hile I was negotiating a serious Mystery Illness this summer, several people suggested that I should write a blog post about my experience. I hesitated, because I struggled with finding a way to do so that didn’t come off as just an old guy talking about his ailments. Maybe I’ve found a way now. I’ve organized my story into four vignettes, each involving a trip to the emergency room.
ER VISIT 1. In the summer of 1999, Kathleen and I had just bought our current house, and hadn’t moved in yet. It was someone’s old summer fishing house, but we planned eventually to live in it full time. When Hurricane Floyd threatened the Chesapeake Bay, we were determined to defend our new castle from the elements.
The hurricane was miles offshore, but we got plenty of wind and rain. I was on attic detail, emptying the pots and pans we had collecting water from dozens of leaks in the roof, when I took a wrong step, between the rafters, and crashed into the dining room below. I was scraped, cut, bruised and contused, and Kathleen had to drive me through the storm to the local emergency room.
They washed up my cuts, x-rayed me for breaks, gave me some painkillers and told me I could go home. “You’re lucky you didn’t break any ribs!”, the ER doc smiled. “Er, doctor, aren’t that and that broken ribs?” asked Kathleen, pointing to my x-ray.
“Good catch!” he said. “They are! Yeah, you have some broken ribs there. They’ll hurt! Bye!”
I felt I had to speak up. “Er, excuse me, I’m no doctor, but shouldn’t you give me a tetanus shot before I go? I fell through a 50-year-old ceiling and got pretty cut up.” He agreed. “Great idea! Let’s do that!”
This was Calvert County in a nutshell. After years of working in DC, and living in a DC bedroom community, one of the things I loved best was the more laid-back pace of life further south. But now I was on notice that that same easy attitude could be found in the local medical care. Uh-oh!
I finally got my fill of laissez-faire doctoring with an ER visit about a decade later.
ER VISIT 2. I settled into the life of a long-distance commuter and weekend Country Gentleman. My GP was Dr A—, who personified the easygoing country doctor. This was okay with me because I was young-ish (I was still in my Second Age), and relatively invulnerable.
One afternoon I suddenly started feeling like I was developing a bad flu. My temperature shot up to a value I hadn’t seen since I was a kid (with a lot less body mass to heat up), and red blotchy spots started to appear on my feet. So I bopped over to Dr A—. He said to take some aspirin, and let’s see how you feel in the morning. After he left and the nurse was drawing blood, I noticed a note the doc had written to himself and left behind. It said simply “RMSF?“. What was he thinking?
So of course, as soon as I got home, I googled Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It turns out that the tick-borne disease does occur in Maryland, and has my exact symptoms: headache, high fever and red blotchy spots that start at the feet and slowly spread up the body. It also said that the disease is not fatal if you start treatment quickly enough, within a few hours of first symptoms. There is a definitive test for R.M.S.F., but if you wait for the results, you’ve already waited too long. Yikes!
My fever wasn’t going down, and the spots were indeed starting to move up my legs, so I rushed to the ER, and told them I was worried maybe I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. They said yes, maybe you do, and admitted me to the hospital. I ended up spending several weeks there. And even though the test ultimately came back negative for R.M.S.F., I resolved that once I got out, I would fire Dr A—’s complacent ass, and find me a doctor who could muster up a little more enthusiasm for keeping me alive.
I found one too, and he’s my GP to this day. He was my GP when, about a decade later, the Mystery Illness that I’m still dealing with now first sent me to the ER.
There is a retired women’s Facebook group that I joined that
suggested we all make a ‘peace painting’ to post on September 11. Mine is
below.
As we approach another 9-11 anniversary, it’s shocking to think that the Global War on Terror is now in its 18th year! I remember when continuous war was not the norm. When I was in college in 1970 we understood this and I believe we spent almost as much time on anti-war activities as we did on academics. That doesn’t seem to be the case these days. I was trying to understand why perpetuating a war that it not leading to any positive outcomes is seemingly impossible to stop and I came across this rationale on the antiwar.com website: “the alliance between defense contractors, retired generals, fundraising-crazy politicians, and a pliant corporate press creates a systemic and vicious cycle of warfare rationalization”. I’m looking for a chance to do some antiwar work, but given what we’re up against, I’m not sure what will work. In the meantime, I can paint a picture that includes a peace symbol…
So I already painted sunflowers once this summer, which I blogged about at https://thirdagethoughts.com/sunflower-maze/. Yesterday I finished a second sunflower picture, inspired by the same experience. This one was a little out of my comfort zone because of the small figure, which I’m not sure I’ve done before. But I am a fan of expanding the comfort zone! I thought maybe I now have sunflowers out of my system but then I read that Van Gogh painted them 15 times. He wrote in a letter that he used sunflowers to express ‘gratitude’. I think I have plenty of reason to express that!
– In which Dorn explores his interest in art, and artists.
athleen and I went to the National Gallery of Art last weekend, and saw two fantastic shows. One of them, The LIfe of Animals in Japanese Art, was (a) spectacular, and (b) over and done–Sunday was the last day. It’s going on tour to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next, I think. We just noticed the “last chance to see it!” article in the Post this weekend and rushed over. It was totally worth it!
The other great show there, that we didn’t even know about till we got there, was of works by American painter Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935). It’s running for another month or so in the East Gallery.
Seeing these two totally different shows, one expected and one totally unexpected, reminded me about what I like about being married to Kathleen. There are many things, but the one I remembered specifically that day was that I like being married to an artist.
I was a bona fide scientist when I met Kathleen, and I figured I liked art, and life with an artist, because it was completely different from science, giving me a chance to experience a whole separate universe of experience. This was a contrast, I thought, with many scientists I knew who were married to other scientists, and so missed out on some of this diversity.
But over time I decided maybe the worlds of science and art aren’t so different after all. They both are endeavors to describe how the universe works and our place in it. They both have rules for how the process is to be conducted, and have widely agreed-upon conclusions that could nevertheless be changed or discarded over time as our understanding grew. The main difference (and it’s big one), as I saw it, is that science seeks to describe the world in ways that are independent of human biases and experiences, and therefore constant no matter who was measuring or experiencing them, where art seeks to describe the world in ways that are completely dependent on human biases and experiences, with all the chaos and unpredictability that brings.
On 9/11/2001, Kathleen was at work teaching at GWU in DC (across the street from the State Department, a viable possible secondary target) when the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings were hit. During the days after that, she watched the news and analysis of the attack, and waited alone for me to get home from a Sea Grant meeting half way across the country, in a car because of the total ban on commercial flights. During the nights she painted.
She produced a still life from an apple we had in our fridge at the time, which she called “The big apple still shines”. It was a faithful rendition of the apple, but it was more–
The Big Apple, of course, is a nickname for New York, which was the meta-subject of the artwork. I don’t know how well this small picture does it justice (the original is almost two and a half feet wide), but the stem of the apple feels like it is descending into a shadowy vortex. The apple is sound, but dark and foreboding. When I first saw it, I could feel something starting to try to pull down the apple, make it less bright than it was.
This is what art does for me: it captures the human experience in ways that science cannot. The feeling of danger, both immanent and long-term, was pretty universal in America right after 9/11, and I feel Kathleen captured that, as well as a sense of resiliency, in “The big apple still shines”.
Other art doesn’t describe a galvanizing moment in history or an easily identifiable human thought or feeling, but I can still feel its power even if I know that most people might see something completely different. This happened with one of the paintings by Oliver Lee Jackson this weekend, which struck me deeply enough to want to try to write about art.
This work is untitled, so I have no idea of the context of the painting. For me, it evoked a feeling of supernaturality. The blue figure on the right and the red one on the left seemed almost human to me, but dreamlike. But the black one in the middle really captured my imagination. In form, it was very like the other two figures, but it was completely unhuman, while still seeming (to me) to be very much alive. The picture made me feel like I was experiencing human and other spirits communicating together through a ritual dance.
I don’t know if what I saw bore any relationship to what the artist was trying to show. But that’s all right, because art is intended to be filtered through human experience, which is different for me, him, and everyone else.
I can feel the validity of the work even if I can’t begin to describe it in the scientific language I am more used to. And it’s the idea that I can feel the rightness of an artwork, or an artist, even if I can’t yet understand why it’s right, that keeps me coming back for more.
– In which Dorn searches for a buried memory and a moral truth.
Reading several different books lately, I was surprised to find that they all contained a theme that tugged at the same half-memory. They brought to mind a vague recollection of a national or world leader speaking at some monumental event or great sacrifice, saying that this had been done to build a world where “the strong shall not eat the weak”.
As vague as this memory was, I have the sense that it had such a finely tuned emotional choreography that I think it must have been staged. Perhaps it came at the end of some epic movie, say about World War II, and I was remembering a voice-over by an actor reading from a speech by Churchill or FDR as the screen went dark. I remember most the use of the verb “eat”–not exploit, oppress, take advantage of, or terrorize. The word seems so straightforward, and yet so evocative, that the phrase stuck deep in my memory ever since.
The memory was brought near the surface when I read The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion by Jonathan Haidt, which I’ve mentioned before (here). To explain why he thought conservatives and liberals think the way they do, he described his search for the fundamental building blocks of social morality. One block was the principle that all people in the community are treated fairly, and even the weakest are protected from undeserved harm. He described how this principle had been around since the dawn of recorded morality.
The very first sentence of the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE) includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.” (p. 167)
Haidt described half a dozen universal building blocks of morality, and posited that different cultures make use of these in different amounts to construct their moral codes. Liberals, he said, put a very great emphasis on the principles of avoiding harm and treating all people fairly. As a card-carrying liberal, I can confirm this. I find that a powerful person or group using their power to take advantage of someone weaker can get my outrage up like almost no other situation.
I share this feeling with the famous Pirates of Penzeance, the good-hearted if ineffective protagonists of Gilbert and Sullivan’s great comic opera of the same name. At one point, the pirates try to understand why they are not more successful:
SAM. Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us. We don’t seem to make piracy pay. I’m sure I don’t know why, but we don’t. FRED. I know why, but, alas! I mustn’t tell you; it wouldn’t be right. PIRATE KING. Why not, my boy? It’s only half-past eleven, and you are one of us until the clock strikes twelve. SAM. True, and until then you are bound to protect our interests. ALL. Hear, hear! FRED. Well, then, it is my duty, as a pirate, to tell you that you are too tender-hearted. For instance, you make a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger party you invariably get thrashed. PIRATE KING. There is some truth in that. (https://gsarchive.net/pirates/pirates_lib.pdf)
I read another book recently, Nature’s Mutiny: How the little ice age of the long seventeenth century transformed the west and shaped the present, by Philipp Blom. I expected it would mainly be about that period of rapid climate change, but there was very little about the climate (other than a description of large-scale repeated crop failures). The book was mostly about the societal changes that took place in the 1500s to 1700s that transformed European culture from a largely agrarian feudal system to one of competing mercantile states driven to philosophical and technological advances and global conquest in pursuit of commercial interests. The concept of the strong eating the weak came up repeatedly in this book, and not in a good way.
In medieval agriculture Europe, even the lowliest peasants had a rightful place in society. The landowners knew that their power came with a responsibility of care over their vassals, defined by centuries of tradition. The shift to a colder climate and resulting crop failures triggered a revolution in culture, commerce and technology that largely destroyed the subsistence lifestyle of the peasants. The powerful landholders changed and adapted their own culture to immense financial gain, and unilaterally severed the bonds of care and service with the no-longer-useful peasants. They redefined their own morality to justify their own opulent wealth, and the extreme destitution that the former peasants had been cast into, as the natural order of things:
“the pomp of Buildings, Apparel, and the like, in the Nobility, Gentry, and other able persons, cannot impoverish the Kingdome; if it be done with curious and costly works upon our Materials, and by our own people,…” This blessed vision, however, was endangered by the serious character flaws exhibited by the monarch’s subjects, especially the poorer ones, who appeared sadly unable to cope with even the most modest trappings of wealth…. The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: “As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious.” Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it….(p. 133)
If I was surprised to find stories of the strong eating the weak in a book I thought was going to be about climate, I was fully expecting it in the next book I started: Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States. This famously subversive history, first published in 1980 and updated many times since, is about American history from the side of the “losers”. Howard Zinn elaborates:
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. (p. 9)
The book has so many examples of what could be considered the strong eating the weak, from the 1490s up to the 2000s, that I hesitate to try to pick one or two to describe. I’ll instead commend this fascinating book to the reader. Many of the stories can induce indignation, in a helpless, it’s-too-late-to-redress-that sort of way, but some are inspiring, even optimistic. You can read a copy of it online at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html.
Having an early memory of my moral ideal awakened in one book, and then promptly squashed by reality in two more, I wanted more than ever to find that memory of mine. The stories I read were horrifying to me not only for their calculating brutality, but also for their familiarity. From the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, I could not find a time or place where I could say, “Here is the point at which we made the turn, and started to create a world where the strong do not eat the weak.”
I very much wanted to find that memory, that quote, that event which was the turning point, so I started searching the internet. The search wasn’t completely straightforward, because I wasn’t even sure I was remembering a speech that had occurred in real life–it could have just been some screenwriter’s tear-jerky conclusion to a sentimental but fictional movie.
I was encouraged when I found a quote by the nineteenth-century Chancellor of Germany and quote-factory Otto Von Bismark: “It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong”. This was so close to my memory’s opposite that it seemed plausible that a real person might have made the counter-statement, especially to mark a wartime defeat of Germany. But maybe I had my quote a bit wrong. Was it not “eat”, but “devour”? Maybe it wasn’t “strong”, but “powerful”? I kept looking, trying different word combinations, and concentrating on Germany and the World Wars.
I finally found what might be my remembered quote somewhere else entirely, at a press conference by John Kennedy in 1961 to mark the opening of a conference of non-aligned nations in Belgrade:
We believe that the peoples represented at this conference are committed to a world society in which men have the right and the freedom to determine their own destiny, a world in which one people is not enslaved by the other, in which the powerful do not devour the weak.
I was only seven in 1961, so if I actually heard Kennedy say this, on the news or something, I’m surprised I remember it at all. But if this is the source of my memory, I’m glad it was a real promise by a real person, and not just a movie line.
But was what he said back in 1961 true? Were people and governments so committed to this ideal? If not then, is it true now, or will it ever be true? Will the meek ever inherit the earth? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but as long as they continue to be asked, and self-serving rationalizations of oppression and exploitation of others continue to be challenged, I have hope.
