If Esme Were Extremely Interested in Depravity

This post is a bit all-over-the-place.  I know it already, only after writing the first few words.  Noo and I are in Ashland, OR, to see a few plays at the beginning of the season, before Interferon robs us of any opportunities for pleasure.  I drove us up here yesterday, after completing a truly awful week of hospitalist rounds, the kind of week that raises disparate literary allusions in my mind.  At one time, I wanted to be a writer and a scholar, so I'm afflicted with disparate literary allusions from time to time.  I think these allusions are the primary occupational hazard of literary scholars.  Believe me, I prefer to examine infected wounds and gangrenous feet than wrestle with renegade literary allusions.

One of the plays Noo and I are going to see is Ashland's production of Macbeth.  The Scottish Play is one of my favorite Shakespearean works because I find it so strange and psychologically horrifying.  My mother and I flew to New York last year solely in order to see Patrick Stewart appear in the title role, an expensive and time-consuming trip but also one of the best impulses I've ever succumbed to.  Since then, I've watched and re-watched several of the existing performances on DVD and listened to scholarly lectures and generally thought a lot about the play.  This is the power of great literature--it takes over the mind and colors your perceptions and ultimately makes you re-consider your life in insightful ways.

Aside from the witches and Lady Macbeth's exemplary hand-washing habits, I think the play is about a man of average morality who loses his moral center.  The play is full of moments in which Macbeth might have made a decision not to murder Duncan in order to put himself upon the throne of Scotland, and but for Lady Macbeth's insistence and the witches' enticing predictions, I imagine he might have been content to be Thane of Cawdor.  But where's the story in that?  His moral struggles over early in the play, Macbeth ends with the title character's complete personal disintegration .  In his final encounter with the witches, he demands they foretell his future, no matter what kind of violence against faith, commerce, and human need they must to use to do so:

I conjure you, by that which you profess,
Howe'er you come to know it, answer me:
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders' heads;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of nature's germens tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken; answer me
To what I ask you.

I think the image of a person who is both provoked and self-motivated to abandon all human goodness has preoccupied me recently, and I think this is because I see a lot of human failings when I'm at work.  Last week I averaged eighteen or nineteen patient encounters per day, and although most of them were old people in frail health, a significant minority were younger people whose own bad habits--IV heroin abuse, smoking, disregard for the basics of diabetic self-care--landed them in the hospital.  I spent hours working up a 50ish man with uncontrolled diabetes and an infected foot who derailed every conversation I tried to have with him about taking care of his diabetes by insisting "I'm STARVING to death on the food you give me."  This from a man with a BMI of, oh, thirty-seven and blood glucoses in the 200s despite the same amount in insulin every day.

It sounds so trivial, but in light of California's budget catastrophe and the entire country's economic outlook, every individual failure to prevent disease begins to feel like moral collapse and further evidence of human depravity.  I admit I'm pretty damn tired out from a really bad week of rounds, and maybe I'm predisposed to gloominess, but I couldn't help thinking about Macbeth's ultimate failure whenever I steeled myself to walk into that diabetic man's room.  At least Macbeth had the decency to get cut down by MacDuff, thus bringing an end to the play.  I'm afraid the drama of non-compliant diabetics and drug users never ends so tidily.

By the way, the title of this post is a hat tip to J.D. Salinger's wonderful short story entitled "For Esme--With Love and Squalor."  Somewhere in the depths of last week's despair, I mis-remembered the title as ending with the word Depravity, which would not have been as strong and I'm glad J.D. avoided it, because the story--about a U.S. soldier's strange and beautiful encounter with a solemn, beyond-her-years little girl named Esme--might have suffered from the substitution.  Esme expresses an extreme interest in squalor, and the soldier obliges with a story of his own post-traumatic moral failing.  If Esme were equally interested in depravity, boy would I have some stories to share with her.

Comments

[rlbates]

Maybe you could write a modern day "Canterbury Tales" about the rural life and Noo's/your travel through her melanoma treatment. (In your spare time, of course)