Category: Autobiographical

Pray for Light or Pray for Faith?

I

One day in the ’90s, standing in my kitchen, I suddenly prayed, “Lord, give me light!” The ‘reply’ came just as suddenly, “The light comes later.” This is an example of an inner or interior locution. Grokipedia:

Interior locution is a concept in Christian mysticism, particularly within Catholic theology, referring to a supernatural form of private revelation in which a divine message or communication is received directly in the intellect or soul, without audible words, external sounds, or sensory involvement. This inner “voice” or infusion of knowledge is distinct from exterior locutions, which may be heard aloud by others, and from visions, which involve imaginative or corporeal imagery; instead, it operates purely on a spiritual level, often providing guidance, reassurance, or enlightenment during prayer or spiritual trials.

The above definition is accurate. How do I know? I have read the great mystics (Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Avila et al., and the best of the commentators Augustin Poulain and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, to mention just two. An article of mine on Poulain here.)

I hasten to point out that while the experiencing of an inner locution cannot be doubted, at least while it is occurring, one reasonably can and perhaps ought to doubt the source of the experience. I petitioned the Lord for light (knowledge, enlightenment, understanding),  and I ‘received’ an ‘answer.’ But from whom? From the Lord?  Which lord? Lord Krishna? Lord Jesus Christ? That it was Jesus  cannot be read off from the experience itself.  Such a reading goes beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  On another occasion, while in deep meditation, I ‘heard’ the locution, “I want to tear you apart.” Presumably that was not from Jesus Christ or any good denizen of the Unseen Order.  But neither does it follow that it was from a demonic agent. The experience qua experience is neutral on the question whether there are any demonic agents.  On a third occasion, during a solitary desert hike, pondering a certain course of action, the ‘message’ was: I am with you. As far as the phenomenology shows, that ‘message’ could have been from Christ or it could have been from a demon impersonating Christ or from the depths of my own psyche.

II

The above is preliminary to my title question. Spelled out, what I am asking myself is whether I should be praying for light (infused contemplation, verification of faith contents, objective certainty) or praying instead for a deepening of faith, and a strengthening of the will to go forward by faith,  That I pray at all shows that I have some faith. (Can you imagine Richard Dawkins or Galen Strawson or Daniel Dennett or David Stove  praying while they are or were healthy?  When Stove got sick and near death, his stridently cocksure atheistic convictions began to totter.)  Pondering the question of whether I should be praying for infused contemplation or for a deepening of faith while remaining (relatively speaking) ‘in the dark,’ I imagined a conversation between me and God.  What follows is of course not a report of an inner locution, but a made-up story.

I pray, “Give me light, Lord!” The Lord replies:

Look man, I’ve given you enough light in the form of what you call glimpses, vouchsafings, peeks behind the veil, intimations of Elsewhere. I’ve given you enough light on which to go forward.  The human predicament is probationary and penal.  You want it to be full of light. But part of your probation is to see if you can hold out in the dark. The light comes later!

Plato saw the world  for what it is: a speluncular chiaroscuro of light and dark, a shadowland in which substance is rarely descried but easily denied.  So now your test is to live by faith. To quote one of your favorite philosophers, “There is light enough for those who wish to see and darkness enough for the contrary-minded.” (Pascal)  Even men of far higher spiritual rank than you such as Augustine and Aquinas were permitted the visio mystica on rare occasions only. You yourself have written about the mysticism à deux of Augustine and his mother Monica when they shared the vision at Ostia.

And you know that monks in monasteries have spent long lives without experiencing infused contemplation. So settle down in the dark, listen, wait, and stop asking me for light. 

 

 

Kerouac Alley

This just in from Thomas Carroll:

I saw the note on your blog about losing all those photos. Wanted to make sure this one made it over to the new platform — see below. Take care and merry October.

Thanks, Tom. Talk about synchronicity! I thought about that photo of yours just a minute before finding your e-mail message.  Here is what I posted on 8 October 2018:

……………………..

A Northern California reader sends this photo of a street scene in the vicinity of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. I made a ‘pilgrimage’ to Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s famous bookstore in the early ’70s. That was before the Kerouac street sign was up.

Some of Ferlinghetti’s poetry can be read here.  To my surprise, Ferlinghetti is still alive at 99. By contrast, old Kerouac quit the mortal coil and “the slaving meat wheel” at age 47.  He is, we hope, “safe in heaven, dead.”

Julien Green’s Diary, 1928-1957

It arrived yesterday evening, and I am already 32 pages into it.  Why keep a journal? Green gives an answer on page one in the entry from 4 December 1928.  He tells of "the incomprehensible desire to bring the past to a standstill that makes one keep a diary." Reading that, I knew I would read the whole 306 page translation of selections from this author's  sprawling diary.  He nailed it.

In '66 I started my journal scribbling. I didn't want that summer to pass away unrecorded. A life unrecorded, like a life unexamined, is not worth living. So I felt then, so I feel now.  Such a life lacks diachronic unity and internal cohesion.  I love cats, but a man is not cat, nor should he live like one.

I'll pull some quotations from Green's diary as the spirit moves me.

This First Things article will provide some background on Green and includes translations of some journal entries written around the time of, and about, the 'reforms' of  Vatican II.

AI, Intellectual Theft, and Lawsuits

A year or two ago I was bumping along at about one thousand page views per diem when I experienced an unusual uptick in traffic. Inspection of the MavPhil traffic log suggested that my content was being stolen. But I didn't much care, and I still don't much care inasmuch as my content has very little commercial value, and in any case, I'm a "made man" with more than enough loot to see me through my remaining sublunary travels and travails. My thinking and writing is a labor love and not a money-making enterprise. Add to that the fact that I'm an Enough is Enough kind of guy who has no interest in piling up the lean green far in excess of what is needed.  And maybe I'm steering Group Mind or Objektiver Geist in a wholesome direction. I'm doing my bit, like a good Boomer, to make this world a better place. 

But what if you make your living by scribbling? What if you have a 'high maintenance' wife, children, a hefty mortgage and you live in a high-tax lefty locale? Interesting questions here.  More grist for the mill.

And so I tip my  hat to Ingvarius Maximus the Alhambran for sending us to  this Washington (Com)Post article actually worth reading. Access is free. (What fool pays for access to such a crappy publication?)

One more thing. When lawyers are replaced by AI systems will AI systems be suing AI systems over intellectual property theft? 

Alligator Alcatraz

Leftist environmentalists are bringing suit to block the construction of a detention center for illegal aliens in the heart of the Everglades. This should interest Sarasota resident and fellow philosopher Elliott Ruffin Crozat who paid me a visit over the last three days. You can imagine the 'orgy' of philosophizing that took place, both peripatetically (hiking in the Superstitions), aquatically (in the pool and hot tub) and automotively (as we meandered down to see Brian Bosse in Green Valley south of Tucson via the scenic route with a stop at the Tom Mix Monument on SR 79 south of Florence and before Oracle Junction.)
 
We thereby honored Aristotle, Thales, Mix, and Kerouac. Here is Crozat looking cool as a cucumber after a five hour ankle-busting hike in 100 degree Fahrenheit weather. Hot, sunny, dry.  Just the way we like it in these parts.
 
May be an image of 1 person and jeep
 
And here is your humble correspondent:
 
May be an image of 1 person and jeep
 
What hypocrites these hate-America leftist scumbags are! Not a peep out of them re: the environmental damage to our beautiful deserts caused by their support of wide-open illegal immigration. The environmental impact on the Everglades will be minimal. The 'gators will see to that!
 
Here, along with many other arguments,  is my Environmental Argument against illegal immigration:
 
The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.
And you are still a Democrat? WTF are you thinking? ARE you thinking?

A Marital Memory from the ‘Nineties

I had dropped her off at Sky Harbor on a Thursday.  She was headed to a conference. I said, "You'll miss Seinfeld." She said, "I'll miss you!" (Seinfeld episodes, the original series, were aired on Thursday nights.) As our 42nd anniversary approaches, I recall the incident with deep love and gratitude.  She has probably forgotten it.

This miner for a heart of gold struck paydirt. The strike was lucky, the pursuit wise. In this life, there's no discounting luck.  For the unlucky.

The Fall of Saigon

Fifty years ago today. I wrote in my journal (30 April 1975):

Saigon was overrun by the communists today. 150 billion dollars and 50,000 American lives wasted during the war.

58,00 is now the standardly cited figure. Goeffrey Wawro, The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024, 652 pp.):

The war had killed 58,000 Americans, 250,000 ARVNs, [South Vietnamese army] half a million South Vietnamese civilians, and 1.4 million NVA [North Vietnamese army] and Viet Cong. Four million Vietnamese . . . had been killed or wounded. [. . .] In their rushed evacuation, the Americans left behind important files, including the names of 30,000 Vietnamese who had worked in the Phoenix Program. These people were the first to be rounded up, tortured, and killed by their "liberators." Two and a half million South Vietnamese were placed under arrest as nguy — "puppets." Anyone affiliated with the old regime was sent without trial to one of the 300 "thought-reforms" camps in rural areas. (529)

Wawro goes on to describe the brutality of the labor camps and the 165,000 political prisoners who died in them. Like the Khmer Rouge, the NV commies lied to their victims, promising them a detention period of only ten days for "re-education." The vast majority of them fell for the lies and ended up detained for up to fifteen years in starvation conditions.

The great David Horowitz died yesterday.  Here is a worthwhile article about the former red-diaper commie who came to his senses. Charlie Kirk pays his respects on X. Now I know how Stephen Miller came to be so astute:

Twenty-five years ago, David mentored a high school student named Stephen Miller. He supported him through Duke, through the Senate, and into the Trump White House. Today, Stephen is one of the most impactful architects of America First immigration policy. A legend thanks to David's mentorship. As Politico wrote, “If you want to understand the immigration policies [Trump] has put into place, you have to also understand Horowitz.” David's fingerprints are all over the populist revival of the last decade.

What did I do during the war?

Around  the time of the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, I was ordered  to downtown Los Angeles for my "pre-induction physical." Due to a birth defect I have hearing in one ear only, and so I failed the physical. I was  classified 1-Y, which was later changed to 4-F.  In any case I had won a California State Scholarship to attend college, and that would have kept me from harm's way for four years, after which the lottery kicked in.

That's my story in a few words. What's yours?

The Calvin Blocker Story

Calvin BlockerMy wife and I owned a house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Euclid Heights Boulevard, from 1986-1991. That location put me within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a Bohemian scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one expects to find in coffee houses: the  flâneur and flâneuse, wannabe poets and novelists, pseudo-intellectual bullshitters of every stripe, and a wide range of chess players from patzers to masters.

It was there that I became acquainted with International Master Calvin Blocker. Observing a game of mine one day, he kibitzed, "You'd be lucky to be mated."

One day he came to my house to give me a lesson. He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down from memory the famous game in which the great Paul Morphy crushed Count Isouard and the Duke of Braunschweig in 17 moves. "Study this," Calvin said.

Here is his story.

Harvey Pekar talks about Coventry.

For the true chess aficionado, here is 45 minutes of Grandmaster Ben Finegold on Calvin Blocker.

How Much Bad Behavior Ought We Tolerate from Our ‘Friends’?

The following arrived on Christmas Eve:

Apatheia, Ataraxia, and Holiday Spirit

I was wondering if you had any advice for those struggling to maintain their Stoic calm as Christmas approaches. Alas, I am one of those souls this year. I will not burden you with the details, but it seems the holidays also bring out many of our dear friends’ struggles with booze. To wit, a friend of nearly 20 years began a bender about a week ago that culminated this morning with his saying to me, this morning, some things that no self-respecting man could forgive in one to be labeled a friend, especially when one has had to forgive booze related outbursts several times before.

So, it seems the modifiers, not the nouns, are the functional words in phrases like “old friends” and this friendship will now be over. I have consulted Seneca on friendship and anger, and I recall Cicero’s advice, but I fear the philosophers offer little in the way of immediate comfort as I accept this loss (and also reflect on what the whiskey demons bring out in myself). I expect you must be inundated with mail this time of year, so know that I appreciate your reading this message. If you have any advice, or perhaps a reading suggestion, I’d appreciate the time you took to do so very much. Merry Christmas!

There are two main topics here, interpersonal relationships and the role of alcohol.

How you negotiate interpersonal relations depends on your psychological type.  I'm an inner-directed man in roughly David Riesman's sense, who knows what he is about and what he wants to achieve. So for me, cost-benefit analysis comes into play when I choose whom to associate with and whom to avoid.  Will contact with this person help me achieve my goals or will it hinder me? Any relationship with anyone incurs costs and provides benefits. So I calculate whether the benefits will outweigh the costs,  given my goals. To do this requires self-knowledge. So that is where you must start. Know thyself! But it also requires knowledge of the people you will be associating with.   Some people are trouble. You can't help them, but they can harm you. Why are you associating with them? For literary purposes? Because you foolishly overestimate your healing powers?  Christ hung out with sinners. But he had special powers, to put it mildly.

On the basis of the slim facts presented, I say that my reader ought to break off contact with his drunkard 'friend.' Break off a 20-year friendship? Well, was it a friendship of affinity or a friendship of propinquity?  I won't pause to explain what I mean; you should be able to catch my meaning.  If there was a deep bond, and the guy hit hard times and sought solace in the bottle, then that puts a different complexion on things. Maybe my reader should try to help his friend.  There is a difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic: every (unreformed) alky is a heavy drinker but not conversely.  If the friend is an alky, it would probably be best to deep-six him, even if he is 'on the wagon.' It's a good bet he will fall off.  As a general rule, people do not change. WYSIWYG! And will continue to get.  Schopenhauer spoke of the immutability of character, with only slight exaggeration. The italicized rule is a very important bit of life wisdom. For example, don't marry someone with the thought that you will change him or her. That way lies misery. To my reader, I say: There is no point in wasting time with some guy whose whole life is dominated by the project of climbing out of a hole he  himself freely dug with a cocktail glass. The same goes for those who dig their holes and graves with fork and spoon or syringe.

But again, it all depends.  Suppose the guy is not an alky. Is my reader single or married? If married, does he have children? Would you want your wife and children to come into contact with a drunkard? Presumably not.

And if you associate with drunks, are you not giving tacit moral approval to their immoral behavior? It is not morally wrong to to have a drink, but it is morally wrong to get drunk, even if you harm no one but yourself. I'll spare you the argument, but invite you think about it.  

My reader mentions Stoicism. Here is a brief summary of the Stoic attitude:

There are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president on down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power.

The Stoics had an important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. I saw that I was allowing the negative thoughts to arise and that I had the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the mental disturbance was my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused the disturbance to vanish.

The Stoics discerned the mind's power to regulate itself and master its thoughts, rather than be mastered by them. They saw that, within certain limits, we create our own reality. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves happy. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed — assuming that one is willing to practice the Stoic precepts rather than merely read about them.

Stoic calm is not that hard to maintain as long as one avoids the near occasion of unnecessary vexation.  Here then is a further reason for my reader to break with his 'friend.'

Coming back to the question of self-knowledge, I recommend that my reader consult Karen Horney (pronounced like horn-eye, not like whore-knee). I don't know if she is much read these days but her books are well-written and full of insight. Here is a taste:

Interpersonal Strategies of Defense

According to Horney, people try to cope with their basic anxiety by adopting a compliant or self-effacing solution and moving toward people, by adopting an aggressive or expansive solution and moving against people, or by becoming detached or resigned and moving away from people. Healthy people move appropriately and flexibly in all three directions, but in neurotic development these moves become compulsive and indiscriminate. Each solution involves a constellation of behavior patterns and personality traits, a conception of justice, and a set of beliefs about human nature, human values, and the human condition. Each also involves a "deal" or bargain with fate in which obedience to the dictates of that solution is supposed to be rewarded.

I would only add that while healthy people are able to behave in all three ways (compliant, expansive, detached) as circumstances require, one can be psychologically healthy and favor one of the interpersonal strategies over the other two. Those of us who resonate to the Stoic teaching are most likely to favor the detachment strategy and move away from people when their bad behavior erupts, by either minimizing one's contact with them, or cutting them off entirely.  I have done both. Pre-emptive measures are also to be considered. We were invited to Christmas dinner and to a New Year's Eve party, get-togethers in both cases organized by my wife's friends. I told the wife  I would attend one event but not both.  I thereby limited the threat to my apatheia and ataraxia.

Finally, having just revealed myself as an introvert and an advocate of detachment (better: non-attachment), I now say to my reader that he should consider who is now giving him advice and factor that in when considering how much of it he should take.

Post-finally, here is a short video clip from Tombstone in which the bad behavior of Johnny Ringo is excused by Curly Bill on the ground that it is the booze in Johnny that is talking.  The relevance to my reader's problem is obvious.

Site Stats at Sweet Sixteen

Although Maverick Philosopher has been on-line for over 20 years now, its third incarnation, this Typepad version, first saw the light of day on Halloween, 2008, 16 years ago. I thank you for reading. 

Although the heyday of blogging is long gone, the peak having occurred near the end of the aughts, I bump along at a somewhat respectable level especially given the austerity of my offerings.

Lifetime Pageviews: 7, 497, 427
 
Pageviews/Day: 1,282.93
 
Total Posts: 12, 520
 
Total Comments: 16, 688
 
I'll be returning to some hard-core philo-content soon, but first things first: every mentally sane and morally decent man Jack and woman Jill of us must do his or her bit to beat back the forces of darkness.  No jacking, jilling, or slacking off.  Do your part, but with detachment from the outcome. To make a slogan out of it:
 
Beat back better!

My Grunt Jobs

Furniture mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles;  grave digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California;  letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree planter in Oregon; taxi driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.

Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.

Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us.  That is buncombe pure and simple.  There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.

But individuation is a task, not a given.  Es ist nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. You have to work at it.

There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.

And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals.  To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.

Tribal identity is pseudo-identity.

Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels

Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto.  I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself.

Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon be banging on all eight. As part of the afternoon start-up I am reading back-to-back, and back-and-forth, Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Orthodox Tradition, St. Vladimir's Press, 1985, orig. published in 1980 as Sacrement de L'Amour), and the Blake Bailey biography of Charles Jackson, the alcoholic, married-to-woman,  homosexual who achieved minor literary fame as the author of the thinly-veiled autobiographical booze novel, The Lost Weekend (1944).  Jackson died at age 65 having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.

I have long been fascinated by the utterly wild diversity of human types. There is nothing like it it the animal world, and yet we too are animals. We are in continuity with the animals but an incomprehensible rupture, saltation, jump, metabasis eis allo genos, occurred at some point in the evolutionary process that gave rise to man who is, paradoxically, both an animal and not an animal. Heidegger is right; there is an abysmal/abyssal (abgruendig) difference between man and animal. An abyss yawns between the two. Heidegger  is echoing Genesis but going deeper, and some would say, off the deep end, with his talk of man as Dasein, the Da of Sein/Seyn. More on Heidegger when I dig into Dugin.

And then there is Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970). I have Merton to thank for bringing him to my attention. Here is a passage that struck me:

There is no reason . . . to call one path [the marital state] or the other [the monastic state] the preeminent Christianity, since what is valid for all of Christendom is thereby valid for each of the two states. The East [unlike the RCC] has never made the distinction between the "precepts" and the "evangelical counsels." The Gospel in its totality is addressed to each person; everyone in his own situation is called to the absolute of the Gospel. Trying to prove the superiority of the one state over the other is therefore useless . . . The renunciation at work in both cases is as good as the positive content that the human being brings to it: the intensity of the love of God. (Evdokimov, p. 65)

For the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and counsels of perfection that Evdokimov is rejecting, see here. "It has been denied by heretics in all ages, and especially by many Protestants in the sixteenth and following centuries . . . "

A Platonist at Breakfast

Amazing what one can unearth with the WayBack Machine. This one first saw daylight on 3 March 2005. 

…………………………

I head out early one morning with the wife in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon dripping with 1950's Americana. We belly up to the counter and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons for Floyd Cramer’s Last Date on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?" "Over medium, please."

The eggs arrive undercooked. Do I complain? Rhinestone-studded Irene is working her tail off in the early morning rush. I’ve already bugged her for Tabasco sauce, extra butter, and more coffee. The service came with the sweetest of smiles. The place is jumping, the Mexican cooks are sweating, and the philosopher is philosophizing:

"If it won’t matter by tomorrow morning that these eggs are undercooked, why does it matter now?"

With that thought, I liberally douse the undercooked eggs with the fine Louisiana condiment, mix them up with the hashbrowns, and shovel the mess into my mouth with bread and fork, chasing it all with coffee and cream, no sugar.

Who says you can’t do anything with philosophy?