I read somewhere that the oldest Veda in the world starts with the sentence "All error arises from confusing the subject with the object."
That impressed me, an Advanced Placement high school student, for two reasons. One, it suggested the vaunted science of semiotics was anticipated by an ancient Indian civilization some 5 or 6 thousand years ago. Two, it seemed true.
Many years later I tried to find this Veda, and failed. But the construct lives with me. And it informs my perception on a subliminal basis.
When I think about Cancer and Me, I wonder, "what is the subject, and what is the object?"
It is a truism of a testy and defiant times that no one wants to be objectified. That has become baked into Freshman Orientation at every school in the U.S. and at least one other country, probably France. I don't want to be objectified, ergo I am the subject, and Cancer is the object.
But I am supposed to fight cancer.
You fight enemies, and they have agency, guile, strategy, and evil intent. You don't fight objects. You fight with objects, in your battles with known or invisible Others who put the objects in front of you and say they do one thing while your experience teaches you they really don't do that thing. Our computers, medical devices, running shoes, hedge trimmers, grooming sets and travel bags never quite live up to their promises. Objects all, and they are not our enemies. The people who design, manufacture and market them sometimes act like enemies subverting our domestic tranquility with their insidious subterfuge, promising one thing and delivering something that breaks, sags, stinks, burns or just sits there instead.
So if we fight cancer, that means it is a subject. A sentence contains a subject, verb and object, not subject, verb and subject. The subject is the entity, the being. The object is the inert thing, even if it has batteries, it has no agency except its ad agency.
If I fight cancer, what is the object that the subject is confused with? I am. I am become the object, and by my objectification, I am giving permission to other subjects to prod, poke, poison, promise and discard me as the subject sees fit.
Is this just the idle word play of a humanities-deranged mind? The mildly toxic effluent of a wasted education? Or is there something to this subject-object thing?
I need to decide, and soon.
If I am supposed to fight cancer, and I don't, then I am either a coward or a traitor. There is no waffling ont he front lines. If I do fight cancer, and it has superior skills and weapons going into the fight, as it is claimed by the literature, then it is a suicide mission anyway. When did Kamikaze become the model of patient survival?
In the heady days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, when there were going to be robots cooking the chickens in every pot and the flying car was just one model year away on GM's drawing boards, anything was possible. And so they invented the Advanced Placement program for smart kids. It was sold to schools as an enhancement of learning for the best and brightest (the ones who gave us carpet bombing of civilians, no coincidence). It was a patriotic amenity offered to a few schools at first under a special grants program from the United States Air Force.
The United States Air Force gave 20 or so school districts over 20 million dollars sometime in the late fifties to create special education programs for the gifted. The leaders of the future. When I was put in such a program in seventh grade, I was ghettoed into a small cohort of smarties, eggheads, whiz kids that were socially disrupted from the life of the Junior and Senior High schools. We were baked in different ovens. A friend of mine who was a student volunteer in the Principle's office looked in our files, and she told me my IQ was 141. Genius level. I had it made. All I had to do was keep my hands in the car and not fuck up and I would be graduated with a golden meal ticket my parent's couldn't have afforded.
I mention this because I did get a first class education. First class doesn't describe it. All of my primary teachers had PhDs. They were recruited from the top ranks of a massive suburban school district. I say massive. We had over 2000 kids in my graduating class in 1965.
And I was their Newspaper Editor, National Honor Society member, Student Council Executive, Regional Journalism Award winner, Speech and Debate honors winner, Best Actor, yadda yadda. Oddly enough, I graduated pretty far back from the front of the class in overall grades, despite straight-A's in my senior year. From 7th through 9th grade I was lost in a pack of mongrel savants, a stray dog in a kennel full of well-groomed, socially connected representatives of the professional class. I was the ugly duckling. But I swanned in my Senior year. And in the course of discovering my intellectual powers and organizational clout, I absorbed a bounty of high class didactics. My professors were impatient to spare our cohort the ignominy of ordinary development. We were treated like scholars, artists, philosophers in training. We would absorb the cream of Western Civilization, swim in the limpid waters of Aristotle and Plato, thrash with olympic fervor among the great minds of the Enlightenment. We even donned the costumes of the Depression and the Holocaust, acting out FDR's vision for a classless society led by a newly minted club of philosoper princes and princesses, and suffering the horror of unspeakable evil in the hands of the Irrational unconscious raised to a national temper among the Nazis. We read Kant, Descartes, and Thomas Paine, and we read Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietszche, Sartre. Some of us went further and read Genet, Kerouac, and Khan, the spokesman for Mutual Assured Destruction.
All of this feverish intellectual green house effect was occurring in a suburb of Minneapolis, in flyover land.
In the course of these studies, I learned syllogism, logics, rhetoric, math. I learned to observe, to measure and compare, to contrast and conclude with probity. I learned to think.
It was the beginning of my downfall.
I thought everyone knew how to think.
It took me five decades to realize that the average mind goes to its silent end blissfully untouched by anything resembling disciplined or formal ratiocination. Thinking is not just a lost art. It is an art that has never been prized. Except for an odd enclave of heated idealistic PhDs cast among a kennel of overachieving nerds in the early sixties, in the Midwest. We imagined ourselves, not entirely in error, the true heirs of Socrates' academy.
When I met students from the Ivy League, I met kindred spirits. But they all suffered the sweet, secure asymmetry of mentorship. In the big schools like Yale, the fledgling intellectual was taken under a real philosopher or jurist's wing and that apprenticeship kept doors open into dining halls and board rooms for a life time, but it also handicapped the fledgling to the errant flight, the idiosyncracies of their mentors. And their fealty, as it was indeed medieval in form, won over reason or common sense when the chips were down and real dilemmas had to be resolved.
I was under no such contract. When I graduated high school, without knowing it, I had become a Ronan, a Samuri with no master. I also had barely run through the skills training, but that didn't matter in the heady days of revolution that set fire to the imagination and draft cards of the nation, in the sixties.
So I come into the battle with cancer, wanting a time out before the battle even engages.
While every person and institution around me is throwing the kerosene of passionate concern on the fire of an epidemic disease, I want to organize my notes and think from First Principles.
I want to define my terms. Challenge assumptions.
Think.
Before I buckle on my buckler and prepare to die for the glory of forestalling death itself, I ask "Really?"
What is really going on here?
And no one knows. They push their carts down the street and hawk their wares. They burrow into the hillside and chase rabbits along the banks of the streams, and call it science and research and medicine and glory.
But it seems like experimentation on live human subjects underwritten by corporations who stand to profit from cures, and overseen by regulatory agencies staffed with lawyers who are adept at mixing agendas in the huge vat of publicly owned companies financial statements and serving up profits to the first in line.
What is going on?
Am I dying?
Is my doom sealed between the envelope and its flap - the envelope of sluggish regulatory change and the flap of patent medicine rushed to market ahead of angry investors brandishing pitchforks and torches?
I am trying to think here.
I want to believe, like Muldar. But the UFOs and the Atlantean Mages I want to believe in are the sci-fi protagonists in a mass hallucination of a war, in which my body is a prospective Borodino, my blood cells are Napoleans feckless infantry, and Chemotherapy is the arrogant if principled assault guards of a commercialized empire.
Before I can believe, I have to think.
It isn't my most charming feature.
Before I can die, I have to believe.
That aligns me with the saints, mystics, and live human subjects of innumerable experiments over the ages.
Before I die, I have to live. I think.
That impressed me, an Advanced Placement high school student, for two reasons. One, it suggested the vaunted science of semiotics was anticipated by an ancient Indian civilization some 5 or 6 thousand years ago. Two, it seemed true.
Many years later I tried to find this Veda, and failed. But the construct lives with me. And it informs my perception on a subliminal basis.
When I think about Cancer and Me, I wonder, "what is the subject, and what is the object?"
It is a truism of a testy and defiant times that no one wants to be objectified. That has become baked into Freshman Orientation at every school in the U.S. and at least one other country, probably France. I don't want to be objectified, ergo I am the subject, and Cancer is the object.
But I am supposed to fight cancer.
You fight enemies, and they have agency, guile, strategy, and evil intent. You don't fight objects. You fight with objects, in your battles with known or invisible Others who put the objects in front of you and say they do one thing while your experience teaches you they really don't do that thing. Our computers, medical devices, running shoes, hedge trimmers, grooming sets and travel bags never quite live up to their promises. Objects all, and they are not our enemies. The people who design, manufacture and market them sometimes act like enemies subverting our domestic tranquility with their insidious subterfuge, promising one thing and delivering something that breaks, sags, stinks, burns or just sits there instead.
So if we fight cancer, that means it is a subject. A sentence contains a subject, verb and object, not subject, verb and subject. The subject is the entity, the being. The object is the inert thing, even if it has batteries, it has no agency except its ad agency.
If I fight cancer, what is the object that the subject is confused with? I am. I am become the object, and by my objectification, I am giving permission to other subjects to prod, poke, poison, promise and discard me as the subject sees fit.
Is this just the idle word play of a humanities-deranged mind? The mildly toxic effluent of a wasted education? Or is there something to this subject-object thing?
I need to decide, and soon.
If I am supposed to fight cancer, and I don't, then I am either a coward or a traitor. There is no waffling ont he front lines. If I do fight cancer, and it has superior skills and weapons going into the fight, as it is claimed by the literature, then it is a suicide mission anyway. When did Kamikaze become the model of patient survival?
In the heady days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, when there were going to be robots cooking the chickens in every pot and the flying car was just one model year away on GM's drawing boards, anything was possible. And so they invented the Advanced Placement program for smart kids. It was sold to schools as an enhancement of learning for the best and brightest (the ones who gave us carpet bombing of civilians, no coincidence). It was a patriotic amenity offered to a few schools at first under a special grants program from the United States Air Force.
The United States Air Force gave 20 or so school districts over 20 million dollars sometime in the late fifties to create special education programs for the gifted. The leaders of the future. When I was put in such a program in seventh grade, I was ghettoed into a small cohort of smarties, eggheads, whiz kids that were socially disrupted from the life of the Junior and Senior High schools. We were baked in different ovens. A friend of mine who was a student volunteer in the Principle's office looked in our files, and she told me my IQ was 141. Genius level. I had it made. All I had to do was keep my hands in the car and not fuck up and I would be graduated with a golden meal ticket my parent's couldn't have afforded.
I mention this because I did get a first class education. First class doesn't describe it. All of my primary teachers had PhDs. They were recruited from the top ranks of a massive suburban school district. I say massive. We had over 2000 kids in my graduating class in 1965.
And I was their Newspaper Editor, National Honor Society member, Student Council Executive, Regional Journalism Award winner, Speech and Debate honors winner, Best Actor, yadda yadda. Oddly enough, I graduated pretty far back from the front of the class in overall grades, despite straight-A's in my senior year. From 7th through 9th grade I was lost in a pack of mongrel savants, a stray dog in a kennel full of well-groomed, socially connected representatives of the professional class. I was the ugly duckling. But I swanned in my Senior year. And in the course of discovering my intellectual powers and organizational clout, I absorbed a bounty of high class didactics. My professors were impatient to spare our cohort the ignominy of ordinary development. We were treated like scholars, artists, philosophers in training. We would absorb the cream of Western Civilization, swim in the limpid waters of Aristotle and Plato, thrash with olympic fervor among the great minds of the Enlightenment. We even donned the costumes of the Depression and the Holocaust, acting out FDR's vision for a classless society led by a newly minted club of philosoper princes and princesses, and suffering the horror of unspeakable evil in the hands of the Irrational unconscious raised to a national temper among the Nazis. We read Kant, Descartes, and Thomas Paine, and we read Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietszche, Sartre. Some of us went further and read Genet, Kerouac, and Khan, the spokesman for Mutual Assured Destruction.
All of this feverish intellectual green house effect was occurring in a suburb of Minneapolis, in flyover land.
In the course of these studies, I learned syllogism, logics, rhetoric, math. I learned to observe, to measure and compare, to contrast and conclude with probity. I learned to think.
It was the beginning of my downfall.
I thought everyone knew how to think.
It took me five decades to realize that the average mind goes to its silent end blissfully untouched by anything resembling disciplined or formal ratiocination. Thinking is not just a lost art. It is an art that has never been prized. Except for an odd enclave of heated idealistic PhDs cast among a kennel of overachieving nerds in the early sixties, in the Midwest. We imagined ourselves, not entirely in error, the true heirs of Socrates' academy.
When I met students from the Ivy League, I met kindred spirits. But they all suffered the sweet, secure asymmetry of mentorship. In the big schools like Yale, the fledgling intellectual was taken under a real philosopher or jurist's wing and that apprenticeship kept doors open into dining halls and board rooms for a life time, but it also handicapped the fledgling to the errant flight, the idiosyncracies of their mentors. And their fealty, as it was indeed medieval in form, won over reason or common sense when the chips were down and real dilemmas had to be resolved.
I was under no such contract. When I graduated high school, without knowing it, I had become a Ronan, a Samuri with no master. I also had barely run through the skills training, but that didn't matter in the heady days of revolution that set fire to the imagination and draft cards of the nation, in the sixties.
So I come into the battle with cancer, wanting a time out before the battle even engages.
While every person and institution around me is throwing the kerosene of passionate concern on the fire of an epidemic disease, I want to organize my notes and think from First Principles.
I want to define my terms. Challenge assumptions.
Think.
Before I buckle on my buckler and prepare to die for the glory of forestalling death itself, I ask "Really?"
What is really going on here?
And no one knows. They push their carts down the street and hawk their wares. They burrow into the hillside and chase rabbits along the banks of the streams, and call it science and research and medicine and glory.
But it seems like experimentation on live human subjects underwritten by corporations who stand to profit from cures, and overseen by regulatory agencies staffed with lawyers who are adept at mixing agendas in the huge vat of publicly owned companies financial statements and serving up profits to the first in line.
What is going on?
Am I dying?
Is my doom sealed between the envelope and its flap - the envelope of sluggish regulatory change and the flap of patent medicine rushed to market ahead of angry investors brandishing pitchforks and torches?
I am trying to think here.
I want to believe, like Muldar. But the UFOs and the Atlantean Mages I want to believe in are the sci-fi protagonists in a mass hallucination of a war, in which my body is a prospective Borodino, my blood cells are Napoleans feckless infantry, and Chemotherapy is the arrogant if principled assault guards of a commercialized empire.
Before I can believe, I have to think.
It isn't my most charming feature.
Before I can die, I have to believe.
That aligns me with the saints, mystics, and live human subjects of innumerable experiments over the ages.
Before I die, I have to live. I think.
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