An operating room being readied in the “New Tower” of Sharp Chula Vista Hospital. Though the technology is probably going to be quite wonderful, there is a dehumanized look, as if out of dark sci-fi. Somehow I'm waiting for the “mad scientist” to enter, with his secret plans to fuse humans and aliens, or humans and robots.*
I've been having a lot of memory flashbacks, including both distant memories and recent ones, in the hospital. One mysterious band on my wrist turned out to be a GPS device. This clunky thing was put on me so that the hospital could track me down if I tried to run away — I was in fact told of patients who tried to run away. This reminds me that one room over I saw armed guards that I assumed were special hospital security. Not so: the patient was a prison inmate, and 2 prison guards were stationed at all times at the entrance to his room.
John Guzlowski:
When I was doing physical therapy for my knee earlier in the year, there was a prisoner in therapy — with 2 armed cops standing right next to him.
Seretta:
Hospitals can be scary places. I don't think it is unusual to see inmates with guards. The times we took my dad to ER they were there.
Oriana:
Wow, to discover that others have witnessed this too.
Hospitals have other means of making sure you stay put, e.g. I freaked out when I saw my mother with her hands tied to the bedframe. The nurse explained she (my mother) was getting up and trying to leave. That was before GPS. And that would have been quite a sight, my tiny mother on Wilshire Blvd, in a hospital gown.
Mary:
I can't believe they put a GPS on your wrist!!! Yes, patients have been known to "elope." Restraining with ties is now pretty much illegal. Was not only cruel and undignified but also dangerous. There are all kinds of rules about restraints now, when, what kind, how long etc etc. My favorite disgruntled, I need to get out of here patient called the local police station and said she was kidnapped and being held against her will. She wanted rescue.
*
(Oriana's hospital tales continued)
Some patients are at least partly demented, and being in a strange place like a hospital, with its lights, noise, and invasive procedures must be particularly stressful to them. This is a perfect transition to my next hospital story, which continues to haunt me.
I have to provide a bit of background. In early March of this year I was hit by a driver trying to change lanes in a situation where that simply wasn’t possible: cars were slowly crawling forward, “nose to tail,” after the rail guard was lifted. There was no space between cars — not just for a “safe lane change,” but for any lane change. To my shock, the car parallel to me on my right side suddenly swerved into my car — as if the driver was either blind or hadn’t bothered to glance if there was indeed space there rather than another car.
Then he swerved back into his lane and stopped, just as I stopped. Cars were piling up behind. I got out of my car and suggested to the elderly driver who’d hit me that we turn into the nearest side street, a small suburban lane. The truck driver who happened to be behind the hitter kindly remained stopped until I managed to change lanes and follow the other driver. I parked at the curb as soon as I saw a space. The other driver parked in the middle of the street (fortunately empty), waiting for me.
To make the story short: badly shaken (if anything bad happens, I tend to assume it’s my fault — but we won’t get into that neurosis), after some preliminaries I asked, “Well, shall we call the police?” The neatly dressed man — I’d estimate his age at 75 or so — replied in a very slow manner (perhaps dazed, but some would call it it “laid-back” — there was also something child-like to it): “Oh, the police . . . They always take such a long time . . .” Again, to make the story short, let me just say I agreed. I was shaking; to steady myself, I was leaning against the door of his car, which showed the concave damage that must have been caused by another accident. I asked, “What’s your name?” He said, “Brett.” I gave him my first name, and we decided to part (I know, I know . . . )
Please remember that I'm skipping all kinds of details. But ultimately the only thing I knew was that his name was Brett.
What followed seemed like a happy ending: I had the relatively minor damage repaired by a body shop that charged a surprisingly low price (maybe due to the competition with the body shops in Tijuana). My little Toyota looked better than new. The incident, while mistifying, seemed closed.
Then came September and my medical apocalypse: life-threatening pneumonia. For a while, the patient in the room next to mine loudly moaned non-stop, night and day; later I was told he had dementia. “He doesn’t understand where he is, so he’s terrified,” the nursing assistant remarked, possibly in a breach of protocol. And no, it seems that no sedation was provided. That was haunting enough, hearing those ceaseless moans.
But my truly uncanny encounter with dementia came later, toward the end of my nearly twelve-day stay in the hospital. I think the door of my room had been left open — again — and I managed to hear the following conversation as a staff member and a patient (likely in a wheelchair) were passing in the hallway:
~ What’s your name?”
(Patient): Brett.
~ Where do you live, Brett?
Not far from here.
~ Do you remember the address?
I don’t remember.
~ Are you married?
Yes.
~ Do you remember your wife’s name?
I don’t remember.
That was the last thing that I clearly heard.
*
As soon as I heard him say “Brett,” I was all attention. It wasn’t just the name — the voice too sounded familiar. Could this possibly be same Brett who hit my car? I know that this sounds uncanny, but I couldn’t overcome the near-certainty that it was.
If that really was the same Brett, dementia finally provided an explanation for that unlikely collision. He no longer remembered how to change lanes. I mean, there was zero space for a lane change, with slow nose-to-tail traffic starting up after the trolley barrier lifted. His leisurely, out-of-it manner of speech made me (and later the friends and neighbors I talked with) think of drugs, but dementia is another answer. Sadly, given his age, it’s a more plausible answer. It’s also a more tragic answer — how long before he’d forget even his own name? And what if he manages to escape again, get on the freeway, and possibly kill someone?
(I will never forget one friend's tale: his car was hit by an elderly woman speeding the wrong way on the freeway. He was the only survivor; his wife and three children died in the crash.)
*
Too bad that while I was in the hospital I got only to hear Brett’s voice, but not to see him. One striking thing about his appearance, back when he hit my car, was his good hair-cut, elegant clothes, and his overall well-groomed appearance. This indicates a family with resources, and likely unwilling to confine him in a “home” — our peculiar euphemism for a place that’s definitely not the demented patient’s home.
“I don’t care about the car — it’s not even my car,” was one of the things he managed to say to me in his slow and strangely unemotional way. It didn’t occur to me that his manner indicated an absence of understanding. My last glimpse of him was his car aimlessly continuing on the side street we turned into in order in order not to obstruct the traffic on the main street. He went straight on toward nowhere that I could see, while I made a U-turn and continued home.
So it might have been him in the hospital, uncanny as that sounds. What a simple if terrifying answer: dementia. Writing about this helps me “achieve closure.” I hardly feel sorry for myself — but it’s heart-breaking to think about the suffering of his wife whose name he no longer remembers, and other close family members he probably no longer even recognizes anymore. And who knows what harm and damage he may have caused in his likely multiple attempts to escape.
I also remember a friend’s shock when, out of the blue, her long-term colleague got diagnosed with fronto-temporal dementia, his professional license canceled, his driving license confiscated. His sons arranged for him to be cared for at home — and at least one time he too somehow managed to get hold of a car, and was eventually found in a neighborhood far away from where he lived.
There is indeed something profoundly disturbing about dementia — whether it’s the empty faces of strangers confined to a “memory care facility” (we are good at euphemisms), or, more shocking by far, if it’s a parent or another loved one. That someone who in the past was bright, sociable, joking around, taking vacations, going out to restaurants and movies can become gradually vacant and eventually cease to recognize us is a shock. I sadly assure that nothing can prepare for the shock of the first time your mother fails to recognize who you are.
Mary:
The story of your encounters with Brett is unfortunately the story of so many personal tragedies, and a social problem we are nowhere near solving. Dementia can be slow in its development, so slow it's often not recognized until it's advanced, and cannot be concealed or overlooked. Those experiencing such confusions and cognitive losses are very clever at concealing them, especially in the early stages. This is a survival strategy — don't expose your weakness, and you may hold on to your freedom and autonomy.
Once it becomes obvious everyone knows what follows: loss upon loss, your memories, your home, your freedom. And in our society an integral key to freedom and autonomy is the car key — the ability to go where you want when you want, to follow your own purpose. Getting the car keys away from someone who can no longer drive safely is difficult both practically and emotionally. It seals the deal— forces recognition and effects the removal of the afflicted from ordinary life. It is a kind of death, the first step in a terrible journey of losses.
And dementia is always a tragedy, even in the "pleasantly demented." It is a death-in-life, the progressive erosion of everything that constitutes the "self," so very intimately involved with memory. Without its memories the "I" seems to disappear, leaving only faint traces behind, like the shadows of ghosts. The loss of language progresses to the point that only a few words may be left, and those divorced from whatever meaning they once had. To watch someone go this way is to watch them die twice, to lose them twice, slow and fast, by inches, long before the final blow.
For the person in dementia confusion most often results in fear. The world has become unreadable, incomprehensible, there is the terrible feeling of being lost in a strange place, only compounded when it actually is a strange place — a hospital, a "home." At the core of that person's need is to escape that alien place, that threatening strange world, that prison, and get back home.
Unfortunately that home is gone forever, often literally, as the longed for home may be one remembered from long ago, from childhood, unreachable for anyone. Here is the core problem of dementia: how can we manage people trapped in this process humanely, with care and love and kindness? How can we keep them safe and prevent harm to others without cruel and humiliating restraints, physical or chemical? With more and more living longer this becomes an ever growing problem, a painful dilemma, because the afflicted are family — our fathers, mothers, husbands and wives. The agony of losing them to the slow death of dementia is mirrored in the painful necessity of measures to keep them safe. So far none of our responses have been very good, and maybe they never will be.
Oriana:
Thinking of Brett, I was struck by his patrician bearing. When I overheard the brief exchange in the hospital, his voice was loud and clear, exuding self-confidence. So what if he didn’t remember his wife’s name — he sounded like someone used to being in the position of command. And he was going to defend that dignity (or essential humanity, or whatever we might call it) to the last, for as long as he could remember at least his own name.
One of the tragedies is our disordered priorities. The funding of dementia research is pathetic compared to cancer research — and the latter has finally moved beyond the shuffling of various lucrative chemotherapy regimens toward more effective treatments, e.g. immunotherapy, or 3-D radiation. Even when it comes to alternative approaches to cancer, there is some promise: fasting, diets that try to deprive the tumors of certain key aminoacids, large doses of polyphenols and other antioxidants (“natural chemo”). When it comes to the various dementias, however, there is now an incipient interest in coconut oil and the keto diet — but so far an improvement in symptoms is the best that has been achieved. (When it comes to exercise and socializing, these are preventive measures — once symptoms are present, it’s too late.)
As with schizophrenia, there is a mystery about the very essence of this erasure of the self — is it an autoimmune disease? Could suppressing the immune system be the key? Or is it basically a “diabetes of the brain” — or both? Again, there should be a lot of research devoted to the basic biology of the various dementias. But in spite of the horrendous cost of brain diseases and the human tragedy involved, there is no commensurate effort to prevent and/or reverse the neural degeneration.
((Also, what happened to the once-promising lead that people taking anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen and naproxen cut their risk of Alzheimer’s in half? Or the effectiveness of art classes for seniors, providing first-rate brain stimulation?)
Perhaps we can’t do very much against the progress of dementia once the brain damage is severe and the symptoms become obvious. But prevention is another story. Think of the effectiveness of the anti-smoking campaign — and think also how aggressive that campaign was. Imagine if we had an equally aggressive anti-junk-food, pro-exercise campaign, combined with massive public education. I know I'm dreaming . . .
*
Let’s detox with a soothing beach image:
People who visit the coast at least twice weekly tend to experience better general and mental health*
MEDUSA
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.
And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.
~ Louise Bogan (1897-1970) Body of this Death: Poems (1923)
*
Medusa’s head, bronze, from one of Caligula's ships found at Lake Nemi MEDUSA AS A “NASTY WOMAN”
~ “A Gorgon from classical mythology, Medusa is widely known as a monstrous creature with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Through the lens of theology, film, art, and feminist literature, my students and I map how her meaning has shifted over time and across cultures. In so doing, we unravel a familiar narrative thread: In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority. Today, the political references to Medusa only underscore the pervasive misogyny that drives many attacks against the so-called “nasty women.”
Medusa remains a potent icon at a time when women leaders continue to be viewed skeptically or, at worst, as inhuman. Indeed, almost every influential female figure has been photoshopped with snaky hair: Martha Stewart, Condoleezza Rice, Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Merkel. These businesswomen, politicians, activists, and artists made the same “mistake” that Susan B. Anthony identified when she commented on the lack of women’s voices in 19th-century newspapers: “Women … must echo the sentiment of these men. And if they do not do that, their heads are cut off.” These women infringed upon the domain of men. The only response, as suggested by their Medusa-fied images? To cut their heads off; to silence them.
The implicit violence of the Medusa comparison relates not only to beheading, but also to rape culture. In Ovid’s story, the god Neptune sees Medusa, desires her, and decides that, because he is a god, he is entitled to her body (sound familiar?). He rapes her in Minerva’s temple, and Minerva, incensed that her temple has been defiled, punishes the victim rather than the perpetrator (again, sound familiar?). Minerva transforms Medusa into a snake-haired monster who now, instead of inspiring men’s desire, literally petrifies them. Later, Minerva gives her shield to Perseus to help him kill Medusa; he uses it as a mirror, deflecting Medusa’s curse. He beheads her while she sleeps and then carries her head in a bag, a trophy he pulls out as needed to destroy enemies.
Medusa has since haunted Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency. As the art historian Christine Corretti has explained, Cellini believed Medusa symbolized both the threat of women’s burgeoning political power and a feminized Italy. Corretti notes that these sentiments were popularized during the Renaissance by Machiavelli who, in The Prince, alluded to the Medusa icon when he described the state as a woman “without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn,” desperate for a manly rescuer. Medusa again became a symbol of a monstrously feminized republic during the French revolution. In 1791, Marie Antoinette appeared as a beastly Medusa in the print “Les deux ne font qu’un.” A year later the English artist Thomas Rowlandson created a print depicting the vision of liberty espoused by the rebels of the French Revolution as Medusa-like.
Later, as women’s colleges began to open in the United States, the 19th-century painter Elihu Vedder imagined Medusa as a self-absorbed woman who petrifies herself by looking into a mirror. Sigmund Freud notably used the myth to explain his concept of castration anxiety. And as women rallied for the right to vote, various anti-suffrage postcards linked suffragettes to the monster. Concerns about gender and power continued into the 1940s when the writer Philip Wylie, in his invective Generation of Vipers, evoked Medusa (and her Gorgon sisters Stheno and Euryale) in order to urge readers to resist the women who had entered the work force after the first two world wars. By then, Medusa’s history as a rape victim had been erased from the cultural consciousness. She had simply become a woman with a terrifying potential power to emasculate men.
However, with second-wave feminism, many writers and artists began to re-examine traditional myth. Hélène Cixous, Colleen McElroy, and others searched the recesses of history for their lost matriarchal heritage and chose Medusa as their muse. “How to believe the stories I am told?” the poet May Sarton asked in 1971 when she looked on the Medusa and found herself not frozen but “clothed in thought.” Later, as discussions about rape culture evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, poets including Ann Stanford and Amy Clampitt channeled Medusa to engage in conversations about the silencing of sexual-assault victims.
Similarly, feminist scholars like Marija Gimbutas re-read the myth of Medusa as a beheading of early matriarchal societies by Greco-Roman culture. According to this interpretation, Neptune’s rape of Medusa and Perseus’s subsequent beheading of her represent the same effort to legitimize male privilege by muting female authority. Indeed, ancient mythology is rife with stories of gods who violate women. This devaluing of women was reflected in the norms and laws of a culture wherein women were traded as commodities between men and rape was permissible by law.
When Medusa pops up in pop culture today, her deeper significance is largely ignored. For example, in the 2010 film adaptation of Clash of the Titans, Perseus rallies his men before confronting Medusa: “I know we’re all afraid. But my father told me: Someday, someone was gonna have to take a stand. Someday, someone was gonna have to say enough! This could be that day. Trust your senses. And don't look this bitch in the eye.” In the film, Perseus knows Medusa has been raped, but she’s nonetheless treated with indifference by the plot, and with hostility by the other characters.
With this context, my students look anew on art like Cellini’s sculpture. Now, they can see that Perseus is the aggressor, not a hero but a symbolic rapist standing astride the body of his victim, her bloodied head held high in victory. Medusa’s closed eyes and lips speak volumes about both the history of women’s oppression and the submersion of women’s histories. It’s a submersion poignantly symbolized by a story that Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney shared recently at a panel discussion in historic Seneca Falls, New York. For years Maloney tried to get a statue of the first-wave feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott moved from the basement of the Capitol Building to center stage in the Rotunda. Colleagues, however, argued that it was “too ugly.”
Women’s physical appearances are often particularly used as a way to demean them, as the Clinton-Medusa images show, and tying women’s value to their looks has also been a feature of the 2016 election thanks to Donald Trump. The misogyny of the election came through in much of the anti-Clinton imagery, including a t-shirt featuring a beheaded Medusa Clinton that reads, “Life’s a bitch, so don’t vote for one.” The shirt echoes the campaign’s most popular slogan, “Trump that Bitch” (and even the “bitch” quote from Clash of the Titans.) The fact that there’s even a market for such political paraphernalia testifies to the terror that powerful women continue to elicit even in the 21st century and to the related and troubling persistence of mythologies that endorse and perpetuate rape culture. As Greco-Roman history makes clear, when the gods devalue women, the people will too.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-original-nasty-woman-of-classical-myth/506591/?utm_source=atlfb*
WORDS TOO CAN ACT AS A MEDUSA
“One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me. He did it while we were clearing the table; the children were quarreling as usual in the next room, the dog was dreaming, growling beside the radiator. He told me that he was confused, that he was having terrible moments of weariness, of dissatisfaction, perhaps of cowardice. He talked for a long time about our fifteen years of marriage, about the children, and admitted that he had nothing to reproach us with, neither them nor me. He was composed, as always, apart from an extravagant gesture of his right hand when he explained to me, with a childish frown, that soft voices, a sort of whispering, were urging him elsewhere. Then he assumed the blame for everything that was happening and closed the front door carefully behind him, leaving me turned to stone beside the sink.”
~ Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
*
BORGES: A NEW REFUTATION OF TIME
~ “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness.
Wedged between Bachelard and Arendt was Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986), that muscular wrangler of paradox and grand poet-laureate of time, who addressed this perplexity in his 1946 essay “A New Refutation of Time,” which remains the most elegant, erudite, and pleasurable meditation on the subject yet. It was later included in Labyrinths — the 1962 collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, which gave us his terrific and timeless parable of the divided self.
Borges begins by noting the deliberate paradox of his title, a contrast to his central thesis that the continuity of time is an illusion, that time exists without succession and each moment contains all eternity, which negates the very notion of “new.” The “slight mockery” of the title, he notes, is his way of illustrating that “our language is so saturated and animated by time.” With his characteristic self-effacing warmth, Borges cautions that his essay might be “the anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentine lost in the maze of metaphysics” — and then he proceeds to deliver a masterwork of rhetoric and reason, carried on the wings of uncommon poetic beauty.
Writing in the mid-1940s — a quarter century after Einstein defeated Bergson in their landmark debate, in which science (“the clarity of metaphysics,” per Borges) finally won the contested territory of time from the dictatorship of metaphysics, and just a few years after Bergson himself made his exit into eternity — Borges reflects on his lifelong tussle with time, which he considers the basis for all of his books:
"In the course of a life dedicated to letters and (at times) to metaphysical perplexity, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, in which I myself do not believe, but which regularly visits me at night and in the weary twilight with the illusory force of an axiom."
Time, Borges notes, is the foundation of our experience of personal identity — something philosophers took up most notably in the 17th century, poets picked up in the 19th, scientists set down in the 20th, and psychologists picked back up in the 21st.
Borges compares the ideas of the 18th-century Anglo-Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley, chief champion of idealist metaphysics, and his Scottish peer and contemporary, David Hume. The two diverged on the existence of personal identity — Berkeley endorsed it as the “thinking active principle that perceives” at the center of each self, while Hume negated it, arguing that each person is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” — but they both affirmed the existence of time.
Making his way through the maze of philosophy, Borges maps what he calls “this unstable world of the mind” in relation to time:
A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream.
Returning to Hume’s notion of the illusory self — an idea advanced by Eastern philosophy millennia earlier — Borges considers how this dismantles the very notion of time as we know it:
Behind our faces there is no secret self which governs our acts and receives our impressions; we are, solely, the series of these imaginary acts and these errant impressions.
But even the notion of a “series” of acts and impressions, Borges suggest, is misleading because time is inseparable from matter, spirit, and space:
Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment.
He illustrates this paradox of the present moment — a paradox found in every present moment — by guiding us along one particular moment familiar from literature:
~ During one of his nights on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn awakens; the raft, lost in partial darkness, continues downstream; it is perhaps a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water; he negligently opens his eyes; he sees a vague number of stars, an indistinct line of trees; then, he sinks back into his immemorable sleep as into the dark waters. Idealist metaphysics declares that to add a material substance (the object) and a spiritual substance (the subject) to those perceptions is venturesome and useless; I maintain that it is no less illogical to think that such perceptions are terms in a series whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end. ~
The simultaneity of all events has immense implications as a sort of humanitarian manifesto for the commonness of human experience, which Borges captures beautifully:
“The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.”
Borges ends by returning to the beginning, to the raw material of his argument and, arguably, of his entire body of work, of his very self: paradox. He writes:
“And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-refutation-of-time-borges-on-the-most-paradoxical-dimension-of-existence?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The more famous image of the Medusa by Caravaggio, 1597. The face is said to be his self-portrait — as is the face of Goliath, in the painting of David and Goliath. *
WHAT WE OWE TO FRANCES PERKINS
~ “Labor secretary to Franklin D. Roosevelt for all 12 years of his presidency, Frances Perkins was the key force behind the most creative and enduring parts of the New Deal—from Social Security to the 40-hour workweek. But Perkins’s career as a workers’ advocate began much earlier. On March 25, 1911, she was drinking tea at a friend’s when a fire broke out behind locked doors at the nearby Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Perkins bolted to the scene, only to witness scores of women workers—Italian and Jewish immigrants, some as young as 14—jumping nine stories to their death. In less than 20 minutes, 146 people died inside the factory or on the sidewalk. Perkins later described that Saturday as the day the New Deal began. In her speech last month, Warren drew inspiration from Perkins, asking, “So what did one woman—one very persistent woman—backed up by millions of people across this country get done? Social Security. Unemployment insurance. Abolition of child labor. Minimum wage. The right to join a union. Even the very existence of the weekend. Big, structural change. One woman, and millions of people to back her up.”
After the factory fire, Perkins, then about 31, became the executive secretary of New York City’s fledgling Committee on Safety. Her recommendations: fire escapes, exit signs, the nightly emptying of office wastebaskets, sprinkler systems, mandatory fire drills, enclosed stairways, and mandatory unlocked exits that could be used in an emergency within three minutes. Those recommendations and her later ones led to worker-protection laws in New York and across the country. She forced lawmakers to see the horrors of factory life. She took then–New York Governor Al Smith to see thousands of women “coming off the ten-hour night shift on the rope walks in Auburn,” she wrote years later, and she sent then–State Senator Robert Wagner of New York crawling “through the tiny hole in the wall that gave egress to a steep iron ladder covered with ice and ending 12 feet from the ground, which was euphemistically labeled ‘Fire Escape.’”
When Roosevelt succeeded Al Smith as governor of New York, Perkins’s reports satisfied his wish to hear the “human part of the story,” she wrote. “He wanted me to tell them … how we discovered that men were getting silicosis while polishing the inside of glass milk tanks; how the girls painting luminous dials on clock faces and pointing the fine hair brushes with their lips had contracted radium poisoning; how the old carpenter who lost his arm and settled his compensation claim by agreement with his employer without a hearing had been cheated out of about $5,000, which we discovered in a spot check investigation,” Perkins wrote.
After the 1929 crash, Perkins and Roosevelt together took the boldest steps in the country toward unemployment relief: The governor put Perkins in charge of a New York commission that recommended setting up the first unemployment office. From there they drew a road map that, upon Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932, they would later use in the White House to address the Depression and enact the New Deal.
Sworn in as secretary of labor, she found a department rife with cockroaches and corruption. Under Herbert Hoover, the Department of Labor spent some 90 percent of its resources on a Special Immigration Unit, created by the Exclusionary Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which involved two brothers overseeing a team of agents who were sent around the country to find and deport illegal immigrants, with a particular emphasis on alleged communists. Often the agents extorted the immigrants for bribes along the way. Perkins declined to renew the unit’s funding. Over time, she began to radically reorient the department toward the needs of working Americans.
She did not shy away from intramural battles. During Roosevelt’s first 100 days, Perkins prevailed over his budget director and fellow patrician Lewis Williams Douglas, who viewed a balanced budget with an almost religious zeal. “I soon realized that good as Douglas might be in handling the budget, he was expressing, in more agreeable and persuasive terms, the very philosophy against which the country had reacted so violently under Hoover,” Perkins wrote in her memoirs of her years with Roosevelt. When Perkins learned Douglas had thwarted her effort to include billions of dollars for public works in a relief bill, she demanded a meeting with Roosevelt.
“You’ve got to decide now, Mr. President,” Perkins insisted, according to Cohen’s account of the meeting. “Here on this beautiful sunshiny afternoon we have to decide if we shall put it in or leave it out.” Roosevelt, always battling conflicting sympathies, agreed, but Perkins took no risks, phoning then–U.S. Senator Robert Wagner, the author of the relief bill and the man Perkins sent crawling down an icy fire escape years earlier, as a witness. Roosevelt took the phone and said, “Frances says that she thinks it’s best and I think it’s the right thing, don’t you, Bob?” Douglas resigned not long after, and Perkins stayed 12 years.
Perkins ably used what leverage she had, and criticism did not deter her. As the New Deal took shape, the Roosevelt administration had significant leverage over corporations, which were seeking relaxation of federal antitrust laws to stall free-falling prices. Perkins thought to phone William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, and ask which provisions he wanted included in the relief bill. Months earlier, when Perkins’s appointment was announced, Green swore he could “never become reconciled” to the selection of a woman and a nonunion official, in that order. Now he took her call, and asked to include the right to organize nonunion workers in the bill. That provision would eventually be codified and known as the Magna Carta of the labor movement. Ultimately, the only legislation Frances Perkins wanted and didn’t see to fruition was universal health care. But everything else she listed at her meeting in FDR’s townhouse, she got.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/what-elizabeth-warren-learned-frances-perkins/600034/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=5dafdaf24c15b8000148a157_ta&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1UwZL4hjM3aWTJIL-_uDFqHvwtaerkQ96D4oSkRMZ4c7l6U3-F7OCpy0Q
“If American history textbooks accurately reflected the past, Frances Perkins would be recognized as one of the nation's greatest heroes — as iconic as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine. Like Franklin, Perkins was a brilliant self-creation: There had never been anyone like her before and there has not been anyone like her since. Like Paine, Perkins helped to start a revolution.” ~ Adam Cohen's Introduction to Frances Perkins' The Roosevelt I Knew'
"All judgment is relative. It may be right today and wrong tomorrow. The only thing that makes it truly right is the desire to have it constantly moving in the right direction."
"There is always a large horizon...There is much to be done...I am not going to be doing it! It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment."
"Nothing in human judgment is final. One may courageously take the step that seems right today because it can be modified tomorrow if it does not work well."
"A government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life."
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Speaking of the contributions of women, let's not forget Hedy Lamar:
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WHY METAPHORS BEAT FACTS
There’s a good reason that Prudential tells you to “Get a piece of the Rock," Allstate offers to help you avoid the troublemaker “Mayhem," and Geico is “So easy a caveman can do it.” Advertisers—and research scientists—have learned that metaphors can be more effective than facts alone at influencing your decisions and actions.
It’s because metaphors, like stories, bypass your critical thinking, influencing your deeper, and more powerful, intuitive mind. This is the part of the mind that is the seat of your decision-making and behavior, and it works by implicit association not rational analysis.
The drivers of our decisions are often the emotional coloring on top of the literal facts.
Metaphors are among the best way to generate these evocative internal and often hidden intimations and feelings.
The reality is we humans are really feeling beings—not thinking machines. We make decisions based on emotion more than logic. Metaphors are often more effective at making us feel differently and as a result they can make us more inclined to act differently. As Boroditsky put it: "People like to think they're objective and making decisions based on numbers. They want to believe they're logical. But they're really being swayed by metaphors.”
So if you want to make a poignant point, or influence others, use similes and metaphors and not just facts and figures. The best business leaders are often experts in the art of persuasion and storytelling through the use of metaphorical comparisons. For example, when Warren Buffet was asked about his first large investment, which involved the purchase of his namesake holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, he said, “We went into a terrible business because it was cheap. It’s what I refer to as the ‘used cigar butt’ approach to investing. You see this cigar butt down there, it’s soggy and terrible, but there’s one puff left, and it’s free. That’s what Berkshire was when we bought it—it was selling below working capital—but it was a terrible, terrible mistake.” While some may bore you with easily forgotten financial facts, Buffet doesn’t just tell stories, he sells them through clever use of metaphors.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unconscious-branding/201503/why-feelings-will-always-beat-facts
WILLIAM BLAKE AND “GHOST OF A FLEA”
As Blake knew, the suffering and violence are also within us. His Ghost of a Flea (circa 1819–1820), harked back to a vision he’d had nearly thirty years earlier of a foul apparition rushing at him in his home, which filled him with terror. When he painted his ghost, he made it tiny, with scaly green and gold skin, an acorn cup in its hand to hold blood, and its tongue flickering out of its mouth. The specter was, he said, the soul of a murderer trapped in a tiny body, yet although its power was diminished it still remained ferociously menacing.
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It turns out that the still is from Hogan’s Heroes. John Guzlowski shared this tale of Buchenwald related by Robert Clary, one of the actors in Hogan’s Heroes:
“We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumors about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, 'This is it.' But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you. ... The whole experience was a complete nightmare — the way they treated us, what we had to do to survive. We were less than animals. Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I'm about to be sent away to a concentration camp, but I don't hold a grudge because that's a great waste of time. Yes, there's something dark in the human soul. For the most part human beings are not very nice. That's why when you find those who are, you cherish them.”
Robert Clary, born Robert Max Widerman, survivor of Buchenwald, actor, author of From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes. It’s been pointed out that every major German character in the series was played by a Jewish actor.*
One of the most iconic photographs of Buchenwald:
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CHRISTIAN GOD AS THE GOD OF THE DEAD
“When you think about it, the only time most people feel religion is at a funeral. That in itself is a metaphor for the church!” ~ (a friend of mine)
Yes, the Christian god is mainly the king of the dead, an interesting transmogrification of Hades, minus the mother figure of Persephone — and with the realm of the dead now not being only the Underworld, but also in part the Upper World (for a minority).
Now with the movement away from the expensive traditional funerals and toward secular memorial services — just family and friends getting together to scatter the ashes and in some way talk about and celebrate the dead person’s life, with his or her favorite music being played — there will be less and less need for the church.
By the way, the same friend who provided the quotation recently attended a traditional funeral and remarked, “The minister didn't seem to believe a word he said.” The times have really changed, and the ceremonies should reflect it. And they will. It's gradual, but inevitable.
One of Jung’s daughters, Gret Baumann, an astrologer to whom Jung sent particularly difficult patients (“And she was always right!”) was a pioneer in this field. She designed her own funeral service. It still took place in a church, but the attendees exited waltzing to the tune of “On the beautiful blue Danube.”
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After Jung’s astrologer daughter, to cheer us up even more:
This is a Flemish "Creation of Adam and Eve." Note that the serpent is already legless, before the Fall. And, near the snake, is that a chameleon? Also, this must be the funniest lion ever painted. And, inexplicably, right in the center there seems to be a small black boy (wearing a loincloth — another un-biblical detail), climbing a tree.*
OLIVER SACKS EXPLAINS HALLUCINATIONS AS QUITE NORMAL
Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do
~ "HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?
In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.
Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows. At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.
Hallucinations (of sight, sound, smell or other sensations) can be associated with migraine or seizures, with fever or delirium. In chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, and I.C.U.’s, hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings. But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process. Such bereavement hallucinations frequently occur in the first year or two of bereavement, when they are most “needed.”
Working in old-age homes for many years, I have been struck by how many elderly people with impaired hearing are prone to auditory and, even more commonly, musical hallucinations — involuntary music in their minds that seems so real that at first they may think it is a neighbor’s stereo.
People with impaired sight, similarly, may start to have strange, visual hallucinations, sometimes just of patterns but often more elaborate visions of complex scenes or ranks of people in exotic dress. Perhaps 20 percent of those losing their vision or hearing may have such hallucinations.
I was called in to see one patient, Rosalie, a blind lady in her 90s, when she started to have visual hallucinations; the staff psychiatrist was also summoned. Rosalie was concerned that she might be having a stroke or getting Alzheimer’s or reacting to some medication. But I was able to reassure her that nothing was amiss neurologically. I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome. “Tell the nurses,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair, “that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome!”
Rosalie asked me how many people had C.B.S., and I told her hundreds of thousands, perhaps, in the United States alone. I told her that many people were afraid to mention their hallucinations. I described a recent study of elderly blind patients in the Netherlands which found that only a quarter of people with C.B.S. mentioned it to their doctors — the others were too afraid or too ashamed. It is only when physicians gently inquire (often avoiding the word “hallucination”) that people feel free to admit seeing things that are not there — despite their blindness.
Rosalie was indignant at this, and said, “You must write about it — tell my story!” I do tell her story, at length, in my book on hallucinations, along with the stories of many others. Most of these people have been reluctant to admit to their hallucinations. Often, when they do, they are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed — told that it’s nothing, or that their condition has no explanation.
Misdiagnosis is especially common if people admit to “hearing voices.” In a famous 1973 study by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, eight “pseudopatients” presented themselves at various hospitals across the country, saying that they “heard voices.” All behaved normally otherwise, but were nonetheless determined to be (and treated as) schizophrenic (apart from one, who was given the diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis”). In this and follow-up studies, Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.
WHILE many people with schizophrenia do hear voices at certain times in their lives, the inverse is not true: most people who hear voices (as much as 10 percent of the population) are not mentally ill. For them, hearing voices is a normal mode of experience.
My patients tell me about their hallucinations because I am open to hearing about them, because they know me and trust that I can usually run down the cause of their hallucinations. For the most part, these experiences are unthreatening and, once accommodated, even mildly diverting.
David Stewart, a Charles Bonnet syndrome patient with whom I corresponded, writes of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and imagines his eyes saying: “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”
Mr. Stewart has been able to take his hallucinations in good humor, since he knows they are not a sign of mental decline or madness. For too many patients, though, the shame, the secrecy, the stigma, persists.” ~
New York Times, November 3, 2012
Oriana:
Sacks wrote a whole book on hallucinations, providing reassurance that hallucinations are common, and most of them are not related schizophrenia.
I'm so glad that Sachs explained bereavement hallucinations, since those are so common — possibly even universal. You suddenly see the dead person just yards away, in the crowd at the mall, or walking in the street. It makes me wonder about Mary Magdalen (a certified demoniac to boot) and her being the first one to see Jesus after the crucifixion (I'm sure she was in love with him).
Auditory hallucinations are the most common. One way to tell a schizophrenic from a normal person who hears voices, music etc, is that the schizophrenic claims only his voices are real; everyone else's are fake, i.e. hallucinations. I think some prophets built a career on their schizophrenia.
The point of the article is precisely that we should not be so free with the label of schizophrenia, since basically we all experience hallucinations now and then. It's entirely normal. I'm quite aware of at least some of my (mainly auditory, but not only) hallucinations in the past, and I'm sure that whenever the conditions are right, e.g. bereavement, my brain will produce the typical visions as well as dreams.
In one incident, I actually had double consciousness, knowing what was actually going on (an alternative medicine treatment) as well as experiencing my quite vivid inner vision — amazing! And mostly, as Sachs says, my brain was trying to soothe me in a time of distress. I also used to have tremendously vivid and detailed dreams in my youth, so creating an NDE would have been child's play for my brain, especially when it was at the peak of its imaginative power.
About the visions of others, well, I have to claim "we don't know, and perhaps we can never know." But I don't think saying that the vision was created by one's brain diminishes it, or denies that the outside world interacts with our nervous system in a very complex way (we actually "fill in the blanks"). As my mother used to say, “The most magnificent thing in the universe is the human brain.”
Penny:
I found the article very reassuring. A lot of writers, including me, hear characters talking in their heads.
Oriana:
Sometimes lines from poems do that for me. Or movies — it takes a while before the characters stop talking in my head! Also . . . for me a night of good sleep is about getting enough dream cycles. Just one short, and my neurochemistry isn't right. The brain is its own movie theater, and we need to expand our understanding of that.
More than anything else, my experience of the creative process helped me learn to trust the unconscious. The answer will come — when it is ready. This can be a name you’ve been trying to recall for days, or it can be the right ending to a poem — some of my poems had to wait for their inevitable-sounding closure for many years!
The point is: the brain knows what it’s doing. Trust it and go for a walk, clean the house, cook a meal, whatever. The answer is not necessarily blowing in the wind, but it’s likely to “come out of nowhere.”
And trust your brain to respond to this always-relevant song that has shaped millions of young minds (of course I don’t mean to imply that it’s all an “inside job” — the brain certainly interacts with and transforms the complex input from the outside world).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G58XWF6B3AA&fbclid=IwAR38JPc-eboMAIbSf9ztcVXq1syUuPNvOUTs4b0nHu11JMpoiMmuNastraw
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Ending on beauty:
In California in the early spring
There are pale yellow mornings
When the mist burns slowly into day.
The air stings
Like autumn, clarifies
Like pain.
~ Robert Hass, from Palo Alto: The Marshes
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