I'm Still Here!

1.

After a brief vacation, I resumed my weekly visits with a hospice patient, Clifton White, who had become my friend. I had been visiting him for months; we had lively conversations.

This time, however, his physical condition had become much worse. Cancer had already ravaged his body, and was beginning to ravage his mind. No longer eating regularly, he slept through much of the day. After the visit, I decided to return the next day, fearing that that visit would be my last.

And so it was. He now had difficulty breathing. His state of consciousness flickered like a desk lamp with a faulty connection. He could still hear me most of the time; I was sure of that.

The time for conversation was over. He had turned on his side; I put my hand on his emaciated hip and sang. Amazing Grace, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, etc. His occasional beatific smile made me realize I couldn’t stop. After an hour or so, I noticed that the death rattle had begun. It was very faint; very gentle, just like Cliff.

I continued to sing, especially Swing Low Sweet Chariot. (Cliff had told me he was a nominal Baptist; I was sure that he knew this gospel song). 

I couldn’t let him die alone. After inviting the angels to come forth and carry him home for the umpteenth time, he opened his eyes a bit, took in a deep breath, exhaled, and was gone.

2.

Clifton White (1953-2019) gave me permission to write “whatever I wanted" about him: He had been born poor in Philadelphia. He had an older brother and five younger sisters; by the time I got to know him, he had lost all contact with his family. He never did drugs, he never got into trouble. If you got to know Cliff, you would know that he was telling the truth.

Cliff was a remarkably kind man. Envy, greed, bitterness—I must say that I never found a trace of these in him during all my visits.

His life certainly had not been easy. One day, when he was a teenager, while walking home form his grandmother’s house, he was shot—an apparent victim of a stray bullet. He was almost killed. He woke up in the hospital with “tubes everywhere.” He had no idea of what happened. His hospital stay was lengthy, but he eventually recovered fully.

The worst event in his life occurred when he was eighteen: his drunken father murdered his mother while Cliff and other siblings were present. Needless to say, this moment was the subject of nightmares for the rest of his life.

He had loved his mother dearly. Even in the nursing home, so many years later, he would look through the window at the sky and talk to his mother, while his favorite song, The Temptations’ 'How Do You Heal the Broken Hearted' played over and over in his mind. His last wish—he wan’t vociferous about it—was to visit his mother’s grave in Philadelphia. It remained unfulfilled.

The most difficult year of his life occurred many years after his mother’s death: he spent the year 2000 homeless in Baltimore. At one point, during the very cold winter of that year, he wanted to die. He was rescued by a social worker who eventually found housing for him. He had never been homeless since. What an easy client he must have been! He never got into trouble; his apartment was always neat and clean.

Cliff was obviously able to keep to himself for long stretches. He apparently never had many friends. This struck me as odd, since he was quite gregarious with me. He earned his money painting houses.

One of Cliff's favorite expressions was "Go with the flow." He was not an assertive person, but this did not limit his happiness. It reminds me of a saying of Cicero: in life we are, as it were, chained to a moving chariot. We have two choices: either fall and be dragged or to run with the chariot as long as we can. This is what Chris meant. I can attest that he ran with the chariot as long as he was able. How many of the dying--or of the living--would assert that they have been completely satisfied with their lot in life? I don't know, but Cliff could certainly be counted among them.

Did he ever get lonely? Yes. On two occasions, he invited a “streetwalker” to stay with him; both times his invitations “ended in disaster.” I didn’t press him for details.

He planned to celebrate his 66th birthday with me, but this was not to be. 

About ten minutes after he died, I informed the nurse. He came into the room, accompanied by two aides who were very somber; one was almost in tears.

Everyone loved him. 

3.

When I began visiting him several months ago, I would occasionally read poetry out loud. Cliff was black, so I thought he might relate well to the poetry of Langston Hughes. (Cliff was smart, but undereducated; he read well, but he was not a reader).

On one occasion I read the following poem to him.

Still Here

been scarred and battered
My hopes the wind done scattered,
Snow has friz me,
Sun has baked me,

Looks like between 'em they done
Tried to make me

Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin',
But I don't care!
I'm still here!

Cliff’s eyes lit up. “That’s me!’ he said, “That’s me!” He was delighted, so much so that I had the poem printed and framed for him. He referred to it frequently. It remained by his bedside till the day of his death.

What an extraordinary person Cliff was! Nothing could keep him down for long—not homelessness, not murder, not even a bullet. Cancer was able to wipe him from the face of the earth, but it failed to wipe the smile off his face till the very end.

4.

I learned a lot from Cliff—and maybe he learned a few things from me as well.

We were different. Cliff never complained;  I must admit, that I had been a glass-half-empty kind of guy. Yes, I had been known to kvetch about difficulties. After all, I hadn’t had it easy, either. (Oh, stop complaining! And I have).

I vaguely remembered having written a poem that contained the phrase that delighted Cliff so: I’m still here. I didn’t think the poem had ever been published; something made me google the poem's title anyway. And there it was. (First published in Wild Violet, an online literary magazine).

The Garden of Ramanatom

I tell them about entropy--March buds ignore me--
Boltzmann's equation nobody believed,
it killed him. Lawns growing verdant new hair--

New strands shall wave at admiring chicks;
the bald spot will vanish by June.

(That's not how it worked with me.)
Each crocus emanating from old roots;
morning glories shall hang from the trellis
like a bunch of resurrecting kids--
Rip van Winkle is a katydid,

an old bug renewed by spring's copy machine;
even if a meadowlark devours him,
his kin will look exactly like him;
no rose would notice the difference.
Like Dorian Gray, I've recaptured youth==

After flitting around blossoms like a bee,
I'll seduce a sensuous woman
who'll find me sexy as Hercules--
I'll still have time and energy for love
after jogging for six hours--

Yeah, right. It's already dusk for this lark;
wings pass the face of a luminous clock
in a darkening sky. Yet I'm still here,
tending my garden. Despite you, I thrive,
entropy! Chervil is old as I feel.


When I wrote this poem, I doubt if I had really believed its upbeat message. No doubts now. 

I see in my mind's eye Cliff's gentle face, the eyes of which convey to me an important message: Go with the flow and never take life for granted again. Good advice. Thank you, Clifton White! May you rest in peace.

Can Cuttlefish Get ALS?

1.
Did you hear about the cuttlefish with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease? No, this is not a joke. This is what the late, great neurologist, Oliver Sacks, heard a colleague say. It set him thinking. The class of cephalopods, (phylum mollusca), is a very intelligent group of animals. 

Maybe it’s possible for an organism as complex as a cuttlefish to be ravaged by ALS, who knows?, Sacks thought to himself. But he had his doubts, so he asked his colleague to repeat what he had said. The latter laughed. He had mentioned a publicist who had recently been stricken with this terrible disease. Sacks was approaching the end of his life when this incident occurred; his ability to hear was no longer acute. (He mentioned this anecdote in his excellent book, The River of Consciousness, which unfortunately was also his last).

Does entropy always win? It does indeed; things fall apart, the center eventually no longer holds.

I read in a recent edition of The New Yorker about a researcher who devised an apparatus which, when worn, would give a young person some idea of what it means to be old. The weight of this unshining armor hinders  movement; the apparatus thus allows a thirty-something to experience what a seventy-something goes through every day, such as having difficulty rising from a seated position, or, among the more fit septuagenarians,  maintaining the downward dog position in yoga for a long time. (Trust me on that one.)

I thought, however, that this old-age suit was incomplete. One would need to stuff cotton in the subject’s ears to give her a good idea of how well—that is, how poorly—old ears hear. In addition, for an average thirty-something to imagine how the average seventy-plus-something sees, the former would need to wear a beaten-up pair of dark glasses. (In my case, alas! I feel sometimes that the dark glasses in question would need to have been dipped in a vat of maple syrup,  then be liberally sprinkled with sugar, and left to dry in an attic for at least a month.)

I’m not asking for sympathy. Visual problems caused by bilateral cataracts and bilateral macular degeneration, however, will not be ameliorated by chomping on carrots. I’m in the process of figuring out what to do, while the vision of my youth approaches the upside-down world of a disoriented bat.

2.

As a man d'un certain age, I reluctantly admit that my hearing isn’t what it used to be, either. A recent example: a few days ago, a neighbor called out to me from across the street. “Semiramide!” he exclaimed. Semiramide? I didn’t know he was an opera fan. Besides, is that the way opera buffs great each other these days? I doubted it. “What?” I replied. “Semiramide! Semiramide!” Rossini’s overture to that piece began to play in my head. I doubted whether I had heard him correctly, however, and expressed my confusion with a shout, WHAT? My neighbor kindly crossed the street and said once more what he had apparently been saying all along: “Happy Father’s Day!”

Mishearing, though, is not, at least as yet, as significant a problem for me as “misseeing.” The latter isn’t even a word! (The word "misreading" indeed exists, but it usually refers to a faulty interpretation of a text, not to an error in decoding the letters of a word). Oliver Sacks gave a good deal of attention to mishearings in his last book, but not a mention of “misseeings.”  My aging brain, typical of many, felt left out.

A great humorist and cartoonist of the past century, James Thurber,  can help set the record straight. (An example of his humor: a rather dismissive critic told him that his cartoon women were unattractive. “Not to my cartoon men!” Thurber replied.)

Decades before the advent of the digital age, Thurber would write his articles on a large, yellow notepad. Unfortunately, his vision was so poor that he was unable to read what he had written. Thurber, thank goodness! frequently managed to find humor in his impediment. (What would an old man be if he couldn’t laugh? Sad).

I remember having read an article of his about the benefits of poor vision. One’s imagination is free to see, at last, whatever it wants to see. Walking down a street while observing the world with the visual acuity of a mole has, according to Thurber, undeniable advantages.

Who are walking down the street? The walrus and the carpenter, trailed by gaggle of jejune oysters! At last, the nearly blind man tells his inner child, you’ll be able to ask a walrus how it feels to have left the confines of a humorous poem for the prose of a (mostly) humorless world! True, as one gets up close, the oysters turn out to be scotomas, as the walrus and the carpenter become the Mutt of a lamppost and the Jeff of a mailbox; no matter: one now sees Bonnie Annie Laurie waving seductively from the distance. One happily moves on.

3.

I now approach a favorite book armed with a strong pair of glasses and a magnifying glass. Misreadings continue, which have taught me something about the brain: it does its best to make sense out of what it reads, and, regarding a word it has difficulty in decoding, it fills in the gaps between letters, and "sees" a familiar word. 

When I read now, I gloss over common words, a method which usually works. But if a more difficult word appears, this system breaks down. For instance, while recently rereading David Copperfiled, I came across the not-too-common word, defalcation. I knew what it meant—that is, if I had been able to decode the letters. My brain probably saw something like de—blur, blur-f--blur blur, followed by ation. How did Dickens know about deforestation, I thought to myself, which was hardly a concern in 1840s London? After much squinting, I finally figured out what Dickens had written.

A final example. Our book club is now reading The Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende.  It is the story of Zarité, a slave who somehow manages to triumph over adversity. In one of the beginning chapters, I came across the following sentence, spoken by a beautiful, sexually experienced mulatto slave to her master, who has decided to marry a Spanish woman and bring her back to his plantation located in what would become Haiti:

“Is it true that Spanish women live in a men’s nightmares with a hole cut in front for making love?”

Weird, I thought, and read on. After a page or two, however, I had to come back to that sentence; I was sure I had misread it, and so I did. With mush squinting I was able to determine what the slave, perhaps somewhat jealous, had actually said:

“Is it true that Spanish women sleep in nuns' nightdresses with a hole cut in front for making love?”

No comment.

Old age, with its inevitable approach to absolute zero, is, however, not all bad. Behind those cloudy glasses beams, as it were, a self-illuminating lens which transports a bright message: perspective. It is hard to imagine oneself as a king of his castle, when much of the castle is already  beyond repair. One learns, hopefully sooner rather than later, the life lesson behind the cogent words of Mr. Rogers: “It’s all about love—or the lack of it.” Once one loves and accepts not only oneself and others as they are, but life as it is as well, serenity follows.

Still, as Bette Davis once said, old age is not for sissies. Increasing aches and pains; decreasing acuities of hearing and vision; the sorrow of leaving behind so many acquaintances and friends whom one will never see again; decreased energy and increased forgetting, etc. etc., are certainly not my idea of a divertissement.

No, this is no country for old men. Or as my brain might misread this sad sentence: this is no chutney for nolled wrens, either. Ha ha.

Some Similarities Between Science and Eastern Thought

                                             In Memoriam: Clifton White (1953-2019)

On May 24, 20019, one of the most prominent physicists of the twentieth century, Murray Gell-Mann, died in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His achievements were numerous. For instance, he, with another physicist, devised a classification of elementary (quantum) particles which he called The Eightfold Way, a nomenclature inspired by the Eightfold Path of Buddhism. As reported in the Times obituary, he didn’t have “a mystical bone in his body” and objected to those who believed in any correlation between modern physics and Eastern teachings.

I do, however, see some consistencies between modern science, particularly physics, with Eastern teaching. That this makes me a mystic I seriously doubt. I leave the subject of levitation, for instance, to those who have feathers between their ears instead of gray and white matter.

I will briefly discuss in this essay five areas of convergence between science and Eastern philosophy, only one of which, I think, is controversial.

1. Anicca, Impermanence

Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, teaches, since time immemorial, that no phenomenal existence lasts forever. It is only recently that Western science is in agreement with this view.The Greeks taught that change occurred only on earth, and everything else, namely the moon and the stars, were immutable and lasted forever. Einstein, after he devised his seminal theories of Special and General Relativities, believed, despite what this own theories indicated, that the universe was eternal. He, in fact, committed what he called the greatest blunder of his lifetime, by theorizing that there was a repulsive force, lambda, that prevented the eternal universe from imploding. (That there is a repulsive force, responsible for the accelerating expansion of space, confirms the universe’s impermanence, not its eternity. Stars will eventually cease to exist; there will be nothing left except so-called "empty space." T.S. Eliot was quite prescient when he wrote, in another context, regarding the end of things: This is the way the world ends/ this is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.)

One can understand why Western ancients concluded that the universe was eternal, since they saw little evidence of cosmic impermanence, limited as they were to the use of their eyes, and not telescopes, as the means of gathering data. Comets and occasional supernovae were thought to be evidence of divine intervention, not mutable phenomena.

Another factor why it was thought that stars never changed is due to the awesome discrepancy between the lifespans of humans and stars. We know now that galaxies began to form shortly—by cosmic standards—after the universe came into existence over thirteen billion years ago. We know now that Shakespeare was more correct than he probably knew when he wrote that “We are the stuff that stars are made of.” Supernovae, the death events of massive stars, ejected heavier elements, formed by the immense pressure of collapse, into space, Some of these elements became the clouds which formed our solar system. Some of these heavier elements, notably carbon, became the stuff of  life on our planet. From birth to death, we carry around this ancient stellar material in our bodies.

Regarding time, the West had been wrong fora very long time. Since the twentieth century, however, science is in complete accord with Eastern teaching in this respect, namely, that everything we know, or know of, including the entire universe, is subject to change; everything, from the oldest galaxy to the youngest child, is born and will eventually die.

2. Anatta, No Abiding Self

This is the second characteristic of existence according to Buddhism; the doctrine that there is no soul has been part of Buddhism since Buddhism began. You are your thoughts; you don’t have thoughts, Science is in complete agreement. Recently, in the New Scientist an article discussed the great “illusion of the self.” Scientists have found areas of the brain that correlate with conscious experiences, such as recognizing colors or even having an 'out-of-the body experience,' yet never an area of the brain that could in any way be considered as the center of the self.

I have come to the conclusion that a sense of self, a.k.a. the soul, whether considered to be mortal or immortal, is a wonderful trick of evolution. Once the nervous system attained a high degree of complexity, it is “natural” that the brain imagined a Wizard behind the Oz of neurons. This had a great biological advantage for the survival of the species. Once one imagined oneself as separate from nature, one could remove oneself temporarily from society and create things, such as tools, weapons, and music. Without this ability to separate in order to think and create, Mozart—and, alas! Hitler, would not have been possible. This sense of self needs to be, and indeed is, extremely strong. I find it amazing that Buddha came to the knowledge of anatta millennia ago, while science has only come to this conclusion recently.

In the motor, as well as the sensory cortex, there is a neurological map of motor and sensory areas called the homunculus, Latin for “little man.” The poor guy is not only upside-down, but downright freaky. The lips, for instance are heavily represented, as well as are the hands. But the little man is as real as the constellation of Orion depicts an actual hunter. There are stars, but no hunter. There are neurons, but no little wizard.

Although, as I mentioned, this ‘trick' of evolution is very deeply seated, the knowledge that there is no such thing as the self defies common sense. (So do the actions of photons, which are nevertheless real entities.) It leads to discussions that get nowhere. For instance, I find debates about the existence of God wastes of time. If self is an illusion, God is doubly non-existent, an illusion of an illusion. First figure out what the self is, that is, a concatenation of thoughts, which will stop such debates before they begin.

If there is no self, free will is an illusion as well. But one can’t live without this illusion. As creatures of evolution, we must live with our "selves” even though we know, upon analysis, that the self is not a real entity, The knowledge of no-self, however, provides balance and keeps one humble, two qualities which are very much lacking today.

The self is a great illusion—here science and Buddhism are in complete agreement.

Dukkha

Dukkha (suffering, or better, insufficiency) is, after anicca and anatta,  the third characteristic of phenomenal existence according to Buddhism. It is here included for completeness’ sake, since it has more to do with inner psychology than scientific objectivity, the concurrence of the later with certain Buddhist principles being the subject of this analysis. 

Evolution has equipped the human individual with sexual desire, as it does with most animals; it also provides humans with imagination and  egoism. Desire in humans, unlike desire in animals which is balanced and in equilibrium with the environment, can know no bounds. Much of human suffering—wars, poverty, defalcations, etc. etc, have their root in unbalanced human desire. Buddhism teaches that egotistical desire—not desire per se—is unsatisfactory and can lead to suffering. Acceptance of life as it is and not how we want it to be is a good antidote to the poison of psychological suffering.  Buddhist doctrines that have psychological meaning and, sometimes, no scientific counterpart or corroboration, include karma, rebirth, and an absolutist sense of causality. These are what scientists call “unfalsifiable” doctrines, which have more in common with religion than with science, and, for obvious reasons, will not be discussed further here.

3. Cosmic Time

As Carl Sagan pointed out, Hinduism (and its derivative, Buddhism) were the only cultures on earth with a sense of cosmic time. Ancient sages did not come to their conclusions through experimentation and scientific proof, but through insight. It remains a truly stellar achievement and is roughly in accord with modern cosmology.

I think the main reason why the East was right and the West for so long was wrong is due to the fact that Eastern ways of looking at the world are characterized by wisdom, the idea that everything is connected, which is much more impersonal than the more human-scale assessment of time, current in the West until fairly recently, and still accepted by creationists.

The comparisons are staggering. Ussher, a 17th century Irish bishop, concluded, through careful analysis of scripture,  that creation occurred in 4004 BCE. The current Jewish year of 5779 commemorates, supposedly, the time elapsed since creation. Compare this with Hindu reckonings in kalpas, each 4.32 billion years, two of which constitute a day of Brahma. We are currently thought to be in the 51^st year of Brahma! According to Buddhism, if you take a mountain, taller than Mt. Everest, and brush it once every hundred years with a silk cloth, the lapse of time it would take to completely wear down the mountain would be less than one kalpa!

These calculations are not meant so much to be accurate, rather than to indicate a near-infinite age of the cosmos, which is in accord with modern calculations. Science dates, with remarkable accuracy the date of the Big Bang to have occurred 13.4 billion years ago. However, the theory of eternal inflation, not provable at this time but quite plausible, posits that universes come into and out of existence eternally. The age of the multiverse, according to this theory, is indeed infinite and an infinite lapse of time is indeed what the Buddhist/Hindu calculations indicate.

These estimates of the age of the universe are fairly new to science. Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century estimated the age of the sun to be about 400 million years, a  challenge to Darwinism, since evolution demanded that the earth was much older than that. (Die-hard creationists still quote Lord Kelvin, who was unaware of the nuclear source of stellar energy!)

Kelvin was wrong, Buddha was right!

4. No Creator God

Buddhism denies the reality of a creator god. It bears repeating that, since the self is an illusion, the concept of god is nothing more than an illusion of an illusion. Science finds no indication of a creator external to consciousness as well. When Napoleon confronted the scientist Laplace with the comment that god had no place in his worldview, Laplace replied that he had no need for that hypothesis. Among the majority of scientists, nothing has changed since then in this regard. 

Hinduism, at first glance, and due to the devotional nature of a large section of current Hindu practice, seems to permit many gods. But in the highest form of Hinduism, Advaita Hinduism, gods are merely representations of internal realities.

To paraphrase Tina Turner’s hit song, What’s God Got to Do With It? Buddhism, Hinduism and science respond: Very little. Very little indeed.

5. Consciousness

There are other aspects with which Buddhism and science are in accord; even greater accordance is found between Buddhism and wisdom. Just a mention of the three hindrances, greed, hate, and delusion, gives a good indication of what is to be avoided in all situations and in all cultures. This is, of course, the realm of ethics, which is 'beyond' science.

A further agreement, at least a partial one, exists regarding consciousness. The East, especially Hinduism, teaches that consciousness is the key to everything. According to Hinduism, consciousness, not science, is primary. Ramana Maharshi, for instance, taught that consciousness and science equals science; stones, for instance, do not have science!

John Wheeler, the noted physicist, thought that consciousness might indeed be the center of reality. Information (the so-called Its from Bits theory) is, according to Wheeler, the very basis of reality—and there is, of course, no knowledge of information without consciousness—at least as far as we know!

This world-view is best addressed in another article. Suffice it to say here that the ancient East and modern science are in agreement regarding many basic concepts. This is astounding, since the ancient Indians came to their conclusions through insight alone.

Was Murray Gell-Mann aware of this concordance? If he wasn't, an ancient proverb can be paraphrased to characterize his genius: even Gell-Manns nod.