Musings on Freud

kerala

At the beginning of one of Freud’s most perceptive works, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discusses what he calls that “oceanic feeling,” or sense of connectedness to something larger than ourselves.  He had borrowed the phrase from his cherished friend, French writer Romain Rolland, who while accepting Freud’s rejection of anthropomorphic religion, still retained a notion of kinship with an enervating source permeating all existence.

Freud hadn’t ever experienced it and derisively equated it with notions of a deity serving as an avatar need for a surrogate father.  In doing so, I think he erred in narrowing its limits.  I’m not religious, but I’ve experienced this sense of  connectedness, and found it both transforming and moving in the mystery of that sudden moment when I am become clairvoyant, my hand on the pulse of all things.

I would use the word mystical, despite its usual religious context, to describe it; that is, an intuitive moment in which one comprehends a reality normally denied to the senses.  Perhaps epiphany gets at it as well, or immediate apprehension of the essence of an experience.  I think this is how James Joyce employed the latter term so central to his notion of artistry as defined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

It happened for me many years ago in the Indian state of Kerala, bordering on the Arabian Sea.  A place of velvet green mountains and palmed jungle laced by myriad canals, it smacked of Venice, howbeit, in tropical mode.  I had come to India to give a paper at the University of Delhi, but allotted extra time to see a bit of its wonderfully different culture.  I chose Kerala simply because I had worked with a colleague who came from there and my Lonely Planet guidebook abounded in promises.  Unwittingly, I wandered into a good choice.

One of the things I wanted to do in Kerala was visit a tiger sanctuary in the hill station countryside famed for its sprawling tea and coffee plantations. (This is where the Brits hung out to escape the heat.)  I had been staying in a humble hotel in the port city of Kolchi.  That first evening I hired an Indian lingering at the door, hoping to glean some earnings from tourists and businessmen as a guide.  Since he had a small boat, I asked if he could take me across the bay that evening so that I could take in one of India’s most exotic traditional dances, the Kathakali, in a town on the other shore.  I marvel now how brave I was back then, perhaps governed more by naïveté than any wisdom.  He waited for me after the dance as he had promised.  Otherwise, I don’t know what I’d have done.  As it was, we returned to Kolchi in total darkness–no stars, no compass.

He asked if I had any plans for the next day, so I shared my thoughts about the tiger sanctuary.  He offered to take me there, only we would need to leave before dawn because of the long journey it entailed.

I pulled myself out of bed in the wee hours accordingly and found my waiting friend outside.  Again, we would have to cross the bay before catching a bus into the hill country.  This time, he had a fifteen year old boy with him to help with the oars.  I wish I knew their names still, but no matter.  I see them before me as I write:  the one, a slender man perhaps in his early forties with five children at home; the youth, dark haired, good natured, eager to please.

As we moved across the bay, suddenly we passed long hulled fishing boats, their crews singing rhythmically as they stood, flinging their large nets into the water.  Behind us, the western sky with its tenacious blackness; eastward, the groping soft fingering pinks of dawn.

Here we were: the three of us, specks silhouetted against the early light, one of us a Christian; my guide, a Hindu; our young man, Muslim, and yet we were one, diverse in creed and culture,  linked by the humanity we shared.  In that moment, a peace descended and I was at one with the universe, transcending time and space; a seer granted entrance into that “oceanic feeling,” knowing that we are all parts of a Whole, or like individual leaves upon a tree.

How petty our quarrels, the enmity fostered by individual ego, that annuls our linkage and with it, our duty to each other as finite creatures sharing the same dreams for love and peace and joy in this brief interval of light.

I haven’t experienced any occurrence of oceanic feeling since, but it doesn’t matter, for I have sampled its existence and drunk its wisdom and its peace abides with me still.

–rj

The Joy of fellowship with Nature

monarch

One of the best hobbies I’ve ever come upon is that of being an amateur naturalist.  It needn’t be expensive and you can do it in your own yard or on a walk or, believe it or not, from a car window.  And, yes, you don’t even have to leave the house.

Here’s a little checklist to see how versed you are on the natural world around you:

1.     Identify the ten most common trees in your neighborhood.

2.     Name five wild flowers that grow in your area.

3.     Identify ten flowers or plants common to your neighborhood landscaping.

4.     Identify five migrating birds that visit your yard.

5.     Name five birds that are year long residents.

6.     Identify ten common weeds in your yard.

7.     Name the planets and identify three of them in the sky

8.     Locate the North Star.

9.     Identify five rocks in your yard or area.

10.   Identify five insects in your garden

Most of us are hard pressed to do half of these IDs.  But then, that’s the fun of it, that you can begin, anytime, anywhere, and discover kingdoms all around you—and even below your feet.

Be careful, though, for discovery can be addictive.  You may even choose to specialize, maybe on rocks, bees or flowers.

Being connected with nature can yield release from daily stress.

It can also give you awareness of the fragility of nature’s weave of flora and fauna, their delicate balance and our dependency on that balance.  One third of our crops are pollinated by bees, for example, but our sprays have caused a serious threat to their survival.

One other gift that comes from a love for nature is how it develops your powers of observation.   My favorite American poet, Emily Dickinson, had this acuteness, with nature’s minutia a dominant motif in her poetry.  Take, for example, this delighful poem.

A Bird came down the Walk –
He did not know I saw –
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –

 He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought –
He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam –
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

Naturalism can grow friends for you.  There are groups of people out there like you who would gladly welcome you.  It’s fun to be among other gentle stewards of the earth, sharing their experiences and concerns, working together to promote awareness and preservation.  I like the Nature Conservancy.  It buys up threatened habitat and maintains it.

Your new hobby can afford you numerous excellent, often moving, reads, like Rachel Carson’s land mark Silent Spring or Thoreau’s classic Walden.  Good stuff on rainy days!

Think about how much you and your family can enjoy that country hike, park excursion, or neighborhood walk, connecting with what you now know, challenged by what remains to fathom in a hobby salient with retreating horizon.

Through its repetitive rhythms, nature confers assurance that tomorrow the dawn and dusk will come again, the seas will rise, and the moon ascend; that after winter, spring will surely come and our aerial friends return.

In sum, Nature amply rewards those who fellowship with her, conferring not merely release, but blessedness in an often troubled world.

–rj

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Proceed with Caution: Acid Suppressants and Mortality Risk

Scanning electron micrograph of Clostridium di...
Scanning electron micrograph of Clostridium difficile bacteria.. Obtained from the CDC Public Health Image Library. Image credit: CDC/ Lois S. Wiggs (PHIL #6260), 2004. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been on omeprazole for eighteen months now and don’t like it one bit.  Like all drugs, it’s a trade off in risk.  Along the way to a cure or relief, side effects can work misery for you.  Omeprazole is what we call an acid blocker, designed to relieve the symptoms of too much acid in the stomach, often resulting in heartburn, a key symptom of GERD, or acid reflux.  More formally, we call them PPIs, an acronym for proton pump inhibitors.  Millions of us take them, sometimes for gastritis, esophagitis, and ulcers as well as for heartburn.  In fact, they’re the second most prescribed medication in America.  You can get omeprazone over the counter

Acid blockers are potent, altering the normal balance of acid and alkaline in your stomach, a balance critical to sound nutrition.  They mug, for example, needed vitamins and minerals like B12, vitamin D, calcium, iron and zinc.  They can make you anemic.

They may also do damage to your bones when taken for a protracted period, leading to hip fractures, though research, sometimes contradictory, hasn’t provided a clear-cut finding on this.

It’s universal, however, that PPIs can lead to a Clostridium difficile infection.  The FDA has been so concerned that it issued an alert on the danger in 2010 and of its consequent, severe diarrhea.  C. difficile is especially menacing to the elderly.

You diagnose it through a stool sample.  If confirmed, they put you on a round of antibiotics.  It isn’t, however, easy to get rid of, as it’s highly resistant.  C. difficile can survive a lack of moisture and collects on many surfaces, then spreads through hand contact.  It’s resistant enough that even alcohol containing hand sanitizers can’t kill it.  For the most part, you get it in a hospital or nursing home.

One of the perils of PPIs is that they do their job so well in reducing stomach acid that C. difficile can ravage your stomach with impunity.  But the real kicker is in the findings of a recent study:  C. difficile is especially hard on PPI users.  In fact, they’re five times more likely to die from it than those not taking PPIs, or its cousins, H2 blockers.  This study, published in the Clinical Infections Diseases journal (Oct. 5, 2011), included 485 patients with the infection at the Naval Medical Center (2004-2008).  Half of those infected were on acid suppressants, with the  majority on PPIs.  Of the 485 infected, 23 died from C. difficile.  19 of the 23 were on acid suppressants.

This has led Dr.  Edith Lederman, an infectious disease expert at the Naval Medical Center, to caution that “stomach acid is a very important defense mechanism against pathogens.  It kills them.” Although there isn’t “enough data that people should forgo use of acid suppression, clinicians and patients need to be aware of the potential consequences.”

As the saying goes, “Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.”  Doctors often prescribe medications indiscriminately, not taking in the patient’s medical history, contraindications, age, and sensitivity.  This behooves you and me to always do our own research and proceed with upmost caution.  Our lives may depend on it.

–rj

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Unlearning our anger

English: Angry woman.
English: Angry woman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe.  I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
(from William Blake, “A Poison Tree”)

 I have known people who rise each morning to nourish their anger in resolve never to forget or forgive wrongs done to themselves.

Anger makes them feel alive, that they have significance and sovereignty over their lives.  The truth is that their anger masquerades their inability to set things right again.

The sources of anger are sometimes surprising.  Often we take up arms against family members, friends, and former loves.  As such, anger is many times symptomatic of love’s betrayal in the hands of those we’ve esteemed most through hurtful words, favoritism, or simply their not taking us seriously.

Anger may lead to sabotaging ourselves in acquiring a doomed dependency on others in the very likeness of ghosts that wronged us long ago, often in a childhood deficient in love.

The chronically angry are easily spotted in the sheer volume of their impassioned complaints against lovers and friends, the workplace, and government, surrogates for targets embedded in the past.

Hate stokes the past, unlike love which invests in the future.  Oddly, time may dull our memory of just what the hurt was or who did it, and yet we know we still feel the heat of rage.

To heal ourselves we may seek out love, only to reject it when it appears, fearful of its possibility for new hurt, or our becoming dependent on it, or its ultimate loss.

Anger can assume many shapes, among them a masochism of self-loathing; or a censuring of others; or a passive aggressiveness that denies one’s anger.

Anger has a way of becoming habit, or addiction to bookkeeping life’s liabilities; a kind of cowardice in a reluctance to confront one’s grievances, attempt their solution and, if unsuccessful, assume loss and invest one’s assets in the future.  As such, it’s self-defeating.  The late Merle Shain put it eloquently in her Hearts That We Broke Long Ago:

As long as you blame someone it makes the problem not yours but theirs, and allows you to keep it without taking responsibility for anything but pointing the finger.  Which means you give them responsibility for your life and paralyze yourself in a place you don’t want to be.

The positive side of anger is that it can help us assert ourselves against injustice; but when it entices us into a snare from which we cannot free ourselves, when we live our lives in the narrow confines of resentment, then it makes a wrong turn.  Quagmired in the past, we are unable to step into the future with its promise of new beginning

–rj

Hamlet in the White House: Obama Blinks

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I had tuned in on Friday to President Obama’s Rose Garden appearance before the media, expecting an updating of data justifying a response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria.  After all, Secretary of State John Kerry had spoken forcefully to the issue, calling it an act of “thieves and murderers.”  How preternatural it seemed for someone who had so vociferously opposed the Vietnam War, throwing his own medals away, to now be advocating a military strike.  There must be something here.

What I hadn’t counted on was the residue from the UK Parliament rejection of Prime Minister David Cameron’s plea for a military option.  Cameron hadn’t originally planned on asking for Parliament’s permission, only to yield to the reality of low public support in the polls and vociferous objection among even his Labor Party cohorts. He simply wanted to protect his hide, an idea that’s proven to be contagious.

Casting a dark specter over everything was doubtless the protracted war in Iraq, now largely deemed the folly of unreliable intelligence and an understandable passion for taking action following the terrorism of September 11, 2001.  While it’s often been remarked how history repeats itself, it’s not a given that we must repeat its madness.

The psychology in Obama’s turnaround in imitating Cameron fascinates me.  Sometimes we say too much and get ourselves into tight places, with anticipated fall out  locking us into responses our better judgment, tempered by time and reason, tells us are wrong.  From this angle Progressives seem justified in calling Obama’s new mindset courageous.

I see it differently, however, as a failure in will, abetted by a compliant media and a war- weary public.  We have a president who has difficulty making decisions.  For six months he knew the location of Osama bin Laden before taking action.  We’re still awaiting the Keystone decision.  Just the day before, we had heard a horrific litany of the deaths of 1400 civilians, more than 400 of them children, by the Assad regime’s use of chemical agents on its own people.  British, French and Israeli intelligence also corroborate the culpability of the Assad government.

Oddly, the President in his Rose Garden appearance told us he had determined to strike Syria, yet wanted to put it up to the Congress.  I think it unlikely that Congress will approve a strike, perhaps the Senate, but not the Republican House with its contingent of Tea Party isolationists.  This may even play into Obama’s hands, giving him an opportunity to extricate himself, or to climb down the ladder as it were.

But he isn’t going to do so without impunity or a severe loss in credibility.  Even more serious, he’s placed our nation in danger, emboldening aggression abroad by rogue governments.  No one’s talked about it, but the present imbroglio is really about Iran.  His paralysis can only encourage Iran’s efforts to achieve a nuclear arsenal.  If I were the Israelis, I would be deeply troubled.  It’s conceivable that Israel may now see itself as needing to launch a preemptive strike on its own, given the unreliability of the U. S.

Given Obama’s hesitancy towards Syria, what’s the script for Iran?  Do you tip your hand, asking Congress for its permission for a preemptive strike?  Or is it you do nothing, accepting the reality of a nuclear Iran with whom we must learn to live with as we do with North Korea?  Meanwhile, a hostile Iran that sponsors terrorism develops a delivery system potentially targeting Tel Aviv and, ultimately, America.  Let’s face it, as a corollary of the President’s pattern, the odds are that Iran gets its Bomb, despite our stringent embargo.

In the present circumstances, Obama has set a dangerous precedent.  Presidents must be free to act in dealing with contingencies that may arise, and this is what the War Powers Act allows with its 90 day allowance before Congressional oversight kicks-in.  A limited strike on Syria does not violate the Constitution, contrary to what some liberals say.

Mr. Obama is known to admire Lincoln.  But maybe he’s forgotten his history.  Lincoln didn’t ask Congress for permission to war against the eleven successionist states.  In fact, the legality of succession wasn’t allowed to be presented before the Supreme Court.  Lincoln rightly knew he couldn’t win in either the Congress or before the Supreme Court.  My point is, strong presidents lead.

A very good argument can be made that any response now planned would be ineffectual and inflammatory anyway, since the strike is so limited and considerable time has elapsed for Assad to move his military assets into the mountains and his troops into   exempted civilian areas such as schools.  Even more important, the Syrian civil war has now largely turned sectarian, with Sunnis vs Shiites, compounded with the entrance of Hezbollah and al Qaeda insurgents, both of whom target Christians, who comprise 10% of the population.

But this gets us back to square one and our ineffectual president.  Obama created this morass with his dilly-dallying over the last two years, giving extremists time to move in.   His red lines mean nothing, as seen in Assad’s emboldened aggression.  While Syrian dissidents lamented the absence of international outcry following the chemical attack of August 21, Obama was silent for 72 hours.  Later,  he played his usual rhetorical slight of hand, stating the situation defied easy answers.

Mr. President, if we’re reduced to this scenario, then you are its creator, having squandered your options and not acted on your own warnings.  Awful as these deaths from chemical weapons are, they’re minuscule in a sea of 100,000 deaths, most of which could have been prevented had you armed the rebels from the outset.  By the UN’s own estimates, we now have 2 million refugees, 1 million of them children.

Playing Hamlet–to act or not to act–is unbefitting a commander-in-chief and poses grave dangers for America.  As Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief of Al Arabiya news channel comments, “He seems unable to make difficult decisions. This will embolden Assad and the opposition jihadis and demoralize the secular, moderate Syrian opposition. Obama is gambling with his reputation at home and abroad.”

With one utterance, Obama has inaugurated a template for disaster, diminishing the powers of the Presidency, making a mockery of American credibility, abandoning Syria’s freedom-fighters, and putting  America and Israel under increased threat from a belligerent Iran ultimately armed with nuclear weaponry.

–rj

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Meditation Goes Mainstream: Western Medicine says Yes

meditation

It’s just me in the sunroom before breakfast, sprawled out on my yoga mat, doing meditation for 15 or 20 minutes.  A series of deep breaths and letting my limbs go slack, a visualizing of a good moment.  The hard part is getting the habit, but having a time and place helps a lot..

The best motivator, however, is how relaxed it makes me feel, and coming from, me, I don’t say that lightly.  As a child raised in an alcohol ravaged home, security wasn’t a given and each day meant finding my place under the sun.  I used to think I was simply a chronic worrier and worried even about that.  Children of alcoholics often try to control their environment to maintain stability.  They find it difficult to tolerate loss or uncertainty.  They like their parameters tightly drawn.

You can take benzies like Valium or Xanax for anxiety and while they’ll work in the short run, they treat symptoms only and, worse, are often addictive.  As for anti-depressants, they may work for some, but then how intact do they leave the user?  I prefer taking a different route, sovereign over my psyche rather than pharmaceutically lobotomized.  I suspect they’re overly prescribed anyway.  And then there are the side-effects that sometimes make matters worse.

Anxiety is triggered by our perceiving danger.  This needn’t be limited to a threat to our safety, but losing our financial way through job loss, investments turned bad, the sudden onset of illness.  Sometimes it’s the loss of a friend or loved one that pulls the trigger.  The common denominator, no matter the source, rests within the mind, or the way we think about things.  Nothing can threaten us unless we give it permission.  We are what we think about.  Anxiety is future saturated, or our thinking fearfully about what may happen to us; depression is present tense.  We think the worst has already happened.

Meditation quiets our panic, producing a mindfulness that can sort out, clarify and more cogently respond to what troubles us.  When we’re stressed fear takes ascendancy, preempting alternative, positive ways of responding to crisis.

Meditation has now increasingly become a part of the medicinal arsenal that had traditionally been limited to pharmaceuticals and surgery in Western medicine.  We know that meditation has restorative benefits for the body when we incorporate the mind into our notion of the corporeal.   In fact, we can measure its physiological results in lowered metabolism, heart and breathing rates and replicate those results.  For a fascinating exploration and summary of the empirical data, pick-up The Relaxation Response by renowned Harvard cardiologist, Herbert Benson.

I happen to be a subscriber to Mind, Mood & Memory, a newsletter put out by one of the world’s internationally acclaimed medical facilities, Massachusetts General Hospital.  In its most recent issue (September 2013), Ann Webster, PhD., Director of MGH’s Program for Successful Aging at Benson-Henry Institute, informs us that “among these strategies for successful aging, perhaps the most effective is engaging in practices such as meditation, yoga, deep breathing, or repetitive prayer that help elicit the relaxation response.  Regular experience of the RR helps counteract stress and other factors linked with higher risk for illness and aging, and causes enormously positive physical, emotional, and cognitive changes.”

This doesn’t mean a trained counselor becomes superfluous.  A good psychologist can target needs and offer ameliorative insights to enhance reduction of stress and promote physical and mental health.  The best medicine is always integrative.

And what do I feel like when I open my eyes and put my mat away?  Hard to put into words, but something similar to the snowflake calm that descends when I play Enya and  find my bullying ghosts have fled..

–rj

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Intolerance: Medicine’s Nemesis

Medical Statue at Semmelweiss Medical Museum
Medical Statue at Semmelweiss Medical Museum (Photo credit: Curious Expeditions)

I had grown up thinking medicine was free of the prejudices, if not sheer ignorance, rampant in the everyday world where resistance to anything new seems a given.  Let’s face it:  we humans don’t like having the security of our assumptions challenged.  The truth is that the history of medicine shows the same proclivity for stubbornness or subordination to the weight of custom as elsewhere.

In his riveting study, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, physician Sherwin Nulan recounts the story of Ignac Semmelweiss, a young Viennese physician in the 1840s, who observed that women delivering their babies in hospitals died of puerperal, or bed fever, considerably more frequently than those delivering at home.  He did his own research to find out why, ultimately discovering a link between medical student routine and maternal deaths.

Each day,  students and profs would examine cadavers in between visiting patients. Although they didn’t have any notion of germs back then, Semmelweiss ultimately concluded that “invisible cadaver particles” on the hands of students and attending physicians was the source.  In short, he had discovered the role of infection in promoting illness.  

Instituting a protocol of his students’ washing their hands in a chlorine solution, he saw a dramatic drop-off in mortality.  His colleagues, however weren’t amused by this young upstart, whose research implicated them in so many deaths.  Consequently, Semmelweiss didn’t publish his research for fifteen years.

Dr. Joseph Lister
Dr. Joseph Lister

By the 1860s,  Louis Pasteur’s germ theory had entered into medicine, though it initially wasn’t widely accepted.  In Britain, Dr. Joseph Lister decided to apply the notion to post surgical infections, which were nearly always fatal.  Discovering that a neighbor city had poured carbolic acid down its drains to eliminate a potent sewer stench, he concluded that the acid had killed microorganisms similar to those Pasteur had identified.  Applying this concept to surgery, he employed wound dressings saturated in carbolic acid.  Later, he added spraying the entire surgical area with the solution.  Ultimately, he expanded the solution to washing his hands and instruments.  Lister published his successful results in 1867, inaugurating the formal beginnings of antisepsis.  It would be another generation, however, before Lister’s innovations became universal.

It was only in the 1880s that doctors had finally moved beyond a solely antiseptic solution to changing their clothes and boiling their instruments, sutures, towels, and sponges and adopting a ritual of vigorous hand washing.  In 1893,  Dr. William Halsted  became the first surgeon to wear a surgical mask.  In the 1920s, white garments and linens became universal, though the former now seems to be giving way to darker shades again.

Infection still remains a serious threat and the shorter your hospital stay, the better your odds.  Each year, nearly 2 million patients experience infection and 100,000 die.

Even with today’s antibiotics, infection looms as a serious menace, complicated by the increasing rise of resistant, highly contagious bacteria strains.

The bottom line in medicine is that what we don’t know often governs more than what we know.   After several thousand years, we overwhelmingly treat symptoms, not causes.  Now and then, however, a Semmelweiss or Lister appears like some new Columbus, charting a vastly different terrain leading to a New World.  Thus, it behooves medicine to be open to self-scrutiny, forfeit vested authority, tradition, and prejudice.  Only in this way can we find the breakthroughs that advance our safety, promote our healing, and perhaps offer sovereignty over some of our most chronic diseases like cancer.

–rj

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Chemical Attack in Syria: Obama Looks the Other Way

SyriaThe videos from Syria are horrific and unprecedented, with row upon row of corpses, many of them children, in what now seems to indicate some kind of chemical agent, perhaps nerve gas, judging by the symptoms, also captured on camera, of the last gasps and spasms of the dying.  Presumably the attack was launched under the auspices of the Assad regime, since it’s well known they possess a huge stockpile of chemical weapons.  It maintains, however, that rebels are simply staging a scenario for Western consumption to provoke intervention.

But this isn’t the way Britain and France see it, the latter calling for possible force if there is verification.  Even, and this is a shocker, Vladimir Putin has called on the Syrian government to allow UN inspectors, already in the country and just twenty minutes away, to visit the scene, though Russia assumes the whole thing is a rebel ruse.  I don’t think for a minute Assad will allow such a thing, though logic would seem to compel it, if what’s happened is simply a rebel scheme.

It’s conceivable Hezbollah or non-government loyalists could have launched an attack like this using make-shift rockets, which they’ve done before, employing tear gas or industrial toxins fired into a confined space.  Bad as the videos are, we don’t see defecation, vomiting and tremors that usually go along with chemical agents.

Because we can’t pin down, at least for now, what precisely happened, we need to refrain from a rush to judgment.  In America we’ve seen enough of war, of thousands of our children killed and maimed, our treasury depleted, and those we’ve fought to liberate us not liking us one bit more.  We got rid of Saddam, Iran’s nemesis, and stoked  its friendship with largely Shiite Iraq.

If this turns out to have been a genuine chemical attack, then such barbarism should meet with a strong response.  It doesn’t require boots on the ground.  No one wants that.  Nor does it mean a no fly zone.   Cruise missiles fired off shore can take out the missile depots.  Give the beleaguered rebels the weaponry they need so that the Assad regime pays a lingering price and this never occurs again.  Include anti-tank missiles as well.

The truth is that the Obama administration has dilly-dallied too long, allowing extremist forces to enter the fray, al Quaeda fighting with the rebels; Hezbollah, for Assad.  Now the war’s momentum, taking a very dangerous turn, increasingly resembles the imbroglio of Sunni vs Shiite, or what we see in Iraq, spinning out of control.

Like an ugly cancer, it threatens to metastasize, drawing in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, where 42 died in a Tripoli bomb blast today.  Iran, meanwhile has been sending in fighters.

The toll on civilians is immense:  100,000 dead;  two million refugees, one million of them children divested of a future.

Meanwhile, our government is clearly confused, self-contradictory, and plainly ineffectual.

Obama told us a year ago, August 20, 2012, that chemical weapons would be a “red line” and “a game-changer.”  Shortly after, he concluded that they had been used and pledged arms.  No weapons have arrived.  Nothing changed.

If we discover that chemical weapons were indeed deployed on this occasion, and substantially, will it make any difference this time?  Don’t bet on it.  Politicians often say things they don’t really mean, and that’s why we’re wise not to believe them when they do.

Ironic for a nation that owes its own liberation from the intervention of the French two centuries ago.

–rj

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An American Treasure: Reflections on Donald Hall

donald-hall-baseball
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about poet Donald Hall, now in his 84th year, and an American treasure. I came upon him early as a teaching assistant at the University of North Carolina at  Chapel Hill, where we used his Writing Well as our principal text in our composition courses.   Written in Hall’s typical plain-language, no nonsense style, I learned a lot from it at this early stage of my teaching career.

The other day I happened to tap into Daniel Giola’s blog with its invaluable essays he’s written on a good number of American poets, including Hall, and I liked what I read.  Giola is himself a talented poet, who formerly was head of the National Endowment for the Arts and currently teaches at Stanford.

Truth is, I hadn’t read Hall, the poet, who served as our Poet Laureate in 2006.  Until I read Giola, I was also unaware of Hall’s prowess in writing memoirs.  I downloaded his Life Work this morning from Amazon and am eager to get into it, seeing the critical accolades its drawn, which doesn’t surprise me.  Educated at Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford, he’s written more than fifty books of poetry, prose and children’s stories;  been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships; the National book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and twice nominated for the nation’s foremost literary honor, the National Book Award.  I’m embarrassed it’s taken me so long to catch-up.

—

I started this draft yesterday and am now a good way into Life Work, which he had initially published in 1993, or just after surgery for colon cancer (originally diagnosed in 1989) that had now metastasized to his liver, giving him a dismal prognosis of 1 in 3 odds he’d be around another year.  Ironically,  he beat the odds, only to lose his much beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, a former student and poet he had married twenty years earlier while teaching at the University of Michigan.  She had seemed so healthy, only to suddenly be diagnosed with leukemia and passing in 1995.  As Hall candidly remarks,  “The worst day is the day when grief or sorrow overcome you.  Your wife has cancer; you have cancer.”

It would take some six years for Hall to right himself again.  Jane’s presence permeated the house.  Giving her clothes away turned into an ordeal:

He emptied the dead woman’s dresser and closets,
stacking rings and bracelets, pendants and necklaces.
He bundled sweaters and jeans, brassieres and blouses, 
scarves
and nightgowns and suits and summer dresses
and mailed them to Rosie’s Place for indigent women.
For decades a man and a woman living together
learned each other for pleasure, giving and taking,
studying every other day predictable ecstasy
secure without secrecy or advenmre, without romance,
without anxiety or jealousy, without content 
….
(from “Kill the Day”)

Each new day reopened the wounds of loss–of lovers in communication, always together, mutual artists sharing creative ecstasy.  The gnawing loneliness. The unfairness of it all.  She was just 47.

All of this is part of the undertone of sadness to this work I sometimes think intrinsic to the acute sensibility common to artistry and especially poets.  As Hall reminds us, poetry is fundamentally about time and mortality.  This has been my own observation across the years in reading, teaching and occasionally writing poetry.  We may think of music as the most affective of the arts, but I have found poetry more so, sometimes reminding me of the way a drug works, bringing potential healing, but with it, too, a risk for side effects and a wish one hadn’t dosed.  But then I think of the greater risk of sensory, if not spiritual poverty, in refusing to let its potential for insight, empathy, and catharsis to work its grace and make me whole.  Poetry is latent with a sacramentalism that wraps around the soul.

One of the big draws of Life Work lies in its repertoire of Hall’s daily ritual that has made his prodigious artistry possible.  Mornings, he rises at 5; better, leaps out of bed, eager to resume yesterday’s unfinished tasks following a cream cheese bagel washed down by coffee.  A consummate craftsman, he revises poems sometimes a hundred times and even more.  Mornings are filled with creation.  Afternoons, with well-deserved indulgence.

I like the human side to Hall.  He tells us he’s installed satellite TV.  He loves his Red Sox and Celtics, never missing a game.  With New England in my own blood, I relish these teams, too, though I’ve lived away from the place for many years.  Reading a work like this alleviates my guilt in often violating the Puritan ethic of duty in my sometimes preferring  play over work.

You won’t find this in Life Work, but in a recent NPR Fresh Air interview (February 8, 2012), Hall tells us he’s given up on writing poetry, since the ideas, words and images don’t spring up with their former ease.  He continues to write, however, focusing on prose:  “As long as I can do my work and continue to enjoy myself, I feel fulfilled.  My body causes me trouble when I cross the room, but when I am writing, I am in my
heaven–my old heaven.”

–rj

Looking, Thinking and Feeling Young

Nicoya Peninsula seen from space (false color)
Nicoya Peninsula seen from space (false color) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my last post, “We are all Ponce de Leon” (August 13), I noted the robust euphoria increasingly prevalent in medical circles that perhaps in the next 25 years, given science’s increasing sophistication in manipulating the DNA’s genetic formulae, many of humanity’s worst diseases like cancer and arteriosclerosis will be harnessed, if not eliminated.  One of its principal advocates is Dr, David Augus, whose best selling book, auspiciously titled, The End of Illness, aggressively pursues this notion. In Hamlet mode, it’s something to be doubtfully wished, but unfortunately untrue.  Served up in a specious brew, it trivializes the idiosyncratic nature of disease, its pernicious fall out in anguish and grief; above all, the individuality of each victim.

We live continuously in a biological world fraught like life at large with unknowns, randomness and the onset of new specters replacing those we’ve vanquished.  While the incidence rates for heart attack and stroke have indeed lessened, high blood pressure and diabetes are way up and cancer abounds (Merck Institute of Aging and Health).  If longevity has increased, it’s primarily due to the drop in child mortality and not medical breakthroughs.

Children still get cancer, a disease that we usually associate with aging,  along with other afflictions.  I lost two siblings, mere babes, from heart disease.  I lost an older brother, doomed quickly by a brain tumor within a few months of his initial symptoms.  He was 47.  I love baseball.  My favorite player, Lou Gehrig, succumbed to ALS at 41.  I noted that Augus contradicts his own optimism in forecasting–“inevitable” is the word he uses–a pandemic that like the Spanish flu of 1918, will kill millions.

It’s good to dream, so long as it’s tempered by reality.  While we’ve made progress in some areas of medicine, our best bet is probably a preventative approach, especially through lifestyle changes such as giving up smoking, monitoring our calorie intake, and exercising more.  Ironically, though we live in an information age that staggers with its seeming infinitude, we still know relatively little as to the etiology of most of our diseases, treating symptoms, not causes.

All of us want to look, think, and feel young–the Ponce de Leon quest again–but let’s not promulgate nonsense.  Aging is a fact we must live with, but it doesn’t have to mean a cane, incontinence, dementia, cancer, heart disease or stroke.  The most recent research indicates that 70% of the ills of aging lies within our control.  We can learn to live with it and live well and for a very long time.

I have some pointers, though not a panacea, that can help us in preventing or delaying many of our ills.  They’re confirmed by recent studies of demographic specialists on longevity and you can find a succinct probing, in layman’s terminology, in Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones, 2nd ed., an analysis of five global hotspots for centenarians, places where men and women still toil in the fields though in their eighties and even nineties and cancer, heart disease and diabetes are rare.

The locales, by the way, are Sardinia, Okinawa, Loma Linda, CA (large Seventh Day Adventist population), the isle of Ikaria in Greece, and Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula.  I should add that these biblical paradises are quickly succumbing to outsiders who bring fast foods and sedentary living with them, eroding aeons of life-enhancing routine and a quality of existence salient in simplicity and minimal stress.

Diet:  In all of these Blue Zones, little meat was consumed, usually once a week or just on a festival occasion due to economics rather than choice.  With Seventh Day Adventists, it was a conscious choice to exclude meat.  Beans, whole grains, garden vegetables, nuts and fruit characterize the several cuisines, not processed or refined food products.  I’ve always found it a good axiom:  “If it’s white, don’t take a bite.”  If giving-up meat isn’t a palatable option for you, then eat less of it and when you do, lean portions only, avoiding red meats in particular.  Or try cutting out meat altogether two days a week.  One other thing, but central: be careful about not only what you eat, but how much.  Centenarians are far and away thin people.

Movement:  People who work physically demanding jobs tend to live longer.  New studies show that sitting more than two hours regularly can shorten life expectancy.  For those of us whose lives are largely sedentary, it’s important to engage in aerobic exercise 30-minutes, 5 times a week, to lower bad LDL and raise HDL, the good kind.  But even brisk walking (3 miles in 45 minutes) counts.  Along with aerobic exercise, it’s wise to add weights to your regimen to protect and strengthen your muscles.  Walk more, sit less.  If space allows, do a garden.  When traveling, use the motel’s exercise room or bring along resistance bands.

Connection: Those who have friends and a support network such as religion can provide are consistently happier people living longer lives.  Pursue something you can commit yourself to.  Find a congregation, book club or lodge; discover a cause; volunteer.  Hang out with positive friends.  Find something that makes you want to jump out of bed each morning.

Serenity:  Those living long lives seem to have found mastery over stress.  It isn’t that they don’t suffer stress, but that they’re able to transcend it, living lives of daily, defined routine, with simplicity a cornerstone.  We help ourselves by reducing overload and unshackling ourselves from the wrenching worry synonymous with materialism, competition, and hurry.  Yoga, Tai Chi and meditation–traditional staples of the East–reduce tension and lower blood pressure, that silent source of many of our diseases.  Tranquil music muffles our pace; a good book provides timeout; a walk along a bubbling  brook restores.  Study quietness and discover peace and with it, longer life.

Family:   Most centenarians center their lives around their families, marrying young and having children.  There is a ritual of togetherness and mutual obligation that informs their lives.  The elderly usually live with their children and thus fare better in their physical and mental capabilities.  America, however, has been trending in the opposite direction, with active families finding quality time together difficult.  Shared activities and  a daily meal spent together are increasingly atypical now.  Mobility often spaces family members widely apart.  On the other hand, those living long, happy productive lives have made family a priority, live in proximity, and exhibit a we-ness in their interaction.

While there aren’t any guarantees, given life’s caprice, individuals mirroring these trademarks tend to fare much better in living long and healthy and productive lives.

–rj

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