7 Oct 2013: I get no kick from cocaine?

No workout at all today for the first no-workout day in months because of last night’s pain which was a multiple of the intensity of the intensity of the night before.  Saturday night’s pain was really bad, and I now know this to be because of my walking workout in which I was secretly and pridefully trying to get back to the Garden (running), for last night’s (Sunday night’s) pain was very intense and easily a ten over ten…perhaps it smashed the barometer.

This was a typical experience in running where when I ignored pain, I’d suffer intensely. The obvious “cure” is not to walk or run at this level of intensity and at this duration at least not for now.

“I bring you suffering: I bring you the release from suffering” – Buddha

The pain was alleviated at last by stilnox and fentanyl which like the smart little guy with the big hammer ten times his size knocked me out. But before that the extraordinary agony (no, don’t italicize it, Chuckles, it ain’t a Greek word) had confronted Saturday night’s prideful claim that I could overcome pain, even tho’ I shied away from that claim, knowing it to be pride, and Pride is “a stick of shitfire with a wick on it”.

But in the agony there was me, a wondering me still, wondering how I could be still there…choral dance in the style of Sophocles:

In the agon there was … me
Dancing amidst the Furies I defied them
But also tempted them to do their worst.
Man proud man must thereby discover his own limits,
For he has said

(Aside, no, “not before he’s dead”, I want no jinglee rhyme this time)

Oh, OK, you can sneak that line in:
But this is noble verse “high and working”, and a combat not of bells,
But of hammers as we strike each other as Hector and Achilles,
Or Palamon and Arcite
In final battle, like the government shutdown.

But my reward for what patience I “shown”, to use the grammar of Pittsburgh Dad who “seen” a tornado in this agon:  was Suffering and then, reciprocal to suffering, this morning’s Buddhist Release from Suffering: “I bring you Suffering” is not just accidentally linked to “I bring you Release”.

It’s a Mystery, as Hemyngs says in “Shakespeare in Love”. Pittsburgh Dad, rather like Homer Simpson, is, qua Dad, the locus of what’s so airily dismissed as patriarchal culture. He seen the storm, he seen Hypolyte being destroyed by the monster I’th’old play (Phèdre). Mother tries to comfort but my Dad told me when I was in the hospital that I needed to be “patient” like a “patient” in a pun of some wisdom tho’ pretty lame.

Since in a chart based on an Excel spreadsheet as a teacher, I discovered some Great Learning as opposed to Trivial Pursuit (“the participle like ‘seen’ or ‘shown’ is always preceded by a helper verb in the ‘have’ family”) I could immediately spot, and more helpfully explain, blunders like that of Pittsburgh Dad. For the student wants Great Learning such as was in my table in which I combined all possibilities of grammar forms in a verb phrase.

I won’t post the table right now because I’m like the mathematician I met at Princeton (damn right I name drop), John Horton Conway who in a seminar at Princeton’s short-lived “John von Neumann Center” (damn right! How do ya like me now!?) Conway said he never liked to search for the paperwork of a proof he’d constructed; it was easier and more fun for him to do the proof again, and, he could spot errors and make improvements! Even as I preferred to rewrite software tools (considered as “lemmas” on the way to a desired theorem) than locate them in a mess or worse use some other person’s idiot idea of the proof unless she was a Knuth, John Nash, Brian Kernighan or Melinda Varian (where Donald Knuth or the three Princeton personalities I mention were excellent sources of software tools and references to tools; John Nash arguably the least “user friendly” but displayed a clear grasp of the notions as early as the early 1950s, which was amazing.)

I have to put the To-Do note “reconstruct and post the verb phrase grammar chart” on top of the wobbly “stacka stuff I gotta do” hopin’ it don’t collapse (to continue, briefly, in “Pittsburgh Dad” style) but trust me I find such activity fun and even analgesic. For “I get no kick in a plane, flying real high with some guy in the sky is my idea of nothing to do”.

26 Sep 2013: Paint It Black (1)

Worked out 23..26 Sep with 20 minutes including 150..200 step aerobics first thing every morning.

But having increasing health issues including: standard hip pain and now, headache that spreads and increases to migraine levels.

Have 570.00 HKD in wallet and more in bank. Not too concerned about effect of USD government shutdown on social security payments on October payment of “my” social security since these checks have been coming and I have been able to save.

30 July 2013: savage pain, workout suspended

Savage pain last night (20/10) woke me up several times even tho’ I was sleeping full length. Painkiller booster every hour until I was silly on Fentanyl boosters. I don’t think I overdid it but the user of Fentanyl syrup needs to be responsible around these issues.

No step aerobics, dance aerobics or running thru 4 august. This has already created benefit.

Note that the blog post for 29 July has gone missing. It contains important content for pain logs, software development and Kant study so if you have a copy put it into a Comment anywhere on this blog.

Note on my personal policy concerning photographs of my grandchildren

A father’s children are “his” in ordinary language altho the story of Isaac and Abraham begins to deny that the father’s sons are “his”. Divorced grandfather have a special problem after thirty-odd years, in some cases, of being an emotional scapegoat and outlet as in “pow! biff! blam!, says the Piller Killer for being a dead, or Grateful Dead following white in most cases, beat in other cases as in deadbeat Grateful Dead following more-interested-than-his-TRS80-than-in-us male.

“He left us.”

“You wanted him to leave.”

“OK, there is nothing wrong with that.”

Actually, there is.

But, to stop exploring side issues and face the Now, a grandfather’s children are not automatically his in the way a grandmother’s are. By the time the children see Granma (I love the variant spellings of that word) both the seers and the Seen are needy, for medical care and financial help, but may not admit it, therefore the grandmothers and grandchildren can conspire to exclude the fierce pain of the Grandfather and recreate a false paradise of childhood when the yard went on forever and there was a birdbath.

Creating those interesting “reason not the need” conversations on the drive home. “Granny Mama and Pitcher Rick’s got a birdbath! [Again, recall what I said about the Nine Billion Names of a grandparent and note how second marriages can introduce the raffish and Damon Runyonesque name into the most genteel ‘hood] Whycum not us?” “Because I say so!!”

There it is, and you have to say so, lay down the law as it were. Might help to smash the first cut as we see Moses doing on that (according to our Holy Sisters in Catholic School) overly literal film of the Ten Commandments.

But, I digress.

I won’t publish my grand-daughters’ images on WordPress or any completely public area of the Internet, but, I do publish them on Facebook. If you like, you can “apply” to be my Facebook Friend but we’ll need some history of interaction outside WordPress, or heavy interaction inside, to avoid the wrath of FB.

I have, and will continue to, publish art based on their image which will always be respectful.

I brood! (je pense!) over a picture of little Esme Sesame!!

Oh my god those eyes (les yeux!! himmels-Augen!!: “heaven’s eyes”).

“Why doesn’t somebody just shoot me in the head? BANG!” – Hook.

I mean for the love of Mike, what would happen if my former wife, my son and grand-daughters were to just show in the way people show up for yain in hospitals when you’re punk: they float like angels, for the most part, or process servers and cops in some instances, into your field of vision “in a moment, at the twinkling of an eye”.

But again: if my family showed up by surprise
In the sea-washed world of my tearful eyes…

I’d have a FIT and might need medical attention. Xs for eyes and a sort of goofy smile.

Esme is very Perky.

Perky little Esme does her perky thang and perks up perkily at the camera. Her eyes are beautiful, like the jungle….She is Perkadelic… And, I see where my son Peter (jungly Peter) has rightfully acquired a little baby seat for her with colorful poppets that wave springily back, and forth. We know from Kant that this rich sensory input is in empirical apperception converted to a Concept such as “dem widdle junglee things what wiggle, and hit me in da nose sometime”.

PerkyEsme knows herself to be Other with respect to dem widdle junglee things for she is not Parsifal, she does not hit herself in the nose. She develops a center thereby. Parents should do many stupid things to demonstrate this for their children…ideas are on youtube, including a baby who thinks it’s a riot to tear up letters rejecting daddycucamonga’s latest job application.

Kant Study

Continues, but have no time to comment on this at this time.

In this blog I hope I have deconstructed the foolish opposition between emotion and reason. It’s a load of cod.

28 July 2018: De Plane!

Pain. Pain. Pain.

“De Pain, Boss!”

Still in some pain as I write three hours later: 20 minute workout first thing at 6:00 AM: very painful: 10/10 at times. Up from yesterday and day before.

Although lying flat does prevent night pain, I was in 5/10 pain on arising and had to punch thru 100 lowrise steps, a walk and 200 supine reps with weights. Inadvertent moves then caused screaming unless I focused on the need to keep quiet and take the pain during early morning workouts to let my homeys have their own pain-free sleep at this time when, in Horatio’s words,

No planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

– Shakespeare, Hamlet

Loading up on painkiller even as I write, but troubled and worried in mind for this could be a permanent change. Down we go unless I trust in Thee.

Still plan to workout, thru the pain but this commitment may not be kept if nthis pain increases, which would indicate that my compulsive working out may be the cause of this pain, and, possibly, much worse.

Evening 28 July note: for this week, do no step workouts. Walking and supine dance with or without weights OK for typical durations of 20, 30, 30+ minutes; will get leg workouts from the Rackety Rower in Physio.

Keeping Computers Alive (with No Money From a Hospital Bed)

Nick the Brain has found that my Black Screen of Death on my MacAir, which has me using a Powerbook, was caused by a dying fan. Not good, because given the way a Mac Air depends on cool air (because its electronics are so powerful and packed in a small space in a way unprecedented in the Mac world), not only the Fan but also the system, depending on cool air flow patterns from the Fan, must shut down unexpectedly to avoid a Kentucky Fried Computer. This only appears to be a software problem but it’s a hardware feature which overrides software.

In addition, Nick the Brain points out that by dropping and cracking my Mac Air I create air holes and apertures which the power engineers could not anticipate. You’d think the holes would consistently cool the computer but as I learned, years ago, in my Windows certification class, they will generally HEAT the computer (whether by way of a crack or removing a panel on a desktop running Windows) since the air flow on either an old Windows or new MacAir system was designed to be OPTIMAL…therefore almost any change will HEAT the computer.

It’s just logic, not Weird Science: if airflow is as near to the theoretical best B such that airflow is B* (B*<B), the chance of accidentally changing your airflow, by dropping your computer, for the better and making the actual airflow A optimal such that B*<A<=B will be zero. Since A can NEVER exceed B by definition A will always be less than B*…worse than any airflow improvement obtained by dropping the system like a stupid idiot.

The problem HERE is that I drop computers, like unto a stupid idiot. I do so more frequently than the average end user because my natural clumsiness which was learned behavior back in the day is reinforced by the crippling effect of my cancer.

So now my resources for communicating with the world consist of a PowerBook 13 inch system with a cracked screen and a Mac Air that may be fried. In addition there's an excellent, and well-supported, Windows system which I can use for emergencies in the common room.

I could break into savings to get an HP Mini running Windows and .Net (native, not mono) or another MacAir but at this time I think it far more prudent to hack around and put up with problems for you learn more from such hacking and "with putting up".

But but … this returns me to my role of "the only truly effective computer user in the room" unless Nick Berriff (the Brain) is here, and this means I have to devote blocks of time to learning the latest "best designs" of idiots, hacks and corporate drones who don't give a s*t…unlike me or Nick. But I would rather read Kant.

Oh well.

Kant Study

Includes significant updates added 28 July 2018

Finished Michelle Grier on “The Ideal of Pure Reason”, primarily a discussion of the ontological proof method in general. Although Kant famously rejected the equivocation on properties and “existence” and other prerequisites to having properties he did believe that objects in the world could have a perfection as it were of properties and tried in the Ideal to make use of this.

To determine (or describe) a thing completely would seem to require that we know all possible positive predicates of that thing and have a list, say (A…Z, A0…Z0, … Az…Zz) of applicable predicates handy. Each NEGATIVE predicate (where, for example, “bad” is ~good or “male” is ~female in the sort of taxonomy we’d look for at this point) can be removed.

Of course, Kant’s optimism on this is rather touching. We can discover new predicates and in other cases we can find predicates meaningless as applied to certain objects. But proceeding as if these wrinkles were ironed-over…

…there exists a perfect being PB such that A(PB) & B(PB) & C(PB) & … Zz(PB) qed.

For example, if we can in such a facile manner prove the existence of the perfect being we also can prove using the same method, the existence of the Perfect Being’s “foil”, PBF, let’s say the Devil, simply by writing (~A(PBF) & ~B(PBF) & … & ~Zz(PBF).

And, if God doesn’t exist, and the same set of properties applies to God and the Devil in reverse, then the Devil doesn’t exist: God exists if and only if the devil exists: you can prove God’s existence by proving the Devil’s existence: “Imagine there’s no heaven”. Because you can in this world enumerate all properties of God, and because its logic is consistently two-valued, questions are easily answered in favor of God.

Complexity of thought is discouraged in universities which increasingly find it difficult to teach philosophy as opposed to “values and ethics” classes with a conservative slant, “critical thinking” with a nice leftist bias exactly where it is needed, or a neutral comparative religion class which isn’t philoophy.

However, we should leave off attacking modern philosophical pedagogy and take a look at our reasoning from overly facile lists of attributes to big results. At this point, we’ve been reduced to conjuror’s tricks which assume almost that beings can be brought into existence by writing or saying certain Kabbalah-like things but that is nonsense. What we’ve done is shown the backward-looking nature of Kant’s thought in addition to its forward looking nature when he, like we, reifies properties; traditional grammar did this as a matter of course since no need was seen for dividing things and properties when both were nouns in most languaged.

However, Kant’s thought is the ground of the very developments in modern logic which he would probably have found most useful, but which defy him here, including the very idea that our ordinary language including the ordinary mathematical notation we use in the spot (without fear that our calculus has occult, Kabbalistic power).

Both traditional and modern logic can treat properties as things and thereby making lists of properties including the excellencies of a Perfect Being. But modern logic can discover contradictory and nonsense properties (such as “shaves all men that do not shave themselves”) that much better.

In a sort of “hack” of symbolic logic notation I can “say” things that look meaningful such as this paraphrase of “some properties are excellencies but not all”.

(Ex)[isProperty(x) && isAnExcellency(x)] && (Ey)[isProperty(x) && ~isAnExcellency(x)]

These amusing parlor games raise issues. For example, the above implies that the world has two objects, one of which is an ordinary object and the other a property.

Now, suppose we have implemented the above notation as a “programming language” (which I ask you not to do for your own sanity). If its world data base contains fewer than two objects then we crash, or at best “there is a bug”. There may also be problems if there is object in the world which is an “excellency”.

I am not saying there are problems. I am saying that in my experience, the problem of “data with no value” was a philosophical and sociological education in itself.

“Data with no value” occurs in outlier and deviant cases and therefore deserves the most attention in social research and computing while getting the least, as does data that doesn’t fit a reified framework (male or female).

If the And operator is not implemented lazily such that in A && B, the “lazy” evaluator does NOT evaluate B when A implies that such evaluation may be a problem, then we crash. Computing here overrides the social need.

But because I have needed so much painkiller booster today, I am getting quite fuzzy and unequal to digital philosophy. I shall return to this subject tomorrow (Monday, China dating, 29 July 2013 starting around 0900, and going to 0100 (1:00 AM approximately USA).

I have just sleepily plugged this Kant Study in. I am so unutterably sleepy that it would be best to check it out tomorrow. My prose must flow between male and female polarities … zzz … huh wuzzat. I shall be well rested tomorrow, and won’t have to torment myself, doing mega step aerobics. Kant students, including graduate students studying Kant, are asked to comment on my sanity based on their knowledge of Kant, helping me to detect whether I’m going off the rails. When thanks to the professionalism and scholarship of the late ED Klemke at Roosevelt University in 1970, and that of his mentor Henry Veatch at Northwestern, we all had the extraordinary privilege of reading the complete Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I had the privilege, perhaps the last time in the West, of reading a complete text and my purpose is to recreate what such close reading is like.

Change Record

1 Aug 2013 Correction to post date. [Change records are important here because we’re possibly documenting a Singularity here. “28 Feb 2028”?? Uh, NO, I cannot travel in time! Make it 28 July 2018, something like that.]’

27 July 2013

20 minute workout in 10/10 (agonizing) pain at 5:56 AM: pain owing to the pulling and stretching of nerve over the last two days will hopefully settle down. Today I’ve resolved to work through sciatica and other obviously cancer source pains in workouts because the workout is that important.

Levels of pleasure/pain starting with pleasure as negative numbers and going to positive for pain. Which makes little sense.

-2000/10 You know what, the big O
-1000/10 Abnormally great exercise high (London Marathon, etc)
-100/10 Normal exercise high
-50/10 Conversation with someone smarter than me
-2/10 Something interesting on YouTube
-1/10 Feeling that the Fentanyl is kicking in
0/10 Where it’s proper to be, probably (that’s a poem!)
1/10 I’m a pussy for even mentioning it
2/10 pussy pussy pussy
3/10 Whoa now
4/10 Bang
5/10 #$%%!!!!
6/10 Ai-yah!!
7/10 Ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethynamethywillbedone …
8/10 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYAAHHHHH!
9/10 SHOOT ME NOW (my kid comes up pokes his head over the bed and says bang!)
10/10 Silence and alert awareness of the pain whilst Buddhist and Christian texts float through my brain and my body making my pain go negative as they sync up with Fentanyl

Neutrality?

Is where it’s proper to be, most of the time, and probably.
You don’t wanna be
The Queen of Germany, always in a rage like Gilda was
On the old Saturday Night Live, for that’s the buzz.
It is best to be the land of the Swiss,
Or a countree you never even heard of
Hast thou ever been, has thou ever seen
Oh San Marino, or Lichtensteen?
That’s the point, my lord, emulative be
Of Brigadoons real. Seek thou the seacoast
Of Bohemia and the Terra Nullius of
Australia
Where men’s head do grow beneath their shoulders
And some are hazardous and anthrophage.
But until thy wound is healed through His grace
I shall take thee to safer place.
I shall take thee
To the lost Duchy of Grantham so fair
Or a country Utopian whose name means, nowhere.
Do not rage for earthy fame:
For from it comes death, ignominy and shame.

Edward G. Nilges 27 July 2013: Copyright (c) 2013 Edward G. Nilges, moral rights asserted.

I did flatten out my bed and sleep with the problem left leg extended, and last night’s sleep was better than the two previous nights so we’re perhaps on the right track. I have Chemo in the coming week which may also help. I flatter myself that the Chemo and exercise are working but we’ll see.

If I have five years that’s a lot of water under the bridge. If I have six months I will have spoken to the new GrandBugs Tessa and Esme, and using my phone time, told them stories like I used to tell peter.

But I need to return to the narrative of this morning’s rather frightful but profitable workout. Hope it’s not too scarey!

With a horrible rictus, and with my face in the window of my room at ground floor level, I did first 100 lowrise steps with aerobic agony and carcinogenetic pain, like a Lovecraft daemon: the Face at the Window:

“For now I wake up screaming from dreams of Yog Soth’oth and the face, screaming at the window. The devil of it, Madison, is that it’s a handsome, white, European face, manly-lined and etched with care: yet it terrifies me as no Black-a-moor’s or Chinaman’s [1] face could. I think, and I ask you to shoot me after I tell you, that it is our Edward’s face.”

It is fortunate that I workout this way consistently at dawn so some kid doesn’t see me. Children and adolescents read inferior books about “The Horror” whereas I seem to be passing through it, the Heart of Darkness. But Lovecraft when he fell ill learned to make terms with the Beyond. We have to no choice.

Religious faith helps in particular my trust in the Harrowing of Hell’s having locked Satan, his Imps and other supernatural beings such as witches in Hell. I don’t think some Goody wife is a witch even if she goes abroad cursing and muttering. For one thing I often go abroad cursing and muttering even though I am not a broad.

But my views are found nowhere in the official Church’s teachings although hate-filled and neurotic doctrines including the belief in exorcism remain. These doctrines, while they provide wicked fodder for reporters anxious for cheap thrills, are to me repugnant and I don’t accept them.

I then walked to the stairwell and did fifty stair steps. Then I climbed and descended one half a flight of stairs, and returned to bed…but stopping the exercise caused, unexpectedly, a great deal of pain, more than when I was “the face at the window”.

The great male nurse C admonished me for screaming as I threw myself on the bed and he was right. The pain was caused by voluntary actions and the dawn hours are for us often the only time when we get continuous alpha level sleep and Pain stops lashing many of the homeboys, so it is inconsiderate to scream in pain between 3 and 7 AM approximately.

[Stamp and Crash, all rise, announcement!]

Officers and gentlemen do not scream in agony and are advised so to counsel other ranks! Leather strips are available for biting! Right. Right? Right. RIGHT!

[Stamp and crash of boots as the Adjutant leaves.]

NOTES

[1] I struggled here over how to phrase this. “Negroid” is offensively close to the cluster of Spanish slave-driver words based on “black and therefore suitable for slavery” of which the worst is “the n word”.

“Blackamoor” on the other hand mocks the user, as self-mockery, for it’s pretentious and Shakespearean.

My late son told me a couple of years ago that it’s “racist” to use “Chinaman” mostly because the user sounds stupid and as if he’s about to fly to Frisco to go to China town for chop suey with his Moslem friend. So perhaps there’s a class of words that are racist-zero because they are in all cases ironic or perhaps I’m full of shit.

I shall add today’s Kant notes and other material to a new post after lunch for fading butt pain and Wan Fei-Yu (I think) on the HDTV in the day room distracts.

Quiz Time!

“fly to Frisco to go to China town for chop suey with his Moslem friend” contains how many errors: scroll down for the answer and explanations

1
2
3
4

ANSWER AND EXPLANATION

There are FOUR errors in “fly to Frisco to go to China town for chop suey with his Moslem friend”.

“Frisco” is an old-fashioned name for San Francisco and a bygone railroad (long since made a part, I believe and haven’t confirmed, of the Union Pacific).

“China Town” is no longer a proper name for a pricey zone of San Francisco: it has no name but is adjacent to North Beach. “China Town” also, somewhat incorrectly, “fronts” the noun “Town” with the noun “China”; while this is correct informally the adjective “Chinese” is available for formal and semi-formal speech and writing.

“China Town” is informal enough to sound like mockery of people who live in that district and its connotation is that the “Town” is where the Chinese are supposed to live; “Chinese town”, without the capitalization of “town”, is more neutral and its connotation is that the town is lived in by Chinese as a matter of fact.

“Chinatown” runs the slightly misused fronting adjective into “Town” making the situation worse because now, “Chinatown” becomes the only correct district people from
China should live in, they being of a different species.

My (late) son Eddie rebuked me for using “Chinatown” and “Chinaman” because both date me and sound and are, Eddie said, “stupid”.

“Chop suey” was a joke name made up by Chinese restaurant operators to fool Westerners into thinking that the day’s leavings were a sophisticated Chinese meal. In fact, Westerners, especially wealthy Westerners, are eating lower and lower down on the food chain as species (especially oceanic species) die off. It is well that they do so, and it increased the profit of restaurant owners. But it doesn’t indicate deep hipster wisdom. Only fad following.

The fad for “raw fish” in which sushi was popularized in the West in the early 1980s horrified older Westerners but as in the case of chop suey and “egg rolls”, which were popularized in urban areas in the 1950s, a public relations campaign persuaded au fait Westerners, hipsters that is of the 1950s or the 1980s, that chopped leftover vegetables, whether served steamed as in chop suey or in a roll of fried dough as in the “egg” (?) roll, was quite the cuisine that was haut (as in “oat”).

Finally, “Muslim” is so preferred today by actual members of the Islamic faith to “Moslem” that “Moslem”, altho acceptable, is considered by publishers and Muslims an error. It might piss Muslims off, so don’t use it. You don’t want to piss Moslems off. Do you.

Richard Attenborough’s films are a good guide to Indo-British pronunciation. In his film Gandhi about the life of Gandhi-Ji, the Hindus in the film during the 1948 Hindu-Muslim riots clearly scream and holler “death to Muhslims” or “death to Mooslims” and not “death to Mahslims” in a maddening way that drives Nehru, Kirpalani and even Gandhi-Ji bat shit, with the Muslim crowds (the pronunciation of their name being best captured using a u whether the sound is “uh” or “oo”) screaming “death to Hindus” or in archaic spelling, “Hindoos”, in reply, confirming that the “u” best captures the oo sound in modern English spelling. Despite the variability of the correct pronunciation the spelling has resolved around “Muslim”, not Moslim, nor Moslem, nor Muslem, nor (to cite a genuinely antique case) “Musselman”.

Change Record

7 Aug 2013: Changed adjective clear to adverb “clearly” in “clear scream and holler”
“Now” in same passage corrected to “nor”

28 June 2013: Knowledge, Experience and Pain

20 mn workout at dawn: walking, three flights of stairs, one later on. Very tired-out, rested twice. The aerobic “step” was taken back by physio and they forgot to return it so I was unable to do my usual 150 steps. Note to self. No need for this if physio doesn’t want me to have it in the room. Just walk to stairwell and do 100 steps at first, alternating L/R at fifty, to simulate the lower rise of the step device. Then gradually increase. Watch exhaustion note cannot crash on the bed (thinking of oneself as Eric Liddell winning the race despite being tripped) may start at a lover step count owing to this.

Or, do the steps after the walk and stagger back to bed.

I always like to plan and scheme about workouts. It makes me so sad at times to no longer be able to run, and if I could, I’d feel like the guy in the film Avatar who without “real” legs, is able to run in a virtual body. Catholics believe in the literal resurrection of the body because they don’t hate the body, they don’t want it chained to a desk.

Kant: continue to read the final chapters of the Critique and the Prolegomena. Neat sound byte in the Prolegomena is: Hume bases Knowledge on Expreience: Kant bases Experience on a (small amount of) (built in) Knowledge. Given what we know about computers, whose architects design-in word lengths and instruction sets, Hume’s tabula rasa is wrong altho preferred by the many, who find it rather queer that when they bark their shins, as did Samuel Johnson and Thomas Reid, this is not an unmediated perception.

Rather strange since many doctors of the time of Reid and Johnson did not think children felt pain, and, perhaps, owing to this, children were enthusiastically savaged in their era. It may be that lower phyla do not feel pain, having only those physical organs needed to register the sensation, but not enough “brain” for the apperception that “this hurts” which seems (to the practical palliative doctor concerned with eliminating pain) to be worse the more self-aware (sensitive) the patient is.

The highly refined, highly self-aware patient like me (ha!) may just have more brain devoted to apperception. We see ourselves contemplating Poussin: we feel ourselves in pain. In the latter case we have to develop ways of feeling yet somehow not feeling pain as in the case of the even more refined apperception of the monk, or for that matter the fantastical duke of dark corners.

9 June 2013

First-thing again 20 minutes, again 100 supine pullups, 100 steps on alternate legs.

The last ten steps on the weakened leg are very hard indeed and cornily I imagine Jane Fonda’s leg-warmered ghost urging me on. Corny!

Heavy pain, as on former mornings during and especially after workout at left hip cancer site, was relieved by breakout syrup med..

Pain. Normally bearable (what alternative is there?) And, it’s a real treat when it stops, whether through meditation, breathing, positioning, or a good old slam of Fentanyl syrup. Sometimes pain stops when it’s still there; that of course is just a shift in your mental attitude. And, there’s my discovery made in June of last year when I went out on a sort of “My Dinner With Andre” with a very smart Oxonian graduate: the company of the learned and charming, especially people more learned and charming than I, is a marvelous relief from pain: during that Dinner with Andre I forgot to feel pain.

Also, pain helps one attend to boring and nearly incomprehensible books such as guess what Der Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, for the pain of being on the edge of comprehension makes the physical pain remote, out there somewhere in the known universe but of no concern compared to damn your eyes figuring out what this verdammte Kant means.

Sometimes pain and God overcomes all these defenses and as happened once during this morning’s siege, one’s blasted with an enormous jolt at the primary site and a simultaneous jolt of nerve pain in one’s blasted ankle, and one can only say how great Thou art and start bawling anthems like Australian and British soldiers in films: David Bowie’s mates in Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence, singing the 23 Psalm, or the defeated British on the German side of the Rhine singing Abide with Me.

But all’s well as I draft this, I am indeed reading the blasted Critique and waiting for congee and an Egg.

Oddly, the last chapter Of Human Freedom in Spinoza’s Ethics, and a feature article in the Chicago Tribune, serve to remind that I fear pain almost precisely to the extent I remain un Homme moyen sensuelle, the average sensual man circa 1975 in my snazzy suit, with my Woodbines, outside the Garden in Sloane Square. Spinoza wrote that the pains of Hell will terrorize only him who self-objectifies by using, perhaps only overusing, drink, tobacco and drugs.

The Tribune article was about how use of drugs destroys the body’s capacity to produce endorphins, those marvelous natural opioids produced by your own body.

Today I am going to Lamma Island as a test run to see whether I am good to go for a discharge from Grantham later this month. They give you the recommended dose of breakout painkiller in the form of dosage tubes. It looks kind of weird to shoot these tubes; I’d rather have a Fentanyl lollipop such as are legal in the USA and are used in the US Army for gravely injured soldiers.

25 March 2013: Fragment of an Agon

Real agony as painkiller wears off. While it is “fun” to search for new positions and new breathing patterns, I may have been downplaying the pain. I am hoping that the second round of chemo helps.

I get a base amount of morphine, which is rather high, using a patch thru doctor’s supervision and then I can ask for more. As long as the requested dosages won’t kill me they are given. I was concerned that the patch might cause an allergic reaction but it hasn’t: I even forget where the patch is. Unlike the original nicotine patch, this morphine patch is like a second skin. It delivers timed dosages of pain relief invisibly.

“Agony” is an extreme word but for me it links to tragedy where in ancient Greece it was an “agon” or goat-song.

Relaxation exercises learned from Hanoi Jane (Fonda): scrunch up your face in a frightening grimace, and then offer up your pain to all-ruling heaven and simultaneously release the face.

For butt pain do ab and butt tightening, and, to release butt pressure, gently raise yourself.

Workout 24 Jan 2012: O Voyager

20 minutes steady and intense rowing machine movement and a nice bath: on the downside, bad news on the cancer front.

The lassitude and reduced appetite I’ve felt over the past week at Grantham may not be due solely to too much bed rest. The cancer manifestation has returned with high PSA levels, in addition to lassitude and reduced appetite. Cancers tend to figure out our treatments in a systematic stepwise way. The next step for me may be chemo, or a sudden lifting of the hormone barrage (daily flutamide, and Leuprorelin Acetate injection every three months) which in some patients, surprises (?) the cancer cells so they diminish in number and strength.

I had great hopes for a hormone barrage even as WWI infantry were cheered by real barrages only to find that there were plenty of enemy left and they were pissed off. The cancer response may be, strangely, similar.

The complexity of cancer’s response is fascinating and Kantian-sublime to the philosopher even if the cancer is attacking him. The incurability of the disease, along with reports of people who at death’s door then survive like the Fisher King, with the Peacock’s beak poised to slay them, teaches us not, in Kant’s words, to build our hopes and fears on vanity; Kant had seen the consequences of such construction in the Lisbon earthquake of 1745.

As Doctor gave me this news I was seriously waiting for the fear to kick in but only felt my usual pain in the butt, the PITB that’s been my constant companion for several months, like the Companions of the Ritter (Knight) in the Durer engraving, Todt (Death) and Teufel (Devil). I only found my smile, my disgusting, long-suffering, Eric-or-Little-by-Little smile as I try instinctively to charm females with me being so brave and all. So where’s my Panic Room, and where does my true self emerge?

Well perhaps my true self might be that smile and the Rager my father or more precisely a manifestation, and a singularly unfortunate one, of my Dad. I myself hate the Rager too.

As I was writing this the handless nurse dumped a glass of cold water on me by accident. The whole secret of life seems to be in how you react to something like that. There is a deeper meaning, for me anyway, in “the gates of Hell shall not prevail”.

…and as I was revising this the handless orderly dropped a mini cup of that damnable laxative that tastes vile and does not work on me. I used his error, however, to snag some alcohol pads useful for hand cleaning.

This tendency to be on balance reasonably cheerful could be just morphine’s euphoria. But I don’t think so, for endorphins have the same effect and the saint has her endorphins when she calls to mind the Noble Truth: that in suffering is the release from suffering at least for the purged.

Heavy matters. But you sure can construct a nice little Limerick based on those three words, morphine, endorphin and euphoria:

A disgusting old chap of Albania
Said, this Morphine gives me no end of Euphoria
But should I run out
I shall be Stout
And run about to generate Endorphins in Albania

Besides, I am on prescribed dosages. They are high as witness my tendency to get nauseous, and I don’t know how hopheads push the dosage to start seeing things…although my visions last Oct were benign when I used improper dosages I certainly don’t want to go back to that confusion.

Doctor allayed my fears about chemo as has Dr Siddharta Mukherjee in his excellent recent book about cancer and its treatment. Our media view of cancer is formed by the treatment of patients prior to 2000 such as Gilda Radner, and their sufferings under crude chemo which does try to destroy the weaker cancer cells by attacking all cells. The thought of getting this type of chemo, BARFOLA or something like that, as an out patient and then a jolly ferry ride o’er the billow with me spewing me guts windward is itself barfoprogenetive.

Thinking philosophically about pain seems a useful way to endure at least mild pain. Pain is not “sense data” because pain is incommensurate with sense data in that pain seems to be a type of knowledge. But there are even types of pain incommensurate with other types of pain, most famously, nausea. I believe Wittgenstein deals thoroly with these conundrums in Philosophical Investigations. Might be worth a reread as opposed to idle speculation and reinventing the wheel.

But precisely because of the suffering of Ms Radner and many other chemo patients, since 2000 many less intense and less barfy therapies have been introduced. The key ratio m/n is m=number of days on chemo and n=number of days off and so we focus on reducing that number. I think that further, n could be analyzed into g+b: “good” days without cancer symptoms and “bad” days so we could also reduce b. The “sweet spot” in m/(g+b) would be m and b equal to zero, of course: nothing but g. We could then evaluate treatments as to how close they came to m and b=0. Of course, I would do this only for myself on entering chemo-land; I do not know if it’s already in use.

But, “them helpis no conclusionis slee” as Dunbar says of “surrigianis”, “art-magicianis” and “astrologgis”: so,just like him, I have to trust in God when all is said and done:

Sith for the deid remeide is none
Best is we for death dispone
After death that live may we!

Details at eleven: we have to Turn It Over. We’re not constituted any other way. To be reassured is to need further reassurance, so we need to take the first reassurance and then act or be still as the situation warrants.

“O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

TS Eliot

Workout 14 July 2012: Absent thee from felicity awhile

Edward G. Nilges, Angels Spread Rumors of Angels, pencil, pen, computer modifications. (C) 2012 Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights asserted. That is (das ist) it’s “fair use” if you like my art and print it as I do on a color printer and then frame it, hanging it in your room (but you can also email me and I’ll sign and frame an original for a couple hundred dollars). But it is not fair to use this image on your CD even if your music sucks and you don’t sell a single disk. In such ventures get in touch with me at spinoza1111@yahoo.com

A pathetic workout in the physio room since it took place too soon after breakfast; approximately ten minutes arm pulls and leg pushes.

Another week with no discharge date and not much improvement in my ability to mosey around Grantham which bodes ill for a successful return to my Lamma home. I lay abed, or occasionally crouch and scuttle with my cane (a “walking stick”, I’ve discovered, in British English) to the convenience store or garden whilst groaning like my Dad when I cared for him. It ryalleh hurts as when Chahlie bit me and it’s still hurting…

Ah, ai-YAH, people fear this and make this, for me, a sudden collapse in my powers, a reason for not celebrating the joy I felt running in Paris, but that is such nonsense and to me a sin against Creation.

Ideally I’d move out of this hostel to a halfway house or monastery where I’d live communally and seek clarity through labor: until my butt heals, writing and perhaps programming, and then agricultural work. My old life (solitary in an apt) was the problem, I need to be with others and make a contribution.

I’m afraid that if I go back to my old life that that will simply cause me to develop another problem requiring readmission to Queen Mary. A typical urban death like that of a divorced father living conveniently above O’Toole’s on Dearborn. Who discommodes nobody anymore.

Pain as I think Wittgenstein said is always private, and while we can compare a pain with our previous pain, I have no way of now how bad the other’s pain is in an absolute way. I can use empirical signals: for example, a United States airman, critically burned all over his body in a crash over North Vietnam, gripped the solid steel railing of his bed while his massive burn was being “debrided” (removing dead tissue) in such a way as to leave the impression of his fingers In the solid steel. I doubt that I would have the heart to allow the debridement to proceed at least without painkillers that would not allow me to remember that I’d marked the steel.

My pain “probably” less than the pain endured by burn victims such as this guy, and note that it is an interesting conundrum, for philosophers only, that it’s meaningful to make this “empirical” assertion (that my pain is probably not as bad) but that assertion is unverifiable.

But such enquiries aside I’d hypothesize, with no way of confirming or refuting it, that women are better with pain. My former wife endured 24 hours of labor in childbirth and my only comparative experience would be a couple of weeks ago and straining to poo while constipated.

In Hong Kong aging shop clerks stand for 12 or more hours with their own edema or deep vein thrombosis and they dare not complain for fear of losing their jobs…there is a disability plan here but it pays little more than 200 US dollars a month: with that you’re not even “talking” a room at the Chung King Mansions: you’re “talking” a wire cage.

But as my late son once Tweeted, self-imposed austerity fascinates and attracts me as it did him: my late son told me I need not be the Stoic while he himself had his Mom as a role model for self-denial.

My son knew that I wanted reunification with his Mom and that insofar as I did not pursue this Einigkeit I denied who I was … for I think my son had read in Žižek that the saint is she who does what she *really* wants.

My son did learn a valuable lesson from me and my credit cards: that in California it’s fun to eat a lavish meal (a big pizza, say, with Cokes for the kids and cheap wine for me, with Caesar salad up front and chocolate cake for dessert to follow, out of doors on a gorgeous late afternoon). To spin around Silicon Valley in my new Ford Escort with me popping the clutch and driving too slow. To go to Fry’s Electronics and nerd out on Saturday morning.

I think that the reason why this stuff seemed so fun in Silicon Valley and not in Chicago was that the weather in Chicago was always God’s Judgement on a Wicked City, and as such questioned why you needed to trudge to the computer store or Chuck E Cheeze Pizza Time Theater. Whereas California’ sunshine always said, let’s GO.

I may have to get used to the simple idea that accomplishing simple errands such as going out for groceries or a sandwich from the Lamma Grille (yum) might just be hard. To get groceries or a Snarfburger, I may have to draw my breath in pain even as Hamlet admonished Horatio:

Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain…

They told me in rehab in 2000 that “acceptance” is the key to my problems, the fulcrum around which I spin saying at first this I cannot accept and then saying “thy will be done” (fiat voluntas tua) when pitched into space by the problem, like Goofy on the ski-jump. But Acceptance here is a big job. I was doing great until my brother called last September, saying sit down and chill out, I have bad news.

I’m angry with my poor son perhaps because he played, structurally, the role of my wife, his Mom, to my sang-froid and to my bouncy response, to my father when my father said back in the 1990s that I was “whistling in a graveyard” when in response to joblessness I was cheerful..as if you don’t, in my experience, need sang-froid when looking for work.

And even more when your doctor says “I don’t have good news”. Sang-froid, not Sangria although the latter might be indicated for those of us who can handle Sangria!

I was doing great in the summer of 2012 and my son, by taking his own life, poured very cold water all over what I’d accomplished just like his Mom or grandfather. The manic element in my bloodline is always targeted, perhaps at the genetic level, by the depressive element.

Where is there an end to it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable –
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

TS Eliot, The Dry Salvages, Four Quartets

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