musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

To be, or not to be; is that a question?


Sometimes it’s obvious to me that I’ve lived a cossetted life, although perhaps only in my epilogue would anyone dare to broach the subject.

That I often describe situations with grammatical metaphors, says a lot I think. I mean, what hard-working person, whose whole life was subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, would ever want their moods described as adjectives; even those moods that modify them when they think of themselves as nouns deserving capital letters; or picturing themselves as adverbs that characterize the opinions of people who keep changing on the move? Clever, perhaps, but more like confetti at a wedding: scattering largely useless semicolons through sentences to honour the bride; harder to follow than commas, more pointless than ill thought-through gifts…

I make no apologies for general irrelevance, mind you; I merely point out how most of what’s left barely makes the grade either; we need colour, innovation; we need images that we can feel and remember long after the description fades. It’s the idea, after all, which is the monarch -it is its presence, like a double exclamation mark, which marks it as special.

In case it is not immediately evident why I sometimes choose to highlight my often fractured thoughts in terms of descriptive grammatical devices, why I occasionally disguise my meanings like carefully wrapped gifts, I feel it is incumbent on me to point out my advancing Age. It makes me think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth when he says something similar (albeit not as gilded with punctuations as I might have liked) to his servant Seyton when he hears that an opposing army is approaching his castle at Dunsinane: ‘My way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age as honour, love, obedience, and troops of friends, I must not look to have -but in their stead: curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not…’ He does, however, use a mouth-watering display of almost palpable images.

But, I fear I have digressed again; the reason I embarked upon this essay was to admire the clever use of different parts of speech to describe thoughts and ideas that are otherwise difficult to conceptualize. How to describe a painting? A life? A thought about Life and what borders it at either end? It requires unusual help sometimes -or, rather, usual things used unusually…

It was an essay by a Seattle psychologist, Eric Jannazzo, who made me think about how Language, like Art and Music can be magical -especially when considered outside of their usual context.[i] That the author was using the different parts of speech to illustrate helpful, if unexpected, ways of considering how we can think of the boundary ends of our time on earth seems particularly apposite to an octogenarian whose timespan is reaching its untethered end.

I suppose I’ve avoided unduly personal descriptions of the process -not the destination, you understand: even thinking about that is where the adventure begins; an adventure is both the journey and the destination and each requires not simply a description, but also an agent able to process it.  No, I suspect we need a unique way to understand it.

Perhaps it is like a scene, or a musical note which, although once clear, gradually fades away like a child waving and shouting from the window of a departing car. In that sense, the end would be similar to a verb, constantly moving, its pitch and even its meaning fading with distance. Then, when you can no longer hear me, there’s no reason, no stimuli, requiring me to maintain an identity.

At what stage does an object -a noun, say- become something else? Can a once-noun become a verb? Shakespeare thought so. Remember Macbeth after he murders King Duncan? He felt so guilty that he asks: ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.’ The bloodstain has itself become a verb…

Nothing is permanent; there is no fixed mark if we ourselves are not the measure. The essay reminded me of something that Alfred North Whitehead, a turn of the last century mathematician and philosopher, had written; it has intrigued me ever since my long-ago Philosophy lectures in university. He pointed out something that seemed immediately obvious, although I’d never had the intelligence to put it into words like him: ‘There is no Nature at an instant’. In other words, reality isn’t a photograph -or in those days perhaps, a painting that forever captured the essence of Nature, but only as it was when it was first observed. Nature isn’t a noun, fixed for all time at that moment; it is a verb: a process that flows from one moment to the next, drawing, learning, evolving from it.

An instant captures nothing but what it once was; an instant cannot evolve without entraining the next, and the next. An instant is dead, for all intents and purposes; trapped in what once, but only for an instant, exemplified an isolated example of the past. To understand it, one must accept that Nature is a process: never trappable, never static, only representative of what, for an instant, once existed. The Whitehead concept was termed Process Philosophy.

But, really, Whitehead was merely describing a verb; an action, not a state. And that’s the reality where we live; and what we do is more of an adverb than a noun which would depend on ever changing adjectives to move through life.

After reading Jannazzo’s essay, I suddenly realized that this has been bubbling through me as I rode the process that was -and still is- my life after all these years. And why do I find this epiphany so helpful now? Why is the feeling of process so calming, if not explanatory at 82? Why has slipping the bonds of thinking of myself as a consequential but static noun in a complex and still-evolving sentence so important? It is filled with semicolons, and commas, like those of Marcel Proust in his In Search of Lost Time; it never seems to stop flowing.

I was born in 1943; I can now ask myself, as I can hear Jannazzo doing with some of his clients: ‘so how was 1942…?’

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/the-existential-balm-of-seeing-yourself-as-a-verb-not-a-noun

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