"I got into philosophy through cooking," said Sharon Fitzwater. "I
know it's not the ordinary path, but then I'm not sure any two
paths have much in common. Resemblance may be fundamentally
superficial. I certainly never expected I'd have so much to do
with Aristotle. It's as much talking with him as about him. Or is
it that I'm trying to talk with myself through Aristotle? It's
always been something of a mystery to me how I might go about
getting my own attention."

She pushed her long blonde hair away from her face. "Cooking
always fascinated me because I was so hungry. My father was a
machinist in Akron, Ohio. He was very good at what he did, so he'd
get called out of town often on quite short notice, sometimes for
as long as a month. I'd come home from school to discover that
he was gone. My mother was a different person when he was away.
Even before Andy Warhol, she had a love affair with
the Campbell Soup can. She'd take a can of tuna fish, add a can of
peas, pour a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup on it, heat it a little
bit and then serve it to us."

"I just couldn't get it down. My brother seemed to manage, but I
couldn't do it. So I got interested in cooking and cooking led me
to a wider world. I discovered French cooking and I discovered
Chinese cooking. I'd get cookbooks out of the library and try to
imagine what the recipes would taste like. I'd filch things from
the supermarket so that I could try a recipe. The first bottle of
red wine I ever had anything to do with I stole from Serankos Wine
And Spirit Shoppe not more than a mile from the Goodyear plant.
When I got it home, I had no idea how to get the cork out. That
was how I found out about the existence of cork trees.

"What interested me the most about recipes was what was left out.
A recipe is like a map. The recipe is not the dish. It abstracts
features from a landscape and is quite indifferent to the mode of
transportation employed. I am always amazed when I take a trip
that what the map promised is there. At the end of a recipe comes
a vision, a flavor, the road to a gustatory memory, which not only
is like no other, but transforms, to a greater and lesser degree,
all previous memories.

It acquires a life of its own in us. I stowed away on a ship to
get to France when I was seventeen. My mother who is now
eighty-eight and as full of complaints as ever claimed that by
disappearing I had taken twenty years off her life. I always tell her
that I've added two decades, not taken them away."

"I learned the language, which was no great trouble, since I've
always been an adept mimic, probably in service of the search for
an escape route from myself. But far more important than learning
the language was learning the taste. That changed everything for
me. I began to wonder why things tasted the way they did. I've
since been to China as well. I've studied chemistry, physiology,
neuroanatomy, botany, some zoology, even calligraphy and brush
painting as well as a host of theologies. I always could support
myself cooking. I never got fat, because I noticed that only when
I started eating did I miss people. So I resist until the very
last minute and savor what little I eat.

"Also, I can always make something like the flavor come back, not
that even in the closest approximation there isn't a haunting
difference that sounds the note of separation. My studies never
satisfied me. Perhaps I displaced my appetite. It's a matter of
how literal you want to be. I came to philosophy really out of a
kind of desperation. It wasn't enough to think and wonder about
flavor. I had to think and wonder about the flavor of thinking and
wonder. I confess I've never been able to follow a recipe
slavishly. So much makes a difference. The light, the temperature,
the amount of moisture in the air, the season, something as
difficult to put your finger on as the ambient mood.

"I was immediately attracted to Aristotle by what I like to call
his 'tangibility.' I was married and had two young children by
that time. I could get my teeth into Aristotle. He excited a
tingle in the buds of my tongue. I could relate Aristotle to
cooking. For example, his famous four categories of cause seemed
to me to have something to do with the act of making dinner. The
final cause of making dinner, the end being pursued, was nourishment,
not only in the caloric sense but in the relational and cultural sense.
The formal cause was the particular designs of the different dishes
and flavors being sought. The material cause was the ingredients,
whose evanescent specificity is one of the great glories of cooking.
The efficient cause was myself, the cook, my pounding, rolling,
chopping, heating, mixing, melding and so forth.

"And at each level of cause, there were peculiar fascinations, as
for example, the intrusion of urges to seduce or poison or redesign
or inspire into the realm of the final cause.

"Yet, for all my allegiance to Aristotle, the romance, the
intrigue, the body of his thought and my own almost explosive
relationship to it, I always felt there was something missing. As
I taught cooking, I observed others cooking and discovered just how
difficult it was to find the receptive moment when the other might
not only hear but grasp and receive what you had to say or suggest.
I noticed as well that the capacity to cook depended crucially on
the capacity to taste, which was highly idiosyncratic. Those who
had it in them to become good cooks were peculiar in another
respect, namely, that they neither exactly followed the recipe or
adhered to strict technique nor did they exactly deviate. They
seemed instead to alter the recipe as well as technique. They
presented it in a different light, redistributing the emphases,
participating in a sort of melding very much in the spirit of
cooking.

"This got me to meditating upon a particular passage in Aristotle
that had always troubled me. It rankled, rousing a negativism in
me that I have always been able to call to my aid but also have had
to watch carefully to see that it does not do me in by setting me,
against even deeper reaches of my will, in sterile opposition.
Aristotle says in the Nicomachean ethics that it is in the nature
of the good to be clear and definite. Now, I am not so sure of
this, for two reasons. The first is that evil can be especially
clear and definite. Certainly this fading century has been full of
examples of that. The second is that the good asks for an open
margin, a horizon, a place for rest, recuperation and surprise. It
plays tag with definition.

"This meditation led me to advance the notion that Aristotle's
account of the four causes is incomplete by reason principally of
its assertion of completeness. That is to say, since we are in the
business of putting things in words, that the four causes, final,
formal, material and efficient do not exhaust the question of
causes. I should say that before I ever even dreamed of putting
this into words it had entered into the spirit and practice of my
cooking, which had become at once more rigorous in execution and
more impromptu in the sense of being tied to the essential
accidents of circumstance, the spirit and flavor of a certain fish,
a certain region's crop of vegetables at a certain time in a
certain season, the composite vector of a certain group's appetite
and my own need and unease about pleasing.

"The fifth cause, whether unkown to Aristotle or simply neglected
by him, is the lost cause. It's what every project rejects. By
its very nature, the lost cause can not be found. Everything we do
or make is a lost cause. It eludes us. It misses the mark and we
have to remark this missing. Otherwise we end up with what I have
called a fetish of the product, while the process recedes into the
background, valued only for the product. But I don't want to
lecture. The lost cause has to do with the indefinite and the
dispiriting aspects of the infinite. It's not a matter of defining
it, but of pointing in its direction what will hopefully be a
liberating finger, not one that only confuses or misleads. Much to
my surprise, my machinist father seemed to get what I was talking
about and to welcome it. He chuckled ruefully and said that, over
time, he had developed tolerance for tolerances."

Sharon Fitzwater's face lit up. A handsome woman in her middle
forties, she went on, "What I really like to talk about is what a
lost cause the idea of the lost cause is. It gets talked about,
but mostly to be pulled apart in a thousand different ways. For
example, it has been put down as a cook's creation. Now that may
actually be a compliment, for what we cook lasts only a short time.
It is meant not to last, except in the process of human transformation.
That process for me is the most lasting form of lasting.

“What's eaten is lost, but also finds itself in new circumstances.

"I've also been accused of being a vengeful woman who wants to make
a hole in Aristotle. There may be some truth in that, too, because
I think it is holes that make us whole. It's a question of finding
a way to include the holes. That has been missing. We have to
organize the body of our thought. That takes a dash of the
indefinite. Or should it be a dot?"

"I'm intrigued," Sharon Fitzwater said crisply, "by the fact that
my hunger is changing, not that there is anything new about that.
My hunger, I would have to say, is getting wiser. I start now with
the idea that every dish, every hope, every holiday, every
appetite, every celebration is a lost cause. I really laughed when
they awarded me tenure. I think it was only because my colleagues
have no idea what to make of me.

"I've offered them free cooking lessons, but none of them has felt
safe enough to take me up. I think old Xenephon wouldn't have
hesitated for a moment. He knew his horses and his dogs. I've
told them I love Aristotle more than ever. The lost cause is like
the missing link. It's the impossibility upon which possibility
depends. When I see a Campbell's soup can, I don't know whether to
shudder or to be grateful. Maybe there is such a thing as the
shudder of gratitude. Now I've told you everything that I know
about my love life."

She smiled and we realized that she had the most complicated green
eyes that we had ever seen. We left with a pang, aware that
capturing her in words was, well, a lost cause, too.

Ludmilla Gribovaya

We managed to get ourselves invited to have tea with the legendary
ballet teacher Ludmilla Gribovaya at her Upper East Side apartment
the other afternoon. It was a cold dark Manhattan mid-winter day.
A desultory snow was falling, the flakes melting and immediately
turning to gray slush when they hit the pavement. It was about as
far from the enchantment of the ballet as we could imagine getting.

Yet, we found ourselves so excited during the elevator ride up to
Ludmilla Grobovaya's fourteenth floor apartment that we literally
could not stand still. We got off the elevator, made an effort to
still our feet, sighed and found her door. We rang, then listened
to the chime echo on the other side of the door.

Ludmilla Gribovaya answered the door herself. She wore a plain
gray smock. She had her hair pulled back away from her face into
a bun. Without any further ado, she invited us in, settled us in
a comfortable armchair by the fireplace and got us tea.

Although we had trouble catching our breath, we plunged in and
asked her a series of questions that seemed foolish to us. After
a while, we found ourselves relaxing. We were able to diagnose,
then, that we had been in terror of her and that the depth of our
relaxation response was proportionate to the terror we had brought
along with us

"People talk about muscles. Yes, that is right. Muscles, yes,"
said Ludmilla Gribovaya. "But that is not enough. Only a part.
People talk about music. Yes, that is right. But that is not
enough. Only a part. Music makes a space for dancing. Music
makes a place for dancing. But dancing must find its own way.
Dancing must find its own weight. Dancing must find its own reach.
Dancing must find its own height. Dancing must find its own
points.

"All of dancing rests on the skeleton. The skeleton, yes. The
bones, that already know where they are going. In no other art, in
no other ritual, is death so present. Imminent. Immanent. It is
because of this central presence of death that, for all the
masculine flourish and bravado of a Nureyev or a Baryshnikov or
whatever name you choose (I myself remember so many others), dance
remains feminine.

"Our best choreographers, our geniuses know this. No, they could
not say it. They do not need to say it. They are women in their
hearts and that puts them at the heart of the dance. They can feel
the beat, the doomed fragile contractions trying to give birth.
All steps lead to death. Individual names, positions, gestures
mean nothing.

"In the first exuberance of our talent each and every one of us
knows we will fail. We know it. It is part of the talent. When
I work with a young ballerina, I always remember this. I always
respect this. Her pleasure is the same as mine. Her pain is the
same as mine.

"We can not get away from each other because we are trapped in the
same place by the same thing. She knows it in her heart as well as
I do. So, when we look at each other, we can look directly, not so
much pupil to teacher, but pupil to pupil, eye to eye.

"When I work with a young ballerina, I know she has already her own
way. I don't know what it is, but I know that she has it. I know
this better than she does. I have seen it before. I have felt it
in myself. She knows more about what her way will be than I do.
Of course, she does. Because she is her way. She was that way
from the time she first drew breath. Maybe from before that time.

"But she doubts and she worries and she frets. She tries to
distract herself. She has so many wishes and worries that I have
left behind. I know she has her own way. So she will hate me and
love me because she thinks I won't let her get away from her way.
It's silly. It's not me. But we play this game. It is a little
conspiracy we have between us and we must be very serious about it,
because we both know how foolish it is. I am stern. She sulks.

"I know how to sulk, too. She is really the stern one. She is
more cruel to herself than I could ever imagine being to her. I
know, because I was once that way, myself, to myself. I spared
myself nothing. First, you dance and then you teach. The wagon is
the same. The harness is the same. The difference is between
being a young horse and an old horse.

"You pull what you can. The old horse knows that the smell of
oats, even the memory of the smell of oats, is sometimes better
than the oats. The young horse has more energy. The old horse was
once a young horse. The young horse knows that one day, if she is
lucky, she will be an old horse. She watches the old horse out of
the corner of her eye. She knows that the old horse knows not just
this road, but other roads, too. She is too shy to admit how
carefully she is watching the old horse.

"The young horse dreams. The old horse remembers. Is there really
so much difference between the two?"

Ludmilla Gribovaya took a sip of her tea. Her gray eyes dipped
under the rim of the cup and came up twinkling, as if they were
still dancing.

"The dance starts from inside. The dance rests on the skeleton.
Yes, that is true. And the skeleton knows where it is going. It
yearns to go up, because it knows that it is going to go down. It
yearns to spin, because it knows it will be so still. The whole
weight of the dance rests on the skeleton. Yes, but what holds the
skeleton up?

"Dancing is thinking that moves. Thinking holds the skeleton up.
The skeleton rests in the flesh of thinking before it rests in the
flesh of the earth. What is this thinking? How would I ever know
in words? There is no knowing this thinking in words. It is a
different moving than the moving of words. It is that thinking
which can only be dancing. If dancing could be said, there would
be no dancing, because no need for dancing.

"The thinking that is dancing needs a mind that floats on the vast
lake of the heart, like, yes, a swan, landing, taking off, gorgeous
in flight, seemingly effortless. But always coming back to that
lake, resting there, its long graceful neck tucked against its
body, sleeping, all its knowing warmly tucked away beneath its long
feathers white as sweet cold new smooth snow.

"I started dancing when I was six. There was only dancing for me.
I was only good for dancing, not for anything else. So I was
lucky. That was lucky, to be good for something that actually
existed in the world and to find it. So many people are good for
something, only what they are good for has not yet been invented.
Or they never come into the same place as what they are good for.

"So they waste away. They pine without knowing what they are
pining for. Dancing can be about this pining, this longing.
Dancing can show what is not there yet, what does not exist, what
is missing, even though it should be there. Dancing can make what
does not exist almost come to be.

"The beauty and the heartbreak of dancing are in the 'almost,' the
way in which dancing always falls short. Because it always does
and it always must. The best dancing is dancing that already knows
this and accepts this and goes on with it. Who knows why we go on
with things? This is just the mystery of life, that we go on with
what is beyond us.

"A dancer dances because what a dancer is for is to dance. Not so
different than why a worm burrows through the earth. Or why a
mushroom pops up from the ground. You probably don't know that
that is what my name means. Mushroom. Such a funny name for a
dancer. In a way, like the mushroom, the dancer draws life from
death, breaking down what was already there, recomposing it,
knowing that what she does will break down, too.

"I did my best dancing, they say, after I was twenty-five. Ten
years. I stopped dancing when I was thirty©five. No, I didn't
stop dancing. I stopped performing in public. You know, my knees
hurt. They had started hurting before I was twenty. I remember my
old teacher Madame Sukaya said to me, 'Ludmilla, you are having
headaches in your knees. That's not such a bad place for a
ballerina to have her headaches.'

"She looked at me and smiled such a kind, teasing smile, more like
a fairy or an elf than a grand old terrible ballerina who had
become a tyrant and a teacher. The worse we are, she went on, on the outside,
some of us, the more gentle we are on the inside. We don't want
anyone to find us out. We try to keep the worst foot forward.
Yes, dancing is a way of hiding from yourself, if you find yourself
too much of a nuisance. Who wouldn't?"

Ludmilla Gribovaya looked at us and laughed a deep musical laugh
that had a teasing caress. We couldn't tell if she meant what she
said or if she was trying to pull our leg.

"The last ten years I danced, death was my partner. I thought
about nothing but death those ten years. I danced and I thought
about death and I longed for it. All this, without ever saying a
word to anyone about it. Maybe that's what they loved about my
dancing. I don't know. No matter how often you look in the
mirror, you can never see yourself dance. You are wrapped up in
your dancing. You feel it, but you don't see it.

"I didn't say a word to anyone because it never occurred to me to
say a word. My involvement with death was nearer than that. It
was so close. I got married during this time, to Ivanov. He never
knew. I never said a word to him, not even in the middle of the
night. I would wake up in tears and lie in bed and sob until the
first pale pink blush of dawn.

"It seems so foolish and so romantic. How much I hurt and how much
I suffered and how much I missed. How intense my suffering made
everything. And only now, afterwards, do I start to know about it.
I danced and the dancing cast its spell over me. I was famous and
a refugee all at the same time. I had no home and no country. I
danced and the audience clapped and shouted and threw flowers.

"How strange that was, the flowers flying over the footlights. I
never knew what the audience saw or what they felt. I only knew
that I danced with death, as if it were a bird, always close,
always singing, occasionally touching my cheek even as I danced.
How soft its feathers were against my skin. Sometimes the bird
sang its own song in the midst of the music and the motion and the
sweat and the pain.

"I listened and even as I moved it seemed to me that I was still as
stone. Oh, it's hard to talk of those days when I was so frightened
of life that I tried to put death between me and all the
living and all the tenderness and hurt and squalor there was around
me. Dancing, like so many other things, is an effort to make
things simple when they're not.

"I've changed. When I was dancing and performing on the stage. I
didn't talk. If I thought, I never let it get into words. I
didn't dare know what I thought. I was afraid that, if I let the
thoughts take hold of my tongue, all my limbs would go limp. I'll
tell you a secret. I never minded the pain in my knees. The pain
in my knees told me they belonged to me.

"They were my knees, when so much else did not seem to belong to
me. Sometimes I didn't feel it was I who moved my body at all. It
moved and I went along. I was carried along by something much more
powerful than I. When I wanted to die, it was the way a child
wants to run away from home. She needs something that is too big
for her to have and that she can't live without. So she runs away
from home because it's impossible. It's impossible to live there
and impossible not to live there.

Ludmilla Gribovaya shook her head. The head, like a gray flower on
the white stalk of her long neck, still remembered more than all
but a very very few people ever know about posture and address and
grace of carriage. Despite her years, her ballerina's body was
still slight and long and clean in its lines.

"When you work with a young person, a young ballerina, for even a
ballerina is somehow a person, if in a very indirect and peculiar
way, you must be practical. Not 'why do you do it' or 'when do you
do it', but always 'how do you do it'. And 'how' in the smallest
pieces you can imagine. The little things. These support the
larger movements.

"If you break things down into small pieces that are right, these
pieces have the architecture of the larger movements in them. The
pattern of the breaking down shows how to put it together. The
fracture points make a blue print. Otherwise, it is like building
with sky hooks. Nothing underneath.

"I am a teacher because I can't do it any more. I can't dance to
the standard I once reached. Yet, I once did it. It is not only
that I remember. No, I understand it more. Sometimes I think that
I experience it more now than I did then. Sometimes I think that
I am experiencing it now for the first time. I also feel that what
I am feeling is not new. Other teachers of ballet have felt it
too.

"Madame Sukaya knew about this. It was why she teased me. She was
trying to give me a hint. When you love something, it is like when
you love someone. You love it because you love it. You love it
because it is there to love. There is no reason or explanation.
Love can't explain itself, ever. Is it good, because I love it?
For me it is. It is the good I know because I love it. For me
that's enough. You see, what I tell the ballerinas I work with is
that I am very simple¨minded. It is true, too. I am very simpleminded.
Should someone else love what I love?”

Ludmilla Gribovaya looked at us again with the twinkling eyes.

"No, of course not. I am too greedy for that. Someone else should
only love what she loves. This is true of the dance. Another
ballerina can only dance her dance. We are so different, there is
never any reason to compete. Before we start competing, we have to
make the dance very small. But it is not small. It is very big.
As big as the night."

When we left Ludmilla Gribovaya's night was falling. The city's
lights showed the cloudy sky which screened the stars off from
view. We stood for a moment on the sidewalk, realizing we had had
a glimpse not just behind the curtain, but also far beyond the
clouds into a realm infinite of stars, each one unique, each one
lending its own distinctive heat to the region of cold space
surrounding it. We had been transported.

"The amoeba's a blob. Man's a blob with something missing. It's
this something missing running all the way through that makes all
the difference. The hole makes the doughnut. It's a topological
step up in complexity to go from being a spherical blob to being a
torus. Once the hole is there, there's orientation.

"Orientation gives a point to perception, to motion and to
motivation. Then you have emotion growing out of all that. Then
you have the tremendous problem of sorting and refining perception
in the service of purpose, that is, turning perception back upon
itself.

"I think there's a whole topological theory of biological development that
remains to be explored. I sometimes ask myself what lies
beyond the torus. Each new inclusion produces a more complicated
exploration of space and a more complicated space for exploration."

Cecil G. Wheatin grimaced.

"The point is so simple and runs so deep. We've got a piece of the
outside inside us. The digestive tract is organized around the
emptiness that fills us up. It's the emptiness we strive so hard
to fill because it fills us up. Mental function was born out of
the need for coordination in eating. That's where the appetite
came from. I'm not meaning to debunk thinking and feeling, but
their complexities were elaborated on a base."

Now Cecil G. Wheatin smiled, a huge ravishing smile that made him
look, even at 6'6" and 286 lbs., like an oversized infant.

"They've found most of the neurotransmitters in the gut. When they
did, it shocked them. The neuroscientists like to think of
themselves as high and mighty, somehow up above it all. They've
got it all backwards. What happened was that they found the gut
transmitters way up there in the brain doing what they've always
known how to do in kind of strange surroundings. The gut had a lot
to think about long before there really was any such thing as a
brain."

Cecil G. Wheatin smiled again.

"I've had kind of a strange life. I grew more than a foot when I
was thirteen years old. Boy, did I eat that year. I was so hungry
I couldn't think about anything else. When I grew so fast, I was
thinking that I was going to play football. I was a pretty good
athlete and I did like to hit people. But I got mononucleosis and
I spent the next year and a half being weak as a kitten. I could
hardly walk down the block. I tried to play football again when I
was sixteen and I wrecked my knee.

I read a lot of books and I got started thinking about worms.
Now, a worm is just a digestive tube that moves. Worms have
rhythm. They have to have rhythm. Their whole lives are built on
what I call the 'squeeze it and leave it' beat. Like most everything else,
the sense of rhythm starts in the gut."

Cecil G. Wheatin flashed his teeth.

"Even now, when I walk down the street on the way to my lab here at
Crockefeller, people stop me in the street and ask me if I play for
the Jets or the Giants. They seem to be evenly split as to which
team I should be on. I think a lot of my interest really was born
that year I was so hungry and I grew so much. It surprised me and
it surprised everybody around me. My father was barely six feet
tall and my mother was just 5'5".

"I don't know that I ever recovered from the shock. I had a
strange perspective on it. It seemed to me something that my gut
did to me. So I've always looked at things from a different
perspective, that is, not what the brain told the gut, but what the
gut had to say to the brain."

Cecil G. Wheatin chuckled.

"There's this great big highway that runs from the gut up through
the auxiliary organs like the kidney and the heart to the base of‘
the brain. We call it the vagus nerve because it wanders around
all through the abdominal and thoracic cavities. It's listening.
It puts its two cents in, but most of all it's listening. It
listens to the gut and it listens to the kidneys and it listens to
the heart. Of course, it talks to them, too.

"Most people like to think of the vagus nerve as a command
communication system coming from the brain back down, but I've
always been interested in traffic up the vagus nerve to the brain,
in other words, in what the gut had to say to the brain. I've been
interested in what the gut does to orient the brain."

Cecil G. Wheatin put his thumbs under his red suspenders.

"I am serious when I say that the inwardness we treasure so much
started in our guts, because they defined inside and outside and
started the whole process of sorting. Of course, the cell membrane
started on this task long before, but the gut brought it to a new
level of complexity by providing a higher order membrane that
conducted a whole different level of exchange.

"The gut knows what time of day it is, what season of the year it
is, how old we are, our habits and dispositions, if we happen to be
women, where we are in the menstrual cycle and how many of us are
aboard. In a most literal sense it is the gut that determines what
we take in."

Cecil G. Wheatin swiveled in his chair.

"The gut as a part of the nervous system, as an integrated sentient
organ has been terribly neglected. The Greeks who thought in terms
of exercise and diet knew something. Our molecular orientation has
been tremendously fruitful in one sense but impoverishing in
another, because it has dismantled our approach to larger patterns.

"Attachment and loss are mediated in the gut. Our moods are
colored by our eating. Our thinking is colored by the gut. I
think that, as we become more sophisticated in the study of the
gut, we will be able to diagnose and treat even some important
disorders of mood and behavior through the gut. We will see how
gut function sets the stage for learning and synthesis, for what we
call creative activity.

"We will develop a much better understanding of ancient systems of
diet. It's very hard to understand without appreciating. We have
to learn to listen to our guts, to hear what they're saying, not
just to talk down to them. We have to learn to enter into much
fuller feedback relationships with the part of us that we feed and
that feeds us.

"We're hard on the track of a dietary treatment and prophylaxis for
depression. We think that this is likely to be an illness that
wells up from the gut and so can not only be treated safely through
the gut, but can also be prevented through the gut. It's not just
what we eat, but how and when we eat and what we do before and
after. Depression is on the increase in all industrialized
countries. We think that has to do with what a hard time we are
having digesting our lives. There is so much that we can not
stomach and that we are right not to be able to stomach."

Dr. Ralph G. Primprop, the Acting Dean For Research at Crockefeller,
was high on Cecil G. Wheatin.

"I know," he said, "that it's a terrible pun, but you'll forgive
me, because it's apt. Cecil G. Wheatin has guts. He's taken a
different approach and it's starting to pay off. It's much like
basing your whole approach to understanding chess on thinking about
pawns.

"The problem in science is to take a fresh look over and over at
the simple things that are fundamental. It took us a while to
develop a taste for his originality, but I think we've got it.
He's no crank. I don't care if he is 6'6" tall and comes from
Texas and likes to wear red suspenders."

"I think," Cecil G. Wheatin told us, "that what we are really
talking about is what we might call a decolonization of the body.
It has to do with an entire approach. I think brain centered
rationalism is running out of rations. The gut is not just some
sort of a territory that works for the brain, performing a
subsidiary function in a a mechanical way. The gut has its own
organization and its own rhythms and its own orientation. It has
its own wisdom.

"We need to appreciate the gut on its own terms, as we need to
appreciate each organ on its own terms, so that we can open up
wider and more practical vistas in our living. We need to rescue
the brain from its own perverted imperium. It's a question of
loving to eat and eating to love, allowing for a back and forth."

With this, Cecil G. Wheatin allowed himself at last the pleasure of
pulling both red suspenders forward and then letting them smack
back with a resounding "Thwack" against his substantial chest.

"If it's alimentary, it's not just elementary but also elemental.
Or, to complete a loop, the mental arises out of the elemental
through the evolutionary good offices of the alimentary passage."

Cecil G. Wheatin licked his lips, leaving them so pink and shiny
that the fluorescent light fixture above his head was reflected in
the mucosal mirror.

How I Treated The Dalai Lama

Back in those days Cleveland was a steel town. It was before the
mills shut down. I was just starting out in private practice and
I still had an office at University Hospitals. It was down in the
basement in what used to be a broom closet twenty years earlier.
Even today, hospitals are busy converting broom closets into
offices.

I went there every Thursday for chest clinic. I saw all kinds of
strange cases. People with the fixed delusion that they had lung
cancer. "It's a way out, doc, ain't it? Good as any," said one
fellow who'd been working at Jones and Laughlin for forty years.
People who wouldn't stop smoking even when they were already on
oxygen. One lady actually did manage to blow herself up.

A young woman who had asthma and would put herself to sleep by
wrapping the belt of her bathrobe around her neck and then pulling
until she passed out. She told this story to one of the pulmonary
guys. He took her by the hand and led her to my office. I don't
think I've ever seen a more delighted look on a patient's face.

But all this is really beside the point, just background. It was
one of those cold days in November a week or so before Thanksgiving
when the year is beginning to wind down and the clouds off the lake
looked like they were freighted with lead. Pete McCorkle said he
had an interesting case for me to see.

Pete had a reputation as a pretty good diagnostician. He didn't exactly
think like the rest of the guys. He was a big fellow, about six feet four
inches, with a blank distracted look on his face, as if he were always thinking
about something else, not the matter at hand.

"Stay on the soft mushy ground," Pete used to advise the residents,
who had no idea, for the most part, what the hell he was talking
about. "When you retreat to hard ground, that's when you get into
trouble. That's when you start killing people."

Pete had even, if not a certain affinity for psychiatry, then at
least a tolerance for it, which, given the mind set of his medical
colleagues, already represented a real measure of social deviance.
Around this time he was going through a divorce, something no one
ever expected of him, behaving just like a teen-ager and romancing
three different women at once, including one who had been born in
Patagonia. So he was particularly open to the world around him.

Pete came slouching into my door. It was an impressive slouch, by
any standards, particularly when it was framed in the doorway of a
room whose true vocation was to be a broom closet. He didn't look
much different than usual, except maybe he was a tad more soft
spoken.

"Bernie," he said, "I've got one that's beyond me. It's probably
very simple. But I think it's too subtle for me. I can't even
tell you what it is that bothers me. He says he's got trouble with
his breathing. Then he told me, quite unprompted, that he has
trouble both with inspiration and with expiration, but that the
troubles are quite different. I couldn't find a damn thing. Not
even a hint of a god damn problem. I sat and listened to him
breath for twenty minutes.

"I listened all over the lung fields and I listened to his heart
and I felt his pulse. There's something odd about him. I can't
put my finger on it. You see, the damnedest thing is that I
believe him. Everything checks out and yet I think there really is
a trouble, some sort of a trouble that's beyond me."

"How old is he?" I asked Pete.
"A young man. I would say in his twenties. Really, it's pretty
hard to tell. He might be older. Maybe in his thirties. You
don't see too many Orientals here in Cleveland."
"What is his name?" I asked.
"Ted, or something like that. Ted Ing or something like that,"
Pete replied, as if the name had next to nothing to do with
anything.

He was about to slouch out of my doorway, when he stopped, still
chewing on a problem he could not adequately define. "It's the damnedest thing. I enjoyed listening to this guy's lungs. I really did. They sounded...well...different. I remember old Leon Stokoloski told me that the reason to become a pulmonary doctor was that there was a music to the lungs. Even in disease, he said, the music was still there.

"I thought of old Leon when I was listening to this guy's lungs. It was the most beautiful sound I think I've ever heard in a pair of lungs. It sounded too good, too clean, too clear. I thought of a mountain landscape, high, severe, serene, savage, wrathful but in a tranquil way. And I agreed with him that there was something wrong, but maybe something
that doesn't make it onto our lists of differential diagnoses.
This guy made me wonder what it was all about."

Pete stood in the doorway and shrugged. Only it wasn't exactly a
shrug. It was a spasm that had met torpor and gotten slowed down.

"I decided I was nuts. So, Bernie, when I decide I'm nuts I refer
the case to you, because I know you're nuts. It's your job to be
nuts and I think you're pretty good at it."

With that last rather fond slur, utterly in character, Pete
McCorkle was gone from my doorway, as if he had been only a vision
in the first place, so able to disperse as abruptly as he had
materialized.

I don't know how to describe the patient. As I seek for words, the
same peculiarly pleasant discomfiture I felt on first meeting comes
back over me and renders me more or less speechless, just as I was
then. What I first noticed was something about myself.

I became acutely aware of my own posture, how I was not only
constricted but twisted in the big tweed armchair I was sitting in.
I tried to straighten up, but I didn't know how to go about it. I
squirmed a couple times and got myself into a position that was, if
possible, even more awkward and uncomfortable than the one I had
started out in. So I gave it up.

He was sitting on a small metal chair with a black vinyl cushion.
He sat very lightly. He looked like even a small wind could have
blown him off the chair.

"How can I help you?" I asked him.

There was no reply, no change in his facial expression, which
remained at once kindly and detached, as if he had not heard me.
I thought perhaps he was deaf and had the impulse to repeat the
question in a louder tone of voice.

I looked at him. There was no discourtesy in his silence. I could
not tell if he was thinking or not. Time was passing. The seconds
had expanded, exploding each one into a world unto itself. I felt
very small, but not unpleasantly so.

I smiled at him, not for any reason. It simply happened to me that
I smiled. As it did, I felt my face in a different way, rather as
if it were most of the time a stiff iron mask in which I was
trapped not only by my will but against my will.

I began to have some sense of what Pete McCorkle was talking about.
In the initial silence, I got an inkling not only of the fascination but of the exhilarating distress that went with it. I also realized, with a detached rationality of which I have trouble being shed, that, if all this had to do with lungs and breathing, it was
in the broadest sense of that process of exchange.

Nothing is easier than to get lost in silence, in the midst of a
moment, in a place where a thousand thousand pathways branch off
each in the direction of a different nowhere which is also a
different somewhere. I knew this before that November afternoon,
but it was only on that Novemeber afternoon that I found where in
myself I knew it. I learned a new interior address.

"I am a deity," he said, very quietly, with nothing so simple as
either self-assurance or self-assertion.
"Oh, no," I thought to myself, "it is the quiet ones who are both
the loopiest and the most dangerous. You just never know what they
have stored up inside them and what they're going to do next."

I tensed. I said nothing. He said nothing. It went on this way
for five or ten or even fifteen minutes. Finally, the edge went
out of the room.

"I came here just to know people, to be among them and feel them
and their ways. It is a pilgrimage. I find that it is hard to
breath here. Especially on Carnegie Avenue. I saw a sign that
said there was a chest clinic here, so I came."

"Can you tell me," I asked, "more about this trouble you have
breathing?"

He did not bother to reply, but retreated into a silence I found
profoundly uncomfortable. Something seethed in that silence.
Only I could not tell what it was. Imagine my surprise when a
vision of a great white cloud-shrouded snow-capped peak surged
before my mind's eye. I had never had such an experience before.
Along its lower slopes, I saw a tiny black speck, the barest
outline of the shape of a man.

My heart rate picked up and I began to sweat. I was not used to
this sort of experience in the waking state. I could not say a
thing. For his part, he did not venture a word. We sat still
together.

Time was growing short. I had to be on my way to my private office
to see my next patient, a young lady named Judith Rosenthal who
never got either any better or enough worse to cause herself seriously
to reassess her own situation. She paid full fee.

"What's your name," I asked.
"Ted Zing," he replied, softly and sweetly, with just a slight
nasal quality.
"Ted Zing," I repeated, reaching for my prescription pad.

My eyes happened to fall on his gabardine trousers which were
frayed and on his scuffed shoes whose soles and uppers were just
beginning to detach, so that I could see a hint of white socks
through them. I realized it was absurd of me to write a prescription,
for he surely did not have the money to have it filled.

It was just around the time when thorazine was coming into wide use
for the treatment of psychosis. I rummaged around in the drawer of
my desk and found some samples. I poured the orange pills into a
plastic bottle which I thrust on him.

"Here," I said, "take one of these each night. I think they might
really help you with your breathing. Come and see me next week,
too, at the same time."

He took the pills and looked at them very appreciatively. He
seemed intrigued with them and with their near saffron color. Then
his eyes wandered to a Swiss musical clock that I kept on the top
of a bookshelf. My great-grandfather had given it to my father
when he was a boy. It no longer worked. In my lifetime, it had
never worked.

"Does it work?" he asked, looking at the clock.
"No," I said, "it never has."

This, of course, was not strictly accurate.

"I will fix it," he said. "Please. You will let me."

As he said this, he was already rising from his chair and making
his way towards the bookshelf. I don't know to this day why I did
not interfere with him. Far from having any urge to stop him, I
was quite pleased with the idea of getting rid of the clock, as if
it were an unwelcome presence that cast its infirm pall over me.

So, in custody of my Swiss clock, he disappeared. I was convinced
that I would never see him again. In the busy round of practice
and family responsibilities, not to mention subsidiary pleasures, I mentally quite lost track of him during the ensuing week.

I was taken by surprise when he appeared at my doorway the very
next Thursday, with the clock in hand. I ushered him in. He
placed the clock on the bookshelf. Quite evidently it now worked.
In the midst of our session it sonorously struck four. I was
impressed not only with the beauty of its sound, but also with the
steadiness of the ticking with which it now seemed to regulate the
atmosphere around us.

He pulled the bottle of pills from his pocket, demonstrated to me
that there were still just as many as before, as if to make it
clear that he had no intention of squandering my gift to him, but
rather meant to keep it whole and intact. He gazed on them with
benevolent pleasure for a long moment. Unconsumed, they seemed to
me to take on a livelier glow, to become not tranquilizers but
something more like vivifiers.

"How is your breathing?" I asked.

He nodded very softly and receded into silence. We sat there
together, until exactly at the same time that I had terminated the
interview a week earlier, he got up to go. That was the last I
ever saw of him.

In the intervening years, I have told this story to no one. I
misheard his name. It was not Ted Zing but Tenzin. I also know
from reading biographies of the Dalai Lama that as a child he had
a passion for mechanical devices and fixed a number of Swiss
watches and musical boxes which had been presented to previous
Dalai Lamas by foreign potentates.

I do not know what leads me now to write this story and expose
myself to the melancholy mockery of my colleagues and other
strangers. Perhaps, over the years, I have become ever so slightly
more brave, possibly even a bit more empty. I have, fortunately,
never wholly recovered from the shame of how I treated the Dalai
Lama. As I write this, the clock my great-grandfather gave my
father ticks steadily on. It has needed no subsequent repairs.

"It was 1973, a pretty strange time. I was young and disgruntled.
I left school and was working concrete. We were using flying metal
forms, pouring the walls, letting them cure and then going on to
the next wall. We were going fast. We were up on the fifteenth
floor of an apartment building in Brooklyn. There were beautiful
views of the city and the water. I also liked standing and
watching the cranes wheeling through the air and the planes
overhead.

"Early one afternoon, a carpenter went over the edge of the
building. One step and he was gone. I'll never forget the look on
his face. It was a mixture of rapture and terror. I was pretty
upset by it. The thing I focused on was whether he knew what he
was doing. He was drunk, but I think he thought he was going
somewhere. I don't know where, but somewhere he wanted to go,
maybe even somewhere he'd been longing to go all his life.

"Maybe it was the look on his face that got me out of New York. I
drifted around the country, working when I needed the money. I
like buildings best when you can still see the sky through them.
I never have liked being shut up inside. I was working one cloudy
November day on a new Ramada Inn on Interstate 70 just east of
Columbus, Ohio when it hit me that we were a nation of nomads.
Only our tents are made of concrete. That changed how I felt. I
realized I was very mad. I realized nothing in the whole world
made me happy. Nothing

"I couldn't get the look on that guy's face out of my mind. It was
like he was trying to tell me something. Only I couldn't figure
out what it was. I never thought about him when I was at work.
But at night I'd think about him. I never have liked drinking, but
I always loved music, all different kinds. I could sit and listen
for hours. I'd close the place down, stone sober. I'd listen to
almost anything. Maybe I couldn't let myself think about him
during the day. It's scary to think how close to the edge we all
are all the time.

"I drifted around for almost five years. I worked in every part of
the country. I was good with concrete. I had a feel for it. It's
not so simple to guess how it's going to spread and dry and set.
The weather makes everything different. You just have to feel it.
It's not something you can teach or tell anyone. I don't know why
I got to wondering. Maybe it was all that music I listened to.
Maybe I'd always been wandering and wondering without even knowing
about it.

"Maybe it was the look on that carpenter's face as he went over the
edge. After a while, I stopped thinking he wanted to tell me
something. I started thinking he had a question he wanted to ask
me. One July in San Antonio we were pouring at night. We were

working on a bank headquarters and they were in a damn frenzy to
get the thing done. I think they needed to get it on their balance
sheet. It had been over a hundred during the day but now it was
cooling down. A whisper of a breeze had come up. A crane was
swinging a bucket overhead just beneath the moon. I could hear the
sirens of police cars caterwauling in the distance.

"I was twenty-eight then. I took in a deep breath and I held it.
I saw everything all at once, the crane and the bucket and the moon
and the stars and the city all spread out below and the lights
flashing down the highways and me. By the time I let that breath
out and the cold thrill of terror left my spine, nothing was the
same for me. I realized I'd been taking concrete too literally for
a long time, taking everything just plain too hard.

"Maybe I should say I realized that I was taking concrete too
concretely, like I was trying to bury myself in what was around me.
Only I could never get myself either to fit or to quit. I'd
written a few ballads before then. I'd write them on napkins or
the backs of envelopes late at night in some joint or other. I'd
sing them over a few times to myself. But I couldn't really hear
what I'd written. I mean I couldn't hear it in my own mind. Or I
was frightened of it. Anyway, after I'd sung them over a few times
I'd just toss the napkin or the envelope in a wastebasket and
forget about it.