Ernest Becker

How Long Does He Have?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 7 Comments

I don’t know, but I wonder if anyone has asked any of my family or friends that question about me. It’s a common question in movies or on television ‘medical’ dramas. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to answer that question unless the circumstances have been set up ahead of time to determine the time of anyone’s death. In most circumstances we just don’t know. In some we do. Maybe you have a gun and are about to shoot a hapless victim. In that circumstance, you would precisely know the day and time of your victim’s death. Somebody on death row in the U.S. would know when they were scheduled to die, but with all the appeals possible, some death row denizens have been there for sixteen years and more. Still, eventually appeals run out and off you go to the abattoir. Or you might get up in Toronto some dreary Monday morning expecting to spend the day dispensing cash and stamping statements as a teller in a bank downtown, only to be stabbed to death leaving a subway train at your usual stop.  

You might have come across the same story I did about the young woman (31) stabbed to death in the subway in Toronto on December 9that around 2 PM. I have no idea if she was a bank teller, that’s my invention, but it would be possible. The fact that she was stabbed at 2 PM is significant. There are many reasons why she would be out and about midday. Her killer, 52-year-old Neng Jia Jin, required a Mandarin translator for his court appearance and was given a list of people he was not to contact even though he was held in custody. He killed the victim, Vanessa Kurpiewska, randomly. Who expects to get up in the morning, get dressed, maybe make plans for the holidays, have a coffee, go off to work, take an afternoon break to do a little shopping, and end up dead on a subway train? On the same day the CBC reported a deadly shooting in Mississauga and every day the papers are happy to report on any number of random shootings and stabbings across the country and in the US. Regular, typical, unspectacular deaths generally appear under the radar, in the obituaries, not on the front pages. 

So, a significant number of people die randomly every day from any number of causes, some endemic, some violent, and all unpredictable. It may happen that I get surprised by my death, or at least by my dying. Probably not, but it’s not in the realm of the impossible. My palliative care team can track the deteriorations in my body, some of which are clear signs of impending death. Kidney failure is a sure sign of imminent death. When I came close to dying a month or so ago after my last chemo treatment, it was because my kidney was shutting down. That’s an indicator of major bodily shutdown. I remember clearly in the ER at the time that the docs asked us what we wanted to do if my kidney did shut down. We made it clear to them that no heroics were to be used to keep me alive. Palliative care doctors are really attuned to changes in the functions of major organs. I’m fortunate in that I have a strong heart and no indication of any cardio-vascular issues. 

We (Carolyn and I) drove to Campbell River last week to see an orthopaedic surgeon about the lytic lesion in my right femur. The palliative care docs flagged it as a potential major issue because it seemed to be growing. The orthopaedic surgeon, Deke Botsford, concluded that the changes that had occurred over the past few months in my femur would not likely cause a pathological break, that is one that would happen with no provocation (a fall, for instance). Anyway, we decided that I would get an X-ray in a month or so and that we would have another chat at that time. Fair enough. No problem for now.

I’m reading a book that was kindly given to me by a very thoughtful neighbour. It’s called: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix (2018). I’m almost finished it. Mannix is a physician and a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist (CBT). Her approach to death and dying is psychological and biological. My approach you will realize, if you’ve followed this blog at all, leans much more to the cultural, social, and anthropological side of things. Of course, I also inject lots of personal anecdotes and experiences. That’s where Mannix and I cross paths. Her book is a compendium of stories about the end-of-life experiences of a whole range of people of all ages in Britain. My blog is a mix of things, but it leans heavily on my experiences in hospitals, with medications, and with medical staff. Denial, for Mannix, refers to how individuals come to accept or reject the fact of their imminent death. For me, following Becker and others, denial is considered primarily a cultural phenomenon which rubs off on every one of us via religious or magical traditions and practices that we rely upon to convince us that we are immortal. Our traditions, practices, and protocols act as collective reinforcement of our beliefs in our immortality. Émile Durkheim, the first French sociologist and education theorist, wrote about the importance of what he called collective effervescence as an important structural component of social coherence. 

I guess if I have any institutional or cultural connections with denial mechanisms, they would be associated with science, especially physics and chemistry. If I have any belief about what happens to my body after I die, it’s that all the atoms and molecules that make up my body will return to the biosphere, to be taken up by organisms in their process of growth. My consciousness will evaporate to nothingness.  So, it goes. 

This Blog

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 7 Comments

November 30, 2022 (8:35 AM)

If you’ve been following this blog since the Fall of 2019, you will know that I was diagnosed with cancer (multiple myeloma) at that time and that ever since I’ve dedicated the blog to exploring my relationship with ‘my’ cancer and its treatment. Lately, I’ve been compiling my blog posts into a Word file. Word tells me that I now have close to 150,000 words in that file. I’m sure I have double that in the blog since I started publishing it in 2012, the year I retired from teaching at North Island College. That’s a lot of verbal regurgitation. 

It’s been a ride. 

Looking back over the years it’s obvious how much of a rollercoaster ride it’s been. The thing is the rollercoaster has two primary seats and a number of others that can also be involved. Of course, I’m in the lead seat. If I didn’t have myeloma there would be no rollercoaster, but since I do have myeloma, any rollercoaster rides I’m on also involve my family. Carolyn is my wife but also my primary caregiver. It has not been easy for her. My daughters who both live in Vancouver have made every effort to support Carolyn and I on our ride. They have come here which is highly disruptive of their lives, never a word of complaint. One of my brothers and one of my sisters who live on the Lower Mainland have come to visit and help out. I have a sister who lives in Nanaimo. She and her daughter, Janice, come as often as they can and bring meals for us to relieve some of the caregiving burden from Carolyn. We are very fortunate also in that we have fantastic, generous, kind, and supportive neighbours. 

I can only go by my own experience but living with myeloma for anyone (and its treatments) means that some days we feel fine (more or less) and other days we feel crappy. Not long ago, after my last disastrous treatment and hospital stay, I spoke with my oncologist at the BCCA in Victoria. I was determined to stop all treatment, chemotherapy, and radiation, which I did. It seemed that I would always get a high fever and some form of infection following treatment. Last month I wrote about how my last chemo treatment almost killed me. Of course, stopping all treatment has its consequences.

As I noted in a previous post, the upshot of ceasing treatments means that I now have to face myeloma head on without the help (or hindrance) of treatment. I am now considered palliative, meaning that any treatment I get now aims to deal with pain alone. So, tomorrow late afternoon I go to the hospital for a CT scan of my right femur. The palliative care doctors want to know what the state of that femur is to better decide on what to do about it. They may recommend surgery. When we know more, we’ll decide what to do. I’m not sure what to think at this point. 

December 1, 2022 (8:00 AM)

It’s probably the coldest day of the year here today at -5˚C. Snow is deep in the yard and we’re expecting more today and tonight. It’s quite bright out now but that can change quickly, just like how I feel. 

Yesterday I introduced the role of caregiver. Caregivers, family, volunteers, or paid members of palliative care organizations are essential for people who are sick or somehow disabled and who can’t always look after themselves, who can’t cook, feed themselves, do laundry, wash dishes, etcetera. Caregiving is tough, one of the toughest jobs around. Imagine going to work not knowing what will be expected of you when you get there. Never mind all the bum wiping and other physically related work that is expected of you. Some of us who need care are quite large and heavy. Caregivers risk injury to themselves as they care for their charges.

For some caregivers who provide in-home care the issue is mental illness or dementia. Imagine going to work and immediately getting verbally assaulted and insulted by the person you’ve come to help. It can be the same in the hospital. While I was there, I often heard caregivers, nurses, and aides, get yelled at and abused in a number of ways by patients. Or the issue can be that the patient may have had a stroke or are otherwise incapable of communicating verbally. Professional caregivers are normally prepared for all exigencies and requirements of the work, but there are certainly times when the work gets overwhelming and tiring.  There are several resources available through government and non-profit organizations that can help caregivers. I list some of the more obvious ones here along with their web links. This Island Health website contains a lot of links to other resources. I don’t feel the need to replicate all of them here. A principal non-profit is the Family Caregivers of British Columbia. It is funded by Island Health, United Way, and the Province of British Columbia. 

December 2, 2022 (12:20 PM)

There is a weather warning posted online by Environment Canada for our region indicating that there might be up to a 15 cm dump of snow today. So far, the snow has been light but it’s picking up now. I’m still expecting to go to the hospital for a CT scan at 5:15 PM, but we’ll see. We haven’t heard from the hospital yet. We’ll see. 

December 3, 2022 (10:00 AM)

Heavy snow out there. It snowed a lot last night. I did go to the hospital for a CT scan. It was snowing hard, but David did a stellar job driving the car, which is great in the snow. The hospital seemed deserted, but that’s an illusion, of course. The wards are full of people behind closed doors, and I’m sure the emerg was busy, but the reception was empty, suitable for bowling.  

December 4th, 2022 (9:22 AM)

So, I wrote on December 1st that it was the coldest day of the year. Well, today is even colder at -6˚C. It matters not to me, not in the slightest. I sit here in my recliner, nice and toasty. I can look out to the beautiful scene outside, but from the comfort of my living room. Works for me. I have good meds and it seems that I’ve been able to figure out how best to take them to minimize pain.

I’m still old and I’m still dying, but at least I have a lot of people supporting me. So many people die alone, violently, and/or in excruciating pain. I’m going to try very hard not to be one of those people. I aim to die peacefully with some good meds to deal with any pain issues I may have. When my ma was dying, the nurses came frequently to give her a shot of morphine. That seems like a good way to go although my mother wouldn’t have been able to tell you one way or another. From her bodily movements I don’t think that she was in a deep state of peace. She was agitated at times. It was almost like watching someone in REM sleep having involuntary limb movements. 

One of the generous neighbours I mentioned above gave me a book to read. Carolyn just finished reading it and found it delightful. Now, I’ll read it. It’s entitled: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial. It was published in 2018. The author, Kathryn Mannix, is a British palliative care physician. As you can tell from the title, this book is right up my alley. It’s not an academic book, so no references. You won’t be reading any quotes from Ernest Becker* in its pages, but Becker is everywhere in the book as the scholarly backdrop to a book like this. 

I’ll leave this post for now. It’s long enough and I need to get on with reading Mannix so that I can discuss her book in my next post. If you are so inclined and you want to read a little scholarly background material for a book like Mannix’s, check out the first couple of dozen posts in this blog, the ones specifically about Becker and The Denial of Death. 

Bye for now.

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*This is the first in a series of posts on Becker’s and related work. I published it in 2014: https://rogerjgalbert.com/2014/01/28/ernest-becker-1-of-mouths-digestive-tracts-and-anuses/.

Chemo and life

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

July 27th, 2022.

It has been about twenty hours since my second infusion of carfilzomib. I take dexamethasone in conjunction with my infusion and that’s what I’m feeling the effects of predominantly at the moment. I’m dexed out, and I will be for a while yet. What concerns me the most is a repetition of the fever I got last Thursday as a side effect of carfilzomib. That fever at 38.9˚C sent me to Emerg for a long day on Thursday. The irony is that the fever is not caused by an infection, but that’s what the staff in Emerg will focus on. That’s what they know. And, of course, they do have to discount the possibility of an infection so they prescribe high doses of antibiotics. I don’t need antibiotics, but there ya go.

This time around, if I get a fever tomorrow AM (it started at 4 AM last week) I’ll know what to do about it. If my fever stays below 39˚C or so, I’ll stay at home, take a cold shower, use cold compresses and wait for it to pass. Last week the fever lasted maybe a day, and it fluctuated a lot during that time. It was funny in a way, because we went to Emerg for a second time last week on Thursday evening because my temperature had gone up to 38.9˚C. By the time we got there it had dropped to 36.6˚C. Well, that was a bit embarrassing. At that point they took some blood and put me in a room to then ignore me for 4 hours. By midnight we had had enough waiting and just went home. I don’t blame the Emerg staff. They couldn’t do anything in any case. But it would have been good to just send us home even if we hadn’t seen a doctor yet.

In any case, I’m a little apprehensive about the next 24 hours. I really need this chemo regime to work so I need to deal with the side effects and not let them force a stop to the regime. Carfilzomib is one of the last possibilities for me apparently. After that, I’m on my own. That means facing my myeloma without any help from chemotherapy. The consequences of that are well, terminal. We all get there, but I was kinda hoping to see my 80th birthday. That’s not rational, of course, because whether I die today or in 4 years makes little difference. After I’m dead, there won’t be any regrets. So, my hopes and wishes for a longer life are purely emotional.

August 3rd, 2022

So, as of now I’ve completed the first cycle of carfilzomib/dexamethasone treatment. No fevers after the first infusion. That’s great. The thing is I need this protocol to work. I won’t know if it’s working until I get my next blood workup in a couple of weeks. I meet with my local GP oncologist on August 10th, but we won’t have the results of my blood tests by then. We will meet, though, so he can assess how I’m doing. Blood work is only one factor in making decisions about treatment, but it’s an important one.

As usual, I’m dexed out after my last infusion of carfilzomib and 12 milligrams of dexamethasone taken orally. The next forty-eight hours will tell the tale regarding other side effects. I’m feeling alright given the circumstances. Strangely enough I have more energy when I’m dexed out, at least until it wears off and at that point I need to lie down and maybe get a little sleep.

I’m currently reading a book by Tom Robbins entitled Jitterbug Perfume. It hit the New York Times Bestsellers List in 1985. I read most of Robbins’ books back then along with books by John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut. Ostensibly about coming up with the definitive perfume, the book is all about the fear of death, immortality and dying. I can’t seem to get away from reading (and writing) about death and dying. That’s not surprising, really, given my time of life. Strangely, I feel I need to apologize for being so focussed on death and dying. After all, death, according to Ernest Becker, is one of the twin pillars of evil in our world, the other pillar being disease. It seems I’m immersed in the twin pillars of evil. So be it. It’s my life right now. Chemo is my life too at the moment. It’s a tough row to hoe sometimes because the end is nigh. But, it seems that we need to always focus on the bright side of life. Talk of death and dying are not welcome in a world that vociferously denies death and dying.

I know too many people right now with cancer, some with cancers much more aggressive than mine. Some want to talk about it, some don’t. Some have died recently, some are still dealing with their disease. Whatever type of cancer we have, we all face the same end. The ‘authorities’ claim that my cancer, multiple myeloma, is incurable, but treatable. Fair enough. However, the treatment can be quite harsh and whether or not it’s worth it is a question we still need to confront. That’s the case for all types of cancer.

As the song says, it’s summer time…and the living is easy. Yeah, right. For all you joung’uns with not a care in the world, you need to take this maxim and run with it. I’m not in a position to run anywhere. That’s fine. We’re all at different stages of life. Have a great summer.

Evolutionary Theory vs. Structural-Functionalism.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

[Don’t be too put off by the title of this post. It looks highfalutin. It may be, but the text isn’t.]

It’s a truism to say that our lives are finite and that we go through stages of development and change. But, it seems, sometimes we need to be reminded of obvious but possibly unwelcome realities. I’m sure we all understand that we follow a path of change starting at birth and ending at death. In between we move from infancy to childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood, and then to old age. Of course, not all of us get to go through every stage. For some of us, the stages get cut off and we die young or accidentally. We may contract a disease at any age that proves fatal. Governments document all of these things with vital statistics and publish all kinds of data on birth rates, types of mortality, morbidity*, et cetera. British Columbia offers a lot of this information online. Statistics Canada also gets into the act and publishes a lot of health related statistics. It’s not an exaggeration to note that we are obsessed with our health and wellness. How much of the internet is dedicated to health related websites? The woo flows freely and the sales of every magic potion, miracle diet, and supplement imaginable are on offer. And there is overwhelming evidence that at every turn we find ways to deny death. As I’ve often noted, one of Ernest Becker’s most salient observations is that the twin pillars of evil in our world are death and disease.

Our entire medical system is set up to discover and ‘fix’ any human organism that doesn’t conform to what we consider normal for any stage of development. It is often unsuccessful in that endeavour, but it doesn’t like to discuss its failures.

Pathology as I use it here describes a condition of abnormality (non-normality), a structural and functional situation wherein things have gone wrong in an organism. The underlying assumption of pathology is that organisms all have a normal condition, and if things cease to work as they are supposed to according to medical science, then they are considered pathological, or at least the cause of their malfunction is searched out and an attempt is made to restore the organism to normality. Medicine, and in fact, our whole culture, decided a long time ago what normal humans should look like and how they should behave. Yes, we all live and die, but pathology isn’t really interested in those realities. A pathological perspective is only interested in bringing a diseased organism back to normality.

Science and medicine have analyzed and dissected the human body in great detail especially over the past five hundred years. Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452 was adept at dissection, and he led the way for countless others who carried on the tradition. Later, biologists analyzed the human body from many perspectives, broadly using anatomy and physiology as major categories, but focusing on systems (cardio-vascular, endocrine, etc.), organs, cells, and their functioning. I’m no biologist so I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the investigation of human biological life. However, it’s clear that our organs (heart, liver, kidneys, et cetera) are of great interest to medicine, particularly if and when they cease to function the way they are supposed to.

As a quick aside, a major sociological school used (and still uses) what Emile Durkheim calls the organismic analogy. He suggests that society is much like the human body. He argues in his dissertation Rules of Sociological Method that there is no organic equivalence between human organs and social systems, but broadly, they share the same epistemological underpinnings. Human organs work in concert for the good and survival of the whole. That’s easy enough to understand. He then argues that human social systems, politics, family, economy, education, et cetera, must work in concert for the good of the whole society. Social pathology occurs when any one or other of the social systems that make up society fail to fulfill their function. The result is that the whole society is ‘sick’ or malfunctions. The problem with this perspective is that it’s not especially easy to find ‘a society’. From my point of view, societies are not be confused with countries or nation-states. They are not necessarily equivalent.

It’s easier to identify an individual human being than a society, or so it seems, until we ask the question: Is an individual human being a stand-alone organism? My answer is no. I could not and would not exist without air, food, water, et cetera. These elements are not necessarily a part of me, but they are essential for my life so excluding them from an analysis of what I am as a human is highly misleading. It suggests that we are somehow separate from the world that surrounds and sustains us. This is a foundational part of the individualism that characterizes our capitalistic world and it’s wrong.

So, broadly, we are captured by a world view that focusses on the structure and function of our organs in a biological sense and our social structures in a societal sense. This is why people often argue that what’s ‘wrong’ with our society is that the family isn’t doing its job, the economy is failing us, education is behind the times, and other simplistic criticisms. Figuring out how to fix it is another thing entirely.

In terms of the human body, if medicine finds that the heart is weak or not working properly, it tries to ‘fix’ it, that is to restore it to its presumed former state. It may conclude that a weak heart will have deleterious effects on the kidneys, and it may even find that a weak heart will threaten the organism as a whole. In contrast, an evolutionary perspective expects the heart to weaken as it ages. It expects that lungs will lose their ability to process oxygen. It expects that over time, muscles weaken, no matter what you do to counteract it. It expects death because death is built right into the model, unlike functionalism whereby death is left unconsidered or considered a clinical failure.

It’s true that an evolutionary perspective has made substantial inroads in science and even in medicine. It hasn’t in sociology, although it’s coming along**.

An evolutionary perspective follows the logic I present in my recent post: LIFE vs My Little Life. From this perspective, birth and death are normal human events. Death, especially, is not considered a defeat, it being an essential part of life. No death, no life. It’s as simple as that. That doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it. Just the amount of effort the human species has spent on denying death, on convincing itself that death is not the end of life, is testament to how unhappy we are with death and dying.

I don’t want to die, but I don’t have a say in the matter either.

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*morbidity refers to the incidence of ill-health in a population.

**see my (slightly outdated) dissertation on the topic published on this blog.

#78 LIFE vs My Little Life

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

[I posted this in February, 2021. I’m re-posting because I think it expresses how I’m feeling right now about life and death. I will follow up with another commentary in a couple of days if all goes well.]

LIFE in capital letters is life writ large. It governs all manifestations of individual life. It goes on merrily as individuals live and die generation after generation. Ironically LIFE needs death to make more life. After all, we eat dead things, don’t we? Of course all plants and animals follow the same pattern. They come and go, often by being consumed by other living things. It’s almost March and the property here is getting ready to burst into life after the long period of die-off and dormancy that is winter. Flowers are appearing even with freezing temperatures.

The early ones are aconites, snow drops, early crocuses, and maybe violets. They express life briefly then give way to the grasses, the ferns and the flowers of spring. The pear, apple, plum and cherry trees will soon display their flowers in preparation for the fruit that will follow as long as the pollinators do their thing. The birds are into mating season and we’ll soon have baby robins, finches, nuthatches, flickers, thrushes, jays, hummingbirds, and chickadees hassling their parents, fluttering their wings and demanding food.

The sun is shining right now. It wasn’t supposed to according to the weather forecasters, but there ya go. Living and dying under the sun. That’s what’s going on. My adult life has been informed by the scholarship of life and death, that is, of life and death as considered by philosophers and scientists. The thought of my own dying hasn’t occupied very much of my time except when my mother, father, and sister Denise died, and then only briefly. Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer that is incurable but treatable, changed all of that. Myeloma kind of sets the stage for end-of-life considerations. There’s no escaping myeloma’s trajectory. It will kill me eventually if I don’t die of something else first. Now, I have a hard time not thinking about my dying.

For most of my teaching career I used Ernest Becker’s work (The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil) to discuss the role of the fear of death on our cultural institutions. The fear of death and the promise of immortality and their overriding presence in institutions such as patriarchy and misogyny have shaped our social relations and created the conditions necessary for human contest and eventually homicide on a grand scale and war.*Related to our fear of death is our propensity to cut deals with deities. Humans have invented thousands of gods (and related semi-gods or supernatural entities) over the millennia. We assign responsibility to those deities for natural disasters, crop success or failure, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. We even put faith in God for winning a football game or a war. We barter with the gods. We make sacrifices. We tell the gods: “Look, we are sacrificing this young woman for you by throwing her into this volcano, now you must reciprocate by ensuring our crops grow well next year.” A life bartered for more life. That’s largely the story of countless religious (and political) invocations over the millennia. Priests and politicians constantly urge us to make sacrifices so that the future will be better.

Modern medicine is an elaborate institution for the denial of death. It’s all about ‘saving’ lives, and it’s willing to go to extreme measures to accomplish that goal. Of course, ‘saving’ a life means little more than postponing a death. Obviously, I’m personally invested in modern medicine and pharmacology. I’m hoping that chemotherapy and radiation treatments will buy me time, effectively giving me more life and postponing my death. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments are not cheap. Just one of the drugs I’m taking will cost over $100,000. One of the pharmacists at the pharmacy in Victoria that dispenses the drugs I use told me over the phone recently that they have some million dollar patients out there, patients that have used these drugs for many years. I attend the Cancer Care Centre at the local hospital and I’m impressed by the technology and the expertise of the many staff nurses and doctors that work in that facility. That can’t be cheap either.

Modern medicine will go to great lengths and expense to treat patients hoping to extend their lives. It must do so otherwise it fails in its sacred mission to safeguard life and battle death, the ultimate enemy. As Becker notes, in our culture death and disease are the twin pillars of evil. Disease prevents us from enjoying the pleasures of life while death cuts them off summarily.

So, we are willing to invest a great deal to save an individual life yet we are also willing to gleefully pile corpses in great heaps during war or in the context of ethnic cleansing, that vile excuse for murder, rape, and pillage as in Rwanda, 1994, or in any countless examples of such celebrated mass murders. We gladly kill for US, for our people because THEY(the enemy) are obviously responsible for our misfortune and distress. If we eliminate THEM our problems will be solved. That is the big lie. As Becker notes, we need a THEM with whom to enter into contests to show our prowess and to show our God (gods) how powerful and deserving of eternal life we are. Why do we spend so much time, energy, and money on organized sport? Sports reflect our constant need to show how deserving we are of life and more life. We win, we go to heaven. The gods are obviously on our side. We lose and we face shame and rejection. This analysis can easily be applied to American politics now too.

I’m rambling now. I guess I’m trying to avoid writing about the finitude of my life, my little life. In the face of LIFE and its overarching grip on the process of life and death, my little life doesn’t amount to much…but it’s all I’ve got really. Maybe I can celebrate my insignificance. Maybe I can celebrate the entirety of my life from beginning to end. In a way end is as necessary as beginning in the scheme of things. Let’s see what I can do with the little bit of life I have left.

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*The need for an opponent or an enemy (THEY) is based on our need to prove our worthiness in competition for the good things in life and for eternal life. The winner takes all! Very early on in human history, tribes split in two called moieties so that there would be contestants to beat proving the prowess of the winners and their qualifications for immortality.

Seizures! What else now?

~ Roger JG Albert

After at least two consultations with nurses and an oncologist, my GP has decided that I’ve probably had a couple of seizures over the past few months. Great.

Lately, after an internet conversation with one of my blog readers I wrote to them about how fully my life had become medicalized. See if you agree with me: I take a bunch of pills morning and evening to deal with cancer and pain. I go to the hospital twice a month for bloodwork and a two-hour infusion of Daratumumab. Monday we went to Nanaimo so that I could get a corticosteroid (dexamethasone) injected into my seventh cervical vertebrae to deal with the chronic pain in my neck; Tuesday morning I had an appointment with my GP for a prescription renewal, and to discuss a plan to send me to Nanaimo again, this time for an EEG if the CT scan I got Tuesday evening showed nothing. In fact, it did show nothing that could explain the two seizures I’ve had over the past few months, one very recently, so off to Nanaimo I go.

The thing is, if they find an abnormality in my brain using the EEG, they will simply want to put me on another drug, an anti-seizure drug. I’m already pickled in meds so why not another one?

My life seems to be driven by medical issues. I’m not alone in this, of course. Many of us have a close personal involvement with medicine, whether in the form of physicians, specialists, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and various other medically-related bureaucracies like our Health Authorities in British Columbia, possibly all of the above. They should actually be called Sickness Authorities because that’s what they deal in, sickness. 

The provincial budget allocates billions of dollars for illness related issues. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many billions of dollars because they get spread out over several spending categories. For instance, the Ministry of Health is projected to spend approximately $25.5 billion in 2022-23 of an estimated $71 billion in total budgetary expenses. There’s another approximately $8.6 billion for infrastructure related to health. I assume the new Dementia Village in Comox falls under this category. Aging and dementia are health issues, apparently.

So, tons of money is spent every year on health issues. I account for some of that, I certainly do. The Daratumumab I get by infusion every month costs a reputed $10,000 a pop. Now that’s a big investment in my being. I’m not sure it’s justified, but it happens because of an overarching ethic dominated by the fear of death and the perceived sanctity of life. As Ernest Becker points out in Escape From Evil, the twin pillars of evil for us humans are death and disease. We do everything we can to fight them. Obviously we fail completely in dealing with death, and fighting disease is often a losing battle too. So, what are we doing? What’s the point? What if we had no ‘industrial’ medicine? Humans lived on this planet for millions of years without doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutics? Why do we spend so much on them now? 

I can safely conclude that part of the motivation for spending such inordinate amounts of money on ‘health’ is to keep the workforce working and reliable day after day, week after week, year after year. Industry requires consistent effort from the workforce, especially from those workers with technical or managerial skills. Another motivation is the transfer of power from workers to managers, in the case of health, from us ordinary folk to the specialist professionals, doctors. 

Since the 19th Century and the advent of scientific management, the control of commodity production has fallen on the managerial class. Workers have been stripped of all control over the productive process. In the case of health, doctors are the managers of our health. We negotiate with them to some extent, we even oppose them at times, but by and large they are in control. I must say though, that that situation is changing and your ordinary GP is becoming more and more a worker for a large bureaucratic organization that controls multiple clinics. Some American hospitals, for instance, extend their control over health spending and profits by buying out or establishing clinics where doctors are employees like any other. 

Obviously we live in a capitalist world where possessive individualism rules, where business is allowed to create products and services that may or may not be conducive to healthy bodies and minds. The fast food business is clearly not interested in our health. Money is the name of the game. Any deleterious consequences for our wellbeing caused by eating too much fast food is addressed by public spending on hospitals, doctors, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. Pharmaceutical businesses might initially be organized with an eye to alleviating human suffering and enhancing wellbeing, but it seems that they soon fall in line with all capitalist ventures in the need for profit above all other values. They depend on illness for their profits. I don’t think that’s such a good thing.

Then I got to thinking. I remember when I was a grad student reading a book by Michel Foucault* called The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. It was written in the early 1970s. The translation into English from the French (Naissance de la Clinique) has a 1973 Copyright date. Foucault was a prominent critic of institutionalized criminal incarceration, the medical clinic, madness, and sexuality, among other topics. He was a very controversial figure in French academia for decades, and a very prolific writer. He’s a ponderous writer to some, but an elegant exegesist to others. I find his critiques compelling in some ways, but belaboured in others. In other words, he’s complicated.** 

In his book on the rise of the medical clinic, his major point is that the medical ‘gaze’, the creation of a specialized, comprehensive, and institutionalized consideration of disease and pathology would become the exclusive domain of the medical clinic. We’ve even been convinced that pregnancy and aging fit nicely under the medical gaze. Other commentators on the power of modern medicine such as Ivan Illich emphasized the class basis of control over human health whereby we become supplicants in our relationships with doctors, whereas Foucault and his followers see the medical/health landscape as a set of power relations that work to “reproduce medical dominance” (Lupton, page 88). 

Because we are so freaked out about death and disease, Foucault would argue, we negotiate our necessarily subordinate relations with our doctors on an ongoing basis. According to Lupton, there is collusion between doctors and their patients to reproduce the system of medical dominance. That’s true in my case, certainly. Without modern medicine, I’d be dead right now.

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*The Passion of Michel Foucault (March 1, 1994), by James Miller is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s balanced, decisive, and comprehensive. Definitely worth a read. Come to think of it, I need to read it again. 

**See Deborah Lupton, Foucault and the Medicalization Critique, Chapter 5 in Foucault, Health, and Medicine, Edited by Alan Peterson and Robin Bunton, 1997, Routledge: London and New York. 

#86. ???????

~ Roger JG Albert

I woke up this morning at seven twenty three and got out of bed at seven twenty eight. In that five minutes between seven twenty three and seven twenty eight I had a couple of thinks1. These were little thinks, nothing momentous or earth-shattering. They were thinks about what I would do today. I decided on a couple of things to work on, writing a blog post is one and the other is going down to my studio to continue a clean up I started some time ago in preparation for some work I want to do.

Today is the day after my Daratumumab infusion at the hospital. That’s a bi-monthly event for me. We get to the hospital for a nine o’clock appointment. I grab a coffee after being logged in at the Wellness Centre then make my way to the Cancer Care Centre. After getting settled in they hook me up to an IV drip and then call the pharmacy to tell them I’ve arrived and that they can prep the Dara. Yesterday it took over an hour for the pharmacy to get the Dara to the Cancer Care Centre. I waited patiently but with a little frustration, I must admit. After about ten fifteen they released the Dara starting the infusion. I read my book for a bit but soon fell asleep. I woke up at eleven forty five. Cool. The infusion was almost done. It generally takes about one and a half hours. At about twelve twenty, Carolyn picked me up and we came home.

Along with the Dara, as you well know, I take dexamethasone and lenalidomide. These are the chemo drugs. Dara is not a chemo drug, but a monoclonal antibody. Click on the word Daratumumab in the paragraph above for some good information about Dara. Dex and Lena are very different drugs that do different things in the blood. Dexamethasone is a steroid and has some annoying side effects like interfering with sleep. That it did last night. I slept in fits and starts and got maybe four hours of sleep total. I won’t get much sleep until Monday.

My life these days is organized around my chemotherapy. Of course, my Dara infusions predominate, but the dex has the most immediate and dramatic effects aside from the hydromorphone. I most often go to bed before nine o’clock in the evening. I rarely go to sleep right away, however. Yesterday, I did fall asleep after going to bed at eight thirty. I woke up about forty-five minutes later with a start. I had gone to sleep with the cat laying between my legs. I dreamt that the cat had been joined by my brother. I woke up with nobody on the bed with me. I was startled when I woke up but relieved too because I find it uncomfortable to have the cat sleep with me. I mean, I could easily get her off the bed, but I’m a sucker for the cat. She rules.

A preoccupation I have these days relates to the purpose of life and how to determine what to do with the time I have left to live. I have all kinds of time every day to think about things so off I go. Obviously there will be some physical restrictions that hamper the kinds of activities I can do; after all, I am seventy-four years old. One serious big think I’m having these days is coming to grips with the kinds of activities I am still capable of doing amongst the many I did during my younger years. I don’t want to simply lay back and avoid any activities that would require of me exertion that might tire me or leave me incapable of doing anything for a couple of days afterwards. I’m still strong enough, but I’m not as well coordinated as I used to be. I’m learning that I have to strike a balance between what I want to do and what I’m really capable of doing. There is a slew of activities I did when I was younger that are beyond me now. I have to be realistic about these things. I cranked up the chainsaw the other day and chopped a bit of wood. That was fine. I could do that. But what I want to do in terms of sculpture would require that I use saws and chisels for a sustained period of time. I don’t know if I have the sustainability to sculpt, but I know I can paint and draw. Whether I have the desire to do these things is another question.

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1 This is a verb being used as a noun, but it’s probably not original.

#78. LIFE vs My little life.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

[I posted this in February, 2021. I’m re-posting because I think it expresses how I’m feeling right now about life and death. I will follow up with another commentary in a couple of days if all goes well.]

LIFE in capital letters is life writ large. It governs all manifestations of individual life. It goes on merrily as individuals live and die generation after generation. Ironically LIFE needs death to make more life. After all, we eat dead things, don’t we? Of course all plants and animals follow the same pattern. They come and go, often by being consumed by other living things. It’s almost March and the property here is getting ready to burst into life after the long period of die-off and dormancy that is winter. Flowers are appearing even with freezing temperatures.

The early ones are aconites, snow drops, early crocuses, and maybe violets. They express life briefly then give way to the grasses, the ferns and the flowers of spring. The pear, apple, plum and cherry trees will soon display their flowers in preparation for the fruit that will follow as long as the pollinators do their thing. The birds are into mating season and we’ll soon have baby robins, finches, nuthatches, flickers, thrushes, jays, hummingbirds, and chickadees hassling their parents, fluttering their wings and demanding food.

The sun is shining right now. It wasn’t supposed to according to the weather forecasters, but there ya go. Living and dying under the sun. That’s what’s going on. My adult life has been informed by the scholarship of life and death, that is, of life and death as considered by philosophers and scientists. The thought of my own dying hasn’t occupied very much of my time except when my mother, father, and sister Denise died, and then only briefly. Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer that is incurable but treatable, changed all of that. Myeloma kind of sets the stage for end-of-life considerations. There’s no escaping myeloma’s trajectory. It will kill me eventually if I don’t die of something else first. Now, I have a hard time not thinking about my dying.

For most of my teaching career I used Ernest Becker’s work (The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil) to discuss the role of the fear of death on our cultural institutions. The fear of death and the promise of immortality and their overriding presence in institutions such as patriarchy and misogyny have shaped our social relations and created the conditions necessary for human contest and eventually homicide on a grand scale and war.*Related to our fear of death is our propensity to cut deals with deities. Humans have invented thousands of gods (and related semi-gods or supernatural entities) over the millennia. We assign responsibility to those deities for natural disasters, crop success or failure, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. We even put faith in God for winning a football game or a war. We barter with the gods. We make sacrifices. We tell the gods: “Look, we are sacrificing this young woman for you by throwing her into this volcano, now you must reciprocate by ensuring our crops grow well next year.” A life bartered for more life. That’s largely the story of countless religious (and political) invocations over the millennia. Priests and politicians constantly urge us to make sacrifices so that the future will be better.

Modern medicine is an elaborate institution for the denial of death. It’s all about ‘saving’ lives, and it’s willing to go to extreme measures to accomplish that goal. Of course, ‘saving’ a life means little more than postponing a death. Obviously, I’m personally invested in modern medicine and pharmacology. I’m hoping that chemotherapy and radiation treatments will buy me time, effectively giving me more life and postponing my death. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments are not cheap. Just one of the drugs I’m taking will cost over $100,000. One of the pharmacists at the pharmacy in Victoria that dispenses the drugs I use told me over the phone recently that they have some million dollar patients out there, patients that have used these drugs for many years. I attend the Cancer Care Centre at the local hospital and I’m impressed by the technology and the expertise of the many staff nurses and doctors that work in that facility. That can’t be cheap either.

Modern medicine will go to great lengths and expense to treat patients hoping to extend their lives. It must do so otherwise it fails in its sacred mission to safeguard life and battle death, the ultimate enemy. As Becker notes, in our culture death and disease are the twin pillars of evil. Disease prevents us from enjoying the pleasures of life while death cuts them off summarily. So, we are willing to invest a great deal to save an individual life yet we are also willing to gleefully pile corpses in great heaps during war or in the context of ethnic cleansing, that vile excuse for murder, rape, and pillage as in Rwanda, 1994 or in any countless examples of such celebrated mass murders. We gladly kill for US, for our people because THEY(the enemy) are obviously responsible for our misfortune and distress. If we eliminate THEM our problems will be solved. That is the big lie. As Becker notes, we need a THEM with whom to enter into contests to show our prowess and to show our God (gods) how powerful and deserving of eternal life we are. Why do we spend so much time, energy, and money on organized sport? Sports reflect our constant need to show how deserving we are of life and more life. We win, we go to heaven. The gods are obviously on our side. We lose and we face shame and rejection. This analysis can easily be applied to American politics now too.

I’m rambling now. I guess I’m trying to avoid writing about the finitude of my life, my little life. In the face of LIFE and its overarching grip on the process of life and death, my little life doesn’t amount to much…but it’s all I’ve got really. Maybe I can celebrate my insignificance. Maybe I can celebrate the entirety of my life from beginning to end. In a way end is as necessary as beginning in the scheme of things. Let’s see what I can do with the little bit of life I have left.

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*The need for an opponent or an enemy (THEY) is based on our need to prove our worthiness in competition for the good things in life and for eternal life. The winner takes all! Very early on in human history, tribes split in two called moieties so that there would be contestants to beat proving the prowess of the winners and their qualifications for immortality.

58 Seventy-three Years At It, Birds, and Bees.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

So, I’m sitting on the deck overlooking the fountain that Tilly has fallen in love with, and I can see the bees working the St-John’s Wort, flower after flower. I tried to capture of video of bees and flowers, but so far it just hasn’t worked. In any case, I swear I’m telling the truth (bees swarm those flowers!) so don’t press me for visual proof although I have posted a picture of the St-John’s Wort above the fountain. Spot the bee!

St-John’s Wort

Hummingbirds are into the honeysuckle to the right of this picture, making regular trips here from the feeder in the front of the house. We have huge huckleberry bushes close by which we usually save for the robins and for my brother Léo when he often comes to visit with his family in the summer. But this year who knows where the robins are and Léo is safely distancing in Maple Ridge. Someone will probably write a book: Romance in the Time of Covid or maybe, Covid-19: Mess up our world will you?

The weather is getting warmer and the reclining chairs we have on the deck are very comfy. Sleep comes easily unless I’m on one of my dex days. Two and a half more chemo cycles. Must make it through. I’m trusting that I won’t be in a wheelchair after my first chemo course is over in October, but who knows, oncologists are not known for committing themselves to a particular prognostication. Oh well. Such is life.

Winding down. Sometimes I lay awake at night, especially on those nights when I’m on a dexamethasone high. Wakeful periods at night are a new things for me. I never had trouble sleeping, not even during really stressful periods in our lives. Now, at least three nights a week I have a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep.

At these times, all kinds of thoughts come into my head. They’re not all bad thoughts. I sometimes go over plans I have for a project I’m working on or I’ll muse on the news of the day. Sometimes wakeful periods can be quite productive. I promised myself years ago that when I got old I wouldn’t be one of those people who lived in the past reliving regretful events or sad moments in my life. Oh, that happens on occasion, but then I catch myself doing it and move on. Inevitably, these days, my mind wanders into the wall of truth that is my seventy-three years of life. Seventy-three years can seem like a long time, but it’s just a flash, really.

In a previous post I wrote:

As Brian Cox, the famous British physicist put it, the universe itself lives and dies in a moment. Individual organisms come and go in an instant. The passage of time is an illusion that allows us to cope with the need to die. One human life lived over a period of eighty years is no more fleeting than the life of the universe itself. 

Cox could have said “One human life lived over a period of eighty years is just as fleeting as the life of the universe itself,” because it is SO fleeting. Lately I’ve been musing about the lives of my parents and of their parents. My parents lived fairly long lives by most standards, both into their nineties, but they’re both gone and now their lives are a complete thing. It’s possible to trace their lives from beginning to end, to focus on the things they did, the children they had, the jobs they had and the way they related to us kids and their friends and relatives. There are photos and some film that my father took with his Super 8 movie camera. Everything they were and did is packaged up and we call that their lives. The finitude of a past life is obvious. It has a beginning and an end.

In our own lives we look back on past events, camping trips, weddings, stressful situations at work, strained relationships, special bonds we create with like minded people and with community. We look forward to and anticipate events, meetings, occasions, going to bed or working on a project. Time never stops for us until we fill that space we call life. At the time of our death, our life space is complete. A life is not complete until death, no matter when death comes.

Yet we are like mushrooms.

We are products of a cultural, social, and physical mycelium that has existence over time. We are much like mushrooms that sprout from a mycelium that has existed underground for some time and will exist long after the mushrooms that it produced slowly melt away back into the soil. Like mushrooms, humans flower for a short time, then decay returning to the soil of our ancestors. We are expressions of a process. Yet, no matter how elegant and truthful this metaphorical explanation may be for our lives, it does not satisfy.

No matter how hard I try to intellectualize the problem of time, life and death, I can’t help but get choked up a bit when I think that I’m on my last legs, that my death is immanent. It’s still a bit of a shock to me to think that I have incurable cancer. No way of getting out of this one. One day soon(ish) I will die. Am I prepared for that day? Not really. I want to think that when the time comes I will courageously and stoically meet my fate, but I may just beg for more morphine. Who know? However I spend my last moments of consciousness, nothing will change the outcome.

Yes, there’s currently a lot of research being done on a cure for multiple myeloma but like AIDS, it’s cure is elusive. There are treatments for myeloma that make it more like a chronic disease than an immediately fatal one, but still, the writing is on the wall, as the saying goes. Besides, myeloma or not, my death is inevitable, as is yours because that is the way it is. Life and death dance together. Learning the final dance may be the toughest thing I ever do.

Addendum

A minute ago I mindlessly killed a mosquito. It’s an automatic reaction. A Jain would be very displeased with me. Janism is an ancient Indian religion. “Jains believe that animals, plants, humans (irrespective of different spiritual development) all have a living soul in them and all should be treated with equal respect and love.” (From the website)

Shit. Well, I guess I’m no Jain.

How mindlessly we treat most life, and how quickly life comes and goes.

44 On art (poiesis) and the search for meaning in my life.

~ Roger JG Albert

[I started writing this at 4:30 this morning. I don’t usually get up before 7:30, but my chemo meds keep me awake sometimes. I’m on a dexamethasone high. In other words I’m stoned. Let’s see how well this comes out. Well, I’m no longer stoned. It’s now 6 PM, and looking it over, I. think it’s fine, but I’ll let you be the final judge of that. It’s only a coincidence that this is the 42nd blog post in this series.]

Over the past few months, since I was diagnosed with cancer I have been on a search for the meaning of my life. I haven’t always recognized that in myself or acknowledged to myself that that’s what I was actually doing, but that is in fact what I have been doing pointedly and with urgency. There is probably nothing more capable of focussing the mind than facing a firing squad or a hearing a physician’s determination that one has an incurable cancer. The problem with the firing squad scenario is that there is no time for any reflection on the meaning of life before the bullets put an end to all reflection. At least with a cancer diagnosis, there is time for reflection. I have limited time left as a human expression in the biosphere, so I intend to use that time fully as a mortal in reflection on the meaning in my life, but more importantly as a generator of art, what Plato called poiesis.

In my life I was able to go to university and a get important post-graduate degrees in Sociology. Those years of study and reflection were exciting, stressful and tinged with contradiction at every turn and I got through them in spite of the system and not because of it, as I was fond of telling my students repeatedly over the years. I was able to learn many ‘things’ but the most important result of all of those years was my license to teach, to engage in an important aspect of my art.

Licenses are important. They are society’s way of legitimizing and concretizing in a title the fact that in the past one has acquired sufficient knowledge and capacity in a field of study or work to pass it on to others, operate equipment or on people, fix our plumbing and in a myriad of other situations. Over the years, my teaching was my art, although it was also my way of making a living and that contradiction was a constant source of irritation for me, and for people around me too, especially my long-suffering loved ones, Carolyn and the kids. During that time, though, I also engaged in the ‘plastic’ arts, in drawing, painting, and eventually in sculpture and printmaking. For most of my life I considered those latter pursuits the artistic part of my life. However, more recently, with my new sharpened mind engendered by my cancer diagnosis, I have been able to look back on my life and conclude that I was always an artist. I may have been born that way, but I think it was more an inadvertent result of my upbringing and the circumstances surrounding my birth and early years. I know now that my parents were also artists in their own ways. I know for a fact, because I worked with him at times, that my father struggled his whole working life with the contradictions he had to face every day having to earn a living doing things that were averse if not actually an insult to his inherent creativity. My father was a master craftsman, inventor, blacksmith and planerman. He was functionally illiterate too. My mother had a grade eight education and could read and write quite well. She had ten children, all still alive and kicking. Can we question her creativity? Definitely not her biological creativity, but she was creative in other ways too. She could sew up a storm and knit, cook like a pro and bake. Mygawd, could she bake! Later in life, after all the kids could look after themselves she took over my father’s workshop and started building all kinds of things out of wood. I still have a table by my bed that she built. It means a lot to me. Then, my father decided to sell the house and move into an apartment. That was the end of woodworking for my mother. She pretty much lost interest after that and it wasn’t long after she got Alzheimer’s dementia and that was that.

I feel I really need to explore in writing what my parents must have gone through during the time I was born and for some time after, and how that shaped who I became and am becoming still. I feel this exploration, my writing here, is part of my legacy, part of what I leave behind for you to learn from or simple contemplate as you would a painting on the wall in your living room, if you are fortunate enough to have a living room that is. My aim is that it engenders creativity in you, its beholders.✿

In any case, I was born on January 4th, 1947, which means I was conceived sometime in April of 1946. My parents were married on January 28th 1946. My father’s first wife, Yvonne Gaucher, died on June 22nd, 1945, seven months before my mother and father married. She died in childbirth after having five daughters. The baby, if it had survived, was to be called Roger, and I would not be. As the fates have it, he died and I was born 19 months later and they named me Roger. Can you imagine the stress my father was under? And my mother? My father had five daughters to look after. He made a call to my mother’s family in Alberta and my mother agreed to come help, look after the children and do all the domestic work. My mother and father had known each other in Alberta before he moved here with his family in 1937. Apparently my mother and dad’s first wife knew each other quite well. A short time later they were married. I can’t imagine what he was going through and we never talked about it.

Of course I was treated like a little prince. Not only was I the first boy in the family, but I had survived childbirth and so had my mother. I don’t really know what to make of my early days, not really. My mother soon had more children so my special status was soon eroded, but not much because my mother then proceeded to have four daughters in a row right after me leaving me the only boy with nine sisters. She had three more sons, interspersed with a couple more daughters.

So I have fourteen siblings in all, one of the older ones dying a few years ago of cancer. The rest of us are all still alive and kicking although a couple of my brothers-in-law have died last year. Many of my siblings are what I would call creative or artistic in work and in play. Five are afflicted with MS or another autoimmune disease. An altogether crazy bunch, but I love them all. What influence they’ve had in my life I can’t really say although they have been supportive when I needed it. And I really needed it when I was in my late teens and early twenties, depressed and suicidal. I could always count on my family. There was always a place for me at the table and a shoulder to cry on. Now I can say that I’m neither depressed, nor suicidal and I haven’t been for some time. Some people might argue that I have a right to be depressed, but I know now what depression is and it’s a waste of time. I don’t need it.

Alright, so what do I make of my life? Well, I’ve made it clear in a number of recent blog posts that I’m not chasing immortality. I’m a happy mortal kind of guy, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to dying. My myeloma is being managed successfully and I may live for another ten years, who knows. When it’s my turn to die, that will be just fine. We all come to the end of the line. Songs have been written about it.

Still, it took a cancer diagnosis and what I thought was imminent death from an incurable cancer to ask the question: What meaning did my life have? What meaning does it have? In the face of death, is there any meaning? These are questions Tolstoy was preoccupied with. As Ernest Becker reports in Escape From Evil: “When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really experienced was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his Confessions: ‘What will come of my whole life…Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?””

My answers to these questions came to me slowly at first over the last few weeks, then more pointedly only in the last few hours. I got answers by reading writers I knew would not fail in helping me answer these questions. The first was Ernest Becker and his book Escape from Evil (1974). Becker always knows the right words to say. He reminded me of the cultural significance of the fear of death and its significance for my personal encounter with death. Norbert Elias I read carefully. His book What is Sociology (1970) reacquainted me with my own discipline in a new, fresh way, a way of locating myself in time and space in a cultural project of criticism which clearly preceded me and will continue without me. But what of my career as a teacher? Recently I picked up a book that had been sitting in my library for thirty years untouched. It’s a book by James P. Carse called Finite and Infinite Games (see the note below). This is the book that triggered my recent reflections on my life as an artist. One section of his book deals specifically with art and culture and the relationships that we have with art as artists. I could have re-read Otto Rank’s Art and Artist but Carse does that for me. Rank’s book is always close to hand but it’s falling apart do to the handling it’s received over the years. Carse argues that the greatest struggle for any society is not with external enemies, but within itself. In society, we strive for titles, recognition for past achievements. But poietai (artists, inventors, storytellers, makers, etcetera according to Plato) are makers of possibilities. He writes (and this is a long quote):

The creativity of culture has no outcome, no conclusion. It does not result in art works, artifacts, products. Creativity is a continuity that engenders itself in others. [quoting Rank] ‘Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects.’

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art.

Since art is never a possession, and always a possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art. If art cannot become property, property is never art-as property. Property draws attention to titles, points backward toward a finished time. Art is dramatic, opening always forward, beginning something that cannot be finished.

Because it is not conclusive, but engendering, culture has no established catalogue of accepted activities. We are not artists by reason of having mastered certain skills or exercising specified techniques. Art has no scripted roles for its performers. It is precisely because it has none that it is art. Artistry can be found anywhere; indeed, it can only be found anywhere. One must be surprised by it. It cannot be looked for. We do not watch artists to see what they do, but to watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously. They openly see its role as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.

So, if my life has been about engendering engendering creativity in the beholder, I think I’ve done that, at least to my satisfaction. Obviously, the best judgments of my impact on people must come from them. Ask my former students and people who contemplate my art embodied in the works I have created and you’ll get varying answers. All I can say is my objectives in my classes and in my paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures have always been to engender a surprise and a new commitment to creativity. Therein lies some of the meaning in my life. I’ve been fortunate to have more. My children, grown women now, are the pride of my life and both creative in boundless ways. I could take credit for that, but Carolyn is largely responsible, I’m afraid, as I was absent a lot as they were growing up. Carolyn, in her own right, is a talented artist. She uses her garden as her main palette, but her skills as a cook are unsurpassed. I can’t take credit for anything they’ve accomplished as individuals, but as a family I think we rock!

That is all.

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✿This concept comes from a book by James P. Carse entitled Finite and Infinite Games, (The Free Press, 1986). Carse is a great inspiration to me, a true artist. I will review his book and its significance for me in a separate blog post soon.