Bonanza Was Her Name
I’m not sure if this works, since I’ve not tried it, but an anchorite in Ireland, who I met in the cold Connemara hills, told me a good cold remedy. He swore by it.
Take a hefty, but not too heavy, woman — and preferably one who has been running to catch the bus to Colchester. But you don’t want her too exhausted. Although you do want her a little scared, especially since you’ve been shadowing her since early morning. (Her being scared brings out the hives and endorphins that help with the cold.)
Now, as the fumes of the departing bus envelop her — and not before — bonk her on the head. Then drag her back to your hell-hole of a cave in the lonely mountains. Once there, slip your congested head between her sweaty thighs.
Hopefully your cold will clear before she stirs. But if she awakes first, you might be stuck with your cold for another fortnight — and an hysterical woman.
And I should add that the anchorite in question didn’t have one hankie in his cave the entire time I knew him.
Life’s like a zipper: It goes down fast and exposes wonders. But it goes up faster when it’s offended.
Brave New Britain
I think it’s high time Britain dismantled its culture and replaced it with (Little) Britain’s Got Talent. Expunge Shakespeare, Ted Hughes, Jane Austen, Dickens, Joe Strummer, Bowie, Morrissey, Thom Yorke, Guy Harvey, Carol Ann Duffy, William Turner, Lucien Freud, William Blake, Percy & Mary Shelley, Colin Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Aldous Huxley, etc, etc, and replace with big burlesque, ballet pole dancing, mimes, clowns, bodybuilders, impersonators, men in spandex, and church workers.
Please, please, please let me get the approval of Simon Cowell and be flung into stardom.
Cruel Month
“Now the full-throated daffodils,
Our trumpeters in gold,
Call resurrection from the ground
And bid the year be bold.” Cecil Day Lewis
Torrential rain here in Maine. Roads washed out until now they are nothing but broken things. Such a sad thing to happen to a road. Where will they go now? Nothing should end in a pile of debris and the silt and stones of soft shoulders. A road is the original creator of boldness. A road is what takes us on life’s journey. You take it or you don’t, but it’s always beckoning. Boldness begins now, as Goethe wrote. But without a road, that boldness becomes nothing but bravado.
Water is bold, too, in its destructive nature. But it can also be benign and life giving. The duality of nature. Something humanity should not forget as we strive for goodness or lapse into apathy. We can’t deny our dualistic nature. If we do, we are a road washed out in spring. A road to nowhere.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to Philosophy
Fascinating. Illuminating. Epistemic. Erotic.
I’m reading this fab book called The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley. He purports in it that by learning about how the great thinkers of our age died sheds light on our own fears of annihilation and death. And religion doesn’t help with its promise of salvation or the material world with its promise of oblivion. Basically, he suggests that we can all enjoy a long life without worrying over its shortness or desiring immortality. And it’s the dead philosophers who don’t necessarily teach us this but show us by example. And we need to keep in mind a radical doubt and uncertainty, like Socrates, because nothing is certain except death — there’s no certainty in the migration of the soul from one place to another or in the certainty of annihilation. There’s just no proof either way. So live. Or better said: “When death is, I am not. When I am, death is not.”
I’m also learning that Socrates last words were, “Crito, offer me some cock.”
And Kant: “Bring me English cheese!”
And philosophical conundrums like this: bean was a slang word in the 5th century BC for genitalia. And philosophical quandaries about why Pythagoras hated beans — could it be because they cause so much metaphysical flatulence?
Plus I’m fortifying myself on these words by Epicurus — known as the four-part cure. Don’t worry about death. Don’t fear God. What is good is easy to get. And what is terrible is easy to endure.
And if I’m ever invited to an elaborate Egyptian feast, the ones that Montaigne wrote about, where a human skeleton is brought to the banquet followed by a man who shouts, “Drink and be merry, because soon you will look like this,” I’ll know to have fun.
And if all this advice fails, I’m going to follow Nietzsche’s example and kiss a horse in Turin.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
Rudyard Kipling
Reason Uber Alles
Here is a tale about Noumenal and Phenomenal. It starts with a thing that is its own thing — and that’s not cant — and is distinct from a thing that is known through the senses.
Which serendipitously introduces Phenomenal.
And immediately the experience they could have shared is quickly handed over to a German philosopher whose will-to-life is misunderstood as pessimistic but is in fact lighthearted and absurdist.
Actually, I came across this philosophical tale lampooned to my sickly tree this morning. It was titled: “The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.”
Having insufficient reason and tenfold fingers, I tore it down and let my daughter colour it in. She returned a half a minute later with a masterpiece. It was titled: “Adequately Unreasonable Until I Reach the Age of Reason.”
Then I drove to work in a terrible fug of the Critique of Pure Reason. I almost hit a standing pedestrian because of it and cursed, “Out of my way! Don’t you understand the universe is not a thoroughly understandable place, and with you stepping out into the road like that it’s getting even more confusing.”
She fingered me. I threw her an elementary matter. She replied in kind with a flash of flesh. I fancied it. But then a subject-object distinction struck me that I might be going along with the German Idealists!
Had I just be molested by a Cartesian tradition?
I wasn’t sure. But I longed to get my hands on those mammary glands.
Then I had one of those perennial philosophical reflections when one discovers not only one’s own essence but also the essence of the universe as a whole. (And I was sure Morrissey had written that.)
But back to the girl. Now she was, viz., unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substance, causality, reciprocity, possibility, actuality, and necessity.
I had had enough.
Vorstellung.
I pressed on the gas and that hypothesizing thing-in-itself as the cause of our sensations and which amounts to a constitutive application suddenly made me stop.
I unlocked the doors. Invited the girl in with a gesture that is a shared reality but regarded from different perspectives. Which translates as she punched me. I punched her back. Vis-à-vis. Or because one punch dispersed throughout space and time causally relates to another punch. Or in layman’s terms: One damn bad seed deserves another. She smarted. I smarted. We both kissed.
And that, I believe, is what Schopenhauer describes as the principle of self-consciousness.
And here my tale ends
The lingering velocity of desire
I should have been a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world, I think, because the philosopher is involved in abstract thought. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have suited me. But since I didn’t go that path, I’ve chosen the next best thing as an idle occupation: writing. But, writing isn’t exactly idleness, either. To quote Will Self, and not myself: “There’s enormous tension between indolence and languor.”
