Zenobia: Empress of the East: "I Am Not My Body. I Am My Mind" (Updated)

Thank you Judith W for this article:  Zenobia: Empress of the East: "I Am Not My Body. I Am My Mind" (Updated) ... for reminding me of when I met Prof Rita Levi-Montalcini at a lecture in 1975(?).

I was in graduate school exploring the fine structure of inter-cellular "social networking" what I dubbed "neuroecology" a decade later at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem , Israel (to the amusement of many colleagues and long before it became a field of study in its own right.

Would I say, looking back, that I had erred by not accepting her invitation to visit her lab at Washington University in St Louis?

No regrets.  I was young and foolish, very much in love, newly married, not to be long apart, and St Louis seemed like the other side of the world . . . .

when everything old, is, also, new again, then

yes, I am distracted, by remembering
the forthcoming
visit
of my dearest 80-something
Professor and spiritual father
(a qualified title which he abhors
, as a life-long atheist,
fair and natural,
as the son of Vladimir Heifetz,
the Jewish pianist composer orchestrator,
and an imperious Russian Orthodox royal
anti-Semite vocalist mother

I thought I'd have a path to bring the voicing
back into science with an idea for an experiment,
an empirical exam that would bring us closer
to the edges of knowing
from the side of trying

Coming to me as if
from above
as much as one can, in such an environment,
subtly,
so that the results emerge from within the data
allowing the conclusion itself
to demonstrate,
to show, if not to (dis)prove

yes, Hashem has given us such great gifts
received with gratitude, deeply grateful
resonance
from knowing that they are
from the Source
Itself

So, into the humming, rumbling,
(or is that my tinnitus?)
future, I go
as a pleasant sostenuto,
how a violin in crescendo
might end a lost symphony,
not a loud cry
but a sustaining tone
resting on a heartbeat
against the wind made percussive
merged
into the mouth of forgetfulness
pianissimo
memory above time
commo ad infinitum