8 December 09
Archeology
We cleared off the counter this evening, uncovering, in no particular order:
A DVD of Return of the King (Extended Edition)
An emery board
A sample (2 capsules) of raspberry-flavored Ultimate Omega, which we each ate one of
A cat brush, loaded with diatomaceous earth
Yarns of different lengths
Random thread
Buttons shaped as teapots and cups and saucers
An aluminium wingnut and washer and single washer
A box of kleenex
About 80 end-of-year solicitations
Stitch markers, different colors, materials, functions
A cork
A shrivelled tomatillo
A bottle of Estro Soy capsules
Knitting patterns for twined gloves and a lace shawl
An Exacto knife
A blue-and-white pottery ink pot
Mail from at least 5 months ago
Grains of rice
A stack of Artist Trading Cards
An accordion-fold book of sketches of a wedding we went to a year ago in August…
Sheesh. We should tidy a bit more often.
3 November 09
Pain
I’ve been, like Jean, thinking about pain. In part because my mother and several other people around me have cancer and other conditions that are either always or occasionally sources of acute pain; another couple of people I know are pregnant and will at some inevitable point in the near future have to decide whether or not to try and lessen the pain of childbirth with medication; and a story I read about the end stages of a dog’s life in Japan. Working with vets who have the ability and power to prevent suffering, and to end an animal’s life when they can, I was curious about the cultural differences that would make this a different choice in Japan. From Butuki:
In general Japanese accept and suffer pain and suffering a lot more than westerners. Even for humans far fewer drugs are used for patients in pain and who are suffering; they believe that the natural things the body goes through is part of the healing process. People (and animals) are expected to accept pain as part of life. That’s why you rarely hear women screaming and cursing in a maternity ward, or men getting into fights on the baseball field when a pitcher hits a batter. It’s considered extremely childish and weak not to bear the pain.
As I was walking around the Fernando Botero show at the Berkeley Art Museum recently, seeing his Abu Ghraib series — the paintings staggering in their intensity, number, and stark visual exploration of human atrocity — I was struck by how closely human pain is probably linked to the fear of it. I’ve been bitten by a dog in the past, and it was a local pain, a reminder that it’s a good idea to keep your hands out of the way of dogs’ mouths, and I patched myself up and moved on. But if I had been afraid of dogs — deadly afraid of all dogs and what they were and could be, wolves and agents of demons — would the pain of the bite have been worse? I’m guessing, yes.
Torture is supposed to work as a method of obtaining information because the victim’s fear of pain is supposed to overwhelm his or her resolve to keep such information from getting into the hands of the torturer. Of course, such a strategy breaks down on even a cursory examination: in the main, the strong resist and the weak say anything. But it does, by soft rumor, spread fear through a population in much the same way “terrorism” does — it breaks with codes and rules that have been established as belonging to proper human interaction, even when that interaction involves killing “enemies.” Pain as weapon. Unpredictable pain as more terrible weapon. The result raises the stakes and makes sadism fair game in warfare, presumably not the intent of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators.
Although I’m impressed by the Japanese stoicism Butuki describes, I am grateful for the advances in medicine that make it possible for people (and animals) in agony to have some relief. Whether we’ve gone too far — chugging analgesics in order to be able to run marathons when in fact our body is telling us, quite sensibly, that we are inflicting serious damage to our skeletomuscular systems — is another blog post.
25 August 09
Trained
When Jennifer and I were young and sunburned during a school camping trip, we paired up during a treasure hunt. But we got lost. Somehow, we ended up along the train track, on the line from Madrid to Avila. Pinned against the rock as the train sped by, we closed our eyes and our hearts raced and we caught our breath and emerged from that gully, glad to be alive, and found our way back to camp. I have never forgotten that terror, the sudden realization of the power of metal moving that fast. I did wonder what the train driver thought of our presence there. We didn’t tell. I haven’t talked about it much. You tend to leave out these accounts of childhood stupidity when recounting your misspent youth.
Today at lunch a man died, hit by a train just out across the field from our house. I don’t know if it was a mistake or on purpose. I saw the coroner’s van, the ambulance, the cops. What I do know is this: that train driver will never be the same again. I wish peace for him or her, knowing it’s more likely they will have lifelong nightmares.
Tonight the coyotes will howl, their mysterious howl for the trains and the moon and the night.
20 August 09
Common Sense: A Plea
My brother-in-law is an opthalmologist. As far as doctors’ jobs go, it’s quite a good gig. Not the superstardom of neuroscience or surgery, not the large salaries of orthopedics, there is still the bonus of good hours and the huge reward that comes from restoring sight to people semi-blinded by cataracts. He lives in a small town (a real small town: population <4,500, unlike Davis, whose population is now >65,000 and should rightly be called a small city). In this small town, people stop him regularly in the street thanking him for saving their mother’s vision. It’s an aging population, so this happens more than you’d think.
One day, he was called in to operate on a kid who’d poked himself in the eye with a stick. (This also happens more than you’d think.) He passed out cold on the operating room floor, alarming everyone in the room. He was wheeled over for a CT scan, other tests. They called my sister.
“Can I just ask you, what was the age of his patient? Seven? Right. That’s Simon’s age. I think he just had a moment of daddy-itis. I think he’ll be fine.” D’s superabundance of common sense has, more than once, been embarrassing to medical professionals, but I’m really grateful to be related to someone who has this much. It provides perspective.
As we move into chemotherapy with my mother, a friend has recommended a book by David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer: A New Way of Life. The book advocates a combination of good-sense nutrition loaded with antioxidants found in foods (not supplements), especially dark fruits and green tea, exercise, and a meditation or yoga practice. All of it in addition to, not instead of, the tripartite therapies used by modern medicine (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy). Sounds sensible, yes? Hardly worth writing a book over, maybe!
Yet this is not advice you’ll get from most doctors, most oncologists. Why? Because they consider it outside their brief. Oncology is all about finding the rogue cells and killing them as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s not about boosting immune systems. Oncology conferences are full of anxious doctors whose lives are spent trying to keep up with the latest therapies, the latest research, and they probably don’t think they’d have time to keep up with all these nutrition or meditation findings, even if they thought it might be part of their work (but they don’t: medicine is very much in the thrall, still, of the palace of pharmacopia). They are busy people, and unfortunately they are getting busier. Certain cancers are now epidemic in the Western world, especially colon, breast, cervical, lung, prostate. (Esophageal cancer, which killed my father, isn’t, but it’s epidemic in Japan, where people are screened for it aggressively.)
Servan-Schreiber is himself a psychiatric doctor who, during one of his own research experiments, was discovered to have a brain tumor, putting him instantly on the other side of the doctor-patient divide. But the most astonishing thing I read last night was this:
“My knowledge of nutrition… was considerably less than that of an average reader of Cosmopolitan. With only minor exaggeration, the following sums up the extent of what I’d been taught [in medical school]:
- Foods are composed of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, vitamins, and minerals.
- People who suffer from obesity need to eat fewer calories.
- If diabetic, people must eat less sugar; if hypertensive, less salt; with cardiac disease, less cholesterol.”
Even knowing doctors are overstressed by advances in their fields, surely we can do better than this. Demonstrably, we have, otherwise we’d still be relying on leeches and bloodletting and blue pills and black draughts. Unfortunately, it means we’re going to have to look out for ourselves while they catch up. We’re going to have to use common sense. I wonder if there’s a pill for that. Hmmm….
9 July 09
Two Weeks
It’s been a fortnight since I arrived in Maine. I didn’t quite make it to mum’s hospital the night I arrived, the plane was delayed, but got in the following morning as early as possible, to find her alert despite narcotics, positive, and with various tubal protrusions.
Tonight, she had a glass of Coppola claret with me, here at home, picking up pens she’s dropped off the floor with a miraculous contraption known as a “grabber” and laughing.
There are other journeys ahead, but I think we’re ready to take them. The knowledge of this, in itself, was plenty reason to come. There have been many others, like making sweet potato ravioli with Simon (aged 8) last night, the song of the wood thrush in the morning, the feeling of rain on my face. Small miracles.
I am ready to go home and back to the drought of California and fiscal emergency and two purring cats. See you back there.
28 June 09
Wet and Humid
I’m in Maine, where my mother is recovering from surgery. Posts will be sporadic from here so I’m going to leave you in the hands of Numenius for a while.
Singing, now, outside this window, are birds I used to know well and which I now need to really pay attention to identify. They include the Maine dialect of song sparrow, a winter wren, thrasher — I’ll try and sketch some for Bird by Bird as I get more time. A pair of ospreys was flying over the trees outside the hospital window yesterday…
24 June 09
Consequences 13
“This was only one solution for the present,” Ellers sniped.
McMason fidgeted. He knew all the funding for the Institute for Computational
History was at stake here.
“But, look at the correlations,” he replied. “The model correctly predicted that the Russians would move into South Ossetia during the time of the Beijing Olympics, and that Chris Hoy would be the first Brit to win three golds at the Games in a hundred years.”
“Did it predict he would be knighted for his efforts?”
“Uh, no…”
“Lookit, how many free parameters does your model have?”
“Five hundred and sixty-seven.”
“And I probably can tweak any ten of them and come up with different solutions giving Hoy and Ossetia. Mr. McMason, your model is underdetermined. To say the least.”
“Ms. Ellers, I just want to remind you of the opportunity you have here. Here is
what the model predicts. The Azerbaijanis will up the rate of water injection in the Baku fields. Overly so, it turns out. In three years, this will induce a massive earthquake just off the coast of Baku. That, the resulting tsunami, and the fires will devastate the oil and gas infrastructure, but more importantly cause a cultural phase transition.”
“Howzzat?”
McMason grew animated. “Fire! In a land with a small but vibrant Zoroastrian community. It won’t be so small after that. People convert in droves. The religious movement spreads south, into Iran…”
Ellers sighed. She now knew the butterfly effect could produce a loon in her office.
(This was the thirteenth post in an online game of Consequences. The series started at Hydragenic. The previous post was at Ivy is here, and the next post shall appear soon at Velveteen Rabbi.)
17 June 09
Dream Cake
A theory of mind in a raspberry torte
Top layer sensing — luscious crimson seed eyes
Underneath cream cheese filling deep cogitations
Crumbly base rich buttery motor actions
Food for thought.
13 June 09
Be-longing
Only the music belongs completely to itself…
Tosh, she thought.
The string-section shimmer of sapphires and turquoises on a mid-afternoon mountain lake, edging into the dark purple bassoon murk: they own the music. The gray pines that sang her their song that day in the rain. The clarion “play ball” and thwack of the bat on ball, the sub-human bellowed glottal stop of the umpire. Ours. The sweet saxophone solo: maybe it doesn’t belong to Charlie Parker, but it belongs to the night, to the smoke and the sweaty sex and the swilled liquor and the bebby Jesus.
We are along for the ride. We gulp what is here and ours and nobody’s and nothing’s.
(This is the fifth post in an ongoing online game of Consequences. Each successive entry begins with the closing lines of its predecessor. Entries are 250 words long, and are linked thematically. The series started with Hydragenic and was followed by Patteran Pages, Porous Borders, The Middlewesterner, and Feathers of Hope. The series will continue in a day or two at Blaugustine. )
17 May 09
Burning
Like this, he said.
A stone circle first
then paper (FT’s best)
then twigs then kindling
then, when that’s caught,
a log.
And another:
a teepee or crossways.
A path for the air.
Camping chairs shifting forward then back
a dance with the cold and
the size of the fire
the kind of wood
(oak’s best, well seasoned)
and how many clothes
we’d lugged into
which Castilian landscape.
Bottles surrounded us
(Chinchon’s good, but best
with coñac).
The bonfire beacon
summoned
shepherds and in pairs, guardias,
and frozen, parched hikers:
all offered a copa
and given a smoke.
Those fires: the cracking and
smoke and bane of
scorpions, spiders, the beasts
that emerged from their midst:
swallowing, omnomming
the night. My youth smells like this.
But the first time —
when I had just learned
to read —
that time, when we walked half a block,
he and I, with our tent and two bags
and the matchbox that held
“cosy” and “warm”
The dry thistles caught and
he beat them: slap! thwack!
the bag snuffing the life
yet there was the mock, the crackling
flames, rebirthing themselves:
That time, I saw something bigger
than Dad
and learned fear.
Ten years
since the flames took the flesh
off his bones
and consumed it all:
fire bigger than Dad —
the land cracks,
the breeze lifts,
and it’s
re-licking its
lips.