Amazon recommended a book to me, and I think it’s an interesting premise. It’s one of those books I’d see in a bookstore and say, “Hey, that’d be kind of cool to read,” but never actually leave with it under my arm.

The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine by Shigehisa Kuriyama

What are our bodies trying to tell us? In the scholarly yet delicately beautiful The Expressiveness of the Body, Japanese scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama examines two widely divergent traditions of diagnostic examination: Greek and Chinese. While at first glance it would seem that this would entail a straightforward familiar vs. exotic dichotomy for Western readers, only a short way into the book we realize that the ancient Greeks were just as foreign to us as the ancient Chinese. While there is some greater resemblance to modern medicine in the works of Galen and his contemporaries, Kuriyama shows us that their struggle to “decode” the body’s signals was just as arbitrary–and just as accurate–as works like the Huangdi Neijing.

Showing that the often dramatic differences between their attitudes about signs such as pulse, breath, and blood both developed from and informed deeper beliefs about the nature of the body, Kuriyama exposes the highly subjective artistry of medicine. Like the proverbial blind men feeling the different parts of the elephant, the ancients focused exclusively on one set of traits and signs and developed a complex theoretical framework around it. Well documented and handsomely illustrated, The Expressiveness of the Body pokes and prods into the space between precise anatomical knowledge and the understanding of qi flow to find the rest of the elephant beyond the trunk, legs, and tail. –Rob Lightner –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Because Tej enjoyed the last one, and because it’s just the coolest thing ever to be recorded, I offer the full 14 minutes of Duke Ellington’s ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo In Blue.’

Before you listen, be sure there’s enough space near your computer to jitterbug. Seriously.

Note also that the file is 14+ megabytes, so broadband is pretty much required unless you’re self-disciplined enough to delay gratification.

Retrophilia at ephemeranow.com.

Woke up with hella tinnitus in one ear. Grogged around for a while; there’s basically nothing to eat for breakfast in this house, and I’m out of both sugar and honey, for the coffee.

After a few hours, I started getting dizzy. Uh oh, sez me. Good thing I kept the meclizine from the last time I had inner-ear-related vertigo. Took it.

Climbed into bed again and passed out for four hours. Woke up, watched TV, fell asleep on the couch for a few hours. Go body go! Kill whatever’s in my ear! KILL!

I feel much better now, though I still have a little extra tinnitus on the one side.


It’s a really odd feeling when you can hear that your body is malfunctioning, or functioning properly to fix a problem. Ringing in my ear meant that my body was on the job. Being drowsy meant the same thing. The crick in my neck means my body is protecting itself against my bad posture from watching too much TV. And so forth.

Depression.

One of the things I’ve noticed lately about the people around me is that they’re depressed. So I’m going to write about depression head on. I’m saying this right now because some of you might not want to read it. Some of you might rather not read a discourse on depression, and some of you might rather not hear what I have to say about depression.

My ideas about depression are weird, but they’re informed by experience. They haven’t allowed me to climb up out of the feelings of depression, but they have shown me the value of being where and who I am.

That said…


Depression is your soul asking you to rethink everything. This is the most important thing about depression, especially a chronic one.

The realities of depression are equivalent to turning down the stereo so you can hear what the lyrics to the song are.. You know about that? If you turn down the stereo and listen with headphones, the singer’s voice will pop out of the song. The singular and most important part of what you’re hearing stands out like a sore thumb because you’ve turned down all the confusing other stuff, like the guitars and drums and bass. Depression is the same dynamic; it turns down the volume of your life so you can hear the lyrics and know what’s important.

And recognizing what’s important, and moving toward it, and holding it carefully so you don’t break it.. That’s the real challenge depression makes of you.

Soulless people don’t get depressed. There’s a popular myth going around lately that we should look at depression as if it were a disease, or an epidemic. I think it’s just the opposite… If people were mentally unhealthy, they wouldn’t get depressed by the craziness of the world. Frequent and prolonged depression that doesn’t come from a physical ailment is a sign that the world around you is nuts. If you have a soul, that is. If you don’t have a soul, then I can’t help you.

My depression, when I’m inside it, is a result of the constant offset between myself and the world outside. The world will always seem nuts to me, for the same reason that I’m always going to seem nuts to the world. Unfortunately, the question my soul asks in those situations is the wrong question to be asking. My neurology is off just enough that there’s no reconciling me and the world of people. Depression triggered by the nutso world won’t help me find what’s important, because that trigger will always be present.

But. Be that as it may. In general, and for all people I’ve encountered, the real ‘cure’ for depression is not to cure depression, but to give in to it just enough, quiet your mind enough, give up hope just enough that you can see what’s old and non-workable for what it is, without ending up slitting your wrists or something. It’s a careful line to try and walk.

The problem is that, for many people, the reason they can’t allow themselves to be depressed is the same thing that’s causing them to be depressed. For instance, a hectic job that you really hate might cause you to be depressed, but you can’t allow yourself depression because then you’d lose your job to sick days. What depression is asking you to give up is sometimes the hardest thing to give up.

And that’s why everyone hates depression. Everyone bad-mouths it, calls it a disease, prescribes little pills to make you not feel it, stuffs it down into themselves in hopes that it’ll go away, grins and bears it, and so forth. There’s no cultural space for depression. It’s like PMS, except worse, because at least PMS is somewhat predictable. Everyone wants their life to work the way they planned it, and how dare depression come along and wreck all that?

But the truth is that in many cases, depression is your body and/or subconscious mind being wise. They know what they need, and they’ll do what they have to in order to get it. Maybe they need for you to sit around and do nothing for a week while they rest, or get used to something new. Maybe they need for you to feel the hard things you’ve been trying not to feel. Maybe they need for you to figure out that living with your parents is the wrong thing to be doing.

I’m thinking about something I heard about a while back: Menstrual huts. The idea being that women who were on their moon, as they say, would go off and do work in the village menstrual hut. A sort of retreat for menstruating women, so they can work out what they need to work out, and the rest of the village doesn’t grow to hate them while they do it. After the period is over, they go back and resume their previous role in the community.

Depression should serve a similar purpose, and be an opportunity to re-evaluate the life one is leading, to determine whether you’re doing the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong situation. The difference being that you might not come back and serve the same role in the community.

Depressing thought, huh?

Success! ‘Powerhouse‘ performed by the Raymond Scott Quintet now lives on my hard drive. And maybe yours, too.

BTW… Any iTunes users out there? It keeps crashing on me when I change the song info. Anybody have a clue?

Well, I feel somewhat better than when I last ‘blogged.

So here’s ‘Black Jazz,’ performed by the Casa Loma Orchestra.

This track always reminds me of Raymond Scott’s ‘Powerhouse,’ which you’d recognize from the Warner Bros. cartoons of the 30s and 40s, if you were to hear it. Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) even covered it once. Unfortunately, it evades collection in my MP3 archive.

Having Asperger’s Syndrome sometimes feels like a slug crawling over an upright razor blade. The barriers are real, but there are ways around them, if you have the intestinal fortitude.

I really wonder about my future. Even just thinking about it, I’m gripped with an overwhelming… something. Akin to rage. Akin to fear. It’s just a big feeling, the kind of thing that makes you want to put your head through a wall. It’s like being on fire.

So when I think about my future, it’s full of images of me with a job, me with friends, me at some kind of peace with myself. And that’s when I know it’s wishful thinking. I’m not up to the task. I’m a slug crawling across a razor blade already, without putting in the effort required to, for instance, keep friends.

Imagine grief. Imagine the grief someone might feel if they learned they’d never be able to use their legs again. Now imagine that the grief is about something inside your mind, something that will never change, something that will always box you in. Imagine if there were a reason to have grief about something as fundamental as breathing, or needing to piss from time to time. How would you make peace with it? Would you just not piss or stop breathing? Would you deny that grief matters? Would you just try to deal, and get over it?

What if it were impossible to get over it? What if there were no escape from it, no matter what you did? You spend a third of a century dealing with it, and it doesn’t get any easier.

You cover it up. You distract yourself. You occupy your mind with obscure information and prevarications so it doesn’t seem to matter that nothing works and you’ll never fit in or belong.

I can take a vacation from my situation, but I can’t take a vacation from my skull.