The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

(Illustrations deleted: if you want an illustrated version write me and I'll send it to you by e-mail)

David B. Schwartz, ‘66

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds…As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

In the Aboriginal world view, every event leaves a record in the land. Everything in the natural world is a result of the actions of the archetypal beings, beings whose actions created the world.

-Ellie Crystal

We sat on the wall, old friends, just as we had done in the sixties when the Palm Court and New College were new. Except that now we were in our sixties ourselves, our deep familiarity and sense of ownership of this place conflicting with hesitancy over intruding upon the commons of the students who now made this home. There were forty entering classes between our time and theirs. The complete student body had changed ten times; ten generations from us. Many of us had children older than these students. Yet sitting on the wall it was still undeniably our home, the soil from which our original tribe had sprung, and all generations of the tribe since that time.

When I drove into the funky old Lido Beach resort that was our reunion base, my heart leapt at all of the familiar faces sitting around the second floor balcony, outside the room with the keg that John Daugherty had set up. My closest friends, of course, were immediately familiar. We had spent the intervening years in close contact, getting married in each other’s houses, being informal aunts and uncles to each other’s kids, holding each other as we went through traumatic divorces. It’s been that movie The Big Chill, on a larger and longer scale. When our old friend Roger Peters was dying of melanoma in Durango, Colorado, John Hart and I flew from the Northeast into Albuquerque and rented large motorcycles, so we could blast up his driveway just as we all used to do at his place at the North end of Longboat Key. It was, he said later, as if his New College youth came, kicking gravel, back into his life.

There in the Palm Court we dedicated a memorial brick to him, with an injunction he had once directed at a campus cop who objected to him pulling his Volvo P118 into the walkway between the wall and third court: “Touch that car and I’ll call a real cop!” We toasted him with Slivovitz, a Yugoslavian plum brandy/airplane fuel for which we had once shared considerable enthusiasm. I forget why.

Other friends and classmates I didn’t recognize initially, until the first word was out of their mouths. Our gathering out on that Lido balcony was an instant re-tribalization of the group who had arrived when there was not much college to speak of. Sitting there feeling a blissful and complete acceptance greater than anything I have known in the intervening years, it was clear that pretty much everyone was feeling the same thing. I leaned over to Charity. “What is this that we are all feeling?” I asked her. She looked back at me and replied simply. “It’s unconditional love.”

The Creation Myth

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What astonished me as we sat on the wall that once was ours was that the current students actually wanted to talk with us. They were keenly interested in who we were. In fact, we could connect immediately. We spoke the same dialect. It was clear that I could connect with an 18-year-old first-year student more readily than I can connect with 98 percent of all of the people whom I meet. We had a common language, a common culture. And the students were deeply curious about the origins of that culture. They were full of questions:

Did you have Walls and PCP’s? (Palm Court Parties)

Is it true that you went to class naked?

Is New College as good now as it was then?

And, finally, and movingly: “Are you proud of us?”

All tribes and cultures have their creation myths. Margaret Mead herself had visited and pronounced New College not a college, but a tribe. It was, in fact, more than a little Samoan. I realized that here an extraordinary event was happening. While the ancestors of aboriginal tribes are lost to the mists of time, here we ancestors of the tribal village of the Palm Court were stepping out of the mists solid and alive. We were the ancestors, come to earth. They could ask us about the creation myth and we could tell them how it actually was. We were there.

We could remember when the palm trees were young, and so were we. We recalled when the Pei dorms stood as an island among scrub and old WWII barracks, when we walked or raced our Honda 50s over to College Hall for dinners, watching the sun set through the windows as dolphins swam along the shoreline. We remembered the first-year “core” program, which everybody had to take. Back then the academic year was eleven months long, and you graduated in three years, except if you were male and could be rewarded for early graduation by being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I suppose I knew in retrospect that we students had in fact co-created the academic philosophy and structure of the college, along with the founders and the faculty. But it had not occurred to me until I talked with students this time that we alone had founded the unique student life of the college. We had come up with a certain way of living together, imaginatively unique, that has reached full flower today. It could have been different: we could have been dropped into those Pei dorms in the middle of sleepy Sarasota and come up with Lord of the Flies. But it didn’t happen that way.

From our rude scratchings back then, a vibrant jiva culture had taken root, winding around and up the palm trees for generation after generation of students. No, we didn’t have “PCPs;” we didn’t even know what the term meant. In the beginning, we had just hung out and danced in the Palm Court. Maybe somebody would put some stereo speakers in the window of the corner third court room. There weren’t many of us back then. These early spontaneous gatherings had grown into the Walls and PCPs: the major and minor tribal feasts around which the seasons revolved.

Like aboriginal landscape, each element of the campus, especially the Pei dorms, was etched with the communal life of the first inhabitants. Around this symbolic topography the tribal rituals of New College students have continued to flourish. The vibrational residue of our life together so long ago still persisted in this place.

The students’ question: “Is it as good now?” stuck in my mind. We are used to the nature of creation myths, which can so often point back to a simpler and purer time than the corrupted present. The sixties and the early years of the college were a heady and exciting time, it was true. It is one of the great blessings of my life to be part of it. But the romantic way we can tend to view the past can obscure the fact that, for pioneers of any new activity, life by definition is hard.

The first class hadn’t even the Pei dorms. The college was yet unaccredited. Just outside the bubble the administrators maintained for us the school was on the verge of going broke. We thought of ourselves as liberated, but in fact we were children of the fifties. So, like the 1967 “Summer of Love,” the New College experience for us was as unimaginably distant from our prior experience as an acid trip is from a martini lunch. In this vast sea change some of us just didn’t make it. There were a lot of casualties – probably many more than in current times, when there are so many safety ropes and staff guides to keep students away from the deeper crevasses. We had the Moolah of the Vietnam War hanging over our very lives. Friends got sucked up and perished. The country approached the beginnings of what felt like incipient civil war. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the saying went then.

We were twice thirty now, but the students seemed to somehow trust us.

The morning after sitting on the wall with the students, we talked about what we had seen. Somebody pointed out that the students seemed to have a lot of self-confidence. “How different from our own experience! We had zilch in that department, “ somebody said. I also noticed that every conversation had been initiated and led by women. It seemed natural, and good. But the women gathered with us at this reunion pointed out how different it was from our own time. “They take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine” said Kathy, a feminine force who played second banana to no man, even in 1964. It was all true.

When students asked us if the college was still essentially as we remembered it, I asked them: “Have you ever seen a multiple-choice test at New College?” They all laughed. What a ridiculous question! And there was another event. Emeritus professor Dr. Knox, upon spotting John O’Neill, who had dropped out without finishing his thesis in the late sixties, practically grabbed him by the lapels and demanded, “John, when are you going to get that thesis in?” Everyone laughed. Then somebody asked Dr. Knox – “”Hey, they wouldn’t still take it after 40 years, would they?” “Sure we would,” Dr. Knox replied. Where else could such a thing even be possibly true?

The most memorable moment for me came when a knot of students – clearly close friends – came up to a group of us ancestors, friends since the Creation. “The wonderful thing,” I explained to them, gesturing to our little group, is that we have remained close friends for all of the years since we were here.” I reached out and gave John Hart a one-armed hug. They all looked at each other. “Do you mean,“ a young woman said hesitantly, that we might all still be friends in forty years?” “Yes,” I replied. The students almost trembled with the thought. They all hugged each other excitedly, and ran off to whatever adventure might be next. I could just guess.

How can we be ancestors? I still feel about twenty years old in the core of my being, truth be told. Especially when I’m around my fellow grey-haired ancestors. There is a line from Coleridge I have kept since I left New College for the “real world:”

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Ay! And what then?

Holding my flower tightly, I boarded a jet home for Ithaca, that oasis of the sixties where old hippies rule and where I feel most at home, save one vibrant Palm Court in Sarasota, Florida. For there is where the ancestral tongue is still spoken and the dreamtime periodically surfaces out of the creation myth and treads at night on Welch tiles under an orange-juice sky.

Seymour Sarason Eulogy

Dear Fellow Friends of Seymour:

I have learned of Seymour's death too late to be with you at his funeral today. I see, looking at the clock, that the service is just starting now. A have appreciated reading the various memorials to him, as I think of this extraordinary, wonderful, man who touched us so deeply that even the third time we always laughed at the joke; "What does it feel like? It feels like talking to the wall!" because we just wanted Seymour to talk just a little longer, wanted him to be happy for a moment, wanted to be with him.

In reading other's thoughts, I began thinking about what made Seymour so special, why he might have inspired such feelings of love and devotion, and his final moving out of this world kindles such keen feelings of loss for me, and for all of us together.

There are many extraordinarily intelligent people around, some of them in universities. There are a number of professors who take genuine personal interest in their students. But Seymour was different: if you worked with him in any way, you eventually came to the realization that there was only single reason that Seymour was helping you: because he loved you. And because he loved you and loved to help you to grow and flourish, the entire breadth of his mind was at your disposal. He had no other consideration than you, and you felt it.

A couple of months ago, Seymour told me that the hardest thing about his existence was that "I don't have anybody to care for now."

Beneath the rough exterior that only served to make him more endearing, this was the guy who cheerfully told me once that he was a really good psychotherapy supervisor. "Have you ever practiced psychotherapy? I asked?

"Oh, no," he quickly replied, almost shuddering. "I'm way too sensitive for that!"

It seems like there must be a good ironic Jewish joke in there somewhere.


Just like his mentor Henry Shaffer-Simmern, Seymour's care for you would most often be expressed in giving you a blank sheet of paper. "Artistic creativity is life, he said. For some of us, Seymour's blank sheet of paper was the charge to write a book. It was his medium: when he was teaching, he seemed to regularly turn one out a year. After he retired, I think it went up to two. "He writes them faster than I can read him!" my friend Hank Bersani complained. You'd go see Seymour, and he would tell you to write a book, and two weeks later there'd be a letter from a publisher asking of if you were interested in a book contract.

Well, I wrote that book, and just as Seymour had no doubt planned, now I don't seem to be able to stop. The next one, I dedicated to him with these words of Seneca, My guess is that is what we all experienced.

What would you think of a memorial symposium that brings all of us together to talk about Seymour's influence on us and the world, so that we can all get to know each other a bit? Maybe somebody could write a book. Seymour would like that.


Suppose, again, that the other endured labor and weariness in teaching me; that, besides the ordinary sayings of teachers, there are things which he has transmitted and instilled into me; that by his encouragement he aroused the best that was in me, at one time inspirited me by his praise; at another warned me to put aside sloth; that, laying hand, so to speak, on my mental powers that then were hidden and inert, he drew them forth into the light; that, instead of doing out his knowledge grudgingly in order that there might be the longer need of his service, he was eager, if he could, to pour the whole of into me – if I do not owe to such a man all the love I give to those to the most grateful ties, I am indeed ungrateful.



Sincerely,


David B. Schwartz

The Dream Analysis Stand at the Farmer's Market

Cartoon: Bare feet with hairy lower legs sticking out on a couch beyond the curtain of a stand at the Farmer’s Market. Hanging Signs: “Dream Analysis $15. The Doctor is “IN.”

Finding the analytic couch upstate was the hardest part. Psychoanalysts never made it much further North from New York than Westchester County. (I know they call Westchester “upstate” from Manhattan, but from Ithaca it is a long ways downstate. ) Finally I found a couch in Philadelphia, where each obituary of a psychoanalyst sends another couch to the used furniture store. Gus, who had been keeping his eye out for me, called me up. “Got one here that just came in, doc,” he said in his South Philly staccato. “Fifties style, but it belonged to a Jungian, so it’s not too rigid.” It sounded good to me. Although I don’t usually use a couch myself, I had tried one out that had been owned by a Freudian. It was no use: everybody’s dreams were both sexual and rigidly interpretive. I mean, how many bicycle masturbation fantasies can there really be? Besides, rigidity isn’t big in Ithaca, except among certain vegans, and I’m not. So I jumped in the pickup and by that Friday night I was backing up to my new stand at the market.

My neighbors at the goat cheese stand and Micro Mama’s on either side of me helped me carry it in. Then I had to only hang the curtain on a rope, stick in a folding chair for me and a box of Kleenex, and I was ready to hang my sign. People could lie down on the couch and couldn’t really be heard against the hubbub of Saturday mornings, while their feet sticking out signaled those in line that there was somebody in the stall – like a bathroom stall, only you didn’t have to duck to see.

Of course I had to address the concerns of the board of directors in the beginning. It is not like I would be in competition with anybody. But some members remembered the problems when they had psychotherapists there before. Behaviorists didn’t really fit the ethos of the market, and various new-age practitioners were disruptive: complaints about the primal scream stand had been particularly vocal. (They moved on to city planning board meetings.) A moratorium on therapists had been declared after the unfortunate incident with the shock therapy stand, when a confused patient wandered off the end of the dock with a full backpack of rutabagas and sank like a stone. Even though the practice was both ecologically correct and sustainable (the electricity was generated by stationary bicycle) the legal liability was judged just too great. Jim Hardesty took back his custom-made Tesla coil to sell to some museum, and the sign: “Zap your worries: Real Brief Therapy,” kicked around until somebody recycled it as a garlic shelf.

Psychoanalysts are the Amish of the mental health professions: they never bought in to the technology, and so remember how to do things in the “old school” way. Dream analysis, a cornerstone of Amish practice, is as potentially illuminating as an MRI, with the advantage of being more portable and a lot cheaper. Of course, it depends upon what you are looking for: if you are searching for brain damage, it’s the right technology. If you are trying to identify sources of persistent and recurring personal suffering, though, a dream can be just the thing. All sorts of people lie down on my couch for a few minutes while shopping, like getting a quick massage on the Commons: people with emotionally-based physical illnesses, depression occurring in Ithacans other than during January through March, the ever-expanding sea of human troubles that are diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses (for these I use de-diagnosis) or the myriad manifestations of hopelessness, even in doctoral students. For these, dreams are just the instrument.

It is true that the preparation of a competent dream analyst takes vastly longer than that of a radiologist. In the Philadelphia psychoanalytic community, where I learned my trade, there is a saying that “It takes 25 years to know what to say in an analytic session.” You can’t really use a dream analysis book. That only tells you the associations of the person who wrote it, along with the usual collective unconscious material. To be competent at reading dreams requires long practice in developing a certain inward focus, an ability to grasp the person’s associational network or personal cosmology as separate from one’s own, and the opening of certain intuitive capacities. When you get it right, you can feel the illumination ripple through the person (this is where the Kleenex is often useful) following which their wings open just a little bit more. If you keep this up, eventually you can fly.

Just before the market opens, a short, weathered potato farmer from Newfield pulls the drape back and plops down on the couch. “Had this nightmare last night, shook me up,” doc, he starts. I was planting potatoes, but all that came up was marijuana.” “You farm organic?” I asked him. “Yeah: biodynamic.” As I suspected: it’s another dream about money, a common theme among organic farmers. I lean back, drawing in on my briar. “I see,” I say, leaning in attentively. “Tell me more.” I suspect that for this one I’m going to be paid in potatoes.

David's home sidewalk is in under his usual table in front of Gimmie Coffee on Cayuga Street.

5/28/09

The Angel in the Dining Room (2002)

The Angel in the Dining Room
David B. Schwartz

Dedicated to the memory of Hubert Zipperlen, 1911 - 2002

To us, as students of Rudolf Steiner, the child -whatever his mental condition may be -is more than his physical appearance may indicate. He is more than his body, more than his emotions, more than his spoken or unspoken words. He is even more than his achievements. In his appearance he is merely the outer shell of an infinite and eternal spiritual being.”
- Karl Köenig

We were getting ready for dinner when Bob saw the angel in the dining room. We were at Camphill Village, a community where people with mental retardation and others of us with less visible disabilities live together. Susan was at the stove when Bob reached out and touched both of us. He gestured mutely toward the corner, by the window overlooking the woods. He pointed toward the angel.

Bob is what I consider an intuitive, which is at the root of his uncanny ability to make contact with deeply disturbed autistic children. But I had come to recognize him as something even more unusual than that - a mystic. He was so sensitive that he picked up things out of the ether. I had a patient like that. As psychologically disturbed as she was, there were certain experiences and perceptions of hers that simply could not be explained by psychology. She simply “saw” them and they were there.

Bob was trembling and his words were caught on his tongue. He looked like a man who had not so much as seen a ghost, but was seeing one at that very moment. She was tall, he whispered slowly, describing what he was seeing as he averted his eyes and looked back for another frightening glance. She filled the corner to the high ceiling. She had long yellow hair, was gowned in flowing robes, and held a scroll in her hands. She looked beatifically and protectively over the scene of the people with disabilities setting the table. Her presence had something to do with them, he knew -the scroll with Susan and me, and our being in that place. I felt something -was it simply psychological contamination, or true mysterium tremendum?

For it seemed that I almost sensed the rustle of the angel’s wings, that sound in the old testament that brought unbelievers to their knees. “My Lord!,” I said to Bob, later, walking him down to the front door. “I sure am glad that I don’t see angels. I’m quite frightened enough as it is!”

After fifteen years of visiting Camphill Village, the closest of a hundred sister intentional communities around the globe, I had finally come to stay for a whole two weeks. Instead of just being a visitor, Susan and I were houseparents. We had a family: not just our own children, but Mike and Michael and Ben and Posey. It was around their table, become temporarily ours, that we gathered for meals. We recited grace, a blessing from anthroposophy, the transcendental philosophy created by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner almost a century ago. Our daughter, Stephanie, eight, spoke:

Sun, earth, water, and air,
Have wrought with God’s care
That the plants live and bear:
Thanking God for this food
In truth live we would
Bearing Beauty and Good.

We reached out and joined hands around the table and pronounced the final
ritual together: “Blessings on the meal.”

Then we ate. The vegetable dishes, carefully prepared by Susan despite the heat of the kitchen in the July heat wave in a village without the modern industrial comfort of air-conditioning, were savory. We had walked down to the garden barns with our cart just that morning, to pick up our allotment of just-picked vegetables from the biodynamic farm along the slopes of French creek. We passed clover fields luxurious with grazing cows, each with their names. Other villagers and co-workers like us tended the cows in the dairy.

The cows, unlike on most farms, retained their horns. This was because of biodynamic farming. Biodynamics was another fruit of Steiner’ s work, like the Waldorf school across the creek and its thousands of sisters, like anthroposophic medicine, and architecture, and other fields. In anthroposophic farming, cows kept their horns. The horns, I was eventually to figure out, had something to do with the unseen world, in which such beings as angels were said to reside over something as earthly as a cow-pasture.

Our family and work were not about any unseen world. They were about the seen world -the world of gardens, and cows, and houses between which one could walk. And a large part of the seen world, although in a quite different way than anything I had encountered in my thirty years in the field of developmental disabilities, were the people with disabilities themselves. At Camphill, there was no apartheid between such people and those who cared for them.

Here, as in all Camphill communities, no-one was paid. One simply made a life together. Early each morning, Mike, who rose early, walked down to the cow barn to bring back our freshly-filled pail of milk. Michael went down to the front step of our old mansion to bring up his Philadelphia Inquirer and read the scores of his teams, legs crossed on the couch, looking very much like an ordinary man reading the sports section before work. It was Susan who told me, eventually, that he could not read.

After breakfast dishes were washed, people, including me and Stephanie, went off to our day’ s work. I pulled out my tools and started installing a ceiling fan to stir the hot air in the dining room. Stephanie helped her new friend Alexandria pull a wagon around the village ªgatherª up all the little children from their houses for a morning’ s babysitting in the yard of Oberlin house, down the woods path from our home. Herbie showed up to chop the fresh vegetables for Susan for lunch. Sandy went right to the sink and began to energetically wash the breakfast dishes. Ross pulled out the vacuum cleaner and set about vacuuming the stairway inch by inch, just as he had done yesterday. And Jean, semi-retired but ironing a tablecloth, filled Susan in on all important events of everyone in the village since the day before. Sooner than we had imagined possible, we settled into the rhythms of an ordinary life. More rhythmic and more ordinary, in fact, than anything we had ever known.

Friendship

As days went on in that hot July, we came unexpectedly to feel as if we had found a home. Susan slipped into being a happy housemother at the center of a large home so beautifully that she started to glow, like a plant finally rooted in nourishing soil. I felt happy myself. I was living again in my life fully on foot, living in community, which I have pursued all of my life. We fell in love with the “villagers” there -and clearly, they with us. Every morning, as I rose early, as Mike appeared with the milk pail, making strange remarks to the air and wandering about outside, as Michael assumed the posture of the sports-reading businessman, Ben wandered in rubbing his sleepy eyes.

Ben was the quintessence of a man with Down’s syndrome; sweet, affectionate, acutely emotionally sensitive to rejection or anger at him, with the typical enlarged tongue of Down’s syndrome which made his speech thick and difficult to comprehend without practice. Down’s syndrome, the great founder of Camphill Dr. Karl Köenig said, was a fairly recent phenomenon in the world evolution. On a planet ever more self-destructively estranged from feeling, people with Down’s syndrome had appeared as an attempted corrective. They were all feeling . Now, of course, there was amniocentesis and abortion, and people with Down’s syndrome were disappearing. This comment of Dr. König was typically anthroposophic, in suggesting the largest possible view of a seemingly immediate phenomenon. Maybe he was right.

Surely Ben was a most positive influence on our often-challenging and
difficult to understand Stephanie. Stephanie, like the modern world, seemed a kind of a fascinatingly bright child version of Bill Gates. We presumed she would be very successful, but hoped that she would be able to enjoy relationships with others as an adult. We had tried constant explanation, exhortation, punishment -it was sometimes as if we were explaining human feeling to someone from Mars. In a week, Ben changed all that.

Ben and Stephanie immediately struck up a friendship. In many ways, they were at a similar level of emotional maturity. Soon our very “un-touchy” girl was hugging. They hugged good morning, they hugged goodnight, they played pretend games with Susan’ s stuffed animal, Buster, who became the house scapegoat for all trouble and bad behavior. They were inseparable, they were joyous. I had never seen Stephanie like this, and it was good.

Much to our astonishment, this change extended to us. This little girl who always wanted to be at a distance even from her mother, who objected to her mother even walking her into nursery school at three, began to crawl into her lap. She even started crawling into mine. Crucially, she seemed to penetrate the mystery of others’ feelings. Perhaps this was because Ben, with his fluid, open face, was as expressive as a mime. When he was happy, he smiled broadly. When he heard something that displeased him, he cried -real tears. In him maybe Stephanie could see what people felt.

Soon Susan made a close friend, a woman named Susie who came to help in the house. At first glance, I thought her to be quite cognitively impaired. She seem to say much. But then Susan started telling me of the many sotto voce observations Susie made over the course of a day. She was acutely observant, it turned out. She missed nothing, whether it was the peculiarities of our visiting friends, who somehow seemed far more impaired in the ability for human sharing and civility than the members of our new family. And all were related with a sympathetic, dry wit that made Susan, who has a similar sharply-observant but forgiving temperament, feel that she had found a friend.

One night Susan was talking on the phone with her mother, and her mother asked what she thought Susie’ diagnosis” Perhaps Susan should find it out and read up on it, so that she could best help her. Maybe I knew. After all, I was supposed to be a psychologist and developmental disabilities specialist. Putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she turned to me in bed, where I was reading. “ What did I think Susie’ diagnosis was?” she queried. “
Susie? I asked, looking up. “Humorist.”

My own deepest friend became Michael, the day he showed me his basement workshop. It was clear that he was both hesitant and very much wanted me to see it. The hesitancy only came of his fear of being rebuffed, that I would tell him I was too busy. “ Maybe tomorrow?” he asked me, while I was up on a ladder hanging a ceiling fan to at least move around the stuffy air. “ about right now? I replied, climbing down the ladder and setting down my electrical tools. I followed him into the basement. What I saw there in Michael’ s workshop was almost enough to make me cry. For I had entered into my grandfather’s workshop, and my uncles’ workshop. Even, to tell the truth, my own.

Everywhere Michael’s beloved tools hung in exquisite order. Screwdrivers ranked in racks. Saws hung from nails. Hammers of all sizes and types ranged across the walls, below sections of scrap wood carefully sorted by size. Wooden boxes of carefully straightened out and rusty used common nails were tacked to the front of his bench within ready reach. There was not a bit of dirt, or disorder, not a thing out of place. Among this sublime order I felt like a child in my grandfather’ workshop, my grandfather who also would never throw away a nail he could straighten. I still use his tin nail-boxes soldered out of discarded Prince Albert tobacco tins, although I could not claim such grandfatherly order as Michael. Were my grandfather to appear, it would be Michael’ s workshop, above my own, that would win his silent acknowledgement that all was as a workshop should be.

Against the power of this setting, there was only one thing missing: the ability to know how to use these tools to build something. Michael was painfully aware of this lack. It was that that he needed me for, he told me. To help him figure out what to do. In the center of the space was a recently-attempted project, a new workbench. It leaned down precipitously at one end. Michael knew that something hadn’t turned out quite right, but couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. He hadn’t a clue.

I had spent the last weeks -and years -dealing with the countless people without mental retardation who cross one’ s path in the world who didn’t have a clue, either. But what they lacked clues about were elemental things that were central to the knowledge of my well-raised, profoundly ethical friend. Someone who knew, also, what it to be a friend; what it was to subsume one’s own egotistic strivings freely to concern for the loving well-being of the other. To take one’ s greatest pleasure in life not from narcissistic self-gratification of all the tedious types; power, money, sexual conquest, and the pleasures of murder: personal, spiritual, environmental, global -but in “ seeing the other grow more beautiful, because we were together.”

My sickness with the latest of disappointing human beings spread across the surface of the earth in this latest, only minimally successful incarnate learning opportunity, had succeeded in opening my heart and eyes. Michael and I stood in the tidy workshop and I realized that in truth he was becoming beautiful to me and that unquestionably - he did not hide himself behind some persona - I was becoming beautiful to him. It was clear that we both sensed in each other qualities of honesty, and of faithfulness. We had been disappointed. And, happily, we had something to give each other. I took a tape measure and quickly determined the height discrepancy of the sides, pieced and marked an extension, and handed Michael the nails to bang into place. Then we rocked it on its side. It was perfect. We celebrated. You’re pretty smart, Michael Bernstein! ”he exclaimed happily. “ Yes, you are,” I agreed. Then we went upstairs to dinner.

Many years ago, I first puzzled over why Camphill afforded better lives to people than any lavishly-funded professional program I had ever seen. I read somewhere a founder pointing out that Camphill was not created as a service program for people with mental retardation. It was a community for everyone. The Camphill founders wished to live in community, and realized that it would be necessary to have people with mental retardation present in order to have it. I at last understood this.

At this time, we slowly became aware that the villagers that we had gotten to know and who had become our friends were recruiting us. They were straightforward: “ You have to move to the village and be our houseparents.” when you move here, I’ m going to work in your house.” They asked about school for Stephanie, and for Nate. With the immediacy of people with mental retardation, some people were packed up and ready to move. In with us. When we left, Michael told me that he was going to go down into his workshop and cry. All this made us pause to wonder if what we had conceived as a summer working vacation might be in fact a call to a new life. This possibility was as unsettling as seeing an angel in one’s dining room.

Back in the World

Once released from social restraints by modernization, however, [Illich claims] a disembedded economy proved to be a relentless force, one that dismantled traditional societies piece by piece. The innumerable and varied ways that people got by and got along were replaced with a life of dependency on commodities...
- Eugene Burkhart

No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma
of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.”
- Ivan Illich

When I got back home from Camp Hill, it seemed as if the dump had caught on fire. Suburban sprawl was steadily expanding, even in the intolerable and exhaust-choked heat. Heavy equipment had leveled what had been a woods only when we left into stripped subsoil ready for an asphalt parking lot. People plowed through the choked atmosphere in air-conditioned automotive bubbles, passing from one cool, bright, windowless big box store to another, a flat sun hanging heavy in the orange sky.
Returning to Hershey after the time in Camphill was like returning to an inner-city tenement after a summer as a fresh-air kid. What was marginally tolerable before now seemed unbearable in comparison.

This is of course the way that change takes place; you get a glimpse outside of your existing situation, and the polarity of experience heightens the contrast so much that it motivates you to take steps toward a new possibility rather than put up with the old. I am always encouraged when I see this with one of my patients. That's when they start moving, albeit with struggle and difficulty. So it was with us: we had left our summer big family and community, the village one walked on foot on paths through the fields and woods, the life so demanding that one fell into bed tired out every night, looking forward to the next day, for a suburban America where one sees faces through the glass of minivans, driving through the blighted landscape of modernity. It was enough to give you the bends.


Dr. Köenig’s vision.

A few years ago I had stood on the site of the first Camphill, overlooking the River Dee on “ Camp Hill” in northern Scotland near Aberdeen, the ancient hill once site to the Northward-thrusting Roman legions. It had been more than fifty years then since Dr. Köenig had come to this place. It was here that he and his colleagues, a group of young physicians and friends fleeing the Nazi holocaust, had made their lonely stand against the forces of darkness by planting “ a candle on a hill.” In company with handicapped children they on that remote hill sought to found a transcendentally -inspired community just as their home Europe was burning in Hitlerian destruction and murder. The
candle lit by those pioneers had burned brightly and had spread throughout the world. Now each stood on their own hills, in contrast to the modern incarnations of evil which were once more gobbling up the world.

It was materialism -the belief that the world was merely matter, a modern form of the ancient sin of hubris, that was destroying the earth. The other six of the ever-present seven deadly sins were, as always, flourishing too. Camphill and anthroposophy’s key contribution, it seems to me, were in trying to break what William James called “ the reign of hardness” in viewing the world. The world was more than “stuff, and people were more than the shells of their exteriors - even people with disabilities. They were a divine mystery. The earth itself was a divine mystery, to be treated with reverence. And there was a way to perceive the divine, to see the world as transcendent and holy, rather than as a site and as consumers for another Wal-Mart.

Bob, when he came into our home and saw the angel, was such a person who could see things -a mystic. But he perceived transcendental aspects of the world with his heart only. He could read the scroll, however. It had to do with me and Susan, and our linked destiny with the people there, he told me. More than that he could not say, he said: such messages are never specific, but rather dropped into one’ s heart to be worked out in one’ s own way.

But he was sure that the angel’s visit and message was about us somehow, and this place. Rudolf Steiner, in contrast to Bob, brought both mystical intuition and a disciplined intellect to the project of seeing the unseen world. The difference was illustrated by my late friend Hubert Zipperlen, who used the example of someone who could perceive auras around people and who said that someone who had a lot of green in her aura, so “he was good with plants.” Just seeing a color in an aura, he pointed out, had nothing whatsoever to do with knowing what that might mean, people at Camphill quietly try to perceive things beyond matter. When Hubert worked in his garden, he talked with the elemental beings who brought growth to vegetables. Water sprites found a home in streams and flow-forms. And most importantly, everyone strove to see the “ infinite being” in each person with a handicap passing through this life. As Köenig
wrote:

We are convinced that every human being has his individual existence not only here on earth between birth and death, but that every child was a spiritual entity before he was born, and that every man will continue to live after he has passed through the gate of death. Thus any kind of physical or mental handicap is not acquired by chance or misfortune. It has a definite meaning for the individual and is meant to change his life.”

The presence of people with disabilities was an opportunity to not only them, but each of us. Perhaps my own handicaps, then, against which I had struggled so long, had meaning as well. Perhaps they had meaning in changing my life. In considering the core passing from incarnation to incarnation in myself and in all those around me I had an opportunity to see the world become alive, transcendent, holy. And even the cows and the fields could keep their horns because the possibility that they might gore other livestock was far outweighed by their importance as antennae bringing cosmic forces into the farm. So I decided to stand, myself, poking my own horns tentatively into the world beyond matter, standing out on a hillock under the stars among the cows, hearing their low mooing in the shadows. What might I discover in such a strange and powerful place? What did the angel’s scroll say about Susan and me, and the company of these people? Maybe, we decided, we should find out.


August, 2002

A Eulogy for Harry Guise (1997)

A Eulogy for Harry Guise
August 14, 1997
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Harrisburg

David B. Schwartz


It is with a sad heart that I walk from my home in the shadow of this cathedral to join in mourning the loss - but celebrating the life - of my colleague, friend, and mentor Harry Guise. I wish to sing the praises of a good man.

Harry and I worked together. Anyone who knew Harry even slightly knew that for him work was not a casual affair. He worked hard all of his life, and his work was helping people. I want to tell one story that tells a little about this work of his.

A few years ago our organization in government had an opportunity to hire someone for the summer to help us. When the paperwork was completed, the bureaucratic office handling hiring offered immediate approval - if we would take a person they’d like us to hire. In fact, she could start tomorrow. But Harry felt differently. We were an office to help people with disabilities, and we should hire someone with a disability for this job. So he persisted.

Harry had to persist a long time to get what he wanted, and the summer was long past and he had done a lot of additional work before he was able to hire such a person. That is how Horace came to work with us.

Horace was an older man who seemed to have never had much of a break in life. Harry took an interest in him, spent time with him, and he did good work for us. When the position ran out, he went on and moved someplace else.

A couple of years later, I was surprised to see Horace sitting in Harry’s office, visiting him. He had come back to town, and the first thing he did was to see Harry. Horace was dying, Harry told me later, and had come back to see Harry one more time. In Harry, this old disabled African-American man who no-one seemed to want had found someone who wanted him, who encouraged him, who saw something in him. So it was no surprise, actually, that he would come back to see Harry one more time.

How many Horaces were there in Harry’s long working life? How many people did he take an interest in and help them to find the blessings of work, a blessing that they would otherwise have not known, and which was so important to him? In fact, if you assembled all the people who Harry helped in this way, the crowd would fill this Cathedral, and the street beyond.

Harry, as others have said, was very self-effacing. He would never sit still for such praise as this. I used to tease him with a nickname I had for him: “Columbo,” after the Peter Falk character in the detective series. For Harry, like Columbo, combined his self-effacing nature with extraordinary perception and intelligence in service of his calling. Like Columbo, when he needed to get to the bottom of some knotty problem he would engage people in offhand conversation. If it was winter, perhaps he would even be wearing a rumpled raincoat. People would take in his comforting diminutive figure, look into his innocent face and his twinkling Irish eyes, and they would tell him everything. Then Harry, who would never miss the subtlest of inflections, would figure out from what they had unself-consciously told him just what to do to be able to get someone a job, or fifty people a job, or a hundred people a job.

I quickly learned not to do anything important without asking him. I would sit down in the big chair in his office, and run by him some new, enthusiastic idea of mine, and Harry would reveal the gaping hole right before my feet that I would disappear into if I took one more step. “How on earth do you know where all these holes are?,” I once asked him in amazement. “Oh,” he replied with a wry chuckle, “I fell in all of them.”

Sometimes, after patiently hearing out some new exciting proposed plan of mine, and being asked what he thought of it, Harry would ask, “How about if I sleep on it?” This, I came to realize, was Harry’s gentle way of saying “David, that is such an extraordinarily bad idea that I am actually worried about you, and maybe if you sleep on it you will forget about it by the morning.”

He was always saving me, and us.

In a meeting over some difficult problem, when everybody was starting to get just a little irritable, Harry would look up and say “Well, are we having fun yet?”


It is important to sing the praises of unsung heros, and Harry was such a hero. He was a hero of mine. He helped people. He was never confused about what was right. He was unwavering in his commitment to people, and untiring in his efforts. He taught me patience.

Thanks for being patient with me, Harry. And be patient for a moment, past the threshold of this world, while I sing your praises; that of a good man.

Post-Katrina in the Big Easy (2008)

The Fragility of Natural and Human Culture in New Orleans

David B. Schwartz
3/30/08

“Culture,” the social philosopher Ivan Illich once said, “is that which holds the economy at bay.” A culture says that here in this place we do things in this particular way, we live in this particular way, which we hold above the measure of money alone. It is the unique, local way in which we “face illness, suffering, and death.” Here we eat in a certain way, live in a certain way, create in a certain way. “When a culture perishes,” Margaret Mead once wrote, it is a terrible loss for the world:

Human cultures are the most distinct creations of human beings, drawing as they do not only upon the special contributions of the singularly gifted, but upon the imagination, explicit and implicit, of every man, woman, and child who live within them, and through them, and who, each generation, remodel the traditions they have received from their cultural ancestors. But although human cultures are the most distinctive creations of the human, they are also the most fragile, for they live primarily in the habituated beings of living persons. Like a dance, for which the music and choreography have never been written down, a great part of human culture is lost to humanity when the group which has carried it, devotedly, in every word or gesture, is dispersed, or destroyed, or forsakes the traditional ways for ways which are new.*




One might think of the borders of a culture as a kind of levee holding back the sea of monetary economics which drives the modern world. Standing in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward I could see where the material and cultural levees failed in hurricane Katrina, and the scraped and barren ruins left in the wake of that breach. I stood where an enormous Mississippi barge, surfing a wall of water, scoured a living neighborhood from the face of the earth, taking a big part of a musical culture with it.

I was shown around the lower 9th by my old friend Richard Waller, a conservationist and volunteer with Common Ground, a visionary and unusual community organization operating out of a tiny house stuffed with 50 college students. They were stacked in bunkbeds, using one bathroom and a garden hose for a shower. The students and the organization’s leadership were there to try to do what they could for those who had called the lower 9th home. Richard’s own focus was not in house reconstruction, but in attempting to restore the wetlands whose slow death over decades had allowed the full force of wind and storm surge to strike unmoderated from the Gulf of Mexico.

“This neighborhood,” Richard gestured, “once had the highest percentage of home ownership by African-American people in the entire United States.” If one listened to mere reports on the news, one would assume that Katrina had washed away some kind of impoverished slum. But this was far from the case. This marginal, below sea-level land was once home to a unique culture whose art has spread throughout the world. These streets gave birth to the blues. It gave birth to jazz. It held the home of the legendary jazzman Fats Domino, who had to be pried away from his beloved piano by his family as the water rose. It’s a good thing, because when the levee broke his piano submerged under fifteen feet of water. It stayed for three weeks. The few remaining houses, scattered here and there across now open lots, still retained numbers spray-painted by national guard troops showing the number of bodies to be removed. There were 1600.

Why did art flourish here? What was so rich about this soil that such creativity emerged? One thing that was unusual about this neighborhood was what they did with their small homes. And they were small – tiny, in fact, by modern American standards. Most of these modest homes did not even have air-conditioning despite its near, humid subtropical climate. While almost everyone in an American suburb strives virtually ceaselessly to pay mortgages, car loans, and increasing improvements, something which requires two incomes to support even with effort, people in the lower 9th part of the “Big Easy” took quite a different approach. With many houses handed down and paid for, often only part-time jobs – even as musicians – were needed. They chose the luxury of time over productivity. With only part-time effort required to secure an acceptable roof over their heads, they could sit on their porches, drink some beer on a hot afternoon, play music, and sing. We are told by anthropologists that “primitive” tribes, including some still existing today, spent and spend much less time securing food and shelter than people in modern societies. In the modern world, work without end is taken to an extreme. Yet right in America, in a Southern city which was home to a community of free slaves even during the civil war, a certain traditional way of living persisted even into the beginning of the 21st century. Persisted, that is, until the levee broke.

Why did the levee break? In a phrase, the war against culture and the war against nature are the same thing. Richard took me out to the edge of the wetlands bordering New Orleans. Walking through piles of rusted steel from depots supplying offshore oil derricks, we came to the indistinct boundary between land and water. “They say down here that when God was trying to decide whether to make this part of the world land or sea, he finally decided upon - neither,” Richard said. You could see where the hurricane had torn up vast swatches of wetland grass, leaving reflective pools of open water that presented no resistance to winds and storm-surges. It was this grass that Richard and his teams of student volunteers were replanting from grasses sprouted in children’s blue wading pools. It seemed an inspiring effort, against overwhelming need.

But what was of greatest importance in that wind-swept place was not what you could see, but what you couldn’t. What was not there to be seen were the endless cypress and hardwood forests that within recent memory covered the spot where we were standing, as far to the north as one could see.

The previous day Richard showed my son and I through such an intact cypress swamp. Tall cypress trees with their characteristic “knees” emerged from the ground that was neither solid nor liquid, in the way that cypresses are particularly adapted to flourish in. Around their roots, a rich and complex ecosystem flourished, too: tall grasses, wild irises in bloom, seemingly somnolent alligators, and more snakes – mostly venomous brown cottonmouths, than I had ever seen anywhere. The boggy land practically squirmed with them. Although the swamp had been hit by Katrina too, here miles of established wetland vegetation had helped to muffled the blow.

It was only as long ago as when Richard and I were in high school that the Army Corps of Engineers had carved a canal through a swamp just like this to make barge traffic from the Mississippi to the Gulf more efficient – and profitable. It was called, by it’s acronym, “Mr. Go.” This immense and destructive undertaking had never turned out to be useful – it was now being decommissioned - but one thing that it did accomplish was to let the salty water of the Gulf up into the freshwater swamp. This breaching of an invisible biological levee caused the death of the forests, and the grasses, and the ecosystem itself. When the hurricane swept through this wasteland, the man-made levees failed. When they did, the culture of the lower ninth ward went under.

While much is made about how governmental systems failed in the emergency, the failure of technology is hardly a surprise. Louisiana is, too, hardly Holland, where an efficient system sticks its technological thumb in the first trickle of a leak. Here there was a pumping station that, unmaintained, failed to start when remotely signaled. We admired the massive concrete construction of a watertight door made to swing shut over a railroad cut in case of flood. Also remotely activated, it was disabled by rusty chains and padlocks. It was like chaining shut an emergency exit. You would have to wade out there with a key to get the thing closed in a hurricane.

Cypress swamps need no activation. They just need to be there. To claim that global warming spawned a killer hurricane is just a fragment of the story. All aspects of nature manifest boundaries that define inside from outside. They may be a cell wall, or a saline differential or a cultural boundary of language, of art, of ways of living. They are all levees that hold the economy at bay, to use Illich’s terms. For it is the unlimited workings of a freemarket economy that is the sea that ultimately covers them all. It starts with the death of a wetlands, proceeds to the collapse of man-made levees, and ends with the death of a culture. Standing in the remains of the lower 9th ward, where concrete steps punctuating blank grassy fields are all that remain of a community, you can walk the lonely streets and strain to hear a single blues note.

When the levee broke in the lower 9th, the storm had passed. It was a bright, blue-skied day. Everyone but the meteorologists, whose accurate warnings were ignored by politicians and the news media, breathed a sign of relief. When the levee gave way, it was like the proverbial Flood.

The legendary urbanologist Jane Jacobs published a book describing how cities really worked at about the same time that the “Mr. Go” canal was dredged. Called The Death and Life of American Cities, its original title was this: Why the Planners Are Wrong. While planners like New York’s Robert Moses sat in high towers marking neighborhoods for demolition and replacement by public works, Jane Jacobs pushed her small children in a stroller through streets and parks, noticing the cultural ecology of people as carefully as Richard observes the ecology of botanical nature. In New Orleans, you can see in dramatic form why human planning always fails to equal the intelligence of the natural world, a world that encompasses cells and people alike.

When Ivan Illich first encountered the word “planning,” which emerged in the language for the first time as the canal’s dredging operations, he was puzzled at his meaning. He went to visit his old friend theologian Jacques Maritan. Did he have any idea what that word meant? As Illich told the story, Maritan sat back in his study and reflected a bit. Then he responded. “I believe,” he replied carefully, “that it is a new word for the sin of presumption.” A more common word for presumption is hubris; the sin that is inexorably followed by nemesis. It is believing, as Illich used to observe, that man can do what God cannot.

Pulling out of Common Ground’s makeshift nursery with a load of idealistic college students and sprigs of seagrass, Richard heads out for a day of wading in the mud planting single stalks of grass against an ocean. He is cheered by these students, who are flocking to New Orleans to help. He’s one of the few “greybeards” among them. He’s been through this kind of thing before. He believes that it is particularly good that they are here, because New Orleans shows them first-hand what the world that they are going to be living in will increasingly look like. New Orleans, he speculates, is merely the first American city to fall to global warming. They can get a good look at what they are going to have to deal with as adults.

Pushing a CD into the dashboard player, he punches up his favorite current song, Bob Dylan’s 1983“Blind Willie McTell.” Dylan looks out the window of his New Orleans hotel and sings homage to the man he considers the finest blues singer of them all, a man who drew upon the traditions of the Delta. Dylan’s song comes out of the pickup’s tinny speakers:

Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

There’s no money in singing the blues. And there is no money in restoring wetlands. But that doesn’t stop these people. Cautioning his volunteers against alligators, snakebite, and sunburn, Richard wades out with his crew to plant the grass he has grown from seed divisions.




* Mead, Margaret, Foreword, in Zborowski and Herzog, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, New York, Schocken, 1973, p. 11.


Common Ground is a nonprofit community organization founded by Malik Rahim. It welcomes volunteers and contributions http://www.commongroundrelief.org/

On Acupuncture (1992)

A Letter to Ivan Illich on Acupuncture
1992

David B. Schwartz


A few days before Christmas, the evening before my then wife Beth was to
get on a plane for Cincinnati, she was suddenly afflicted with a severe,
unremittting, pain in her left arm. We knew what it was because she had had
it before, exactly two years ago. It was a pinched nerve in her neck. Then she
had spent six weeks on her back on painkillers, and the siege had left her with
a deadened nerve. Now it had come again, this time even more severe. And
this time there was another thing: Beth was six months pregnant. It was a
holiday weekend, and she was in agonizing pain.

When you suddenly are faced by a loved one who is an extreme and
possibly dangerous medical situation, you reach for everything to help
healing that you know. You call the obstetrician, of course, who digs up a
neurologist to meet you at the emergency room, and then you deal with the
bureaucracy of the emergency room, which is all jammed up with poor people
whose kids have the flu and who have no money to see a doctor, and you and
the neurologist have to wait to get together because you have to go through
triage to get a room. And of course when he examines Beth you have to think
to yourself that he could have talked with her and checked her reflexes in the
hall, or in a booth of the corner diner, or even in our own home. He gives her a
prescription for codeine, which you can get over the counter in other
countries and which I now know is of course is inferior to opium by
inhalation, which has been illegal ever since the Chinese built the railways. The
doctors can't do a Magnetic Resonance Image test because Beth is pregnant,
and they can't of course do surgery unless it's an emergency, since she's
pregnant. So I bring her home to lie in bed on a special pillow and suffer the
pain and see if she gets better or worse. If it gets bad enough so that she
loses bowel and bladder function, we're to call. As it turns out it gets worse,
but not worse in that way.

We started with our chiropractor, who was very helpful but who could not
affect the problem with the sensory root, then went to the neurologist, as I
described. The pain intensified and Beth started visibly sinking in color and
vitality, and started to cease eating. It got pretty scary. I called up my
mother, who drove down and immediately took over the kitchen and bought a
soup chicken. I got Beth's closest sister, who is a neurological intensive care
nurse, to get on a plane and fly up from Florida. They were on their way now.
Finally I called up my friend and master acupuncturist Bob Duggan at home
down in Maryland. Bob grasped the situation immediately in a very broad way,
and gave me some acupuncture points to start massaging. And because Beth
could not move, let alone travel two hours, he did something that was to me
just incredible; out of friendship he got in his car and he drove all the way up
here on a Sunday afternoon and treated her right in her own bed. After that
point she started to get better, and Beth's sister Joanie arrived and started
arranging ice treatments and traction and all sorts of other nursing things
and my mother made delicious meals that sparked Beth's appetite. Soon what
had been a very scary, sinking situation in which we were alone and sliding
slowly towards surgery and the potential loss of this child started to be
reversed. After a week and a half, for the first time, Beth got up, walked
downstairs gingerly in her neck brace, and joined us for dinner.
So that is what happened.


Caring and Compassion

A friend of mine named Seymour Sarason once wrote a quite wonderful book
called Caring and Compassion in Clinical Services. In it he examined the
frequent complaint about modern medicine; that doctors were increasingly
distant, technological, and lacking in real compassion. Of course he ended up
looking at what he called the "disease of professionalism," a subject that I
have learned so much about from both he and Illich. In the people involved with helping
Beth there was a great range of caring and compassion, and I think a certain
theme emerged. The obstetrician is an excellent person, somebody who would
talk to us directly at 7:50 on a Sunday morning, and who could rustle up a
neurologist, something we would have been unable to do directly. But she was
a medical specialist; all she could do ultimately was make a referral.
Dr. Shaffer, the chiropractor, was much more accessible; he lived above his
office, he answered his own phone at home, and he immediately opened up his
office and saw Beth; twice on one Sunday. He was personal and concerned.
Perhaps above all, he touched; his fingers ran up and down the surfaces of
my wife's back, bringing up a picture of the minute alignment of vertebra, of
muscles in spasm. He hammered tiny light vibrations into the resonance of
muscles and bone and nerve, attempting to change their tune, head cocked to
hear like an intuitive piano tuner. But while he worked, while he figured, his
fingers, his hands, his close presence reassured, cared, and made evident his
desire to cure Beth, this particular person in this particular distress here on
his treatment table.

The neurologist was a nice, evidently kind, but somewhat distant physician
who was not in a rush. We saw him later at his office. He sat behind a big
desk; we sat on the other side. Then Beth sat on an examining table and he
briefly checked her reflexes; yes, some further deterioration was taking
place. Neurologists, even within the medical profession, have a reputation for
being cool, emotionally isolated, "cerebral." Surely he was picturing a lot from
his verbal and brief physical examination. But the main difference from the
chiropractor was pointed out by Beth as we walked out the door of his office.
"You know," she said, compared to Dr. Shaffer, he hardly touched me."
In fact, the only kind of touch proposed was that which was scheduled for
two weeks if she did not get better; an electromyogram. Beth had had this
before; what it consisted of was sitting very quietly while the doctor drove
steel needles into the muscles of her already throbbing arm, moved and
wiggled them around, while ink lines were made on chart paper. This would tell
us with some accuracy if deterioration was taking place in the motor root. I
already had noticed that Beth did not have the strength in her left hand to
squeeze the toothpaste tube, so I knew some deterioration was taking place.
This was not very accurate, of course. But for what end accuracy in this
case? If the only treatment was referral to a neurosurgeon, and they won't
and shouldn't do surgery anyway, why do the test? It was in this instance
that your phrase "medicalized torture" came to mind.

Then, at the most desperate moment, Bob Duggan appeared. I thought it was
tremendously interesting, as I sat in the room watching Bob examine and
treat Beth, what was taking before me. For Bob was not sitting in a chair by
the bed; he was leaning over, and crawling around on the bed on either side of
her, and behind her, and scrunching up against the headboard to get to and
reach the right places; touching, testing, probing, looking in her eyes, at her
face, inserting needles, massaging points, tracing meridians. There was no
professionalistic barrier at all. He was just my friend Bob, up here to help
Beth. Flat on her back, in bed, was where she was; therefore he had to drive
all the way up here, come to her bedroom, and get onto the bed with her.
thought what the neurologist might think if I proposed that he should do the
same. He would, I am sure, be stricken with anxiety! But this is what
had to be done.

Bob was with us all of the time; as guide through this experience, as helper an
interpreter. He would call every morning to talk to Beth and see how she was
progressing. After this one treatment, things really got stirred up and begin
to move around. For the first time she got pains in her other arm. Her skin
color started to improve. Then she started to get well.

What about Joanie, Beth's sister, the nurse? She immediately came in and
kissed her and hugged her and started treating the spine aggressively with
icepacks, lovingly and firmly helping Beth to stand them because the cold
hurt at first. As the pain started to ebb slightly, she lured her through the
risk of more excruciating pain to try some hours without codeine. They got
so she could be out of pain if perfectly immobile; then the next day up to eat
breakfast, then a brief journey out of the sick room downstairs, then a rest;
now take the codeine now before it starts to hurt; now let's do traction.
Aside from her intuitive and skillful nursing gifts, the kinds of practical
things to help of which the neurologist apparently knew nothing, Joanie, like
Bob, was where Beth was; in the bed, snuggled up in my ordinary place,
drinking coffee together, watching movies on the television, talking, napping. I
could see that Joanie was not only giving her nursing care, she was coaxing
and luring Beth out of the paralysis and pain she had become encapsulated in,
back tentatively into the world of upright movement.
In asking Joanie about what she was doing, she replied that she wasn't sure
she really knew, completely; it was intuitive, it was seat-of-the-pants. "The
main thing," she said to me, "is that when you start helping someone, anyone,
they have to know that you are absolutely there for them, you are in this
with them, that even if you're not exactly sure of what to do you are not
going to retreat and go away."

Finally, there was my mother, who works most winters caring for elderly
wealthy people in Florida. There was chicken soup, and more chicken soup,
and roast chicken, and snack trays brought to the room, and daily trips to
the grocery store to bring back mountains of stuff that I was just
confounded we could need all of, but it was as if she was going out to gather
sustenance, activity, color and smell and taste, to bring the wind of life into
the house that had formerly been so sick and still. We had a birthday party
for my mother in the midst of it all, right around Beth's bed.

Now each of these people, these healers were, it could be said, professionals.
But what an incredible range there was. What was the essential difference? I
must say, I was impressed with what seemed to be the influence of
economics. The one who was the strongest part of the economic system, the
neurologist, with his office and his instruments and network of referrals and
need to see patients in the emergency room, was the least influential of the
healers. The chiropractor, who lived above his office and who really
had a healing touch, was much more of a simple "tradesman." But the real
healing presence came from Bob and Joanie, who had no economic connection
at all. Joanie, of course, because she was Beth's sister, who Beth in turn had
once cared for and run her pig farm when she was laid up. The unexpected
event here was Bob, a friend who I had met through a friend in faraway Lee
and Manfred's and Ivan’s apartment in Oldenburg, Germany. Who would leave
the clinic, the desk, and just come. For what? I would have to ask him. For
care and compassion? Surely. But primarily from philia, because we were
friends and when I was in distress and called him he not only talked to me, but
he came.

This also reinforced something that I have been thinking about much lately;
that under the smothering and distorting layer of economics, of the
commodification of care, that here and there the caring, skilled, ethical
professional clinician can still be found to exist. They are a fragment of an
older culture of healing not yet displaced by modernism.


Which Body?

I had thought a bit about compassion and clinical professionalism before, of
course, so these events served mostly to help me notice a few finer points
about it. What was completely new to me was the evident and striking
difference in the body of my wife that each of these clinicians saw.

I began to see for the first time what my friend Ivan Illich was pointing to in
his work on the 'history of the body." And I had recently read a book by his
and my friend Barbara Duden. One phrase which kept coming back to me from
it was her realization in The Woman Beneath the Skin that in reading about
the bodies of 18th century Frenchwomen that her own experience of her
body was useless as a basis and guide. Visiting Bob Duggan’s school of
acupuncture I began to hear about this very unfamiliar acupuncture body,
which was similarly different from the allopathic medical body I had been
trained to see, and which I unreflectedly thought the body was.

Here all these acupuncturists were talking about six superficial pulses on each wrist that I had never even heard of. Of qualities of fire and of wood. They were talking
about a body I had never seen, but which was very evidently there.
In the space of a very few days, I saw three practitioners examine my wife as
I watched. I tried to follow along and picture in my mind what they were
seeing. The chiropractor, as I mentioned, followed the alignments and
movements and tensions of the body with a delicate sensing hand. It was
clear that he could feel the spine as his hand rippled along it; all of its fine
bony edges, where the nerves inserted; how the slight turn of a foot turned
up the tension in the right shoulder just so. The neurologist's body, in
contrast, seemed very abstract. He didn't need to touch it. From my own
limited training in that area, I could I think picture what he might be seeing.
There were all of these neurons, and synapses, and disks. It was a cool, clean
wiring diagram of sorts. The neurologist's icon for the body seemed to be the
computer-generated images of the MRI, showing the solid architecture of the
body, the map the neurosurgeon clipped to the back-lit screen before he
began to cut.

In the body seen by the neurologist, the fact that my wife's skin had started
to get pale and flaky at the same moment that the pain had started, or the
fact that her head was chronically congested, or what might be happening in
her emotional life when this pain erupted, were not part of his picture of the
body; they simply didn't exist. Even my wife's good obstetrician, when
questioned about the skin change, suggested she see a dermatologist if she
really wanted to pursue it. These aspects of the body were apparently part
of another specialist's picture. And all pictures in allopathic medicine seemed
to be taken at extreme magnification, like a snapshot with the wrong lens
that turns out showing only somebody's belt buckle, with their head and feet
beyond the frame.

Then there was Bob's picture of the body. Trying to follow what he was doing,
I watched him closely. It was clear that the body he was working on was
almost a completely different body that the body of the neurologist, and very
different in many ways from much of the chiropractor's. He put tiny needles
in the right arm, and made the pain in the left arm moved around. He showed
me where to press under the right armpit to reduce the pain in the left arm -
and it did! He had me massage a point near the right collarbone, and Beth
reported a warmth going down her left arm, ebbing away the pain. He saw the
fact that the pain was moving around as good, and helped I think to free the
energy up so that it could move around some more.

To Bob, the skin and the congestion were intimately connected; breathing
related to ability to heal and reduce inflammation, something that must be
opened up. He saw drinking hot things and avoiding cold as things that had
effects on the body before him. He looked at Beth's eyes; asked about her
energy level, saw the health crisis as a process with the nadir behind us, and
stirred the fires of healing. Even to the small extent I could follow the image
of the body he saw in my wife it was quite astonishing.

I began though this to see a little bit of what Illich was talking about in
examining the certainty that I had assumed to be the body. Can I say that the
body is a participatory creation? What a wonderful body the body of
traditional Chinese medicine seems to be. In the allopathic medical body,
there is no way of healing in this case but rest; no way of controlling pain but
giving the entire central nervous system a mild painkiller. In the acupuncture
body, I sit and massage points on the foot, wrist, and breastbone. When I
move the latter, my wife's breathing instantly slows down and deepens, the
tension starts to go out of her body, and the pain subsides a bit. I put my
hand on her swollen stomach. Every time I massage the breastbone, the baby
kicks.

Community

I did not consider myself to have deep roots in the community of Harrisburg
back when Beth was sick. So it really was a kind of a surprise to me to learn
what connections we actually had when we needed them so much.
Since we were unexpectedly at home for Christmas with nothing much in the
house, a friend from my office dropped by with a complete Christmas dinner
that we could eat on the bed. Jack at the pharmacy on the corner ordered
the special pills Beth needed. When I stopped by our neighborhood Greek diner
to pick up a milkshake to try to get Beth to eat something, the owner
refused to charge me for it, sending it along with get-well wishes. Since funny
movies helped distract Beth from the pain, I'd go over to the little movie
store on the next street to get her daily "movie prescription" refilled. Every
day the owners, true movie fanatics, would debate what would be the best
"classic" to send over, and inquire how she liked the last one. After a week,
they started to keep a list of ideas they had on the bulletin board behind the
counter in preparation for my evening visit.
The most moving thing, though, was Mary and David's visit. Two years ago
when we were in town alone we had a homeless mother and her three kids
over from the shelter for Christmas with us, and we became friends. We
helped them to get out and to set up, and I had thought to myself that this
Christmas they would again be celebrating it in their own home. We hadn't
seen them for a while but then Christmas night Mary and her oldest son David
rang the doorbell to come and wish us Merry Christmas and bring some gifts.
They had heard Beth was ill from a friend who runs a stand at the market.
Them reappearing was really the nicest Christmas gift of all. We had been
there for them, I guess, and they were there for us. We were there for each
other.

All of these things; the response of our friends and neighbors, my mother
and Beth's sister appearing, made me think about something that Illich said
once; that culture was ”that with which we faced illness, suffering, and death.”
I had thought that this seemed a somewhat unusual definition of culture at
the time. This experience brought home to me in a deeply personal fashion
how all we have to look to really is our culture, and that even when you think
that you are in a place where there is not much surrounding you there is
often more than you think.

Everything good that happened to us through this; Bob's trip up, the help of
family and friends and neighbors, took place within the realm of friendship, or
family, or neighborhood. And even the useful clinical help we received was
cultural first, and professional second.

A month or two later Beth was much better. In fact, she seemed completely
recovered. We had since seen a neurosurgeon, and he told us that despite the
lack of pain there was progressive motor loss, and that if she did not have
surgery after the baby is delivered (presuming there was no recurrence
before) that there was a danger of becoming significantly disabled. It was a
worrisome prospect. He seemed quite sure. He looked at the MRI (seeing,
incidentally, a different structural problem than the other physicians read
there) and there the problem was, plain as day. Perhaps, I worried, he was
correct.

Neurosurgeons are trained, and skilled, and can see something - the nerves -
much better than I could. But I, I learned, could see something that he could
not; that the body which he saw and accepted with such certainty is only one
body of many. There are many healers, and correspondingly many bodies. And
beyond the individual body, there is also the vision that includes the person,
physically, psychologically, spiritually (to use the closest available terms) as
one part of a network of others of which this body is inextricably part, such
networks themselves being part and expression of a larger culture of
meaning. Perhaps, I began to understand, culture is not only that with which
we face illness, suffering, and death, but that which defines these very
experiences. It is culture, after all, that gives us the specific bodies that we
are so certain that we have. This helped me to reflect more about why in my
own work on healing I have been so continuously drawn to the structure of
culture, rather than to the structure of nerves, whence I started twenty-five
years ago.
Our son Nate, who was three months away from his birth when Beth was sick,
is now ten years old. And Beth is fine. She seems just about as strong with
her left arm as she is with her right. Maybe a little less; I don’t know. She
carries heavy things around and doesn’t favor one arm. So I guess it remains
no problem for her.

She does have a problem every once and a while. Her back starts to knot up
in the same way that preceeded her terrible attack. Curiously, it is always at
the same time; around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest, a few
days before Christmas. She always tends to slow down, rest, and take a few
days off work. She gets some chiropractic adjustments from Dr. Shaffer,
and maybe a massage. Sometimes we used to drive down to see Bob for
an acupuncture treatment. The pinched nerve has never, so far,
come back. We felt lucky.

When Christmas comes, though, we always used to think back on what
happened that Christmas tenyears ago, when Beth didn’t have surgery after
all, and I learned so much about our bodies and about our community.


Previously published as: “An Occasion to Think About Healing: A Letter to Ivan Illich.”
The Journal of Traditional Acupuncture, XIV, 2, Spring, 1992, 15-18, 49-50. Excerpted in Quintessence, 13(2), 1-2, as The Acupuncture Body.