Vale Seamus Heaney

Heaney, the son of a cowman from County Derry who grew up to win the Nobel Prize for literature, died yesterday. I first encountered him as the verse translator of Beowulf, who’d recaptured the thumping rhythm and thick, gutteral roll of the original in a way that made other translations seem finicky and quaint. His own poetry pays a similar attention to timbre: to the sound and taste of words in the mouth. “Blackberry Picking,” apt for an August elegy, has a tactile, sensuous joy that’s threaded through with mortality. As good a poem as any to remember him by.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Though much is taken, much abides

When she was confused and incoherent and aggressive, it was consoling to think that this was not really Elaine. This was a disease having its way with her. She was still there, in there somewhere, but this was not her. This was not real. I still think that was true, and tonic for our distress, but at the same time she demanded and deserved care because she was still herself. Though ravaged and fouled, her personhood was undiminished. 

This is the thinking behind a reconsideration of dementia care in the US, based on the work of British social psychologist Thomas Kitwood, a pioneer of what it seems strange anyone should have had to pioneer: person-centric care. It's a view that critiques our prizing of cognition over other aspects of human being, like sensuality, intimacy, pleasure, which survive the dereliction of the mind. A view that returns us to the mystery of human life, the more mysterious at the moment of its unravelling.

A recent New Yorker piece describes what Kitwood saw as the problem. “In advanced Western societies, where a sense of community is often weak, the evident frailty of people with dementia generates fear; this unease is socially managed by turning the demented into nonpersons, who are warehoused in nursing homes and pathologized with terms like 'resisting care.' The problem, Kitwood concluded, 'is not that of changing people with dementia, or of “managing” their behavior; it is that of moving beyond our own anxieties and defences, so that true meeting can occur, and life-giving relationships can grow.' Only in this way could the personhood of people with dementia be conserved, even as their intellection declined." This is about seeing people for what they keep, not what they lose. Though much is taken, much abides.

None of this does away with the indignities of showering and feeding and changing nappies, but perhaps it transforms them from mechanised processes into acts of grace. Acceptance instead of anxiety. Love instead of fear.

Going hence

Last night our dear friend Elaine left this life. These last few years she's been in a growing darkness, a coming night where the light gets dimmer and the sounds less distinct. She was still good-humoured (until the last stay in hospital), and you could still make her laugh that belly chuckle of hers, but she's been losing, faster lately, finger by finger, her grip on this world. So, when it came, it was a mercy. An end of darkness. We know where she is and who she's seeing now in wondrous light.

But that doesn't make her going any easier. Death, even a merciful death, is still an enormity. It was the end of her suffering but also the end of a long, loving life.

She'd grown up near Mildura, a redhead like her Dad. She and Chris met at Bible College. They got married in 1965, and crossed the Nullarbor in a Volkswagon. They had two children of their own, and fostered a dozen Aboriginal babies in their years as missionaries in the dusty West. Later they travelled the world together. She loved the castles and lakes of Europe, and she had an amazing ability to read maps and timetables, even in foreign languages, and find their way wherever they were. She was bright and quick, she had an extraordinary memory. She dreaded the loss of it. She'd seen her mother go down into that darkness and she did everything she could to avoid it. But it came in the end.

She had long, bony fingers and an everlasting pile of knitting. Until lately she did crosswords and sudoku in record time. She loved jewellry, china, collectable dolls and bric-a-brac. Anything with 'Grandma' written on it. Any kind of Royal memorabilia. She had more Andre Rieu than you would have thought possible. Apparently she was a wonderful cook, but that had gone by the time I met her. She would never say no to a cup of tea, nor to another cup of tea. She loved hymns and songs, especially the Sunday School songs she learned as a child. She had a lot of funny sayings, colloquialisms. She told us her husband, a talker, had been vaccinated with a gramophone needle. “You should be on the stage!” she’d tell him. “There’s one leaving town in half an hour.”

She had a quick temper, but she was quick too to laugh, and the first to help or give. She had a special love, that never dimmed, for her autistic granddaughter, who got her last words: "Hello darling." She was warm and brave and kind. Her whole heart was in her face.

I'll miss her terribly. But I wouldn't wish her back from where she's gone.

“If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going."

Jane Austen: Game Theorist?

I like this. In a book out this year, Michael Chwe, a polisci professor at UCLA, posits that Jane Austen was a proto-game theorist, roughly a century and a half before game theory. Game theory (apparently) is about choices and preferences, thinking strategically not only about your own moves but about how others will respond to your moves. Austen and her characters are constantly engaged in this kind of strategic thinking. Nor, says Chwe, is this accidental. He argues that exploring and relentlessly theorising strategic thinking is Austen's explicit intention in her six novels. This might seem far-fetched, but if you consider game theory as arising from rational choice theory, Austen's mind and model seem a neat fit. Her novels are all about rational versus irrational choices, conceiving rationality in the most liberal sense. As well as her actions, Austen's conversations are full of cause and effect, decision analysis, binary choices, rational responses. Her characters conceptualise the world in terms of relationships and causalities, and the characters with the least social agency, usually women, think in the most strategic ways to gain advantages. “I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies,” cries Mrs Croft in Persuasion, “instead of rational creatures.” The rational creatures who are both the heroines and anti-heroines of Austen's world make perfect subjects for Chwe's reading. This is insightful and entertaining stuff, but I like the bigger point that the humanities themselves, not only the soft and hard sciences, are amenable to new ideas about how humans work.