The revelation that one has a life-threatening disease creates a sentient flood of emotions that infuse the patient with fear, confusion and depression. It contains the spectrum of pain, suffering, deterioration of life-style, crippling and possible annihilation. This burden falls first on the patient and his family, and then on his doctor. The drama is a dilemma of cure or palliation wrapped about the emotional core of that person with science, drugs, technology, mysticism and hope. The ongoing process is the most dynamic encounter of being alive, and before it is finished will have used and drained a large percentage of the vulnerable emotions that identify our humanness. An overview of these involvements as they relate to the area of the head and neck shows how complex the process has become, the remoteness of its solution and the truth of its experience.
Month: July 2019
Memento mori
Simon Leys, The House of Uselessness – Collected Essays
Do you grieve at the thought that your life must come to an end? The alternative could be worse – Swift showed it convincingly in Gulliver’s Travels. Arriving in Luggnagg, Gulliver heard of the existence of “Immortals” among the local population. From time to time a child is born with a large round mark on his forehead, a sure sign that he is a “Struldbrugg”: he will never die. This phenomenon is not hereditary; it is purely accidental – and extremely rare. Gulliver is transported with wonderment: so, there are some humans that are spared the anguish normally attached to our condition. These Struldbruggs must be able to store a prodigious wealth of moral and material resources through the ages – a treasure of knowledge, experience and wisdom! In the face of Gulliver’s enthusiasm, his hosts can scarcely hide their smiles. Though the Strudbruggs are indeed immortal, they do age: after a few centuries they have lost their teeth, their hair, their memory; they can barely move; they are deaf and blind; they are hideously shrunken with age. The natural transformation of language deprives them of all means of communication with new generations; they become strangers in their own society; burdened with all the miseries of old age, they survive endlessly in a state of desolate stupor. The progress of medicine provides us today with good illustrations of Swift’s vision.
We never cease to be astonished at the passing of time… This shows clearly that time is not our natural element: would a fish ever be surprised by the wetness of water? For our true motherland is eternity; we are the mere passing guests of time. Nevertheless it is within the bonds of time that man builds the cathedral of Chartres, paints the Sistine Chapel and plays the seven-string zither – which inspired William Blake’s luminous intuition. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
The Real Point is Control: The Reception of Barbara McClintock’s Controlling Elements
Nathanael Comfort – Journal of the History of Biology 32: 133–162, 1999.
Of McClintock’s much-vaunted interest in the paranormal, her friend Evelyn Witkin said it wasn’t belief, but that “she just felt we were at a point of profound ignorance, that we were overestimating our understanding of the way things worked.” The reference was to nature, but it might have been to the nature of science.
Henry Michaux
I am afraid
– afraid that,
once dead,
I shall have in some sense
to live even longer.
(Henri Michaux, Note sur le suicide)
One travels against.
To rid oneself from the native land,
his attachments of every kind
and everything that clings to oneself,
despite oneself.
Voyages of expatriation.
To travel in a sense to purge oneself:
Not to acquire anything.
To impoverish yourself.
That is what one needs.
(Henri Michaux, Interview)
INQUIRIM VITAE 
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