I thought I left my store discount card at the grocery last Tuesday. So after I put my groceries away I went back out to the store. When I got there I asked the cashier if I I had left my card on the counter; he told me I had not. I rifled once again through my wallet. And there it was, tucked in interior compartment. Somehow I had failed to look there when I was at home.
I took that as a sign that I shouldn't have to prepare dinner from scratch. There is a decent Vietnamese restaurant on a corner between the grocery store and my apartment building. I haven't been there in a while, years really. My last steady girlfriend and I used to go there now and then.
I walked in. The place was full. The sun was shining. The front of the restaurant is a wall of glass that opens to the sidewalk. I went to the cashier and asked for some vegetarian noodles. She told me to have a seat. It would be ten minutes.
I sat down and looked around and noticed that everyone in the restaurant was young, late teens to early 30s. A contemporary dance-music song was throbbing on the sound system. A young woman sang something about "American freedom" or "American mopeds." I can't remember. It had a thumping, ass-pumping synthesized bass riff.
It was odd to be in the room where I was decades older than anyone else, including the restaurant staff, who all looked as if they were children. At work I am, at fifty years, one of the youngest. The mood in the restaurant was buoyant, generally happy, carefree. I found it quite pleasant, a welcome departure from my everyday work environment where people are exhausted, morose and despise one another.
When I was a student at the university I was a big fan of the pre-Marxist Georg Lukacs. I read closely his neo-Kantian Soul and Form and his Hegelian The Theory of the Novel; both were thin volumes that packed a wallop. What attracted me to the young Lukacs was the sense that he was writing and philosophizing from a "buzzed" state; that what he was after in his theorizing was "a springboard to the ultimate."
This hope or belief, that the ultimate -- whatever it may be -- is achievable, is what (consciously or not) animates young people and makes their company enlivening. Young people are Romantics. It takes decades of toil at soulless jobs to leech this Romantic sensibility from our bones.
The note below was addressed to my best college chum, Mark, on the occasion of his 23rd birthday. I apologize for the sporadic nature of these "The Colt 45 Chronicle" posts. The project is ending with more a whimper than a bang. I was a confused young man who drank a lot and was trying to be true to friends and my wife, but I couldn't see a clear way forward. I didn't believe very much in myself.
"But here what mattered was a passive capacity for experiencing life. The Romantics' philosophy of life was based -- even if never quite consciously so -- on their passive life-experiencing capacity. For them the art of living was one of self-adaptation, carried through with genius, to all events of life. They exploited to the full and raised to the status of necessity everything that fate put in their path; they poeticized fate, but did not mold or conquer it. The path they took could only lead to an organic fusion of all given facts, only to a beautiful harmony of images of life, but not to controlling life."
Georg Lukacs, "On the Romantic Philosophy of Life"
-- Written by someone who was something we're not, twenty-two. But twenty-two was the year we got together and did all the things that we can say we did. Now, which is twenty-three, we can sit back on our poetic haunches and wax ecstatic about sniffing bullets and gulping poison -- a poor but true and suitable fate for two who are so concerned with the idea of "controlling life."
So maybe next year, when twenty-four looms large on your horizon -- after I've already been rapped by nature's sweet sting -- I'll point out another essay in this very volume and tell you how the author composed it at a callow and dewy, but nonetheless brilliant, twenty-three; at which point, we'll trade punches, swap stories about Jesus (or some other eternally suffering man-god) and forget the myth of our elevated youth.
Last week I said these letters, what I have dubbed "The Colt 45 Chronicle" (after my favorite malt liquor to imbibe while pursuing epistolary endeavors), were drawing to a close. Well, there are still a few, more than a few, left. I'd say ten.
This week's offering is a letter to my father where I complain, sounding like a Goldwater Republican, about work and taxes. Then I quickly pivot to an articulation of a Gaia theory of Earth emulation in one's personal behavior -- "bear everything and keep moving." The letter concludes with a paragraph on Hegel, whose philosophy both my father and I admire. The letter opens with a shout-out to Van Morrison's Avalon Sunset (1989), a cassette copy of which my father had recently sent me.
Summer 1989
Dad! Thanks for the gifts. The Van Morrison is plenty good, especially "When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God." That's the question, ain't it? I haven't got a chance to listen to the other tape just yet but that's just around the corner. August has been full of visitors and very busy. Shea and Osha arrived the 1st of the month, and then we had my buddy Mark fresh from Spain and France, and now we're doing Kevin, who's enrolling in business school at Columbia. On top of all this, we expect Colin in about two weeks.
I'm working at a law firm on Wall Street; I'm a proofreader. The pay is poor, but the hours are flexible, and I can earn overtime if I desire. Ashley has just started her second year of classes. Right now she's finishing up her summer fellowship, a research paper on medical charts. I continue to let the ol' corpus go to pot: too many quarts of beer and too little exercise. Mea culpa.
New York City is New York City. After a year here, I'm starting to feel that I'm becoming part of the grand metropolitan process, Manhattan geography being embroidered on the surface of my mind's eye and my life being spent at work and for drink. It's the same old story, the story that everybody or just about everybody comes to learn at one point or another. I guess it's called "adult," being an adult, which is a polite way of saying that you're dead about fifty years before they carve your headstone and plant you in the soil.
The United States is a big country, and most everybody works; subsequently, the government makes a lot of money. I figure I go to work one day out of four solely for the government. I get over 25% of my pay withheld for taxes, which is about eighty dollars a week. Add that up and you get $320 a month, or $3,840 a year. Back in my early days in Berkeley, I came close to living on $3,840 a year. It's a racket, Pop. The whole stinking game of life is a cow's udder siphoned by a dairy farmer's machine.
I'll tell you something. While I was standing on the subway platform the other day waiting for the downtown 'A' train to come and take me to work I got to thinking. It appeared to me right then -- necktie suturing in Adam's apple, malt liquor from the night before bubbling under brow -- it appeared to me that the whole point was to become like the Earth, to bear everything and keep moving. You got to take everything on, or at least be open to the possibility of doing so; otherwise, what's the point of living with yourself, with a little anal weak piece of shit? Now, I know you can never get to the perfect place where you're doing it all, where you're accepting all burdens and radiating assurance in every direction. But I think you can keep the idea as an imperative and always respect it consciously; and when you get the chance you can and should put out the effort and be faithful and make it happen, no matter how piecemeal.
So the train came and the doors opened and I stepped in, saying to myself, "The point is to become like the Earth." Oh, well, another day at work.
The back gets curved and dreams are punched out. It's a big burden to deal with the fact that the past is gone. Hegel was an optimist; he thought you could deal with it. Sometimes I think he's right, but most other times I know he's wrong. I know I talked about this last time, about the importance of a healthy (-- now that's a big word) relationship to time, but I can't help but think that this is the issue, the big issue, in all things having to do with anything, namely, that time fades away. We've got to appreciate and take satisfaction in the past and at the same time find a way of moving on.
I read philosophy while I was at the university, a practice that lasted for five years after my school days had ended. Then, while living in Texas, I shifted to reading American history. But periodically, every three or four years, I would dip back in and try to figure out what I was working on and what issues I was trying to resolve in my lost and unfinished honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori. The last time was during the Trayvon Martin shooting protests. I stopped off and did some research in the Koolhass-designed downtown public library on my way to a rally.
Taking a quick look this morning at some of the big philosophy/theory journals -- Mind, Synthese, October, Representations -- from when I was a toiler in the groves of Academe, nothing much seems to have changed in the last 30 years. The offerings in October -- articles on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt -- and Representations -- an issue devoted to how online search tools and big data are affecting research in the humanities and social sciences -- at least seem interesting.
Philosophy takes more time and energy to read than history, politics, or fiction. So it falls to the wayside if you are a worker running the rat race to earn a living.
The letter below is addressed to my friend Shale who is now a professor at a state university in the Midwest. I spent part of the 1988 Xmas holiday with him and his roommate Steve, who were both political science graduate students at UCLA. Other friends would stop over in what turned out to be a four-day bacchanal punctuated by brutal two-on-two basketball games at a backyard garage hoop; also, drunken, competitive ping pong matches.
The letter ends on a note of regret that we didn't keep the party going as I continued my Christmas travels north up I-5 to San Francisco, and from there on up into Southern Oregon. That winter was a particularly cold one for the West Coast. As it turned out it was the dividing line between my years at -- and my friends from -- the university. Life would not be the same; there would be no bacchanals together in the future. I realized that the next time I was out on the West Coast, the spring of 1990, which marks the end of this collection of letters.
Speaking of which, I did the audit of the number of these missives that remain. There are little more than 20 left. If this project is to be completed by the end of the regular NFL season, I'm going to have to start posting two a week. If I stretch the deadline to the Super Bowl in February, I can stick to a single post on Sunday, shifting to a Saturday-and-Sunday schedule in December.
Winter 1989
You know what philosophers are? They're comic book heroes. Plato might as well be Superman; Aristotle, Batman. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume are the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man is Kant. Being a little bit away from the academy and that bitch Philosophia, as I have been now for close to 9 months, helped me come to this while I was pissing just a second ago.
I heard the other day when I called up Mark and Niall (Mark had left a message on the here machine in NYC saying that his car had been stolen), that the sadomasochistic love trinity didn't quite make it, that the Belgian waffle didn't get cooked up. Niall did relate to me though the story of Steve puking on -- as I envision it -- the trunk of your body. Whew! You guys are shattering all records and putting together quite a storehouse of memorabilia. I'm glad I was around for a spell to feel a little of that LA effervescence.
But back to the philosophy thing. I read an essay by Derrida yesterday, and it was damn good. He was writing about the whole humanist existential turn-on in France after WWII; you know, about how the Sartre behemoth was spawned; that a lot of the shit boiled down to a systematic misreading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger; that Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY was read only in light of Kojeve, who taught it as a kind of textbook for a philosophical anthropology and who thereby overlooked Hegel's own architectonic as set forth in the ENCYCLOPEDIA: Phenomenology of Spirit followsAnthropology; that Hegel's Anthropology concludes with the general form of consciousness, "sensuous certitude," which begins the PHENOMENOLOGY.
Oh, what the fuck am I doing? I don't have the stamina to finish this explanation. Anyway, I read Rorty's intro to the THE LINGUISTIC TURN today -- all about Ideal versus Ordinary Language philosophy. It stank like shit compared to Derrida, and I've done my reading on Ideal Language philosophy (Urmson is the guy to read here; he's sweet and clear). I guess what I wanted to say about Jacques Derrida is that I think he is one damn-ass fine historian of philosophy. Now, if you read him as some serious methodologist, a la your hero Weber, you're just gonna be disappointed. But as someone who gives you a good sense of all the important issues at stake in reading Heidegger, or Husserl, or even Nietzsche (who he creatively rehabilitates from all the low-minded snipes of "last metaphysician" cunts), I don't think there is anyone better today.
Just to finish up the poor-man's recapitulation of the essay I read -- Derrida was simply saying that the supposedly metaphysically-free existentialism of the '50s did not escape traditional metaphysics. "Man" was baldly yet deceptively substituted for "consciousness," ontology for phenomenology. Please remember, this is a gross oversimplification, and I really do miss the point, I think. I fail altogether to capture the persuasiveness and subtlety of argument. He whips in a little Nietzsche at the end; you know, the bit in ZARATHUSTRA about high noon and the difference between the superior man and the superman (ouch! that high noon shit is good -- the superman who turns his back on the camera, his tracks disappearing as he walks away). And mind you, Derrida is not one of these poststructuralist sloppy types, the kind who don't footnote, who engage in constant speculation. Derrida always exhaustively footnotes, always entertains all the published secondary, in many languages.
Anyway, enough of the tirade.
I had a lot of fun cruising the Grapevine. I had never done it before. I did 35 mph a lot of the way up the thing, but it was perfectly fucking incredible coming down out of it and seeing those Bakersfield stretches straight as a ruler. Pushed the old bus hard at 65-plus the whole day, no stops. But I couldn't help feeling a twinge of regret leaving the dudes behind like that. Shit, I felt like all of us should have just piled into the old beast, bought a couple cases of the Banquet Beer, had the boom box spitting, and then cruised north. There would have been pillows and sleeping bags back there for you guys, Steve, Colum, you, Jeff to lounge on. I would have been at the wheel, beer nestled in crotch area; empties could have been thrown anywhere; and there was a hole in the floor, about a foot behind the driver's seat where the sink (for camping) used to be, where you guys could have pissed out without even requiring us to stop.
But you and Steve were doing something, Colum was doing something, Jeff was doing the same, and so was I. So we'll chalk it up to "could've been" and look forward to the future.
Dark as dusk near midday with the rain pouring down. Earlier this morning out on run, most if not all passersby geared up with Seahawks hats and jerseys, I suddenly became concerned about the emotional impact a loss this afternoon would have on the collective psyche of the city. We are attached by heart and hip to this football team -- to Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson and Golden Tate and Earl Thomas. Our suffering will be immense if they falter.
Speaking of suffering, I dropped a table on the top of my foot the other day setting up for a safety training at the local. It hurt so much I entertained the thought that it might be broken. The monkey mind starts chattering away, and you have to apply the higher mind. The higher mind was saying, "Look, simmer down. If the foot had a break, I wouldn't be walking. Plus, it would be swollen so much it would hurt to be wearing a shoe." But the monkey mind keeps on chattering, "You don't know that! There are a lot of bones in the foot. And it'll probably swell up tonight. Why not at least go get an X-ray?"
I stopped off at the grocery store last night to get my shopping done for the coming work week. When I got home I noticed that my computer was powered down. Unusual. I always leave my computer on; I let it go into sleep mode. When I tried to boot it up I had difficulty. After a long while it did start up, but I could not access my accounting software -- Quicken -- nor my iTunes. I ignored it. Then before going to bed I decided to restart the computer, which it would not do, staying perpetually in "Shutting down . . ." mode.
I went to bed and left the computer running like that. Around 1 AM I was awoken by a young man-young woman dispute taking place on the street below. The guy was repeating this torrent of words punctuated by the word, "Now!" I could not make out the others words in the torrent. Just the cadence ending with "Now!" Over and over again he repeated it like some kind of black-magic incantation.
I took the opportunity, being up at 1:30 AM, to try to reboot my PC, which was still stuck on the "Shutting down . . ." screen. This time it would not boot. I tried to remember how to access the BIOS screen and the process I went through a couple of months back when I have was having problems, but I was groggy and couldn't remember much.
Finally, after going to my filing cabinet and determining after a halfhearted search that I hadn't saved the instructions to boot to the BIOS screen, I decided to power down the computer one more time and just let it sit all night trying to boot.
By the time I got back to bed, I heard another voice down on the street. Apparently a resident of my apartment building, a guy my age maybe a little older from the first floor who I didn't recognize, was not so tolerant of the ongoing dark arts lovers' street quarrel. He had gone to the street in his rain gear and intervened. He was telling the guy to leave the young woman alone. I guess the young guy had grabbed the young lady. So the young guy and the rain-geared neighbored argued, with the neighbor yelling to a woman -- (his girlfriend? his wife?) who must have been at the window of their apartment -- to phone the police. I was about to get dressed and go down, debating the wisdom of adding my voice to the drama, when I saw the young woman take off down the street, and then shortly thereafter another young man came up from out of nowhere in a black t-shirt and took the aggressive young man by the arm and led him away.
And with that quiet returned. And lo and behold! In the meantime my PC had booted. I went back to bed and slept soundly.
The letter below, from more than a quarter-century ago, is addressed to my father, with whom I have a good relationship to this day. I visit him twice a year at his Solano County home, and we run a road race together.
In college I was a Kantian, but one who was seduced by Hegel's revision of Kant, that noumenal knowledge was possible. At the time my father and I shared the Hegelian seduction, this Beatnik idea, as expressed by Dean Moriarity in On the Road, that "we know time." (I was also, as you can see, heavily influenced by Paul Virilio.)
Now I am a Kantian of the type expressed by Jacobi when he said that the rationalism of Kant's critical philosophy ends in nihilism; he thereby coined the term. I do think we can know time, but I don't think that offers any liberation from the idea that the unknowable, systemically, always remains unknown.
Nihilism is the province of fathers and sons. It is no coincidence that nihilism was first popularized in an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev which was translated into English with the title Fathers and Sons. The great Cormac McCarthy's last two novels -- No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) -- both enormously successful critically and commercially, explore this connection between nihilism and fathers and sons. Nothing says it better than the Sheriff's dream at the end of No Country for Old Men, delivered by Tommy Lee Jones who played Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the 2007 movie version of the novel:
Autumn 1988
Well Dad, I tell you, I forgot the exact point of this correspondence. Did it have something to do with the car? I remember the bike(s) and the missing box information, but that's it. So anyway, I bought a Casio watch today. I was getting sick and tired of the gold dandy that uncle Boo-guy gave me; it made for a left hand (because of the wedding band) that was a little too ostentatious for my palate; and you had to wind it regularly, making life run five-minutes fast or days slow. The digits on the Casio don't leave any room for doubt, and the unostentatious black speaks to my heart. But this shift raises an important question: the shift -- my personal shift -- from circular time to linear time. The old conception of time, the circular one, was something I definitely had to live under for a spell, and it did me an unquantifiable sum of good. But I always had the itch to return to linear tine, and today I did. If I start to notice those ill effects I have come to attribute to the Casio scheme of things, I'm going to have to go back to the gold dandy, at least for a couple days a week.
[Weeks passed] Ashley is doing just fine. Midterms are i.n about a week. And thank goodness for the A's. I've almost given up on the 49ers. They don't televise the games out here very often, though I did enjoy the early season 4th-quarter conquest of the pompous Giants.
[Weeks passed] Well, needless to say, I'm back to the 49ers now. The World Series left me shattered for a while. Everyone needs their salvation. So I'm back to my old status of blood and guts for the red and gold. The squeaky stallion is gonna make at least one more gallop on the Western trail, to the land of Hegel, champion of the Occident. Hegel's schtick was that we know time, and by me that's just about the hippest, most optimistic thing a person can come to; so I don't shy away from all the bad raps he gets as a rigid Trinitarian dialectician Prussian apologist. His core, heartfelt insight was that the noumena, the unknowable element in our world, is a product of time, and is revealed through time. Hey, that's okay. Because of you and mom and whatever you two we're going through, I got a taste of the Sixties explosion and a heap of the Seventies confusion. I did the Eighties myself. But knowing time is a dangerous thing. It's what Nietzsche talked about in THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY; it's the opiate of looking backwards, of resting on one's rotten laurels (what the old Christmas tree looks like on the first day of spring). Knowing time always has got to be coupled with a philosophy of speed, of shooting forward and taking on the accidental; otherwise, there isn't anything to ruminate historically about. In Hegel's scheme, the accidental (what he calls Nature) steps up, transmogrifies, evolves through the dialectic into the rational (Geist, spirit). So the accidental is essential fuel for the old thinking machine.
I send along a picture of one of my hearts, which you know well.
There is something sickly comical about supporters of the coup government arguing that General Sisi has to be supported in his bloody crackdown on pro-Morsi demonstrators because the military junta is all that stands between Egypt and chaos. Well, chaos is already reigning in Egypt. Thirty-six Islamists were slaughtered in the custody of security forces; 24 police were killed in an ambush by militants outside Rafa in Sinai where an insurgency is underway.
Israel is lobbying aggressively on behalf of the coup government, while the coup government is cracking down on the foreign media. The West will mouth platitudes about democracy and human rights, but continue its support for el-Sisi. The United States will nibble around the edges, as it did with the announcement that it plans to suspend non-military aid (it should be the other way around) to Egypt; this will allow Obama to claim that he is working with the junta to restore democracy as soon as possible.
The news of Mubarak's release is going to make the West's charade much more unbelievable. We'll see how Europe responds now that the cat is out of the bag. Can time be made to flow backwards? You would think that the answer from the birthplace of Hegel would be a resounding, "No!" But neoliberalism is triumphant. And neoliberal thought imagines itself as the end of history, a delusion which bodes ill for the Arab Spring.
