Just Thinking

Work that brain

A new study published in the Archives of Neurology on January 23 reported a strong association between cognitive activity and beta-amyloid deposits in the brain. Beta-amyloid is the protein that destroys brain tissue in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Study researchers from the University of California in Berkley found that cognitive activity throughout a person’s early and middle life had a direct impact on the degree of beta-amyloid deposits. The more cognitive activity, the fewer deposits. The kinds of cognitive activity reported in this paper are well within the reach of everyone, such as reading, writing (including writing letters and emails), going to the library, and playing games. Although genetics certainly plays a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, working your brain to slow or prevent its development is an option for everyone. And it’s free!

Previous research, including the Nun Study, which I wrote about in Just Think, has demonstrated an association between cognitive activity and the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, but this is the first study to identify a physical explanation for what is happening in the brain as a result of cognitive activity.

In an interview with Science Daily, one of the paper’s authors, William Jagust, MD, said, "There is no downside to cognitive activity. It can only be beneficial, even if for reasons other than reducing amyloid in the brain, including social stimulation and empowerment....And actually, cognitive activity late in life may well turn out to be beneficial for reducing amyloid. We just haven't found that connection yet."

 

Suzzy Roche: stories, prayers, songs

After going on Friday night to hear Suzzy Roche read from her new book, Wayward Saints, observing her adoring audience, and later mentioning it to a few friends, who I then learned were long-time fans, I realized I am a bit out it having never heard of her before. Suzzy (pronounce to rhyme with fuzzy) has been a singer and performer for three decades or more, as you, my reader, probably already know. Now, she is also an author. Roche described her new book as a “mother-daughter love story,” and based on the excerpts she read it’s obvious that, like most love stories, there will be some pain for these characters to hurdle along the way, related but perhaps not limited to matters of faith and rock-n-roll. I wanted to buy the book and have her sign it, but the book table ran dry just as it was my turn.

 Mostly, what I want to say here is that my husband and I were enchanted with her. Her presence, smile, and energy were amazing. She seemed like a woman of substance. About writing her book, she looked at the audience squarely and  said, “I’m 55 years old and I have something to say.” I like when an author believes she has something to say and is not just in love with her own voice.

In between reading excerpts from the book, she picked up her guitar and sang. One of the songs she sang was a prayer written by Mary Gordon, which she put to music and recorded on her CD, Why the Long Face. It’s called “Prayer for Those Whose Work is Invisible.” Aside from the fact that it was beautiful, it caught my attention because my current book in progress--and nearing completion--is on the topic of “work.” One of the essays in the book is called “First Author, et al, Aud Infinitum” and is about exactly that, work that is hidden.

 Here are the prayer’s lyrics (written by Mary Gordon*):

For those who paint the underside of boats, 
Makers of ornamental drains on roofs too high to be seen; 
For cobblers who labor over inner soles; 
For seamstresses who stitch the wrong side of linings; 
For scholars whose research leads to no obvious discovery; 
For dentists who polish each gold surface of the fillings of upper molars; 
For sewer engineers and those who repair water mains; 
For electricians; 
For artists who suppress what does injustice to their visions; 
For surgeons whose sutures are things of beauty.
For all those whose work is for Your eyes only,     
    who labor for Your entertainment, or their own, 
    who sleep in peace or do not sleep in peace, 
    knowing that their effects are unknown.

Protect them from downheartedness and from diseases of the eye.
Grant them perseverance, for the sake of Your love, 
    which is humble, invisible and heedless of reward.

(*Note: This prayer is from “Six Prayers,” by Mary Gordon in God Is Love: Essays From Portland Magazine. Brian Doyle, ed. Augsburg, 2003.)

 
Roche mentioned that she and Gordon are working on a larger similar project, putting to music a group of prayers that Gordon wrote (“Prayers and Lamentations”) for The Paris Review. I look forward to that project’s completion.

On pessimism and prayer

This morning over at the Good Letters blog, Kelly Foster writes about pessimism and prayer, the murderous and the marvelous in “Reckoning the Marvelous.” Kelly is a good friend, an incredible writer and a beautiful person. Do yourself a favor and read her ongoing work at Good Letters, and this post in particular.

An excerpt:

I could even see myself clinging desperately to my own vigilant anxieties as if they could buoy me or conversely, as if remaining anxious and vigilant would somehow communicate to God, as if he was unaware, my utter seriousness and desperation for the need for a happy ending in this case.

I could almost see myself physically holding the tension, grasping after it, squeezing it in my hands, clutching it to my chest. I could almost envisage my anxiety as a pulsating cloud, a more powerful force for good or for a solid outcome than God.

My boyfriend, who is about as gracious and empathetic a human as you will ever meet, made a simple but profound point when I confessed my panicked visions to him.

“Maybe we have to make space in prayer for the belief that good things happen too,” he said, kindly, kissing my forehead and putting his arm around my shoulder.

 

Read the post in its entirety here.

Caravaggio's Angels

The Annunciation, Caravaggio, 1608-09

 

One day last week I left behind client work for an out-of-office lunch break. I scooted over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for a lecture by Steven Ostrow, a professor from the University of Minnesota. The talk was entitled, Between the Sacred and Profane: The Angels of Caravaggio. It wasn’t so much that I was drawn by the focus on Caravaggio--truth be told, I know very little about this artist--but that the title of the talk captured my curiousity and imagination.

The lecture was held in the Institute’s Pillsbury Auditorium and to my surprise, although I realize I shouldn’t have been surprised, it was packed. I walked in with only a minute to spare and if a friend had not been saving a seat for me, I would have been sent to the overflow room downstairs.

The thing about Caravaggio and his angels is that unlike his fellow artists of sacred imagery, he didn’t paint angels to look like other-wordly celestial creatures, dispensing flower petals or strumming on musical instruments, pink-cheeked and blonde. When asked why he painted angels the way he did, he responded, Because I’ve never seen an angel.

He painted angels using human models and so they looked like humans but for the wings sprouting from their backs. In his paintings the angels are often on a cloud because he posed the models on a box, which became a cloud on the canvas. He didn’t create angels strictly from his imagination, but coupled his imagination with what he knew and could see, and we saw evidence of that in painting after painting flashed on the screen.

When the talk was over and the people in the audience stood to leave I looked them over and wondered why they had come. A small fraction of them were probably students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design next door. Others were museum docents. Others were collectors or other sorts of unofficial students of art. Then there were probably some like me, not really there to fill out my mental files on Caravaggio but to take whatever was given and hope to use it somehow in my own work, which is never on a canvas.

It did indeed give me something to think about. Caravaggio is like most of us, using what he could know and see to extrapolate towards what is unknown and unseen. That’s what writers are doing with metaphor, analogy, parable, building blocks of reason or narrative. When I first took my seat in the crowded auditorium, I’ll admit that I wondered if I belonged in the audience, taking a seat away from a verifiable art student but but that concern quickly vanished. When the public is invited, the public should come. If we use what we know to create something new or to explore what is beyond our reach, why not expand what we know and have seen?

Marilynne Robinson: "Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty"

Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Home,  has an excellent piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review published yesterday, "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible."

A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man? Dante created his great image of divine intent, justice and grace as the architecture of time and being. Milton explored the ancient, and Calvinist, teaching that the first sin was a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, and providential because it prepared the way for the world’s ultimate reconciliation to God. So his Satan is glorious, and the hell prepared for his minions is strikingly tolerable. What to say about Melville? He transferred the great poem at the end of Job into the world of experience, and set against it a man who can only maintain the pride of his humanity until this world overwhelms him. His God, rejoicing in his catalog of the splendidly fierce and untamable, might ask, “Hast thou seen my servant Ahab?” And then there is Dostoyevsky’s “idiot” Prince Myshkin, who disrupts and antagonizes by telling the truth and meaning no harm, the Christ who says, “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.”

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

Keep reading.

 

The art of play

Jennifer Trafton, children's book author, shared some good words over at The Rabbit Room on the art of play, specifically as it relates to the reading and writing of children's books. Here's a taste:

I will defend and defend the belief that the deepest reality of human life that we must impress upon children is not that life is hard and death is inevitable and they need to get used to sadness and darkness and make the best of it. The deepest reality is joy. The prize hidden under the scratch-and-win card of life is a beauty so big that no happy ending in a story can even come close to approximating it. War is a horrific stain on the floor of an extravagant ballroom. Tears are temporary; laughter is eternal.

Read more of The Art of Play by Jennifer Trafton. (ht: roots and wings)

 

To cross or not

Awhile back I was walking on a sunny afternoon and came to a busy intersection in my neighborhood. The light in my direction was red, so I waited next to a 60-something man on a bike. Across from us on the opposite corner was a group of 10 to 12 people, mostly young teenagers and a few adults. Into a break of traffic, while the light in our direction was still red, the man pedaled off the curb and into the street. 

His course already chosen and underway, over his shoulder he said to me, "I hate to be a bad example to all those kids over there but…."

"But you're doing it anyway," I said back. 

Running a red light on a bike isn't the worst offense and probably not deserving of a millstone around one's neck for leading the young astray, but this man's recognition that he was acting as a bad example but doing it anyway was sobering. It made me think of all the little things that add up to the way that grown-ups shape the generation that follows.

The kids probably didn't even notice, but maybe they did. I probably wouldn't have noticed or thought twice about the man hurrying on his way when opportunity opened if he hadn't said something. But he did say something, and in doing so he shined the light on an exchange of personal gain and freedom against common good. He shined the light on what each person in one generation owes the generation that follows and watches.

I've walked against that light many times. Hopefully, not when kids were around, but maybe? I'm going to be more careful.

Advent reading at The Other Journal

This Advent, the fine folks at The Other Journal will be posting a "wide diversity of reflections on how communities are celebrating and encountering the advent of God made present in their lives."

Today's post ("Waiting with Mary: A Meditation on Luke 1:26–38, 47–55") is an essay by Isaac S. Villegas reprinted from Presence: Giving and Receiving by J. Alexander Sider and Isaac S. Villegas.

To have faith is to recognize that our waiting is a time of pregnancy. Mary teaches us how our waiting becomes the labor of the gospel in our lives. It’s not that God only comes to those who have faith. That’s not it at all. Our faith isn’t the permission God needs to get involved with us. God doesn’t wait for our faith or ask for permission. Instead, to have faith is to know that God waits with us. To have faith is to recognize that this laborious waiting is the coming of God. Our travail is the coming of God. We are overflowing with God, whether we believe it or not. God’s new life is always about to happen, even when it seems impossible.

Keep reading "Waiting with Mary" by Isaac S. Villegas at The Other Journal.

To Zambia with Kandel in The Best Spiritual Writing 2012

Some writing delivers information, other writing delivers entertainment. Then there is the exceptional kind of writing that delivers what Nabakov describes as the "indescribable tingle of the spine." This kind of writing links the writer and the reader in a mysterious way. My friend Jill Noel Kandel's essay reprinted in The Best Spiritual Writing 2012 is this kind of writing. "Burial Cloth Removed," first published in River Teeth, takes you to Zambia, where Kandel and her husband lived for 6 of their 10 years overseas, and to Minnesota, where she lives now and from where she is uncovering those years in Zambia that "lie hidden." About Zambia Kandel writes, "Color the borders of Zambia, fill them in with yellow or pink on a map of Africa, and you will see a butterfly. I lived in the western wing." I found this map of Zambia, black and white, ready to be colored in and I'm tempted to pull out my color pencils. You can read the first paragraph of her essay here. 

Another essay not to miss in this volume of BSW is the "Foreword" by editor Philip Zaleski. He proposes an adaptation of Balthasar's la théologie a genoux or kneeling theology to describe what should be the practice of the spiritual artist: l'art a genoux, or kneeling art. 

I'm just starting to dig into this new volume of BSW and will try to highlight some other pieces in coming weeks.

An essay of mine, "Spinning and Being Spun," originally published in Comment magazine, is listed in the back of the volume under "Other Notable Spiritual Writing of the Year." That essay is now online and you can read it by clicking the hyperlinked title.

 

Thomas Merton's prayer about the road ahead

This prayer of Thomas Merton's came at me from two directions over the last couple days. When that happens, I think it means, pay attention. 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.*

 

*From Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. 

What I learned last weekend about slavery

Last Saturday, I attended a symposium on human trafficking put together by my good friend who recently quit her day job and is pouring herself into this issue. Presenters included law enforcement officers, several men and women who run organizations to help victims, and musical and spoken word artists. It was eye-opening to say the least. That's exactly what it was meant to be. Who knew this was happening in our own back yard? How can a wrong be righted without this awareness among ordinary citizens? The stories we heard were graphic and shocking. 

Here is some of what I learned: Minnesota has the largest number of homeless youth per capita in the country. Not New York or California, but Minnesota. This doesn't even count the youth that are homeless but part of a homeless family. A homeless youth on his or her own will be targeted by a trafficker within 48 hours of being on the streets. Nationwide, the average age of entry into sex trafficking is 13 years. This trafficking is a form of slavery, quite literally, and is the fastest growing black market crime. In Minnesota alone, 8,000 to 12,000 women and children are being sold for sex. Some are locked in rooms and forced to provide services to a steady stream of customers; others are on the streets to attract customers under the watchful eye of their "owners" who will use baseball bats or any other means to make sure they stay on the job and bring in a certain daily quota. This doesn't happen only to girls from the wrong side of the tracks. Rich kids get trapped too. Traffickers are trained to see the vulnerable in shopping malls, on the streets, and, in rapidly increasing numbers, on the internet and lure them by affirming their beauty, promising to take care of them, pretending to be their boyfriend and so on, and then the trap is set. Overall, considering sex and labor trafficking together, an estimated 27 million people are enslaved worldwide. 

Nationwide, there are few law enforcement officers dedicated to human trafficking and fewer than 100 recovery beds for rescued women and children, with long waiting lists for those beds. Few churches or civic groups want to host awareness events and fundraising for this cause is difficult because the topic is too dark, too scary. To be honest, I don't even like having such darkness on this blog.

So what can an average person do? Here are some ideas from the symposium:

• Pray. Never underestimate the power of prayer against evil. Check out Exodus Cry, which is a prayer movement to end human trafficking.
• Watch. Be alert for children and women who may be victims; be alert for venues for this activity. Brothels with enslaved women and children can be (and are) in suburban homes as easily as city apartments. Here is the national human trafficking hotline: 888-373-7888.
• Give. The people and groups that work against this evil need money to keep going. Some of the organizations discussed include: Source Ministries, Breaking Free, Mission 21, and Not For Sale.
• Reject. Whenever possible within your sphere of influence, reject the normalization of pornography and all other forms of selling women and children. The experts say this normalization of porn in mainstream life directly increases the demand for the services of sexual slaves by increasing the appetite of customers and dulling their sense of right and wrong.
• Buy. Look for fair-trade products. The coffee and chocolate industries are particularly likely to use slave labor. Fair-trade producers do not. Buy clothing and other products from companies who do not use slave labor. Check out Free2Work for a phone app that gives you corporate responsibility info from a barcode scan.
  
• Love. If you have children or grandchildren, love them, love them, love them. Love them. Attend to them; care for them. Don't cause them to go looking to strangers for what they need from you at home: care and feeding, assurance of their value and beauty, security, attention, relationship. If you have a child who is a prodigal, always always keep an open path home.

What Art Does

 

The University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum re-opened earlier this month after being closed for a year due to an expansion project. My husband and I went to the public reopening event to check out the new galleries.

I saw a mother holding hands with her young son (maybe 7 years old?) and overheard her say to him: "That's what art does. It makes you go 'huh?' And then you stop and think."

 

The physicality of books

Michael Paulus has a good piece today over at Curator magazine on the defense of a personal library and physical books:

I recently moved and repeated a routine that has accompanied every move I have made since I got married defending my personal library. Every time we move, and are confronted with the effort and expense of moving so much paper, my wife asks the quite fair question, Do you really want to keep all these books? Since I am a keeper of books both professionally as well as personally, I consider this to be a serious and profound question. It goes beyond my personal preferences and peculiarities and gets to a fundamental question being asked of libraries in the digital age: Do we need to keep all these physical books?

 

Keep reading "Defending My Library."

Postcards

A couple weeks ago I took a writing class and the instructor pulled from her bag an armful of postcards. 

"Pass these around and use something on the front or back for inspiration," she said.

Postcards of all kinds came our way–touristy, artistic, promotional, thematic–all bright and colorful with writing on the back (hellos, musings, quotes) from her correspondents near and far. Short snapshots of writing and contact is made. That plus the picture to hold in your hand, a gift! 

It reminded me that in high school and college, a good friend whom I had left behind in a cross-country move would send me frequent postcards, a sentence or two or three. They were like the notes we had passed in class or the 5-second conversations at our lockers. They were a joy.

I watched the instructor with her postcards and wanted to pull a similar pile from my bag. A year ago–one full year ago–I bought a couple postcards to send friends and they finally now got in the mail.

Smart women

This summer, my husband and I made a day trip to Stockholm, Wisconsin, a tiny town on the Mississippi with a population of about only 100, but many art galleries and shops. I found this mug at one of the shops.