After having been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, I decided to create a blog with the hope that it would provide an idle distraction. You are here.
-- J. M. Barrie 1860-1937: Rectorial Address at St. Andrew’s, 3 May 1922
They say a sign of depression is when you cry by yourself. But what if it’s not your fault? Blame it on the bitter winds of winter, or failure of selective memory, or collapse of those denial mechanisms once thought inexhaustible. Perhaps it’s the realization the inexhaustible always ends.
The Nuns preached self-control because there is no other kind. What I didn’t get then, is that the concept of “God’s Will” was code for man’s having none. Being young, and at the self-delusional axis of an egocentric universe, I mistook the focus on self-maintenance as an ideological attempt to indoctrinate me with the myth that my autonomy was a threat. And further, that that threat was a form of power. Come to find out, the one threatened most was always myself. That ubiquitous self-help cliché concerning “being one’s own worst enemy” has its origins in the Biblical injunction to “do unto others.”
I suspect Twain had these things in mind when he scolded us that what we see as man’s most noble and sublime quality, the capacity to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, can also be seen as our “primal curse.” Unlike all other animals we can choose to be cruel, greedy, avaricious, and inhumane. Think about it, in general, wouldn’t you say your dog, cat, or parakeet treats itself better than you do?
The issues here are about autonomy and choice late in the game.
The holidays always bring out the worst in me. In Melville's purview, we’re all fast fish, and loose fish, too. If this is true, when the night draws nigh, is it we that determine when our last run is done. Having recently described myself as having a “last run” in me, does this mean that God sets the drag? Is “control” an obsolete metaphor? Is the dualism of control and submission fatally flawed?
A friend recently told me he was running out of time to keep running away. Sister Patience looked good once -- under that habit of youth -- but as a memory, she doesn’t age well. Patience requires time, and that’s a non-renewable existential resource.
Melville may have been speaking of autonomy versus fate, but his words also apply to the ways we meet our end. I’m happy-sad of late. And why shouldn’t I be when I see myself, and those closest, whither toward late winter.
And so my friend, at the end of our, “long day,“ when the senses fail, and the meaning wavers, we’ll both take comfort in memories of those who love us.
They say that all good writing begins with a passion for it. I’m sitting here stoned, gouty, and itchy, and I’m supposed to get crazy about this. What I have noticed is that anything of interest is autobiographical, and that most of us can’t achieve the necessary distance to sort out the chaos of our own lives. I certainly can’t.
Take for instance my childhood. My Catholic upbringing would seem a rich vein of self-reflection. But I can’t really describe the depth of how twisted it has left me. Those authors that truly approach the depraved sensibility my past evokes would seem too much to some. My friend and office mate gave me a compendium of Ivan Brunetti’s work that exactly touched my most decadent sensibilities. His comics unleashed my inner hysteric. The book is “Misery Loves Company.” I was going to try and describe it, but doing so would risk alienating even my most loyal supporters.
For you action movie, science-fiction fans, here’s my 4 minute + Xmas video card: go to youtube, search terms = Ataque de Panicol (Panic Attack!) 2009 by Fede Alvarez. Speaking of New age greetings, many thanks to Sudsy and Nancy for the Bob Dylan Xmas card.
I’m still sitting here…time to go to B.s for bone-in rib roast. But not before stopping at Frenchs to borrow some gout medicine.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned my aversion to the holidays. All that phony peace on earth and goodwill towards men baloney is enough to make the staunchest hypocrite blanch. Couple that with a football and gluttony fest thinly disguised by a nativity myth and you’ve got one sick holiday.
But seriously, getting and spending just ain’t what it used to be. How can you spend when you ain’t got? All that stimulus horsecrap can only work when the pig getting stimulated spreads the wealth, and you know that ain’t gonna happen, cause that’s a, whaddaya you call it? Oh yea, SOCIALISM! The Obamans’ plan was to have the fat cats share the wealth after the bailout trickled up from us taxpayers. So what’s the result of the corporate rescues and economic stimulus: lowered credit limits and escalating interest rates across the board. Nice. Oh well, at least the arms merchants are making money off of the war. That’s capitalism. It’s good?
Survival of the richest.
What happens when masses of people need food?
Unemployment, Swine flu, erectile dysfunction, foreclosures, rising prices, cancer, you name it, there’s always something to sway our attention from global warming. I say this in reference to the Polar bear.
The way Glenn and I see it is like this. Time passes, the earth changes, animals come and go, man is a part of that big picture, and the Polar bears’ inevitable extinction is a part of the universe’s natural process.
A fine thing it is when a guy steals your shoes at Christmas. I’d bought em’ on 8th avenue and only had em’ a month when they went missing. Wouldn’t have thought much about em’ were it not for seeing that scene in “Treasure of Sierra Madre” where the guys caught wearing Dobsy’s shoes after killing him on the trail. It’s about how the winds of envy and greed ultimately blow out the pilot light of character, the movie, that is.
“We acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We were wrong. We were terribly wrong.”
-- Robert McNamara 1916 – 2008: speaking in Washington, just before the twentieth anniversary of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, April 1995
It’s a cold and windy day. The 50’s brick ranch with original windows just doesn’t cut it when it’s below 30. Haven’t written in a while and I’m not feeling it now. Saw the liver doc yesterday. He confirmed my feeling that it’s an abused, but still functional, organ. He asked, and I consented, to take the cure. My only request was that I begin the regimen in the spring, which will allow me to take my medicine, so to speak, in the teaching off-season and warm weather.
B. and I traveled to Philadelphiaover the weekend ofNovember 19. On Saturday we went to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia's Mutter Museum. Here’s some stuff on that:
Our History
In 1858, Thomas Dent Mütter, retired Professor of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College , presented his personal collection of unique anatomic and pathological materials to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia . Our collection now boasts over 20,000 unforgettable objects. These include fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens; skeletal and dried specimens, medical instruments and apparati; anatomical and pathological models in plaster, wax, papier-mâché, and plastic; memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians; medical illustrations, photographs, prints, and portraits. In addition, we offer changing exhibits on a variety of medical and historical topics.
Our Treasures
Our one-of-a-kind treasures include:
The plaster cast of the torso of world-famous Siamese Twins, Chang & Eng, and their conjoined livers
Joseph Hyrtl's collection of skulls
Preserved body of the "Soap Lady"
Collection of 2,000 objects extracted from people's throats
Cancerous growth removed from President Grover Cleveland
Tallest skeleton on display in North America
This place was way cool. What isn’t mentioned above is their collection of shrunken heads. Too much! You’re looking at a shrunken human head. R.J., you would love this
joint.
A shrunken head is a severed and specially prepared humanhead that is used for trophy, ritual, or trade purposes.
Most known shrunken heads were manufactured either by indigenous peoples in Melanesia and the Amazon Basin, or by European or Euro-Americans attempting to recreate the practice. In Amazonia, the only people known to have shrunk human heads are the Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa and Aguaruna, collectively classified as the Jivaroan peoples of Ecuador and Peru. Among the Shuar, a shrunken head is known as a tsantsa.
The process of creating a shrunken head begins with removing the skull from the head. An incision is made on the back of the neck and all the skin and flesh is removed from the cranium. Red seeds are placed underneath the eyelids and the eyelids are sewn shut. The mouth is held together with three palm pins. Fat from the flesh of the head is removed. The flesh is then boiled in water that has been steeped with a number of herbs containing tannins. It is then dried with hot rocks and sand, while molding it to retain its human feature. The skin is then rubbed down with charcoal ash. The lips are sewn shut, and various decorative beads are added to the head.
In the headshrinking tradition, it is believed that coating the skin in ash keeps the musiak, or avenging soul, from seeping out.
Shrunken heads are known for their mandibular prognathism, facial distortion and shrinkage of the lateral sides of the forehead; these are artifacts of the shrinking process.
Among the Shuar and Achuar, the reduction of the heads was followed by a series of feasts centered on important rituals.
The practice of preparing shrunken heads originally had religious significance; shrinking the head of an enemy was believed to harness the spirit of that enemy and compel him to serve the shrinker. It was said to prevent the soul from avenging his death.[4]
Shuar believed in the existence of three fundamental spirits:
Wakani - innate to humans thus surviving their death.
Arutam - literally "vision" or "power", protects humans from a violent death.
Muisak - vengeful spirit, which surfaces when an arutam spirit-carrying person is murdered.
To block the last spirit from using its powers, they decided to sever their enemies' heads and shrink them. The process also served as a way of warning those enemies. Even with these uses, the owner of the trophy did not keep it for long. Many heads were later used in religious ceremonies and feasts that celebrated the victories of the tribe. Accounts vary as to whether the heads would be discarded or stored.
Those damn South Americans are always up to something shocking. Check this story out:
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 11/20/09
LIMA, Peru (AP) — A gang in the remote Peruvian jungle has been killing people for their fat, the police said Thursday, accusing the gang’s members of draining fat from bodies and selling it on the black market for use in cosmetics.
He said the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told the police it was worth $60,000 a gallon.
Police officials suspect that the fat was sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, he said he could not confirm any sales.
At a news conference, the police showed reporters two bottles of fat recovered from the suspects and a photo of the rotting head of a 27-year-old man.
The gang would cut off its victims’ heads, arms and legs, remove the organs, and then suspend the torsos from hooks above candles that warmed the flesh as the fat dripped into tubs below.
The band’s fugitive leader had been killing people to extract fat for more than three decades.
The police had received a tip four months ago that human fat from the jungle was being sold in Lima. In August, police officers infiltrated the gang and later obtained some of the amber fluid, which a police lab confirmed as human fat.
The suspects were arrested in a Lima bus station with a quart of human fat in a soda bottle.
I suppose I should talk about the war (can you say Obama’s folly?).
I’m too lazy, so here’s some excerpts from Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed piece in the 12/01/ 09 New York Times:
“After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option."
"It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole."
"More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.”
“Politicians are seldom honest when they talk publicly about warfare. Lyndon Johnson knew in the spring of 1965, as he made plans for the first big expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that there was no upside to the war."s
"A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 [American troops] are going to end that war.
McNamara replies, 'That’s right.'”
Nothing like those sentiments were conveyed to the public as Johnson and McNamara jacked up the draft and started feeding young American boys and men into the Vietnam meat grinder.”
-- William Shakespeare 1564-1616: “Romeo and Juliet” (1595)
Having postponed multiple previous liver biopsy appointments designed to check the status of my liver scarring post chemotherapy, and having not had this procedure in 5 years, I decided it was time to allow the liver docs a look. In truth, I would have postponed again, had I not promised to participate in a research study.
In the fall of 07’, when I spent a lot of time at the UM Cancer Center, I had many blood draws. I rehash this here as a preface to the story I’m about to tell. The nurses who do the blood draws at the UMCC are pros. Oftentimes you can’t even tell you’ve been poked. Yesterday was different. Mind you, that which follows is small potatoes compared to the plight of some of my other ailing friends, but I’ll try to make it interesting to those of you who enjoy a bit of squeamishness. Appropriate, don’t you think, for this Friday the 13th?
So this pert little Howellite comes in, has me sign off on every possible complication. You know, the usual: collapsed lung, internal bleeding, and death. She then informs me that she, a research assistant, rather than a nurse, will be drawing my blood. As these things go, I’ve had enough experience that I’m fairly calm about these thing. So, when she misses the veins in my right arm on three tries, spraying my contaminated blood all over the room, I tell her to try my left arm. Her ineptitude now has her agitated, so she starts behaving in a way that I’m sure many of you have experienced yourselves: she tells me "I’M" not relaxed. It’s classic Freudian projection in its most typical manifestation. Switching arms, she drops the syringe on the floor, and begins to sweat while trying to make some boring small talk meant to distract attention from her obvious lack of medical skills. She tells me that she would never move from Howell (home of the Michigan KKK) because she wouldn’t want her children to grow up in a liberal Sodom and Gomorrah like Ann Arbor. All the while my criminal child, a thoroughly corrupted bubble girl from A2, is grinning like a coon. Having warned her that the veins in my left arm might require some serious digging and gouging, it was no surprise to me when she couldn’t find any blood. With this, she just gave up and said she had collected enough from the right.
After 20 minutes of needling, and multiple bloody punctures later, they wheeled me down to the MPU (Medical Procedures Unit) where the biopsy would take place. The patient is placed on their left side on a stryker frame, the right arm is extended up and behind the head, the right leg is draped over the left, the body is then stretched in a way that the torso is splayed sufficiently that the cartilage between the ribs presents the maximum surface (so that the needle might avoid piercing the bone). The insertion area, about nipple level slightly to the back of the side, is then swabbed and numbed up with lidocaine, after the fashion of a dental visit (including the short, sharp, stinging sensation on the skin’s surface), after which a 1/8 inch incision is made to accommodate the needle. The patient then takes a half breath, blows out all the way and holds (so that the lung is not punctured and thus collapsed), at which point the physician plunges the ultra-thin trocar deep into the liver and extracts the sample tissue.
Now that I’ve set the scene, allow me to introduce the players. Upon entering, I’m greeted by the attending physician, Dr. K. (I don’t think the last name was Kervorkian), a resident, Ryan something, a nurse, and the infernal health wench that botched the blood draw. Then, using a magic marker to delineate the proper target area, the attending shows the resident how to locate the optimal point of entry. So here we go.
Patiently resigning myself to bend to their will, and donning an attitude of dutiful compliance, I steel myself for the command to take a half breath, blow it out, and hold it. The order comes. I blow and hold…whump…it’s just as I remembered it, or better, a reminder of why I had been so quick to forget it. Imagine a long ice pick heated up on an electric stove burner being suddenly plunged into your gizzard. It only takes a second, but what a second. The nurse says, “breathe, it’s over.”
The attending physician walks over, looks at the core sample and says, “not enough tissue. We’ll need to do it again.” I think, “Fuck you,” and silently resolve to stop everything and have them take me to the recovery area. But I don’t. Instead I say, “what do you think I am, ‘Moby Dick’?” The attending, with almost a glare, tells me he’ll do the procedure this time. With a twisted kind of a soulless half shit-eatin’ sadistic grin he says, “blow and hold.” He then plunges the trocar deep into my liver. The millisecond of blinded by the light pain comes again and is gone. “We’ve got enough now,” he says, barely concealing his glee at harpooning an uppity patient.
By the way, he says, as I’m wheeled out, “since we had to take two samples, you’ll be here four, rather than two, hours.”
“To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you…They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.”
Bill Bryson 1951-- : “Neither Here Nor There” (1991)
ANIMALS
At Kerrytown Market there is a butcher shop, “Sparrow Meats,” that specializes in free-range, organic meats. On Sunday I stopped there and bought some Berkshire pork chops. As I sit here pondering the current events passages I’ve selected as daily writing prompts, I’m reminded of these succulent little roasts. It seems researchers found that pigs, when enclosed in pens appointed with mirrors, used the mirrors to locate and monitor their food.
This scrupulously followed routine of hoarding and guarding their food immediately reminded me of the gustatory practices followed by the Tessier family. Of the five boys in that litter, my brother, Paul, would have made the so-called “lower animals” most proud. For Paul Michael, knives and forks were used less as utensils than protective weapons. More than once did he bury his fork to the hilt in my forearm, as if that could stop me from snatching the Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks he was so zealously guarding. In our house, it was more stable manners than table manners.
Now, sophisticated and wise in my geriatric decrepitude, I take comfort in knowing that assessing my brother to be a pig may have been a compliment rather than insult, albeit unknown to me at the time. I now learn that “pigs might rank with apes, dolphins and other species that have passed the famed ‘mirror self-recognition test’ thought to be a marker of self-awareness and advanced intelligence.”
Ok, I’ll begrudgingly admit Natalie Angier’s Science Times article exonerates Paul’s behavior somewhat, but it still can’t account for the way he dismissed the mirror image of his multiple chins as a sign of his gustatory satisfaction rather than an affirmation of his vanity. Which, according to Angier, is normal, after all, “why should the pigs waste precious mirror time inspecting their teeth or straightening the hairs on their chinny-chin-chins, when they could be using the mirror as a tool to find a far prettier sight, the pig heaven that comes in a bowl?
And what a sight it was for Bro Paul. I won’t say we were poor, but one of his favorites was cheerios fried in bacon fat. In all fairness to my brohammer, his being part pig, of sorts, would explain his skills at football, herding, Nintendo, and making vaguely communicative grunts. We’ll leave the last word on this to Ms. Angier: “Pigs can do a circus’s worth of tricks: jump hoops, bow and stand, spin and make wordlike sounds on command, roll out rugs, herd sheep, close and open cages, play videogames with joysticks, and more.” Natalie Angier (NYT 11/10/09)
But enough about pigs, what about dogs? As we speak I’m listening to my message machine, it’s Detroit Edison, asking that I keep my doggie inside, lest one of their meter readers be harassed in the course of duty. Shadow don’t play that way. What an insult! This noble mastiff diagnosed my cancer, negotiated down my credit card debt, spell-checked my last published article, put in my sump-pump, cleaned my gutters, solved my unfinished crossword puzzles, and has single-pawedly eradicated my urges to kill and mutilate myself. What a dog! That’s it! I’m renaming her Sudoku!
But seriously, if they’re that afraid of Shadow they might just as well ask her to read off the numbers. Even more seriously, I would say that dogs do NOT think like us. If they did I wouldn’t own one. Dogs are loyal beyond question. Jack London’s, “To Build a Fire,” is a fine read, and probably my favorite London short story, but the subtle character judgments he attributes to the dog are more in line with the thinking of men than animals. Here’s some recent doggie chatter from the times:
“The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers. Sarah Kershaw (NYT 11/01/09).
DEATH
When Cub Koda died some years ago, Kim French and I attended the funeral. He was buried in a fine grave in the Napoleon (maybe it was Waterloo) graveyard. What was most striking about the ceremony was the informal nature of the friends and family’s interactions, and the humorous nature of the instructions Cub left us. At the climax of the ritual, just as Cub was about to be lowered into his final resting place, a boom-box was fired up, and a wig-singeing rendition of the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” (1963) served as the irreverent funeral hymn that ushered Cub into the great beyond. Papapaoommaomao….
So what’s my point? Only this. We’ve gone beyond the poems, prayers, and promises that have always served as a proper sendoff for our dead, near and dear. Nowadays we’re trending more and more towards the idea that we can somehow keep the dead alive the in our memories, dead, but not forgotten.
Writing in the 11/01/09 New York Times, Thomas G. Long reminds us that “current funeral fashions….illustrate the sad truth that, as a society, Americans are no longer sure what to do with our dead.” We can laud the deceased as much as we want, but when they’re gone they’re gone. “’A good funeral,’” says Thomas Lynch, a poet and undertaker in Milford, Mich., ‘is one that gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.’
Here’s more from Long:
“Rituals of death rest on the basic need, recognized by all societies, to remove the bodies of the dead from among the living. A corpse must be taken fairly quickly from here, the place of death, to somewhere else. But no healthy society has ever treated this as a perfunctory task, a matter of mere disposal. Indeed, from the beginning, humans have used poetry, song and prayer to describe the journey of the dead from “here” to “there” in symbolic, even sacred, terms. The dead are not simply being carted to the pit, the fire or the river; they are traveling toward the next world or the Mystery or the Great Beyond or heaven or the communion of the saints.
….Today, however, our death rituals have become downsized, inwardly directed, static and, as a result, spiritually and culturally impoverished. We tend now to recognize our dead only for their partial passions and whims. They were Mets fans, good for laughs at the office, pleasant companions on the links. At upbeat, open-mike “celebrations of life,” former coaches, neighbors and relatives amuse us with stories and naïvely declare that the dead, who are usually nowhere to be seen and have nowhere to go, will nevertheless live always in our memories. Funerals, which once made confident public pilgrimage through town to the graveyard, now tread lightly across the tiny tableau of our psyches.
….A corpse is a stark reminder that human beings are inescapably embodied creatures, and that a life is the sum of what has been performed and spoken by the body — a mixture of promises made and broken, deeds done and undone, joys evoked and pain inflicted. When we lift the heavy weight of the coffin and carry the dead over the tile floor of the crematory or across the muddy cemetery to the open grave, we bear public witness that this was a person with a whole and embodied life, one that, even in its ambiguity and brokenness, mattered and had substance. To carry the dead all the way to the place of farewell also acknowledges the reality that they are leaving us now, that they eventually will depart even from our frail communal memory as they travel on to whatever lies beyond.
‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people,’ William Gladstone, the British statesman, is said to have observed. Indeed, we will be healthier as a society when we do not need to pretend that the dead have been transformed into beautiful memory pictures, Facebook pages or costume jewelry, but can instead honor them by carrying their bodies with sad but reverent hope to the place of farewell. People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living.”
Thomas G. Long, a professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, is the author of “Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral.”
Since I mentioned Jung’s speculations about the afterlife in my last post, I would be remiss to not include an excerpt from Edward Rothstein’s splendid obituary of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ in the 11/04/09 NYTimes:
“His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator. The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, myths speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.”
TRASH
Think about it, a floating dump twice the size of Texas!
“ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.”
“We live in a society basted in self-regard, our moralists tell us; fat and dozy on the lion’s share of the world’s resources, polluting the seas and burning fossil fuels, we gaze in loving torpor at our own reflection, and the gnat-bite of recession barely disturbs our narcissistic trance.”
-- Hilary Mantel “The New York Review of Books” (10/29/09)
This begs the question: what is it we aspire to? The surrounding throng, it would seem, seek celebrity above all else. Reality televison reflects the tragi-kitsch consequences of this obsessive “self-regard.” Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame has been blown up, passe in its quaintness, the temporal abolished. “Fat and dozy” on slow-speed Bronco chases, Jiffy Pop balloon rides, and dancing charlatans, the bar is low. When mediocrity is the inevitable outcome of a society living in a “narcissistic trance,” seeing only ourselves in the mirror of nature, it is understandable we prefer our media indifferent and banal in attending moral matters.
After all, the grotesque depths to which our collective aesthetic appreciation has fallen, never mind our moral attention, would have us prefer Tom Delay represent a dancing star to watching Cyd Charisse in “The Bandwagon.”
I suppose the discomfort in casting that inward gaze toward the lot of others -- aside from those we can identify with -- is too painful to bother. No wonder tardy pilots trump atrocities in Congo, and celebrity extortion is the story of the day. The 14 Americans who were killed yesterday, making it one of the deadliest in the eight-year war, is relegated to page ten news when no hostile fire is involved; as if crashes during gun battles, friendly fire, and other unholy accidents, carry less gravity, encompass less lethality, and are, therefore, less worthy of our consideration, when, as the headline reads – “Hostile Fire Is Not Suspected.” Death-lite, I suppose.
History shows us that moral indifference is not solely the province of the ignorant and uneducated. At least they choose to disassociate themselves from civic obligation. Writing on human sacrifice in ancient cultures (10/26/09 NYT), Janet M. Monge, a physical anthropologist at Penn, informs us that, “Ritual killing associated with a royal death was practiced by other ancient cultures, archaeologists say, and raises a question: Why would anyone, knowing their probable fate, choose a life as a court attendant? It’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand.” Oh really? Do tell. Perhaps Dr. Monge missed yesterdays suicide car bombing in Baghdad, where the toll stands at 155 dead and counting. 9/11 must have escaped her, too.
Is there really a distinction between palace attendants loyal to royal mortuary rituals, Japanese kamikaze pilots zealously dedicated to emperor and country, doctrinally submissive Christian martyrs, and fundamentalist fanatics of Allah? “Hard for us to understand?” Monge’s is less a cold choice than a chosen obliviousness. An oxymoron, yes, but one I think applies. Scholarly over-immersion, or intellectual narrow-mindedness, is no excuse for moral inattention.
CANCER
Given my age and audience, curios of science in matters of health are an ever engaging, and always fascinating subject. Even my limited encounters with serious illness have solicited encouragements toward healing pyramids, salvific light shows, miraculous elixirs, manipulative hand cures, and preemptive energy unblocking procedures. Dear Mr. Mcgoo’s advice column has periodically invoked the ghosts of Dr. Snake Oil in recounting the pseudo-sages along the road to recovery. The smug exhortation to follow the proper diet -- as if the secret cure to immortality is as close as the people’s food co-op -- rings hollow when your next meal will be delivered by a feeding tube through your nose. Interesting it is how quickly we spawn of the New Age Zeitgeist reconsider the status of modern medical science when faced with tumors diffuse through the abdomen and suspicious masses in the breast.
With that introduction, please attend to the following excerpts from Gina Kolata’s most interesting article in the 10/27/09 Science Times section of the NYT: “Cancers Can Vanish without Treatment, but How?”
Call it the arrow of cancer. Like the arrow of time, it was supposed to point in one direction. Cancers grew and worsened.
But as a paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted last week, data from more than two decades of screening for breast and prostate cancer call that view into question. Besides finding tumors that would be lethal if left untreated, screening appears to be finding many small tumors that would not be a problem if they were left alone, undiscovered by screening. They were destined to stop growing on their own or shrink, or even, at least in the case of some breast cancers, disappear.
“The old view is that cancer is a linear process,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. “A cell acquired a mutation, and little by little it acquired more and more mutations. Mutations are not supposed to revert spontaneously.”
So, Dr. Kramer said, the image was “an arrow that moved in one direction.” But now, he added, it is becoming increasingly clear that cancers require more than mutations to progress. They need the cooperation of surrounding cells and even, he said, “the whole organism, the person,” whose immune system or hormone levels, for example, can squelch or fuel a tumor.
Cancer, Dr. Kramer said, is a dynamic process.
It was a view that was hard for some cancer doctors and researchers to accept. But some of the skeptics have changed their minds and decided that, contrary as it seems to everything they had thought, cancers can disappear on their own.
….Cancer cells and precancerous cells are so common that nearly everyone by middle age or old age is riddled with them, said Thea Tisty, a professor of pathology at the University of California, San Francisco. That was discovered in autopsy studies of people who died of other causes, with no idea that they had cancer cells or precancerous cells. They did not have large tumors or symptoms of cancer. “The really interesting question,” Dr. Tisty said, “is not so much why do we get cancer as why don’t we get cancer?”
….With early detection, he said, “our net has become so fine that we are pulling in small fish as well as big fish.” Now, he said, “we have to identify which small fish we can let go.”
But enough about miracles and the obligations of living, what about the afterlife?
THE AFTERLIFE
Coming from a proselytizing atheist, you may find it odd I’ve even broached this subject. Has he left his senses, come to his senses, had an epiphany, or worse…? Is the man daft? Has he no shame? Like a minority of other fools we suffer, I, too, wonder what the state of conscious reality is circumscribed by. Imagining other worlds, physical laws, apart from those which lie within our understanding is, by definition, inconceivable. Is there something, anything, beyond understanding? For some, faith allows a way of imagining a realm beyond the specific worldy context that shapes consciousness and its awareness of that world. A rhetorical digression, but worth saying as a preface to my own struggle with contemplating an afterlife.
But first, some excerpts from Carl Jung’s reflections on the afterlife:
“Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves.”
“Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers.”
“Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things.”
“What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean , or what kind of reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. We cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic projections.”
“The question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it. But how? My hypothesis is that we can do so with hints sent to us from the unconscious – in dreams, for example.”
-- C. G. Jung (c.1957)
Dreams, paranormal activities, crop circles, the Mystery Spot, Sea Shell City, might not these strange psychic manifestations suggest something beyond the constrictions of consciousness? I recall a recurring dream I’ve had where I’m chased down and knifed repeatedly. In another, the top of my neighbors’ heads has vertical zippers from ear to ear. Further, my dead friend, Ned, unzipping his head, so that he might better share his thoughts, bows to me, at which point the head of a dog I once had emerges and begins to lick my face incessantly. Is this evidence that dreams are really a form of unconscious flatulence that releases the various psychic debris that accumulates over the course of one’s life? Or perhaps a banal conflation of non-linear subconscious memories, akin to the mental structures that inspired the surrealists.
But how do we escape our “anthropomorphic projections”?
Jung writes, “It seems probable that the real nature of the archtype is not capable of being made conscious, it is transcendent.”
Here, Jung, a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology, implies the archtype as something arising from our animal instincts. Why not simply say the impetus toward spirituality and religious belief is innate rather than learned. For Jung, our belief in the myths and stories we collectively share is correlative to having a faith that our conceptions concerning the afterlife are equally valid to the convictions of the non-believer. And how might this benefit us? While I don’t know if he had the existentialists in mind, here’s Jung:
“While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archtype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.”
le always ends. 
e requires time, and that’s a non-renewable existential resource.
