On C-section

In the next months there would be many more such bodily humiliations. In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body—to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness—so that you can live.

Salman Rushdie. Knife. 2024.

I can’t help but relate to this. Isn’t every labour-csection process exactly like this? To suspend one’s bodily autonomy and every shred of dignity and to lie at the mercy of “medical strangers”. I recently went through such a process and haven’t got over its trauma yet. I try to forget the whole nightmare but have panic attacks whenever I am reminded of it. Is it just me or is it common? If it is common, why is no one talking about it? I felt humiliated to my utmost core, degraded, and dehumanised surrounded by medical personnel with their “years of expertise”. If it was not for them, I (or one of “us”, in my case) would have died, that’s true. But I had never imagined such helplessness and degradation.

Quote #124

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a science without assumptions; the very notion of such a science is unthinkable, absurd. A philosophy, a “faith” is always needed to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a raison d’être.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack.”

Quote #123

He detested his office and the furniture. Sitting in a chair, dangling one’s legs under a table, seemed an extremely irksome process; it was as if you remained half suspended in mid-air. He liked to keep his knees folded and tucked–that alone gave him a feeling of being on solid ground.

R K Narayan. The Financial Expert. 1952.

Quote #122 “I thought very carefully about words”

There had to be a way. I tried to shake my head clear and take some more deep breaths. I steadied my pace. I thought very carefully about words and how you made them. I checked my tongue and tested my throat. I had to pull myself together. I had to communicate.

The wasp factory: a novel. Iain Banks.

Quote #121

To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is not this the paradoxical problem nature has set itself with regard to man? and is it not man’s true problem? […] he must have become not only calculating but himself calculable, regular even to his own perception, if he is to stand pledge for his own future as a guarantor does. […] The task of breeding an animal entitled to make promises involves […] the preparatory task of rendering man up to a certain point regular, uniform, equal among equals, calculable.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack.”

Quote #120

Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness… And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself.

Maya Angelou.

Quote #119

Paradoxically, a society that, in the face of starvation in great areas of the world, allows a large part of its machinery to stand idle, that shelves many important inventions, and that devotes innumerable working hours to moronic advertising and to the production of instruments of destruction — a society in which these luxuries are inherent has made usefulness its gospel.

Max Horkheimer. Eclipse of Reason. 1947.

Quote #118

Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms with it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it is not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time. […] Henceforth, toys are chemical and substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.

“Toys.” Roland Barthes. 1972.

Quote #117

Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen your watch because he did not know you had one.

Shaw, George Bernard. Preface to Misalliance. 1909-10.

Shaw is a problematic figure. His views on almost everything is iconoclastic. He calls the ‘family’ a humbug. Elsewhere he states that parents should be free to dissociate their relationship with their children, and just throw them out of the house, and the community should have moral responsibility to take care of all the children. It is not possible for adults to enjoy the company of children because the latter are cruel, selfish, and noisy.

Most importantly, Shaw approved of eugenics, the pseudo scientific theory that natural selection can be accelerated and manipulated to the advantage of the race by suppressing the reproduction of the genetically inferior races and classes. So his use of the word ‘imbecility’ is a loaded term; in a hierarchy of individuals based on intellectual capacity, the imbecile or the ‘feebleminded’ as they were called then, was a blot on the human gene pool.

Although I agree with the point of this quote, namely that innocence is overrated, I would replace imbecility with inexperience, perhaps.