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Monthly Archives: January 2011
Happy Burns Night!
Back in 2002 an acquaintance, a scientist by training, looked at me and, apropos of nothing at all, declared something along the lines of “Anyone with taste who is being honest admits that Robbie Burns was a terrible poet. His reputation is underserved and based on a particular linguistic gimmick.” I can’t remember all the details of my reply but I do know that it was loud, impassioned and involved lots of arm waving and underdeveloped, polysyllabic parallels with Chaucer and Dante. I don’t think I convinced the person in question but to this day I have little time for those who look down on Burns with what I see as ill-informed condescension and prejudice.
This evening we had a small Burns Night celebration here at Casa Omphaloskeptic. I can’t say it was terribly traditional given that the menu consisted of vegetarian haggis (very, very tasty and highly spiced), parsnip and wasabi mash and some peas. Once the table was laid I took advantage of the archive of people reading all of Burns’s works that BBC Scotland has just made available online and we listened to a certain ode to a particular dish.
Have a listen:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/external/player.swf
I’m no expert on the poet or his life so I can’t offer an informed opinion of what he would have thought of an offal-free version of what his poem refers to as a “chieftan.” Perhaps what we had was more of a minor, courtly hanger on of the puddin’ race. Happy Burns Night everyone.
Sal
SAL
He owes his life to his capacity to be of therapeutic use to his sick sister, otherwise he would not have been chosen in the first place. (source)
The circumstances of my birth were never any kind of secret. My parents were open with me and my sister from the days of my earliest memories and I suspect that they talked freely about them in the time before that. They loved me too; deeply and dearly in a way that had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that I was their son. As young as I was the story meant little to me; I had no contextual frame to help me understand the implications of what my life meant. Bit by bit, year by year I gradually came to comprehend that families like ours, children like me, were few and far between. If my parents’ hope had been to spare me the sudden shock of a discovery about my origins then they were successful. I never had that sickening moment of epiphany that I know a few others like me suffered or that I’ve heard individuals talk about who discovered, as adults, that they were adopted rather than the natural offspring of the people they called Mom and Dad.
Me and Jane were always close too. We still are even though none of us have seen her or spoken to her in almost three years. Not even a text message or an e-mail has arrived from her simply to inform us that she still lives and breathes on this world. Just as I can tell that we are still close, I know she’s still alive and, I think, happy. I would sense it if this were not true, just like when we were growing up I always seemed to know what she was feeling and thinking even when we were apart. It was like we were part of one another which, in a way, we were but I don’t go in for any of that mystical, spiritual bullshit. Our link, as unusual and manufactured as it might be, resulted from nothing other than a set of scientific procedures and biological, genetic circumstance. Simple as. If we happened to be closer than other brother and sister pairs it wasn’t because our minds or souls or some other metaphysical appendages were linked. We were just lucky to share an affinity, to get on well and to have an awareness of one another even at a distance.
When people find out what I am, it’s not uncommon for them to assume that I must have resented Jane. How could I? It’s not like she had any more choice in the matter than I did. She was only 18 months old when the entire process started. Besides, I love my sister and I want, no, need her to be alive in this world. How could I feel any ill will or anger toward her? Just as she didn’t ask to be born sick, to come into this world dying at a faster rate than the rest of us she never put up her hand and asked our parents or her doctors to do what they did. I was a last resort, chosen at a time when she was too little to comprehend that she desperately needed options and that I was a choice of final, heart broken desperation.
The only ongoing point of irritation I ever felt toward my parents, a little blister that still flares up from time to time, is my name. They never called me by anything other than the diminutive Sal though, like all children of our economic class, they made sure I could spell it in its entirety by the time I went off to school at the age of five. S-A-L-V-A-T-O-R-E. I never gave that name much thought. Everyone called me Sal, I thought of myself as Sal and that was pretty much as far as it went. On occasion I might have wondered how I wound up with such an exotic name when my sister was simple, plain Jane. If I did I was proud of that difference in some minor way. It wasn’t until I was fourteen, in 2055, that it occurred to me how ridiculous my parents were to call me Salvatore. Maybe they shortened it to Sal because they realised this themselves.
As I said, my parents never made any secret of the fact that I was created, chosen because my sister was desperately ill. Born with a rare condition called Fanconi Anaemia, something that unlike most children we could both pronounce and spell from an early age, she had been in and out of hospital on regular basis from the time she was weeks old. In her case the disorder, inherited through an unlikely and unlucky combination of our parents’ genes, progressed quickly. Her bone marrow started to fail, her body could not fight off infections and from the time she was ten months old she lived in a sterile room at the research hospital. Blood transfusions were regular and, despite the trumpeting that surrounded its creation nearly a decade earlier in 2030, MaD SID, the Marrow Donors Strategic International Database failed to produce a suitable match. Our parents were forced to watch Jane play a waiting game with death.
Her best chance of actually living rather than existing for a handful of years or months longer, from transfusion to transfusion, in that sterile hospital suite was through a donation of cells and bone marrow from a sibling. Ideally that sibling would provide an exact match to Jane, reducing the risk of her body rejecting the donated material. It was also the case that, under normal circumstance, any additional children our parents brought into the world would suffer from the same Fanconi Anaemia killing Jane. Could you do that? Bring a child into the world knowing there was a likelihood, however small, that you and your partner had issued your baby a death warrant? That question, right there, and my own answer to it means despite any incomprehension or frustration, even the occasional tinge of resentment I might feel toward my parents fades into unimportance. I am here, living and thinking in this world and like all humans I have a fierce loyalty to my own life. For the most part I am happy. How can I possibly resent or second guess my parents when what they chose to do not only saved Jane, but also ensured I was born healthy? If a donor had been found I would not have been born at all.
The procedure had been around since some time either side of the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries; I’ve never paid enough attention to remember the dates when the first of us came into this world. I have met some of the others, even Charlie Whitaker the very first, and though some part of me had hoped for it, had watched video accounts by some of the others claiming otherwise, I felt no shock of recognition or spark of shared identity. They were just some other people. Charlie was just some guy decades my senior with whom I had nothing in common. As in all the other cases our parents underwent IVF treatment. A set of embryos was created and then each was tested for two things: the anaemia and to see if it provided a match for Jane. Luckily for Jane, our parents and me a healthy match was found after the first round of IVF and implanted in our mother. A smidgen under nine months later I was born.
At my birth cells were harvested from my umbilical cord to help treat Jane. A short time after that some of my bone marrow was donated to her. One year on and she had moved back home, had needed no transfusions, though still visited her doctors regularly. By the time I was old enough to start remembering the events of life Jane was healthy. She no longer spent nights in hospital and, if she had to visit the doctor a bit more often than other children, she only ever did so to receive an entirely clean bill of health. I don’t think either of us really questioned it. I know we both got a bit tired of our parents droning on and on about how she had been ill, how I had been “chosen” – that’s the word they always used, “chosen” – as her saviour sibling and life had changed for the better.
It wasn’t until I was 14 when the debates were raging and the international moratorium on these treatments and the creation of saviour siblings was enacted that I realised how strange my existence seemed to some people. The vehemence of both sides of the debate surprised me, especially those fundamentalists who seemed to think that the scientists were playing god and that those like me were offered as some sort of false idol or ersatz Christ. All my parents wanted to do was save their little girl. All the doctors wanted to do was ease her suffering.
I understand the ethical concerns that ran through the whole debate and the procedure itself. At some level it is entirely true to say that I would not exist if my sister hadn’t needed me. I was simply the lucky embryo, the one in a batch of embryos that met certain requirements and so was brought to term. The rest were destroyed. My parents never loved me less for the circumstances of my birth, they never treated me as anything other than their child. In fact I think I had more freedom than my sister ever did simply because the habit of worrying about and protecting her was so deeply ingrained in them both. I certainly never felt any weight of responsibility for my sister. How many people worry about the things they can’t remember, the events they had no control of when they were busy drooling and burbling in their nappies?
The one thing that does sometimes get on my nerves is just what I said it was. My name. Here I am, one of these so-called saviour siblings and my parents decide to call me Salvatore. I guess I’m just lucky that we aren’t Spanish or South American, that we aren’t Catholic as well, otherwise I might have wound up being called Jesús.
Still, everyone calls me Sal so most of the time I can forget about the ridiculous, boastful name I was given. As for all those other ethical issues and debates that, despite the moratorium, still seem to flare up from time to time I can’t say I care too much. I’m here, I’m alive. How could I want it any other way?
I do wish I could talk to my sister. . .
Better Than I Could Say It
I had a long list of ideas on this subject, but I think this comic by Jen Sorensen makes the important point(s) more eloquently and in a more measured tone than I can at present. It’s worth a read here.
The Seductive Pronoun
I was never one of those lecturers who strictly forbade my students the use of the first person pronoun in their writing. Plenty of my own teachers, lecturers and professors had imposed precisely that prohibition on me and, while I understood their good reasons for doing so, it always seemed a step too far. Academic writing does need to include acertain element of authority that a too conversational style destroys, but it should also be flexible and, to my mind at least, seek clarity of expression. Sometimes, nothing but a nice first person pronoun, an “I” standing tall and alone in a sea of polysyllabic terms can perform wonders in terms of imparting meaning and emphasis. The trick, as I always told my students, is knowing when and where to make sparing use of the pronoun.
I2
(source)
Nevertheless, my time as an undergraduate, a grad student and then a lecturer and struggling academic left me wary of using the term myself. I can think of at least three occasions when a simple “I” in a published chapter or a conference paper I wrote would have resulted in an economy of words and a clarity of meaning that I shied away from. Instead I acted like some sort of verbal or textual contortionist, afraid of offending the commandment I had received from my elders while, in my heart of hearts, I knew myself to be an unbeliever.
When I started this blog I wasn’t surprised to find this shortest of pronouns popping up with great frequency. The confessional, conversational nature of this forum almost necessitates its use. What has surprised me is that the more fiction I write the harder I seem to find writing in anything but the first person, to avoid peppering my writing with I after I after I.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at this. I have been expending some effort in trying to see some world or situation through my characters’ own eyes, so the exposition of their visions should, I suppose, be easily achieved through the first person. The thing is some of these individuals are really unsavoury, unpleasant, downright nasty pieces of work that I wouldn’t think I would be able to voice or speak of in anything other than the third person. Should I worry about the possibility that by letting such creations speak “I” they are somehow bleeding into the real life identity that is the first person narrating my own disconnected patterns of thought and interpreting my interactions with the real world? I don’t really think so but. . .
The other issue that perplexes me is the fact that even when I attempt to write in the third person my writing keeps slipping back into the first, most often through a sudden and unanticipated appearance of the pronoun. That’s not useful or flexible. Despite the fact that I know this, despite my determination to avoid it happening I know that earlier today “I” suddenly appeared in a piece where I didn’t want it and I found myself unable to pull myself from its orbit. It’s likely to happen again tomorrow and the next day and the next after that.
Perhaps my love affair with the first person pronoun should tell me something about my own impulse to write, my real motivation for trying to be something called an author. Perhaps, at the bottom of everything else, the simple fact is that I am in love with the sound of my voice.
Another Year, Another Ride
Happy New Year everyone. Now that the festive season has come and gone things should be returning to normal here at the Omphaloskeptic. That should mean regular posts and plenty of waffle.
Before those posts start appearing I would like to let all my visitors know that I’ve just registered to ride from London to Paris for Action Medical Research over four days in July. You can see the itinerary of the route I will follow here. I’ll probably mention my fundraising efforts and training attempts from time to time but, for the most part, I plan to keep those confined to seperate, dedicated blog. I’ll be riding for the same charity that I completed a century for back in September, and event I originally crowed about along with some of my reasons for doing so back in January of 2010.
Keep your eyes open for more details.
’)
