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Movies we watched this past month:

Notes about our movies: Many of the movies we watch are foreign movies with subtitles. After years of watching movies in foreign languages, Arabic, French, Swedish, German, British English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and many other languages, sometimes two or three languages in the same movie, the subtitles have disappeared for us. If the movie is dubbed in English we go for the subtitles instead because we enjoy the live action and sounds of the real voices so much more than the dubbed. If you wonder where we get all these foreign movies from, the answer is simple: NetFlix. For a fixed price a month they mail us DVD movies from our on-line Queue, we watch them, pop them into a pre-paid mailer, and the postman effectively replaces all our gas-consuming and time-consuming trips to Blockbuster. To sign up for NetFlix, simply go to http://www.netflix.com/ and start adding all your requests for movies into your personal queue. If you've seen some in these movie blurbs, simply copy the name, click open your queue, and paste the name in the Search box on NetFlix and Select Add. Buy some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. You get to see your movies as the Director created them — NOT-edited for TV, in full-screen width, your own choice of subtitles, no commercial interruptions, and all of the original dialogue. Often you get the Director's Cut Edition which adds back excellent footage that was cut from the theater releases. With a plasma TV and Blu-Ray DVD's and a great sound system, you have theater experience without someone next to you talking on a cell phone during a movie plus a Pause button for rest room trips.
P. S. Ask for Blu-Ray DVD movies from NetFlix.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2" (2011) Spectacular ending to the 14 year journey we’ve been on since first book until the last movie. The vignette at the end when Harry and pals are taking their kids to board the Hogwarts Express made Del and I realize that we are watching three of our own kids going through the process of sending their kids off to college now. Like a spell from Hermione’s wand, this is A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !
“The Treatment” (2006) Ian Holm as the Last Great Freudian haunts Jake as he loses one girl and another comes into his life. Is there life after analysis? Jake doesn’t seem sure. Can he merge into an already formed family? A delicate look at a sensitive guy trying to make his life work.
“Ramona and Beezus” (2010) about two sisters growing up, a pre-teen Ramona coloring outside the lines of her life while her mid-teen sister Beezus rains on Ramona’s parade. Will Beezus ever get Ramona and learn to love and appreciate her? Will her father, the Fat Greek guy, ever love his job? The artwork which wrapped the classroom reminded me of Reenie, my daughter, who did a similar thing in her college classroom. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !

“Roaring Twenties” (1939) Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney roared through Prohibition and each other’s lives. At one point you can hear Cagney do the voice Bogart used in later movies as a bad guy.
“The Good Guy” (2009) comes into an experienced Wall Street sales office and is taken under the wing of the leader, who teaches him how doing sales and seducing women are similar activities. Naturally he seduces away his philandering boss’s girl friend and thereupon lies a piece of tale.
“Stone” (2009) DeNiro plays the good guy parole officer to Ed Norton’s bad guy con, showing his elder how it’s done today, “You talking to me?” Steamy scenes with Ed’s beautiful young wife must have been a treat to aging DeNiro.
“Morning Glory” (2010) Rachal McAdams moves so fast as morning TV producer, she makes your head spin. Turned a lot of heads at the Today show as well, but she loves family, which is a good sign for her new main squeeze. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !
“My First Mister” (2001) A stomach-turning start for this one: an angry gal full of piercings and tattoos who hates her ebullient mom and her awol dad. Wants to get apartment and needs job. Finally she offers to give Albert Brooks a hand in a men’s store and a real story begins and slowly develops into A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !
“The A-Team” (2010) rated A for Action, no doubt. If you want something done with maximum destruction, this is the team to call. Liam Neeson must be taking Sean Connery pills as he seems to be getting better-looking as he gets older.

“Beautiful Kate” (2009) Bryan Brown as the dying father of twin boys, of two girls, and two mysteries.
“The Man without a Past” (2002) worth saving, makes his way in the world without a name till his past says hello and he tells it goodbye.
“The Lincoln Lawyer” (2011) our first 2011 first-run DVD movie of the year with Matthew McConaughey as a lawyer whose client is guilty, but he must find a way to get him acquitted anyway. It’s innocent ones who go to jail who cause the most problems, and he also has one of those weighing on his conscience! He gets rescued in the end by Eddie and the Cruisers. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !
"Mademoiselle Chambon" (2009) is a slow, beautiful romance between a construction worker and a violin player who is also his son’s school teacher. Almost wordless romance which blossoms under his wife’s radar, but her pregnancy roils the waters. Can he leave her and his aging father for this will-o’-the-wisp which darts from place to place?


“The Brylcreem Boys” (1998) were British and German prisoners during WWII which were captured by neutral Ireland and kept till war’s end. Their friendship, competition, and animosity ebbed and flowed with reports from the war front and their girl friends, remote and local.

“The Adjustment Bureau” (2011) Philip K. Dick-inspired movie with Matt Damon playing a Kennedy-like Senator and President wannabe when something goes wrong and he gets on a bus because his watcher nodded off. Suddenly Matt is looking behind the curtain and seeing the Wizard pulling the strings! Movie glosses over the who-watches-the-watchers to keep them from making a mistake such as the one which was the seed of this movie. The Chairman likes people ready to sacrifice everything for love. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! !
“Sirens” (1993) A young Hugh Grant and Sam Neill are upstaged in this movie by the lively beautiful naked female models for the paintings Anglican priest Grant wants to stop artist Neill from exhibiting. Newly arrived from England in Australia, strange creatures and mores dazzle Grant and his staid wife.
“Sweet Dreams” (1985) for Patsy Cline are few and far between, but for three years her incredible singing style topped the charts of country and pop music. Take a trip into the past with the music of this movie. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !

“Last Chance Harvey” (2008) with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson is painful to watch: a father whose daughter refuses to let him give her away at the altar. Alone in London, job gone in NYC, no friends, only a Poll Take he snubbed at Heathrow. Not much of a chance left for Harvey. But things change. A DON’T MISS HIT! ! !

Misses (Avoid At All Costs): We attempted to watch these this month, but didn't make it all the way through on most of them. Awhile back when three AAAC horrors hit us in one night, I decided to add a sub-category to "Avoid at All Costs", namely, A DVD STOMPER. These are movies so bad, you don't want anyone else to get stuck watching them, so you want to stomp on the disks. That way, if everyone else who gets burnt by the movie does the same, soon no copies of the awful movie will be extant and the world will be better off.

“Frontier of Dawn” (2008) Photographer & actress fall in love and die trying to make it work, like Romeo and Juliet, Cleo and Marc.

“MacGruber” (2010) is a send up of special ops which falls flat with its crude humor and senseless jokes. Don’t let your friends watch this one, stomp first, ask questions later. Val Kilmer almost unrecognizable. A DVD STOMPER
“Let It Rain” (2008) and watch another movie while it does, not this one. Actually rained 6.54" inches in Gretna today, apropos. This dumb movie worse than the dumb documentary movie they were trying to shoot inside this movie.
“Surviving Crooked Lake” (2008) was almost as hard for the four teenage girls as it was for us surviving this lugubrious movie. Not one of the girls made a good decision and the guy who ran off into the woods in complete darkness after a girl who “wanted to be alone” was the worst decision anyone made. Let her run and she’d stay just out of sight of the campfire. Chase her and you’ll be dragged around in a sleeping bag for the rest of the movie!
“Twelve” (2010) was a Two, imminently forgettable dark script and choppy cutting back and forth in time.
“Happy Ever Afters” (2009) was lousy to begin with got worse in the middle when I hit the EJECT button and became happy ever after that decision. Not enough derogative adjectives in English to describe this turkey fully. Watch it yourself if you don’t believe me.

Your call on these — your taste in movies may differ, but I liked them:

“Point of No Return” (1993) Hollywood’s version of “La Femme Nikita” starring Bridget Fonda as the drug addict cop killer rehab’ed into a government assassin.
“Going the Distance” (2010) Drew Barrymore in a bi-coastal love affair which mostly goes nowhere — movie was like waiting in line at an airport. She looked too old for him which wasn’t in the script.
“Battlefield: Los Angeles” (2010) felt to me like an episode in the video game “Call to Duty” with its non-stop carnage and destruction. Shreveport, Louisiana must have took a deep breath of relief when this filming was completed!
“Paris” (2009) Juliette Binoche unable to save this love story to Paris from a slow death, but warm touching love and Parisian scenes at the end save it.

“The American” (2010) George Clooney as a loner again, taking his last assignment in Italy, where he has become a moving target of Swedes try to kill him, and the gun he is custom-designing may be intended for his own assassination. Slow movie with little dramatic impetus.
“The Return of Nanny McPhee” (2010) expresses my regret over not having returned the DVD without watching it. Kiddie fluff with dancing clouds and hyper-active curtain-climbers subdued by an ogre of a nanny. For the kiddies only, a Your Call.
“Case 39" (2009) Renée Zellweger stars in this tale of the power of fears which have not been traced away — you must face them again and again. No redeeming qualities in this one like in “The Green Mile” a similar supernatural tale.
“Hall Pass” (2011) in which Owen Wilson gets married and wonders why he feels trapped. Raised on sitcoms, he naturally has to ask his buddy for help and they both get a week off of marriage and a chance to discover the folly of their own immaturity and maybe grow up as a result.
“Washington Square” (1997) a Henry James novel set in the house we saw during our trip to NYC in the Washington Square area made into a movie about a wilful unhappy father who creates a wilful unhappy daughter. Ending sucks.
“Soul Kitchen” (2009) was dark, but full of verve and excitement to make it to satisfying movie about a Greek pair of brothers who needed to be in China and in jail, but somehow opened a great restaurant, then had it swindled away and can they get it back?

Crab, Crawfish, Avocado Salad

Background on Crab, Crawfish, Avocado Salad: Sometimes a recipe creates itself because of some ready ingredients on hand for a hungry Chef and his lady. This was one such recipe. We had just eaten a lot of freshly boiled crawfish the night before and had spent some time peeling the remaining crawfish for the fridge. The next evening I concocted this quick and easy salad for supper. The essential ingredient is the JUMBO Lump Crab Meat. The word jumbo in the title means you are getting the best select crabmeat in whole chunks, just as if you had peeled them by hand yourself. The Jumbo Lump costs almost twice as much as the Lump, but like it or lump it, you'll wish you had chosen the JUMBO.

Ingredients
8 oz JUMBO Lump Blue Crab
1 ripe Avocado
2 dozen or so boiled crawfish (See Photo)

 Preparation
Peel the crawfish, eating and leaving about two dozen tails. Open the jumbo lump crabmeat container and separate the crabmeat, feeling for any pieces of shell and remove them.

Cooking Instructions
Do not peel the avocado, rather slice it in two and remove seed. Then slice into chunks using a round-tipped knife or slicer as shown here under Cooking Instructions.

Add the avocado first then the crabmeat and top with the crawfish tails.

The seasoning in the crawfish will lightly season the rest of the ingredients of the salad, so taste before adding any salt, pepper, etc. Do not add any salad dressing or other condiments except as an experiment.

Serving Suggestion
This recipe will serve two people and makes a nice tasty summer lunch or pre-meal salad.

Other options
Regular lump crabmeat may be substituted for the Jumbo Lump but you will notice that the large pieces of crabmeat makes the extra cost for Jumbo Lump well worth it!

And for my Good Readers, here’s the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Reader’s Treasury. NOTE: these Blurbs are condensations of the Full Reviews sans footnotes and many quoted passages.

1.) ARJ2: The Awakening — An 1899 Novel by Kate Chopin

One hundred years after this novel was published, I received a copy of it and began reading it, but I made it only halfway through and lost track of it. On a peaceful July weekend, it seemed a good time to read it, and I read it all the way through this time. The novel starts during a summer vacation on Grand Isle, about a hundred miles drive south of where I am sitting as I write these words.

The heroine is Edna Pontellier who spent a lot of the summer with Robert Lebrun who preferred her company to that of a game of billiards with her husband Léonce at the Klein Hotel. In a short couple of paragraphs we get a precis of the Pontellier's relationship. Edna was treated as property by her husband, but she acted as a free spirit whose heart is her own property, much as the rings she placed in his keeping while she was walking on the beach.

[page 21] Mr. Pontellier finally lit a cigar and began to smoke, letting the paper drag idly from his hand. He fixed his gaze upon a white sunshade that was advancing at snail's pace from the beach. He could see it plainly between the gaunt trunks of the water-oaks and across the stretch of yellow camomile. The gulf looked far away, melting hazily into the blue of the horizon. The sunshade continued to approach slowly. Beneath its pink-lined shelter were his wife, Mrs. Pontellier, and young Robert Lebrun. When they reached the cottage, the two seated themselves with some appearance of fatigue upon the upper step of the porch, facing each other, each leaning against a supporting post.

      "What folly! to bathe at such an hour in such heat!" exclaimed Mr. Pontellier. He himself had taken a plunge at daylight. That was why the morning seemed long to him.
      "You are burnt beyond recognition," he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers. He sent back an answering smile.

Thus, it was not surprising when Robert decided to forgo Léonce's game of billiards to enjoy more of Edna's company.

[page 21] "Come go along, Lebrun," he proposed to Robert. But Robert admitted quite frankly that he preferred to stay where he was and talk to Mrs. Pontellier.
      "Well, send him about his business when he bores you, Edna," instructed her husband as he prepared to leave.
      "Here, take the umbrella," she exclaimed, holding it out to him. He accepted the sunshade, and lifting it over his head descended the steps and walked away.
      "Coming back to dinner?" his wife called after him. He halted a moment and shrugged his shoulders. He felt in his vest pocket; there was a ten-dollar bill there. He did not know; perhaps he would return for the early dinner and perhaps he would not. It all depended upon the company which he found over at Klein's and the size of "the game." He did not say this, but she understood it, and laughed, nodding good-by to him.
      Both children wanted to follow their father when they saw him starting out. He kissed them and promised to bring them back bonbons and peanuts.

Early in the novel, we see a marriage drawn and quartered, dissected by Kate Chopin’s delicate scalpel. Already we have the feeling of a Victorian marriage in decay and a love affair in bloom between Edna and Robert under the blasé eyes of her business-minded husband who trusted that the mores of the time would keep Edna within the pumpkin shell of her marriage. The next morning Léonce gave Edna half the money he had won the night before at the Klein Hotel and then eagerly left for his business on Carondelet Street in downtown New Orleans. When a box of sweets and patés later arrived on the island from her husband, the ladies with whom she generously shared them declared her husband to be to the best in the world, and Edna had to agree she knew of none better. But Edna did not fit in with the other women with children there.

[page 26] In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands and esteem it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

Robert was twenty-six years old and had since his fifteenth birthday attached himself during summers at Grand Isle to some fair lady, a young girl, a widow, or perhaps an interesting married woman like Edna. Edna was turning into an adult at the age of twenty-eight and began to realize it. I recall when Dr. Zurik, who was going to take my tonsils out when I was twenty-nine, told me, "You know this will be a serious operation. You're not a child anymore; you're an adult." It was a simple statement, but it made me realize, made me feel as a reality, for the first time, that I had become an adult. When Edna declined the offer to go to the beach with Robert, and then later accepted, she came to such a realization herself.

[page 31, 32] In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. They may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight — perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.
      But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
      The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
      The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

The voice of Kate Chopin enfolds us, the reader, into its soft, close embrace. Her voice reaches across three centuries with the vibrancy and timbre of a modern voice to touch our soul. Her voice sits lightly on our soul like "the night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep." (Page 46)

She learnt to swim for the first time after years of simply splashing about in the Gulf waters. Becoming an individual, learning to swim, she was setting out from land on her own this summer, leaving people behind her on the shore.

[page 47] Once she turned and looked toward the shore, toward the people she had left there. She had not gone any great distance — that is, what would have been a great distance for an experienced swimmer. But to her unaccustomed vision the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome.

Upon her return to their home on Esplanade in New Orleans at the end of the summer, we observe Mr. Pontellier and are able to deduce his relationship to Edna from this description of how he felt about his house.

[page 71] Mr. Pontellier was very fond of walking about his house examining the various appointments and details, to see that nothing was amiss. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain — no matter what — after he had bought it and placed it among his household goods.

Clearly, Edna was one of his household goods, and Léonce, outside of marriage obligations, never penetrated any further into Edna than into one of his delicate statuettes. If she were shiny and pretty on the outside, he was pleased. When he made a fuss over Edna's not remembering the callers of one afternoon, he was not at all interested in Edna's reasons, but rather in how her actions would upset the wives of his business contacts. He admonished her, "But it's just such seeming trifles that we've got to take seriously; such things count." They were actual trifles to Edna, but he didn't seem to notice or care. His statuette was out of place and needed to be set aright.

Robert had left to find his fortune in Mexico and remove himself from the temptation, the forbidden fruit which Edna represented to him. Edna thought of him constantly.

[page 75] As Edna walked along the street she was thinking of Robert. She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

Finally Léonce noticed his statuette was out of place a lot, and consulted his doctor, asking his help to fix the problem, as if it were some faulty carriage wheel and he were a blacksmith. But the doctor was helpless to fix a wheel which was rolling just fine on its own, only not where Léonce thought it should be going. Her sister's wedding in Kentucky was such a place he wanted her to roll to, but she resisted. When her father, a Colonel in the Confederate Army, visited them in New Orleans, he told stories to her and the doctor who was visiting and that allowed the doctor to tell stories about a deviant woman who returned to her homely ways after her escapades were done.

[page 92] The story did not seem especially to impress Edna. She had one of her own to tell, of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. They were lost amid the Baratarian Islands, and no one ever heard of them or found a trace of them from that day to this. It was pure invention. She said that Madame Antoine had related it to her. But every glowing word seem real to those who listened.

She and Robert had rowed in a pirogue at Grand Isle one summer night, and her fancy had elaborated that incident into the dream reality she earnestly desired.

Mr. Pontellier left for the Kentucky wedding followed by a long business stay in New York and Edna was left alone, her two children placed in the arms of her mother-in-law in Iberville.

She spent time with Alcée Arobin, the man her doctor hoped she would avoid, long drives, days at the races, as he tried unsuccessfully to woo Edna. She found a room of her own, a small place to rent a few steps away from the family home, and made plans to install herself into the apartment before Léonce returned. She told him of her plans and he absolutely forbid her to do so, but his words bounced off of Edna as if she were actually a statuette. Robert came to town and he as much as confessed he'd loved and missed her while in Mexico, but he would not make a move on her. She planned a dinner for about twelve of her closest friends, not the afternoon tea ladies her husband had forced her to entertain, but real friends she had met in Grand Isle and in the French Quarter on her own. It was to be a sumptuous dinner, a last supper, full of golden and silver accouterments, and she would preside as the Queen.

[page 112] The golden shimmer of Edna's satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. it was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arm, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.

And, in the end, she stood alone on the beach at night in Grand Isle, naked to the world, and swam out to sea.

Read or Print the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/awakenig.htm

2.) ARJ2: The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

Another serial murder mystery by a Scandinavian author, this time a Norwegian, and Detective Harry Hole takes us through a labyrinth of Norse names and Oslo places before this 454 page novel winds to a climactic end. Actually I counted about four climaxes before the final one. There's no Girl with a Dragon Tattoo in this one, no journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and no Stieg Larsson stringing out the plot and fleshing out the characters, but there is a detective Harry Hole known for being the only Norwegian who worked on a serial murder case, and there is the most unlikely object of horror, the eponymous Snowman, whose appearance after a snowfall presages the downfall of another innocent victim. If you've read or seen any of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and enjoyed them, you will be delighted to find Jo Nesbø, unlike Larsson, is still alive and kicking out marvelous mystery novels, like The Snowman, the one Sara saw when she looked out the window of her bedroom.

[page 6] Sara pulled herself up onto her knees. Got up and looked into the garden. And there, there was the face.
      She laughed out loud with relief. The face was white, with eyes and a mouth made with black pebbles, probably from the drive. And arms made from twigs off the apple trees.
      "Heavens," she gasped. "It's only a snowman."

"Only a snowman" — those words will never be repeated again in the course of and the curses of this novel.

Luckily no children will read this novel because the ubiquitous snowman who appears after the first snowfall would soon become only a distant memory as no kid would want to build one. Besides that, did you perhaps notice that the snowman in the passage above was looking towards the house? Snowmen, respectful snowmen, never do that, like people at the beach who always face the ocean, snowmen always face the street. Ten-year-old Jonas asked his mother why the snowman didn't face the street after insisting that he didn't make it.

[page 24, 25] The snow in the garden reflected enough light for him to make out the snowman down below. It looked alone. Someone should have given it a cap and scarf. And maybe a broomstick to hold. At that moment the moon slid from behind a cloud. The black row of teeth came into view. And the eyes. Jonas automatically sucked in his breath and recoiled two steps. The pebble-eyes were gleaming. And they were not staring into the house. They were looking up. Up here. Jonas drew the curtains and crept back into bed.

Enough about the snowman, let's take a look at one of the candidates for the snowman maker as Hole prompts Arve Støp to explain how Norway views the USA and President Bush.

[page 15] "Why do you think Norwegians are so skeptical about George Bush, Arve Støp?"
      "Because we're an overprotected nation which has never fought in any wars. We've been happy to let others do it for us: England, the Soviet Union and America. Yes, ever since the Napoleonic Wars we've hidden behind the backs of our elder brothers. Norway has based its security on others taking the responsibility when things get tough. That's been going on for so long that we've lost our sense of reality and we believe that the earth is basically populated by people who wish us the world's richest country — well. Norway, a gibbering, pea-brained blonde who gets lost in a back street in the Bronx and is now indignant that her bodyguard is so brutal with muggers!

Do girls make snowmen? This novel will tease you about this possibility before you reach the end of this book. One candidate is a detective, Katrine Bratt, sans tattoo, but with many of the other qualities of dragon-draped Lisbet Salander(1), including carefully assisting as Hole works. The names of many of the characters are insightful as they reach us in English: Harry Hole is an asshole — as are most detectives, Arve Støp can stop his presses, Magnus Skarre may be a big scary, Filip Becker a trifle flip, Katrine a brat, Gert "Iron" Rafto as stiff as a steel roof girder. And so on. Don't let the Norse names stop you from enjoying this novel, just have fun with them, try discovering hidden meanings, there are some.

Hole drives up to Hoff to where Birte Becker has disappeared and the pink scarf Jonah had given his mother was decorating the snowman looking at the house. There he meets the husband, Filip Becker.

[page 40] Harry nodded slowly. "Would you mind if I had a look around the house?'
      "Why's that?'
      There was a brusqueness to Filip Becker's question that made Harry think he was a man who was used to being in control. To being kept informed. And that argued against his wife having left without a word. Which, for that matter, Harry had already excluded in his mind. Well-adjusted, healthy mothers do not abandon ten-year-old sons in the middle of the night. And then there was all the rest. Usually they used minimal resources at such an early stage of a missing persons case, unless there were indications which suggested something criminal or dramatic. It was "all the rest" that had made him drive up to Hoff himself.
      "Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you find it; Harry answered. "It's a methodology."
      He caught Becker's eyes behind the glasses now. They were, unlike his son's, light blue and shone with an intense, clear gleam.
      "By all means," Becker said. "Go ahead."

Harry Hole has made a methodology of the insight I had when I wrote my second Matherne's Rule some thirty years ago, "You never know until you find out." Importunate people who usually do not have a clue as to how the mind of an innovative thinker works expect one to explain how and why one is approaching a difficult task in a certain way, but often the only way one can discover the answer to some puzzle is go outside the nine dots of the un-creative person's mind. So the un-creative interrupts the creative to ask how and why something is being done, instead using their own God-given mind to help solve the problem themselves.

As Mikael Blomkvist showed, detecting is not the exclusive domain of Detectives. But Hole is of another order of detective, a combination of the best detecting qualities of the genre from Sherlock to Colombo, and thus he punched in the head of the snowman in Jonah's yard and pulled out his mother's cell phone. The snowman maker had left behind her scarf and her cell phone. But Hole knew finding Birte's Nokia was not a triumph, only a short scene in a puppet show where the snowman maker was pulling the strings. Apparently the snowman maker was also writing the script, as this cryptic message had appeared in Hole's pigeonhole.

If there were any doubts that the eponymous Snowman was playing with Hole, this letter seems to have removed them.

[page 72] "There's one more thing," Harry said, reaching out to switch on the overhead projector between the piles of paper on his desk. Magnus Skarre cursed and shielded his eyes as blurred writing suddenly appeared on his face. He moved, and Harry's voice came from behind the projector.
      "This letter landed in my mailbox exactly two months ago. No address, postmarked Oslo. Produced on a standard inkjet printer."
      Before Harry could ask, Katrine Bratt had pressed the light switch by the door, plunging the room into darkness. A square of light loomed up on the white wall.
      They read in silence.

Soon the first snow will come.
And then he will appear again.
The snowman.

And when the snow has gone,
he will have taken someone else.

What you should ask yourself is this:
Who made the snowman?
Who makes snowmen?
Who gave birth to the Murri?

For the snowman doesn't know."

How do we now know that the Snowman is after Harry Hole? Because the Murri was a serial killer that Harry tracked down.

[page 72] "The Murri was the nickname of a person who is now dead," Harry said from out of the darkness. "A murri is an Aborigine from Queensland in Australia. While this murri was alive he killed women all over Australia. No one knows for certain how many. His real name was Robin Toowoomba."
      The fan whirred and buzzed.
      "Serial killer," said Bjørn Holm. "The one you killed."
      Harry nodded.

As Sherlock liked to say at this point in his detecting, "The game is afoot!" Later when Harry calls a clinic to ask about a disease the doctor specializes in, the woman who answers the phone has never heard of the disease. That makes Idar Vetlesen the prime suspect as the Snowman. His hobby? Curling. Played on ice, pushing an object which might resemble the head of a snowman around. By this time, several heads of snowmen have rolled, including one with a cell phone inside and another with the skull of a dead woman inside.

Harry gets another clue when the specialty kono paper on which the above letter was printed is traced to Rafto who stole items from victims whose deaths he investigated. One day he swapped a silver penholder he had pilfered for the rest of the kono paper that a store had in stock. Iron Rafto would have become a suspect if he had not been already found, stiff as a you know what.

Below Harry reveals his methodology of detective work in another application of "you never know until you find out":

[page 179] "There's a cellar, too," Katrine said, pointing to a trapdoor in the floor. "This is your area. What do we do now?"
      "We search," Harry said.
      "What for?"
      "That's the last of our thoughts."
      "Why?"
      "Because it's easy to miss something important if you're searching for something else. Clear your mind. You'll know what you're searching for when you see it."

Harry is a vast Hole of information which he delights in sharing, such as when he tell Katrine that boxers have been monitored during a match and they have found that they are often knocked unconscious for a short period of time and their body remains standing as if it knew what to do while waiting for consciousness to return. One of my favorite pieces was about the origin of the word "deadline" — as deadlines are something any writer is familiar with — the essence of motivation. Turns out it is a metaphor which had its origin in reality during a deadly war, one he calls a "Civil War".

[page 193] Harry had read the word deadline originated from the battlefields of the American Civil War when, for lack of anything material to lock prisoners behind, they were gathered together and a line was drawn around them in the dirt. Which became known as the dead line, and anyone who strayed beyond it was shot. And that was precisely what they were, the news warriors down there in the foyer: prisoners of war restrained by a deadline.

Humorous, also, was Harry, but often his humorous commands were so funny that he had to repeat the command directly to get action. "We haven't got much to work on. We can sit here and drink coffee and scratch our stupid heads. Or we can go home and return tomorrow with the same stupid, but not quite so exhausted, heads tomorrow." When his team just stared at Harry, he had to tell them, "I'm not joking. Get the hell home." (Page 195)

Harry was also industrious and daring. When one of the Snowman suspects apparently commits suicide, Harry injects himself with a saline solution to find out how long it took the suicide to do it and found that it took longer to inject it than the deadly solution took to incapacitate the victim. Therefore, no suicide. Don't recall Colombo ever using himself as a laboratory animal for an experiment. Sherlock with his cocaine, perhaps.

Clearly printing presses got their name from the ink they press into paper, but Arve Støp has another idea in mind, a characteristic of modern day presses, the ones where the reporter never sees his words pressed into paper, but where his metier is extracting useful data from oft times reluctant informers. Harry asks Arve a question and gets no answer.

[page 227] "I can easily register that you refused to answer the questions, Støp."
      Støp raised his glass in toast. "A familiar countermove, Hole. One which we press people use every single day. Hence the name. Press. People."

A migration of metaphor from referring to machines which press words into paper is morphed into people pressing other people for the words to be printed on paper. And now, the printing is no longer in paper form so much as in pixel form, and when on paper, sprayed as toner or ink instead of pressed into the paper. So Arve Støp may have it right for this new millennium, the only printing press left is the pressing for information.

As the plot turns into the home stretch, Harry Hole has knocked down several strawmen, er, snowmen, potential Snowman candidates, when he recalls what the guy in blue jumpsuit who had arrived in the first of the book to tear away his walls told him. He had cut himself during work on them and had to turn one board around because blood can't be removed from an untreated piece of wood and the only alternate would have been to paint the entire wall red. Once more the game was afoot and a visit to a certain barn reveals an important clue. "Blood? She was trying to hide blood with blood?" (Page 370) Layer by layer the intricate plot begins to unravel itself before our eyes and reveal the true Snowman as Harry rushes to save his best girl's life before she melts the last snowman. No one wants to Be Negative as the rush to complete this novel ensues. Harry admits, when asked, "What's going on?" that there are two answers to that question, "One is that we're closing in on the Snowman." and Two, "I don't know." And you, Dear Reader, will likely not know until the Snowman begins the tale of his relationship with a snowman which began him on this lifelong path of vengeance.

This novel is a book gripper, so if you're reading on a Kindle, be careful not to break the delicate screen. Don't start it unless you have a day or two ahead with nothing planned. I would not want an air traffic controller to start this book one night before going to work on the graveyard shift and not be able to think of anything but whether the latest strawman is the Snowman. Or whether Harry is going down the hole as a scapegoat on this escapade. Or whether Rakel, his main squeeze, will survive her turn on the E-Ticket Snowman Ride. It's all in here. Don't do as I did with Stieg Larsson's book and wait for the movie. This book is by far more interesting and more fun than any movie. And its movie, when it inevitably arrives, will be more interesting if you have first suffered through the enjoyment of the book.

~^~

---------------------------- Footnotes -----------------------------------------

Footnote 1.

1. Eponymous heroine of The Girl series: With the Dragon Tattoo, Who Played with Fire, Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I only watched the movies in Swedish of the first two novels, but read the third one before watching its movie. If you prefer a watered-down Hollywood version, the Millennium Trilogy will becoming to a theater near you soon in English.

Return to text directly before Footnote 1.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read or Print the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/snowman.htm

3.) ARJ2: Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine, GA#312, Lectures 1&2 by Rudolf Steiner

In Steven Johnson's Foreword, he focuses on the inseparability of spirit, soul, and body and poses the very good question, "How does the treatment itself affect the whole human being, including that human being's context (age, biography, personal relationships)(1), of which the presenting symptom is only a part?" (Page xxxii) If we only examine the physical portion of a human body, it is as if the body is an oboe and we are tuning up the oboe to improve its performance, ignoring the fact that it is the oboe player who is suffering — the oboe player representing the relationship to the oboe similar to which the spirit and soul bears to the body of a patient who is ill.

[page xxxii] Physicians are often amazed and confused by the fact that the patient's receptiveness to a medicine seems to influence the response to treatment — hence the whole vexing issue of the placebo effect. At the same time, outcome-based research is today validating many of the "alternative" therapies that have their origins in spiritually-based methods of healing. Nevertheless, the "active ingredients" of such therapies elude current research techniques. New thinking is needed to understand life as it really is, the interrelated whole, in which the spirit and matter interplay with each other like the instruments of a symphony orchestra.

What attracted me initially to Rudolf Steiner's writings was his usage of modern, scientific terms to describe the spiritual realities of the world in place of the long, polysyllabic and unpronounceable Theosophical names. In his work on medicine, he likewise brought his spiritual insights into a form which can be understood by Western physicians who are curious about the spiritual underpinnings of their life's work.

[page xxxiii] In many instances, Anthroposophy helps to bridge the gap between Eastern spirituality and Western consciousness by translating the language of those traditions for practitioners educated within the context of materialistic thought.

Materialistic thought for doctors means their grounding in anatomy, physiology, and general biology which focuses only upon the physical body of the human being. It is not surprising that such a methodology would create medical doctors who refer to patients by their case number or room number instead of their name. Room and case numbers do not have biography and personal relationships, only individuals do, and their name is an essential part of who they are and how they relate to the world. Doctor John today might order a battery of tests on Case No. 17, analyze the results, and enter the woman's hospital room, and instead of asking a question about her health, he tells her what he thinks needs to be done according to her objective test results. This usage of the word objective completely neglects the spiritual and soul qualities of the patient's life. A true medicine will include the spiritual and soul components as part of its assessment of objective reality. Thus Steiner begins with a discussion of the obstacles conventional medicine creates to a truly objective assessment of reality.

[page 1,2] First of all, I will give you a few indications of the obstacles that the modern, conventional study of medicine presents to a truly objective grasp of the nature of illness as such. Second, I will indicate where we must look in our search for an understanding of the human being that is capable of providing a true foundation for work in the field of medicine. Third, I will use an understanding of human connections to the rest of the world to suggest the possibilities of a rational system of healing. in this third section, I will answer the question of whether healing is altogether possible and conceivable.

The fourth and final item was one which every experienced lecturer does best to ask for: a list of questions which the members of the audience would like answered during the course of the lectures. Thus he laid out his plans for this series of lectures in medicine and established the foundation upon which Anthroposophical Medicine was born.

I recall, some thirty plus years ago, before I found Rudolf Steiner, that I read a book on homeopathy in which various tinctures, herbs, and substances could be used to heal people. The list of substances was extensive, but what they could be used to heal also formed a huge list and the items in the two lists overlapped! The same substance could be used for hundreds of illnesses or physical problems, and dozens of substances could be used for one problem! How could anyone ever make sense of such complexity, I wondered. And continued to wonder for 4 decades until I read this book. In it Steiner explains that one starts not with a problem, not with a substance, but with a human being — a full human being in every sense of spirit, soul, and body which is what the root word anthropos means. The word anthropos when sophy is added onto it forms the word anthroposophy and that is Steiner's word for his field of expertise: what it means to be a full human being! Anyone who comes to Steiner expecting something less than learning about what it means to be a full human being will leave disappointed. Anyone who does expect learning about what it means to be a full human being, will find a lifetime endeavor ahead of them! An endeavor which will prepare them well for their many lifetimes to come.

Medical doctors today who take the Hippocratic Oath are rarely, if ever, told this essential truth about Hippocrates.

[page 3] To an unbiased student, Hippocrates' views — which, as you may already have noticed, continue to play a role right into the nineteenth century — constitute not only a new beginning but also, to a very significant extent, the end of ancient views on medicine. In what comes down to us from Hippocrates, we encounter the last filtered remnant, so to speak, of very ancient views on medicine that were acquired by means of atavistic clairvoyance rather than by taking the anatomical route, as is done today. The relative position of Hippocratic medicine might be characterized best by saying that it was the point in time when ancient medicine based on atavistic clairvoyance came to an end.

The end of ancient views on medicine means that modern physicians, those since the time of Hippocrates, treat the patient as a material object instead of full human being. Thus, their overweening concern with chemical tests, electronic monitoring, and various X-Ray imaging techniques. But even early Hippocratic physicians still sought the origin of diseases in the four humors of the body.

[page 3, 4] Speaking superficially — but only superficially — we can say that Hippocratic physicians sought the origin of all disease states in an imbalance among the fluid bodies that work together in the human organism. They pointed out that in a normal organism, these fluid bodies must stand in a definite relationship and that in a diseased body, their proportions deviate from the norm. Correct proportions were called crasis and incorrect proportions dyscrasy. Of course, these physicians looked for ways to influence the imbalance and reestablish the correct proportions. Four components in the outer world were seen as constituting all physical existence: earth, water, air, and fire (although fire was the same as what we now simply call warmth). As far as human and also animal bodies were concerned, these four elements were seen as being specialized into black gall, yellow gall, mucus, and blood. It was thought that the human organism needed the right mixture of blood, mucus, and black and yellow gall in order to function.

How do modern physicians and medical educators approach the humors? Chemically, basically.

[page 4] If modern, scientifically educated individuals approach a subject like this, their first thought is that when blood, mucus, and yellow and black gall mingle, they do so in accordance with intrinsic properties that can be determined by means of elementary or advanced chemistry. Seeing it in this light, people imagine this to be the origin of humoral pathology, as if the Hippocratic physicians had seen blood, mucus, and so on, only in this way. This was not the case, or rather, it was true of only one of these components, namely black gall, which seems most typically Hippocratic to modern observers. As far as black gall was concerned, Hippocratic physicians did indeed think that its ordinary chemical properties were the active factors.

These modern thinkers would be exactly in line with these ancient physicians, but only in the case of the black gall humor. The other three humors are affected by cosmic forces.

[page 4] They thought that these other fluid constituents of the human organism possessed certain intrinsic properties in the form of forces or energies lying outside our earthly existence. Thus, just as they saw water, air, and warmth as being dependent on the forces of the cosmos beyond Earth, they also saw these constituents of the human organism as being imbued with forces coming from outside the Earth.

Our modern doctors have blithely ignored the cosmic forces which affect water, e.g., and which enters the human body when water become part of the fluids of the body. They have no possibility of understanding the writings on medieval medicine because the clairvoyant information upon which these writings were based had died with Hippocrates. Steiner took it upon himself to help revive via his own clairvoyance and teach the principles upon which the physicians of Hippocrates time operated in the world. Those principles, not some cookbook approach to medicine, is what Steiner shared during these introductory lectures on the subject of medicine.

One of the first principles, which will be familiar to students of Steiner, is that two of the basic components of the human being are its physical body and etheric body. Paracelsus, a famous 16th Century physician, postulated the etheric body.

[page 6] The terms archeus as Paracelsus uses it and "human etheric body" as we use it actually sum up something that does indeed exist, but without tracing its actual origins. Doing so would oblige us to proceed as follows: we would have to say that the human being has both a physical organism, which consists essentially of forces that work out of the Earth, and an etheric organism, which consists essentially of forces that work out of the periphery of the cosmos.

With his insight, Paracelsus uncovered the cosmic aspects of the human being which had been forgotten since the time of Hippocrates. Paracelsus was the harbinger of the work that Johannes Müller, his famous pupil Ernst Haeckel, and later Rudolf Steiner would come to build upon.

A sea change came in medicine when in 1761 when autopsy became a definitive source of information about diseases. Even though the etheric body is gone during an autopsy, the effects on the organs of the body caused by the illness when the etheric body was present can be recorded. Autopsy, as it were, sounded the death knell for what remained of the ancient clairvoyance-based medicine and signaled the beginning of modern materialistic medicine.

[page 8] Only from this time onward can it be said that autopsy became definitive. It was possible to tell from the corpse that if a certain illness — regardless of what it was called — was present, a particular organ must have undergone a specific change. These changes began to be studied during postmortem examinations. This practice constitutes the actual beginnings of pathological anatomy, while everything that had previously existed in the field of medicine was based on certain persistent effects of ancient clairvoyance.

We know from Steiner's other works that every human being also has an astral body and an Ego or "I am" eternal spirit. Those will be involved with various aspects of illness, injury, and healing also, but the etheric body is the life body and its effects are most noticeable by doctors and other healers. If you injure yourself, e. g., by a bruise, the area of the bruise will hurt because the etheric body has been dislocated temporarily from the injured area. Healing by laying on hands, I suspect, works because the etheric body of the healer flows into the injured space to supplant the missing etheric body and promote quicker healing of the area. It also reduces the pain immediately as shown by the success of the well known “Let Mother kiss it better” technique.

Steiner closes out the first lecture by saying, "the important point for today is to show that medicine must once again turn its attention to something that cannot be accomplished through either chemistry or conventional comparative anatomy, something that can be achieved only if we move on to consider the facts from a spiritual-scientific viewpoint . . . what is most needed is a spiritual recognition of the healing value that may be present in a material remedy." (Page 17)

Every new set of Steiner lectures I read — I have read over 191 books of his lectures — contains new and mind-boggling concepts that I either had not heard of before or contains fuller explanations of something which he had only hinted at earlier. The "heart is not a pump" is of the latter type: I have read in several places of his explanation of how the heart works and I will explain to you my understanding as a way of setting the stage for the new revelations in this book. Anyone who has watched the throbbing bulb of the fetus in the place where the heart will eventually grow cannot explain how the heart could be a pump as there are no visible pumping mechanism in operation(2).

Truly one is witnessing the circulation of the blood (which is primary) causing the tiny hydraulic ram in the tiny bulbous heart (whose beating is secondary, caused by the circulating blood pushing the valves). What is the function of the valves which act as hydraulic rams? To create vortices which intermix the blood from the lungs carrying oxygen with the blood from the intestines carrying nutrients from the digestive system. Rightly understood, the pulsing of the blood is not due to the pumping action of the heart, but it is absolutely necessary to ensure that the key ingredients of life: Oxygen and Nutrients are completely mixed together in the blood before it continues on its circulatory path to the cells of the body! The heart is not a fuel pump, to use an automobile metaphor, but it is rather a carburetor. What does the carburetor do? Its job is to get a balanced mixture of oxygen and gasoline to the spark plugs to ensure that the internal combustion proceeds smoothly. Too much oxygen, the fuel mixture does not ignite. Too much gasoline and the engine floods and won't run. An automobile requires two things to run: Fuel and Spark. Every mechanic knows that. But unless the fuel is the proper mixture, which the carburetor ensures, the engine will misfire or not fire at all, or will run very sluggish with very little power. Does that sound to you like someone with a "bad heart"? It should, because, rightly understood, the heart is the carburetor for the human body. It is not a mechanical pump(3).

[page 19, 20] If we take cardiology as our starting point today, however, the connection between knowledge of the human being and the needs of medicine becomes especially difficult. I could say that something present as a mere potential in the study of bones and muscles has emerged fully in the view that has developed with regard to cardiology. (Let us restrict ourselves to the heart for the time being.) And what is the general view of the human heart? It is seen as a pump of sorts, pumping the blood into the various organs. All kinds of interesting mechanical constructions have been invented in the attempt to explain the heart as a pumping machine. In reality, these mechanical constructions completely contradict embryology, but people have not been attentive enough to really question this mechanical theory of the heart, so it has not been tested, or at least not in the generally accepted scientific way. I will first sketch the situation for you, and what I present in the next few days will confirm, bit by bit, what I can initially present only as a point of view. The main thing to consider in looking at the heart is that the heart absolutely is not, and cannot be, a so-called active organ. The activity of the heart is not a cause; it is a consequence.

Steiner tells us the respiratory processes and the metabolic processes are "thirsting" for each other and this thirsting is satisfied during the flow of the blood through the lungs. (Page 20) But along the way, a pulsation is set up by the interruption of the blood flow long enough (i.e. during one heart beat) to ensure a complete mixing of the two disparate blood flows, one from the lungs (air) and the other from the digestion (nutrients).

Steiner quotes an Austrian physician, Dr. Karl Schmidt, who wrote in his article "Pulse Curves and the Beating of the Heart" that "the beating motion of the heart resembles the action of a hydraulic ram which is flow-activated." (Page 21)

What does all this mean? One might ask.

[page 21, italics added] When we see all cardiac function as the consequence of these interpenetrating flows (as I can now symbolically term them) of fluid and of gas, we are still viewing matters only on the mechanical level. But ultimately, what is the heart? It is a sense organ. And ultimately, even if we are not directly conscious of the heart's sensory function, even though this is one of our subconscious sensory activities, the heart nonetheless exists so that our upper activities may sense and perceive our lower activities. Just as you perceive color processes in the environment with your eyes, you also perceive with your heart, although in the dimness of the subconscious. You perceive what is taking place in the lower part of your body. Ultimately, the heart is an organ of inner perception, and it must be addressed as such.

What are our upper activities and our lower activities? If we imagine the human body with a line drawn through the heart, the upper activities are divided from the lower activities and the heart is the sense organ which provides feedback and coordination between the two activities of respiration/sensory-neural and digestion/nourishment/metabolism. He says, "The balancing of nourishment with respiration takes place through our rhythmical activity, the significance of which we will still have to discuss." (Page 22)

How is the heart a sense organ? Good question.

[page 22] Essentially, the heart is the organ whose perceptible movement expresses the balance between these upper and lower poles. On a psychological — or perhaps it would be better to say sub-psychological — level, the heart acts as the organ of perception that mediates between these two poles of the human organization. You will see that only this principle, if kept in mind while studying everything that anatomy, physiology, and biology have to offer, is capable of shedding light on the human organization. As long as you do not differentiate between these upper and lower poles with the heart mediating between them, you will be unable to understand the human being, because there is a fundamental difference between all of the lower organizational activity of the human being and the activity of the upper organization.

As Above, so Below is a famous dictum of spirituality and we can see its process in the way the Above region has a counterpart in the Below region. Basically, this means if something is wrong in the sensory-neural realm (Above region), we could expect to find something amiss in the metabolic realm (Below region) and vice versa. The dividing line I mentioned earlier does not actually go through the heart, but rather, the two regions are separated in space by the diaphragm which facilitates our breathing. The organs of the lower region, the spleen, pancreas, kidneys, liver, and the intestines are separated from the upper region by the breathing diaphragm. Any excess activity in the upper region of an individual can show up somewhere in the lower region as an abnormality in one of the organs located below the diaphragm. Any abnormality in the lower region can show up as an abnormality in the area above the diaphragm. A physician who understands this relationship can make a change in one region to fix problems in its polar region.

This relationship will not be discovered by the tools of the materialist scientist because there is no transfer of material substance only a polar relationship.

[page 22, 23] Everything taking place down below has its negative image or counterpart up above. We can always find a corresponding image in the lower region for everything that is involved in the upper region. The most significant point here, however, is that there is no material transfer of substance between the upper and the lower, but only a correspondence. We must always understand how to relate something from down below to something else up above, without insisting on a material transfer. Let us take a very simple example — the cough reflex and actual coughing — in the context of what is up above, or to the extent that these things belong up above. Their counterpart down below is diarrhea. We will always find that anything in the upper region has its counterpart below. We understand the human being correctly only when we are able to grasp these correspondence correctly, and we will encounter many of them in this lecture course.

I hinted at how these polar attributes can lead to disease and here's how Steiner describes the situation. If you know anyone who is a hard working thinker who suddenly develops problems in the polar region of their body, this is a sure sign of this connection and an adjustment to the worker's habits may be called for or evolve through some exigency connected with their problem. I knew a young man whose severe kidney stones forced him to retire and he has had no problems with his kidneys since then. As Steiner avers, "These are more than just abstract correspondences."

[page 23] At the same time, in any healthy organism, an intimate association is taking place between the upper and the lower. In a healthy organism, this association of pairs is such that any particular upper-body function — perhaps a respiration-related activity or one related to the sensory-neural apparatus — must overcome another activity down below and run its course in complete harmony with this lower counterpart. An irregularity immediately occurs in the organism if a process from below somehow gains ascendancy or precedence so that it is far too strong for its corresponding activity above, or vice versa. (Later, this will lead us to a true understanding of the disease process.) Upper functions must always correspond to lower ones in a specific way — overcoming each other, taking place in ways that reflect their orientation toward each other, as it were. This orientation is very specific and is individually different in each person, but in every case there is a very specific correspondence between how upper processes and lower processes run their course.

As humans we strive to remain balanced, but sometimes one of our realms may veer off-course and an imbalance begins to reveal itself, a dis-ease or ill-ness appears first in the etheric body. For practical purposes, one can simply ask the patient about the first signs of their ill-ness, as that will reveal the source of the dis-ease. Steiner gives us an example of where the lower region is over strong, which can result in a problem in the upper region.

[page 23, 24] Let us assume that down below, in food intake and in the digestive system in the broader sense, the inherent chemical and/or organic forces of the ingested food predominate. In a healthy organism, all of these forces that are active and inherent in the food itself, all the forces we study externally in the laboratory, have to be overcome by the upper element to such an extent that they become irrelevant to any internal activity of the organism. No outer chemistry or outer dynamics or the like continues to function. It is all completely overcome. It can happen, however, that the correspondence is not strong enough for the upper element to really grasp and pervade its lower counterpart completely. In a sense, the upper element cannot completely "cook" the lower or — as I might also put it — etherize it through and through, which would be a slightly more accurate description. In such a case, the process that predominates in the human organism really does not belong there. It is a process just like those taking place in the outer world, and it should not be taking place within the human organism.

As a cook, I know that food must be cooked thoroughly for it to be digested properly, and I make sure that happens. But if I get interrupted by a long phone call, I may run out of time, and the food will not get cooked long enough. The process which should have taken place in the outer world of my cooking pot must then take place inside the human eating it which may lead to a stomachache. This is a crude example of what Steiner said above about the etherization of the food being like an internal cooking which goes on.

He gives us the two polar opposites of hysteria (excessive independence of metabolic processes) and neurasthenia (debility of neural system, perhaps revealed by negative thinking). In hysteria we find metabolic (nutrient) processes driven too hard. In neurasthenia, we find the call on the upper organs so demanding that its forces do not reach into the lower flow of nutrients. Clearly the ability to understand these processes in the early stages before they reach detection by lab tests and procedures is important. And these aberrant processes will eventually reach that stage where even the most materialistic medical doctor will be able to point to the conclusive evidence, but the patient may be very sick or dead by that time.

[page 25] You can also see that it is more important — far more important, I might say — to study a syndrome's outer manifestations than to study defective organs postmortem. An autopsy of defective organs merely reveals consequences. The essential thing is to grasp the overall picture, the phenomenon of the illness, which in some way will always tend more in one direction or the other, toward neurasthenia or hysteria.

My first exposure to the abdominal diseases which result from hysteria came in a book by the famous Swedish doctor Axel Munthe(4) who strove to maintain a successful practice for the rich women in Paris for many years. These women were mildly hysterical, and they came to him on a regular basis complaining of abdominal pains. He diagnosed them as suffering from an inflammation of the appendix or appendicitis and gave them various medications to provide them relief. They each went away happy and returned in a week or so for a repetition of the examination, diagnosis, and a new prescription for relief. Then one year, a remarkable thing happened, a doctor in America was reported to be curing appendicitis by removing each patient's appendix. Voilà, no more appendicitis. But Dr. Munthe's ladies refused to allow him to take out their appendix and consequently stopped coming to his office for treatment. He became desperate because, as a young doctor, he had no large reserves of money to fall back on, and his primary source of income had dried up. He talked to his fellow doctors who revealed that they had similar problems and they had begun diagnosing their patients' identical symptoms as colitis. Dr. Munthe began doing the same and soon his waiting room was filled with eager ladies who left very pleased with a diagnosis of colitis and a prescription. And they returned on a regular basis as before.

The above anecdote is true and would be humorous but for an interesting fact. Colitis is rarely diagnosed these days, a hundred years after Munthe's Paris practice, but the exact same symptoms are presented to gastroenterologists and internists who diagnose it as irritable bowel syndrome and these patients make up a substantial source of their income.

[page 25] Similarly, in the other direction neurasthenia assumes an organic form in diseases of the throat and head. For the medicine of the future, it will be extremely important to study these "imprints" of what are initially functional/physical symptoms in neurasthenia and hysteria. The consequence of hysteria that has become organic, if I may put it this way, will be irregularities occurring anywhere in the digestive system or in abdominal processes in general. But what takes place in one such system of organs works back into the organism as a whole. We must not ignore the fact that irregularities occurring here work back on the entire organism.

There was a time in my life, in my middle twenties, when I went through both a mild hysteria and neurasthenia. As a result of the hysteria (I called it hypochondria back then), I was beset by amoebic dysentery caused by some tropical intestinal bug, Dr. Everett told me. It required me to submit stool specimens to confirm the disease and later ones to confirm its absence. I went through two courses of this disease in two years. There were the symptoms in the abdomen caused by some "excessive independence of my metabolic processes" as Steiner calls it on page 24. After that disease was over, I moved to neurasthenia with a series of throat infections leading me to have a tonsillectomy at age 29.

[page 25] In neurasthenia, we have an upper function that demands too much of the upper organs; as a result, something that should have been transmitted from above via the heart in order to take place down below instead takes place prematurely up above and reaches its conclusion there. The activity in question is not transmitted through the damming-up process in the heart and thus does not extend down into the lower flow, the flow of liquefied nutrients.

That was me at age 28 or so. My heart was blocking the transmission of my feelings to the lower organs causing the throat problem which resulted in the operation which seemed to solve the problem. What is interesting to me now is first to note how quickly I went from hysteria to neurasthenia, and what was going on inside of me mentally and emotionally at the time. The hysteria showed itself to me by my overweening concern with my health. The slightest thing could trigger some dreadful fright that I might be dying and soon I was back in Dr. Everett's office. He finally located the amoebic dysentery and I felt a relief at knowing what I had was curable. At one point, the repeated stool specimens caused me to begin describing to the kind old doctor what my stools looked like between specimens, and one day he told me, "You know, Bob, there is no silver standard in Paris for stool specimens." That droll statement caused me to smile and I think that helped to cure my hysteria and stop my constant worrying about my health(5). But soon my throat was sore all the time, almost as if an underlying condition had arisen that the hysteria had been masking.

This time, the crucial element of my healing actually came a few days before the operation when my surgeon, Dr. Zurik, looked at me and said, "This is a serious operation, Bob, you are an adult now." That statement hit me like a lightning bolt, "I am an adult!" No one had ever told me that before. It was if he had said, "Time to put away your childish things." Yes, childish things, like my hysteria and neurasthenia. And I did. The operation was a success and I recall vividly the recovery period when I arrived back in my home in Kenner, surviving on frequent chewing of Aspergum (aspirin laced gum) which was the only thing that seemed to relieve the pain in my throat. Barely functional, I was facing a severe hurricane Camille heading straight for us, which could overtop the Lake Pontchartrain levee a few miles north of our home. I was hauling food and furniture upstairs and making my four children ages 4 to 9 feel comfortable and safe. We survived the hurricane fine as it veered at the last moment to the Biloxi area, and a month later I took a job in California. I grew up a lot in those few years. I had indeed put away my childish things. And now for the first time, I can see the relationship between what was going on in my head to what was going on in my body.

This next passage could be titled, "Suppress Cough Suppressants", because Steiner leads us to understand the importance of the cough reflex as a corrective action taken by the body, which otherwise might run into physical ailments. This is the first time I've read anyone explaining the benefits of coughing, and yet, I've avoided cough medicines and suppressants ever since the events of my twenties (back in the 1960s). In addition, I have noticed in many movies when a person is under pressure, they break into a nervous cough. It is a real cough by their cough reflex designed to keep certain things getting in to skew either their upper or lower region. It is best not to suppress this balancing reflex of the body by artificial cough syrups and suppressants.

[page 28] When a person's lower organization is such that it cannot be controlled by the upper organization, the cough reflex is a healthy reaction on the part of the body, an attempt to prevent certain things from getting in. Simply preventing coughing by direct means under any and all circumstances may cause damage, because harmful factors will then be able to enter. The body coughs because in its present condition it cannot tolerate these harmful factors and wants to eliminate them. The cough reflex is just a sign of something happening in the organism that makes it necessary to prevent the entry of invaders that could otherwise easily gain access.

Night sweats, of which I have no personal experience, is a condition used by Steiner to explain the unconscious anabolic processes and conscious catabolic processes. It helps me to remember that catabolic processes are "destructive" processes because the root "cata" appears in cataclysm and catastrophe. Anabolic are building up processes, on the other hand. Night sweats provide an example to illustrate the polar processes.

[page 29] In order to do full justice to this subject, we must know a bit about the intimate connection between all excretory functions, including sweat formation, and the aspect of our nature that includes psychological and spiritual activity. Building-up processes, the vital anabolic processes, really constitute only a basis for the unconscious, while excretory processes, wherever they may take place, correspond to the awake and conscious activities of the ensouled organism. Our thinking, too, corresponds to the brain's excretory or catabolic processes rather than to its anabolic processes. Night sweats constitute an excretory process that normally ought to parallel an activity of the soul and spirit, but because the upper part of the body is not interacting with the lower in the right way, this process waits until night, when the organism is freed from activity of spirit and soul.

What did my bouts of amoebic dysentery and sore throats have in common? Were they perhaps my body's marshaling of its forces against some unseen and incipient disease? This thought never crossed my mind until I began reviewing the material on pages 30 and 31. First a little more background on me. My Aunt Carolyn, three years older than me, had tuberculosis. She was living with us at the time when I was a senior in high school. All members of our household had tests for TB which were negative. She entered the Dibert-Brown TB Clinic on Tulane and Claiborne and I visited her there a few times. She was released after a couple of years completely healed and has never had a recurrence of the disease. Neither have I ever been diagnosed with TB, but a curious thing happened about 16 years ago when I had a minor operation to seal up a small belly-button hernia. The X-Ray they took showed a small spot on my lungs and the specialist I went to explained that it was a very old TB scar. Somehow my body, without my knowing it, had healed itself of TB at some time in the past by inducing series of sore throats and coughing and following up those corrective actions with diarrhea from the dysentery. As improbable as all this seems, it matches the processes Steiner discusses on pages 30 and 31.

[page 30] The symptoms of an illness are united in a functional structure, a nonmaterial organization, as it were. In a certain sense, one symptom belongs with another. As a result, if other conditions in the organism ought to provoke some sort of reaction — let us stick to incipient tuberculosis here — but the organism itself does not have the strength to accomplish this, then the rational thing to do is to assist the reaction just at that point, causing one illness to follow on another. Ancient physicians stated this as an important rule in the education of physicians. They said that the danger in being a physician lies in being able to induce illness as well as drive it away. Physicians are able to induce illnesses to the same extent that they are able to cure them.   . . .     But these induced disease states are illnesses in their own right. And coughing, sore throat, chest pain, weight loss, night sweats — all of these are real symptoms of illness. It may be necessary to induce them, but they remain real symptoms nonetheless.

In my case, it seems that my body was able to induce these disease states to ward off the incipient tuberculosis, though I only recall sore throats out of the list of induced disease states. When I read the next paragraph, I noticed that the setting straight of the upset digestive process required the process of diarrhea, which is exactly what the dysentery caused me to have.

[page 30] Of course it is easy to realize that, having half cured a person — that is, having induced these symptoms — we cannot simply abandon the patient to his or her fate. At this point, the second part of the healing process must set in. We must take care not to stop with inducing reactions to ward off the disease; something must then ensue that cures these reactions and sets the whole organism back on the right track. We would have to ensure, for instance, that when coughing or a sore throat either develops naturally or is artificially induced as a defense against incipient tuberculosis, the digestive process, which in such cases always shows signs of constipation, is set straight. In one way or another, we will notice that this digestive process needs to be guided in the direction of an elimination process — diarrhea, for example. It is always necessary to allow diarrheal processes to follow coughing symptoms, sore throats, and the like. This points to the fact that a symptom appearing in the upper part of the body must not be seen in isolation.

What started out as a description of how our heart works as a carburetor and a sense organ has evolved into a deep understanding of the healing processes of the body by considering the upper and lower realms mediated by that marvelous sense organ, the heart. Compared to Steiner's knowledge, what cardiac specialists in modern hospitals know about the heart seem kindergartenish.

[pag 31] You see, once a real understanding of cardiac function enables us to grasp correspondences between the upper and lower parts of the human being, and once we also understand the first signs of disease on the functional or etheric level, as in neurasthenia and hysteria, we can then move on to an understanding of their imprints on the organic and physical level. By studying the outer manifestations of symptoms that belong together — including symptoms we ourselves have induced — we will discover how to guide the course of an illness in a certain direction, deflecting it to a greater or lesser extent in order to lead the entire process back toward health at the right moment.

Steiner closes Lecture 2 with a brief discussion of homeopathy. My earlier reading decades ago in non-anthroposophic literature was that in homeopathy, very diluted substances (which could be poisonous at stronger concentrations) were given to patients so that by causing the symptoms of the illness they have, could cause their body to get well, thus, the origin of the word, "homeo" meaning "similar". What I had assumed was that progressive dilutions would continually decrease the effect of the chemical, but I find now that my materialistic assumption from my chemistry lessons was wrong!

[page 32] If you call to mind the properties of any substance, the properties that make its effect apparent to us in any way, you have what is absorbed into the human being's lower functions once it has been overcome by the organism, as happens in digestion. It is also possible, however, to homeopathize substances (if I may put it like that), to eliminate the substance's internal cohesiveness. This happens when we dilute the substance in any way or prepare homeopathic doses. The resulting phenomenon has in no way been given due consideration by our modern science, and in any case people tend to consider everything abstractly.

But one cannot continue dilutions indefinitely; there is a rebound effect.

[page 33] No such activity ever vanishes into infinity. Instead, it goes only as far as the limits of a definite sphere and then snaps back on itself as if it were elastic. Admittedly, however, its qualitative aspect is then often different from the quality of the original outgoing force. Only rhythmical processes exist in the natural world. There are no processes that lose themselves in infinity; there are only processes that rebound on themselves in a rhythmic way.
      This is true of both quantitative and qualitative expansion. When you begin dividing a substance, it possesses certain properties from the outset. These properties do not decrease into infinity as you continue the divisions. Beyond a certain point, they swing back and turn into the opposite properties. This inner rhythm is also the basis of the contrast between our lower organization and our upper organization. Our upper organization is a homeopathizer. In a certain way, it immediately counteracts the ordinary digestive processes, forming their opposite, their negative image. It could be said that when homeopathic pharmacists produce their dilutions, they are really transforming properties that otherwise relate to the lower human organization into properties that then relate to the upper human organization.

This completes my review and study of the first two of the twenty lectures in this book. I have learned a lot about some of the mysteries of my own life that I didn't even consider to be mysteries or knowable. I have learned that my writing reviews of Steiner's lectures takes me into a deeper understanding of his spiritual science than I could receive on a first reading. I look forward to sharing with you my study of the rest of the lectures in the coming months, and will publish these in multiple reviews as I progress through the rest of book.

~^~ Links to Future Lectures of Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine, GA#312
Will Be Added Below as They are Published to the Website

To Read a Review of Specific Lecture, Click Below.

Lectures in Dornach, March 21, 22 of 1920:       Lectures 1 and 2
Lectures in Dornach, March 23 to 27 of 1920:       Lectures 3 to 7

---------------------------- Footnotes -----------------------------------------

Footnote 1. For those who write for help with using the doyletics memory procedure, I created a short questionnaire for them to use: "Send this information — Name, Location in the world, Age, Sex, Marital Status, Children, Occupation, and Current Challenges in your life." This allows them to shed light on who they are as a human being rather than focusing on one presenting problem.

Return to text directly before Footnote 1.

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Footnote 2. With modern technology I was able to witness a short video of the throbbing bulb of a live fetus. One can only wonder how Steiner witnessed this in his lifetime a hundred years ago.

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Footnote 3. Granted, ingenious engineers, by pretending the heart is a pump, have created mechanical devices which by a pumping action can cause the mixing of oxygen and nutrients to occur for a certain period of time, but it is not an efficient or long-term replacement for the human heart so far as I know. Mechanical devices lack the amazing sensing mechanisms of the heart and a replacement human heart will out perform any mechanical heart in the long run.

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Footnote 4. As described in his famous book, The Story of San Michele.

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Footnote 5. Another droll comment from Dr. Peter Everett’s dry wit came after I had noticed him commenting on my low blood pressure every time he removed the strap from my arm. I grew concerned, so I asked him one day what that meant. He replied, “It means you may be cursed with a long life.”

Return to text directly before Footnote 5.

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Read or Print the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/amedic12.htm

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I hear often from my Good Readers that they have bought books after reading my book reviews. Keep reading, folks! As I like to remind you, to obtain more information on what's in these books, buy and read the books — for less information, read the reviews.

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8. COMMENTARY:
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In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to coverse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.

1. Padre Filius Spots a Ninja Chicken Carrying a Protest Sign this Month:

Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of the Digest to share us on some amusing or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.

This month the good Padre reads about Ninja Chicken Protest and Spots a Picketer.

2.Comments from Readers:

• EMAIL from cousine Suzanne Potier in Baton Rouge:
  Click on: http://www.whathappenedinmybirthyear.com/ The screen is going to fade to black. You'll be pleasantly surprised with this one...
  Type the year only.
  Then click the question mark (?) and sit back and enjoy.
• EMAIL from Sam (Salvo) DiChiera in Australia:
  Hi Bobby,

  Been hectic since our last email/correspondence.

  Please send across your phone number and suitable time to call. I might be in Adelaide for week as my Mum is having surgery and I'll be doing some travelling and spending time in waiting rooms during the night (your day!) and would love to catch up and talk.

  Hope things are going well for you.

  Salvo
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  NOTE: I knew Salvo as Sam back in the early days of working with Doyle Henderson (1998 to 2000). Sam was a ready resource for many things we tried to do. In the days before YouTube, Sam helped me to come up with a short video clip for on line usage. He has gone back to his given name of Salvatore, and his friends call him Salvo. Great to have him back in my world. We had an hourlong phone call to renew our acquaintance a few days ago. Bobby




• EMAIL from Ed Smith in Lubbock, Texas:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBYPlcSD490&feature=share

  I was very moved by this, pondering as I watched it how there was a warm love and compassion moving between the human kingdom and the group soul of the water mammal. I couldn't help but think of some of the things also that Steiner said about our relationship to the elementary beings. Romans 8:19-23 always comes to my mind when I contemplate these things.

  Ed

• EMAIL from Jeff Parsons:
  A 3D Printer which can replicate objects with moving parts within minutes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxMsSz5Aw

3. Poem from Freedom on the Half Shell: "Curtains for the Wall"

Give me your poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free and I will give them taxes, regulations, restrictions, and every manner of unfairness ever created by persons saddled with the illusion that they can decide what is best for someone else's welfare. The individual, like the business professional, knows what's best in a given situation and, given the freedom, will take that action. The forces of coercion are prying open the shell that contains the living muscle and spirit of the American people — will we resist those forces and keep our muscles and spirit alive, free to open at will, or will we give up like the oyster and settle for "freedom on the half shell?" Here is another poem from Freedom on the Half Shell, this one written shortly after the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989:

Curtains for the Wall

From Budapest to Bucharest
Democracy's in from the West
Communism's on its knees
Heedless of its dictators' pleas
Economies of running free
Dog the heels of history.

In the Eighties' East Germany
It took half a years salary
To buy a color VCR
And a BMW car
Required the riches of a czar.

The Wall fell down
And broke its crown
And all the King's horses
and all the King's men
Couldn't put it together again.

It wasn't hammers and chisels
Or rockets or guided missiles
That transformed the Wall into dust
And turned the Iron Curtain to rust
But seeds of democracy nourished
By flowing tears of the vanquished.

And when the Wall at last disappears
We'll remember over the years —
As the Wall recedes, brick by brick —
Communication did the trick.

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9. CLOSING NOTES:
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Thanks to all of you for providing the chemistry which has made this site a success. — Especially those of you who have graciously allowed us to show your photos on this website — you're looking good!

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My reviews are not intended to replace the purchasing and reading of the reviewed books, but rather to supplant a previous reading or to spur a new reading of your own copy. What I endeavor to do in most of my reviews is to impart a sufficient amount of information to get the reader comfortable with the book so that they will want to read it for themselves. My Rudolf Steiner reviews are more detailed and my intention is to bring his work to a new century of readers by converting his amazing insights into modern language and concepts.

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10. GRATITUDE — in Three Easy Steps:
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Look at George Burns, Bob Hope, both lived to 100. Doesn't that prove that "He who Laughs, Lasts"? Do you find nothing humorous in your life? Are your personal notes blue notes? Are you unhappy with your life? Fearful? Angry? Anxious? Feel down or upset by everyday occurrences? Plagued by chronic discomforts like migraines or tension-type headaches? At Last! An Innovative 21st Century Approach to Removing Unwanted Physical Body States without Drugs or Psychotherapy, e-mediatelytm !
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