Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Dying for it
It is a prevailing feature of these blogs. Ruminations on the nature of death. Obviously I have a personal interest, growing more so as the end of my candle burns a now disproportionate path and, judging by a growing readership, so do you, whatever condition your own tallow is in! Maybe it’s life imitating art, but the rather public death dance of Jade Goody is followed by the media and their audiences with an obsessive vicariousness that needs some attempt at explication. Curiously, switching TV channels, here in London, I also found myself listening to Patrick Swayze talking of his own battle to press back the perimeter of his life. His face displayed the lines of the warrior in the midst of his final battle. His cancerous cells were, to his mind, intelligent enemies, changing form like wraiths as they sought the more vulnerable channels through his body. Whereas, Goody projects an almost religious novice’s beatific radiance, her shaven head adding to the image of almost nun-like otherwordliness. Hers is an acceptance of what is to be and a grasping at the drama of living it, bathed in the sympathetic eyes of a population not given to absorption with death.
I am looking at that last sentence. Yes, I feel it is true, death being the last taboo, particularly if it is twinned with old age. Thus, it takes the virtually lived deaths of public figures to seduce audiences into the dreaded discourse on mortality that is normally evaded by wilful acts of denial. In Jade Goody’s brief tenure on a public’s imagination, her chosen behaviour at the end seems to have touched a hidden nerve of admiration and empathy among many. She had already achieved a kind of fame with her brash insensitivities and street-wise, broad-brush repartee, becoming one of the many who become TV generated icons, gained without any gift other than her will and her larger than life representation of a particular slice of humanity . How many girls now see celebrity in similar vein?
One can do no other than wish her well and wonder if a miracle might occur for her. At the same time, there is a lesson from her transient, screen life as there is with Patrick Swayze’s. Their last curtain calls bring home the realisation that we tend not to think about our own final hours until they are ticking by on the face of an actual clock beside us.
One of my management clients, a heart doctor, as it happens, replied as follows to a patient questioning him, in a piece of dialogue that could have been taken from a dark comedy:
“Who wants to be a hundred?” asked the patient.
“A ninety nine year old, usually,” replied the surgeon.
It is a prevailing feature of these blogs. Ruminations on the nature of death. Obviously I have a personal interest, growing more so as the end of my candle burns a now disproportionate path and, judging by a growing readership, so do you, whatever condition your own tallow is in! Maybe it’s life imitating art, but the rather public death dance of Jade Goody is followed by the media and their audiences with an obsessive vicariousness that needs some attempt at explication. Curiously, switching TV channels, here in London, I also found myself listening to Patrick Swayze talking of his own battle to press back the perimeter of his life. His face displayed the lines of the warrior in the midst of his final battle. His cancerous cells were, to his mind, intelligent enemies, changing form like wraiths as they sought the more vulnerable channels through his body. Whereas, Goody projects an almost religious novice’s beatific radiance, her shaven head adding to the image of almost nun-like otherwordliness. Hers is an acceptance of what is to be and a grasping at the drama of living it, bathed in the sympathetic eyes of a population not given to absorption with death.
I am looking at that last sentence. Yes, I feel it is true, death being the last taboo, particularly if it is twinned with old age. Thus, it takes the virtually lived deaths of public figures to seduce audiences into the dreaded discourse on mortality that is normally evaded by wilful acts of denial. In Jade Goody’s brief tenure on a public’s imagination, her chosen behaviour at the end seems to have touched a hidden nerve of admiration and empathy among many. She had already achieved a kind of fame with her brash insensitivities and street-wise, broad-brush repartee, becoming one of the many who become TV generated icons, gained without any gift other than her will and her larger than life representation of a particular slice of humanity . How many girls now see celebrity in similar vein?
One can do no other than wish her well and wonder if a miracle might occur for her. At the same time, there is a lesson from her transient, screen life as there is with Patrick Swayze’s. Their last curtain calls bring home the realisation that we tend not to think about our own final hours until they are ticking by on the face of an actual clock beside us.
One of my management clients, a heart doctor, as it happens, replied as follows to a patient questioning him, in a piece of dialogue that could have been taken from a dark comedy:
“Who wants to be a hundred?” asked the patient.
“A ninety nine year old, usually,” replied the surgeon.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
From Lover to Carer: John Suchet
We are fragile beings, here temporarily and ever hopeful that we will make the most of our stay in life, to the very end. Not a bitter end, but a sweet drift from everything we know. I was listening to John Suchet on BBC Radio 4 this morning in the sub zero beauty of the Pyrenees, talking about his wife Bonnie and how she was being taken from him by Alzheimers. How he has spilled into anger occasionally at her increasing ineptitude - with all the resulting guilt.
It brought back to me ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ by Oliver Sachs. You may have read it but, if not, it is a series of well written, wry case studies of people with personality problems which have resulted from brain lesions, cerebral diseases and rare conditions that impair a person’s sense of self. In it are people who live in micro worlds of short term memory so that everything is experienced and forgotten within minutes, people who have no sense of self in space (proprioception) and have consciously to keep their eyes open and tell themselves what to do with every bit of their bodies or they will collapse in a heap and people who mistake and confuse every day objects to such an extent that life becomes an impenetrable series of perplexing labyrinths. What Sachs suggests is that, despite the severity of these conditions, there is something, some essence that remains which is quintessentially human, even if the personality of the individual has fled the brain.
The false belief at the heart of the fragility, it seems to me, is the notion that we have a unity which we call ‘the self’. The reason, perhaps, is probably our need to be social creatures, consistent, coherent, relatively easy to get on with, so that we become stereotyped in our habits, attitudes, behaviours. People then think they ‘know us’ and so we present no threat. If this uniformity begins to break down and our acts become inexplicable, then we become social problems. We present a picture of ourselves to the world that is incompletely human.
What to make of it? There would hardly be an individual among us who would want to face the slow extinction of the personality, even allowing for the fact that after some point in the disintegration we wouldn’t be aware of it. It comes back to the clichéd question of ‘who are we’? If a disease can rob us of our personality then was it a mere chimera in the first place? An illusion? What held it held together for so long, anyway? All those cells in the brain and body interacting chemically and electrically, conspiring to project on the screen of the mind the wavering image that each of us are taught to think of as the self. No wonder we embrace religious convention to give us the potential comfort of a meaningful life now and a Hereafter where this wavering montage coalesces into a heavenly form. It is too painful to feel that our entities are merely the result of the capriciousness of tiny cells.
And these same cells make us empathise with John Suchet, feel for his terrible dilemma, and write reactions to it just like this.
We are fragile beings, here temporarily and ever hopeful that we will make the most of our stay in life, to the very end. Not a bitter end, but a sweet drift from everything we know. I was listening to John Suchet on BBC Radio 4 this morning in the sub zero beauty of the Pyrenees, talking about his wife Bonnie and how she was being taken from him by Alzheimers. How he has spilled into anger occasionally at her increasing ineptitude - with all the resulting guilt.
It brought back to me ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ by Oliver Sachs. You may have read it but, if not, it is a series of well written, wry case studies of people with personality problems which have resulted from brain lesions, cerebral diseases and rare conditions that impair a person’s sense of self. In it are people who live in micro worlds of short term memory so that everything is experienced and forgotten within minutes, people who have no sense of self in space (proprioception) and have consciously to keep their eyes open and tell themselves what to do with every bit of their bodies or they will collapse in a heap and people who mistake and confuse every day objects to such an extent that life becomes an impenetrable series of perplexing labyrinths. What Sachs suggests is that, despite the severity of these conditions, there is something, some essence that remains which is quintessentially human, even if the personality of the individual has fled the brain.
The false belief at the heart of the fragility, it seems to me, is the notion that we have a unity which we call ‘the self’. The reason, perhaps, is probably our need to be social creatures, consistent, coherent, relatively easy to get on with, so that we become stereotyped in our habits, attitudes, behaviours. People then think they ‘know us’ and so we present no threat. If this uniformity begins to break down and our acts become inexplicable, then we become social problems. We present a picture of ourselves to the world that is incompletely human.
What to make of it? There would hardly be an individual among us who would want to face the slow extinction of the personality, even allowing for the fact that after some point in the disintegration we wouldn’t be aware of it. It comes back to the clichéd question of ‘who are we’? If a disease can rob us of our personality then was it a mere chimera in the first place? An illusion? What held it held together for so long, anyway? All those cells in the brain and body interacting chemically and electrically, conspiring to project on the screen of the mind the wavering image that each of us are taught to think of as the self. No wonder we embrace religious convention to give us the potential comfort of a meaningful life now and a Hereafter where this wavering montage coalesces into a heavenly form. It is too painful to feel that our entities are merely the result of the capriciousness of tiny cells.
And these same cells make us empathise with John Suchet, feel for his terrible dilemma, and write reactions to it just like this.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
February in Paris ….
…doesn’t have the same sense of rhythm and cadence as the April song, nor the allure. After 34 C in Ghana, here I am suffering some minus measurement or other with a wind as sharp as a knife uncapping a soft boiled egg. L’Hotel Terrasse is well-situated on the edge of Montmatre, equidistant from the Sacre Coeur and the industrious sex shops and clubs along the Boulevard Clichy. The third element of my mental triptych is below my hotel window. It is the Montmatre Cemetery, so significant that they had to build an iron road bridge over it. It is typical of French flamboyance, a Lilliputian city of splendid grey stone tombs, clinging to the steep gradient of the hillside and descending higgledy piggledy under the aforesaid bridge. It is prime real estate. Do the living offspring have to pay rent? Some of these mausoleums are bigger than the average mobile kiosk, a tardis-sized wooden box that can house a whole family in the shanty in-fills of Ghanaian cities.
Anyway, sex, death and religion are near at hand, which is diverting, if not particularly comforting.
We ate in a bustling fish restaurant along the road last night and the surreal suddenly fell upon us like the icy air in the street. The place became invaded by Scots in tartan, a sad bagpiper who could only play Scotland the Brave and a group of ageing bohemian artists, the men with their grey hair in pigtails or swept in luxuriant waves behind their ears and down below their collars. One was wearing an electric blue full length coat and another the white equivalent. Their accompanying women were, as with feathered birds, less conspicuous.
So there was much kissing, embracing and loud talk as the MacDonald moths danced around the blue and white flames. As a floor show it wasn’t bad – probably more perky than in the lap dancing arenas in the other direction. Some, given their age, may be hoping to reside in comfort under my window, providing the ground rent is fully paid up and their ancestors have subsided enough to provide elbow room.
As for the Scots...? Their resting places will be, generally, less well advertised, given their tendency to moulder in the unknown graves of their Diaspora.
…doesn’t have the same sense of rhythm and cadence as the April song, nor the allure. After 34 C in Ghana, here I am suffering some minus measurement or other with a wind as sharp as a knife uncapping a soft boiled egg. L’Hotel Terrasse is well-situated on the edge of Montmatre, equidistant from the Sacre Coeur and the industrious sex shops and clubs along the Boulevard Clichy. The third element of my mental triptych is below my hotel window. It is the Montmatre Cemetery, so significant that they had to build an iron road bridge over it. It is typical of French flamboyance, a Lilliputian city of splendid grey stone tombs, clinging to the steep gradient of the hillside and descending higgledy piggledy under the aforesaid bridge. It is prime real estate. Do the living offspring have to pay rent? Some of these mausoleums are bigger than the average mobile kiosk, a tardis-sized wooden box that can house a whole family in the shanty in-fills of Ghanaian cities.
Anyway, sex, death and religion are near at hand, which is diverting, if not particularly comforting.
We ate in a bustling fish restaurant along the road last night and the surreal suddenly fell upon us like the icy air in the street. The place became invaded by Scots in tartan, a sad bagpiper who could only play Scotland the Brave and a group of ageing bohemian artists, the men with their grey hair in pigtails or swept in luxuriant waves behind their ears and down below their collars. One was wearing an electric blue full length coat and another the white equivalent. Their accompanying women were, as with feathered birds, less conspicuous.
So there was much kissing, embracing and loud talk as the MacDonald moths danced around the blue and white flames. As a floor show it wasn’t bad – probably more perky than in the lap dancing arenas in the other direction. Some, given their age, may be hoping to reside in comfort under my window, providing the ground rent is fully paid up and their ancestors have subsided enough to provide elbow room.
As for the Scots...? Their resting places will be, generally, less well advertised, given their tendency to moulder in the unknown graves of their Diaspora.
Labels: Paris. Religion, Sex and Death
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
The shape of gods to come
I see that sufferers from multiple sclerosis in its early stages have responded well to stem cell surgery and wondered, as usual, what road we are on as a species. Some time ago I posited the view that our capacity to develop ourselves in dramatic ways, using the full range of medical interventions, was essential if we were to get off this planet before we made it completely inhospitable. We will eventually be able to design humans for all environments and social and political demands.
Until now the majority of us have projected our need for a god on an Immortal, outside ourselves, thereby attributing to Him or Her or It the power of omniscience and omnipotence over our affairs. Thus, in Ghana, the winners of the December election, the NDC, thanked Him (in this case) for prevailing upon the electorate to vote them in. The opposition would have done the same if they had won. Sadly, the opposition have not held No-Thanks-giving services for their defeat! I didn’t realise, until I read The History of God by Karen Armstrong (a nun who leapt the convent wall), that the Jews fell for the notion of Jehova at a time when there were competing gods in their pantheon, because – Big New Idea – he rewarded when things went well and punished when they didn’t. This was a Mark 2 god, I would guess. Before this, in Mark 1 times, you needed a god for each good outcome you might desire, weather, harvest, victory over your enemy, love… and there were even gods who dished out the bad stuff. Having one god who acted judge and jury was innovative and since He dealt with all possible events, he beat off all challengers.
Now we are quickly moving to the aforementioned position of recreating and constructing ourselves in a myriad ways. Not in a god’s image, presumably, but according to our own sense of purpose. The Mark 3 God now exists inside our human consciousness. It will mean a radical rethinking of whatever underpins our moral precepts. We are at a stage of Gods R’ Us. It is distinctly at odds with the Mark 2 Ten Commandments, for example and the denunciation of (graven) images that are not a likeness of Him. On a website: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_10co.htm
it is reported that even the Anglican Church seems predisposed towards this irrevocable change in outlook, if its quote is anything to go by: "Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens."
I see that sufferers from multiple sclerosis in its early stages have responded well to stem cell surgery and wondered, as usual, what road we are on as a species. Some time ago I posited the view that our capacity to develop ourselves in dramatic ways, using the full range of medical interventions, was essential if we were to get off this planet before we made it completely inhospitable. We will eventually be able to design humans for all environments and social and political demands.
Until now the majority of us have projected our need for a god on an Immortal, outside ourselves, thereby attributing to Him or Her or It the power of omniscience and omnipotence over our affairs. Thus, in Ghana, the winners of the December election, the NDC, thanked Him (in this case) for prevailing upon the electorate to vote them in. The opposition would have done the same if they had won. Sadly, the opposition have not held No-Thanks-giving services for their defeat! I didn’t realise, until I read The History of God by Karen Armstrong (a nun who leapt the convent wall), that the Jews fell for the notion of Jehova at a time when there were competing gods in their pantheon, because – Big New Idea – he rewarded when things went well and punished when they didn’t. This was a Mark 2 god, I would guess. Before this, in Mark 1 times, you needed a god for each good outcome you might desire, weather, harvest, victory over your enemy, love… and there were even gods who dished out the bad stuff. Having one god who acted judge and jury was innovative and since He dealt with all possible events, he beat off all challengers.
Now we are quickly moving to the aforementioned position of recreating and constructing ourselves in a myriad ways. Not in a god’s image, presumably, but according to our own sense of purpose. The Mark 3 God now exists inside our human consciousness. It will mean a radical rethinking of whatever underpins our moral precepts. We are at a stage of Gods R’ Us. It is distinctly at odds with the Mark 2 Ten Commandments, for example and the denunciation of (graven) images that are not a likeness of Him. On a website: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_10co.htm
it is reported that even the Anglican Church seems predisposed towards this irrevocable change in outlook, if its quote is anything to go by: "Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens."
Labels: Gods. Stem cells. Graven images.