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Archive for October, 2008
hallow’s eve
reflecting today on how our sicknesses can have meaning… not only biological but metaphorical. i wouldn’t go so far as to say the metaphors reveal the causes of our illnesses. yet perhaps it’s not insignificant when a man with aphasia dies of complications from an abscess – from that which he could not expel from his body. or that another man with extreme emotional defenses – an excess of barriers – becomes ill with broken skin that can no longer function as a barrier between him and his environment.
leaving a patient’s home today, i found myself deep in thought. my patient is gravely ill, and without exaggeration i can say that his body is skeletal. it was just a short jump to the holiday.
we never did much for halloween growing up, and what we did usually entailed a family dinner for my grandfather’s birthday anyway, but when it came down to it, my parents were rather firmly planted in their stance that (if i were to paraphrase it) halloween risked glorification of evil by its imitation. my sibs and I were encouraged to emulate only good entities. that must have included pumpkins, because i remember us all cycling through some roundish orange smocks.
i don’t fault my parents for their position. and yet.. i now find myself with an appreciation – almost a sense of respect and honor – for the rituals that allow us to rebel against, and for one night, control, the dark things that surround us, unacknowledged, all year long. this need to recognize, represent, to play at scaring ourselves and each other, to poke fun at the dreadful gravity of mortality – reflects a deeper drive to overcome it. when on halloween we enact the things we fear, embody the things that threaten us, those things are weakend, lose some of their power. in claiming, for a moment, the faces of pain, horror, sickness, grief, we enact a triumph.
that is, in some deep way, a sacred thing.
turns and returns
… or how the gilding in the sky last night took me back to a honduran beach, or its sharp blue this morning to a stiletto-cold morning in edinburgh. life is surely more helix than line, more spiral than straight.
degrees of separation
just pondering the interconnectedness of people. it’s always a slightly funny feeling to find that (e.g.) your friend’s sister goes to school with some random person you met travelling, who also knows a college classmate of a friend from church… or some such. makes the world start to feel like a cloverleaf tracing back to the center again and again, or the layered folding of a protein molecule. makes me wonder to whom else i may be connected, and how.
reading list
i’ve been reading a lot over the past couple of months. i’m not sure why i’ve taken such a literary turn, but i’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. ten years after most of the rest of the world, i picked up a harry potter book. i zoomed through the first 6 books, have the 7th in my possession (after some tense exchanges with the online vendor i ordered it from – it arrived a little late and i was getting nervous!!) although i haven’t started it yet. after gorging myself on 1-6, for some reason i’m saving 7 for a little while.
i remember some people in the conservative evangelical world making a fuss about kids reading harry potter b/c the heroes were learning witchcraft. i had always reserved judgment because i hadn’t read any of the books. but now i can opine freely! and, in my opinion these books have profound things to say about good and evil, the use and misuse of power, life, death, friendship, growth, and loss. and they are totally easy and fun at the same time. and… i think your average sunday school kid would get a lot out of them. not to mention me!!
my other recent authorial discovery is haruki murakami. i started with hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world (nice title, huh?) and then moved on to norwegian wood, i think perhaps his most famous, which i finished this morning. i liked the first one better – there was something incredibly poetic about the way it created a dialogue between two utterly different worlds, gradually building and revealing their connection. norwegian wood was a more straightforward story, but with a number of nested and interlocking themes that repeat in varying iterations. there’s a certain stiffness to his style (which may be partly attributed to the fact that i’m reading him in translation), but at the same time a reliability that keeps me reading. i trust him as a narrator, somehow. they both had a very strong introspective quality about them – creating intimate, interior worlds. interesting, and worth exploring further.
i’m doing a 3-day workshop in narrative medicine next weekend, so the readings for that have been occupying a lot of time lately. lots of wonderful discoveries, mostly from the medical literature. but a more accessible one – http://www.storycorps.net/ – an oral history project, literally people telling their stories. there’s a huge variety & wealth of experiences represented… some beautiful, touching, and revealing moments there.
a nice post-mortem on the financial crisis
well.. if anyone else has been wondering what in the world has been going on around here, my good and, i may even venture, extraordinary, friend has come out of the blog closet to explain it all, and for that i am rather grateful:
haunting
i ran across this guy on the train platform tonight. he describes his stuff as classical electric guitar. i thought it was gorgeous and got a cd. http://matthewnichols.com/
there was something about it that i found so moving, poetic.
i haven’t been about the city in ages. a friend’s birthday party shook me out of my accustomed local routes – across a river to a whole other world. sometimes i forget that this place can be magical.
puke, probability, and public transport
sitting on a bench on the uptown platform, i noticed several disembarking passengers gazing at something at the end of the bench with marked expressions of distaste. whatever it was, i couldn’t see it from my seated vantage point. based on their faces, i hypothesized either a) at a probability of 80% — vomit, or b) at a probability of 20% (i.e. four times less likely, although with at least a four-fold grossness factor) — used condom.
sort of fortunately, it was neither — instead, i saw a very wretched specimen of local vermin. a tiny, pale-colored rat, crouched on its hind legs, almost birdlike. it looked immobile but on closer inspection i could see it was trembling. and mangy. i did feel sorry for it, in spite of myself, despite having rather firm anti-rodent sentiments. “it’s cold; it needs its mother,” commented a fellow who was passing. i was inclined to think it needed a heavy dose of antibiotics or quick and permanent sedation.
yet another touching subterranean vignette.
