Month: November 2010

A Couple of Venice Characters Met Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my recent Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify.  It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool.  But working Manpower grunt jobs  was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

One cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.'  A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D.  Lived in Venice, California, with a couple other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath.  He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree.  Booze and dope didn't help either.  I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates.  A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel."  When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety.  He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating.  In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there.  Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it.  So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs.  And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible.  Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me.  We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon.  On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie.  John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels.  (For more on Montgomery see here.)  Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home.  I've regretted that non-meeting ever since.  Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Last Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM.  Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse.  While passing Saratoga, CA  decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats.  We couldn't get in touch with him.  So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso.  By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse.  The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.] 

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA.  [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971]  Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case.  Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before.  Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared.  Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon.  Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's.  Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM.  Thursday spent in Eugene.  I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests.  Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM.  Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel.  Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger,  Jim Huntsman.  Arranged to start working Monday morning.  So far, so good.

Is It Rational to Fear Death?

Death Dying is not the same as being dead.  'Death' is ambiguous as between 'dying' and 'being dead.'  But I will use 'death' to mean 'being dead.'  So the title question comes to this:  Is it rational to fear the 'state' of being dead?  There are ways of dying such that it is rational to fear them.  But that is not my question.

The fear of death torments some.  It appears to have tormented Philip Larkin as witness his poem "Aubade" reproduced here.  The fear of death gets a grip on me sometimes, but then it dissipates in the light of clear analysis.

When I fear death, what am I fearing?  Presumably what I am fearing is self-loss, my losing of my very self and the state of being lost to myself.  My losing, not anyone else's. The loss of my self to me is what I fear, not the loss of my self to others.

But this raises the question whether it is possible that I suffer the loss of myself.  If not, then the fear of death is groundless.

Either death is the annihilation of the self or it isn't.  Either way, the self cannot be lost to itself.

If physical death is the annihilation of the self, then the moment of death is the moment of my utter cessation.  After that moment I cannot lack anything either consciously or unconsciously.  That which does not exist can neither possess anything nor lack anything nor be threatened with dispossession.  The point is quite general: both having and lacking presuppose the existence of a subject of possession/nonpossession.  That which does not exist, therefore, cannot gain or lose anything, have or lack anything.

It follows that if physical death is the annihilation of the self, then after death I cannot be in a state in which I experience the loss or lack of my self — or the loss or lack of anything.

If, on the other hand, physical death is not the annihilation of the self, and one survives bodily death, then too there can be no experience of self-loss for the self is not lost — precisely because it survives.

I conclude that the fear of death, the fear of being dead, is irrational.  I can reasonably fear being bereft of house and home, wife and friend, but not of being nothing.  The very phrase 'being nothing' signals the irrationality.  Perhaps I can fear the process of becoming nothing — if nothing is what I become — but not of being nothing.  For as long as I am merely becoming nothing, then I am something.

If, on the other hand,  I survive my bodily death, then I can fear the state I will find myself in post mortem.  I like to think that we are now in the shadowlands, and that yonder, on the other side, will be clarity and light. We will learn there what we cannot learn here.   But what if the post mortem state is one even more confused and indeterminate and shadowy?  That's an awful thought, and one that makes materialism attractive:  if I can be certain that I won't survive, then I can be sure that there is an ultimate escape from the horror of existence and that I need fear no surprises. (But you are a fool if you think you can be certain of any such thing.)

But although I can reasonably worry about the state I will find myself in post mortem, what I cannot reasonably worry about it is being nothing.  For if I survive then I am not nothing, and if I do not then I lack the primary requisite for experiencing anything, namely, existence.

Epicurus vindicatus est.

Looks like old Larkin was in dire need of some of my logotherapy (to hijack Viktor Frankl's term).  But he's dead and so beyond the reach of my cognitive therapy.  Not to mention that trying to reason with a poet or any literary type is a fool's errand.  They are not equipped for that sort of thing — which is why they are poets and literary types in the first place. 

Yes, there are exceptions.

Remembering an Old Man on the Skids

Brew-102-1-B-L I once worked odd jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Culver City, California. One day on the job old broken-down Carl Murray delivered himself of a memorable line.

"Bill, there was a time I was limber all over and stiff in one place. But now it's the other around."

Old Carl didn't like Levi jeans. "They ain't got no ball room." Those were the days before the 'Gentlemen's Cut.'

Motorcycles he always referred to as "murdercycles." One day we were digging up sunken tombstones in a local cemetery, a fit job for a  philosopher with his meditatio mori. Carl complained of the others that day who got the "gravy" jobs. But I found that breaking up concrete with a jackhammer was far worse than working with pick and shovel in a graveyard.  And decidedly less meditative.

After work we would knock back a few cans of Brew 102 in his Culver City flophouse room and I would listen to his stories.

"Bill, there are just three things in this life I crave: women,  cigarettes, and beer. In that order."

Why Philosophy Matters

Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 229:

The life of the mind, of which rational inquiry is an integral component, is an essential constituent of our conception of the human good.  And rational inquiry leads inexorably to philosophizing.  For we engage in philosophy not (merely) because it is intellectually diverting — a game one can play for its own sake.  It orients our thought, clarifies our values, guides our actions.  Philosophy matters because it clarifies and systematizes our thought about issues that matter.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

Here again my annual Thanksgiving homily:

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of. Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings.

Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.

Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.  Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon?  Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness.  However you say it, it is true.  The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene. 

Broad generalizations, these.  They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying.  He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur cannot think his way out of his misery.  Don't get hung up on the exceptions.  Meditate on the broad practical truth.  On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.'  But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical.   Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative.  Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist,  a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

 

John Deck’s Contrast Argument Against the Philosophy of Being

John N. Deck is a highly interesting, if obscure, figure in the neo-Scholasticism of the 20th century. I first took note of him in 1989, ten years after his death, when his article "Metaphysics or Logic?" appeared in New Scholasticism (vol. LXIII, no. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 229-240.) Thanks to the labors of Tony Flood we now have a better picture of the man and his work. The case of Deck may well prove to be a partial confirmation of Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."