The Evil Eye

I am hyper-vigilant. I believe in the existence of evil. If that makes me paranoid, well, I'll handle it. My long range reading plan is driven by a hunger for a more fertile and abundant reality but not one without a good road map. For that reason I have intended for some time to re-read a great little book which clarifies somewhat the problem of the evil eye, something that hadn't disappeared from the culture during my formative years; it resonated in our village's nearby Italian neighborhood, and in my father's introjects of his dear illiterate Montenegrin Serb Mother.  It was for instance why he blessed himself when he went by our little Catholic Church, even though he never attended it. Someone was watching. The book is titled Mal Occhio, [evil eye], The Underside of Vision, the author is Lawrence Di Stasi, and I am re-reading it as we speak. 

Very quickly, in his short but profound book, Mr. DiStasi  makes the connection from the evil eye to envy*. Now, personally I've always thought that envy is one of the most under-rated of the seven deadly sins. A mother and her baby on a walk run in to a woman who gushes over the baby's beauty. The baby comes down with a fever and the old aunt is called in to enact the process of Mal Ochio, which involves olive oil in a bowl of water, (which the author explains in detail.) It is a process which works to counter the disease brought about by the evil eye. DiStasi also delves into the causes of the evil, as perceived by it's believers, in the history of the unwitting gazer.  One common cause is believed to be the result of a child being allowed to go back to nursing after having been weaned. This of course is primitive stuff, probably, we think, going back to the Paleolithic. 

 He then brilliantly relates the peasant superstition and/or mythology on the evil eye to the progression of theological concepts from recent Christianity back through the transition from the Goddess of the Mammoth hunters to the gradual changing of the guard from female led pantheon to Male led which he traces, with help from Joseph Campbell et. al., to the beginnings of the Bronze age.

What appeals to me though is that I tend to give the mythology credence in my own life, possibly owing to a mixture of existential influences from the culture in which I grew up, small town multi-cultural America, multi-culturally raised, somewhat superstitious father, and certain life particulars, such as; that I was a child model, a life situation I go into in some depth in my oft mentioned book, The White Fence. My father used photographs of my sister and me, as well as other people in town, local citizens who'd volunteer as models, and occasionally professional models from an agency in New York City, as part of his process of painting illustrations for fiction and advertising in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Red Book, and the like.  Modelling was not an easy job. Film was not as fast 70 years ago as it is today. (When Tri-X film came out it was a blessing). And huge powerful lights were required, which burned the eyes. There was a kind of feeling of being coerced almost to the point of torture by the big brute of a father, who would also charm and bribe. I received money whenever I modeled, money according to a perceived going rate; something like five dollars when I was five, and ten when I was ten, and yes, I was still at it at twenty, when twenty bucks was a lot of beer money. 

The job itself was referred to as Posing for Dad, though when others did it it was called modelling. What was harder than the job itself, for me, was that it put undo attention on me in the eyes of the small town population.  As in, "I saw you in your Dad's illustration. You're so cute!" That from adults. My contemporaries among the children never mentioned it, but I sensed a certain resentment. I never thought about envy in those days, mostly I'm referring here to the 1950s, but, with the magazine exposure and the flamboyant family, the former model mother, and all;  in retrospect I feel I was "at the affect", of a heightened envy environment.   

The Saturday Evening Post, in particular, was important in mid 20th century America, as it had been since the days of the Declaration of Independence. I invite you to check out the following well done website..... https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/history-saturday evening-post.

To follow this thinking about envy a little further, let's remember that what "catches the eye", is usually something of value, with value and attraction semantically closely tied. We value a beautiful child, gold, food, real estate, baubles, and many things; but with children the sense of value seems instinctive. All mammals seem particularly drawn to the babies of their species, and sometimes to other species.  We love puppies and kittens. Dogs seem to love and be extra gentle with baby humans. (See youtube.)  It even has a name;  Neoteny:  

 
From an article in the Scientific American, July 1, 2009, by Charles Q. Choi, titled; Being more infantile may have led to bigger Brains. The author is so concise that I can't see paraphrasing the whole article, so, ...quoting the author;

"For decades scientists have noted that mature humans physically resemble immature chimps—we, too, have small jaws, flat faces and sparse body hair. The retention of juvenile features, called Neoteny in Evolutionary Biology, is especially apparent in domesticated animals—thanks to human preferences, many dog breeds have puppy features such as floppy ears, short snouts and large eyes. Now genetic evidence suggests that neoteny could help explain why humans are so radically different from chimpanzees, even though both species share most of the same genes and split apart only about six million years ago, a short time in evolutionary terms.

In animals, Neoteny comes about because of delays in development, points out molecular biologist Philipp Khaitovich of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For instance, humans sexually mature roughly five years after chimps do, and our teeth erupt later. “Changes in the timing of development are some of the most powerful mechanisms evolution can use to remodel organisms, with very few molecular events required,” he explains.

To look for genetic evidence that neoteny played a role in the evolution of Homo sapiens, Khaitovich and his colleagues compared the expression of 7,958 genes in the brains of 39 humans, 14 chimpanzees and nine rhesus monkeys. They collected samples from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—a region linked with memory that is relatively easy to identify in the primate brain. These tissues came from deceased individuals at several stages of life, from infancy to middle age, enabling the researchers to see how genetic activity changed over time in each species.

In both humans and chimps, about the same percentage of genes changed in activity over time. But roughly half these age-linked genes in humans differed from chimps in terms of when they were active during development. Analysis of the 299 genes whose timings had shifted in all three species revealed that almost 40 percent were expressed later in life in humans, with some genetic activity delayed well into adolescence.

Although the specific function of many of these neotenic genes remains uncertain, they are especially active in the gray matter of the human brain, where higher thought occurs, the researchers note in the April 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. [year?] They are now probing other parts of the brain in humans, chimps and macaques to see where neoteny might play a role.

Actually proving that neoteny helped to drive human evolution and brain size is difficult. Khaitovich suggests analyzing genetic activity in cases of faster-than-normal development in people, “which past research already shows can lead to a reduction in cognitive abilities,” he says.

Other experts certainly think that neoteny’s role is reasonable. The ability of the brain to learn is apparently greatest before full maturity sets in, “and since neoteny means an extended childhood, you have this greater chance for the brain to develop,” says molecular phylogeneticist Morris Goodman of Wayne State University, who did not participate in this study. In other words, human evolution might have been advanced by the possibilities brimming in youth.

Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "Juvenile Thoughts."

[Neoteny is a characteristic of domesticated animals, dogs, foxes, horses, cows, and etc. and may account for improved learning ability.]

And. Babies are cute, and they continue to be cute over a long period, in spite of being very messy. And young women, some more than others, are judged cute by many men of all ages. Women's magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Town and Country, print advertisements for expensive women's clothes, supposedly for women of marrying age, using fourteen year old models, many of whom look disturbingly like  Jon-Benet Ramsey.  


*I may have been primed for this book by another book which came into my life many years ago; and in an odd way. The book, titled Envy, A Theory of Social Behavior, by Helmut Schoeck;  ( b. 3 July 1922; d. 2 Feb 1993 ); was sitting on a friend's shelf for several years and my eye kept being drawn to the title on it's spine. I eventually peeked into it, and then, over time, I asked if I could borrow it, and my friend said, "Take it, it came with the house."  It is a scholarly tome, but fascinating. It is a survey of the forces of envy in primitive cultures throughout the world. His research illustrates clearly how envy shapes cultures, down to the ubiquitous feeling that anyone's eye can be envious and that envy inspires sorcery. Love thy neighbor? More like watch your neighbor very carefully. When I finally finished it I was convinced that envy is the engine that runs the world. The book has glowing blurbs from Karl Popper and Thomas Szasz. The author was a professor of Sociology, born in Austria, educated in Germany and the United States, post doctoral fellowship at Yale, and etc.

The Prehensile Gesture

 

 

Two books came in the mail a couple of weeks ago as I began my participation in the Covid Virus Quarantine. One was Garry Apgar's Quotes for Conservatives, and the other was a book by an associate professor of English at the University of Maine, Laura Cowan, titled Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres. (The book to your left is not related to this post except obliquely.)  
I gave Garry's book a short rave review on Amazon, because I think it is a wonderful book. O.K., Garry is a friend, but, take my word for it, it's terrific.  

These two books came before April 1, so I'm using that date for a new book ban. No more buying books until May 1st. So far, so good.  

I was very much looking forward to the Cowan book because I have read enough of West's writing to know that I am a serious fan, and have decided to become a West expert, at least in my own little world. I have no-one to impress but myself, and yet that will by no means stop me. 

   That having been established, I dove into the Cowan book a couple of days ago, I'm now a few chapters in, and am up to where Cowan is talking about West's novel, The Return of The Soldier, a book which is built around a case of Amnesia.

In a sense, the novel is about reaching out for something that is not there. It is a certain kind of gesture, one filled with longing, frustration, sorrow, but those are my words. Prehensile is a case in point for the way that West uses metaphor. It might help a little to quote this short West paragraph taken from Cowan's book; the narrator, a female cousin of the absent soldier is speaking;

"That day its beauty was an affront to me, because like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christoper from the wars."
  
It so happens that I have had the topic of Amnesia stuck in my craw for some time, for the following reason. My own life history, which I've been mining as a resource for my writing, (about which I must refrain from apologizing at some point), is peppered with cases of alcoholic amnesia. Which is to say, because so many people seem to misrepresent this symtom of alcoholism, the loss of memory associated with the imbibing of an amount of alcohol that one's brain could not tolerate at a given time, which loss of memory seems to be absolute and unrecoverable for that specified time. For me those "black-outs" were frequent, usually occurring at least several times a year. 

For a long time I've wanted to write about a blackout experience that occurred while I was in the Army in Alaska, in the mid-1960s. Briefly, I was in a bar downtown, and lost a period of time beginning while I was dancing with myself in that bar, The Crossroads, in downtown Anchorage. I came-to snuggled up to an unknown woman who was in the driver's seat of what I assume was her car.  Her right leg, her gas peddle leg, was in a cast from toe to hip. She was a handsome woman, with shoulder length brunette hair, earings I think, and a nice smelling perfume which I began to inhale. She was asleep. She woke up when someone, a Military Policeman, began wiping the snow off the windshield. The car was blanketed in snow. The woman woke up just in time to hear the Policeman tell me to get out of the car and then tell me to get into the barracks fast. I didn't have time to say goodbye or "Who are you?"
   It was a week-end, so I was able to get back to my own living space, my bunk, and sleep off the rest of my still drunkeness.  The after-affect was mostly a feeling of disappointment that I had probably found the love of my life and would never know who she was. In fact I went back to the Crossroads several times and never saw her. I began to wonder if the whole thing had been a hallucination.

Another black-out experience, though, is the one that really bothers me. I want to be able to write about that time, or at least, mine it, for a possible story, but there is too much blur, too much lost time.  
  It was still the sixties, I'd been out of the Army for a couple of years, (1968?) ...I was living in a run-down apartment on the lower East Side of Manhattan, with a friend and his seventeen year old wife, hanging on to a job doing past-ups and mechanicals, a simple form of commercial art, at a mid-town ad agency, when I was invited to a wedding. 

The Groom to be was my Godmother's nephew, Julian. My Godmother was the ex-wife of a friend of my father's. She had been part of Dad's heavy drinking party crowd during his and my mother's glory days as illustrator and model couple in glamorous Beekman Place. Everyone was glamorous, successful, and heavy drinking. A world I was forever locked out of by fate.

Julian was going to marry his girlfriend Mandy, and they were going to live in France. Mandy was Catholic, and they needed to both be Catholic in order to live in France and receive some sort of tax benefit. He was on a skimpy trust fund, and Mandy I assume had some money. He and I didn't know each other that well, but we had somehow discovered a bond, which was binge drinking. We'd been on several binges over the past six or eight years, when Julian was visiting Aunt Kitty, or, in one case, when I was living in London.  Our only real tie was that we had somehow begun to think of ourselves as relatives, cousins perhaps, because we expected Aunt Kitty to die someday and leave us a bunch of money. We assumed she was loaded. She was, but that's another story. 

   He had been born and raised in England, (though his mother was an American, aunt Kitty's sister), gone to Eton and Cambridge, been in lots of prankish trouble, been kicked out of Cambridge, and since then had worked sporadically as an editor. He was staying in Manhattan with an Eton buddy, Peter Davies, who had a unique claim to fame.      
   

Peter Theodore Davies was the son of Peter Llewelyn Davies. If you Goggle the father you will find a wiki called Peter Llewelyn Davies - Neverpedia, the Peter Pan wiki; It's three pages but I'll just quote from the first paragraph, then you can decide if you want to read on:

"Peter Llewelyn Davies, (February 25, 1897 - April 5, 1960) was the middle of five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, one of the Llewelyn Davies boys befriended and later informally adopted by J.M. Barrie. Barrie publicly identified him as the source of the name for the title character in his famous play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. This public identification as "the original Peter Pan" plagued Davies throughout his life, which ended in suicide."

Peter T.'s father had killed himself in 1960 by throwing himself under a train at the Sloane Square Underground Station in London. The father was an alcoholic and probably drunk at the time. Peter T. was married and living in Manhattan, somewhere below 14th St. 

I remember meeting Julian at a bar, it might have been 1 Fifth Avenue, having a drink or two and then going to Peter's apartment, to meet Peter, his wife Frances, and Mandy. The idea was that at Aunt Kitty's suggestion, since she was under the impression that I was a good church goer, that I was to be Julian's Godfather and assist at his baptism, which would follow immediately. A little about Peter T. and his siblings, again from Neverpedia: 

"Peter's [Llewelyn], wife died not long after his suicide. His sons all chose not to have children, to prevent passing Huntington's* to another generation. Ruthven (Rivvy") developed Huntington's (and his wife Mary Bridget Pearce suffered from Multiple Sclerosis), and became depressed and bitter about what he perceived as Barrie's negative impact on his father's life before he died in 1995. George did not marry, leaving the UK for New York, traveling extensively in South America, and returning to Brooklyn where he died. Peter Junior, [Theodore], married Frances Jane Carson in 1965, but had no children. He committed suicide in 1990, at the age of 47."


We had a few drinks at Chez Davies and took a cab to the church. The church was run by Dominicans. The priest to be involved met us at the door and gave us a short speech. (He was by the way a handsome guy, possibly Italian, with black hair, wearing a brown wool robe with a hood, which was down, and he had on a cool pair of brown winged-tipped cordovan shoes. He said something to the affect, (probably noticing that we were drunk), that we shouldn't worry about the religious or spiritual part of the ceremony, that that would all be taken care of by him. I found that re-assuring. We, he or I, I don't remember, poured water over Julian's head as he leaned into some sort of fount, and I think I said something like I baptize you in the name of The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Then we went on to the marriage ceremony which must have been blessedly fast so that I don't remember it, and then we went back to the Davies and drank some more. The blackout must have started during the wedding. The next thing I remember is that it was morning, Monday morning, and I had just arrived back at my atrociously low-class apartment.  It was time to go to work and I decided that now was the time to quite my job. There was no other choice. I was quite incompetent at the paste-up trade, and they would probably fire me soon, and anyway, my friend Einar thought I could make more money working with him at the Village Moving and Firewood Company. And therefore, as Einar and his Wife and I concluded, I might as well have a medicinal dose of LSD before I leave for work. I took the acid, had a light breakfast somewhere on the way to the subway, and at the 42 st. Station, with the acid beginning to kick in, I bought myself an Orange Day-Glo necktie. I was still wearing my lightweight herringbone suit jacket, which was rumbled from 24 hours of carousing. I appeared at work, went up to one of the partners and informed him I was quiting, to which he said, "Good, I was just going to fire you anyway." I said goodby to my fellow bull-pen employees and went off to the next stage of my life.
    My hesitation to write about the wedding, which included members of such a noteworthy family, is I expect obvious from the lost time that started during the very wedding of which I have spoken. I felt though, that I should give it a try.

*Huntington's -  Huntington's Corea was an important part of the Oral History of East Hampton which Martha and I produced circa 2000; the disease was found in one of the prominent local families.