musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The last refuge of the unimaginative


I’m not sure where I fit on the psychological spectrum -somewhere in the middle, probably- but I think I would prefer to be on the edge somewhere… Not too close to a cliff, or anything, but far enough away that I can actually see the sky, and feel the wind. Liminality is a state of mind as well as a seat near the traditional boundary, and it offers an interesting, if unconventional, view of the activity within. There, like being in the highest, furthest place away from the field in a stadium, the crowd is often of more interest than the game.

From that far away, it is easy to see yourself as different and not simply an inadvertent splash outside the main puddle: a contrasting entity in the same venue. It all depends, though, doesn’t it?

I remember being very influenced by a book I read sometime in the early 1960ies. I had just finished a semester at university, and was flailing about wondering whether or not to continue with the same courses, or to sever my allegiance with the Arts and make the switch to Science. I happened upon a book by Colin Wilson, The Outsider, and almost dropped out of everything. It was about alienation and creativity; it seemed to describe me, still an impressionable teenager, and still struggling to find a pattern that would accept me -or, rather, a pattern I could fit into. I don’t know that I felt that I was particularly creative at the time, just…well, different. I was quite content to be by myself, and unaware that to succeed in that environment it would be better if I joined something -a group, perhaps. Or a club. We are, I was told, a particularly social species; our customs and expectations are driven by our relationships with others, they do not originate from the solitary mind, but from the crowd. It’s where safety lives, it’s where the herd feeds.

So, either unable, or more likely unwilling, to engage with the mob, I decided to join the university chess club. It met on Friday evenings when everybody else was out celebrating their brief weekend reprieve from classes, and since the chess club was as quiet as a library, seemed a perfect refuge from the stormy blast. The problem, though, was that everybody there seemed intensely serious about the game, and they treated the club as if it were a refugium where members didn’t feel so out of place on the otherwise vibrant campus. But I simply couldn’t muster that degree of solemnity, that much dedication to an essentially meaningless activity like chess. It accomplished nothing; it served no realistic function; it reminded me too much of that trope about playing cards until somebody -some god, I suppose- finally turned out the lights. It was evidently not where sanity flourished -mine at least: there was no agency or sustaining motivation to be gained. The club was hollow, not hallow…

The other clubs I tried to join and subsequently abandoned, were all much the same: they required a sense of dedication that I never acquired, an interest I did not possess and a camaraderie in which I felt unable to partake. Perhaps we are not all equal members of a herd; perhaps received knowledge can sometimes remain undelivered… I have to wonder what that meant to me at the time.

Does the apocryphal prisoner who finally sees the sun after escaping from Plato’s cave really gain more knowledge than his enchained compatriots? Or is it just different knowledge, unvetted knowledge, unpopular and therefore unaccepted knowledge?

What then is knowledge? How will you ever know that you know, if you don’t stand on the shoulders of those who went before you; don’t build on the edifice they have fashioned for you? What differentiates a fresh perspective from a goofy one? A simply wrong one? Is it only Time, the  accommodating leveller, that sorts things out, or before it is even considered a contender, does it require the kind of unsettling paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn described?

I went out with a girl in those unsettling times who, if nothing else, was proud of her inconsistency, her nonconformism. To do what others did, to believe what others believed, was anathema, as she used to describe it, although I’m not sure she had the Pope in mind then. I’m not sure Lucinda had anything in mind, actually.

She was, she once confessed to me, the broken product of the foster care system, and had apparently been shuffled through several families, each of whom fostered different ideas as well as children. Each of them had different expectations of her, so she’d ended up rejecting them all. She was an exceptionally intelligent person however, and had tried to process these experiences into usable categories without success.

As might be expected of an inquiring mind, she’d ended up majoring in Philosophy which is where I met her as I was undergoing my own turmoil. We’d both just read Kuhn, and we both were convinced a paradigm shift of some sort was gearing up, although neither of us could agree on what might change. I played with the idea that we were living in an interregnum of sorts; she did not believe we had ever lived in a stable enough regime to consider it had actually ended.

But she was like that, and my over-stimulated teenage imagination loved it; loved the alienation she embodied; loved the freedom to believe in non-belief… Well, to believe in her, I suppose. Until I didn’t, that is; until I couldn’t…

Some things about her just didn’t add up. She had a brother, she was pretty sure, and he was currently in a penitentiary in Saskatchewan, but when I asked her how she knew this, she refused to say.

“I am a mystery with no answers,” she used to tell me when I tried to talk to her in bed at night. And whenever I pressed further, she’d paraphrase a poem as she often did. One time it was Yeats, I remember: “The centre cannot hold and my anarchy is loosed upon the world,” she whispered and then smiled at me in the darkness as if she were herself the rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

It was heady stuff, but as time wore thin with her, I began to realize that I, at least, needed a firmer base; I needed a centre that could hold. And I wondered if she’d ever find anything to believe in. It did not seem like a phase for her, something that Time would winnow out, and even when we agreed to part, she appeared to weather it as if she was again merely being shunted to another foster home… She lived inside a shell I could not enter.

We promised to keep in touch, but she soon transferred to another university -or quit altogether, perhaps- and I changed my courses into Science and soon was swept into a reassuring paradigm, all thoughts of Kuhn behind me. All thoughts of Lucinda buried. I had managed, unlike her, to accept the shadow of the herd ahead.

Many years later, though, I did get a post card I which have to assume was from her. I don’t know how it ever reached me because by then I had graduated and moved to another university in order to pursue an unexpected career in Medicine. We were both much older when the card finally found me. She hadn’t signed it, but as soon as I read it, I realized it was from Lucinda.

“I still think of you, G,” it started. “The menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid, but I am still the master of my fate; I am still the captain of my soul…”

Nothing more; just those few words, a paraphrase of Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, a poem we had always loved. She hadn’t changed, I could tell. In the fell clutch of circumstance, she had not winced nor cried aloud.

I could only hope that under the bludgeonings of chance, her head, if bloody, was still unbowed. I envied her convictions I realized; she was the one with the unconquerable soul.

I realized, too, that I had never really forgotten her…

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gozzter

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