For the first time since Karen and I came out of quarantine, the weather this morning was just too miserable - -11C with snow showers laying a thin, slippery layer on the sidewalks - to consider going out for a run.
So I rode my bike on our exercise stand instead, and watched the first episode of a Netflix documentary series my darling daughter had recommended. It's called Surviving Death, by filmmaker Ricki Stern, based on a book by Leslie Kean, a "journalist and paranormal enthusiast," as Wikipedia describes her. The series dropped last month.
Caitlin was always a closet irrationalist, wanting in particular to believe in ghosts and hauntings, although I don't think she ever quite manages to do it - believe, I mean. She's too much her skeptical parents' child.
I have to confess that for a brief time a few decades ago, I too was susceptible to occasional magical thinking. In particular, I got intrigued by "scientific" research into reincarnation. It was this that made Caitlin think I might enjoy the series.
There is much that is culturally, symbolically and historically interesting about the notion of reincarnation, but the modern supposedly scientific proof of its existence is not part of that. The "proofs" presented are fraught with the usual problems of paranormal research - over-reliance on anecdotal "evidence" that can't be fact-checked, flawed research design, the presence of confirmation bias, etc.
Much of the work on reincarnation has been done at the University of Virginia in its Department of Perceptual Studies, a facility devoted to paranormal research. UV DoPS was founded by a Canadian-born psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson, who died in 2007. Stevenson's work continues, though, despite some very damning critiques of his voluminous research on the subject of reincarnation, which was otherwise mostly ignored by real scientists.
The reason I mention all this is that one of the principal talking heads in Surviving Death's first episode - which is not about reincarnation but about "near-death experiences" - is a lead researcher at DoPS. So immediately, my skeptical radar was pinging loudly.
Some of the evidence presented - all of it anecdotes from supposedly reliable people - I'll admit is compelling. None of those interviewed appeared to be out-and-out fakes - note: I say, appeared to be - and only one was demonstrably a little flakey.
A very sober-seeming doctor reports a near-death experience she had after she drowned while kayaking and flat-lined for over 30 minutes before being resuscitated. Defying the odds, she recovered without brain damage, and described the experience - fairly typical apparently - of going to some kind of heaven and meeting spiritual beings, including dead relatives. The beings told her her then 11-year-old son would die young. Which he duly did.
Another woman, who "died" for 37 seconds as a result of an embolism after childbirth, was able to describe in great and apparently confirmable detail who was in the operating theatre when she flatlined, where they stood, what they did, and even what the surgeon said under her breath.
Most of the rest of the episode was more of the same. The DoPS researcher spends about a minute and a half of the 50-minute running time outlining and shooting down "rational" explanations that have been suggested for the phenomenon.
Completely missing from that list was the suggestion I always thought plausible, that near-death experiences are hallucinatory phenomena that last far less time than the person's later memories suggest and possibly are embroidered and fleshed out as the subject is resuscitated and becomes conscious.
This is in line with one of the best accepted theories about dreams: that they're fragments of sense impressions that flash through the brain during sleep, part of the brain's housecleaning, which a reviving consciousness then cobbles together into some kind of narrative, however wacky.
Are near-death experiences dream-like episodes triggered by a failing consciousness realizing the imminence of death - which are then somehow retrieved and turned into narratives by a returning consciousness?
I can confirm from personal experience the existence of one of the persistent features of NDEs: the out-of-body experience. NDE subjects usually describe hovering above the deathbed, seeing whatever is going on, but sometimes moving around and even moving through time. I had a very brief out-of-body experience once when I was running a high fever and fainted. As I fell - stark naked, as it happens - I could see myself falling, seemingly from outside my body.
I've always taken this as evidence of the power of the human imagination rather than of the paranormal. A good novelist or screenwriter in the right mindset can imagine in incredibly lifelike detail scenes and people that don't exist and never have. That the human brain can imagine the scene of their own imminent "death" - or their own collapse - from the point of view of an outside observer and "play" it to failing consciousness doesn't seem so hard to believe.
Okay, enough of this silliness!
*
I did get out this afternoon. I deliberately did not head towards the river, but walked into the centre of town. It's not that I've lost interest in London as River City, I just needed a change of scenery. I thought I'd find and record more street art.
All I really saw, though, was the stuff I mentioned in an earlier post - which I don't like. Over-bright colours, crude designs. I think I've figured out why they can be seen so many places downtown, usually on the plywood boards nailed up over windows in unoccupied buildings - of which there are far too many in London's downtown.
They're all to be found on buildings owned by local developer Schmuel Farhi. So many of Farhi's properties are unoccupied and boarded up or under-occupied that it's hard to figure out how he makes money. Yet he always seems to have enough to buy more property to leave vacant and moldering.
There are a couple of bright notes on the otherwise depressing stretch of Dundas St. between Richmond and Wellington - once the city's beating heart, now home to tattoo parlours and sex shops, and a hangout for junkies. For one, Elizabeth Noël is back downtown.
Years ago her shop was on Richmond Row, selling funky clothes and gift items. I used to shop for Christmas tree decorations there. She disappeared and reappeared further north on Richmond near Oxford. The shop had become a destination for retro-cool prom dresses, but also still sold interesting tree decorations at Christmas. Now she's moved in on the north side of Dundas between Clarence and Wellington, near Grooves record store.
It's starting to be an interesting block for retail. The city's coolest bookstore is also there, Attic Books. And Jonathan's gallery, a nationally known purveyor of ceramic art, which also sells paintings. It's always fun looking in Jonathan's window at the often whimsical ceramic pieces.
I wandered up to Wellington and down towards Queen's Ave. That took me past the old Wright Lithography building, another Farhi property, and one of several he boarded up after acquiring and left to rot, presumably in hopes the city will eventually allow him to tear it down when it becomes unsalvageable. It's a gorgeous old building that could have been developed into something special, but because of Farhi's tender loving neglect, it will probably be another London heritage building that ends on the scrap heap.
That building has enormous emotional meaning for me. I spent many hours there as a child and then again as young adult. Farhi bought it years ago and got city approval to develop it as a high-rise condo, with the original building preserved at its base - so he said. It turned out to be all talk, no action. Nothing ever happened. And there sits the library to this day, with Socrates staring balefully out from above the boarded-up front door. Another one he'll let deteriorate until there's no other option but to tear it down.
No comments:
Post a Comment