Infinite Challenge

**Well, it’s taken several weeks and several odd strategies but I managed to get through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace on my third attempt. 

One strategy was to get the Audible version of the book (free to new members, which you can immediately opt out of). I played it back at 1.5x speed. But I also had the text version that I could read in a browser on a large display. Because of this I was both audibly and visually kept on track. While I was at it, by using an earphone with a pause control, I could stop and mark the many, many instances where the narration differed from the text. These marked places are easily condensed into a document that I can send to the publisher or Audible.com, which will probably not initiate any re-aediting, but at least it’s on record. Oh, and I did this only while walking on my desk treadmill with the keyboard and display on the versa desk. 

Reading the book is a tedious task, and without multiple inputs the reader could easily get lost, or lose much of the writing. There’s hardly any plot but the text explodes like a firehose of words describing in minutest detail things that are not essential to understanding what’s going on, hence the tediousness. On the positive side, there are engaging descriptions of addiction, addiction therapy (mostly AA), depression, suicide and family relationships. Its often funny, both in the action or in the premise or description. Read the Wikipedia entry on it and you’ll see that the whole thing has a gigantic tension between reality and hyper reality.

I read this book mostly because it’s been praised so much, especially on its 20th anniversary. But frankly, I don’t think I’m up to its challenges. And don’t know who could be. I think I understand addiction better, depression better and even suicide. But reading the book is like having a large neurotic pet that is physically ill. A lot of work, and you’ve gotta love it. Or else, like me, take it on as a challenge for private reasons.

Reply to comment on previous post

**I’m always impressed when someone notices this blog, which I write mostly for my own amusement. Once in a while there comes a courteous, thoughtful comment that I appreciate. This is one that came through, anonymously, recently. It’s worth a complete post and not just a reply in the comment section. I’ve included the commenter’s text in italics. 

This is your blog. Your space. Your MT space. So if others come here to read & comment, hopefully it's out of respect & consideration.

Yes, it’s my space but it’s a public place. Anyone can come and read and make comments. It’s the way blogs work. But I wish all commenters were as gracious as you. Thanks.

You being a former CS teacher/lecturer, you're bound to be remembered by some in the small-world CS community where you were known by many. 

Yes, I met many good-hearted people during that trek through the desert. Only a few of them have stayed friends with me since I left, and I value them. 

Being that CS is a practice of mental grappling & reasoning, out of the spirit of respectful consideration, you may have some here who are innately different from your current perspective, making comment.

Yes, I expect such.

Regarding your comments that "There is no spiritual healing," and "the CS movement is coming to a grinding halt," how could you possibly know? These claims are as unscientific & unsubstantiated as what you are claiming to be unscientific & unsubstantiated!

I beg to differ. Thirty five years in the religion and half of that as a practitioner and teacher never showed me an actual healing that could be verified by the same kinds of rigorous standards used in medicine or in public health. In fact, as noted in the post, during those years I saw lots of people encouraged to wear their failures on their bodies for all the world to see. And if you follow the link, you can see where I starred in one of the most painful tragedies imaginable: encouraging a mother not to seek the simple medical treatment that would have kept her child alive. I can never forget that, though for several years I tried. 

As the post noted (and as others of my posts have also) a reasonable person would “follow the money.” It’s a pretty good indicator of what people think will do them some good. The money isn’t going into spiritual healing. And not just because Big Pharma has a lot of influence. It’s because nobody is coming forward submitting a physical healing that can be reliably tested. Everything is still in the realm of the anecdotal. Even the CS pubs don’t ask that "healings" be verified by professionals. The only requirement is that the testifier and “witnesses” have good reputations, which smacks of collusion.

If even one CS healing would pass an objective, professional examination, and if the result could be replicated over a wide range of conditions and time, there might be serious interest in what produced it. In that case CS healing could become a big BUSINESS, because people would flock to a method that resulted in such convincing proof of healing. It isn’t happening.

How many practitioners are actually making a living solely from the work they do as pracs? I could never make it, and I was somewhat popular. And most of the pracs would not be in the business if not for wealth outside of income from the practice. Many have spouses who work. Many are just plain wealthy, making their practice more a hobby than real work. And a few, mostly young people, are willing to live at a subsistence level for a time. Pracs may be busy, but it’s mostly because (mostly elderly) people call for inspiration and support as they struggle with the inevitable physical and mental issues associated with aging. Either that or if they’re teachers, they have a ready-made pool of starstruck customers willing and eager to sustain them.

Bedside manner is actually the most potent element of a successful CS practice. People can be talked out of psychosomatic problems, talked into feeling more hopeful and less stressed (stress being a major component of many problems), or given little busywork assignments that help them ignore the fact that physically they aren’t getting better and in most cases are getting worse. I’ve been in the same room with pracs on the phone troweling on platitudes to people who call them, often every day. This is not spiritual healing. It is a consensual con game. Somewhat useful, but not marketable to a public that simply wants to be cured, and not just schmoozed. 

As for the “movement,” it is hardly moving, growing gelatinous as it wanes. I used to work in the 26-story “Administration” building on the CS campus. Even then there were some floors only sparsely populated. But now the whole building is leased out to non-church occupants. It's a pretty clear sign of less “administration” to do. The former Colonnade building is now named for its address and is occupied by Northeastern University. Obviously the church is on life-support from its property holdings and other investments, and not from the bequests and contributions of its increasingly expiring members.

It’s even gotten to the point that today when a case of child abuse based on spiritual healing practice makes the news, Christian Science is hardly ever mentioned, other than as an historical reference. CS parents are now too smart (or afraid) to rely on spiritual healing for their kids, because they don’t want to be arrested and have their lives and faces plastered across the news media for being guilty of child abuse. And they’re also patronizing medical practitioners and pharmacies like everyone else, but more or less sub rosa. 

To a certain logic, all may appear to be one thing, but what if the framework of that logic only represents a level or layer of comprehension that is infinitesimally small? What if there is way more going on underneath that is just not known or understood to that logic? What if there IS a lot more to a man than the physical body?

You can go as low or as high as you want, but in the end people want actual healing in their lives. Practical results. Not just a good feeling, or patience with their pain and disabilities. Or even a satisfying theory. They don’t want some intellectual abstraction, some fondly wished for reality. They have a pain, or a functional failure or a deformity and they want to get back to normal. Normal as in humanly normal. Until CS can deliver that kind of result, it will remain a mind game and a conspiracy, won’t generate much interest and will continue to diminish as an influence in the world. My post was ultimately about being in step with reality vs. simply being theoretical. You can be logical within a theory but if you start off wrong you will end wrong (even MBE said something like  that). 

The shoes of CS do not fit everyone. 

Because most people don't want to contort themselves to fit a rigid, fruitless mold. MBE claimed that physical healing would verify the validity of CS. We have yet to see that evidence.

That is to be expected in our big world. One would not expect a ballet dancer to moon-light as a logger. Different shoes. In those two worlds, one could not be the expert of the other's field. 

The "field" we're talking about isn't a specialty. It's normal human life. 

A non-believer cannot claim to be an expert of the beliver's field - it simply cannot be. Different realms & different focuses of thought.

Whoa! I AM an expert in this field. For too much of my lifetime I studied it, practiced it, taught it, lectured about it, wrote about it and went to jail for it. Don't tell me I'm not an expert.

The post you’ve commented on was exactly on your point. One can be completely  consistent with a theory but ultimately wrong because one's premise was wrong. Intellectual consistency and logic just don’t matter to someone with a cancerous organ, or a cataract, or a blocked artery. The ONLY thing that matters is that the diseased condition is reversed and normalcy re-established. Whatever your “realms or focuses of thought,” the pain, the malfunction, the contagion, the deformity and so forth inhabit the only real dimension of interest to a sick person. Make a conclusive demonstration in that realm and you will get the millions to investigate and take up your belief.

Otherwise slide into history like the Shakers, who at least made something useful.

Right sequence, wrong foot

**In order to get out of marching around on an October's cold, muddy field in Buffalo, I volunteered for the ROTC band. It didn’t seem to matter that I said I played piano, they needed drummers and so I was handed a drum. I can keep a beat pretty well, though I don’t do all the flourishes real drummers can do. I enjoyed rehearsing with the band up in a nice, warm third floor lecture hall that overlooked the frozen sleety grounds where my less fortunate comrades slogged around hefting icy rifles and soggy boots. The band practiced all winter for the big spring parade, which of course occurred outdoors in a still-cold Buffalo spring, like March or April, maybe even May. One of my first impressions on reaching the street was that the drum was damn heavy to walk with, and had sharp hardware that bashed against my thigh with every step. Never having been fleet of foot, and concentrating so much on dodging the pain of marching with a drum on my hip, I lost track of the “left-right-left-right” cadence bellowing from the drum major ahead. While everyone was stepping with their left foot, I was stepping with my right, and vice versa. So while I was perfectly in time step to step, I was completely out of step with my group. Of course I was soon made aware of this mistake and skipped around to reverse it - with corresponding extra jabs to my thigh.

A current luminary in the Christian Science movement, is also an astrophysicist. So he’s not only a scientist who happens to be Christian, he’s a Christian who also claims to be scientific about Christianity. About the only thing these two disciplines have in common is that their arguments follow in logical progression. But like my faulty marching, CS starts on the wrong foot. Which pretty much invalidates all of its conclusions. And results in pain. I recently read the text of a talk he’d given in which he made many unsubstantiated claims, using the same quotes and cadences I used to make when I was on the same lecture circuit. 

I was once impressed with that tight logic. Until I discovered that the starting assumption — that there is a divine entity managing everything in perfect harmony— was bogus. It had previously, over many years, been an unchallenged assumption, I having been brought up with that assumption and participating in all the religious activities that sprang from it. So, while the CS arguments stemming from that assumption are in time with each other, they are totally out of step with reality.

Another kind of theist might find the logic of CS convincing, if they were free enough from parochial influence. But in the end they’d wind up just as disappointed and frustrated as I was. While some may argue that the existence of God cannot be proved, or unproved, the claim of CS to be true is defeated by its own measure. All through its literature is the claim that the truth of its assumptions are demonstrated by physical healing. Not just feeling better, or bearing up optimistically or becoming a nicer person. Physical healing. The kind of healing that millions (billions?) of people seek and find without resort to prayer of any sort, least of all “Christianly scientific prayer.”

No matter how strenuously Christian Scientists claim to be healed, there have been no convincing instances of it in my experience. Just the opposite. I’ve seen people so sick and unhealed through prayer that they let growths develop on their face or body; who put up with days of migraine pain; who even let helpless children endure suffering, sometimes to the point of death. Despite all kinds of rationalizations, it is not the patient but the practice that is at fault. 

If “spiritual healing” were effective, people would seek it, pay dearly for it. It would be so popular that whole industries would spring out of it, and educational institutions would teach it. And there’d be no bad press. Believers say that such can’t happen because of the perversity of humanity, its materialism and false education. But a healing practice based on the principle that there is an infinite, omnipotent and readily available divine source cannot have such conclusive and consistent failures. At least there should be some spectacular successes! And those successes would drive further interest and patronage. But what do we have instead? An increasingly inward-looking church, members and publications quietly congratulating themselves that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, real physical healing is going on and therefore they are in step with the truth. 

The CS “movement” is quietly grinding to a halt. The decline is aided, of course, by the fact that a large segment of its (lucky) membership is aging and dying. The righteous claims of younger, more robust members are being shredded as they age by the ailments typical of a human body that is exceeding its evolutionary design. Many secretly use medical services. Most parents are compelled by community laws to have their sick children treated by real medical doctors, cutting down on the most egregious of their practices. Many of their kids, not brainwashed by parents and grandparents, don’t join churches and thus don’t make up for the deceasing membership. 

Whatever can be said about the sound logic of Christian Science, it does not deliver on its promises. There is no spiritual healing. None. And if there is no such healing then the logic that would predict it is totally internal, and its practice is out of step with reality.