| | I
thought I'd found the friend… Okay;
Ezra asked me to write my story and now, then, a most important part of my story,
during this time, is, no, was a lady,
and the lurgi. (We'll come
to that.)
And of course much of this is private, I guess.
or
is it? It is,
but with Clinton's escape (the meaning of "is").
so,
I was thinking of continuing chapter five as an open letter to the new friend
I thought I had, though that would in fact just take us back to my main theme,
homeopathy, because… because that's the thing that's extra special, and it's
 important,
like Mendel's sweet peas; a lost key to a new science.
Gregor
Mendel studied inheritance in sweet peas. Wikisays: "Mendel's
pea plant  experiments
conducted between 1856 and 1863 established manyof the rules of heredity, now
referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance."
Mendel's
work made no impact - zilch - were "lost", buried in some library dust
for 35 years. Then, against the what odds, rediscovered in 1900, and it gave birth
to genetics.
MAME's ultradilute dot-blot anomaly/phenomenon, likewise,
is new science - a  mechanism
in the micro-patterning and resonance of stuff, that might just be the key to,
for example, neurological function, psychology, mind. I'll explain, in a minute,
the bridge between homeopathy and the psyche. (1)
I'm not yet, though, going to talk much about Pons and Flieshman's cold fusion
cell. You'd think I'm crazy… So… chapter
5: a letter to a lady, (2) which
I think is about karma. I
thought I'd found a friend, but she said, "Not quite." So it's nice
to flirt, and tussle (sighs). But the smell of her was of home... Recap:
Nature published the Benveniste ultradilution paper in June 1988, then debunked
it (scurrilously) in July. At that juncture they said they would welcome pertinent
comment and… (3) And there
matters lay.
Oh, in September Jacque Benveniste
visited us in Toronto and gave a talk in the Medical Science auditorium. But there
matters lay. In February
of 1989 Prof. Pomernanz received a call from a microbiologist , a Prof. M. AbouHaidar,
also of the U of T.
(4) Could he come a see us. He
came with his team, and several of us working in Bruce's lab attended the meeting.
What MAME brought us was extraordinary: the ultradilute DNA dot-blots. (5) So
here is the story: Mohammed Eweida was a postdoc working in Prof. AbouHaidar's
lab with Southern dot-blots. As I tell the story, Mohammed Eweida wasn't very
happy, I don't know why, but he was out of there: he was off to the Karolinska
in Stockholm in the up-coming summer: and so, perhaps to kill time, he spotted
out the dilutions eighteen times, even though the staining was lost to sight at
the seventh,
and... and he got a dark spot at the eighteenth dilution!
On
his way to the trash-can, Eweida passed by Michael Dobbs, a postgraduate student
working in the lab. "Look at that," Dr. Eweida said to Michael.
A month before Dobbs had been to Jacque Benveniste's
lecture on ultradilution. (6) So,
when Mohammed showed Michael his anomalous result with an unexpected spot at the
eighteenth dilution Michael thought, incredulously, "ultradilution".
"Eh, Mohammed," he said. "Do that again."
Dr.
Eweida repeated the viral assay, this time taking it out to the fiftieth decimal
(one in ten) dilution. (7)  Again
there was a dark spot that shouldn't be there at the eighteenth dilution, and
now there were also stained spots at the 19th dilution, and the 25th and 26th,
and the 38th, and 43rd dilution, but not at the dilutions in between. At the 25th
and 26th dilutions there is virtually no substance left in the solution. We have
approached Avagadro's number. At 10 to the minus 38, for sure there is no DNA
left in the target. (8) And yet
the undiluted complementary strands, the molecular DNA in the probe (labeled with
avidin-biotin), binds to the ultradilute target! They can not be binding to a
substance, not to molecular DNA. They may be binding to a signal, an electrical
signal imprinted into the nitrocellulose. They are binding to something! At
first sight this seems, to some, to contradict classical science. "How can
water, with nothing in it, remember what was formerly but is no longer there?"
But here were Prof. AbouHaidar and Dr. Eweida, here they were with these filterpapers,
dozens of them, with dark spots. In the first dot-blot that they showed us, the
binding recurred at the 18th and 19th dilution, and the 25th and 26th and beyond.
But the pattern moved about. Sometimes the 18th turned dark, sometimes it was
the 16th…
Well, Prof. AbouHaidar when he first saw it, suspected
a joke. And when Michael Dobbs, and then another post-doc, Sira, repeated it,
still Menir AbouHaidar suspected a hoax. When he tried it himself, there it was.
No hoax. (He'd lay hidden hairs across the target's envelope to detect any intervention.
cloak and dagger stuff.)
What to do next? Well,
they came and see us, Dr. Pomeranz and his team. (9)
They came to talk to us in confidence, so I started referring to them as MAME,
my acronym for Menir AbouHaidar and Mohammed Eweida. They came to us to hear what
we could tell them. "Do it again," said Pomeranz. And they did... Meanwhile,
I went home is a tizzy, synapse snapping!
Why
this story is important, I will tell in a moment ~ but you, dear reader, might
also want to know about the overwhelming in my life this last while, besides the
lady: there is the threat of the lurgi, the bites, the devil's spite… rat
tail ends, the lurgi, the Dreaded Lurgi is lurking. But I'll come back to that
in a moment.
Let me just edited, deleted half a page of rage about atrocities
that rage about us, in which we may (or may not) be complicit. (That section was
for the girl. She'd want some thought about our universal cares, I think) Its
important stuff, but I've nothing new or special to say about it. But let's go
back, and on, to the "lurgi",sideways…
When
I was a lad,
we crossed the Atlantic to a strange city. We rented a home,
with the cat, Pooh Cat, who was, to look at, an unprepossessing cat, a feisty
tabby who'd sit on the brick pedestal that housed the front gate and dangle her
paw to tempt taunt or claw passing dogs. She once chased a friend's spaniel yelping
round the yard till rescued.
Pooh Cat became
a friend. I seem to draw them. Not friends: cats, he said.
Pooh
was eleven or twelve, my age. One day I came coming home to find a lump or bundle
in my bed beneath the blanket that purred when touched: Pooh and kittens. Before
that, though, I think it was I found the cat curled up sleeping in the closet,
and went and snuggled face, nose, into her belly. That was my first experience
of intimacy.
There's something else to mention
here: the cant that there is some absolute meaning in Sanskrit chants. Words are
symbols, I think, without great meaning in themselves. But the Sanskrit bit, that
here there is power and meaning in the sound itself… 
OM Sat Chit Ananda, the very breath of God.
So I was a little in an altered state the other
day, the other year, medicated, but focused and "here", somewhat "present",
and saying goodbye to my dog Lucky, me going out at the door, but I stopped and
crossed the room to put my face on, in Lucky's side, and paused, and Proust to
Pooh Cat a life ago, oh grace.
Migwetch, Heara,
I said.
Migwetch is "thank" you in
Annishnabi, the language of this land. Heara is a neologism, a slur of "heart"
and hridya, heart in Sanskrit. Herea is a private name I had for my dog.
Migwetch
Heara, I said to Lucky, speaking in tongues. 
We moved to London when I was eleven. To begin with stayed with friends here
and there and then we rented a house from a family who were traveling for a couple
of year. The house, in Hampstead, which came with the cat, also came with tenants
above on the third floor: Joan O'Donovan and her son Oliver. Once a week, very
regularly, we joined them to listen to the Goon Show. 1955.
Largely the creation of Spike Milligan, the Goon
Show was the origin and inspiration for generations of zany British humour, birthing
Peter Sellers, inspiring Monty Python. (10)
"You can't get the wood, you know."
I
meet Spike once.
My father was a friend/acquaintance. Sometime when
Spike
played
a one man show in a west-end theatre.
We went back stage after. What a sweet man. He spoke of a theatre piece he itched
to produce, but lacked the resources. You'd enter the theatre,  take
your seat. The wait would be long, long, before the house lights dimmed. Again
a wait, the opening late, wait, till finally the curtains open, and you find ourselves
facing another auditorium filled with another expectant audience. (12)
(A "concept" piece.)
One memorable Goon Show was an episode about,
ta da, The Dreaded Lurgi… a poorly defined, but dreadful, condition. Unfortunately,
my story, now, also, in part, concerns the lurgi.
Five
or six years back I had lodgers, roomers. One at a time. A succession. The last
one,  skipped
away without paying the rent, and left us, me and the house, left us the lurgi.It's
very contagious.
Signs of the lurgi… My
mate, Darrell, had the lurgi, the last couple of years, short sad life. Worried
he'd given them me, me and my house.
"No, no, no, Darrell. It was the absconding tenant."
Darrell
helped me get rid of the lurgi - sprayed the couch, which we later put out, Diatomaceous
earth, everywhere. I suffered perhaps three attacks by the lurgi over a week,
and then we - the house and I - were clean. Darrell weren't so lucky. He was living
in a one room apartment, in Parkdale. The lurgi climbed under his door Darrell
was sure the witch lady next door was siccing 'em on him.
(Dee was a mite paranoid.)
There are few conditions
as stressful as the lurgi. The itch, but if your friends see the signs, or you
own up, as you should, you become a pariah, a leper.
Sure
the scourge of the lurgi hasten Darrell's death. (Then oh how we sang his praise.
Except Teresa. Teresa was sober 'bout Darrell. There's
a piece I meant to put in the last chapter (about evil, and the devil at large),
even to start that chapter, but it slipped… A couple of week ago in Toronto
one of the newspapers printed a poll showing that a slim majority of Torontonians,
53%, say they would like the city to exterminate the raccoons. My lady, if she
was still with me, would say I was over the top writing, "First they took
their land, then kill them, the natives, then the raccoons. They torture the chickens
and pigs… then it's the Jews."
"I'll
not share (this land) with vermin!" Pride, sloth, greed, malice; all your
defilements.
Hey, but rats, ticks and fleas, fuck off. (12)
I
want to weave through here a strand about karma.Last summer, 2013, some hornets
built a nest on the front, the face of my front porch (behind the red currant).
I wasn't quite sure who they were, even after I'd disturbed them and four of them
stung me! Wow! Bang! Wack! Woe! Meanwhile I noticed some "paper wasps"
going in and out of the wall just under an upstairs window. "Ah," I
thought, confusedly, "It's the hornets resettling." (The "paper
wasps" are the long bodied wasps.) So
I made an attempt at smoking them out of there - a bit of smudging - gave then
some moments to leave, and then I sealed the gaps under the window. For weeks
and weeks paper wasps huddled round and tried to get home in to the sealed "nest",
pining (13) for their starving,
trapped, sisters and queen. The hornets, meanwhile, suddenly one day, the nest
and they were gone. (14)
Soon
after sealing the wasps, I went up to Tisarana, a Buddhist monastery, (15)
and I asked Ajahn Viradhammo about Karma and my paper wasp. Ajahn Ve said that
intention is an essential part of karma, that life is complicated, to err is human,
and we live with consequence. Also, we accept the karma…
I
spent some of my "work time", "chore time", at the monastery
helping "repoint" the ground floor stone work barn wall. Watched "paper
wasps" fly in and out (They seem to be more "wall wasps" than "paper
wasps".)
I woke next morning itching, and with the sign
of the lurgi. Told the novices. Striped that bed. Moved it out to the barn. Washed
and then dried everything, twice.  (Threw
out my satchel on the way home.) I doubt I brought the lurgi to the monastery.
Probably some other visitor left them. And I wonder if it truly was the lurgi.Or
could it have been spider bites? Spider bites can look just like the lurgi. (though
they usually have a different time course.)
They can also look, and present, quite differently.
Hmm?
Spiteful spiders.
Satan's
little demons? They may just jump on you and gnash and gnash away. Little spiteful
jumping spiders. They can wind down on to you from the ceiling, bite you to spite
you and jump away. (this happens here in southern Ontario.)
Two
years ago a spider bit me,and those bites were quite like the lurgi.
I
threw out the couch. (and other stuff)
Last year
they bit me twice, the spiders. (16)
And this year it's been more than half a dozen times.
Then running home from her place, oh, now it's a month ago, there was a sudden
pain at my ankle: and it hurt all day long (off and on), deep and local, and I'd
no idea whether it was musculoskeletal/connective tissue, or spiders (while I
was running?). Could not tell. That was a Saturday…
The
Sunday morning I came down stairs. I had left a finger of cinnamon whisky in a
shot glass on the kitchen table. No patients to see. I could have that. I lifted
the glass to mouth and, wham, a wasp stung my lip (right on the mucosa, mouth…
I swatted instinctively knocking it to the floor, dead. Placed it on the alter.
And then my lip, and jowls, swoll. I thought they might burst!
Spent
the morning in "Emergence". In the hospital. Looked like a clown.
According to my notes, it was the next morning
that I woke with some very lurgi like bites. I went and bought the poisons, but
Teresa said, "What you resist, you attract," and, "Before you spray,
first pull up the carpet." So for a month I've been rentovating up-stairs…
Now,
why this had authority, Teresa's advise about the carpet, is because of the attic
room on St. Clarens, back in nineteen eighty six, seven - (that's back when in
Pomeranz lab we were replicating Benveniste's ultradilutions) - there was an attic
room on St. Clarens that she, Teresa, and Darrell - we had only recently met Darrell
- he was still in his teens - an attic room, that Teresa and Darrell renovated
- he put in a sky light and all - and I was just in a tizzy through out all that,
quite paranoid. Somehow it would all involve, devolve onto me, and I couldn't
cope… OMG freak! Back
to the recent saga, the gnat! A few days after I moved out of the up-stair, to
escape and to renovate - camping in the living room on the narrow chiropractic
bench/table. (Nando slept on it, in the basement, some weeks when he was in Toronto
and Ezra was here in the small room.) (17)
Renovations:
I'm putting putty (18) in the cracks
in the "okay" pine wood floor upstairs, pulled out the skirting boards
 to
seal the walls to the floor (and some painting)… A few days after I moved
downstairs, there was a gnat. I was stoned, working on a picture, a drawing…(19)
I looked round for something to catch it with, the gnat. There were just some
burnt out tea-candles to hand. Couldn't catch the little blighter with that small
"cup". They bite, you know. I dithered some moments, then I swatted
it! Within thirty seconds there was an intense itching on my upper thigh, near
the groin. A white flared what? bite? like a spider bite, but no… it was
gone in the hour.. Since
I started pulling up the carpet and redoing the upstairs, I've fallen behind with
my story - long enough for the lady to love and leave - long enough for Ebola
to flare in the news. Is it not by luck, or by grace, that contagious diseases
are relatively benign (20), and
virulent diseases are not too contagious (or maybe their hosts are extinct.)
So
God in his Heavenly home with Powers and Dominions singing Holy Holy hallelujah!
and he said "Enough! Let there be dark and light." And there was, as
for instance, there were pathogens and parasites, and stinging insects. But why,
I wonder, this summer, why this convergence of (coincidental) insect attacks?
Because, perhaps, because I was writing about the Dark Lord, or rather, his absence?
Maybe he's trying to get my attention with his spiders and bugs? But its more
like karma than evil. Or is it? I don't know, but it is a bit of a "downer".
Hey, and meanwhile the lady's gone … I
know these insect attacks are a pretty low-grade "synchronicity"…
like setting out to meet Claudia Moore all those years ago: (21)
a Sunday walk around Toronto with the intension of meeting this beautiful amazing
dancer, and after a couple of hours, did cross her path and meet her in the market.
Thinking about the numbers in that, I'd
guess I'd passed a thousand or two people in a city of two million. That would
make it a one in a thousand type thing, and probably more likely less improbable
than that, the market being the sort of place she might visit. A low grade coincident.
And coincidences are going to happen sometimes…
And
there is another coincidence in my life: almost a Rozencratz and Guildenstern
heads heads heads thing. (22) It
relates to my chiropractic practice. In the system I practice (23),
 we
note that the top vertebra, C1 (24),
it shifts to one side or the other: it fails by "falling"laterally.
And you might expect it to fail equally often sliding to the left or to the right.But
in my practice I find C1 is almost always shifted to the right. Its more than
19 out of 20. Might even be 99 out a hundred. (I once phoned the head of the "Gonstead
Research Society" and asked her if she saw a preponderance of right sided
C1 subluxations. She did. Of course I didn't say I'm seeing them 99 times out
of a hundred, and she didn't volunteer a number either.) So does the world just
bring me only right-sided "atlases", or does the atlas indeed almost
always shift to the right? And if so, why?
Is
this my Rozencrantz moment? Or a weirdness. I don't know.
But
I'm going to leave these musing on love, and insects, and karma. Teresa says what
you focus on you draw to you, and she says one should relate to the pests not
as "other", but as an extensions of oneness, and she says they say "I
have no enemies." (25) And
Teresa says the poem I wrote the day Yacinta Dolores de los Angeles left
is a "puppy love poem"
So
I'm going to take a spell of writing about a bright moment in "my story",
after MAME showed us the dot blots, and all the synapse snapped into new completions,
meanings, understandings… I felt so blessed,
but
what am I going to do with this gift? and jeez, I'd love to share it…
Puppy
Love Poem
which was titled "Where"
but could be titled defaulting
silver kisses
or fuck me, she didn't like my company
where
I
just did what I thought she's suggested we do
I fell in love where after
the first electric kiss
she sent me boat loads of promised besos
then
loved me silly for awhile grrunt
(no teeth) nghuagh
mm mm
hghaugh! I
thought I'd found the friend
but she said
not quite so
its nice to flirt
and tussle
but the smell of her was of home besos
des.a.pare.cido babe
kisses
disappeared kisses yes
its nice to flirt and wrestle
but the scent of her was of home where besos
desaparecido
kisses disappeared
chapter
6.
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