Re-Reading Lewis Thomas: Obituary Lecture for Franson Manjali (Kochi Memorial Meeting organised by JosephDavis2024)

Post Covid Re-reading of Lewis Thomas Susan Visvanathan (Former Professor of Sociology,CSSS, JNU susanvisvanathan@gmail.com) That Covid left a trail of destruction is our great loss, as we co-existed with rampant death for two years(2020-2022). After that, those who suffered from long Covid left us, without saying goodbye. Lewis Thomas’ “The Youngest Science: Notes of A Medicine Watcher”(Penguin 1995) tells us beguilingly that right up till the mid 1930s, there was no cure for many diseases, such as influenza, syphilis, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, measles, chickenpox. Doctors and nurses provided palliative care, and hoped for cell regeneration given the circumstances of rest and nutrition provided to the patients. He writes that the purpose of the curriculum was primarily to diagnose and recognize the disease, to classify, list their signs, symptoms and make accurate diagnoses. There were some remedies such as aspirin, morphine, digitalis, bromides, barbiturates ( ibid 27). While the doctors counseled patients on their visits, it was the nurses who were the institutional catalysts who networked between the medics (professors and interns) other nursing staff, aids, cleaners, porters, lift operators and management. It was they who had the institutional pulse and knew each patient in terms of diagnoses and active treatment, which was in their hands. Because of their catalytic knowledge and networking abilities, they had the ability to be friends and confidants of those who were in danger by serious illness, and carry information to their family (ibid 67). Lewis Thomas thus shifts the trajectory of the nurse as having the job of carrying out doctors’ orders to one who, as a professional, lived in the intimate zone between life and death. Nurses make it their business to know everything that is going on. They spot errors before they can be laundered. They know everything written on the chart. Most of all, they know their patients as unique human beings, and they get know their families. Because of intimate knowledge, they are quick to sense warps in the system and act upon it. According to Lewis, the average sick person feels anxious most of the time because of anonymity, no identity other than the name tag, the sense of being left adrift with a plastic tag with number, and in danger of getting lost, being whisked into a wrong laboratory, to have a wrong procedure and so on. He writes, ‘The attending physician or the house officer on rounds and usually in a hurry, can murmur a few reassuring words on his way out the door, but it takes a confident, competent and cheerful nurse, there all day long and in and out of the room on one chore or another through the night, to bolster one’s confidence that the situation is indeed manageable and not about to get out of hand” (ibid 69). Lewis Thomas argues that the evolution of language is parallel in terms of its concepts like the evolution of the species itself. The question of’ when cannot be answered, he writes, because we have to think of the existence of prokaryotes which are organisms which have the appearance of bacteria. These left traces in rocks 2 to 3 billion years ago. Two and a half billion years ago they appeared as algal mats (ibid 52). A billion years ago these algae produced enough oxygen into the earth’s atmosphere to form nucleated cells. From there formed the mitochondria and chloroplasts of plant cells which coexist with us today. Similarly, the roots of language are produced perhaps twenty thousand years ago. For Thomas, the root word for doctor is leech, coming from the work laece in English, lake in Middle Dutch, in early Germanic it was lekjaz. In Indo European languages, its origin was in “leg” which meant “to collect”, with derivatives leading “to speak’ : hence lecture, logic, and logos are from leg. Lekjaz communicated magic words, leech stood for the double meaning of a worm as well as Doctor. Assimilation is the term used for the fusion of two different meanings in one term. The idea of ‘collecting’ present in ‘leg’ has persisted, as it combines the doctor’s penchant for collecting blood and fees ( ibid 53). He goes on to explain that the word Doctor comes from “dek” meaning something proper and useful. It became docere in Latin, to teach, also discere, to learn, hence disciple. In Greek it was understood to mean an acceptable kind of teaching, thus the roots for dogma and orthodox ( ibid 53) Here, I come to the work of Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romain Vanishing Voices (2002). They show how oral traditions become threatened with extinction, when languages are no longer used and are forgotten. One remembers here the encyclopaedic work of Ganesh Devy and his team where documentation of existing languages and dialects become the basis of their survival. Oral languages according to Nettle and Romaine survive through intergenerational transmission. Languages become extinct when people do not use this language any more. They prefer to educate children in commercially viable languages which help them with education and jobs. Peripheral languages become extinct, in favour of metropolitan languages. Official languages are not known by the majority of the population - these involve metalanguages and technical languages. Laboratory languages, with the creation of dictionaries and sometimes scripts try to rejuvenate oral tradition. This can end up as a form of museumisation. The will to learn a language and use a script makes a dying or dead language become reactivated. Languages are a storehouse of memories and knowledge. Levi Strauss, striving to generalize the unity of the human mind, spoke about the depth and variation of botanical classifications in South America by tribal communities and the complexity of kinship algebra in Australian tribal communities. Industrialisation depletes forms of traditional knowledges. The comparative method was used by Anthropology to collate vast literature across society. Malinowki’s intervention regarding matriliny and the place of the mother’s brother sought to critique Freud’s concept of the Oedipal complex. In the Trobriand case, the nephew felt antagonism toward the maternal uncle, not his biological father. The question of nature and nurture thus became central to Sociology. Lewis discusses the questions of neurological trajectories which define perception in the following way. In real life, research is dependent on the human capacity for making predictions that are erroneous, and in the ability that researchers have to bounce back. The predictions are pure guess work. Often they are wrong. Error is the mode. We all know this this in our bones, whether engaged in science or in the ordinary business of life. More often than not, our firmest predictions are chance-based, on what we imagine to be probability rather than certainty, and become used to blundering very early in life. Indeed, the universal experience, mandated in the development of every young child, of stumbling, dropping things, saying the words wrong, spilling oatmeal and sticking ones thumb in one’s eye are part of the preparation for adult living. A successful child is one who has learned so thoroughly about his own fallibility that he can never forget it, all the rest of his life ( ibid 82). For Lewis, research is born out of recognizing error, and re-searching again. Its root is err, which does not mean ”wrong”; the Indo_European root is ‘ers’, signifying “to be set in motion”, it comes into Latin as errare, meaning to “wonder’ but the same root emerges in Old Norse as “ras” or rushing about looking for something. The English word “race” comes from ras. In order to get something right, we must get something wrong, or to quote Lewis, “many things wrong”. Here, he turns to the term “stochastic” which communicates randomness. Stochastic is the term for pure chance. “But it started out, as happens so often in language, with precisely the opposite meaning. The original Greek root was stokahs, meaning a brick column used in a target, from this the root word meaning “to take aim” were derived. (ibid 83) We like to think that we take aim to hit targets by taking advantage of a human gift for meaning and precision. But there is this secret, embedded in the language itself: we become accurate only by trial and error, we tend to wander about, searching for targets. It is being in motion, at random (from a root meaning running) that permits us to get things done. Edward Lorenz in his book, Chaos suggests that even chaos has rules, we only need to decipher them. In the pendulum gone awry, or arrythamea the beat that is missing is calculable, just as the metaphor that a butterfly wing flapping can create tremors in the atmosphere, sufficient to create a storm (or not). This is how Lorenz moves from the idea of a rule bound universe to one of random chance. It also explains Levi Strauss preoccupation that change in any one element can change the entire structure. Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory (1999) orchestrates an account of the mutations of fruit flies in milk bottles in the 1950s to help us understand why obsessive interest by scientists on DNA and chromosomes helped us to understand different beats and rhythms in human neurological webs. In an interesting analogy between receptors of language, and receptors of antibodies, Lewis Thomas says that antibodies are created by using certain virus loaded genes which are then spliced onto an animal. The cross channel information is received, antigens are created when the body recognizes a foreign body. Lymphocites rush to respond, and a clump of lymphocites form to hereditarily pass on this information. He writes, “When the horse serum protein appears it is not recognizable to any but a small minority of the cell population, for all the rest it is a waste of time, motion, and effort. Also, there are risks all around, chances of making major blunders, endangering the whole organism. Flawed lymphocites can turn with an inability to distinguish between self and nonself, and replication of these can bring down the entire structure with the devastating diseases of autoimmunity. Blind spots can exist, or gaps in recognition analogous to color blindness, so that certain strain of animals are genetically unable to recognize the foreignness of certain bacteria and viruses. (Thomas 1995:85) This is the reason that in the odd case, a vaccination can maim or kill. Preeti Monga, the gifted pedagogue who became blind after vaccination has written of living a normal life, dependent on the memory of the world, before sight went completely. According to Lewis, the analogy of lymphocyte selection and recognition, is being used to understand how the brain works. It is postulated that the thinking units equivalent to lymphocytes are the tiny columns of packed neurons which make up most of the substance of the cereberal cortex. These clusters are the receptors, prepared in advance for confrontation with this or that sensory stimulus, or this or that particular idea. For all the things we will ever see in the universe, including things not yet thought of, the human brain possesses one or another prepared, aware, knowledgeable cluster of connected neurons as ready to lock on to that one idea as a frog’s brain is for the movement of a fly. The recognition is amplified by synoptic alteration within the column of cells and among the other groups with which the column is connected and memory is installed (ibid 85). Thomas then goes on to say that Artificial Intelligence may one day become superior to our own. Since this essay was written at a time when its infallibility seemed appropriate, he sets up the human brain to be unique in its ability to forget and to make mistakes. Confusion is the nature of the human mind, not just as it ages, but in the everyday contexts of forgetting, remembering erroneously, and nothing can be recalled at will, since where its stored is never very clear. For him, forgetting is the act of emptying the brain and relearning are everyday pursuits. (ibid 88). He says with utmost compassion, Come to think of it, you could not run a human brain in any other way, and the clearing out of excess information must be going on, automatically, autonomically, all the time. Perhaps there are certain pieces of thought that must be classed as nonbiodegradable, like addition and one’s family’s names, and how to read a taximeter, but a great deal of material is surely disposable. And the need for a quick and ready sanitation system is real: you cannot ever be sure, from minute to minute, when you will have to find a place to put something new. At the very least, you are required to have and use, a mechanism for edging facts to one side, pushing them out of the way into something like a plastic kitchen bag. Otherwise you would run the risk of losing all good ideas. Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea – the kind of idea that looks as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything – tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different. There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking hard about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You’d better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark (Lewis 1995:88). In an essay called “The Long Habit” in Lives of a Cell (1980) Thomas asserts that Death is a topic not discussed or raised. Large scale death viewed on the television screen hardly moves us. For ourselves during our mortal moments, we think Death will go away (Thomas 1980:55) Extending our life technologically presents the possibility of long life. In the 19th century, men died at 45 years of age, women at 40, on the average. Now the upper class think of 90 years as an average span of life extendable to 110. We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can post pone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one’s watch (ibid 57)…..We don’t know much about dying, about corporality, about extinction. Cells don’t die that fast, they can regenerate in test-tubes even hours after death. “It takes hours, even days before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces (ibid 58). According to Lewis Thomas, there is a switch off mechanism that allows detachment before death or atleast witnesses of near death experience have said so (ibid 59). Lewis seems to believe that the spirit returns to origins, I prefer to think of it as somehow separated at its filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath hack into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter (ibid 61). He sees the earth analogous to a single celled organism with its membrane of sky, piercing which creates entropy. Outside this vacuum of blue sky is the blackness of space. The color photographs of the earth are more amazing than anything outside: we live inside a blue chamber, a bubble of air blown by ourselves. The other sky beyond, absolutely black and appalling is wide open country, irresistible for exploration (ibid 50) This is the microcosm analogy of ‘life :earth :: death : outer space’. Yet we hope to encounter our loved ones again, we hope to see them in the remembrances of others, though bilateral kin linkages, through the constellation of images produced through photographs and narratives. What is a memoryscape? It is healing by its very virtue – we learn to use happy memories for recovering our past. Bad memories undergo suppression, though have recurring identity as nightmares. We learn to process these over time, crafting good memories from new landscapes, mutual recognition of pleasure principles. We use these in turn to craft new languages of desire, never forgetting the old languages of knowledge and experience. It is this relation between past and present which allows us to imagine a future. Here too is the place of language, of speech, of sharing. Human beings gather, they share ideas. Like rituals, seminars, visits to the beach or shops, language becomes the conduit of survival (ibid 73). In the midst of all this collective activity, is the autonomy of the cell – it performs, functions, dies. We must give it that autonomy (ibid 78). What makes us unique is language, human speech. It begins to look, more and more disturbingly, as if the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. Language is, like net building, or hive making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human being. We engage in it communally, compulsively and automatically. We cannot be human without it, if we were to be separated from it our minds would die as surely as bees lost from the hive ( ibid 105). Thomas continues We are born knowing how to use language. The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences is innate in the human mind. We are programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar. There are invariant and variable structures in speech that are common to all of us. As chicks are endowed with an innate capacity to read information in the shapes of overhanging shadows telling hawk from other birds, we can identify the meaning of grammar in a string of words, and we are born this way. According to Chomsky, who has examined it as a biologist looks at live tissue, language must simply be a biological property of the human mind (ibid 105). The universal attributes of language are genetically set, we do not know them, or make them up as we go along (ibid 106). Yet, he acknowledges that language has a life of its own. They become instinct, new meanings and words are created. Individual languages leave their dialect forms. Separate languages can exist side by side maintaining their integrity with out permeability or compatibility. At other times languages may come together, fuse, replicate and give rise to new tongues (106). Here, he endorses the primevality of music and art, which were probably the first languages combining symbols and sounds. Silence too, has its language, as mystics know. Reading and writing are often done in solitude. Translations liberate meaning. Raimundo Pannikkar used the concepts of shruti and smriti to show how there is a shift from secrecy to shared meaning. There is a need, equally to allow the authorship of speech, to shift to interpretation rather than the idolatory of the text (Visvanathan 2022b). What is the dialectic between faith and human rights? Pursuing our rights as believers/non believers we carry on with our daily chores (ibid 147). Ascription implies closure (ibid 148). Technological change and digital resources make our understanding of the world more complex. The dispossessed, the meek inherit the earth remaining behind when all else is lost. Talking to plants- the bases of organic farming is the iconic symbol of this . We must believe that they believe, whether it is in divinity or the secret life of plants (ibid 148). Sociologists never attend to the truth value of utterances as they do to representation, or forms of disclosure ( ibid 149). Ideologies are totalitatarian. Translation, comparative religion, learning from history, from the other, opens up the texts (ibid 149). This leads to new ways of orienting ourselves to the known world. Feminists demand accountability. Love and responsibility are not enough. The concept of dhyana or concentration as Simone Weil called it is essential to the task of learning (ibid 150). As Humanities shift from the Universities to the technical colleges they are seen as the Handmaids of the Sciences. A space carefully created for the establishment brains to embellish themselves, to become cosmopolitan rather than unidirectional. And yet, we remember Bachelard who could integrate Laboratory and Poetry to unravel the world in a technical way, and with narrative virtuosity in the metalanguage of verse. How do texts correlate between canonical and the domestic? Subramanium and Velacherry Rao say that in the 16th, 17th and 18th century it (neeti shastra) was frequently read out across communities. In 1708 Ziegenbalg wrote that the St Thomas Christians knew it by heart and quoted it often (ibid 154).. This absorption in the grand traditions of Hinduism are common. We look at Clifford Geertz’s classic work Negara to understand how the Hindu Buddhist consciousness permeated the elite strata in Java. The inscriber whatever the epoch, becomes the utmost authority. Political ideologies, dramatic interpretations, details of mundane description, suppression of the problem, enhancement of the politically expedient, engineering of silences, in the passing of the text maybe noticed (ibid).In the case of religious poetry, the erotic often becomes translated into the inviolable mother’s body. Here too, there is an act of mapmaking (157). Much of the spiritual texts point to androgyny, as the devotee has to cross borders transforming his/her/their psyche in constant devotion. Those crossing borders live in osmosis. Heteroglossia is present. Sometimes untranslated mystic states are communicated through body language – tranquility, detachment, solitude, silence, revelation, dream, prayer, seeking. The physical leads to longing. Transcendence to newer states leads to what C.S Lewis called spontaneity, originality and action. In my ethnography of ashram life in Tiruvannamalai titled The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramanamaharshi , I noticed that Nature/Space and Time lie beyond the individual. There is a denial of free will. A search for symmetry follows. The paradox of hierarchy exists between the holy and the individual. Manifestations in a literary device follow, be it poetry or philosophy. The seeker who transcends is permitted to renounce. Yet there are duties, routines. These are times of meditation, community prayer, chanting, meals (both serving and eating) social interaction and silence. All are governed by clock time, and often the ringing of bells. The penultimate rules are silence, meditation and work. Ramana Mahrashi never believed idleness led to meditation (Visvanathan 2010: 231). To understand Nature in terms of the mystery whether in religion or science is the quest for solitude (ibid 232). The inalienable nature of solitude once recognized is the quest for solitude. Thomas Merton said “ We put ourselves between ourselves and things” (ibid 253). Silence has the power of love, it moves beyond classification. Silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it. Renunication has a specific attribute. Solitariness and the Here, work and community all go together. The metaphors used are of family and brethren. Normal life, such as householders live is about comfort, reassurance and diversion. Here, we are able to gather, reassure one another, we enjoy the consolation of companionship (ibid 233). To live in intimate communication with that mystery is the mystic’s sole choice, where the only goal is to be one with the godhead. Erich Fromm in Beyond the Chains of Illusion writes of the awareness of the unconscious which appears as Jung’s collective unconscious. Here, too, are found the archetypes of repression, domination and resistance, terms beloved of feminists. Challenges to revealing the unconscious remain, namely fear, hopelessness and lack of proper orientation. Fromm writes that resistance is an attempt to protect oneself from fright. People said that after the second world war, that they did not know that Jews were killed. People say today that they do not observe death, threats, or admit to selective inattention. The question of Palestine remains closed, hurtling towards extinction, a self fulfilling prophecy about a map without people. It is for this reason that war rages on the planet collectively, an enemy is sighted and the cannons and bombs go off endlessly. We know that arms, food, medicines are run by investment by known and connected oligarchies. Health and agricultural capitalist enterprises find in war machineries substantial profit-making motives. Workers receive wages and support managers. Earlier, there was a distinction between ‘doing a job’ and ‘having a vocation’. There is patriotism and love for the country, which is deeply imbued in terms of partisanship. Fromm deals with the understanding of ambivalence as a necessary part of existence. There is love, hate, contradiction, dialectic and paradoxical thought (Fromm 130). Assimilation brings profit, and no questions are asked. Learning languages become an essential part of survival strategies. Language is for communication, interaction, commercial values, increasing awareness, globalization, abbreviation (sms) and mobility. Learning languages arise from fear of isolation, ostracism, and fear of exclusion. It is a continuous interplay of new vocabularies, changing radius of power and domination, and the essential play of creativity and adaptation. In the rapidly changing world, there are acceptance of norms which are against human nature. ( ibid 138) We know that the polarization of the world today is similar to the early medieval period in Europe. The return to a world which capitalizes on autodestructive tendencies is based on the atrophy of language, where speech is monosylabillic, and renders the passivity of the governed subject as a given. Reference Fromm, Erik 1962 . Beyond The Chains of Illusion Lorenz, Edward: 1995. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Thomas, Lewis: 1980. The Lives of a Cell. New York: Bantam Books 1995. The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher. New York Penguin Visvanathan, Susan:2010. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. New Delhi: Roli .