This was written in response to a
friend's medical crisis. I like it enough that I decided to share it with
everyone. In 1987, I was told that I had pituitary cancer after taking an
eye-exam. Further investigation revealed that I had a rare birth defect, unidentified
until then. MDs always try to pretend that their fine art and dubious science
has reached such a state of perfection that they know almost everything and are
seldom wrong. The trouble is that MDs have been doing this since the time of
Dr. John Dee, court physician to Queen Elizabeth I. Dee is remembered today as
a ceremonial magician and I think there might be just a little hocus-pocus left
in medical science even now.
Have you read "A Clockwork
Orange" by Anthony Burgess? Burgess was told in 1960 that he was incurably
ill and had, at most, two years to live. This caused him to sink into a
clinical depression and begin drinking heavily so he did the logical thing; he
moved to Moscow, Russia. Moscow was a very cheap place to
live at that time. Burgess continued to drink heavily. That was about all there
was to do in Moscow. There were no other
distractions so he got a lot of writing done, five novels in one year to be
exact. Burgess had gone to Moscow to finish as many novels as
he could before dying so that the royalties would be enough to leave his family
financially secure. One of these was "A Clockwork Orange". Beating
the most optimistic prognosis of not one but many MDs by thirty-one years,
Burgess died, a rich man, in 1993. Interestingly enough, he loathed the Kubrick
film that helped make him rich intensely. Stephen King also loathed Kubrick's
film of "The Shining" so intensely that, in 1997, a second version appeared based on a
screenplay written by King. The two versions are very different.
And Clarke hated Kubrick's 2001 because he wanted it to be about space aliens, and Kubrick made an intensely personal, metaphorical film that isn't actually about space at all. Clarke even walked out of the premiere before the movie was over. The two weren't talking for years. This is reflected in a Time magazine cover on a table in the sequel, 2010. The text says something about USA v. Russia, but the pictures are of Clarke and Kubrick.
And Clarke hated Kubrick's 2001 because he wanted it to be about space aliens, and Kubrick made an intensely personal, metaphorical film that isn't actually about space at all. Clarke even walked out of the premiere before the movie was over. The two weren't talking for years. This is reflected in a Time magazine cover on a table in the sequel, 2010. The text says something about USA v. Russia, but the pictures are of Clarke and Kubrick.
