1/26/24

  Friday, January 26, 2024

In bed at 9, awake at 1:50, unable to sleep thinking of cystoscopy, lesions, and fulguration, up at 2:20.  Let Lilly out at 2:30.  Raining, 35°, high of 37°, wind NNE at 10 mph, 3-11/17.  0.1" of rain in the last 6 hours, 0.2" expected in the next 24 hours.  Sunrise at 7:13, sunset at 4:55, 9+42.

Treadmill; pain.  I woke up with wrist pain thinking of more bladder procedures and the horrendous last one.  Around 2 p.m., 30:18 & 0.70 while watching today's episode of Democracy Now on YouTube, focused on the ICJ decision on Isreal/Gaza and The Chris Hedges Report interview of Ilan Pappé on Israel and the Palestinians.    

I'm grateful that the chronic and persistent pain that has developed in my wrist, hand, and forearm is in the right wrist and not the left.  If a similar condition were to develop in my left wrist, I'd be in trouble.  It's good to be left-handed when you have a verkrimpter right wrist.

À-propos of my gratitude note yesterday on classical education.  David Brooks has an excellent piece in this mornings's NYT: "How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society."  The answer, he says, is classical education, broadly conceived, not just in schools but throughout life.  Excerpts:

I confess I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I’m convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what’s going on in the people right around you.

I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.

The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Some are just average-looking old people. But even the plainest face “is so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably.” We are jolted into not taking other people for granted but to sense and respect the immense depth of each human soul

When I come across a Rembrandt in a museum, I try to train myself to see with even half of Rembrandt’s humanity. Once in St. Petersburg, I had the chance to stand face to face with one of his greatest paintings, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” He painted this one at the end of his life, when popular taste had left him behind, his finances were in ruins, his wife and four of his five children were in their graves. I have seen other renderings of that parable, but not one in which the rebel son is so broken, fragile, pathetic, almost hairless and cast down. The father envelops the young man with a love that is patient, selfless and forbearing. Close observers note the old man’s hands. One is masculine, and protective. The other is feminine, and tender

 Though this painting is about a parable, it’s not here to teach us some didactic lesson. We are simply witnessing an emotional moment, which is about fracture and redemption, an aging artist painting a scene in which he imagines all his losses are restored. It is a painting about what it is like to finally realize your deepest yearnings — for forgiveness, safety, reconciliation, home. Meanwhile, the son’s older brother is off to the side, his face tensely rippling with a mixture of complex thoughts, which I read as rigid scorn trying to repress semiconscious shoots of fraternal tenderness.

These words made me think of myself as the Prodigal Son, made me think of my sins of omission and commission towards my parents, both my mother and my father.  With my father, thankfully I had time in his last years for repentence and conciliaation; with my mother I wasn't so fortunate.

When you go to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, you don’t just see Picasso’s “Guernica”; forever after you see war through that painting’s lenses. You see, or rather feel, the wailing mother, the screaming horse, the chaotic jumble of death and agony, and it becomes less possible to romanticize warfare. We don’t just see paintings; we see according to them.

I saw "Guernica" many years ago when it was displayed at MoMA.  I look at photos of it now and think of Gaza and Ukraine, of American bombing of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, of the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq.  Mostly though I think of Gaza because Picasso's screaming horse reminds me of all the donkey carts we see in videos of fleeing Palestinians. 

This process of refining and expanding our internal mental models is not a dry, purely intellectual process. If we’re lucky, and maybe only in rare moments, it can be gut-wrenching and intoxicating, a fusion of the head and the heart. As my friend Arthur Brooks writes, “Think of a time when you heard a piece of music and wanted to cry. Or recall the flutter of your heart as you stared at a delicate, uncannily lifelike sculpture. Or maybe your dizziness as you emerged from a narrow side street in an unfamiliar city and found yourself in a beautiful town square; for me, it was the Piazza San Marco in Venice, with its exquisitely preserved Renaissance architecture. Odds are, you didn’t feel as if the object of beauty was a narcotic, deadening you. Instead, it probably precipitated a visceral awakening, much like the shock from a lungful of pure oxygen after breathing smoggy air.”

This paragraph reminded me of the times when I have felt my eyes well up while listering to a piece of music or watching a magnificent musical performance on television.  I used to wonder if I was just weird, but apparently I'm not the only one to have these experiences.  I think of Richard Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder, and especially Beim Schlafengehen (When Falling Asleep),  Brooks' reference to "stand[ing] at a delicate, uncannily lieflike sculpture" reminds me of my trip to Rome with Mike Hogan, of visiting the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria and seeing Bernini's exquisite Saint Tereas in Ecstasy of St. Teresa.and the church of San Fraancesco a Ripa in lower Trastevere to see another Bernini masterwork, Beata Ludovica.  The two saints appear to be in physical rapture and we jokingly referred to the statues as Orgasm 1 and Orgasm 2.  St. Teresa is on the left; Blessed Ludovia is below.

From my notes from the trip Mike Hogan & I took to Rome in March, 1995:  

"I liked San Francesco a Ripa, but Mike wasn't too crazy about it.  It might have been the blue neon cross on top of the altar or perhaps the electric, Christmas tree lights halo around the lifesize  Madonna statute on the right side of the church.  But the church is small and colorful and warm-feeling and had Bernini's Orgasm II, more generally known as Beata Ludovica.  The statue is supposed to capture the nun in her death throes, about to meet her maker.  It appears that Bernini had a different sort of maker in mind when he sculpted the statue.

The Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere is very different from all the other churches we saw. . . . The principle artistic attraction of the church is (1) the statue of the body of the beheaded St. Cecilia as it was found in the catacombs centuries ago, with its head turned backwards  and (2) the scavi beneath the church . . 

My last fulguration was performed by Eliot Silbar at the Rawson Avenue Surgery Center in Franklin.  Was it 10 years ago?   I arrived on a Monday morning at the appointed time in severe pain from my Hunner's ulcers, desperate to be anesthetized for the procedure.  Unfortunately, the facility's oxygen tank system had developed a leak over the weekend. Dr. Silbar and the anesthesiologist were unwilling to proceed without a supply of oxygen in case it was needed.  I lay in the pre-surgery prep room for what seemed like an eternity in intense pain, waiting for oxygen tanks to be delivered from wherever hospitals get their oxygen.  No pain relief from either Silbar or the anesthesiologist.  At some point, the oxygen was delivered and I was wheeled into the OR and put under.  When I regained consciousness, I was still in serious pain, hooked up to an IV morphine drip, with a nurse monitoring my blood pressure and controlling the drip.  My blood pressure would decrease with each infusion and the next infusion wouldn't be released until my blood pressure rose to some desired level.  Even with the morphine I was in pain, distressed that it was being 'rationed.'  I had no control over my left arm (or was it both arms?), which kept rising up from the gurney and waving about.  I don't remember how the ordeal ended, whether I fell asleep or passed out or what, but eventually Geri picked me up and took me home.  It was a terrible experience.  When I asked Dr. Silbar at our next appointment what had happened, he gave me a brush-off answer.  That was the end of our relationship.  I still shudder thinking of the experience and it causes me to hesitate to agree to another fulguration though I suppose I will.  I should know whether there are lesions inside my bladder and whether I am at risk of reliving the severe pain I lived with so long before the 3 fulgurations Silbar performed.  That pain had me engaged in "suicidal ideation" for months, considering how I could pull it off masquerading it as an accident.  A terrible time in my life.

Missed VA appointment.  Podiatry.  Because of sleepless night?  Embarrassing, making me wonder again about executive function and cognitive decline.

ICJ decision on genocide case against Israel.   I watched on YouTube the president of the ICJ, American Joan E. Donohue,  deliver the court's decision declining to order a cease-fire, as requested by South Africa but ordering Israel to take steps to prevent its IDF from engaging in acts of genocide and from making statements inciting acts of genocide.  Israeli officials say the court went too far; Palestinian supporters say it went not far enough.  Israel's fascist government will presumably ignore the court's decision.  South Africa will probably seek enforcement from the Security Council.  What will Biden/the U. S. do?  Another in a long line of vetoes?