{"id":10580,"date":"2016-08-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-15T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/scientist-scholar-soul"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:04:24","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:04:24","slug":"scientist-scholar-soul","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/scientist-scholar-soul","title":{"rendered":"Scientist, Scholar, Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

So. The young doctor, like the senior scholar, prefers research to humanity.\u201d With this concise remark, Dr. Vivian Bearing deftly reveals an unsettling truth about herself and, by extension, the kind of detached rationalism that the modern scientific researcher and the modern academic typically wield. Margaret Edson\u2019s play Wit<\/i> focuses on the final all-too-human hours of Vivian Bearing, a renowned scholar of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne. Set principally in Bearing\u2019s research-university hospital room, Wit<\/i> takes up an array of themes that are readily recognizable to contemporary audiences: the ordeal that cancer patients like Bearing experience; the courage or lack thereof that one can have when facing one\u2019s own death; the role of empathy in the practice of medicine; the relationship between patient rights and medical ethics; and, of course, the place of suffering in human life. But this short play speaks to more than these concerns \u2014 even if reviewers and critics have sometimes had a difficult time seeing this. Wit<\/i> shines a rather unflattering light on the methodological abstractness and frequently dehumanizing nature of a certain form of modern scientific reason. In the process, Edson\u2019s play clearly and perceptively reminds its late modern audience of a simple truth: try as we might, we cannot hide forever from confronting certain elemental and enduring questions about God and the soul.<\/p>\n\n

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\r\n\t\tMy Play’s Last Scene\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

P<\/span>laywright Margaret Edson based Wit<\/i> in part<\/a> on observations she made while working as a clerk in the cancer and AIDS unit of a research hospital in her native Washington, D.C. The play was first staged in 1995 in California; another production, with Kathleen Chalfant in the lead role, opened off Broadway in 1998. Edson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. Wit<\/i> was then made into a movie by HBO in 2001<\/a>; that version was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Emma Thompson, who together made only minor alterations to Edson\u2019s script in adapting it into a screenplay. In 2012, the first Broadway production of Wit<\/i> garnered two Tony nominations, one for best revival, and another for lead actress Cynthia Nixon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The play opens with fifty-year-old Vivian Bearing walking on stage, wearing only hospital gowns and a baseball cap on top of her bald head, pushing an IV pole. After commenting on the vapidity and studied impersonal nature of the banter that fills chemo wards \u2014 exemplified by the ever-present utterance of \u201cHi. How are you feeling today?\u201d by hurrying passersby or monotone medical messengers \u2014 Vivian recalls her initial diagnosis with Stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer. At the recommendation of her doctor, Harvey Kelekian, a driven research oncologist at the hospital affiliated with the university at which she teaches, Bearing agrees to undergo a harrowing eight-round, experimental chemotherapy treatment at \u201cfull dose.\u201d Speaking directly to the audience, Vivian engagingly chronicles the events and conversations that shape her stay in the hospital \u2014 most memorably her exchanges with Kelekian and his young clinical oncology fellow, Dr. Jason Posner (who was a former student of Vivian\u2019s); her experience serving as research material for grand rounds; and her conversations with her primary care nurse, Susie Monahan, in the Cancer Inpatient Unit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Possessing a well-earned reputation for being unrelenting and unforgiving in the classroom, Vivian at times directly compares her suffering and struggles within the medicalized modern process of death to Donne\u2019s poetry, particularly the most famous of Donne\u2019s Holy Sonnets, \u201cDeath be not proud.\u201d With the gradual exception of her nurse Susie, Donne is Vivian\u2019s only real interlocutor during her time in the hospital. A highly ambitious and productive academic \u2014 for which she is rewarded with praise from her peers \u2014 Vivian has forged a rather solitary life for herself. Husbandless and childless, with parents who are now deceased, she has no one to serve as her emergency contact. Indeed, Vivian\u2019s sole visitor, her graduate school mentor, the famed Donne scholar Professor Evelyn M. Ashford, visits only in Vivian\u2019s final minutes \u2014 and even then only after Ashford has come to town to attend her great-grandson\u2019s fifth birthday party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a touching and honest conversation with Susie, Vivian, aware that she is not getting better, decides to mark her chart DNR \u2014 do not resuscitate. As Susie explains to a now self-reflective and vulnerable Vivian, researchers like Kelekian and Jason<\/p>\n\n\n\n

like to save lives. So anything\u2019s okay, as long as life continues. It doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re hooked up to a million machines. Kelekian is a great researcher and everything. And the fellows, like Jason, they\u2019re really smart. It\u2019s really an honor for them to work with him. But they always … want to know more things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Yet despite Vivian\u2019s DNR order, Wit<\/i> concludes with the young Jason frantically attempting to resuscitate Vivian after she has flatlined. In the final moments of the play, we see the recently deceased Vivian stepping out of her bed, removing her gowns, and reaching for a small light as she stands naked on the stage.<\/p>\n

The theme of scientific rationalism\u2019s methodological blindness to human beings and the human things runs through Wit<\/i>. Vivian\u2019s doctors apparently \u201cnever expected\u201d their experimental treatment, even at full dose, to knock the Stage IV ovarian cancer into remission. Rather, they saw Vivian as an opportunity to study the disease\u2019s reaction to a new treatment. Giving full-throated voice to this view, Jason jarringly and unapologetically shouts immediately upon Vivian\u2019s death that they cannot let her die: \u201cShe\u2019s Research!\u201d By setting a carefully crafted stage and drawing its audience\u2019s attention to the speeches and deeds of its humanly recognizable characters, Edson\u2019s play confronts us with a paradox that lies at the heart of the kind of rationalism that Max Weber\u2019s \u201cScience as a Vocation<\/a>\u201d lecture famously described and extolled: the sterility, specialization, and abstractness of modern science dogmatically prevents it from knowing anything substantive about the very being who practices it.<\/p>\n

The scientific scholars that Wit<\/i> brings to life, whether they are doctors or medical researchers or even professors of literature, have remarkably little to say about the human being as human being. As Vivian observes, to such practitioners of science,<\/p>\n\n\n

What we have come to think of as me<\/i> is, in fact, just the specimen jar, just the dust jacket, just the white piece of paper that bears the little black marks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Lest her audience miss the point, Edson puts this particularly dehumanizing view of the human person on display in a scene depicting Kelekian\u2019s team running grand rounds \u2014 a spectacle that Vivian, at this early point in the play, can only comment upon wittily. Surrounding Vivian\u2019s bed, Kelekian and his team of fellows studiously analyze her vital signs and test results without ever mentioning Vivian by name, in fact, without even using the cold, clinical, and depersonalized term \u201cpatient.\u201d She drolly states that \u201cin Grand Rounds, they<\/i> read me<\/i> like a book. Once I did the teaching, now I am taught.\u201d Odd as this sight is, it is not completely foreign to Vivian: she remarks, \u201cFull of subservience, hierarchy, gratuitous displays, sublimated rivalries \u2014 I feel right at home. It is just like a graduate seminar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grand rounds: Professor-turned-patient Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson in the HBO movie) is examined by Dr. Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd, far right) and his medical fellows.<\/i><\/span>HBO<\/span><\/p>\n

For the kind of scientists that Kelekian and his team of eager young researchers represent, the unique and unrepeatable human being can only be seen as a collection of mathematized parts \u2014 measurable creatinine levels, calculable lymphocyte cells, quantifiable bilirubin secretions. Seeing universally and deeply, but still only narrowly, such scientists fail to see the forest for the trees; they remain methodologically unaware of the particular named human being who is the particular human patient whom they study and treat. Efforts to inculcate in young research doctors a sense of their patients as human beings, even if only to help them \u201cconverse intelligently with the clinicians\u201d and to improve their bedside manner, are considered by the researchers to be a waste of time.<\/p>\n\n

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\r\n\t\tHer Last Debt to Nature\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

B<\/span>ut Kelekian and his fellows are not alone in viewing Vivian\u2019s cancer cells in isolation from the person who is Vivian Bearing. For a long time, Vivian herself does this. Like her former student Jason, Vivian has difficulty thinking about the world as a whole, particularly \u201cthe part with the human beings.\u201d In fact, Vivian Bearing, the renowned Donne scholar, prided herself in looking at things this way. Critics have been wont to seize on Wi<\/i>t<\/i>\u2019s at times withering indictment of the kind of biomedical science that Kelekian and Jason practice. But to Edson\u2019s credit, she does not simply identify this kind of dogmatic blindness exclusively with modern natural and medical science. Edson\u2019s poetic gaze focuses on the essentially monadic character of our modern understanding of scientific reason. That understanding of reason typically informs our view of science tout<\/i> court<\/i> \u2014 that is, it typically serves as our model for both the natural and human sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edson\u2019s play dramatically portrays the conception of science that animates Weber\u2019s vocation lecture. That view of science demands nothing short of single-minded dedication to a form of scientific specialization that knows only parts of a carefully, systematically deconstructed whole; as Weber memorably puts it, \u201canyone who lacks the ability to don blinkers for once and to convince himself that the destiny of his soul depends upon whether he is right to make precisely this conjecture and no other at this point in his manuscript should keep well away from science.\u201d Rooted in the new form of natural and philosophic science that Francis Bacon and Ren\u00e9 Descartes helped define and popularize, such science characteristically focuses on knowledge of mechanistic operations, not knowledge of given natures, purposes, and ends. From this perspective, the human being (or for that matter the God who reveals himself to human beings) can only be understood as a thing and not a person \u2014 as a collection of composite parts and not a living, loving, and thinking person who seeks to know and be known by other living, loving, and thinking persons. On this score, Kelekian and Vivian are one. Each scientist voluntarily dons blinkers. Each scientist systematically misunderstands the complex and composite being that is the human being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just a comma: Vivian Bearing (Cynthia Nixon in the 2012 Broadway production) recalls a grad-school encounter with her mentor, Professor E.M. Ashford (Suzanne Bertish).<\/i><\/span>YouTube\/Broadway.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No moment in Wit<\/i> illustrates this problem more clearly than a flashback scene early in the play. Vivian here recounts a meeting in E.M. Ashford\u2019s office where a twenty-two-year-old Vivian discusses one of her early papers on Donne with her professor, who at the time is in her academic prime. Ashford informs Vivian that her recent treatment of Donne\u2019s \u201cDeath be not proud\u201d was something of \u201ca melodrama.\u201d Vivian\u2019s misreading of Donne\u2019s sonnet was partly, but only partly, due to the fact that she had used a version of the poem\u2019s text that was incorrectly punctuated. To be more precise, according to Ashford, the edition Vivian used was marred by \u201chysterical\u201d punctuation: \u201cAnd Death \u2014 capital <\/i>D<\/i> \u2014 shall be no more \u2014 semicolon<\/i>! Death \u2014 capital <\/i>D<\/i> \u2014 comma<\/i> \u2014 thou shalt die \u2014 exclamation point<\/i>!<\/i>\u201d As Ashford points out, the text should read: \u201cAnd death shall be no more, comma<\/i>. Death thou shalt die.\u201d (The stage directions here note that, \u201cas she recites this line, she makes a little gesture at the comma.\u201d) The renowned Donne scholar authoritatively explains to her young student that by replacing the lowercase Ds with uppercase Ds and replacing the comma and period with a semicolon and an exclamation point the intrusive editor has fundamentally distorted the meaning, that is, the essential point, of Donne\u2019s poem. In its original form, Ashford says, Donne\u2019s text intimates that<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing but a breath \u2014 a comma \u2014 separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It\u2019s a comma, a pause.<\/p>

This way, the uncompromising<\/i> way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn\u2019t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

However, the young grad student Vivian, like the established Donne scholar Vivian, is incapable of understanding what E.M. Ashford is saying. To Vivian, the original and proper formulation is nothing more than \u201ca metaphysical conceit. It\u2019s wit!\u201d Donne\u2019s words are simply playthings, elaborately constructed formulations that put the poet\u2019s superior acumen on display. The sonnet has nothing to teach us about (to use Ashford\u2019s words) life and life everlasting, about the soul and God.<\/p>\n

Professor Ashford pushes back: \u201cIt is not wit<\/i>, Miss Bearing. It is truth.\u201d Ashford then takes a good look at Vivian, pauses, and \u2014 as if to punctuate her point about what Donne has to teach us \u2014 tenderly tells Vivian to not go back to the library, but instead go out and enjoy herself with her friends. But at this point, impervious to either what Donne or Ashford has to teach her about the variegated richness of human life, Vivian promptly ducks back into the library.<\/p>\n

Vivian\u2019s successful academic career flows from this first apparent insight \u2014 from the notion that Donne\u2019s Holy Sonnets are (as she tells the audience and, in a flashback, a classroom of students) exercises in \u201cthe outstanding human faculty\u201d of the early seventeenth century, \u201cnamely wi<\/i>t<\/i>\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n

In the Holy Sonnets, Donne applied his capacious, agile wit to the larger aspects of the human experience: life, death, and God.<\/p>

In his poems, metaphysical quandaries are addressed, but never resolved. Ingenuity, virtuosity, and a vigorous intellect that jousts with the most exalted concepts: these are the tools of wit….<\/p>

So we have another instance of John Donne\u2019s agile wit at work: not so much resolving<\/i> the issues of life and God as reveling<\/i> in their complexity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Thus understood, Donne\u2019s poetry is, at best, as Vivian says to the audience, ornate fodder for the scientifically trained scholar \u201cto see how good you really are.\u201d And, having scrupulously devoted herself to studying \u201cthe subtleties of seventeenth-century vocabulary, versification, and theological, historical, geographical, political, and mythological allusions,\u201d Vivian, \u201cwith confidence,\u201d can now say at fifty, \u201cno one is quite as good as I.\u201d Her students left the class \u2014 if Jason\u2019s case is representative \u2014 impressed by her intellect and convinced that the Holy Sonnets were \u201clike a game\u201d or \u201cpuzzle.\u201d \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing we learned\u201d in Vivian\u2019s class, Jason says, \u201cit\u2019s that you can forget about that sentimental stuff,\u201d what he calls \u201cthat meaning-of-life<\/i> garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not being cured: Vivian (Emma Thompson) splits a two-stick Popsicle with nurse Susie Monahan (Audra McDonald) as they discuss Vivian\u2019s Do Not Rescuscitate order.<\/i><\/span>HBO<\/span><\/p>\n

Vivian never explicitly repudiates her scholarly interpretation of Donne\u2019s sonnets. But her time in the hospital clearly coincides with a recognition that there may be more at stake in Donne\u2019s poetry than mere witty games jousting with metaphysical matters. It is only after the cancer has progressed and the chemotherapy treatments have gotten more and more brutal that she begins to speak of herself, body and soul, as a whole person. Vivian can no longer avail herself of the detachment and distance, scholarly and personal, she once found in wit. \u201cNow is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit,\u201d she tells the audience. As she recognizes her mortality \u2014 \u201cMy cancer is not being cured, is it.\u201d \u2014 she also begins to see that what she had once called \u201cthe issues of life and God\u201d are not things to revel in, nor even to resolve, but rather permanent things with which human beings must live.<\/p>\n\n

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\r\n\t\tBe Not Proud\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

I<\/span>n contrast to the blinkered vision of scientific researchers like Kelekian and Jason and modern scientific academic researchers like Vivian, one might argue that the poet Donne \u2014 and if we allow ourselves to step beyond the text of the play, the poet Margaret Edson \u2014 help us to see more about ourselves, God, and the world. Edson\u2019s play reminds us of the distinctive pedagogical power of literature and poetry, for the play speaks not just of a common human nature or a universally conceived human being or, even, a variety of human types. It paints particular human characters with particular names and particular lives. Edson, the poet, can create a world, and, in so doing, depict the role that chance plays in the lives of the characters who inhabit that world. But she is also able to depict chance in a way that is not really chance (at least as we commonsensically think about chance\u2019s place in human life). For the poet controls what role chance plays in her work: Wit<\/i> creates a world where Vivian happens to develop ovarian cancer; where Vivian happens to meet Kelekian and her former student Jason; and, most importantly, where E.M. Ashford just happens to be in town for her great-grandson\u2019s birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As poet, Edson is able to form fully thought-out characters, select a series of events and a series of deliberate human actions, and arrange these characters, events, and actions in such a way that her intended point gradually becomes clear. Wit<\/i> offers us a carefully crafted world that cannot be mathematized, a world in which chance and human freedom are seen to be essential features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the play\u2019s pedagogical power does not stop here. Edson uses her art to show us something about that mysterious, unquantifiable thing that is the human soul. The only character to use the word \u201csoul\u201d (other than when reciting Donne or quoting the Shakespearean quip about brevity being the soul of wit) is the trained scientific scholar who is really able to see people, E.M. Ashford. The first time Ashford uses the word occurs in the passage quoted above, when she is discussing Vivian\u2019s melodramatic treatment of \u201cDeath be not proud.\u201d The second time occurs very shortly before Vivian dies. Crawling into bed with a weeping and moaning Vivian, Ashford puts her arm around her former student. As Vivian nestles into her, Ashford begins to read to Vivian from a children\u2019s book she has bought for her great-grandson, Margaret Wise Brown\u2019s The Runaway Bunny<\/a><\/i>. It is the story of a small bunny who repeatedly asks his mother what she would do if he were to run away. \u201cIf you run away,\u201d the mother bunny says, \u201cI will run after you. For you are my little bunny.\u201d To each place he proposes to flee, his mother explains how she will find him. \u201cI will be a bird and fly away from you,\u201d the little bunny says. \u201cIf you become a bird and fly away from me,\u201d his mother responds, \u201cI will be a tree that you come home to.\u201d After reading some of the little bunny\u2019s half-hearted proposals, Ashford remarks, \u201cLook at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?\u201d Ashford, the scientist who reads Donne in order to learn what he has to say about \u201cSoul, God,\u201d has no problem talking about the soul, and about God and the soul. By contrast, the concept of science that Kelekian, Jason, and Vivian share is constitutionally incapable of talking about the soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will run after you: Retired professor E.M. Ashford (Eileen Atkins in the HBO movie) reads to Vivian (Emma Thompson) from the book <\/i>The Runaway Bunny.<\/i><\/span>HBO<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a work of literature that is infused with wisdom and poetic insight, Wit<\/i> has much to teach us \u2014 particularly those of us who have chosen to live a life of rational inquiry and who have made the further choice to bring that life to bear on the education of others. Edson\u2019s tightly knit play conveys deep human truths that are worthy of philosophic pondering. Perhaps we might even say that the play borders on the philosophic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, in the end, this claim is not quite right, either. For while Wit<\/i> raises questions that philosophers should ponder, it does so in a way that is, at least in some instances, clearly theological. Edson herself tells us this. Remarking on her work in a 1999 interview<\/a>, she notes that the \u201cplay is about redemption, and I\u2019m surprised no one mentions it…. Grace … is the opportunity to experience God in spite of yourself, which is what Dr. Bearing ultimately achieves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edson understands her play to be not only about human freedom and chance, but also about human freedom and grace. The God that Ashford speaks of, the God she finds in both Donne and Margaret Wise Brown, is not a god of emanations or a prime mover or a geometer or a god of nature and nature\u2019s laws or a postulate of pure reason. He is a providential God. He is a God who hunts people down and offers them grace and salvation in spite of themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a God undoubtedly is difficult for the self-described \u201cextremely smart\u201d Professor Bearing to accept. The description she offers of the speaker of one of Donne\u2019s Holy Sonnets eventually comes to apply just as well to herself: \u201cThe speaker of the sonnet has a brilliant mind, and he plays the part convincingly; but in the end he finds God\u2019s forgiveness<\/i> hard to believe, so he crawls under a rock to hide<\/i>…. When the speaker considers his own sins<\/i>, and the inevitability of God\u2019s judgment<\/i>, he can conceive of but one resolution: to disappear<\/i>.\u201d (Reflecting this understandable human tendency, Vivian, shortly after deciding on her Do Not Resuscitate order, declares \u201cOh, God. I want … I want … No. I want to hide. I just want to curl up in a little ball.\u201d The stage directions have her then dive under the covers.) Thus, the God who writes straight with crooked letters ultimately may or may not be Vivian\u2019s God; the play leaves this question open. Vivian\u2019s redemption \u2014 especially given the play\u2019s final scene where Vivian rises naked from the bed in which she died and moves serenely towards a light with her arms outstretched \u2014 could be a form of Christian redemption. Or her redemption may have come earlier: it could consist in the fact that after having been laid low by her cancer and the grueling treatments and the manifold indignities she has suffered, the formerly boastful and prideful Vivian feels in her final days a first true prick of genuine awareness of herself as a whole person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wit<\/i> does not just raise the philosophic question about God and the soul, then. It presents, in both poetic speech and deed, an answer, partial to be sure, but an answer nevertheless, about God and the soul. Undoubtedly, this answer too is something that a philosopher \u2014 or students of philosophy \u2014 could (and should) ponder. However, it is not something that a philosopher can fully understand as a philosopher<\/i>. For it is an answer that is necessarily rooted in and informed by an understanding of a personal God and the human person that is made in the image of this God and gratuitously redeemed by this God. As such, it is an answer that, in the decisive respect, lies beyond the grasp of both wit and philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc D. Guerra on Margaret Edson\u2019s play \u2018Wit\u2019 and the temptation to hide from matters of ultimate meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16829,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[2286,2266,2279],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10580"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10580"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}