aphorisms

We got to have lunch, yesterday, with a famous man of our time: a mystic whom some regard as the most intelligent on earth today. Peculiarly, this is his home town where his family still resides. Unbeknownst to us, this man’s brother happened to be sitting near us, and at the end of his lunch came to sit with us. (He could have known we were to be there…).

He, the brother, the younger, had rejected his older brother’s way in life – an acid-freak hippy, in today’s parlance. And he asked who we were that we had brought his brother to this Temple of Rationality, the University. When he heard who we were, colleagues in some sense, he asked me who his brother is, and why we had brought him there…where he no longer seemed to belong or to fit. I answered, telling brother about brother: not what he did, not what he is, but what is his importance, how his work and thinking had influenced ours, and what that work is.

Somehow, I think convincingly, I translated the mystic into the rational (the probably mystical into the apparently rational), telling the doubting, the rejecting brother, who the other is, in terms which made new sense. My other friends, sensing the privacy of a privileged conversation, turned away and could not watch us. I, the translator, I the broker, now of brother to brother…a magical moment. (John and David Lilly)

Why do you want to…join American Studies? What should the field be? What about pedagogy? America? Courses? Outlooks? A quizzing, an inquiry, a testing and a trying-out. An hour and a quarter, until the “Literature” contingent broke for their commuter buses (or a drink?), I was asked, pushed, pulled, cajoled, enticed, challenged…

To be privileged, to tell the world what is America, I thought that was good and wanted to do it more. An experiment, noble, I became a kind of patriot, wanting it to last. The world has changed, and our place within it. The Great Cultures, the isolated and primitive, are all now partaking of urban life; the world wants translation and interpretation. This is what I do.

The study of the city – problematizing and exoticizing what is ordinary; taking the bookish-bound beyond the edges of the pages of their texts to see and note the odyssey upon which they are bound. What, who, how…doubled back upon the city’s people(s); their seeing, seeing themselves seeing…How I hear, what I try to see…a seeing, a hearing!

Next day’s flitting doubts race through mentality’s self-wishings and wonder how wise this is to try to sell myself as if I were a believer and practitioner, and one of “them.”

{…almost any ordeal to get new material?}

Arguments, debates take place in ways which defy my understanding. A current debate on the nature-nurture controversy occurs between an old man who is some sort of turncoat, directed against the work of a now-dead woman, which she had done many years ago when she was very young.

The debate had caught-on, at least for a while, exciting those who want their own arrogance massaged, who suspect that others they do not like are inferior in some natural sense, leaving themselves superior in some natural sense. But why – in this context? Why – about the work of a young girl whose impressions may have been guided by some presumptions about the possibilities of the human condition? Why against M. Mead?

Well, she had become famous, the mother of the world, the oracle of oracles who would address all human problems and keep the lid on the world’s dangers. She did not address problems within a clearly intellective context, and she is easy to attack if the problem is shaped in certain ways, for being something, someone she never claimed.

The debater, an old man now, turned in his own life from her field, to one which seemed to locate itself deeply in nature; to be a lobbyist for the natural world, that it is clear to him what this means. He restudied her work of many years ago, and found it wanting, incorrect, of depicting the human condition in any way he considers to be natural.

She, by now mythic, beyond the legend in her own time, staring back at us from the Great Beyond, not fazed by the man, not afraid to wander into any arena where she could debate, could outshout, out-talk anyone. The great debate, and issue in world politics, fought out between personalities which attract and excite and resonate… [and obscure the issues!]

Between here and there, clear vision.

Nothing to shut out,

not a thing to blur

or to halt our seeing forever and with clarity.

We do not always see what there is.

Put glasses on, take them off, shut eyes, open, listen.

See, hear, feel, sense.

The inner voices obscure,

the day is blunted or celebrated,

and we do not hear.

The ears ring clearly,

music plays from the memory,

stirring voices into hums which ring the aura

which reflects the light reflecting sounds.

Like Plato’s caves, we live chained,

seeing shadows;

or the shadows of shadows.

We want, we don’t want,

what there is, what there should be,

cast into the shapes of things,

The objects of desire and moral suasion

moves our honesty,

recasting streams of being and solidifying factuality.

I fought to see,

to push away the curtains and veils of visions;

I fought to hear, to feel not just my feelings resonating,

but what there is.

I found myself floating

upon the waves of a thousand years’

thousand years of why’s and because’s

blunting the sharpness of outline and of detail.

Entering Heraclitus’ river,

I found it always different,

but always different in the same direction;

upstream and downstream.

It never lay still, but neither did I.

Wanting stillness,

seeking to sleep so my dreams

might tell me what was,

I floated,

and lulled myself into the calms

from which I could look out

and tell that all was as it was, was as it is…

To spite, I think, the arrogance of historiographers that all of progress is dialectic, that one side contradicts another to resolve in some somewhat new synthesis, it does sometimes happen that issues are in some interesting or significant opposition.

Most of the time, however, the process of the world is not oppositional but one side or position passes the other-by…on different trajectories in alternate concepts of what is a space.

But when resolutions occur, when a concept is bombarded, reasonably, in terms of its contradictions, its fading applicability, its historical place no longer, then the issue of process, of a certain sense of historical progress, is – as they say -interesting.

The difficulties include the outlook that all is dialectical, that change and history emerge from opposites, that the temptation, the persuasion of thinkers who want to taste or revel in change, spend their energies constructing theories of what is an opposition, thereby to discover meaning: for themselves? – for meaning’s sake?

But here, meaning and the politics of ideas-in-opposition merge, and it is difficult to distinguish what is meaning from what/who wins or loses.

It is difficult, too, to say that meaning or winning from a dialectic process is, in any real sense, progressive; merely that one occurs later than another, or displaces it. Here the winners claim primacy, virtually because they won, but call it ideological or truth.

Here, too, the claims of prophets tend to outweigh the claims of wisdom.