=ph1_0505 NOTES ON PHILOSOPHY, doc 1, 8 May '05 ------------------------------------------------------------------- HERAKLITUS is pre-eminent among the Pre-Socratics. Really, the only Pre-Socratic from whom I get much of anything. Pythagoras was no doubt great, but so little of his writing survives, the rest is inference. He had much to say about the harmony of descending symattries, and that is much of the aesthetics of Plato's dialogues I guess. Eg The Republic. The Parethenon is said to be built in such symmetry. That is, a ratio which is repeated in diminishing scales. Heralitus is a great stylist, well worth reading in Greek bilingual edition. We have more of him than I think of any other Pre-Socratic -- more significant remarks, that is. One of his notions is dynamic tension -- a notion in Buckminster Fuller, eg with his 'exploding rhomboids' -- Steve Baer, in Placitas, built a dome on that principle, this would be 1966, to show that it could be done. In Heraklitus we have it in his aphorism about the bow. And also in his notion of 'Strife' as essential to existence. And so we see a similar form of thought -- there was a maybe very great book called 'Forms of Thought' advertised in the early pages of the First Whole Earth Catalogue -- that is Stuart Brand, it came out about 1965 -- published in England as I rcall -- so as I say, we see a similar form of though in Heralitus best- known aphorism, the river as exemplifying what PVK -- and before tthat, I heard it about 1962 from Seal Doss, a teaching assistant in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley -- of 'continuity in change'. I think Heraklitus has a metaphysics of 5 elements -- in ascending order: earth, water, air, fire, aether . And then there is his great aphorism -- "Wisdom is one thing and one thing only -- to know how thought steers all things through all things." As I have often said, this reminds us of the image of Ulyssess as the Steersman, the man at the tiller of a small boat sailing through the night -- and the image of the rooster, which is the emblem of Ulyssess, or one of his emblems -- and that reminds of the rooster in the morning brachot -- "who gives the rooster wisdom to discern day from night" -- or to take it up one level to metaphor, to distinguish good from bad -- no easy task, at least if one lives in peaceful times. ================================================================ WOMEN PHILOSOPHES. "So Huzzah! for the women, philosophers such as they are dare let the world rest on the gentlest touch " (sa, Poem included on my Website, 'A Brief History of Empiricist Epistemology in Honor of Jerry Woods, DDS) In March '05 the IHT noted the death of Andrea Dworkin. A militant feminist, of course, and not without hatred of men -- and someone once said to me, her sister once said to her, that she had so much antipathy toward men that the only way should would get past it would to be to marry one of THEM . I recall waking up one morning to find her doing karate kicks, naked from the waist down. The sort of image that one recalls. A leader in an Egalitarian Haverat, she once took a Torah scroll home, which I thought might be a bit inappropriate in the bedroom of her apartment, inasmuch as she had taken me home too. Well, one day during the week before Pesach I stopped by and noticed that she had put my hiking shoes -- really just leather work-shoes -- out on the front stoop; and thus I was relegated to chametz. That sort of thing happened rather often in my romantic youth. So anyhow, I think one can say that Andrea Dworkin as a philospher of sex. I knew her only casually, as a volunteer at the New York office of the Student Peace Union, which I headed '63--'65 . I had always, that is after she became somewhat notorious as an outspoken litearay figure, intended to write a book about our encounter, to be entitled 'Dorkin' Dworkin'. But truth to tell I knew her only as a dropin volunteer -- a good enough typist, as I recall -- and so I never got past the title, cince I had no more to say after that one pun. A quiet, somewhat withdrawn high school student of unremarkable appearance. Shulamit Firestone wrote 'The Dialectic of Sex', but that is not an easy read, and I did not get past the first chapter or two. Marxist philosophy I suppose. Ricky Sherover was also a Marxist philosopher, but apparently there are only one or a few articles of hers available. She had been a friend of the Marcuse's, when she was getting her Ph.d at Brandeis, and after his wife died she married him. But I don't think this was blind adulation, she would sometimes acknowlege my discomfort with his prefunctory antipathy toward Wittgenstein -- Where W. said "Philosophy leaves everything as it is", Marcuse saw this as a refusal to enage with soial problems -- well, Wittgenstein did not, apart from volunteering as a male nurse during World War II -- rather than as making the point that philosophy does not discover anything, nor even assert anything, but merely offers betting_fitting conceptual clothing, or one might say, more detailed conceptual exegesis, or what everyone perceives. Well, Ricky was a great person -- very good, very honest, unaffected -- not feminine, but womanly -- she had an affair with Carl Shrager, while he and I were flatmates in a slum house in Cambridge -- he was a bit of a wildman, but I think treated her with respect and gentleness -- I telephoned her from my boss's office in 1988, getting her number from the Tikun Magazine office in Oakland or Berkeley, after telling them that I was calling "very long distance" -- anyhow, she remarked with some pride tht she still remembered her Hebrew -- she had been a volunteer at Kibutz Yad Chana, the Israel CP kibutz, named in honor of Hanah -- Shenesh is it -- who was killed by the Nazis after parachuting back into -- Hungary was it -- to attempt to organize Resistance - - She remarked that she had lost touch with Carl Shrager, and regretted it. Well, we live in an environment poisoned by corporte greed, and it kills at random. ------------------------------------------------------------------ PLATO Plato strikes me as an effete fop. Too cute by half and a bit of a poof. Maybe he loses in translation, but maybe he gains. Of course I ain't hardly read the dude. Writes well, I suppose. Eva Brann wrote an excellent essay, 'The Musike of Plato's Republic' in Agon I:1, 1967, published by the Department of Classics at UC Berkeley. She showed clearly all the symmetries in Politea ('The Republic'). As I said above, this notion of descending symmetries is a Pythagorean notion, and exemplified in the Parethenon of Athens. Plato's insight was that there are Archetypes. And he seems inclined to have envisioned them as mathematic symmetry. J.N. Findlay, and also PVK if memory serves, suggest that Plato was rooted in the Elusian mysteries, which were esoteric. That means that his Dialogues are mereley the exoteric projection of his esoteric philosophy, which is unwritten. The myth of the cave in The Republic seems to be taken from the Elusian mysteries, as described by PVK. Rudolph Steiner also took Plato is based on the Elusian mysteries. Another note: recall the introduction to Diatoma's speech in The Symposium. (Which I suppose is to Plato as The Tempest is to Shakespeare.) Notice the 'this is a tale as told by A to B who told it to C who told it to D ...' -- you will see that what we have as Diatoma's speech is but a 7th derivative -- the 7th retelling, presumably with loss and error at every stage. And those 7 retellings would correspond to the descent of the soul into incarnation through the 7 spheres. Well, all that will take us to 'HIK'='Hazrat Inayat Khan, Founder of the Sufi Order in the West, whose collected works are available on CD from the Sufi Order, New Lebanon, NY 12125'. But of HIK anon. I imagine that Sokrates fares rather badly in Plato's recreation of him. But who knows, maybe he is enhanced in Plato. The English and Anglophiles made much of Plato, however little patience they may have had with the untidiness of Greece. So no doubt there are many great translations and great commentaries on his dialogues; I ain't taken heed of same. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ARISTOTLE Ron Hathaway, in the Philosophy Department at UC Santa Barbara in the 1960s -- I sat in his class in 1967 or so -- pointed out that what we have of Aristotle is merely the lecture notes of his students. Which may be why he don't read with a darn. Aristotle is quite important because he takes heed of teleology ("final cause"), where most of western philosophy looks only to mechanistic causation -- Aristotle's "efficient cause", Hume's billiard-table as paradigmatic of the model of mechanistic causality. That means that Aristotle makes space for both Divine and human agency, rather than yielding to the so-called Newtonian model, where the world is like a clock that was once wound up and now is running along, and eventually will run down. So it would have been that which endeared Aristotle to the Christians, codified in the Thomists. We will eventually get to Whitehead's Process and Reality -- Paul Schmidt, first at Oberlin and then at U of New Mexico Alburquerque, was very taken with Whitehead, though I don't know what he wrote on him. P&R seems to have been an insight, of great synthetic power, which Whitehead wrote at a single go and never even re-read, or so I had heard or read. Elsewhere I have suggested a progressive continuity from Whitehead's P&R through Rav Kook to PVK. I don't know how far I can go in explicting that insight, but I think it's a useful 'working theory' or 'propadeutic' or whatever you'd clal it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ST. AUGUSTINE I've not read him, and doubt I will. He seems to have had certain problems in his relationship with women, which should disqualify a philospher from anything but analysis. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ST. THOMAS $ Ain't hardly read him neither. Seems really square, like walls of rectinlinear building-blocks. Definitive of the Dark Ages no doubt. Medieval rigidity. -------------------------------------------------------------- SPINOZA Spinoza's Ethics, as I learned it in Paul Wienpahl's class at UC Santa Barbara ca. 1968, and Wienpahl approached it from a standpoint of Zen, is a great work. That was how I met Susie Harrison, as I glanced up and saw her sitting in her seat, eyes and almost her body too dancing to the music of Spinoza's Ethics, while everyone else but me was hunched over their desks taking notes as fast as they could scribble. One didn't even have portable cassette recorders in those days, let alone digital audio input. The orthodox and Israel anti_orthodox Jewish communities make much of Spinoza's brush with osensible atheism, but that's nearly beside the point. It once struck me, from a lecture by a Mr. Pines -- or rather from a chap who was repeatedly quoting that unfortunately_named (in the ears of callow USA students, the Vulgarians of Harvard College) Israeli gentleman -- that one could show a continuity between the Rambam (Maimonides) and Spinoza. First of all, of course, one must get past Spinoza's Cartesian framework -- in davka Latin -- and the pseudo-Euclidean structure of the Ethics. Somerset Maughn remarks in his introction to 'Of Human Bondage' -- that being the title of the chapter of Spinoza's ethics that deals with the 'Passions' to which most of mankind is enslaved -- that he was fortunate in having been led to choose that title. As I recall, it is the dispassionate 'Emotions' -- what PVK would call 'Divine Emotions' or 'Divine Attributes' I suppose -- that are the realm of freedom in Spinoza's philosophy. Mark my words, this was a great Jewish philosopher, who discovered and charted a stellar constellation in the sphere of philosophy. I think Margalit at Hebrew University has written extensively on Spinoza, but maybe he don't have much to say. I don't know, I ain't read the dude. Too, a lot of the ethics is just building up the metaphysical -- epistemologc maybe -- platform from which Spinoza will finally launch us in his rocketship. ----------------------------------------------------------------- LEIBNIZ Stephen Hawking notes how cruel Newton was to Leibniz. And the history of philosophy seems to have brushed past him. I ain't read the dude -- odd that I never got a Ph.d ; I've not read almost everyone of any imagined importance -- but I've read a bit about him, maybe in Will Durant's History of Philosophy, which should be proscribed reading for anyone past adolescence. Which is when I read it. I knew back in Belmont Senior High School that I intended to be a philosopher, because obviously "the world needs fixing" as R. Shlomo Carlebach once remarked -- obviously, since why otherwise would I have had to leave a comfortable progressive co-educational school with small wood buildings, pretty young women -- girls really, but we never thought of ourselves as other than adults of somewhat younger years -- for the regimented brick and concrete holding pen for anti_intellectual yahoos, where one even had to piss en masse, and salute the flag and the Lord's Prayer too every morning. So anyhow, obviously the world needed fixing -- starting with the eradication of suburbia, for we had moved from the old-world brick streets of Cambridge , and an old Victorian house with a yard with 2 grape vines and 4 pear trees, "world enough" for a child -- and my mother planted flower beds every spring -- to the nouveau riche suburbia of Belmont, where you could stand in our vest-pocket back yard and look down to the end of the street through all the other identical vest-pocket back yards behind their nearly identical "colonial" houses -- ours cost about $23,000 on mortage, in 1954, and is now worth maybe a half-million or more. And so anyhow, obviously the world needed fixing, and philosophy is what sets out the blueprints for how it should be fixed -- and after that hoi polloi can do the rest, and should. A philospher should only have to say once what to do, repetition and pedagogery is for psychologists; they have to deal with feelings, we stay safely in the realm, or sphere -- a bit of a bubble-dome, what -- of ideas. Cha-cha cha. So anyhow , Leibniz -- his great insight was the notion of monads. "They have no home because they are always at home," someone wrote. Surely not Durant, he was much too dull. Monads, like gonads, contain within themselves the entire universe. (PVK repeatedly makes this point of each human soul, however it may chance to have become individuated, and however much of its heritage it may have relegated to the unconsious. PVK's image is that of a piano, most of whose keys have been taped closed so one cannot now play on them.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ KANT Kant exists only as a corrective to Hume, and is comprehensible only as Wittgenstein bedecked if not precisely dressed up in metaphsics. And believe me, Kant's metaphysics is nothing to send down a catwalk on a cakewalk in Milano; it is dowdy enough to be stuffed back in any Victorian closed. I'll return to Kant in a bit, if the coffee still holds. Everything I know about Kant I learned en passant from Cavell, while he was lecturing on Wittgenstein at UC Berkeley 1961--1963, before Harvard bought him for an ornament. Well, after playing the WASP for a few decades -- davka writing books of Hollywood comedies of the 30s and 40s, how camp can you get -- and then with the chutzpah to write on not merely Thoreau but Emerson too -- Harvard always has had a precocious Jew or two -- Berenson was one of the first -- repudiating their own heritage with such ideologic energy that everyone who glances can see it but they -- So anyhow, I took extemsove of mpt close to verbatim notes as he spoke, and then wrote them up, and must have shlepped them to New York and then back to Albuquerque, but left them in the Maxine's garage and they chucked them when the moved, them and the chaps who burned down the Libarary at Persopolis. So anyhow, I gather that Cavell finally go around to writing him his work from that period, and its published, but I forget now which title -- doubtless sitting at the moment in the Harvrd Coop. One felt at this UC Berkeley classes that Cavell was on the verge of a breakthrough about later Wittgenstein, but whether he ever leapt over to the other side of that conceptual abyss I don't know. Ashenbrenner lectured on Kant, from an empiricist standpoint, and I wrote then, "So thoroughly had he run up against that brick wall that one could read Kant in reverse from the bumps on his head." Empiricist epistemology was a dead-end street in the history of philosophy , and quite distorts whatever it touches -- chops it up in little pieces. So, Kirk and Raven's book 'The Pre Socratics', which has nothing useful to say , and much misleading, on any of them. Wheelwright at least made a try at apprehending Heraklitus as a wholistic if not mystic thinker. And someone remarked that that British flagship, The Aristotelian Society, bears practically no recognizeable resemblance to Aristotle's thought; it's just anothe bit of British bric_a_brac. Well, my mind's a bit full and bubbling over now, so time to turn down the heat -- eat something resembling breakfast maybe. I told Eliahu once, I tend to forget names and such nowadays. He said, 'I'm Eliahu.' I said back, 'We've met.' Everyone knows, with age one loses the memory of particulars, and also short-term memory -- that's why a house is so important, because it enables one to place all the devices of an increasingly complex life in places where one won't forget they exist -- the tragedy of homelessness is not sleeping out on a dark restaurant stoop in the cold, but the disenablement of the intrastructure to lead a constructive life -- -- and now in this shoebox I can't recalll where I put half the things -- well a fifth maybe -- that I need -- -- too, the mind becomes with age so fulll of things that something must spill out, or be dumped -- -- and, again as PVK notes, one gains in the capacity to form gestalts of what one has has experienced -- I suppose that's the co-called wisdom of old age -- and too, one's long-term memory is enhanced -- which can be quite useful for a post-modernist poet who accumulated most “f his trivia in his youth -- it is all relatively accessible now, to paste onto poems -- if only I can remember where I put the poem I wrote yesterday, I can add a quote someone said in high school fifty years ago. That stud boyfriend of Connie Osgood once remarked that he had once found himself importent, and remarked, "in such a situation most people would of course commit suicide" -- they baited Sokrates about his age, and he replied, it was good to be free of such a stern taskmaster. No doubt that is the key to the dispassionate wisdom of old age -- before that, one's mind needs be bent on procreation -- to the exclusion of reflection and wisdom. None of which gets me any closer to Locke and Hume and then Russell, even C.I. Lewis in passing -- all the dead-end of empiricist epistemology, stemming for the scientistic -- not scientific, scientistic -- not science, but taken the pop science of the age as a model -- in this case, it was Optics, and they made it a model of epitemology, and then found it led to what Ryle calls 'dilemmas' -- conceputal dead-ends that seem to show that we could never have known anything in the first place -- and so it took about two generations for philosophers to stand up and say, but of course we know things -- it starts with Moore holding up his hand and saying, I know that this is my hand -- and then Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin come along and say, my friend, you are not wrong but you are talking nonsense -- unless of course you are grubbing about in a trench after a particularly bad mortar attack or some such -- that is is ordinary-language analyis -- showing how preposterous the statements of fallibilist epistemology are, and the reaction to it too, by taking them seriously for a moment and showing how far removed from their intended context is the sort of context in which they would fit. ----------------------------------------------------------------- THE EMPIRICIST EPISTEMOLOGISTS -- Locke, Berkeley, Hume -- Someone Locke blunders into an atomistic presupposition, without even noticing it -- nor have any subsequent critics as far as I know which ain't far -- and from then on it's downhill all the way on the slippery slope, all the way to radical skepticism, as Hume shows, crying out to Heaven, 'why did you damn me to be a philospher' -- and as I say, that's what Kant says "roused me from my dogmatic slumbers" -- on the way there Bishop Berkeley brings in a Supreme Being as a deus ex machina to fix epistemology, but that's so ad hoc no one takes it seriously in this history of philosophy. The other error was what Ryle would call a 'howler' -- a conflation of methodologies -- here, mistaking physiology for psychology, and then in some sense that I don't yet see clearly taking this muddled psychology for epistemology -- and then being astounded when this so called 'theory of knowlege' -- really just a model, not a theory, since it posits no new facts -- fails to explain the things that we all knew in the first place. Leading to the conclusion, not unreasonable from what I've seen of the world, that everyone is mad but me. Well, if you take that seriously you are insane -- this is where a sense of humour, and more important of irony, becomes a saving grace -- but of course no-one in academic philosophy takes academic philosophy seriously. (And then is why scoundrels flourish and scarf up all the Ph.d's while honest men drop out -- not to mention virtuous women. At Columbia somoen said, they say, when you come to write your Ph.d pick a topic you don't care about, because if you pick a topic you are about, you'll never get finished. They also said, it is not necessarily the best and brightest who get the Ph.d 's ), ------------------------------------------------------------------ RUSSELL Russell was a good and honest man of course, rare enough in academic philosophy. I've barely glanced at his work, and that not since college 40 years ago. I think though that, although within the tradition of 'empiricist epistemology', he added a fair dash of common sense and realism. I do recall his notion that our criterion for taking a statement as true is that it is the consensus of qualified observors. To take his example, in determining what happened at the sit of an auto accident. So it is not the consensus of all observors, but only the consenses of all qualified observors. Now this sets the basis for saying that statements about the mystic realms are true. Although the preponderance of hoi polloi don't know the astral plane from a NASCAR racetrack, we may still consider the statements of mystics, and take some as more reliable than others -- indeed take some for honest men, and others for apparent charlatans. And something similar applies to evaluating claims of efficacy in wholistic healing. Many, and most likely the preponderance, of persons are too corrupted in body if not mind to be receptive to wholistic healing techniques. And so the usual objective scientific method, intentionally indifferent to individuals, will show no efficiacy for any such technique. We then add the notion of 'qualified subjects' to that of 'qualified observers'. --------------------------------------------------------------- WITTGENSTEIN: This is, for me, a huge topic; later Wittgenstein was my main interest from UC Berkeley, where I was influenced by Cavell, thorugh Columbia, and on to U. of New Mexico (Albuquerque) and then UC Santa Barbara. Not that that I studied Wittgenstein from anyone at any of those places, nor even studied Wittgenstein anyhwere after Cavell's class at Berkeley, I just kept rewriting what I had already made up my mind to, while I coasted through classes. So ok: One thing that Wittgenstein teaches, thorugh his method not explicitly, is fallibility -- not fallibilism, fallibility -- that is, that the empiricist epistemology of his predecessors was on the wrong track, and a dead-end one at that, in lookinf for criteria for certainty. Whatever we do, and whatever evidence we may muster, one can imagine situations in which circumstances would prove us wrong. But one must go on anyhow, basing perceptions, decisions, actions, and even commitment to relationships on our best evaluation of the situation, even though we not that it is not inconceiveable that subsequent circumstances and information may disprove, discredit, and even betray us. The only other alternative is a sort of psychotic paralysis, a refusal to do anything for fear of being wrong, exemplified in the catatonia of psychotics (nowadays suppressed by drugs I assume, but about 1960, when I spent a summer with the AFSC as a volunteer at Manhattan State Mental Hospital, one would see catatonics standing about motionaless, like those living statues one sees nowadays busking on streetcorners. The AFSC, for all their good intentions, were wrong to have exposed impressionable young volunteers to psychopathology. One might be suggestible. At the end of each day, after we left the wards, I would briefly cry, that people so like myself were locked up. With one patient I discussed Wittgenstein, she was one of the few persons with whom I have ever had a good discussion about poor old Ludwig. ================================================================= WITTGENSTEIN The Tractatus is a work of genius, crystalline clear, coherent, symmetric, and quite wrong. Inadequate too. The story is that Wittgenstein , who had said that every symbol had a designatum, referencing it in rather an iconic way, was riding on a train with Sraffa, a mathematician at Cambaridge. Sraffa, it is said "made a typical Napolian gesture, and asked, what is the meening of that . Whereupon Wittgenstein abandoned his earlier work and set out to write his later work, which he never succeeded in finishing. He agreed to publication of PI only, or so he said in its preface, because others were misrepresenting his later work. He writes in the Preface that he hoped in would be published in juxtaposition with his earlier work, so that readers can see the contrasts and progress. The Editors assure the reader that this will be done in the German-only edition of the work. But the German_only edition merely puts the the Tratactus back_to_front with PI. Whereas W. clearly wanted passages from the early work to be juxtaposed with passages from his later work. It seems to be that if/when this is done, one will get quite a new perspective on the later work. That relates to another point. W. says in the introduction to PI, that he would hope to not spare his readers the trougle of thinking for themselves, but rather to stimulate them to do so. He also says, in remarks published decades after his death in 'Culture and Value' , that in philosophy the race is sometimes to the slowest. It was once said of a great thinker -- a physicist if I recall, but maybe a mathematician -- that he leaped from peak to peak, leaving his students to trudge slowly after him. That is, that his presented his conclusions but not his way of reaching them. Something similar might be said of Wittgenstein. One gets only a few glimpses of the path he takes to reach his positions. With Wittgenstein's later work, the question is not, what is he saying, but rather, why is he saying it. And so all this fuss of a bilingual edition is unnecessary. He ain't Goethe. I have rarely referred back to the German, and when I do find no particular gain in doing so. Wittgenstein's Literary Executors -- Anscombe, Geach, and von Wright as I recall -- have "measured out" his Nachlass "in coffee spoons" (to borrow a well-turned phrase from T.S. Eliot, the Ali Baba of intellectual property.) Almost a half-century after his death, it has still not all been published. One reads various unconvincing excuses, hints of scandal and what not. Wittgenstein was unmarried, had no children, and is not reported as having had any affairs. A few voices on Internet say he was gay -- one can scarcely imagine a more unfitting term for such a gloomy gus -- and if he was, what of it; so was half of British academia, on the principle that "our servants will do it for us" -- as at the stately mansion of Lord Chatterly, a romantic creation of D.H. Lawrence. Lo the Noble Savage." Reduced to a landscape gardner. Amd yet it some of those peripheral remarks, so long held back by the Executors, that seem to have the most depth. Alice Ambrose took extensive notes of Wittgenstein's lectures, collected them in what was called the Green Book, and seems to have built her career on releasing them bit by bit during the course of it. A new high-water-mark in intellectual blackmail. We can' t fire her, she still has half the Wittgenstein material unpublished. It is said that Geach once introduced himself, "I'm Geach -- Miss Anscomb's husband." Generally speaking, the Nachlass adds little to PI. Then there is the middle period, between Tractatus and PI, but it seems to be mostly false trails. There is a Blue Book, which seems to be regrded as unimpressive and inconclusive. And then there is the Brown Book, which at least is clear. Follwoing the principle of what is called 'logical atomism', W. seems intent to build up, as the periodic table of the elements is built up from the simplest to the most omplex comhginations of electrons, protons, and neutrons, the language that we use from the simplest possible language-games. It was in 1938, if I recall I once read, that W. abandonned that manuscript with a notation, (in German) this all, up to here, is worth NOTHING . (Nothing emphasized). We get a flashback to that in PI, with the "Slab!" language-game, as simple as language-game as one might imagine, but that goes nowhere. The notion of language-games remains, but no attempt is made to show that the complex ones are logical aggregates of the simplest imaginable ones. It is tempting to say that in his Tractatus phase -- one speaks of his 'early work', but there was only one early work, the Tractatus -- the choice of name was Moore's , in allllusion to his own Principia Ethica, that title a play on Russel and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, which WAS a gret work. Moore seems to have been rather a genius at hiding his own medicocrity. Wittgenstein had called the Tractatus merely, Logisch_Philophica Abhandlung -- a handbook of logical philosophy. It was not later than 1963, my first year of grad school, when I surfed off a class on Wittgenstein by Justus Buchler, who had no snese of him, that I constructed a sort of pyramid of topics in W.'s PI (which was what one meant when one spoke of his 'later philosophy', there being little else post-Tractatus in print except for Remarks on the Foundations of Mathetmatics, which I never did get into -- though it seemed to have little enough to do with mathematics. S the topics I set out were Meaning as Use, Family Resemblance, Language-Game, Criteria, Grammar 'Necessary Privacy' (which W. exhibits as a red herring), "An 'inner' object stands in [logical] need of outward criteria. Later I added to that list -- W. touches on e thics, aestehtics, and religion; an also has a response, just as Kant did, to all the Hume-an dead-end dilemmas -- solipsism (that from Descartes, not Hume), epistemologic necessary fallibilm (which is a corallary of the problem of sense-data) , other minds (an instance of the problem of fallibilsm -- if I can't be sure the world is as I suppose, or even that it is, how much more can I not be sure that someone else is as I suppose them to e (and in need, in most cases they are not), or even that they have a mind, or soul (and many horror films are based on that fear, and all wars too). As fo9r et hics and aesthetics -- and less clearly, for religion - - here I think W.'s approaches allows forr an affirmation of values -- one need not quibble over whether thesse are 'absolute' values - - at least not yet. I want to say: Paul Klee was a real artist, and a great one, compaable to Bach but for his snes of humour; Warhol was just a commercial shlock_and_shock__jock. As with most problems, they look big amd insolveable only when you look at them through cartoon pictures, usually in a state of modified hysteria. When you sit down calmoly and look at the paritculars, they tend to resolve themselves, though often not in either of the opposed ways you had imagined. I never did get passed Part I of PI, which I know almost by heart; but my remarks on Wittgenstein are all drawn from Part I, I have barely read Part II, and have no idea of what to make of Part II:xi, wher W. develops at length the notion of 'seeing-as'. I might imagine what he might mean by 'seeing-as', but I cannot imagine what relevance it has to anything else he says. As for Wittgenstein's new 'method', which hs seemed to regard as the most, and maybe only, important part of his later philosophy - - and I am rather inclined to agree -- weell, C.D. Rollins once said, Wittgenstein gives you a new tool -- or maybe he said, some new tools -- but you may want to have others tools as well in your tool-box. This was in the last of the good old days, when men fixed their own automobiles rather than calling a garage. W.'s method takes us directly into applied philosophy, which is a topic I might like to develop, if this infinitely complex body, whihc i used to take for granted, don't let down with a bump too soon. Cavell once remarked that Malcolm had rather built a career on saying 'I knew Wittgenstein'. Aliza Artz at Haverat Shalom once remarked that Elie Wiesel had built a career on being a 'Survivor' (of the Shoah, the 'Holocaust'). Malcolm was maybe one the greatest naifs in intellectual history since Candide. He seems to have been no great shakes as an analytic philosopher, much less a creative one, but to have beena thoroughly good man, and a most loyal friend to Wittgenstein, who could not have been the easiest person to befriend, much less have as a house-guest. So Malcolm says, he once remarked duirng the War that "the British character would not stand for that"+ and Wittgenstin retorted in some heat, Have I not taught you anything. It was that abstractdion of 'British character' that W. apparently found intellectuaslly intolerable, he was always one for particulars rather than abstrations. "A picture held us captive", W. remarks, maybe in referenve to the iconic, or 'picture' theor of meaning -- one would like to say, using the terminology of C.S. Peirce, in his 'Three Kinds of Meaning' if I recall, that Witthenstein goes from ann iconoic thoeryx of meaning in his early work, to a legisign theory of menaing -- meaning references by laws of usage -- in is later work. But that's not doubt too easy. I would say, thus is our comic-book world of CNN -- cartoon battles of good and evil. It surely seems to be wthe world of that aborted adolescnet George E.W. Bush. And from there one goes to the Hindu theory of maya. PVK says, we livei n a world of opinions, tntralpped by our own opinions, unable to see past them. Well, that does sound like a paraphrase, and less apt too, of 'a lpicture helld us calptive.' So too the image of captivity returns in W.'s remark, 'What is your purpose -- to thow the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.' Tho PVK might say -- tho on the ohter hand he makes much of the myth of untying the Gordian knot -- that there is no exit unitl one reises into a higher dimension of perception. Such an image occurs in Bunel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, as I recall -- a pretty young woman is geing dragged away, screaming. Then she just sort of stops, stands kup, shrugs, and walks away from it all. It sseems to me that there is a major role for what I would call 'applied philosophy' -- I barely dare look to see what use charlatans are currently making of that notion and term -- in delfating the hot air balloons that serve as boogeymen to motivate today's pop politics -- I don't think of illustsrations off-hand, but you will find many amongst my Letters_to_the_Editor on my Websites. A letter to the editor is as challenging an art form as poetry. Though what I write is too much better than what they print. Taking time out to file my toenails. Not that I'm a Schwartzarnegger: it's rather a necessity for hiking down mountains. The Talmud says, burn your fingernail cuttings, for fear a pregnant woman step on them and miscarry. But that's fanciful, I think what they really mean is -- for fear an evil spirit find the parings and use your DNA to hex you. The Indians used to be very circumspect in their speech, at least when the visited New Buffalo, which was no doubt unhallowed ground, for fear than an evil spirit would overhear. "There are more things BETWEEN Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, my ephasis). "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- what an incredible title -- the forces of evil defeated by a Valley Girl in her spare time -- the perfect revenge of the Rightous -- you don't get a Knight, you don't get a Superhero, you just get a kid popping bubble gum And Breindel Swirsky said, instead of making movies about Survivors of the Shoah, I could have been sitting in a Sorority House chaning my toenail polish all day long -- And PVK often said, you can spend so much time building your base camp that you never go up the mountain. The Me generation spends so much time "working on myself" that it never goes to work. Ben-Zion Gold, rabbi at Harvard Hillel, once remarked in passing, there is no particualr merit in being a Survivor (of the Shoah). I am one of maybe a minority who came to the SO from an basis in activism -- first the anti-War movement in the USA, then the commune movement. Most at Zenith seem to be coming from the 1970s Me Generation. Self_improvement to the point of narcissism. Taking off from one of Tom Lehar's paroidies ("Be prepared") I used to think to myelf, to the tune of a Crazy Otto rag, "Oh be prepared / to prepare to prepare to be prepared" -- for it seems we never go the marching orders so many of us were waiting for -- except once we were encuraged to support Amnesty International -- no doubt PVK grieved all his life for his sister, Noor Inayat Khan, zl'b. What a comfort she would have been to him in his life. The heart and spirit of a bold knight in the body of a shy young girl. I've often said -- the first time I came to the Abode, they put me in the old barn -- this was before it was made into apartments, it was just an old barn then, and the barn swallows would fly in and out -- so there was a picture of NIK on the wall, she has always reminded me of my closest childhood friend, Gail Meyer Petersen. Well, so anyhow, to some that might have been humble lodging, but I felt very much at home. One of the themes of later Wittgenstein is that philosophy is not a sort of science that for some mysteriosu reason one can do in the overstuffed armchair in the library, but is rather maerely a question of how best to fit eoncepts to experience. That is the meaning of "philsoophy leaves everything as it is". It does not discover anything new, the philospher, like the poet (when he , or me, ain't too busy being cute), merely tries to articulate more preicisely whate we all know and agree that we know -- common sense. So when Hume concludes that the world may not exist, and someone says, he's wrong, all that is at risk are Hume's concepts not the world. It is appropriate that I take a long wide swing away from Kant, and only come back on him after doing Wittgenstein. What Kant says is: We cannot but think thusly, therefore it is meaningless to ask , is thus_and_such really the case. As far as we can ever see, it is, so accept that. This is the verifiability criterion of meaning -- if no conditions can be imagined that would tend to disconfirm a proposition, then it is meaningfless to say that the proposition is untrue. I have tried to use this as sort of transcendental ontologic proof -- if we cannot but believe that the Suprreme principle of Being is Unity, Goodness, and Truth ("Quodlibet est est unum, verum, bonum" then it is meaningless to place in question the existence of such a Being. For we cannot imagine the universe without the Tao. This is a sad victory for common sense -- not that we have proved that it is true, but that we have shown that it makes no sense for us to quesion it. So noumena are not the ultimate reality, but merely that of which it makes no sense to speak. "Says Kant, you may think there's a Ding_an_sich, but it's only an epistemologist's shtick." (sa) And so we are transcendental realists, if I recall Kant's phrase aright. Our world is inescabably "sicklied o'er with the pale caste of thought" (Hamlet). And from there it is very short leap over a very narrow abyss to take one to the position that experience is necessrily perceived in linguistic form. (And I think Aristotle said that first). And that takes us to Wittgenstein. Do not ask, is this my hand, nor how can I know that htis is my hand, ask only, under what donditions would we and would we not say, 'this is my hand'. (And what Wittgenstien does not quite say is, under ordinary circumstance,s it makes no sense within orindary language -- and what might one mean in using extra-ordinary language, or in using oridnary language in an extra-ordinary way -- even to raise the quesion. As I recall, Austin brings that out more clearly. One of Wittgenstein's techniques is a sort of variant on the Marxist_Leninist ploy of 'aggravate the contradictions'. That is, one takes a statement used outside the bounds of ordinary language usage, and adduces a context in which such a statement would be appropriately used. Eg, "the cat is on the mat but I don't believe it" -- a simple paradox, since ordinarily when one says sometghing it is taken for graned that one believes it -- presidental candidates aside of course. But then too we have terms for that -- lies, white lies, campaign promises, etc. etc. So then the contradiction with ordianry usage becomes aggravated into an incongruity of the siuation in which such a statement would fit -- eg, that the cat weighs 45 pounds and the mat is a little lace doily. Well, I'm not making much of this as clear as one might, but I've been away from it for a while. ---------------------------------------------------------------- #P ---------------------------------------------------------------- JOHN AUSTIN (J.L. AUSTIN) One would say that John Austin died young, at the outset of his career as an ordinary language philosopher. One would not say that of Wittgenstein, who seems to have a reached a dead end and to have , in his Nachlass, mostly been just repeating himself. (Malcolm recalls that when they told Wittgenstein he was dying, he replied "Good!".) In temperament and style they are opposite -- Austin the detatched urane college don, with wartime service in Intelligence; Wittgenstein the epitome of Sturm und Drang, evading intellectural but not emotional responsibility during the war by serving as a nurse. But their work so interweaves that I can barely tell their techniques apart, although those techniques lead away into differnet directions. I once tried to follow up all the techniques suggested by Austin in 'A Plea for Excuses'. I rather doubt I can recover that paper, but anyone with patience could re-create it. The least interesting thing about Austin, except of course for academic philosophers looking to gain brownie points by finding some published something with which they can find a few faults, is his thoery of 'Performatives'. That is merely theory, a propadeutic, and Austin's real contribution is not theory but method. One of Austin's touchstone lines is (I don't have the quote at hand) that we should turn out attention from 'the Good and the Beautiful' toward "the dainty and the dumpy". --------------------------------------------------------------- WHITEHEAD'S PROCESS AND REALITY As I say, it seems that Whitehead, who was already one of the leading intellectuals of his era, with Principia Mathetmatica which he wrote with Russell, had an insight and dashed off Process and Reality in a single go, and then never turned back even to re- read it. Well, it is a fine piece of phiosophical synthesis. He seems to touch all the bases. Perception is there, as prehension. (Whitehead makes much of Locke, though I never did see just why.) Plato's Forms (Arche , archetypes) are therer as 'eternal objects'. Aristotle's teleology, 'final cause', is there somehwee, though I forget just where. ----------------------------------------------------------------- HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN The collected works of Hazrat Inayat Khan have been published by the Sufi Order, New Lebanon, NY , and that publication has been input on CD by the Sufi Order (by the Seattle staff). What we have as the works of HIK are almost entirely transcriptions made at his lectures. I gather that these were essentially verbatim. It is my impression that a bit of editting went into some of them, and that Sharif Graham, who retired as professor of comparative religion at the University of Arizona I think, restored the original texts. I do not know when HIK learned English. He writes in a cleer style, with no apparent discomfort. In an introduction to one of his works he asks that his wording be retained, even though, he says, it may strike some as old-fashioned. Unlike PVK, he does not branch off into related fields. It is generally assumed that HIK had achieved Enlightenment, that is, that he had gone up and seen whatever there is to see. It is also generally assumed that he was an honest reporter of what he saw. I have read almost nothing of what he wrote, and studied none of it, though, being fond of aphorisms and with a very limited attention span -- which must be why I flunked my Ph.d comprehensives the first time, and never tried again -- for one thing, I could not get past about page 90 of Kant's first Critique, by then I figured I kneww it all and could say it a lot clearer than Kant did. My mother said that one day I came back from school -- nursurey school I assume, though maybe kindergarten -- and told her, "I'm not going back to school again." She replied, "Why not, Stephen" -- and notice in that reply that she was addressing me with respect, as a mature intellectual. I replied, "Because I know it all." Well, Plato would surely have approved that answer- Much of PVKs lectures may soon seem dated, as science overtakes his scientific speculations. HIK's work, to the extent that it correponds to my impression of it, will not age, as it is largely independent of contemporary events. The language is not hard to read. PVK seems to have considered himself to have not reached the stature of HIK. ----------------------------------------------------------------- PIR VILAYAT INAYAT KHAN I rather doubt that I will see a complete collection of PVK's work in my lifetime, unless of course I buy a farm in the Bible Belt and get put on life support. Hitherto it seems in general to have been poorly and hap-hazardly preserved. Fortunately PVK saw himself as primarily a pedagogue, not a philosopher, and so there is much redundancy in his Nachlass. On the other hand, with most tapes I listen to, I hear some things I had not heard before. I mean , he says things that I do not recall his having said nor written in work I had hitherto encountered. It is quite an uneven Nachlass. As far as I know, almost all PVK's lectures were taped. However, these Master tapes were then used to make copies sold to the customers -- the persons who attended his seminars. That is, they were replayed many times before being put away. At Zenith, most customer copies were made on El Cheapo tapes. That has two disadvantages. First of all, an El Cheapo tape gives you as little as possible. That means that a 90-minute tape is no more than 45 minutes on a side (and sometimes, if I recall, a bit less). Whereas the namebrand tapes used as Master tapes are about 47 minutes on a side. And often were recorded on until they stopped. Which means that up to 2 minutes may be lost on each Side of a customer copy, especially on Side A. (As the lectures were scheduled for no longer than 1.5 hours, and as PVK was usually very responsible to scheduled time and did not often run over it, one would expect the lectures to finish before the end of Side B, in general.) Also -- Ben-Zion Solomon at Moshav Mevo Modi'in pointed this out to me -- an El Cheapo tape is made with less Chromium Oxide, and so tends to wear out sooner. Most of the Master tapes were Type II, almost all the Customer Copies were type I. In general, at least when I was doing it, VIPs got Type I tapes for their copies. I don't know how well Zenith Master tapes were presered and archived. I am apprehensive. One can reasonably say that the Walia Collection was not well-preseved, at least after she left it in her house in Ligonretto, having moved to a smaller place. Most of the Walia Collection was taken by ZR to Suresnes. I hope the USA tapes, held at the Abode and in the varous SO offices -- Lebaanon Springs, Santa Fe, Seattle -- were better cared-for. Much work by PVK was published in his lifetime, but it is not clear how closely he checked the edits. I recall his remarking at one Zenith week, which I think I transcribed, 1998 I think: "'That which transpires behind that whch appears' -- someone wrote a book by that title -- I haven't read it" -- which seems to imply that he did not check the edit of the book published under that title. On the other hand, in his introduction to 'The Way of the Dervishes' he makes a point of thanking the editor, Alison Binder. He did write 'The Message in Our Time', but remarks, in his introducdtion, with his typical tact, that he thanks the commerical editors, Harper and Row, for cutting the manuscript down to a third of its original size. At one Zenith camp someone asked him about possibly republishing that book, and he said no, it had too many errors . I think the person who heard that reply said that PVK expressed the hope that he might have time to corrct those errors. What he meant by 'errors' I do not know and can barely guess. Many short excerpts from his lectures appeared in the monthly magazine called 'The Message', produced by persons close to him. Almost all those excerpts are editted, and the editor usually noted, although the date and place of the lecture from which it was editted is usually not noted. My transscriptions are verbatim, and the verbatim is correlated with the tape. I also juxtapose 'Flying Edits' with the verbatim. Those 'Flying Edits' are quite conservative. I also juxtapose my own notes, which are very free-wheeling. PVK also wrote Keepting in Touch's -- monthly newsletters intended only for mureeds. Those KIT's are very dense, and I would say the English original could use much editting, although that edit would have to be juxtaposed with the original. PVK's mother was American, and he grew up in France, so once can assume that he was fluent in both English and French. He referred to his German as 'Pir Vilayat Deutsch', apparently without excessive modesty. Although Rinataya Nachman has suggested that it was rather an improvement on the original , as was the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible. Vayu Doeberecke remarked to me that the transcriptions he presents of PVK's 1993 and 1994 Zenith German lectures, which I include on my DVDs, are edits. He did not present the verbatim. I have retyped one Emergence article, which seems to have beena sort of precursor KIT, written by PVK for that magazine, not taken from transcriptions of lectures. I think that PVK will eventually be recognized as one of the leading -- philosophers I would say, though he did not think of himself as a philosopher, as far as I know -- of his era, and maybe of at least western civilization. Until the last decade or so of his teaching he would often draw analogies between his thinking and that of contemporary science, especially physics. A great deal of his work he deemed esoteric and/or confidential -- I recall that at one Zenith Camp he left behind some notes which he asked to be burned by one of those who attended him, in this case Lisa Malin: and that was done. I know nothing of the nature of such materials. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ================================================================= At this point I'll break and write about cultural matters. I've done this before, and maybe posted it to my Website - I can't quite keep track of all I've put there, especially moving about -- This is what they used to call a living will -- not in the sense of intructions not to rack one to life support -- which I would not wish done to me of course -- but in the sense of bequeathing to any who care recommendations of great things to see and hear -- Well, Bach of course, and Paul Klee. Bach knew the natural harmony of tones; Klee knew the natural harmony of colours. In Klee we have both colour and line; I don't understand nor particularly like the latter. Strange effigies. With Henry Moore we have a natural harmony of shapes and spaces. As for musicians -- Landowska, of course, and Svatislav Richter. Both bring out the universality in whatever they touch. Within folk music I very much liked Joan Baez. My mother once remarked that she had an incredibly pure voice. Lately I have listened to a tape of Jacqueline du Pres -- it happened to be a performance of the Elgar -- eminently forgettable except for her 'cello playing -- and of a Haydyn concerto, bakced up by Barrenboim. Well, she is lake a jazz musician in her freedom and versatility. Barrenboim remarks in a video about her that she takes liberties which "we lesser mortals" do not dare. Technical mastery, of course. I rather liked the paintings of Franz Klein, harmonies in 2 dimensions, but I'm not sure if that was not somewhat an adolescnet infaturation. And Cezanne too, something of that harmony of form speaks to one. As Mozart sometimes does. As if one's real name had been called. Of writers I rather liked Ray Bradbury, and Truman Capote's "Other Voices Other Rooms" , for all that Capote later turned into rather a "sacred monstoer". There is a poignancy in both, a nostalgia for something lost in childhood that cannot now be recovered, but can be recalled. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I guess that's all I can make of this essay for now; cut and print. --------------------------------------------------------------- sa, Campra, 10 May '05 -- 1 AIYaR -- Rosh Hodesh -- gvurah sh'b' TIFERET -- -- a misty, quiet rainy day, just a lightt drizzle at times, the trees just coming into leaf -- ================================================================ ================================================================ TIMOTHY LEARY Leary merits study as a serious philospher, though one will have to shovel out truckloads of garbage to collect and bring back his insights. He was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard when he starting taking LSD, with Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, aka Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzger. Then it bacame a bit of a media sensation, and Harvard threw him out -- threw out the three of them as I recall. Some time later Leary was returning to the USA from Mexico with his daughter. She was found to have marijuana in her privates. Leary claimed it was his, that claim was accepted, and he was sent to jail for it. Apparently he went crazy there. He was apparently sent first to a minimum security prison, from which he made the mistake of accepting an offer to escape, and then to San Quentin. where he went crazy. I do not know if he ever recovered. He said many insightful things, usually in aphorism. He first spoke of LSD in an introduction to a book by Alan Watts - - it was a beautiful coffee-table book, II forget the title -- I want to say, 'The Way Things Are' but that was the title of Percy Bridgeman's book on operational philosophy. One of the first, well-known, was : Turn on, tune in, drop out. Later he would add " -- gracefully, gracefully." That is: Turn on, tune in, drop out -- gracefully, gracefully. Of marijuana he said: Not one person in a hundred knows the poper use of this delicate, exquisite drug. Recounting one time when he was confronting the authorities, he remarked, "I said nothing that would not have made sense to an amoeba." He also said -- this was a lecture at Columbia, in MacMillan Hall if I recall, 1963 I assume -- "My selves hate metal -- don't yours." He wrote Psychedelic Prayers, which is adaptations from the Tao Te Ching. He used to say: Freedom consists in playing games of one's own choosing. As I've said, I was sitting at New Buffalo one evening when he walked in with a group of his friends. They sat by our fire, but talked mostly amongst themselves. Someone said to him about somone, 'He's keeping his wife happy.' Leary said, 'That's a good yoga.' He used to say, 'The LSD yoga is the longest hardest yoga there is.' That would be his way of referring to what PVK would call, 'Awakening in Life'. 'Karma yoga' is a good term for it. Ram Dass was a homo, and then I think went to celibacy. Leary used to say, one must actualize the particularities of one's karma (that was not at all his phrasing) -- he meant -- if you have an ethnic heritage, you must actualize that, not deny it -- that would especially apply to being Jewish -- and you must actualize your sexual identity -- on that I assume he meant, your heterosexual identity. The notion that one could be ESSENTIALLY a homosexual became fashionable only a decade later. I once walked up to him at the opening of Andy Warhol's Plastic Inevitable, on the upper lower East side, 3rd St. if I recall. That would be 1963. I asked him, do you know of anyone who is trying to combine philosophy with psychology -- for I had thought that would be my field, and had even devised a symbol for it, perhaps to make into a lapel pin -- superimposed Phi over a Psi.He replied, I don't know anyone who isn't. Well, so much for that career. A bit deflated, I asked him, do you have any advice for me. He said, There is nothing to be afraid of. He wrote another book, prior to Psychedelic Prayers, but I can't now recall what it was. I may have tried to take it with me on one or two acid trips, but one can't read much under those circumstances. It was very nicely illustrated, as I recall, though glossy. I think it was after he had walked out of that minimum security prison that he ended up in Algeria or Tangiers, with Eldridge Cleaver, who had sponsored his breakout -- not the best of company. Cleaver had been busted for being a militant black activist, and re-emerged lending his name to a designer blue-jeans called 'Cleavers'. That was before sexism became unfashionable. At one point, shortly after he was kicked out of Harvard, he was doing a sort of LSD training in Guadalajara, Mexico. I had wanted to go down there and do it, but I didn't. "And that has made all the difference" (Robert Frost, Two Raods Diverged... ) That's about all I think of for now. --------------------------------------------------------------- LITTLE JOE GOMEZ It was Little Joe who created the Peyote Church Ritual, which is very brilliant. They used to say, 'Don't talk about it, bring them in.' That may still apply, so I'll not say much more about it here. He could not read the Bible, but said he read it all in nature. He used to say, "Put it." His English was quite limited, which accounts for the very terese form of the sayings that I can recall. He said of himself, 'Always happy.' And indeed, he seemed to find the harmony -- one would almost say, the Divine Harmony -- in whatever situation he happened to be in. George Robinson, who worked for a while as a sort of lieutenant to the millionaire philanthropist Harvey Mudd, who had build a home in Arroyo Seco, would tell at New Buffalo some of the things he heard Little Joe say. He once asked him, Joe , are you a witch, and Little Joe said, I can do all the things they can do. He said that Little Joe said of the first trip to the Moon -- Know what they'll find when they get there -- dead Indians. I sent him up at Lama a book depicting Zen Masters -- I'm sure it was the Boston Museum of Fine Arts catalogue of their Zen in Chinese and Japanese painting exhibition, ca. 1965 or so -- they said Joe said of it, 'Lots of Indians.' I was breaking up with Susie Harrison, and went to see him. He said, 'Lots of women.' He later married Adrian Gomez. She would have a wealth of things to say about him, but maybe she is not still alive. John Kimmey, who was or maybe still is a director of Lama Foundation, would know. And would also recall many things Little Joe said. George told this story: Little Joe was in Hollywood with his brother John, I guess to be extras in a movie. Little Joe had long braids when I knew him. Some white man said to John, I want to f__k your squaw. So I guess they asked the guy for some money, and he gave it to them, and then , as George retold the story, Little Joe pulled down his pants and when the guy saw he was male he walked away. George said Little Joe said, Easiest money he ever made. When we were building the house for Little Joe, it was Dave Pratt, Larry McIntire, me, and a homosexual couple from Lama, former dancers with the Joffrey Ballet, named Tony and Rex. So one can see, Joe was indifferent to male homosexuality. His daughter lived at Santa Domingo pueblo. I had driven up to see him at Taos Pueblo when he was dying. It was in the car of Mary Powers, with whom I never quite had an affair though I should have, she was teaching Psychology at UNM when I was a grad assistant there. Little Joe said something to Adrian -- 'My daughter'. Adrian, who could be pretty frum even as an Indian, said to Joe, but it's Quiet Time -- as it was, a time when the Indians of Taos pueblo do not go out. Driving back to Albuquerque, I stopped to wash the mud off Mary's car at a roadside carwash, which happened to be in front of Santa Domingo pueblo. I realized only later that I should have gone into the pueblo and asked for her to tell her her father was asking for her. Once I worked for a day for Little Joe for money. When I did he was very different -- really playing the part of a boss. The rst of the time I worked for him for no money, and he was just like a friend. I do not know if I recall much more about him. About things he said, that is. I long thought he was the wisest man I had ever met. Though later I sometimes wondered if PVK was wiser. ----------------------------------------------------------------- sa, Campra, 10 May '05, tiferet sh'b' TIFERET The stars nice in the sky. How do people live in places where they cannot see the stars. =============================================================== ==============================================================