(Paging Dr. Rorschach! They're doing the test backwards-- interpretation first, image afterwards!)

The new presupposition that underwrites this feeling is the discovery that the body isn't a material object, but a pattern of activity. Sounds wooky, but let me explain.

Hanging over this past summer was a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. The offending gland was finally cut out, along with a bunch of suspicious lymph nodes, by a magically deft surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital one August afternoon. After a few weeks of recovery (stiffness, soreness, all the usual stuff) I was able, thanks to soup, poetry books, and the love of a good woman, to take my place among healthy people again. And then it was time for phase two of my scary movie, the Curse of Marie Curie.

I'm joking about the curse, I hope. One of the good things about thyroid cancer is that the therapy can take advantage of a biological marker: alone among the tissues of the body, the thyroid absorbs iodine, so if you are concerned that there may be lingering cancerous thyroid cells wandering the lymphatic and vascular alleyways of your body, a dose of iodine-131 can pop them with a minimum (at least in theory) of collateral damage to other cells that were just standing around in the wrong place.

Here's how it's done. Without a thyroid gland to regulate your metabolism, you need to take a thyroid hormone pill every day. Skip the thyroid hormone, and your metabolism slows down; eventually it will stop and I guess you die. In the meantime, your pituitary gland will start sending little “did you get my message?” emails to the missing thyroid gland in the form of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). Any roaming thyroid cells are getting copies of those emails and start to get irritated. “Where's the thyroid? Why won't that damn lazy gland do its job?”

The nuclear medicine specialists use your TSH level as a way to gauge the deprivation of your vestigial thyroid system. At the same time as you're off the thyroid hormone, they forbid you any foods containing iodine, which in this country means staying off iodized salt, any seafood (for sea water contains lots of iodine) or commercially prepared food (likely to contain iodine among other additives), eggs, dairy products, smoked or cured meats, etc. A bland diet, in short, for a couple of weeks, and no going out. I don't quite know if the lack of iodine has a perceptible physical effect over such a period, but after a week I was ready to believe that iodine deficiency is a cause of idiocy (not just goiter). Between the missing thyroid hormone and the missing iodine I got pasty, puffy, listless, bloated, belchy, with bags under my eyes, a fitful appetite, an inability to digest what I did eat, an inability to sleep at night, skin that turned ostrich-like or crocodilian, a persistent taste in the mouth like old cough syrup, and slowed-down thinking; plus I couldn't get certain fragments of tunes out of my ears, as if they were there to stay on perpetual repeat. My legs and arms kept going to sleep or cramping up, sign of poor circulation. I wouldn't say it was dramatically awful: it was nothing like breaking a bone or losing a finger. But it was a draggy and frumpish way of wearing out time, a reminder that metabolism is a way of existing, and I guess my metabolism has always been fast. So although I was definitely still in my body, I wasn't exerting the mode of activity that is me, that is, a certain clock rate, a certain expectation about how fast breaths, heartbeats, thoughts, gestures, desires, bedtimes, commas, and so on should be coming along. A rhythm.

The purpose was to get those thyroid cells really hungry for some iodine, so that when we baited the trap with iodine-131, they would wolf it down and be neutralized, never again to metastatize. I don't know what goes on at the cellular level. All I can say is that by the time the docs gave me my dark-blue capsule with its radiation dose, I was ready to move to the end of the experiment. I went nucular, as the executive branch says.

48 hours later, I could have fish again. A little piece of smoked salmon from the corner store was a celebration. And my first thyroid hormone pill too. Just in case they're right about iodine and idiocy, I've been sprinkling Morton's salt on everything. And-- placebo alert-- feeling more like the old thinking reed day by day.

Aside from the bit about a self being a pattern of activity in a body (from which I don't think it's actually possible to transmigrate, but perhaps I am overly literal-minded), I got to experience a different way of being in the body. I can now imagine the lives of hypothyroid people with a previously inconceivable vividness. To be quite honest, I had been in the habit of thinking that if people had trouble with putting on weight, it was because they couldn't control the amount of food they ate or they didn't exercise as they should. Sloth and gluttony, as the old folks called it. The simple physics of input and output. But once I'd had a couple of potatoes sit in my stomach for a whole day, and been unable to do anything about it, and had a parallel deadlock with the next day's apples, or apricots, or whatever, I could envision a way of being for which that would be the unremarkable constant sensation. Of course it would make you sluggish, and of course matter would come to rest in your tissues as a lasting deposit or encumbrance unless you went to extraordinary lengths to burn it off. I felt a strange helplessness. My willpower has never been in doubt, but what was not working was situated somewhere below the domain to which will applies. I could begin to see myself-- my self-- as an effect of a certain setting of the internal thermostat.

That 70s feminist slogan-- Our Bodies, Ourselves-- proved to be a half truth. A good half truth, but one needing to be complemented by the kind of stuff Aristotle (no feminist) was concerned about in De anima:

And I guess it's to Aristotle that we owe that magical word “metabolism.”

I owe a lot to Monsieur Lévi-Strauss. Never officially my teacher, he taught me steadily for years and years-- through books I pored over and reread, through his big public lectures at the Collège de France, through the lateral connections to which his work led (the allies, Lacan and Jakobson; the antagonists, Derrida, Godelier, etc.). Some of my strongest lifelong friendships were solidified in the shadow of his lectures. Some of his paragraphs I can recite from memory, with ever-renewed admiration for their deft interlocking of syntax and semantics, their apt figures, their subtly scandalous implications.

Of course he was not always able to keep from saying silly things-- about Marxism, about Buddhism, about Islam, about India, about the resolution of the sciences of behavior to their ultimate constituents in physics and chemistry, about Rousseau, about nature. Still, if you want to make no mistakes, you avoid saying anything, and I'm glad he chose not to be that kind of mute sage. By taking intellectual risks, he left anthropology a very different discipline from what it was when he wandered into it.

I stumbled across La Pensée sauvage in my first semester at college, and it was a transformative reading for me. I was feeling homesick (so to speak) for France, where I'd spent my last year of high school, and would have grabbed any French book off the shelf just to see the grave and acute accents again. What brought me to the stacks was a paper I wanted to write about something I'd noticed (I was ignorant enough to think it was original) about words denoting the passage of time, that they were all metaphors drawn from space. There must have been a bibliographic category for books about cognitive metaphorics, because I was almost certainly not looking for this book. But the title, with its clever pun (savage thought / wild pansy), caught my eye, I opened to the page about scale, information and miniaturization in painting, and I was hooked.

Turning back to the beginning of the book, I read and thoroughly sympathized with its argument that you could do extraordinarily refined and complex operations of thought even if you were a so-called primitive person speaking a so-called primitive language. I should acknowledge that I owned more than one pair of shoes and had been to some very high-end schools, but I liked the idea that cognitive refinement didn't depend on having a specialized logical vocabulary because this seemed to be good for the vindication of poets, and I wanted, then as now, to speak up on behalf of poets, to get people to take them seriously as intellectuals and not just as the jingle-jangle team you call a week before the holiday party.

The book's closing chapter, a polemic with Sartre over the Eurocentrism of Sartre's Marxist-derived conception of history, I devoured with relish too. In this I think I was probably happy to see a counter to the immense self-assurance of the few Marxists I knew.

My motives, therefore, were anything but pure, but if you sign on with Lévi-Strauss for some sectarian interest you will soon find yourself challenged with an argument that runs exactly counter to your wish. I still remember the Sunday afternoon I spent walking around trying to find a response to the discussion, in Tristes tropiques, of the relative humaneness of cannibalism and imprisonment. The cannibal takes the enemy of society and ingests him, renders him harmless and makes him yield up his calorie supply for the needs of his fellow man; the so-called civilized man throws the enemy beyond the borders of society where he can do no evil, but no good either. Which is preferable? Very much a pacifist and with vegetarian inclinations, I was sure that eating people is wrong, but when you put it that way, M. Lévi-Strauss, I didn't really have a good basis for my feeling so any more. The disorientation I felt-- what Kant called being summoned out of one's dogmatic slumbers-- I would experience again and again in encounters with Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and the whole lot of them: that crew who came intellectually of age contradicting you and whose obituaries you read, one after another, in the paper.

Just this morning, before I got the news, I was singing the praises of your word “bricolage.” As the young and insolently clever Derrida pointed out at the Structuralist Clambake of 1966, the moment of your own apogee and the day when a new whisper of doubt entered the longhouse, you framed it wrongly, by making a contrast with the “engineer,” who can create a totally purpose-built machine or language out of brand-new pieces; this engineer exists only as a theological fiction, and is probably inconsistent with any attempt to imagine such engineering. But if bricolage is the assemblage of new wholes out of the discarded pieces of ideologies formed at diverse times for incompatible purposes, and held together merely by an occasion (here goes, memory: “le bricolage bâtit ses palais idéologiques avec les gravats d'un discours social ancien”), then deconstruction is really negative bricolage, more properly named, perhaps, débricolage, because it too recognizes the impossibility of breaking through to a new, unused, uncorrupted language of truth. (“Deconstruction” would be the undoing of the work of the engineer; but it's already admitted that engineers in the strong sense are not available.) Your critics, sir, had to pry stones from your edifice in order to have something to throw at you-- stones that you had extracted from Durkheim, Mauss, Morgan, Granet, Marx, Montaigne. And that's progress. I have a vision of a castle moving across a landscape, an inch or two per century, its walls and towers whirring like decks of shuffled cards.

Irony? Hypocrisy? Don't forget, this is academia. The simplest thing is always more complicated than it seems.

Using a special hand-held fMRI technology for mind-reading, the particulars of which Printculture is not free to divulge (or we'd have to kill you), we were able to do a follow-up study and uncover the thought processes that led to this seemingly anomalous result. It turns out that ethics professors are, rather, particularly subtle and scrupulous in their approach to book theft. Here's what we were able to read from the neuronal transcript of one such subject, admittedly an unusually garrulous one.

(Freely translated from the original mentalese by HS.)

Berlusconi's racist and sexist gaffes, like his pursuit of the limelight and his yen for plastic surgery, always struck me as clownish, but Italians were lucky that this guy, who was able to tie up the media, the legislature, and the courts for so long, was really interested in money and fulfilling a simple kind of narcissistic consumer fantasy. A more lean and hungry-- power-hungry, that is-- kind of guy could have taken Italy down a much more fearsome path. As it is, they have only to reproach themselves for letting the country waste a decade of its historical existence doing nothing important, and for failing, once more, on the left to create a more inspirational project than complaining about a slick con artist. I'll be glad to see him go-- tabloid thou art, and unto tabloid shalt thou return; ashcan to ashcan, dirt to dirt-- but not very glad if there's nothing better to follow.

For a serious immunity issue, consider China's ongoing amnesia about the years 1957-1976. Similar impunity, much bigger trauma.

[Cardullo:] So one of the film’s themes is man’s harmony with nature – when he achieves it – and how such harmony can only help his relations with other men.
[Kurosawa:] Precisely.

Despite Kurosawa’s unambiguous answer, his film sends a somewhat different message.

Dersu Uzala is a cinematic adaptation of the 1926/1928 memoir by the Russian explorer of Siberia, Vladimir Arseniev, entitled В дебрях Уссурийского края / In the Wilds of Ussuriland and translated into English in 1941 by Malcolm Burr as Dersu the Trapper. The film starts where the book ends: in 1910 Arseniev returns to the village of Korforovskaya, where several years before at the edge of the woods he had buried Dersu Uzala, his expedition guide. To his consternation, Arseniev realizes that the development of the village and its growth far beyond its previous borders have swallowed up the grove of cedars which used to mark the gravesite. With the trees cut down and the grave leveled, there is no sign or mark left to record his friend Dersu apart from Arseniev’s memory.

In fact by the end of the story Arseniev describes how after burying Dersu he had sat by the road grieving and commemorating. In writing down this recollection, he adds: “As in the cinema, all the pictures of our past life together were unrolled before the eyes of my memory”. By this point in the book, the “pictures” of Arseniev’s and Dersu’s adventures unrolling in Arseniev’s memory are already familiar to the reader. The book ends with this melancholy farewell not only to Dersu but also to Dersu’s natural habitat, the taiga, which is vanishing under the advance of towns, railroads and highways.

Kurosawa discovered the book during the Second World War and began to think of filming it with Japanese characters and the island of Hokkaidô as a setting, but he abandoned this project as infeasible. In 1973, when the Soviet production studio Mosfilm invited Kurosawa to make a film of his choice in Russia, the more than twenty-year-old idea of adapting Arseniev’s book resurfaced. Mosfilm’s invitation gave Kurosawa an opportunity to shoot on location in Siberia, in the very region where Arseniev had conducted his expeditions at the dawn of the twentieth century. Most of the characters could stay Russian, framing and bringing out the focus on the Asian protagonist Dersu, a hunter from the Ussuri branch of the Nanai tribe (known to the Russians of that period as the Goldi). And it is difficult to overlook that Kurosawa’s rearrangement of the plot framed the film’s narrative in a way that highlights its sense of grief:

Although upon the film’s release Kurosawa claimed many times that the film’s message is ecological and that modern man has a lot to learn from Dersu in this respect, the director’s concern with the protagonist and his grave seems to have much darker, unexpressed roots.

But what are Dersu and his death to Kurosawa and Japanese audiences? We know that the original idea of the film was at odds with Japanese militarism. In a 1981 interview, Tony Rayns asked the film director about the influence of militarism - the national situation in which he entered the film industry - on his cinematic career: “Do you think your career would have developed differently if the national situation had been different?” In response to this question Kurosawa described the climate of censorship that doomed many of his wartime ideas, including his first conception of the adaptation of Arseniev’s Dersu Uzala.

the first concept of the film goes back to the moment and motive of Kurosawa’s peak interest in Dostoevsky: “the novelist’s era, with social oppression and the destruction of truth under the tsars, [was] a direct analogy to the epoch of Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia and the Pacific, during which [Kurosawa] matured as an individual and an artist” (Goodwin, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, 1994: 71). In fact, the platoon of Russian soldiers headed by the officer Arseniev whose task is to map the Russian territory adjacent to Manchuria, first in preparation for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and then in its aftermath, can be seen as an analogy for the Japanese advance into the neighboring regions of Manchuria in the 1930s.

The trackless land that Arseniev has to chart and where state borders are still to be marked appears as a pre-modern pan-Asian no man’s land where populations of Chinese, Koreans, Manchurians and many Mongolian tribes are equally at home, moving, hunting, and trading freely, occasionally clashing in local conflicts. Russians, like the Japanese in their day, unambiguously come to these Asian territories as colonizers. They bring to this land “civilization,” which means territorial claims with borders, controls, and trade taxes. Such mappings and extractions then give the occasion for wars in which colonial interests will clash, with a heavy price paid again and again by the local populations.

This historical background is a powerful subtext, hinted at only indirectly through the Russian characters’ military outfits and Arseniev’s measuring and charting apparatus. The film’s emphasis on the two dates of the expeditions - 1902 and 1907 - projected in bold numerals in 70 mm format is difficult to overlook. These dates frame the time of the Russo-Japanese conflict, present as an ominous ellipsis, a silent gap which anticipates the two future world wars to come: wars fought over the same issues of mapping and remapping of conquered territories by the industrialized powers.

For Kurosawa, the return to Dersu Uzala in 1975, when his career was stalled in Japan, recalled the time of Japanese militarism with its suffocating censorship. It was a return to a book that had once offered him material and occasion for a silent resistance and a critical sentiment. Kurosawa was often criticized for having “evasive political views” because usually he refused to explain his films, referring the critics and audiences to the films themselves. This advice should be also followed in the case of Dersu Uzala, despite Kurosawa’s uncustomary volubility in regard to this film.

Kurosawa’s film constitutes a nostalgic glance back at the pan-Asian space without borders at the time before the major tragedies of the century had happened, but it is made with historic knowledge of the things to come. This knowledge, to which the characters themselves are still blind, accounts for the film’s idiosyncratically turn-of-the-century Chekhovian dramatism, which the Russian playwright called undercurrent. An undercurrent designates an unexpressed or understated conflict, or rather a tension in the situation, or in the characters’ relationship, which is hidden under the seemingly calm and uneventful appearance of things. Like the river crossed by the explorers at one moment in the film, a stream of calm appearance can harbor a dangerous current leading to a hazardous waterfall.

Maybe the most uncanny and important dramatic undercurrent of the film with its focus on Dersu’s grave is the historical fact that Dersu comes from the Siberian branch of the Goldi tribe. The closely-related Nanai, known in Chinese as Hezhe, in nearby Manchuria were almost totally exterminated by the Japanese during their occupation of this territory in 1930s under the auspices of imperial race theory. The treatment of nomadic peoples in the Japanese-dominated areas of Manchuria was ambiguous: on the one hand the Tungusic aboriginal populations were claimed to be kin to the ancestors of the Japanese, and thus the ethnographic justification for a common political destiny of the peoples of Northeast Asia under Japanese dominion; but the Nanai and other nomadic hunter groups were regarded by the colonial administration as little better than gypsies and treated as an inferior race, herded into concentration camps, forced to endure military service during the traditional hunting season, and nearly exterminated in the fifteen years of the Manchukuo state’s existence.

The victims of this genocide—for which no acknowledgment or repentance have ever been expressed—acquire a face in their ethnic kinsman Dersu Uzala across the Russian border, a member of an ethnicity which was similarly dying out under Russian and Chinese forays into Siberian territory. With this historical fact in mind, Dersu’s wisdom and culture are not just those of primordial mankind, but those of a particular people exterminated as subhuman for their alleged lack of wisdom and culture. This message is encoded in the film as silently as are its other references to the Russo-Japanese war and other wars to come.

The grave of Dersu Uzala is erased by the encroachments of civilization, but this civilization is not just that of the Russian Tsarist and then Soviet Empire. A Japanese audience can equally see itself as complicit in the erasure of Dersu’s grave in Manchuria—an erasure for which Kurosawa tries to compensate cinematically by ending the film with Arseniev erecting Dersu’s walking stick as a makeshift memorial over his grave. The last shot is a close-up of the forked upper side of the walking stick that has accompanied Dersu throughout the film.

The forked stick of the real Dersu, as we can judge from historical photographs, was held with the fork down to the earth. Kurosawa turns it meaningfully downside up, to make the fork visible. This is not just a random choice. The forked stick represents the Nanai shamanic symbol of the World Tree and becomes a visual leitmotif of the film. The whole cosmology of the Nanai is condensed in this sign.

Taken out of the film’s context and frozen into a sign on its own, this symbol transcends its intimate function as a memorial for Arseniev’s deceased friend and becomes a symbol for a whole ethnicity that has suddenly disappeared from the surface of the Earth. Not in vain, Kurosawa insisted that he wouldn’t make a film without interest for the Japanese audience. And it is hardly surprising that his film encountered only a lukewarm reception in Japan with Kurosawa being unwilling to announce its message from the rooftops. It was up to his viewers to search for his film’s meaning. But to uncover this meaning was definitely not a comfortable enterprise.

It doesn't take much to bring out the reciprocities latent in human concern. Lately we have all been in a lather about health care, though some of us have been more concerned about guaranteeing the business model of private insurance companies; or when we haven't been worrying about the public option, we've been worrying about H1N1 flu.

Epidemics are a good reminder of the short distances between any two members of the species. When Virchow said (in 1848) that doctors were “the natural attorneys of the poor,” germ theory wasn't yet triumphant, but the growth in the understanding of contagion over the 19th century did interesting things to political thinking.

With Robert Koch's isolation of the tuberculosis bacillus, it became obvious that everybody was connected. We were all just a cough away from picking up somebody else's disease. People were connected by “a thousand natural ties,” though they might not be listed in the same Social Register. The nineteenth-century novel had been saying this for some time. But without bacteria.

So people are tightly connected and buzzing with bugs. What do you do about it? Virchow and Koch: when you vaccinate the poor, you improve sanitary conditions, you do good for everybody, for illness, like the mysterious hand of God, can strike anybody at any time. The other tendency is to deny the connection and do everything possible to wall off the rich from the poor. This second strategy, imperfect and inhumane though it is, gains vindication every time the statistics show a differential outcome for the well-off and the just-getting-by. In a certain large country bounded by two oceans, the heritage of Calvinism on which an anxious and competitive capitalism has been grafted leads to poor health indicators in the aggregate, excellent indicators for the lucky top quartile (thanks to science and medicine liberally applied, the hand of God appears in normal times to be no longer a concern), and a political debate about health in which the distress of the people who don't have health care at all gets less air time than the anxiety of those who have it about having to share any of what they've got.

Epidemics show that walling-off is not such a good long-term strategy. I was amused to see a far-right-wing meme out there according to which Obama and his crafty henchpersons sowed the seeds of H1N1 just in time to scare righteous rugged individualist Americans into the arms of government protections, meaning socialism, the nanny state and the end of life as we know it. This shtick doesn't sound at all likely, but gives a nice X-ray of the obsessions of the rightmost fringe, which are not all that remote from those of the relatively right-of-center part of the tablecloth. (If tablecloths are what fringes are supposed to be attached to-- please supply the missing object if you know.)

The Guerrilla Philologist here was recently asked to look up the source of a line attributed to Pasteur, “Le microbe n'est rien; le terrain est tout” (“The microbe is nothing; the terrain is everything”). It occurs, without attribution, in the work of a well-known lefty doctor who has done tremendous things for global public health. But it must have had at least a hundred years of circulation before that guy quoted it, and I was trying to trace those.

So far the search for an ultimate origin eludes me-- it will take hours in the stacks, and I can't schedule them just now-- but here is the pattern of distribution I find on the Web. The quotation, in slightly altered forms that will give a handhold to text epidemiology whenever I find the time to follow the dissemination of its different clades, is a big favorite among the kind of natural-medicine advocate who wants to reverse germ theory in favor of an explanation that makes the internal balance of the body, its digestion and humors, together with the influence of the milieu, the cause of sickness. The legend is that Pasteur said these words on his deathbed, and the implication, for the naturopath, is that Pasteur admitted at the end that he was wrong and that his adversary Béchamp had been right all along. What an easy victory! (It doesn't matter for the wielders of the quotation that germ theory had a nice backing in experiment and observation that isn't so easy to erase. The argument from authority holds, and Pasteur's renunciation would be an epic event. Did you hear it? He literally said that microbes are “nothing.” So he is denying the existence of microbes....)

So let's see what happens if you put the quotation in its “natural-healing” context, reading up and down the web pages on which it occurs. You find that the people who really like stressing the “milieu” are eager to propose diets that minutely regulate what goes in the body, regimes of exercise and medical leisure time (lots of colon cleansing and purging) and positive thinking that are meant to distance you from the ugly things that are out there, and shouldn't be in here. In other words, the cordon-sanitaire idea of how to deal with disease. Beam me up, Scotty, or at least get me into a gated community where there's lots of disinfectant, organic flax seed, and a yoga room.

These seem to be the people who are so disenchanted with medicine that they refuse to have themselves or their children vaccinated. Of course. They are pure. It's other people's fault for being unclean, and too numerous as well.

So that's what's at stake for some: germ theory as the stalking-horse of socialism and communism; wealth and lifestyle choices as our safety and refuge. Poles apart, to say the least, from the lefty doctor who, I am guessing, when he encountered the apparently apocryphal Pasteur quotation took it to mean something in the Virchow-and-Koch line, more or less “a microbe doesn't get going unless social conditions favor it.” It's hilarious to see the two groups coinciding around a few words diversely understood.

You're looking good, Louis Pasteur! Really good! I mean it.

--

(Update: thanks to Jonathan Cohen for suggesting that I look in René Dubos, “Le microbe et le terrain,” Bulletin de l'Institut Pasteur 72 [1974], 87-94. It's a good article, but pas de savon! No soap in the four or five leading biographies of Pasteur on the shelves of the Yale Medical Library, either, or even in the hilarious parody of historical research by E. D. Hume, Pasteur or Béchamp? So the mystery abides for now. Any Printculture reader who knows the answer, please step forward for your fact-checker laurel.)