Terminal Lucidity Preceding Irrational National Incoherence

If you tell me whom you haunt
I’ll tell you who you are, said André Breton,
but if you tell me whom you taunt,
I’ll know, as fact that you can bet on,
not only who you are but how
you have defined yourself to be
the fruit of a far higher bough
than those with whom you disagree,
a claim that may be based on lucid
madness, which he found in Leonora,
bad quality if you abuse-use it,
like Shabtai Tsvi, changing rules of Torah,
coherently irrational,
as is, claimed Gershom Scholem, kabbalah,
and delusions that with national
rationales can make politics so noir,

a quid pro quo for what’s been labeled
as the questionable quiddity,
in minds dementia had disabled,
of what’s been termed “ terminal lucidity,”
recorded in blessings made before
his death by Jacob, in Genesis,
predicting that God will restore
great peace to Israel, unharmed by menaces.

In “The Strange Phenomenon of ‘Terminal Lucidity’: As they near death, some dementia patients recover mental faculties assumed to be long lost,” NYT, 7/1/26,  Billy Brennan discusses  a paper published in 2009 in The Journal of Near-Death Studies, an academic outlet for discussion of death-related phenomena that have no ready scientific explanation.

[An] article, written by a German biologist and parapsychologist named Michael Nahm, drew attention to reports of unexpected mental clarity in gravely ill people. Evidence of such events existed going back to antiquity, but the phenomenon had been largely forgotten since the 19th century.

Nahm called it “terminal lucidity.” In his research, he had come across many remarkable instances, including the story of a 26-year-old woman, Anna Katharina Ehmer, who died in a German psychiatric hospital in 1922. Ehmer reportedly had never learned to speak, but, according to the accounts of two witnesses, spent the final half-hour of her life in bed singing hymns. Similar seemingly impossible behavior, Nahm found, had been seen in people with dementia, tumors, neurological disorders, abscesses “the size of a hen’s egg” and many other forms of brain-ravaging illness.

Brenan’s article caused me to wonder about the description of Jacob’s behavior before his death, mysteriously crossing his hands when blessing the two sons of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, in order to bless the younger grandson, Ephraim, before Manasseh the older, (Gen. 48:14-22) This precedes Jacob’s provision of mysterious prophetic predictions regarding all his twelve sons (Gen. 49:1-28), reflecting Jacob’s terminal lucidity. On the other hand, I am confident that the pessimistic predictions made by some pundits regarding the future of the United States and Israel do not reflect such lucidity.