Graham, Robert. (2017). Neighbourhood Watch: Health and Care in the Videography of Donigan Cumming. [unpublished manuscript].

The healthy have never had patience with the sick, nor, of course, have the sick ever had patience with the healthy. This fact must not be forgotten. For naturally the sick make far greater demands than the healthy, who, being healthy, have no need to make such demands. The sick do not understand the healthy and the healthy do not understand the sick… In reality, a sick person is always alone, and whatever help he gets from outside nearly always proves vexatious. A sick person needs the most unobtrusive help, the kind of help the healthy cannot give.

Thomas Bernhardⁱ

In Modernity and Self-Identity, his 1991 guide to the “contours of high modernity”, Anthony Giddens proposed that, “Processes of institutional sequestration appear in various areas. In each case they have the effect of removing basic aspects of life experience, including especially moral crises, from the regularities of day-to-day life established by the abstract systems of modernity. The term ‘sequestration of experience’ refers here to connected processes of concealment which set apart the routines of ordinary life from the following phenomena: madness; criminality; sickness and death; sexuality; and nature… Broadly speaking, my argument will be that the ontological security which modernity has purchased on the level of day-to-day routines, depends on institutional exclusion of social life from fundamental existential issues which raise central moral dilemmas for human beings.”ⁱⁱ

“…Madness; criminality; sickness and death; and nature.” These terms for “arenas of sequestration” could serve as the dominant topic titles and category domains for Donigan Cumming’s entire career. In Trip (1999) a forceful and overwhelming nature is presented in an anti-eclogue of a storm-hit city covered in ice through which the film-maker strains to walk, with a soundtrack of his heavy breathing and emergency sirens. A certain amount of low-level criminality (mostly drugs and petty violence) is marbled throughout the work, and explicitly so in the account of a prison knifing in Wrap (2000). Cumming presents sexuality in both de-eroticized nudity and accounts of dispassionate, tawdry or unwanted intercourse. What follows from death is shown in the elegiac Prayer for Nettie (1995) and in Culture (2002) where Cumming visits the recently deceased Nelson Coombs’ apartment. In Cut the Parrot (1996) we see how Albert Smith’s sudden death is memorialized by the cigarette burn remaining in a linoleum floor while his community, with hymns and stories, circle around his fresh absence. But the category of madness, understood broadly to include addiction (both to alcohol and to drugs), depression, neurosis and mental disability, and varieties of sickness (including aging) figure the most throughout his work. His output, in both still photography and video, displays a constant effort to de-institutionalize and de-sequestrate these experiences, to compel our acknowledgment of and to illuminate, however disturbing, our trade-off between “ontological security” and these “central moral dilemmas.”

Among his troupe of players, these models and actors, there are those we can identify as having lives of marked affliction and of whom Cumming draws excerpts from their “careers.”ⁱⁱⁱ Colin Kane in Erratic Angel (1998) is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who is maintained by a medical and welfare apparatus which he treats with fear, righteous ingratitude and contempt. In Four Storeys (1999) and if only I (2000) we are introduced to the “wretched life” of the crippled Colleen Faber. My Dinner with Weegee (2001) was begun as a political, historical memoir, an interview piece with Marty Corbin, an old activist, but, as Cumming recounts, “When we started, Marty was sober and I was the serious acolyte. This benign set of circumstances shattered when Marty slid into a period of depression and drinking.”^iv

A laryngectomy gives the taciturn Gerry Harvey in Voice:off (2003) a roboticized voice, while in Locke’s Way (2003) Cumming illustrates through representations (medical texts and family photos) the discomfiting presence (though at a remove) of his brother Julien Cumming’s developmental disability.

Whiggery

Whether they knew it or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.^v

W.B. Yeats

There are many forms of Counter-Enlightenment suspicion, each with its own specialized disaffection: towards modernity, secularism, materialism, scientism, technology and its applications, even progress itself. These critiques seek to identify the overt harms of contemporary dogma, but also the harmful neglect of the potential to experience what Charles Taylor calls “‘Fullness’…the condition we aspire to.” Seeking the missing, sensing the “intimations of authentic deprival”^vi has been the task of many writers, thinkers and artists.

I would like, for the purpose of this essay, to bundle the strands of that current dogma under the rubric of ‘Whiggery’, following the lead of both Yeats and Herbert Butterfield, whose Whig view of history (1939), condemns Whiggery as the proud and complacent trust in progress and its undivided benefits. Whig history judges the past from the viewpoint of a triumphant present. This is an account which favours the progress of successful revolutions and evolutionary destruction and which then serves to ratify a seemingly inevitable present. To consider the possibility of an alternative history, Ivan Illich once suggested , “…you have to follow the practice of those historians who take the past so seriously that they become puzzled by present- day certainties.”^vii

I grant that it’s an arch and parochial expression, remindful of narrow British politics, but it serves my purpose to identify a certain manner, a style of mind and partisan disposition which shows itself in many disciplines. Besides history, I suggest you could find whig versions of sociology, economics, but also medicine. Whiggery is a habit of thought which shapes any deliberation to suit its conventions and its dogma. Its success is that it is always on the winning side, because that is how it is defined: that which has succeeded is correct. Technological innovation and expansion becomes synonymous with progress. Biological consistency allows for generalizations to be made with probabilistic predictability. It cultivates planning which Illich identified as, “..a new variety of the sin of pride.”^viii

Applied to medicine, Whiggery assumes that the constantly correcting and adapting methods of science and technology lead to an ever improving and progressive medical knowledge and practice.

The anti-whiggery critique is the cohort of a counter-enlightenment doubt which views modernity as a cheat: it not only delivers less than promised, it smuggles in much that was not anticipated or wished for. Counter-Enlightenment critics of medicine and of progress would include Christopher Lasch, (The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics), Michel Foucault (The Birth of the Clinic), and particularly Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis, his screed against “medical technocracy”.)

The medicalization critique has two components: the iatrogenic, which claims that medical progress is in fact harmful to the human being. And secondly, that medicalization is a stealth approach of administrative social control: the benefits mask the harm.

Beyond that, the form of medical scientific knowledge is toward the increasing isolation of medical attention toward diseases and their cures rather than patients and their healing.

Combined with a growing rationalizing bureaucracy which chose medicine as its instrument of choice for administrating the body, medicine has contributed to what Christopher Lasch has called, “the socialization of reproduction”^ix in which, as Louis Menand summarizes the argument, “Private life was immediately made prey to the quasi-official helping professions and the ‘forces of organized virtue.’”^x

The recent debates in the United States over health care have presented the issue almost exclusively in economic, material terms and in the politics of who should control the mechanism. Like Foucault and his “apparatus”, Paul Ricoeur identified the mechanism as being a form of controlling “equipment”: “Every institution tends to develop the passions for power in men who dispose of some form of equipment (material or social)…Within the centre of the most peaceful and harmless institutions lies the beast, obstinacy, the tendency to tyrannize the public, and the abstract justice of bureaucracy.”^xi

The economic arrangement is not necessarily crucial: free market or public, the impulse is toward rationalization through applied technology and organization which shows itself as the bureaucratic mechanism on behalf of predictability and control, which is to say, management. While not a documentary, Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions, (2003) gives us a tour of contemporary medical administration. Sébastien , the son of the dying Rémy, asks an hospital administrator to permit his father to have a private room. Arcand brings a light and skillful touch to the scene, for instead of a stubborn crone, the administrator is an elegant, sympathetic but oblivious woman who articulates in almost poetic bureaucratese. She welcomes the son’s efforts, not because they show a filial devotion but because they are consistent with the Ministry’s “ambulatory thrust” and “awareness programs involving family members.”

Cumming’s work is about the institution of medicine, but without ever showing a hospital or a doctor. In Cumming’s videos the hospital is like Kafka’s castle: never entered, but the seat of a barely masked, radiating influence. The hospital is simply the institution-token, architectural metonym of medicine. While bodies enter the spaces of medicine, medicine also enters bodies through cultural and psychic injection: “Contemporary bodies are the internalized image of the diagnostic tests and visualization techniques used in medicine, and such bodies are introjected through alternative medicine, as much as through established medicine.”^xii Both Marty and Colin describe themselves clinically as “depressives” and Cumming shows us the medicines everyone relies on, including Colin’s ginseng capsules. Colleen identifies her pills by their functions, “These are mood stabilizers, these are thought organizers and these are calmers.”

In its extreme, total therapeutics requires the infantilization of the person, what Ivan Illich has called social and cultural iatrogenesis, in which medicalization usurps our definitions of our bodies, life, pain, health and death. It intubates the spirit, replacing natural functions with, “…a code or set of rules, a set of disciplines to make us internalize these rules and a system of rationally constructed organizations…to make sure we carry out what the rules demand. All these become second nature to us.^”xiii Illich again: “…the structures of welfare and insurance systems trained everyone for patienthood.”^xiv

So, while there may be no doctors or hospitals, we do see Colleen, in if only I, on the phone to the hospital, pleading politely but emotionally and in near tears, with all the oratory of her powerlessness, for her medication, her wheelchair, her diapers and her money.

We hear Colin Kane in Erratic Angel, rant that, ”The medication has made me so strange…”I’m sick from it – I’m all paranoid and screwy.” “They’re making it worse.” Sensing the Medical/Welfare nexus at work, Colin is convinced that should he stop taking his pills, they’ll cut off his welfare.

And in My Dinner with Weegee we see Donigan and Colin combine with Marty to get him admitted to detox. For Cumming, this gaming the system (Marty fears that he won’t be allowed in. Donigan asserts, “That’s not gonna happen. We’re gonna leave you there.”), “..is a very clear exposition of how the social actor prepares to interact within the current state of socialized medicine…To me it’s the older, or terminally ill, person’s way of asserting that they are in fact still alive, not ready to be written off. They’re trying to get better or, at least, feel better.”^xv

Documentary Comportment

He enacts his politics with a camera that can’t get close enough.^xvi

Michael Hoolboom

Understood spatially, ‘attitude’ is position “considering the inclination of its axes in relation to the horizon.” As such, documentary attitude can be described in terms of its inclination, as displaying a top-down or bottom-up orientation. Top-down is the approach of most heroic documentary which accompanied attempts at social reform. It scans from a distance and seeks the generic. It relies on everyone keeping their places and displaying themselves as legible types and classes, in a form of sociological profiling. Top-down comes from a chosen, advantageous observation point and knows in advance what it is looking for. During the Thirties, The Farm Security Administration’s Roy Stryker, situated in Washington, sent photographers out on assignments across the country with detailed ‘shooting scripts’. Stryker was not reticent about this and has himself reported Ansel Adams’ comment: “What you’ve got are not photographers. They’re a bunch of sociologists with cameras.”^xvii Top-down instrumentalizes the documentary encounter and is conducive to technocratic ambitions. It is teleological and whiggish. It is also abstract, macro, and deductive. It starts with the premise and a purpose and seeks out the illustrative evidence. “I have,” photographer Edward Burtynsky said in an interview, “a thematic concern which is my point of departure…I often devise my shooting strategy using topographical maps. I look for roads that will take me to high vantage points…”^xviii. Even the earthy Michael Moore in Sicko (2007) began with the political conviction (and abstracted knowledge) that the American health system was failing to deliver to many, including the insured, and sought out to film those who could demonstrate it.

Among examples of medical documentaries, Frederick Wiseman’s 1989 Near Death is more bottom-up than top-down in that his investigation begins in a particular place with a specific curiousity: a large inner-city hospital and how do people die? The setup is entirely conventional: the hospital, the doctors, nurses and orderlies, the patients and their families – the complete occupational template. Wiseman and his camera are unobtrusive and there is no overt engagement with him. At 358 minutes in length, the film can afford to be patient and we see long drawn out scenes of doctors in discussion with their patients and their families. These discussions are really negotiations and they are a Pinterish display of language as ground for struggle and power. The starting position is for the doctor to ask the patient/family unit what do they want to do, and the answer is always,”Everything you can…as long as there is no pain.” The doctor agrees and then elaborates the implications and again asks if that’s what they want. Bit by bit, while the doctor is always offering to do what’s asked, the patients are shaping their replies to concur with what the doctor really wants.^xix But the presence of the camera disciplines everyone, who are all on their best behaviour and act how, I guess, they imagine they’re expected to. As such, it is a portrait of an institution functioning as to expectation, satisfying its civics class description.

Cumming begins in the neighbourhood: he starts from where he is and finds his scripts in their emergence from the situation at hand. There is no preceding concept which brackets the events in advance. His bottom-up, phenomenological analysis shows detailed, concrete and material, life-worlds with micro “in-your-face” tight focus. “The community that became Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography was formed by my trolling the streets, reviving old social contacts, expanding the circle, mixing together the known and the unknown.”^xx

His engagement with Nelson Coombs was straightforward, “I met Nelson on the street in 1983…”^xxi Cumming met Pierre, the protagonist in After Brenda, “ by chance at Nelson Coombs’ apartment. Nelson was one of my long-time models.”^xxii if Only I was, “ first proposed by Colin. When Colleen was thrown out of her halfway house, Colin brought her straight to my door. He wanted the story recorded as it was unfolding. So the tape was, in a sense, their idea..”^xxiii

At a certain point, Donigan Cumming can be considered to have split into two: ‘Cumming’ is the director and camera operator behind the lens, while ‘Donigan’ becomes a ‘character’ in his own tapes. “In Locke’s Way, my role is as a character in my own life.”^xxiv As Hoolboom points out, this alters the spatialization of the encounter: Donigan enters the proceedings and as a participant: “But you are so relentlessly close…that it’s clear you are part of the scene, not to mention that you talk with them (not ‘over’ them in the all-knowing voice-over manner).”^xxv

Besides his rule-bending proxemics and resistance to prepared scripts, Cumming also casts his models without their classificatory identities: “I do think…that the tapes function [as social project], though I insist that the subjects do not form a cohesive group that can be labelled ‘marginal, largely unseen, underclass.’ In fact, I think that the work has not found broad distribution for that very reason: because it represents individuals whose stories don’t boil down to a statistical roux, because it features people in the complexity of their circumstances, including both positive and negative traits (people don’t clean up before I drop by, and so forth).”^xxvi

Cumming resists the soothing , aesthetic form of the narrative. “Colin, in some respects, represents my feelings about the charisma and false promise of storytelling….Narrative, as the modern world frames and enjoys it, is a poor way of getting at, or delivering, the facts. At root, narrative is not interested in the truth. The narrative forms we favour are products of a revenge culture, organizing material to suit circumstances and ambitions in the present. The result is mythology and propaganda.”^xxvii And, as John Burrow writes in his A History of Histories, “A story is inherently whiggish.”^xxviii Those who justify the narrative structure say that it suits the ideal model of life as a quest for the good.^xxix The ill have enough to deal with without being burdened by unfulfillable quests.^xxx Good and meaningful death goals set up many for failure and, well, imagine the feeling of flunking death. About Voice:off, Cumming has said, “I was angry with the whole idea of storytelling, especially narratives designed to deliver life experience and satisfying endings.”^xxxi

The episodic and the mosaic are more suited to the ideas of chance and contingency than the determining coherence of a good story. For one thing, the careers of the ill and the indigent don’t arc, they are lives of stasis, of just being. Not doing, but being: it’s not about what to do but where to be: in Erratic Angel, three men lie on a bed discussing housing options (which is a fixed concern: looking for cheap digs and not getting evicted). Colin’s comments on his stasis, his life is that it is, “…at a dead stop.” Illness supplants work, and the identity-marker it provides. Richard M. Cohen was a young television news producer before being felled by MS: “I must rise above the culture of perfection and remember that I can be even if I can no longer do. I am learning to acknowledge weakness, accept assistance, and discover new forms of self-definition.”^xxxii

Palliation

In Unloving, a 1961 essay on writers and writing, the English novelist Henry Green, commented on the author/physician Anton Chekhov, that, “In his short story ‘The Kiss’ he does more than realise and understand, he makes life as the medicos cannot. Living one’s own life can be a great muddle, but the great writers do not make it plain, they palliate, and put the whole in a sort of proportion. Which helps; and on the whole, year after year, help is what one needs.”^xxxiii

During the 1990s, up the hill from Cumming and his neighbourhood, some doctors at McGill University began a program in what has come to be called “Whole Person Care.” Coming out of work done in end-of-life palliative care, it is a critique generated by doctors of their own education and practices. Dissatisfied with the ‘curing’ epistemological model in which the doctor sought to identify and eradicate a disease distinct from the patient, these doctors sought to offer a model of ‘healing’ in which the patient, assisted by the doctor, comes to accept change. ‘Whole Person Care’ developed from insights in palliative care and the necessity “to reincorporate healing into the medical mandate.”^xxxiv The palliative care movement arose at the point where scientific medical curing had reached its limits. In the face of the incurable , medicine runs out of tools, except for pain management. But true palliation, it was discovered, is not merely analgesic. The work of palliation is to alleviate suffering, in all its dimensions, with an equally fully dimensional set of responses. Healing does not necessarily rely on curing nor does it avoid suffering: “Healing is the personal experience of the transcendence of suffering.”^xxxv In the preface to the 1995 edition of his 1975 book Medical Nemesis, Ivan Illich tried to redeem the “art of suffering” against which “the organized pursuit of health has become the principal impediment to suffering experienced as a dignified, meaningful, patient, loving, beautiful, resigned and even joyful embodiment.”^xxxvi

Curing seeks to return the patient to normal, to the condition before the illness (and in its teleology, deserves to be branded whiggish). In healing, the physician accompanies the patient through necessary change. In curing, the patient is treated almost as a spectator to the doctor’s battle with the ailment. “In the healing mode the power shifts toward the patient. It is within the patient that healing will occur and it is the patient who will make the healing journey.”^xxxvii

Attitudinally, it is a bottom-up approach and it requires mindfulness. Based partially on Dr. William Osler’s notion of ‘equanimity’^xxxviii, mindfulness is understood as an “attribute of consciousness: they propose that consciousness encompasses both awareness and attention. When purposefully cultivated, mindfulness results in heightened awareness of inner and outer experiences through focused attention in the present moment.”^xxxix It is not a technical method, but an artful skill of openness and adaptability to shifting circumstances. It requires listening, compassion and flexibility.^xl Its practitioners often cultivate their mental discipline through meditation.

Cumming’s ‘Whole Person Documentary’ practice displays palliation at both the ‘Donigan’ and ‘Cumming’ levels. Donigan is always ministering, doling out medicines, wiping soiled pants or performing advocacy functions. He asks questions and solicits songs, prayers and stories. Though Donigan can also be a bit of a nag about substance abuse: he berates Colin Kane for his reckless pill consumption, tries to talk Marty Corbin out of having another beer and bemoans his brother Julien’s Tylenol habit. Practicing a kind of holistic therapy, he even prescribes to Colin a professional shave and a haircut, with some salutary effect.

Donigan is the impassioned participant in Locke’s Way, “I wanted to appear to reach a state of physical exhaustion, to sweat, breathe heavily and appear to suffer. The stairs between office (text/medical history) and basement (pictures/family memories) wore me into a frazzle.”^xli Here Cumming neatly represents the conflict within the human sciences between the positivist ‘office’ of explanation and the interpretative ‘basement’ of understanding.

Cumming, on the other hand, is all equanimity and his ‘mindfulness’ is present in his intuitive, flexible and improvisational ways of working. The interactions are designed on the fly and , “the movement from project to project has been quite instinctive.”^xlii As he spoke of the circumstances around the making of My Dinner with Weegee: “It’s not my habit to break things off when confused or surprised, so I just kept shooting and tried to grapple with developments as they twisted around me.”^xliii Cumming has long admired and learned from the work of Jean Rouch and there is something here of Rouch’s call for uncertainty, “But for the best possible result, it is necessary for there to be an inspired performance on both sides of the lens…There must be skill, but also risk….The camera person…..must be…’a little bit afraid’.^xliv Cumming has spoken of the fugal, trancelike filming process where the camera comes to resemble a small animal, like a ferret in his hand. Rouch called for, “one further condition…’la grace’…his use of la grace is an allusion to the condition that Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as Dionysian, a completely amoral state in which creativity is spontaneous and intuitive rather than rational. Rouch believed that this grace could not be learned, taught, or made to happen: it simply arrived suddenly on its own account, or not at all.”^xlv

Cumming is no anodyne humanist. An art like Cumming’s palliative strategy (consoling where there is no cure) requires a sometime tart astringent vision. It is meant to discomfort and is sometimes confusing, often abrasive and insistent on showing raw imagery. Yet it serves to reduce the anxiety of difference, strangeness and the alterity of the stigmatized, to ‘fuse the horizons.’ “Looking at other lives, especially the lives of people in crisis, makes us uncomfortable. Why shouldn’t we be uncomfortable? I certainly am…I do what I can to represent what’s happening to many people in our society, without imposing feel-good narratives. In short, I try to make the pictures match the words.”^xlvi And yet, “As members of a media-addicted society, we need mediations that access the fear and anxiety within ourselves, so that we don’t hold them against others whose failures, as Erving Goffman puts it, are more spectacular than ours.”^xlvii

The Neighbour

In Western accounts of social care and mutual responsibility, one of the major metaphoric figures is that of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells this parable in answer to the question, “Who is my neighbour?”^xlviii What is often stressed in interpretations of the parable is that the Jewish victim is not of the same family or tribe as the helpful Samaritan. For Charles Taylor, the neighbour is determined by contingency, he is, “the one you happen across, stumble across, who is wounded there in the road.”^xlix For Paul Ricoeur, “The neighbour…is characterized by the personal manner in which he encounters another independently of any social mediation.”l

Cumming is deeply rooted in his neighbourhood, having lived in the same downtown Montreal house since 1975. Determined by propinquity and chance, the neighbour is not family. There’s not much family in this filmed community. There are mate-figures and cronys, but no onscreen children or parents. Offstage, Marty has a brother who has sent him a cheque. And, of course, there is Donigan’s brother, Julien. This is not incidental, for the cluster of care participants nowadays importantly includes the family which provides a legitimizing, ratifying and symbolic therapeutic function (think about the operation of the “intervention” for example). As Donigan tells Marty, the hospital must understand that, “I care about you,” but, “I’m not somebody who can take care of you.”

Cumming’s photo and video work is how he makes himself a neighbour, how he exercises his neighbourly function. That relationship is constituted by the act of his looking, and looking over time: “When I started to work seriously with Nettie Harris, it was a case of looking at her, after 6 or 7 years of looking at her, and realizing that she was getting very old and thinking how involved I was in that process.”^li This constant looking becomes a watching, an overseeing and a vigilance. In a soliloquy in My Dinner With Weegee Donigan says, “When he sickened and began to die, he refused to see me. I am catching up with those I watch. They’re just ahead now….Equipped with canes, walkers, wheelchairs, pills and drink. A wheezing, dirty beacon…In a dream, I’m running in amongst them…” As Philip Larkin, in The Old Fools, describes the fate of the old as seen by the not-quite-so-old or the sick as seen by the well:“..and how it will end?…Well,/We shall find out.”^lii Any of us, at different times, could be helpful Samaritan or beaten Jew. Cumming has spoken of his brother, “I know something about the discomfort and fear of the body and mind failing. I intend the work to be a site where people can exchange their feelings about these things without trying to rein them in through ‘correctness’ or dominance. To sum up, what life with Julien has offered is an edgy sense that life is arbitrary – that arbitrariness, not continuity, is the norm.”^liii

However indirect his goals, the work may yet have effect. Asked if his work could lead to social change and action, Cumming replied, “Social action: what can that mean? Possibly it means that people who have gone through some kind of trauma or breakdown, or who work in the social or medical services, or who are simply sick of social ills being papered over, are able to respond to the work. I’m gratified when people who self-identify as I’ve just described tell me that the tapes have touched something in them, or told a truth they think needs telling, or helped them in some other way.”^liv

Against a whig documentary illustrating a normative sociology, which maintains the power of the well over the sick, Cumming displays the anger and frustration of those caught up in commodified welfare relations. The analysis must be capable, to paraphrase Yeats, of looking out Marty’s eye. After all, Marty, viewing the film of his descent, had the equanimity to say, “That’s a cautionary tale.”^lv This suggests a work of healing and making “life as the medicos cannot.”

Against “levelling, rancorous, rational” whiggery , social theorist John O’Neill has offered an alternative of the “wild”: “To think sociologically is to dwell upon a question we have answered long ago: How is it that men belong to one another despite all differences? That is the task of wild sociology, namely, to dwell upon the platitudes of convention, place and love; to make of them a history of the world’s labor and to root sociology in the care of the circumstances and particulars that shape the divine predicaments of ordinary men.”^lvi

Notes

i Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1989, pp. 46-47.

ii Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991, p. 156.

iii “Traditionally the term career has been reserved for those who expect to enjoy the rises laid out within a respectable profession. The term is coming to be used, however, in a broadened sense to refer to any social strand of any person’s course through life…In this light, I want to consider the mental patient.” Erving Goffman, Asylums, Anchor Books, Garden City, 1961, p.127.

iv Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p.114.

v W.B. Yeats, The Seven Sages, in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. I, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan, New York, 1989, p. 241.

vi George Grant, Technology and Empire, House of Anansi: Toronto, 1969, p. 141.

vii Ivan Illich and David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, Anansi Press: Toronto, 2005, p. 129. Or as George Grant characterized such serious history, “as a search for good which can be appropriated to the present.” George Grant, Philosophy in The Mass Age, Copp Clark: Toronto, 1959, p. v.

viii Ivan Illich in David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, Anansi Press: Toronto, 1992, p. 62.

ix Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, Basic Books: New York, 1977, p. xxi.

x Louis Menand, Christopher Lasch’s Quarrel with Liberalism, in American Studies, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2002, p. 203.

xi Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, Evanston: Northwester University Press, 1965, p. 107.

xii Ivan Illich and David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, Anansi Press: Toronto, 2005, p. 127.

xiii Charles Taylor, Foreword to David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, Anansi: Toronto, 2005, p. xii.

xiv Ivan Illich, Twelve Years after Medical Nemesis: A Plea for Body History, in In The Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990, Marion Boyars, New York, 1992, p.216.

xv Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 114.

xvi Mike Hoolboom in interview with Donigan Cumming, in Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists, Coach House Books: Toronto, 2008, p. 112.

xvii Roy Emerson Stryker, The FSA Collection of Photographs, in Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 As Seen in the FSA Photographs, New York Graphic Society: Boston, 1973, p. 8.

xviii Michael Torosian, The Essential Element: An Interview with Edward Burtynsky in Lori Pauli, Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2003, pp. 50-51.

xix The film is certainly of educational value. One learns that if your doctor ever tells you that the most important thing for him to do is to make sure that you are comfortable, then it’s time to see that your affairs are in order.

xx Cumming, in Hoolboom (2008), p. 120.

xxi Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 119.

xxii Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 117.

xxiii Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 115.

xxiv Hoolboom in Hoolboom (2008), p. 120.

xxv Hoolboom in Hoolboom (2008), p. 113.

xxvi Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 124.

xxvii Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 117.

xxviii John Burrow, A History of Histories, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2008, p. 445.

xxix Galen Strawson, Against narrative, Times Literary Supplement, October 14, 2004.

xxx Jean-Dominique Bauby’s example in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – composing a book while afflicted by locked-in syndrome – must make all the other disabled in the world feel like complete slackers.

xxxi Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 121.

xxxii Richard M. Cohen, Blindsided: Lifting a Lfe Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir, HarperCollins (NewYork), 2004, p. 222.

xxxiii Henry Green, Unloving, in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. Matthew Yorke, Chatto & Windus, London, 1992, pp. 281-2.

xxxiv Tom A. Hutchinson MB, Nora Hutchinson BA, Antonia Arnaert PhD, Whole person care: encompassing the two faces of medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 14, 2009, pp. 845-46.

xxxv Egnew TR. The meaning of healing: transcending suffering. Ann Fam Med 2005;3:255-62. Quoted in P.L. Dobkin. Fostering healing through mindfulness in the context of medical practice. Current Oncology, Vol. 16, No. 2, p. 2.

xxxvi Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis – The Expropriation of Health, Martin Boyars: London, p.iv.

xxxvii P.L. Dobkin, Fostering healing through mindfulness in the context of medical practice, Current Oncology, Vol. 16, Number 2, 2009.

xxxviii In his Valedictory Address (“Aequanimitas”) at the University of Pennsylvania, May 1, 1889, William Osler called for the young doctors to cultivate an equanimity and imperturbability in the face of patients, which would invoke a calmness and clearness of judgement. More than just an attitude, this was meant to be a performance: “…educate your nerve centres so that not the slightest dilator or contractor influence shall pass to the vessels of your face under any professional trial.”

xxxix Brown KW, Ryan RM. The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. J Pers Soc Psychol 2003;84:822-48. Quoted in P.L. Dobkin. Fostering healing through mindfulness in the context of medical practice. Current Oncology, Vol. 16, No. 2, p. 2.

xl Hutchinson et al,(2009), p. 845.

xli Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 121.

xlii Donigan Cumming, Continuity and Rupture, Paris: Services culturels de l’Ambassade du Canada, 2000, p. 20.

xliii Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p.114.

xliv Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009, p. 257.

xlv Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009, p. 257.

xlvi Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 117.

xlvii Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 125.

xlviii Gospel of St. Luke, Chapter 10, Verses 25-37.

xlix Charles Taylor, Foreword to David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, Anansi: Toronto, 2005, p. xiii.

l Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965, p.109.

li Donigan Cumming, Continuity and Rupture, pp. 20-21.

lii Philip Larkin, The Old Fools, in Collected Poems, Faber & Faber: London, 1990, p. 197.

liii Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 120.

liv Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 125.

lv Cumming in Hoolboom (2008), p. 114.

lvi John O’Neill, The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative Philosophy, Politics and Sociology, Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1989, p. 189.