For next year!
[Posted by "Monsanto Tribunal" on X]
Books
A more p.c. view of The Horse and His Boy...
One shouldn't have a favorite Narnia book--they need to be read together--but this is mine. It's the wittiest, the most subversive, the most deftly characterized.
Today it may seem unfortunate that Lewis's mind, when asked to imagine a culture alien from Narnia's, leaped straight to the influences of the Arabic literature he'd been studying. (Lewis, a consummate word-nerd, could probably read all the living European languages without a dictionary, so to keep his mind awake in middle age he took up Arabic.) Calormen is simply "the hot land"; there's nothing Islamic about it, and in any world where humans live the residents of "the hot land" would probably tend to have darker complexions (unless the author goes to the trouble of inventing an explanation why they wouldn't, which I once did); but the few words of the Calormene language Lewis bothered to invent have an Arabic look, the houses are built and furnished like something out of the Arabian Nights, and the way the Calormenes speak English sounds as if it were influenced by the Victorian translation of the Arabian Nights too.
It becomes more important in The Last Battle to remember that Calormenes are not Arabs, nor are meant to be. Writers of speculative fiction based on the idea of a possible future for our world have an easy excuse for the limitations of imagination. They can say, as Anne McCaffrey did, that the leaders of the human colony on the planet Pern were Irish and Iranian, so as the Pernese culture evolved it showed the influences of its founders' sense of ethnic pride; Pern has laws lifted out of Ireland's and so on. Lewis accounted for the British influence on Narnia by importing its royal family from London, but he never did explain the origin of Calormen at all, probably because it's not really Arab or Iranian.
So what are Calormenes? They are unenlightened people, simply. Apart from the detail that the name Aravis sounds like "Arab" (but it also sounds like, e.g., the Welsh Arabus, "witty," and other words and names Lewis must have known)...Calormenes arrange marriages for their children without consulting the children's preferences, and resent that Narnian young people arrange marriage for themselves. Calormenes cheat each other in business. Calormene traffic laws consist of "everyone who is less important has to get out of the way of everyone who is more important." The Calormene religion does not adore a vision of the One God whose manifestation in Narnia is Aslan; Calormenes know about lions as dangerous wild beasts but they worship a vaguely Assyrian-looking vulture-man they call Inexorable Tash, who embodies no virtues but merely power, and who is ultimately identifiable with the Evil Principle. Tash is not Allah, the Arabic version of Elohe that invokes the God Abraham served, but he may be identifiable with some of the earliest Semitic male gods, who were identified with storms and battle and had no qualities we might call "spiritual." Lewis knew well that Arab and Persian civilization is, like European civilizations generally, at least illuminated with occasional flashes of enlightenment. Calormene civilization shows no such flashes. It is the civilization of people who may not be altogether bad, but who are, as a group, unenlightened enough that nice people like Aravis and Emeth are called away from a nation where most people are irredeemably nasty.
Each of the Narnia books is a teaching story about some aspect of Christianity. Prince Caspian seems generally to be about the Christian's private struggle against his own bad habits; The Horse and His Boy is more about the Christian's relationships with un-Christian people. Shasta, who is not even a native of Calormen, and Aravis, who is a native of Calormen but is eager to leave, have the right stuff in them; it's good for them to be in Narnia and to marry each other when they're old enough--there is no race prejudice here, Aravis may have a darker complexion than Shasta but she's good enough to be his wife and his people's queen. Rabadash, who seems to be more typical of Calormen, is not good enough to be Susan's doormat and there is a suggestion that Susan would have done better not even to visit his family and consider his proposal. Rabadash's courtship is not about friendship; it's all selfish lust. "I will have her," he rages, referring to Susan, "false, proud, black-hearted daughter of a dog that she is!" Susan is not a bad character, her eventually ceasing to be a Friend of Narnia does not necessarily rule out her going to the English part of Heaven as having been a good Christian back in England, but if she'd been "wise as a serpent" (as Christians are told to be) she would have recognized Rabadash's bad qualities sooner.
But much more than being a story about rejecting unworthy friends, The Horse and His Boy is a story about Christians' relationships with worthy friends--including animals. (Loving and respecting horses, Lewis understood, is not incompatible with riding them, but when the children are being taught to ride by grown-up horses they learn a lot of things many horsey people prefer to ignore.) It is full of love and loyalty, good faith and good will, adventures and tests of courage, green hills and blue sky. It is a delight to read.
So of course is Laura IngallsWilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek.
Sweet innocent childhood--kid drama, lost and found playthings, learning firsthand that friendly Plum Creek becomes dangerous in flood...
Health: Pain Management
David Manney asked for comments on this post. I don't know. Could my father or my Significant Other ever have given him some. I collected a goodly number when actively doing massage, too. I hit the button to send him a few. The system wouldn't take them, apparently because I block cookies. I'm not suggesting that you allow cookies in order to weigh in with your opinions here...
Some people assume that patients, especially women, need to have every experience of discomfort blocked by chemicals that cause more discomfort than they're meant to block. Impacted wisdom tooth? Pop a handful of Tylenol! Having a baby? Full anesthesia for the full period of labor, which may take longer because of the anesthesia, and never mind the possibility of long-term brain damage for either mother or baby because nobody should have to listen to a person gasping to control pain! Arthritis? Hey, in Canada now you can get tax-funded help to commit suicide!
Others assume that patients, especially young men, are wimps who want to be addicts and commit slow unacknowledged suicide at the taxpayers' expense if they need a refill of any pain medication. Maybe some of them are wimps. My father, a polio survivor who'd forced himself to work through the pain to rebuild every nerve and muscle he had, had forgotten more about non-drug pain management than most doctors have to learn; if he said pain was unbearable and untreatable, it was. So he took Tegretol and, though religious beliefs seemed to block any active suicidal thinking, he became obsessed with telling the world he didn't want any medical treatments more "heroic" than that if his health got worse, and with expressing support for Dr. Kevorkian (then regarded as a homicidal fool, now regarded as a pioneer at least in Canada). Giving patients Tegretol or other heavy-duty pain suppressants can feel like writing them off. It can be hard to admit that someone who is already missed may have exhausted all hope of either drug-free pain management or recovery of physical ability.
I've seen other patients whose problem was that they were too brave and tough about pain. They don't become drug addicts because they want to get high--the suggestion that they might be, or might know, that kind of miserable "scag" is fighting words! They end up becoming addicts because they don't want to take a week off to let inflammation subside or relocate a dislocated bone; they want to push on, working longer and harder and faster than younger (and sometimes bigger) co-workers, to impress their bosses, to earn bonuses or promotions, to keep their wretched dead-end jobs. Like champion athletes, they may own a sport (or a heavy labor job) for longer than normal people ever expect to do it, and still cry real tears when they start to slow down. Some of them need better ways to recover from injuries, or change what they do all day in time to prevent injuries; they don't need to be treated like scags. Though some of them become disabled and fade out of life in pretty much the same way the scags do--at best, at home or in a hospital rather than in an alley.
(Scag is heroin. A scag is a person who wants to lie around seeking a drug "high" all the time, who has no reason to live and will never be missed. We say no to drugs because we don't want to be scags.)
Will there ever be better solutions? When people aren't able to muster their own endorphins to manage pain, will there ever be a safe, non-addictive replacement for natural endorphins? I don't know. I do know that a big part of the benefit of massage is that massage people listen, to patients' words and to their physical reactions, and pray or meditate with patients during each treatment. This makes it very easy to tell whether a patient is a wimp or a scag, or is doing everything person can to be healthy. When some people say they feel depressed, they mean they want their own way and their families may be relieved if they'll settle for dangerous drugs; when my husband said he felt depressed, he meant he was dying of cancer. If MDs broke the chains of slavery to insurance schemes and took the time to listen to patients in this way...why shouldn't MDs get this benefit, when treating patients who don't need massage? The doctors who are still respected already do.
Words
According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there may be any number of things people want to talk about but don't because their languages don't (yet) have words for those things. Coining a word allows us to talk about these things.
Well, I don't know. Did youall want to talk about the blur our eyes see in front of and behind the clear image on which our eyes focus? The word for the blur is now, officially, "bokeh." It should logically rhyme with "OK."
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