Wordsworth's Daffodils

I wondered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils,

These lines from Wordsworth’s Daffodils are so deeply ingrained in us that it is very difficult to read them with detachment. The poem sums up many of the themes that are associated with Romanticism-themes such as subjectivity and imagination.

Although Wordsworth saw the Daffodils long time back , there is a sense of immediacy and involvement. It follows that along with subjectivity and imagination , it is memory that too plays a pivotal role in Romantic tradition in general and in this poem in particular.

Everybody would agree that we can never go back to our ‘good old days’ however hard we are whipped by the strongest sense of nostalgia. The concept of time machine or the theme in ‘Back to future’ are still in the realm of idea. Therefore there is no other option but to ride piggy back on memory that alone can transport us back to the past.

It is memory for which I am who I am or you are who you are. All the time throughout our lives we are engaged in creating memory right from the moment we wake up till the time we hit the bed. Memory is what creates our lives’ coherent narrative. What happens just in case there is a suppression of links in the chain of our memory? We cease to be who we are. Just imagine Wordsworth  had a highly fragmented memory? We could never have Daffodils in its present form. Wordsworth might have resorted to meaningless confabulations. It is only for his coherent memory that Wordsworth could write:

   For oft ,when on my couch I lie

   In vacant or in pensive mood,

   They flash upon that inward eye

   Which is the bliss of solitude;

 Daffodils is nothing but the celebration of human memory.

( After reading Oliver Sacks)

On Death and Dying

‘Life is an uncertain adventure in a diffuse landscape, whose borders are continually shifting, where all frontiers are artificial, where at any moment everything  can either end only to begin again or finish suddenly, for ever and ever ,like an unexpected blow from an axe. Where the only absolute,coherent, indisputable and definitive reality is death’. ( From The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez Reverte)

 Temporality is the fundamental law of existence. Anything that is living today has to die a death sooner or later.  Yet we are so obsessed with the business of living that we hardly situate a thought on death in a narrative that is understood by all. This existential question is often considered as an old age luxury.  It is because of the belief that an awareness about the uncertain length of life may be a hindrance in the ascent of man whereas, on the contrary, many who sense impending death have hastened their contributions to humanity.

 Oddly enough man is the only creature who lives in the perpetual shadow of death. He is the only creature who is aware of death in the scathological sense of heaven or hell.

A quest for death merely for some metaphysical experience is rather rare although our myths are ridden with altruistic suicides. What we ‘modern’ men call euthanasia is still a hotly debated issue across the world.

On the other hand a search for the fountain of youth and immortality has always fired the imagination of everybody. Greek legend tells that Eos, the Goddess of the dawn married a mortal Tithonus. But while the Goddess remained eternally young (Even without using Pond’s Miracle),Tithonus began to age . So Eos begged Zeus to make Tithonus immortal. But Eos forgot to ask for the eternal youth that had to accompany the immortality. Zeus granted her wish. Tithonus became a shriveled cripple who incessantly babbled to himself. Gods became so disgusted with him that he was changed into a Cicada. So it follows that an immortal life without the attendant vigour and vitality is a real curse.

What happens if nobody dies? Saramago has given a very good description of such a situation in  his ‘Death at intervals’. In a nameless country all of a sudden people achieve immortality. Hospitals are full with terminally ill patients ;but they do not die. The patients and their relatives have a harrowing time. People met with terrible accidents yet never died.  Insurance business collapses and the Church became irrelevant as there was no death ; there has to be no resurrection or kingdom of God. Alongside a syndicate emerges who smuggle, against hefty amount, the terminally ill patients to the neighbouring countries so that they die a quiet and unknown death there.

However, in reality nobody can achieve such an eternal life( however useless and boring that might be). The physics of aging and dying tells us that as we age our ‘entropy’ increases in accordance with the Second law of Thermodynamics. Also we age and eventually die because of the ‘oxidative damage’ that the business of living inflicts on our body and mind. If the ‘entropy’ is decreased and the ‘oxidative damages’ can be minimised, human beings one day might not age and die. This idea  is,of course, still in a nascent stage.

A man can die in a variety of ways. Does not it remind us the fact that in a game of Cricket a Batsman can be out in a variety of ways?

Above all a man can kill himself. Sometimes the reason for killing oneself remains unclear. Every man( woman too) has a deep and dark recess of his own self to which access is not allowed. Sometimes a strange fear can be a reason for killing oneself. Jack London committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling because every night he dreamt that he drowned in sea and died. He did not like the idea of dying by drowning. So he killed himself in a way he liked ( I found this information in Murakami’s After the quake. So still I am unsure if it is fact or a highly fictionalised account).

Can there be a romantic idea of dying? If there were one, I am sure it is not a sudden ;but one surrounded by dear and near ones. And that too in a ripe age and after a brief illness.

Personally I have always liked Sudhir Kakar’s statement that I always tell my friends who are in medical profession:’ Medicines exists to fight disease; not death. When death comes holding hands with disease, it is the duty of the physician to prepare his patients for its arrival’.

A kind of peaceful and collaborative death.

On The Objectivity Of Science

A handsome man, seemingly  a man of science wearing a white coat appears on the Television screen and tells us how the health drink Horlicks has been found to be immensely beneficial in improving both the health and mind among young children. The visual, in order to back up the claim flashes young, healthy and  noisy children bustling with all the trappings of good health and mind. We the lay people lap up literally  what the handsome man in the advertisement announces because it is deeply ingrained in us that science is always non-partisan. Although it is questionable if the claim can stand to scientific test.

The commercial exploitation of science for its perceived strength of unbiased role(in knowledge production)) can be traced back to 1941 in the Chesterfield cigarette advertisement that depicted  researchers measuring nicotine  and thereby promoting the brand for its relatively low nicotine level.

Naturally questions will arise how science as an academic pursuit can be faulted on this count. It is the practitioners of science who are to be blamed. That is the crux of the matter that I wish to highlight. Those who may view science as a disembodied entity might hold a different viewpoint.

How ideology can privilege one set of scientific hypothesis over another can be found in the claims of Trofin Lysenko(1898—1976)an agronomist from former Soviet Union who argued in favour of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In other words according to Lysenko mangoes can be grown in coconut trees. His method of mutating crops by ‘vernalization’ was tested in many countries and found to be false.

Interestingly it reminds me Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog in which a doctor implants a  human heart( other organs too including testicles) into a street dog assuming in the manner of Lysenko that the dog will exhibit behaviour that are human. Unfortunately the experiment goes awry and the dog becomes an intractable menace.  I often think that the novel is nothing but a lampooning of Lysenko’s outlandish idea.

Yet the Lysenko hypothesis found favour with the Soviet regime because it is in line with the party’s ideology. In recent times the Steady state Theory that postulates that the universe has no beginning and no ending and it just is , finds support among the Marxist disciples simply for the reason that it precludes the need for a creator. In both the case I feel the scientific claim here is ideologically deterministic.

‘Forman Thesis’ named after the American science historian argues that the content of early Quantum Mechanics was shaped by the culture in which it was produced. It was the unexpected defeat of Germany in the first world war that prompted the scientists to accept the uncertainty principle put forward by Werner Heisenberg rather than alternate interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.

The title of Bruno Latur’s book’ Laboratory Life:The Social Construction Of Scientific facts(co written with Stephan Woolgar) is a pointer to the fact that even scientific facts can also be socially constructed.

A scientist is not a disembodied entity that toils day in and day out inside a laboratory. He or She is also a human being like you and me and is influenced by what goes around him or her.

In recent times our state has witnessed a massive uprising in the form of public protest against the construction of big dams. Reams of paper have been used in writing in favour of or against the construction of big dams. The whole issue has become hazy for lay people as the discourse has failed to bring about a reconciliation of the opposites.

Expert committees have been constituted that voice both for and against the issue. It will be interesting to see how the uprising is going to influence the scientific truths involved in the issue. Or will  science really remain unbiased?