Δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς

God-like (or splendid)  Achilles

The struggle naught availeth

Well, not quite.  I am losing weight.  Not fast, but it's been 3 weeks now.  The chart shows my weight, measured each week on a Saturday morning after my shower.  You can see how I gained weight over the Christmas period (wife's birthday, wining and dining clients, Christmas, New Year, wedding anniversary), reversing the previous downtrend.  But once again I'm losing.

I'm on the low-GL diet, discovered  by the nutritionist Patrick Holford, and I was on it before the Christmas splurge.  GL stands for "glycaemic load".  "Glycaemic" is a nice Ancient Greek word meaning "sweet-blood" (glykos/glukos=sweet, haim/haem = blood) and the low-GL diet is about controlling your blood sugar.  Well, much follows from that, which is a little bit complicated.  But it is NOT a conventional low-calorie diet.  And unlike all other diets I've tried, it works.  I tried it 10 years ago and lost 1 kg a week over 20 weeks.  I'm never hungry.  I avoid high-GL carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar, but eat (as a vegetarian) a fair amount of low-GL carbs like beans and chickpeas. I eat lots of raw nuts whenever I am hungry.  You can eat berries (delicious), nuts, peanuts, beans, veggies, tofu (meat if you have to, but I never eat meat or fish), apples, cheese with care, tehini, hummous; but you must avoid things made with white flour and sugar.  I avoid alcohol; it seems to make me gain weight very fast (hence the Christmas gains).  You do have to give up caffeine because it affects your blood-sugar much like high-GL foods, and that was by far the hardest thing to do.  You must exercise 15 minutes a day, which I find doable.

So, by next Christmas I want to be 20 kgs (44 lbs) lighter.  And I'll have got there without self-deprivation .... except for not drinking tea .....

Compassion

Compassion (Latin cum=with, passion = suffering) or its Greek-derived equivalent sympathy (syn = with, pathos = feeling) shouldn't really have anything to do with right and wrong.  When somebody is suffering, it's irrelevant whether it's their own fault or not.  That's hard to do, actually.  When someone has caused their own strife we are inclined to feel less sympathy for them.  And yet, if we were the ones suffering, wouldn't we still want to be comforted?  Wouldn't we want those we love, our friends and family, to just give us comfort and support, even knowing that our travails are our own fault?  And if we would like that, how can we refuse it to others?

According to Frans de Waal, whose thoughtful, thought-provoking and eye-opening book (The Age of Empathy) I have just reread (for the third time), we are hard-wired to empathy and sympathy.

Some quotes from Professor de Waal:

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.


Sympathy and compassion are not weaknesses. They are strengths. They are what makes us human, and allow our vast human tribe to survive.  The hyper-competitiveness of the standard male model is dysfunctional and destructive, both to those who believe in it, and to the rest of us. We--our society--need something better.  I once thought that gay men, having had to come to terms with the fact that they are not (according to society) "real men", would have reinvented masculinity to tone down the selfishness and competitiveness and lonely struggle that straight men have to endure.  Alas, it's not happened.

Intimations of mortality

A Honda 750 4-pipe: my bike 30 years ago

When I was young, I never really believed I would die.  I was, in my heart of hearts, not just immortal but invincible.  As an example, I used to ride a big motorbike along De Waal Drive, which is an old, very winding freeway along the face of Table Mountain in Cape Town.  Drunk.  And I survived, idiot that I was, to tell the tale.

But over the last few years, I have had several warnings from Ἀργυρότοξος Ἀπόλλων  ( Silver-bowed Apollo)  A heart-attack scare, a cancer scare, decaying knees, gut problems,   The sore knees won't kill me (I hope!) but they're just another sign of wear and tear.  And tiredness,  I used to have abundant energy.  Now I seem to need more sleep in the day, but can't get a decent night's sleep at night.  Boring.

Yet I might live for another 30 years.  Who knows?  These days I live as I did then, from day to day.  Then because each day's fun was immediate and thrilling.  Now because I don't know when it'll all end, and since there's sweet FA I can do about it, I  might as well get on with life.  The deep depression I endured after Henrik died is past.  All the same, I'm still not joyful, as I was then.  I miss the insensate joy of those days 30 years ago, driving too fast on a sharply curving road along a very steep mountain, drinking too much without ill effect, staying up till all hours, sleeping with unsuitable people, finding out about literature, music, art, cinema, talking intensely with other people about the meaning of life.  But I am still alive, for now, and there is still beauty and interest in the world, despite everything.

Head of an Athlete (Apoxyomenos)

Stunningly beautiful.

You can buy it here!

Gay Influence

While looking for pics for the previous post, I discovered this fascinating blog:

Gay Influence

It's subtitled "gay and bisexual men of importance", and it's a compendium of gay-shaded men since Alexander the Great.  Great resource.  I'm putting a link in the blogs list in the sidebar.

Bust of Alexander the Great

I loves ya

Neither money nor possessions brings happiness. But love can, even if it doesn't always last.  Agape or eros?  Give me philia.  Eros dies, and betrays. But philia, that curious amalgam of love and affection and concern and sometimes desire; ah, that can bring happiness.  Until it too ends.

Nous sommes tous seuls, au fin.

Colby Keller (and friend)

I've talked about oxytocin before.  It's a hormone released during sex which makes you trust and love your partner. Observe the expressions on the faces of Colby Keller and his partner.  They may be in a studio, being filmed, and "acting" but there is a connection between these two.

There's nothing wrong with casual sex.   But if you combine it with affection (we have too few words in English to describe all the different kinds of love, but affection is a kind of love) then it comes close to the divine.

Love one another as I have loved you.

This was a new commandment (entolh) given specifically and deliberately to the apostles by Jesus.

It is love (sexual love as well as all the other kinds) which makes the agonies of life endurable.


From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.

Of course, immediately after, The Book of Common Prayer also says:

From all inordinate and sinful affections; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us.

Well, there are perhaps "sinful affections".  But there are divine affections too.  Whatever the ChrisTaliban say.

P.S. Note that Jesus himself never once mentions homosexuality, never mind condemning it, but several times calls divorce an abomination.

P.P.S.  Colby Keller as far as one can tell seems to be a nice bloke.

More than friends

Yet friends can be as close, too.

The Greeks had at least three words for love:  ἀγάπη, agápē for the selfless love of father or mother for son  or daughter; φιλíα, filia, the love of friends; and ἔρως érōs.  Aristotle, interestingly, describes the relationship between young lovers as well as between lifelong friends as φιλíα.   Agápē is non-sexual,  érōs is purely sexual, but filia is (potentially) both.