The Power of Poison (II): Poisonous herbs

As mentioned in the last entry, despite its promising start, the AMNH exhibit largely focuses on the one-sided meaning of poison as harmful agents, without showing much of its beneficial functions. In the only non-West demonstration, it presents a servant offering an elixir to the first emperor in China, Qinshi Huangdi, along with some brief descriptions of elixir poisoning in China. Again, poison is something to be avoided. That is the general impression of poison in our society, which the exhibit captures and reinforces.

Along this line of thought, the show gives some examples of herbal poisons. One is called Monkshood, a plant with blue or purple flowers that look like the hood on a robe worn by a monk. 

It grows around the world in northern temperate climate. Its root contains powerful neurotoxins and cardiotoxins that can kill a person by heart attack. Any medicinal uses? Yes, yet the exhibit says that the plant is “sometimes used in extract form as an anti-inflammatory agent, but this is extremely risky because of the plant’s toxicity.” So better to be careful with it. In history, it is also the case in the West. As early as the first century CE, the plant was recognized as a powerful poison. In his monumental work De Materia Medica, the Roman pharmacist Dioschorides called the plant wolfsbane, and, as the name implies, only used it to kill animals. However, if I tell you the Chinese name of this plant, you might be surprised: fuzi (附子). It is one of the most commonly used drugs in Chinese medicine since antiquity. Of course it needs to be carefully processed before application. But why did the West ignore the medicinal value of the plant? This is the same type of plants in the Aconitum genus. In Europe it is condemned as the “queen of poisons,” yet in China it is hailed as the “chief of all medicines.”(百藥之長) Interesting, isn’t it?

Let’s flip the coin. There is another poisonous plant in the show called Belladonna, which grows in Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia (because of this geographical restriction, the plant did not enter Chinese pharmacy). 

The toxic chemical called atropine in the plant can induce hallucination and coma. Atropine derived from the name of a Greek goddess Atropos, who represents fate and destiny (another entry is on its way for this fascinating, if not somewhat melancholic, topic). 

Atropos has two sisters: Clotho, who spins the thread of life, and Lachesis, who measures the length of the thread. But Atropos’s role is most decisive and cruel: she cuts the thread. And that is the conceived power of the plant. Belladonna belongs to a large group of plants of Solanaceae family called nightshade. If these names sound too technical for you, the following foods in the group may not: tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and hot peppers. Of course they don’t contain the same kind or level of toxins as Belladonna, but if one eats them improperly, for example, eating potatoes with sprouts that contain a high concentration of alkaloids, the omnipresent Atropos may start her job…

Finally, let’s take a look at a famous poison called hemlock. This parsley-looking plant (picture on the left), grown in Europe, northern Africa, and Asia, can cause paralysis and death. It is famous because Socrates allegedly drank the lethal poison for his death sentence. I couldn’t find this plant in Chinese pharmacy, but people often confuse it with a herb called gouwen (鉤吻) in China (picture on the right) . They look somewhat similar – yellow and clustered flowers, slim stems, but belong to utterly different families (see the edges of their leaves are different). Interesting, gouwen is the plant that, according to the legend, the Divine Farmer (神農), the alleged founder of Chinese pharmacology, tried and died from. It later acquired a colorful name in China – duanchangcao (斷腸草), which we often see in kong-fu novels. Unlike the fate of fuzi, gouwen was mainly imaged and employed as a poison in Chinese history. 

Well, this entry might feel a bit technical. If nothing else, here is the message - don't be afraid of fuzi, and be careful when you next time eat potatoes.

The Power of Poison (I): Arrow Poison

 

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NYC recently put up a new exhibit called “The Power of Poison,” which a few colleagues pointed out for me. “That is my thing!” I mused. It may not have much history in it given the curator being a zoologist, but the topic is too close to my research to be missed. So I went early this week to check it out.

As a whole, the exhibit is not bad. In an online video, the curator introduced the show by citing the words of a famous 16^th century alchemist Paracelsus: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dEuJqbJo6S4) I love this quote because it speaks to the essence of poison – poison is not defined by what it is but by how it is used. [Paracelsus is such a fascinating figure who deserves a full entry. Stay tuned!] The start of the exhibit echoes this philosophy. It shows a box of chocolates: they are our favorite treats, but poisonous to dogs (theobromine causes seizures in dogs). What makes a poison depends on who or what you are. It then shows a large bowl of salt: it is vital to life, but too much of it can kill. Dose matters. Despite the promising start, the rest of the exhibit doesn’t follow suit, but rather focuses on the toxic effects of various poisons. The relativistic and paradoxical meaning of poison is largely lost.

The most interesting section of the show is “Poison in Myth and Legend.” What were the earliest human experiences with poisons? Imagine that we lived 30,000 years ago, when agriculture was yet developed and we co-inhabited with dangerous plants and animals. Our first experiences with poisons probably came from eating toxic plants or being attacked by poisonous animals such as snakes and scorpions. It is believed that the original meaning of Chinese character du (毒) is snake in grass. The 2^nd century BCE work Masters of Huainanzi (淮南子) includes a legend that the founder of Chinese agriculture and pharmacology the Divine Farmer (Shennong) tasted hundreds of herbs to find useful medicines for his people. A later legend adds that the courageous and benevolent Shennong eventually died from eating a highly poisonous herb called gouwen (鉤吻). These early interactions with poisons, likely by accident, gradually taught humans to avoid them or even better, use them for good. In a hunting society, the earliest use of poisons was probably for making poisonous arrows. The exhibit presents a nice animation of a Greek legend: The Greek hero Hercules (that is where the word “Herculean” came from) killed the nine-headed serpent Hydra and smeared its blood onto his arrows to make powerful weapon. 

  

Such a legend may have a historical basis. The earliest evident of using poisons came from an archeological site recently discovered in South Africa (dated 24,000 years ago), where residues of castor beans (蓖麻) were found on a wooden poison applicator. Interestingly, the English word “toxic” derived from the Greek word “toxikon,” meaning poison arrows. 

            Ancient China also used poisonous arrows, most prominently with a poisonous herb called wutou (烏頭). In a famous story in the Romances of the Three Kingdom (三國演義), the Shu general Guan Yu was wounded by an arrow poison of wutou, and he courageously asked the physician Hua Tuo to scrap off the poison from his bones. I need to remind the curious readers that although the story is also in the original Sanguo zhi (三國志), which the Ming novel is based on, the poison of wutou is not specified there. In any case, the use of wutou for military purposes lasted long in Chinese history. In a military treatise called Wubei zhi (武備志) in the 17^th century, we find a detailed recipe to prepare an arrow poison called 見血封喉, which involves wutou. The name gives us an instant chill. 

            Finally we have an arrow poison called curare used by tribesmen in South America jungles. When European explorers in the 19^th century encountered the poison in the exotic land, they were fascinated by its power to cause temporary paralysis. Later, it was introduced into Europe for studying human physiology, notably by the famous Claude Bernard. In the early 1900s, doctors even used it during surgery to keep patients from moving, though they were still conscious. That is a tale of the positive use of poison.  

Tuning the Rig (Harvey Oxenhorn)

Francis Bacon once said, some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and only a few to be chewed and digested. Harvey Oxenhorn’s book Tuning the Rig is one of that few. It is a book of expedition and exploration, on the faraway seas of Newfoundland and Greenland, and in himself. Harvey took on a journey on the Regina Maris, an old sailing vessel, to watch and study whales in the Arctic. The book is about that unique, and life-transforming experience. When I first picked up the book, I was not very enthusiastic. No need to be convinced of wild life protection; neither am I interested in ships or sailing. But as I went on, the book engaged, and absorbed. Yes, there is an environmentalist argument in it, though presented subtly; yes, lots of accounts on the nitty-gritty details of daily routines on the Regina, but with a purpose. Most important of all, the book is meditative. There are moments when Harvey stood alone on the deck, facing the immense and quiet sea, he contemplated the meanings of life, and living. Such as this one:

What in the world was I doing here? Why was I standing in sleet in the middle of nowhere at one in the morning? What was I trying to find out or prove? … It had always been this way; maybe that was why I had no “bright hall” to dream of coming back to. I had made a botch of it; I had failed to find, or at any rate to keep, my hearth back home. Indeed, it was from this emptiness, this absence, that I was fleeing. Yet nothing could feel emptier than the prospect at which I now stared. … All I could think to answer was no answer, the Buddhists’ “noble truth,” that life is suffering. You feel it as our prow divides the wet black world in half: Time’s fabric splits, then mends astern.

Beautiful, isn’t it? Harvey, after all, was a poet. He had a special eye to capture beauty and elegance, even in the most routine and trivial things. Take this one, as he observed one of his shipmates’ measuring with a sextant in his hand at 3am:

To see him standing there, against the vacant sky, is to be reminded just how small and how impermanent we are. And to admire all the more the way his feet are planted, the dignity in his unturned face, his hands controlled and quiet, his mind the same. He is not posturing, not even thinking of himself. Yet as he aims and reads the instruments, he is aligning himself, literally, with stars.  

But I should not use “even” here; I should use “because.” This is the lesson Harvey learned. In the epigraph, he cited James Clerk Maxwell’s words “the object of knowledge is relation.” On a ship, on the high seas, unity was the key for survival. Everyone, even inexperienced Harvey, needed to chipped in, and strictly followed the daily routines to guarantee the safe sailing of the vessel. People were so interdependent in this special environment that the spirit was written into the sub-consciousness. The word “routine” had a profound meaning for Harvey:

“Routine: derived from ‘route,’ a line of pilgrimage or travel.” How widely must one travel, and how far afield, to discover the value of the word? No matter. To believe in the journey is to have already arrived. And to surrender to the long haul, willingly, is to take it and make it your own.

To take the haul willingly, but also tactfully. Hervey further reflected:

When I first came on board, I thought that the whole world owned me. I was ready to make music, damn it. I was disappointed, angry that so little in my life would stay in tune. But tonight, as I barely heard the sounds we made before they were blown astern, I understood such disappointment to be arrogance.

It is arrogance to expect that our life always be music. It is false pride to demand to know the score. Harmony, like a following breeze at sea, is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost, our lot is to tack and tune.  

To lower the self-ego, to accept limitations and failures, to always ready to adjust, is the secret of a full life. 

Five years after the journey, Harvey wrote in the epilogue, aptly titled “Home,” as follows:

I am of a generation often faulted for preoccupation with the self and an inability to make or keep commitments. From childhood we were relentlessly exhorted to make ourselves special – to achieve, achieve, achieve. Beneath that impulse (and the style of education it inspired) lay the assumption that the way to be a complete and successful human being is to cast your own net ever wider, to leave your individual mark upon more and more.

What many of us are coming to understand is that this way of living has enormous costs. We are perpetually spread too thin, fragmented, scattered. As we strain to hold together more and more, we bring less and less of ourselves to each spinning moment. In the manic pursuit of gaining and becoming, what is lost is the capacity for simply being: with each other, with nature, with ourselves. Not surprisingly, when we think of freedom, we locate it outside our daily round. We define it as escape.

What I discovered abroad Regina is that we have it backward. Freedom, Hegel said, is recognition of necessity. In exercising self-restraint, in accepting the kinds of limits that I had previously squandered so much energy evading, I experienced a sense of purpose and a kind of solidarity I’d never known before. I had gone far off to bring what mattered closer – gone to sea and come back feeling grounded – relieved of the burden of specialness, reprieved from the lonely ego, released but also reengaged.   

It took Harvey another three years to publish the book. Shortly after, sadly, he died from a car accident. I am glad that in his short life, he had this transformative experience on Regina and was able to share that experience, with his humble and revelative reflections, with us. That is his legacy; his spirit of living and being will continue to resonate. 

  

     

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho's bestseller The Alchemist is an easy read. It is a spiritual novel, telling a story of a shepherd boy named Santiago who pursued his dream of finding the treasure at the Pyramid in Egypt. What happens during his journey from southern Spain to the Pyramid transforms the boy's life, a miraculous alchemical experience. 

The book aims to inspire: We all have our personal dreams, but often we ignore them because either we fear the difficulties to pursue them or we are distracted by other things. If we do take the path instructed by our hearts, we will have great life experiences no matter whether we eventually find the treasure or not.

The book reads like a fable, full of language of spirituality and big-letter words: Personal Legend, the Language of the World, the Soul of the World, Love, etc. Ten years ago, this would have been a perfect book to read, to inspire me to do what I wanted to do. Since I have passed that initiation stage, the book feels less relevant now, and somewhat even dry, didactic, and repetitive. My personal experience says things more visceral and powerful than what a fable offers. Nonetheless, the book does have some insightful lines. Here is one: 

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

This is very true. We are often afraid of initiating things different because we think they are difficult. Only to a certain degree. The difficulties are to stop those who only want these things superficially. If you want something badly, nothing can stop you, and actually you will find it not so hard to pursue it anyway. Internal conviction is much more difficult than any external difficulties that you can imagine. 

That is my experience eight years ago - eight years, woo, that is a long time. In late September that year, after more than two years of deliberation and struggling, I eventually decided to make the change, not just at the level of mental entertainment or confiding to a few close friends, but to act definitely - email the professors, talk to the people in the field, etc. It is true that once I did all these, a sign of my wanting it seriously, the whole world conspired to help me. I received lots of positive feedbacks and encouragements; I developed more concrete ideas to make the transition; I even found a person that had similar experiences as me. Three months later, on that unforgettable Saturday morning, I sat together with KC in his office and nailed the matter. That was pretty quick, wasn't it. But I don't want to de-emphasize the difficulty of the process. The difficulty resides, however, not in the process itself, but in the process of convincing myself to follow my heart, to pursue my "Personal Legend." That process is pretty damn hard. 

So in the fifth-year of my last PhD pursuit, my life underwent a drastic and decisive transformation. Now I am in the fifth-year of my current PhD study, reading The Alchemist. If nothing else, the book is reassuring, and elicits a sense of déjà-vu. I was there, like Santiago, taking a journey to pursue my dream. Now I am on the path that I chose, and moving forward to find my "treasure." It is a wonderful feeling.

Sayonara, Ayu san!

I met Ayu san when we both took Allan's course on the history of medicine a few years ago. She was a visiting scholar, doing research on athlete foot. In one section, we discussed a book called Modern Period - how 20th century American women embraced modern hygiene to manage their menstrual cycles. Ayu san said, in a dramatic yet assertive way, that Japanese women have the ability to control their periods. This amazed the American audience. 

And that showed Ayu san's character. She has great interest in, and actually believe in, certain things that we might regard mystical or even superstitious. We have talked about, on multiple occasions, her experiences with psychic readers. The messages she received from them became pivotal guides for her life, especially her personal life. This strong spiritual commitment provided her confidence and reassurance that sustains her life. 

On the surface, Ayu san is one of those achievers, finishing her degree quickly and obtaining one of the most competitive post-docs in Japan. She constantly works, even if she is aware of its caveats. But when I talked to her more, I found her quite an honest and warm person. She is one of my few friends to whom I can confide personal feelings about life, especially love life. She has a clear vision of what she is looking for, a vision gained from her psychic reader. It is a high, and unconventional ideal, maybe too high to be practical. Sometimes I felt conflicted when she asked advice from me. Should I encourage her? Should I recommend she be more realistic? I don't know. I see myself in her. 

"I have to believe in it, right, Yan san? Otherwise, how can I make it happen?"

Something in the past also bothered her - the tragic death of her former advisor. She has been trying to find the reason, but with no avail. In front of death, we all become powerless. This unpleasant memory lingers with Ayu san: underneath her ambitious and assertive face lies a vulnerable and sad heart. 

Ayu san is leaving, going back to Japan. People come and go, very typical of Cambridge culture. Whichever the pathway that Ayu san is taking, I wish her best luck. A person like her - sincere, idealistic, caring, and vulnerable, deserves a good life.

The Masters

CP Snow took over 30 years (1920s-1950s) to write The Masters, a novel on the academic life in an imaginary university in England. The plot is rather simple: The master of an old, prestigious university is about to pass away, so a new master must be elected. Faculty members presented two candidates: Jago, a professor in Humanities who has great ambition, strong social skills, but less of an academic achievement; Crawford, a professor in Science who is an established scholar, yet not as adept in human connections. Written in a first-person narrative in the eyes of one of the faculty, the book delineates the process of the election through a series of negotiations, persuasions, and power struggling. 

Snow is famous for his idea of "two cultures," i.e., the culture of Science and the culture of Humanities in academia. But the book strikes me not by the distinct characteristics of these two cultures but by a shared mentality that defines academic life, or more precisely, academic politics. As the heart of the contentious election lies the ambition, ideal, and self-interest of individuals. Both candidates desired the position badly, and they used all strategies, not always noble, to achieve their goal. The book is not an "exposé" of the dark side of academia, however. It is rather a sober reminder of the importance of social relationships and individual characters in shaping academic life.

In the eyes of Eliot, the narrator, each faculty member involved in this election has his own character. Eliot aligns himself with Jago, the candidate in Humanities. Why? Because Jago prefers self-torment than conceit. Ago is vulnerable in his own eyes. He is proud and diffident at the same time. Maybe at the deepest level, pride and diffidence becomes the same (p204). I resonate with this connection though it is hard to articulate why. Pride comes from within, from an attitude of pursuing something high and noble, with intrinsic values. Diffidence implies connection or comparison to others, how one positions oneself in a social network. We can do things that we feel proud of because they fulfill our moral needs. But that is a self-centered sentiment. Often times we don't experience that pride fully until what we do is socially recognized, or even better, appreciated. But that departs from one's own perspective; we are asking others, often unconsciously, to agree with us that what we think is right and good is actually right and good for everybody. Every time we do a good, unselfish thing, with lots of pride, we plead appreciation from others. Yet we are not sure whether what works within us works interpersonally, so comes lots of diffidence. Can we do things truly altruistic, without considering being paid back, not in material sense, but in a sense of social recognition? Are we all like Jago or Crawford, whose pursuit of mastership evinces their insistence on such a recognition? I don't have the answer. But I want to say this: morality entwines with sociability. I often consider my urge to do good things is self-satisfaction derived from a pure pleasure to be helpful and useful. But how pure is the pleasure if the satisfaction is conditioned and mitigated by the reactions from the helped? What if that person does not say "Thank you?"

Ang Lee at Harvard

People tend to have two kinds of dreams. One is more realistic; the other, dreamy dreams, unlikely achievable in their lifetime. Randy Pausch, in his last lecture, talked about his childhood dreams, most of them were achievable, and he almost checked off the whole list. Almost. Because he did have dreams like becoming a NFL player, a hard one for a university professor. That is a dreamy dream. 

If switching career is my realistic dream, what is my dreamy dream? Probably a film director. A director who can master all kinds of genres, producing films from all corners of the world with a strong independent, creative spirit. Of course, I desire recognition, fame, and box office as well. So I would image that I am a mix of Darren Aronofsky, David Lynch, Hayao Miyazaki, and … Ang Lee. 

If I have to choose one in that dreamland to emulate, Ang Lee is probably my best candidate. I have seen almost all his movies, except a couple of early ones, and often amazed by his extremely diverse cinematography. It is even more amazing for his capacity to interpret Western culture (Sense & Sensibility, Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil) perfectly as an outsider. We don't see this sort of artistic and commercial success duplicated in academic world. Not at all. Can I even think of one scholar, who is from a non-Western background, produce groundbreaking scholarship on Western subject matters? No. The power dynamics is manifest in Western academics: Many Western scholars are great Orientalists, although that term is not used anymore after Edward Said's Orentalism, but not vice versa. If in the era of post-colonialism and post-modernsim, the West do not perceive the non-West as culturally inferior, they might still consider they are historiographically superior. In this sense, Ang Lee's success is almost a miracle. After all, the world of film-making is different from academic world, where language still matters tremendously. Maybe the visual is a more universal, powerful, and communicable language that made Ang Lee the single person who successfully worked against this power dynamics.

Too much on academic jargons. Back to the main topic. Ang Lee, together with his long-time partner James Schamus, came to Harvard to participate in a panel discussion about his films and his film-making experiences. It was an event that aimed to foster conversation between academics and artists. It was a nice attempt, though it is a bit awkward to see scholars offered their interpretations of Ang Lee's films, sometimes closely related to his personal experiences, right in front of the director. Of course Ang Lee was gracious, unassuming, and humble, and agreed with all these interpretations. But he also said something that manifested a clear distinction between a scholar and an artist: the former always analyzes, while the latter does what they feel right. Ang made movies out of his artistic instincts, not out of preoccupied analytical thoughts. In this sense, the philosopher-turned-director Terrence Malick is an exception, but even there we don't know how he produced a film since he rarely talks in public. Ang did say something deeper: We all live in pretense, underneath which hide our deeper, more complex, even disturbing, feelings that we cannot or don't want to explore. Film is one of the most powerful pretenses that allows us to explore our deeper feelings - often unpleasant, and a deeper understanding of ourselves. Making films, for Ang, is self-discovery. The topics and cultural backgrounds of his films are remarkably diverse, but they all connect to this discovery process, a process that resonates with all humanities. To use the cliché, we only understand the world by understanding ourselves. In this sense, the diversity of Ang's cinematography reveals the unfixedness of his own character: Always curious to explore new domains and never settled in one place. Underneath his docile façade lies a rebellious and free spirit.

Probably I will never be a film director, considering the dichotomous mindsets between an artist and a scholar. But Ang Lee's case is inspiring. Similar to Ang's experiences, I am also living between two cultures, and aspire to "step on the cultures of both China and West; wholeheartedly produce works with universal value." (兩腳踏中西文化，一心評宇宙文章 from 林語堂). How to make it work is a far more difficult question. How to balance between two cultural values? How to negotiate with my own tradition? Sometimes I consider myself a person who "travels with my root." (pilfered from Mu Xin 木心) I like that spirit because it nicely merges my individual spirit with my cultural identity. I don't believe in absolute freedom, because absolute freedom means absolute nothingness like what the movie Gravity portrays. Attachment is a fundamental aspect of humanity. What I desire is a "restrained freedom," conditioned by human relationship (family, friends, society). We may say Ang Lee is a genius, but he humbly attributed his success to team work, a spirit undoubtedly cultivated by him and his cultural background. Ang Lee's experiences best showed this: an individual, idiosyncratic indulgence of curiosity and pursuit of self-discovery can only be achieved and sustained by an effective collective support from others. A genius knows how to make the two mutually nourishing. This is no less true for academic success.