=bio0505 BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE , May '05 ----------------------------------------------------------------- I think maybe we have not yet acknowleged the limitations and risks, much less opportunities, of Internet interaction. Saki Less has suggested that persons becoming acquainted primarily via Email offer a brief biography, if only to ensure civility; here's mine. I grew up in the 1940s on a run_down genteel street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a Victorian house with a large yard that had 4 pear trees and two grape vines. I wnet to Shady Hill School, co_ed , progressive, intellectually and culturally enthusiastic, with a social structure that supported individual responsibility. I have since searched for a community I liked as well. My father was an experimental physical chemist at M.I.T. His career, endangered by the Witchhunt of the USA 1950s, consisted of systematically measuring intermolecular forces at very close distancs, by sequentially shooting atoms of gas at each other, in an apparatus he largely built himself, measuring the average defelction, and trying to fit a graph to it. My mother wrote her year's undergraduate honosrs thesis on Ezra Pound, observing that his ear was still excellent but his Cantos nonsense. He wrote back that she was "a poor bleating American she_sheep", but invited her to visit. She did little subsequent writing, but became quite a good editor. Ours was a secular, intellectual home. I learned that I was Jewish, which to me meant that, as members of a minority -- for I have never felt 'American' -- one was obligated to supported the struggles of all persecuted minorities. On my father's side, we are quite likely descended from R. Hayim Heikel of Amdur -- the name Chaim and then Ida (Chaya, I assume) is in the family -- and certainly descent , via. R. Nochum Jaffe of Grodno, from 'The Levush'. On my mother's side it is assimilated New York German_Jewish. My grandmother, a personal of exceptional if understated moral character, was a stalwart in the New York Ethical Culture Society. My mother grew up in a large house overlooking the Hudson river on Haven Avenue, now the Presbyterian Medical Center, but lost its money in the Depression; my grandmother and the 3 children them moved to a solid apartment on West End Avenue. My mother slept on a couch in the living room, underneath the heirloom grandfather clock, and later remarked that she had always thought that there much be something which kept time but made less noise. In 1953 we moved from Cambridge to Belmont, a suburb of no character, and a large neo-colonial house on a small lot. From the back yard one could look down through identical back yards to the end of the street. I then attended the Belmont Junor and Senior High, a well-regard intellectually vacuous environment in which I learned to type and not to use words of 4 syllables. Being too clumsy to play football or baseball -- a weak left eye leaves me with little depth perception -- I ran track. Although I liked the 220 yard dash I was too slow off the starting blocks, and so ran cross-country, the 1000-yard, and sometimes the mile. In college, desirous if not determined to find out what was wrong with the world and tell them once and for all how to fix it, I drifted into philosophy, finding that my lack of visual imagination -- I can still barely remember peoples' faces -- was compensated by an aptitude for metaphysical thought. If the same thing is being said in a variety of conceptual ways -- as eg Kirkegaard so interminably does -- I can often see through the concepts and correlate them. It is that which enables me, most of the time, to juggle the 'Sufi' and Jewish_religious paths. At Oberlin I was influenced by C.D. Rollins course on Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations', and then at U.C. Berkely by Cavell's lectures on Wittgenstein in 1962. I also took a course on the similar ordinary_language techniques sketched in J.L. Austin's 'Collected Papers'. Cavell indicated that Kant fell neatly if redundantly into place when viewed as a metaphysically top_heavy ("hier_top_tip_loftical", Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake) precursor to Wittgenstein, rather from the pseudo_optics epistemologic methodology of Hume. At Columbia I was charmed by Morgenbesser's intellectual energy and agility, though I followed very little of his lectures. I was also charmed by the weekly tea for graduate students in the old building that held the philosphy department. ("Milk or lemon, Mr. Feynmann." "Oh, both." ) Subsequently I took a few half-caps of LSD, a major intellectual experience to which I no doubt owe my later religiosity, on three paths, none of which I have renounced, all both neo_traditional and non_traditional -- an American Indian path, Haverat Judaism, and the Sufi Order in the West. After a year or so of rolling exceptionally thin joints of pot and then jotting down insights, I wangled a graduate assistantship at UNM Alburquerque, where I intended to become the Hippie_in_Residence and write up what I intended to be ground_beaking work in Psychedelic Philosophy. After a year I left in a huff with an M.A. which Paul Schmidt ensured that I get and take , and went to Santa Barbara, where I met Susie Harrison, dancing to the music of Spinoza's Ethics in Paul Wienpahl's class, while everyone else but me was frantically hunched over their chair_desks scribbling notes. While going to UNM I had lived in a 2-room Adobe in Placitas, and at the end of the year I went up for a visit to New Buffalo commune (on my Suzuki 80 with Jane Billotte, her son, and a black eye). It was at New Buffalo, really the creation of Max Finstein, that I became acquainted with the so_called Peyote Church, really the creation of Little Joe Gomez, an elder of Taos Pueblo. It seemed to me that this served New Buffalo as a feedback paradigm of what a community should be. We felt that New Buffalo, which I saw as a sort of rural analogue to Tom Hayden's Newark Project, as creating a working model of an alternative social structure. So I was sure that this, not graduate school, was the place for someone interested in philosophy, but I went on to UCSB anyhow, where I was rather depressed, did more work on Wittgenstein, and in retrospect was saved from the hepatitis epidemic that hit New Buffalo that winter. As we say, our footsteps are guided by heaven, "if you would but hear his voice". Blonde Larry McIntire used to say of New Buffalo, "The only rule is there are no rules, and to live here costs all you've got." When everyone in a community is dedicated to a common goal, for which they transcend individual differences, the synergy is magic. But such a social organization has an 'Achilles heel' -- it can be infilitrated by some who without decalring themselves disdain that goal and exploit the community, After a very cold winter in a 1- room Adobe, to which in the finest tradition of male chauvinism I had dragged Susie , I tried single_handed to shout out the infidels, and instead fell into a nervous breakdown, if hippies can have them. When I returned to New Buffalo later that year, quite shaken down and out of my youthful idealism, most of the old guard, the founders, had left. Someone said it was like a family where the parents one night went out to the movies and never came back. I tried to keep the old values, shouting out many harmless if somewhat indolent yuppies. "I was the meanest man in the place / a second-rate substitute Justin Case." I mudded over half the rooms -- that means putting fresh mud on the outside, to protect the Adobe bricks from erosion by rain. I also hauled ahout 40 tons of dry manure one summer, in repeated trips with an 8_tine pitchfork in a small pickup truck. I did that pretty much single-handed. Put it all on one field, planted turnups, harvested them, packed them in sand in the root cellar so there would be sure to be something to eat sll winter, and then left until spring. I do not especially like turnups. Also got the John Deere tractor fixed on my stipend of $200 a month, got free government seed for Crested Wheat Grass, and drilled it into most of the land that we couldn't irrigate. It came up ok, and I assume it's still there. Took care of the chickens one winter. Bought them infra_red light bulbs, and sacks of chicken feed with a hundred supplements, and got up each mornig at daybreak to change their straw and water. Gave me a raison d'etre, or at least a reason to get up in the morning. Collected a few beshated eggs and gave them to the kitchen. Probably cheaper to send out to Santa Fe for quiche. Back in Massachusetts, I came to Haverat Shalom in Somerville, an egalitarian minyan whose spirit is expressed in the First (Red) Whole Jewish Catalogue. I have yet to find discussions of tora that good. Joel Rosenberg was there, a great midrashic poet, and Rina Kling, whose Yom Kippur Ne'ilah I still recall. I had dated Nancy Neyhard, a fine person and true friend, who later walked the Appalachian trail, ending at Khatadin. We met through the Sub Sig Hiking Club -- Submarine Signal Corps, formed at MIT during the War. I think I have a slight familitarity with most of the White Mountains. As childten, my brother and I learned to sail on the MIT Sailing Dinghy's . From sailing one learns to remain calm, quiet, and efficient under difficult conditions, and to keep one's eye on a mark. A few times I got OPB rides on the Atlantic, the last watch of the night, including dawn , is a great pleasure. I subsequently dated Ciel Metoyer. I still regret the break with her, and have longed wished to try to make amends. Louisiana octaroon background I think, maybe a Creole witch in the geneology -- and I guess now some American Indian anncestry; she once apologized to be, in a crisis, for not being telephatic. Her grandmother was a physician in Newark, and her mother a psychiatrist in Burlington Vermont. Although, as she remarked, her skin was paler than mine, she was proud of her Afro hair, and identified strongly with being Afro-American. She once spoke of an older Afro-American man man who said, "I can't say that I'm proud to be an American, but I'm glad." To my regret, I have no children that I know of, though "sometimes I wonder". The 60s, a decade which ended for me around 1976 , were an interesting time, especially when I was at New Buffalo. Well, so much for my classified ad. After leaving New Mexico, I was drawn to the Sufi Order in the West, headed by Pir Vilayat Khan. I first went to the Abode of the Message, the community established by PVK in New Lebanon NY, for a seminar by R. Zalman Schachter, whom I regard as maybe the foremost eclectic Jewish_religious thinker of our time. I once heard him arguing with a few of his senior -- well, part-time students maybe -- at BU Hillel; they were moving methodologies as if they were chess pieces. I was drawn to R. Shlomo Carlebach, and would try to attend whenever he was in whatever area he was in. In his presence, one felt that the world made sense again, and that one had a proper place in it. I have attempted to do a bit of work in archiving the the teachings of RSC, and of PVK. In that work I try to be rsponsible to academic standards. I sometimes think that I really ought to pick up a Ph.d somewhere, it's the sort of thing that I would like to suppose was, like having children, expeced of me, an obligtion which I would like to have done with as little effort as possible. I have done a bit of hiking around Campra, but just trails and roads, I'm scared to bushwack. Some nice winter walking when the roads are closed but packed. And I don't know now how anyone can live anywhere without clean air, practically no noise pollution, and little enough light to see the Milky Way. The Indians used to pray that everyone should have clean air and clean water. It is the Vanzetti's who have enabled me to stay at Campra, and for that matter enabled Zenith to he here. Both are magnificent workers, with much love of nature. OK, a few more notes, some of them tucked in above: I continue to regard myself as left_wing, a sort of issue_oriented united_front liberal, in the partriotic tradition, as I imagine it -- Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger and all thaat -- of the CPUSA in the 1940s. I differ with the Israel left only regarding the optimal location of the eastern border in the vicinity of Moshav Mevo Modi'in -- the favor the Midia River, I am inclined to favor, if logistic difficulties can be resolved, the Indus. I have tried to argue that self_determiniation is an inherent right of individuals, not collectives, which often repress it. And anyhow the land of Israel is simply too small to subdivide. Especially to a group whose primary economic infrastructure is the export of terrorism. In 1964 I pretty much ran the NYC office of the Student Peace Union. I had concluded that right or wrong the Vietnam War was unwinable, otherwise we would already have won it; so therefore the only ethical course that I could advocate to the government of my nation was to quit. Maybe it would have been best had North Vietnam quit, or quit too, but my citizenship and responsibility was vis_a_vis the USA . Nowadays I say I am from Massachusetts, not from the USA. If the USA survives the Bushies, it will be as nation which has been raped. An apparent policy of intentinal insults to Muslim religious sensiblities is especially infuriating. With the undermning of the U.S. dollar by the Bush Administration, I continue to live on an increasingly insufficient essentially fixed monthly income, albeit munificent by Israeli norms. I was not forewarned that with ageing one's appetite for life increases. Well, I might as well wrap this up for now, the coffee and my writing lost its edge an hour ago. And other things to do today. There's more details in the =auto*.* docs on my Websites. ------------------------------------------------------------------ sa, Campra, 27 May '05 -- 18 AIYaR -- hod sh'b' HOD -- Lag b'Omer -- 28 Rabi al' Thaanay -- A misty spring day, only a little chill in the morning air -- =================================================================