In general I read pretty broadly, or, truth be told, skim pretty broadly. But once in a while an essay catches my attention that has me read deep, long and hard, or provides the pleasure of really expanding my horizon.

The Economist article below is such an instance: it describes how research into a basic human activity – crying – evolved over the years. Not so many years, as it turns out.

The concept of emotions themselves dates back only to the 19th century, when French philosophers tried to understand our feelings as reflexes, not “moral sentiments or accidents of the soul.” So many feelings, and so many of them culturally specific:

“basorexia, the sudden urge to kiss someone; or matutolypea, the ill-temper that flourishes between the alarm-clock and the day’s first cup of coffee. For Anglophone readers, some of her subjects are mysteries locked behind the door of someone else’s culture. Amae, a Japanese term that describes the comfort felt when you surrender, temporarily, to the care and authority of a loved one. Liget, an angry enthusiasm that buzzes in the Ilongot tribe of the Philippines, pushing them to great feats of activity – sometimes agricultural, sometimes murderous. Awumbuk, a feeling of emptiness after visitors have departed, is experienced by the Baining people of Papua New Guinea”

And so little we knew about crying.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-luxury-of-tears

Give me good old guilt, or anger, or surprise, any time…… Or a good cry, for that matter. My lachrymal life seems to have been severely curtailed with increasing age. More simply said, it’s very hard to cry these days.

And that despite the fact that I fall squarely into the group that, according to modern research, cries the most: those living in affluent, democratic, extroverted, and individualistic countries. I certainly do not belong currently in the category of people who are under severe stress  – physiologically, economically, emotionally – and who are much less likely to cry than the rest of us even though they would be most justified. The energy is simply not available to them.

(Photographs, by the way, come from visits to museums and cemeteries – I do not take picture of actual people crying….)

Darwin assumed that tears had no function. Modern psychologists assume the opposite – tears have an important role, they make us empathic, an important trait for our species which has a long, helpless childhood, a vulnerable period for survival. Tears elicit care, protection and love from adults (in theory)…. and silent tears aimed at the protecting parent do not give away weakness to predators, as vocal cries would do.

Loss, failure and helplessness produce tears, as do positive situations where tears help to bond relationships. How others react to tears matters as well – positive feedback or scorn will shift your own experience of crying. As will illnesses like depression – crying does not provide the relief it does when done for extraneous causes.  Thus, crying is not universally alike, nor is it always good or always bad – context will make all the difference.

Time to find a good tearjerker movie…..

This week’s musings will select from a grab bag of topics. IF I can muster the energy to write at all on those days that are predicted to be 108 degrees (42 in Celsius….) in Portland, OR!

Emotions ran high last week in the political realm and I thought it would be interesting to tackle the topic of emotions. Not that scientists agree on what emotions are. If anything, they strongly disagree and publicly scorn each other in often not so subtle ways. Here is a review by Carrol Izzard from a couple of years back that states the minimum consensus:

Emotion consists of neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated), response systems, and a feeling state/process that motivates and organizes cognition and action. Emotion also provides information to the person experiencing it, and may include antecedent cognitive appraisals and ongoing cognition including an interpretation of its feeling state, expressions or social-communicative signals, and may motivate approach or avoidant behavior, exercise control/regulation of responses, and be social or relational in nature.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1754073910374661

The major camps in the debate propose that there are

a) distinct emotions ( numbers vary from 5 – 21 with 7 being most frequently accepted), that they are innately rooted and that they are universally recognized in the respective facial expressions of joy, surprise, anger, fear, sadness and contempt. Paul Ekman is representative for this approach; he and his research group  also developed a theory of micro expressions that give fleeting hints to what a person is feeling and/or concealing. They have, in addition, developed tools that they claim can improve your ability to detect and correctly identify emotional expressions, which they are happy to sell you ( and, it turns out the CIA, FBI, and other three lettered organizations…) I always wonder when a scientist starts having a website .com….

http://www.paulekman.com

The work has led to all kinds of testing yourself how good you are at identifying emotions….https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/well-quiz-the-mind-behind-the-eyes/

You could also test your skills with the facial expressions of today’s photographs….

b) Margaret Mead was an early sharp critic of Ekmans et al.’s theory, but within the field of psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett an her colleagues provide the strongest alternative to the above claims. She questions that emotions are biologically basic and that there are universally alike. Emotions do not exist in a vacuum and context is everything – that can be the cultural context or the individual’s history guiding the interpretation of and reaction to stimuli that produce an affective response. (if this interests you, she has an interesting book out: How Emotions are made – The Secret Life of the Brain. Link below is to an earlier research article.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1934613/

One thing,  though, is agreed upon, from Freudians to Neuroscientists: emotions, whatever they are, do organize and govern behavior. Without them we are toast. Best example comes from a patient of D’Amasio’s who had medically necessary brain surgery that removed any ability to feel emotions. He was paralyzed in everyday life for the simplest tasks, because decisions based on just gut level – do I prefer orange juice or coffee for breakfast –  were out of reach for him.

Today’s choice of visionary (the blog’s theme of the week, remember) is closer to home. It is someone I know well, have known for a long time in a variety of roles, including that of friend, temporary employer, and member of a shared community. It is a person who with singular vision, determination, engagement and insane amounts of work has managed to build a museum in town that has grown from an idea around the kitchen table to a modern, inclusive and smart institution that has finally found a permanent home in the park blocks.

I am, of course, talking about Judy Margles, the director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Before I turn to photographs of the new place, let me hasten to add that there were many helping hands, planning minds, engaged hearts and open checkbooks that made the transition from hole in the wall to shining flagship possible. I respect all of them, the talented and committed staff in particular, adore some of them and am grateful for a community that pulled through. However, let it be said, pulling teeth is also a term that comes to mind when thinking of the process, or pulling your hair out, when things, years back, faced obstacle after obstacle.

It takes a person with vision to pull it off, but also many other skills. It takes someone with patience, with the ability to persuade people, with a flexibility to change plans when necessary, with imagination regarding the asks, with smartness in choosing personell including curators, with a willingness to take risks where the rest of us would have long chickened out. We did not always see eye-to-eye when I worked at the museum, but I really want to express my boundless admiration for a lifetime work that generated something big, something important and something meaningful.

Hannah Arendt’s case for the Vita Activa included a philosophy of judgment as something that enables political actors to decide on actions in the public realm, on what goals to pursue and what actions, past or present, to praise or blame for their consequences. This is what you DO when you build a museum that ensures remembrance of Jewish history, including the Holocaust, out of practically nothing, investing most of your adult life. This is what Judy did.

Photos are of the museum in its new space; for detailed insight here is a link to a fitting review. http://www.orartswatch.org/a-bigger-bolder-jewish-museum/

A bigger, bolder Jewish Museum

The current Bruskin exhibit is wondrous; do yourself a favor and go look at it.

The café will open this week; an auditorium awaits lectures and discussions. The giftstore beckons.

DO GO!

Stumbling blocks, echoing the Stolpersteine you see all over Germany these days, inscribed with the names of those deported and killed, located in front of the houses they lived in.

Lesley Dill Vision Catcher – McNay Museum, San Antonio, Tx

I was strongly encouraged – hm, roundly scolded – hm, lovingly prodded –  last week to deal with my current pessimism regarding world affairs. Given that I take to the advice of my friends I decided to give myself a boost by looking at inspirational people this week.

And since it is Juneteenth today, I start with a memory of a man who I met during my volunteer days at Hospice. He was a small black man, shriveled to next to nothing in his last weeks of life, in his 90s, and of the sunniest disposition I have ever encountered in anyone. The range of laughter, sounds of mirth, clucking of amusement could have filled a whole symphony.

He was pain free – the gift of Hospice – and content with his life, ready to hang up his boots. We spent several afternoons talking about his life and all the adventures he had, growing up in Texas and eventually migrating to the North West.

He vividly remembered the Juneteenth celebrations – the holiday that commemorates the June 19, 1865 announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, and more generally the emancipation of African-American slaves throughout the Confederate South. The news came late to Texas – almost 3 years late, to be precise. And it did not go down well with the slave holders – at the time 250.000 slaves were seen as property in the state. The freedmen, however, started to celebrate the day in years to come, despite obstacles put in their path.

(Here is a link to a good article about how the day is memorialized:http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/18/1670962/-Juneteenth-and-the-memorial-to-black-history-in-Texas)

One such hurdle was the fact that state-sponsored segregation of facilities prohibited celebration in public parks. Freed people pooled funds to purchase land on which they held the Juneteenth celebrations in the larger cities, like Houston’s and Austin’s Emancipation Park. In smaller towns, folks like my guy instead went to the woods.

He described an annual frenzied week of preparation. The men would take a herd of swine to the woods. The pigs would root out all the poisonous snakes and eat them so that the place was made safe for the picnic to come. The women would prepare foods in advance and then every one would arrive for the celebration to sing and dance around the spits where those very life-saving pigs were now roasted for dinner. He swore that the meals of snake made the pig meat particularly tender and delectable. Hm, what do I know.

He had many stories to tell, some of them sad, but he always came up with a version that celebrated the good, focused on fierceness and overcoming. I’ll try and follow the model in the spirit of “Beat the Pessimism”!

Photographs are from Texas.

Then and now,

especially now: 

For Thursday’s timely entertainment here are your horoscopes in art terms…. that is if you are an artist or interested in art. Or not. Never mind what I think about them, or that the astrologer considered Michael Jackson as the greatest US post war artist…..

Astrological Aesthetics: June 2017 Horoscopes

They are, of course fun to read and nonsense, but that is true for most types of entertainment….

(Photographs depict some, not all, of the signs – you get to figure out which is which….)

And just in case, let’s follow up with horoscopes that scientists would write….

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/01/if-scientists-wrote-horoscopes-what-yours-would-say

I won’t go into the details of the debate – after all, this week is about entertainment, not education…. says the bossy, assertive pisces