Episode 52

Episode 52

Hello and welcome to Episode 52 of the Eyecatching Words podcast, your weekly aural magazine with news, features and music from deep in the heart of Woking in Surrey.

As usual I will be taking a look at my week which was a very significant one in terms of my life story and I will be reflecting on visits to London, Portsmouth and Bath. In the news of the world I have something to say about the hostage exchanges in Gaza / Israel, amongst other things.

The feature articles this week are Caterpillar Soup, the strange history of thanksgiving in the context of the American Civil War, and the case for turning Maslow’s pyramid on its head. But let’s kick off with a look back at the last seven days.

The Week

I wore a t-shirt that I had bought in Lisbon during the summer for my last trip into the office non Thursday. It said simply “out of office” which is now my permanent retired state. We celebrated in the local pub, with a good turnout for the time of year with one or two surprises. I counted no fewer than four bosses, past and present. Not bad for a man who tends to give his superiors problems.

Despite my “no cards no presents” request someone who shall remain nameless organised both. Absolutely lovely words from people. So touching. And a mind boggling collection of over £300 which I shall put towards a new camera.

Retirement, I have discovered, is like getting married or having children. It attracts every cliche under the sun, but at the end of the day people, in an act of what therapists call projection, tend to comment on their situation rather than yours. If they fear retirement they will tell you that you will soon want to find a job. If they are unhappy at work they will tell you how lucky you are (for the record I’m not lucky, I’m 65 years old and I bloody deserve it).  And if they are in an unhappy relationship they will ask you how you are going to deal with your partner. What is more everyone assumes you have a plan, which I don’t. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of enthusiasm but no template. But I do intend to enjoy it and find meaning in it, which surely is what you should do with any part of your life.

My celebrations produced a little tiredness but no hangover and the following day we were out in London meeting friends in the evening at a little restaurant off the Tottenham Court Road. This became a very boozy affair of three and a half hours duration and the staff eventually kicked us out at eleven fifteen. For the record it was The Greyhound Cafe, an excellent Thai restaurant in Berners Street which I can recommend. 

My objective for day three of retirement and beyond was therefore to stay sober, something which I achieved with ease. On Monday we went to Portsmouth to see the Mary Rose. An astonishing spectacle. This was my second visit and the use of mixed media and technology, combined with some knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteers, lifted it above the usual museum experience by several notches. It’s a compelling story made poignant by the artefacts, nineteen thousand of them, recovered from the sea bed along with half the hull. A lot of the weapons were of continental origin, such as Italian crossbows. DNA showed that the ship’s master carpenter was Spanish. And as we couldn’t make our own sailcloth, this was imported from France and Poland. Brexiteers take note. We have always traded with Europe and relied on foreign labour. Learn the lessons of history.

On Tuesday we went to Bath for the Christmas markets and the Jane Austen experience. The former were brilliant, the latter insipid. Actually it was just bad. Outdated, boring and dowdy but mercifully short at under an hour. 

Bath itself was in fine shape and the market stalls numbered getting on for two hundred, dotted around several streets and courtyards in the centre of the city. Very well stewarded, with above average products. It is on until the 10th December so catch it this year if you can, their website is excellent and will give you all the detail. As ever I talked to a lot of the stall holders, many of whom were local traders and there were a number of charities and community interests as well, so it didn’t feel like a straight up Christmas money grab. Here are a few soundbites: 

As for the news from around the world it was heartening that the ceasefire in Gaza seems to be continuing and yielding results, but it is also clear that things will never be the same again and that, as with most wars, there is no plan for peace, only alternative dystopian visions of the future. But 2024 is a key year politically. Elections are due in The Ukraine, America, the UK, and the EU. There is potential for instability to pile uncertainty on top of tragedy. Autocrats everywhere will see next year as an opportunity to consolidate and extend their grip.

Meanwhile the release of hostages by Hamas, seen as a success, is in fact a continuing and terrible spectacle. Wonderful for those families that are reunited, it leaves many others still waiting and in pain. It reduces war to a matter of numbers and negotiation. It is without a principle and is a political trade in human lives. 

As for the rest of the news, one day is becoming depressingly like the next. We live in an age with no clear way forward and the news can only reflect that and not counter it. With COP28 starting imminently do not expect anything to change. Climate change summits are nowadays being used by oil rich nations to exploit outcomes and even the meat industry sees it as no more than a lobbying opportunity.

Caterpillar soup

There are many things that we learn from children’s stories which give rise to the belief that the universe is basically a logical and caring place. Two of these are that caterpillars are cute and butterflies are pretty. The transition from one to the other is an event not dissimilar to the story of the ugly ducking who becomes a swan, a transformation that is so unlikely that it is portrayed as almost a religious experience.

But the reality is rather more sinister.  When the caterpillar spins a chrysalis it does so in order that it can digest itself alive. It quite literally dissolves itself or as Scientific American put it in an article back in 2012  “If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out.” The only exceptions are a bunch of DNA templates for making the butterfly known as imaginal discs which carry the information needed for construction. Its almost as if there were a bunch of floppies with setup programs on them like we used to have in the ghastly days before DVDs were used or software could be downloaded (Microsoft Office used to have over thirty of them for one installation – I remember those terrible days back in the 1990s). 

I came across this process in an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, one of the fathers of AI and I am not sure butterflies will ever be the same for me again. I am left with so many questions. Do the experiences and memories of the caterpillar transfer to the butterfly (presumably not)? Is it one life or two? Why do some butterflies only last a few days and others can live up to a year? Why is the  male of the parnassus species so bloody unpleasant to the female? Apparently after they have mated he puts a plug in her vulva to stop her having sex with any other butterflies. 

But butterfly lore is fascinating and extensive, being concerned as it is with symbols of rebirth and optimism. Native Americans have considered butterflies as symbols of transformation, hope, and rebirth. In Chinese culture, the symbolism of butterflies evokes the qualities of freedom, earthly beauty, love, and the human soul.  

The famous children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar is the seminal tale from 1969 of how a caterpillar goes on a binge eating session to hasten his transformation into a butterfly. What is not so well known is that this was originally called “A week with WIllie the worm” until the author’s publisher persuaded them into a change of literary direction. 

The Spanish poet Lorca apparently wrote a play in which a butterfly and a cockroach fall in love and decide to get married. It was not a success and closed after four nights. Lorca himself was taken and assassinated by Franco’s rebels during the Spanish Civil War so there was no butterfly like happy ending to his story. 

The word for butterfly in formal Greek is psyche, thought to be the soul of the dead. Ancient Greeks also named the butterfly scolex (“worm”), while the chrysalis – which is the next stage of metamorphosis from a caterpillar – was called nekydallon, meaning “the shell of the dead”.

But my favourite reference to butterflies comes from the trial of Mick Jagger who was sentenced in 1967 to three months for possession of amphetamines. The sentencing led to William Rees Mogg, then editor of the Times to write an editorial in the paper, “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” that helped swing public opinion towards a more tolerant view of recreational drugs. As a result the harsh sentencing was later quashed under appeal. William was ironically the father of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the odious MP, former cabinet minister and poisonous purveyor of Brexit fallacies and a man who remains stuck in the cocoon of his own strange world view.  He I am sure will never spread his wings and bring colour and joy to the world. 

Thanksgiving and Civil War

It is a little known fact that the American Civil War gave birth to a new and terrifying invention that plagues humankind to this day and leaves a terrible legacy that lasts for decades wherever it is used. That invention is the land mine. Put one foot wrong and you can be blown to smithereens. Whole parts of a country become no-go areas. And the victims in the long term are so often the children and civilians who have to live with them long after a notional peace or truce has been declared. They rarely bother the wealthy and those who manage to live safe and secure in well ordered communities. As a metaphor for what is happening in American society it is hard to better.

Thanksgiving has come and gone for another year in America but with every year that passes it seems more and more bizarre, particularly as its history is so dubious and its current connotations so loaded with difficulty. President Abraham Lincoln fixed it in 1863 when he proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”, calling on the American people to also, “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience … fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation”. Lincoln declared it for the last Thursday in November which is where it has more or less been ever since.

Why am I interested in Thanksgiving? As an Englishman I do not celebrate it, although we have done Canadian thanksgiving courtesy of my daughter which is several weeks earlier in October. My interest lies in what I think is one of the biggest threats to our world order,  namely the disintegration of American democracy. Thanksgiving has been used to make a political point in the past and as an attempt to heal America. But The divisions in American society are now so great and so deeply buried that they cannot be resolved within the existing political consensus (if we can even call it that anymore).  The Christian right wing is so at odds with the rest of the country that it is difficult to see how it can swing back to the centre ground of politics. A schism, which would have shattering effects for the world economy, seems inevitable. If the Ukraine and Gaza can cause so much loss of confidence and instability in the world economy, what would even a partial collapse of American constitutional integrity do to it? During the Trump administration there were mutterings from states such as California of seceding from the rest. We now face the very real prospect of Trump 2. A second term could see an even stronger call for the formal dissolution of the union.

Heather Cox Richardson, who I quote often in these podcasts, made a dark reference to the American Civil War in a recent article. It suggests that the place we find ourselves in now has deep and dangerous roots in American history.

“In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government, and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied, and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields, even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law. And in 1865 at least, they won.”

Maslow upside down

It is fitting to look at the life and career of Abraham Maslow given the situation that the world finds itself in. Maslow was an American psychologist born into a Ukrainian family in the early years of the 20th century and one of that astonishingly large community of Jewish thinkers and leaders who in the last two hundred years have inspired everything from the development of the atom bomb to the fomenting of revolution in Russia. Maslow however was a creator who stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, a man who believed in human progress despite being attacked in the slums of New York where he grew up and being the victim of acts of racism and ethnic prejudice. Rather like that other famous Jewish psychologist and concentration camp survivor Victor Frankel, who wrote the seminal “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Maslow was remarkable for being able to grow hope in the Petri dish of suffering.

Most psychologists before him had been concerned with the abnormal and the ill. He urged people to acknowledge their basic needs before addressing higher needs and ultimately self-actualization. He was guided by the idea that people possess the inner resources for growth and healing and that the point of therapy is to help remove obstacles to individuals’ achieving them. His great concept was the hierarchy of need, which you will often see presented as a pyramid although he himself never presented such a diagram. At the base of the pyramid is basic physiological need, such as food, shelter and bodily functions; then comes security, particularly in areas such as employment and health and family life; then comes close friendship and intimacy (as opposed to just sex); this is followed by status and achievement; and finally comes acceptance, creativity and a higher state of being. Or as Maslow described it self actualisation.

Maslow defined Self-actualization as achieving the fullest use of one’s talents and interests—the need “to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” As implied by its name, self-actualization is highly individualistic and reflects Maslow’s premise that the self is “sovereign and inviolable” and entitled to “his or her own tastes, opinions, values, etc. Indeed, some have characterized self-actualization as “healthy narcissism”.

The main issue with Maslow’s hierarchy is that it gives the impression that you have to almost go through ordeals of need to reach a state of bliss. This was not really his intention, but rather like the pyramid model itself it has taken on a life of its own.

The fact is that history is littered with people who, like Maslow himself, have achieved great personal development despite not getting their needs met. People who have become great thinkers and teachers despite living in poverty. People like Frank who have endured the horrors of the concentration camp yet emerged not bitter but hopeful. Conversely there are people, such as Elon Musk and the other billionaires who run the world today, who have everything but are flawed and are contributing to the ills of the world and the destruction of the planet.

So next time someone quotes the hierarchy of need at you just tell them that you are a healthy narcissist and that they’ve got it wrong. Human beings come in all shapes and sizes and some of them are amazing despite having nothing and come from nowhere.