The Colt 45 Chronicle #46

I fiddled about on my undergraduate honors thesis for a couple of years before finally leaving the university the summer of 1988 without completing it. I shouldn't say "fiddled" because I worked quite long and hard on that thesis -- a discourse on Kant, Frege and Derrida that argued for the possibility of the analytic a posteriori (a type of statement Kant ruled out) -- though I would frequently say I was working on it when I was actually off drinking and copulating with one girlfriend or another who was not my wife-to-be.

Right before my betrothed and I left Berkeley in a VW bus bound for a quick Reno stopover in order to tie the knot on our way to the married-student housing offered by New York City's Columbia University Medical School, I inexplicably plucked from the fully-loaded bus a box containing the fruits of two years of research and writing -- countless days spent in branch libraries taking notes from academic journals and then spilling my musings into composition books while I drank coffee in Telegraph Avenue cafes -- and handed it to my father with instructions for him to mail it to me when we arrived in New York.

My father did what I asked of him, but the tomato box containing my honors thesis, my "magnum oh" that ingeniously (or so I imagined) bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy in au courant fashion, never made it to New York.

A cutout of the front portion of the box containing my father's return address was mailed back to him. My honors thesis had gone missing. The speculation was that the crack-and-peel label containing the address of our married-student apartment fell off the box. But if that were the case why not ship the whole box back to the return address which was still visible? The lid of the box must have become separated from the box itself.

My father was disconsolate; he felt responsible for the loss of the thesis. To this day he suspects some sort of foul play by the postal service. Just the other day he related to me that when he dropped off the box at the post office and was admonished by the woman working the counter for coming in so close to closing time with a such a heavy box that she was expected to lift.

Whatever it was, whether a label that had lost its adhesive or sabotage by a disgruntled clerk, my fate was sealed. I told myself I could recapitulate the pith of what was contained in all those boxed notes, and I made a half-hearted attempt evenings after work during the summer of 1989. But the jig was up. I used to be able to recite from memory the chapters of my thesis, how the argument moved from the analytic-synthetic distinction Kant makes at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); to Frege's logicist program in his Begriffsschrift (1879) and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and the ontological implications of defining arithmetic as analytic; to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) and the possibilities for a new, more ethical pedagogy. Now, I can barely remember the barest of outlines. Hopefully, I still have notes somewhere from that weak summer of '89 attempt to capture what was lost in that missing tomato box.

Autumn 1988 

Gentlemen,

The parcel which I'm looking for is a box, approximately 8"x12"x10", with a lid (it's much like an IBM photocopy-paper box). It has air holes on either side (I believe it was originally a box for shipping tomatoes). It weighs about twenty-five pounds.

CONTENTS

The box contains l) books, 2) photocopies of books, and 3) loose-leaf handwritten pages (see next page for sample of hand writing). A list of the authors and titles of the books is as follows:

Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Jacques Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
Immanuel Kant, GROUNDWORK . . .
Gottlob Frege,FOUNDATIONS OF ARITHMETIC
John Sallis, SPACINGS

The package was sent from Fairfield, CA to New York City (10032). My biggest concern is not with recouping any dollar value for the missing material, but with finding it. You see, the box, which I had my dad send to me, had a year and a half's work in it. Without it I can't write this paper; and without this paper, I can't get my bachelor's degree. (A real, honest-to-goodness, tearjerker.) So I would sincerely appreciate any kind of reply, no matter how brief. 

Thank you,

The Colt 45 Chronicle #22

Last Sunday I was on the road in the Bay Area running around Lake Merritt with my father and then later taking in an afternoon Giants game with my buddy Oliver. So there was no post from an archive of letters dating back to the end of the 1980s when I first arrived in New York City. We resume today with letter number 22, a thankfully brief note to my girlfriend Stacey. In this missive I self-indulgently compare our authorial aspirations to those of a young Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (At least Stacey realized some success. Today, she's a prize-winning author.)

At the end of my time at Berkeley when I was trying to finish my honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori, I figured out that what I was trying to say about understanding Kant filtered through Frege (logicism) and Derrida (grammatology) could be found in Fichte and his explanation of the I as thing-in-itself.

At our last dinner together in Oakland, I tried unsuccessfully to describe to Stacey what I had discovered reading Fichte. Hence, the letter below, written a few months later, after I had relocated to New York City with my wife.

Summer 1988 

I told you a story about Fichte once in a car on the way to dinner; I even tried to feed you the moral, about how there's no difference between things that change history. -- A little perfection on I-80 on our way to shitty food and shitty debauched, defeated jocks. And then there's beer, always beer, which is a vacant-lot heaven full of Egyptian-dead cats and dog-shit pyramids; we share it and love it and are alone in it. But the story about Fichte was designed to inspire, both of us: something about youth paying off in a mundane way; that we can do what we're doing and still make our name; all we have to do is take one fair-sized risk. Fichte gambled on writing something (he wrote AN ATTEMPT AT A CRITIQUE OF ALL REVELATION in about a month) and then abased himself at the feet of the master. He figured something out. I'm not pushing institutional prostitution; I'm saying, shit, pump something out. If it's shit, get rid of it. But if it's decent, fork it out to the master. Unfortunately, and hypocritically, I never listen to my own lessons. I could go into a sizable self-deprecating diatribe, but it would bore . . . Let it end by saying that I'm a shithead, an asshole, etc. . . And that I'm a shithead, an asshole, and on and on . . . for doing the Christ-ed, fuck-up, can't-do-it routine. My problem is that at twenty-three I feel I go all the way back to Moses. I feel that life is largely lusterless. I feel that my sword is always already beaten into a plowshare.