Daily Archives: August 14, 2021

MOSCOW, August 10. /TASS/. Moscow will not reconsider its stance on a number of key international issues to meet Washington's expectations. This will entail tighter US sanctions, the general director of the Russian International Affairs Council, Andrei Kortunov, told TASS in an interview.

He stressed that after the Russian-US summit in Geneva US President Joe Biden called for waiting for several months until the moment it would be possible to say something more specific about the outlook for Moscow-Washington relations.

"One has an impression that he gave [Russian President Vladimir] Putin several months to make corrections. During these several months Russia is to show that it has done its homework and its policy has changed," Kortunov said. "If the US side really thinks so, then such expectations are futile, of course, because the Russian leadership has no wish or readiness to make any fundamental changes to its policy."

Kortunov predicts that the US side will be strongly disappointed by Moscow's refusal to drop its intentions to match Washington's expectations.

"Then we will most probably see more sanctions and other repression towards the Kremlin. Many in Biden's America have been calling for this," he said. He believes that ahead of the election in Russia Moscow's rhetoric and stance towards the West would be getting harsher.

The analyst stressed that both countries were interested in continuing the strategic stability dialogue, but even here quite a few questions remained regarding its format and the aspects to be discussed. Also, Russia and the United States had many unresolved regional disagreements, from Ukraine and Iran to Libya, Kortunov said.

"Regrettably, we see no major positive shifts for the better. The sole achievement, and a very odd one in a sense is that Russia has become the second largest supplier of oil to the United States after Canada. This is somewhat surprising, bearing in mind the sanction policy and competition on the energy market," Kortunov said.

"It will be wrong to underestimate the importance of the restoration of some channels of communication, of the consultations that are already in progress and of the greater predictability and rationalism of US policies. Nevertheless, Moscow-Washington relations remain relations of rivalry and not cooperation. And there are no indications in sight something may begin to change in a more positive direction," Kortunov concluded.

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Russia will not change its position to please US; Washington to step up pressure expert - TASS

It used to be that telling stories around the edges of faith was what faithful people did. Jews call this midrash, or aggadah: the tales that extend the stories of Torah and other scriptures, that fill the gaps between the lines. It is here, not in the holy writ, that Abraham smashed idols, that Lilith was Adams first wife, that the hand of Pharoahs daughter miraculously stretched to reach baby Moses as he floated down the Nile.

Early Christians told stories too, prodigiously. They fleshed out many stories about Jesus only alluded to in the canon, like the descent into hell we refer to in the Apostles Creed and wonderful details of his childhood. In the Renaissance, St. Ignatius Loyola taught his followers to practice imaginative self-immersion, filling enough gaps in the sparse scriptural narratives to feel like they were there. From Pentecost to the verses of Dante, Christians made the faith their own by riffing on it.

The Reformation seems to have put an end to a lot of this. Protestants banished the storytelling spirit with their turn to sola scriptura, to only what can be found in the canonical books. In response, Catholics doubled down on doctrine, on the magisterium's role in promulgating law and teachingas if to outdo the competition in literalism. Even as the church later elevated the Immaculate Conception, it did so less as a story than as a logical outgrowth of doctrinal propositions.

U.S. Christians have taken literalism of all sorts to new heights, particularly in Protestant evangelicalism: the Bible, no more and no less. American Catholics adopt many of the same habits of mind with our strenuous legalism.

All this is to underscore my surprise that the major creative achievement of American evangelicalism in recent yearswith a Catholic in the starring roleis essentially midrashic.

The Chosen is a TV show about Jesus, told through the lives of his followers and others caught up in his ministry. Jesus himself and his Red Letter lines appear only briefly, while the Gospels tiny snippets about his followers explode into the foreground. Why was Simon Peter fishing when Jesus found him, and what were the women disciples doing all day while the Gospel accounts were ignoring them? Why did the disciples argue so much? The answers require conjuring a lot of stories.

For the internet Christians who have criticized The Chosen, the problem is precisely its willingness to imagine what the Bible leaves out. But from what I can tell from the internet, most viewers simply love it.

An older woman I know told me she loves Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, even though she isnt Catholic. We realized we could talk for an hour about Mary Magdalenes relapse on the show, whether Jesus saw Judas before the Sermon on the Mount, and everything else. We only slowed down when she came to tears at the thought of Roumies kindness as Jesusespecially his first words to Mary Magdalene at a tavern: That is not for you. You see, my acquaintances marriage was in trouble. She was planning to leave town. Things were not so good. She seemed of the sort the Lord especially comes for, and The Chosen was ministering to her.

People like the two of us are more than an audience, more than a fandom. The show has bypassed conventional studios with the most successful media crowdfunding campaign in history, which included both donations and equity investment. It follows a long tradition of Christians pioneering cooperative economies, going back to the Book of Acts. In this and other ways, The Chosen directs our focus outwardto the enabling role of the audience, in addition to the lives of the disciples.

In the Bible and screen adaptations past, Jesus is the center of attention. He is always the one preaching, the one healing, the one leading the action, over and over to the point that it can get old. But when we dwell more fully on the lives into which Jesus appearedthe years of disability, misery and confusion that preceded his simple words, the knowing smile his face betrays right before astonishing someonethe text grows closer to the freshness that the Gospel writers must have felt when they set about telling the stories of this man who felt so incredibly important to them.

The freshness is what religious art and stories are for. We fallen creatures, so inclined to backsliding and forgetfulness, need it. We are not God, and we can see best through other mortals experience. This is why we need the saints. Earlier Christians clever and contradictory tales may strike modern rationalism as backward and odd, but they recognized that faith takes root in imagination. Perhaps the best thing about The Chosen is that somebody else can still tell these stories and others all over again in entirely different ways.

The shows Jesus trusts those he chooses for who they areall that they areand what they will make of him.

Dallas Jenkins, the director of the series, is a voluble presence on the shows YouTube channel, where he presents as an energetic youth pastor, more muscular and assertive than the subtle, playful Jesus of The Chosen. His all-Americanness contrasts with the ancient Jewish otherness of the show, where the only people with American accents are the occupying imperial soldiers, a kind of mirror on the Middle East today. I have not been able to withstand much of the hours of talking-head time he has logged to fundraise for the show, but God bless him. He has taken on a mighty task and done so with a once-in-a-generation achievement.

Mr. Jenkinss father is Jerry B. Jenkins, best known as co-author of the Left Behind novels, an also-midrashic mashup of campy sci-fi and the end-times prophecy of the Rapture. The novels evangelizing strategy is more scared straight than the greatest story ever told, and there was a certain safety in placing its interpretive storytelling in the future, especially for fundamentalist-inclined audiences anxious about any liberty-taking with Bible-times. The differences are all the more reason The Chosen stands out as courageous.

I am grateful for that courage. I confess to have been a Christ-more-than-Jesus sort of Christian, closer to the cosmic Word than the incarnate guy. The Chosen has gotten me more into balancean abstract way of saying this show is heart-melting, that Jonathan Roumies Jesus has fearsome power to open the Scriptures to us and that the women and men who follow him are people in whom we can find traces of ourselves. It helps me love the Lord like I never have before.

At the risk of committing artistic sacrilege, the closest experience I can remember to watching The Chosen was visiting the tender, visceral frescos of Fra Angelico in the monks cells of San Marco in Florence. Those frescos are at a centuries-long disadvantage of cultural relevance and fading paint. I am not claiming the show will hold up for as long as they have.

It is only two seasons into what is supposed to be a seven-season run; the heart-melting could cool down. But as soon as I made it to the end of Season 2, I did what I hope more will: added my share to the crowdfunding collection plate for Season 3.

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'The Chosen' dares to imagine stories about Jesus and the disciples that aren't in the Gospels. It's a revelation. - America Magazine

PARIS James Reed was devastated by a work-related burnout and in desperate need of someone to guide him. The wildlife documentary filmmaker was exhausted by film shoots, unable to take care of his son and felt like a dried-up spectator watching the world fly by. It was the early 2010s and in a last-ditch attempt to find existential meaning, he turned to his childhood passion for diving. Floating among the underwater kelp forests, he met an unexpected mentor and his life took an unlikely turn. While gradually beginning to feel alive again, Reed crossed paths with a small, fearful octopus."I felt that this creature was really special, it could teach me something, it had a particular trick. So I had this crazy idea: What if I went there every day... every day without exception?"

Which is exactly what he did, always in the company of his video camera. My Octopus Teacher, co-directed with Pippa Ehrlich and released on Netflix in 2020, is the purposely uplifting tale of an encounter between a human being with nothing to cling to and an octopus with many suckers.

"It taught me to feel that we're part of this place, that we were not just visitors," narrates the voice of Reed, who has fallen in love with a creature in perfect symbiosis with her environment.His film, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary on April 25, is an invitation to recognize other forms of intelligence. When presented with these emotionally-charged images, it seems incontestable that this strong-armed and cunning being knows how to play and strategize. This animal intelligence is all the more humbling as the little octopus, whose mother dies shortly after its birth, must learn everything by itself without the natural transfer of social knowledge.

"In Jules Verne's time, the octopus was an evil beast. This was because it was morphologically very different from us, a frightening prospect. Today, we realize that it's closer than we thought," says neurobiologist and philosopher Georges Chapouthier, author of Sauver l'homme par l'animal ("Saving Man Through the Animal World"). "There are already similarities when it comes to its aptitudes, vision and prehension. She [the octopus] is able to unscrew a jar, to reach her goal by way of a detour and to use coconuts as a shield. While we have long thought that intelligence was the prerogative of vertebrates, the observation that complex cognitive abilities can be developed in other groups invites us to put things into perspective."

Navigating troubled waters at the confluence of reality and myth, this blue-blooded animal is, as writer and art historian Pierre Pigot points out in his book Le Chant du Kraken ("The Song of the Kraken"), "a creature of the rift and the threshold," which "reappears when civilization becomes afraid of its reflection in the mirror." As humans begin to understand that their hegemonic rationalism is leading them straight to catastrophe, the need to re-establish an intimate dialogue with other living beings arises. For this, we need tutors and mediating entities. Consequently, the furious squid that haunted the imaginations of the 19th century has given way to a kind of "octobuddy" that we would gladly invite to drinks.

As a means of reconciliation between the human and the animal world, our slimy new friend is suddenly everywhere. Is it a coincidence that we've started playing Squids Odyssey on our smartphones a game whose heroes are adventurous little cuttlefish and that our subway neighbor is reading Erin Hortle's novel, L'Octopus et moi ("The octopus and I")? Is it just a coincidence that our children are watching the Octonauts, an animated series in which one of the main characters is an anthropomorphic, oceanographer octopus? Is it a coincidence when our colleagues have been embellishing their messages with tentacle emojis for weeks, or teleworking at the Parisian bistro Le Poulpe?

"Through education, what we have learned above all are the abstract and technological cognitive aspects, which we find in languages or mathematics and are carried out by the left hemisphere," says Chapouthier. "But humans also have emotional aptitudes leading to altruism and empathy, which we do not develop as much and is perhaps one of the defects of our societies. However, the essence of an animal thought is a thought without language, a thought of emotion, something that should be within our interest because it allows us to reconnect and leave the moral bankruptcy of the human species behind."

James Reed, Pippa Erlich (left) and Marlee Matlin with the Oscar for Documentary Feature Photo: Matt Petit/AMPAS/ZUMA Wire/ZUMAPRESS.com

Today, talking about octopi on LinkedIn is not an aberration. Quite the contrary: it is now inspiring, just as the late Steve Jobs' turtlenecks were in their time. "It immediately creates sympathy and adds value," says Caecilia Finck-Dijoux, 50, who specializes in business consulting. "When I founded my company with my partner, we were looking for a name related to the sea. As we are both divers, the octopus appeared an obvious choice to us. But, in French, the word has a soft side. So we chose the English term and we called ourselves 'Octopus Marketing'. It seemed interesting to us to identify ourselves with this animal that has several tentacles because, through our consulting activity, we bring additional arms to the client. In addition, like the octopus, which is forgotten in its environment, I love to blend into the processes of companies where I intervene."

But what does the octopus have to teach us or reteach us anyway? Perhaps, quite simply, how to believe. Where our species only sees dead ends, this contortionist becomes a master of escape driven by "An almost Kafkaesque conviction: there is always a way out," says philosopher Vinciane Despret, author of Autobiographie d'un poulpe ("Autobiography of an octopus"). They possess an admirable drive for life that expresses itself through a singular way of inhabiting the world, based on camouflage, behavioral mimicry and the science of dodging. If the octopi suddenly start to write, it would not just be propelled not by their poetic nature but rather due to a new threat forcing them to evolve.

"The question of extinction has been haunting me for some time, and that's what I've been trying to unfold in a non-tragic fictional mode. All these animals that are disappearing, that we won't see anymore, how are we going to leave something of them? This is what haunts me," confides Despret. Her octopus-fiction is all the more disturbing considering that, in reality, the genre's animal muse is not really in the process of disappearing. In fact, the population of cephalopods has increased immensely in the last sixty years.

Surfing on the expressive potential of ink and foraying into other mediums the octopus acts as a muse for another species, creatures who produce creative output on a massive scale in order to ward off their fear of extinction. We'll let you guess which one.

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How The Octopus Conquered Humanity - Worldcrunch

During lockdown, the ability to go for short walks was for many a source of solace, as earlier in the year we saw the spring flowers appearing and the trees beginning to bud. Now with most restrictions lifted, we return to Scotlands hills, lochs and wild places, delighted to be among them once again.

When writing about nature in the third decade of the 21st century however, it is hard to experience its beauty and to delight in the pleasure that it gives us without also thinking about all the threats to its survival.

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Our harmful impact on it became quickly apparent during lockdown when, in the absence of normal human activity, we saw how quickly nature began to regenerate itself.

Ecologist and author Richard Mabey summed this up perfectly when he said that nature is doing marvellously well without us. It is vital that we cease to treat nature as an infinite resource which is at our disposal and ours to use at will. We should take from it only what it can sustainably give.

The beginning of the 19th century saw a flowering of the Romantic movement in the arts. It was a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on logic and intellect, which preceded it.

Nature became vitally important particularly in art and poetry and writers such as Wordsworth and Thoreau wrote of the spirituality that arose from the affinity they found in nature.

In art, landscape painting became important both here and on the Continent. In Scotland, Alexander Nasmyth began to paint landscapes and is considered to be the 19th-century initiator of a tradition which has continued down to the present day.

In fact, nature is a common theme in both Scotlands art and poetry. I look forward to visiting the Turner watercolours which are exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery in January each year.

No matter how many times I return, I still stand in awe before them. In one work, nature is all movement, wildness and drama with its endlessly shifting shapes, while another draws me into the serenity at its heart.

From the lyrical 18th-century Epistle to Davie In days when daisies deck the ground, And blackbirds whistle clear, With honest joy our hearts will bound by Robert Burns through to poets of the present day, nature is a recurrent theme.

In the introduction to the 2005 anthology of his poetry, Norman MacCaig is quoted as saying landscape is my religion and animals, birds and reptiles make frequent appearances.

In the poem Stars and Planets, he describes the beauty of the night sky, then subverts the poetic imagery in the last verse: Its hard to think that the Earth is one , This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters, Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters, Attended only by the loveless moon.

Music too looks to the natural world for inspiration. Orkney-based composer the late Peter Maxwell Davies spent three weeks on the British Antarctic base at Rothera.

Afterwards he composed his Antarctic Symphony, distilling the essence of what he called this terrible, hostile wonderland into the piece. I visited Antarctica in 2011 it truly was the experience of a lifetime and something I will never forget. I loved the remoteness the silence broken only by the wind, the penguin cries, the sea breaking on the rocks and the occasional crack of splintering ice, with sea, snow, ice and sky spreading as far as the eye could see.

That there are creatures here which have managed to make such amazing adaptations in order to survive these extreme conditions fills me with wonder and makes me feel how very insignificant human beings are by comparison.

I have tried to convey these feelings in my paintings of the landscape as well as the more intimate studies of the Antarctic wildlife. On an ecological note, current ice loss in Antarctica is seen as a key indicator of climate change.

For me, a connection with nature is fundamental to my own well-being and my work as an artist. The changing seasons with their colours, scents and sounds have a unique impact upon my moods, thoughts and feelings.

Stilled by sitting by a gently flowing river or overawed by the majesty of a thunderstorm, I find that nature communicates with an immediacy unparalleled by anything else.

The infinite variety of shape and form within nature fascinates me, like the curve of a leaf, the complicated twisting of roots, the patterns made by falling leaves. Much of my work is based on an observation of nature in one form or another as my starting point for a painting often grows out of drawings from my sketchbooks.

The experience of lockdown when we had little contact with nature served only to emphasise its importance. In the scheme of things, this was a relatively short period to be out of touch with nature. How much worse will this be if it is lost forever?

Annie Broadley is an Edinburgh-based artist. To see more of her work visit her website, anniebroadley.com.

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Covid lockdown reminded us of how nature is both an artistic and intellectual inspiration Annie Broadley - The Scotsman