(pic here of louvre dido © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons)
one thing can be said for hurricanes, they are very impressive when viewed as satellite orange over the ocean blue or traveling some fine inlet like the gulf of mexico, just slouching towards bethlehem and all like a crude beast. before we were viewing weather like that, the prediction would come in the form of news at sea or impending skies or whatever, or animal behavior. I remember noticing, sitting in the kitchen of a girlfriend’s house in sunset junction in LA, watching the morning anchors on the weather channel find new words to describe the upteenth storm that season while my sister on the phone was telling me they were driving out of the state. florida was really hit that year, everyone there remembers it, but most people don’t remember what year it was. i remember because it was the same year i split up with my husband, and the summer had been filled with hunting for a new place while staying at my friend’s house. but this year, there are again storms and in between, life. recently someone i know had to go for some basic tests that they were denied because they didnt have medical insurance and the emergency rooms in their state are not required to provide care and absorb the cost; it happened more subtly earlier this summer to another person i know, subtly because here in texas hospitals are required to provide ‘indigent care’. that’s pig latin for, ‘you gotta give a shit’. in the classical version of the hippocratic oath, physicians would say this: “i swear by apollo physician and asclepius and hygieia and panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that i will fulfill according to my ability and judgement this oath and this covenant: [and here some commitments to be decent and respectful to the one who taught the art of medicine, followed by this very significant phrase:] i will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick [that’s diet and nutritional measures, you know] according to my ability and judgement and keep them from harm and injustice.” hippocrates was a doctor in athens during the time of the peloponnesian war. its more or less the same in the modern version, the oath, only without apollo and all. hygieia? goddess of health. panaceia, goddess of healing and daughter of asclepius, god of medicine. you know apollo surely. but the physicians are not really more than pawns in a major schematic to completely dehumanize and unsoul and systematize private human affairs in this ridiculous way to where people aren’t even sensible anymore and defer consistently to things like this: “well, my computer screen is saying….” or “you’re not in the system” and “that’s just not our policy, miss”. to whatever degree there is a malevolent, money-grabbing mind behind these changes in the practice of–well everything, medicine, voting, driving, smoking in a restaurant, on an airplane, keeping your shoe laces tied from when you leave home until you finish travels, etc– really it’s a condition of the times to get dumbed down by meanness and stupidity but dont do it! 😉 hospitals are the new healthcare program in america and all the private practice doctors are… out of private practice. i know two doctors who had to leave medicine and go into the insurance business, just to support their families! ??? as for diet and nutrition, that is the medicine. this summer i wrote a song that i called the dido song. i had been reading (or trying to read) the aeneid and got stopped by the impression after book 1 that the entirety of the modern civilization was what rose up out of the trojan war and the start of what was to become rome and all things of and out of rome began on the journey between troy and tunisia and that new city. the story of dido queen of carthage and aeneas is a terrible story and i think is an amazing and precise depiction of what we have done with the divine aspect of the feminine in our brave new rome–er world, and it appalled me so much i had to write a song about it. i read it like the original sin or crime of our current paradigm, knowhatimean? ts eliot called their meeting in the underworld where aeneas tries to explain himself “the most telling snub” in western literature. its a damn bad premise for a brave new anything nevermind world. ok ok, shep’s gonna…. shep! (uh oh) mmhhhhnnh. wow, shep! yeah. i know i know you dont have to say it: lay off. i know. how r ya, shep? 😉
Jennifer Leonhardt 