musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

Out, Out, Brief Candle


I realize I’m getting old -or is the gerund no longer necessary for me? My thoughts -my questions- are of necessity sliding epilogically toward the last chapter of my as yet unwritten autobiography. So it will come as no surprise that I am empathetically wired of late. I am an unabashed fan of John Donne’s observation that ‘any man’s death diminishes me’, although I would amend it to observe that anything’s death diminishes me as well…

I suppose that is a platitude, however: everything dies, and so my diminution would also be terminal. But, of course, it is. And yet we only seem to relate to the death of something that has touched us in some way: something which, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel opined in his famous 1974 essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, has sufficient consciousness for us to understand what it would be like to exist as that creature. He argues (as Wikipedia puts it) that there are facts about conscious experience that are subjective and can only be known from that subjective perspective.

I would have agreed with his opinion had I not happened upon a truly moving video (taken through a powerful microscope) of a microscopic being -a ciliate named Loxodes magnus– as it dies.[i] It’s a creature not at all like us; I’m not sure that we share much of anything with it except that we are both alive- or perhaps, more to the point, that we too, will die. But just saying that without witnessing it, is much like being told of the unnoticed death of a stranger in a land far, far away, or the commonplace that everything dies -animals, birds, plants… It has little relevance to us. As Nagel points out, if we cannot somehow envision existing in the particular body of the thing, then how could we ever empathize with it? How could its sudden non-existence have any meaning for us? It is, for all intents and purposes, just an it. An other. And it fades into the background like a shadow on a moonless night.

I don’t know why watching the video affected me so much, but of course I suppose I’ve never actually watched anything die before; never witnessed the internal disintegration of those things which I assume were its organs; never witnessed the all-too natural death throes of something that went ‘gentle into that good night’ – the night against which Dylan Thomas felt we should rage; it seemed to accept the dying of the light.

But, would it understand no dawn would follow? Did it care? Or is it only me who is condemned to look forward to worlds not yet born, or perhaps in those last moments, reflect on what once was and would soon be forever lost? Did its last meal of algae sustain it long enough to notice that things were changing: that it was dying…?

So many questions… Like, how much of the world in which I live and function did it share? Or is it even fair to compare our two realities when I have no idea whether it was able to identify itself as ‘self’. Surely, though, the ability to recognize something outside its body as food suggests it had an identity that differed from its prey. And what would urge it to consume the prey other than a need we would call hunger? Below what phylogenetic scale are we suddenly not allowed to attribute the need to replenish resources as ‘hunger’? Identity? Life?

Anthropomorphism is a double edged sword nowadays, I think. We are beginning to recognize that other beings than ourselves have agency, purpose, intent in their interplay with the world we all share. Intelligence is merely the ability to alter our interactions appropriately and solve the various impediments to achieving the goal.

Does it require a brain like ours -a set of central interconnecting neurons- to react appropriately to problems? Does a plant have a brain to allow it to mate, ingest, ward off threatening opponents like insects, or heal injuries? Does it not enlist others like fungi or microorganisms to help it to survive? It is our loss if we ignore the teleology of other creatures. We are not alone in the world; we are unique perhaps, but are we not all unique?

There is truly a Great Chain of Being, but the Medieval Christian view is only one way of envisioning it. It is not necessarily hierarchical; it does not require a deity at its top, only a recognition of the variety of forms the Chain encompasses, and its development and refinement over Time. Evolution has to start somewhere, I suppose, and simply because some thing, some organism, temporally preceded our own does not diminish its worth, nor impugn its credentials as a Life form willing and able to compete along with us. It is different, but all the same, a member of the same club as us: an essential part of the Great Food Chain we seldom see.

Without the video, without a microscope, I realize I have taken many things for granted: out of sight, out of mind. And yet, even as a more self-styled sentient creature than the Loxodes magnus, I am somehow diminished by its slow and silent death. To paraphrase Donne again: I am not an island entire of myself, I am a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, I am the less. I will never send to know for whom the bell tolls…

It tolls for me.

[i] https://aeon.co/videos/an-elegy-for-a-dying-microbe-explores-what-we-really-mean-by-death

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