343. The Violet Hour plus

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1989

Making a bank deposit at an ATM just now I was reminded, to my surprise, that I’ve been banking with Wells Fargo for thirty years. Of all the notable things I recall about 1989, switching banks for the last time wasn’t one. While I don’t think as highly of Wells Fargo as I did even eleven years ago -- when they came out of that last banking crisis looking better than most everyone else -- I’ve stayed with them for the same reason I switched -- it’s easier than dealing with smaller banks that are always getting swallowed up or closing down. Also, they are one of the few local banks left.

Of course I’ve had an account with PG&E even longer, forty-three years, and I don’t trust them at all. It’s nice to be a monopoly. I buy my electricity from the city but still have to pay PG&E just as much money to deliver that electricity. 

MCU

I’ve been thinking again about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how science and magic mix. Harry Potter and Thor are special by birth, the notion of nobility that is surprisingly popular in popular culture. But Marvel characters tend to be average people that something unusual has given special powers to. Superman, like Thor, was born to his power. Iron Man and Batman have power largely due to wealth (Green Arrow, too), but anyone can be bitten by a radioactive spider or get zapped by some strange energy force (Captain Marvel or the Flash or the Hulk). I would actually rather not read how these powers are supposed to work as the pseudo-science would just be painful. As much as I enjoyed the Captain Marvel film, the whole idea of her power is ridiculous. As with the TV show Eureka, I just pretend it’s supposed to be about magic. Magic isn’t supposed to make sense.

The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe 

The Dial Press - 2016

The Prologue was excellent. I don’t know Roiphe but I like the way she writes.

Susan Sontag - 

This is really excellent. And necessary. Illness As Metaphor needs to confront this final chapter in Sontag’s life and that’s what Roiphe is doing. I have to confess that I keep thinking of Trump when she talks about Sontag’s self-myth. I completely sympathize with David, but when so many people are actively engaged in pretending that a fantasy is reality, you know something is really wrong. 

On page 51 now and I’m wondering if Sontag will ever admit that she was wrong and that death can be a friend. That is what Sontag’s “courage” and “love of life” has come down to, an almost pathetic fear of death. Not a good look for a philosophy student.

I missed noting the page, but this is after they return to NYC from Seattle. The word that is missing here is Penelope Liveley’s favorite word, solipsism. I’m not sure Sontag truly believes in a reality outside herself. I’ve always thought of solipsism as a problem for Epistemology but if you are a true solipsist, it must become a metaphysical concern. Without you there is nothing.

This is why you have to read a story to the end. I mean the story of a life. The story of the survivor, of the person who always beats death can, ultimately, have only one ending. Just as Napoleon’s story of endless war could have only one ending. I’m tempted to say that she got the death she deserved, but that sounds cruel. She got the death that was true to her nature. She could never come to terms with death. She saw death as the enemy. And that’s fine, better than Foucault, for example, but in the end she paid for this with more suffering than was necessary. Though, of course, suffering is a kind of living. 

Occurs to me that eschatology must have been for Sontag what gynecology is for me, something I think doesn’t apply. Also, Sontag’s “battle” with bone marrow transplant and what followed took about five months. I don’t think I would try this even if I was guaranteed 10 good years.


Freud - 

p80 I may be with Freud here. People forget that morphine doesn’t suit everyone. Just as Sontag would cling to life (and Annie would photograph anything) I don’t see the point of living if you are not able to think clearly. Also, I’ve not had to deal with much pain. My opinion is subject to revision.

Wow! The bit about Lun not coming near him. Now here’s an aspect of my belief in Dog that I hadn’t anticipated. Dogs do have the wisdom to go off and peacefully die. This also suggests the idea (from Pullman) that our death is always with us and the dog can see it. Or probably smell it. This book is so exceeding my expectations.

P85 Lou Andreas-Salomé, I don’t know why I’m surprised to find her here. Roiphe seems to be hostile to Freud’s Stoic attitude toward death.

P89 Okay, now I see what she’s doing. And I completely agree. It is one thing to say that we have nothing to fear from death as when it arrives, we shall be gone. It is another to seriously face the end of your self. (And this would be true even if your body would continue to live.)

(Princess) Marie Bonaparte is yet another interesting women in this story.

P90 “In taking on a personal physician, Freud entered into a personal relation with death. He was beginning what could almost be called a negotiation. He asked Schur to promise that when the time came he would help him die, which Schur did. He also asked Schur to promise to be completely honest, which he did as well.” Quite a deal.

P91 “...Freud took up what he called ‘the sweet habit of smoking’ when he was twenty-four... he... was soon smoking twenty cigars a day...” I am reminded of Hans Castorp. 

“... he wrote, ‘For six days now I have not smoked a single cigar, and it cannot be denied that I owe my well-being to this renunciation. But it is sad.’ ” 

P92 “...Life without cigars was unbearable, a misery. From very early on he linked smoking to his imaginative work, to his creative side. It seemed to him impossible to work, to concentrate, to envision without a cigar, almost, to live. Something vital, crucial, was tangled up with cigars, something akin to identity.”

P93 Schur: “ ‘I asked myself repeatedly whether I was entitled, or even obliged, to insist more strongly on the enforcement of abstinence... I could not, and in retrospect I realize that I should not regret this fact. It’s questionable in any event whether such an attempt would have been successful.’ ” I am reminded here that my own father could not stop smoking until getting his rib cage cracked open threw off his golf swing... and by then it was too late.

She covers how he saw his passionate smoking as being opposed to his otherwise “petit bourgeois correctness.” His identity as an intellectual. 

P94 “His smoking... is crucial to his biography, to understanding his life and times. Freud is interested in this other story, this story written out in smoke. He is not careful. He is not correct. He is not the punctual, controlled, financially responsible, bourgeois Freud. ‘The fellow is actually somewhat more complicated.’ There is the wildness of his passion for cigars: it is the fire, the fuel, the fruitfulness. Elsewhere he calls it his ‘sin,’ which is an interesting word choice for a man of science, a man so naturally disinclined toward religious frameworks. The word ‘sin” endows the habit with a glamour, a richness it might not otherwise have; it is his taboo, his vice, his irrationality, and as such it is crucial to him, it is animating.”

P95 ...”Smoking, he suggests, is a substitute for the sexual; it is the expression of the libido.”

P97 “In... ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’ which came out in 1920, Freud raised the possibility of a silent drive toward death, a secret desire for annihilation animating each of us. He wrote a line many analysts would resist, finding it too extreme, too sweeping, too unsettling: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ And in this strange, speculative work, he began to address the irrational draw toward death, the desire for it, the mysterious attraction of undoing oneself.” 

I need to refer here to other people interested in this at the time from my Foucault work. And of course Hans Castorp comes to mind again. Here is a quote from The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller, he is writing about Foucault’s time in California exploring “limit experiences” in the Gay bath houses of SF and knowingly exposing himself to AIDS.

p 34

Foucault’s work was drawing to an end; and his life... was ending in an ambiguous gesture, as if he had finally grasped the full significance, too late, of the fatal temptation he had first identified nearly ten years earlier, long before AIDS had become a tangible threat: “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.”

This ties in so well with what Freud wrote above about smoking and the libido. Neither man could resist their personal temptation.

And Freud’s self-image that required smoking is in a way similar to Sontag’s survivor self-image.


While talking about dreams,

P78 ...”In the depth of his dream,” writes Foucault, “what man encounters is his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfillment of his very existence.”

Foucault got some of his ideas about death from Georges Bataille and the Surrealists. But I’m not ready to work out if they were getting ideas from Freud or the other way round. Or if it was a Jungian thing and the ideas were just floating in the collective unconscious at the time.

P100 “He would write later, ‘Only the collaboration and the conflict between both primal drives, Eros and death drive, explain the colorful variety of life’s phenomena, never one of them alone.’ ” Again I can’t help thinking of Foucault.

“...He wrote... ‘What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’ ”

P102 Bonaparte makes up the following response to her from Freud, “Fr: Why sad? That’s what life is. It is precisely the eternal transitoriness which makes life so beautiful.’ She was making this dialogue up... but he had often expressed this view -- in a short essay on Goethe, in his letters; it was a recurring theme in their conversation.”

P103 ...”So the work he is doing now is the work of dying: He is doctor and patient, subject and writer, analysand and analyst.

“Freud seems, at times, to be studying his own relation to life: the subtle and nuanced fraying of the connection... ‘The change taking place is perhaps not very conspicuous; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the qualities very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking.’ ”

P104 “When in 1904 Lou Andreas-Salome wrote a floridly sentimental poem about how she would like to live a thousand years, even if those years contained nothing but pain, Freud commented wryly, ‘One cold in the head would prevent me from having that wish.’ ” (Amen.)

P109 “Freud finishes the last page of the Balzac novel and closes the book. He is not working anymore. He is not reading. He says, ‘My dear Schur, you remember our first talk. You promised me then you would help me when I could no longer carry on. It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense.’ ...
...

“At first Anna says no, and then Anna says yes.

“Schur gives Freud a third of a gram of morphia. He drifts to sleep. Later, Schur administers more morphia when he becomes restless.

“A quiet falls over the house. Freud is quiet under the mosquito netting.

P110 “...he died in the manner he chose to die, at the time he wanted to die. He chose and controlled something most of us are not privileged to choose and control. He imagined for himself this death. It looked to others like he had fallen asleep... Anna wrote, ‘I believe there is nothing worse than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities for which one loves them. I was spared that with my father, who was himself to the last minute,’ ...

“‘We cannot observe our own death,’ Freud wrote so authoritatively, so convincingly, and all the while he was trying his best to do exactly that.”

I have to say I can’t imagine a better death than this. And yet... it is also a death he didn’t learn anything from because he was in complete control. 


John Updike -

P117 “legerity” - le·ger·i·ty. physical or mental agility or quickness; nimbleness.
When "legerity" first appeared in English in 1561, it drew significantly upon the concept of being "light on one's feet," and appropriately so. -Merriam-Webster 

Very well written. His death is in some ways even better than Freud’s -- the one and done approach to chemo. But he doesn’t get to control the timing as Freud did. Interesting that I found this moving and yet I still have no desire to read him.

To return to sex and smoking and limit experiences, it would seem that that Krishna-like Updike had died long before.


Dylan Thomas - 

And this one is about his marriage. But also about drinking and the “metaphor of being sick.”

Oh, Roiphe tricked me. She played the crime procedural game on me and I fell for it. It isn’t those earlier, obvious subjects but the loss of his talent that is the root of the problem. Perhaps.

P182 About “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: “When you hear him (in these last readings) reciting the familiar line, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ the cadence is so mesmerizing that it seems to be a poem about acceptance; it lulls you into a feeling of goodwill toward the workings of the universe. Its emotional effect is in fact the opposite of the meaning of the words: It is a paean to the natural order. When one hears the last soft, caressing ‘Do not go gentle’ one can’t help but be lost in the loveliness of the lines, seduced. When Thomas stands up onstage, incanting it in his unnaturally beautiful voice, ‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,’ it is a lullaby, drained of violence, drained of anger. You can suddenly hear in his voice what you cannot see on the page: This is on some very peculiar level a love song to death.”

That was amazing.

P186 “...They brought him to St Vincent’s Hospital... His medical records show that he had suffered ‘a severe insult to the brain.’ ”

Dear God, we are all doomed as we’ve suffered nothing but insults to the brain since 2016.

What an ass. I hope Caitlin did well after his death.


Maurice Sendak -

P241 “Maurice viewed artistic influence as an active process. He picked an artist to borrow from for many of his projects. As he put it, ‘The muse does not come pay visits, so you go out stalking, hoping that something will catch you. Where do I steal from?” ... ‘He had a way of swallowing an artist whole, but what he came out with was wholly his own, unmistakably a Sendak drawing.’...”

This reminds me of Martha Grimes and Faulkner.

P243 “After Eugene died, Maurice wanted Lynn to take photographs of his body. He held on to these photographs and liked having them.”

This seems to be a call back to Annie and Sontag.

“Eugene was cremated and his ashes were buried in the garden with Jennie...” Okay, that line got me. 

P247 “This seems to be key: Staring into something you have always been terrified of [death] and finding it beautiful.”

P260 So like my father’s death. The time of day when we seem to be least tethered to life. 

All but one of these deaths were hospital deaths. Even the great have a hard time avoiding that fate.

Thinking about deaths in The Brothers Karamazov -- as one does -- the two deaths that Dostoevsky uses to show Christian values and attitudes and possibly a connection with the Perennial Philosophy, are completely unlike these modern deaths in that there is so much less fighting and intervention. Only Sendak seemed to enjoy a degree of peace and transformation in his final days. Sontag certainly didn’t. 

It is curious that Christian civilization, which has traditionally denigrated this life, has spawned a medical system that fights death as though it were sin. Freud may have been aware of the appeal of death and he did decide to go out on his own schedule, and yet up until then he had fought it as tenacious as had Sontag. Really it was only Thomas who was not ready to do nearly anything to avoid death -- though there is Freud’s smoking to consider. 

If I were to write a book like this, I would try to find subjects who had had time for a more contemplative death. I think that is possible, though increasingly rare with our medical system.

It amazed me how many things I recognized from my father’s death (and life) in this book. His death was exactly like Sendak’s. I held his feet in the hospital just like Updike’s first wife when he was having congestive heart failure. And the discussion of how painful a heart attack is reminded me (thanks a lot) of how, when he had his first heart attack when I was 16, I drove him to the hospital (mistake number one) and dropped him off at the front door so that he had to walk through the hospital to the ER, because I didn’t know where the ER entrance was. Of course one could make a good argument that, in fact, my Id was throttling my Super Ego until it passed out and then gleefully convincing my Ego to avoid the ER entrance. Bad Id!


James Salter -

I was unfamiliar with him but I love his way with words. I need to read this section again.

P283-4 This is why I’m grateful that my mother in a sense betrayed my father, by calling 911 when he went into congestive heart failure the night after his 79th birthday, giving me time to attend his actual death four or five unpleasant days later. I haven’t experienced death coming for me, but I have been around death at work and it is strangely natural.

I would like to know what happened with some of the incidental people after the deaths of these famous people. The helpers who were a little more than servants but not quite family.

I have some things I would like to ask my parents now, but they are just about random things in my childhood that they might remember. Confirmation of what I think happened.

With not smoking, it’s not so much wanting to live forever as not wanting to die in that particular way. 

And shouldn’t the subtitle be “Great Authors At The End?”


There was an element of finding and needing meaning in life in all these stories. The meaning of their art (or self-image) sustained them. But when it failed, as with Thomas, they fell apart.

333. Birthdays and death

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Birthday part 1

Today (when I wrote this, but it's been sitting for weeks) would be my father's 99th birthday. It would also have been the 20th anniversary of his easy death in his sleep. But that didn't quite happen. Instead of "going gentle into that good night" he had to struggle in hospital as the light too slowly faded.

I wish he had had the easier death, though if he had, I would not have had a chance to observe it and would have lost that very educational, if uncomfortable, experience. What I learned is that, at the end, you have very little control over events. Or at least you can't count on having much control. It will be what it will be. And as with illness in general, you just have to ride it out as best you can.

This evening I was in my neighborhood bar having a martini in my dad's honor, and caught the very end of the Duke basketball game. And I mean the very end, as I sat down they were just running out the clock so I didn't get to see a single play. As a Louisville boy, my dad must have been distressed by dying just as March Madness was getting started. Meanwhile I only watch the highlights of the Warrior's victories. I'm a pathetic sports fan.

Europa

Leaving the gym today there was a guy just outside the gym playing an acoustic version of Carlos Santana's Europa. It wasn't an electric guitar, but it was amplified, so I could still hear the song as I crossed Sutter and walked down Trinity Place. Covering Santana is dangerous, but this guy was doing a good job. He was just to my favorite part of the song, the four rising, sustained notes that take it up into the stratosphere, and I was wondering how he was going to negotiate this with a conventional guitar. Wisely, he didn't even try. Though that is a frustrating way to end the song.

Birthday part 2

The other day I was reading an interesting piece from Medium about our relationship with death -- can't find it now. The author was probably around thirty and his doctors thought he might have a serious problem, though by the end of the piece the tests has come back favorably. Still, he had been forced to confront his own mortality... to see the elephant, to reinterpret a phrase from the Great War.

Some people spend their entire lives obsessed with death, some never seem to notice death until something unexpected, like this health diagnosis, comes up later in their lives. This author spoke of the immortality of children and teens who never seem to think of death. Of course there are always the exceptions to this. And he also spoke of seeing his own death in the mirror, of being aware that it was always with him. This is an idea that I believe Phillip Pullman also played with in His Dark Materials. 

An aspect of being in what must now be considered my late sixties, is that you can't get away from death and aging. Recently I learned that my boss from thirty years ago, who was a couple years younger than me, suddenly died in his sleep. Yesterday I was watching a PBS Space Time episode I had previously missed featuring Richard Branson (both Branson and Pullman are, "Sirs") and couldn't help noticing that he was only a year older than me and that the sun had not been kind to him.

I think I look a bit younger than my age because I've done a good job of avoiding the sun because I was aware of that danger. I'm out in the sun a lot during event greening season, but the sun rarely touches my skin. I could almost be a vampire. 

But sixty-seven is sixty-seven regardless of how well you're holding up. You notice the gaps in your cohort even if you don't attend the funerals. You know that your death is with you, even if it's likely that it remains twenty years off. For my birthday I'm slowly hitting all of my favorite places to eat, but I'm not overdoing it. Mission Pie is still on my list, so there will be at least one desert, but I'm also ramping up at the gym, so things aren't getting out of hand. Thanks to being a veggie, my most decadent eating is actually quite healthy. I'll probably die of some strange interaction of brown rice and tofu.

331. Natural Causes

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Natural Causes 

by Barbara Ehrenreich, Twelve (Hachette Book Group) 2018

She is eleven years older than me. I doubt that she’s going to suggest a specific age to avoid routine tests, but I do wonder when she made the decision for herself. Seventy-five seems to be a conventional choice for this, but I think I may want to get a bit of a head start since I have no family to speak of.

P13 So far this is preaching to the choir. I’ve been negotiating with my dentist about X-rays for years. I was going to follow the six month interval between cleanings this time, but we agreed I would also get X-rays next time so I’m going to wait nine months -- which puts it into my target of 2020. It’s still pretty silly as I’ve never had a regular cavity and my one problematic tooth now has a crown. But your dental health is supposed to get worse as you age so I’m willing to compromise on once every four years. Since I don’t have a PCP at the moment, no one is urging me to do any other tests. 

P50 Well... I have to admit I’ve found fault with my doctors the past few years for being so hands off. I wonder if Ehrenreich is aware of the previous tradition of physicians not touching patients? We do seem to be heading back to a largely talk-based diagnostic practice. Where the doctor listens to your description of your symptoms and prescribes some kind of “physic.” It would be nice to have Victoria Sweet's response to this.

P70 The fitness chapter was interesting and perfectly timed. I was procrastinating going into the gym but did go in after I read it. As she mentions, it was my back problem that got me started but now I do it to keep in shape for my event greening work. The odd thing is that my back has been great for over a year but for almost a year now I’ve been dealing with a re-injury to my shoulder, which was a gym-related injury. My gym participation has had both positive and negative effects on my health.

P90 Mindfulness and neural plasticity considered. She doesn’t present much science here. These are easy targets, but she doesn’t land any hard blows. 

P95 The Lisbon Earthquake yet again. She does an excellent job of covering this topic. 

P97 ...”We can, or think we can, understand the causes of diseases in cellular and chemical terms, so we should be able to avoid it by following the rules laid down by medical science... Anyone who fails to do so is inviting an early death... every death can now be understood as suicide.”

This is interesting. And I’m certainly guilty of looking for reasons to blame people for their deaths -- but this is primarily so that I can imagine myself safe from the same fate. In addition to the celebrity deaths she sites, I remember Nick who was the person I knew most concerned with electrical fields, detecting them and avoiding spending time within them. And he died early of cancer. Sometimes there’s almost a Death in Samara quality to these things.

P108 “...the American working class -- or at least the white part of it -- which could once hope for steady work at decent pay, has lost much of its way of life.” This is a good point. Related to my War on South of the Slot, idea. But for how long was that really true? Twenty years? Thirty years? If we go by Detroit it was a very brief golden age.

...”An advantage of wellness as a status symbol is that it is less likely to incite the envy of the lower classes than, say furs and diamonds, plus the practice of wellness goes on largely out of sight...” And yet to the extent that wellness is appreciated to be a status symbol by the lower and under classes they will find a way to participate. So I do hope there is some value to it -- though I rather suspect it will be adopted as a kind of ritual over their existing bad habits. But we shall see.

P136 I’m not quoting much, but I’m really enjoying Ehrenreich’s exploration of this topic. This makes for a great summary and overview of the past century and more. I, of course, can’t avoid also considering all this in a military perspective, which actually seems to work quite well with the self against self aspect she’s just been talking about. Armies and militaries are rarely the well-ordered “systems” we imagine them to be. Besides Napoleon’s ever feuding corps commanders, there are the US bureaus that let down their forces in WW2 by providing faulty weapons and then defending their mistakes rather than responding to their shortcomings when the problems began to appear. And there is the conflicting “selves” of the two lobes of the brain not to mention the underlying “self” that I’ve frequently likened to an operating system. 

I like the way Ehrenreich thinks. And writes.

P161 Agency - I love the way she took this down to the quantum level. What she hasn’t done is take it to the level of Logos. So maybe she doesn’t have a Classical philosophical background. Here’s what I have in mind, and it’s even nuttier than attributing agency to macrophages:

Today I went to the gym, but it was a cold morning and it took me a while to get moving so I started at the gym later than I would like. After my workout I lollygagged before starting my shower. I figure I was running at least an hour late when I finally headed out to lunch. 

In the alley I noticed a guy in construction clothes with a camera looking through the fence next door to us and asked him what he was looking for. He explained that he was trying to get a photo of the back of a building that is about to be rehabilitated. You can’t see it from the alley, but I let him in and took him to our rear fire escape where you can see it. He got his pictures. But he only got his pictures because I was in the right place at exactly the right time. A minute earlier or later and it wouldn’t have worked. This goes beyond simple agency and requires we consider the possibility of the Logos. Or pantheism.

In our last book Rick Hanson wanted us to remember those moments when we feel gratitude, but what I most enjoy are the moments when I feel completely in sync -- when I feel I’m exactly where I should be. As in this instance above, there’s no earth shaking consequence to this. I made a random guy’s day a little better. If I hadn’t been there to help him he might have been able to get access to one of the other properties that would give him a view of the building in question, but I wouldn’t like his odds at that, and the angle from our building is actually better. Again, this was not important but it was perfect in it’s very particular way. The mirror image of all the buses and streetcars that pull away just as I arrive. And I believe I have to give Darling credit for suggesting that we have looped back to the Logos after the long Western adventure of pursuing objective scientific truth. 

And, I suppose, this is my adult alternative to my childhood belief that God (or Jesus?) loved me. If you can’t have a personal god watching your six, the next best thing is to believe the Logos is doing its job if only in small ways like this. 

P180 Hans Castorp would have enjoyed this chapter immensely. The details of death. The notion that macrophages may still be just doing their jobs when they contribute to the medical crises of aging and dying is quite interesting. This goes beyond Zeke Emmanuel in "The Atlantic" who also suggested stopping elective medical routines after a certain point. Ehrenreich is, if I read her correctly, suggesting that “fighting” heart disease is a mistake because the “function” of heart disease is to get rid of the elderly (and useless.) This, by the way, is why both Settembrini and Naphta were ultimately arguing from a weak position in TMM -- Naphta in particular should have been delighted to simply die of his disease rather than fight it in the Alps. 

I tend to favor this outlook and I can’t think of any good arguments against her here.

P196 Extinction - I thought it was interesting that both Avengers Endgame and the Battle of Winterfell episode of GOT came out the same weekend. Both of these fictions dealt with kinds of existential crisis which we do, as a species, seem quite interested in. They were also entirely magical. It almost seems like we are more comfortable with magic than science. Maybe this is because many of us can “understand” magic better than science. 

P207 “Two years ago, I sat in a shady backyard around a table of friends, all over sixty, when the conversation turned to the age-appropriate subject of death. Most of those present averred that they were not afraid of death, only of any suffering that might be involved in dying.” [This is what people think but it would be nice to have some real data. I suspect they would in fact be like Hans Castorp’s special cases when actually faced with death.] “I did my best to assure them that this could be minimized or eliminated by insisting on a nonmedical death, without the torment of heroic interventions to prolong life by a few hours or days...” [And I maintain that, in the end, we have very little control over how this goes.] “...there is little personal suffering to fear. Regret, certainly, and one of my most acute regrets is that I will not be around to monitor scientific progress in the areas that interest me, which is pretty much everything. Nor am I likely to witness what I suspect is the coming deep paradigm shift from a science based on the assumption of a dead universe to one that acknowledges and seeks to understand a natural world shot through with nonhuman agency.” [Me too.]

“It is one thing to die into a dead world and, metaphorically speaking, leave one’s bones to bleach on a desert lit only by a dying star. It is another thing to die into the actual world, which seethes with life, with agency other than our own, and, at the very least, with endless possibility. For those of us... who... have caught glimpses of this animate universe, death is not a terrifying leap into the abyss, but more like an embrace of ongoing life....”

Here, Ehrenreich has in mind the “Perennial Philosophy” brand of spirituality, which I’m fond of myself. However, as I sometimes remind people recounting near-death experiences, as nice as it would be to believe that these positive spiritual experiences are a foretaste of actual death, there’s really no reason to jump to that conclusion as a near-death experience is not death. At best we can expect a positive experience leading up to death. This is what Dostoevsky described so well in The Brothers K. After death it’s still anyone’s guess. If I had to bet, I would go for the experience we are so familiar with already, what we experience when we lose consciousness. Which is to say, nothing... until the self can pull itself together. And after death that would be impossible.

I really didn’t expect this book to be so philosophical. It’s probably just as well Ehrenreich doesn’t know about the Logos as it is probably better to avoid that Hellenic jargon and to stick with her description of the world as having agency. I do wish she had gotten into how our bodies seem to have agency independent of our selves. She may need to read more Oliver Sacks books.

Back to the Introduction. This book contains content that was forced, somewhat against its will (like with a mammogram) to blend together and form a whole. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to go with the essay collection model. My guess is that essay collections don’t sell as well as “books.” 

What this book is about: That our immune system can turn against us. Macrophages. The health care system. Our desire to control our mindbody. Pxiii “The body -- or, to use the more cutting-edge language, the ‘mindbody’ -- is not a smooth-running machine in which each part obediently performs its tasks for the benefit of the common good. It is at best a confederation of parts -- cells, tissues, even thought patterns -- that may seek to advance their own agendas, whether or not they are destructive of the whole...”

Pxiv “It turns out that many cells within the body are capable of what biologists have come to call ‘cellular decision making.’ Certain cells can ‘decide’ where to go and what to do next without any instructions from a central authority, almost as though they possessed ‘free will.’ A similar freedom... extends to many bits of matter that are normally considered nonliving, like viruses and even atoms.

“Things I had been taught to believe are inert, passive, or merely insignificant -- like individual cells -- are in fact capable of making choices, including very bad ones. It’s not going too far to say that the natural world, as we are coming to understand it, pulses with something like ‘life’...

Pxv “I present the emerging scientific case for a dystopian view of the body -- not as a well-ordered machine, but as a site of ongoing conflict at the cellular level, which ends... in death... What is the ‘self’ if it is not rooted in a harmonious body, and what do we need it for anyway?”

I think we’ve read better books on the nature of the “self.” (Ones that started with neurological oddities like a lack of short term memory or total amnesia. Also the consciousness of the two lobes and the suggestion that there is an underlying agent that decides what to present to us as reality and “helps” us decide things like who would be a good mate.) But what is interesting here is her focus on the body and how much of it is not “us.” That our bacterial cohabitants have their own agendas is one thing, but that macrophages which would seem to be part of us also have agendas is curious. 

328. Coast Starlight

Link to Table of Contents

AMTRAK should fire that bitch Julie. 

What with a train recently getting blocked by snow and a fallen tree, and news of even more storms, I did everything I could do online to learn the status of the train I was supposed to be taking to SLO last week. According to all AMTRAKs online information, the train wasn’t running. There’s a map where you can see the location of all AMTRAK trains, there were no 11 or 14 trains on that map. When I asked specifically, I was told the same thing. When I called the only number AMTRAK offers, I got to chat with Julie, their retarded AI. She confirmed that there was a disruption and promised to connect me with an agent... before disconnecting me. I then tried to call the local stations but was unable to find an operating local phone number. I sent an email and got a reply that someone would get back to me after they opened at 8am -- I needed to be on my bus at 7:50.

I had gotten up at 6am to reconfirm all this and then went back to bed. But then I thought, would even AMTRAK be stupid enough to just leave everyone up in the air like this? I mean they had my email and cell, they should have contacted me if I was going to be left stranded. So I got up, packed up quickly, and headed for the Temporary Transbay Terminal. I didn’t even have time to trim my beard.

I assumed there would be a replacement bus, but here I am on the nonexistent 11 train, getting an interesting tour of the lower part of the East Bay. We followed the inland route through Niles, which feels rather like SoCal in it’s endless suburban squalor. Just went by Levi stadium, to my surprise. I didn’t know the train could take this route. We’re on Caltrain tracks now -- and when did Caltrain get this facility in Santa Clara? Now we are passing where I thought we would join this line, but I guess that’s just a minor siding of some kind. 

There’s a Whole Foods down here? Just to the west of Deridon Station. Even more residential development than last time I was here. There’s really only one little lot of the old industrial section and it seems abandoned and no doubt about to be redeveloped. 

And speaking of changes. The parking lot at Jack London Square, that was filled with food trucks for the Eat Real Festival, is now the site of a new building, residential I think and still under construction, that fills the entire block. We don’t work that event anymore, but this is still a bit of a shock. I wonder if they’re developing the space behind where we put the dumpsters?

2019

I thought this would be the year I reflected back thirty years on one of the best years of my life. But thanks in part to having just read Calypso, where David Sedaris keeps thinking ahead to when he will be “old,” I’m finding myself also thinking back twenty years to when my dad died and then twenty years ahead to when I will be the age my mother was when she died. So twenty years back I was helping my frail, dying parents and in another twenty years I will be that same age, and potentially in that same condition. Given that my sixties so far have not been a walk in the park, I can’t help sharing David Sedaris’s gloom when contemplating the future.

Of course twenty years is a long time. This will be my twelfth year of Greening, which is itself a long time, especially for me in one job. I can imagine doing this for another five years, maybe nine. I can’t really imagine Greening when I’m past 75. There’s a point where the years ahead seem not too few, but possibly too many.

Spring?

I think our cold and rainy weather is coming to an end. I think this not for any meteorological reason, or because of the behavior of large rodents, but because I remembered I had a long, warm raincoat at the back of my little closet. I wore it yesterday and realized I should have been wearing if for weeks now. So, my assumption is the weather will change now. And nothing Descartes wrote can make me think otherwise. (Solipsism reference.)

Last night I learned that the person I worked for at the Apple Multimedia Lab had died in his sleep. I hadn't seen him in a few months less than thirty years. I don't know what health problems he may have had. Since March is the month my dad died in the hospital -- and a Lab friend has a brother currently doing the "dance of death" with his hospital -- my first reaction was to think that this was an unusually good death.

I'm also reading The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble (more on this later), which seems to be shaping up as a fairly dark book about death and aging, so everything is going counter to the spring season -- though I am noticing the green, new growth on the maple tree out my kitchen window. I even walked past a funeral at Notre Dame des Victoires on the way here to the Bank Cafe.

217. Insomniac City - complete

Link to Table of Contents

A new book

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Bloomsbury 2017

This is my next book and I've really been looking forward to it since I first heard about the book some months ago. Not only is there an Oliver Sacks angle, but Hayes sounds equally interesting and more visual. And it is also as much about NYC as anything else. And how could I not be interested in a book about what is in some ways the ultimate city. 

I almost said "ultimate American city," but I think that would be shortchanging NYC. Though I should also make clear that when I give it this exalted status I don't mean simply the city as it is today, but also the past incarnations. In particular, the Edith Wharton NYC and the city around the 1940s -- before Robert Moses became de facto dictator after 1946.


Anyway, I'm only eleven pages in and the book is already living up to my expectations. Hayes moved to NYC from SF after his partner died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack while only in his forties. (As with Ficre, your forties and fifties are the worst time to have a heart attack. Since heart disease runs in my family, I was relieved to make it past sixty, when your survival chances are supposed to be better.)

Hayes, when he moved to NYC, did what I did moving here, brought only the most basic necessities and moved into a tiny place in a decent location. This almost forces you to live in the city rather than to stay in your apartment. And then his insomnia both drove him out, when I would be deeply asleep, and made sure he had lots of free time to pursue his interests. And, as a photographer, you really couldn't have a better subject.

I haven't been to NYC in over twenty years, but I still remember it with fondness (and I was there at possibly the lowest point in my life). What strikes you most, coming from SF, is how mistaken you were. SF refers to itself as The City, and when compared to the rest of the Bay Area, or even the rest of the American West Coast, this is apt. We are dense and our streets are busy at times other cities have gone to bed... or died. But the moment you walk out on a Manhattan sidewalk, or cross a street there, you realize that your definition of "density" and "busy" was really pretty silly. Compared to NYC, SF is like a Disneyland version of a city... or at least this was true before we added the overlapping "Insanityland" operation.

How is it everyone in books about NYC has a view of either the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, if not both? The prevalence of terraces on NYC apartments in magazines is actually easier to understand. I know one person with a view of the TransAmerica Pyramid. The place I stayed on North Ave in Chicago did have a great view of the Hancock Building, but how could you not see Chicago's towers in pancake flat Chicago.

p9 One day I met a man with the name of an angel. He was French. His accent was so think it sounded fake. We got to talking and I told him what had happened. [This is in SF shortly after his partner of 25 years had died.] "You're going to be fine," Emmanuel said right away. "Something bad always leads to something good." He spoke from personal experience. His partner had died six years earlier. But he did not use the word, died, as he told me his story. Nor did he say passed away, a euphemism I had come to hate. Instead, Emmanuel said, "When my partner disappeared . . ."

... I had to say something. "You said 'disappeared'__"

He nodded.

"That's exactly how it feels for me, too."

Now, this is a book that exists because "Something bad... [lead] to something good." But I still think this phrase is as objectionable as "passed away." It's even dangerously close to "God never gives you more than you can handle" -- which I think should rank right up there with self-defense as a justification for killing someone.

Actually, the reason this caught my eye is that I just read, through Medium, a piece on Stoicism that emphasized amor fati -- if you are flogging Hellenistic philosophy it helps to connect it to that trendy new kid, Nietzsche. (I don't want to be critical here, I'm pleasantly amazed to find people pushing Stoicism.) 

amor fati is a more general, and more profound, conception than looking for something good to come from something bad. It's closer to "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" And this is also why I don't try to sell it to my friends, along with vegetarianism and pedestrianism (which I just coined to mean not owning a car.)

Also, Nietzsche's conception of amor fati has a back channel to de Sade which is hinted at, though people tend to ignore it, in the meaning of "Good" and "Bad" in "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" At most, good and bad expresses our subjective perception of some event. de Sade, Nietzsche, and the Wisdom of the East all agree that this subjective perception does not accurately describe the objective reality, which is neither good nor bad. Looking for something "good" to follow something "bad" misses the point. What would be the virtue of embracing Eternal Recurrence of something "good?" It's saying "Yes" to whatever life throws your way that makes us a super person.

What's odd is that this has more than a little in common with the bliss of Zosima's dying brother and of the grace Frank Osteseski was arguing for. I really can't imagine all these people being happy forced under the same tent (I'm imagining them as charged nucleons, or wet cats, held in close proximity by the strong force) but who knows? 

"O"

He's still in SF and just met Sacks, who we will be calling "O," while visiting NYC. Usually people leave SF when they want to start a family -- not always, as the small horde of rug rats across the street from me in Noe Valley's new "downtown square" can attest. Or they go to Portland for a more laid-back, Portlandia experience. So I approve of Hayes's change of scenery to a more seriously urban location. If I were one to regret things, never moving to NYC would be the thing I would regret. (I could also make an argument for regretting Toronto and especially Montreal, but those places are not at all the same thing, despite their various appeals. Not to mention the winters.)


On Becoming a New Yorker
p24 I had gotten here just like millions of others before me and since: on a one-way ticket and with only vague notions of how I'd make it... 

From Kennedy [Airport], I took an A train headed for Far Rockaway. That was the wrong direction for getting to Manhattan, as New Yorkers will recognize and as I eventually figured out. But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.

This is both the identical way I arrived in SF (though on a Greyhound) and my approach to travel... though I have to say I'm better with maps than Hayes appears to be. 

He writes wonderfully about riding public transit. Though I wish he would contrast NYC with here, as I'm not sure I see the difference aside from the scale and that it runs all night -- which I do envy.  

Subway Lifer
p29 Perhaps he's just presenting the good aspects of riding NYC subways here, I can't imagine this is really the whole story. He makes it sound like Disneyland.

I still remember my love for NYC subways when I first visited the city way back in 1971 (or 1972?). And those were the bad old days. I was enchanted by the scale and the decrepitude... the wabi sabi was overwhelming in those days. When I was back twenty years later I spent more time walking -- an even better way to see a city -- so all I recall was that the trains were shockingly cleaner. 

I like to think that New Yorkers wouldn't permit some of the nonsense I see on trains and buses here, just as I did see rush hour crowds sweep confused tourists out of their way like the wind would blow away trash. I imagine them tossing miscreants not observing the common sense rules of using public transit off the vehicle or into pits hidden about the stations. I wouldn't say anything in such a case.


p52 Hayes is giving us the intimate details of their relationship, that O never mentioned. I'm more like O than B in this regard, but I was curious. I'm getting a much better idea of what Sacks's life was like both before and after they got together. If you wrote a character so out-of-his-time as Sacks was -- no computer, no exposure to popular culture, so dedicated to writing with his fountain pen -- no one would buy it. While I respect aspects of it, how someone could be so curious about so many subjects yet turn his back on the internet is a mystery to me. As much as I love books -- and reading them slowly and repeatedly -- I would never give up the ability to read so widely (the internet is the worlds largest library, if you want to think of it that way) and to sample multimedia presentations like Feynman lectures and the various Crash Course and Space Time YouTube series I'm addicted to. 

Feynman's QED sits on my "favorite non-fiction" shelf at home, but if I want a blast of Feynman goodness I will find a lecture instead of grabbing the book. 

p52 On the roof of O's building. This doesn't sound like City Island, did O move? I don't recall that from his memoir.



Taxis in NYC
p104 I suppose NYC is different in this respect as well, but in both Phoenix and here in SF I had repeat customers on a regular basis. Often more frequently than I would have liked. And while you do find different sorts of people in any neighborhood, they are also sorted to some degree. There are people you would be surprised to find (or are surprised to find) in a given context. 


Björk
p111 If Björk makes diner and dessert for you and Oliver Sacks, you pretty much have to write a book just so you can describe the evening. Everything else here is just padding.

Sacks makes a long list of elements that are not present in the human body, but I'm not so sure about this. Perhaps this doesn't include the GI tract as I would think there would be at least trace amounts of nearly everything in the gut, especially of meat eaters. This is a question Sacks could have answered but Hayes probably can't.


p127 The day after Sandy, O is lying on the couch, I am in the easy chair... We have opened the bottle of Veuve Clicquot left over from his birthday; we figure it will get warm otherwise...

The 28th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake was this week. Consuming perishables was such a part of that experience. In the hours after the earthquake we cleaned out the free ice cream from our neighborhood ice cream shop, before it all turned to soup. Then, after night fell, we turned to the contents of our freezer and refrigerator (fortunately, we still had gas for cooking.) A few days later there was a big social gathering (in Cow Hollow, of all places) where the power had yet to return and friends were called in to polish off someone's even larger freezer and refrigerator food supply. With candles for lighting, of course. 

It wouldn't have been as nice if we had been caught under falling brick or concrete at the time of the quake, but we weren't, and life goes on.



Lauren Hutton
Now this is something I would never have imagined running into in this book. I can imagine how a young person might not know or recognize Hutton, but for O this is one of the most astonishing examples of how he lived in his own strange little world. 

Hutton was my first model crush, probably about the time I started finding Playmates freakish looking. From what little I've learned about her over the decades, I'm a little disappointed she didn't get the black-eye in a motorcycle accident.

Still Insomniac City

Hayes has formatted his book into tiny sections which I'm taking advantage of to read the book slowly. To savor it taste by taste. I'm now at page 238 and I think we've come to the end of the fun part, the part where you can let yourself forget how the story has to end.

This should actually be interesting, if not fun. Hayes got off easy with his previous partner, will he appreciate the greater amount of time (and bother) this time 'round? O is such an observer of everything his take on dying should be particularly valuable. Though his passing is also particularly painful due to all he knew. And it isn't really just because I recently rewatched Blade Runner that I'm reminded again of the poetic climax of that film, delivered by the dying replicant, Roy, 

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

This is the essence of the tragedy of death, all the moments lost in time but also the memories -- including the memories of other people -- and the knowledge unique to that person. 

You can think of life (what is experienced in life) as a multifaceted collection of perspectives. And over time perspectives are subtracted by death until in the end there is nothing left except, in some cases, visual imagery or a written account. 


Yes, I did read the ending of that section of Insomniac City correctly.

p252 O rejects adding explanatory info for scientific terms used in In Motion preferring that the reader look it up. Which I did, and he's right. When you look up one thing, it always leads to something else and you learn even more.


Near the end of O
p271 This morning: A bowl of blueberries for breakfast. "Each one gives a quantum of pleasure," O says with delight, then reconsiders, "if pleasure can be quantified."

That's an interesting thought. Can other things be quantified like that? I kind of think not. Blueberries, for example, are not limited to a positive ground state. There's always a under or over ripe one that drops below zero. Anything perishable has this problem. Off hand I can't really think of anything that never drops to or below zero pleasure. 

Even if you add ideas or thoughts, as I think O would at least consider pleasures, they too can drop to or below zero.

p272 O no longer wants any visitors to the apartment unless he expressly invites them: "I don't have time to be bored!"

When he is not resting, he is working on new pieces nonstop.

This is actually one of the things I would most fear if I were dying in a hospital setting, say. You would need a gate keeper. 

In the end, we get very little about O's actual death, and certainly nothing from his perspective. As with The Five Invitations, there is no compelling argument for subjecting yourself to an elemental death. There's no suggestion here that even Oliver Sacks was able to learn something useful or interesting from the experience of slowly dying.

I think it's a good decision, but it is a little odd that we get the effect on Hayes of the death of his SF partner but not the effect of O's death. 

Next Wednesday there's a celebration of Sacks's life and books here at the Commonwealth Club, with Hayes and (for some reason) Victoria Sweet in addition to other people more obviously connected to Sacks. I now want to read the book he was writing at the time covered by this book, but I think I'll probably skip the "celebration."