The Ineffability of Pain

For the sufferer, pain is the prototype of certainty – there’s no way to doubt that you have pain. But it is the exact opposite for those who observe a person in pain. David Biro

“Ineffable: too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.” Many individuals are in pain much of the day. Their back hurts, they have an awful sciatic pain, a stabbing migraine that never goes away. They may try to describe their pain to another person. But there are no words for what the person is experiencing.

All they can do is groan, shout, screech or swear. And all the other person can do is listen and observe the behavior of the person in pain, a far cry from the person they used to be. They are bent over, in a slouch, rubbing their leg or forehead, trying their best to get from one place to another or reduce the pain in their leg.

“English,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Consider a person who suffers from a spinal cord tumor, a tumor that puts pressure on nerve fibers and damages them. Or one who has had a compression fracture of the spinal cord, usually caused by osteoporosis or lifting something heavy, too heavy for their weak spinal cord.

Both can lead to severe back pain that is very difficult to treat. When a person with such a tumor or compression fracture tries to describe the pain they are feeling, once again all the observer can say is that they understand. But their pain cannot be felt.

Elaine Scarry writes about this difficulty in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. “When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact.”

She says physical pain has no referential content. “It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.”

Your doctor asks you to rate your pain on a scale from one to ten. You say it’s a ten, the most extreme point on the scale. But what does that number mean? Yes, it hurts a lot, but are there more specific words, instead of a numeral to describe your experience?

In an essay on medicine and literature, Andrew Solomon writes in the Guardian (4/22/16), “The language gap frustrates your visit to your doctor. He seems not to understand the problem because you can’t describe it lucidly enough. You don’t understand the proposed treatment because he can’t explain it. I’ve sometimes forsworn medical help because the complexity of voicing what is wrong has felt heavier than the sickness itself.”

In short, there are few words, if any for extreme pain, it resists the language available to a person and any attempt to describe it reverts to the “pre-language of cries and groans.”

Elsewhere, Ian Frazier wrote “Talking about hunger and being hungry are two different things; talk can wait for a convenient moment, but when you’re hungry you’re hungry right now.”

Frazier’s remark captures precisely the very general issue I am writing about, the discrepancy between words and feelings, between words and experiences.

Poetry

This April marks the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month. While I don’t read a great deal of poetry, there are some poets that I turn to from time to time. C. P. Cavafy was a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He wrote (in Greek) only 154 poems some of which were published in local newspapers and magazines. In celebration of National Poetry Month, here are two of his poems that I have always liked.

An Old Man
At the noisy end of the café, head bent
over the table, an old man sits alone,
a newspaper in front of him.
 
And in the miserable banality of old age
he thinks how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.
 
He knows he’s aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.
So brief an interval, so very brief.
 
And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,
how he always believed—what madness—
that cheat who said: “Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.”
 
He remembers impulses bridled, the joy
he sacrificed. Every chance he lost
now mocks his senseless caution.
 
But so much thinking, so much remembering
makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,
his head resting on the café table.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

Morning Sea
Here let me stop.  Let me too look at Nature for a while.
The morning sea and cloudless sky
a brilliant blue, the yellow shore; all
beautiful and grand in the light.
 
Here let me stop.  Let me fool myself: that these are what I see
(I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)
instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,
my recollections, the ikons of pleasure.

Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

Public Squares

Michael Kimmelman writes about the importance (he calls it a craving) of public squares in the New York Review of Books (4/20/16). He says, with increasing frequency people are moving downtown “for the pleasures and benefits of cultural exchange, walking streets, parks, and public squares.”

Kimmelman, the architecture critic for the Times, points out that “The art of architecture requires not just making attractive buildings but providing citizens with generous, creative, open, inviting public spaces.”

I was born in Los Angeles and lived in a neighborhood, not far from a few shops but there was no public square nearby. When I moved to Portland, Oregon to begin teaching, once again I began living in neighborhoods that didn’t have a community gathering place.

It was only recently that I moved to an area in town where there are two public squares: one with a rock-water fountain that becomes a crowded wading pool in the summer; the other a natural garden with native plants. Both are occupied only during late spring and summer months and neither is the kind of public gathering place like the agora of ancient Greece or the piazzas in every town in Italy.

I have friends who live in the suburbs, about two miles from the nearest town in a cluster of homes set back about a mile from an eight lane freeway. Each time I visit, I am struck by the vast differences between their neighborhood and mine. The homogeneity of theirs is conspicuous, with every building a home and every home a garage, garden and shake roof.

There are no buses, apartment houses, or coffee-houses nearby. Most of the homes scattered about the hillside in their suburban setting face away from the street. There are no sidewalks and it is rare to see anything like the sort of social life there that is everywhere along the sidewalks of my urban neighborhood.

Each time I visit Italy, I am struck by the lively public socializing on the streets in the neighborhood in Florence that has almost become my second home. The people there greet each other with great warmth. The owners stand outside their shops in order to better converse with those who own the shops across the way.

I doubt that the rarity of such encounters in America is because Italians are more outgoing than we are. Rather I think it has more to do with almost haphazard way their cities have evolved over the centuries and the resulting relationship of the buildings to the street. The frequent socializing of the Italians occurs because their cities naturally invite fortuitous meetings between individuals as they stroll along the sidewalks or meet their friends in their neighborhood piazza. Richard Goodwin writes:

Now in Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day's work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, arts, doctors, technicians, poets, scholars. A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity; the changeable temper of a thousand spirits by whom every object of discussion is broken into an infinity of sense and significantions--all these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.

In his book, Intimate Anonymity, Hillel Schocken defines a city as: "a fixed place where people can form relations with others at various levels of intimacy, while remaining entirely anonymous." Schocken argues that a city should make it possible for individuals to have contact with a variety of people from whom they can choose their intimates. He concludes his essay by noting: "The future of urbanism lies in the understanding that the city is a human event, not a sculpture."

I am sure this is the secret to the design of all good cities and the neighborhoods within them. It is surely the secret of my neighborhood in Portland and why, through the relationships that I form here, some of which are personal, others entirely anonymous, I have become rather attached to it.

Oh, that the winter in the far north of this land was a little shorter and the days were a little sunnier, warmer and not so rainy.

Warfare at a Distance

The United States is currently at war in four countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. It’s not ground warfare, it’s not air warfare, both of which risk the lives of those who take part in them. Rather, its something entirely different, warfare at a great distance that in no way risks the lives of Americans. It is known as drone warfare.

In drone warfare, a man or woman sits in front of a screen in a cramped, stuffy trailer in the Las Vegas desert and presses a switch that delivers a horribly destructive Hellfire missile in a country a thousand of miles away. It’s not unlike a video game, except that individuals viewed on the screen are in fact killed, sometimes several of them, sometimes those for whom the rocket was not intended

Recently, I saw two films that dealt with this form of warfare—“Good Kill” and “Eye in the Sky.” In my mind, both films confront the morality of drone warfare. Both also reminded me of the well-known experiments of Stanley Milgram on obedience and disobedience.

These experiments illustrate the power of proximity on delivering “shock” to a “learner” in a distant room. The percentage of subjects who deliver the full “450” volts increases the further away they are from the “learner.”

Similarly drone warfare illustrates how easy it is to fire a rocket intended for a person or group in a far off country. The killing is real, yet it occurs half a world away and is obscured by the very technology that enables it.

Milgram’s experiments also illustrate the power of authority on compliance. If an authority figure tells you to press that button, you will be more likely to do it, even if it brings tears to your eyes.

Ethan Hawke plays the role of the drone operator in “Good Kill.” He knows there is always the likelihood of “collateral damage,” namely, the deaths of innocent individuals. His guilt and boredom lead him to drink, a crisis in his marriage and he too becomes a causality of modern technology.

The estimates of collateral damage play a critical role in “Eye in the Sky.” The governing overseers want to know if the attacks will lead to a diplomatic crisis or worse. The military wants to discharge its responsibilities as effectively as possible.

The military officer (the authority) in charge of the attack in “Eye in the Sky,” played by Helen Mirren, brings considerable pressure on her assistant to make an accurate estimate of innocent deaths, too much pressure in my opinion, so that the assistant ends up making an estimate well below what he actually believes--with disastrous consequences.

Both films raise a host of questions about drone warfare--some legal, some moral, some about its consequences. Among them are the following:

1. How are we to regard drone attacks in countries that are not at war with the United States?

2. How serious is the radicalizing force of drone operations among some Muslim individuals?

3. What are we to make of the inevitable collateral damage of drones, that is unintentionally killing of innocent individuals, including families, children and foreign aid workers?

4. How accurate are the official reports of the collateral deaths of innocents?

5. Does the targeted killing of presumed terrorists reduce the risk of terrorists attacks on foreign countries, including the United States?

6. What consideration should be given to the serious psychological damage some drone operators experience or to the equally serious effects of the constant hovering of armed drones overhead on civilians in a potential attack area?

7. Does the use of drones violate international law and if so, in what respect?

None of these questions lend themselves to a clear-cut answer. They call for a careful analysis, drawing on factual evidence where possible and the kind of methodical reasoning that is relatively uncommon.

How to Avoid Paying Taxes

It’s tax season once again and the recent Panama Papers “scandal” has highlighted the various ways individuals and corporations are scheming to avoid paying them.

The Prime Minister of Iceland and his wife were the first to receive notoriety when it was revealed they had transferred a goodly sum of their assets to the Virgin Islands. The Prime Minister announced his resignation, then backtracked, saying he only stepped aside for a short period. Now it appears he will be replaced by the agriculture and fisheries minister, after all. So it goes.

According to Cass Sunstein (New York Review of Books (1/14/16) many individuals in the United States and elsewhere have been transferring their money to foreign countries—Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Virgin Islands. In this way they have been able to avoid paying taxes in their home country.

Drawing on the work of Gabriel Zucman in his The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Sunstein says the magnitude of these transfers is considerable.

• About 8 percent of the word’s wealth, $7.6 trillion is held in tax havens.

• As a result, governments lose about $200 billion in tax revenue each year.

• In the United States, the annual tax loss is $35 billion; it Europe it is $78 billion.

While awareness of these figures is growing and the issue has been much discussed, to date no major “crackdown” has occurred.

James Surowiecki describes (New Yorker, 1/11/16) a somewhat similar tax avoidance strategy of large, multinational corporations. It is not (currently) illegal for American corporations to locate their operations outside this country and more and more of them are doing this to avoid paying US taxes.

He also discussed Pfizer’s recently announced merger with the Irish drug company Allergan. Pfizer was planning to reconstitute itself as an Irish company, thereby lowering its overall United States taxes. However, the plan was recently called off after the Treasury Department removed many of the tax benefits of such a merger.

In January of this year, before the new Treasury Department rules were in place, Johnson Controls announced its merger with Tyco International also based in Ireland. By doing this, the Times editorial page (1/29/16) claims they will avoid taxes in the United States “by at least 150 million a year.”

In commenting on tax inversions, Sunstein suggests that regardless of political party, it is unlikely you would approve of illegal corporate tax havens. Here is an area he believes “in which significant reforms might appeal to people who otherwise disagree on a great deal.”

Why am I writing about this? I am not an economist and I know little of the ins and outs of tax law. Yet it seems to me just another form corporate and individual irresponsibility.

I am dismayed when I think about the billions of dollars that are not paid to the government and, if they were, the potential benefits that might accrue. At the very least, it is clear that this is yet another reason why the United States tax system is long overdue for changes.

I am but one among millions, my words are scarcely heard, they count for nothing, but I cannot avoid expressing them.

A Doubter's Almanac

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things. Renee Descartes

There are two sections in Ethan Canin’s latest novel, The Doubter’s Almanac. I found the first engrossing, the second redundant. The plot focuses on Milo Andret who grew up in a remote part of Michigan. Milo was a loner who spent his time wandering deep in the forests surrounding his home. His parents rarely spoke to him, he was reluctant to form friendships and realized early on that he was “entirely alone in the world.”

In the summer of his 13th year, Milo found a tree blown down in the forest and began carving its stump into a 25-foot-long wooden chain that looped back upon itself. It was a remarkable creation that he hid in a concealed underground hollow. His ability to find his way in the forest and ease in visualizing shapes anticipated his work in typology, a field of mathematics that studies geometric properties and spatial relations among objects.

Milo enrolled in the mathematics department at Berkeley where he began work on the fictional Malosz conjecture. His advisor, Hans Borland, told him, Topology is God’s rules, Andret. That’s what I’m telling you. And you’ve been called upon to translate them.

He began by assuming the result and working backward. If this was true, then so must this be true and so on. In this fashion and after many hours of difficult, exhausting analysis he was able to prove it.

… within hours of showing the proof to Borland, rumors of the achievement had begun to spread. Soon after, the paper had been accepted by the Annals….At thirty-two years old, he’d found a solution to one of the great problems in the history of mathematics. The article would arrive next month in libraries around the world: the Malosz conjecture, thanks to Milo Andret, had become the Malosz theorem.

Milo won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics and obtained an appointment in the mathematics department at Princeton. At this point his life took a precipitous turn. It started when he began insulting members of the department, sleeping with women, and turned to drinking and drugs. It’s was if his mathematical genius was a curse that justified his noxious behavior, displayed without shame or apology.

Milo’s behavior became so objectionable that he was fired from the Princeton faculty, whereupon he moved an isolated cabin by a muddy lake, not unlike his childhood home in Michigan. So began the second part of A Doubter’s Almanac, narrated by Milo’s son, Hans.

We learn that Milo began teaching at one unknown college after another and that he married his former secretary at Princeton. Hans, like his sister, inherited Milo’s mathematical gifts and the curse that goes with it. He also took to drugs and alcohol in an effort to flee the curse. Meanwhile, Milo struggled to solve another mathematical problem, the Abendroth conjecture.

The central puzzle of the Abendroth conjecture concerned a subset of Whitehead’s CW-complexes that were infinite yet finite-dimensional. Clear enough. Though it was considered part of algebraic topology, Andret had a feeling that its solution—if it was going to be solved at all—would come not through equation but through the ability to visualize strange and unearthly shapes. At this he was quite adept.

He started working on it in the belief that he had “one thing left” In him. But he got nowhere and spent most of his time drinking. It is said that a mathematicians’ work was generally over before the age of forty. Perhaps so.

The book ends as Milo falls ill, his family, including his former wife, who had earlier left him, and his first love at Berkeley return to care for him. Hans writes that people like his father are always chasing after something. Each question leads to the next one in a never ending effort to comprehend something. Such a quest has a powerful appeal to me.

The second part of the novel had none of the momentum that the first had. I wanted to know if Milo solved the Malosz conjecture. Or if he had given up. If not, I wanted to know how he solved it and if anyone had solved it before he did. It was one of those fictional tales that I found hard to put down, until the next day, when I turned to it as soon as I could.

The world, if you let yourself consider it, was a puzzle in every plane of focus. Why was he so afraid of it? Then the corollary: Why did he want to live? He wanted to live so that he could solve a great problem.

Apple Inc.

Yesterday, was the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Apple Corporation. Apple products have made an enormous difference in my life, as well as millions of others. About five years ago, I wrote a blog on Steve Jobs and how he benefited the college where I taught for many years. Apple’s anniversary gives me an occasion to repost it.

At the same time, I want to reinforce the doubts I expressed then about some of its products, especially the iPhone. Nothing depresses me more than to see people staring at their iPhone screens throughout the day—in restaurants, on the street, around the dinner table, while they are driving—anywhere it seems.

I believe the iPhone has become an addiction for all too many people. The constant preoccupation with the device has become a substitute for plain thinking, plain observing, plain reflection, conversation, rumination, or dreaming.

Here is what I wrote in October 2011:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Apple’s 1977 “Think Different” Advertising Campaign.

Steve Jobs went to Reed College where I taught psychology throughout my academic life and was a student while I was there before he dropped out after his first semester. For a while after, he continued to hang around the department, primarily in the heavily electronic physiological lab and audited several of our classes.

And it is true, as he noted in a graduation speech he delivered at Stanford several years ago that he was troubled by the fact that it cost his parents so much to send him there. I doubt, however, that was the only reason he dropped out.

I write about Steve Jobs not only out of respect but also because he and his original team at Apple brought the computer world to me. Throughout his life he remained extremely generous to Reed. After the first computers were produced at Apple, he gave each faculty member one and he continued the practice with each succeeding version of their personal computer.

I never would have learned to use one were it not for the simplicity, its user friendliness as it is called. That feature is characteristic of all Apple products, They are designed to be models of simplicity.

It was simple matter to learn how to use them, something I had previously found impossible with other computer operating systems around then and still do with complicated Windows-based computers. In a way, the early Mac with its graphic interface opened up a new life for me, gave me a better and clearer way to express myself, and eventually with the development of the Web and the Internet expanded the sources of information and the ease of obtaining them regardless of where I am.

You have to remember when this was, otherwise it makes no sense given the electronic world we live in today. It was in 1984, twenty-seven years ago [at the time of this writing], that the first Macintosh computer was produced. The picture above is what it looked like and something like it sat on my desk at Reed soon after it was manufactured.

I wrote my first book on it, a book on promoting energy conservation, with a word-processor known as MacWrite. Since my handwriting is atrocious, completely unreadable even to me, I never could have written such a heavily documented book without it.

Everyone once it a while I stop to think about the larger implications of the new products that Jobs and his group at Apple developed—the iPhone, iPod, the iPad. I’m not entirely certain they represent the positive contribution the personal computer does.

Haruki Murakami wrote about life before and after the development of the electronic revolution recently. I was reminded of what he said about this issue in thinking about the death of Steve Jobs and his enormous influence on society.

By setting the story [“Town of Cats,” published in the New Yorker] in 1984, before cell phones and e-mail and the Internet had become common, I made it impossible for my characters to use such tools. This in turn was frustrating for me. I felt their absence slowing down the speed of the novel. When I thought about it, though, not having such devices at the time—both in daily life and in the story—ceased to be an inconvenience. If you wanted to make a phone call, you just found a public telephone; if you had to look something up, you went to the library; if you wanted to contact somebody, you put a stamp on a letter and mailed it. Those were the normal ways to do those things. While writing the novel (and experiencing a kind of time slip), I had a strong feeling of what the intervening twenty-seven years had meant. Sorry to state the obvious, but maybe there’s not much connection between the convenience of people’s surroundings and the degree of happiness they feel.