The Scholars have spoken: SEX IS GOING TO CONTINUE.
As I fessed up a couple-days-back, I was to attend a meeting of scholars. "It was a cold, dank night" but still the circle filled. All the attending folk are interested in the complexities of being human. Average Age? Maybe 62 .... 13 Good Souls or so. Scholars. Couple a Third Quarter types bring the mean down with the Late Last Quarter folk to the beginning of the Fourth Quater when flowers still smelled sweet ... Hell! When I could still smell flowers. Really a very nice group of people who have thought deeply about these matters for many years, some more than others ... oh! and me. About half are MD's or DO's and the other half, if you include one writer, are health professionals with different Letter-Salads following their names. Not a lotta Dr. This ... Dr. That going on but maybe there's a pecking order anywy -- but, at least at the surface, first person and friendly-like.
I was not at the top of my game. A couple of hours prior to the meeting my heart decided to go out of rhythm. (BTW ... not all that dangerous ... the Atria of the Heart can flutter about quite a bit before an event has any significant chance of capturing your "freak flag" ... oh! .... and your humor.) It's funny how the brain interprets irregularities in the heart. It goes something like this.
When my heart is at its resting and rhythmic rate of 38-45 beats per minute, I'm calm and relaxed and pretty easy going. When it moves up to 80-100 because of exercise, it still feels pretty good. I can feel my heart beating: "I'm still alive, God ... thanks." When I leave rhythm and am moving willy-nilly from the 40's to 135 or 228 and back, again, without any particular pattern, my brain thinks there's something wrong. Maybe a tiger sneaking its head out of the jungle, a tiger who will soon will try to "dine with me" ... or, more to the point, "dine on me." Now, when a person is anxious or their brain gets the "Your heart's moving fast" signal of anxiety, lots of things change. The normal sweating and palpitations are there for getting the person ready for fight-or-flight ... Those parts of the brain that control Abstract Mathematics, Poetry, Near Vision, Memory, Sequencing, and Complex Thoughts, in general, take a nap. There's little point in either writing a poem for a preying Tiger nor of looking closely at his incisors just before he's to claw you and eat you. No. Those functions have learned to disconnect with anxiety and a-fib convinces the brain that it's anxious. Indeed, what the Armies of the world do in Basic Training is, at least in part, teach how not to shut off those protective higher functions and to permit some of that strategic thought even while fighting or running for your life.
All this was to say that when I'm in this state of mind that accompanies cardiac arrhythmias, "Good Comportment" is not likely the highest grade on my dance card ... or maybe I'm making an excuse for being Old! ... and last night was no exception.
We were all to have read this piece on the need for morality in the health care provider. Now, the author's notion of morality didn't include any prohibitions or compulsions, beyond the usual ... that in my thinking, reduced to "We don't make love and we don't make war." Years ago, a colleague had suggested a simpler version: "We do what we say we were going to do." This particular author that we were reading suggested that morality centered on a capacity to see the other -- say, the patient -- as a person in their own right ... Martin Buber had called this an Ich-Du ... I-Thou relationship to separate it from treating the other as an It (an Ich-Es relationship in Buber's German).
I would have thought that all this that the author was borrowing (while appropriately citing) from Buber would've been thoroughly uncontroversial. I woulda been wrong.
Do I think human folk can revel in the elegant ideas of another one of our tribe? I used to think that. This morning I bounce back and forth from hopeful playfulness with this simple idea and disquieting disappointments that even those who are professionals at this Psyche game have a difficult time listening to each other.
Or maybe, I'm just an Old Man who finds it hard to be satisfied and sits on a chair near his stoop shaking his cane and kvetching at the same time.
And what does this have to do with Sex and Aggression?
For that? ... our next episode of Old Guy Kvetching .....
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