Hermetic Jokes

Among the jokes classified by Ted Cohen as hermetic in Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1999) are the following that he classifies as strongly hermetic:
 
What did Lesniewski say to Lukasiewicz? "Logically, we're poles apart."

What is a goy? A goy is a person who is a girl if examined at any time up to an including t, and a boy    if examined at any time after t.

One day a paleographer came into his classics department in great excitement. "There has been an earth-shaking discovery," he  anounced. "The Illiad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by some other Greek with the same name."

If you got those, then try this severely hermetic one on for size:

What's round and purple, and commutes to work? An Abelian grape.

These three also fall under the hermetic rubric, though they are not especially so:

According to Freud, what comes between fear and sex? Fuenf.

A young Catholic woman told her friend, "I told my husband to buy all the Viagra he can find." Her Jewish friend replied, "I told my husband to buy all the stock in Pfizer he can find."

After knowing one another for a long time, three clergymen — one Catholic, one Jewish, and one Episcopalian — have become good friends. When they are together one day, the Catholic priest is in a sober, reflective mood, and he says, "I'd like to confess to you that although I have done my best to keep my faith, I have occasionally lapsed, and even since my seminary days I have, not often, but sometimes, succumbed and sought carnal knowledge."  "Ah well," says the rabbi, "It is good to admit these things, and so I will tell you that, not often, but sometimes, I break the dietary laws and eat forbidden food." At this the Episcopalian priest, his face reddening, says, "If only I has so little to be ashamed of. You know, only last week I  caught myself eating a main course with my salad fork."

Kerouac October Quotation #21: Sweet Gone Jack 41 Years Down the Road

Kerouacs Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died.  The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 41st anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus)

I own eight Kerouac biographies and there are a couple I don't own.  The best of them, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983), ends like this:

The night of Sunday October 19, he couldn't sleep and lay outside on his cot to watch the stars.  The next morning after eating some tuna, he sat down in front of the TV, notebook in hand, to plan a new novel; it was to be titled after his father's old shop: "The Spotlight Print."  Just getting out of bed Stella [Sampas, his third wife pictured above] heard groans in the bathroom and found him on his knees, vomiting blood.  He told her he didn't want to go to the hospital, but he cooperated when the ambulance attendants arrived.  As they were leaving, he said, "Stella, I hurt," which shocked her because it was the first time she had ever heard him complain.  Then he shocked her even more by saying, for the second time since they had married, "Stella, I love you."

Less than a day later, on the morning of October 21, after twenty-six blood transfusions, Jean Louis Kerouac died in St. Anthony's Hospital of hemorrhaging esophageal varices, the classic drunkard's death.

On Dizzy Gillespie's birthday. (p. 697)

He was 47.  I was 19.  On a restroom wall at my college, I scribbled, "Kerouac lives."  A day or two later a reply appeared, "Read the newspapers."

Kerouac October Quotation #20: The Body So Thick and Carnal

Kerouac Blaise Pascal says not to look to ourselves for the cure to misfortunes, but to God whose Providence is a foreordained thing in Eternity; that the foreordainment was that our lives be but sacrifices leading to purity in the after-existence in Heaven as souls disinvested of that rapish, rotten, carnal body — O the sweet beloved bodies so insulted everywhere for a million years on this strange planet. Lacrimae rerum. I dont get it because I look into myself for the answer. And my body is so thick and carnal I cant penetrate into the souls of others equally entrap't in trembling weak flesh, let alone penetrate into an understanding of HOW I can turn to God with effect. The situation is pronounced hopeless in the very veins of our hands, and our hands are useless in Eternity since nothing they do, even clasp, can last. (Vanity of Duluoz, p. 133. Photo by Tom Palumbo.)

Christine O’Donnell and the First Amendment

Although O'Donnell  comes across as an airhead, she was actually right: there are no such words as "separation of church and state" in the First Amendment.  The Establishment Clause reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ."  Chris Coons got it wrong when he misquoted the clause as "Government shall make no establishment of religion."  Not government, but congress.  William A. Jacobson explains why this matters  Not "make no establishment of religion," but "make no LAW RESPECTING an establishment of religion."  In other words, Congress shall not enact any law that sets up any particular religion as the state religion.  (But it seems it also can be interpreted  to have the further meaning: Congress shall enact no law that disestablishes  any particular religion that happens to have been established.)

I refer you to Professor Jacobson for detailed analysis.

And another thing.  I have never understood why liberals oppose the posting of the Ten Commandments in, say, a judge's chambers. (Well, I do understand why they oppose it; my point is that I can't see that they have a logical or First Amendment leg to stand on.)  First, the Decalogue is not specific to Christianity or to the other two Abrahamic faiths: it is precisely common to all three in virtue of its Old Testament provenience.   Hence even if its posting could establish a religion as the state religion it would be no particular religion that would be thereby established.  Second, and more fundamentally, it is ludicrous to suppose that the mere posting of the Ten Commandments could have the effect of establishing any particular religion as the state religion.

What motivates leftists (and contemporary liberals whose slouch towards leftism leaves them for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the former) is hatred of Judeo-Christian religion, and with, it hatred of the morality that such religion conveys.  Note that I wrote 'Judeo-Christian' and not 'Abrahamic.'  For it is a bizarre fact about the Left that they are soft on that religion which is uniquely violent and uniquely anti-Enlightenment at the present time, Islam.

Rise and Shine With Manny

Kant-3 For, "The bed is a nest for a whole flock of illnesses." (Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Gregor, p. 183)

I read Kant and about Kant at an impressionable age, and it really is a pleasure plowing through his texts again as I have been doing recently. I suspect my early rising goes back to my having read, at age 20, that Kant was wont to retire at 10 PM and arise at 5 AM.

Soon enough, however, I was out-Kanting Kant with a 4 AM arisal from the bed of sloth. And when I moved out here to the Zone, 4 became 2:30. (A Zone Man must make an early start especially on outdoor activities before Old Sol gets too uppity.) I've tried 2 AM, the time the Trappist monks of Merton's day got up, but I couldn't hack it. 2:30 is early enough. (I don't know whether the Trappist regimen is as rigorous today as it was in the '40s and '50s, and I'm not sure I want to know.)

The New York Times Kerouac Obituary

Tomorrow, October 21, is the 41st anniversary of Jack Kerouac's death.  I remember the day well, having noted Jack's passing on a piece of looseleaf I still have in a huge file full  of juvenilia from that period. 

The NYT obituary features a perceptive quotation from Allen Ginsberg: "A very unique cat — a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant."  For pith and accuracy, that's hard to beat.  The obituary concludes by noting that Kerouac "had no use for the radical politics that came to preoccupy many of  his friends and readers."

"I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic," he said last month. He showed the interviewer a painting of Pope Paul VI and said, "Do you know who painted that?  Me."

Kerouac October Quotation # 19: Vanity of Vanities

Vanity of Duluoz, p. 23:

Still I say, what means it? You may say that I'm a braggart about football, although all these records are available in the newspaper files called morgue, I admit I'm a braggart, but I'm not calling it thus because what was the use of it all anyway, for as the Preacher sayeth:  "Vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity."  You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you even die, and the name of that grave is "success," the name of that grave is hullaballoo boomboom horseshit.

The Beats: A Mutual Admiration Society

Here is Allen Ginsberg on Diane di Prima. Perhaps you have noticed how the Beats and their descendants, holed up in such enclaves as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, stroke each other.

I puzzle myself by my continuing avid interest in the writers of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac principally. How does such an interest  jive with the rest of my personality? How can such a logic-chopper appreciate a poetic lush like Kerouac? Or given my politics, how could I have an interest in Ginsberg?

"I am large, I contain multitudes." (Walt Whitman)

Dorothy Day on Max Bodenheim

I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put their own inimitable stamp on themselves. The creatively maladjusted and marginal who do duty as warnings more often than as exemplars.

Joe Gould, Greenwich Village bohemian, is an example. His story has been told by that master of prose, Joseph Mitchell. More on Gould and Mitchell later. Here you can read Dorothy Day on Max Bodenheim,   another luminary in the firmament of early 20th century Greenwich  Village bohemia.

Skeptical and Credulous

By turns we are too much the one or the other. We find it difficult to balance doubting and believing.

Properly deployed, doubt is the engine of inquiry, but it can also become a brake on commitment and thus on living. One cannot live well without belief and trust — but not when they become gullibility and credulousness.

Whistle blowers such as Harry Markopolos have a hard time getting through to people who want to believe.  Their intellects suborned by greed, otherwise intelligent people who were warned by Markopolos were taken to the cleaners  by the avuncular Bernie Madoff despite the improbability of a legitimate 1% per month return in a market that safely permitted half of that.

They were skeptical of Markopolos while credulous of Madoff.  A clear proof of not only the difficulty of balancing skepticism and credulousness, but also of the weakness of the  intellect in the face of the torrent of the passions.

By the way, Markopolos' book, No One Would Listen, held my interest from the first page to the last.  It lives up to its subtitle, "A Financial Thriller."  A central lesson is that we should be deeply skeptical of federal regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.  It failed utterly to uncover the Madoff Ponzi scheme and dismissed the repeatedly-made Markopolos warnings.  Liberals, with their tendency to believe in the salutary effects of an omni-intrusive and purportedly omnicompetent government,  should heed this lesson. 

Nagel on Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

I have in my hand a copy of Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997). The last essay in The Last Word is entitled, "Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion." One hopes that Nagel does not consider it the last word on the topic given its fragmentary nature and occasional perversity. But it's a good essay nonetheless. Everything by Thomas Nagel is worth reading.  Herewith, a bit of interpretive summary with quotations and comments.

Nagel's essay begins by pointing out a certain Platonism in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, a Platonism that is foreign to pragmatism as usually understood. Nagel quotes Peirce as saying that the aim of science is "eternal verities," a notion at odds with the Jamesian view that the true is that which it is good for us to believe. What science is after is not a set of beliefs conducive to our flourishing but a set of beliefs that correspond to the world as it is independently of us. The researcher aims to "learn the lesson that nature has to teach. . . ." But to do this, the inquiring mind must "call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale [the natural light]. . . ."

This Sex Business

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102:

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens' backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come near his food. He is not called upon to support his offpsring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience!

Being like the animals is of course no solution, even if it were possible.  A strange fix we're in: it is our spiritual nature that enables both our sinking below, and our rising above, the level of the animal.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.