92. God's Hotel

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This belonged with the previous post but that was already too long. I also reference something here from near the end of The Brothers K., but that can't be helped. I'll probably refer back to this when I finally get there. 

So here, all together, are (most of) the parts of God's Hotel that I think relate to Dostoyevsky but also to the whole Mephistophelian transformation of the world in recent centuries, resulting from our Faustian bargain with science and reason. And, of course, my thoughts on Sweet's ideas.

Laguna Honda Hospital is a San Francisco institution that was originally a traditional alms house.

God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet

Riverhead Books/Penguin edition 2012 

p111 ...By physis Hippocrates meant the “nature” of a being to grow into itself; (“a mustard seed into a mustard plant”)...

p112 ...like anima and spiritus, physis and the healing power of nature were exiled from medicine more than one hundred years ago. They were victims in the battle between two completely different conceptions of health, disease, and healing -- mechanism and vitalism.

The mechanists believed that life was mechanical, simply a series of processes that science could eventually understand and duplicate; the body was a machine that could be fixed. For the vitalists, the body was not a machine. They believed that life had something special about it that science could never duplicate. The vitalists were the romantics of medicine, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century they lost their battle with the mechanists. By the early twentieth century, any reference to vitalism or the healing power of nature was considered heretical. Yet vitalism did not disappear. Instead, it dived down into the subterranean rivers of Western medicine and reappeared in the many side streams of alternative medicine.

p118 ... Ever since the duties of the monk infirmarian had been split between doctor and nurse, and the Latin curare split into cure and care, there’d been a battle going on [in the hospital] for control. Who would be in command of the hospital? Doctor or nurse? Whose model of curare would triumph? Cure or care? And this battle was joined at the French Revolution, when the doctors tried to wrest control of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris from its nursing nuns.

The description of the division of nursing and doctors at Laguna Honda in this book reminded me of the special status of non-commissioned officers -- or chief petty officers -- on U.S. Navy ships. Captains, and officers in general, like doctors, come and go but the Chief Of the Boat (COB) endures and, like the nursing staff, makes sure the ship runs efficiently. 

p119 For more than a thousand years the nuns ran the Hôtel-Dieu: Caring for the sick poor defined their monastic vocation. They provided food, shelter, and spiritual care; they nursed the sick; and only when necessary did they call in a physician. Until the end of the eighteenth century that was just fine with the doctors, because the sick poor at the Hôtel-Dieu did not offer them a pecuniary or any other reward.

But around the time of the French Revolution, medicine, like so much else, was changing. Doctors were beginning to believe that the best way to understand the body was to correlate their treatments with what happened to their patients. They started to keep careful records and perform autopsies on patients who died. Their records and their autopsies allowed them to relate the course of a disease to the dysfunction of internal organs, and to connect their physical examination of the living body to the pathophysiology they found inside the corpse. These were powerful innovations; they would provide much of the data for our bible, DeGowin & DeGowin. And the reason that the doctors of Revolutionary France suddenly wanted control of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris was that the best “material” for their new approach was at the Hôtel-Dieu -- the most varied patients, the most multitudinous, and the most compliant.

p120 The doctors convinced the Revolution’s administration to remove control of the Hôtel-Dieu from the nuns and give it to them.

The nuns protested. They refused to serve under doctors... The idea of using patients -- Christ’s charges -- as experimental objects was murderous, a disastrous idea, they said... [Long story short, the nuns remained for another 150 years until France secularized the institution early in the 1900s] Then the nuns left.

This next section is here solely because of the resemblance to the Berghof in The Magic Mountain. Something that suggests The Magic Mountain to me seems to turn up in everything I read.

p169 ...The Hospital of Saint Bruno [in the French Alps], with it's arched stone entrance and wings of high, arcaded windows, was a long-lost relative of Laguna Honda. 
...
The Hospital of Saint Bruno, ... [Dr. Lapin] explained, had been built in the nineteenth century as a tuberculosis sanatorium, when the only treatment for tuberculosis was regime -- a diet of eggs, milk, and meat; and the quiet, sunlight, and fresh air of the Alps. Although that treatment had worked surprisingly well, after antibiotics against tuberculosis were discovered, the hospital had been emptied and almost torn down. But then it was realized that its out-of-the-way location, fresh air, and good diet might make the hospital suitable as a rehabilitation facility for alcoholics and drug abusers, and it was reopened.

Dr. Lapin turned and walked through the arched stone entrance, and we followed him through a hall and out into a wide corridor. On our left were floor-to-ceiling windows; they faced south, he said, for the sunlight and vitamin D that did help cure tuberculosis. On our right were the rooms of the patients. The DOJ [Department Of Justice which was pestering the Laguna Honda administration about their common wards] would have been pleased. Each one was private, with the narrow bed, small desk, and wooden closet that the French favor...
...
p170 Finally Dr. Lapin led us to lunch in the doctors' dining room.

The dining room was entirely of polished wood -- floors, walls, ceiling -- and very quiet, without windows. Its long table was set for eight, with gold place plates, silver settings, three wineglasses, and one tiny glass for liqueur. And for the rest of the afternoon we ate and drank as course after course arrived, and wine after wine was poured.

Dr. Lapin and HUG [Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève] doctors discussed the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse, though I can't tell you what they said. I wasn't paying attention. Mostly I tasted and sipped, and looked around at the heavy, quiet walls. Especially after that third glass of wine [or could it have been Hans Castorp's porter?], they seemed to exude stability and security, with their memory of many such meals, and their expectation of many more.

I thought about how, after tuberculosis was cured, the Hospital of Saint Bruno had not been torn down. Someone had recognized that there was still a need for such a place in modern France, this century for alcoholics and drug abusers. I thought how, even after a cure for alcoholism and drug abuse was discovered, there would still be some such disease without a cure, some illness whose victims could profit from the prescriptions of those old-fashioned physicians -- Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman...

Ha! Back on the Magic Mountain. And wouldn’t the French serve three kinds of wine plus liqueur for lunch at a facility for alcoholics and drug abusers? 

p233 [Her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela] There were many stunning moments on that first section of the pilgrimage, but the one I carried back to the hospital was the day it was pouring rain. We were a long way from that evening’s shelter, and we would be walking in the rain for a long time. It was cold; I was soaking wet; and Rosalind and I were singing to keep warm. There were mud, fields, and rain; and I was chilled to the bone. Yet I didn’t want to be anywhere else than in that muddy field, or doing anything else than walking in the rain, or be anything else except chilled. I didn’t want to have arrived at our warm and comfortable destination. I didn’t want the rain to stop or the fields to stop being muddy. I didn’t want to be dry or warm, or to be one step farther along or one step farther back. I wanted to be just where I was because only by being where I was could I experience what I was experiencing. Which was pilgriming. 

Or life. 

p234 As I walked through the field, I thought about how much of my life I had spent trying to make sure I would never be in that place -- out in the cold, homeless, and without shelter. I thought of my patients who lived on stoops... Once I’d asked a patient who was eager to get discharged and back to her stoop what the attraction of her life was. From what she told me, I’d thought it was freedom -- from work, duties, responsibilities. But in the rain that day I wondered if, homeless, cold, and sheltered only by her stoop, she meant the feeling I had that day. I was happy and knew I was happy, the happiest I’d ever been. Not blissful, joyous, angels-coming-out-of-the-clouds happy, but happy as in “a feeling of great pleasure or contentment of mind, arising from satisfaction with one’s circumstances.” Happy from hap, as in what happens -- things as they turn out to be.

This train of thought is continued later, 

p272, ...The longest and hardest day turned out to be the opposite of what I’d expected. And over and over again, for the rest of that second section, that’s how things would turn out. That was the main lesson I took from the pilgrimage that year.

...Every day I awoke, ate breakfast, started walking, and things happened. People showed up; I had adventures. Some I liked, some I didn’t. Some I expected to like and did not like; others I expected not to like and did like. I began to see that the unexpected... was the only thing I could expect. One was presented with an experience, a person, whose value one did not know in advance. What seemed to be good might be bad; what seemed to be bad, good. One didn’t know; one had to wait.

I suspect the fondness many men have for their military service is related to this. Likewise the happiness of the monk or nun who has given up control of their life to their order. And while this may not be exactly what The Grand Inquisitor and Zossima were talking about, there is something of that here.

p378 Mr. Rapman was the last lesson in my schooling at the old Laguna Honda, and I knew it at the time. It was the capstone; it summarized almost everything I’d learned. There was the importance of modern medicine, with its intensive care units, transfusions, and antibiotics. Without that “medical model of care,” Mr. Rapman would never have survived his fatal liver disease. But modern medicine was not enough. Mr. Rapman also needed the Way of Laguna Honda, the Way of Hildegard and premodern medicine -- tincture of time, the little things, Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman -- to heal completely. But even that had not been enough. It took Don Taylor [a hyper-active Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor who has just died], with his enactment of meaning ["I gave myself up to a Greater Power?" is the way Mr. Rapman puts it] and of love, to save Mr. Rapman’s life for good.

This is the most difficult lesson... I mean for me. I don’t like it. I don’t want it to be true. But after Ram Dass, Anne Lamott, (Dostoyevsky, specifically in “The Grand Inquisitor” but Father Zossima makes the same point) and now Victoria Sweet, I have to agree that some kind of “Greater Power” seems to be necessary for most people. And Richard Dawkins and I are just going to have to learn to deal with it.

Of all the people I've read so far, warning about this infernal new culture scientific man is creating, I think Sweet actually does the best job of showing the changes and what it has cost us. Still, it’s also interesting, when you consider Dostoyevsky’s attitude toward Claude Bernard and modern medicine [this is the bit we will have to return to much later in the book], that Mr. Rapman's process of personal growth leading to faith only takes place because of vile people like Bernard. I wonder what Dostoyevsky would have made of this. 



Lizaveta
Remember Pavel's mother?  Recently a woman like her has shown up near my supermarket. She stands either on the sidewalk or in the street and I believe her intention is to beg but she doesn't quite know how. She makes noises but, in my experience, doesn't use actual words. She reminds me of Lizaveta and of the long and very common history of the village idiot. For a village to care for such a person is really not that hard -- even with people with more extensive needs for food, clothing and shelter than Lizaveta had. But when there are a hundred or a thousand Lizavetas things get more difficult. 

Cities early on developed the almshouse to address this need, and Laguna Honda was originally an almshouse in that tradition. Now we don't even have that, and in cities today people like Lizaveta are simply left on the streets to make their way as best they can among strangers and predators. A new urban model is needed to address a situation that is clearly not going to go away, despite everyone's wanting it to. 


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79, TBK. Bk III. 1-2.

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The Brothers Karamazov

Book III. 1.
Finally we arrive at the house and meet the servants. How is Fyodor not a Foucaultian anti-hero? But, perhaps, rather than relishing the limit-experiences he goes to such trouble to instigate, he holds back at the brink and depends on Gregory to ground him to this world. He flirts with but still holds back from disaster.

p103 Corrupt and often cruel in his lust, like some poisonous insect, Fyodor Karamazov was sometimes, in moments of drunkenness, overcome by superstitious terror and a moral convulsion which took an almost physical form. "My soul simply quakes in my throat at those times," he used to say.

At such moments he liked to feel that there was near at hand, in the lodge if not in the room, a strong, faithful man [Gregory, his servant], virtuous and unlike himself . . . One who had seen all his vices and knew all his secrets, but was ready in his devotion to overlook everything, not to oppose him and above all, not to reproach him or threaten him with anything either in this world or in the next, and, in case of need, to defend him...

In this passage Gregory certainly has a Christ like aspect. And isn't this really the essence of religion? Certainly of Christianity. Someone who knows us completely but forgives us everything and will stand beside us regardless what happens.  

p104 ...Alyosha "pierced his heart" by "living with him, seeing everything and blaming nothing." Moreover, Alyosha brought with him something his father had never known before: a complete absence of contempt for him and a consistent kindness, a perfectly natural, unaffected devotion to the old man who deserved it so little. All this was a complete surprise to the old wretch who had dropped all family ties. It was a new and surprising experience for him, who had until then loved nothing but "evil." And when Alyosha had left him to join the monastery, he confessed to himself that he had learned something he had not till then been willing to learn.

So the vile Fyodor we see in these pages is the moderated version of this character, having been beneficially touched by Christian love... Now that's a scary thought.

... Gregory was cold, dignified and reserved, and spoke, weighing his words, without frivolity. It was impossible to tell at first sight whether he loved his meek, obedient wife, Marfa. But he really did love her, and she knew it. [Omniscient]

p105 Marfa was by no means foolish; she was probably more clever than her husband or, at least, more prudent than he in worldly affairs. Yet she had given in to him in everything without question or complaint ever since her marriage and she respected him for his spiritual superiority. It was remarkable how little they spoke to one another in the course of their lives; they spoke only of the most necessary daily affairs. The reserved Gregory thought over all his cares and duties alone, so that Marfa had long grown used to knowing that he did not need her advice. She felt that he respected her silence, and took it as a sign of her good sense. He had never beaten her but once, and then only slightly... [she had danced in a "Moscow" rather than the village fashion, so obviously needed some kind of a beating.] But there it ended. The beating was never repeated, and Marfa gave up dancing.

I don't know what to make of this. Marfa seems to be a pretty typical Dostoevsky woman, really not so different from Katerina. Is this 
Dostoevsky's ideal?

p106 [Gregory and Marfa's six fingered infant child dies soon after birth] Marfa observed that, from the day of the burial, Gregory devoted himself to "religion," and took to reading the "Lives of the Saints," for the most part sitting alone and in silence... He was fond of the Book of Job, and had somehow acquired a copy of the sayings and sermons of "the God-fearing Father Isaac the Wyrian." [ This is an appropriate quote from Father Issac, "A handful of sand, thrown into the sea, is what sinning is, when compared to God’s Providence and mercy. Just like an abundant source of water is not impeded by a handful of dust, so is the Creator’s mercy not defeated by the sins of His creations."] He read this persistently for years on end, understanding very little of it but perhaps prizing and loving it the more for that. Of late he had begun to listen to the doctrines of the sect of Flagellants settled in the neighborhood. He was evidently shaken by them, but judged it unfitting to go over to the new faith...

p107 Gregory was perhaps predisposed to mysticism. And the birth and death of his deformed child had, as though by special design, been accompanied by another strange and marvelous event... on the very night after the burial of his child, Marfa was awakened by the wail of a newborn baby...

Opening the door of the bathhouse, he [Gregory] saw a sight which petrified him. An idiot girl, who wandered about the streets and was know as... (Stinking Lizaveta), had gotten into the bathhouse and had just given birth to a child. She lay dying with the baby beside her. She said nothing, for she had never been able to speak. But her story needs a chapter to itself.

I'm tempted to skip this description of the ephemeral character Lizaveta, but this passage reminds me of what has been said about Alyosha and I'm wondering what Dostoevsky sees in this.


Book III. 2.
p108 ...Spiteful and diseased, her father used to beat Lizaveta inhumanely [?] whenever she returned to him [after her mother dies]. But she rarely did so, for everyone in the town was ready to look after her as an idiot, and so specially dear to God. Her father's employers and many others in the town... tried to clothe her better, and always gave her high boots and a sheepskin coat for the winter. But, although she let them dress her up without resisting, she usually went away, preferably to the cathedral porch, and taking off all that had been given her -- kerchief, sheepskin, skirt or boots -- she left them there and walked away barefoot in her smock as before.
...
p109 ...She would walk into strange houses, and no one drove her away. Everyone was kind to her and gave her something. If she were given a penny, she would take it, and at once drop it in the alms box of the church or prison. If she were given a roll or bun in the market, she would hand it to the first child she met. Sometimes she would stop one of the richest ladies in the town and give it to her, and the lady would be pleased to take it. She herself never tasted anything but black bread and water... they knew that if she saw thousands of roubles she would not have touched a penny.

It is interesting to compare Lizaveta with Father Ferapont.

She scarcely ever went to church. She slept either on the church porch or climbed over a low fence into a kitchen garden. At least once a week she used to turn up "at home," that is at the house of her father's former employers, and in the winter she went there every night, and slept either in the passage or the cowhouse. People were amazed that she could stand such a life, but she was accustomed to it and, although she was very tiny, she was strong and healthy. Some of the townspeople declared that she did all this only from pride, but that is hardly credible. She couldn't speak, and only from time to time uttered an inarticulate grunt. How could she have been proud?

Lizaveta is impregnated either by Fyodor or by an escaped criminal and her orphan is raised by Marfa and Gregory. This child is Pavel Smerdyakov ("The Stinker"). A surname invented by Fyodor himself. Pavel becomes the third servant in the household when he grows up.

As usual, I wonder what, exactly, Dostoyevsky meant by this character. Lizaveta would seem to be the most Christian and "holy" character in the book... exceeding even Zossima and certainly Father Ferapont. Having, apparently, no intellect to sacrifice to faith, she simply lives this particular Christian ideal almost as an animal. Is she in fact a daughter of Eve? Does she share the knowledge of good and evil or is she still in a state of nature.

This is not an idle question as she is also the mother of Pavel. Dostoyevsky is diabolical in the way he piles plot on plot and hides, in plain sight, the most amazing things thanks to spectacles of distraction. The holy Lizaveta and the unholy Fodor create -- through rape, apparently -- Pavel, who plays a role in The Brothers K. not unlike the role Euphorion plays in Goethe's Faust. (Euphorion is the issue of Faust and Hellena and... well, it's complicated. I'm going to tackle Faust next, but Here's a little taste.)


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