Philosophy of Arnaut

Abolutism vs. Relativism

2006-03-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

So my friend R., a professor of philosophy trained in the British/American analytical school and now a specialist in ethics, has recently told me that he wants to write a book about how the move in the U.S. toward relativism and away from the belief in absolute truth has resulted in the slow and painful demise of science and will eventually, if not stopped or reversed, lead to the death of science.

When I asked him for an example, he cited Kuhn and his book The Nature of Scientific Revolutions (if I have that title right). If you know the concept of paradigm shifting, then you at least have come under the indirect influence of Kuhn.

R. feels there is some middle ground between the two extremes and he'll be arguing for and demonstrating how to achieve that middle ground in his book.

We stand on opposite sides of the argument, I suspect, with my own inclination to support Kuhn's thesis that science (and all other disciplines) are mostly paradigmatic, and as the times change and people change, paradigms shift.

I also hold with Nietzsche that there is no truth with a capital "T", but rather there are multiple perspectives on basically everything. To have a fuller appreciation of a "fact" say is to consider as many perspectives on it as you can muster and how you relate to them and they to you in the world.

One current philosopher who holds the view that I endorse is the neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who now teaches at Stanford University, I believe, in the comparative literature department. Rorty was educated in analytic philosophy, and even taught it at Princeton for many years, but rebelled against it finally, discovered Dewey, Davidson, and other pragmatic philosophers with whom he agreed, and also developed an appreciation for Heiddegger, the late Witgenstein, and the postmodernist philosophe Jacques Derrida. These inclinations led Rorty to be considered an outcast by his more traditional colleagues and drove him to seek appointments in comparative literature, first at a school in Virginia, I believe, and then finally in Stanford. Rorty is a prolific writer and touches upon the whole notion of "truth" and its nature on the opposite side of the argument from my friend R.

So it should be interesting going forward. R. and I often talk about his article and book ideas and I often read drafts and give him my feedback. He knows about my own inclination toward Continental philosophy and views it with suspicion, but maybe on some slight level, he also values it as a modest glimpse into the enemy camp.

For my part, I'm trying to educate myself in my own philosophical leanings, but it's a long road. Ahead of me are many crucial works to ingest and time, as we all know, is fleeting at best.

On my many motorcycle rides into work from my Texas hill country home, I try to stay focused on the potential road hazards ahead and all around me, but some of my reading creeps into consciousness now and again. I'm reading some Rorty now, but also a book by Kellner, a philosophy prof from UT of 20 years ago whose classes on the Frankfurt School I sat in on and who now teaches at UCLA and was, when I knew him, a little Marxist. Today he along with a partner prof from UT El Paso are carving out some theoretical territory that has to do with what they call the "Postmodern Turn." They theorize that we are between "modernism" and "postmodernism" and that a number of authors, Debord, Baudrillard, and others, are exempla of this "turn." Kellner and Davis would plop down on my side of the absolutist vs. relativist argument. Rorty characterizes the sides as essentialist vs. antiessentialist.

More on this to come as the year unfolds and R. develops his thesis.

To Fall Is to Regain Humility

2006-02-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

So when I got my Harley, I had the good sense to have engine guards put on it (some call 'em crash bars). They stick out to both sides of the bike, and when you drop the bike (which I've done three times now), they keep the chrome engine and air cleaner and the foot pegs and the brake and all the things that kind of stick out--all from getting scratched or marred or otherwise damaged and hence expensive to fix.

But dropping the bike itself has become kind of a ritual with me. I'm learning each time which kinds of situations create the likelihood of a fall, and I'm also learning how much I can resist, at which point I have to give in and just let go and live with the consequences, and how quickly I can "recover" my composure and set the 670 pound bike back upright again.

Today after I installed highway pegs on the crash bars so that I can stretch my legs out for relief when the normal mid-peg position leads to leg cramps, I also did something I've never done before. I took the bike for a spin sans gloves, helmet, or leather jacket. It was one of the most liberating feelings I had felt in a long time, and then when I got back to the office and was all full of myself as I backed the bike into the slanted parking space, viola, I felt it tipping dangerously too far to the left and I tried to correct it a bit, but realized it had passed the "tipping point," so I just let go and let it (and me) go down. But I was up in a sec and righted the bike and saw that it was none the worse for the fall.

But I myself had a mini-epiphany that told me on a bike, you can't let yourself be too self-endeared lest you over-reach your balance point.

So what does all this have to do with philosophy? Everything. For one, on my trip I stopped by Borders and snuck a read in the Cambridge History of Philosophy book I'm planning to buy tomorrow (at a 30 percent discount; yay). I read about the medieval philosopher Averoes (and also Maimonides) and how they were jewish and islamic in a Spain that was in the midst of its 300 years, Arabic-ruled period. My roots are from this part of Spain (Cordoba; Andaluz) and so I keep being drawn to the thinkers of that period.

But that's not the real philosophy connection I'm getting at. The "real" one is too obvious to state and it has to do with self awareness and caring for the self and moderation in all things and the like. I don't need to talk down to you to explain this; it's plenty obvious.

But I will plant a seed for future discussion. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig talks about the period among early Greek philosophy when the notion of dichotomies first got started: you know, the opposites of good/bad, hot/cold, mind/body and all of that. And with Aristotle, the naming of parts and the apotheosis of parts. Pirsig says rubbish, a motorcycle is not a collection of mechanical parts. It's something greater. And to divide it is to do it injustice. And I would go into this in more depth, but that is the topic of a future entry, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, know that I know how crucial to fully and freely living the understanding of humility is. Perhaps at some point, I won't have to be reminded of this by dropping my bike, but if that's what it takes, then so be it. Egos were made for self-correcting and it's a healthy enterprise.

Con Safos

--Arnaut

Only the Lonely

2006-02-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine who rides motorcycles said it just a few minutes ago. "I know you understand," said he. "When you're out on your motorcycle, it's just you, God, and the universe."

Yep, I get it, even though I'm a pragmatic atheist and so would not capitalize the word "god" the way he does.

There certainly is something about the solitude you enjoy on a motorcycle ride through the country. You know that you are vulnerable to all kinds of mishaps because you're so exposed to the elements and you're only supported by two wheels and forward-force, but that makes the solitude even sweeter.

You also know that a deer, or a semi-cognizant driver, or any of a number of things could intrude and end your life in a millisecond. But you accept the risk, in part, so that you can enjoy that feeling of aloneness in the universe my friend spoke of. It's not so much feeling insignificant because of the hugeness of it all; it's more like feeling connected to the pavement, the weather, the road conditions and that "extension" of existence that often gets lost when you're at the office or in an automobile in traffic or in many other soul-numbing situations.

Motorcyclists have this three-finger dropped-arm salute they greet one another with when they meet out on those long, lonely stretches of highways. My wife describes the greeting as "very sweet," and she's right, although most of us Harley riders would utilize a more Anglo-Saxon war-mongering kind of description, if we could conjure up a description of any kind on short notice, that is, because being out on the lonely road means being without language for awhile. It's a visceral kind of thing. You'd more likely grunt than string together vowels and consonants.

Not prone to metaphysical musings, I nevertheless sense something elemental in a long, country-road, solitary motorcycle ride. Maybe it's closer to pragmatism in philosophy than say to transcendental idealism or any of the other "isms." It just plain feels good.

It's like: "Ah. There now. Whew. Great." and on and on monosyllabically until one runs out of the need to attempt to describe it.

With apologies to Nike: you just do it. And you just get it. That's it, Marmaduke. That's just plain it.

Motorcycles and the Art of Living on the Edge

2006-01-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

I once had a friend, a deeply philosophical person, whose head was always immersed in thought to the point of distraction for matters of everyday life. Realizing this was a potential problem, he went off to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. His reasoning was that with sharp hooks flying by at alarming speeds, he'd have to focus on these dangerous elements in order to survive. But he'd also have the depth of the ocean as a symbolic reminder of the collective unconscious and he'd have his days to swing about in his hammock and reading Kirkegaard. This latter act almost did get him killed by one of the shipmates who didn't take kindly to deep thinkers, but therein lies another story.

This current blog entry is about motorcycles and philosophy and marks my return to blog land after a pretty lengthy absence.

At the age of 58, about 2 months ago, I became a Harley guy. This is actually pretty funny when you consider that I'm of small stature (5'7") and prone to nerdiness. You could ask many of the people who've known me throughout my life what kind of 2-wheeled transportation I might go for, and many would offer up a bicycle as the speediest or perhaps a motor scooter as a stretch. But no one would say a Harley, unless it would be my friend who once described me as having the heart of a rugby player trapped in a ping pong player's body.

And that's the connection between my story of my new Harley and my friend G.'s story of Alaska fishing. To wit: in order to drive and survive on a Harley, you have to focus. You have to constantly review the condition of the road and predict the behavior of cars in front of you, behind you, and to all sides of you. As one instructor of a national motorcycle safety course said to we students, "You must never be surprised by anything."

Statistics say that most accidents happen to motorcyclists in the first six months of owning their first bikes and within 25 miles of their homes. The most common kind of two-vehicle accident is a motorcyclist colliding with a left-turning auto. The most common kind of one-vehicle accident is a motorcyclist mis-judging the slope of a curve and swinging so wide as to leave the roadway (unless felled by an oncoming car who just happens to be swinging through that same curve in the opposite direction).

My wife was at first completely against my becoming a motorcyclist. Recently, she has warmed up to the idea for this reason. If at 58 you're not already a motorcyclist, then you probably don't have that many chances left to you to become one. Only a few years younger than I, my wife is taking stock of her life and being mindful of the many things, some of them involving risk or expense, that she wants to do before it's "too late." Traveling to Italy to visit the land of her forbears is chief among those.

I told a friend of mine (a professor of philosophy) that I named my motorcycle Foucault. "That's a precious name for a motorcycle," he replied. "Are you going to name your left glove and right glove Discipline and Punish?" You have to be a Foucault fan to get that joke.

But the joke ties back in to philosophy as the overriding theme of this blog. I've promised myself that I will ride my motorcycle often as a reward to myself for continuing to study philosophy and for getting back into physical exercise to combat the growth of my girth and the weaking of my musculature.

My current reading program goes something like this: Hume (selected), Kant (all), Nietzsche (all), Hegel (selected), Husserl (selected), Merleau-Ponty (selected), Sartre (all major), Heiddeger (major), Foucault (all), Derrida (all) and then selected others: Levinas, Deleuze, Berlin, Rorty, Lyotard, Eco, and so on.

If you're steeped in analytic philosophy then you'll note I'm not covering that area. Rather, I'm concentrating on authors that are part of the Continental tradition and that could also be said to have created a new discipline that's more related to cultural studies than philosophy by itself. It's a very different approach to philosophy--the Continental approach. To study along this path means to study a philosopher's entire works and to "think them through" as a way to both understand what they had to say (much of it very difficult and dense stuff) and to add to your own arsenal of thought.

The connection, then, with riding Foucault the motorcycle and reading Foucault the critic of culture is that both acts carry with them significant risks and also require an exertion of will beyond the everyday. With who knows how few days of life I have left to me, the last thing I want to be accused of is living it in a mundane, ordinary way.

My motorcylce weighs 672 pounds or so. I weigh about 207 pounds. My pile of philosophy books weigh more than I can hope to measure. But it's a nice weight to take on.

THEWRATHOFGW

2005-08-05T09:15:00.000-07:00

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We Are Sport for the gods

2005-07-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing up a reading of Homer's Iliad and it's made me more contemplative than usual. Set down in writing around 800 something B.C.E., and relating a tale of warfare that occurred seveal hundred years prior, it has often been credited with giving us a view of pre-Socratic Greek cosmology and the like.

Setting aside for a moment the sheer majesty of a 24 book poem that was apparently recited orally without crib sheet to the accompanyment of some sort of ancient Greek stringed instrument, The Iliad is war up close and personal. You get graphic descriptions of warrior taunting warrior before slitting a gut with a sword and watching guts spill out on to the ground, or spears piercing eye sockets, or battle axes cleaving bodies in two.

The setting is the 10th year of the Acheaeans against the Trojans over Paris stealing Helen and cuckolding Meneleus.

But much more is at work in the cosmology. The Greek gods are very much involved in the conflict, knowing the outcome before it is to happen, obviously, but also taking sides and saving their favorites while helping the favored destroy thier ill favored. These are gods who are immortal, but in every other regard, very human. They sleep around, even with their own daughters and sons and also with mortals.

This is long before notions of reason and the unconscious, so pretty much every act by a human has divine intervention of some sort linked to it.

It makes me think of Vietnam (also 10 years as far as the U.S. was concerned) and the current situation in Iraq. As much as we don't want to admit it, there is something of a holy war at work in Iraq. U.S. influenced judeo-christian ethics against Moslem fundamentalism.

I feel for the warriors involved in this conflict. They seem at times to resemble the Acheaens and the Trojans--mere sword wielders who are being swept into conflict by distant "lords" whose motivation is purely self-interest and power.

One would think and hope that we could learn something about how to live on the planet together from studying the foibles and triumpths of ancient history (and not so ancient history), but as we are reminded time and time again, we learn little to nothing from past mistakes.

The other burr that gets under my saddle is that leaders such as Bush have this god-like power to move us into these kinds of conflicts and send young men and women to their deaths and there doesn't appear to be a damn thing we mere mortals can do about it.

And so we brood, like Achilles outside his tent, at the shame and injustice and loss-of-face of it all, but to what end?

I don't have an answer but I damned sad that I don't. Shame on me and shame on us.

Learning from Others

2005-07-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the Texas Gulf Coast of Port Aransas. My wife, A., our good friends R. and J., and their daughter L. and her boyfriend B., all journeyed down for a weekend of surf, sea, walks, talks, food, laughter and general rejuvenation.

I learned that R. is unbeatable at Scrabble because of his profound understanding of and love of strategy. I learned that A. and J. are unselfish caretakers whose value, to me, is priceless. I learned that L. and B. are tender and I was moved by the way they touched one another (and touched my heart).

I brought down books for us all, one of which was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This one was for me, who had put off reading the book for some unclear reason since its publication in 1974. So make that 31 years. And now I've read it and been extremely moved by it. Maybe I waited 31 years because I was just ready to read it. The fellow at half-price books sho sold it to me said it took him six months to get through it and that everyone he's talked to took a year or two to navigate it. I scratched my head in wonder at that; I got through it in a week of off and on reading. It seemed clear and easy to me, but maybe that's because I read it as a relief read (sort of like a marathon-recovery run) to get a break from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

If you've read ZMM, then you know that its narrator, Robert Pirsig, wrote it in the aftermath of a massive dose of "involuntary" shock treatments designed to rid himself of his insanity. His alter ego, Phaedrus, makes an appearance in the book as the personality that used to inhabit Robert's body before the shock treatments were brought to bear to destroy him. Robert and his young son of 11 or 13; somewhere around that age, are on a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California, and along the way, Phaedrus becomes more and more a presence in the story, as does the recounting of events leading up to the mental breakdown, as does philosophy, as does a tension between father and son that one wonders if either can survive, and then finally, Phaedrus re-inhabits Robert, he and son reconcile, and the story ends on a tentative yet hopeful note. The son himself, who has apparently shown signs of mental fragility, has some hope in observing his father that he, too, can re-integrate, or at least avoid dis-integration.

In the edition that I read, Robert's epilogue discoses a sad post-script to his son Chris' fate. Just two weeks before his 23rd birthday (in 1984, 10 years after the original publication) and a few days before he was going to fly to England for a reunion with his father, he was stabbed in the chest outside the Zen center in San Francisco and died on the sidewalk.

This startling news lends a poignant after image to the story that I'm still awash in.

I picked up Pirsig's sequel, Lila, just today. Written 15 years after ZMM, which was subtitled "An Inquiry into Values"; Lila is subtitled "An Inquiry into Morals." I'm sure it will be a compelling read.

But I started off this blog with the title "Learning from Others." And that's one of the epiphanies I've recently had--that we are in the world to learn from others. The other epiphany was/is that we are in the world to care for others.

I care deeply for my Texas Gulf vacation companions. Even though our retreat lasted only a couple of days, I think we all came away with a little bit more knowledge of one another and recharged through the mutual caring we all extended to one another.

In this time of larger global calamities, we must invest ourselves all the more seriously in such small mutual exchanges of positive energy. It seems to be our only hope to nurture the re-integration of the Phaedrus in all of us.

Someone Precious This Way Came

2005-07-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

We come into a world
Cloaked with mystery
Doing our best
To pass through
With good will

We don’t know and
Can never be prepared
For Fate taking from us
Someone precious

But when Fate does
We must mourn
And we must do our best
To honor memory

When we lose a beloved
We lose something in our selves
A wound that needs tending
With dutiful love and willed caring

Our beloved would want us to mend
And so we do so in sadness
That a life we hold dear still
Is not now near us

But memory lives on inside us
Vital, tender, fully felt
And we go on as we must
Mindful of every minute

And how we owe it to our precious one
To embrace life, to fully live

For B. in Memorium of his brother (1993-2005)

Being in the World for Others

2005-07-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

So I'm not ready yet to dive head-long into Heiddeger. I keep circling around him and sticking a toe in now and then to test the waters. I keep a copy of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) on a table at my office at work and I pick it up now and then. What has stood out for me that lets me know I'll like the water once I'm ready to dive in is Heiddeger's assertion that we are in the world to learn from others and we are in the world to care for others.

That's how it felt at my wife A.'s art reception at the Blue Goat Cafe recently. We had a great turnout of friends who came to join in the celebration. L. played her violin and everyone enjoyed wine, cheese, ale, spirited conversation and time communing with A's paintings. G. and V. came from pretty far away after an evening event and still made it in time. And then we all adjourned to our house for more conversation, music, drinks, and good will.

Being in the world and being with others is such a crucial part of living. Learning how to be with others, to learn from others as Heiddeger says, seems to me these days to be paramount in importance. If we could learn from others instead of trying to impose our will on them, seems like the world would be a much more inviting place.

I've learned much from A. in our almost 12 years together; I have much more to learn. Not only from A., but from all my family and friends. And from all those philosophers now inhabiting my reading-project list. So I still need to circle Heiddeger a while longer while I get into Kant and give him a good thorough study. That will lead to Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kirkegaard and even some Platonic dialogues before I sit down seriously with Heiddeger, but I also have a lot of caring for others to do in the meantime.

And that's as it should be.

A Liberating Hole

2005-06-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

So at the age of 58, my life was divided in half by a small hole in my left ear lobe. Life until then on Wednesday, June 22, 2005, was piercing free. Life ever after, for however long that might last, is marked by a small hole.

Actually obtaining that hole was relatively painless. A., a young tattooed, handsome lad of multiple piercings himself, did the deed in the back of the parlor while my wife, A., cringed at the front. But she admitted afterwards that it looked not as horribly frightful as she had imagined all along that it might.

So there it is. As for me, the ritual had a liberating quality to it. For most of my life I've been politically correct to a fault. There seemed to me to be something very authentic about this deed. Rebellious?

It was an existential choice that communicated back to me something real about myself and it somehow made me a happier being.

That tells me it was the right thing to do; making choices that bring one closer to the depths of one's authentic self seem to be healthy actions.

If I can remember how to post some photos with this missive, you'll see a sequence of the event.

Ciao for Nao.

Thinking Things Through

2005-06-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

We are all philosophers unless we choose not to be. In that case, we are in denial and pursue a life of self-willed ignorance. Those who choose to be philosophers, spend their lives trying to understand how much we don't know. No one who has ever lived and has ever pursued this goal of understanding has ever finished the job before shuffling off this mortal coil. C'est la vie du filosophe!

I came across some essays by Hanah Arendt browsing over at Borders. These are a collection of writings that she never published while alive. But in just reading the intro, I already discovered in her a person I want to learn more about.

The continental tradition of philosophy is one that generally takes an author and the author's project, studies it, and uses it as a springboard for thought and discussion. Arendt bears that kind of study.

One of the interesting things about her Dionysian side is that when she was 18 years old and studying philosophy under Martin Heiddeger, he called her to his office one day and declared his passion for her. He 40 years old and she 18 and most likely a virgin consumated in his office that day an affair that was to carry on for years, both before WWII and picking up again in the 1950s, even after Heiddeger had been labeled a facist and Nazi sympathizer. Arendt, who was jewish, found a way to overlook that side of Heiddeger, which says a lot about her.

It says even more about her when you consider that her life-long project was to study totalitarianism and the conditions that allow it to exist, and sadly, to in some cases prevail.

Although she had a doctorate in philosophy, Arendt didn't accept the label "philosopher" until late in her life. She considered herself a person who liked to "think things through," who wanted to pursue understanding. She may be a very model of the right way to pursue understanding. I'll let you know if I continue to have that opinion as I read more of her works.

And that may take some time; my reading list is already several years full and promises to grow daily.

If only someone would pay me to read and think; then work wouldn't keep eating up my reading time.

:-)

Shakespeare and Me

2005-06-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

Well, in my ongoing zoom read through modern European philosophy, I covered Rene Pascal and a smattering of his pensees and now I'm hopping and skipping through Baruch Spinoza's Ethics. Pascal is famous for the "wager" assertion; you know the one, if you have a 50/50 chance of being right by believing in God, then even if you are racked with doubt, you still have a good chance of coming out on the positive side. If he exists, you win. If he doesn't exist, you don't lose. But to me, that's still pretty lame and indicates more his unwillingness to be labeled a heretic than his wisdom in the process of wagers.

He did have a couple of comments that I don't have at hand to quote verbatim, but one had to do with the stupidity of war, which is always an exercise in futulity to satisfy politico egos, and another on madness that I thought was very clever and made me think that those of my friends who think I'm mad are probably right. But with sanity being the only alternative, madness doesn't seem such a bad thing.

But the real subject of this essay is Shakespeare's ear. His left one to be exact. I'm about to imitate it by going in next Wednesday on my birthday to a piercing parlor and getting a left earring. My wife "A" was so cute when we stopped by the parlor to check it and the "piercing" apprentice out. She asked him, "Say, is there a cultural reason why one would choose one ear over the other if one were going to pierce just one?" Without missing a beat, he replied: "Well, if I was going to pierce just one, I'd do the left."

So, that meant the answer to the question was "yes," but that still didn't tell us what the left or the right symbolizes.

My professor friend thinks I'm nuts to "self mutilate" in a permanent fashion. He also concludes that my willingness to make a cultural statement without knowing exactly what that statement is provides further evidence of my madness.

"Is Hamlet mad or merely pretending to be mad?"

Arnaut is but mad north by northwest.

And as for the "gay" thing, I've mostly been construed to be gay by pretty much everyone most of my life, so what difference is a little earing going to make? (I guess I'll find out ... gasp).

Whatever. If it was good enough for William, it's good enough for me.

And so it goes.

R.'s Tenure

2005-06-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

On very rare occasions
The stars align
The planets parade into proper orbit
Light fully contains the dark

Once in a great while
Integrity prevails
Courage and perseverance are rewarded
Ethical behavior wins out

Occasionally, but only occasionally
A pure soul gets recognized
For its true value
Even by the most muddle headed
Of administrators and their ilk

If the world didn’t stand still
For just a beat
When R. read his letter
It should have

St. M’s will never be the same
Nor should it ever want to
The jury may have been divided
A president may have gone against the grain
But this was deservedly R.’s day

If there is a God
S/he no doubt smiled in assent
Finally a right decision
Finally some sense has crept in

Finally R. can catch up
On some well deserved sleep
And his friends
Can see him grin
Again … again … and again

On Meloncholy

2005-06-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

Keats ends his poem "Ode to Meloncholy" thus: Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil'd Meloancholy has her sovran shrine,/ Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/ Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;/ His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,/ And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

Maybe its listening to Paolo Pandolfo on viola da gamba and Matt Haimovitz on cello playing Bach's minor key cello suites (2, 4 and 6) that have helped to put me in this sad mood, or maybe I chose them because their hurtful harmonies fit my present sorrow.

I feel sad, unappreciated, ignored by family and friends, as though much of what I do is awkward and out of joint. It's as though my deep love for people pushes them away in some manner and leaves me feeling nakedly foolish and alone.

I don't know where to go with this except to settle down internally into some sort of depth of meloncholy. My wife asked me "why so sad today?" and I half jokingly replied, "Oh, it's just a bout of existential despair," but as Freud implied in his "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," there was probably some truth to my jest as there is to every jest.

My wife looked at me and said: "You've got to stop reading philosophy for a while. I can't wait for the next Harry Potter book to come out." That at least made me chuckle for a bit. But then she went to take her nap and left me to wallow in my sad state, mercifully. It's hard to fully suffer in the presence of a loved one--sadness requires isolation to be experienced properly.

We went to a lovely dessert and violin duo performance at a nearby coffee house last night. The young duo, Suzuki trained violinists who both recently graduated eighth grade, played for 2 hours with lovely style and maturity for their age. Their teacher D., a legend in these parts, attended and sat at our table for a time. She's a lovely woman of Japanese descent who truly gets what Dr. Suzuki was trying to convey in his Nurturing by Love teaching philosophy. In the past 20 or so years of teaching in this area, she has affected so many lives in such positive ways. She's kind of a Yoda to the violin crowd around here, and she truly does have this aura of love and wisdom about her. Thinking of her almost pulls me out of my meloncholy mood, so if I want to wallow, I'd better move my thoughts on to something more morose.

But my friend L. also came in last night with her new boyfriend B. It was so great to see her and him together in that way that young lovers have of touching and sitting close and being completely into one another. She studied violin also under the D. of Yoda fame and is in fact one of the many success stories coming out of this studio. Anyway, L. was looking like quite a striking young woman last night and radiated a happiness that A. and I haven't seen in her eyes in a while. That was a nice end of the evening event.

But today I woke up with a blanket of sadness over me. It's actually quite prevelant in the Williams clan, this penchant for meloncholy moods. It's what makes us like sad movies, tragedy over comedy, minor chords, tales of woe. That's pitiful, I admit, but I'll take pathos any day over some of the other alternatives.

But I think I've wallowed enough; it's noon; time to eat and then head outside to enjoy the Texas weather.

Oh happy dagger, let something else be your sheath (apologies to Juliet and William S.); I'm off for lattes and laughter.

Memories

2005-06-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

To put you in the mood for this post, just think of the old, bedraggled alley cat from the musical Cats singing Memories. Freud described the "traces" left by our experience (which I figure is related to memories) being like those marks on the "magic writing pad" that are left in the wax beneath once you lift up the writing surface to create a clean slate on which to write again. You don't see the marks anymore, but they are there nevertheless.

Proust created a whole masterwork based on this same phenomena. When his narrator bites into a madeline, supposedly, the whole 7 volumes of Remembrance of Things Past floods into his memory like a flash.

Plato called it the bodily memory. It's like when you experience things, you are only consciously aware of a very small part of the experience at the time, but much more of the experience gets lodged into your "body" (in Plato's venacular) than you realize. Today, we'd probably say the brain.

In fact, experimental psychologists are very fond of probing brains (of living subjects) and have found that certain probes not only bring back a long-forgotten memory, but much of the phsyiological and emotional reactions that were supposedly going on when the memory was implanted.

Memory was a central theme for Faulkner, too. In one of his novels, he says something like "Memory begins before knowing remembers." That might just be this whole bodily memory thing. Maybe Faulkner even read Plato during his several week binges on grain alcohol.

In the case of the alley cat, her "traces" and "scars" are worn on her body (er, costume) and are reflected in the sad timbre of her voice and the poignant lyrics of her song.

Memory likely also drives many of us who are creative in our writings, our music compositions, our art. We try to tap into those experiences that were only partially felt, understood; it's our quest to more fully live--or in some cases, re-live.

There's a headline in todays NYT that says something like military recruiting is down because parents don't want their kids to join up now that the Iraq war is two years old and shows no signs of abating. Are these parents just now realizing this? Where is their memory our 10-year fiasco in Vietnam? Their kids are too young to remember that war, but they certainly aren't. Why did they ever encourage their kids to join the military in the first place? Do we really need a Michael Moore to point out to us that war is absurd and gets people killed and is mostly carried out to satisfy the egos of power-hungry imbeciles?

I guess memory doesn't always serve us well.

Some memories are too painful for us; they get buried very deep in the wax and sometimes it takes a lot of therapy to pry them out. And then sometimes, what gets pried out is a "false memory," much to the detriment of the wrongfully accused.

It's interesting that after so many years of philosophy, medical science, psychology, that we humans still know such a paltry amount about ourselves, what really makes us tick, how we experience the world and react to it. What makes us us.

As we all remember from our sophomore year, or whenever it was that we were forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address, "the world will little note nor long remember what we say here ..."

But memory is key, isn't it, to our knowledge of ourselves. An area we should all explore more.

My wife and I saw Notebook the other night. I almost wish I hadn't. It's much too painful to witness even a fictional account of alzheimers much less to contemplate actually living through it. And then there's Memento; yet another assault on the senses albeit an intellectually interesting one.

And then there's the subject of how our memory plays tricks on us, like when you go back to your junior high school classroom and realize it's puny rather than the big expansive world you remembered it to be; or how your college girlfriend--Miss Turd Face--seems to remember that it was you who left her rather than she who left you (what a convenient way to protect one's conscience).

Oh, well, enough for now. I just rememberd that I'm at work and shoud be, ah, working.

Joyce, Camus, Jung 'n Me

2005-06-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

I took one of those Jung-influenced personality tests the other day. Turns out I'm an INFJ, which means introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. The profile fits me like a glove and about 1.2 percent of the rest of the population, making this personality type the rarest of those derived from Jungian typology.

This explains to me now why I have such an afinity for my cat Orphan, who is also highly intuitive--and caring for those who suffer. INFJs are also called Counselor Idealists and both Orphan and I fit that description.

Once, Orphan, who isn't prone to come to people he doesn't know well and least of all to males, went right over and sat in C.'s lap when he was going through a devatating breakup with his wife. Orphan stayed glued to him while he sat on our couch and cried his eyes out. It was one of the most touching scenes I have ever witnessed.

An example of the intuitive gift/curse. Once while living in the Bay Area, I sat bolt upright at about 2 or 3 in the morning and I "knew" that a person very close to me was consumating an affair. I had to get up and go sit on the couch and just be there in the dark knowing more than I really wanted to know. I didn't even have to probe into the truth of the intuition later to know that it was true (and it was).

This also happened just the other night. 3 a.m. (what is it with this time), I awoke and knew that another friend was going down the sex path for her very first time. The truth of this was confirmed for me the next day when she came over, sat on our couch, and Orphan plopped right up in her lap as if to soak any potential negative vibes that were left over from the ordeal.

The curse of intuitive types is knowing on some deep level these things even when they don't want to know. No, the knowing of it is OK. It becomes a curse only if the intuitive type feels compelled to reveal what s/he knows. That can lead to problems. Oh, lordy how it can.

The obvious solution is to use this Counselor Idealist demeanor for the benefit of others but mostly to keep the reality of it to oneself.

And so I have tried, sometimes successfully, to do in my life; and so I shall continue to try to do. And may my friends and loved ones forgive my many missteps. (I know Orphan will).

Beauty Is Truth--Truth Beauty

2005-05-31T13:03:00.000-07:00

The title is from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn, I believe. His last line: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.

That may be so. The problem is ferreting out the truth. Descartes wrapped up his Meditations V and VI pretty much going back over the God thing (V) and how God is certain the way triangles in our mind are certain and in (VI) he got into his mind/body controversy that still has philosophers butting heads and squaring off on one another as if fisticuffs is going to solve some philosophical argument. The way Descartes explained it, the mind is always there--you don't cut off a piece of the mind--it is not an extensible thing. But the body can be modified by cutting off a foot, say, or a hand. Then it isn't the same body. The mind, according to Descartes, exists independent of the body--it is not a sum of parts. But the body is just this non-mind extensible thing made up of parts and structures.

OK, so I'm way in over my head here. But I did read the darned meditations, so give me some slack. I don't know that I want to spend too much time worrying about whether my mind and body are split anyhow; to me, they just sort of go together.

But back to this truth and beauty thing. If we know it's true that Bush is a turd head, for example, is knowing this to be true a thing of beauty? That might just be a stretch, even for a romantic such as Keats.

But the Bush sidetrack is relevant, because when I decided to go off on this philosophy venture, it was pretty much a decision to trace the history of ideas that I'm interested in and see how they fit me, while at the same time retreating from such contemporary distractions as newspapers, news magazines, television, radio broadcasts, and anything else wherein I might accidentally be informed of what kind of political craziness is going on these days. I frankly don't think we will find beauty hanging around the Republican party headquarters or in Bush's cabinet or in the vicinity of the Pentagon war planning rooms where scenarios of which evil axis country to be next invaded are worked out while young people of U.S. and Middle Eastern extraction are obliterated in some crazed humanoid chess game played out by mean-spirited people who would not know beauty if it slamed right into them (which it won't).

So I look into the archives of philosophical history, I look into the eyes of my wife, I look into the hearts of my friends, I look into the memories I have of my children. That is where I see beauty; that is where I see truth. That is where I will perhaps come to realize that beauty and truth have resided all along while I was too busy worrying about current events being played out in Washington to notice and give rightful things their rightful due.

So enough of that. Let's get right with the world as it should be. Let's see if this Keats thing has some meat to it.

My Head Is Bloody But Unbowed

2005-05-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

So in meditation IV Rene Decartes tackles the problem of the false and the true, or at least that's how he subheaded the meditation. What he actually does is spend the early part of the piece saying how he really does believe in God, in case you didn't catch that in Meditation III, and then he gets around to talking about free will and how he believes that we humans have it. As for the "true," he says that our understanding is what allows us to recognize the true and that we don't err because our understanding won't allow us to. But the will, he says, is indifferent and more expansive that our understanding, so the will can indeed lead us into temptation and help us err like there's no tomorrow. The way Rene plans to fix that is by containing his will within the confines of his understanding, and thereby taming it to the point of only moving himself in the direction of the true and the good. "To thine on self be true," said Polonius (in Shakepeare's Hamlet). "It thou do this, then thou cans't not be false to any man." Or something like that.

This whole free will thing is on thin ice these days, apparently, what with all the advances in physics and our scientific knowledge--something our Mr. 17th century didn't really have at this disposal. In fact, I have a friend up in Canada, who like Achilles brooding outside his tent while the Trojan war rages around him, is stuck in a comtemplative morass due to his despair that everything seems predetermined and predestined and there's no free will. C., my young friend, came to this conclusion much to his dismay during a bad philocybin (sp?) mushroom trip. Ever since then he's felt as though he's just so much protoplasm and chemical actions-reactions to a chain of cause-effect that was there before he was born, determines all that has been or will be with him, and robs him of any kind of true control over his life or decisions.

Now that's sad, isn't it? Even if my belief that I have free will is a myth of my own making, I'd much rather live the illusion that get stuck in a quagmire of predeterminism. What a downer.

I would say that I'm passionate about the will, and I'm not so sure I'm on board with Descartes about the need to reign it in (except that on occasion I admit that it's a good idea to "edit oneself"). It's almost like I'd rather be passionately in error than prissily right. That's certainly true when I play cello--when in doubt, play out, is my motto, much to the consternation of the entire cello section around me.

I also spout off passionately about things I know very little about, much to the dismay of those who know much more than I. But I do so without apology.

Since a babe, I've had a strong independent will and it has been both my greatest strength and likely my hybris--my fatal flaw. But I embrace the will and I resolutely believe in free will (even if it's a myth). When I face the firing squad, just before they place the blindfold on me and ask if I have any last words, I'll say: "I still believe in free will." I'm just stubborn that way.

I wish some of my obstinancy would rub off on my friend C. up in Canada, but the "will" and other such things are problems to be dealt with personally and in isolation, without the intervention of well meaning meddlers.

And I've probably meddled in people's affairs quite enough for this lifetime.

For some strange reason, rather than Invictus, which has the line in it that this entry is entitled after, I'm inclined to end this missive with a different poem that goes something like this:

Beneath the wide and starry sky
Dig me a grave and let me lie
Gladly did I live and gladly die
and I lay me down with a will.
Be these the words you cleave for me
Here he lies where he long'd to be
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.

Little Lamb Who Made Thee

2005-05-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Throw a rock at a convention of philosophers, and you can bet it will land on someone who is still still struggling with the God question. It seems to be one of those unaviodable philosophical problems that they all must deal with. (That we all must deal with?)

And so it was with Rene Decartes. Here he is in meditation III (and again in V) musing about God. Although he was a product of the 1600s, I still wish Rene had struggled a bit more before reaching his conclusion that there must be a God. You'd think the champion of universal doubt would have chipped away a bit more at this too easily reached conclusion.

In Decartes' case, he reasons that every cause is mo' better than its effect, and something innate in him has caused him to have the idea of perfection. This innate idea didn't come from him, so it must have been planted there by something greater than him, which he reasons would be God. End of debate.

Growing up in small town Texas, I was reared in the Southern Baptist religion. My mother had leanings, also, toward the Pentacostle faith. I was a little Decartes, questioning everything, getting thown out of Sunday school classes, and being pretty much thought of as a heathen bordering on damnation. My older half-brother, on the other hand, was a slightly larger than me fire-breathing fanatic. We fought constantly over the interpretation of Bible verses; he because I wouldn't accept his interpretation; me because I wouldn't allow anyone to force feed me their belief system.

As we grew up, he migrated over to the Assembly of God faith, became a lay preacher and prison guard (same mindset, pretty much). I converted to Catholicism in my early 20s, then to Unitarianism by my mid-20s, and then became pretty much what I am today by my 30s--an athesist leaning agnostic.

Agnostic because I don't think we humans at all have the intellectual powers, or any other powers, to finally answer the God question (sorry Rene). Atheistic because when I examine all the answers to the God question and all the religions that have been founded on them, I just don't find them at all credible.

Instead, I opt for having some questions in my life that will not have answers--likey to my dying day. Mystery is my friend, when it comes to some things.

But not believing in God, that does not mean that I don't live by a moral code. And for me, the code is simple. Try to maintain a reasonable perspective on what seems to be true; do not intentionally harm others.

And finally, I consider it to be more holy to generate questions than to supply answers.

Little lamb who made thee? Hell, if I know--or care.

Toda la vida es sueno y los suenos sueno son

2005-05-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

So Rene Descartes in his second meditation got going pretty well, even getting to the "ego est" proposition of I exist. But along the way, in keeping with his doubt methodology, he wondered what if an irascible God were just playing tricks on us, and all that we thought was real was only a dream. In one of Jorge Luis Borge's short stories, he has this "modern motorcycle rider" type dreaming about being an Aztec Indian who is about to be sacraficed in some sort of ritual. The story goes back and forth between the motorcyclist and the Aztec. Not until the plot twist at the end of the story does the reader realize that the story is told from the Aztec's point of view and that he is imagining himself in the future riding some yet-to-be-invented device, which turns out to be the motorcycle.

In Decartes case, he was using the whole "what if a mischevous God" scenario to illustrate that as long as he was actively thinking of these things, then that was all the verification he needed to know that he exists. He exists, in other words, as a thinking being who is thinking.

So Descartes has now added to his inventory of things to be re-admitted to his vacuumed out brain that he knows he exists when he is thinking and that thinking things exist--while thinking, at least.

In my dream last night, shortly before 3:30 a.m. when I knew my alarm would go off to wake me so I could take care of a long-overdue freelance writing project, I saw this flash of light, sort of like what I imagine people traveling in a plane might see if the plane explodes in mid-air. And I awoke thinking "So, this is what death is like; will I have any awareness at all after this?"

And, of course, I immediately realized that I was awake and alive and that it was time to rise and shine and write that darned story.

So, what is my point? What's real; what's a dream; what can we know and verify a la the quentissential doubting Thomas of all time, Rene Descartes? I know that my story was past deadline and that I needed to finish it, especially if some funds were to be forthcoming for an already planned purchase. And I knew that I needed to preserve at least a modicum of energy to get to work today and take care of an editing project with a deadline that couldn't be posponed. And I knew the cat must be fed, the wife kissed, the shower taken, the car driven, the CD of Damien Rice listened to.

And so I did; and so it is; same old story.

Not much of worth to tuck back inside my too, too hollow brain at this point, I fear.

La vida es sueno y los sueno sueno son.

I Love, Therefore I Am (who I am)

2005-05-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

So, now I've moved on from Rene Decartes Discourse on Method to his Meditations. I'm just into the first meditation where he gets all warmed up to start down his path of doubt.

I've been taking an inventory of what it is that makes me me and trying to clean out the clutter, and just leave what is truly me that I accept completely and make no apologies for. The primary thing I've come up with so far is love.

I have loved intensely and tenderly my whole life, just not wisely and to the benefit of everyone whom I've loved. I had a dream about my first wife last night. We met when whe was 15 and I 17; we fell in love. We courted from November to May in the warm climate of Florida and I fell completely in love, as did she. And then we wrote while I did a tour of duty in the Philippines and Vietnam and then we courted again for a month as I came back to the states on my way to Portuguese language school in Monterey. Then after six months studying Portuguese, in August just after her 18th birthday, while on leave and on my way to catch my spy ship, the USNS Jose F. Valdez that would be sailing with me on board for a year off the coast of Portuguese Africa, we eloped. We didn't even really successfully consumate our marriage before I sailed away and she retired to my parents home in Texas, disowned as she was by her strident Southern belle mother. And then a year went by and I returned, headed for a year of study of Russian at Monterey again, this time as a couple. From there it was Washington D.C., and the National Security Agency. Our marriage suffered primarily because of her bouts of mental illness and it eventually failed not so long after the birth of our son and six months before the birth of our daughter.

My love for her failed us, but I still this very day love her on some level. Still after she bitterly took our children away from me, still after she cut off all communications with me and denied any communications from me with them, still after she moved on, as did I, to other relationships.

Last night in my dream, I was standing outside a widow looking in, and she was inside with my children, now grown to their present ages of 33 and 34. She saw me looking in, and she came to the window and opened it out; it was a bi-split window, and then she kissed me and asked me to come inside.

In real life, I doubt that would ever happen, but in the reality of dreams, it just tells me that I still love her. And I don't mean this as a betrayal of my present wife, whom I love dearly. It's just that the love I felt that caused me to join with my first wife in the first place, never really completely died away.

And that's the thing about me--the thing that I have to keep in my new minimalist inventory of my self. It's that I love genuinely the people I love, and I don't ever stop loving them. Not when they stop loving me, not when the relationship fails, not when there is no chance ever again of my being able to express my love openly to them.

The way I express my love isn't always received in the way it was intended. Sometimes to my great regret, it pushes people away. To my great sadness it doesn't always bring to those I love the nurturing I wish it would bring.

That part I need to work on, and I will.

But the part I have to accept fully is that I am one who loves. That is who I am. That is a great part of what makes me me.

The Mother of All Spring Cleanings

2005-05-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

When Rene Descartes was 23, during a lull in some fighting in Germany or some such place, he had a lazy day by himself in a "heated room," he says, and he began to take an inventory of what he knew. He wasn't pleased with the chaotic nature of it all. Reasoning that a building designed by one architect is much more pleasing that one put together hodgepodge fashion over time, or that a city planned and designed from scratch to finish is much more pleasing in its structure than one that has grown, unplanned, from a village by adding here and there with no overarching plan, Descartes decided to basically vacuum out his brain. For his own sake, he wanted to take out all the inherited ideas with their inherent unquestioned assumptions and put back into his brain only those philosophical thoughts that he could verify as truth.

Descartes would follow through with this plan over the next nine years, the setting up of which he records in his "Discourse on Method." He wanted to begin with simple questions and draw upon what he considered to be some of the tools of mathematics, analytic geometry, and algebra to test some of these ideas. He counseled himself to seek middle-ground questions, exercising moderation in his ambitions and in what he would grant. He also would place higher emphais on "actions" than thoughts (or at least I believe he said this; but I may have dreamed it last night, falling asleep as I did after reading his Discourse on Method, which deserves a repeated reading).

Many would point to Descartes' project as the beginning of modern philosophy and its tendency to criqique everything--not just what we know, but how we know, and how we know we know. So Descartes seems to be a good place to start for me in my quest to vacuum out my brain, and start from scratch to take an inventory of the world and its "truths."

When I ask myself how much I know is true, I come up with scant answers. I do know this much is true, my mother truly loved me. That seems a trite answer, but still, it's one I hold to and one I'll re-insert into my now nicely vacuumed brain. She's been gone from her physical body for the past 12 years and my sad regret is that I didn't demonstrate though actions more while she was alive how greatful I was to her for the lifelong love she gave me. She wasn't one to say "I love you" all that frequently, but she would close her letters that way. She was just a decent, caring person who loved unconditionally and has always been my model for strength of character and genuine caring for others. So for now, her demonstration of how to truly love gets its rightful place back in my brain.

Another truth I think I'll add in at this point is the observation of how important it is to nurture others, whether its your loved ones, your friends, your co-workers, people you meet through social gatherings. In a world as harsh as ours with so much mean-spirited energy, to take an active stand and champion the idea of nurturing (through actions) is to me a second philosophical truth that I will admit to my now sparsely populated brain.

But I'll leave off with those two thoughts for now. Descartes spent nine years reconstructing his thoughts on the truth of things and the truth of truth, so I'll give myself at least that long on my reconstruction project. Much has happened since the 1600s that needs sorting through.

Let the journey begin.

Wind Beneath My Winds

2005-05-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

My wife has been on a trip back to California to visit relatives and Nevada to visit friends for going on two weeks. I've missed her terribly. Her absence has given me some time to ponder the relationship between husband and wife, how they seem to become an extension of one another over time.

We have been together 11 years--the longest such relationship either of us has ever had. And both of us have had multiple relationships, so we entered into ours a bit jaded about the whole idea of relationships. Oh, we were in love all right, but maybe just a bit mistrustful of what "in love" really means, and certainly just a bit cynical from having loved and lost in the past.

A. is about the sweetest person I've ever met. She's an artist, full of creativity. But sensitive like her father; in fact, she's sensitive almost to the point of being ill suited for this harsh world. I like to think that the home I help make for us is a haven for her and that the support and love I give to her is a source of strength.

She did hurt my feelings a bit--almost like piercing me to the core once when we had an off-handed conversation about soul mates. She has this ability sometimes to just speak her mind without running it through a sensitivity-filter first and out comes a blunt truth that can be a bit startling. We were talking about the idea of soul mates, and when I asked if she considered me her soul mate, she said something like "Oh no--hardly." The abruptness of it at first startled me. I thought: how could you NOT consider me a soul mate. And then, as with most of her startling comments, it set me to thinking.

Is she my soul mate just because we are married? What is a soul mate? Is it someone who sees into the very depths of your soul and completely understands what's there? Maybe even has a similar depth and makup in the pit of their very soul?

For me, what would a soul mate look like? Would it be a person who deeply understands why I love and hate poetry at the same time? Would it be someone who understands why I'm so compassionate and giving? Would it be someone who doesn't think my tendency to love fully and widely is just being smarmy?

Is it someone who in being around them their soul resonates with yours to such a degree that it's like the sympathetic vibrations that one string instrument in being played sets off in another string instrument? Is it someone whose thoughts are like harmonics of your own?

Sometimes I wonder if I've ever really had a soul mate or if I ever will, or if it's even possible for anyone to really have that. I sometimes think that we are all alone, isolated at the depth of our core. And then something will happen, like it did today, when my friend R. sent a thoughtful email and caused this wave of happiness to sweep over me.

Do you think that sometimes we need a soul mate so badly that we just project onto some poor unsuspecting soul a connection that isn't really there? I think I may have been guilty of that recently. Maybe I'm guilty of that a lot.

I've been in the nurturing posture for some years now, and sometimes I'm so busy nurturing others--which gives me great happiness, perhaps more than any other thing I do--that I seldom, perhaps never, ask for nurturing back. And when someone does nurture me, unsolicited, it's so surprising and it feels so good, I want to savor that feeling. I wonder if it's the way I make the people I nurture feel? But I'm so intensely nurturing that I fear my intensity may often put the object of my nurturing off. How sad is that?

I'm listening to a recording of Chet Baker's last great concert before his untimely death, so forgive the somber direction this has taken. He's singing "My Funny Valentine" is his drugged-out tender voice and it's almost unbearably sad, considering that shortly afterwards he plunged to his death from a window in Amsterdam.

But don't get me started on the topic of death.

And let me stop here because I realize that I haven't really made up my mind what "soul" is, so how could I possibly hope to understand what a soul mate is?

So let me defer further thoughts on this until I have a better idea. And may that be sooner rather than later.

Me and My Shadow

2005-05-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

I knew that I was going to like G. the first time I ever saw him, which was in 1976 on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. He was manning a donut and coffee cart, and he had a copy of Kierkegaard open before him. He had his ubiquitous outfit, levis, t-shirt, hooded sweatshirt, and my memory has him chewing on a straw. G.'s persona was the "good ol' boy from small-town Illinois"--Taylorville, I think it was.

G. was a graduate philosophy major at the time, although later he was to change his major to psychology after a well meaning professor pulled him aside and said something like: "You just don't get Kant, so maybe you should consider another line of study."

The professor may have done G. a favor, because today he is a very successful pyschologist in private practice in a clinic he owns and runs that helps people deal with chronic pain. (But he has never given up his study of philosophy either, which is one of the many things I admire about him.)

G. intoduced me to LSD (one of two times I ever took the drug in my life). I recall the experience because G., a lifelong student of Jungian philosophy, had always warned me that I didn't deal with my shadow side enough. "It's like a big bear," he would say, "and it's always one step behind you. If you don't turn and face it, eventually it will overtake you and devour you."

I heard what he was saying on some level, but wasn't sure it really applied to me. So during this LSD trip, I remember G. and I looking at each other while standing in his living room. I think we both felt this onrush of love for one another, because we hugged and it was one of those lengthy passionate, squeezing kind of hugs that are so life-giving. And with eyes closed during this hug, I had these mental images of a battlefield with bombs landing left and right. I was walking through this field with explosions all around me, and I was hearing this beautiful classical music with incredible harmonies and textures. And I felt this sense of well being like I was fine and would be able to negotiate the battlefield unharmed.

That image has stayed with me these almost 30 years since that day. It showed me something about my nature, and the fact that rather than turning to face my shadow, as G. said, I'm aware that shadowing things are all around us, but I also have this harmonious nature that guides me through.

Now that isn't exactly dealing with the shadow, but it is accepting it on some level--perhaps even loving it? Amor fati? I'm not sure.

But to tie this back into philosophy, like G., Kant has been a shadowy figure for me, too, who keeps rearing his ugly head. Well, perhaps not ugly. Make it complex.

In reading Wallace Stevens, for example, I learn that he was influenced by Schopenhauer. So when I pick up the first volume to Schopenhaeur's magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, he tells me in his preface not to bother reading further if I haven't already read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

But it doesn't stop with Schopenhaeur. Another philosopher I want to study is Nietzsche. Again, as assumption Nietzsche appears to make, is that to understand him, one has already mastered Schopenhaeur and Kant.

It goes on; after Nietzsche, Heidegger; and again, references back to Kant.

I think it's a popularly held notion that all of Western Philosophy (prior to Kant) is a footnote to Plato. I'm discovering that all of modern philosophy (at least the authors I'm interested in) is a footnote to Kant.

So this summer, I'll try to make my way through Critique of Pure Reason again, finally turning to face my shadow. I've read it once already, but I think you have to read Kant three times in order to read him once (at least that's true, for me). And so I begin my second journey.

May the path, though fraught with explosive danger, be as harmonious as a Puccini aria.

One can hope.

You've Got a Friend

2005-05-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

I've been thoughtful the past several days about friendship; how vital it is, how important it is for one to safeguard it, how easily it can be lost if the proper care isn't taken.

Sometimes the loss is sudden and shocking and irreparable, like when a good friend commits suicide (one of mine has) or is just taken by a dread disease prematurely (another of mine was taken in such a way last summer). Those kind of losses create a sadness that never quite heals, but because of the irreversible nature of these kinds of losses, it's oddly acceptable.

But when a friendship is lost, or in danger of being lost, because of your own shortsidedness and stupidity, that's a harder pill to swallow.

And because I'm in that tenuous area right now with one of my best friends, I'm mindful of how important relationships with significant others in your life really are. My wife, my best friends from college, my best friends just down the road here in Texas. Friends that may not be as close as these, but still important connections I've made in the 50 or so years when I was capable of knowing what friendship was/is.

My financial situation has been up and down since I moved to Texas and we've gotten startling news, like oh by the way Mr. Taxpayer, you underpaid your 2003 taxes by $8,000. Yipes. But being out of work for too long or dealing with taxes that seem to monumental pales in comparison and relative value to the importance of friendships and preserving them. That's where true worth resides.

I hope I'm not too late to do some badly need repairwork on friendship. We shall see.

Poetry's Terrible Beauty

2005-05-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

I have always been drawn to poetry, but it has never been kind to me. I have this romantic streak as wide as a Kansas mile, but I also have a stoic nature that runs deep and is tainted with scepticism like so much black bile. This has caused me to fall in hate with poetry for much of my life, but like a secret vice that gets hidden away from most of the world, once in a while I relent and let out my love of poetry, and generally I am always sorry.

The times I haven't been sorry are the poems I've written to my daughter. But over the past two years or so, I wrote some poems to someone who reminded me of my daughter, and that has gone very badly for reasons probably too fraught with psychological complexity that one should only go there, like Dante into Hades, with a guide. And for now at least, I have no Virgil to steer me.

Some two decades ago I did a masters degree at University in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. I did a book-length narrative poem about my youth in small town Texas as my thesis. It was sort of a Spoon River Anthology approach to this small community in which I grew up. I called it The Earth House. I pulled it out the other day and read over it and realized that with the exception of a poem in tribute to my Grandad, it was pretty awful.

I guess I understand better now why this one professor at UT that I had submitted a sheaf of poems to in order to interest him in an independent study course finally turned me down. I learned later that he used my unreturned sheaf of poems in his class to illustrate how "not" to write poetry. Poetic justice?

One of the poets I most admire is Wallace Stevens. He manages to mix philosophy and poetry in an incredibly intelligent way that I keep coming back to again and again. Another is e.e. cummings who is just about the most romantic poet I've ever read. I'm a mix of the two, but not nearly as insightful or talented. When I was writing my masters work of poetry, confessional poetry was all the rage, and I attended reading after reading that was like being exposed to someone's journal and learning more about them than you would ever want to know. It made me almost want to hide my poems in a shoebox like Emily Dickinson and hope that someone upon my death would have the good sense to destroy them.

Against my better judgement, over the past two years, I've written poetry to a young woman much younger than myself. She was kinder than she should have been in accepting this unsolicited outpouring of winged words from me, but recently she basically had had her fill and let me know in pungent prose that she pretty much has been on some level offended by some of the poems and indifferent to others. It was only out of her affection for me as a friend, she said, that she had tolerated these poems for this long.

I guess that professor who used me as the example in his class of a bad poet had a point after all. He didn't get much argument from his students, except for one, who actually kind of liked my poetry and sought me out to tell me that (along with revealing the whole sad story of how the poetry teacher had abused me with his public flogging). I'm sorry now I didn't remember the young woman's name who did this as the one fan of my poetry I've ever met. What a missed opportunity; maybe she'll be the person who inherits my shoe box after I die and publishes my collected works through one of those vanity presses. She'll likely have the only copy that ever gets read.

So that's why I hate poetry. Can you blame me?

Teach Your Children Well

2005-05-16T23:25:00.000-07:00

When my son was 11 months old and my daughter 1 month old, I left for Turkey with the U.S. Navy. I was a Russian linguist on an intelligence mission and in my early 20s. I had at least three years ahead of me on this assignment and perhaps 4 more years beyond that at Navcomsta, Rota, Spain, if I elected to stay in the Navy (which I didn't, but that's another topic).

My wife and I had divorced and as I settled into my assignment in Turkey, she had remarried. She soon embarked upon something of a fairy tale romance in that she, who was basically bipolar and prone to suicide attempts, had actually made one of her frequent attempts and the Navy Corpsman who rode with her from the motel to the hospital in the back of the ambulance and holding her hand the whole way, fell in love with her "at first ambulance ride." And the rest, as they say, is history. They married and he took on the duties of raising my children. Within a year, they had a child of their own.

So here I was in Turkey; this was during the early 70s during one of our famous oil shortages and so prices were up and supply was down. I was particularly cold that winter in many ways, not just tempature wise due to my inability to afford kerosene. So when my wife's attorney contacted me to offer to have her new husband adopt my children, I was in a vulnerable state. A couple of things about me contributed to an existential decision that I regret making now, but that at the time I thought was best. I reasoned that my children did not know me and only knew their step-father. If he adopted them, they'd live their life with him as their father and wouldn't be torn between us in terms of love or loyalty. Not only that, I also knew that my wife would use the children to get to me if she had the chance, say, if I tried to arrange some kind of bi-country custody arrangement; throughout their lives (at least until they were of age) she'd have ample opportunities to manipulate me through them.

So, out of some misguided sense of loyalty to her and to my children, I signed away my parental rights to them. I mistakenly thought that at some point my now ex-wife would still allow me to have some kind of connection with my children, but I was sadly mistaken. As soon as the adoption was approved by the courts, she cut off all communication with me for the next 20 years.

So for 20 years, I wasn't able to talk with my children or know where they were living or how they were doing. That also went for my family members, including their grandmother, my mother, who was crushed by this development. About 8 years ago, when my son was 28 and my daughter 27, we were reunited. My son came from Florida to California to visit me a couple of times. My daughter, reluctant at first, finally came for a visit, and then decided that she would move to California to be near me. In fact, she moved in with me and my wife, and we lived together for two years. I'm close to both my son and daughter now and we will continue to build a life of connection, but the incredible gap between their newborn years and when we finally were able to connect can never be bridged.

I obviously have played out in my mind over the years what it might have been like to parent my children in their formative years. It's not something I'll every know. I find myself connecting with young people and trying to play a parental role almost unconsciously. It's sad and poignant at the same time, and certainly not all that fair to the poor unspecting young person. But I guess I do subscribe to Nietzsche's dictum "amor fati" which is to not only accept all that has been and will come to be, but to embrace it, even love it. And so I do, so I must. But I don't wish a similar fate on anyone.

So, teach your children well; love your children well, and don't readily ever give up that right.

I Could Drink a Case of You

2005-05-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

Sometime during the last 2.5 years that I've been back in Texas (after a 20 year exile in the San Francisco Bay Area) I came to realize that I had fallen in love with a young woman 40 years my junior. Actually, this all began as a friendship. The person in question and I played in an orchestra together, and as I got to know her she became a close friend, as did her parents, whom I now consider my best friends.

My wife loves her, too, and also considers her parents as best friends.

So, loving is one thing; falling in love is something else. Or is it? I have found myself over the past several months going through some of the highs and lows of emotions that a person who has fallen in love goes through. Missing the loved one when they are not there, feeling one's heart beat faster when they are around. Going through periods of sadness. Feeling all the senses heightened.

So, being the introspective person that I am, I've been "dealing" with these emotions as best I can. First off, don't even think it. I've never behaved inappropriately around this person, nor will I ever do so. Also, I love my wife dearly and have no intention of ever doing anything to taint the relationship I have with her. Loyalty is a highly valued virtue with me.

So is this love I feel, then, for this teenager an innocent emotion? Well, I don't think I've been innocent since shortly after I departed my mother's womb, so I won't use that as my defense in the courts of universal morality.

But I am mindful of how vital the emotion of love is to we humans and in how crucial it is to me to find the right ways to express my love for this person. On her sixteenth birthday, I wanted to write a long narrative poem for her, but I had a chat with her mom first to see if she thought doing so would be inapporpriate. We kind of had a laugh over the Lolita/Humbert implications of such a thing. But her mom, the tower of wisdom in matters of the heart, left it up to me and this person to "work it out between us." My wife and I ended up doing a poetry/art collaboration. I'm actualy not certain how it was received by the person in question, who is very private when it comes to such things. But I do know that the creative act was heartfelt, and it allowed both my wife and me to express how very special we both feel this person is.

Is Eros at work here? Well, I think Eros is at work in any act of love--that's just the nature of love. I'm "in love" with my daughter, too, and see her as a lovely, desirable and wonderful person. So is my love for this teenager a "fatherly" love? I think that it is at least that, and more. Her parents have been gracious enough to include my wife in me in many family gatherings where I'm given the honor of being like a father and the fact that they have done so is important to me.

When this young person recently experienced an intense, but short-lived infatuation with someone she met over the Internet (and whom she never met in person), she did me the great honor of confiding in me for part of the time. Rather than a feeling of jealously, I kind of rooted for her and this connection; it didn't work out for them after all, but I was very supportive of the possibility. So I know that the love I do feel is an accepting one that can be of benefit to her, rather than wanting to steel her away like the Phantom of the Opera and shield her from the Eros kind of love from others.

Love is kind of a funny animal; like cats, it chooses where it wants to live. The most we mere mortals can do is welcome it and care for it, just as we do those strong-minded, stubborn felines that bless our lives.

My hope is that the love I feel for this person helps sustain her through the many trials that she will face as she leaves home, attends college, enjoys the thrill of falling in love herself and suffers the inevitable broken hearts that ensue when we open ouselves up to love.

That is my wish.

2005-05-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

Armed and Ready.

2005-05-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

Armed and ready for action.

And So It Is . . .

2005-05-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

So here I am 57 years old and starting a journal for the umpteenth time. Except in the past, becauseI fancied myself something of a writer, I always bought those cool blue cloth-bound journals you see at most stores. Well intentioned, I would write on a few pages, then abandon the journal out of some notion that it was all pointless self-indulgence.

You see, I have this problem. I'm an introverted thinking type, so ideas matter to me and the world is internal. I think a lot, probably to my peril. But making my thougts "material," or in other words "out there," has never been a high priority.

But for some reason, I have all these questions about life these days, so I'm joining the millions of people who've put their journals in cyberspace hoping perhaps that some virtual potential soul mate will read them, grow contemplative, and perhaps even leave a comment now and then.

A pitiful cry for meaningful connection? A pale attempt at some semblance of at least cyber immortality in a world that promises only one outcome for we animals of the people persuasion?

Perhaps. But my vow is to be honestly--brutally honestly--introspective and about my past, present, and at least the direction, as best I can understand it, of my future. My work, my home life, my loves, my friends, my aspirations, my disappointments.

Join me if you care to; I can use all the friends I can get, you included.