Einmal ist Keinmal

Literature+Illness=Illness

2011-06-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.

Roberto Bolano, "Literature+Illness=Illness"

From Vaughn

2011-06-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

As months go, June is unassailable. It holds the longest day, the lushest greens, the sweetest peas. Its calendar heaves with commencements and betrothals. Roses bloom and strawberries blossom only in June. Fireflies flare against June's night skies alone. Its birthstone is the pearl! Fresh and unfettered, June knows nothing of the clawed, parched trail of summer days to come, and returns, every year, as deeply and perfectly June as ever.

anson mills

complacencies of the peignoir, and late

2010-11-28T17:14:00.000-08:00

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

(fr. "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens)

on Indolence

2010-11-28T16:55:00.000-08:00

And evenings steep'd in honey'd indolence

Keats, "Ode on Indolence"

The quiet life in day-tight compartments

2010-11-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

"Mankind, it has been said, is always advancing, man is always the same. The love, hope, fear and faith that make humanity, and the elemental passions of the human heart, remain unchanged, and the secret of inspiration in any literature is the capacity to touch the cord that vibrates in a sympathy that knows nor time nor place.

The quiet life in day-tight compartments will help you to bear your own and other's burdens with a light heart. Pay no heed to the Batrachians who sit croaking idly by the stream. Life is a straight, plain business, and the way is clear, blazed for you by generations of strong men, into whose labours you enter and whose ideals must be your inspiration."

fr. William Osler's 1913 address to the students of Yale College

W. Eugene Smith

2010-06-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

Dr. Ceriani resting in his kitchen, after having spent the night operating. Kremmling, Colorado. 1948. From W. Eugene Smith's iconic "Country Doctor" series.

a decent happiness

2010-04-24T08:14:00.001-07:00

The Rain

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

(Robert Creeley)

thromboangiitis obliterans

2010-03-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

inadvertently

2010-03-01T19:49:00.000-08:00

Inadvertently I passed the borders of her teeth and swallowed her agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It brushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls of an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.

She whom I deprived of a voice stares at me with big eyes and waits for a word.

Yet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to her--the stolen one or the one which melts in my mouth from an excess of heavy goodness.

Zbigniew Herbert, "Tongue."

enough work to do, and strength enough

2010-02-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

Gentlemen:

It may not have escaped your professional observation that there are only two classes of mankind in the world—doctors and patients. I have some delicacy in confessing that I belong to the patient class—ever since a doctor told me that all patients were phenomenal liars where their own symptoms were concerned. If I dared to take advantage of this magnificent opportunity which now lies before me, I should like to talk to you all about my symptoms. However, I have been ordered—on medical advice—not to talk about patients, but doctors. Speaking then, as a patient, I should say that the average patient looks upon the average doctor very much as the noncombatant looks upon the troops fighting on his behalf. The more trained men there are between his dearly beloved body and the enemy, he thinks, the better.

I have had the good fortune this afternoon of meeting a number of trained men who, in due time, will be drafted into your permanently mobilized army which is always in action, always under fire against Death. Of course it is a little unfortunate that Death, as the senior practitioner, is always bound to win in the long run, but we noncombatants, we patients, console ourselves with the idea that it will be your business to make the best terms you can with Death on our behalf; to see how his attacks can best be delayed or diverted, and when he insists on driving the attack home, to take care that he does it according to the rules of civilized warfare. Every sane human being is agreed that this long-drawn fight for time which we call Life is one of the most important things in the world. It follows therefore that you, who control and oversee this fight and you who will reinforce it, must be among the most important people in the world. Certainly the world will treat you on that basis. It has long ago decided that you have no working hours that anybody is bound to respect, and nothing except extreme bodily illness will excuse you in its eyes from refusing to help a man who thinks he may need your help at any hour of the day or night. Nobody will care whether you are in your bed or in your bath, on your holiday or at the theater. If any one of the children of men has a pain or a hurt in him you will be summoned. And, as you know, what little vitality you may have accumulated in your leisure will be dragged out of you again.

In all times of flood, fire, famine, plague, pestilence, battle, murder, or sudden death, it will be required of you that you report for duty at once, go on duty at once, and remain on duty until your strength fails you or your conscience relieves you, whichever may be the longer period. This is your position. These are some of your obligations. I do not think they will grow any lighter. Have you heard of any legislation to limit your output? Have you heard of any bill for an eight-hour day for doctors? Do you know of any change in public opinion which will allow you not to attend a patient even when you know that the man never means to pay you? Have you heard any outcry against those people who are perfectly able to pay for medical attention and surgical appliances, and yet cadge round the hospitals for free advice, a cork leg, or a glass eye? I am afraid you have not.

To do us poor patients justice, we do not often dispute doctors’ orders unless we are frightened or upset by a long continuance of epidemic diseases. In that case, if we are uncivilized, we say that you have poisoned the drinking water for your own purpose, and we turn out and throw stones at you in the street. If we are civilized, we do something else. But a civilized people can throw stones too. You have been and always will be exposed to the contempt of the gifted amateur—the gentleman who knows by intuition everything that it has taken you years to learn. You have been exposed—you always will be exposed—to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world’s most bitter agonies—the people who would limit and cripple and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering.

You remain now perhaps the only class that dares to tell the world that we can get no more out of a machine than we put into it; that if the fathers have eaten forbidden fruit the children’s teeth are very liable to be affected. Your training shows you daily and directly that things are what they are and that their consequences will be what they will be—and that we deceive no one but ourselves when we pretend otherwise. Better still you can prove what you have learned. If a patient chooses to disregard your warnings, you have not to wait for a generation to convince him. You know you will be called in in a few days or weeks, and you will find your careless friend with a pain in his inside, or a sore place on his body, precisely as you warned him would be the case. Have you ever considered what a tremendous privilege that is? At a time when few things are called by their right names, when it is against the spirit of the times even to hint that an act may entail consequences—you are going to join a profession in which you will be paid for telling men the truth, and every departure you may make from the truth you will make as a concession to man’s bodily weakness, and not his mental weakness.
Realizing these things, as I have had good reason to realize them, I do not think I need stretch your patience by talking to you about the high ideals and the lofty ethics of a profession which exacts from its followers the largest responsibility and the highest death rate—for its practitioners—of any profession in the world. If you will let me, I will wish you in your future what all men desire—enough work to do, and strength enough to do your work.

Rudyard Kipling, fr. a speech delivered to the students of the
medical school of Middlesex Hospital in 1908 (via Lapham's)

-

2010-02-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

A breeze like the turning of a page
Brings back your face: the moment
Takes such a big bite out of the haze
Of pleasant intuition it comes after.
The locking into place is “death itself,”
As Berg said of a phrase in Mahler’s Ninth;
Or, to quote Imogen in Cymbeline, “There cannot
Be a pinch in death more sharp than this,” for,
Though only exercise or tactic, it carries
The momentum of a conviction that had been building.
Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it
Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains
The white precipitate of its dream
In the climate of sighs flung across our world,
A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that
What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
The light sinks today with an enthusiasm
I have known elsewhere, and known why
It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way
Years ago.

fr. John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

Mikhail Bulgakov Performs a Tracheotomy

2010-02-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

So I was alone, surrounded by November gloom and whirling snow; the house was smothered in it and there was a moaning in the chimneys. I had spent all twenty-four years of my life in a huge city and thought that blizzards only howled in novels. It appeared that they howled in real life. The evenings here are unusually long, and I fell to daydreaming, staring at the reflection on the window of the lamp with its dark blue shade. I dreamed of the nearest town, thirty-two miles away. I longed to leave my country clinic and go there. They had electricity, and there were four doctors whom I could consult. At all events it would be less frightening than this place. But there was no chance of running away, and at times I realized that it would be cowardly. It was for precisely this, after all, that I had been studying medicine.
Yes, but suppose they bring me a woman in labor and there are complications? Or, say, a patient with a strangulated hernia? What shall I do then? Kindly tell me that. Forty-eight days ago I qualified 'with distinction'; but distinction is one thing and hernia is another. Once I watched a professor operating on a strangulated hernia. He did it, while I sat in the amphitheater. And I only just managed to survive.…

More than once I broke out in a cold sweat down my spine at the thought of hernia. Every evening, as I drank my tea, I would sit in the same attitude: by my left hand lay all the manuals on obstetrical surgery, on top of them the small edition of Döderlein. To my right were ten different illustrated volumes on operative surgery. I groaned, smoked and drank cold tea without milk.

Mikhail Bulgakov, fr. A Country Doctor's Notebook, 1916

Ziggurat

2010-01-23T11:40:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed reading this story, by Stephen O'Connor.

to the daisychain or grave

2010-01-22T15:48:00.000-08:00

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Allen Ginsberg, fr. "Howl"

The Howling of Wolves

2010-01-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a violin, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running—brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

Ted Hughes, "The Howling of Wolves"

these temple bones

2010-01-17T17:53:00.000-08:00

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

Galway Kinnell, fr. "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight"

and it is so

2010-01-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985

Fair Enough

2009-12-22T15:02:00.001-08:00

Q: What is it that you most dislike?
A: Seeing fish with silver skin marinating in cream.

Jasper Johns, Vanity Fair, 2007.

Das Unheimliche

2009-11-21T06:33:00.000-08:00

Perhaps Freud was anticipating robot therapists for autistic children.

"The idea that robots will teach people to relate to others, she says, is as fallacious as the argument that e-mail facilitates telephone conversation and then direct discussions."

Dr. Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, 2009

Coronary Circulation

2009-11-01T23:50:00.001-08:00

(via swivelchair)

Kidneys

2009-11-01T23:03:00.000-08:00

But who doesn't like eating kidney? Kidney is, after all, such an accurate thermometer in matters of love.

Peter Altenberg, "Die Niere," 1913.

Diagnosis

2009-10-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

Or make the patient cover his eyes so that he cannot see, and say, “Look out, I’m going to prick you!” and do not prick him. Then say, “I pricked you on the foot,” and if he agrees, it is a sign of leprosy.

Jordan of Turre, fr. "The Symptoms of Lepers" 1320 (via Lapham's)