Against Their Will: Everywhere, All The Time, Drunk, In Packs

I thought I had said everything I wanted to about the horrible gang-rape case in Delhi, but I feel compelled to put down a few additional observations. They center on what made this case notable, and what perhaps needs a little more attention. In no particular order, here they are.

First, the Delhi rape would not have been news had it not included a violent, savage assault with an iron rod on the young woman that resulted in her death. Had she been ‘just’ raped and not suffered more than the ‘usual’ injuries that raped women suffer, the case would have been forgotten rather rapidly. The humdrum announcement of yet another rape, somewhere, sometime, would have been unlikely to have attracted much notice. Something exceptional is always needed to jolt us out of our normal somnolent response to them. Perhaps the number of rapists, perhaps twisted acts of degradation (our social media culture now provides ample opportunity for old-fashioned ‘notch on the belt’ bragging to acquire an added new dimension), perhaps dramatic acts of violence (as in this case), or perhaps the location or placement of the victim (an American raped abroad always makes more news than one raped right here, at home.)

Second, the rape became a cause célèbre because it happened in India’s capital, and because its victim was an aspirant to the better life. She had moved from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’, from a small town to the big city; she sought to go even further. She was enrolled in a professional course of education, one that promised her and the family she had left behind a better life. Sadly, had she been a resident of a village in India’s hinterland, perhaps a Dalit set on by ‘high-caste’ goons, her gang-rape would not have made the news. Or if it had, via  a small paragraph not on the front page. it would not have provoked the current reaction. (In Govind Nihalani‘s Aakrosh, the landless peasant Lahanya Bikhu, in the movie’s horrifying climax, kills his sister to ‘protect’ her from the landlord and his foremen who have already raped his wife and condemned him to jail.)

Third, there was an old familiar companion in this story of rape: alcohol, our most beloved legal drug, whose removal from the index prohibitorum ensured that no other drug would ever be legalized. From college campus to invaded town, from frat party to street alley, rape and alcohol often go hand in hand. Sometimes, it seems, there is nothing quite as dangerous as a group of young drunk men. If they aren’t picking fights with each other–possibly the safest outcome for all bystanders–their roving eyes turn elsewhere. Quite often, it’s a woman they fancy. And of course, they attack in packs; nothing quite makes men feel as brave as alcohol and the presence of other conspirators.

Last, as I noted in my previous post, the ubiquity of rape of worldwide (in space and time) should give pause to those keen to turn this into a uniquely Indian pathology. When Susan Brownmiller wrote Against Our Will, she did not subtitle it Indian Men, Indian Women and Rape in India.

Carmen Ortiz Did Not Act Alone in Hounding Aaron Swartz To His Death

No prosecution of war criminals, torturers and mass murderers; no prosecution of those that declare a war on false pretense; no prosecution of those that indulge in  grand larceny and financial fraud, immiserating the lives of many; no prosecuting of the rich and the powerful; but over-zealous hounding of a young, idealistic, brilliant man whose only crime seemed to be the desire to make available accumulated knowledge to all; and as always, the continuing incarceration and punishment of the nation’s dispossessed and underprivileged. This is not the justice system we would like to have, it is the one we actually have.

What could have motivated the prosecutor run amuck, Carmen Ortiz, to seek the horrendously disproportionate jail sentences and fines she sought for Aaron Swartz? Political ambition, perhaps. But focusing on her actions alone would be a mistake. Ortiz took the line she did because she was well aware that she was acting in a very particular context, a time and place in which the penalties she sought stood some chance of being viewed as the appropriate punishment for a baleful malefactor.

Ortiz, you see, was well aware that she lives in a world densely populated by confused, ignorant people, incapable of understanding the legal, economic and utilitarian roots of private property, or the differences between physical property and intangible property, who are too lazy to bother disentangling the idiotic term ‘intellectual property’, who faithfully parrot the lying press releases of media corporations, who cannot be bothered to understand how the creation and propagation of ideas works. These people can be relied upon to childishly shriek and scream at every instance of an action that threatens to upend the neat little black and white world they have constructed of absolute property rights and romantic notions of creativity. They can be relied upon to deploy, with little prompting, an emotionally charged, morally inflected language of ‘theft’, ‘piracy’, ‘robbery’, and ‘stealing’ to describe actions whose descriptions call for considerably more nuance. They are firm and upstanding and self-righteous, full of rectitude and judgment; they imagine themselves defenders of the starving artist and the inventor in the basement, not realizing they are, as usual, corporate shills and defenders of the antitheses of their proclaimed stances. They clog our bulletin boards and blog comments spaces, whining about how ‘artists deserve to be paid’, about how books and poems  will never get written, how movies will never be made, music will never be composed, songs will never be performed  in a world that does not offer as much copyright protection as possible, from the cradle to the grave and beyond.

These howling fools–who include those who work at supposedly elite institutions of learning–had set up a chorus, an applause track that Ortiz craved. Her cruel, over-the-top, inquisitorial sentence of thirty-five years and a million dollars, one would that terminate the career of a man who packed more creativity into his little pinkie than all the hordes who claim to be the faithful defenders of creativity, would ensure her hosannahs from this gallery. She would be enshrined as the Grand Protector of Property. Could there be a higher honor in our society?

So she acted. And pushed Aaron Swartz into his grave.

The Masterpiece Too Horrible To Recommend: Francine Prose on Haneke’s Amour

Francine Prose–(what an excellent last name!)–titles her review of Michael Haneke‘s Amour ‘A Masterpiece You Might Not Want to See’, (New York Review of Books Blog, 7 January 2013) and begins with the following:

Michael Haneke’s Amour is the ultimate horror film. With its portrayal of the shocks, the cruelties and indignities to which old age and disease subject a happily married Parisian couple, it’s far scarier and more disturbing than Hitchcock’s Psycho, Kubrick’s The Shining, or Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and like those films, it stays with you long after you might have chosen to forget it.

That pair of opening sentences tells us, perhaps, all we need to know. I have not seen the movie yet but it is clear it is about ageing, the slow downward decline toward death that is the lot of those whose appointments with the Grim Reaper do not occur suddenly, and lastly, perhaps it is about the crowning insult to injury that is often the terrible fate of some: watching your loved ones die in front of you, even as your own body slowly gives way.

Prose suggests Haneke’s vision of this aspect of the human condition is unsparing enough to raise the question of whether he is a ‘sadist’ or a ‘moralist’ or both. Clearly, this is not the kind of movie that one can watch dispassionately. And as Prose suggests, having seen the horrors that Haneke makes available to us, should we warn others away from it? And contrary to the notion that classics demand periodic reconsumption, why would you ever want to watch this horrorshow again?

Why would I voluntarily put myself through the awfulness of watching the scenes in which the couple struggles to navigate the suddenly staggering demands of the wheelchair, the knife and fork, the toilet?

So, several questions then: If a work of art brings us into uncomfortably close contact with an all too well-known aspect of the human condition, are we compelled to pay attention? In all probability, we’ll experience it ourselves in all its frightening immediacy. Can an artist’s eyes be a little too unflinching? Sometimes we should look away, not compel others to look, and if like Prose, it has seared our eyes, perhaps we should warn others to stay away.

These questions are familiar and have not lost any of their intractability over the years. For the present moment, I want to merely point to an addition to some of the expected responses to Prose’s piece. (Such as, for instance, that ‘art should confront all there is head-on’ or ‘let others make up their own mind whether the art they experience is too painful for them.’) That additional response comes those that have already experienced the loss of a loved one, and lived through its extended nightmare, and now disdain this cinematic rendering of their lived experiences. Or from those, like doctors, for whom such scenes of decay and death are all too commonplace. For these folks, the cinematic version of an all-too familiar experience is at best a painful exercise in forbearance and at worst a wilful act of self-directed torture. The trauma sufferer often plays reluctant host to a recurrent, unwelcome guest: the memories and visions that have already left visible and invisible scars. Ripping off the bandages to let the wounds run again might be unwise.

Note: I intend to see the movie.

Copy-Editing and Proofing Nightmares With a Twist

Dreams are revealing and so, I have never talked about my dreams on this blog. And perhaps that struck me as too self-indulgent. But that is a decidedly strange decision because, from time to time, I have indulged in many autobiographical ramblings here. Today, I’m going to recount one from last night, most certainly one of the most singular I have ever experienced, one worth recapitulating because it is about books, writing and anxiety, and so it should resonate with those who write. And those who are anxious. (The intersection of those two sets is huge.)

So, the dream. I cannot quite place the location or time, but the setting is quite clear: I am in a large room with windows and a large desk in front of me. I am working on a manuscript, a book of mine, brought to me for copy-editing and proof correction by, get this, a human messenger. That’s right; this manuscript has not been emailed to me by a publisher for correction. Rather, a large burly man, I think only partially clothed, and I think, glistening with sweat, a cross between a palace guard and a championship wrestler, has personally carried over it to me. I do not remember his features too well, but he is definitely muscular and bare-chested. He resembles more than anything else, an executioner of sorts, someone, who if provoked, might easily turn to violent reprisal or correction. I am to correct it, make all the necessary changes, and then hand it back to ‘Ol Hermes here to carry to back to the publisher. So I get to work; I feel compelled to.

As I work through the book, I make corrections with a pencil. Suddenly, I stop and look at my corrections; they strike me as illegible. Yes, even I, their writer, cannot quite make out what my corrections, strikeouts, and amendments amount to. They need decipherment, and I will have to do so quickly. In an effort to seek reassurance, to assuage a suddenly manifest anxiety, I call over the messenger, and point him to the scribbles, saying ‘I seem to have marked up the book quite badly. What do I do?’ My man merely grunts, and says, ‘Finish it up, and then we’ll go through it together.’ At first, this strikes me as impractical but then I reason to myself that it will not be too bad. Surely, it can’t take more than a day. Reassured, I return to work.

But things get worse. I notice there is new, strange, unfamiliar text in the book. Not just simple typos or text manglings. Rather, there are illustrations I have never seen before, and even worse, entire passages of text that seem to have appeared by magic, inserted by an anonymous hand. Finally as crowning insult or injury, there is an entire new section written in first person describing experiences that I have never had. I stop, unable to continue to any more. Who has done this? I realize that I am not just perplexed or irritated or angry. I am scared. In part, it is because I am anxious. How can I make the required corrections? I don’t have the source file; this is a typeset file; I will have to strike out, replace; it all seems to be bubbling up into a chaotic, irredeemable mess. But even more fundamentally, I feel the fear of the violated. Someone has taken a hammer to my  Pietà; someone has reached out, cuffed me on the ears, slapped me across the face, and told me, bluntly, that they can get change my work, modify its meaning, become its author, without asking me for permission; who, why?

At this point, the dream starts to fade as my fear and anxiety build. This is a normal turn of events in dreams of mine where the anxiety levels become unbearable. I think I call Hermes to show him the mess, to ask him if he knows anything about how this mutilation might have taken place. But—and I cannot remember clearly now—it is not as if he has anything useful to offer. Why would he know? His is not to reason why; it is only to transport the text back and forth. And the dream comes to an end.

I started writing this blog post shortly after waking up in the morning so the details as I can remember them are as clear as they can be.  I’m still perplexed by it. I wonder if the messenger symbolizes the tyranny of the deadline, the fear of contract cancellation, or the implacable inflexibility of the publisher. And copy-editing is hard, tedious work, of course, leaving behind many a scar worn in by memories of endless, iterative checks. But the most interesting emotional response of mine, I think, was the fear that someone had the power to change what I wanted to say before I could say it, to modify my written word before it saw its way into print.

William James on the Selectivity of Consciousness According to Human Interests

A couple of days ago, I noted humanism‘s affinities with pragmatism, and quoted William James to cement that claim. Today, I want to point to James’ treatment of consciousness to show how fundamental human interests are in his philosophy of mind. (This post is cribbed from Patrick Kiaran Dooley‘s Pragmatism as Humanism: The Philosophy of Willam James, Nelson-Hall Publishing, Chicago, 1974, pp. 42-52. All James quotes below are taken from Dooley’s citations from Principles of Psychology.)

For James, our consciousness influences our behavior and our actions by selection from data presented to it (via attention); what guides and regulates this selection and attention are our practical, aesthetic, religious and ethical interests. We first become aware of the world via sensational contact with it (these sensations are already knowledge for James). This data of awareness of the world around us is then enriched by differentiating it and noticing relationships among its different aspects. But these relationships that we notice, the aspects we attend to, are not just those that are presented to us most frequently; they ‘stand out’ because they are of interest to us. We perceive that which we attend to and we attend to that which interests us. In sensory attention:

The only things we commonly see are those which we preperceive and the only things we preperceive are those which have been labeled for us, and the labels stamped on our mind.

In perceiving, consciousness is selective in isolating a group of sensible qualities which, because ‘they are most constant, interesting or practically important, we regard as the most essential constituents of the thing.’ It also selects among these to appoint some as typical or ‘correct’ representatives of the object in question:

Out of all the visual magnitudes of each known object we have selected one as the real one  to think of and degraded all the others to serve as its signs. This ‘real’ magnitude is determined by aesthetic and practical interests.

Some representations are promoted to the status of ‘true’; others to that of ‘signs.’ This follows simply from the fact that ‘true representations’ are perceived from the most practically advantageous positions.

For James there is no such thing as a pure sensation; all is interpreted first. We do not experience the world passively but actively act on the data available to us. Our attention does a great deal of work: by settling again and again on the most ‘useful’ presentations it turns them into ‘experience.’ But it is driven by our interests, which determine the how and the what of our experiences.

And this then further leads to our construction of what is real, of what we consider reality – the ‘common sense world.’ Here objects appear of interest and importance to us. To call an object ‘real’ is merely to indicate a reference to ourselves because our cognitive relationship to the world is ‘affective’, not dispassionately objective:

[We] give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to with a will.

The affective component of our selves thus determines what we consider ‘real’: the objects of our beliefs are related to our interests. This extends to all levels, so that even the most ‘basic’ entities of the world are those that bear an acute relation to our interests, ranging from the most practical to the most sublime. In our conceptions of the world, we are constantly selecting and rejecting according to these:

Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily classify it under, makes me unjust to other aspects. But as I am always classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity–the necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me.

   Our purposes determine our conceptions of the world, its so-called ‘essential properties’ but:

Reality overflows these purposes at every core. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize things. 

Thus even in the most basic sizing up of the world, in our determinations of ‘what is,’ we cannot eliminate the human. We are mixed up in the cement of the universe.

No Matter Where You Go, There’s Home: Robert Viscusi’s Astoria

This morning, while out for a errand-laden walk–visiting the pediatrician’s office, shopping, and getting an influenza vaccine shot–in this bizarrely gorgeous East Coast January weather, I ran into my friend and Brooklyn College colleague, the poet Robert Viscusi, with whom I work at the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. I admire Bob for his erudition, wit, and writing, have learned a great deal from him over the years, and consider my meeting-time jousts with him among my most enjoyable and intellectually rewarding campus experiences ever, so it is to his work that I devote this brief note.

I own two of Viscusi’s books: the difficult, yet rewarding, quasi-autobiographical novel Astoria, which introduced me to, among other things, the Stendhal Syndrome, and provided an acute, poetic glimpse of the Italian-American experience that seemed to speak directly to me, also an immigrant to the US; and the short collection of poems titled A New Geography of Time.  The inscriptions on the latter reads, ‘To Samir Chopra, From the land of the sphinxes, Bob Viscusi, 10/17/12, Brooklyn.’ But it is to the former that I am paying attention today.

When I began reading Astoria, I found immediate resonances: it is a tale of loss and discovery, of parental connections and sunderings, of new beginnings, and pasts left behind. It is about mothers and sons, and families, transplanted. It is not an easy book; when I first reported this to Bob, his response was to suggest reading it aloud. I complied; it worked. When a poet turns his hand to a novel you must not follow him all the way; continue reading him as you did before. For as Viscusi describes Astoria in the prologue:

It’s sort of a novel in the form of a poem in the form of three essays about the meaning of history.

I mentioned the Stendhal Syndrome above. What role does it play in Astoria? Quite simply this: the narrator of the story suffers from it. He was first afflicted at the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, two years after the death of his mother. He discovers she is, to him, Napoleon. As he moves through this world, he finds that his journeys, no matter how far-flung, never take him beyond Astoria, her home, a Napoleonic empire. He carries her, the strongest and most distinctive imprint on his persona, a ghost in the corpora, with him, wherever he goes. But she is Astoria, so he takes Astoria everywhere. Some of us want to go home but are told we can never do so; yet others, it seems can only go home again and again.  As Buckaroo Banzai might have said, ‘No matter where you go, there it is.’

Home, of course, is our most familiar resting place, where we seek to return, for comfort and succor in times of adversity, when confronted with the world’s strangeness. It sticks to us like a skin. The immigrant’s journey’s are often termed a sloughing off of this cover, but as Viscusi notes, it persists, screening, vetting and transforming, quite uniquely, everything that seeks entrance into our bodies and minds. Astoria  shows us among (many!) other things, how we take our homes and histories with us, wherever we go.

Grazie Professore!

Beware the Easily Defined Philosophical Term

Over the course of my philosophy career, I’ve come to realize I sometimes use technical philosophical terms without an exceedingly determinate conception of their precise meaning. But I do, however, know how to use them in a particular philosophical context that will make sense to an interlocutor–reader, discussant, student–who has a background similar to mine. (Perhaps this is all that is required with just about any word? What more could be required after all? But I digress.) Thus, I muddle through, talking about philosophy, writing on it, teaching it, debating it. Heck, I’ve made a career out of it.

A classic example of an ambiguous, yet useful and widely used term is ‘humanism.’ I made heavy use of it in the first paper I wrote in graduate school, in a paper on Marx and Feuerbach‘s views on religion. I described Marx and Feuerbach (and possibly Hegel) as humanists, referred to the Young Marx as an arch-humanist in distinguishing him from the Later ‘Das Kapital‘ Marx, and so on. Over the years though, I’ve come to sense that I don’t have a real handle on the term other than to say it refers to ‘human-centered philosophies.’ When asked to explicate that term, I launch into various examples: early Marxism, existentialism, secularism–stress its affinities–philosophical naturalism, for instance–and point to other schools of thought that employ the term, like, say, renaissance humanism. Within the context of these examples, I am then able to try to clarify what is meant by ‘human-centered.’ This past fall, when introducing students to existentialism via Sartre–besides the obvious import of the slogan that ‘(human) existence precedes (human) essence’–I stressed his claim that Sartrean existentialism is humanism because it emphasizes, centrally, the human freedom and ability to make choices. And as I’ve mentioned affinities above, it is worth mentioning humanism’s affinities with pragmatism. In particular, William James, who took ‘humanism’ to describe his pragmatism, offers us some wonderful characterizations of it:

[I]t is impossible to strip the human element out from even our most abstract theorizing

[T]o an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products.

The ambiguity of philosophical terms should not be too shocking: many philosophical terms have been employed in a wide variety of disciplinary contexts; they have extensive histories of usage and thus resist precise definition (as Nietzsche usefully pointed out a long time ago); they are used to clarify, extend, and resolve philosophical debates in more than one arena of disputation; sometimes, they are drawn from different languages and then encountered in translation; they often enjoy extensive deployment in non-philosophical contexts, and thus create ambiguities between antecedent and  current usage. Furthermore, philosophical traditions that stress conceptual analysis can sometimes exacerbate the confusion: by emphasizing necessary and sufficient conditions for usage, they risk smoothing out, by force and fiat, the rough, serrated edges of meaning that make the term as useful and ubiquitous as it has been.

A philosophical term that is all too easily defined should make us just a little suspicious about its  usefulness.

The Deadliness of Humorlessness

In the climactic scenes of Umberto Eco‘s The Name of the Rose, Adso of Melk and William of Baskerville confront the old, blind, and malignant librarian Jorge, sworn, no matter the price to be paid in lives, to keeping  Aristotle‘s Poetics a perennial secret because of its subversive doctrines that not only analyze and permit laughter, but speak of it approvingly. Jorge senses the dangers that lurk were such a revelation come to pass, for laughter would bring in its wake gaiety that would disdain solemnity, the fear of the unknown, and the punctiliousness of church doctrine. In sum, it would bring about, and elevate to the status of desirable and necessary, a subversive, corrosive, irreverence:

But if one day–and no longer as plebeian exception, but as ascesis of the learned, devoted to the indestructible testimony of Scripture–the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, and to seem noble and liberal and no longer mechanical; if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation, ‘ then we would have no weapon to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporeal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breath where they list! [Warner Books, New York, 1980, pp. 580]

In his humorless, grim apprehension of the power of the message of the Poetics, Jorge is not alone, and such fulminations are not unknown to contemporary readers.  Eco’s purpose in bringing this character to life, in populating him with such bombast and self-importance, seems to be that of  reminding readers of the Jorge-archetypes that even today, dog our every step in every walk of life, but do so most perniciously in the public, political sphere.

Most prominently, Jorge’s refusal to get the joke, to throw his head back and allow himself a chuckle or two, reminds us of the idiotic knee-jerk reactions of the pompously pious who are easily offended, hurt or otherwise insulted by satire, ridicule, parody, or indeed, the merest descent into something less than the unquestioningly reverential.  Sometimes they are priests, sometimes the lay devotee, sometimes they are politicians, sometimes they are their acolytes, sometimes they are academics. No matter their exact identity, there is always some doctrine out there, defended to the end by a band of the faithful, diverse in all manners, but yet united by a deep and fundamental, almost existential, insecurity, a frightening suspicion that the object of their firm and committed belief might not be all its cracked up to be, for whom even the miseries of hell pale into comparison with the uncertainties that might be induced by any attitude toward their devotional object that does not rise to the level of worship.

The protestations of these Jorges would be merely amusing irritants if they did not, like the suicidal, sightless character in Eco’s novel, also insist on adding other, more deadly, arrows to the quivers of their reprisals. It is then that the humorless reveal themselves to be the most dangerous of all.

Hail to the Mighty Nurse

When I was a mere nine years old, I underwent a tonsillectomy, a minor operation that surprisingly enough, in those days, required general anesthesia. My mother spent as much time as she could with me in the hospital, but my constant companions otherwise were the military hospital’s nurses. I might not have been a teenager, but I was still, mysteriously enough, old enough to develop crushes on many of the nurses who did the rounds and attended to my many needs. They wore impossibly starchy uniforms, as befitting those serving in the armed forces; they were prim and proper; they were firm, kind and efficient. I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to the hospital ward but I did feel more than just the passing pang on waving goodbye to my merry band of temperature-taking, brow-stroking, bedsheet-smoothing caretakers.

Some thirty-five years on, nurses don’t cease to impress. My daughter’s entry into this world was most proximally brought about by the deft handiwork of an obstetric surgeon, but it was considerably and significantly facilitated by a hardworking and attentive group of nurses. From initial admission to prep work to recovery, a nurse was always there, providing expert, experienced care, offering words of advice, caution, and sometimes gentle reprimand too.

My wife and I spent two nights in a maternity ward after the birth of our daughter, and from the time we entered its rooms to the time we left, we were in the care of its nursing staff. I described my anticipation of my firstborn as a mixture of excitement and terror, and the most active factor in the mitigation of that terror was the maternity ward nurse. I always expected fatherhood to involve a great deal of on the job training; I didn’t realize that my first and most visibly accomplished teachers would be a group of nurses.

They knew how to handle newborns with just the right mix of firmness and gentleness; they were champion swaddlers and they knew how to teach its moves to an utter novice like me (I still haven’t mastered the really, really snug wrap, but I’m getting there, keeping their finished product as an aspirational goal); they knew how to change diapers with ease and minimal fuss (and they expertly shepherded me through my first diaper change disaster too); they were, in all the important ways, my hand-holders through my first trepidatious steps through the valley of fathering.

After we left the hospital to return home (but possibly even before) I wondered about how many families the experienced nurses had seen entering their wards with their newborns in tow, how many lives they had kicked off, how many anxious parents’ queries they had answered, how many anxieties they had smoothed over, how many bumblers they had turned into quasi-competents, able to approach the task of rearing a child with just a little confidence.

The world of medicine has often not taken adequate care of these indispensable components of the medical system; doctors have often not acknowledged how their work would be impossible without their assistance; and more than one reformer of the medical system has sought to underwrite their vision via a diminution of their role. They are often invisible, unacknowledged, and unappreciated. Be nice to one the next time you see one or need one.

Note: Support nurses unionizing!

Better Living Through Chemistry: The Decaffeinated Life

Five weeks or so ago, I quit caffeine. Cold turkey. Strictly speaking, that isn’t true: I have consumed a fair amount of decaffeinated coffee since then; there are trace amounts of caffeine in that beverage; I have also eaten many bars of chocolate, dark and otherwise. But never mind. I think my efforts count as ‘quitting caffeine.’ Five weeks on, I do not feel that terrible pre-caffeinated feeling in the morning anymore, one that could only be relieved by strong coffee or tea. My sleep is better; I think I sleep deeper; and I feel more rested.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why did I quit caffeine? Bizarrely enough, it was because I anticipated sleeplessness, the kind that would be created by the arrival of my first-born child. Dreading a state of existence in which sleepy, catatonic, incoherent, and delirious, I stumbled from one interrupted sleep session to the next, all the while fueling myself with stronger and stronger coffee, I resolved to steer clear of the dark brew altogether. I wouldn’t drink coffee and I wouldn’t drink tea. My wife had successfully mastered the non-or-de-caffeinated state quite well during pregnancy, making a seamless transition to herbal tea in the mornings and the occasional decaffeinated coffee thereafter. Her success at what seemed like a very difficult abstinence was inspiring. Still, there didn’t seem any particular reason to do so myself.

But coffee can be a dark master. I had noticed I was seeking refuge in coffee too many times during the day. Sometimes to ease distraction, sometimes to relieve anxiety, sometimes to get over the mid-afternoon blahs. And always, always, at meetings. It still did its bit in the morning, ushering me from the land of somnambulism to that of the wide-awake, inducing in a dullard a sliver of euphoria so intense that it made waking up worthwhile, but it was increasingly being called on to do perform all sorts of duties through the day.  The net effect of that constant fueling was, strangely enough, a more drowsy mode of existence, but frustratingly, only during the day, and not at night, when I really needed to fall asleep. The constant caffeination wasn’t working. Facing this inescapable fact, and the looming birth of my firstborn, my choice seemed clear.

So I did it, replacing my morning cuppa with a mug of rooibos chai (a South African herbal tea) with milk. On the first two days, I suffered the dreaded caffeine withdrawal headaches. Petrified by their intensity, I sought relief in decaffeinated coffee for the next three days. The trace amounts of caffeine there helped me get through the first week of abstinence. Thereafter, the headaches disappeared. Now, I still drink rooibos in the mornings (and the occasional decaf latte as a treat). I do not crave coffee or tea in the mornings, even as I cannot imagine a morning without some kind of hot beverage. And pleasingly, though my sleep patterns have been disturbed quite extensively by my baby girl, I find it easy enough to fall back to sleep after each nocturnal disturbance.

The body. it’s a wonderful thing; chemistry lets you play with it.