Mixed Success

The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth by Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg is at her best as a teacher of both writing and zen and of writing as a spiritual discipline and practice. I first encountered her books around 20 years ago. Writing Down the Bones was all the rage in writing groups and of course, being contrary, I avoided it for a few years and then read both that one and Wild Mind (basically a re-run of Bones, but enjoyable). I found them invigorating, and loved the spiritual aspect, though her favourite methods didn’t work for me.

The Great Failure, however, isn’t about writing nor is it about failure as a path to success. It’s a memoir about the two important men in her life and their failure to maintain appropriate boundaries, resulting in abuse of their positions, one as father, the other as teacher. It’s a divided book, not only in its subject matter, but in the success of the portraits.

Her portrait of her father is nuanced and vivid. He was, as one would say in Yiddish, “a grober yung,” a boor (literally “a gross boy”). He had little boyhood himself, and was little cared for. As a man he was crass and oblivious to his crassness. He commented on his pubescent daughter’s body, he held her too tight, he made her uncomfortable enough to avoid being alone with him. A bartender, he had no understanding of his adult daughter’s career as a Buddhist teacher, but he was earthy and without pretension.

During a visit to her home in the southwest, he sat outside to watch the sunrise at her command. When she asked him what he thought of it, he was nonplussed; it was a sunrise, it happens every morning. On another occasion she tried to teach her parents to meditate. After ten minutes of silence, she asked him if he’d noticed how busy the mind was, how many thoughts flit through it. He said he hadn’t thought at all, not a single thought. What was it like for him, she asked. It was like it always is when nobody is talking or doing anything, he said.

He was loud, he was busy, he was vigorous, he was insulting, a grober yung who loved his daughter with all his heart. His simplicity, his complexity, and her forgiveness for all of it comes through vividly.

It stays with me. And I envy her this possibility of forgiveness because, although her father failed in many ways it was out of ignorance, not intention, and there is all the difference in that.

Her portrayal of her teacher, Katagiri Roshi, a zen master and founding abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, while sincere lacks the vibrancy and understanding she has for her father. Katagiri’s motivations and feelings in carrying on secret affairs with students are unknowns that Goldberg tries to fill in with guesswork. Her guesses are sometimes plausible and sometimes, for me, dubious. And the situation is different in another way; he was her teacher not ever her lover. The wounds are wounds of disillusion, and as disappointing as the disillusion is, it is a surface wound compared to what she experienced as a daughter.

Perhaps better writing comes out of deeper wounds. I wonder what, as a teacher herself, she would say about that.

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*Science, Ethics, and a Gripping Tale

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

On Saturday the wind blasted from the east and there was rain all day. And all day I read, gripped by a story of human endeavour and human bewilderment.

Ten years in the making, this book is well-written and beautifully structured. It tells the story of the making of the book, Skloot’s investigation, Henrietta Lacks and her family, medical ethics and Lacks’s cells, which have been astonishingly vigorous. The book is thoroughly researched, the author’s treatment is compassionate, knowledgeable, honest, lucid.

Back in the day, not as far back as one would hope, scientists and doctors experimented on vulnerable populations: African-Americans, soldiers, psychiatric patients, orphans, and others who were either disenfranchised or sold for the purpose. This is the context for the horror and suspicion which Henrietta Lacks’s family felt when they discovered that she lived on in some incomprehensible way, blasted into space, used in cancer research, and a thousand other ways.

Her family was poor. Their education, such as it was, ended in grade school. They’d suffered from systematic poverty and racism for 150 years. And the most recent generation has also suffered from familial abuse that included torture and starvation by step-parents. They did not choose, or understand, how Henrietta’s cells led to uncountable medical and scientific discoveries, including the Salk vaccine for polio.

When Henrietta Lacks underwent surgery for cervical cancer in 1951, at the age of 30, the doctor sliced a bit of her tumour. This slice was used in research on culturing cells. Up to this point, human cells had quickly died in culture. But Lacks’s cancer cells turned out to be uncommonly vigorous. They multiplied in the millions, for decades, and are still doing so. Ironically, the disease that resulted in her sad and early death provided the human tissue necessary for testing drugs, vaccines, and even effects of space travel. Known as HeLa cells, they were freely shared among scientists at first. But then a bright entrepreneur took on the task of turning HeLa production into a billion dollar business.

Yet her family can’t afford health care. They suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoperosis. They die young from strokes and heart attacks.

This is her younger daughter, Deborah Lacks speaking. She was a toddler when her mother died of cancer.

Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! I can’t say nuthin bad about science, but I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make. (p 256)

A poem by Deborah Lacks:

cancer
check up
can’t afford
white and rich gets it
my mother was black
black poor people don’t have the money to pay for it
mad yes I am mad
we were used by taking our blood and lied to
We had to pay for our own medical, can you relieve that
John Hopkins Hospital and all other places, that has my mother cells, don’t give her
Nothing. (p 280)

Just a few years ago, Henrietta Lacks’s middle son had a quintuple bypass when he was 56 years old. He woke up from surgery $125,000 in debt because he didn’t have health insurance to cover it. (p 306) His mother’s cells sell for about $200 a vial. The quantity of cells would cover the earth several times over.

The doctors who treated Henrietta Lacks did so to the best of their ability and the medical knowledge at the time, at a hospital which was established specifically to treat poor people regardless of race at a time when most hospitals wouldn’t treat African-Americans at all. George Gey, who did the original research on HeLa cell culture lived modestly, putting his own salary into the lab equipment and working around the clock, while his wife, Margaret Gey supervised and ran the lab with no salary at all.

But there is something immoral and callous about the subsequent arguments and court cases around use of human tissue. Protesting (successfully) that scientific progress would be halted if people had rights over the use of their own discarded body bits, scientists, their lawyers and other authorities seem to have no problem with the fact that those people have no access to the benefits that are derived thereby.

This is not only a fascinating book, but an important one. While never stated as such, it is a clarion call for universal healthcare.

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Hela cells being used to research familial pancreatic cancer, 2007 by Slater E, Amrillaeva V, Fendrich V, Bartsch D, Earl J, Vitone LJ, Neoptolemos JP, Greenhalf W

(cross-posted to A Novelist’s Mind.)

*Gender Bending in a Ruffled Collar

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

In a fast frolic through Elizabethan England, Bryson tells us what we know about Shakespeare (not much) and what we don’t (a lot). He runs through various theories and assumptions that critics have made about Shakespeare’s life, debunking the Shakespeare didn’t write it crowd. What makes this book fun (and longer than a chapter or two) is the the social history of Shakespeare’s day.

For example, culinary taste ran to sweet syrupy sauce over everything, to the point where those who could afford it had blackened teeth, and those whose teeth were white painted them black for the fashion of it. It was a toothless, violent and mysteriously fevered as well as plague filled time. The population of England before the black death was 4.5 million. After the decimation, it took about 200 years to recover, just as Shakespeare was reaching his literary peak and theatre was the newest, best, most popular entertainment ever.

Nobody knows why Shakespeare bequeathed his wife his second-best bed or who the young man was that he dedicated a number of love sonnets to. One popular guess is Southampton, who paid 5000 pounds to get out of his engagement (equivalent to 1 ½ million pounds today, or about 2 ½ million dollars), leaving him free to date boys.

Bryson makes a point of saying that Shakespeare was the preeminent gay poet of his day because of those love sonnets, and contradictorily also the preeminent playwright of heterosexual romance. However, given that boys had all the female roles in the theatre, it seems to me pretty consistent. While in continental Europe women played female parts, in England women on the stage was considered far too risque and therefore illegal. Hence boys were women, which gave an underlying sexual ambiguity to the play’s romance, even more so in the plays where young male actors played young women pretending to be boys. Add to that the men playing men falling in love with them, confused until the unmasking of their lover as a boy woman. Gender bending has a long and fine history.

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