with the Girardian theory that Caiaphas, the leading religious figure of the time, could say to his colleagues, "Is it not better for you that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to perish?" In any other religious context, this sort of rationalization would be valorized. But in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, this stunning truth is revealed: God is not on the side of the scapegoaters but rather on the side of the scapegoated victim. The true God in fact does not sanction a community created through violence; rather, he sanctions what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, a society grounded in forgiveness, love, and identification with the victim. Once Girard saw this pattern, he found it everywhere in the Gospels and in Christian literature. For a particularly clear example of the unveiling process, take a hard look at the story of the woman caught in adultery.

In the second half of the 20th century, academics tended to characterize Christianity -- if they took it seriously at all -- as one more iteration of the mythic story that can be found in practically every culture. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Star Wars, the "mono-myth," to use Joseph Campbell's formula, is told over and again. What Girard saw was that this tired theorizing has it precisely wrong. In point of fact, Christianity is the revelation (the unveiling) of what the myths want to veil; it is the deconstruction of the mono-myth, not a reiteration of it -- which is exactly why so many within academe want to domesticate and de-fang it.

The recovery of Christianity as revelation, as an unmasking of what all the other religions are saying, is René Girard's permanent and unsettling contribution."

A Happy Man -- Edwin Arlington Robinson

When these graven lines you see,
Traveller, do not pity me;
Though I be among the dead,
Let no mournful word be said.

Children that I leave behind,
And their children, all were kind;
Near to them and to my wife,
I was happy all my life.

My three sons I married right,
And their sons I rocked at night;
Death nor sorrow never brought
Cause for one unhappy thought.

Now, and with no need of tears,
Here they leave me, full of years,--
Leave me to my quiet rest
In the region of the blest.