Parkinson's Diary: Episode Seven, Another Progress Report

 

Yesterday, I had an appointment with my neurologist/mobility physician who handles my issues with Parkinson's Disease. I am doing well, although I definitely have that ailment.  He increased my dosage of Sinemet, the mainstay in Parkinson treatment. This was a four month follow-up.

I certainly have problems with ambulation, but this is to be expected. My tremor is not a big issue; it’s mostly on the left side. One of the main things that it affects is my typing—this blog, for instance, has to be carefully edited and all those extra z’s and s’s removed. My handwriting continues to be awful—being almost legally blind doesn’t help. I’ve given up writing long-hand, since it is so difficult to read my own writing that I have to recompose whatever I’m writing when I try to enter it into a computer. Since vision is such a problem, I need to dictate into the computer.

--Stop! A significant new problem: the new dose of the Parkinson’s medicine. I took it for a few days, and noticed a distinct improvement with my mobility issues. However, a side effect soon became apparent. The medicine, Sinemet, is a combination of carbidopa and  leva dopa. The carbidopa helps the medicine pass through the blood brain barrier into the brain. There it can enter the basal ganglia, the mobility centers of the brain, and help motor function. Yet, I imagine, that its effects on the brain aren’t limited to the basal ganglia. I began to be confused. I still was aware of my surroundings, but the feeling bordered on panic. Is this a side effect that would diminish with continued use of the drug? Perhaps, but the side effect was so great that I’d rather deal with reduced mobility, at least for the time being. So I decided to take the increased dosage at night, which, I presume, will help me get out of bed better in the morning.—The medicine works, but if I can’t function, it’s best to stay seated!

….Well,I'm  seate--again.

R.I.P. Alexei Navalny

Today we  learned about the death of Alexei Navalny, who died--undoubtedly an unnatural death--at the age of 47, while imprisoned in the Russian gulag. I mourn him as an American Russian literary patriot. It's as if Anna Karenina came back to life, only to put her neck down on the tracks of the Long Island Railroad during rush hour after listening to the news--with an emphasis on the dreadful news from Russia. The bloody mess on the tracks leaves us with an imitation Stalin who has killed  a real hero. Yes, another tear trickles down the cheek of Mother Russia, beset as she is with the attempts of Tucker Carlson to  suckle at her breast. (Poor Mother Russia! One breast free only because Trump is trying to grab her by the p.)

Was Navalny murdered in prison? Judging from Putin's well-deserved reputation of brutality and the fact that Navalny had  previously been poisoned by him, it is likely. But we may never know for sure. Putin's denial of involvement is what we expect from such a brutal dictator, who cannot tolerate opposition--and Navalny was his chief opponent in Russia. Yet even if we never know the cause of the Russian hero's death, it is clear that Putin at the very least significantly contributed to it.  Putin unjustly imprisoned him, and an Arctic prison is light-years away from a family picnic.  The fact that he was photographed the day before indicates the possibility both of poisoning and of a heart attack. In either case, Putin should be put on the death certificate as cause of death. One thinks of Dostoevsky before a firing squad, that unbenownst to him, shot blanks by order of the secret police. Except here the brutality of the secret policeman is not in question.

It's as if all the greats of Russian culture are pointing toward that neo-Stalinist monster while chanting, "j'accuse."  As in the past, Russian people  don't seem to be listening.

Yesterday, I listened to a performance of Tchaikowsky's great Sixth Symphony.  The famous, deservedly very famous melody from the  first movement, repeated later on, for me was the pefect musical expression for the contemporary Russian mess. Tchaikowsky died soon after he composed it; society was crushing him. When will there be a silver lining to the dark storm cloud that is Putin? Not any time soon, I'm afraid.

But it will come. Music expresses all emotions, so let me end with positive notes. Putin's barbarity will not defeat Mother Russia forever. (In my lifetime? Alas...)

But that day of liberation will come. The day when Putinism will be gone forever, is beautifully expressed by a chorus from Mozart's opera,  Idomeneo. "The sea is calm. Let's proceed; everything is reassuring.  We will have a happy future. Hush, hush, let's get going."

This music reveals what human beings are  capable of. Mother Russia, please wake up! Now!

(If you can't play this video, type in "Placido e il mar" on YouTube and please listen to it there.)

What Parkinson's Has Taught Me

I slwalk, yet still practice my art. (I can!

Can I still travel with walker and cane?)

My secret is happiness: I still love! I still breathe! Yet

the knives in my knees haven’t crippled my heart.

What a privilege it is to be humble! What a privilege it is to believe.

Thomas Dorsett,  Colombia, 2024

A 'Terrible' Sonnet by Hopkins

 

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

     I cast for comfort that I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you, unforseen times rather--as skies

Betweenpie mountains--lights a lovely mile.

In this poem, Hopkins gives himself good advice, which he unfortunately never heeded. Hopkins was, of course, very religious in the conventional sense; but he got, in my opinion at least, the message of religion only half-right. The commandment of all religions is to love one’s neighbor as oneself; attempting to love one’s neighbor while despising oneself is always misplaced. We can look at the great commandment then not as a commandment at all but as a statement of fact: One loves one’s neighbor only to the degree that one has love for oneself. Hopkins once wrote this beautiful line: “There lives the deepest freshness deep down things.” If one couldn’t find that deepest freshness deep down things in oneself, one wasn’t looking hard enough or was looking in the wrong direction.

It is well known that Hopkins had a strong carnal nature. His sexual orientation was basically homosexual. He once wrote that he decided not to become a painter or sculptor because he would have to deal drawing naked men, which presumably caused him much grief and even panic.  He decided that the only way for him to overcome his self-disgust was by giving himself up to God--The god of the Catholic Church, which strictly forbade homosexuality and masturbation.

We’ve learned a lot since Victorian times. Homosexuality is no longer synonymous with sin for the very reason that gays are able to love--one must agree with the current pope that in this regard, “Who am I to judge?”

I do not wish to psychoanalyze Hopkins’s sexuality here; I just present it as a potential source of his self-disgust. That he was a very unhappy man and rejected himself is obvious from reading his poems, especially his later poems, when God didn’t deliver that which he expected: peace and joy. Obviously, you don’t have to be gay to suffer from an animus against the self; family pathology, peer rejection, and insistence in getting from the universe what the universe is unable to deliver are other frequent causes of self-rejection.

Life is a rare phenomenon in the universe, advanced life even rarer. We have all won the lottery, as it were, and are incredibly lucky to be alive. Most of us realize this; the genius Hopkins apparently did not. Let us now turn our attention to Hopkins’s great sonnet and indicate why his noble idea to be less hard on himself ultimately failed. Notice the obsession with self; the poem begins with ‘My own heart.’  He admits that he is ‘comfortless' and finds no way out from the hell he is in.

He refers to himself as 'poor Jackself’ who is 'sad' and ‘jaded’—not a good start. One gets the impression that Hopkins at this point in his life saw himself as a mess and threw himself on the mercy of God for relief. But God, for whatever reason, remained silent, which abetted Hopkins’s despair.

The poem ends with one of the most beautiful images in all poetry. Hopkins acknowledges that joy does indeed come sometimes, but it arises spontaneously. It ‘lights a lovely mile,’ as sunlight does when breaking through  clouds. Whenever I read these lovely lines, I seem to see sun breaking through; a beautiful image. That the clouds in his internal sky were largely self-caused, however, Hopkins would have probably denied. Too, too bad.

One has no right to reject oneself. If you share Hopkins’s despair, fight, fight, fight for your right for a happy life. (Humility and despair are polar opposites.) Remember what nuns and priests used to say, and perhaps still say, "God loves you just the way you are." Some of us moderns might say instead, "The universe accepts you just the way you are," not the way your ego insists how things should be.

A beautiful poem about a man who is stuck in a hell of his own making.

The Soul--Two Poems from the Deronda Review

 Two of my poems, along with the work of many other poets, appeared in the current edition (Vol. 10,  Vo, 1, 2023). 

The editor is Esther Cameron, who lives in Israel. She is an old friend. The subject of the curent edition was announced as, "The Soul."

Consummation

A shriveled prune accepts its pit.

Mouse on a glue trap, why resist?

Phantoms burn; limbs toss and turn,

Face mind's mirror: who exists?

Silence is also communication.

Expect nothing at all from death.

God hasn't sent you a postcard'

Answer it! Answer it!

Nature's unsigned letter is enough?

Advanced age lacks consolation?

It's never to late to meditate;

What joy it is to finally give up!

The Soul 

                  --for Esther Cameron

Everything is nothing to a star

Not to little you or me

With soul we thrive

Without it we flail

Even Leonardos nod

It's not in the pineal gland

With it we rise

Without it we fail

Martin Buber was right

Between us almost nothing yeasts

Despite lean and angry years

We're still at it

Whatever it is

It is

Ranjit and Nataraja

At Earlam we'll offer in each aging hand

the outstretched palm of Shiva, dancing

the it-doesn't-matter--though it-really-does

sidesteps of late middle-age.

On  the telephone he tells me

half of Richmond thinks he’s a terrorist,

while those on campus whose idol is diversity

think he’s very special since he’s brown.

 

He received the mint chutney I sent him;

he broke up with Ivana from Prague.

He switches the subject to beef in French fries

and, not that they should, but can’t they tell

 

a mullah from Saudi Arabia

from a half Catholic boy from Madras?

Shiva intervenes with the sound of creation,

static.  It bristles with loneliness.

 

Feminists, curries, Foucault.

I tell him, we’ll be there in June—

He, tossed between drums and fire;

We, falling beneath Shiva’s foot.

 

We arrive at Earlam sixteen hours late.

He has a new friend. Everything’s fine.

That night she shows us new moves she’s taught him.

Right, left, one, two—We join in the dance.

Note: I'm putting together my sixth book--it may well be my last-- and found this poem in an old file. The subject matter concerns  our dear nephew Ranjit, who passed away last year. At that time in our lives,  the time of the poem, Nirmala and I were in loco parentis for Ranjit. He came here about 25 years ago, and stayed with us for about a year. After much applying, he was accepted at Earlam College, a liberal college  in Richmond, Indiana. The poem has to do with our subsequent visit to Earlam for Ranji's undergraduate graduation. The reference to beef in French fries has to do with a  controversy at that time when, after years of assuring the Hindu community that there was no beef in Macdonal's French fries, they had to admit that beef fat was used to prepare the fries. 

I forgot about Ivana from Prague, one of Ranji's Earlam friends!

Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, is, of course, Shiva. I have been heavily influenced by Shaivite Hinduism, a.k.a. vedanta. There are many references to Shiva on my blog.

Oh, and thanks to Sudhir, Ranjit's uncle, for supplying the photo.

Pax et Bonum to All!

 https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/592927301726877053/2023989654651543547

This was my Christmas message from several years ago. I still play the song on the piano with my friend Chris, who plays the flute; the problems mentioned in the essay have only grown worse; still hanging on over the precipice, although my muscles have became a lot weaker; still happy.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas! My advice when I was young would have been: Change the world. Much later, my advice would have been, Keep Breathing. Current advice: I am no one to give advice; Yet, keep breathing!!

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. On the 25th, we invited some people over. Philip, my son; Tina, his  sister; Roger, my nephew; Sonia, his friend; and a most gracious host, my dear wife, Nirmala. Little gifts for everyone as well

Age, illness. vision problems,  and politics have made my world a lot darker. So I decided to hanukkuh up everything: bright,  colored lights everywhere. It does indeed lift the spirits, We took advantage of other ways to bring light into our world as well: we  exercised a lot;  read a lot; wrote greeting cards--better  than never-- and, most of all, we enjoyed each other's company. We are very lucky indeed.

Hope you are too~ Keep doing what you love; love,

Blogger Thomas