Maybe (Maybe Not) (17 page)

I’m told that during an international competition many years ago, a man named Frank Marshall made what is often called the most beautiful move ever made on a chessboard. In a crucial game in which he was evenly matched with a Russian master player, Marshall found his queen under serious attack. There were several avenues of escape, and since the queen is the most important offensive player, the spectators assumed Marshall would observe convention and move his queen to safety.

Deep in thought, Marshall used all the time available to him to consider the board conditions. He picked up his queen—paused—and placed it down on the most illogical square of all—a square from which the queen could be captured by any one of three hostile pieces.

Marshall had sacrificed his queen—an unthinkable move, to be made only in the most desperate of circumstances.

The spectators and Marshall’s opponent were dismayed.

Then the Russian and the crowd realized that Marshall had actually made a brilliant move. It was clear that no matter how the queen was taken, his opponent would soon be in a losing position. Seeing the inevitable defeat, the Russian conceded the game.

When the spectators recovered from the shock of Marshall’s daring, they showered the chessboard with money. Marshall had achieved victory in a rare and daring fashion—he had won by sacrificing his queen.

To me it’s not important that he won.

Not even important that he actually made the queen-sacrifice move.

What counts is that Marshall had suspended standard thinking long enough even to entertain the possibility of such a move.

Marshall had looked outside the traditional and orthodox patterns of play and had been willing to consider an imaginative risk on the basis of his judgment and his judgment alone. No matter how the game ended, Marshall was the ultimate winner.

I’ve told that story countless times.

And on the checklist of operating instructions for my life, this phrase appears:

“Time to sacrifice the queen?”

It turns up in unexpected situations.

Now hold that thought while I pull out a childhood reference from my touchstone collection. Remember Tinkertoys? Interconnecting wooden parts—spools and rods—that came in tall canisters. Still do, but the parts are all plastic now.

When I taught art, I used Tinkertoys in a test at the beginning of a term. I wanted to know something about the creative instincts of my students. On a Monday, I would put out a small set of Tinkertoys in front of each student. And give a deliberately brief and ambiguous assignment: “Make something out of the Tinkertoys—you have forty-five minutes today and forty-five minutes each day for the rest of the week.”

A few students were derailed at first. They were hesitant to plunge in. The task seemed frivolous. They
wanted to know more about what I wanted and waited to see what the rest of the class would do.

Several others checked the instructions in the can and made something according to one of the sample model plans provided.

Another group built something out of their own imaginations or worked at finding how high or how long a construction they could devise.

Almost always at least one student would break free of the constraints of the set and incorporate pencils, paper clips, string, notebook paper, and any other object lying around the art studio—sometimes even leaving the class for a time to gather up soda straws from the cafeteria or small dry branches and sticks from the schoolyard. And once I had a student who worked experimentally with Tinkertoys whenever he had free time. His constructions filled a storeroom in the art studio and a good part of his basement at home.

I rejoiced at the presence of such a student.

Here was an exceptionally creative mind at work.

He had something to teach me.

His presence meant that I had an unexpected teaching assistant in class whose creativity would infect other students. I thought of him and other such students as “queen sacrificers.” They had “Q-S.”

This “Q-S” trait applies to almost any situation—even trivial ones. I came across one such student who had volunteered in the school alumni office to help
with the mailing of a fund-raising appeal to major donors. His job was to place stamps on the envelopes. In true form, he was
not
licking the stamps and pasting them to the envelopes. He was
licking the envelopes
at just the right spot, then sticking a stamp on that spot. Pounding the stamp once with his fist, he moved on.

He explained that the adhesive on the stamps tasted awful. The envelopes, on the other hand, had an interesting cinnamon taste. And besides, the stamps stuck better this way.

Affirming this kind of thinking had a downside.

I ran the risk of losing those students who had a different style of thinking.

Without fail one would declare, “But I’m just not creative.”

“Do you dream at night when you’re asleep?”

“Oh, sure.”

“So tell me one of your most interesting dreams.”

Invariably the student would spin out something wildly imaginative.

Flying or on another planet or in a time machine or growing three heads.

“That’s pretty creative. Who does that for you?”

“Nobody. I do it.”

“Really—at night, when you’re asleep?”

“Sure.”

“Try doing it in the daytime, in class, OK?”

One more touchstone now and this puzzle will fit together.

On a hot summer’s day, late in August, I sought shade and a cool drink under the canvas awning of a waterfront café in the old harbor of the town of Chania, on the Greek island of Crete. More than 100 degrees in still air. Crowded. Tempers of both the tourists and waiters had risen to meet the circumstances, creating a tensely quarrelsome environment.

At the table next to mine sat an attractive young couple. Well dressed in summer fashions of rumpled linen and fine leather sandals. The man: stocky, olive-complexioned, black hair, and mustache. The woman: lanky, fair, blond. Waiting for service, they held hands, whispered affections, kissed, giggled, and laughed.

Suddenly, they stood, picked up their metal table, and, carrying it with them, stepped together off the edge of the quay to place the table in the shallow water of the harbor. The man waded back for the two chairs. He gallantly seated his lady in the waist-high water and sat down himself.

The onlookers laughed, applauded, and cheered.

A sour-faced waiter appeared. He paused for the briefest moment. Raised his eyebrows. Picked up a tablecloth, napkins, and silverware. Waded into the water to set the table and take their order. Waded
back ashore to the ongoing cheers and applause of the rest of his customers. Minutes later he returned with a tray carrying a bucket of iced champagne and two glasses. Without pausing, he waded once more into the water to serve the champagne. The couple toasted each other, the waiter, and the crowd. And the crowd replied by cheering and throwing flowers from the table decorations.

Three other tables joined in to have lunch in the sea.

The atmosphere shifted from frustration to festival.

One does not wade into the water in one’s best summer outfit. Why not?

Customers are not served in the sea. Why not?

Sometimes one should consider crossing the line of convention.

One need not be in a classroom or playing chess.

Whenever life becomes Tinkertoys, the queen may be sacrificed.

A
friend from Algeria will not eat pork. He grew up in an Islamic culture where pork was considered unclean. Though he has lived in the United States for several years, and though he no longer practices the religion of his childhood, he still does not eat pork in any form. In part of his mind, he knows about the history of food taboos, and he knows that millions of people eat pork all the time with no harmful effects. Still, for him, for reasons he cannot articulate, pork is unclean
.

To give me some perspective on how he feels, he sent me a newspaper article stating that “200,000 Taiwanese are drinking their own urine daily. Their purpose is to cure disease, improve health, and achieve longevity.”

The story concerned a man named Chen Ching Chuan, who was applying for a new identity card in Taiwan a couple of years ago. The police thought he was lying to them because he looked about thirty-five or forty years old, though he was actually sixty-four. When he attributed his youthful appearance to the fact that he had been drinking his own urine, the story was picked up by the reporter covering the police station and became international news. Upon investigation, reporters found that Mr. Chen Ching Chuan does indeed drink three cups of his own urine every day. Moreover, he says that morning urine is best.

I am not making this up.

Mr. Chen Ching Chuan has become so well known and so many people are following his example that he has set up a urine-therapy hot line to provide advice on this matter. Also, you can buy a book entitled
The Golden Water Cure
, which documents cases in which seriously ill patients have regained their health through urine therapy.

Those who have reason to know say urine from a healthy person tastes like beer, when served cold. Mr. Chen Ching Chuan notes that “urine, like blood, is full of nutrition; therefore drink all of it and don’t waste a drop. What happens when you regularly drink urine is beyond your imagination.”

Trying to be objective about all this, I consulted a friend of long standing, whose integrity, intelligence, and professional experience qualify him as an expert on the subject of urine. He is a urologist, who has spent time in both clinical and research medicine.

He said he doesn’t think urine therapy is going to catch on, but it is true that drinking normal urine won’t hurt you, and given the mysteries of the placebo effect, it’s likely to be as useful as any other substance that provokes the body’s capacity to care for itself. He went on to say that urine has prevented death by dehydration in extreme crisis situations. It’s free and readily available. And, yes, as a matter of fact, he has tasted it. And, yes, it does taste like beer—warm or cold.

Further research turned up a book widely distributed in India, under the auspices of Morarji Desai, who has held many high positions in government, including that of prime minister. The book is
Mana Mootra
[“human urine”];
The Elixir of Life.
It’s full of documentation by Western-trained physicians and scientists who confirm the value of drinking urine daily. Apparently, millions of Indians do. Mr. Desai feels so strongly about this matter that he would like to make urine therapy a mandated part of government policy.

Now we’re into serious politics. Can you imagine the campaign rhetoric in our own country? “My
party’s national health plan is for everyone to drink a glass of urine first thing every morning.”

Maybe it would go over. I mean, if we can survive on generous helpings of horse manure as government policy, who is to say human urine isn’t a reasonable alternative?

Thinking of urine brings to mind time spent in a doctor’s office waiting room. Waiting, and waiting. With little to do except read old magazines and watch other patients as they watch me. Every once in a while a person’s name is called, and that person goes up to the desk to consult with the nurse and then shuffle down the hall to the rest room.

Whether man or woman, when they come out, they act furtively, as if they’d done something they should not have done. They glance around to see if anybody is watching. Quickly, they put a little jar on the nurse’s desk and hastily return to their seat to begin intensely reading a tattered copy of a 1975 edition of
Woman’s Day.

What they left up there on the desk was a urine sample.

Everybody’s done it. Remember the first time?

“Do what? In this? How? What the hell for?”

It’s something nice people do only for the sake of medical science. If you weren’t sick or you weren’t cowed by doctors and nurses, you wouldn’t do this—not even alone in your bathroom at home.
An average person excretes more than fifty thousand quarts of urine in an average lifetime. Odd that something all of us so regularly manufacture—something so necessary and useful—should have such negative connotations.

Urine is unclean. Period.

But the facts of the matter contradict this position.

Every respectable source I’ve consulted confirms that urine isn’t dirty.

Fresh urine is cleaner than saliva.

Urine is cleaner than your hands are most of the time, cleaner than your bacteria-infested toothbrush, and freer of germs than the tuna-fish sandwich you ate for lunch. These items are crawling with bad stuff.

Not urine. Urine has no bacteria in it.

It’s 95 percent water and 5 percent urea, which is what’s left after proteins break down.

It contains traces of about two hundred minerals and compounds, including ammonia, calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium.

It’s useful, too.

You can tan leather with it and use it as a fertilizer. Also as a dye and a detergent. It will clean your hair.