Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  Perhaps I have voyaged through sufficient extremity to last a while, and can enjoy the softer fruits of being human; perhaps I can trust that what has kept my light alive through frozen landscapes will not fail me now, that miracles happen every day, and that there is time for thaw, growth and greening. I look forward in this second half of life to a gently warming sun shining down on open waters, the fire of mulled wine on a cold winter's night and the soft, warm belly of my cat unfurled after sleep.

  ***

  People are getting tired of the journey now and long for home; moods are frayed and viral illnesses abound. Shaun is irritated by Jean-Claude's table manners to the point of moving to another seat, Inga can't stand Herman's hair parting, and Herman is annoyed that Shaun has taken ‘his place’ at table.

  The night before we dock the wine is on the house – or rather, on the ship – and I worry about the potential increase in my workload as the empty bottles line up on the table like a defeated army, and the assembled company begins to display high-risk behaviour. My concern does not last, as unbeknown to me the Frenchman keeps my one permitted glass topped up, and before long I am offering discount rates for keyhole surgery and singing experimental songs by moonlight up on the helideck.

  I retain only island memories of the evening: I know the biologist cut his finger instead of his steak whereupon I talked him into receiving an anti-tetanus vaccine injection, which went quite well, considering the considerable challenge of inserting a moving object into a moving object. Inga danced with a table, which left her patched with brownish bruises.

  Later an officer approached me to discuss his hernia operation and then to put to me, without my inquiry, that size doesn't matter. When he started telling me that he loved his wife, I attempted to change the subject, but he sailed on anyway, and offered me pleasure in exchange for pleasure. I wouldn't, he suggested, even have to take many clothes off.

  Back in my cabin, while congratulating myself on having survived the night, I discovered Tabasco sauce on my toothbrush after inserting it into my mouth, and plastic wrap across the toilet bowl while peeing. I fell asleep wondering about men, reprisals and connections to the pleasure centre.

  18 March

  Day twenty-three and land is in sight, the familiar contours of home. I am struck by how these massive eruptions of earth are rooted deeply in the ocean floor, from where all life seems to arise, and about which we know less than the surface of the moon.

  Our ship at long last comes to rest, tethered like a tired horse to land, waiting to be replenished before the next voyage out. I retrieve my passport and return my Antarctic clothing. The young black cadet asks me boldly to take him to the opera next time the ship docks, as he has never been before.

  My companions and I say goodbye before dispersing. The weatherman is met by his divorced wife, with whom I later hear he spent the night; an officer who has signed up for extra voyages is fetched by an unenthusiastic wife and two ambivalent daughters; a crew member whose father died while we were at sea is received by relatives in black. We are delivered back to life that has moved on, as we have.

  Stepping off the gangplank to the welcome of a good friend, I find I must learn to walk again, for the earth tilts and shifts beneath my feet reminding me I am a beginner always, that what I'm used to is what I know. Tomorrow is my birthday and I want to celebrate. More than anything I want to see my sons' changed faces, to throw a party round a tub of Antarctic ice and to rest afterwards upon the dreamboat of my bed.

  ***

  I discovered that my son had already begun to arrange a party, the first time in my adult life anyone had done this for me. The piece of Antarctica went into the freezer until the party, when few believed the ice keeping the beer cold was from the southern shelf and not from the machine at the local bottle store. When everyone had gone home and the fire round which we had sat outside had died, my son and I launched what was left of the ice into the swimming pool where it looked uncomfortable, lit by underwater lights, as though it didn't belong here. The next morning it was gone.

  118

  ***

  PART THREE

  Tracking the Truth

  15. To Trust or not to Trust

  One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

  André Gide

  We all have aspects of our lives that we would like to change. But attempts to alter our behaviour and circumstances initially increase anxiety; so we mostly don't unless forced to. Also, we might not be aware of what change is possible, and what is not.

  Confronting our unfounded fears might allow real concern for ourselves, others and the earth to emerge. If we take our courage in our hands and step out of repetitive patterns, how do we decide on a new path? Before we examine means to alleviate the situation, we must first dig ourselves in deeper to investigate the full extent of the problem. We will take a closer look at trust, and what breaks it.

  A small child trusts her parents or caregivers automatically, because she depends on them for care and sustenance for her survival. They are her point of reference in the world, as she knows no other, and has not yet developed the neural capacity to question her circumstances.

  A time inevitably arrives when a child experiences betrayal by the parent. She recognises for the first time that her parents are fallible. This constitutes a crisis, and a plunge into fearfulness and rage. In order to overcome the betrayal, she must relinquish the idea of perfection, and admit reality. She has to accept that humans are fallible, and develop the ability to discern when to trust and when not to do so. Is the parent a ‘good enough’ parent who is trustworthy most of the time, or is the parent mostly untrustworthy?

  It is not only parents who betray our trust. At some point it occurs in any close relationship that we had hoped to depend on. Most people are trustworthy most of the time. However, we may have areas where we are predictably untrustworthy, for example people who always arrive late, or who habitually make excuses to extract themselves from arrangements, or who repeatedly pass on personal confidences.

  A young male patient arrived to see me. He was shocked to discover that Dr Garisch was a woman. I assured him that all general practitioners deal with all issues, but if he was more comfortable with a male doctor, I would see whether one of my colleagues was available.

  He shook his head, sat down, and plunged into a story of how, while he was away on business, he had drunk too much alcohol one night, and had sex with a woman he didn't know well. He was terrified that he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease, and that his girlfriend would find out. He had no genital or other symptoms suggestive of an STD, and the examination was normal. I counselled him and ran blood tests which were negative, and then after a few weeks I repeated the HIV test to cover the window period, which was again negative.

  The man was not reassured. He returned several times during the next few months, wanting to be retested. In the interim he had developed a tight feeling in his chest and could not sleep at night. I could find no evidence of cardiac, gastrointestinal or respiratory disease. I suggested that his symptoms were of anxiety – the voice of his conscience – and reassured him that making mistakes is the most human of traits. Errors, I proposed, are in themselves not the problem, as one can make amends in most instances. The main thing is to learn from mistakes to avoid repeating them to our own detriment, and to the detriment of those we love. I suggested that he perhaps tell his girlfriend what had happened, and work it through with her. He was adamant that he could not do this because she would leave him. He declined the option of psychotherapy.

  We all have an idea about who we are, but every now and then something happens that gives us a window into another aspect of our natures. This young man saw himself as faithful and reliable, and he could not forgive himself for betraying the image he had of himself. I suggested that he bring his girlfriend in if he would like me to facilitate his telling her, but he refused the offer.

&n
bsp; I told him that any relationship will come to the point where it is tested. That is the way of life. How the two individuals involved respond to the difficulty will determine the viability or strength of the partnership longer term. I said that although it was not essential that he tell his girlfriend about this once-off betrayal, it was an opportunity to get real with each other. If not this event, then there would be others that arise in their relationship which would test it to the core.

  Hillman suggests that we cannot have trust without the possibility of betrayal.58 Whether in a love relationship, or with one's doctor, homeopath, therapist, religious leader, building contractor, divorce lawyer, dried milk producer or dentist, we might unconsciously want them to have an expertise and authority that will function like an all-powerful, consistent, infallible parent or even a god. Hillman calls this primal trust, and he likens it to the naïve, out-of-this-world trust of Adam's symbiosis with God before the Fall. We want the person we have invested with our trust to know what is best for us, look after us and always act in our best interests. When they let us down, our impulse might be towards revenge, denial of the value of the relationship, or cynicism. Or it may eventually resolve into a more conscious acceptance of an imperfect world. The relationship will never be the same after betrayal, but if worked with consciously by both parties, it can become less innocent, ignorant or self-deceptive.

  Situations arise where not betraying another might mean betraying yourself. Patients who are really ill and refuse a sick note, protesting that they are needed at work, could be overriding their best interests. In a marriage, a spouse may stay in a repetitively abusive relationship because of the vow to love their partner forever.

  When we are ill or injured, it can feel as though our bodies have betrayed us. We rely on our bodies to drive us around, taking them for granted until they break down at the side of the road. I have seen patients annoyed, even outraged, that they should be left in the lurch and in bed, when they have important meetings to attend.

  ***

  In his 2005 acceptance speech59 for the Nobel Prize for Literature, playwright Harold Pinter notes: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing … can be both true and false. ’ His assertion applies to the exploration of reality through art. But as citizens, he argues, we must ask: What is true? What is false?

  Artists, he claims, use language to probe the truth, whereas politicians ‘on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people … live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. ’

  Noam Chomsky writes that the foundation of government is the control of public opinion through lies and manipulation. He points out that we recognise this strategy with ease in the most despotic and military of governments, but argues that ‘it is far more important in the free societies, where obedience cannot be maintained by the lash … The modern institutions of thought control, frankly called propaganda … originated in the most free societies.60

  Chomsky appeals to the public to educate itself in order to challenge the manipulations of the state to control public opinion. If we do not do this, he says, it allows for those in power to deceive, to steal from and even to destroy other countries while purporting to be advancing democracy.

  ***

  In his Schumacher lecture entitled ‘… And Huge is Ugly’,61 James Hillman points to the modern trend towards enormity – from multinationals, agribusiness and supermarkets, to genocides of millions and population explosions, to mega-cities and garbage barges. He argues that burgeoning hugeness has numbed our sensitivity to beauty.

  The contemporary trends in psychotherapy and the New Age movement are in danger of reducing the power of the psyche to a narcissistic obsession with the self. We persuade ourselves to trust the belief that if we turn inward, away from the mess we have created in the world, and work on ourselves to find serenity, this will contribute to improving the political and social situation in the world.

  Hillman takes psychotherapists to task for turning fear, outrage, desire and shame into the neurotic individual emotions of anxiety, anger, neediness and guilt. Calling them our animal senses, he argues that they are appropriate and essential attributes for life.62

  We need these emotions to alert ourselves to the toxic mess we are continuing to create in our own home, the world. They are guides to help us find our way. Dissociating us from these responses, and perverting them into neuroses which can then be medicated or purged, numbs us to the abuse that surrounds us and allows it to continue. We learn not to protest. Hillman states that our propensity for consumption and waste as distractions from boredom is not merely immoral and unhealthy, it is shameful.

  We need to wake up to desire, not as mass-produced and mass-marketed megabuck pornography, nor as the latest ‘must-haves’ on the mall racks, but as the yearning for connection with the psyche, creativity, intimacy and life.

  Undermining our animal instincts by calling them personal problems, we cut off an important organ of perception. This could be a major reason why we are anxious and depressed: we accept the unacceptable while knowing we are fooling ourselves. Both the world and Psyche need our outraged, ashamed, fearful and desirous engagement.

  ***

  As adults we need to become curious about who we are and how we live. We need to question our actions and ask whether they benefit ourselves, each other and the earth, whether we have to accept and trust the way things are, and what we might do to change this. Scratching below the veneer of how we have always seen ourselves and the world can be very alarming. It can cause panic attacks and dizzy spells. We want to avoid suffering, so we are reluctant to go there.

  We have constructed the rickety platform of contemporary life, and need to reconsider. The scientists and the artists have contributions to make as we stumble on, trying to find an authentic and congruent way to live.

  ***

  16. Instruments of Truth-finding

  The pursuit of truth is life-giving.

  John Lukacs63

  There is a crisis of trust in the world, with good reason. People are using the term polycrisis, as there are problems in all departments. Corruption and abuse are not the bad behaviour of a few aberrants; they are endemic all over the world, from financial scams to tax evasion to bribery of doctors to stressful working conditions to bad eating habits. We know we are being lied to about how various products will ensure the whitest teeth, popularity and relief. Our lives are littered with competing falsehoods. Our economy depends on us buying things we don't need.

  It is time to examine the instruments hailed as methods to ensure that we are not being deceived. This section of the book examines whether they are dependable, or whether they have let us down.

  The human brain, by its very nature, makes associations in an attempt to make sense of ourselves and the world. In other words, we are constantly, unconsciously, on the lookout for patterns. Huge areas of the brain are allocated to associative functions. Making correlations about happenings in the outside world occurs by making neural connections in the cortex. But the brain sometimes comes to false conclusions. The mind is easily tricked. Fabricated or false associations can be incorporated into the culture as general knowledge or ‘common sense’; for example that butter is good for treating burns, or that the air is the only way infection is spread.

  ***

  Epidemiology is a branch of science concerned with the occurrence, transmission and control of epidemic diseases. Just over two hundred years ago, Dr Alexander Gordon, an obstetrician in Aberdeen, investigated an epidemic of puerperal fever, or sepsis, in women who had recently given birth. The mortality rate of this disease is very high. At the time, people believed that the contagion was transmitted through the atmosphere. In one of the first epidemiological studies
, Dr Gordon kept a diary of all women who were infected, their ages and addresses, whether they lived or died, and whether he or a midwife had assisted the delivery.

  A pattern emerged, and Dr Gordon was able to conclude that the contagion was carried from one birthing room to the next on the hands and clothing of the midwives whose job it was to assist the patient and to prevent harm. The healer herself had unwittingly carried death into the heart of the home. With candour and scientific objectivity Gordon wrote in his treatise, published in 1795: ‘It is a disagreeable declaration for me to mention, that I myself was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of women. ’64

  He noted: ‘the observations which an extensive experience has enabled me to make will serve to illustrate … that if practitioners had observed more and reasoned less, there would have been little dispute, either about the nature or seat of this disease. ’

  Observation over time is an essential aspect of the modern approach to ascertaining truth in medicine. In the next chapter we will look at the tool of scientific method more closely.

  ***

  Marion Milner asserts that the poet – in the broad sense, including all the arts – is an essential, not a luxury.

  It was not until [man] had learnt something about the facts of climate and the seasons … that he could know how to use these to his own advantage and avoid being destroyed by them. But there were not only external facts he had to know. There were Internal facts, facts of his own Impulses and conflicting desires, and It was here that the poet was the pioneer … often, by not realising the nature and strength of their own desires, men have been wrecked by them.65