Spitting Mad

Joint replacement patients, even those under 65, have surgery because they cannot sit, stand, lie down, walk, bend, sleep, work, and do everyday activities without extreme, sharp, often grinding, usually unrelenting pain.

As the disease worsens, pain killers work only in the amount suitable for a large horse and often at the expense of consciousness.

I have just read an Associated Press article that characterizes joint replacement patients as whining boomers who demand surgery only to be able to exercise as if they were still forty and to deny aging. The article suggests that they should all accept their pain and limited mobility as a normal part of aging, shut up and use canes, and suck it up as many in previous generations have done when faced with the same limitations.

The article is wrong on so many counts, at best misleading, at worst unethical. First, I fully acknowledge that some do and are exactly as the article claims. The author found them, quoted them, wrote what doctors and others actually think about them. Beyond that...

The article leaves the distinct impression that this is the true and only "face" of joint replacement. Once the ugly truth of these unrealistic boomers is revealed, the next step is easy. Why feel sympathy for their suffering? They are vain and out of touch, after all, self-absorbed and putting too much stress on already limited resources. (There's a familiar theme here.)

The article attributes the need for joint replacement only to obesity, the desire for youth, or the refusal to endure minor discomfort.  Obesity rates do not account for all the surgeries, so "fix-me-itis"(as one surgeon calls it) must account for the balance.

Nowhere does the article discuss osteoarthritis as a degenerative disease with many possible causes, many not at all in the sufferer's control. Age alone is not one of the major causes; many seniors well into their eighties and nineties do not have the condition.

The argument to simply endure as previous generations did is ludicrous. Most previous generations didn't have the option of joint replacement.The first ones were done in the late forties. At best, boomers' parents and some of their grandparents could have had the surgery - many have. Our ancestors endured the severe pain and limitation because they had no other choice.

We have choices, but we need more research. As the article points out, we just don't know how more active recipients of joint replacement will fare over the years.

The best way to ensure the reduction of this version human suffering is to treat it with a procedure that we know works. Another false picture of selfish, entitled boomers whose suffering we either discredit or deny doesn't help anyone.

And, as the article points out, for whatever reason, candidates for joint replacement are getting younger every year, so eventually we will need some other rationale than that of fitness-driven boomers.

Persephone in the Yard

Every spring, the branches of certain shrubs and bushes turn a vibrant purple during the time just before new shoots appear. Sometimes whole hillsides of trees present a blanket of deep, vegetative purple.

That display is Persephone returning from Hades, the Lord (and place) of the Underworld, to be reunited with her mother Demeter. It is the return of spring, leading to new growth and eventually harvest, at which time Persephone must return to Hades. It is one myth of the origin of the seasons.

This is only one of the Greek myths involving Persephone/Kore/Proserpine. Like most myths, even from one geographical area, there are differences, adaptations, and blendings of traditions, as one age or religion gives way to another. The artistic license of many singers/poets creates another layer of details.

Add to that all the people, places, cultures, religions, and storytelling traditions from "everywhen" and everywhere, and a simple desire to know which was first and original quickly becomes insurmountable. As I learned more, it all happily became richer, deeper, more complex, and entirely more interesting.

Still, I have my personal favourites, and every spring when that wonderful purple signals Persephone's yearly return from the underworld, I know this is mine for the origin of seasons.

Art is the Thing

Our scientific understanding of sound frequencies, musical instruments, and analog and digital technologies for conveying sound waves does not ever fully explain a Mozart piano concerto, nor does our understanding of music theory.

Neuroscience does not explain the piano concerto, and it does not ever fully explain the writings of Shakespeare. But because neuroscience is the newest kid on the block and has a trendy cachet, some believe it can explain Hamlet and all other art in ways that will fundamentally alter our understanding.

But I don't believe it.

Morgan Meis's article "This Is Your Brain on Art," in The Smart Set (March 17/11) discusses these issues in his review of V.S. Ramachandran's book The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for what Makes Us Human. The article is well written and a balanced discussion, although Meis at least somewhat believes that the findings of neuroscience will deeply shift our relationship with art.

In his review, Meis points out that Ramachandran does not claim to explain the ultimate meaning of art, just that "making art and appreciating art seems [sic] to be universal in the human species"  :

Neuroscience is not meant to replace other standpoints from which we appreciate and analyze art. Ramachandran thinks, in general, that neuroscience can make significant contributions to aesthetics without otherwise encroaching on the humanities. Our love of Shakespeare, he argues, is not diminished by our understanding of universal grammar.

Ramachandran gets it because he understands the science and understands its limits, but so many non-scientists want to base every field of study and area of human endeavour on neuroscience. So we have brain-based Shakespeare, brain-based leadership, brain-based art history, brain-based relationships, etc., etc., etc....

Individually, it is a personal choice to base one's life on misunderstood science written about in popular culture, but we shouldn't rush to re-write social policy and whole academic disciplines based on it. (I've written about this in literary studies; there is a trend towards neuroscience as full explanation of literature.)

I believe that our relationship with art is not most importantly about hard-wiring and synapses, that is about the material. The importance of our relationship with art is existential and beyond science.

Some of Ramachandran's research (which I discussed in Mirror, Mirror) is about phantom limb pain and how the brain responds to a mirror image in place of a missing leg. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, presents the play within his play to hold up a kind of mirror image to Claudius, an image that contains Claudius's missing guilt.

The more things change, the more they stay the same! The mechanism in both images - the Renaissance understanding of the psyche and twenty-first century understanding of the brain -  is that the viewer will respond as if the missing element is indeed present and act accordingly.

Ramachandran's mirror image and neuroscience, generally, contribute to our understanding of humanity and art. But, like Shakespeare's play within the play, it is only part of a much larger, complex, and maybe inexplicable whole.

Meis writes: "We are going to go forward into the unknown in the quest to make art fully knowable and we'll deal with the consequences when we've arrived, joyful in our accomplishments and sad, too, at the inevitable loss of all that has been left behind."

Loss? I don't believe it.