Murray Bail's The Pages

In Murray Bail's The Pages (NYT review here), two women, one a philosopher and the other a psychoanalyst, drive into the Australian hinterland so that the former may appraise the unknown work of a reclusive self-styled philosopher who has died, leaving his work in disarray in the austere corrugated steel shed where he labored for years.

So far the story itself sounds austere, but Bail's short novel is told briefly and impressionistically. Within the framework of the mystery of Wesley Antill, of his life and his life's work, philosophy and psychology as competing ways of being and knowing are set in relief.

That Bail, previously unknown to me but clearly an assured and sophisticated writer, trots out certain well-worn stereotypes makes me wonder if he didn't do so knowingly, as if defying the stigma of stereotyping or implying that there is more truth in such than we would care to admit. For we meet the flaky psychoanalyst, who has affairs with married men (and at least once in the past, with a client) and who manages to come across as both curious and self-absorbed. Her ambivalent friend is the detached, vaguely awkward, Aspergers-ish philosopher. Both of these are juxtaposed with the tough, taciturn ways of the sheep farmers (Antill's brother and sister) whom they meet on their errand.

Of course, philosophy and psychology do not exist in simple contrast or parallel. Philosophy is seen to have crucial emotional and biographical functions, whereas psychology makes truth claims, all too often unexamined. But Bail is obviously not interested here in academic arguments, but in philosophy and psychology as differing ways of being in the world, which Bail strikingly links to the physical environment:

Hot barren countries--alive with natural hazards--discourage the formation of long sentences, and encourage instead the laconic manner. The heat and the distances between objects seem to drain the will to add words to what is already there. What exactly can be added? "Seeds falling on barren ground"--where do you think that well-polished saying came from?

It is the green smaller countries in the northern parts of the world, cold, dark complex places, local places, with settled populations, where thoughts and sentences (where the printing press was invented!) hae the hidden urge to continue, to make an addition, a correction, to take an active part in the layering. And not only producing a fertile ground for philosophical thought; it was of course an hysterical landlocked country, of just that description, where psychoanalysis itself was born and spread.

It would appear that a cold climate assists in the process. The cold sharp air and the path alongside the rushing river.

In Bail's telling, here and elsewhere, philosophy (even if it is thoroughly naturalistic) has an otherworldly aspect; that is, it can only deal with deeply human problems, yet it seeks to distance itself from its human roots, becoming suspicious of language itself and attempting to break into some situation of truth above or beyond. It thrives in barren (mental and physical) landscapes, whether everything extraneous is put aside. It is unclear whether the enterprise is heroic or pathological. Elsewhere he writes:

"Too much light is fatal for philosophical thought." But some light is necessary.

That is, philosophy is about clarity, but total illumination lays bare the questionable motives of philosophy itself. Philosophy can only seek its own justification as a cat chases its tail. Yet one comes away from the book with the impression that psychoanalysis, while stemming from an honorable impulse to know oneself, is forever losing its way in acts of self-indulgent navel-gazing in cluttered, verbose interactions. Like I said, stereotypes--there it is, that idea again.

This is an intriguing fly-by view of philosophy--see its towering peaks and desert expanses--and psychology--see the buildings crowded into the hillsides, with people busily moving to and fro. Overarching it all is a book like this, the work of the imagination.

Doctor's Orders?

A couple of quasi-medical links worth noting...Karen Houppert in Salon considers the factors that may have led to a schizophrenic woman, Otty Sanchez, to not only kill but consume parts of her newborn baby. In accounting for why Sanchez reportedly was off of her meds (and according to the article claimed to have been hearing voices telling her to do the deed), Houppert suggested that a doctor probably told her to stop taking them due to breastfeeding. Say what?

It is not for me to comment on Sanchez's specific case beyond saying generally that it is overwhelmingly more likely that she was off of her meds because, in the case of schizophrenia and other severe and persistent mental illnesses, non-compliance is more the rule than the exception. When one considers that the disorders in question often involve poor self-insight, and that the medications are often extremely expensive and have significant side effects, non-compliance ceases to be surprising. I have no idea whether she was even in active treatment around the time of her pregnancy or delivery, but by the time the baby was born the only potentially life-saving intervention would have been social services intervention to ascertain her mental status and fitness for motherhood at the time.

Houppert commendably offers a view of "killer moms" as desperate and hopeless women rather than as amoral monsters. However, in our contemporary glorification of maternal instinct it is easy to overlook the fact that infanticide, far from being unnatural, has in fact been a routine practice in numerous "primitive" cultures in various times and places. While the practice seems to make no evolutionary sense at first blush, it actually does inasmuch as infanticide usually happens when a mother (often a particularly young one with poor social and financial support) feels overwhelmed and unable to raise the baby safely. In that case, it makes evolutionary sense for the mother to punt, so to speak, and preserve her own well-being as she can live on to reproduce again. This is obviously not to condone a heinous deed (murder and rape are "natural" as well), but it is to argue that it is not inherently psychologically puzzling.

In another vein of risky behavior, a local story looks at the persistent popularity of tanning beds despite new data suggesting that they dramatically increase the lifetime risk of skin cancer. However, a 78-year-old woman in the article justifies her habit (I have never had the pleasure of visiting a tanning salon, but I never would have expected to encounter the 70-and-over crowd there).

The reasons for this practice are interesting. Some just thumb their nose at medical recommendations, which is a useful reminder that there are values in life apart from cautious self-preservation. Tanning salon operators (who might be said to be biased) maintain that their services are actually healthful inasmuch as they provide vitamin D in a controlled fashion (according to the article some folks actually arrive with doctors' notes advising them to get more vitamin D).

There is also the fact that while skin cancer is common, and undoubtedly more common with tanning bed use, it is also an eminently treatable cancer in most cases when caught early. I don't mean to trivialize it, but apart from the rare melanoma, your average skin cancer is not, say, pancreatic or ovarian cancer.

In an overview of biotechnology's effects on the human body, William Saletan in the New York Times points out that many current and developing medical interventions seek to compensate for risky behaviors, from overeating to running on bad knees. So my inference is that advances in the diagnosis and treatment of skin cancer may have the eventual paradoxical effect of boosting tanning salon profits.