MY FIRST LOVE

Spoken language is simple and direct. There is action in every sentence spoken. Nothing hidden, except that which is in the mind of the speaker. And what is spoken is what the speaker intends to say. The written word on the other hand, has no such constraint. I can make you think thoughts that you might never have dreamt of or make you sit beneath an oak tree with cool breeze of the evening and a setting sun slowly dying in its warmth. Ah, and I can take you to a place where you have never been, wide open fields of greens, undulating hills and valleys with a few large weeping willows overhanging their leaves in despair for company. But I shan’t do that today.  I will let those that do such things take you, if you are willing, to nirvanas where eternal blossoms grace the fields.  Today, I will tell you about my first love. What a ride it has beed.  It lasted for a career. It was replaced by a beautiful girl who became my wife and was subrogated to the next lower level. But it still remained a love for me for a while.

"Today, I will tell you about my first love."

This love thing, there is mystery in it. One can spend a lifetime delving into it and know very little. For instance, when I was younger, I had this notion that everything there was to know, had already been discovered and so there was nothing for me to venture into. But as I grew up poking holes in thoughts and other assumed realities, which clustered around and made some orbit the stellar magic cast by seasoned older people with thick rimmed glasses who had grown frown lines and large noses, I soon realized that they were faced with the same dilemma that I was; what is real?

Now mind you the context within which these words find the digital ink on the screen remains an enigma. True knowledge is never true for long. Something always comes along to overshadow it. Take the Ptolemy assumption and one would live and breathe it daily till Galileo comes along and with a simple telescope turned the whole egocentricity on its head and he almost literally lost his head over it.

"True knowledge is never true for long."

Ideas that ignite thoughts always bring in a charm of snake-oil sniffers. There is money to be made. And a snake-oil sniffer will not be denied his Dollar or Shilling or Yuan. His, is progress in the Kaching world not in the toil of searching for truth. Progress however, is a matter of experimentation, isn’t it? A thought is buried deep within someone’s mind that makes him or her sitting on the edge of the bed at night, wondering through sleeplessness, "how to" until the break of dawn. These ideas are then transformed into energy to experiment, to verify, to validate and thence to produce for others to benefit. Innovation has never been about money. If it is, it will never make any. Innovation is about passion and love. For snake-oil men it is all about money, period.

"For snake-oil men it is all about money, period."

See this circumstantiality always takes me onto paths that, well, are less travelled. Rocky, sometimes, painful seldom, yet in the end for the most part, rewarding. So, let me linger on those pesky distillers of snake-oil a moment longer. These many, undaunted soldiers of limited value create hurdles upon hurdles for innovators, lying to them, cheating from them and usurping their ideas only never to be able to fully realize the thinker’s thought. And in that, lies the solace for the innovator. But the unceasing tiresome volleys of “do this and that” keep coming. For each stride brings wealth to the snake-oil group. They measure for measure’s sake and then demand everyone should “Follow that measure,” because to all others it is gospel. They force-feed misinformation and disinformation even to the intellectuals who at times succumb to the tantalizingly perceived value these wretched beings project and thus in doing, lose their soul in the process. The deeper the intellectuals sink into the desire of “self,” the further they are beholden to those that drive these desires. The world sinks slowly into chaos as common sense becomes rare and people rush on the streets with their eyes wide open and their minds paralyzed shut, committing the only act they know how to do; go through the day.

"The deeper the intellectuals sink into the desire of “self,” the deeper they are beholden to those that drive their desire."

Okay, yes, I must tell you, for this writing is getting long in the tooth. My first love was medicine. It spoke to me of things that were impossible. The human body, a massive collection of individual cells, each finely tuned to perform a finite set of functions. Those tiny, itty-bitty vessels are the ghost within the human machine. Vessels with many stowaways that function as a collective in perfect harmony. And the magic of this grist mill is replenishment; as some cells tire, they are replaced by new ones. All happens in the quiet of the circumstance, painlessly and efficiently. The beat goes on. The dance of cells continues until it cannot anymore.

There is magic, for instance, in embryology; of how the parts become, from so simple a fertilized egg. There is splendor in the human parts as they grow and enlarge and a create a field, realized as anatomy that dissects each part to understand its visible limitations and its anchors. All parts beautifully form fed into a gorgeous frame. And then there is physiology; a fecund land of function that binds the anatomical parts. The mechanics defined, each part versatile and committing to the function of the whole. Inspired by this choreography of the anatomical parts, a living breathing being is installed on this Gaia. The perfect image of the homo-sapien. These are the visible beings. What goes on inside to keep the chemistry of action is a wonder to behold. There are the invisible things that only peering through microscopes reveal. However more and more magnification right down to the electron level can make one see the workings of the city within the tiny little cell; its power structure enclosed in the mitochondria and the humors that flow as electronic signals from the surface of the cell to its nucleus where marching orders for building materials, proteins and proliferation are undertaken creating a symphony of cell growth and division. All this happening deep within through the tightly knit chemistry of electrical impulses. Such essence of magic is never perceived to the idle mind, only one that lurks at the periphery of inquisitiveness. This molecular microbiology of life’s essence is the magic crafted by unmeasured and innovative intellect.

But let me not forget, when pathos strikes the discordant cell, there lies the human dignity of help, nurture, nourish and rebuilding. The understanding to limit such pathos is the discourse of a few learned and humble minds. These minds that spend their days, learning, for there is a lot to learn, and then putting that knowledge to test, to heal. To heal, there I said again, "TO HEAL!" The days turn into nights, and into days and the world turns over and over as a lifetime passes in the service of humanity.

"The understanding of such pathos is the discourse of a few learned and humble minds."

That my dear reader is medicine; my first love. But now sadly it is slowly dying. The scaffolding is all that remains. The snake-oil men have destroyed all but the skeleton. They have sucked out the humor, the sinews and the skin of this wondrous joy and left the gangly skeletal remains flailing in the wind, subject to their whims. The joy of learning and experimenting has been replaced by useless information that does not make for intelligent understanding. Knowledge testing shams are rampant. No where is the desire to inquire about experience. Experience they say is nothing. Really? Discordant information is like plastering a façade with hidden struts to hold it up as in a movie set. No substance, just form. These snake-oil people have loud megaphones and they constantly blast away their cymbals and beat their drums till all is cacophony.They compare humans to machines. Slowly eroding the sense of value by conjuring up value where none exists. And then they come for the kill; "attest to the expressed need for testing of their made up standards, conjured up in catacombs of their ivory towers" or die a professional death. Ah but were it so simple but that the mind has bad dreams. Slowly the desire to understand dies and such is the penalty of misunderstood regulatory fiat designed for metrics, impose willy nilly to the detriment of the vulnerable, the sick and the infirmed. 

That love is lost by the deeds of all these hedonistic snake-oil souls and yet the desire to win back its worth still remains strong amongst a few. Please don't let them destroy it. I beseech those that have the will and the strength to fight for the sanity of real human intellect in science in general and medicine in particular, to reform and remake the love that I once loved so dearly.

"I beseech those that have the will and the strength to fight for the sanity of real human intellect."