A Long View on Life: Psychosis to Altruism

actually my heavily abridged version of a rambling article published today in the Atlantic Monthly. The article reports on Harvard’s 72-year-long “Grant Study” documenting 268 “normal” happy lives.

The man who took over and still runs the study, George Vaillant, has an appropriately subtle mind. I like his notion of “distortions of experience” which he likens to our physical defenses against injury such as swelling or clotting. The study demonstrates that we all defend ourselves mentally over time, but Vaillant categorizes them in an interesting continuum from psychosis to altruism.
(the unabridged version on the web site includes a great video interview with Vaillant)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness


Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.
e, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.
[...]
Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years. From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries. [...] [When] Vaillant discovered the Harvard Study, and his jaw dropped. “To be able to study lives in such depth, over so many decades,” he said, “it was like looking through the Mount Palomar telescope,” (then the most powerful in the world. )
[...]
Arlie Bock—a brusque, no-nonsense physician who grew up in Iowa and took over the health services at Harvard University in the 1930s—conceived the project with his patron, the department-store magnate W. T. Grant. Writing in September 1938, Bock declared that medical research paid too much attention to sick people; that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases—and viewing it through the lenses of a hundred micro-specialties—could never shed light on the urgent question of how, on the whole, to live well. His study would draw on undergraduates who could “paddle their own canoe,” Bock said, and it would “attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal young men.” He defined normal as “that combination of sentiments and physiological factors which in toto is commonly interpreted as successful living.”

[...]

As the Grant Study men entered middle age—they spent their 40s in the 1960s—many achieved dramatic success. Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of ’43). But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met Vaillant’s criteria for mental illness. Underneath the tweed jackets of these Harvard elites beat troubled hearts. Arlie Bock didn’t get it. “They were normal when I picked them,” he told Vaillant in the 1960s. “It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.”

[...]

Even as [Vaillant] takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

The story gets to the heart of Vaillant’s angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

In contrast to Anna Freud, who located the origins of defenses in the sexual conflicts of a child, Vaillant sees adaptations as arising organically from the pain of experience and playing out through the whole lifespan. [...] Most psychology [sets] health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness. “Social anxiety disorder” is distinguished from shyness. Depression is defined as errors in cognition. Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. “Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”
[...]
The good news, he argues, is that diseases—and people, too—have a “natural history.” After all, many of the “psychotic” adaptations are common in toddlers, and the “immature” adaptations are essential in later childhood, and they often fade with maturity. As adolescents, the Grant Study men were twice as likely to use immature defenses as mature ones, but in middle life they were four times as likely to use mature defenses—and the progress continued into old age. When they were between 50 and 75, Vaillant found, altruism and humor grew more prevalent, while all the immature defenses grew more rare.

This means that a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading. A man at 20 who appears the model of altruism may turn out to be a kind of emotional prodigy—or he may be ducking the kind of engagement with reality that his peers are both moving toward and defending against. And, on the other extreme, a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may turn out to be gestating toward maturity

[...]

Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.

What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”

[...]

He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people."

[...]
Vaillant also dramatically expanded his scope by taking over a defunct study of juvenile delinquents in inner-city Boston, run by the criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. Launched in 1939, the study had a control group of nondelinquent boys who grew up in similar circumstances—children of poor, mostly foreign-born parents, about half of whom lived in a home without a tub or a shower.

Vaillant also arranged to interview a group of women from the legendary Stanford Terman study, which in the 1920s began to follow a group of high-IQ kids in California.

In contrast to the Grant data, the Glueck study data suggested that industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether the boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor, including family cohesion and warm maternal relationships. “What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”

Gail Sheehy’s 1976 best seller, Passages, drew on the Grant Study, as well as on the research of Daniel Levinson, who went on to publish The Seasons of a Man’s Life. [In the 1990's "positive psychology"] spread wildly through academia and popular culture. Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur.

“The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

[...]
[Case No.248. The test subject is referred to in the article as “you”.]
" “Probably I am fooling myself,” [wrote a consistently happy-well participant] in 1987, at age 63, “but I don’t think I would want to change anything.”
How can we know if you’re fooling yourself? How can even you know? According to Dr. Vaillant’s model of adaptations, the very way we deal with reality is by distorting it—and we do this unconsciously. When we start pulling at this thread, an awfully big spool of thoughts and questions begins to unravel onto the floor.

You never seemed to pull the thread. When the study asked you to indicate “some of the fundamental beliefs, concepts, philosophy of life or articles of faith which help carry you along or tide you over rough spots,” you wrote: “Hard to answer since I am really not too introspective. However, I have an overriding sense (or philosophy) that it’s all a big nothing—or ‘chasing after wind’ as it says in Ecclesiastes & therefore, at least up to the present, nothing has caused me too much grief.”

[Case No. 47. The test subject is referred as “you”.]
“I’ve answered a great many questions,” [wrote a happy-sick participant] in your 1946 survey. “Now I’d like to ask you people a couple of questions. By what standards of reason are you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? Happy? Contented? Hopeful? If people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about the people?”

When a questionnaire asked what ideas carried you through rough spots, you wrote, “It’s important to care and to try, even tho the effects of one’s caring and trying may be absurd, futile, or so woven into the future as to be indetectable.” Asked what effect the Grant Study had on you, you wrote, “Just one more little token that I am God’s Elect. And I really don’t need any such tokens, thank you.”

is definition of “normality.” You said you loved The Sorrow and the Pity and that, in the movie, the sort of men the Grant Study prized fought on the side of the Nazis, “whereas the kooks and the homosexuals were all in the resistance.” You told Dr. Vaillant he should read Joseph Heller on the unrelieved tragedy of conventionally successful businessmen.

Your “mental status was paradoxical,” Dr. Vaillant wrote in his notes. You were clearly depressed, he observed, and yet full of joy and vitality. “He could have been a resistance leader,” Dr. Vaillant wrote. “He really did seem free about himself.” Intrigued, and puzzled, he sent you a portion of his manuscript-in-progress, wanting your thoughts. “The data’s fantastic,” you replied. “The methodology you are using is highly sophisticated. But the end judgments, the final assessments, seem simplistic.

“I mean, I can imagine some poor bastard who’s fulfilled all your criteria for successful adaptation to life, … upon retirement to some aged enclave near Tampa just staring out over the ocean waiting for the next attack of chest pain, and wondering what he’s missed all his life What’s the difference between a guy who at his final conscious moments before death has a nostalgic grin on his face as if to say, ‘Boy, I sure squeezed that lemon’ and the other man who fights for every last breath in an effort to turn back time to some nagging unfinished business?”

If you had your life to live over again,” the study asked you in 1981, “what problem, if any, would you have sought help for and to whom would you have gone?” “I’ve come to believe that ‘help’ is for the most part useless and destructive,” you answered. “Can you imagine Arlie Bock—God bless his soul—trying to help me work out my problems? … Or Clark Heath? The poor old boys would have headed for the hills! The ‘helping professions’ are in general camp-followers of the dominant culture, just like the clergy, and the psychiatrists. (I except Freud and Vaillant.)”

Around this time, Dr. Vaillant wrote about you: “The debate continues in my mind, whether he is going to be the exception and be able to break all the rules of mental health and alcoholism or whether the Greek fates will destroy him. Only time will tell.” Dr. Vaillant urged you to go to AA. You died at age 64, when you fell down the stairs of your apartment building. The autopsy found high levels of alcohol in your blood.[...] When asked if there was a death [among study participants] that had affected him, Vaillant mentioned Case No. 47—“Alan Poe”—an inspiring, tragic man, who left many lessons and many mysteries, who earnestly sought to “squeeze that lemon.”

[...]
Distortions can clearly serve a protective function. In a test involving a set of pictures, older people tend to remember fewer distressing images (like snakes) and more pleasant ones (like Ferris wheels) than younger people. By giving a profound shape to aging, this tendency can make for a softer, rounder old age, but also a deluded one. [...] The Harvard data illustrate this phenomenon well. In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent. “As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”

At age 50, one Grant Study man declared, “God is dead and man is very much alive and has a wonderful future.” He had stopped going to church, he said, when he arrived at Harvard. But as a sophomore, he had reported going to mass four times a week. When Vaillant sent this—and several similar vignettes—to the man for his approval to publish them, the man wrote back, “George, you must have sent these to the wrong person.” Vaillant writes, “He could not believe that his college persona could have ever been him. Maturation makes liars of us all.”

Robin Hood's first murder (the fog of genaeology, pt. 2)

pre-requisite: See my earlier post the fog of genaeology...

Today I learned my 14th c. ancestor, Roger La Zouche, had a grand-nephew (i.e. his brother Eudo's grandson, also named Roger) who committed one of the most notorious crimes in 14th century England when he slayed the powerful nobleman, Roger Bellere. The Ashby Folville Cross (see photo) still marks the site where La Zouche slayed Bellere in 1326.

Eustace Folville was blamed for the murder, but in fact Roger La Zouche had struck the fatal blow against no less a victim than Bellere, the baron of the exchequer, the founder of the chantry chapel at Kirby and the owner of nine estates. The murder of Bellere was a first-rate scandal and a warrant was issued for the immediate arrest of... not La Zouche but the better-known Eustace Folville. Folville was quickly concealed by locals, even as he himself concealed the guilt of La Zouche, a small land owner who ironically had to conceal his concealer.

Likeness to the mythical Robin Hood gains momentum here; the Folville Gang found themselves pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Eustace Folville and his brother took to their roles as fugitive outlaws and graduated to multiple murders, robberies, and kidnappings of nobles for huge ransomes. At one point, the brothers sought refuge among another notorious band of felons, the Cotterel Gang in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Agents of the king pursued them there, unsuccessfully. Written indictments from the period describe Eustace and his brothers as mercenaries acting on behalf of "the ostensibly law-abiding...to commit acts of violence on their behalf." Among the clientelle for the Folville Gang's mercenary services were a priory, an abbey, and on several occasions a wealthy nobleman.

In the decades following the lives of La Zouche and Folville, reports of their valor only swelled. They came to represent, not outlaws, but enforcers of a law more true than the King's own, perhaps more divine than man's law itself. In William Langland's epic poem, Piers Plowman, the "Folvyle lawes" are named among the treasures of God's own grace, an antidote to the assails of the "Antecrist." In this passage, Langland personifies Grace to describes the means of man's salavation through the varied provenance of God.

My very quick translation of the passage:

Says Grace, "before I go, I'll give you
treasure
and weapon to fight the Antecrist when he assails
you."
And gave each man a grace to give unto
himself
So that Idleness would not encumbre him, neither
Envy nor Pride.

To some are given wit and words to win their life's
lode.
[...]
And some are given to ride and recover what was won
unrightfully.
God wished them to win it back by strength of hand,
to fetch it from false men by Folvyles
lawes.

Forthi,' quod Grace, "er I go, I wol gyve yow
tresor,
And wepne to fighte with whan Antecrist yow assailleth.'
And
gaf ech man a grace to gye with hymselven,
That Ydelnesse encombre hym noght, ne Envye ne
Pride:
Divisiones graciarum sunt.
Some [wyes] he yaf wit, with wordes to
shewe--
Wit to wynne hir liflode with, as the world
asketh,
[...]
And some to ryde and to recovere that unrightfully was
wonne:
He wissed hem wynne it ayein thorugh wightnesse of
handes,

And fecchen it fro false men with Folvyles
lawes.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;view=text;idno=PPlLan;rgn=div1;node=PPlLan%3A20

Stretching across the centuries, another relative of Roger La Zouche would gain his own infamy in the Great Basin of Utah, Isaac Perry Decker. Subject of a future post.

Sun Ra still not heard

trade offers welcome
Monorails and Satellites vol. 2
Impressions of a Patch of Blue
Jazz in Transition
Out Beyond the Kingdom Of (Discipline 99)
Somewhere Over the Rainbow (We Live to Be)
Some Blues But Not the Kind That's Blue
Song of the Stargazers
Sun Rise in Egypt vol. 1-3
Night in East Berlin
Bratislava Jazz days
Astral Planes & New Moonbeams

Tribute to Stuff Smith with Billy Bang
Stay Awake Compilation (pink elephants on parade track)

jargon to aid perception

SMELL
Acetic- "pricked" badly sour
Aroma- grapey smell of young wine
Bouquet- complex smell of mature wine
Corky- mouldy
Heady- attractively alcoholic
Lively- indefinable good sign, fresh, frank
Musty- rotten, mouldy prob bad barrel stave
Sappy- fr."seve" lively, forthright, esp burgundy
Sulphury- hot, nose-tickling, often cheap whites, blows off with exposure to air
Yeasty- means unstable, due to fermenting bottle

DESCRIPTION
Apples - Malic acid is common in young wine
Blackcurrants - smell and flavor in many reds
Earthy - common in Italian wines, sometimes +/- term
Flowery - forthcoming, attractive scent
Gun-flint - scent of flint present in whites e.e. Pouilly Fume
Honey - Associated particularly w/ "noble rot" in great sweet wines
Nuts - Nuttiness often present in well aged wines and good old sherry
Oak - should not be easily identified as oak
Peaches - esp in Loire wines
Raspberries - esp Bordeaux and Rhone valley
Smoke - many whites
Spice - pronounced in Gewurtztraminer
Stalks - green-wood, under-ripe
Truffles - most elusive of all scents, burgundy, barolo, hermitage
Vanilla - imparted by oak cask
Violets - elusive scent of some wines

GENERAL POSITIVE TERMS
Baked - results from very hot sun on grapes
Big - strong, round, satisfying
Body - "volume" due in part to alcoholic strength
Clean/Coarse - refrshing, perfect/crude
Complete - mature, balanced
Distinctive
Dry
Stiff/Dumb - too young or too cold
Elegant - indefinable
Fat - well-fleshed, not good in itself
Finish - aftertaste, long or short
Firm/Flat - young, decisive style/weak, unexceptional
Hard - tannic
Se'che' - dried up, too old red wine
Silky - texture found in good beaujolais
Supple - opposite of hard but not pejorative as "soft" would be
Unresolved - not old enough for components to have harmonized

Technique and process
Racking = draining the wine off its lees
Fining = adding egg whites that sink and remove particles from racked wine

"Let us not forget the hundreds of different ways Burgundy can be made. ...Permute zero to 100% stems, zero to 100% new wood, fermenting at 25^ all the way up to 35^C and above, cold soaking or no."

Batholiths of the Sierra Nevada

First, an aside:In 1902 Mt. Pelee on Martinique erupted with 4 deafening blasts, the pyroclastic flow killed all 30k people, only two people survived, one a murderer awaiting execution, protected by his dungeon.

=-=-=-=--reading notes on-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-"Geology of the Sierra Nevada" by Mary Hill-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"Batholith" is deep rock, its individual masses are called "Plutons." separated from one another by metamorphic or igneous rock. The Sierra plutonic rocks formed as crystals solidifying within liquid (in a thick mush, overcrowded crystals form til there's no more liquid (due to cooling or total crystalzation)). Darker rock was first to crystallize, lighter last, and Quartz (pure silica)is thought to be the residue. Actual coarse-grained dark granite is absent in Sierra, spots of darker rock are more often igneous rock that escaped metamorphic melting.

The first 4 billion years of what became the Sierra is unknown, the oldest rocks today were laid down 500 million years ago (Ordovician). They show that the sea washed over the land for 400million years. All older rocks (called "bedrock" or "subjacent series") were marine in origin. Sea receeded over the next 100million years.

Two great groups of rock formed the gold belt, Paleozoic (250M) and Mesozoic (75M) in age. All the rocks are now metamorphosed, but are often referred to (where poss) by what their orig names would have been (limestone, shale, sandstone), confusing amateur geologists. The Paleozoic beds were once mainly limestone, siltstone, and mud (collectively called "hornfels", they are even, fine-grained). Paleo+Mesozoic outcrops are now seen in the w.sierran foothills and along the crest. Uplift of granite and erosion have exposed the underlying granite. Where viz together, Paleozoic beds tilt at a different angle than Mesozoic, called an "unconformity." In higher country, color also distinguishes them. Paleozoic are reddish brown on their exposed surfaces while Mesozoic turn gray. Mixed in may be shiney green Serpentine, brought up from earth's mantle (source of chrome, asbestos, and nephrite jade.)

Fossils - Cenezoic to Teritary Period (50-65M yrs ago) plants, winged seeds, laurels, figs, oaks, magnolia, witch hazel, small palms, cycads, hiclkorys and persimmon but no conifers. Not many fossils, no birds or bugs but near Knight's Ferry close to Tuolumne Table Mtn, two little horses (Nannipus and Hipparion), two camels, a pronghorn antelope and one tooth of a mastadon were found. (Yes there were n.american horses, but they vanished along with n.american zebras, tapirs, and camels in the ice age.)

Volcanoes are of three types: Basalt, Andesite, Rhyolite. Unlike Hawaiian basaltic lava flows that are calm, the initial Sierran Tertiary eruptions were rhyolitic, an explosion of steam from liquid lava that hurls dust, sand, blocks, and "bombs". Just as Krakatoa spewed its rhyolitic ash 7x around the planet (the sound was heard for 3k miles,) the Sierran Tertiary blasts 40M yrs ago left beds of ash 450' thick in gold country and 1200' thick near mountain the crest, north and northeast of Yosemite Natl Park. Other andesitic volcanoes erupted 20M yrs ago. These were hot mud flows (called "lahars" from the Indonesian term) cascading down streams and mtns inundating all but high country crests and some greenstone in the foothills. They carried masses of rock, boulders of granite and metmorphic rocks, torn and shattered trees.

Sierran passes are andesitic terrain, sparesely populated with bushes and digger pine for miles. Carson Spur on Hwy88 is an example, a mudlow perched above hundreds of feet of granite thru which the American River has carved its path. Weather has carved the volcanic cliff face into battlements and towers resembling a derelict fortress. Near Knight's Ferry on Tuolumne Table Mtn, the streaming lava flow through what was Stanislaus Rivery (Tertiary Period) hardened more than the surrounding hills which eroded away leaving a high, sinuous ridge (formerly a river valley!)

During the ice age, a third sierran volcanic era began (just 1M yrs ago) in the Mono Lake area vents near 11k foot Glass Mtn. An avalanche of fire poured 2100' down and flowed 10miles, moving at 100MPH out burying 350M sq mi under 500' of 1200-2400F degree rhyolitic ash, erasing whole hills and canyons. Later, a basaltic flow issued from Mammoth Lakes basin west into Middle Fork Vly. Devils Postpile's 60' columns resulted from this 600k yr old basaltic flow that was 900' long by 200' high. Recent basaltic cones have formed 3mi south of Devils Postpile, steam can be seen in winter on Mammoth volcano.

Mammoth volcano is part of a string of obisian glass and pumice domes called Mono Craters which have pushed 9000' above sea level, but remain dwarfed by the Sierra west of them. Still active as hot springs attest. An 1890 eruption releasing sulfur fumes and boiling the normally cold waters of Mono Lake is the most recent known activity. Oddly, Mono Lake has fresh spgs in the depths of its caustic, alkaline waters.


Basic mineral families=
Quartz (won't scratch, white, often clear, sometimes milky)

Feldspar (marked by lines, less glassy than quartz)

Mica (soft, flaky, thin sheets, glimmers (foolsgold))

Amphibole (dk green/black, lacquered, breaks obliquely)

Pyrozene (close to Amphibole but breaks at right angles, short stubby square)

Calcite (Pearly, Glassy, breaks obliq, knife scratches)

Iron - only small deposits, but the high slopes of the Minarets may falsely deflect your compass needle.

Gold (shiney, soft) In 1854 a 160 pound chunk came from Carson Hill mine near Melones. Great rips in earth during Jurassic (150M yrs) allowed mineralizing solutions to rise from the depths. Those faults "healed" with quartz, etc including gold and silver in sheets ("veins") and holes ("vugs") 10k feet+ deep filled with ore-bearing minerals and metal shot thru the rock on either side. Gold bearing quartz was usually last to form, esp where veins turned or split. Miners believe milkier quartz was more likely "live" with gold. 25M yrs of erosion during Cretaceous period removed 9 vrical miles of rock (.5-1.5 feet per 1k years) to expose gold bearing quartz veins. 1860s gold miners using huge hydraulic hoses eroded 1555M cubic yds (8x the panama canal) out of the sierra and into farmlands, the fastest erosion in history til an 1884 court injunction halted it.

Other Sierran minerals of note:
Tungsten - (used to harden steel) world's largest mine up Pine Creek (near Bishop).

Garnet (not gem quality, used as an abrasive) pale reddish brown.

Diamond - hard to distinguish from Quartz, miners took several hundred, probly ignored many more.

Plutonic Igneous Rock families=
Granite typically shows white quartz, black biotite mica, and feldspar. Salt n pepper, or sometimes pink.

Diorite is mostly feldspar, darker than granite with little or no quartz

Gabbro is dk gray to black, equal parts feldspar (plagioclase variety) and dark minerals. No quartz.

Peridotite = grainy dark green/black minerals, no quartz or feldspar. Most in Sierra has wholly or partly metamorphosed to serpentine.

Porphyry= granite with lumpy chunks of feldspar crystals as large as several inches diameter. See rhyolite dike west of convict creek and Mr. Morrison quadrangle.

fog of genaeology

a detail of Decker genealogy

The English King, Henry II (top photo) has an illegitimate son, William Longespee (Longspear) (second photo) either by Rosamond de Clifford (poisoned by Eleanor of Aquitaine) OR more probably Ida, Countess of Norfolk but either way, his father is undisputedly Henry II and Longespee is made 3rd Earl of Salisbury. Subsequently, he's the first person buried in Salisbury Cathedral.

It's possible to discover upstream that Henry II descends from Charles Martel, Pipin the Short, and Charlemagne as well as Henry I and the Dukes of Burgundy. Just what that may mean is a fog of one's own making (excuse the pun). Even so, personal genaeology offers a vector along which we wander the thicker fog of total human history. Selecting an ancestor as attentional clue, it's possible to focus on particular paths through history. Memory being an active, rather than passive faculty, remembering subjects are willing to assert relevance, if only by literal sequence of events, to ourselves. We let ourselves into labyrinths infested with minotaur.


In this instance, one vector through the genetic rhizome of Decker lineage extends to Edward II and his illegitimate son William Longespee, 3rd Earl of Salisbury.

William Longespee's grandaughter Ela (Isabella) marries Roger LaZouche (1267) (see Robin Hood's 1st murder)
whose grandaughter Ela (Helene/Elena) LaZouche marries Alan Charlton (1317)
...six generations of Charlton boys before one has a daughter, Anne...
Anne Charlton marries Randall Grosvenor (1500)
their daughter Elizabeth Grosvenor marries Edward Bulkeley (1566)
their daughter Frances Bulkeley marries Richard Welby (4 Jun 1596) and immigrate to Chelmsford, MA
their daughter Olive Welby marries Henry Farwell (16 Apr 1629)
whose greatgrandaughter Mary Farwell marries Edmund Hovey (8 Feb 1727)
their grandaughter Olive Hovey marries Elijah Freeman (27 Dec 1781)
their daughter Olive Hovey Freeman (photo) marries Winslow Farr (5 Dec 1816) and comes to Utah
whose grandaughter Tirzah Farr (photo) marries John Franklin Gay (19 Jan 1869)
their daughter, my great grandmother, Nancy Pearl Gay (photo) marries Feramorz (Fera) Decker (24 Feb 1892)

===some details on the details===

King Henry II has illegit son named William de Longespie "Longsword" 3rd Earl of Salisbury with Mistres Rosamond "the fair" de Clifford (posioned by Eleanor of Aquitain). Their romance is set in A Man for all Seasons in Woodstock royal forest 8mi NW of Oxford)

William Longespie marries Ela (or Isabella) Devereux (d. 1261, descended from Dukes of Burgundy via Robert, Archbishop of Rouen 989-1037) son of Richard I {Duke of Normandy}) According to Britannica 1955 v.8 p.934 "first family of Counts of Evereaux descended from an illegit son of Richard I, Duke of Normandy. Became extinct with death of Count William in 1118. Countship passed in right of Agnes, William's sister, wife of Simon Demontfort (d.1087) to the house of the Lords of Montfort l'Amaury. Amoury III of Montfort ceded the peerage in 1200 to King Philip Augustus. Philip the Fair presented it (1307) to his brother Louie for whose benefit Philip the Long raised the countship of Evreux into a peerage of France (1317)

Ela (Isabella) is the daughter of William Longespie and Ela Devereux's 3rd son Stephen Longeseppe (Earl of Ulster)

reading notes - History of God

"Enuma Elish" - Marduk and Tiamet influences Canaan myth of Baal.

Baal-Habad cannot be saved by father El disguised in sackcloth w cheeks gashed, from underworld of Mot (god of death and sterility) he must be saved by Anat (cf. Inana, Ishtar, Isis) his lover and sister. Death of a god, quest of the goddess, triumphant rturn to divine sphere.

Pindar describes olympians as aspiring to fulfill their partially divine nature.

2000BCE Abraham left Ur and event. Settled in Canaan (near mediterranean sea). Along with wandering chieftains like Abiru, Apiru and Habiru, Abraham (m. Sarah) at end of 3rd millenium BCE migrated from mesopotamia toward mediteranean and served as mercenary of king Sodom. His wife Sarah dies and he buys land in Hebron. His grandson Jacob bears sons who become the 12 tribes and flee to egypt during famine then forced their way back into Canaan allying themselves w the Hebrews there and became known as the people of Israel, a confederation of various ethnic groups loyal to the god of Moses, Yah-weh.

First written in the 800BCE, the five books known as the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) were collated in 500BCE. 19th c scholars devised a critical method for discerning 4 sources which explain duplicate and contradictory stories in the pentateuch. Source J refers to Yahweh, source E refers to Elohim, both prob wrote during 8thcBCE. but source D (Deuteronmy) and source P (Priestly accounts and Genesis) wrote in the 7th and 6th c BCE. The P texts were written after the exile of the jews, it interprets events in J and E and adds 2 books: Numbers and Leviticus and draws on Enuma Elish in his account of Genesis {P argues that humans can't perceive God, only the afterglow of divine glory. Moses hides himself in a crevice and glimpses yahweh only as he departs.}

It is difficult anywhere in the Pentateuch to find a single monotheistic statement, in fact it seems to take the existance of other gods for granted, but asks for sole importance of Yahweh above all others. The agreement to do so is called the "covenant" btw god and man. The Ark of the Covenant is the portable altar the Israelites had with them during years in wilderness.

Man= adam, dust= adamah

Almost certainly Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob believed in Marduk, Baal and Anat. Unlike these gods though (and instead like ancient greek dieties of the Iliad) the Canaanite high god El speaks to Abraham directly and personably introducing himself as 'El Shaddai' (el of the mtn), a trad. title of the canaan god El. Elsewhere called El Elyon (most high) and El Bethel and preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El. The E source however describes god speaking to abraham through angels, not directly.

Dieties in pagan belief had regional bounds to their power, it was always wise to worship local dieties but when Jacob sleeps with a rock as his pillow and dreams of a ladder where El promises to be with him in a strange land it's clear that the idea of a universal diety has begun. Jacob upends his stone pillow and pours a libation of oil on it renaming the place Beth-El (House of El). Standing stones were common featues of Canaanite fertility cults. Jacob decides that El's far ranging protection will make him El-ohim or the only god who counted.

Years later jacob wrestles all night with an angel and at daybreak refuses to release him til he learns his name. The angel asks "Why do you ask my name?" and blesses him there. Jacob names the place Peni-El [El's Face] "Because I have seen El face to face and I have survived."

Abraham's faith in god is more like trust than belief or orthodoxy. The promises made by El are ridiculous like abraham being father to multitudes when Sarah is past menopause. In fact when their first born comes they name him "laughter" (Isaac) and Abraham must further show trust by being willing to sacrifice isaac back to god.

Yahweh Sabaoth (God of Armies) is partisan and bloodthirsty and pragmatic. When Moses is made his first prophet to speak to Pharoah and the children of Israel he protests that he isn't able to speak well, but Yahweh made allowances for this allowing Moses' brother Aaron to speak in his stead. Pharoah resists gods demand to release slaves til ten plagues are sent and angel death takes all firstborn sons of egyptians while sparing the sons of hebrew slaves. Pharoah relents then pursues the hebrew slaves and his army is drowned in parting of the Reed Sea. This mapping of divine deeds onto real geographic spaces some suggest corresponded to a contemporary peasants revolt and as such had great power as a myth and inspire more conceptions of vengeful theology.

Eli-jah (yahweh is my god) wandered kingdom of King Ahab (a yahwist married to jezebel, a pagan blvr in Baal and Asherah) wearing a hairy shirt and leather loincloth and challenged Ahab to a contest on Mt. Carmel btw Yahweh and Baal to be witnessed by 450 prophets of Baal. Two bulls were placed on altars and each god summoned to take it w fire. Fire fell on Elijah's bull and he ordered all 450 prophets to be slaughtered. A hard rain afterwards proved yahweh could also rule fertility, thought to be the domain of Baal.

Paganism had essentially been a tolerant faith, provided they weren't threatened there was always room for a new deity. Hinduism and Buddhism encouraged people to go beyond the gods yet the prophets of israel were unable to take this calmer view. In jewish scriptures "idolatry" became a sin and worship of "false" gods inspired nausea similar to the revulsion some would come to feel toward sexuality. Of course, most Israelites belived implicitly in pagan deities and at the same time must have been aware that their own conception of Yahweh was similar to pagan idolatry. Yahweh was gradually supplanting functions of fertility gods like Baal bul it was obviously difficult for the irredeemably masculine Yahweh to usurp the function of a goddess like Asherah, Ishtar, or Anat who still had a great following among Israelites. The "Axial Age" saw a decline in the status of women who were sometimes held in higher esteem than men. The rise of cities meant more masc qualities of martial, phys strength were exalted. The democratic ideal of Athens for example did not extend to women whereas women like Deborah had led armies into battle. Heroic women like Judith and Ester would continue to be celebrated by Israelites but the monotheism of yahweh would come to be managed almost entirely by men.

The ascendance of yahweh did not catch as easily to israelites as buddhism or hinduism to the people of the subcontinent. It involved strain and violent confrontation. God would bring his elect to prosperity but if they deserted him "you will be torn from the land...scattered from one end of the earth to another." The book of Joshua destroys the Canaanites, wiping out the Anakim from Hebron, Debir, and Anoth. No Anakim left except in Gaza, Gath and Ashod. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings were revised acc to the new ideology. A god that justifies hatred and scapegoats outsiders is easier to swallow than the God of prophets Amos or Isiaih who demands ruthless self-criticism.

332BCE Alexander of Macedonia defeats DariusIII of Persia and Greek rationalism comes to middle east. Jews of Palestine and diaspora deeply influenced by greek culture and translate their own scriptures into Greek producing the version known as the Septuagint. Some Greeks came to worship Iao (Yahweh) alongside Zeus and Dionysus. But by 2nd c BCE the relat. Is char. by hostility.

Irreconcilable diff between Aristotelian God who is scarcely aware the workld exists and Biblical god who involves himself intimately in human affairs. Greeks think God is discovered by human reason whereas biblical God makes himself known by means of revelation.
Mitzvot= 613 commandments

Roman Empire establishes itself in middle east in 1st c BCE and allies more with Jews than Greeks.