SpokenVerse | The Optimist by Joshua Mehigan (read by Tom O'Bedlam) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded February 2012 | Updated October 2024, 6 hours ago.
I pronounced the poet's name wrongly, I should have said Joshua Mee-gan. Mee-han is the Irish pronunciation. And I called him Joseph in the intro. My apologies to the poet for these mistakes - I was careless and I'm sorry.
Optimism: it has been said that the state of mind we call "Sanity" is actually a state of irrational optimism. In case you didn't notice her joke, when the doctors told her that she was going to lose taste, she asked them to choose her last dress - because she wanted to it to be in good taste.
It's a sonnet. The last line looks like a direct quotation from a geometry textbook. e.g. "a point is something considered to have position but no magnitude". I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who first used the "vanishing point" in drawing perspectives, the most distant point, the place where parallel lines appear to converge.
Most people with adequate notice become accustomed to the prospect of dying and it ceases to bother them: they become disembodied, selfless, tranquil. In old people dying of natural causes, there may be a long period of attrition, called "dwindling". They seem untroubled by it. Like the old-fashioned raster-scan TV when switched off they collapse gradually, shrinking to a point, then vanishing.
Death is sometimes abrupt and violent - but even then, there is some internal mechanism which prevents us from being frightened or feeling pain. An unreal state-of-mind takes over, a feeling of not really being there, we are present merely as an observer of the scene. This natural protective mechanism explains, perhaps, the out-of-body experience some people report when they have faced death. It is amazing how people react to life-threatening trauma: they turn up in emergency rooms carrying their severed limbs, apparently not feeling pain or fear.
Pain is entirely generated within the body as a survival mechanism: it doesn't come from outside events; it is not caused by injury or disease but from the body's protective reaction to those insults. Things which inevitably kill you tend to cause no pain, at least in the early stages. Evolution cannot create a defence mechanism against things that are inevitably fatal. Death is a natural part of life, after all. It is recovery and survival that hurts: the pain immobilises you while your body repairs itself. The pain conditions you against making the same mistake again. It's a strange concept, but pain is A Good Thing.
It seems that it is those who are still healthy and not immediately threatened by death, who fear death the most. Shakespeare was obsessed with it. Philip Larkin's fear was extreme. In Aubade he said, chillingly, "Courage is no good: it means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave". When he was really facing the prospect of death from throat cancer he became resigned, saying, "I am going to the inevitable".
The third line from the end is "That cancer just rehearsed life's attitude" - it took me a while to be convinced this wasn't a misprint: I would have been less surprised by "reversed" - but this is from Mr. Mehigan's own site.
The brain scan is an illustration from New Scientist, and is actually about mind-reading, not cancer:
nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/brain-scan-mind-reading-of-spatial.html
The painting is "Ria Munk on Her Deathbed" by Gustav Klimt
The film showed stars of varying magnitude:
On the right, Libra, and on the left, Cancer,
Mapping the brain's horizons, vanishing points
Respectively of reason and desire.
The doctors liked her cheerful attitude,
Hope being all she had in her position.
She waited, calm. Touch burned out first, then vision.
Emotion slipped. Last would be lungs and heart.
But, noting trends, they told her Taste was next.
She asked then, could they pick out her last dress?
She wasn't making light. It seemed to her
That cancer just rehearsed life's attitude
That one's desires must taper to a point,
Which has position, but no magnitude.
I pronounced the poet's name wrongly, I should have said Joshua Mee-gan. Mee-han is the Irish pronunciation. And I called him Joseph in the intro. My apologies to the poet for these mistakes - I was careless and I'm sorry.
Optimism: it has been said that the state of mind we call "Sanity" is actually a state of irrational optimism. In case you didn't notice her joke, when the doctors told her that she was going to lose taste, she asked them to choose her last dress - because she wanted to it to be in good taste.
It's a sonnet. The last line looks like a direct quotation from a geometry textbook. e.g. "a point is something considered to have position but no magnitude". I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who first used the "vanishing point" in drawing perspectives, the most distant point, the place where parallel lines appear to converge.
Most people with adequate notice become accustomed to the prospect of dying and it ceases to bother them: they become disembodied, selfless, tranquil. In old people dying of natural causes, there may be a long period of attrition, called "dwindling". They seem untroubled by it. Like the old-fashioned raster-scan TV when switched off they collapse gradually, shrinking to a point, then vanishing.
Death is sometimes abrupt and violent - but even then, there is some internal mechanism which prevents us from being frightened or feeling pain. An unreal state-of-mind takes over, a feeling of not really being there, we are present merely as an observer of the scene. This natural protective mechanism explains, perhaps, the out-of-body experience some people report when they have faced death. It is amazing how people react to life-threatening trauma: they turn up in emergency rooms carrying their severed limbs, apparently not feeling pain or fear.
Pain is entirely generated within the body as a survival mechanism: it doesn't come from outside events; it is not caused by injury or disease but from the body's protective reaction to those insults. Things which inevitably kill you tend to cause no pain, at least in the early stages. Evolution cannot create a defence mechanism against things that are inevitably fatal. Death is a natural part of life, after all. It is recovery and survival that hurts: the pain immobilises you while your body repairs itself. The pain conditions you against making the same mistake again. It's a strange concept, but pain is A Good Thing.
It seems that it is those who are still healthy and not immediately threatened by death, who fear death the most. Shakespeare was obsessed with it. Philip Larkin's fear was extreme. In Aubade he said, chillingly, "Courage is no good: it means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave". When he was really facing the prospect of death from throat cancer he became resigned, saying, "I am going to the inevitable".
The third line from the end is "That cancer just rehearsed life's attitude" - it took me a while to be convinced this wasn't a misprint: I would have been less surprised by "reversed" - but this is from Mr. Mehigan's own site.
The brain scan is an illustration from New Scientist, and is actually about mind-reading, not cancer:
nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/brain-scan-mind-reading-of-spatial.html
The painting is "Ria Munk on Her Deathbed" by Gustav Klimt
The film showed stars of varying magnitude:
On the right, Libra, and on the left, Cancer,
Mapping the brain's horizons, vanishing points
Respectively of reason and desire.
The doctors liked her cheerful attitude,
Hope being all she had in her position.
She waited, calm. Touch burned out first, then vision.
Emotion slipped. Last would be lungs and heart.
But, noting trends, they told her Taste was next.
She asked then, could they pick out her last dress?
She wasn't making light. It seemed to her
That cancer just rehearsed life's attitude
That one's desires must taper to a point,
Which has position, but no magnitude.
