RJ – Page 32 – Brimmings: up from the well

Lexington, KY: Reflections on My Old Kentucky Home

I count myself fortunate to live near Lexington, KY. Its assets are many; its liabilities, few.

I like its small town feel—no row housing here; no factories puffing their toxins into the air.

Though ranked 61 among American cities, currently about 311,000, it’s unique in not having freeways threading its thoroughfares, unlike neighboring Louisville and Cincinnati.

To be sure, Kentucky is often synonymous with poverty, but Lexington defies such stereotypes. Located in the center of the pristine Bluegrass countryside renowned for its grandiose thoroughbred farms, Lexington is not only one of our nation’s most beautiful cities, but also one of its most affluent.

Unlike many cities, Lexington enjoys one of the nation’s steadiest local economies, with unemployment currently a miniscule 3.7%. Forbes Magazine has it as the 4^th “Best City” for Business careers. Kipplinger ranks it 6^th as a “Best Value City.”

Lexington can rightly boast its being “the horse capital of the world.” A 2014 survey revealed that 67,500 horses populated the Bluegrass, including 24,600 in Lexington!

Another laurel is its 6^th place ranking as one of the country’s “most inspiring cities” (worldwidelearn.com), topped only by Boston, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.

Lexington is also listed 7^th as a “Best City for Quality of Life” (nerdwallet.com).

In spite of these accolades, however, Lexington faces continuing challenges from commercial interests who, left to themselves, potentially pose a threat to the city’s bucolic flavor and, as a family city, the superb ambience of the city and surrounding area.

Take what Lexington did in 1996, demurring to commercial interests, and appropriating 5400 acres from the Rural Service Area for development. If Lexington were to further erode the rural landscape of the Rural Service Area, the legacy might well be to make Lexington just one more American city characterized by urban blight.

Fortunately, the city is currently enjoying a hiatus with the tenure of Jim Gray, its progressive mayor. Under the current Five Year Comprehensive Land Use Plan (2011), set to end next year, the city has held out for wise land stewardship, reaffirming the 40 acre minimum set in 1958 for new residential land and commercial development.

As Gray puts it, “building our brand and our economy means that first we preserve what is special and unique about our Lexington—our bluegrass landscape.”

Concurrently, unbridled development has raised its ugly head within the Urban Service Area with numerous architectural gems of the nineteenth century torn down to make way for an underground garage, office tower, hotel, and retail and restaurant space downtown in what has famously turned into a cavernous hole in the ground since its first shovels in 2008.

Meanwhile, yellow dinosaurs gouge the rich soil of a former 56-acre farm to make room for The Summit, a new mall by a national conglomerate just down the road from gargantuan Fayette Mall, which recently expanded by another 26 acres.

You see, I’m an idealist and would have preferred the city’s opting to purchase the farm for green space along one of the city’s most grid-locked traffic corridors, Nicholasville Road—something on the order of the New Haven Green or Savannah’s The Squares. Or like New York’s Central Park or Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, offering timeout sanctuary in the very heart of urban bustle.

But what about the cost? Well, before you think me insane, consider that the city council had previously come up with a $354 million plan to renovate Rupp Area, home of the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball team. I’d say it’s a simple matter of getting our priorities straight.

While Lexington may seem to enjoy a rich tapestry of parks, some 100, they’re relatively small while large areas of the city haven’t any parks at all. The city’s special gem is Raven Run, a passive park of 734 acres (no sports facilities, etc.), preserving natural habitat and several well maintained hiking trails.

Lexington needs to pay attention to its tree canopy anyway which has experienced a sharp decline, some of it doubtlessly due to the recent infestation of the emerald ash borer. According to a 2012 study, the city’s tree coverage stands at 27%, with 40% the gold standard.

Lexington currently isn’t a member of the City Park Alliance, and it should be. Its rival city, Louisville, is. The Alliance offers a mapping technology with demographic data that can be accessed online. The Alliance ranks the 75 largest U.S. cities as to how each of them is meeting its park needs. Lexington ranks 51 (parkscore.tpl.org/rankings-advanced.php).

The upshot of all this is that Lexington, while doing well, can do better and must if it’s to assure preservation of its unique ambience, underpinning its attractiveness as one of America’s best cities to call home.

–rj

Paris Bombings, Public Response, and the New Tribalism

CTyf4XOWUAA3a4J Evil is very real and as we know from the Paris mayhem, universal. ISIS, of course, is its mirror image.

This week, Kurdish Peshmerga troops, retaking the city of Sinjar in northern Iraq, discovered two mass graves just outside the city. One contained the bodies of 78 elderly women shot by ISIS; the other, some 60 men, women and children, presumably Yazidis, executed when ISIS captured the city a year ago.

These past several weeks have, in fact, marked a turn in ISIS strategy, since the free flow of recruits has nose-dived with the tightening of borders adjacent to Syria and Iraq and the entrance of Russia into the Syria conflict.

Accordingly, what’s transpired in France may only be the opening round as ISIS licks its wounds.

In the West, we are rightfully angry and troubled by the Parisian carnage. In Facebook, many of us have changed our profile images to include the French flag or Eiffel Tower to show our solidarity.

Contrast this with our visceral indifference with its ethnocentric moorings to ISIS’s barbarism on Muslims or those we perceive as political adversaries. In fact, Muslims have been its greatest victims.

A Russian commercial jet recently went down in the Sinai, taking 224 lives. Intelligence sources suggest a bomb had been placed aboard and ISIS, as with the Parisian violence, claimed they were behind it.

In Lebanon just one evening removed from the Paris massacre, a Hezbollah neighborhood was bombed, resulting in 43 deaths. Again, ISIS was the perpetrator.

In October, 99 lives were taken in twin bombings in Ankara, Turkey. Although ISIS hasn’t claimed responsibility, they are believed responsible.

Meanwhile, media are saturated with coverage of the Paris horror, as they should be; yet by the same token, the coverage given to the aforementioned violent episodes have proven miniscule.

I’ve seen this same scenario repeated in natural calamities as well. Recently, earthquakes occurred in Pakistan and Iran. Coverage? Well. There’s always Google.

The Russians we don’t care much about these days, so our interest in the Sinai crash seems more out of curiosity as to its cause and not from compassion.

Last week’s bombings in Beirut: So what? These were Muslims, weren’t they? And I should add, Hezbollah. Israel knows their terrorism first hand, so they get what they deserve. Problem is, the casualties were civilian, many of them women and children.

Turkey? Isn’t that something we’ll be eating soon? Ankara? For many Americans, where the hell is that? For the record, it has a population of nearly 5 million! That’s twice the population of Paris!

Think about this: The greatest humanitarian crisis of our time is that of 4 million Syrian refugees, along with another 8 million dislocated Syrians within their country. Our response: bickering as to whether we should take in 30,000 or 65,000, or any at all as some of the GOP presidential candidates have suggested.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post informs us that American contributions to international causes has declined over the last two years.

I think of Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, who nails down the cruelty of indifference to the sufferings of those we see as different from ourselves, taking the liberty to replace Jew with Muslim:

I am a Muslim. Hath not a Muslim eyes? Hath not a Muslim hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?

Let’s call our indifference, or xenophobia, what it really is–a return to the tribalism we thought we Westerners had shed long ago.

–rj

A Life-Changing Quotation

Every once in a while, I come across a quotation that really stands out. I like this one, though I don’t recall exactly where, or when or how I came upon it, but thought you might like it too:

Did I offer peace today?

Did I bring a smile to someone’s face?

Did I say words of healing?

Did I let go of my anger and resentment?

Did I love?

–Henri Nowen (1932-1996)*

*Nowen, priest, theologian, and author, lived the life he preached, loving others, and writing some 39 books, translated into thirty languages. His most famous book: The Return of the Prodigal Son.

–rj

Don’t Be a Phoul: When Neighbors Cut Down Trees

My daughter has been complaining in her recent emails about a family on her street in Bellevue, WA.

They’ve cut down two lovely Douglas fir trees, the kind that startle Easterners like me not used to arboreal skyscrapers, many of them magisterial in their silent dignity bequeathed by longevity.

Bellevue, a fast growing suburb adjacent to Seattle, still enjoys a fecundity most urban areas in America can only envy. When I was there a few weeks ago, I relished walking myriad needle softened pathways of the city’s several forested trails bisecting an urban landscape. Apparently, however, the area has also attracted a newer influx indifferent to the charms of a bucolic setting.

These neighbors complain that their trees were messy. They tired of the needles falling on their roof and car. Around the corner, another neighbor recently did the same thing for the sake of planting a garden free of shade. In its slovenliness, it appears she’s made things worse, not better.

Meanwhile, the company that’s done the cutting directly goes about soliciting customers door-to-door on a regular basis. One of the cutters bragged to my daughter, obviously relishing her displeasure, that he likes chopping down trees.

Unfortunately, we live in an America that prides itself on a free economy, with consumers having sovereignty over their choices. Sadly, in this case, these individuals opted to buzz-saw these magnificent sentries of public health into oblivion for convenience sake.

It’s the way things work in a mutual exchange between the entrepreneurs of the market place, motivated by money, igniting consumer sentiment often detrimental in its long term consequences; for example, alcohol and cigarettes. George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Nobel Prize winners, term it a “manipulation of focus” in their insightful new book, Phishing for Phools: The Economcs of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton University Press).

Phishing is their term for business interests that phish (i. e., angle) to get phools (consumers) such as you and me to do their bidding to the detriment of ourselves. Think banks, pharmaceuticals, real estate agents, etc.

There are two kinds of phools: those who fall for the falsity of the phishers’ claims and those, the vast majority of the public, who succumb to their own emotions, prone to making bad decisions simply because they initially feed their emotional wants. You see this in matters of health where our predominant diseases such as atherosclerosis, diabetes and often cancer arise from faulty lifestyle choices such as the wrong food, overeating, indulging in alcohol, or not exercising.

It’s this way of doing things, in this case, overblown avarice with its bubble effect that led to the colossal recession of 2008.

In sum, what’s been happening in my daughter’s neighborhood, threatening its pristine uniqueness, is a facsimile of the phisher-phool conundrum writ large, neighbors manipulated into opting unwittingly against their long term interests.

Maybe you think this is all nonsense. Property owners have the right to do as they like.

But have they the right to harm the public-interest, given the menace of air pollution and global warming, by cutting down their trees?

And what about the neighborhood aesthetic? Hurrah for neighborhood associations!

We aren’t disconnected beings. Yes, we are our brothers’ keepers.

Bellevue government needs to get itself in gear. Trees are public domain just like telephone poles and street lights. Good government is on to this. Consider New York which just completed planting one million trees or Boston which plans to plant 100,000.

It’s estimated that planting trees in urban areas reduces energy use up to 50%. Just one tree absorbs up to 8 pounds of air pollution annually. Trees increase property value. Studies show people drive slower on tree lined streets. They add beauty and lend character.

Let’s not be phouls!

–rj

The Elephant Factor in Last Night’s Debate

Growing older may not be a disease, but like many diseases, it’s progressive. Not only do we diminish in physical capacity, but in mental acuteness as well, resulting in a lower threshold in processing information.

Aging needn’t be feared per se, however, since scores of elderly enjoy a quality of life many young people can only envy. Take last night’s Democratic debate. Hillary Clinton, who may very well be elected president in the coming year, is 67; her chief rival, Bernie Sanders, 74; Jim Webb, former Virginia senator, 69.

Personally, I found their performance under conditions of surely immense pressure immensely gratifying. I say this because I live in an America that frequently denigrates its older citizenry with “old” often taking on pejorative connotation approximating the “n-word.” If it’s hideous to discriminate on the basis of color, no less so when it comes to your age.

Psychologically, we need more discussion on the subject of aging. Does it confer strengths, in this case, in leadership acumen? I believe it does.

Consider what animal studies might show us; for example, elephants where it’s the matriarch, or oldest elephant, that often leads the herd to a waterhole only she knows about. In short, age often confers the wisdom of experience.

When it comes to being president of the United States, it’s hardly an on-the-job learning experience. Every decision in our more than ever complex world is fraught with consequences, some of them impacting upon our very survival. We need leaders who can take us to the water hole.

Of course, younger leadership may connote creativity, or initiation of new approaches to problem solving; older leadership, a rigidity, or running in place.

In a dangerous world, however, I prefer stability. Unfortunately, the human proclivity is to select on the basis of looks, or youthfulness, rather than functioning. Implanted by evolution to augment progeny, beauty proves a formula few of us can resist. I suspect the birds and the bees know a thing or two about this.

Interestingly, the issue of candidates having changed their positions over time came up. I like Hillary’s answer: “I think all of us have changed positions.”

In short, we evolve, experience conferring wisdom. I call it “seasoning.” The elephant thing again.

Oh, shucks! Missing from the debate was crusty Joe Biden, 72.

Just imagine!

–rj

On Visiting Bloedel Reserve

If you have a garden and a library you have everthing you need.–Cicero

I’ve been doing a lot of walking in the Seattle area these past several days, while visiting my daughter and family. As a gardener back home in Kentucky, it’s nice to see what cool temperatures and ample moisture can do for making verdant landscapes and, maybe more to the point, motivating green thumbs to spend time outside, free of humidity, high temperatures and, of course, mosquitoes.

Case in point was yesterday’s day long excursion to Bainbridge Island via one of Seattle’s ubiquitous ferries that add to the area’s delights. There we took in the 150 acre Bloedel Reserve with its rich tapestry of Douglas fir forest intersected by well-kept trails, rhododendron and tea garden displays, reflecting pool and sea vistas.

As the Irish poet Yeats might say, “peace comes dropping slow” in a place like this.

I confess to being a Romantic unashamedly, though tempered sufficiently with realism to know nature’s moods. Unfailingly, gardens possess a spirituality for me, moving me out of myself into an awareness of connection with universal rhythms of genesis, maturation, and ending. I am but a leaf of the tree of life. Beauty lies here in the now, not in a speculative destiny.

…there, all days, my heart goes
Because there, first, my heart began to know
The glories of the summer and the snow,
The loveliest of harvest and of spring. _Edith Nesbit

–rj

Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts

I could voyage to the stars,
gaze into infinity,

unshackle earthly anchors,
tumble freely,

floating on space,
drift into solar ports

of dark safety,
discovering bliss–

I’d like that a lot,
save jettisoning fellows,

imperfect, but weathered
by earth’s impromptus,

its sun-drenched fissures,
yet stubborn harvest

of courage, empathy, and love,
seeded by struggle.

nourished by hope,
redemptive.

–rj

Dream Rummaging

We dream–it is good we are dreaming–
It would hurt us–were we awake.
Emily Dickinson

Freud in his London office (1939)

Do you dream a lot?

I know I do.

Incessantly.

I dream more now that I’ve gotten older, abetted by having to get up in the nights at this juncture.

Should I care about dreams?

Do they have meaning?

Can they help us?

Perhaps show us our real selves?

Make for a better world?

I know I’ve always been interested in them from earliest days.

The catalyst was probably Freud’s massive Interpretation of Dreams, which I confess to reading all the way through.

For Freud, dreams reflected repressed desire, often of libido.

The wish principle always.

But how can that be?

Don’t I often dream my fears?

With Freud, I always sensed a wanna-be novelist at work, ingeniously spinning narratives, howbeit, in the name of science–alas, to confirm an a priori hypothesis without the backup of today’s medical formulae of random testing and cohort studies. But then, how do you quantify something so ethereal as dreams?

But don’t get me wrong.

I think his Civilization and Its Discontents one of the great masterpieces, despite its surprising brevity.

His triad of Id, Ego, and Super Ego continues to spellbind me by virtual of the myriad ways I see it manifest itself in both myself and others.

Auden, as always, said it so well in his “Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939):

for one who’d lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion….

I was surprised to read in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ tell-all memoir, Moving On, published just several months before his death last week, that he was seeing a psychoanalyst for some fifty years–and, remarkably–the same one every week! Sacks kept a notebook on his nightstand, recording his dreams faithfully.

Make no mistake: Sacks is a man I came to love and respect deeply. I just wish I knew why he kept finding psychoanalysis a cornucopia of self-knowledge, apart from crediting it with his rescue from drug addiction acquired from his youthful halcyon California days a la Muscle Beach.

For me, the great influence on how I look at dreams has been Freud’s former disciple, Carl Jung. His notions of anima and animus, often projected in dreams, have proved revelatory personally and hence liberating.

He taught me that so much of living life is finding equilibrium, or the balancing of Ego and Self. Dreams offer symbols to excesses in ourselves that can be remanded.

He also introduced me to polarity as the essence of mythos truth with its tension of paradox.

If Freud looked to our past as the repository of dream content, Jung saw dreams as projections of possibility and therefore hope.

Jung was more a cultural analyst, or pseudo-anthropologist, finding universality across a wide spectrum of symbolic significance, rummaging what he collectively called archetypes.

In younger days I nearly chose becoming a licensed Jungian therapist and sometimes wonder if I committed one of the great follies in my life in turning down its seduction. Campbell, that ardent Jungian, famously urged we should follow our bliss. That maxim, aside from its latent dangers resident in reductionism, may often prove wise counsel and its rejection the source of substantial human misery.

But to sum up, I think what I’ve liked best in Jung is his acceptance of the banality of evil, Arendt’s phrasing for resident evil in Man. No liberal withering away via socio-economic exegesis, often speciously argued in my view.

Maybe my lifelong fascination with dreams stems from my youthful days drenched in fundamentalist biblical parochialism. There was Joseph, so masterful at dream interpretation that the Pharaoh took him into his confidence, ultimately saving Joseph’s kindred Hebrews.

And of course, there’s Daniel.

For the ancients, dreams gave warning and with it, admonition.

I chose to pursue a Ph. D. in English Literature. Well, you guessed it: Coleridge’s famous Kubla Khan poem, which he explained as the aftermath of an interrupted dream. But that’s just one dream poem. There are scores of other dream poems.

What I’m meaning to say is that there have been so many threads feeding into my dream fixation, not just Freud and Jung who were obviously mesmerized.

Do dreams exhibit patterns?

Do they help us to know ourselves?

I believe they do.

And that’s why I need to go back to exploring my dreams again, now that they seem to occur more frequently.

Like Sacks, I may soon be keeping a notepad on my nightstand.

–rj

Why We Mourn a Lion’s Death

In the aftermath of Cecil’s killing. you may have seen the op piece to the NYT by Goodwell Nzou, a Zimbabwe graduate student at Wake Forest University.

Supposedly, he provides contextual balance, giving us the other side of the story, at least for the average Zimbabwean. For the many of us world wide, however, his version unwittingly says more about the sorry state of conservation in Africa generally and of a latent hostility towards Americans for their hypocrisy and subliminal attack on Zimbabwe culture:

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

Further:

The American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train has turned an ordinary situation — there were 800 lions legally killed over a decade by well-heeled foreigners who shelled out serious money to prove their prowess — into what seems to my Zimbabwean eyes an absurdist circus.

We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.

Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.

And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger.

Now there’s truth to some of what Nzou says. How would you and I feel about living in a rural landscape where incursions, sometimes with deadly consequences, are happenstance: crops trampled, cattle killed, humans mauled? Additionally, Zimbabweans must face menacing poverty daily. Losing your crop or cattle is no small thing.

And we certainly need to own up to our sorry carnage of animal resources, whether the eastern mountain lion, passenger pigeon, Eastern elk, sea mink, or Carolina parakeet. We almost succeeded in delivering the same fate to both the buffalo and our national icon, the bald eagle.

But these sad deeds belong to a past redundant in stupidity and cruelty. We pillaged Native American lands, employed slave labor, denied women the vote. It’s simply wrong to impose a modern mindset on a cultural past we’ve shed long ago.

His inference that Americans care more about African wildlife than about Africans, however, is surely a stretch:

We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.

In 2012, American aid to Africa came to nearly $12 billion. Presently, the U. S. contributes aid to 47 African nations and operates 27 missions on the continent. Americans were on the front line in the recent Ebola crisis, contributing massive medical assistance that included medical personnel and army troops. Over the previous decade, we’ve contributed $50 billion under PEPAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief to test and treat africans for HIV. We’ve taken in thousands of African asylum seekers, etc.

On the other hand, when it comes to caring for their own people, it looks to me like educated Zimbabweans are voting with their feet to leave their country when given opportunity. I wonder if Nzou, who’s been in this country for five years, plans to return and help his people with the skills he acquired in America, presumably through American financial resources. Last year, American universities shelled out $4.7 million for Zimbabwean scholarships.

But returning to the threat of wildlife to rural villages, my understanding through wide reading about Africa indicates that humans, not animals, are the trespassers, with ever increasing numbers encroaching on wilderness areas.

What’s more, Nzou conveniently circumvents the way in which Cecil was killed. He didn’t stalk or stray into any village. On the contrary, he was lured from Hwange National Park, a game sanctuary, by unscrupulous big game interests. Cecil was also wearing a monitoring collar.

Cecil didn’t threaten any villager.

His death was hideous. Wounded by a high powered crossbow, the twelve year old lion bled slowly for forty hours with an embedded arrow in his side, before being tracked, shot, skinned and beheaded.

A park icon, he delighted tourists, thus offering a boost to Zimbabwe’s strapped economy. While he may not have figured in Zimbabwe’s consciousness, he was certainly loved by park visitors from abroad. No media hype here!

Yes, Nzou is right when he says “in Zimbabwe we don’t cry for lions.” That’s because they don’t give a damn about their wildlife generally, whether in Zimbabwe or the rest of Africa, save for a few exceptions. This helps explain the 800 lions killed by Westerners over the last eight years in Zimbabwe alone.

That’s a truly atrocious figure when you learn that this is out of a population of just 1,690 lions in the country to begin with (lionaid.org).

The truth is that Zimbabwe is riddled with corruption and hunting quotas often exceeded. Meanwhile, its wildlife treasure has been not only decimated, but faces extinction.

In this calumny lies the real hypocrisy and telling shame.

Across Africa, the lion population is in deep trouble just like the continent’s beleaguered elephants, experiencing a 42% decline over the last two decades, according to Scientific American.

Now I don’t want to be simplistic like Nzou, who cherry-picks his arguments, nor a teary-eyed romantic. Properly managed hunting can actually help shore-up lion numbers, if done in a context of enforced rules. But in Africa, that’s a big if and, meantime, trophy hunters largely operate with impunity and pose a serious threat to remaining wildlife.

As Cecil’s killing demonstrates, not even the national parks are off limits.

The major threat, however, comes with the ever advancing pastoral creep in African countries, reducing wildlife habitat.

Nzou would have done better to listen to President Robert Mugabe’s own observation on all of this: “Cecil the lion was yours and you failed to protect him.”

And so we in the West mourn Cecil’s death, and not without reason.

–rj

Oliver Sacks: Medicine’s Laureate

I find every patient I see, everywhere, vividly alive,
interesting and rewarding; I have never seen a patient
who didn’t teach me something new. Or stir in me new
feelings and new trains of thought.
–Oliver Sacks

I’ve just finished Oliver Sack’s recently published autobiography, On the Move: a Life. Better, I devoured it.

Medicine has always interested me, and I read a lot of its literature on an almost daily basis. Still, while I know some things about how the body works, I’m largely ignorant when it comes to how the brain functions, its capacity for life enhancement and, conversely, its potential for horrendous suffering, physical and mental, when failing to function properly, either through genetics, injury, disease, or simply aging.

In reading Sack’s book, I’ve made a dent into the immensity of what I’ve missed. After all, Sacks is a neurologist, and a gifted one at that–a doctor fond of research with an extraordinary compulsion for not only writing down his observations of more than fifty years, but in an idiom we laymen can understand.

He’s written eleven books, published in hundreds of medical journals, and with a rare propensity for uniting science and art, has regularly contributed to the likes of The New York Review of Books and my favorite, The New Yorker. The New York Times has appropriately dubbed him “the poet laureate of medicine.”

Do you remember the riveting movie, Awakenings, starring a young Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, with its moving depiction of postencephalitic patients hospitalized for some forty years, initially responding to a bold and controversial therapeutic approach that gave them a brief window of normality, only to relapse? It came from Dr. Sacks’ book of the same title.

You may also know of his popular collection of brain vagary anecdotes published as The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.

What I find most compelling in Sacks is his innate compassion for his patients, a doctor who sees them as individuals possessing a context integral to their healing and thus worth knowing, a practitioner who conveys to his patients that they matter deeply.

Up there too is his refreshing approach of reaching past the compensational paradigm of contemporary medicine to root out the origins of our morbidities and facilitate their cure.

And no corner thing, there’s his open honesty about his earlier drug addiction.

Likewise, he writes movingly of being gay and about his several loves.

At the personal level, Sacks is a natural draw for me in his love for both science and literature, lifelong zeal for motorbikes and weight lifting, his introversion, a brother with schizophrenia (which is true of my son), his outspokenness about entrenched medical prejudice with its jealousies and frequent resistance to innovation. All of these, and more, find their way into On the Move.

I was surprised to learn that Aubrey “Abba” Eden, Israeli diplomat, who always impressed me with his Cambridge accent and articulate English, was a first cousin; likewise, Al Capp, formerly loved for his Little Abner cartoons until his sexual downfall.

Sacks, towards the end of his autobiography, writes of his declining health, without mentioning his now, terminal metastatic melanoma (he’s now 82). I take this omission as his not wanting reader pity to enter into play in judging his autobiography.

The reality, of course, is that Sacks is a very brave man who has lived in death’s neighborhood for many years, both as a physician and in his personal life. Thus I wasn’t surprised in the least in his openness and acceptance of his terminal illness elsewhere. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html?_r=0

Below I’ve given you my chosen book highlights, hoping they’ll entice you to read this supremely humane work. As I write, On the Move has made the Best Seller List of the New York Times:

On being gay:

“You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.”

My mother, so open and supportive in many ways, was harsh and inflexible in this area.

Her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.

On taking tests:

I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but I can spread my wings with essays.

On his brother’s schizophrenia:

…what sort of world Michael lived in, none of us knew. And yet he was very intelligent; he read continually: had a prodigious memory, and seemed to turn to books rather than “reality” to get his knowledge of the world.

On the poet Thom Gunn:

I’m not sure what Thom saw in me at this point, but I found in him great personal warmth and geniality and warmth mixed with fierce intellectual activity. He was incapable of indirection or deceit, but his directness was always accompanied, I thought, by a sort of tenderness, too.

On Robin Williams (who, portrayed Sacks in the film version of Awakenings):

Over the next twenty-five years, Robin and I became good friends, and I grew to appreciate–no less than the brilliance of his wit and his sudden, explosive improvisations–his wide reading, the depth of his intelligence, and his humane concerns.

On medicine:

This gave me a feeling of what was wrong with American medicine, that it consisted more and more of specialists.

…unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities. One cannot abstract an illness from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.

On Awakenings:

The postencephalectics had been in a state of suspension for decades–suspension of memory, perception, and consciousness. They were coming back to life, to full consciousness, and mobility. Would they find themselves like Rip Van Winkle, anachronisms in a world that had moved on?

When I gave L-dopa to these patients, their “awakenings” were not only physical, but intellectual.

American Medical Association response to “Awakenings” experiment:

In the summer of 1970 then, in a letter to JAMA, I reported my findings, detailing the total findings of L-dopa in sixty patients whom I had maintained on it for a year. JAMA published my letter, but while I had got plenty of positive responses to my letter in The Lancet, my letter in JMLA was greeted by a strange, rather frightening silence.

The silence was broken a few months later, when the entire letters section in one JMLA was devoted to highly critical and sometimes angry responses from various colleagues.

I thought it was improper of JMLA to publish these attacks without giving me an opportunity to respond to them in the same issue.

I knew that I had something important to say, but I had no way of saying it, of being faithful to my experiences without forfeiting medical “publishibility” or acceptance among my colleagues.

On the death of his mother:

My mother’s death was the most devastating loss of my life–the loss of the deepest and perhaps, in some sense, the realest relation of my life.

On W. H. Auden:

He was …critically important to me during the writing of Awakenings, especially when he said to me, “you’re going to have to go beyond the critical…Be metaphorical, be mystical, be whatever you need.”

I wept after I received Auden’s letter [following publication of Awakenings]. Here was a great writer, not given to facile or flattering words, judging my book a “masterpiece.”

On nursing homes:

In some of these places …I saw the complete subjugation of the human to medical arrogance and technology. In some cases the neglect was willful and criminal–patients left unattended for hours or even abused physically or mentally….I worked in other nursing homes where there was no negligence but nothing beyond basic medical care. That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning–a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy–was ignored or bypassed; “care” was purely mechanical and physical.

On himself:

I am shy in ordinary social contexts; I am not able to “chat” with any ease. I have difficulty recognizing people (this is lifelong, though worse now my eyesight is impaired). I have little knowledge of and little interest in current affairs, whether political, social, or sexual. Now, additionally, I am hard of hearing, a polite term for deepening deafness. Given all this, I tend to retreat into a corner, to look invisible, to hope I am passed over.

On writing:

The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy unlike any other. It takes me to a place–irrespective of my subject–where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time.

__rj

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: