On Falling Asleep, Marxist Analytic Philosophy, a Short Story, and a Physician to the Homeless - Dinner Table Digest № 35
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We start off this week’s Digest with a short story; while I do not typically read much fiction, I do have a soft spot for short stories. I’m hoping to feature more of them in future Digests. Also in today’s issue is a reflection on the liminal nature of sleep, a curious attempt to re-paint the history of analytic philosophy, and the story of a physician to the homeless in Boston.
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Just a Little Fever - Sheila Heti - The New Yorker
This short story explores the life of a 30-something single woman, who begins a relationship with a much older man, a customer at the bank where she works. Told from the third person perspective, I was drawn to the cadence of the writing, which gave me the feeling that I was, perhaps inappropriately, getting the 'inside scoop' on Angela's love life.
She was shampooing her hair with cherries. It was entirely her idea to do it—she hadn’t read about it anywhere. She had taken the little cellophane sack of cherries out of her bag and put the cherries in a wooden bowl and pounded them down with a flat, broad spoon, drawing out the pits with her fingers, then she had slipped into the shower and put the whole mess on her head and shampooed it in with a little bit of moisture. This was her way of treating herself, since only the moon seemed to be on her side, shining down silver on her coat that night. After she rinsed out her hair, it was pink and smelled like cherries. She went to bed with it wet like that, and when she woke up it looked like her head had bled in the night. She put the pillowcase in the sink with a bit of soap and left for her day in the world, the sun shining down on her, creating a golden armor that coated her body entirely.
How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless - Tracey Kidder - New York Times Magazine
One of the most impactful experiences of my life was volunteering with the Waterloo Region’s homeless population at out of the Cold in the late 2000s. Indeed, while there are new challenges to be faced by the local homeless community, the Out of the Cold program was successful in providing homeless folks in the area with shelter, something we can’t seem to manage to do these days. This piece introduces us to Jim O’Connell, a physician who has made a career of serving and - most importantly - learning to love Boston’s homeless population.
The morning O’Connell arrived, the clinic was closed for a shift change, but half a dozen nurses were already inside, waiting for him. In the cramped space near the clinic’s front desk, metal chairs were arranged in a semicircle, with one chair in front, meant for him. In his memory, he sat there surrounded by nurses. Their faces were stern. They said they weren’t interested in investing their time to train a doctor who planned to leave in a year. And if that was what he planned to do — to play doctor to a bunch of homeless men, earn their trust, have them learn to rely on him and then desert them — it would be better if he didn’t come at all. He was probably looking for an interesting experience, they said. He probably thought he was doing a good deed.
They were warning him, in a way that made him feel accused of having committed those sins already — as he had, inwardly. He felt shocked, too shocked to feel offended. …
[Barbara McInnis'] voice, though high and small, sounded gentle. The nurses had seemed hostile, but O’Connell shouldn’t take that to heart, McInnis said. Nurses created this clinic, and they were proud of it, and many of them would be happy never to see a doctor on the premises. She disagreed. Homeless people ought to have the benefit of doctors’ skills. “I really think we want doctors,” she said. “But you’ve been trained all wrong.” Most if not all of the clinic’s patients had experienced severe trauma, she explained, and the typical doctor’s approach often terrified them. So it would take time and patience and a lot of listening before O’Connell would even have the chance to act clinically. “You have to let us retrain you,” she said. “If you come in with your doctor questions, you won’t learn anything. You have to learn to listen to these patients.”
And then he heard her say: “Come on in now, and you’re going to soak feet. I’ll show you how.”
The Birth of Analytic Philosophy Out of the Spirit of McCarthyism - Christoph Schuringa - Jacobin Magazine
This interesting piece looks at the history of the analytic tradition of philosophy in a new light. Jacobin is well-known for its left-wing journalism, so I was not particularly surprised to see the angle the author takes. While I’m familiar with the usual story of how the Analytic Tradition crystalized - (Vienna Circle + Russell & Moore + Wittgenstein = Scientific Rigor) the idea that American McCarthyism played a pivotal role is, well, novel, I’ll say that much. Drawing on the persecution of left-wing and Marxist professors in the academy through the McCarthy period, Schuringa claims that
In the case of those who pursued a Marxist approach in their philosophical work, it is clear that a direct counterforce to analytic philosophy was severely injured in its efficacy insofar as their careers were suppressed by McCarthyism.
In essence, Schuringa suggests, the dominance of analytic philosophy in the 20th century was not because these philosophers were doing good work, but because those philosophers who might challenge the rising dominance of the analytic tradition were being persecuted by the state for their political beliefs. For my part, I am sure that it is possible that the inability of Marxist philosophers to practice their craft, presumably in opposition to the analytic tradition, meant that the analytic philosophers did not withstand the most withering of criticisms. However, having spent time reading in both the Marxist and the Analytic Tradition, I think this is highly improbable.
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Trying to Stay Awake - Jenny Diski - London Review of Books
This witty observation on sleep - or on the process of going to sleep and becoming unconscious of all going on around you - held me in rapt attention, if only because I can identify with nearly every word.
At any rate, that’s how I’d look at the subject if it weren’t for the fact that sleeping, for all its inherent dangers and waste, is and always has been my activity of choice. Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. One of my earliest memories of sensual pleasure (though there must have been earlier, watery ones) is of lying on my stomach in bed, the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that), the eiderdown heavy and over my head, my face in the pillow, adjusted so that I had just enough air to breathe. I recall how acutely aware I was of being perfectly physically comfortable, as heimlich as I ever had been or ever would be, and no small part of the comfort was the delicious prospect of falling slowly into sleep. Drifting off. Moving off, away, out of mindfulness. Leaving behind. Relaxing into hypnagogia (a condition I may always have known about and desired, if not been able to name), anticipating the blurring of consciousness. It must have been a familiar routine, because I was so filled with confident pleasure of what was to come. Daydreaming a story (princes, princesses, cruel guardians, rescues), trying to hold onto the narrative as the thread of it kept drifting away, or I did, out of reach into a storyless place, a gentle fog. The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.
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