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ON-LINE
ISSUES
V.5
N.1, August 1999
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How
Do we Know (Y)our Health after Hiroshima? Ethics in Writing Cases -
A Reflexive Thesis
by
Ken
Schramm
schramm@interchange.ubc.ca
Centre
for the Study of Curriculum & Instruction
University
of British Columbia
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| Abstract
Abstract(ly)
You do not yet know
you are looking at my face
making a case of me for which
you are responsible when you begin
reading "How do we know (y)our health
after Hiroshima? Ethics in writing cases.
A reflexive thesis," a report of research, I
supplement U.B.C. Faculty of Medicine
who imagine cases to teach health sciences
with special attention to aboriginal health,
alternative, and complementary medicines. I
imagine a writing seminar of health professionals,
researchers, students, and teachers who write their
health cases of individuals, families, communities,
lands, or species. A self reflexive thesis, I display
on my familied body, my face in this case,
my pedagogy: imagining authors who write
(y)our personal and professional memories,
experiences, understandings, judgments,
decisions, responsibilities and actions
for making (y)our case of
health in writing.
I am written in three columns of father, child, and mother
voices
given life and meanings by the courage and hopes of (y)our readings
reflecting on my portrait by Ken Schramm, M.D., Ph.D. student in CSCI.
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Father
voices reading…
What is your research question?
The form of my
question is embodied above in
the shape of a human face.
These three columns represent
the shoulders, arms, and body
of a reflexive thesis in a family
as a thinking body made by
father, mother. and child voices.
A short answer to my research
question is: we know our health
in families by voicing (y)our
thinking in writing, embodying,
marking, and following traces
of (y)our abilities to remember
(y)our familied bodies
as homes.
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Child
voices imagining…
You are touching me here on
this page, and the next page,
and all the pages to come, with your eyes, your breath, your fingers,
your feelings, your mouth and your nose, smelling and tasting
my virtual inks, you
are writing me, whoever I will
have been, reflecting your
touching, thinking me, a
reflexive thesis speaking all by my self with your voices. Like
a post card anyone who finds me can tell my story. I am not sealed
in an envelope like a sent letter. I am inside Hiroshima with
He and She and you and
me.
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Mother
voices thinking…
He is reading silently in
Boericke's Materia Medica, a
homeopathic book of remedies and diseases, listening to Welsh
songs on CBC radio, reading
aloud to me and after being
silent awhile, He says "sounds terrible."
"Yes" says Me.
"How do you know what I'm
thinking?" He asks.
"Oh! I meant the music," says Me. "I like the music of my ancestors.
I can't stand reading these diseases in Boericke," says
He. "He and She and
Hiroshima" is written from
stories he told me of nuclear
war, marriage, divorce, and
genocide.
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Health
and ethics mean making a home together with families in ‘The Peckham
Experiment' of Pearse, or thinking Heidegger with Derrida. In
this column with a patriarchal voice, He follows a tradition that
a thesis is based in linear progress and knowledge presenting
a continuity of researchers writing the Book of Life, explaining
the world found and made by researchers following ‘the scientific
method.'
Writing what He is doing when He is knowing is a way to find and
make His voice at home in a self reflexive thesis, questioning
or affirming a way of life His voice reads as healthy. How do
we question a patriarchal way of life as healthy? The tradition
we question is written in hierarchies of habits, families, institutions
of power and knowledge which privilege human above nonhuman lives,
rich over poor families, men over women, experts over amateurs,
words over bodies, professional knowledge over personal, familied
and remembered common sense. In this way of life our health is
written by experts who show us what is healthy and which questions
we can ask of our health or of them. Health decisions are made
in hierarchies of bodied classes, families, genders, principles,
rules, or codes of ethics.
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One
of the Kens who wrote me down was asked why he wrote me and what
is his thesis any way? Ken said he heard my voices, and found
another writer named Ken to write me. The only way he could explain
me would be finding and making another
story and i would be inside a
story inside a story. He said his thesis was like listening to
Bach playing jazz and he discovered the music of He and She inside
Hiroshima or HeRoSheMa and
the only way out is in
here in Hiroshima blowing you and me away on another August day
remembering US bombing and killing us here in
HeRoSheMa.
mmmma memories
sunny shiney bars making shapely shadowy
colorsey all over me
baby babbling
birds singing
dogs barking
music speaking singing
animaleasy dancey prancey
crows crowing noisy nonsense
crying lost lost lost
dying music
I can't understand.
do policeman die? Yes.
don't wannabe policeman
do firemen die? Yes.
don't wannabe fireman.
do doctors die? Yes.
Don't wannabe doctor
don't wannabe dead. Everybody dies sometime. Some one is always
dying all the time. i have
all the time there is.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
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To
write his story He found and made an imaginary author who
wrote His life experiences as a ‘case.' When He is reading and
writing, He hears voices
speaking in his world and He
can feel lips, tongue, and throat working, but the voices He hears
are not in His head, and sometimes the voice is not His voice,
but a softer more feminine or child like voice. His voices are
not His only and are heard and felt but not seen. They are not
mine which I hear among the movie images of my
body but they can be written
from stories He tells me. He
listens but he does not hear me or see me or feel me, I am invisible
to him. I am invisible to myself.
I see me in my children gifts of life all little hands and feet
and innie outie belly button eyes winking at me
each different and the same
singing their songs snugly
nursing growing running so
fast so far taking me with them till I am scattered
all over the beaches
across all the worlds of hungry loving children seeing me in their
eyes dancing singing drawing paint food and eye food open mouths
crying calling asking what is it? to every thing alive dying what
is it? where do they go when they die? where am I when I am thinking?
asks Hannah of Arendt family thinking ethics at Adolf Eichmann's
Trial.
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Mother
says i am growing up too fast. i said i only have a few pages to
sing my song. She says i need time to enjoy life and I am too young
to be thinking about dying. Father says this story is a visit at
home with us and we should be able to laugh
and play without worrying
because we are going to die
before it is all over anyway. I can't remember a time when I didn't
think about being born
and dying like frog eggs in the brook and fish eating the eggs and
tadpoles in the pond, and roosters
we ate for Sunday dinner. Father would carefully hold it to kill
it but it would always fly above us headless and bleeding all over
us. I dream of growing
up and having babies
and dying and being born again like great Grandmother and wonder
what will they smell like and what will they see and who will they
be? Auntie Leslie says her Pueblo relatives are buried at home in
a room next door where the roof has fallen down making a shallow
grave, their spirits going over
to write their stories
at Cliff House, and torytelling is when we let them all come in
from out there to give us their gifts and be with us inside our
stories. |
She
discovered that Eichmann followed orders to kill Jews, without
ever thinking, making a habit of not thinking. She named
his unthinking obedience the
‘banality of evil.' He thinks I
don't think because I don't talk words the way he does. I dance
words in music and movies he doesn't hear or see. He asks where
I go when I am ‘in the fairies' thinking dreaming lives
born, or not yet born, wondering what if all truths are mothers
known only to those who share
love with them, who can and do imagine being in another body different
from the one they were
born in and out of?
Child is growing up
much too fast for me.
I don't think it's healthy for her to be in such a hurry to grow
up and die. She says she does not want to
die but I think she is curious
about what is on the other side of life and who lives there. She
loves
Auntie Leslie's stories of
prophecies of Spider Woman
weaving the webs of stories we live and her hopes that her younger
‘white' brothers and
sisters of America will let Mother Earth teach us to make our
homes
together here not somewhere out in space. I can't wait to go with
her to visit Auntie Leslie in the Southwest to see the desert
bloom and grow again. Hard to believe this is where they tested
the first
atom bomb.
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How
do we question our ethics when we ask how weknow (y)our health
after Hiroshima? Remembering nurses, physicians, and teachers
who fill in forms to write health reports on their patients or
students, this thesis has the form of a family as a writing body
which asks how we know (y)our health by voicing (y)our stories
in writing. The form of
this thesis models a way of life in which family health workers
visit families to make plans for the care of their members from
birth to death at home. We know (y)our health by sharing (y)our
dreams and stories of
caring for children across three generations of families.
Caring for children as good
human beings means we decide we need to be healthy and heal ourselves.
Education for those who care for the health of others should enhance
the health of healers as well as their clients, students, or patients.
The new U.B.C. Faculty of
Medicine ‘case based
curriculum' uses health cases written by faculty to teach basic
and clinical sciences without providing their students opportunities
to write and think their own health. This thesis
supplements their new
curriculum by writing a
familied body in which
students imagine authors to
write their own experiences as health cases.
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Within
a familied body, we
question "healthy" ways of life in making (y)our homes
together. We use autopoietic
logics of the supplement to tell stories which deconstruct monopolies
in meanings of
(y)our health. In family
therapy, stories have been
rediscovered as healing in
autopoietic theory. Autopoiesis is based on the research of Humberto
Maturana who surgically rotated the axis of a
frog's eye and found that the
frog's tongue missed catching flies by exactly the angle to which
the eye had been rotated. He decided that the nervous system,
not a frog's eye perceiving light, made their worlds in habits
of knowing...
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Uncle
David Werner tells me
children of any age, can behealth workers by helping to make their
home and community healthier places to live. I wish I knew how
to make the world a healthy place. I read his books ‘where there
is no doctor' and i tried to
dream what i could do to help my brothers and sisters be healthy
and i asked them to tell me but all
they wanted to do was play
doctor and I wanted to be the
midwife. Nobody wanted to play with me, They said it was gross
and ran away. I asked my Teacher
if we could study the child-to-
child health worker part of Uncle David's book. She said we are
all too young…
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In
July ‘45 they did not know
whether the Bomb wouldblow
up the whole Earth burning up all our oxygen. I think of all the
mothers and children of the Manhattan Project as baby boomers.
Women of
San Ildefonso Pueblo cared for them. Their black-on-black pottery
is famous. Aunt Leslie says Pueblo potters never separated themselves
from Mother Earth and her children and did not try to improve
her gifts. The designs of their pottery do not copy but abstract
from each individual squash blossom, releasing them from their
uniqueness, to portray a wholeness of all their aboriginal relations
in a portrait of health…
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| Coda
In
my M.A. thesis at U.B.C. Library you will find here a story of my first
research project at 12 years' old when my uncle who worked on the Manhattan
Project taught me that the only secret of the atom bomb was that you
are making one. "He and She and Hiroshima" form the belly and exploding
genitals of the bodied work, followed by an annotated bibliography made
of grandparent legs, dancing on Mother Earth in an appendix made by
a palimpsest of excluded texts. The whole familied work embodies a portfolio
of writings since 1967 encouraging writing our stories in exemplary
cases.
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| References
& Endnotes |
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Grandfather mother speaking writing
storied and healing lives, ghosts,
books, words, and remedies…
"A
- BOMB AND H -…
Those alive love…"
Louis Zukofsky
- Arendt,
H. (1978). The Life of the Mind. One/Thinking. Two/Willing.
One Volume Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., page
5: "…Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit
of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract
attention, regardless of results and specific content,
could this activity be among the conditions that make
men abstain from evil-doing or even ‘condition' them against
it? (The very word ‘con-science'…points in this direction
insofar as it means ‘to know with and by myself,' a kind
of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.)"
Her Gifford Lectures.
- Arendt,
H. (1996). Love and Saint Augustine. Edited and
with an interpretive essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
and Judith Chelius Stark. Chicago & London: University
of Chicago Press. Arendt's doctoral dissertation was written
under the direction of Karl Jaspers, a physician and psychiatrist.
Both were influenced by Martin Heidegger, especially his
Being and Time. Where Heidegger emphasized awareness
of death in the life of individuals, she wrote of natality,
life and our gratitude for life, love of neighbor and
the world. She was revising this work in the 1950's and
early 60's while she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil and prepared her Gifford
Lectures. Augustine's "I am become a question for myself"
and writing of Confessions were provoked by the
death of his friend.
- Bennington,
G. & Derrida, J. (1993). Jacques Derrida. Translated
by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago & London: University of
Chicago Press. "This book presupposes a contract. JD,
having read G.B.'s text, would write something escaping
the proposed systematization, surprising it…" (p. 1)
- Boericke,
W., M.D. (1991). Pocket Manual of Homoeopathic Materia
Medica. New Delhi: B. Jain Publishers (PVT).
- Byrd,
D. (1994). The Poetics of the Common Knowledge.
Albany: SUNY Press. "Humberto Maturana…writes… 'there
is no transmission of information through language'…We
are not chained! We are in no sense required or regulated
by language, our own or others. We are not input-output
machines, functioning at the whim of the information that
we suffer. We are, rather, self closing organisms that
take their own output as input. The joy of language is
that it sometimes allows us the opportunity to enter unconstrained
community, not mediated and numbed, but intensively felt.
In saying that language is connotative, Maturana means
not that language refers to emotions but that language
is emotional, not informational…" (pp. 237-238).
- Heidegger,
M. (1993). Basic Writings. from Being and Time (1927)
to The Task of Thinking (1964). Revised and expanded
edition. Edited by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco:
Harper Collins. Includes: "The Way to Language; The End
of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking; Building Dwelling
Thinking."
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Grandmother father speaking writing
storied and healing lives, ghosts,
books, words, and remedies…
"There will be no peace in the
Americas until there is justice
for the earth and her children."
Leslie Silko
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| Note
This
article was presented on May 1, 1999 at the UBC Conference "Bodymind:
Holistic Explorations of Cognition, Action, and Interaction in Education"
by Ken Schramm, M.A., M.D.
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About
the Author
Ken
Schramm is a physician poet and a Ph.D. student at the Centre for
the Study of Curriculum and Instruction of the University of British
Columbia.
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Copyright
rests with the author.
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