“What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again.
I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” –Michel Foucault

Sep 1, 2015

Medical Science



               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.