Killing Pests

I have been growing roses in this cool climate for many years. About two years ago, whether because of climate change or just migration, we were invaded by Japanese beetles, beautiful little animals with coppery wings and regular white and black dots all around.

They eat roses just when they blossom, especially the lighter-coloured ones. Nothing seems to work against them: a master gardener suggested the systemic Bayer once-a-year insecticide, which you pour into the earth around the bush just as the leaves come out. I used it. The first beetles I saw, in late June, just fell off the leaves. But after a few weeks, they consumed all the pink and lavender and multicolour roses.

La mi mujer felt my frustration: so much work, so much care, so much love, all gone to feed the beasties. She suggested I go out morning and evening with a tub of soapy water and drown the beetles. And so I did, faithfully, until medical matters diverted my attention.

I had to justify to myself the drowning. Not so much the systemic insecticide, but the highly personal killing I was undertaking. And I have not been able to do so. I have told myself these creatures, however beautiful, are destroying my property, which I have struggled to make beautiful, which I have loved and tended. And then I think, incongruously I admit, of all the genocides of the past century, and how they were rationalised by comparing the victims to a plague, to pests, to an infection.

Then there is the occasional bat. Bats are mostly 'protected species,' and we are not allowed to kill them. How one can tell them they should go away and scare (or infect) other homes is more than I know. And so they get in, one or two each summer. How they do is unknown also, but they can fit through a gap no more than a centimetre wide by folding their skeletons around their backbone.

Last month la mujer saw one flapping about the dining room, and out we ran into our backyard, and left the door open hoping the thing would fly out. It didn't, but apparently another one flew in.

So I called a friend who has an air pistol and has accounted for more mice than has his cat. He came over with two such weapons and we searched the house from Wednesday to Whitsuntide and saw no bats. It (or they) had escaped.

A few years ago I caught a bat, with the help of a robust friend. We took it outside and killed it. And after the fury of the event, I asked myself again why I wanted to condemn an entire race, a species. Why did I need to find in them something so fundamentally hateful as to justify their destruction?

Is it beyond reason to think that the effort to think of both these kinds of pests as contamination, as unclean, is just a bit reminiscent of the efforts of the worst of humanity to make Europe 'clean' of, for example, Jews?


Alex

The Three Sweetest Words

My daugher is strikingly beautiful. At one point, while rehearsing for a performance of the Crucible, her director gave her an exercise for showing a character being alert and happy. She should imagine herself as a doctor just going in to tell an anxious patient, 'It's not cancer.'

I heard those words, or a message which added up to them.

There are always 'possibles,' and 'maybes,' and 'look again,' but the answer is still the one which restores one to life--which however routine or conventional, is deep and alluring and full of promise.

Alex

Shadows

When I was small people watched soap operas without embarrassment. Whenever the almost-banal bad news that the character had cancer was announced, it was preceded by the doc telling him or her that he had seen 'shadows' on the x-ray. I have no idea if x-rays of the period really showed 'shadows,' or if this was just a piece of TV mystification, or MD mystification. But it worked: it conveyed a ghostly and ominous presence in one's body.

I had some 'shadows,' of some sort on a CT scan of my lungs a few days ago, and tomorrow morning I will have a bronchoscopy to try to determine if one of the two is malignant. (The other may be too small to reach with the instrument.) The doc, and the books I read, tell me the likelihood is very small that the one in my right lung is anything but a more or less insignificant 'broncholith,' while the one in the other lung is also tiny and seems to arise from a scar first observed years ago when I smoked tobacco. But there is such a thing as scar carcinoma....

It's going to be hard to go to sleep tonight. I'd like to think that the procedure, preceded by local anaesthetic and then by midazolam and fentanyl, will not be awful: in fact, I may not feel anything at all. It is the pathology, of course, which troubles me most. A single malignancy which is small and has not invaded even adjacent lymph nodes is not awful: it can be removed with little loss of lung function (but many years of worry afterwards). The real killer (pardon the pun) is if the little shadow above the scar in the other lung is also malignant--and worst if it is the same kind of malignancy which I hope they do not find in my right lung. In that case I think I review my will very quickly and consider how I might spend a foreshortened life.

I never expected any of this of course. I have lived into middle age without any particular illness, which is itself a grace. And now my friends are all sending good words, and my best friend, who is vastly overworked, came to spend an hour or more this evening to divert me from my anxiety.

My brother in Tel Aviv said the 'Mi-sheberakh' prayer for me this past Saturday in synagogue. It invokes G-d who blessed our ancestors and asks him to bless the person in peril. I knew he was going to do so, and I'd like to think I felt the benefit flowing into me.

I will be back with more news when I have it. May the Power who controls the universe give me, and all those whom I love and all who read this message, good health and long and useful life.

Alex

Compassion, Suffering, Gratitude, and Legal Fees

1. The Gentlest Man on Earth

When I was very young I knew a man in Israel named Adam ben-Hanokh. When I knew him, he was already middle- aged, or so I thought. (I was perhaps 16 at the time.) If I heard the story right, he had been born in Austria before the Nazis took over, and after the start of the Murders his parents had saved his life by lodging him in a monastery. Those good and holy men preserved his life, and more: he survived the war, intact in spirit, and with their kind help, intact in his Judaism. After the war he came to Israel.

Adam was the gentlest person I have ever met. I have to think that even if those monks were careful in not trying to convert him to Christianity, they had imparted to him some of their generosity of spirit and much of their contemplative calm. In war and peace, terror and ease, in hunger and comfort, he was always the same quiet, sweet teacher to all of us who were young.

After I left that place, I heard that he had--just once in his life--raised his voice impatiently at a student, and the student had cried inconsolably for hours.

2. Suffering

The American economy these days is said to be failing. I think the economic situation is worse than the authorities admit. I see every day people who have worked all their lives, confident in the American promise, suddenly find they cannot pay their bills or support their families in anything like even the modest comfort to which they grew accustomed.

Among the bills they don't pay are those presented by their lawyers--and who can blame them? It makes no economic sense when times are hard to pay your lawyer: most likely he or she has already delivered the services you need; you have reaped the benefit, and now the children need shoes and you cannot fill your fuel tank. Should a decent person pay his lawyer and leave his children in want?

Having so many clients unable to pay is new for me too: it has not been this bad in more than twenty years. I found myself frustrated and angry at the many clients for whom I had stayed up late and awakened early, and who had benefitted, sometimes mightily, from my work, my research, my intellect, my resourcefulness--my putting their needs ahead of my own and my family's. And they were not paying.

My firm's payables must be paid, and the lawyers and staff must pay their own mortgages and rent, and feed and clothe our children and ourselves. So we went to the telephones. I found myself coming close to losing it and shouting at one client. who owed us thousands of dollars and had not paid anything in two years. I was harsh, much harsher than usual, and when she started crying I could not help myself and I said 'if you had sent me even five dollars we would not be having this conversation.' And I hung up.

I never expected to see her again. Two days ago she came into my office with a check for the total balance, and explained that she had received a small inheritance, and she apologised to me.

3. Gratitude

Last week, while the Dalai Lama visited, a cousin of mine by marriage who manages to be a Buddhist clergyman while not forgetting that he is Jewish, came along to hear the Dalai Lama, and to teach. We had dinner a week ago and we chatted about gratitude--and that much of life's suffering can be...not overcome, but in some way, absorbed by a person's reminding himself of all that is good in his life. The exercise consists of always saying, and thinking, 'I am blessed,' and thinking of the ways in which one is blessed. It is said that this exercise leads one more readily to compassion for others as well.

Our small county in the Heartland maintains a park where dogs can run free. It is hundreds of acres in size, and has the remnants of an old orchard, and meadows and hills and tall trees. And it is marked by six or eight stumps of trees on which poetry and selections of good prose are posted and replaced. We call it 'poetry on a stick.'

The dog and I walked the paths and found an apple tree we had not seen in dozens of walks, just outside the abandoned orchard. And strikingly, even though we are at least six weeks from apple harvest in this chill corner of Exile, the apple I picked was without a blemish, and ripe and sweet in my mouth. In my tradition there is a prayer of thanksgiving said when good things happen: a holiday arrives, for one, and when you eat the first ripe fruit of its kind. You thank the Creator for 'giving us life, and sustaining us, and bringing us to this season.'

I have never said it with such delight and so many tears as today.

The Dalai Lama

A few days ago the Dalai Lama came to our town. He spoke in a huge indoor stadium, and about 20,000 people and I attended. The experience had some whimsy about it: near the auxiliary parking, in a field, stood about ten llamas wearing sashes bearing the motto Free Tibet.

I had read a book of lectures by this man long ago, and I had the impression that he was moderate, sweet-tempered and evidently modest and humble. I'm not sure I knew more. And after hearing him talk for an hour, and answer questions for half an hour more, I don't think I know more.

I came prepared (and hoping) to find a hero: a person of simple origin who had acquired great skill and learning and a warm spirituality, and who perhaps could help me find my way out of a dark wood where the right path was murky. Much of this perhaps--but no hero.

The grandest thing he said was 'I don't know.' A questioner had said that her husband had killed himself from an overdose of drugs, and she was left alone and devastated, and she wanted to know how she could deal with her emotional pain and overcome it. The Dalai Lama--whose face was shown on large TV monitors so the whole audience could see him up close--looked...consternated and then sad, and then he said 'I don't know.'

If there was one moment when I could have loved him and found my hero, it was then. What other clergyman faced with an example of suffering and urgent hope of the sufferer to make sense of her experience and transcend it, would say 'I don't know'? Perhaps a religious scholar faced with the complexities of a problem of ritual or business ethics could begin a response with a statement that he did not know. But rarely a pastoral one, a teacher. Our clergy must know. And from this need they often enough emerge...pompous and banal.

Well this clergyman did not know, and he was sad and frustrated when he recognised it. But then the profession of clergyman took over, but at least with humility. He went on to something like--you could make a diligent effort to be compassionate to other people. You can consider that your tragedy has already occurred: you cannot change it, but you can change how you think about it. And you can change your life to absorb the tragedy somehow.

Somehow. He may not have used this word, but it was implied.

So he was not a hero. Instead he showed he is a wise man.

In my life as a lawyer, and in my personal life (and they are not so far apart) I fairly often encounter people who are consciously suffering. (It is not for me to tell people I think they are suffering, but not consciously.)
It occurred to me, probably from something I had heard elsewhere, to suggest to one such person, a woman who had once been very attractive, but had mistreated her skin with much sun and many chemicals, and her body with various illegal substances, that she volunteer at the homeless shelter, perhaps just to help serve one meal a week. Or more if she found she wanted to do so.

I wish I could say that my advice did wonders. She didn't take it, and she spiralled downward. This was years ago, and I don't know what has become of her.

Saying 'I don't know' is at once banal, and made the Dalai Lama a kind of hero. A humble one.

Who Knows What the Law is?

I don't. At least never for certain. I'm speaking less of the professional and technical question of what is the law applicable to a particular issue, than of the question what 'law' really is, as such(per se).

It takes a moment to realise that one does not really know what the law is. There are hints of how nebulous the concept can be throughout our culture. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously spoke of the law as a 'brooding omnipresence.' All very well--but brooding like what? A hen, warming her eggs? A thoughtful and frustrated Achilles in the Titian painting, sitting on the beach and looking over a cloudy sky and stormy sea? Something otherwise somehow sitting above us all?

Or try this: the laws in the officially published statute books are not the law; they are merely evidence of what the law is. So where is this law, and how do we find it? Do we search biblically, looking at the skies above and the earth beneath, and find it perhaps ultimately in our hearts?

Surely not. The inclination of the heart of Man is evil from his youth. You might find evil in me, but it will be much harder to find...law. Jeremiah spoke of a time when the law would be inscribed on our hearts--meaning, presumably that in a New Epoch people would behave rightly without having to consult guides outside themselves.

Could the law be--in the Foucauldian sense--an archive, that is a somehow socially constructed body of knowledge, the self-creating repository of infinite sources of knowledge, or assumed knowledge, or myth or falsehood. All these are social items for consideration and inclusion. Take them together, all together, and you have a kind of presence which is shared out among all of us, all members of a society which is in some way governed by the law, and can be found by a search in the archives, both written in the conventional sense, and written in our hearts.

Everything, after all, can be found in Plato.

Transference and Lawyers

There is a built-in, inevitable conflict of interest between the lawyer and his or her client. It's not only that the lawyer wants to be paid and the client is likely reluctant to pay very much. It's far more subtle and fundamental. It's actually very much like what Freud called 'transference,' or whatever German word he used.

Most clients are naive--in the sense that physicians speak of
'opiate-naive'--that is, not experienced in dealing with...the item in question. Clients who have not dealt much with lawyers come to them nearly always stricken by something which they feel has been imposed upon them: a divorce (which lots of men in the Heartland don't really see coming), a lawsuit for collecting money, a criminal charge based on something they did or did not do.

But when they meet the lawyer, they are terribly vulnerable. They know they are entering a world which uses a different form of the English (or other) language they customarily use; they believe that words are magical. If you use the wrong one, you can be cast down to Hell. Or jail. If you use the right ones, you may emerge victorious, regardless of the merits.

And you are entering a world with its own rules of etiquette, its forms of address ('Milord,' 'Your Honour,' 'ladies and gentlemen of the jury'. And you risk always looking foolish, ignorant, naive. (Lawyers often feel this even after thirty years of experience.)

So the naive client meets the lawyer, and is full of need. They need someone who understands the language, the rules, the way somehow to get through the nightmare. And here is the lawyer, who, if he or she has the slightest sense of salesmanship, or even just compassion, seeks to fill the need. (And the lawyer has his or her own needs to be felt as nurturing, competent, expert.)

So the client must believe that the lawyer is wise and good, and can save him.

This is when the lawyer says, 'my retainer will be five-thousand dollars.'