I DON'T GET INTO THE CITY, MUCH. True, I often scuttle in on Tuesday nights to cook for the Dolphin Club but that’s boats, an obsession that overrides my obsession with staying put. But last Sunday afternoon I took a special excursion.
I play tennis with a friend, Neal Vahle, a writer. Neal is 76 and still wallops me on the court. He’s also a deep old file, a thinker and a theologian who lived for several years in a Wisconsin monastery. I know, I didn’t think they bothered with monasteries there but took stark Lutheran doom straight, by the book, because simply keeping warm in the winter occupied so much effort. Jesuitical contemplation on alternate theory might have slowed them down long enough to freeze to death.
Neal and I were talking about raising children with spiritual values in a secular age. Saturday morning at temple or Sunday morning at church is as rare as rolling hoops and knickerbockers, nowadays. How should my grandsons Max and Lucas be raised to have spiritual values? more importantly, how can they become part of the six millennium heritage that carries so much of our core culture? They might wander away from the powerful river of Judeo-Greek, Christian-Roman, Renaissance-Protestant stories, values, fables, metaphors and history that floats us today, makes us who we are. In tossing away the shallowness and frequent hypocrisy of contemporary churches, liberal parents are almost literally tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think about this often. Neal and I talk about it sitting on the bench when serves change. So Neal suggested that I attend a “fellowship service” at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco to hear Doug Fitch speak. Doug is a small, wiry black man with enormous and expressive hands, long-famous as a spell-binding orator, and for many years the minister at Grace Church in the City. Fitch left Grace because there is a mandatory retirement age of 70. After he left, a band of a hundred or so folks began using the Unitarian Church as a Sunday-afternoon venue for a non-denominational spiritual gathering. That's as close to religion as they choose to describe it. So now the gentle spellbinder, born into fundamentalist evangelical faith, now calling on his involvement in Eastern meditation and traditions, holds forth at this odd gathering of Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, loose Lutherans, and even (so I’m told) some Muslims.
It was a wonderful experience. There was a stunning choir, theatrically skillful, with a young, electric choirmaster. They were backed by a band (puh-lease) of keyboard, drums, trumpet and electric bass. The mix was remarkably black for a San Francisco gathering, almost half. The choir reflected this proportion, which was fortunate because the three black basses were sonorous and emphatic, especially when the choir sang some African chants in Swahili – or some dark continent langridge – from the surprisingly strong Christian tradition in large parts of Africa. Amazing.
We sang one hymn but it didn’t count as a Sunday church song since it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Loud and lusty, it was no more go-to-meeting than the second-liners returning from the graveyard, twirling parasols behind a New Orleans funeral. A lot of clapping. Some hands waving in the air, a joyous noise. We didn’t have that at the Thoburn Memorial Methodist Church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Nothing close to it. Sigh.
I can’t call Fitch’s talk a lecture or a discourse. No. It was a sermon. No talk about religion, no mention of Jesus. These folks are anti-Trinitarian, viewing Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a philosophic mischief perpetrated by Constantine in the 5th C. That is, they approach God through the intellectual side door. Of course the sermon had no Bible verse. But, crikey, the rolling rhythms of great religious oratory swept everyone along. We heard the unmistakable notes of Martin Luther King’s Pentecostal heritage – repetition, rhythm, sudden changes of pitch and volume, calling out and asking response, loud exhortation and quiet reflection, shifting from the intimately personal to the abstract whole.
And how could any speech from a pulpit be a lecture if it had (mirabile dictu) an Amen Corner. Yes. No shit. A running basso continuo from a few male members of the choir sitting on the aisle: “Yes. Yes! Tell it. Oh no! Amen. Amen. Yes, brother. Speak the word. Mm-MM! [This last an admonitory expression of anger and disappointment at injustice, obviously the work of the anti-Trinitarian, Satan-less, abstract devil.] DO tell! We hear it. We feel it. We know it. With you now. Yes, brother.” It’s appropriate that the choir members constituted the Amen Corner because it became obvious to me that good Amen-ing is closely akin to scat-singing, a skill that sounds casual and easy to any singer who hasn’t tried it. I was forced to admit that I didn’t have the experience or skill to become a competent or even an unembarrassing Amen-er. Sorry.
Fitch. The little man filled up the vast space under the Gothic hammer beams and inside the colorful, geometric, unreligious but inescapably religious stained-glass, above the unnoticed hard wooden pews. Oh, yes. Tell it. Mm-MM! His body language had expression, authority, and a mime’s wit. He plied the skillfully subdued but operatic magic of his dancing arms and hands. His flashing palms were pinkish orange in contrast to his weathered tobacco complexion. His modest, light suit suggested a boardroom but Fitch revealed a lion chewing on the horse-haunch of a premise. And we listened. We hear it. We feel it. With you now.
It wasn’t empty oratory but a logical, well-built discourse on the importance of continual learning, a constant opening of viewpoint through education in any form in life. “More learning, more life” was the theme but it twined around the critical role of tragedy and defeat in human learning, the regrettable but indispensable tutor of grief, the place of frustration and anger, the path with many thorns leading to the loveliest views. There were many “Amens” from Fitch as affirmations: “This I believe.” There was confession and humility, the little man vaulting above us but remaining one of us – ignorant as we were, blindsided as many times as we have been. He was, he assured us, determined not only to learn all his life but to live a long life (“I intend to reach ninety-nine years. Oh, yes,” to applause) and to savor every glittering drop of it.
This was no Happy Meal Sunday treat with fries. Indeed, it was strenuous in a way. I can’t imagine anyone who could remain a spectator, there. The pulse of spiritual stirring was so involving and strong that we ran to keep up with it. We sorted through old fears and freed pent-up desires. We centered ourselves in silence but we did so as a body of humans together. It was intellectual work.
This community of striving for quiet clarity may be something we lack in a secular life. It’s easy to grow narcissistic when you live with your own echoes. Quiet meditation – which could be called “centering” or “prayer” or even more casual reflection – is not the same experience as solitary meditation. Somehow it draws more amperage from you.
There was one familiar church artifact: the collection. These folks pay the band, support the choir, rent the hall, subsidize Doug Fitch’s enormous labor of preparing his “sermon.” They’re also politically and socially active, righteous San Francisco liberals supporting all the initiatives of justice, peace and diversity that damn near save the Californian Spirit from triviality. So the collection, counted and notated by my painstaking friend Neal, is honest and painless. We got a band, after all. The bass guitarist looked profoundly bored and was doubtless looking toward some livelier gig with more women in less, so he should be paid for his time. And, hell, it probably touched a part of him. After all, California’s mission system was based on paid converts.
Afterward there was the familiar milling crowd noshing on potluck brownies, cakes, nibblies and (Fitch's favorite, we were warned to save some for him) lemon bars. Very nice people. I placed them in the same drawer as my real, kind, jolly Dolphin Club friends.
It was altogether nourishing, refreshing, fertilizing, joyful. I’m ignoble enough to state that I managed to fall in love with every female member of the choir. Oh, yes. Tell it. And no one at my college bar would believe that I could someday moon from actual church pews over a speckled-pup cute woman who would in a more ecclesiastical setting be called a “deaconess.” Oh yes, brother. Speak it. In my defense this certainly had much to do with reawakening spiritual banks dormant in me for years. Amen. Or I may be merely a dirty old man whose shame has eroded sufficiently that I can admit these things. Mm-MM!
Altogether a wonderful time. It couldn’t be better, even with fireworks. First and third Sundays of the month. With you now, brother.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Anything that gets himself out of the studio can't be all bad. And this was a therapeutic event. It had a high mensch-ratio and a low piety score. Not bad for Sunday in a church of any kind. About education, I can't fear for himself. He's compulsive about learning damn near anything, and he tries mightily, with his limited tools, to string everything together in a logical way. Given the reports of low senility rates for scholarly nuns, we hope this constant, bubbling mental activity will fight off Alzheimer's. This would be an especially serious malady in my already odd friend because we couldn't see the symptoms for years.
Showing posts with label New Age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Age. Show all posts
Monday, June 7, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
CHICKEN ART
My dear old friend Dean Torges, whom I met when I was about twelve, is a master woodworker, a philosopher, one of the most intelligent and most thoughtful men I've ever met. He's a world-famous bowyer, and (this is a compliment from the era of Theodore Roosevelt) a woodsman and hunter of consummate skill. But presently he's building a chicken house. It's a mobile chicken house. A chicken's need for new vistas is something I simply never considered. Still, Dean knows chickens. He's raised them on his little Ohio farmlet for donkey's years and enjoys his own eggs, broilers, and smoked whole chickens. I suppose he knows chickens better than most and if a mobile chicken house will help his fowl, who am I to quibble? He's even built mobile outbuildings, mesh-covered bomb-shelter frames that roll on old lawnmower wheels to keep his chicks out of hawks' talons. Fowlopolis.
He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.
After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:
Dean:
There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.
I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.
Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.
You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.
Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.
It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.
What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.
Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.
He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.
After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:
Dean:
There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.
I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.
Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.
You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.
Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.
It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.
What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.
Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.
Friday, March 26, 2010
WISDOM OF THE ELDERS
MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND DEAN TORGES posed a question for me on his fine blog, www.bowyersedge.com. He said:
I regret not asking a question of old men when I was a boy. When they told me, “I wish I knew at your age what I know now,” I regret not prompting them. Several times it happened, always in the company of assembled friends, but not once did I or anyone else ask, “What is it that you know now, Mister? Is it about opportunity? Does it concern confidence or nerve? Something about Standard Oil stock certificates? What? I want to know.”
They understood that we hung on their next words, yet not one of them ever volunteered further information. Instead, they smiled and went silent, outlasting our attention.
These old men were not talking about future events played to an advantage, but about perspective and understanding, something profound, some pearl of wisdom. This much I was sure of and no more. Since I was new to life compared to them, I reasoned that perhaps I was not ready for such wisdom. After all, life lessons worth knowing can’t be told or taught, right?
Dean and I both knew those old guys, elders we respected for their chops – skills in rabbit hunting or frog-gigging or simply making money. We saw this money skill from our perspective as boys – it allowed them to have some of the free time we had, time we knew would be stolen when we were thrust into citizenship. We saw hunting skill as God-given: a man could be blessed enough to be a hunter. Or a woodworker, or an artisan who had God in his fingertips. We knew those old guys but we didn't know much about them. In short, we knew shit.
Why couldn’t they impart their wisdom to us? Why can’t we impart our wisdom to our grandsons, Varmint and Max? Dean’s question heated up my brainpan and my roundabout thoughts have forced me way out on a limb. I must hypothesize from this thin and bendy perch.
I’m going to begin back a piece, because I believe that elders of the tribe once transferred wisdom to young men as part of their manhood rites. But only as far back as World War I for now.
The overwhelming lesson of World War I was that we can’t trust tradition, anointed authority, or royalty. The Great War was largely fought among three grandsons of Queen Victoria: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas, and Kaiser Bill was Vic’s favorite. The calamitous losses of a war which had no real goals or even a sensible cause were disillusioning and drove a generation out of its comfortable emotional attachment to the familiar. The result was stark modernism, functionalism, reduction. During the Third Battle of Artois (One and Two seem to have been preludes) the Entente Forces lost 86,000 British troops and 250,000 French Troops for a temporary gain of a few hundred yards. The nonsensical official reports of victories costing millions of men for negligible territorial or strategic gain disconnected a generation from any trust they might place in institutions. Cubism, Dadaism, twelve-tone music and the hard-boiled detective novel were post-war products of a disillusioned age.
World War II disillusioned the next generation in another way. It was a more egalitarian conflict with clearer lines drawn between fascism and liberalism (the definitions of these two creeds have changed radically since then). But this war caused another disconnect: the system doesn’t work. The simultaneous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. bases all over the Pacific revealed that our Navy and intelligence services were completely bamboozled by a second-rate power. Then that strange oriental nation kept the upper hand for the next three years. More confusion: our Communist enemy, Uncle Joe Stalin, became (suddenly, inexplicably, by fiat) our friend and favorite charity. Invasion operations in Dieppe and Norway were total cockups; we couldn’t get it right. Our Atlantic convoys were nightmarish slaughters. The attrition rate for “precision daylight bombing,” something our experienced allies refused to do, approached 100% for the tour of 20 missions. D-Day, the Great Invasion, was such a SNAFU that our toehold on the continent was tenuous for weeks. In those weeks after D-Day our troops moving inland were confronted with the bocáge, impenetrable and stubbornly defensible hedgerows. Our crack aerial photo analysts had assured invasion troops that the hedgerows (most topping 20’) were minor obstacles, only about three feet high. We couldn’t get anything right. Without the USSR’s seemingly unlimited capacity to bleed, we would have surely sought terms with Chancellor Hitler. Men in charge, systems, experts, generals, boards, agencies – never got it right. World War II was one unexpected FUBAR ("fucked up beyond all recognition") after another from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Bulge. We couldn’t trust anyone.
The old men we knew were veterans of that conflict or at least that time. Perhaps they had wisdom, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t trust any obvious truth because they’d seen so many truths die quickly. They were a saddened, cynical generation with a hard shell of “well, we won on a technicality, and the best revenge is to live well.”
But we're not them. Why can’t we impart our wisdom? Let’s go to another war and another time. In the 70’s we shot ourselves in the foot, Dean. Our generation, appalled by the purely political wars in Korea, Cuba, the Congo, and Viet Nam, rejected any “wisdom” from anyone over thirty. We established a Youth Generation. We insisted that given truths were always tainted by politics and corporate manipulation (this happens to be largely true of national truths). We were a “free” generation, open to anything new, rejecting worn-out morality and polite society, questioning both etiquette and hygiene, exalting style over content, adoring the “natural” as achievable by common sense and gut feeling. We cried up youth as a magic time of inherent wisdom that needed no external input. Especially from pigs, honkeys, Tricky Dicks, or war-mongers. We rejected anything the old guys were willing to pass on.
And now we’re the old guys, Dean. We created a youth culture, then grew out of it. I believe we’re actually embarrassed to have an opinion, or to pass on a set of skills. Our young men have no rites of passage into the tribe. Hell, Dean, there ain’t no tribe. It’s every man for himself.
There’s also a cultural certainty that men (compared to women) are foolish, childish, toy- and sex-obsessed, and probably unnecessary when genetics catch up to female superiority. What could they possibly offer young men except more foolishness?
We had a liberal desire to make a better, fairer world, Dean. Out of our fear for crumbling governmental institutions and bumbling authority figures, we have succeeded in writing ourselves out of subsequent scenes. We’ve become the drones. Honestly, I’d looked forward to being a white, Anglo-Saxon, domineering, triumphant male. Nope. It didn’t work out that way. History and our own best instincts torpedoed me.
In order to pass our wisdom on to Varmint and Max, you and I must embrace the importance of what we know. Not many men, in this helter-skelter culture, are brave enough to claim the importance of their intellectual heritage for fear of sudden and derisive denial. Can we sort through thae (considerable) backlog of skills we’ve acquired and settle on the unimpeachably important things our grandsons need? Can we create the rites of passage that prepare young men to receive wisdom? Can we get away with it?
I’m betting we can, for Max’s and Varmint’s sake. We’re the elders now and though our forebears were reluctant to pass on truths tainted by their crushing experience, we have an obligation to find our own assurance, somehow.
A few years ago I sailed on a racing cruise with my dear, incarcerated John Carter. We shipped a crew of ringers – young, strong men picked for their racing experience. Several were Olympic small-boat sailors, all were marvelously beefy deck apes. The first night out I insisted that they sit down to supper instead of take their plates on deck. I discovered that none of them had actually dined with their parents and families. After dinner we had a bit more wine, some poetry, cigars, and civilized talk. The boys were astonished, in thrall. They’d never been part of a formal male gathering with intellectual content and gentle rules of decorum. One of the boys finally spoke up, admitted that he'd never really had the opportunity to sit down with his father or any other adult male in a quiet, conversational atmosphere. Then he said something remarkable, “You guys are, like, grown up. Men. You’ve been, like, around.” We nodded grimly, thinking we had the scars to prove it. Then the boy said, “What’s all this business … about … women?”
Well, what could we say? Perhaps nothing in the absolute truth line but it surprised us later because we had some sound advice and some valuable warnings. It was even important that the boys knew we had shared their confusion and had taken the same perilous journey toward love, had crashed and burned, and it was important that we recognized that they’d do their share of crashing and burning.
So let’s take this as a parable. If we can find the right venue, the right time, and if we know what our young men need from us, we may be able to impart wisdom that, yes, will make their journeys easier. This is a truth in itself.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
That was an extraordinary evening afloat. The boys were bright. Because they had been involved in class and club racing they were accustomed to mature men, even if most of them were shouting skippers and selfish louts. So they were primed to receive something from men. It's doubtful if less worldly and less accomplished boys (winning many races built their assurance) would be as receptive. I'm not sure Himself is justified in his belief that he and Dean Torges can transfer wisdom. It's probable that a "normal" late teenager would be gravely bored by dinner, poetry, discussion and intellectual pursuits without benefit of digital enhancement.
I regret not asking a question of old men when I was a boy. When they told me, “I wish I knew at your age what I know now,” I regret not prompting them. Several times it happened, always in the company of assembled friends, but not once did I or anyone else ask, “What is it that you know now, Mister? Is it about opportunity? Does it concern confidence or nerve? Something about Standard Oil stock certificates? What? I want to know.”
They understood that we hung on their next words, yet not one of them ever volunteered further information. Instead, they smiled and went silent, outlasting our attention.
These old men were not talking about future events played to an advantage, but about perspective and understanding, something profound, some pearl of wisdom. This much I was sure of and no more. Since I was new to life compared to them, I reasoned that perhaps I was not ready for such wisdom. After all, life lessons worth knowing can’t be told or taught, right?
Dean and I both knew those old guys, elders we respected for their chops – skills in rabbit hunting or frog-gigging or simply making money. We saw this money skill from our perspective as boys – it allowed them to have some of the free time we had, time we knew would be stolen when we were thrust into citizenship. We saw hunting skill as God-given: a man could be blessed enough to be a hunter. Or a woodworker, or an artisan who had God in his fingertips. We knew those old guys but we didn't know much about them. In short, we knew shit.
Why couldn’t they impart their wisdom to us? Why can’t we impart our wisdom to our grandsons, Varmint and Max? Dean’s question heated up my brainpan and my roundabout thoughts have forced me way out on a limb. I must hypothesize from this thin and bendy perch.
I’m going to begin back a piece, because I believe that elders of the tribe once transferred wisdom to young men as part of their manhood rites. But only as far back as World War I for now.
The overwhelming lesson of World War I was that we can’t trust tradition, anointed authority, or royalty. The Great War was largely fought among three grandsons of Queen Victoria: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas, and Kaiser Bill was Vic’s favorite. The calamitous losses of a war which had no real goals or even a sensible cause were disillusioning and drove a generation out of its comfortable emotional attachment to the familiar. The result was stark modernism, functionalism, reduction. During the Third Battle of Artois (One and Two seem to have been preludes) the Entente Forces lost 86,000 British troops and 250,000 French Troops for a temporary gain of a few hundred yards. The nonsensical official reports of victories costing millions of men for negligible territorial or strategic gain disconnected a generation from any trust they might place in institutions. Cubism, Dadaism, twelve-tone music and the hard-boiled detective novel were post-war products of a disillusioned age.
World War II disillusioned the next generation in another way. It was a more egalitarian conflict with clearer lines drawn between fascism and liberalism (the definitions of these two creeds have changed radically since then). But this war caused another disconnect: the system doesn’t work. The simultaneous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. bases all over the Pacific revealed that our Navy and intelligence services were completely bamboozled by a second-rate power. Then that strange oriental nation kept the upper hand for the next three years. More confusion: our Communist enemy, Uncle Joe Stalin, became (suddenly, inexplicably, by fiat) our friend and favorite charity. Invasion operations in Dieppe and Norway were total cockups; we couldn’t get it right. Our Atlantic convoys were nightmarish slaughters. The attrition rate for “precision daylight bombing,” something our experienced allies refused to do, approached 100% for the tour of 20 missions. D-Day, the Great Invasion, was such a SNAFU that our toehold on the continent was tenuous for weeks. In those weeks after D-Day our troops moving inland were confronted with the bocáge, impenetrable and stubbornly defensible hedgerows. Our crack aerial photo analysts had assured invasion troops that the hedgerows (most topping 20’) were minor obstacles, only about three feet high. We couldn’t get anything right. Without the USSR’s seemingly unlimited capacity to bleed, we would have surely sought terms with Chancellor Hitler. Men in charge, systems, experts, generals, boards, agencies – never got it right. World War II was one unexpected FUBAR ("fucked up beyond all recognition") after another from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Bulge. We couldn’t trust anyone.
The old men we knew were veterans of that conflict or at least that time. Perhaps they had wisdom, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t trust any obvious truth because they’d seen so many truths die quickly. They were a saddened, cynical generation with a hard shell of “well, we won on a technicality, and the best revenge is to live well.”
But we're not them. Why can’t we impart our wisdom? Let’s go to another war and another time. In the 70’s we shot ourselves in the foot, Dean. Our generation, appalled by the purely political wars in Korea, Cuba, the Congo, and Viet Nam, rejected any “wisdom” from anyone over thirty. We established a Youth Generation. We insisted that given truths were always tainted by politics and corporate manipulation (this happens to be largely true of national truths). We were a “free” generation, open to anything new, rejecting worn-out morality and polite society, questioning both etiquette and hygiene, exalting style over content, adoring the “natural” as achievable by common sense and gut feeling. We cried up youth as a magic time of inherent wisdom that needed no external input. Especially from pigs, honkeys, Tricky Dicks, or war-mongers. We rejected anything the old guys were willing to pass on.
And now we’re the old guys, Dean. We created a youth culture, then grew out of it. I believe we’re actually embarrassed to have an opinion, or to pass on a set of skills. Our young men have no rites of passage into the tribe. Hell, Dean, there ain’t no tribe. It’s every man for himself.
There’s also a cultural certainty that men (compared to women) are foolish, childish, toy- and sex-obsessed, and probably unnecessary when genetics catch up to female superiority. What could they possibly offer young men except more foolishness?
We had a liberal desire to make a better, fairer world, Dean. Out of our fear for crumbling governmental institutions and bumbling authority figures, we have succeeded in writing ourselves out of subsequent scenes. We’ve become the drones. Honestly, I’d looked forward to being a white, Anglo-Saxon, domineering, triumphant male. Nope. It didn’t work out that way. History and our own best instincts torpedoed me.
In order to pass our wisdom on to Varmint and Max, you and I must embrace the importance of what we know. Not many men, in this helter-skelter culture, are brave enough to claim the importance of their intellectual heritage for fear of sudden and derisive denial. Can we sort through thae (considerable) backlog of skills we’ve acquired and settle on the unimpeachably important things our grandsons need? Can we create the rites of passage that prepare young men to receive wisdom? Can we get away with it?
I’m betting we can, for Max’s and Varmint’s sake. We’re the elders now and though our forebears were reluctant to pass on truths tainted by their crushing experience, we have an obligation to find our own assurance, somehow.
A few years ago I sailed on a racing cruise with my dear, incarcerated John Carter. We shipped a crew of ringers – young, strong men picked for their racing experience. Several were Olympic small-boat sailors, all were marvelously beefy deck apes. The first night out I insisted that they sit down to supper instead of take their plates on deck. I discovered that none of them had actually dined with their parents and families. After dinner we had a bit more wine, some poetry, cigars, and civilized talk. The boys were astonished, in thrall. They’d never been part of a formal male gathering with intellectual content and gentle rules of decorum. One of the boys finally spoke up, admitted that he'd never really had the opportunity to sit down with his father or any other adult male in a quiet, conversational atmosphere. Then he said something remarkable, “You guys are, like, grown up. Men. You’ve been, like, around.” We nodded grimly, thinking we had the scars to prove it. Then the boy said, “What’s all this business … about … women?”
Well, what could we say? Perhaps nothing in the absolute truth line but it surprised us later because we had some sound advice and some valuable warnings. It was even important that the boys knew we had shared their confusion and had taken the same perilous journey toward love, had crashed and burned, and it was important that we recognized that they’d do their share of crashing and burning.
So let’s take this as a parable. If we can find the right venue, the right time, and if we know what our young men need from us, we may be able to impart wisdom that, yes, will make their journeys easier. This is a truth in itself.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
That was an extraordinary evening afloat. The boys were bright. Because they had been involved in class and club racing they were accustomed to mature men, even if most of them were shouting skippers and selfish louts. So they were primed to receive something from men. It's doubtful if less worldly and less accomplished boys (winning many races built their assurance) would be as receptive. I'm not sure Himself is justified in his belief that he and Dean Torges can transfer wisdom. It's probable that a "normal" late teenager would be gravely bored by dinner, poetry, discussion and intellectual pursuits without benefit of digital enhancement.
Friday, March 19, 2010
NIGHT STUFF
My naps are precious to me: gourmet sleep. Yesterday I had one of my best naps. This flu cycles on and on like World War I, control ebbing and flowing between my macrophages and the viri, so I’m mostly tired. Having completed a piece for WoodenBoat I took my little fleece blanket and walked into the Big House backyard. I rolled into the rope hammock at the far end of the yard, tucked the blanket up under my head, covered my eyes with my battered Panama hat, and slept for an hour in the gently swinging hammock. The air was like wine, the temperature perfect, and breeze light, and the sun was filtered through leaves. God smiled on me and I slept as peacefully as a boy.
This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.
Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.
The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.
The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.
Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.
It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.
The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.
My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.
It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.
Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.
CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.
This morning I was awakened by the hardest working piece of local equipment I know of – a little John Deere six-wheeled, motorized utility cart owned by Maragus Stables across the road. The Hispanic ostler is up and working before sunrise. I heard him this morning at 0530h and put on my glasses to watch the lights of the cart scuttle around the paddocks. I opened the window by the bed to hear the ragged purring of its engine. He was giving the horses their morning flakes of green-flecked alfalfa hay.
Sometimes they wake at night in their standing sleep and kick the backs of their stalls or ring the galvanized pipe fencing with their iron shoes, peevish for some equine reason. Humph, “reason” isn’t a quality I associate with horses; they’re not intelligent animals like a dog or a dolphin but herd creatures bound by strict codes of behavior. A few of them have been trained against their herd instincts to be useful in ways, and any riding horse has had its natural balance (usually on the forefeet) readjusted to carry weight on four legs. They can be domesticated but not brought into real communication. So I don’t attribute high-jinks in horses to cleverness or spite but merely to herd protocol reasserting itself in some obscure way.
The cart made its dark rounds, and it’s making it day rounds in the full sunlight now, the day-guy picking up horseapples with his plastic mucking rake and tossing the rich, hardly processed dung in the cart’s tipping back. He’ll run it 150 yards up Wildwood Lane and vector off to the north side of the Lane where at least a hundred tons of horse manure – what must be an obscure fortune in nutrient – age. The Maragus property is a long slice from the road to the edge of the woods where the manure heaps are, just where the hills begin mounting abruptly to the ridge behind us, in our southwest. That’s the ridge that separates Novato from Lucas Valley; George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is just over the long, descending spine stepping down to 101.
The time before sunrise, before that magical time the Prudent Mariner knows as “nautical twilight,” is dangerous territory for reflection. For a person like me with odd sleep habits – and maybe old guys’ sleep habits are always odd – seeing the lights of any job activity actually underscores the alienation of night dwellers like me. It often backs me into acknowledging just how far outside the mainstream of life I am, how little I share with my fellow citizens. If anyone at the bank or the grocery could see my life written on my forehead I suppose they’d be mildly shocked that I’m not one of them. I don’t have a job, per se, but a self-marketing profession with remarkably little paperwork. Much less, I’m sure, than the bank and the IRS would advise. I have digital trails of iteration and reiteration of my designs and my texts as progressive digital files. There’s a big cardboard folder of original pencil drawings that have been scanned as working files to be wrangled with PhotoShop and Illustrator into products. Much of the production work has been done long past the bedtime of sensible citizens who prepare themselves for sleep an hour or two before midnight.
Occasionally at the end of a late session I walk outside and look at the stars. I’ve turned the movement-activated light outside my door off so I’m not greeted with a nasty flash, and I know how far I can walk up or down the side-drive before the backyard lights or the garage front lights see my heat signature and flash on. For some reason I can almost always see Orion in the celestial lane above the black line of roof to my northeast and the ragged line of poplars to my southwest. I’d go farther and even walk down the road but I’m fenced in like the horses by the danger of a disappointing, intrusive, rude glare of suspicion from the who-are-you front lights.
It’s dangerous to feel so alien and hemmed in and uncollegial. I should live in a village where the grocer and hardware clerk know me and anchor me to life with small talk. I think I’d enjoy having a payroll clerk deduct taxes from my paycheck, and have folks tell me what we were doing. I believe I’d look forward to lunches with various people and to jokes and to family news.
The time before nautical twilight reminds me that at my age, at my level of skill, in my profession/s, I’m unemployable in any practical sense. My collegial time is used up. I’ve become a troll keeping odd hours and wondering about other alienated souls in the dark.
My friend Pat Gavin, the cop, habitually preferred solitary night shifts. His view of humanity was a bit jaundiced: he said that after one in the morning a cop seldom meets anyone who isn’t drunk. In DC I often saw him going on shift or coming off. When I hugged him – he was a very dear friend and one of the best men I’ve known – I’d feel the stiffness of his Kevlar bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. He’d been shot before, almost fatally, and you could expect that Kevlar as part of his hug.
It would be useful to have some “on-line now” notice on e-mail or some social web program, to know how many of one’s friends – cops, painters, writers, designers – were up and about, someone who might enjoy a chat or even a cuppa.
Carl Sandburg captured night people very well in one of my favorite poems, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight.”
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
The milkman never argues;
he works alone and no one speaks to him;
the city is asleep when he is on the job;
he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work;
he climbs two hundred wooden stairways;
two horses are company for him;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders;
they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work;
they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers;
their necks and ears are covered with a smut;
they scour their necks and ears;
they are brothers of cinders.
CARL SANDBURG, Cornhuskers, 1918
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is several kinds of fool, as soft-hearted and well-meaning as he is. He should get to bed and get his life into synchronus with life and people. He should get out and avoid reflections on alienation. We're all alone on our own iceberg. It does little good to emphasize that fate.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
DR. GRAMMA
WE'RE ALL WORRIED about our health, and about our friends' health. We tell them to push fluids, sleep soundly, minimize stress, steam veggies. From a personal perspective we control only a few threads of our health. Ask a thoughtful, chess-playing, small town general practitioner who sees sickness played out on a small canvas over a few generations. He’ll agree that there’s not a lot we can do about sickness beyond a few things you heard from your gramma.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
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