Category Archives: Philosophy

Brother Dan had company today, so when I stopped by to say hello, I stayed for just a few minutes.  He has to go in for an echocardiogram on the 22^nd of this month.  At that time, the doctors will decide exactly what to do with the good carotid, and then they will do it.

I asked him how he has been, how he has felt over this time.  He says he doesn’t know.  I don’t think this is an evasion or that he is repressing something.  Sometimes when he is trying to express something, he uses his hands in a funny way.  He measures something in the air, in the way a person might do telling a fish story.  This time he made a big measure when he tried to recollect the first month after the stroke.  He said it was like nowhere, this space between his hands.  And I said, did he mean he had forgotten it.  He seemed to indicate no, more like there had just been a blank.

I think what he is experiencing really is beyond his comprehension.

Freud was probably wrong about infantile amnesia representing the repression of polymorphous perversity and all sorts of other nasty sexual stuff.  Well, he was not wrong either, but repression is not the whole story.  Representation is.  And thinking about Dan and infantile amnesia I have to wonder how much language is necessary to have a sense of having any kind of experience at all.  Dan’s language powers were affected by the stroke.  He did not have the words for it and I do not mean this in the sense that he lacked the philosophic depth to experience what he felt. Or that he had bumped up against some profound existential emptiness.  Rather he lacked words like “needle,” “bed,” “red light.”

Without being conscious of it, or needing to be conscious of it, we are always moving among named things.  Like cars, or trees, or bushes or under sky.  And as we do move among these named things a potential at least for an experience is present.  We don’t always have to have an experience; maybe nothing really happens.  But if something did, we would have in retrospect the materials (those named things) for the construction of a narrative or the sketchy outlines of an experience.

Car.  Red light.  Freeway on Ramp.  Freeway.  Stop

You could make a narrative out of that.  In fact I did just that after speaking with Brother
Dan and thinking about aphasia. I stopped at a red light located directly in front of the on ramp leading to the freeway on which I could see many cars passing by.

But this little narrative would not be available to me without the words to weave the experience together.  But what if, like an infant, one had no words.  Or no causal connections like: red light means stop.  I doubt one would remember much of anything…since the potential for memory would not exist.

Indeed some aphasia victims forget (actually that is not the right word) rather cease to grasp the connection between red light and stop.

Wham!  I think I have hit the wall.

Did I make a joke:  People say the grief process goes: denial, anger, and so forth.  And that I have jumped straight over denial into anger.  I don’t think there is a so called grief process.  Hell, there’s just grief and more or less of it.  Today, I seem to be at the more rather than less stage.

For a while I had this sort of hectic energy as if deep down inside of me I had this little engine running that just wouldn’t shut off.  To rest, one needs to relax, but this little engine wasn’t letting me relax.  Well, now the engine has stopped and the result is not relaxation but generalized misery, approaching my old colleague torpid depression in which the meaning of it all become elusive.

I woke up vexing myself about the political and emotional correctness of a song I wrote yesterday.  Perhaps it was a signal that the engine was shutting down.

The last stanza goes:

Old Buddha say the worst thing is to be born
I guess that makes old Buddha seem pretty damn forlorn
But maybe that old Buddha was onto something we forgot
Being dead is easy; it’s life that is the shock

A big wind comes straight out of nowhere
And knocks down anything that is standing there

If you are alive right now
You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time….

So I start chastising myself for suggeting maybe life itself is a horrid mistake and nothingness is better.  And so I should change the lyric, if I had the energy to do it, to something more upbeat.  Talk about a loss of perspective…

Big Wind. It’s an MP3.

As indicated some time before on these pages, I bought a used guitar about 4 years ago for 350 bucks, and since that time, I have been trying to make up songs using my computer as my recording device.  I use a software program called ProTools that includes another program called Reason.  With this piece of software one can mix in a drum line and other effects with guitar, voice, and base that are produced by me and directly recorded.  Finally I think, after fiddling for I don’t know how long, I managed to start making decent drum lines.

I made up this song yesterday and I expect it reflects my current mood.

It’s an MP3 and should download pretty easily.

I call it:  “Broken Hearted Melodies.”

Some progress was made on the parking lot since Tuesday.  More of the blacktop has been moved away and earth is showing now, as well as dust when the tractor goes through.

The digital data projectors are stored in this room, along with cables and other odds and ends. I dropped off my cables and keys at audio visual place where one gets the audio visual stuff as I do at the end of each quarter.  Then I have to check them out again for next quarter.

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Yesterday, I got my car “smogged” as required by California law.  I was happy the old 86 Volvo passed, but sad to learn it churns out about 25% more pollutants than your average up to date car.  But I drive it less than 7000 miles a year so maybe that makes up for the pollution a little.  The smogging cost over 50 dollars; and the fee for the registration was over 50 dollars. 

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I recently read that in the 19^th hundreds in the US fifty percent of all children did not make it past the age of 10.  If a person turned 21 in the year 1900, there was a fifty per cent chance that one of that person’s parents was already dead.  The world wide average life expectancy doubled in the 20^th century from 30 to 60 years of age.  The average life expectancy however has risen in significant part not because people are living longer but because the infant mortality rate has been very significantly reduced.  There has been a 10% increase in life expectancy at the upper end.  Whatever that means.

 Women live longer than men, though men, in the industrial nations are catching up, and the affluent live longer than the poor.  Certainly the notion of class is a social construction, but is living a shorter amount of time because one is poor a social construction? 

This is an accidental photo.  I had just taken a few snaps of my parking lot and I must have failed to turn off the camera because when I loaded the files onto my computer, this photo showed up. 

I didn’t know it was there.

I feel dizzy looking at it because I know that shadow is my shadow and so I am looking at myself upside down.  I have no idea where the camera was pointing when I took this snap because I was not aware I had taken a snap, but it must have been pointing behind me.

Here I am right side up.  I feel less dizzy looking at it this way; though this way I certainly do look as if I had a pen head.

I like this accidental photo partly because it reminds me of a De Chirico painting.  I have liked his paintings for a long time.  They are sad and remind me of the passage of time.  Shadows play a big role in his paintings.  Usually they are very long—those shadows—suggesting, I believe, the end of the day.  In the picture below, the little girl rolling the hoop has a shadow behind her, but she seems herself painted in the same color as the shadow.

Continue reading Accidental Snap→

At one time I had a book on anxiety, a collection of different kinds of articles, semi-empirical on anxiety.  One, I remember, speculated on some kind of evolutionary connection between intelligence and anxiety.  The word, intelligence, as used in this context seemed to have less to do with intelligence as a thing penetrating the mysteries of the universe and more to do with military stuff.  The CIA for example is the central intelligence agency.  People who work in the organization, while not themselves necessarily intelligent, seek out intelligence.

Intelligence here would seem allied to a view of the world as engaged in conflict or as posing dangers, from another people, perhaps, or the elements, to one’s particular tribe and within that tribe to one’s self.  Intelligence, in this light, would seem integral to survival.  The more intelligence one might acquire of possible, potential looming disasters or attacks by known enemies, the more one might prepare to meet and greet these possible eventualities.

Anxiety appears—not as fear per se—but as a heightened awareness of possible things in the environment that one ought to fear or that might prove deserving of fear, depending upon one’s intelligence. In the tribe certain anxiety prone individuals might stand then as outposts or guards against threat from without.  Certainly, the best guard at night, the one least likely to doze off and thus pose a threat to the entire tribe, is the anxious fellow, the one a little jumpy even in what might appear to be “normal” non-threatening circumstances.

Such a fellow leans outward as it were, via the senses, into the environs.  He notices things that go bump in the night.  Over time, he might even notice patterns or signs that portend or seem to portend coming events.  The sound of a twig breaking in the dark makes him jump.  He is like that prairie dog seen on television, the one who sits high on top of a mound, constantly scanning the sky for signs of the hawk that might come swooping down at any second to carry off one of his kind. 

If the anxious scout gopher does gather intelligence on an incoming hawk, he lets out an alarm so that his fellow gophers may seek shelter or at least flatten themselves upon the ground. The behavior of this anxious gopher, by sitting so high up and out in the open himself, has been seen as a sign by some of the possibility of “altruistic” behavior in the animal kingdom.  Certainly this is not the case.  The anxious prairie dog seeks above all else to save his self and if others are also saved so be it.  The fact is the anxious prairie dog in light of his anxiety simply doesn’t trust anybody else to keep an eye out. 

The work of the anxious prairie dog is isolating because, anxious as he is, he knows threats may arise not only from without but also from within.

The year my death thing kicked in was not a good year.  That was the year my English teacher threatened to kick me out of his class because of the bad things I said and wrote about him.  That was the year too the coach asked me if I wanted to quit the basketball team because my attitude wasn’t right, he said.  I didn’t know anything was wrong with my attitude, and I didn’t know either that I stopped talking for most of that year until years later when one of the parents said something about it and said they were worried.

Now I wonder if that wasn’t the time my depression started to kick in too.  My death thing, as I said, was not some random cognition but an actual sensation of some sort.  I have read that the biochemistry of the adolescent brain is still in flux and I know that quite a number of types of mental illness kick in for males in their late teens and early twenties.  Prime time for schizophrenia.  So that sensation might have been some sort of biochemical shift, or blip, or glitch in the old brain.  What the connection between this blip or glitch was and the “death thing” I couldn’t say.  I doubt there’s any connection between a biochemical shift and an awareness of death.

I don’t recollect having thought of myself as depressed at the time.  But I didn’t have a word for that either.  People didn’t talk about depression much.  I guess I would say I felt lousy and the old lady would see me moping around and ask what was wrong, and I would say, Everything or Nothing.  That’s what it felt like too: everything or nothing. 

 I suppose I was lucky to have found Dostoevsky at that time.  All of his books are about death, dying, suicide, the threat of suicide, people that die, or should be dead because they are such goddamn crappy people.  Raskolnikov kills an old lady for no clear reason and goes around the rest of the book thinking about suicide.  Suicide or insanity—those seem to be his choices.  I do know that reading Crime and Punishment the first time made me feel as if I had been saved.  Not exactly that, I guess, but at least somewhere, some time, people had been who might have had an inkling of what was going on inside of me at the time in 1962.

And through Crime and Punishment I came upon the diverse existentialists who opened up a whole new world of death and misery that made me feel at home.  OK.  It was a bit of a stretch. Most of these people lived over in Europe and didn’t speak English.  I had to go abroad to feel at home, still that was better than nothing.  How could I not feel that “shock of recognition,” as I think Edmund Wilson called it, when I opened up The Rebel and found Camas saying the first and the most basic question for the philosopher was, “Should I kill myself?”

Poor Aunt Sue.  Anyway one day I get a call from her out of the blue, and somehow she has got wind that I have practically finished my work on the PhD and in acknowledgement of the feat wants to buy me a car.  Spending time around Aunt Sue was so hard, I was remotely tempted to say no, but I couldn’t have said no in any case to her gesture, and besides my little Volkswagen was on its very last legs.

So she comes up and we spend an afternoon in a used car lot.  First this one, then that one, and really I didn’t fucking care as long as it ran, but I had to feign enthusiasm and interest, and finally she more or less settled on a powder blue Mustang 2.  It was a pretty shitty car but it was the first I had with automatic transmission and that was pretty cool.  She paid 6000 in cash for it in 1979 dollars, so I guess it wasn’t cheap.

 But by that time she had launched her own career, got a realtor’s license, and what’s that other thing—a broker’s license—so she could go completely out on her own, though she still worked with some firm, and she was making money hand over fist and had acquired multiple properties, rentals and such.  Partly she was there at the right time; the California market was making one of its whacko runs.  And I am sure she was good at it.  Pushy, but not too pushy, real smart and I do believe completely responsible.

 But it was a crazy day.  Trying to buy a car in a couple hours in an afternoon was not the way I would do it.  But she wanted to make a grand gesture I guess.  Well, maybe, it worked because I remember it, and the dinner I had to sit through with her afterwards.  She could be pretty blunt and would ask me such questions as, “Are you happy?”  “Is this what you really want?”  That sort of thing.  To the first, I had to say, no, of course since I was absolutely miserable, and as for is this what you really want, well, I had not idea what I really wanted because nobody had ever asked me.

I could have lied I guess and said I was perfectly happy but it wasn’t in me.  So she started to tell me how I could be happy and successful just like her (when all you had to do was look at her and see misery leaking out everywhere).  She had gone to some self-help group and the leader told her what to do.  It was all in the will. First you wrote down what you wanted (which she did on the spot) and then you will.  So she had done that and four years later she looked at what she had written down that day that she wanted—a Lincoln and a mink coat—and she had both. And much more.

That’s all I had to do.  Will it and it would be so.  I could hardly stand to listen to this shit and then it got really weird because sadly it had recently been learned that her husband had cancer, and well, she wondered—she had wondered deep inside herself—if maybe she hadn’t willed that.  God, I felt unhappy.  I sort of felt like crying, for god’s sake, the way people get along.  I guess she was saying that deep inside she had wished her husband dead and more than that her wish had come true. I tried to say, no, no, no, of course not; a person simply couldn’t will such a thing.  But I don’t think I had any positive effect.

I don’t know maybe five year later she developed breast cancer and died in about six months.  It was just too far along.  As a final act of will, she wrote my mother out of her will even though she had promised the old lady she would get something up till a month before she died.