musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

Art thou not sensible to feeling as to sight?


Where do I stop; where are my boundaries? Is my pencil part of my brain when I write myself a note? Should a blind person’s cane with which they navigate the world be considered an extension of their hand -of their mind -since it warns of obstacles much like their eyes? For that matter, is my brain really in a separate Magisterium? Does it merely use my body like my body does the cane? In that sense, does my brain own the body it controls like a chattel slave?

 I know I’ve already written about this, but just like the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne who sometimes wrote about the same a topic more than once, I continue to be fascinated with whether there are any borders between me and the world. Am I, in effect, the world? So many questions…

It does make me wonder whether things I enjoy as I travel through the day -things like the warmth of the sun on my skin, the song of the red-winged blackbird clinging to a cattail in the marsh I pass near the lake, or even the thin skein of ruddy clouds in a sunset sky- are more than simply things out there. If they were, then why and how do they affect me like seeing a friend on the sidewalk smiling at me and waving… Why does the connection feel so… so comforting? So important?

Some days, if it’s warm enough, I like to sit on my porch and just watch the leaves dance in the breeze. It’s not that I’m communing with trees or anything, but I’m often struck by the similarity of the branches to the conductor of an orchestra. Silly, I know, but nevertheless somehow as comforting as sitting in my own private box in a theatre. Only it’s not private; not really. There’s so much rustling in the audience: like little children, the leaves just won’t sit still, and as in any audience there’s always random noise -a robin delineating its territory with a song, a crow trying to locate its flock with a hoarse cry; a dog somewhere barking at a stranger. Nature is like that around my porch.

They’re all signalling, I suppose, but to understand a signal you have to know the language, intuit the stimulus; to deny that they are purposeful, though, is to be parochial, deaf. If a radio is turned off, there are no programs; to mute a radio is a purposeful decision: you don’t want to listen – even if it is transmitting music that you might enjoy. Not all sound is simply noise…

I often wonder what I’d be missing if it were silent. Or maybe the silence in itself conveys something. To paraphrase a popular aphorism, the noise of absence is not merely the absence of noise… But I digress.

Sometimes -often, in fact- I try to interpret some of the messages that reach for my senses. Whether or not I am the intended target, I wonder what they are trying to convey; and why. Is the crow cawing for the joy of the sound, or more believably, to alert his friends where he is? Even the seemingly random noise of fluttering leaves tells me that the wind they feel may indicate a change in the weather -another signal: a ‘to whom it may concern’, like the old notices used to warn.

I suppose what I’m saying is that nothing happens without a reason. Answers are everywhere if you are curious enough to ask the right questions: keys in locks for the attentive; a waste of time for the indifferent. Nature is wasted on the apathetic I think.

If I am a part of nature, if my me extends beyond my body, as it does with a cane, a pencil, a cerebral analysis of what my eyes detect out there, then is there knowledge in ‘the land’ as many aboriginal societies maintain. The land is alive, and communicating among its various parts; can I not tap into its wisdom -or, to revert to a less pretentious description- understand what it is teaching?

Even without a common language, there is a sense that something purposive is going on: tree-things, bird-things, insect-things… noise to us, for the  most part, obviously; and yet even noise does not exist with a reason. I suspect that what we call noise is just sound whose information we are unable to interpret or use; it is sound we try to disregard, or at worst, try to eliminate.

I, for one, would be disappointed if we assumed that Nature wasn’t constantly talking -maybe not to us, but to somebody, to something, who needed to know.

Alfred North Whitehead (a mathematician and philosopher who lived at the start of the last century) argued that fundamental reality is composed of processes, not things; an idea that Nature is alive – a nature that is dynamic, unfolding, and in constant dialogue with itself. In fact, Whitehead would even refer to his metaphysical scheme as a ‘philosophy of organism’. In the philosophy of organism, rather than brute and lifeless matter, nature itself (from the molecule to the honeybee) is understood to be composed of ‘drops of experience’.[i]

‘Knowledge is not only in our flesh, but in the flesh of the world… Rather than a dualistic relationship, we become ‘one’, in a sense, with the cane.’ There’s all too much Cartesianism still floating about: ‘Western approaches to knowledge often take for granted René Descartes’s postulation Cogito, ergo sum – ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In doing so, they typically assume a Cartesian split between mind and body. That is, between the immaterial res cogitans (or ‘thinking substance’, which Descartes equates with the soul), and the material res extensa (‘extended substance’) which makes up the concrete ‘stuff’ of the natural world. Knowledge, if it exists anywhere, exists squarely in the mind – a mind that is wholly untethered from the natural world.’

Really? Is knowledge so disembodied? Are our bodies, well, stupid? And is the world out there so very separate from us -so very different…? Is the world not like a flower, and are we not the nose, the eyes, but also the enlightened who interact with it… should we not be grateful for the opportunity?

[i]https://psyche.co/ideas/there-is-knowledge-in-the-land-as-well-as-in-ourselves

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