Vulture

When this poem germinated I was thinking only of vultures, of their long patient deliberations in the sky: the math teacher walked into it and surprised me. He was an ancient man who taught me calculus -- an amazement that still amazes.

A math teacher stooped in his pulpit walk:
as he turns he lifts one dull black tine
(a primary feather, like a sprig of chalk)
and slowly underscores the horizon line.

He is deliberate, hooded, ugly, sincere.
There is a beat (stroke of pen, sweep of oar)
in his blood-naked head only he can hear:
this is what it means for an old man to soar. 

In Praise of a Huntress Moon

And the sky en vidrios corúscat, multisplending;
O sake us for God, and mend us for bendas, bensittay!

Say clearly what you mean, before you end your say.

Look where the vultures ride the thermals, where you can

or can't see

the waves of air they ride on, hypérvolant and vigilant:

if we love to watch them, it's because we love to watch

the things we can't quite see. Mr God is like that: you find

the lint from his pockets, but his hands are always elsewhere.

I would not spend a lot of time 

turning inside out the cloth, or checking all the seams.

Bang! this damn tambourine, and sing a song of praise,

song of ending, song of nightfall, the iridéssing of default,

when the sky is violet lavender and fades, surprised

by such a clair à voyant, clair à voyaging moon.

Lever

Time is our home and death is our friend

-- Iain McGilchrist,

Knock when you come to the west door; be sure

to touch the river pebble in your pocket 

for luck; forget your excuses. 

Just answer the questions best you can.

No one is trying to trick you here.

Today the long road, east and west, was tilted

to be level with the sun. I guess you were busy

with your pry-bar, Archimede! 

That at least was an easy one to solve.

Lay it down on me: pull as hard as you like.

That metal crossbeam catches the morning sun: 

even second-hand, these tines of light 

pull gently every strand of me apart:

the brisket of me would fall from the ribs 

at a nudge. I have been a long time in the pot.

They say a friend might happen by for a meal,

and welcome. I have kept house untidily:

but friends will forgive the debris of a lived-in life.

The History of Smoking. Not parsimony

‘You do not know your danger, Théoden,’ interrupted Gandalf. ‘These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience. Some other time would be more fitting for the history of smoking.’ 

It adds to my pleasure in this passage that the enjoyment of tobacco is one of the many things regarded with puritanical horror by my people. It might shorten your life. Horrors! (As though a short life was worth less than a long. Lung cancer is a hard way to exit, I acknowledge: but many of the exits are hard.)

I don't, as it happens, smoke: I share the hatred of the corporate deceit about the health risks of smoking, and I prefer you to smoke out of doors and away from the cradles of my grandchildren. But so long as you have the facts fairly in front of you, I don't have the slightest desire to stop you -- let alone to prevent you from speaking about it because we're sitting on the edge of ruin. Where else have we ever sat?

------

And the bell, ringing. "What I do is me: for that I came."

Life, in its essence, is a making new: a wholly superfluous, superabundant, self-overflowing -- an exuberant, self-delighting process of differentiation into ever more astonishing forms, an unending dance, in which we are lucky enough to find ourselves caught up -- not just, as the left hemisphere cannot help but see it, a series of survival problems to conquer. If reality is ultimately just an eternal, unchanging, perfect unity, as some philosophies seem to suggest, life is going the wrong way about making that clear. To the degree that we can discern any governing principle to the cosmos, it is not going to be parsimony.

Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, p 853

March

The clouds have not quite lost their grip on the mountain's hair

blow though the wind blows, but
the fall leans away and misses the splash pool: March
is master here.

The god whispers at my ear, rapidly and in Greek I cannot catch
some dialect of Olympus no doubt

why send a messenger I can't understand? Do not fear but bring

these three as gifts...

But the slap on my face will do, in place of understanding, the sting

of celestial fingers on my face;

swim in the Sound in spring and the jellyfish will lay their tentacles

across your nose and cheek, just so:

many messengers, one message. You are asleep at your post. Little enough

We've asked of you:

Not even to understand: just to listen. The clouds tear free; red weals

on the face of the mountain,

which treads water and gasps. The swell is pale gray, mottled with white;

this time of year snags

buck silver and even the seals show them some respect: it is early,

too early: but even now too late.

Again, The Matter With Things

The Matter With Things is two weighty volumes, some 1,500 heavily footnoted pages, not even counting the appendices; and you might think I would have finished it with a sigh of relief, and turned to something else. Instead, I turned instantly back to the beginning, and began again.

I read ten or fifteen pages a day, in the portion of my sacrosanct morning time dedicated to demanding reading. I'm halfway through again, which means I've been reading this book for four months, without ever the slightest desire to desist or turn to something else.

(I guess scrupulous accuracy requires m to qualify this by saying that when I turned back to the beginning, really I turned to the beginning of Part Two: Part One is a fresh setting-forth of his brain hemisphere hypothesis, which I already knew well from The Master and his Emissary, so I skipped reading it again.)

It is just such an entertaining book, and so full of things! There's a hint of those old absorbing Medieval encyclopedias, that are stuffed full of fascinations: but unlike them, this is a sustained coherent argument that makes more sense of the world -- and what is presently the matter with it -- than any twenty other books I have ever read. To stay in the pedantic and literal mode -- the fact that it's ten times longer than most books still leaves it with twice the concentration of value per page. I opened the book today at page 766, and found this, speaking of the importance of negation:

It is not often enough remarked that science establishes what is not the case; that we are propelled into philosophy similarly, by the feeling that something widely held to be the case cannot, in reality, be the case. p 766

And on the facing page, speaking of Coleridge's distinction between imagination and fancy, this anecdote:

There is a story told of a Fellow of Merton College, a mathematician, who was irritated by the attention paid to J.R.R. Tolkien, a Fellow of the same Oxford college, by the fawning guests of other Fellows. One day in the Common Room yet another guest was introduced to the great man, and gushed, 'Oh, Professor Tolkien, I do so admire your writing, it's so -- so full of imagination!' The mathematician could bear it no longer, and from behind a newspaper was heard to snort indignantly: 'Imagination? Imagination?! Made it all up.' p 767

Collapse

It is idle, I suppose. "Civilizational collapse," I intone, as if I knew what that meant, or what it portended. What it means is -- precisely that I don't know, that I can't guess. Bad times, at least, for a while. Possibly end times. But also huge opportunities arising, as the glaciers of the world's civilizations calve. We just don't know.

There will be eddies: places almost untouched; surprising recoveries; it's not going to be unrelieved disasters all the way through. 

I see people who pride themselves on how dark their vision is; but really they're upset because they have been clinging to a rosier picture than was ever been credible, and now they're dealing with the possibility of it not turning out so well. Let me know when you're done with all that, and we can go on to building what we can, eh? In this mournful and battered world, rather than in the world of your fantasies.

I have no quarrel with fantasies per se, fantasies that are recognized as such. But your outrage at seeing your fantasies declined by the world shows that you were taking them as more: as the actual program of future events. It's time, it's long past time, to see that the future is totally unknown. That we can lose and be annihilated. Time and chance happeneth to us all. It's good that it should be so, actually, because we are a little, trivial people, pettifoggers, engaged in endless litigation, swollen full of indignation and self-righteousness, unable to endure a moment's quietness. Our disappearance is not going to be a bad thing. Suffering there is, and suffering there will be, but that was a given from the start. We are not capable of making a new world. We never were. Get over it: go home, change a diaper, wash the dishes, mend a window. Cold weather is coming.

Reprise

Picture my astonishment, when reading Keiji Nishitani, to find a Buddhist Heideggerian soberly discussing sin, for all the world as though it was allowed, as though it were something that could stand the steady, corrosive gaze of a modern philosopher; as though it was something that had to be reckoned with. I have not yet gotten over the surprise. I still have not really read very much, and most of the modern philosophers I have met, by chance, have been timid creatures who want to live in orderly houses, where they can be depressed in decent comfort and privacy: they would certainly not admit a concept that might blow the roof off their house, let alone blast a hole in the floor.

----

So. The point is, that I was taking myself to task: I should be thinking about the One, in all its multiplicity -- of God, if you want to use that word -- and how I should or could or might turn towards it: but whenever I began I veered into trivial thoughts of what I needed to do to stop overeating and make sure I got regular exercise. For God's sake, Dale. Grow up.

But then I backed up a little bit and asked myself: are you so sure that these two things have nothing to do with each other? That they're not, in some difficult-to-grasp way, the same question? And as soon as I thought that, that little fragment of Middle English verse came into my head: Adam lay ybounden, ybounden in a bonde... and kept flittering around my head. These little tendrils of habit, this commitment to excessive comfort and relentless stimulation -- what if that is, precisely, what is binding me? And the two wheels converged. The same spin, the same speed. This is in fact one wheel. I don't know exactly how, but I know that it is; and that it stands in some relation to that queer foreign concept of sin.

It's not that I imagine God gives a tinker's damn, let alone one of his own, whether my pants fit. It's the contortion, the throttling of one part of my mind by another part. The striving and writhing in a narrow, airless space. Ybounden in a bonde. The fact that it's an undignified struggle -- that's just one more reason to think it's the one to lean into. 

Not the only struggle, of course, nor one I can (or necessarily want to) win. It's a well-trampled ground and I no longer think that local victories and defeats are going to lead to sweeping breakthroughs: it's not that sort of fight . If I eventually manage to get some distance from it, it won't be because the battle's over, but because I'm no longer invested in it in the same way; which is not the same thing as pretending it's not going on. It's a flicker on wall, the pattern of lights a small boy glimpses moving on the wall as he falls asleep. Real enough, but due to be washed away by morning.

Cathedrals

A couple comments, here and on Facebook, gave rise to a discussion with myself, last night, as I walked under the night sky. Some people said, they have never had any interest in any religious topic, never had any religious experiences, and they were well content that it should be so.

In some moods, I think I could almost say the same; perhaps I have said the same. After all, have I had any religious experiences? Really?

One irrelevancy has to be cleared away at once. It is not at all surprising to me that people who equate religion with what happens in a typical North American church should be uninterested in religion, and devoid of religious experience. What mostly happens in those churches is lectures, by remarkably ignorant and stupid people, consisting of attempts to assert obviously false propositions, accompanied by crude petitionary prayers and maybe some mediocre 19th Century songs. At no time does silence supervene -- possibly for fear that God might get a word in edgewise. I would not blame anyone for a lack of interest in these proceedings. The boredom they inspire is intense, and is well-recognized even by the people who willingly attend them.

So leave that aside. No, the question that I paused on, was "do I actually have any religious experiences at all, or do I just imagine them? Do I just make them up because at one point I had an audience that liked to hear me speak about them?" I walked under the restless night clouds and thought about that.

The trouble is that these experiences are fleeting and fragile, while the memories and descriptions of them are durable and robust. What I call to mind, when I try to bring them back, is my own words, and a few vivid images: poplar leaves trembling in afternoon sunlight; the blaze of a sunrise through wet twigs, forming a fiery circle around an intolerable brightness; things I have written about repeatedly, I'm sure. I grope backwards and find the words, and the images. I don't find the experiences. They're not to be summoned at will. "Not a tame lion," you can say: but anybody, with any motive, might say that.

On the other hand, the analytical mind has its own weaknesses. It prefers to dismiss as illusory anything that is can't be frozen in time and broken into constituent parts. It's always questing after atoms, fundamental particles, elements. And these experiences are experiences of totality, of gist. No wonder the left hemisphere of the brain shrugs impatiently. They are not the sort of thing it can cope with.

I finally concluded: yes, I have had these experiences: though I had more of them when I was younger, and I have been very bad, lately, at putting myself in their way. You can't summon them, but you can invite them. "I don't go to church because God is there," somebody or other said, "I go to church so that if God does come, I'll be in the right place to receive him." Just as wise writers go regularly to their writing desks, not because inspiration lives there, but so that, if inspiration does happen by, they will be in the right place to make use of it.

So when I speak of "church" I mean partly just any place or circumstance that make it more likely that God will happen by. The wild places, the sea and the mountains and the waterfalls, are obvious instances: and I must spend much more time in them. But a "church" is also a community, a sangha, that is oriented towards -- whatever it is. Because in groups we are more than we are as individuals, loath though we Americans are to acknowledge that; loath as I am to acknowledge it. We build ugly convenience stores: but we could build cathedrals. It has happened before and it could happen again.

Pretending not to Believe

This business of pretending not to believe -- like a scientist who devotes his life to discovering what is true, and pretends not to believe in truth -- that's what's exhausting. And that's why I called it quits with Buddhism: the fact is that Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and I do not. Buddhists believe in a pure realm, and aspire to it, and I do not. There are all kinds of ways to practice as a Buddhist without believing those things, but you finally end up like the scientist who purports not to believe in truth: your whole life is a tottering, jury-rigged house built on nothing, and you could wake up tomorrow with the walls fallen down and the wind whistling through. I think it's better for the scientist to admit he believes in truth, and it's better for me to admit I'm no Buddhist.

There are (at least) two ways to go wrong here. One is to say, I know so little, why not accept my ignorance and practice with whatever group may be handy? And the other is to say, I must lay down the total schema of reality and not talk to anyone else until I'm done, and then bustle about with a checklist on my clipboard and see if any church meets my specifications. Both wrong. But what then is to be done? I don't know. 

I admire those people who, wherever they are, just walk into the nearest place of worship, of a Sunday, and take up whatever practice is to hand -- confident that if it's God's house God will take care of it, be it church or temple or mosque -- but I don't think I'll ever be one of them. 

But though I don't know where I am, or where I am going, I am not lost. Finding my location and my path is not something I have to do before I can take up my work: it is my work.

A Blue-Behinded Ape, Home from the Hill

I am unfamiliar with the trends of literary fashion, nowadays -- praise be to God! -- so I have no idea how Robert Louis Stevenson is faring. Probably worse than ever. But remember that he wrote the two best auto-epitaphs in English. Both appeared in Underwoods, published in 1887. One is almost unknown now, I think:

I am a kind of farthing dip,
    Unfriendly to the nose and eyes;
A blue-behinded ape, I skip
    Upon the trees of Paradise.

At mankind's feast, I take my place
⁠    In solemn, sanctimonious state,
And have the air of saying grace
⁠    While I defile the dinner plate.

I am "the smiler with the knife,"
⁠    The battener upon garbage, I

—Dear Heaven, with such a rancid life,
    Were it not better far to die?

Yet still, about the human pale,
⁠    I love to scamper, love to race,
To swing by my irreverent tail
⁠    All over the most holy place;

And when at length, some golden day,
⁠    The unfailing sportsman, aiming at,
Shall bag, me—all the world shall say:
⁠    Thank God, and there's an end of that!

The other is the sort of poem that gets put on ornamental plates, and is taken for anodyne by careless readers, who miss how it plays with time and point of view, and take it for bluff hearty stuff in the line of Kipling or Henley. It's nothing of the sort, and it will live a lot longer than we will:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
⁠    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor; home from sea,
⁠    And the hunter home from the hill.

Just now I'm reading Kidnapped to Martha, and we are taking deep delight in it, and mean to go on to Catriona.; and I'm going to tackle the second volume of Underwoods. I stupidly skipped it a few thousand years ago when I was first reading Stevenson, because the poems in that volume were in Scots; which at the time was a discouragement rather than an inducement. I was in a hurry then. Now I'm so old that I don't need to hurry ever again, so I have time to read it.

Quotidian

Oh, man. I so needed a morning like this, a long morning studying at Tom's, equal parts of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo -- which is a fabulous book -- and Greek. What with one thing and another my mornings have been eaten by dragons, lately. So this was restorative.

I need a vacation, and I will take one soon. Have to get the year-end letters out first. This year has been the nightmare calendar for getting gifts processed and thanked: I didn't even get the lion's share of the gifts until after New Year's, because of the way the non-post days fell. It meant I was all caught up on Christmas Day, which has never happened before, but I was only caught up because the bolus dose was yet to come.

I may have to force the issue of a vacation with Martha: say, "you don't have to come with me, but I am going away for a couple days." We're old, but we're not that old. And even if we can't find someone to feed Van Buren, he'll just do what he did before: break into somebody else's house and eat whatever he finds. He's not exactly a delicate flower. More a semi-retired brigand. He may wreak havoc, but he's not going to starve.

A cold snap coming, four days with the temperature never rising above freezing, so we'll have to lug the earthquake water from the shed back into the house. Maybe change it out while we're at it.

Take good care, friends! xoxo

Vanishment

That he is vanishing all men know: 

a lift slant eyelid tells them so, 

not that I think it's noticed much -- 

not a vanishment as such -- 

so much as shrinking from the touch,

a disinclination to know at all, 

all that he knew in time before.

Read the note, it's all in there; 

the leaning angels twist their hair,

and wait the interim music out. 

Nothing they have to show more fair 

than tit for tat and this for that -- 

he says he's gone

but he's said stuff like that before.

Gone, alas. How would you know? 

His absence glows

like the moon from just behind the hill. 

You used

to think him not so ill: 

but he was much more cheerful then -- 

his opinions more like those of men;

lately he has turned so queer.

I think you know his late career,

the smell of tar, malignities,

his patience with indignities,

the twist of yarn between his fingers

catching on his scaled skin. 

For the lingering sake of God:

let him go, or let him in.

Swerve

So I practice. Visualize space not as empty, but as overflowing with sensitivity and awareness: not an emptiness, but an ocean. Picture each supposed atomic particle as a world of luxuriant life, too tiny to bother with the occasional comet-like photon blazing by. What if there is not a single still, dead thing in all the universe? Turn the whole thing upside down. "An object at rest tends to remain so," intoned Mr. Newton: but as it turns out there is no such thing as an object, let alone one at rest. Everything that looks like an object turns out to be an eddy, holding its character only so long as the flow of the river and the obstructions it flows against remain. And the river and the pylon in turn are eddies, arising from larger flows and greater obstructions. If you try to understand why an eddy behaves as it does by scooping up the water it's made of and examining it in a bucket, the progress you'll make will be meager. "See? An eddy isn't real!" declares the Newtonian, proudly displaying the contents of his bucket. "It's an illusion!" And before his back is turned the eddy is there again, swirling in the same way, entirely untroubled by the interruption. Not real. Sure.

It actually matters, how we think about space. It matters dreadfully. We are sick from our delusions of vast empty spaces speckled here and there with inert particles, billiard-balls flying about from a dimly-conceived cosmic Break. This particle moves because something bumped into it, and that something moved because something else bumped into it, and so on. Why did anything ever move at all? Oh, that is a forbidden question! Only a very naughty child would ask that. 

Lucretius saw it: that to explain movement at all you had to endow atoms with a capacity, an inclination even, to swerve. You can worriedly push the necessity farther and farther away and farther back in time; you can assert, rather improbably, that there was just One Big Swerve a long, long time ago -- call it the Big Bang, if you like -- but something, at some point, swerved. Is it not more reasonable -- since we daily experience ourselves swerving here and there -- to assume that everything everywhere is swerving all the time?

Newton and Einstein, of course, were much smarter men than I am. The story goes that when Einstein first realized that his relativity equations accounted for the "wrongness" of Mercury's orbit -- its tiny but persistent deviation from Newton's laws -- he was shocked into silence for days. Had he actually seen into reality? Apparently so. 

But even he, though his faith was strong, could not demonstrate an deterministic universe. I am way beyond my writ, now -- I readily confess it -- but my point is, so are you. We know fuck-all about it. A little humility is in order here.

The Matter With Things

Finished The Matter With Things, including all eight appendices, and now I'm feeling a little lost and forlorn. I didn't really expect him to end by giving me marching orders, but there lingered a wistful hope that he'd tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. Of course he didn't, and the whole point of the book is that there is not and could not be a context-free algorithm for what to do. The world is not like that.

Vervaeke, of course, coming like me from a Buddhist tradition, delivers practices -- meditations, contemplations, yogas: too many of them, probably. A lot of people probably just walk away from that part of his talks confused. We were already studying a three hundred page menu: adding on to it may not be the most useful thing to do. McGilchrist doesn't offer any practices. He doesn't advise you to walk down to the nearest church on Sunday morning and see what happens. He doesn't advise you to do anything: that's not his business. Which is appealing in its own way: as is his humble admission that he is just as damaged by modernity as anyone else. We are dug into a deep hole here, and nobody is going to just step out of it. The first order of business is to strike a match and get a good look what we've fallen into. For one thing, we're each in our own special, custom-made hole. Getting out will take some custom wriggles, in addition to general hole-climbing skills.

But I do come away with more direction, and more hope. I have been postponing practice until I knew what to practice. "My business, first, is to understand," I keep saying to myself. But it gradually comes into focus that I've misconceived things. It isn't that I need to understand in order to practice. It isn't even that I need to practice in order to understand. I need both of those things, of course, but the missing part, the part that McGilchrist supplies to me, is that figuring out what to do is in fact my purpose. The program is not to make the right guess at what God wants me to do, and then do it. I am God figuring out what to do, you might say; God coming into being. This confusion and aporia is a feature, not a bug. I'm in exactly the right place doing exactly the right thing. And so what I think actually matters. Like, really matters. In all my life I've never taken seriously the idea that what I thought could matter. But suppose it could? Suppose it does?

So many things fall away and so many things come in question, when I really shake free of reductive determinism. What had seemed so very rational and unprejudiced now looks in many cases more like begging the question. What if my family and my nation -- to take just two examples -- are as real as I am? Well, then the world becomes more complex. But it also becomes deeper. And we are so tired of this damned two-dimensional, schematic world we've made for ourselves. It's remarkably easy to convince people of the absurd hypothesis that this world is a simulation. Because so many of us have already made a simulation of it, and crawled inside our representation to live there. So the idea sounds right. 

But it isn't. The world is quite, quite real. And so are we.

Here I sigh, and shake my head, and resist the urge to highlight this whole post and hit the backspace key. The trouble with talking about God is that the moment you start doing it you start thinking you have a handle on Her. (Case in point: you assign Her, or Him, or It, a gender, which is patently ridiculous. You capitalize Her pronoun or you don't. The absurdities multiply inexorably) But the trouble with not talking about God is that you start to forget Her. Equally catastrophic, especially in the poisonous atmosphere of radical individualism. Hypoxia sets in immediately.

Around the time of the equinox, the sun rises and shines straight down Burnside street, and if you are walking east, the sidewalk and the wet twigs of the trees are all on fire, and they make concentric circles of light around it: you are in a fiery tunnel going towards a brightness you can't endure, and it's shockingly beautiful.

“When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.'

Squander

 

My Chinese office-mate, back at Informix, when I asked her for a Chinese surname, gave me this: fei4, "fey" with a falling tone. It is a surname, and it sounds roughly like the first syllable of "Favier." It is also a word-element meaning "squander." It seemed uncannily appropriate.

The sense that I am squandering is heavy on me.

Immediately problematic to put it that way -- as wasting time: it is not possible to waste time. We all of us have all the time there is. To speak of "wasting time" is to take a ridiculous view, in which I possess a dwindling collection of packets of time that I can deal out to various enterprises. That is not what time is like, and only a rigorously trained stupidity can take it to be like that.

No, the problem is nothing like an improper allocation of time-resources. The problem is that I am facing into a corner, and wondering why the world is so small. The solution is not to try to push the walls out. The solution is to turn around.

The solution is to turn around.

I am old and tired and worried, but that's only to be expected of someone who stands in a corner gazing at the walls all day. What else would I be?

The House my Stepfather Built

In that house I would learn all I know about being unhappy: which is a considerable amount, for such an improbably fortunate person. I learned to consume treats continually, while reading books about impossible elsewheres; such chores or duties assigned to me, I simply ignored. I was much alone, and awkward in company. I slipped away to roam the hills at night and watch the stars. I thought myself the smartest person in the world: nobody else read so much, nobody else thought so much. Someday, I would find my people and be happy and admired.

I thought myself very different from everybody, and I was actually, for the time, somewhat peculiar. But I just a generation ahead: pretty soon lots of people would be experiencing life as I did, and considering themselves very misused and maltreated, while living in luxury and performing not a single duty -- the generation that J.K. Rowling catered to so successfully. We were all just terribly special and misunderstood, and somewhere was the Hogwarts where everyone would realize our greatness. Certainly there was no point in adapting to or serving in this world. This was just a tedious waiting room.

And so much of my life was paltered away, kicking my heels in the waiting room, which was actually the real world and the only world I would ever know. The habits I learned in that house have poisoned me all my life. Nostalgia? No, none. I would not relive my childhood or youth on any inducement. It was a bad time, and it left me warped and enfeebled for life. 

It was actually a rather beautiful house, in a very beautiful setting, and I can at least say that I loved the hills and the sky. I knew the dirt roads and the trails intimately. I would like to live somewhere beautiful again, before I die, though it seems increasingly unlikely that I will. I'm glad I knew the night sky before it was littered with satellites, and glad that I learned black oaks by climbing them and griming my hands on their rugged pelts. That much of the lost world I do have in my blood.

Hush, now, and listen for the breeze that comes up at first light: watch for the bloody sun to spill over the hill crest and make the oaks into calligraphy against the pink sky. Not much longer now. There are not many threads to pick up, but I'll gather what I can.

Manifest Mistake

But that is not what I want to spend the little time left saying: there are plenty of justifiers of violence thronging the courts already: nothing I could say will be left unsaid. Turn; go back. Scuff the dust of these fifty years, and forget all foreign conflict. The wars are coming home soon enough.

My wife and my father both, last week, spontaneously, said "they're just evil!" 

Challenged, they would have walked it back, referred to media empires and information bubbles. I didn't challenge them. I don't even know that they're wrong. But true or not, it explains nothing. Half the country can't suddenly have achieved pure evil, while the rest of us walk in the ways of virtue. If they're evil, we must be too. And they perhaps perceive our evil just as clearly as we perceive theirs. We are all of us driving to perdition. Maybe we should stop.

A squirrel turns his white belly to the November sun: for a moment it dazzles. Then squirrel and sun are gone.

I am tired of being ill; more tired of being stupid. G.K. Chesterton:

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.

The Israel-Hamas War

Many of my (mostly Left and far-Left) friends are baffled by my finding this situation complex, and some of them are outraged by my heavily-qualified sympathy for the Israeli side. So -- to clear my head; I don't expect to convince anyone, or even to be heard by them -- this is how it appears to me. I distinguish two questions about justifying recourse to war:

1) Is the war just?

2) Is there a reasonable expectation of winning it?

These are to my mind entirely separate questions from a third question, which is, 

3) is this war being conducted ethically, insofar as such a thing is possible?

Let's take these in turn. My friends will be surprised, or maybe just baffled again, when I agree with them on issue number (1). Hamas had sufficient reason to go to war. Israeli encroachments, particularly under the Netanyahu government, have been intolerable. The viability of a Palestinian state has been deliberately (and also inadvertently) rendered impossible by the Israelis; their treatment of Palestinians as a helot class would be casus belli enough, even if you simply throw away all the various historical arguments (which I think for sanity's sake might be a wise choice, in this particular conflict.)

So far, I and my lefty friends are on the same page. It's when we come to question (2) that we begin to diverge. Most of them would flatly deny the premise; in fact I suspect most of them would not understand its relevance. But it is a traditionally accepted test: for it to be right to begin a war, you must have a reasonable expectation of winning it. Hamas has no such expectation. They were never going to win this war. They are going to lose horribly. To begin this war, with not the slightest prospect of victory, was wrong, even though the casus belli was sufficient. So this is the first place we diverge.

On question (3) there is an apparent agreement among everyone (except Hamas itself, and people who accept a drastically alternate set of facts) that the brutal massacres of Israelis in October were wrong, and constitute a war crime. But there is apparently a crime passionnel defense accepted by some of my friends: The Palestinians were so justly and repeatedly outraged that nothing they do can really be held against them. I understand this defense. I do not accept it.

So now, flipping to the Israeli side. Their casus belli is simple and to me, beyond reproach: their people were brutally and deliberately massacred. They have not just a right, but a duty, to protect their citizens. To me their right to fight back against Hamas, and to destroy it, is clear, and I don't fully understand how anyone can dispute it. It's question (2) that troubles me. Is there a reasonable expectation of winning this war? At once we're faced with what the definitions of winning could look like. The expressed war aim, of freeing the hostages and eliminating Hamas, seems trivially achievable: that is to say. they can, at huge cost to themselves and a huger cost to the civilians of Gaza, kill or capture nearly everyone who at the outbreak of was identified as a member of Hamas, and possibly rescue a few of the hostages. Can they avoid creating, in the process of doing so, another generation of "Hamas," whether it goes by the same name or not? I doubt it. Israel desperately needs clarity on their war aims, for the sake of their own souls. There are some -- a minority at present -- whose war aim actually is genocide. To be unclear will be to drift that way. That's how the American genocide of its indigenous peoples mostly played out: haphazard, half-intentioned, half blundered-into. Without blazing clarity and resolution, Israel will wander down that path, and the "genocide" accusation -- which I presently think unjustified -- will gradually become true.

And I suppose I must turn to question (3), since I don't seem to be able to convince myself to just be silent. For the most part, I think that the Israelis are conducting this war ethically. Siege is legitimate when an enemy fortifies a civilian habitation. As far as I can tell the IDF is not trying to kill civilians. They are trying to defeat Hamas. Our own War on Slavery hinged on the siege of Vicksburg, which was every bit as much of a deliberate humanitarian crisis. If you mean to win a war, and your enemy fortifies and defends a town, you conduct a siege. (And if you don't intend to win a war -- see question (2) above -- you have no business fighting it). So -- yes. I find the siege of Gaza horrifying too. But it doesn't look to me like a war crime. It looks to me like the war that Hamas has insisted upon. 

Whether it's wise for Israel to let Hamas set the terms and chose the terrain is another question. I don't know whether a cease-fire is the right thing or not: without a clear alternate path it seems as likely to be just prolonging the misery. And I do not know if there is some alternate path. The Israelis are possibly the most creative people on earth, and I passionately wish for them to get the hell out of this and come to clarity, and national unity, about what the end of the road is to look like. The road of unclarity leads to exactly one place, and they don't want to go there.  

I've been very ill for the past few days, which may have given me some insight, or may have made me especially stupid -- probably the latter, since no one sensible would comment on this conflict, if they didn't have to.  But I'm posting this mostly to get the damn ruminations out of my head. Thank you, to such friends as I still may have. Lots of love.

I Am Rebuked For Silence

I am rebuked for silence, while a carrier group 
worth the assessed value of a midsize nation
sails into the Eastern Med, and fabulous sums are handed over
on my behalf. If you really can't tell: my silence is consent. 

I understand that the game must be played out:

but there are certain roles I do not care to play.

I am rebuked for silence: hear then my words, O Israel!

I love you beyond reason and beyond sense,

and the wheeling track of the stars knows 

the darkest thoughts we've shared. I will not

repudiate my love. And this also is a silence, for which

I also will be blamed. So be it. If the shoe were on the other foot

would a Jew be left alive, between the river and the sea?

I've heard their words. I listen. Silence is good for that.

Do I therefore forgive your sins? I don't. I am not much

in the business anyway, of blaming or forgiving. My

business is grief, which I get on with, day by day.

"Everything is cut away but the Present"

Kierkegaard suggests that we're depressed, in modern times, precisely because we're trying to live in the present moment: we have emptied the past and the future of all meaning. "Everything is cut away but the present; no wonder, then, that one loses it in the constant anxiety about losing it." In these conditions McMindfulness is more likely to exacerbate depression than to relieve it. Relying on the present moment to supply all our meaning was already overloading it: piling more on is not likely to help.

I still think most people will need mindfulness practices (very broadly construed) to have a life worth living. But I've joined the rebellion against locating the present moment as the place where reality lives. There's a lot of reality. Some ways of reaching out to touch it are historical, and some are soteriological. The fact that "we look before and after" is a feature, not a bug. Sure, it can get us in trouble. What can't? Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

A quiet Fall day.

Interregnum

Interregnum. Summer has lost its grip, but Fall has not yet taken hold: cloudy, quiet, rainless days appear one by one and vanish. In the evening, Vega or Arcturus appear, dim and inarticulate, in the pools between the clouds, and vanish again, their messages undelivered. I am waiting, I suppose, for my two granddaughters to arrive -- one in Colorado, and one here. A pause, while Fall considers its approach; a long indrawing of the tide.

It's California weather, of course, not Oregon weather. My parents' generation of Oregonians tended to move to California when they retired, and their bones got tired of the damp and chill: climate change has accomplished this move for my generation without the trouble of packing. At the moment -- why not gathers such crumbs as fall? -- I'm content to live in a dryer, warmer state. The September slant of the sun has always pleased me, and we get to see more of it, now. 

---

(Notes on Kierkegaard's Either/Or, continued.) 

p 154. "As a passionately erotic glance craves its object, so anxiety looks cravingly upon sorrow." 

I'm nonplussed by this business of "the modern Antigone." Why? He must want to say something about the modern condition that just pointing out the ancient condition would not convey: but I'm not clear what that is. The sheer effrontery is impressive, of course, but effrontery is Kierkegaard's stock-in-trade.

Side note: K's sexism is the smarmiest, ugliest kind. I applaud any woman who has the fortitude to wade through this sewer. Thank God he never married: what a mess he would have made of it!

p 180. the fiction of the narrator in "Silhouettes" is that he knows all about love. Since K is obviously an awkward inexperienced young man, this falls on its face from time to time. K knows almost nothing about love, except what he's read in books. The farthest my generosity can stretch is to take all this as a species of literary criticism. 

p 198. It takes some doing to keep reading. My dislike of K is profound: I find him deeply, deeply antipathetic. All this analysis of seduction and its aftermath, which is all adolescent fantasy: and yet never the slightest twinge of what drove Shelley to imagine, "this could be otherwise: eros could be in service to agape."

Maybe K is right, and it can't be: but for God's sake, you want him to at least be tempted by the idea. Instead he goes on and on and on, clearly relishing the betrayals, lingering on them lovingly. No, I do not like this man: I find him repellent. For all his supposed sympathy with these Maries and Elviras and Susannas, he would not lift a finger to help them.

Either/Or, 2

There is an important metaphysical point being made in this apparently trivial issue of Don Juan, as archetypical "medieval" seducer, being only expressible in music. K is asserting that there is one single correct way to express the archetype, and that Mozart has done it. What this means is that Don Juan is in fact real, and that the expression of him must conform to his reality. It echoes K's assertion that Homer is the right treatment of the Matter of Troy, not just a treatment of it -- that the Matter of Troy demanded a particular expression. This is anti-modern, anti-Romantic, in the extreme, though to (say) Dryden or Pope it would have been a matter of course.

It is in other words a refutation of the "flat ontology" of the Romantic/Modern, which says that there is matter, stuff, which is inert, and then there is shaping spirit: there is nothing else. To speak of matter "demanding" a certain form is, to a Modern, a fallacy. But that's precisely what K is insisting on.

p 129: "Don Giovanni's life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life."

... what the actual fuck? The weirdest use of "anxiety" that I have ever seen.

Despite not knowing the opera, and not understanding the German philosophical turns of phrase ("qualified as spirit" probably means something, but damned if I know what) I think I have a sense for what K is talking about in this section: the manic phase of bipolar, when the force of one's desire seems (and sometimes is) irresistible. It's true that this is only really expressible in music.

p 145: "... this age... automatically makes the individual responsible for his life... One would think that the generation in which I have the honor of living must be a kingdom of gods."

p 151: "Since it is at variance with the aims of our association [ the symparanekromenoi, the fellowship of the dead ] to provide coherent works or larger unities, since it is not our intention to labor on a tower of Babel that God in his righteousness can descend and destroy, since we, in our consciousness that such confusion justly occurred, acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavor in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature's infinite coherence, that an individual's wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality..."

This page-long sentence/paragraph is a tour-de-force -- pure Kierkegaard. The intellectual pressure is enormous

Notes on Kierkegaard's Either/Or, 1

"language is bounded by music on all sides" p 69

Even when K is blithering he comes up with such valuable things. (Why, why are we discussing language vs music at all? No clue so far.)

"Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate." p 70

I have no idea, none at all, what K means by "spirit."

But, as often, I must have patience. This entire book, I suspect, is a sustained definition of "spirit," and looking for a simple definition is looking to skip the book. It's like asking 'what does Plato mean by "the good"?' Socrates said that "the good" was what life was for, but he also said he didn't really know what it was. He wasn't being coy, he was being honest. All Plato wrote were partial, fragmentary attempts to shadow forth "the good," especially in the person of Socrates: to ask for a simple definition of it is to totally misunderstand Plato's project. And so here. K's project is to shadow forth "spirit," and I'm just going to have to move in and out the tide of his thought and hope that the movement stirs something in me.

p 76 - 78: we're fairly embarked in actual discussion of Mozart's operas, here, and it may well be that reading the rest of this essay -- when I know nothing of Mozart, or of opera, or of music -- will be ridiculous and a waste of time. Certainly there's no point in reading this a second time without having at least some background. I'll persevere for now, but between having not the slightest notion of opera, and no idea what a phrase such as "desire is absolutely qualified as desire" may mean -- if anything -- I'm really not gleaning much here. Hopefully I'll do better with the upcoming essay on ancient tragedy.

Flowering

There's a course to be taken in between. The French existentialists -- I barely read them, but what a baneful influence they had on me! -- thought of life as a thing to be invented; made up, out of some primal creative fire, and then committed to, in an act of bold self-assertion. I don't think this conception stands up well under examination. Who, after all, does the creating? Where did *that* self come from, the one who makes the choices? Why, the self before the choices, of course, and you get a regress that's either infinite, or ends up in Mama and Papa and your kindergarten peers. This is noble independence? I don't think so. The thing  doesn't make any sense: and anyway it doesn't correspond to anything I know or remember about myself. I didn't invent myself. I've gradually and painfully discovered myself. There is self-shaping that goes on, choices, and practices; but Dale arrived on the scene already Dale, just as both my children, as far as I can tell, arrived already themselves. 

At the other extreme is Buddhist thought, as I met it in the Tibetan Kagyu lineage. There is no self, they insisted: it's an illusion, a narrative -- as Joan Didion would have said -- imposed on the phantasmagoria of experience. It's a useful and enormously generative idea, and it leads to all sorts of discoveries and undeceptions. I'm deeply grateful for it. But I don't after all think it's quite right either. I remember my teacher Michael Conklin saying that what was striking about meeting an old friend after many years was the fact that they were a now a different person; and it was one of the few times that I thought he was just plain wrong about something. No, that is not what happens. What's startling is how much they are the same person, how very recognizable they are: and how much, through all the changes, they recognize me. There is a generative pattern at work, spinning out fractal variations: infinite variations, but it's recognizably that same pattern playing out.

That self is not a thing, of course, like a lamp or chair: It's more like a song. "Diamonds and Rust" can be sung by Joan Baez or by Judas Priest. It's not the same song, but it is the same song. It's like that. 

What this means is that the impulse to make narrative sense of my life is not, necessarily, self-deception: though of course it's peculiarly prone to it. I can try to understand this pattern, try to cultivate it, try to put it in the corner of the garden where it will flourish. I can aspire to a flowering of myself, in the right place and in the right season. 

Pail

On the kitchen floor, a chrome pail 
left idle for the moment
stands in a flare of sunlight,
surrounded by reflection:
a white pool on the polished floor.

an imposition of a narrative line

upon disparate images, she said,

and like a good obedient boy

I chanted and believed, chanted and believed,

but I am quite suddenly old and

(not as suddenly) wicked, and now

I don't believe it. No. It's the story

that's real, it's always been the story,

the story makes the images, not the other way around.

As if I could make such things! Old and wicked

as I am: I'm not so impious as that.

And so much time given to those

old gilt cruel gods; so much time given

trying to sew a rag doll of myself. When

I could have followed a single splash

spilled from the jar of the sun; a moment's

careless radiance; a story of its own.

Resistance to Plato; Predictions about the Russia-Ukraine War

So start here. Whence the resistance to starting this morning? I’m supposed to pick up Plato’s Republic and continue reading Book VI. Why am I not? Some faint impression that I deserve a treat that I have not received? That there’s too much to do, and somehow not doing any of it will fix that? A suspicioun that I’m embarked on the wrong task?

Some of all of those, I think. There are of course the enormous discomforts of Plato’s sexism, his authoritarian turns, his pluming on account of the superiority of philosophers over all other men. I don’t want to follow him into any of those; though the only one I’m really in danger of is the pluming. My political opinions are neither here nor there, since no one ever will (or should) pay attention to them. And my detestation of sexism finds nothing in Plato to challenge it. But thinking myself a better sort of person… ugh. I fall for that easily.

But no: it’s not that. Really it’s the question of whether I’m doing the right thing. I think I am, that this reading and thinking is necessary, but I must be careful not to follow that with the notion that I am a philosopher, in the modern sense: that I have any business composing arguments and trying to persuade people. I have neither the training nor the intelligence for that. Nor do I think more arguments are particularly needed: and even if they were, I don’t think anyone would read mine. So no. I am not going to write philosophy. That’s not the point.

No, the point is private and personal, and it is entirely negative: to clear away the false opinions and indefensible assumptions that are crowding my skull and making the place unfit to live in. I need to make room. That’s all; that’s enough.

---

I'll record some predictions about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to keep myself honest:

1) I think the war will last for many years, on the scale of the Iran-Iraq war (which in military terms it closely resembles, though no one ever seems to make that comparison.) My guess is seven or eight years. The Russian army has been incompetent, for sure, but much of their apparent incompetence just reflects how difficult it is to advance far against an evenly matched opponent in modern warfare. Deceiving an enemy about where your reserves are, or what your schwerpunkt is, has become almost impossible, unless (as in the initially-successful American campaigns in Iraq) you can disrupt enemy communications and blind their intelligence. Neither side can do that here. People who expect a 1940's style blitzkrieg from either army are living in la-la land.

2) Unless, of course, the Russian army collapses, or revolts. Possible, but two things to bear in mind there: one is, that any successful revolt in the next couple years would be not by pacific liberals, but by Zed radicals. What they want is total mobilization and escalation, not peace. In the case of a putsch or coup the war would intensify, not lessen. The other thing to bear in mind is that the Russian army does not need good morale to operate: it never has. They are not embarrassed by shooting their own recalcitrant soldiers. It's all in a day's work. Expecting them to collapse because their soldiers aren't excited about the war is absurd.

3) I rate the chances of tactical nuclear weapons being employed at some point at about 50%. I don't expect it to go to a global exchange -- I rate that possibility at about 10% -- but I do expect the Russians to use tactical nukes if the Ukrainians are moving into genuinely Russian territory. (The question of what is genuinely Russian territory, to Russia's increasingly demented government, is not of course clear. It may include the Crimean peninsula; it may not. I don't know.)

I like to record my predictions, largely because it's good for me to be reminded of how often I am totally wrong about things. It's a useful discipline.

Books

Under it all there is a low not-sound; a subtonic grinding of plates; while above are the netted lines of swallows too shrill to be heard, too quick to be traced; letters that  dissolve in the sky before they can be read. The book is there. Here, rather. Anywhere that a fool might reach. Did you really think you were the only exception? God may be merciful; I wouldn't know; but that would be bizarre.

Among the fooleries I see again, "where are all the aliens?" The supposed Fermi paradox. I don't think we will meet them face-to-face, or face-to-whatever: the distances are too great, the time is too long, for us to happen to meet at 5:45 at the corner of 3rd and Main Street. But we are probably in sight of the books they have left. We just don't know they are books. The first contact will be an archeology, and a Linear B to be deciphered. You can know there's a message without knowing what it is.

I woke worried at 3:00 a.m., and worried an hour before I got cautiously out of bed. I took my dad to get his catheter changed, two days ago, and his moan at the most painful moment of it is still in my ears. We drove through what seemed like all the streets of Eugene and Springfield, going there and coming back. The urology clinic is a block or two away from my old elementary school; to get there we drove past the University of Oregon whose campus I walked through daily as a young man; and coming back we swung through the old downtown of Springfield which was my haunt as a teenager. Some of the buildings were different, after fifty years, and all had changed their skins, so the recognition was pervasive but unconvincing. At every turn I thought, "oh, I know where I am!" and next I thought, "no, I don't know where I am at all." My dad remembered to tell me where to turn just a bit too late for me to turn, so we retraced our steps a couple times. A piece of my mind is still groping its way through those streets: the part that would not sleep this morning, I guess.

First light can't be too far off, now: twenty minutes at most. I'll take a walk, and look for the sky to change. I'm tired of the dark.

Making My Heart Beat

Sure. The whole project misconstrued or misconceived.
Thunderstorm at dawn: deep dark with lightning,
and now a morning pretending nothing ever happened,
but a gore of draggled blossom spread across the walk.

A wire threaded through the ribcage

might grow warm with each flash, and every kettledrum roll

could start something speaking, it seems, it seems

for a little while, it seems but it stops with the rain.

That Danish cockatoo decided, better not: and reading

his poisonous note, about the weak despair of women,

I can hardly not agree with him: better not. 

Still the nails drive deep, and the hands flex 

of their own accord. Another breath, and another: 

almost steady now, almost I could imagine that my breath

has caught its rhythm and could go on by itself: I am tired, so tired,

of making myself breathe; of making my heart beat.

A Living Thing

Timaeus. The only piece of Plato's writing directly known to the early medieval world.

Plato is quite clear that the universe is “a single living thing that contains within itself all living things, mortal or immortal.” A living thing. How lovely that is, and how different from the dead universe of scientific materialism. In Plato, everything is against a living background.

Note that every human being has two souls, a mortal one based in the trunk and an immortal one based in the head, with further subdivisions and hierarchy within the mortal one. And it is part of the lower soul, seated in the liver, that dreams and practices divination. (Which must then be interpreted by the rational upper soul to make it useful knowledge.)

Then there’s the daft, immensely entertaining description of how and why the Demiurge created the human body: it’s extraordinary that seasoned veterans of of edged-weapon warfare could be so ignorant of human anatomy (no, Tim, there is one abdominal aorta in the center, not a matched pair on either side of the spine!), but there it is. Also – but this is more understandable, in a rabid patriarchy – total ignorance of embryology. The fact that every known human being starts little and grows up has apparently made no impression on these men at all. 

So yes, all the exasperation that Enlightenment science, not to mention feminism, finds in a text like this is well-earned. So much wasted intellectual effort! Start at step A and think up any old crude version of a falsifiable test, and you wouldn’t need to bother with any other steps. This is ridiculous.

And yet. And yet. Where it comes from: a deep conviction that the universe is intelligible, that satisfying explanations can be found, that everything in this living, intertwined universe has intention and desire; that our minds resonate with the world because we belong here, because everything we think shapes and is shaped by reality. Underneath my laughter and incredulity runs a current of regret: a conviction that under this heap of error there is one thing these men achieved that we cannot. They built a conceptual world that was worth living in. Can we say the same?

Theaetetus

Well, Theaetetus is one that I certainly need to reread: extraordinarily rich. This is the one in which Socrates likens the task the god has given him to midwifery: delivering other people of their ideas. He's dead serious, both about the task and about the god. And this is the one that dallies with, (but does not accept) the idea that there are irreducible unknowns ("things of which we know only the names") that are the foundational elements of all the knowns.

On to Timaeus, and then I’m done with my first rapid read of Plato’s greatest hits. Man. I had no idea how rewarding this was going to be. Nor how illuminating of the whole tradition that I’ve been nibbling at the edges of all my life: these texts are central. Ridiculous of me to have neglected them because they are philosophy, and philosophy is not something I do: how puerile an attitude is that, to be frightened away from my birthright by some cataloger’s decision to put these books on one shelf instead of another?

I wrote to a friend:

I am just marveling at Mr Plato these days. I can’t believe I never read him, in all these decades of reading. More and more resentful (irrationally, I know) of The Republic for giving me such a skewed and squinted view of him. Imagine if you were introduced to Dostoevsky by some lengthy antisemitic Russian triumphalist tract (didn’t he write such a thing?) and everyone went about saying it was his best work… so after slogging through it you just skipped Brothers K and Crime and Punishment. Like that. I’m reading Theaetetus right now. So good. (So totally unpronounceable as an English name. That’s probably really why people go around recommending The Republic: they know how to pronounce it.)

Parmenides

The problem of the One and the Many has never troubled me -- undoubtedly because I have never risen to it -- so I'm finding the Parmenides rough going. Plato, however, is at his most artful: here is your chance to see young Socrates, at the moment he first got to run with the big dogs!

(Zeno murmuring, "the force is strong in this one...")

---

Yikes. The brilliant, painstaking idiocy of the Parmenides. Can he really believe he’s still meaning anything when he gets that far in to the labyrinth? I can’t tell. That this is the Zeno of Zeno’s paradox is obvious enough, though. Fascinating that Parmenides' obedient interlocutor should be young Aristotle. (Holy crap, how did I not know any of this before? A lifetime at my books, and I’m still ignorant as hell.)

---

It’s fitting that the final sentence of Parmenides, in my translation at least, is not even a sentence: if there is a main clause there, I can’t detect it.

Dialectic

Finishing the Phaedrus. Finally, I have a definition of dialectic, a word that has bedeviled me since college. (Probably because I first met it in Marx and Hegel, who both put it to strenuous and unaccustomed work.) For Plato, it’s the art of collection and division: “seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind,” on the one hand, and being “able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do,” on the other. Note that this is not seen as imposing categories or distinctions, but as recognizing them. (Phaedrus 265d)

274c & following, is Socrates’ denunciation of depending on the written word: reading encourages you to think you know things, when you don’t; relying on texts leads to a feeble memory; writing fails to fit the message to its audience; texts are frozen and can’t answer questions. Writing is an amusement and an aide-memoire – not serious philosophy.

And now, on to the Parmenides.

If it didn’t mean wishing away the parable of the cave, I might wish Plato had never written The Republic: such an ugly book, full of Socrates at his worst: it put me off Plato, and in fact philosophy, for decades. I’m glad that I have lived long enough to meet this Socrates who prays to Pan by the riverside: asking for his daily bread, and to be made beautiful inside. A different man entirely.

Bad Algebra (or, Why I'm Reading Plato)

When I went back to school to get my Computer Science degree, I took a Calculus course. It was sort of a spiritual awakening for me: but never mind that for the moment. Sometimes the instructor would put a problem we'd had trouble with up on the blackboard. He'd work through it, get through the parts we already understood, and then, right at the most confusing moment, he would stop. 

"And the rest is just algebra," he'd say, toss the chalk back into the tray, and move on to another topic.

This happened a couple times. When the students began to ask him to work out the algebra, too, you could see a light going on for him. It was the algebra we were having trouble with?

"Look," he told us, very earnestly. "You've got to get your algebra nailed down. Your bad algebra is going to kill you."

---

He was right. There's nothing particularly difficult about calculus: its reputation for difficulty comes of the fact that you have to be comfortable with algebra in order to do it, and not many of us learned our algebra all that well. 

---

Today, I think, "my bad philosophy is going to kill me."

---

When I was young and impressionable, growing up in hick town in a backwater state, I decided that philosophy was useless. I actually had pretty good reasons for deciding so. I wanted to know how to live: and the only philosophers I encountered assured me that they could not help me. Each individual created his own meaning, they said, and he committed himself to it: reason could help him neither to find meaning nor to clarify it. (I don't even know who these philosophers were: I got their ideas mostly second-hand, and I was a young innocent. People pontificated about Sartre and Camus a lot in those days: it probably had something to do with them.)

So. If philosophy and reason were useless in figuring out how to live, it seemed to be that the next best thing was case studies. Novels offered case studies: what sort of life do you have if you set your heart on this, or cultivate that? Philosophy had no answers, maybe, but fiction had lots of local, provisional ones. So I read fiction, and wandered into literature, and basically made a life of it. Not a bad choice. I don't regret it.

---

But I had made a large mistake. I had thought that I could just leave philosophy alone, and as it turns out, that's not the way it works. Ignoring philosophy doesn't mean that you don't have ideas about who you are, what the world is, and what you should do in it. It just means your ideas are bits and pieces absorbed from anywhere, unexamined and contradictory. You build your life on these notions: you can't help it. And you find yourself then at age 64 asking once again, "how should I live?" and realizing that this is a problem that you don't have even the minimal tools for addressing.

Your bad algebra is going to kill you.

So: start over. Learn the basics. "What good is Plato going to do you?" someone said to me. "He's wrong about everything important." Maybe so: but you have to start somewhere.

Spring Slash

I am silent when called upon to witness:
I bow my head and mutter, "let each planet
take its course, let every life end where it will; why,
with no writ for life, should I open my palm for death?

Who is calling? You get no more of me
with your mighty obscurities. Say it plain
or get out of the road." My long patience
has run out. The Spring slash is burning, but no voice

comes from it. A beetle makes its slow desperate way
over the moss, while the shadows of birds and clouds
fill him with distress: O brother! We understand as much.
Our call is important to them. Yah. Fuck them.

A wind in the throat of the Gorge: a keening

and a death wail, and whitecaps on the river. It was snow

not long ago, and there'll be snow again before the year turns.

If that's a call I am not home.

Winter Afternoon

The pigeon's toes as he carefully
steps over his own feet: the cock
of his head at the swish of a car:
the night-echo of 4 p.m.
when the light has (mostly) drained from the sky
and rinsed away the day's greed,
(the day's greed for now) to make
room for the evening's: oh
my dear friend I miss you:
you were always undismayed
even when terrified, and 4 p.m. 
was a trifle to you. Now I am expected
to find my own courage, 
and I have none, and no one now
wears silks of outlandish colors,
turquoise: apricot:
chartreuse: plum:
how anyone faces this hour of the day
without a visitor in motley
who carries summer in her fists
I do not know.