Looking for Salvation in Medicine

Several months ago, Atul Gawande wrote an interesting article in the New Yorker on why people seek unnecessary treatment.  He questions why patients will willingly undergo unnecessary treatments that are objectively more dangerous than undergoing no treatment at all.  He discusses why this is the case and posits, among other ideas, that part of the problem is that people generally don't know what statistics in medicine mean.  Having thought about the piece myself, I question whether it is so much that we don’t know as it is that we want to know about certain things in certain ways.  Alan Levinovitz, author of The Gluten Lie:  And Other Myths About What You Eat, remarked about a similar issue involving diets:

And I thought to myself, you know, it’s funny, people are trying to debunk these fad diets with scientific evidence, but what they’re not realizing is that really these beliefs aren’t scientific at all. They’re wrapped in scientific rhetoric, but ultimately they’re quasi-religious beliefs that are based on superstition and myth.

In his piece, Gawande notes that a patient from whom he surgically removed a benign thyroid cancer that was only discovered due to an unnecessary test “thanked me profusely for relieving her anxiety.”  She was not concerned about her actual physical health condition.  If she were, she would have recognized that the procedure to remove the benign tumor carried with it higher risks of death and physical harm than leaving the microcarcinoma alone and monitoring it.  The need for treatment was not medical.  Her understanding of the condition was conditioned on a belief system about cancer (and medicine) that is mythic.  Dr. Gawande was fulfilling a function perhaps closer to shaman than surgeon.  The problem, if it is a problem, is with modes of understanding and typologies of knowledge.

It is too easy to blame greed.  Certainly greed in medicine exists.  So does false hope and unrealistic expectations.  Charlatans take advantage in medicine as they do in the revival tent (or on the revival screen, as the case may be). 

The idea of medicine in America is, or has become, salvic.  Christ on the Cross is no longer intercessor or savior or redeemer.  Now it is the busy doctor dispensing antibiotics for viral upper respiratory infections or the cardiothoracic surgeon putting in a stent or the plastic surgeon cheating time with a Botox injection who intercedes, saves, or redeems.  The Rosary replaced by the Rx b.i.d.  The actual state of health is unimportant compared to the reassurance of an explanation, the ritual that allows us to feel as though everything is okay, that everything is in order, that we are being taken care of.  The soul has become the body.  Our quest for health is, as Levine notes with diet, quasi-religious.

And pain.  Pain is more than nociception.  Pain is a modality for expressing discomfort, physical or otherwise.  Complaints of pain alone seems not to establish physical pathology.  However, we have learned that when something hurts we go to the doctor.  Unhappy marriages hurt.  Financial distress hurts.  Is it any wonder that we somaticize?  Seeking understanding and counsel in medicine is normal behavior for persons acculturated as we are; that is acculturated to believe every problem is medical and every medical problem has a solution.

One of Foucault’s profound insights in The Clinic is that the patient went from being a person in the pre-clinical era of medicine to a specimen when medicine became “scientific” or clinical.  As a specimen, the patient became an object of inquiry rather than a person in the world.  The goal of treatment became a disease-free state rather than well-being.  Thus, questions about the patient’s overall well-being that were not directly related to the disease state were subverted and minimized.  “Treatment” would only be proffered in the presence of objectively verifiable disease, regardless of the patient’s degree of actual suffering.  Consciously or not, patients came to understand that if they wanted relief from pain they would have to characterize it as a disease-state.

Members of all societies suffer, some more than others, but suffering is a constant.  No society is Edenic.  Nevertheless, contemporary American society seems to predispose its members, at least those members not living in abject poverty, to a certain anomie.  For whatever reason, traditional American cultural institutions seem unable to ameliorate this state.  Instead, this cultural disaffection seems often to be medicalized in forms such as low back pain, arthritis pain, or depression.  

Unfortunately, medicine treats the manifestations of anomie as disease states, with predictably poor results.  Despite the predictably poor results, medicine treats manifestations of anomie with the same confidence and professional brio with which it treats broken bones.  Hence, a perversity of expected outcomes is created for both doctors and patients.  Doctors offer something approximating science while patients seek salvation for existential discomfort out of the firmament of superstition and myth.  Unfortunately, never the twain shall meet.

A Penurious Spirit: the Closeness of Conservatism

The inherent closeness of conservatism amounts to a worldview premised on the twin beliefs that people don't need to share and that nothing should be done to fix things that aren't fair.  Oddly, nothing about the psychological underpinnings of conservatism are democratic, despite the constant prattle about freedom and democracy that comes from those on the right.

Life as we know it contains hardship and can be a struggle, but these facts do not suggest that life is also not replete with wonder or that we should not attempt to assuage hardship and struggle.  Neither does the fact that life has difficult aspects suggest that we ought to respond with dour self-righteousness to the whole of life.  Such a gross and derelict puritanism bleeds life of what makes it interesting and worthwhile.  Contrary to the conservative animosity toward generosity and happiness, there is much to enjoy in the world, enough to go around for everyone.

What is it that I enjoy?  I yearn for expansive experiences.  I yearn for soul-satisfying laughter.  I yearn for hours and hours of conversation with interesting people about interesting things for no other reason than to experience the pleasure of good and thoughtful fellowship.  I yearn to share lovely memories with my family.  I yearn to take my son out early in the morning with a fishing pole to see the sun peak over the horizon as our lures splash into the water.  I yearn for the marauding rhythm of Whitman's verse.  I yearn for the meditative splendor of Yeats at his best.  I yearn for the earthy humor of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  I yearn for the insatiable desire to keep reading, ceaseless, without rest or breaks, that I experienced when I picked up the Snopes trilogy or the Lord of the Rings or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  I yearn for the excitement I felt when I was in college and first experienced the humanities from an open-ended critical view.

But the inherent closeness of conservatism suggests that these pleasures should not be democratic.  They should not be available to all of the people.  If this is not the de jure position of conservatism it is at least the de facto effect.  Why should any person who is capable of sensing beauty and experiencing joy be deprived of the opportunity to do so?  I remain convinced that no humans should be treated as or be allowed to become societal detritus.  The best society, it would seem to me, is one in which all members are given the opportunity to live freely and in modest comfort, with access to an education that ignites curiosity and inspires the desire to learn more.  In short, the best society is one in which we share with strangers and strive to make things better for persons other than ourselves.

Jeb! Likes Education Choices (If He Gets to Make Them for Parents)

"The conservative conundrum-- if you allow freedom and choice, you have to accept that people may choose things you don't like..."

The quote is lifted from a blog post about Jeb! Bush's education plan.  His candidacy seems more and more irrelevant as each day goes by, but his "plan" offers a great opportunity for Peter Greene to discuss why the conservative fetish with choice is both oxymoron and bad policy.  I thought the first post was better, but both are worth reading.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

When I was an undergraduate, I read some Dylan Thomas poems in a modern poetry class.  Of course we read "Do not go gently into that good night."  I enjoyed the poem immensely.  I have always been drawn to things demonstrating what might be called a rebel impulse, especially when I was young.  For me, "rage, rage against the dying of the light" could effectively have been read as "rage, rage against every injustice" since injustice was the chief vice to be opposed.  I was full of rage and fury; Dylan Thomas seemed to be speaking to me.  I would rage, rage, rage.

I hadn't thought of Thomas for some time when my father reached the end stage of the colon cancer that had been consuming him for several years.  The poem struck me as inapposite.  What could my father rage against?  Had my father raged, it would have been futile and weird, like Lear on the heath.  There is no raging against a disease that you have lived with for nearly a decade, a disease that you have known for some time would take your life.  Instead, there is gnawing pain and existential anxiety.  There is occasional regret and occasional insight.  Mostly, there is simple adaptation.  Waking and getting through each day because each day keeps coming and that is what we do when we live.  We wake, we get through, we wake, we get through.

Watching my father waste away did not diminish Thomas' words, but it demonstrated for me that the way of life and death is not binary.   Life is not a question of desire or its absence.  Were it so, my father would be alive today.  He had much desire to live.  He may even at times have had rage.  However, desire, even at the extreme edge, cannot guarantee life.  Neither is it even a possibility with the slow waste of metastatic cancer.

I have, however, recently been reminded that there are things worth raging against.  Not too long ago, Kraft-Heinz announced that it would be closing the Oscar Mayer facility in Madison, Wisconsin.  Executive jobs will be located in Chicago and all production jobs in Madison will be lost.  On my way into work around the time of the news, I heard a piece on public radio mentioning that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation ("WEDC") did not attempt to work with Kraft-Heinz to keep the plant open.  This despite the fact that at least two other states successfully offered tax credits and other benefits to keep their local Oscar Mayer plants open.  I feel like Wisconsin's light is dying and there ought to be more raging.

The Wisconsin legislature and the governor continuously tout themselves and the policies they contrive to be better for Wisconsin businesses and hence better for Wisconsin because they will lead to job growth.  This is complete and utter baloney.  The Walker administration and the Wisconsin legislature have no interest actually doing anything that will preserve decent union jobs in Wisconsin, especially not in a city that votes heavily Democratic.  They do not care and are almost certainly happy to see those jobs go so they can continue to drive decent jobs with decent benefits (and the Democratic voters that often hold them) out to be replaced by lousy jobs with lousy benefits held by resentful workers who seem to think that progressive social policy is the reason for their economic insecurity.  Oddly, white persons holding non-union blue collar jobs in rural Wisconsin are reliably Republican despite Republican policy being responsible for much of their economic insecurity.

This is messed up and is worth raging against.  Buying the Republican line of political reasoning amounts to implicit racism.  When you think the reason that you don't have a good job is because of Obamacare or welfare, you are a racist.  You are effectively saying that you would have a good job if income was not being redistributed to pay for handouts to black people (because that is who the anti-welfare crowd assumes all the benefits are going to).  You know what, though:  you are not only a racist, you are a moron.  The reason you don't have a good job has almost nothing to do with social programs and almost everything to do with political policies that maximize the wealth of businesses and the wealthiest individuals at your expense.

I have for too long attempted to be nice about this stuff.  I'm done.  I don't think Wisconsin has much left to commend it.  This saddens and angers me.  Losing Oscar Mayer and knowing our state government did nothing to prevent it from happening sickens me.  I recommend that everyone write to the WEDC and Governor Walker and tell them how disappointed you are in their lack of caring for Wisconsin workers.  Tell them how disappointed you are in the direction Wisconsin is heading.

More importantly, call out all the people who voted these kleptocrats into office.  Tell them they are racist if they oppose social welfare benefits because they think they disproportionately benefit black persons and other minorities.  Tell them they are fools if they believe welfare benefits have anything to do with their own economic insecurity.  Tell them they are fools if they believe unions have caused or contributed to Wisconsin's current economic woes.  Tell them they are making Wisconsin into a sluggish backwater that is a national joke.

I feel like I am losing something meaningful as Wisconsin drifts right and becomes more know-nothing.  I also feel like nothing I or anyone else can do or say will change things.  Nevertheless, I can remain silent no longer.  Like the wise men and the good men and the wild men and the grave men, I will not go gently into that good night; I will rage against the dying of the light.

Free Play, Organized Sports, and the Death of Joy

I took my son to an outdoor ice rink a couple of nights ago and we played some pick-up hockey with a couple of his teammates and their older brother.  It was magnificent. We had the rink to ourselves for 90 minutes.  I had a great time, but watching the kids play was even better.  Later that night, I thought about the seeming diminution in free play that kids engage in today.  I know, I am nostalgic crank.  Now get off my lawn, etc.  But seriously, the loss of free play seems less nostalgic than an observable phenomenon.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in youth sports.

In many ways, youth sports have become routinized to the point that playing can seem more like a job than an enjoyable diversion.  This is shameful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the primary purpose of sport is play, which is generally supposed to be fun.  As youth sports have become more routinized and formal, kids spend less time engaging in free play.  Historically, free play is where kids learned to love the games they played and where they taught themselves the individual skills necessary to participate in particular sports.  Athletes were born on the pond or the playground or the schoolyard.  It is there that they developed love for the game and self-reliance.  If a kid wanted to learn a move, they essentially had to teach themselves.  Free play was essential both to learning the game and learning to love it.

Now, many kids spend little or no time playing sports outside the organized setting.  If they cannot pick up the game in formal practices or official games, they are not likely to pick up the game.  The exception is the kid with the driven parent who sees that his daughter could use more time and pays for her to have private lessons.  Rather than finding time for her to play, the driven parent finds more time for formal instruction.  Certainly all this time will lead to improvement and produces many exceptional athletes, but it also sends the messages that athletics are about something other than fun and that the player is incapable of self-improvement.  I think this is a mistake that first and foremost hurts kids, but also damages sport in general.

I am partial to hockey because it caused me to think about this and I love it, but all active free play is glorious:  no coaches, no instructions; just happiness, creativity, and passion.  This is the genius of free play:  doing something because you alone are moved to do it.  The experience is both greatly satisfying and enormously valuable.  As a purely athletic endeavor, free play spurs creativity like nothing else.  The whole point of free play is to have fun and the way you have fun is trying to beat your opponent, which gives you an incentive to do something clever.  It breeds experimentation.  It also breeds self-reliance because the only one who can figure it out is the player him or herself.

Free play is also satisfying in ways that formal games are not.  Nobody wants to lose, but in true free play the stakes are essentially personal so the consequences of games are much less stressful.  Free play is one of the few venues in sport where what in fact matters is simply playing the game.  Stepping off the ice after an impromptu pick up game feels good.  There is no worry about how you defended or played offense.  The only thing that matters is that you played.

This is the nation that gave the world jazz.  We are improvisational specialists.  We are at our best not when we are carefully following a script, but when we are allowed the freedom to react and think for ourselves in whatever situation are in.  I for one will continue to find opportunities for us to just play and I suspect that in the end my son will be better for it.  I know he will be happier.

Lengua

I'm not sure what you call this, but I needed to get it out despite being incomplete. It's about my grandmother and America.

Lengua

When she was dying, I visited my grandmother in the nursing home.  I brought my infant son, Luke, for her to meet.  It would be the first and last time she met him.  At the time my grandmother suffered from the end stages of peripheral artery disease.  In addition to being physically infirm, her mental status had declined precipitously since I had last seen her.  She recognized me, but she existed in a kind of twilight zone between past and present, fluidly slipping between here and there.  

We wheeled my grandmother to a common room and she held her grandson on her lap for a little while.  She smiled broadly.  I remember my mother telling me that she loved working the maternity ward when she was a nurse in the hospital.  She had a thing for babies and it showed even as she was slipping from the world.  

When Luke was in her lap, she sang him lullabies.  She sang in Spanish because she couldn’t remember the English lullabies she learned later, when she was an adult and had her own children.  My grandmother was born in San Antonio to a Mexican immigrant mother and a German-American father, who, by dint of happenstance, was orphaned and raised by a Mexican-American family.  She learned to speak Spanish first and English second.  And while her English remained slightly accented until her death, it was the drawl she had picked up from her thirty plus years in Texas that was recalcitrant.  

Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).  A Nebraska law forbad teaching foreign languages (except Greek, Latin, and Hebrew) to public and private school students who had not successfully completed the eighth grade.  Meyer taught reading in German at the Zion Parochial School (a Lutheran school, and we know from experience that Lutherans are radical usurpers of law and order in the U.S.) to, among others, a ten-year-old boy named Raymond Parpart.  Nebraska charged Meyer with and convicted him of violating the statute, a criminal offense.  Meyer appealed the conviction; however, the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed it.

Meyer sought relief with the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.  The Court noted, tongue-in-cheek, “the salutory purpose of the statute” due to “the baneful effects of permitting foreigners … to rear and educate their children in the language of their native land,” before concluding that the Nebraska statute was unconstitutional.  As Justice McReynolds wrote:

[t]he American people have always regarded education and acquisition of knowledge as matters of supreme importance which ought to be diligently promoted...

and:

[t]hat the State may do much, go very far, indeed, in order to improve the quality of its citizens, physically, mentally, and morally, is clear; but the individual has certain fundamental rights which must be respected.  

The Court held the Nebraska statute was unconstitutional because, among other things,

[i]t is well known that proficiency in a foreign language seldom comes to one not instructed at an early age, and experience shows that this is not injurious to the health, morals, or understanding of the ordinary child.  

Justice McReynolds put the matter succinctly:

The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.

Tender and fierce, my grandmother smiled when we arrived for visits.  She never wanted us to leave.  

I didn't know her when she was young, obviously, but I know she was young like I know I was young and you were young too.  What I know of her youth I learned from photos and stories, mostly stories.  Her stories.  My mother’s stories.  Things heard while the adults talked around the dining room table.  I pieced these things together to imagine who she was.

And she was the sun around which her family orbited for many years.  Until her sons and daughters became suns in their own right, establishing new orbits, spinning out of the old. I think she knew and understood what was happening and why.  I don’t think it broke her heart so much as it caused her, especially in the last few years, to atrophy in loneliness.  

It broke my heart when we left on Sunday after Mass and after breakfast and I could tell that she didn’t want us to go, her small and bent 90-year-old frame waving good-bye at the back door of the Pine Meadows senior apartments, eyes rheumy or lachrymose or both.  Mi abuelita.  

We experienced the vestiges of her Spanish when I was a child.  My grandmother used two Spanish expressions unceasingly:  ‘pobrecito’ and ‘¡Cállate!’  For her there were no English equivalents.  So when we were sad or sick or hurt we heard, ‘pobrecito.’  And when we were too loud or rambunctious, we heard ‘¡Cállate!’  My mother said ‘pobrecito’ all the time but abandoned ‘¡Cállate!’ in favor of its English equivalents.  I occasionally hear ‘pobrecito’ escape from my lips, but only infrequently.

Declaring English the official language means that official government business at all levels must be conducted solely in English. This includes all public documents, records, legislation and regulations, as well as hearings, official ceremonies and public meetings.

Official English legislation contains common-sense exceptions permitting the use of languages other than English for such things as public health and safety services, judicial proceedings, foreign language instruction and the promotion of tourism.

My grandmother lived an interesting life.  She experienced the Jim Crow south in a peculiar way:  she passed for ‘white’ while her mother was clearly of Mexican origin and so my grandmother witnessed segregation from a privileged but psychologically devastating perspective.  

“[Mapp] told this editorial board that ranchers should be allowed to shoot on sight anyone illegally crossing the border on to their land,” reads the editorial before noting that Mapp “referred to such people as ‘wetbacks.’”

Chris Mapp, GOP Senate Candidate, Texas, speaking to the Dallas Morning News.  In response to the story, Mapp replied that using the slur was as “normal as breathing air in South Texas.”  

My grandmother chose a path most women of her era would not have followed.  She received a BSN and worked in public health in San Antonio.  She obtained a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University.  She lived in Quito, Ecuador for a time as part of a medical exchange program.  She did not marry until her mid-thirties.  She continued working after she married my grandfather and moved from San Antonio to Antigo, Wisconsin.  She met my grandfather when he returned from WWII and was stationed at Fort Sam Houston.  Eventually she became a public health nurse for Langlade County, Wisconsin.  

Just as he was about to reach the safety of Mexican soil, the masked officer in the front of the boat suddenly dropped to one knee and fired his assault rifle at the crowd, hitting Arévalo in the thigh and the chest. “They killed him! They killed him!” his wife screamed in Spanish. His younger daughter, Mariana, had been standing next to him when he was shot, and she was in all likelihood the only person who reached him before he died. She hugged him as he lay on his back, bleeding.

My grandmother was tough and had an independent streak that was indelibly Texan (because, as she was wont to remind us, Texas was its own country once and didn’t really need the rest of the United States).  She did not suffer fools.  When she wanted to do something, she simply did it.  And she was fiercely protective of her family.  And she believed ardently in the obligation we have to help our fellows.  When she retired, she ran a blood pressure clinic for senior citizens.  She made her grandchildren quilts.  She painted ceramic figures and donated them to church fundraisers or gave them as gifts.  She was in the Rosary Society and rarely missed Mass.  

¡Amadísimo Protector mío, San Antonio! Heme aquí, a tus pies, plenamente confiado en tu poderosa intercesión. Mírame con aquel espíritu de dulce y tierna compasión con que mirabas a los pobres.

I eulogized my grandmother poorly, which torments me.  Too few people sat in the pews, which happens when you live to 95.  The empty spaces distracted me.  Everything I said reverberated, hopelessly inadequate to the task, incapable of lifting the audience up, of bringing her alive in our minds and memories.  I suppose this is my attempt to repair that failed peroration.

When Senator Chuck Grassley warns that President Obama’s executive action on immigration violates the limitations expressed in the Declaration, he fails to see that America’s founders, in the Declaration itself, criticized the British king for obstructing immigration to the North American colonies that would encourage growth.

She remains with me, occupying a prominent place in the conversation that takes place often in my mind between those who have come and gone and me.  I know her smile still, unfaded and just a bit mischievous, and I can taste her mincemeat cookies, and I can hear her say my name, an inimitable utterance, like no one else.  An immigrant's child.  Abuela.  Grandma.  Bertha.

Cousins come

Aunts and uncles come in from the cold

And in the air is … is

I do not know but it is delicious.

The ruddy faces, handshakes and hugs

And my grandmother smiling:

We are hers and she knows it.

And knowing she knows is delicious

Musings on Creativity, Part One

I was driving home from teaching a class the other night and the Rilo Kiley song “Breakin’ Up” played.  The song starts with a whimsical keyboard phrase, which has a decidedly ‘electronic’ quality to the sound, and it builds from there into a lovely piece of pop music.  Listening to that introductory phrase, it struck me that creativity is miraculous.  Whether it is noodling with a keyboard until a phrase arises or being struck with a theme and crafting a symphony around it - the synthetic and serendipitous process by which we create works of art is worth contemplating.  This is why we in the West accord significant artists with almost mythic status and will often focus obsessively on the biographical and historical milieus out of which are arises.  The process is remarkable and we have a deep desire to learn how it works, to explain the process in causal, reductive terms.  I too have this desire:  I want to know about the artist’s life, what was going on in the world at the time of and in the lead up to the piece, what interested her at the time she created it, etc.  Having this desire strikes me as normal given our epistemological need to view physical phenomena in a linear, cause-and-effect manner.  Nevertheless, it seems worth considering the process through with objects of art arise (which I hesitate to call ‘the creative process” because it is an indirect return to a linear epistemological mode) independent of the need for a linear explanation.  Instead of asking how an object of art arises, I would rather ask why does an object of art arise?

Alle Menschen werden Brűder…

Perhaps I am merely reorienting an epistemic concern into an ontological one.  Or more properly, I am maybe giving an epistemological query and ontological component.  Regardless, asking why an object of art arises seems to be a more fundamental question than asking how and object of art arises.  And the ‘why’ question is in essence a question about being human.  This is not to say humans alone can create expressions cognizable as art but rather reflects the simple reality that I am human and am writing specifically about the creation of a type of thing by humans.  I consider this to be an important distinction because the question should not limit the felt scope of the object of art by the specific terms used to pose the question.  The orientation of the idea of art as being an exclusively human product similarly limits it, in this case as a socio-biological artifact explainable in those clinical, reductive terms.  The point being that answering the ‘why’ question should not devolve into an empirical triviality or a species-centric chauvinism.  

So why?  Why does an object of art arise?  Some reductionism in answering the question will be inevitable (if I wish the answer to be coherent).  Hence, it seems like we should start with some basics like we have the capacity for wonder.  Being reductive by nature, I will try to define ‘wonder’ without stripping it altogether of its essence.  Wonder underlies or gives substance to our appreciation for things that cannot be reduced to facts and is more than just passingly emotional. Although Freud sought, in his inimitable reductive way to explain the term ‘oceanic feeling’ attributed to his friend Romain Rolland, the idea of this felt response to the eternal is an approximation of what I mean by ‘wonder.’  I do not, however, limit wonder to a response, however extraordinary, to the eternal.  Rather, the subjective response that can be described as oceanic can arise in myriad settings, such as a response to light falling through leaves of trees in a forest or to a speech or to a painting or to a sporting event.  

Rudolf Otto also captured something of the idea of ‘wonder’ in his extended meditation on the numinous and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  In contrast to Rolland, whose Gallic roots may have something to do with the difference, Otto’s meditation on the numinous is starker and more awe-ful (in the sense of being a more definitively third party experience), but nevertheless describes the experience of the numinous as the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, which he locates in a somewhat austere, but still wonderful, divine.  It is the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable that is key because that experience is not limited to the divine but also arises in encounters with the beautiful, with grace, and with sublimity.

The classical dramatists and philosophers of Greece offer another treatment, if not an explicit definition, of what I call ‘wonder.’  Consider Aristotle and his meditation on tragedy in which the capacity of drama to produce catharsis may be considered an extraordinary, though reductive, interpretation of ‘wonder,’ as it arises through art.  So too the Euripidean reaction to the strictures or conventions of Classical tragedy in which he can practically be heard to shout through the lines of dialogue “Wonder has not rules! Wonder flows unbounded like a flooded river!”  And through the Euripidean lens we see a definition that is anti-definition, that resists reductivity utterly, that wonder is feeling in extremis with witnesses, it is Medea and Jason, it is the Bacchae and Pentheus, it is consumptive, all-consuming, it is impossible to reduce, to define, to regulate with rules.

And with wonder, as in so many things, we seem, as humans, to want to make it and not just experience it at the whimsy of fortune and circumstance.  I don’t think this impulse is reductive, which is why I think the question ‘why’ is more ontological than epistemic.  The impulse is additive, creative; seeking to birth a new instance of wonder in the world, an instantiation, an irruption of the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, the phrase that cannot get out of the musician’s head, the lines of poetry that roll on with preternatural power, craft and inspiration, an irruption of the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable into being.  And this is why - because wonder inspires us to create wonder.  We see this in our capacity to noodle on the keyboard and create a song, to feel the wonder of being human and create a symphony, to feel the wonder of divine self-sacrifice, to create the Eucharist.  

In part, the impulse to instantiate wonder, to create it, is a social impulse.  Despite the fact that sometimes it is a lonely impulse of delight, the creation is not meant to be unheard or unseen or unfelt; the creation is not meant to be alone.  Yeats’ beautiful elegiac poem was written to be read.  He was not engaging in some form of intellectual onanism.  Despite the fact that the narrator professes no love for his people, he did not remain silent.  The created instance of wonder is a communicative act.  If we ask ‘why’ we must acknowledge the need to share, that wonder, that the oceanic feeling, that the mysterium, arises in the context of sociality.  

Perhaps it is because of our sociality that we can access wonder.  To the solitary creature how can wonder be possible?  How can there be an oceanic feeling?  It would seem that all of the various characterizations of wonder require a modality of thought-feeling that arises out of the intersubjectivity of group life and behavior. The felt impossibility is only possible if one can grasp the self simultaneously as subject and object which is both the essence and difficulty of self-aware agents living in groups.  This is what gives us our capacity for transcendence, of being above and below simultaneously, which, it would seem, is the path to wonder and art.

This idea of transcendence is a blessing and a curse.  Without it we wouldn’t have the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, but with it comes the knowledge that we can’t escape the lower, that the felt understanding is the best we can hope for, that we won’t inhabit the higher plane or know precisely what it is to be like, to be the same as, the virtually inconceivable.  Religion promises a path to the inconceivable, but only through absence, through various forms of apotheosis; art lifts us so we can feel the virtually inconceivable, so we can get as near to it as our humanity allows.  And this is part of the why - wonder and transcendence are (and feel) extraordinary.  We want to experience transcendence and wonder and we have, at least some persons have, the capacity to construct things that will take us there.  And the capacity generates the impulse and the impulse cannot be sated unless it is shared.  Otherwise the artist would be a hermit who practices mysticism.  

And so the artist does not retire to a cave or a cell but instead makes something, an object the purpose of which is social.  And if the artist succeeds, the object causes or helps those who experience it to also experience transcendence and wonder.  And this experience is not serendipitous.  The artist intends to create the experience and those seeking out the object of art intend to have the experience.  When I went to a Chihuly exhibit I did so in part because the whimsy and organic energy that Chihuly’s large works possess cause me to experience the sublime, the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable.  This is why.  Not for me specifically but because Chihuly knows there is some ‘me’ who will glimpse the eternal through his remarkable chandeliers.

The movement that art inspires in the individual consciousness exhilarates and almost by necessity crosses boundaries.  This is a necessary component of transcendence.  Being above and below necessitates movement across a threshold.  The movement across the threshold to the transcendent, which is the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, is, in itself, value-neutral. The movement is simply that - a movement of thought-feel.  

Unfortunately, the movement frequently causes fear and consternation among various parties that have an interest in controlling the transcendent or who worry about the effect that the transcendent will have on those who experience it.  In some cases, persons find the experience to be liberating, which can cause those persons to reevaluate their lives and especially those aspects of them which seem to act as a bar to experiencing wonder.  For those who want to control behavior and ideas, for those who are in the business of policing norms, the experience of liberation among subjects who are deemed to be governed by the norms will often be seen as dangerous.  Norms, whether we care to admit it or not, retard persons from experiencing wonder.  Love is exhilarating, marriage is not. Hence, the authoritarian impulse to characterize the liberating experience of wonder and the art that fosters it as libertinous at best and more often as obscene, lascivious, or libidinous.  And from there it is short work to characterize the work of art as depraved, destructive, and dangerous when it is in fact almost certainly none of these things.  

Even intentionally provocative art is not depraved, destructive, or dangerous insofar as it uses received norms to help us transcend our workaday experiences and achieve the felt understanding that I call wonder.  Of course artists intending to create provocative art often fail to do this and produce works that merely provoke or are in fact depraved or obscene.  But this is not an indictment of art, whether of the intentionally provocative sort or not.  Art fails to be transcendent most of the time.  This is not an indictment of art but rather a condition of being human.  Not all pieces of art can be transcendent.  If they were, transcendence would be deprived of meaning.  We cannot always be simultaneously above and below.  If we were, there would be no distinction between the two states because their simultaneity would then be our natural state, which would be experienced as a single state.

Nevertheless, when we ask why, we must answer with “because we can experience wonder.”  Even in the most authoritarian, desultory, and controlled environments we display a persistent and remarkable capacity to experience wonder.  Amid terror and violence we retain the capacity and desire to experience wonder.  And when we can and want to experience wonder we create art, insuperable and beautiful butterflies at Maidenek, Dostoyevski after the gulag, the spirituals of American slaves.  The provocation may be political or rebellious, but if it causes or assists us in achieving transcendence, that in itself is not a political or rebellious act.