Going hence

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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. 

The absurdity of not writing poems

I've been reading the lectures of Nobel literature laureates. There are some exalted names among them, but the one I liked best was a name I didn't know and couldn't possibly pronounce. Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish poet, a contemporary of Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, who died last year at 88. She won the Nobel in 1996, and spoke in her acceptance lecture about poetry as an occupation, and inspiration as something that attends any kind of work done with love and imagination. Inspiration, she says, comes out of a continuous “I don’t know.” In praise of this phrase she says: “It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny earth hangs suspended.” Poets in particular are inspired by it, and every poem is a makeshift answer to it.

This poem, “Possibilities", seems much more positive. These things, at least, she already knows.

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

Healing reason's wounds

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We drove past Bellevue on our bus-top tour of New York. It's America's oldest hospital, ivy-covered, venerable, haunted. It bears a name almost synonymous with madness, but it also handles injury, maternity, malady, vagrancy. And, unbeknownst to our bus-top tour guide, Jose, it publishes a Literary Review. The editors describe Bellevue as a “witness to nearly three centuries of human drama," and their Review as “a forum for illuminating humanity and human experience." They publish fiction, nonfiction and poetry about illness, health, and healing, which, as far as human experience goes, about covers it.

Editor-in-Chief Danielle Ofri, a doctor at Bellevue and a professor at NYU, writes about the burgeoning use of poetry and literature in medicine, and her own use of poetry with her patients as a way of disarming and reframing the experience of being ill, helping patients split apart by illness find their way back to wholeness. I had come across Rachel Naomi Remen already, a doctor who's pioneered holistic healing and emotional engagement of doctor and patient. But literature and medicine strikes me as a particularly apt pairing: poetry as the richest expression of human being, and human suffering; the humanities at work in and on humans.

Around the time that Bellevue's old bricks were first laid one upon another, the Enlightenment struck the human enterprise and scattered its flocks. I like the thought that science now finds its complement in art. I like the thought that the human being, dissected on Enlightenment's table, is recompacting, reforming, finding its way back to wholeness. Poetry heals reason's wounds.