The Bareback Human Oasis

“And although it seems heaven sent / we ain't ready, to see a black President”
– Tupac Shakur

"When Barack wins this evening, it's a victory for all of America - because black people and brown people and red people and yellow people all understand that he understands that all villages matter."
– Oprah Winfrey

Tupac is dead. And as of November 5th 2008, so too perhaps is history. Not in a Fukiyama-melodrama kind of a way. No. But in becoming the most eligible candidate for assassination in a generation, Barack Obama appears inadvertently to have ‘redefined’ history. Or to have inverted the space-time continuum, which is likely well within his powers.

Consider: the term ‘history’ has traditionally been applied to an aggregate of past events, or to a branch of knowledge concerned with the systematic narrative of such events. (Granted, history is a bit of a cad, having fathered numerous illegitimate intellectual offspring and probably screwing Hegel on alimony. So treat the preceding definition loosely, like history has his women.) ‘Past events’, like a wall coming down in Berlin, or bombs falling on a harbour, or the penning of a timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people (cf. Tribe Called Quest, A. 1991. Can I Kick It? New York: Jive Records). Past events.

What business, then, have contemporary affairs in being packaged up and sold as ‘historic’? Does not ‘the historic’, as a temporal division, necessitate some future period of reflection, the privilege of, in President-speak, our children, and our children’s children, and so on? Is it not this interval itself that ultimately constitutes history?

It seems the post-modern obsession with reflective histrionics has finally caught up with itself. The temporal dislocation of history, which allows for events to exist simultaneously both in the present and in an imagined future-past, has rendered its study overtly metaphysical. But wait. Is this really anything new? Haven’t prophets, leaders, sportsmen and the like been looking to ‘situate’ themselves in future-history for many centuries past? As social beings predisposed to seeking the approval of others, is it not inevitable that we entertain ideas about how we will be perceived by coming generations? Has anything changed? And how long is this string of rhetorical questions?

In recent times, the definition of the term ‘historic’ appears to have been expanded, with many new meanings having been appropriated and introduced into public discourse by politically dominant groups. (That singular, current events can now be deemed ‘historic’ testifies to this subtle semantic manipulation.) The word is increasingly applied to the cessation of processes, such as wars or Olympic medal droughts, and occasionally even to incipient ones. Consider the recent example:

When Barack Hussein Obama was ordained as the 44th President of the United States, leader of the free-world, saviour of the solar system and legitimate puppy-purchaser, celebration was unconfined. A jubilant nation witnessed scenes of unparalleled excitement; not since November 1989 had the world’s media captured in such totality the joy and anticipation of a people. What do these events have in common? Teary, rosy-cheeked girls; a cross-cultural camaraderie; the collective warmth of heart that fought off the chill of a November midnight? In Berlin they played Beethoven’s 9th, with the word “Joy” (Freude) changed to “Freedom” (Freiheit); in Chicago’s Grant Park, where some 750 billion people had gathered to witness the Second Coming, they played Jackie Wilson’s 1967 hit “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher”. Yet despite these startling similarities, the two occasions differed in their temporal orientations. While the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated chiefly as an ending, the coming of Barack was heralded as a beginning. Of what remains to be seen, and as such the widespread elation that has accompanied his ascension seems at once baffling and injudicious.

Yet the excitement is neither illusory nor localised. The global community has endorsed the occasion of Obama’s election as ‘historic’, based on novel, pervasive and slightly contradictory definitions of this term. These new strains of ‘the historic’ interbreed with older, grander and more abstract ones, in turn producing highly resistant, air-wave-borne forms. Upon contact with these virulent ideas, people come to believe that they are indeed witnessing a pivotal moment in some logical sequence – human progress perhaps - leading to symptoms of (unbounded and unfounded) hope and joy. Side-effects include back-slapping and fist-pumping; celebrity sufferers may choke on their own soundbites.

Seduced by the sirens of history, paralysed in a future-past, it is an excessive pattern of emotionality and attention-seeking behaviour that characterises the children of HPD (Histrionic Personality Disorder). Hungry for history’s approval, and impatient for his arrival, they build history in their own image. Chants resound: “Yes we can, yes we can, yes we can”. In sun-scorched canyons, through bristling forests and ‘cross the icy wastes, sweet melody on the breeze: “…taking me higher, than I’ve ever been lifted be-…”

In the distant valleys of time, history lies in wait.

All this is absolute nonsense of course. Except maybe Tupac’s quote at the beginning – I can think of 49% of a certain adult population who would probably agree with him there. But as Oprah so astutely observed, it’s not about black and brown and red and yellow, not anymore. We have to rid ourselves of this Lego mentality if we’re not to be overcome by those Eastern powerhouses, the Reds, the Yellow Reds and the Browns.

Ode to the Open-Minded

There can be few aspects of modern paleaopathological research more morbidly intriguing than trephination (also known as trepanation), the surgical removal of a disc of bone from the skull of a living individual without causing damage to the underlying blood vessels and brain. The procedure constitutes the earliest form of surgical intervention for which we have objective evidence, and its continued practice amongst both isolated tribal societies and a rare ilk of free-thinking Westerners has cemented its current position at the intersection of age-old and New Age healing.

In its ancient form, trephination was a lengthy and traumatic affair. Prehistoric surgeons experimented with a variety of tools and techniques to facilitate the extraction of bone from the cranium. In Europe, skulls were commonly trephined using the flint-scraping method, whereby an elliptical orifice was created by gradually scraping away the lamina externa (outer table) and diploë and then, with considerable delicacy, the lamina interna (inner table) to expose the dura mater. Elsewhere, the modus operandi involved ‘boring’ a series of small, closely adjoining perforations that extended to the lamina interna. The strands of bone between perforations were then cut, and the resulting piece of bone levered out. Arguably the most macabre approach was the push-plough method, in which a series of curved grooves were scraped into the skull to form a thin recessed circle. Repeated scraping would eventually release a smooth roundel of bone, although this could take several hours, or even days. It is therefore unsurprising to learn that many societies utilised native plants with psychoactive and medicinal properties to provide much-needed pain relief. (The high survival rates in Peruvian trephinations hint at the adoption of an effective surgical antiseptic or anaesthetic, and given the fundamental and spiritual role of the coca plant in their culture, it is likely that its cocaine-bearing leaves fulfilled this function.)

Skulls exhibiting trephination’s telltale orifices have been excavated at sites of almost every archaeological period and location, from Stone Age East Africa to 17th century Scandinavia. There appear to have been centres of concentrated surgical activity in Neolithic France and pre-Incan and Incan Peru, although it is now evident that the procedure predates both cultures by several millennia. The earliest documented trephined skull was recovered from the Vasilyevka II cemetery in the Dnieper Rapids region of the Ukraine (radiocarbon dated to 7,300-6,220 B.C.). The skull belonged to a man who was over 50 years old at death and showed a healed legion of several centimetres in diameter on the left of the frontal bone. The discovery of similar healed trephinations on every habitable continent has widespread implications for our understanding of the movement of prehistoric peoples and ideas. Trephination was being practiced on a global scale long before the earliest known trans-Atlantic and Pacific voyages, yet many academics have refused to believe that such a bizarre procedure could have come about as an independent innovation in more than one location. We are forced to conclude, therefore, that our prehistoric forefathers boasted either a precocious seafaring capability or an instinctive predilection for neurosurgery.

The most arresting aspect of trephination concerns our ancestors’ motivation for indulging in such a hazardous and traumatic procedure. Current consensus holds that trephinations were performed chiefly for the relief of intracranial maladies, such as depressed fractures, scalp wounds, concussion and lesions of a syphilitic nature in Peru. However, due to the fact that the majority of trephined skulls show no signs of trauma, it is likely that alleviation of headaches was the fundamental motive. Other authorities have argued that while trephinations were undoubtedly performed for the relief of intracranial maladies, in prehistory these ailments were ascribed to evil spirits thought to be dwelling within the head. The cure, therefore, was to open the skull and release the spirits. This may have inadvertently improved the patient’s condition, and hence the surgical intervention persisted. The paracetamol generation may have little sympathy for such severe curative methods, but for many centuries it was thought that the bodily organs were the seat of individual emotional attributes, such as courage (to be found in the heart), anger (based in the spleen) and so on, and that these could be manipulated accordingly. It is little wonder then that prehistoric skull surgery was approached in a similarly blasé manner, perhaps stemming from the belief that the brain was the seat of one’s psychological characteristics. Indeed, the anxiety associated with modern neurosurgery is derived largely from the relatively recent realisation of the brain’s fundamental importance as the central control system of the body.

Paul McCartney, in a 1986 interview in Musician magazine, recalls John Lennon asking him and his wife, Linda, “You fancy getting the trepanning done?” They declined. This was during the late ‘60s, when the Beatles were extolling the virtues of LSD, the Velvet Underground had chosen to ‘nullify’ their lives with heroin, and millions of other young people were beginning to appreciate that eluding the semblance of known things through the use of drugs is one of the perennial avocations of mankind. Some nine millennia after its conception, trephination was seized upon by this enlightened bunch as a subtler, safer, and more prolonged remedy for the pain of consciousness.

Among the new proponents of the age-old practice was Amanda Feilding, an Oxford dropout who performed and filmed her own trephination with the aid of a bathroom mirror and an electric drill. Like many others, she reported the onset of a mildly euphoric sensation, of relaxation and peacefulness. (According to trephination advocacy groups these changes result from the restoration of the full pulsation that is lost when the skull is sealed in childhood. Such pulsation inflates the brain’s capillaries, accelerating its metabolism and empowering it to permanently regain its youthful level.) Fielding ran for parliament in the late ‘70s under the banner of “Trepanation for the National Health”, and over the course of two elections she succeeded in convincing 188 voters of their entitlement to free professional trephining. She later married Lord James Neidpath, a former professor at Oxford, where he taught international relations to a young Bill Clinton. Encouraged by his new wife, the couple travelled to Cairo where they found a surgeon willing to trephine Neidpath’s skull for around $2000. Within a few hours Neidpath says he felt the effects. “It seemed to be very beneficial.”

So what does the future hold for trephination and, indeed, other forms of mind-enhancing masochism? Among its primitive practitioners, trephination will persist so long as they do. In the West, meanwhile, it is likely that the development of highly sophisticated virtual worlds will negate the need for conventional avenues of escape. Virtual reality might seem preferable to skull surgery or drug use, but it is no less perilous. As John Gray notes in Straw Dogs: ‘the world disclosed in ordinary perception is a makeshift of habit and convention. Virtual worlds disrupt this consensual hallucination, but in doing so they leave us without a test for a reality that is independent of ourselves’. Rarely does the past challenge the future for shock value.