The Last Circle

[Peter Presland]

"The question you asked is, in my opinion, the most critical question that could be asked. Be advised, that if you find the answer to that question, you will have the answers to all your questions. But if you publicize that answer, you will never be safe again."

-Really, when you think about it are any of us ever truly safe?

Every morning when you get into your automobile you are risking your life.

Everybody dies...

Redouble the efforts to out the bastards, at every fucking level, not only this pig but all of the pigs.

EE

I have had several brushes with death recently, and I know what it was that motivated me to re-emerge from a left-sided multiplex almost-totally hemiplegic stroke. I read "Living in Process" by Anne Wilson Schaef, whose frontispieces have the names of the cardiologists, nurses and ICU beds so that I will not forget those who saved my life.

I read "The Body Silent" by Daniel Murphy, the professor emeritus of anthrpology at Columbia who described his diagnosis of the paralytic cerebral palsy, our culture's reactions to handicap, and his eventual slow death.

I also read "The Denial of Death" by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, before my sudden cardiac arrest, or the days spent unconscious in the ICU.

I had previousy read Laurence Gonzalez' book "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why".

All four are highly recommended reading.

I have continued my efforts... re-doubling isn't necessary in my case.... but when the coroner rules it a suicide, life insurance doesn't pay anything to the survivors, who are left with nothing but questions, grief and loss.

The objective is to stay alive long enough to have made it count for something, to squeeze the marrow out of one's being, not to sacrifice it mindlessly.

I had a cranial base tumour removed back in 1996. Impossible to describe the succeeding few months - absolutely appalling by any commonly recognised standard. So yes indeed, I too can say with conviction that a genuine brush with the grim reaper and surviving it with ones mental faculties intact is likely to be something of a watershed.

I haven't read all of those books, but the Becker one I have, and heartily recommend it. But better yet, for those inclined to dabble with Becker, is his final work "Escape from Evil" - it was unfinished at his own death in 1974 and his executors took it upon themselves to facilitate it's publication. It is under 200 pages.

Becker considered his work to be in furtherance of a sort of Freud - Rank - Jung continuum. As a keen student of Jung, I'm sure David Guyatt would find inspiration in Becker too.