We start with an illustration of Ralph Lewin's incomparable verse, "MM", followed by his thoughts on "Herbal Remedies." There follows Jonathan Saville's exhilarating essay, "Jogging in France." Please enjoy.

MM

By  Ralph A. Lewin

Young Jesus, at the age of four,
Suggested to his virgin mum
"Let's scrap the Roman calendar
And start the first millennium.
We'll number years in such a way,
By custom or divine decree,
So everything that's gone before
Is counted back from 1 BC,
While later dates in future years
In history, as time goes by,
We'll designate by numbering
As "something anno domini".

When this proposal got to Rome
And reached the ears of Julius C.
He said "One can't re-number dates:
They must be numbered after me."

"Then we shall alter that" said Christ
"For after you are dead and gone
The dates might change: they won't if this
New system, and if I, live on."

The years rolled by. When Otto II
Sat on the throne in Germany,
And England's king was Ethelred,
Unready in his piety,
The scholars worked the system out
And reckoned that the time had come
(Before the Middle Age began)
To start a new millennium,
So they agreed that yearly dates
And all that followed after them,
When written in the Roman way,
Would start their numbering with M.

Relentlessly more years rolled by;
The C's and X's followed fast;
As tyrants rose and empires fell,
Another thousand years have passed, 

Now, twenty centuries AD,
It's time to use a second M -
Which ends an epoch, in a way,
And that'll have to do, pro tem.

* * * 

Herbal remedies 

My wife comes from Singapore: I come from England. Though we both have confidence in ordinary Western pharmaceuticals, she has also some faith in herbal medicines. I have much less, and I'll explain why. 

Animals and plants evolved together. Animals learned which plants were good to eat, and which might be good to nibble to alleviate hunger pangs or aching limbs. So plants developed ways to deter them, including nasty spines and unpleasant or even poisonous chemicals. (Even as a boy, I learned that each species of caterpillar would eat only certain kinds of leaves; most other kinds deterred or killed them.) Apes and our ancestors learned that some kinds of leaves were poisonous, but that others could be chewed to alleviate fatigue or pain. As mankind evolved, so did medicine men, who gathered and stored such leaves and roots, and who remembered and transmitted their plant lore. These men were the first herbalists. 

They evolved everywhere, among ancient Africans, Indians, Chinese, native Americans and Europeans. Around 350 BC, Galen, a Greek in Asia Minor, collected and wrote down much of this information. In China Chun Yi (about 150 BC) and Xu Zhi-cai (about 550 AD) did likewise, as did Avicenni in Persia around 1000 AD. In time, others copied and enlarged on these and other compilations according to their own experiences. Among them, a few centuries ago, Paracelsus in Switzerland and Culpeper in England wrote considerable treatises on herbal remedies, some based on earlier publications, others on their own experiences with real or partial cures. 

However, many also based their choices of plants on what they called the "doctrine of signatures". God, they asserted, had given certain plants certain attributes whereby those in the know could recognize their potential uses. By such thinking, species of Euphrasia called "eyebright", with flowers like little eyes, must surely be curative for eye disorders. (Look for "euphrasia" on your bottle of eye-drops: it's probably still there today!) Later chemists got into the act. By various means (extraction in hot water or spirits, distillation, crystallization, etc.) they obtained concentrates and then pure preparations of the chemicals that the plants had originally evolved ("secondary metabolites" they are now called) for their own protection. 

For instance, among the countless remedies for "the fluxes" was an extract of Atropa belladonna, which gave us atropine - which I know from personal experience works well if the dosage is carefully controlled but could be disastrous if taken in excess. Chemists identified and named other responsible molecules, such as quinine and ephedrine, and often found that by modifying their molecules chemically they could enhance their efficacy (e.g. by acetylating the natural salicylic acid to a simple derivative, which we now know and love as aspirin.) And so modern pharmacy evolved. 

Now I'm sure that those old medicine-men and wise women knew only a fraction of the medical potentials of the plants around them, and nothing at all about others. So for the past 50 years at least, pharmaceutical companies the World over have been looking into the possibilities of new drugs from hitherto unrecognized sources. Leaves, roots, fruits and seeds of many tens of thousands of plants, and other native sources too, are being tested annually, and a few new products (e.g. taxol from yew bark) and new cures are being turned up. Before they are allowed to be used and sold, they must legally be tested (on animals and human subjects) to show that they are more efficacious than harmful. Many of them are still, fundamentally, remedies derived from herbs, but now their relative toxicities, effective dosages and long-term effects can be specified and their shelf-lives controlled with a fair degree of accuracy. 

So why go back to using dried leaves and roots, gathered by who knows whom, dried in some dusty place, sold and resold by the sackful and then stored - for who knows how long - in more or less closed jars on the shelves of herbalists? There probably are components of various efficacies in some of them - maybe even some that contemporary pharmacologists has yet to discover and exploit - but I don't have much confidence in using them.  Furthermore, they often occur as mixtures (my mother-in-law recently urged me to take a cough mixture that contained, among various herbal products, the dried gall of 3 different kinds of snakes) which obviously complicates the picture. 

In other words, I am inclined to regard with suspicion today's so-called herbal medicines as no better and no worse than the herbal remedies that were all we had in Europe three, four or five hundred years ago. Although at that time, doubtless, some of them were really useful, I'm sure that medical science has progressed a long way since then. 

But do you think I can ever persuade my wife to agree with me? 

Ralph A. Lewin, 
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 
University of California, San Diego, 

*********

Jogging in France

By Jonathan Saville



I'm jogging in France. That is--I'm doing something I do all the time, but doing it in a new place. The newness opens my eyes, brings the routine back to full life, turns the It into a You.

Early in the morning in a big provincial city, a city like Caen, the capital of lower Normandy. I trot out of the centrally located Hôtel Royal at 7:00 a.m., a vague map in my head, otherwise completely on my own. The clerk is at his desk immersed in the Figaro, bakeries and tobacco stores are opening along the gray streets, the nearby church of Saint-Sauveur is beginning an early mass. I speed along past them, and because the sense-impressions are all so fresh and foreign and attractive I become aware of what it means to be static and what it means to be moving. The red-smocked girl setting out the pastries in the bakery window and the black-surpliced parish priest standing before his sparse flock in one of the two parallel naves are tied down to a place, and indeed to a job. But I, for the moment, am free of attachment, taking in what I see or hear or smell (the intoxicating odor of fresh French bread), but refusing to be captured by any of this. Everyone else has roots, but I am flying.

It is not just movement that gives me this freedom, but movement with speed. Walking will not do it. The walker doesn't notice the ground, which merely provides him with something solid on which to place his feet. My feet are vigorously at work on that ground, pushing at it, driving it backward behind me, the sidewalk along the half-timbered storefronts of the Rue Saint-Pierre, the grass in the narrow little park under the heroic equestrian statue of Bertrand du Guesclin. By its resistance, the earth acknowledges my activity; by its steady retreat behind the heels of my running shoes, it confesses itself mastered. My running gives me not only freedom but power; without ever having to battle Englishmen or Spaniards, I feel within my muscles and spirit the power of a du Guesclin.

A greater power, actually. That fourteenth-century warrior fought for his king in the Hundred Years War, but no king has commanded me to dash through this awakening city, darting up alleys, plunging across squares where the traffic is beginning to clog, winding my impromptu route through tangled streets du Guesclin himself might have followed. My will is my only monarch, yet in its own way it is as greedy and ambitious as those Valois kings the late-medieval general served. I am appropriating this city for myself, taking it over, possessing it--not by conquering, killing, governing, and taxing, but by knowing.

This is what I do when I burst out of a dark, crooked little street into the square before the stupendous Abbaye aux Hommes, that monument of Norman romanesque that William the Conqueror built as penance for having married his cousin Matilda. I have known the fortress-like facade and the soaring interior from photographs, for every history of architecture devotes reverent space to this masterpiece. But now I make it entirely my own. It is I who rapidly view the lofty twin towers from every spot in the square not already occupied by parked cars; it is I who enter the modest portal at the right, still at a trot, and by looking with the intensely energized attention of a runner take the whole vast structure into myself.

Before there is any time for my possession of the Abbaye to be called into question, I'm off again, for the whole rest of the city remains to be acquired. In two hours of uninhibited and undirected running I will have covered an enormous area of the city. All the major monuments of the past will be mine (the Abbaye aux Femmes built by William's spouse, the flamboyant Gothic church of Saint-Pierre, the remains of William's castle in the spacious park at the city's heart), and all the modern centers (the lush botanical gardens, the university, the sports stadium, the racetrack, the conference center, the railway station, the port facilities, the memorial peace museum), and neighborhoods of various ages and styles exhibiting a millennium of building and destroying and rebuilding.

Meanwhile, Caen will have followed its own routine timetable from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., but I am soaking up tremendous stretches of living time just as I am laying claim to a multifold area of lived geographical space. While everyone else here is busy having coffee and croissants or settling down to work or desperately searching for a parking spot, I am on a dizzying trajectory from William and Matilda in the Eleventh Century to the devastating Battle of Caen in June, 1944 to the wholesale modernization and economic prosperity of the city (and of France as a whole) in the past few decades. It is all mine now, in space and in time; the unmoving earth has given way beneath me; the streets of the maps and the monuments of the architectural histories have yielded themselves up as vassals to my experience and my memory; and when, in my drenched gray sweatsuit and carrying a bag of incredibly ugly and incredibly delicious French apples and a warm, crackling baguette, I stumble back into the hotel on the by now noisy and congested Place de la République, the desk clerk, looking up from his newspaper with the expression of quizzical indulgence the French reserve for crazy foreigners, has no idea that he has just witnessed the triumphant entrance of Jonathan the Conqueror.

For every conqueror, however, even of the jogging kind, the world is waiting to reassert itself. A jog at Mont-Saint-Michel presents many of the same opportunities for insight Caen did. The overcoming of gravity is more exciting here, as I bound up the steep streets and stairways that lead from the village along the isolated mountain's flanks to the foot of the miraculous fortress and church that crown it. The challenge of mastering this place's geography is simpler, because there is virtually nothing in the broad shallow bay stretching to the horizon but this one compact mound of rock and trees and terraced ramparts and stone houses and cobblestone alleys and Gothic spires. The traversal of time is just as extreme, from the earliest stages of the abbey in the early Middle Ages to the brisk modern hotels on the mainland a couple of kilometers to the south. But as befits this conglomeration of nature, history, religion, and art aggressively thrusting upward out of the encircling flatness, Mont-Saint-Michel is less disposed than a fairly level, sprawling city to submit to the will of an imperialistic jogger without showing its own mettle.

But first there is the sea, over which the mount presides like a haughty overlord, and which has its own less obvious but equally irresistible power. Around the island, and to either side of the long stone causeway that connects it with the mainland, there is--at low tide--a seemingly unlimited expanse of sand, and--at high tide--a seemingly unlimited expanse of sea. How can a jogger resist abandoning the safety of the island and causeway when the landscape is turning into a seascape, to run before the rising tide that speeds in "at the speed of a galloping horse"? Here is a thrill for the jogger to savor--the world fighting back, and with the runner's own weapon: speed. Alas, these days it is a rare occasion when the galloping horses shake their foaming manes. Only at moments when high water and low water are at their most extreme separation (over forty feet), and when a good stormy wind whips up the drama to even more overwhelming heights, can a runner get his full rush of adrenalin trying to keep ahead of the advancing waves. Ordinarily, the pace of an elderly convalescent would succeed in keeping his feet comfortably dry as the gently hissing tide ambles in.

To a jogger with imagination, however (and what is the use of jogging without imagination?), Mont-Saint-Michel can assert itself in a way that is less physically dangerous but just as daunting. The causeway, straight as an arrow, meets the mainland right next to the mouth of the Cousenon River. This river, at the frontier between Normandy and Brittany, used to have a will of its own, wandering this way and that over the lowlying farmlands, until it was tamed by engineers and confined to a man-made channel--a channel just as straight as the causeway, and running for miles and miles southward through bland countryside. Along the channel there is a footpath, which from my point of view is of course a jogging path. Running back from the island, I transfer from causeway to path and keep on running, with Mont-Saint-Michel at my back.

Or so I would suppose. After a long lulling stretch of eventless running, I idly look over my shoulder and with a shock discover that Mont-Saint-Michel is nowhere to be seen: gone is the pointed steeple of the abbey church, gone are the monastic buildings called "La Merveille," gone is the mountain, gone is the village, gone are the turreted walls. It is an absolute desertion, as though the single meaningful object in my environment has broken off all contact and withdrawn its splendor from me. A simple matter of perspective, naturally: the curvature of the earth, the fact that light travels in a straight line, all that. That is not what it feels like, though, and even less so as I turn and retrace my running steps. Now, instant by instant, the mount begins to appear again, like a threatening presence emerging relentlessly from the formless waters of dream--first the sharp stone needle at the very top, then bit by bit the abbey buildings, finally the village and the walls and the whole fabulous silhouette that declares itself so passively and picturesquely on travel posters everywhere.

I am not in a state to appreciate the laws of optics. I have been running on the earth and breathing the air deep into my lungs and feeling the blood coursing through my arteries, and I see things as they speak to me, not as an abstract impersonal science has taught me to understand them. The sky is a huge inverted bowl with me as its center; the sun glowing through the damp overcast is a divine being generously giving me light and warmth and life; and Mont-Saint-Michel and I are bound to each other as though on a seesaw. I perceive the way my running makes the mount sink into the sands or rise from them; but, at the same time, I feel the mount itself taking command, its willful sinking driving me away, as though it had tipped me down into the grasslands that roll toward the south, its aggressive rising pulling me back to it, so that I can pay tribute to its glory the way in the past visiting pilgrims would offer their contributions of coin or produce to the monks.

Which of us, then, is in charge of this reciprocal ballet: the jogger claiming to master the world by running through it and knowing it, or the world silently and ineluctably mastering the jogger by shaping his space, articulating his vision, establishing his sense of location and distance, telling him where (and who) he is?

One more jog to complete this process of illumination. I am in the Loire Valley, near the south bank, in the heartbreakingly lovely countryside between Angers and Saumur. My home, for these few days, is the Château de Cheman--not really a castle, but a manorial farmhouse, dating from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and still surrounded by vineyards and cow-pastures and rows of dark cypresses. The owners rent out a couple of spare rooms, and I have left mine at dawn on a cold, misty October morning to jog along the road parallelling the river. There is nothing dramatic on this section of road: farms, fields, some corrugated iron huts for agricultural experiments, the minuscule, undistinguished, treasurable towns (a twelfth-century church, a closed general-purpose store, a closed cafe, an ornate town hall, a few dark houses), Saint-Sulpice, Blaison, Gohier, Saint-Rémy-la-Varenne, no architectural masterpieces, no remnants of signficant historical events, no features worthy of mention in the guidebooks, but France, totally flawlessly copiously France, down to the very center of the earth.

It is quite cold, with a raw, biting cold, and I have to hide my freezing fingers in the pouch of my sweatshirt. There is not a soul to be seen, and uncanny silence around me as I jog along, the silence unbroken except by the pounding of my feet on the narrow paved road. I had hoped that as the sun came up the mist would dissipate and the air would grow warmer. Instead, the feeble sun, less and less visible, seems to be sucking up the vapors of the wet earth and of the Loire and filling the air with them so densely that a mere flick of the mind could give this mist the name of rain.

I am going through a forest now, and the exquisite gradations of almost entirely leeched tans and greens and grays, as the mist rises in ragged floating scraps among the dim trees, tells me where Corot found his inspiration--for where, in this old, aesthetically rich, profoundly and repeatedly explored country is there anything that a French artist has not already looked at with shrewd, undeceivable eyes and given the indelible form of art? Yet soon even Corot has vanished (the Corot the forest and I have both been changed by); everything becomes blurred, uncontoured, uncertain, melting out of definition, the forest of Merlin and the Lady of the Lake, mysterious, wonderful, from a time before thinking was separated from living and in a place beyond all latitude and longitude. Finally, that forest too, at the ultimate edge of invisibility, imperceptibly crosses the border into absence. Now the sides of the road are invisible; I cannot see where I am going or where I am coming from; I am enveloped from head to foot in pale, clammy, blinding grayness. Time, evidently, to turn back: the most fanatical jogger knows when it is time to give up and to direct one's attention to a shower and a hot espresso.

I about face and continue my jogging, a bit more slowly after a few inadvertent stumbles over the road's invisible margins into pathless fields or icy bogs. It should be about here that I turn left up the cypress-lined path to the "cha^teau." But there is no turnoff, not here, and not later, for many long minutes. At last I sense (I really can't see it) the road opening up briefly to the left, but when I take the slightly ascending path, perceiving it with my feet rather than with my eyes, a few yards tell me that there are no cypresses along this driveway, and therefore no Château de Cheman at its end.

I turn back and descend the sideroad--but now the main road too appears to have changed its position. It goes off at an angle I don't remember. I try it for a while, swathed in fog, and for all the muscular exertion in my legs I seem to be making no progress at all. It is as if the cold, wet, featureless world around me has absorbed me into itself, taking away my sight, taking away my ability to move anywhere, depriving me of everything the jogger exults in: speed, freedom, knowledge, mastery, power. I turn around and try going back the other way, but with no more effect. Every direction is the same. The running is only an illusion; I have been compelled to take root, and I am there, somewhere in the Loire Valley, forever.

If you have read this far, you will be wondering how I managed to find my way back to the château. Perhaps the more pertinent question would be whether I found my way back. If this is a story about my bodily location, then the answer must be "Yes, I found my way back to the cha^teau, and eventually back to the airport, and eventually back to America, and eventually back to San Diego, California, where I returned to my usual jogging trails and my usual habits of thought and feeling." But if this is a story about jogging as a spiritual activity, and about human beings as souls, then the answer is that I never found my way home, that I am still there, on that road in the French October mist, jogging chaotically now in this direction and now in that, no longer the master of experience the jogger likes to suppose he is, but quite lost.

Quite lost. I don't think I am the only one. And does that kind of lostness mean we are seeing less now, or more?

*******

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