Black Hole

Black Hole, galactic core of Messier 87 (Event Horizon Telescope)

Have you ever had an overwhelming desire to do something that you know is bad for you? Perhaps you're being driven by an unconscious wish. Still despite all your attempts to avoid temptation, there’s always a point of no return. Sometimes it’s a feeling of deprivation. Even though it’s pain masking as pleasure, you may conclude you  caved into such impulses so many times, it no longer matters. It’s just one more sin. Tomorrow you will start with a blank slate. You’ll have the chance to be good again. You only have today goes the old saw, yesterday is done with, tomorrow has yet to be. Of course this unrelenting sometimes destructive urge is a description of addiction, the exemplification of delusory pleasure. Pornography or food or alcohol may produce a high that’s followed by a crashing withdrawal that can only be palliated with a dose (usually larger) of what’s already been administered. It’s a paradigm of many activities in life, of pent up needs to exact revenge, telling the truth (when it’s not asked for) or pursuing a goal with no limits—i.e. knocking your head against a brick wall. Do you deserve a reward or are you looking for an excuse for one? Are you treating the pain of pain or the pain of life, in the case where you take one Percocet too many after the procedure. When to say no and when to say yes? That’s the question. Do you desire happiness or are you simply edging toward the event horizon of a black hole?

Read "The First Law of Emotional Thermodynamics: Longing is Directly Proportional to Self-Hatred," by Francis Levy, HuffPost

The Ethicist: Stalker Not Wannabee

poster for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979)

Dear Ethicist: Thanking you in advance for your prompt attention to this matter. As I enter this third trimester of my existence, I can barely disguise my impatience with the slow responses to my requests which are on the verge of becoming demands. For instance, do I have a right to make ultimatums to prospects I don’t know and who don’t know me? Do I have the right to assume an intimate relation to a stranger who is not forthcoming and even ask them if they will attend a session with my relationships counselor even if they have never met me or expressed an interested in my existence? A young man may make overtures to a girl, but if she’s not interested and he continues, he is stalking. Is that what I have become, a stalker? I suppose I’m having a problem with boundaries. Where do I end and other people begin? Do you know?

 

Stalker Not Wannabee

 

 

Dear Stalker Not Wannabee: You should assume that someone who doesn’t return your calls or e mails is not interested in you, until you receive evidence to the contrary. The whole world doesn’t revolve around you. People have their own agendas, one of which is survival, economically at least. If some prospect doesn’t express interest in you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t desirable. All it indicates is that you’re not a hot property. When you’re a hot property, you know it since everyone wants you and you’re likely to become the one who’s being harassed.

 

 

Stalker Wannabee: Oh, I get it.

Read "Pornosophy: Forbidden Fruit" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

The Ethicist: Divorce Announcement Advocate

 

Dear Ethicist: I regularly read the paid obits in the paper. It’s a good way to keep up with comings and goings so to speak. The marriage vows column provides a similar function albeit more in the comings area. But I’m wondering why one never sees a column devoted to divorces? It would be very informative to know who is or isn’t with whom. I’ve always felt there are similarities between divorce and death. Divorce listings could easily be modeled on your typical paid obit with a description of the background of both parties, where they went to school and what clubs or other community organizations to which they belonged. It would be up to who's ever placing the notice, but I think it would also be useful and even instructive to know the reason for the divorce such as infidelity or the more umbrella term “irreconcilable differences.” Most of the people who get married eventually get divorced and then die. So this seems like a no brainer. It’s also a way for newspapers—which have been suffering huge losses due to the decline of newsprint and the rise of social media—to make an extra buck.

Divorce Announcement Advocate

 

 

Dear Divorce Announcement Advocate: Your suggestion makes sense, but the problem is that it’s unlikely most divorced couples would be able to agree on the content of any announcement. Many divorcees play the blame game. While that can make for good reading, it can result in libel suits. For now I think you’re going to have to rely on old-fashioned gossip which is the place where warring couples can bad mouth each other with impunity.

 

Dear Ethicist: I see your point.  It was just an idea inspired by Leslie Jamison's review of Divorcing by Susan Taubes in The New York Review of Books. Jamison says, "I believed that divorce involved a ceremony, the inverse of marriage, in which the married couple moved backward through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar, unclasping their hands, and walking separately down the aisle."

Dear Divorce Announcement Advocate: Nice quote!

Read "Moravia's Contempt by Francis Levy, HuffPost

 

Menage a Trois or Folie a Deux?

It takes two to tango, but what about three? Is that a square dance? Threesomes, are of course, a part of sexual lore, but apart from prurient associations, why is the human desire to connect often expressed in couplets—and heroic ones of the kind one finds in Alexander Pope's “The Rape of the Lock?" If you look at it as an insurance matter, a threesome provides a certain degree of protection from loss. If one member of the threesome expires the remaining two have each other. Not only this, but the classic duo epitomizes the romantic agony, often at its basest level. Many couples displace their hatred for themselves, particularly during the third trimester of life when it’s apparent dreams will not become realities, rather than on themselves. It’s a convenient psychodynamic trick and useful in many ways, but ultimately nothing close to what one might call pleasure. Add another person to the mix and you're back in the agora where everyone must be their best selves or risk obsolescence. Internecine jealousies only serve to increase the value of a partner who might otherwise be taken for granted. The menage a trois also has implications evolutionarily to the extent that it increases the gene pool while lessening what former National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster recently termed “strategic narcissism” with respect to America’s unilateral withdrawal from the Afghanistan.

Read "Sperm Count: Is Squirting An Urban Myth" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

The Two Herberts

cover Spanish Edition of Pan Cogito

Just because two poets share the same last name doesn’t mean there’s much to compare. Brunette Coleman was by the way a pseudonym used by the poet Philip Larkin. Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly were aliases employed by sometime poet Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is asking for it with the title of her most recent offering in The New Yorker, “This is Not a Poem,” despite the work's obvious craft. "Nor is it a poem where a cracked mirror yields a startled face" exemplify the poem's strident beauty. But let’s take the two Herberts, George and Zbigniew. One was a 17^thmetaphysical poet and contemporary of Marvell and Donne, the other a minimalist who’d fought in the Polish resistance during World War II. Comparing the two initially appears to be a throw of the dice. It’s also a akin to comparing the German idealists philosophers Kant and Hegel with logical positivists like Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer who discountenanced the notion of unverifiable truth. Actually, it turns out that Zbigniew considered himself a distant relative of George which is tantamount to saying Fichte was related to Frege or Carnap. It’s actually fascinating that the Polish poet may have had some of his English ancestor's DNA. Zbigniew is famous for Mr. Cogito, the book that emanated from the poem, “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” (1973) that in turn owes its provenance to Descartes “cogito ergo sum.” "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" famously begins, "Go where those others went to the dark boundary/for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize." One of George Herbert’s most famous books is The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633). “Cogito ergo sum” first appeared in Descartes Discourse on Method (1637). Can it be said that George and Zbigniew were at least drinking from the same well?

Read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

The Prophet

You may have entertained the biblical notion of seven fat and seven lean cows from Pharaoh’s dream. Hopefully, you’re in the fertile period, but when there’s a drought in love or work, you inhabit the seven fallow years. The trouble is that 7+7=14. If you're beginning the 7 fallow years at a certain age, it might not be until Charon pulls up that you discover your "out of cow" experience is hell. At what point do the N.I.H. and the CDC declare it’s no longer necessary to save up for a rainy day and expend the remaining grain  left in your silo? When you’re an adolescent, you might palliate your longings by reading tomes like Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha or even Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther—which address the longing of the aspirational personality. You will undoubtedly have many painful disappointments particularly in the area of love, but as you wander some deserted urban metropolis on a hot August night in the middle of your romantic agony, you’re still subliminally aware your whole life's ahead. As the years go by, however, you become like a fighter in the later part of a 15-round bout, who finds it increasingly hard to get up after they’ve taken a fall. Carpe diem, "sieze the day!"

Read A-Z Quotes by Francis Levy

The Ethicist: Know-It-All

Dear Ethicist: One of the problems with going on Ancestry.com is that you may find out things that are not necessarily beneficial. Say your first cousin once removed leaves his or her assets to be divided among surviving family members. As best as you can ascertain, you’re it. Then you go on Ancestry and find out that lo and behold you’ve got some cousins you didn’t know about who are also eligible to receive the cash. This is all hypothetical but if you didn’t go on Ancestry you wouldn’t have learned about the long-lost cousin and you wouldn’t have to divide the cash. You may wish you'd never gone on Ancestry under the theory that what you know won’t hurt you. Too much knowledge is not necessarily a good thing. Oedipus had that problem. If he hadn’t heard the oracle he wouldn’t have brought about the very thing he was afraid of. In this case, you're likely to find you’ve just complicated things. You may have had a good intention in signing up for Ancestry, but next time you’ll be more circumspect about responding to ads which offer knowledge (remember the apple?) instead being content to leave things alone.

 Know-It-All

 

 

Dear Know-It-All: First of all, who is “you?” Is “you” a thinly-veiled form of “you?” And why do you insist on using the second person pronoun? It’s not like Abracadabra where suddenly you’re going to find you have a cousin and the cousin is going to come out of the woodwork smelling the money that's owing to them. A family tree can be a joy or a Pandora’s Box. It's a two-edged sword. It’s rare that meeting up with a relative, you don’t already know is a good thing. It usually means you're going to have to start saying “no” to baptisms and brits. So what if you 're all alone in the world? You're not going to be any better learning you have cousin in Babylon.

Read Evan Harris' review of Francis Levy's Tombstone: Not a Western, The East Hampton Star