BEE DEATH

The theory now -- after years of research -- is that the honeybees are dying because of killer chemicals used to control damage to plants.  The main killer is nicotine, the same as a person killer.  It was not present in natural environments so that honeybees never learned to avoid it or even to detect it.  But the effect on them is invisibly deadly.  And addictive.

Addiction is not conscious.  Addiction might not be detected.  The phenomenon of being addicted is very old and in the most basic functions of the brain as well as embedded in the molecular reactions of the cells and muscles, the autonomic nerve system.

Some human body systems are far more susceptible to addiction.  First the cell level ability to respond at least at the epigenomic level -- the more intense, the more addictive.  Then the inter-person forces of society and relationships.  Availability, intense links to the effects related to trauma, terror, and low-level anxiety barely conscious, if that. The corporate mind-fucking advertising, the commercial substrate dependent on the substance’s production and marketing.  (Tobacco farming is deep into the identity of some places.)  It hardly matters whether the substance is nicotine or heroin.  In fact, honeybees, or whatever it is that pollenates opium poppies, have probably evolved ways to handle opiods.  

Honeybees, which are mostly European like our earthworms, are susceptible to nicotine poisoning in part because they go from one flower to another, accumulating, while American ground bees (like bumblebees) don’t do that.  They are not hive bees.

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on sex.  You already knew that.  (So does smoking -- sooo sexy!)  The virus is not perceptible.  Sometimes sex is not perceptible.  I just watched “Black Narcissus,” the 1947 film -- ironically listed by Amazon as “Christian” though it is about lust, both spiritual and physical.  The idea is that a fabulous retreat in the Himalayas used to be sequestered as a harem.  (Don’t go looking for it -- it’s a scale model with a painted background.)  Its walls are painted with seductive sexy dancing girls, but outside from the incredibly gorgeous and rarified perch, the view is “heavenly.”  At age 8 I only knew I was disturbed and imprinted with these subconscious metaphors.  My girl friend and I danced for hours in her backyard while her mother vigilantly watched the fascinated old man in the house behind, who was watching us.  The mom knew and had sense enough to protect us without forbidding us to dance or alarming us about a social dimension we were not ready for.  

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on IV drugs. Syringes are the enablers.  There are no condoms for syringes. (They'd have to have a hole in the end, wouldn't they?)  But it is conscious -- the addict knows what’s happening and even the thought of the act: the spoon, the candle, the rubber tubing is enough to stop the vehicle so the addict can climb in. 

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on pain addiction.  Not much research has been done on the addictiveness of pain, I think.  Is there a difference between self-inflicted pain (cutting) and group imposed pain (boot camp)?  What about four-inch heels, so like needles?  As painful as the spiritual and sexy toe-dancing shoes for ballet.  (The directors of “Black Narcissus” also did “The Red Shoes.”)  Why are nuns and priests often into self-torture through restrictions or active flagellation or hair shirts?  Why is secrecy or limited collaboration (the confessional) a part of the addiction?  Can one be as addicted to the secrecy as to the punishable behavior and then flirt with disclosure in order to imagine fear, pain, and sex?   

 Kerr, Kathleen Byron asthe nun who goes mad, and Farrer

Aren’t the entirely bundled-up nuns as sexy as the David Farrer character, about as bare as the Fifties would allow?   And isn’t Gauguin Syndrome in part about “going native” but not “really” being native (Jean Simmons as a Tibetan -- please!  Like Natalie Wood in “The Searchers” ?  What about that famous National Geographic image of the green-eyed Afghani woman) -- flirting with the edge of autochthony, all about the earth/body and the escape from over-structured societies.

The flower, the pollen, the invisible poison, the devastation of missing populations and the loss of profit.  Bees communicate by dancing in a correlating way: using the direction, the distance and the promise as translated into a little compass metaphor on the porch of the hive.  One can get hooked on the bee dance of pornography, online flirting, depictions of all sorts, without even knowing it.  Easier for women to deny arousal than men, sometimes it takes equipment to reveal what the body knows.  And can demonstrate in males unless you’re sitting close enough to the poker table to hide an erection.

Jean Simmons -- an unlikely Tibetan

“Send me a picture -- a RECENT picture.”  “Put your picture by your post.”  “Try to look attractive. “Like” people -- give us their names.   And kids have to be told to NOT sext, because they think it’s innocent.  It’s so possible to double-speak in the sleepy dark of an adolescent bedroom with walls full of sexy posters.  Or in the addiction parlor of the Oval Office of the President, as full of power as one of those carefully fenced and warning transformer sites we see so often that they become invisible.

Bottom line: addiction is not always perceptible and often is detected only through consequences.  Attempts to break addictions often become addictions in themselves: “group”, intimacy, self-affliction and denial.  

This is because so much of the addiction is in the animal substrate of humanness; unconscious, automatic, and meant to expand in the face of danger, discouragement or paralysis.  Craving cannot be cured by intelligence.  Nevertheless, to some extent both are in some exquisitely subtle way calibrated to be triggered by thinking.  As our technology becomes ever more delicate, we begin to think of addressing the penetrations of sex and drugs with changes to our very cells.  Now there’s a scary enough idea to give you a squirt of adrenaline!

Joe LeDoux is on the edge of this research.  His books are like the early Kinsey investigations of sex -- so scholarly, so dependent on footnotes and sources to be mastered that I have to read them at a table with a high-lighter and legal pad, now and then traveling to the computer for definitions.  The words aren’t in my medical dictionary which is a little dated.

I do better than most stuffy people with obscene materials because there is so much overlap with literature.  Well-written descriptions of every kind of transgression (sex or abuse or sickness and death or raw violence or HIV-AIDS) are as addictive as their subject matter, without the earth/body consequences.  I do not know whether censoring these real forces is helpful or whether their vivid depiction is damaging.  I’m pretty far over on the open depiction side.

As an eight-year-old, “Black Narcissus” -- which is masterfully done -- hooked me right there in the plush theatre seat, surrounded by family and society.  The title comes from a mythical perfume, which is a drug, right?  The East Slope of the Rockies can as spiritually exalting as the Himalyas, Blackfeet can serve pretty well as Tibetans, and if you don’t think Bob Scriver is as sexy as David Farrer, it’s because you didn’t know Bob.  He didn’t own any shorts because he never wore them.  If it seemed safe, he took everything off.  If it wasn’t safe, he only removed his shirt.  

I do not demonize drug use because “drugs” are a part of the operational system of the earth/body -- for better or for worse.  Maybe we would do better to address the human interactions that produce deceptive information in our bee-dances and lace our flowers with poison.  

Lilas et Narcissus Soivohle for women and men

Here’s something for Facebook users to consider.  I dumped Facebook quickly, partly because most of my family is clearly hooked.  It’s part of their reassurance that they are normal, safe, and attractive, though it is anything but.  https://blog.bufferapp.com/psychology-of-facebook  It’s what I got my education in order to escape.  My relatives think it is all about family.  It’s not.  It’s “hive mind.”  All about swarms and queens, so terribly sweet.