Bafflement

I’ll let you in on a running argument I’ve been having. I know my opponent to be a persistent guy. He hasn’t left me alone for as long as I can remember.  He is both my worst enemy and my best friend. In fact, he is myself.

As Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes. Sometimes they argue and I don’t agree with myself. The stream of my thoughts gets impeded. There are tributaries and reefs. Boulders get in the way. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. Thank you, Wendell Berry.

The current book I am reading/skimming is entitled, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. It traces the medical history of a Hmong baby with congenital epilepsy. The reader is tempest-tossed between the exasperation of the pediatric team trying to deal with a non-compliant family and the unfamiliar cultural customs of the Hmong people.

The mother and father love their child yet when directed to administer two or three medications they withhold one or double the dose on the other and instead kill a chicken to propitiate the gods. Or they press a coin into the belly of their baby and ascribe the illness to the spirit world. Finally, the doctors arrange for the baby to be taken away and raised by a foster family for a period of time.

Perhaps the medical staff was too hasty. They failed to engage the cross-cultural belief system of the family. They might have arranged for better interpreters or visiting nurses to manage the meds. Out of all this came reforms which acknowledge the practices of cultures steeped in non-western health measures.

It was for me a confrontation with the irrational. I welcome non-rational extravagances in poetry. Metaphorical flights of fancy deposit me in countries of otherness with inexplicable images and connectivity.

Yet had I been part of that medical team I, too, would have seen the family’s acts as reckless endangerment. At the same time my more open and empathic nature leans toward a recognition of a more so-called holistic approach.

Now I am going to make a huge leap. My mind jumps from the defiant Hmong parents to the unthinking followers of the charlatan with the red tie whose cohorts range from the self-serving to the blissfully ignorant. How to reach those who would sacrifice Democracy as if it were a chicken in order to serve a false idol? This is the great bafflement we face.