Indigestion

     At some point around ten to fifteen years ago I began to get heartburn.  Heartburn, inaccurate since it uses the word heart, an organ not involved in the malady, nevertheless possesses a poetic sound.  A burning heart, like a melting heart, seizes one's attention from within.
     The latest term for heartburn, GERD, refers to gastroesophageal reflux disease.  In other words, a condition in which stomach acid and/or content flows back into the esophagus, or food pipe--not an implement for smoking food as one would tobacco.
     The lack of communicability associated with inelegant words like GERD was experienced by me when my nurse practitioner, who's also my primary care provider (PCP, which doesn't mean angel dust in this context) diagnosed that condition in 2014.  Due to the health insurance situation in America for most of my life, I didn't have health insurance until that year, so the GERD went unremarked upon by medical professionals.
     She said "GERD" to me as if I knew what she meant.
     "Are you speaking Klingon?" I asked.  She's the kind of person I can easily joke around with.
     She explained the term, and I said, "Oh, heartburn."
     Acid reflux is another currently popular term, but there are two others I like, because they're out of date.  There's an interesting feature in Google called Google Books Ngram Viewer.  There are graphs for thousands of words showing instances of their use in written (published) form.  Thus, pyrosis, an outdated term for heartburn/GERD, peaked in 1879.  By 1931, hardly anyone was using it.
     Pyrosis derives from Greek, puroun, meaning "set on fire."  Does that describe a bad case of heartburn?  I'd say so.
     From a steady rise in written use in 1965, heartburn peaked in 2004.  Acid reflux doesn't appear in the Ngram Viewer, indicating it's too recent a term for evaluation.  GERD, same thing, but the word dyspepsia, from the Greek, duspepsia, meaning "difficult to digest," peaked in 1886, dropped to a modern low in 1985, but has risen a bit in use since then.
     Of course, these instances reflect what people write, not what they say.  "GERD" is often used in conversation these days.  When I've mentioned my condition, I inevitably hear, "GERD?"
     My case is a combination, I think, of ingrained eating habits, nervous tension, and generalized anxiety.  I had a dream in the dawn time this morning that seemed like something programmed by a news organization.  I was in a classroom, all of us adults.  I had books and a notebook, a pen.  There was a teacher, and about ten tables at which three or four students could sit.  I don't know what the class's subject was (call it Physics for Dummies), but even before the teacher could start, word spread through the room lightning fast that a "sniper" was on the premises, and we should get under the tables.  Inside my dream reality, the fear of being shot, and especially of hearing people, women particularly, scream in terror and pain, was a real, felt experience lasting what seemed a few minutes.
     An "all clear" sounded.  We got out from underneath the tables and I assume class started, although I was then absent, having woken up in the gray light of my bedroom, birds singing, traffic starting.
     I'm reading Georges Bataille's book, Le Coupable (Guilty).  I almost bought a copy of this strange journal-like philosophical work in the 1990s, buying his book Erotism instead.  He wrote Guilty during World War Two.  In France, he observed the war firsthand, along with the German occupation, but his attitude was that of a non-combatant.  He embraced the experience of difficulty.  My comprehension of his ideas is limited at this point.  I now read the book and find it hard to get it to line up in ways I can understand, but I keep reading it.  Like my father said about the historical writings of the Roman, Tacitus, "You have to plow through a lot to get to the good moments, but the good moments are in there."
     Bataille writes, "Great and terrible events are difficult to deal with.  But it's also true I wouldn't have wanted to live without them, even if what they brought me minute by minute was worse."
     Embodying oneself in the real, which includes war, disease, hatred, interpersonal messes, the inevitability of gravity, time, and circumstances, pulling us to the horizontal position that means death, the pain of love and loss, the way gain turns into nothingness, the roar of disasters and the unheard deaths of caterpillars, means accepting the deal of being born.  Of getting older, a condition relying on time's passing.  During those flowing years, more and more terrors, difficulties, irritants, pile up, making two conditions, fate and character, get closer until they meet.
     Set on fire, pyrosis, a burning heart.  Guilty of living.

                                                                             Vic Neptune