Wings of Hope

Juliane Koepcke 

There was a story in the Science section of the Times ("She Fell Nearly Two Miles and Walked Away," 6/18/21) about a 17 year old, Julian Koepcke who fell l0,000 feet to the earth in the crash of Lansa flight 508 on December 24,1971 over the Amazon and survived. She was still buckled into her seat when she landed. The impact was cushioned by the thick vegetation of the jungle. Koepcke, eventually Juliane Diller, would become a well-known zoologist whose work brought her back to the very area of the crash, which also killed her mother. Some people shoot for the stars and others are headed for the ground. The story of the orphaned child tumbling to earth is a legend you might expect to find recounted in Marquez. Werner Herzog eventually shot a documentary Wings of Hope (1998), which dealt with the incident in which the teenager trudged ll days in the jungle using the knowledge she had gained growing up in a family, where her father was a biologist and her mother an ornithologist, to trace the estuaries and streams to a river which eventually brought her back to civilization. The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) dealt with the effect an indigenous people of a Coke bottle dropping out of the sky. Talk about UFOs. In The War of the Worlds Orson Welles created mass hysteria when his Mercury Theatre on the Air feigned an alien invasion. Imagine spotting a teenager in an airplane seat twirling in your direction.

Read "What is it Like to Be a Fly," by Francis Levy, HuffPost

Appointment in Samarra

"Conatus" is a key concept in the philosophy of Spinoza. George Bernard Shaw used the term “life force” to describe a similar demiurge.  The idea is that whether it’s mind or matter, there’s a propensity for things to exist and continue on. Perhaps this explains why a fly, a creature who doesn’t possess consciousness (at least in human terms), still runs from the swatter. Have you ever chased a water bug which seems to know you’re  coming? And also why human beings, when deprived of one faculty after another, still seem to have the desire to live. In fact, one of the most unnatural acts is suicide since it contravenes the impetus most organisms express to persevere, often against the odds. Camus once said “there is but one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” Suicide is a radical act that is to cite the title of the famous Huysmans novel, Against Nature. Depression is often offered as an explanation when someone ends their life, but it's a dismisive almost mechanical explanation that doesn’t take into consideration the radicalness of the act. Humans are the only creatures in nature that end their own lives. It’s often said that a person is unwittingly killing themselves by virtue of their self-destructive behavior. Is accident the right word to use for the crash which took James Dean’s life at the age of 24? John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra charts the downward path of a character, Julian English, who eventually ends his own life. The same can occur in societies in which genocidal civil wars have the quality of an unacknowledged collectively self-annihilating impulse. 

Read "Suicidal Ideation and Other Thoughts" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

Introducing the Self-Driving Fork

Tesla Autopilot

Tesla produced one of the first self-driving cars ("When Will Self- Driving Cars Rule the Roads?" Malcolm Gladwell, GPS, 6/27/21), but it poses the question of what other devices could be programmed to operate without the benefit of the human mind? Just look around your kitchen or bathroom for starters. How about a self-driving fork or toothbrush, a self-eating apple that auto masticates (ie takes bites out of itself). Naturally any food could self-driving. Let’s say you’re suffering from anorexia, you might have a box of those Omaha self-eating steaks sent to you. Human beings are prehensile creatures which means they walk upright and can use their hands, but let’s pretend that people had not evolved to this level. Self-involvement is a characteristic of homo sapiens. The next step is to be self-driven (the furthest extension of the self made man) which means you're always on auto-pilot. You have undoubtedly met individuals with mechanical pre-programmed responses to everything. Take this to its logical conclusion. Say you're proposing marriage. Have Siri or Alexa do it for you. The same with testimony before the judge in the ensuing divorce. Alexa knows you're going to say you're a victim who was emotionally abused. All you have to do is sign the matrimonial equivalent of a DNR and she will take care of it for you. Then there's the self-written valedictory speech and eulogy and on the presidential level, State of the Union. When it comes to the bathroom what about self-driving soaps, that unwrap themselves, then suds you up?

Read "The Driverless Car" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

The Impossible Profession

Disenchantment was the word that Max Weber used to describe the triumph of mechanism. If you look at the whole as not being greater than the sum of its parts then the universe is easily reducible to predictable stratagems. Everything is explained. Everything falls into place with no room for any magic. Naturally no one is interested in those old traveling medicine men with quack potions, but there are certain ideas and concepts such as the notion of consciousness itself that are not easily reduced to bits of empirically verifiable perception. Scientism and the attendant datafication are direct products of disenchantment. In Freud and Man’s Soul, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettleheim showed how the James Strachey translation of the Standard Edition diminished the poetry of Freud’s language in the service of promoting psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. Psychoanalysis is not psychopharmacology and no talk therapy based on the bond created between two human beings—which contains so many irrational elements—is ever going to successfully become denuded of its spiritual and/or metaphysical elements. Thus, the late Janet Malcolm’s classic work on psychoanalysis was titled The Impossible Profession. Do human beings require transcendence? In The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles addressed a striving that occurs early in the development of a human being’s life.

Read "Psychoanalysis: The Patient's Cure" by Francis Levy, American Imago

Annals of the Paranormal: Chock Full 'o Nuts

photo: Green4life80

Consider the paranormal phenomenon of ordering in from a restaurant that's closed its doors forever. You may have a box full of  stained take-out menus, which bring back fond memories of mythological culinary figures like General Tso. It’s sad to see the years of interchanges go down the tubes. If you can bend a spoon or witness lights flashing during a séance, then why not bring back the famed Number #1 (chow mein, fried rice and egg roll) from the precincts where it no longer exists. If it sounds like a tall order, consider the fact that Houdini freed himself from an underwater box or that the Flying Wallendas have regularly defied gravity. There's a growing belief amongst those who dabble in the occult that spirits of past restaurants reside in an ether. Of course, there are naysayers resigned to the fact that when a restaurant's gone you'll no longer be able to order off the menu. It’s usually the same crowd that doesn’t believe that dog spelled backwards is God. Are you nuts (or Chock Full 'o them, if you believe in the impossible?

Read "Diasporic Dining: Combination Plate" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

Character Actor

Arnold Stang

Character is the moral side of disposition. One can be quiet or loquacious. A shy person may be afraid of people or merely circumspect  Bravado may itself be a form of concealment with the noise acting as a diversion like a flare that invading forces send to fool the enemy. These dispositions become fully distilled into other affects. Some people are spontaneous while others take a wait and see approach. From the societal point of view reticence is often viewed as a form of thoughtfulness whereas a person who shows his or her hand too soon can be viewed as fickle. It's when these traits get attached to actions that they definite “character.” For instance, a person may be poker-faced, sphinx-like and hard to read, but transmogrified into unscrupulousness such an individual’s behavior and actions are described as Machiavellian. On the other side of the fence, there are the plain dealers who wear their emotions on their sleeves. If you’re buying a used car, that’s the kind of salesman you want in your corner. Mohammed Ali’s style was alternately Machiavellian and in-your-face, but sometimes his forthrightness was ironically the deterrent. Rope-a- dope was a ruse like D-Day, but when Ali taunted George Foreman he made him blow his cool. Looks are not everything, but morphology may be indicative of character; for instance, if someone is built like a brick shithouse, they may act like one. Generally bad character is associated with the kind of subterfuge that leads to lying. You may describe a beloved colleague as honest as the day is long. However taken literally you might not want to trust what he or she says during the winter.

Read "The Interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's Dreams" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

Sense and Sensibility

Emotion itself has its own history, provenance and chronology. Sensibility is a changeable matter. Romantic love meant something different to the troubadours than it does to the modern soul which is often in flight, performing an almost platonic longing after an ideal which doesn't exist. Unreality has an unfair advantage over “the real thing” since it satiates the always insatiable lust for possibility. The unknown quantity contains a mystery that appeals to the imagination. So-called free will is the villain that undermines the ability to focus on the here and now. Somewhere between feudalism and the advent of the free-market economy, custom and prescription were replaced by the culture of choice and self-invention, but human existence is like a ruler whose ever smaller gradations become reflected even within shorter spaces of time. Would the female characters described in the novels of Edna O’Brien be recognizable to the cast of Sally Rooney’s Normal People which deals with the complexion of love and in particular lovemaking amongst Irish millennials. Even with the world Rooney describes there are disparities which are a source of conflict. In one scene Rooney’s central character Marianne's description of her enjoyment of rough sex alienates her from her former boyfriend Connell who reacts with incomprehension to the inclinations of someone he thought he’d known. Imagine a panel composed of famous fictional characters  from Middlemarch, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, from The Great Gatsby, Rabbit Run to the The Human Stain. Surely none of these creations would agree when it came to describing what they found appealing or attractive in another person.

Read "What is Happiness?" by Francis Levy, HuffPost