Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Trapped, Wriggling, Pinned (Like an Insect) to a Board…

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[Image: “impossible decisions,” by a Flickr user who identifies themselves as “danna § curious tangles.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you for that option!)]

This week, whiskey river offered us some road-trip advice — in which the road trip in question is not literally a road trip, although the metaphor sure works in this case. The river gave us just the one italicized stanza, but the whole thing feels relevant:

Before We Leave

Just so it’s clear—
no whining on the journey.
If you whine, you’ll get stuck
somewhere with people
like yourself. It’s an unwritten law.
Wear hiking boots. Pack food
and a change of clothes.
We go slowly. Endurance won’t
be enough, though without it
you can’t get to the place
where more of you is asked.
Expect there will be times
when you’ll be afraid.
Hold hands and tremble together
if you must but remember
each of you is alone.

Where are we going?
It’s not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can’t
take another step imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.
Trudge on. In the higher regions,
where the footing is unsure,
to trudge is to survive.

Happiness is another journey,
almost over before it starts,
guaranteed to disappoint.
If you’ve come for it, say so,
you’ll get your money back.
I hope you all realize that anytime
is a fine time to laugh. Fake it,
however, and false laughter
will accompany you like a cowbell
for the rest of your days.
You’ll forever lack the seriousness
of a clown. At some point
the rocks will be jagged,
the precipice sheer. That won’t be
the abyss you’ll see looking down.
The abyss, you’ll discover
(if you’ve made it this far),
is usually nearer than that—
at the bottom of something
you’ve yet to resolve,
or posing as your confidante.
Follow me. Don’t follow me. I will
say such things, and mean both.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

We’re at a point now (still in the Las Vegas area) at which our own road trip has been at a standstill for three months. We so needed a break from the three-nights-here-five-nights-there-a-single-night-at-the-other-place pace, y’know? Just finally being able to empty the car of all luggage and travel bags — instead of selecting the one bag or two to tide us over to the next stop — well, it felt like a heavenly indulgence. And we could have done a lot worse than to stay with The Stepson!

…But now, of course and maybe inevitably, we’re hemmed in by the pinch of various realities: the end of the wintertime snuggle-in evenings; a dwindling reservoir of cash set aside for the trip; an ongoing pandemic (despite the kinda unconvincing official reassurances, which feel to me more like a series of exhausted collective “Oh, the hell with it!” pronouncements); inflation and war; the fact of not yet knowing where we’ll even live when the trip is “done”… We daily fight the good fight of not turning on each other simply as a substitute for not being able to fight all the large-scale battles.

This feels like a good time to open up the little book of, well, let’s call them homilies for lack of a better word: the little book we used to refer to here at least once a month for many years, but haven’t since August. Therein, on a well-thumbed page we find a fable of sorts:

#90: On foot, dog-tired, the man approached a busy intersection. He’d never been there before, but as he drew nearer he’d been eyeing it, seemingly larger and busier, with every step: cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks and delivery vans, even bicycle lane, a river of vehicles — any one of which could kill him, and all of which together would certainly obliterate him completely…

Now he was here at the corner.

Now he could see, as he could not from farther away, that the intersection was well marked with traffic signals (not, alas, with “Pedestrian Crossing” ones). This might have given him courage, given him simple hope. Except… except that the traffic never let up, not in any of the four directions, no matter the signals’ red-yellow-green status. Somehow, all the wheeled menaces were managing to thread through the gaps in oncoming and cross-traffic, without stopping or even slowing down.

The man could not understand this. In an infinite universe, he had often told himself, all things must be possible. But surely that didn’t apply to a system as chaotically random as this, driven as it was not merely by physical forces, quantum mechanics, the unpredictable quirky cross-purposed nature of human mood and decision-making…

Then it occurred to him that, well, he too was an animate object. In an infinite universe, he thought… and so he swallowed once, and stepped off the curb.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

______

Note: I am very much aware how lucky I am — we are — to be able to whinge about such dilemmas, vs. the truly excruciating, life-threatening, and/or literally maddening ones pounding at the doors of people around the world right now. See Stephen Dunn’s first stanza, above.

Coming from Elsewhere, and Now Headed That Way

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[Image: “05a.WMATA.MetroCenter.WDC.8April2016,” by Elvert Barnes. (Found on Flickr, using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river, just a few days ago:

At any particular moment in a man’s life, he can say that everything he has done and has not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to this moment. If he’s being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that’s a fulfilling notion. But if he’s in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

(William Least Heat-Moon [source])

Well, yes. I guess that’s true — the gods know, How could I have been so stupid? is a question I’ve put to myself a thousand times. The problem with the question, in those words or others, is two-fold: (1) it’s always retrospective, as though one could have anticipated and prepared for every possible mishap or misstep over the course of decades of life; and (2) from a certain perspective, the Nobel Prize winners and great Chiefs themselves surely experienced “How could I be such a dope?” moments. To pluck one arbitrary bad moment from one life and set it alongside an arbitrary moment of glory from another really doesn’t make for a fair comparison — nothing to beat oneself up about or, for that matter, nothing to swell one’s head…

Coincidentally, this comes during a week when I cracked open a book I’ve had for a long time — its acquisition probably triggered, now that I think about it, by a whiskey river-inspired Friday blog post. Early on in the book, back to back, we find a couple of germane passages. The first is a story of an old friend, Nasruddin (the name spelled variously with one or two d’s):

It’s 4 A.M. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. “Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?” “Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!”

(Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks [source])

…almost immediately after which, we read:

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there. This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

(Rumi, ibid.)

Facing The Other, Pretending Not to See Oneself

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[Image: “Ukraine, Day 1,” by John E. Simpson.]

This week has certainly delivered to the world a big, heaping wallop of unease, hasn’t it? I’ve found it difficult to be really philosophical about “it all”; mostly, like many people it seems, I am baffled and rather irrationally angry that “it all” has come to pass… and I say irrationally, because after all, what do I know, and who am I to be having opinions about it?

A few days ago, before the invasion, the onscreen chyron beneath a couple of CNN talking heads said something like, How will a Russian invasion of Ukraine affect your pocketbook? I have no idea what the commentators were saying — the sound was off, and there were no closed captions displaying — but those big boldfaced words really hit me wrong. All I could think was, My pocketbook?!? Jeezus, think about what it would mean for the Ukrainians…!

Explicit references to politics and world affairs seldom bob to the surface over at whiskey river, where the current is always gentle. But the anonymous blogger there is human, after all, and in especially fraught times a given week’s selection may be hard to separate in one’s mind from the real-world context. Or maybe it’s just one’s own imagination that fits an interpretation around something like this (italicized portion):

At the risk of telling you
what you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There will always be people who think suffering
leads to enlightenment, who place themselves
on the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them
and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward that sure thing that awaits us,
which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs. Cavendish, every day is old news.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

I read of people who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, and think to myself: Yeah. Like Putin, that fool, that dupe of his own aspirations.

And then I cast around for more, not at whiskey river, and come across first this:

Malignant aggression does not reflect true human nature; it is connected with a domain of unconscious, perinatal dynamics that separates us from our deeper identity. Those who initiate war activities and violence in general are typically substituting external targets for elements in their own psyches, which should properly be faced in personal self-exploration.

(Stanislav Grof [source, but original text unconfirmed])

Yes, I exult, yes: that’s it, exactly!

But no, that’s not “it” after all… or rather, that’s not “it” unless I skip conveniently past that last clause: one’s own psyche, subject to self-exploration. And this, I think, is it — as expressed below, with my emphasis added to the original:

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

(Pema Chödrön [source])

When I was young, I knew a man just a few years older, man who suffered violent mood swings. Medication “helped,” after a fashion: as I recall, it rendered him impassive — functioning, as they say, but also strangely not-human. Yet when unmedicated, he tended to destroy the lives of people around him, principally his family. He seemed alternately obsessed and focused on the strangest ideas, and violently angry about injustices he imagined the world and those people had inflicted upon him. Eventually, with the help of improved medications and other therapies, he came to have something of a normal life — but the memories of those past episodes forever seared themselves in the minds of those (including me) who’d known him back then.

I think back to those young men now: him, going through the inner hell he went through and acted out; and me, watching in horror as he figuratively staggered from one violent encounter to another, lapsing only temporarily into dull-eyed “normalcy.” And I think of my helplessness then, and my helplessness now, and my hope that somehow — somehow — the right balance of remedies can be found, or forged. Maybe then madness can finally be laid to rest: an awful memory, but no more than that.

And then maybe we can return to life as it should be — never again “normal” (because it never was), but at least stabilized by fellow-feeling for strangers and an absence of national envies and judgments. (“National” the key word there: I doubt that we’ll ever, as a species, be free of personal envies and judgments.)

To Be as Aware and Alone as Can Be — Naturally

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[Image: “Sedona: Leaf and Shoe,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’d titled the image before realizing it actually depicts two leaves — the obvious one, and the ageing, deteriorated thing up there in the northwest quadrant — which maybe makes the whole thing more poignant, I dunno. I certainly didn’t mean it as a comment on the shoe-wearer’s age and deterioration!]

One of whiskey river’s offerings in the last week was a poem whose ostensible subject might have been familiar to romanticized-nature poets like Wordsworth: the multi-sensory beauties of the natural world. Yet there’s also something distinctly modern about it — something about the natural world as it could be regarded particularly “nowadays,” immersed in a global pandemic and buffeted by techno-socio-political turmoil:

The End of The World

“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled,
And we scrambled down beneath the bridge
On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.

We tramped for miles on a wooded walk
Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.
Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor
While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.

We came to a bend, where the river grew wide
And green mountains rose on the opposite side.
My guides moved back. I stood alone,
As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.

Shelf by stone shelf the river fell.
The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.
Faster and louder the current dropped
Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.

I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,
My journey done where the world ended.
I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,
The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

(Dana Gioia [source])

Oh, sure, there’s a mention of a car. But that’s not the modern touch I’m thinking of. I’m thinking more of the sensibility: a progression — from being with others to being by oneself, from a shared to a personal experience. But notice, too, the touch of an ancient tradition: if it were truly modern, that focus on the personal would force an observation on the self. (Y’know, like, “What does this all say about me?”) Instead, Gioia’s poem regards — very obliquely — a self only in a context of nature… as an elementary particle within a molecule, perhaps.

It reminds me of this (not from whiskey river, although it possibly could have been):

Let us change our way of thinking and our way of looking. We have to realize that silence comes from our heart and not from the absence of talk. Sitting down to eat your lunch may be an opportunity for you to enjoy silence; though others may be speaking, it’s possible for you to be very silent inside… Being alone does not mean there is no one around you.

Being alone means you are established firmly in the here and the now and you become aware of what is happening in the present moment. You use your mindfulness to become aware of every feeling, every perception you have. You’re aware of what’s happening around you in the sangha, but you’re always with yourself, you don’t lose yourself. That’s the Buddha’s definition of the ideal practice of solitude: not to be caught in the past or carried away by the future, but always to be here, body and mind united, aware of what is happening in the present moment. That is real solitude.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

Always with yourself, aware of what is happening but not really aware of your self as such. Real solitude. And a real comfort.

By the way, for anyone who might be wondering: the cataract removal surgery in my right eye went just fine. The only real hitch (aside from — surprise! — my elevated blood pressure): the doctor could not use his beloved femtosecond laser, and had to resort, after all, to the good old manually wielded scalpel. But the eye is fine — presumably all but healed. (Next week I meet with him for the last time about the surgery, and also probably to discuss a follow-up surgery in the left eye, sometime in the next few weeks.)

As you may know, I was quite nervous about how or even whether I’d be able to understand the voices of any of the attending medicos. As it happens, they were all very good about either wearing clear plastic shields or simply tugging their masks out of the way, so I could see their mouths as they talked. But… Well, I’m not sure how to explain this… Picture me lying on my back on a gurney or surgical bed-type thing, looking up. Positioned at the top of my head is the surgeon; to the right and left, nurses or other aides. So from my perspective, none of their mouths were right-side-up. It turns out that I can’t lip-read a mouth that’s turned sideways, and can do so for an upside-down mouth only with great difficulty.

There’s always something, as they say. (Only I can’t hear them when they say it sideways.)

Straddling the Margin Between Art and Life

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[Image: “Khamir,” by John E. Simpson — one of my #jes_storypix series on Instagram, in which generally heavily edited photos of “real life” are used to illustrate imagined narratives. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The caption: “Khamir had been staring at his phone for what felt like an hour. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t called yet, couldn’t believe she’d stoop to such a… a betrayal. A lazy betrayal at that! She knew how much he depended on her, needed her. Now the whole thing had fallen apart… Blinking back bitter tears, he finally punched in their private number, held the phone to his ear. When her voicemail picked up, he spoke rapidly: ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll call off the air strike. Happy now?’”]

This week, whiskey river points us (in the case of this quotation) in the direction of an old, real-world debate:

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words…

(Lawrence Ferlinghetti [source])

Maybe it’s not so much a debate as an assertion, or maybe even just a forceful suggestion: that in order to accomplish sweeping societal change, the poets must lead the charge. (References to poetry really may mean art in general, but I’ll stick to Ferlinghetti’s script for now.) Well, no — maybe “must lead the charge” overstates the case; perhaps the point is more like “Even poets can and should contribute to the revolution.” In those terms, I can buy it — I strongly doubt that anyone but poets themselves looks to the poets for political, social, cultural guidance.

On the other hand, poetry — again, art in general — certainly can and sometimes does help shift the Zeitgeist in one direction or another, especially in concert with other cultural influences. Poetry — especially recent poetry — may suffer a bad rap (it’s too dreamy, too moody, too confessional, too abstract or weird), but it’s difficult to separate what we know of a given age’s general nature from the poetic (etc.) movements it engendered — the Romantics pushing back against the Enlightenment, the Beats excavating the hollows under the postwar-US bourgeois civilization, and I guess even the Zen poets’ and artists’ fascination with nature at a time when Japan was ruled by warlords…

Calling the 2020s something like The Pandemic Age — I don’t know, a bit premature, yes? (Together with everything else — climate change, political upheaval, economic crises, and so on — in my worst moods I sometimes fear we’re seeing The Last Age.) But I wonder what the art of now will look like in the rearview mirror, decades hence. What — of early 21st-century neuroses, preconceptions, perspectives, emotional states — what will linger in human consciousness of what, at this point in history, it means to be human? What will poetry and the other arts have, y’know, wrought in the meantime?

The past year has rewarded me with, among other things, a burst of reading, both fiction and non-fiction. When I was young, as I remember those years anyhow, I read constantly. But over time it became a habit experienced in hindsight rather than in a given moment: a book, even a short one, might take me two or three weeks to finish. My reading took place only in a blurry sort of half-hour or so each night as I descended into sleep, and that was it.

One book I read last summer was a 2014 novella called Sleep Donation, by Karen Russell. It posits a world in which the United States suffers a plague (!) — one of insomnia. The ailment becomes so widespread that an entrepreneur has developed a means to transfer excess sleep from those who get through the night without difficulty to those who lie awake staring into the dark. The most highly valued donors, of course, are those who sleep without interruption… and without nightmares.

The system works pretty well, except — well, how do you know if someone has awful nightmares? (You ask them.) And if insomnia, and nightmares, can be passed around like a virus, what happens when a donor with a godawful recurring and communicable nightmare either doesn’t know it, or chooses for whatever reason to disguise the fact?

Meet Donor Y:

“Donor Y” walked into a sleep bank in San Diego and asked to register. It was his first time donating sleep. According to his file, he is a forty-two-year-old white male, five feet seven, 189 pounds, 128/67 blood pressure, no sexual partners sharing the bed with him, no children. He checked no on all the disqualifying boxes: Sleep apnea: no. Sleepwalking: no. He was next handed the CDC alphabetized list of all three hundred known contagious nightmares —

  • Abomination, horned
  • Ambulance, frozen yellow siren
  • Anthill, no queen
  • Ants, flesh-eating
  • Aorta, burst
  • Asteroid, green
  • Attic, grandmother’s ghost
  • Attic, padlocked toy chest
  • Avalanche, death of self
  • Avalanche, death of spouse
  • Avalanche, live burial

Et cetera. Donor Y did not check a single box.

(Karen Russell [source])

Donor Y’s sleep donation has terrible consequences both foreseeable and surprising. (For instance, people who “catch” his nightmare often choose to give up sleep entirely rather than endure it again, becoming amphetamine-dependent… and, of course, they eventually go mad and die.)

By posting this excerpt along with whiskey river‘s, I don’t mean to suggest that Lawrence Ferlinghetti had science fiction anywhere on his radar when composing “I am signaling you through the flames.” But yeah: good science fiction always says at least as much about the author’s time as it does about the future or the past. When Sleep Donation came out, nobody had ye heard of COVID-19, but even a casual reading of the book could’ve told an extraterrestrial being some valuable lessons about human behavior in such an event.

Putting an Eye Under the Knife (Part 2)

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[Image (from Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2008-05-14): kinda self-explanatory, no? Nevada, it seems, is the US’s third most seismically active area, after Alaska and California. Also probably self-explanatory: why I’d have been researching earthquake data for the Las Vegas area. My cataract will be removed right about where the Valley View Fault crosses West Charleston Boulevard.]

Yesterday I gave you a more or less (for me) straightforward account of some facts about tomorrow’s cataract-removal surgery — facts about the procedure itself and about the related prescriptions (drugs and eyeglasses), facts which have been instrumental in disturbing my OCD sleep in recent nights. Today’s post veers off the path of objectivity — arguably into surrealism.

The personal issues

I have had my body slit open — intentionally — on only one prior occasion: the simple removal of a cyst, a couple years ago. In the present instance, though, I’m opting to functionally alter myself. It’s not a just matter of excising a flaw (although it is, in part, exactly that). It’s an alteration of something central to my self: my eyesight.

Naturally, the jokes about bionic eyes and such have occurred to me. And I wonder: when someone shines a flashlight into my right eye at night, will the eye still glow, and if so, in what color? When I visit my optometrist in April, will she still be able to use the various instruments which photograph the back of my eyeball to check for retinal issues of one kind or another? Will simply blinking feel different between the two eyes?

A lot of these kinds of questions are triggered by dwelling on the disclaimer and consent forms I had to sign, which list numerous possibilities for What Can Go Wrong both during and after the surgery. And then when I dwelt on the nature of the laser-assisted surgery as described yesterday, I also started to think about those fleeting moments when the thing is zizzing and swishing across my eye: a technician jostling the instrument’s housing, a sudden sneeze or cough…

Finally, yes, I wondered even about earth tremors — heck, about the passing of a heavy truck on a nearby pavement. If this computer-guided laser is so finely tuned that its incisions are measured in quadrillionths of anything, won’t a simple incorrect quadrillionth of the same anything be enough to throw off everything that follows?

I’m kidding, kinda, about all the above. (Not to say that I didn’t think and re-think about it all long enough to lose sleep.) But one thing still not quite alarms me, but has almost made me want to just drop the whole idea and go forth into semi-blindness…

I’ve never made a secret of my hearing issues, or of the fact that I wear two hearing aids just to get along in a society — a world — where sound is important. Here at RAMH, when I first fired up the blog about 19 years ago, I even set up a whole “Hearing” category because I was so sure I’d be blabbing about it regularly. But it hasn’t worked out that way, for whatever reason.

In short, my hearing (including the parts of my consciousness devoted to understanding speech) has continued to decline with time. I pretty much can no longer carry on “normal” conversations with people unless I can see their faces, in particular their mouths, to boost their intelligibility to me.

And, as you can maybe imagine, the pandemic’s mask practices have played absolute hell with my comfort level whenever conversation is required.

Aside: I am by no means the only person this applies to; you can find lots of references in news and feature reports about the pandemic’s unexpected social consequences for the hearing-impaired. In what follows, I’ll try to keep the focus on how it applies specifically to me, this week.

So here’s the scenario I have imagined:

I’m lying on my back on a table at the time of the procedure. My head is secured in place with a strap or similar means. My right eyelid has been anesthetized, and is being held open by one of those eyelid-clamp things. The doctor, nurse, or other attending professional says something — I can hear the sounds, but cannot make out the word(s)… because, of course, I probably cannot see the words being said — and even if I could look in their direction, they’re probably masked. What did they just say? Was it in fact something addressed to me? Or are they talking among themselves? Which one of them said it? Was it an instruction of some kind, requiring me to respond somehow? Am I supposed to focus on… something? Move my eyes… somehow? Or keep them absolutely still? Is it okay for my left eye to blink right now?

And so on.

Now, the seeing-their-mouths thing I’ve already tried to be proactive about. They know (although they still need reminding) that I have to see their lower faces. I actually emailed the head of the clinic to describe the problem; in response, she purchased several clear plastic face shields which they have (mostly) remembered to have handy when I’m scheduled to meet with them. (When they’ve forgotten, at my insistence they and I have been okay with tugging their masks away from their mouths.)

I’ve also picked up, on my own, a case of a product called ClearMask (shown in photo at the left); it’s been FDA-approved for use as a surgical mask. Primarily, I did this to reduce The Missus’s and my own frustration when the two of us are out and about somewhere and need to talk, but I’ll also take along a couple of them with me tomorrow, and maybe they’ll at least serve to “spread the word” a little. (It’s also insurance for me: the surgical procedure is taking place at a completely different building than the one I go to for exams and so on, so they may not have their face shields handy.)

Finally, I figure I’ll just lay it out as plainly as I can before I even lie down, something like this:

I’m going to turn off my hearing aids now. Please understand: I won’t be able to hear you at all once I’ve done that. If I need to do something other than just lie here during the surgery, you need to come up with some way to communicate that to me, NOW, while I’m listening to you. Maybe you can touch my left arm if you need me to look to the left, say, or tap my forehead if you need me to look straight ahead. But for all intents and purposes, during the procedure, please consider me stone-deaf.

It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. (For all I know, maybe they’ve already been discussing this, and they can just stop me before I get started.)

I expect not to update you here on how it went for a few days after tomorrow — maybe next weekend. Mostly, though, I’m just looking forward to not having to obsessively anticipate anything for a while!

Putting an Eye Under the Knife

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[Video: an animation showing how cataract surgery is traditionally performed, using tiny surgical blades for any necessary incisions. (There are videos on YouTube of actual cataract surgeries being performed, but they’re just a little bit too, er, ick for me to include here.) My own surgery on Monday morning will be performed, as explained below, using a laser rather than the scalpel(s).]

For starters, okay: really, there’s no knife involved. (On the other hand, it sure sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Life on the edge!) There’s definitely an eye. But I am going under a laser in a couple of days. And just because I am, well, me, these last few days leading up to the experience carry with them a certain amount of drama — all on the inside, you understand. This drama falls into three categories: the procedure; the prescriptions; and the, uh, John-specific considerations.

The procedure

As family and friends have had cataracts removed, you’d think that by now I’d actually have known something about the procedure — about cataracts themselves. But no.

Oh, I knew there were cloudy… somethings in sufferers’ eyes. But how were the clouds dispelled? How could something, like, in the eye be removed? Surely not by actually cutting the eye? Aren’t eyeballs basically just flexible globes full of some liquid? (I even knew the term vitreous humor.) Surely to cut the eye would be to invite a tiny but perhaps audible “pop!” — the presumably cloudy fluid now splattered all over the lens of an observing microscope?

Obviously that hadn’t happened to anyone I knew who’d had the surgery… because, of course, that’s not how the eye is cut: there’s no, like, jabbing or poking involved. The incisions in question all involve only the lens of the eye, and its immediate surroundings.

And that was my second surprise: the lens has to be cut in order to be removed and replaced. You get an actual new — and artificial — lens.

So the procedure I’ll be undergoing will take somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes, and consist of two steps: removing the faulty lens, and inserting a new — and presumably non-faulty, haha — one in its place.

Classically, the removal is done using a tiny little scalpel, often with an offset blade like the one shown at the right. This enables a horizontal slit to be made — hence, the non-jabbing kind of cut — very shallowly in the region of the lens. This is the kind of surgery shown in the video at the top of this post.

In my case, the doctor will be using something called a “femtosecond laser.” The “femto-” prefix means “one quadrillionth”; in other words, in every second the laser pulses one quadrillion times (one followed by 15 zeroes). It makes a stitching type pattern, first around the lens and then back-and-forth across the lens, breaking it up into tiny little regularly shaped fragments which are vacuumed away. At that point, the eye in question is, well, lensless. (Apparently, during this interlude, the center of the eye turns red. This isn’t from leaking blood or anything; it’s the color of light reflected off the back of the eyeball.)

I’ve seen animations of the circular and cross-stitching path of the laser beams. The animations must be slowed waaaaay down, so you can see what actually happens. (It’s almost like watching Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies: swish-swish-swish-SWOOSH, and the target collapses in a pile of shards.) The idea, as I understand it, is that the beams’ paths are computer-controlled: programmed not only for horizontal/vertical placement on the surface but for actual depth of the cuts, according to previously taken, ultra-precise measurements of the eye in question.

(This is all rather dazzling, wot?)

So then once the bits of the cloudy lens have been removed, it’s time to move on to the next step: inserting the artificial replacement.

My ophthalmologist gave me a choice of two recommended (and both fairly recently introduced) lenses. One is a trifocal-type lens — basically with three different facets to give me near, middle, and far-sight focus. A problem reported by (some? many?) wearers of the trifocals: at the “edges” where one facet transitions to the next, the lenses seem (especially at night) to create glittery halos of light.

The alternative is more like a so-called “progressive” eyeglass lens: a single convex smooth arc, finely tuned for the patient’s need. This lens — the brand name is “Vivity” — is shown at the left, in its pre-inserted state. (As I understand it, the two thin “arms” extending out to the side are flexible — springy — the tension of which holds the lens in place, nestled in its shallow pocket in the center of the eye’s surface.) I’ll be getting a Vivity lens on Monday.

As far as how the new lens is inserted, the doctor will use a tool actually called an injector. It behaves similarly to a hypodermic: the “payload” — the Vivity lens in this case — is placed into a small cylinder, and as something like a plunger at one end is depressed, the lens squeezes through a narrow opening at the other end, into the space at the front of the eye previously occupied by the old, cataracted lens. Those two skinny arms on either side of the lens don’t quite make a “sprong!” noise as the lens settles in, but the effect is more or less the same, and then it’s all over but the shouting… and, of course, the post-op.

Which brings us to…

The prescriptions

Aside from the new lens itself, multiple prescriptions are involved: three for the post-operative period itself, and one… well, let’s say that is a longer-term issue.

The ophthalmologist prescribed three types of post-op eyedrops:

  • Prednisolone (brand name Inveltys, bottle with a pink or white cap): to be used 3x daily (breakfast, lunch, dinner)
  • Ketorolac (Prolensa, gray cap): 1x daily (breakfast only)
  • Ofloxacin (no brand name specified, tan cap): 4x daily (breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime)

During the times when I’m taking more than one of those, I’m to wait a few minutes between each kind of eyedrops before moving on to the next.

The drama here really has nothing to do with the prescriptions themselves, but with getting them filled at the pharmacy. Because at this point, naturally, the question of medical insurance rears its head.

I’ve got very good Medicare coverage, including a prescription supplement. This does not mean, however, that every drug — that is, every drug brandname — is covered equally by my insurance providers. Specifically:

  • The ofloxacin: no problem. Covered, with a cost to me of around $10.
  • The ketorolac/Prolensa: “covered,” but the insurance would at first cover only about 10% or so of the total cost. This would mean, out-of-pocket, about $350 of my own money. After I contacted the drugstore, they substituted a non-branded generic… at a cost to me of about $58.
  • The prednisolone/Inveltys: boom! the insurance hammer came down. My insurance would not cover this at all. I had no idea what to do at first — I mean, evidently I did need the prescription, right? I still don’t know what the issue was, but once the ophthalmologist contacted the insurer, all was eventually well. It cost me $30-something out-of-pocket.

The longer-term prescription I’m referring to here is my existing eyeglass prescriptions. I have three of them, for both eyes: a pair of progressive-lensed glasses; a pair of reading glasses; and a pair of progressive-lensed sunglasses.

Here’s the potential issue: after Monday’s surgery, I am expected to need no glass(es) at all for my right eye. Continuing to use my existing glasses will therefore not work, for that eye… although it will for the left eye. So — this seems to be a recurring theme — I’ll have two choices.

The first is just to replace the right lens in each pair of glasses with a lens of plain, non-Rx glass. (Or, I guess, replace the eyeglass frames with a left-eye-only monocle. Unlikely, but possible.)

On the other hand, as it happens, I have a “smaller,” less advanced cataract in my left eye as well. So in a couple-three weeks, I can choose to have the lens of that eye replaced as well, with (yes) another Vivity lens…

I don’t know yet what I’ll do to resolve this all. The cataract in the left eye will almost certainly get worse over time. If I simply postpone surgery for it until it does become a problem, then who knows where I’ll be when I do get it done — and having it done by a different ophthalmologist, at a time when (who knows?) maybe I won’t still be able to get the same kind of Vivity lens… It’s all a bit of a crapshoot, innit?

And on yet another hand, damn, these things are expensive, even with good insurance…

Answer (haha) hazy. Try again later.

I’ll save the third type of drama — the “personal” type — for a later post, tomorrow or even after the surgery; this one is already long enough. Appreciate your patience with it all, though. I’m pretty sure I’m working out my own anxieties, not asking you to share them!

About This Business of Stilling the Monkey…

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[Image: “Gas Apparatus,” by someone on Flickr who identifies there as “Reva G.” (Using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you very much!) The photographer says: “I found this complex array of gas piping nicely sunlit behind a local industrial building. It looks just like the flowchart my brain uses for trying to make mundane everyday decisions!”]

There is so much to see in the world — to know, to experience. How do we decide what to attend to in the first place? And once we’ve attended to something, how best to understand it, to know it as fully as it can be known — to “get” it? Herewith, some thoughts on the subject… courtesy of whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called “real world” so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one’s wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search…

A recurring motif of the esoteric traditions is the realm of the unseen — other dimensions, invisible entities, inner planes, etheric bodies, energy centers, planetary forces, hidden masters, the list goes on and on. Some people with a tendency toward paranoia are strongly attracted to the esoteric precisely because it mirrors their secret fears: unseen forces affect our lives, consensus reality is a sham, the universe is somehow converging on our personal slice of life. The spiritual landscape is littered with addled mystics who jumped into esoteric belief systems that were more than their sanity could bear…

Which leads us to a skill that it would be wise to cultivate: the ability to maintain a simultaneous belief and disbelief in all matters esoteric until you have undeniably experienced them for yourself. Let us call this “faithful skepticism”…

The kind of “knowing” that one finds in gnosis is personally verified. It isn’t based on the hearsay of another’s experience. And even when you have experienced something that seems real, it is well to keep room in your worldview for the possibility that it is all in your imagination. Keep things in perspective.

(Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney [source])

Well, I started thinking about this (as one does). The passage highlights multiple dichotomies or divergences in types of experience: different forms or sources of “groundedness”; the divide between the sensed outer world and the unsensed but known inner; what distinguishes paranoia from a world simply imagined…

And all the this-vs.-that, in turn, got me thinking about the restless mind which besets me during some nights. What if… On the other hand… How about if…? I think I could… No way could I… They (the people who name such things) often refer to this as “monkey mind,” and offer various prescriptions for, well, tranquilizing the monkey.

Here’s one of those prescriptions — not from whiskey river — on letting silence simply settle in and take up residence in our heads:

When you are practicing zazen, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are both­ered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not both­ered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer. In five or at most ten minutes, your mind will be completely serene and calm. At that time your breathing will become quite slow, while your pulse will become a little faster.

It will take quite a long time before you find your calm, serene mind in your practice. Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise, but they are just waves of your own mind. Nothing comes from outside your mind. Usually we think of our mind as receiving impressions and experiences from outside, but that is not a true understanding of our mind. The true understanding is that the mind includes everything; when you think something comes from outside it means only that something appears in your mind. Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm.

(Shunryu Suzuki [source])

Most of us have not trained — have not even contemplated training — in the formal practice of zazen. So for most of us, simply shutting off the monkey is, well, easier said than done: something to aspire to, I guess, without necessarily being able to pull it off on the spur of the moment. I just came across the following this morning, in fact, after a very restless night of my own; the author had found himself “wide awake” at four o’clock in the morning:

I fell back asleep at some point, but it wasn’t the kind of sleep that felt restful. I thought I was reading the paper that entire time. Then I realized that there was no Times article about puppets filling my suitcase with grapes.

(David Sedaris [source])

Asking the Hardest Question, and Not Reaching for the Easy Answer

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[Image: “A Hallway of Unopened Doors,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I can’t possibly need to hammer the metaphor in, can I?]

This week, whiskey river offers us a quote pulled from their commonplace book (something like a blog archive). They’ve used the same quotation in the past, and — as it happens — so have I (about five years ago), thanks to their trustworthy influence:

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing — not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision — a cocktail, a remix — of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes — we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.

(Caitlin Moran [source — subscription probably required])

When I used the quotation before, I didn’t know where it originally came from (book, blog post, etc.). This time around, I found the source (thanks to a generous subscription offer): an essay from The Times (i.e., of London) back in 2014. This offered me the opportunity to place it in context with the text preceding and after the quoted passage…

It turns out, see, that Caitlin Moran wasn’t really speaking of what she believed then, at the time she wrote the essay; she was thinking back to her younger self. The paragraphs preceding the excerpt above reads:

In my teens and twenties, I took after [my mother], and became a passionate advocate against any notion of an afterlife. Ninety per cent of the problems of humanity, it seemed, stemmed from a simple cognitive dissonance: refusing to acknowledge that this is it. That we are alive now, and there will be nothing else later — no second chances, no higher levels. No Heaven. No Nirvana. That if there is joy, or progress, or enlightenment, or love to be had, it must be had now: between your birth and your death; as fast and fiercely as you can. All we have is the breath in our bodies and a finite share of seconds, and each one must be spent with the same joyous reverence as a gold coin.

This is because, at 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

So she had that one sentence’s revelation, as she describes. But then, in 2014 and not years before, after the ringing “Don’t you dare” conclusion she added:

But that, as I say, was in my twenties. Ten years later, things have changed. I want there to be an afterlife, now. I wish it devoutly — not from any unhappy desire for an afterlife to be better than this one, but from sheer curiosity.

At 38, I think when I die, I need desperately to be handed a stiff drink and be allowed to ask, “What the hell was going on all that time? Come on — why did they build Stonehenge? Where did my first passport disappear to? What were Neanderthals really like? Where did my second passport disappear to? What would the third Amy Winehouse album have sounded like? Where did I lose my wedding ring? Can I have a map of the world, in fact — with each thing I’ve lost marked with a luminous pin?”

I don’t want swan’s wings. I don’t want my own planet. I don’t want eternity. I just want to know everything, ever — then be reordered across the universe, again.

I myself have nothing I could honestly call “a belief in the afterlife.” But I love the idea of a brief but ambitious interlude of revelation which precedes the ultimate atomization of whatever the hell my self is: a chance to “know everything, ever”… or at least, maybe, the answers to twenty or a hundred questions. The last one of which would simply go something like this:

And now the very last, final thing I want to know: after I get the answer to this last question, well… what happens next?

A Worldview Shaped by Others’ Eyes and Ears

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[Image: “The Curse of Milhaven,” by Elias Ruiz Monserrat. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you very much!)]

Like many (most? all?) people, at least those influenced by Western culture and values, I go back and forth in my general outlook: Things are so bad, as opposed to Things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’ve been kept awake at night both by crippling, flailing despair and by excited anticipation. But also like many people, I tend to occupy one end of the continuum vs. the other. And for me, the world is generally happier than not.

Many times over the years, I’ve thought about why this might (or might not) be so: why do we favor one vs. the other? The thought experiment that finally nudged me towards an answer was to imagine myself born into a world with no other people at all. (Yes, yes, I know: if there’d never been any other people, I couldn’t have been born at all. Repeat after me: thought experiment.) In such a world, would I — or anyone — tend to be more one than the other?

Last week, as though reading my mind on the subject, whiskey river offered me this:

For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them — that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

Suppose I pose to myself a question: what is this passage about? The answer might unfold like this:

Oh, surely it’s about cynicism… No, wait, it’s actually about cynics — people afflicted with cynicism… and it’s about innocence, and fear, and…

But that doesn’t seem right. Or not complete, anyhow…

And then I got to thinking about Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, the book which I mentioned in last week’s Friday post. In particular, I thought about the chapter in which Foster tries his damnedest to “be” a badger; here, he’s writing about his eventual comfort — his deep satisfaction — with finding himself lying in a Charles Foster-shaped hollow in the earth, about his no longer feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic in such a setting:

…all that swirling atavistic panic slowly cleared. I didn’t hyperventilate if I wasn’t on my actual and metaphorical hind legs, manfully scanning distant vistas and making sense of and plans for the big picture. It was okay to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me. From there it was a small enough step not to mind being eaten, and not to mind being in, or getting toward, the state in which one is eaten. And once you’re there, you’re at last a proper ecologist, knowing your place, all ecocolonialism gone. Only then, at the end of a weary and distressing metaphysical road, can you really begin the business of being a badger…

What does the individual badger “hear” as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologize as a difficulty in inquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends.

(Charles Foster [source et seq.])

Back to my thought experiment: had I been the only human ever on the planet, I would never have known cynicism. Fear, sure; desperation even, of course. (Never having known another person, I doubt that bitterness would have ever occurred to me.) But cynicism (like envy, jealousy, and so on) — that requires an Other. It’s a response not to the way the world is, but to the way people are in the world.

And yet it’s not the only response possible to a world shared with others, as Foster seems to be saying. Once we get to know the others, we can choose to like them, to not like them, to be indifferent to them. If we try hard enough, we can even become them, to a limited extent. But to be cynical about them is no more than a glib prediction of their behavior and its effects on oneself. It’s a vow, furthermore, never again to be surprised.

I think I’ll choose surprise, thanks all the same!

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