Holy Crap!

I have a midden of folders I've dragged around after me for many decades. It fills (in true midden-style strata) a two-drawer, oak file cabinet. Eyes have not be laid on the contents for as long as it has existed.  Last night, I began to go through it, taking a half-foot high pile of folders and a mug of chocolate mint coffee to the living room sofa where I examined old pages, one by one.

I found the following, written by myself in the '90s while employed by a major pharmaceutical company as a scientific writer, of all things! The page, ripped from a spiral notebook, seems to be a scrap of an initial draft, much crossed out and scribbled over:

Buprenorphine: Covariate Model Study

I. Introduction

Buprenorphine is a semi-synthetic, lipophilic, mixed agonist/antagonist opiode of the oripavine series. In vivo, it ranges from 10- to 100-fold more potent than morphine. It is an FDA approved drug with a known safety profile in both animals and humans.

Three Phase-1 clinical studies were conducted to further identify and assess Buprenorphine safety and efficacy potentials. Based on data derived from these studies, mathematical covariate models were generated: the final model (Run 05XX) was selected both for the concision of its match to the three study results and for the degree to which it excluded the generation of findings in spurious and irrelevant domains.

The objectives of this covariate model study were: 

• To isolate the compartmental pharmacokinetic model most accurately describing the plasma concentration and time profile of Buprenorphine after single and multiple dosing via intravenous and transdermal routes of administration;

• To apply data from the three Phase-! study screenings of covariant effects on the pharmacokinetic transdermal absorption parameters;

• And finally, to project plasma concentration time curves after a variety of dosing scenarios, using the established pharmacokinetic model as the predictive instrument.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The energy, precision and zeal of this work--both the writing and the collaboration with all the chemists conducting the research--came back into mind like a thunderclap. (Adjunct recollections included my having known in depth what I wrote about!) I sipped my mint chocolate coffee and admired my mind. A bittersweet activity, to be sure, as my mind now hums along at a simian level. . . .

(In the snapshot, the dirt under my fingernails is from having just planted some sugar snap peas in the garden.)

I love the look of a written draft copiously revised; the workings of the mind made visible. . . .

In the files on my lap I also found a critical paper on T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" on which my beloved Barnard Professor Eleanor Tilton wrote: "Very interesting. Discuss in class."  I seem to have argued that despite Eliot's principle of the objective correlative, he commits T. E. Hulme's error of trying to make poetry compete with religion and ends up conveying mystical states through personal conviction.  Wow, I really got into it, too. 

I speak not out of vanity, but with an amazement at a lost capacity to think. Ou sont les neiges d'antant? 

Eva's Fireplace

Well, I was looking for a photograph showing how the bricks were ghosted with a thin latex wash, but the only one I could find makes the bricks look solidly painted--although they're not. It must have been the light. . . .  (That's Eva the boar holding a handmade birding arrow.)

Addendum to previous post:

Michiko Kakutani writes in the NYT of the role literature has played in Obama's thinking

  www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19readhtml?hp.  

wherein she iterates what I've been trying to say, but more specifically related to his reading. I especially note this passage:

"Mr.Obama . . . has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr's writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility."  This is what I meant about breadth of thinking and the willingness to embrace ambiguity. . . . 

aqUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

This is the title Olive the cat created for this post by settling her furry bum on the warm keyboard (it's 5 degrees outside, and the chill seems to creep inside in spirit, if not in fact). The little sweetheart has spared me the effort of dreaming up an alternative for these musings about Obama, who will be inaugurated in three days.  

(Here her attention 

has been deflected to pawing cream out of a pitcher beside the computer:)

I want to talk about the interstices of personal and national states of spirit, how they effect each other without our being aware.  Henry James once observed that "a novel is a novel as a pudding is a pudding, and . . . our only business with it could be to swallow it:" The meanings I take from this for the nonce are (a) that the blend of novelistic elements should be so homogeneous, so inevitable, that they draw no attention to themselves per se,and (b) as in the novel, so in life.  Our own psychological states and that of the nation are generally so commingled that we swallow them whole and don't even think to tease them out. (Like, if you forget yourself and drink orange juice right after brushing your teeth, you don't think toothpaste + orange juice = bad, you just shudder.)

It so happens that over the last eight years, my personal gloom and that of the nation were such a pudding.  It's name was Anomie.  I've felt alienated and purposeless whenever I've thought about this country's condition.  I think that my personal obstacles would have felt far less daunting if the national scene were bracing me up, and I have a sneaking suspicion I've not been alone in this. . . . (I mean, sure, there have been the happy ones all along, but they're another story.)

All this to come to the present, and a look at the optimism that I find myself sharing with the rest of the country.  (A political ignoramus, I state up front that I'm not dealing with a sophisticated political data bank, but rather with [my own] intuitions.)

I've found my pre election cynicism and loathing of all candidates and media displaced by a growing appreciation of the President Elect. Specifically, of his intellect. I like the way he seems to entertain polarities of thought within a mentality free of Procrustean mutilations of same. His choices of Cabinet members and inaugural speakers (as well as the list of his prior associations)--appalling to so many--suggest to me a breadth of intellectual engagement.

[Somewhere, during the campaigns, I saw a black and white photo of a surly Obama, clad in black leather jacket and slouching outside his NYC digs when he was at Columbia, but now I can't find it to insert here.]

It is as if Obama's thinking operates within one of Vonnegut's chronosynclastic infundibula, those loci within the cosmos where all truths coexist.  

And here I am, feeling a fellow breadth of possibility because there's so much that's not being edited out.  It's a kind of peace, in and of itself, for the mind. It's kind of a freedom--a permission--for the lions and the lambs of thought to lie down together while they're all considered dispassionately.

I am happy and hopeful because this seems true to me now.  I, too, as I assume for Obama, was initiated into this freedom of intellect at Columbia (and, first, Barnard, for me).  I also learned how this realm demands more of the thinker within it than any biased position ever does, be it political, theological, ideological, or whatever else. I, in my putterings about, am no less lazy in meeting intellectual demands than I need be. But Obama now has the screws on him tighter than anyone else on the planet. The question arises whether he'll find the intellectual strength to be true to his intellect--in addition to the political strength to defend it.

Maybe this time and place just days before the Inauguration is a brief hiatus wherein I can think optimistically, as I describe here. Perhaps I delude myself.  Has my general political ignorance left a gap that admits soft thoughts?  My daughter K emails me that Obama "prevaricates, discusses, weighs, circumbilivaginates (if I may quote my old pal Rabelais), but he does not have any gut-felt morals or convictions, and those are what it takes to lead." Perhaps my daughter is right, and I simply succumb to wishful thinking. But perhaps not.  No, come to think of it, both. Mustn't forget the infundibula. . . .