In the rock I trust

Last year I gave away my trad climbing gear, some of it new, some of it by then almost 25 years old. Not the end of the world: I would still be able to go sport climbing, where the bolts are all already installed, and of course continue in the climbing gym. And yet … I told Shelley and KP, climbers themselves, “there goes half my identity”.

Of all that I can relive in memory and imagination, what dominates is my sense of the rock. My rock paradigm: cool, smooth, hard, solid, something to trust with your life. Many a rock that does not instantiate this ideal. I’ve climbed on crumbling rock, exfoliation, with bits breaking off. I’ve sometimes stuck my pro in little cracks with edges like eggshells. I’ve slipped on basalt, God’s answer to stealth rubber. And still, pervasive in all my memory, is this sense of the rock I can trust, trust to bear me, to hold me, to offer me safety, to hold my feet on scarcely perceptible unevennesses, to carry me up.

There is lots to remember, gratefully or ruefully, certainly fondly. When Ric Otte introduced me to Yosemite, I got hooked at once. But I did not lead during the first two years, just followed and belayed Ric and his friends … quaking in my climbing shoes as often as not. At the beginning of the third summer there, coming down from something harrowing –on Middle Cathedral, I think — I said “I don’t ever want to lead”.

They all understood it as a comment on how I had felt. Early the next morning they took me to the easiest climb in the Valley, Swan Slab Gully, and said “Lead!”.

Later, toward the end of that summer, Ric told me, “look, you can follow 10a, so let’s go up Crest Jewel, you can lead the easy parts.” It was a good climb, lots of face and friction, but steep and rather dubious looking bolts. At some point, when he was leading a 10a pitch, he yelled down to me, “look, Bas, look at that helicopter flying down below us!”. I didn’t. I was swearing, “damn it, Ric! I don’t want to look down!”

The first time I climbed Revival, in Church Bowl, I had the impression it was hardly ever climbed. About three-quarters on the way up, looking for protection, I found the remains of a bolt, not much more than a nail sticking out. I took an old wire-threaded nut, scrunched the wire around that rusty nail, prayed … Much later, on Hobbit Book in Tuolumne, I hung first a water bottle, and then one of my approach shoes, on bits of rock sticking out (‘dinner plates’ and ‘chicken heads’), to improvise some parody of bolt protection. These were not moments colored by fear, they stick in my memory with the felt satisfaction of cooperating with the rock, accepting what it let me have.

There is much else to climbing, of course. The easy together feeling of people who rely on each other; laughing over things that could have gone so badly … like when Baylor and I vowed never again to rappel without adding a prusik safety ( a vow neither of us kept very faithfully).

And the minor miracles. Leading a pretty steep but not really difficult route in the Pinnacles, I suddenly found I could not move my left foot up. The little loop at the back of my climbing shoe had gotten caught in the carabiner clipped on the last bolt. Something, everyone said later, that had never before happened in the history of climbing.

And now I was not in a good position, right foot on a small hold, right hand stretched out above me — bending down was just not on. A controlled fall? No, I would pivot down from my caught left foot, slam into the rock, no way to fall free. Someone below told me to wait until they could go up farther on, and lower a rope to me. But could I stay in this awkward position so long?

A little miracle — I managed to worm my foot out of the shoe. Then I climbed up to the next bolt, on one shoe and one foot, secured myself, climbed down again to get the shoe. After climbing that day, I cut the loops on both shoes.

And once again, the rock I trust had held me in its loving arms, carried its tough love only as far as a warning.

Hollywood and the baroni dell’università

I am no Foucault nor was meant to be.  If I give my impressions of power structures in academia they will be like, let us say, the impressions of an ant vis à vis an orange.

When I first came to Italy I was soon told about the university barons: old professors who held all the power, each with his own fiefdom in the university.  Perhaps they were already disappearing then, as the universities were being forcibly democratized in the aftermath of the sixties. Some cities, Florence, Bologna, were proudly leftist, and the professors were said to be of the people.

It was certainly in a different city (I won’t disclose whether it was farther north or farther south) that I got to witness some of the worldly splendor of power in academia.  The Professor in the Department hosting our symposium invited us to dinner at his house.  House? Well,  … palazzo … statues in the garden among the sculpted monkey-puzzle trees, dark oak wall paneling and wainscoting in the hall.  Entering the hallway, a somewhat too large, but still discreet crucifix half-hiding in a nook.  A dining room that proclaimed the glories of an earlier century. Candles lined the center, as if marching up to the head of the table, where the Professor held forth.  Seating was choreographed with a nod to male/female alternation but rather more by social precedence.  I could still see the Professor but far enough off to fail, though not with great regret, to hear his conversation.  Staff dressed in black, with long white gloves, moved discreetly behind my shoulders, reached in, added and removed food, corrected my placement of the cutlery. 

I cannot hide a twinge of nostalgia.  In Italy, in philosophy conferences, we were greeted by the mayor or representatives of the provincial government, declared cultural events in the city calendar, invited to special viewings and concerts.  Since contrasts should be sharp, cut to Los Angeles, to a dinner with the USC University Trustees.

It was also in the mid seventies when USC recruited new philosophy faculty.  As I came early for my interview my friend Sid, who taught at Northridge, took me for a drive through Hollywood;  we stopped on, I think, Mulholland Drive to see the Hollywood sign.   It was around then that Dory Previn was singing Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign: “You know the hollywood sign/ That stands in the hollywood hills/  I don’t think the Christ of the Andes/ Ever blessed so many ills/”.

The chairman, Martin, recently retired in the East but already very Californian (white Mercedes convertible, “We are going to have the greatest philosophy department west of the Mississippi”) showed me where I would have my office.  That would be in Mudd Hall, below the clock tower where they had filmed The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  The space was shared with the library,  and with the office of John Hospers, philosopher of art, 1972 Libertarian candidate for Presidency of the USA. 

That year the university had three new special appointments and we were invited to the Trustees annual dinner, at a Ventura country club.  As it happens each of us still betrayed our recent immigrant status with noticeable European accents.  We were asked to give small presentations in the pre-dinner schedule; my neighbor explained how he had developed a program to turn biowaste into fuel.  I’m no longer sure what I explained, but at the reception a guest approached me with a grateful look: “I had never understood so well what a tautology is”.  Then the Trustees each spoke.  The first was tall, slim, handsome man with an educated way of speaking, an industrialist — he did not prepare us properly for the spectacle of his colleagues on the Board.  There was a woman from Texas, of a certain age, cosmetically fortified, acting very girlish toward the other Board members, detailing how many millions she had raised for the endowment.  The next applauded her, saying “That’s the game, we all know it: get, give, or get out!”.  And the last one had great fun complimenting the academic speakers, imitating our accents with movie-Gestapo German “We haff ways to make you teach!”  Getting serious he commented on the special power Trustees had to fire deans.  Our own dean, whom I had come to admire for his sang-froid and good sense, sat beside me, wincing.

This dean, and our department, were quite wonderful.  Bit by bit I began to understand that there was a gradual diminishing of civilized attitudes between this base at faculty level, and the higher reaches of administration, Provost and President, on the way to Board of Trustees.  The reckoning arrived in 1979 when the Los Angeles Times revealed that the President, Jack Hubbard, and the Provost, had traveled to Iran to present an honorary doctorate to the Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah (just deposed that year).   The not -unconnected aftermath was the one million dollars endowment of the Pahlavi Shay of Iran Chair in Petroleum Engineering.  Journalistic outrage noted that even President Roosevelt, paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, had had to travel to USC in 1935 to receive his honorary doctorate.  The news developed quickly.  The Provost went into the hospital with a suspected heart attack and could not be reached for comments.  President Hubbard had apparently already announced his plan to retire, some time beforehand, and was ready to do so now.

A colleague raised the salient puzzle, not touched on at all by the newspapers.  Why would the Shah, the King of Kings, of the House of Pahlavi, Light of the Aryans, Emperor of the Peacock Throne, have wanted an honorary doctorate?  Had his wife perhaps reproached him, who did he think he was, if he didn’t have a university degree? 

Writers in seclusion

As I was recently re-reading Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight I found myself in a strongly felt connection to a phenomenon — though it is one I have never witnessed, involving people I have never known.

When novels become famous they are often reprinted with an introduction. I never read it (or if I do, only afterwards), fearing that they could spoil the experience. But as I opened this book I could not help but notice a phrase on the introduction’s first page. This novel, Nabokov’s first in English, was written in Paris, 1938 — in the bathroom of a one-room flat.

It reminded me at once of Pascal, who also lived in Paris, and whose work in mathematics is still remembered, some of it even so-named (‘Pascal’s triangle’). I know Pascal as a logician, as a mystic, as a romantic 17th century figure. But he was also the captive of the Jansenists of Port Royal, a Catholic group entirely Calvinist in its demeanor and tight-lipped constraint. From them he learned that mathematics is just another form of sexual self-indulgence. So he gave it up. Or tried … Eventually he allowed himself to engage in mathematics still, but only in time wasted with respect to the intellect: time spent in the bathroom.

More tragically, there is the story of the logician, Leopold Loewenheim, originator of the Loewenheim-Skolem paradox (which I love inordinately much). The story is part of logicians’ folklore and may be apocryphal. What is true it that in the 1930s Loewenheim’s professional life as a high school teacher in Berlin came to an abrupt (though temporary) end, when he had to accept forced retirement as a 25 percent non-Aryan. Tarski visited him in that period, but after the war Tarski, like every one else, was convinced (wrongly) that Loewenheim had died in a Nazi concentration camp. It was during that time of rumors too, I think, that the story went about that Loewenheim had managed to continued doing logic in the camp, but only when he could hide in a bathroom.

Neither Jansenist convictions nor external pressures have ever pushed me this far. But isn’t exile in a bathroom for writing just one example of how writing, once writing takes hold of a person, is irrepressible? And therefore goes on in the most unlikely times and places, regardless?

In the middle of reading Sebastian Knight some idea occurred to me and I turned to the back, to scribble notes inside the back cover. There was writing there already: “Tranquillity Variation 5.8, Quien Sabe 5.7, ? Lolita 5.9, between Tranquillity Variation and Quien Sabe”. A list of climbing routes in Joshua Tree, written while I was there with a guide, Jim Hammerle, in 1993. At lunch Hammerle, who lived in a trailer nearby, told me how he planned to earn money by making avocado sandwiches for climbers, and asked me what I was reading. A book by Nabokov, I said, you know, he wrote Lolita, it was a movie too. He had never heard of Lolita. Then, the next day he took us up a new route, and said that he would log it in at the climbing store as “Lolita” — a first ascent. I doubt he ever did. I was just as unreliable in my intentions — my notes in the back of Sebastian Knight were for a long story I meant to write about this time in Joshua Tree, and I never did.

But Sebastian Knight illustrates another phenomenon for me: that when writing, there is also to urge to write about that writing, to bear witness to how, when, and where it was written. Nabokov’s novel is extreme in this respect: asked what The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is about, I can only answer: about the writing of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

I don’t mean it is a novel about a novel being written in a bathroom, worse … or better … (?) it is about it’s own being-written.

The author who appears as the narrator is not the author of the book here on my lap. Of course not. Italo Calvino said that when he writes a novel, the first character he must create is the author of that novel, even if that is a character which never appears therein. Umberto Eco called it the constructed author, and insisted that the second (or simultaneous) construction is the constructed reader. He elaborated: that is the ‘model reader’ that you pretend to be when reading the book, the reader who is more knowledgeable and more intelligent than you will ever be.

The narrator, who is the author researching his famous brother Sebastian Knight, in the process of writing Sebastian’s life, lives in Paris, comfortably as far as I can tell. He dashes about England, Germany, and France, diligently recording all the places in which he did the writing — the writing of this very book. Much more constrained than he or any novelist, I could still not resist doing the same — in prefaces I list places where I wrote; in one, Scotland and Italy, in another Bologna, Assisi, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and London.

Maybe the summing up is just this. The phenomenon I never witnessed but glimpsed in Nabokov, Pascal, and Loewenheim, was, in itself, just that suffered constraint of having to write which forced them into exile in a bathroom. But what it pointed to was the self-conscious, embarrassingly self-preoccupied, obsessive, writer-being that writing creates.

The Spirit Has Two Wings

Long before I came to California I was aware of it as a center of spiritual life in many forms. 

When we had landed in Edmonton in 1956, our first house was on 92nd Street, near the disreputable part of downtown. I had my bed in the attic.  There, in a closet, I found a stack of Reader’s Digests and many pamphlets, little booklets, published by the Vedanta Society of California.  These pamphlets had appealing photos of a monastery near San Diego, with secluded gardens for meditation, and of two women of amazon stature , glowing with health and good will, in white togas.  

In these pamphlets I read about Swami Prabhavananda, who had come to California from India, to bring the message of the saint Ramakrishna, and the teachings of the Vedanta.  I got a paperback copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the Upanishads (I still have it!) and daydreamed of a retreat into the beautiful arms of a monastic life.  

Many years later, living in Berkeley, I happened to pass by the Vedanta center there.  I did not stop, there had been too many detours and byways since then, although I was, and am, still fond of the Bhagavad Gita.

Living in, rather than visiting, California became possible in the mid seventies, when I started teaching spring semesters in Los Angeles.  Living in Venice, near the sea, I found the Temple of Man, a poetry center sustained by a permanent daily garage sale. Having declared itself legally as a church it was tax exempt, and a garage sale needs no business license, nor are there rules for how often you can have one.  The poetry evenings were memorable for the poets. One was a very manly man whose poem was about being a poet and ended with the line “A work worthy of a man!“, to which I heard many murmurs of assent.  The woman who followed him talked about her own poetry before reading it, and indicated in a not so veiled way that she had once slept with Allen Ginsberg, back in the fifties. 

Still searching I looked into the telephone yellow pages and found, with surprise, that in the nearby St. Monica Catholic Church a Latin mass was celebrated each Sunday.       Latin! Vatican II, which had turned the altars around and prescribed the liturgy to be in the language of the country, had happened more than a decade before. But some churches kept a place for the old ritual and its solemn dignity.

The church was large, full of people in shorts and short sleeved shirts or low cut blouses, perhaps to be expected with the beach and Santa Monica pier so nearby.   The mass was celebrated by two priests, one young and one old.  The young priest spoke Latin with such ease that he seemed to be talking with God as with a friendly neighbor (“hello God, it’s me, Damian …”, something like that) .  The old priest was, in contrast, stumbling so much over the Latin, and so tardy, that the occasional coughing was growing slowly into a small epidemic.  I was not Catholic, and not focused enough to overcome these barriers. I had hoped for something to intrigue me, that was not there.

The next year I returned, and first walked by the Temple of Man.  The younger of its two attendant men, Thomas, was there managing the garage sale, and invited me over to his house.  We went to the upper floor, dark with curtains on the windows, light subdued …  A couple of very young people were there, a little dreamy, or perhaps sleepy. One began to play the flute as we drank tea. Thomas began to talk about how they were no longer happy in the Temple of Man, and invited me to come by again on the weekend. I did go back once or twice, feeling a bit lonely just then. But the atmosphere felt awry, sometimes even a little sinister.  Soon I decided to leave it alone.  

I had seen a notice tacked up in the house, announcing the Los Angeles Zen Center’s introductory meditation classes.        So I started going on Tuesday evenings. An apprentice monk would be in charge, give a little talk about breathing, counting our breaths up to 13, letting thoughts go their own way, as if they were birds flying by.  Then we would sit.  At first everything inside me was screaming to get out.  After some weeks I had progressed to ten minutes of peace, before feeling as if a huge rock inside me wanted to roll out.  At the end of twenty minutes we would have tea, and some desultory talking.

At the end of the semester, we were told, it would be possible to have a private interview with an adept, possibly the abbot.  The ritual for an interview was very clearly defined.  The supplicant would sit outside the door and wait for a tinkling bell, then enter on his knees to kneel before the master.  There was to be no speech unless the master asked. To signal the end, the master would ring the little bell again. Then, immediately, the supplicant must exit, going backward, on his knees.

As we talked, we learned a little about each other.  One young woman said that she had a recording of Eastern music to meditate by. She would recline when centering her attention, often find that she had peacefully fallen asleep.  A youngish man who was always very restless began to talk.  He had grown up in a mobile home, his bed was in an alcove that he could close off from the family.  Every word he uttered sounded like a hurt, a voiced distress, a pained memory.

The next time, when he spoke again, there was a silence when he ended.  Then the apprentice monk began to speak.  When I first came here, he said, I had a great deal of pain. I had lost my way, I could not bear what I was going through, I had come to escape myself.  After a month or so I was granted an interview with a master visiting us from Japan.  I was in awe of him, a man of such solidity, this was a man like a wall.  I waited at the entrance for the little bell, then went in.  Kneeling before the master I waited. He looked at me with compassion.  I felt that here, finally, there was someone who could understand me.  Gently he said “You have much pain.”  He paused.  Then: “Get rid of it!” Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle … 

Did I also have an interview with an adept at the end? Yes, but there was nothing to remember, not even a summary dismissal.  It was a time when, as I now know, I was blithe, blithely turned away in my ignorance, looking outward only, not ready for anything they could have shown me.  Could they have shown me anything?  I don’t know, I still have my doubts. I did not return to the Zen Center the next year. 

In 1981 I did not return to Los Angeles but started on my time in Princeton.  The long story of how I drifted toward, and eventually into, the Church is for another time, if at all.  But I want to end this with the nun, Sister Mary, who taught me the catechism.  A woman well into her fifties I think, she belonged to a liberal order, very Vatican II, detested by the more orthodox parts of this always dysfunctional, yet stay-together, church.  She took as her textbook the 500+ page long Dutch catechism, also infamous for its liberal form.  Since I had not grown up Catholic, some very simple things were a mystery to me.  Watching the sign of the cross made in quick and careless gestures confused me: what was first, the downstroke or the horizontal?  It is easy to remember, Sister Mary said. You mention the spirit last, and the spirit has two wings.

  When our lesson strayed into the personal she would not give advice, but solace: God writes straight on crooked lines.

At the end of the school year Sister Mary was re-assigned to a campus in New York.  She was at once distressed and optimistic, visibly hopeful. Who knows, she said, it may be a new life.  I may fall in love again! who knows what will be.

****** 

There was a song often played the first year I taught in Los Angeles.  I only remember now the slowness of its melody, and a single line.

Time goes by so slowly …., and time can do so much ….

A Razor’s Edge

When I was 17, working part-time in the Edmonton public library, I was allowed to take home any books slated for discard.  One, which I still have on my shelves, was Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.  It is the story of Larry through the eyes of a narrator, ostensibly the author himself, who catches glimpses of Larry’s quest over a number of years.  Larry came back from the war with an altered sense of values. The norms and goals that had been self-evident before, and still were to his contemporaries, did not any longer make any sense for him.  He leaves, to loaf (as he says) and study.  Eventually we see that he has found answers in the mystics, and through a stay with a saint in an Indian ashram.  What is most surprising in this story, in retrospect, is that Larry was presented from the beginning, of all the characters, the most at ease in the world, the most well-adjusted and at peace.  From when we first meet him his demeanor is entirely natural, in contrast to the artifice of those who fit compliantly into their station and its duties.

The book’s title page has a quote from the Upanishads, “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; … the path to Salvation is hard”.  Underneath I wrote a quote from Herodotus, “Our fortunes lie on a razor’s edge …; for freedom or for bondage ….”.  But Larry did not pass through sloughs of despond, his life was blessed, the razor’s edge was passed not in an upheaval but as growth.

Today I would be quite critical, the book has much that does not ring true.  It raised a question for me, however, that I still have, and that has had only unsatisfactory answers.  

The public library was located close to the Hotel Macdonald, at the time the only high-rise, overlooking the Saskatchewan River ravine.  One evening, going home late, I took the path on the hillside below the hotel.  There was an older man drinking from a bottle half-hidden in a paper bag.  I sat down near him.  He did not offer me a drink, but after a while he began to talk. He was, I guess you would say, a semi-vagrant, finding seasonal work.  “There isn’t a place for me here”, he said, “me, French Canadian”.  I wondered, was he like Larry? Was he changed from when he was young, if not by a war then by a world where he did not fit?  A moment later he turned to me, as if he had heard me asking, and said “I’m fine”.  

The dividing line between freedom and bondage, though, is not a razor’s edge; for every step into freedom there is a tether unbroken.  Once I was invited to lecture in Puerto Rico, and I added a week or so to my stay to see the island.  As I was driving on my way to a high point in El Yunque rain forest I saw a young woman by  the road, thumb out for a lift.  As she got in I had the impression that she was distinctly grimy.  Perhaps she had been working in a field or garden, or perhaps hygiene just wasn’t her thing.  Where was she going, was there another village still up ahead?  No, she told me, there is a commune, you can’t see it from the road.  

Though this was some time after the sixties, it was still not so unusual for people to drop out, as they would say.  She asked to be let out quite high up, at a track with not much to mark it.  Before she stepped out, she asked when I thought I would be returning.  About four hours later she was in fact waiting there in the same place to catch a ride back.  I was rather intrigued, asked how she normally got about.  “We live without money” she said, “we’re done with all that”.  Very reluctantly she gave some vague answers.  They had vegetables, they worked for food and other things, yes, she had been there for a few years now.  For all she told me, she was a person with no past.  I asked what the food might be like there out in the country.  I’d be happy to treat her, if she wanted to stop for a meal.  When we were in the cafe she told me to have a dish, which turned out to be very plain, just plantains, rice, and beans. “I don’t want anything to eat”, she said, “but if it is ok I would like a glass of wine”. It sounded like a concession, something that would be obtained with money.  With her reluctance to talk so obvious, I found myself tongue-tied.  Having dropped out, was she free, free from a bondage that characterized my own life?  A freedom that was in any way like what Larry had sought?  I could not find a good way to ask it.  

In the years around 1980 I went three times to Mexico City: for a lecture, for a four-week seminar, and for a conference up in the mountains to honor Hilary Putnam.  It was on the first occasion that I took an extra week to explore the city. On the first day I went out to the Teotihuacan Pyramids north of the city.  After a while, rather tired, I sat down on the steps of one of the smaller pyramids near the Pyramid of the Moon, close to a couple that I had seen sitting there for a while.  The man, distinctive because he was wearing two hats one on top of the other, had been sketching.  He called over, sounding American, and asked if I’d like half a sandwich? I said I had brought some snacks, but could I look at what he had been drawing?  

We ended up spending the week together.  I had a car, so we went to the see Our Lady of Guadaloupe, in Tepeyac on the outskirts of the city.  And I trouped around with them, in the marrkets, where he would trade his drawings for food and sometimes money.  He sketched quickly, easily catching a likeness to someone at a stall — people were friendly, and liked to have the sketches.  There we would eat hot boiled corn on the cob with crumbly white cheese, or tamales wrapped in corn husk leaves.  The girl, about fifteen, spoke no English and I no Spanish, but the artist, Jack, was happy to tell his story.

Jack had been a mortuary supplies salesman, with a wife and children, till at the age of thirty he decided to quit and go on a vast bicycling tour of the Western states.  He did not return home, he took a bus to Mexico, where he had an uncle — he dropped out.  Although he thought he might stay to live with his uncle, he made sure not to spend the money for a bus trip back to the states.  But two guys he was talking with in a bar, very friendly, came out with him and pulled a gun.  We’re really sorry, they said, but we need it more than you do.  After a while the uncle told him he would not put up with him any more.  Since then he had lived on more or less a dollar a day, he told me.

In the morning I would go to where they lived, a garage with a single light bulb and a water tap outside, part of a row of garages.  We went to see a family in a make-shift hut with a large couch and a television set.  Their five year old girl, Jack told me proudly, was a good student already.  She would go and get the milk for her family and some neighbors at dawn,  before going to school.  

Later I sent him art supplies, and he sent me some drawings.  But how can I see him?  Did that conscious decision to drop out, to leave the familiar world behind, lead him to freedom?  It certainly did not lead him to saintliness.  The girl he was with then (and according to one letter, later replaced by another) had been in a school for advanced students, and left it to travel with him; not something that raised any question of conscience.  As we can surely understand, his days were preoccupied with the question of money.  Unlike the young woman in Puerto Rico he did not belong to a commune that had learned how to live without money.  Although he was friendly enough with me, I could also see that he was on the whole rather surly, inclined to sound nasty. We talked about Our Lady of Guadaloupe, but he saw her only as a tourist would.  I asked him in various ways how the change in his life had changed his life.  At one point he would exclaim that he would never go back, that his salesman’s life had been a living death.  At another he would be talking vividly about going back to America, getting casual labor, have a car again.  

So, my real encounters with people whose story might have been like Larry’s, brought no inkling at all of what Larry’s way might have been.  Each of the three were poor, in the sense of money-less, nevertheless content in their way, but not projecting any sense of peace.  Should I be cynical, and conclude that the salient difference was Larry’s “three thousand a year”, which allowed him to live without working?  With such a resource it may still be as hard to find inner peace or enlightenment as it is to pass over the edge of a razor.  But without it, is there any way at all to arrive there?  

I remember a story “Learning to Fall”.  It ends with “Aim for grace”.

Students

Sometimes, along the way, unexpectedly, there is a sign of some student from long ago.

At one point I wanted to get one more physical copy of my book on formal semantics, which had been out of print for some time. There were second-hand copies for sale on Amazon and I wrote for one of them. It came with a note from one of my Toronto students in the 70s, Mary. She had been teaching philosophy and co-writing a logic textbook — but now she and her husband were selling all their books, they had a sail boat and were going to sail around the world.
       Another time, walking on a street in Vancouver, I heard my name. It was another Toronto logic student, Dan, a short solid guy who told me he had not wanted to be an academic after all. Already as a student he had become involved in backgammon, a game as old as civilization itself, played for serious money in silent rooms all through the world. He made good money at it, he said. Just now he was going to sell a Volkswagen that he had accepted from one of the players who had lost more than he could pay.

But I want to talk about three students whom I came to know better: Allen and Mark who did become philosophers, and Robin Kornman who became a Buddhist monk.

Allen was an undergraduate in the late sixties. He did not fit in well, the university had made an exception to let him live off campus when the ill-fitting became too salient to be ignored. As the weather grew rainy and colder he would still come to class in sandals without socks and a sport jacket with the sleeves torn off. He was amazingly good at logic, outshining the entire class. Then, about midway, his exercises dropped from brilliant to mediocre to worse than poor. I called him in, asked him what as happening. “That question just doesn’t arise” he told me. All that happens is entirely determined by the physical history of the universe, what happens and what I do was already set in stone before we were born.
      I told him he should do well, because I wanted him in my advanced logic course in the next semester, which had this course as a prerequisite. Near the end of the semester there was only one chance for him to pass, and that was to ace the final exam. He sat with the exam paper for a while, then wanted to just hand it in. “Do it” I told him, “If you don’t do it well, I am determined to flunk you.” He sat with it another half hour, then handed it in half finished. I failed him in the course.

But then the next semester I gave him special permission to take the advanced course. Once again he outshone everyone. All the heart-wrenching problems with his girlfriend were over, and he was not a determinist anymore.

Mark looked very young, as if he might still be in high school, when he appeared in my philosophy of science class. This was in the eighties. He was a physics student, and again remarkable, like Allen, because he stood out intellectually. Where the philosophy majors had difficulty Mark would just breeze through. But that was the only way he was like Allen.

About a year later Mark came to see me. He was writing a paper on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, knew of my interest in it, and asked for philosophical literature. By giving it to him, I suppose I placed another adder in the grass. The next semester I came across him in the campus cafeteria, sitting dejectedly by himself, looking distraught. I sat down, said “What is the matter, Mark?” He had just had the worst of all spring breaks, he told me. For he had gone home and told his parents that he was going to switch from physics to philosophy. His mother had cried. Then she had called a cousin — someone I knew well, actually, a philosophy professor — to ask him to talk to her son and convince him not to do that.
Mark stayed firm and, like Allen, Mark became a remarkable, brilliant philosopher.

For Robin Kornman I have to go back again, to the summer of 1969, when I taught a short course on Existentialism, in Bloomingon, Indiana. That was a hippy summer, awash in marijuana, flute playing, reading from the Tibetan book of the Dead, all that sort of thing. The students — another of whom, Steven, would become a Buddhist teacher, and I would eventually know well — tended to approach Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as a sacred text. What struck me about Robin was that he seemed so sensual, as if he were tasting the words.
      In 1970-71 I was living in London, and one day Robin showed up. Could he crash with us for a few days? He was on his way to India, looking to buy a cheap airline ticket in London. He told us that he had had a mystical experience. In India he would find spiritual guidance. He was now discarding everything not essential to staying alive, everything material and superfluous. So he had as clothes just what he wore, plus a long shirt to have on when washing those. Someone suggested, jokingly, that really, underwear was also superfluous. “Right!” he said, “so I will discard that before boarding the plane”.

Twenty-five or so years later Robin looked me up in Princeton. He was enrolled as a graduate student in the East Asian Studies program. They had admitted him on the basis of the extensive translations of Sanskrit and Tibetan scriptures which he had already completed. For after his wanderings in India, he was a disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in Colorado, during which time he had mastered those languages. Trungpa had died, and Robin had gone off on his own, as a spiritual teacher.
      As was perhaps not unusual for an itinerant monk, even as skillfully adapted to our society as Robin, he had few possessions; some of these he stored in my attic. We had long discussions walking around Princeton, but they ended abruptly. He had begun telling me of the sexual liberation initiated by his teacher Trungpa, and fell almost immediately into astonishingly venal, vulgar descriptions of women’s bodies and sexual activity. I told him I did not want to listen to this, and we became estranged. Some time after he left Princeton a gangling youth appeared with a truck and took away what Robin had left in my attic.

But Robin, who died at age 60, is much alive on the web, presenting many spiritual teachings, and recalled in fond remembrances by other Buddhist initiates. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is easily found there too, named by a group of fifty women who accuse him and his acolytes of sexual abuse.

So it goes.

Californians

In the spring of 1974 I went to Adelaide, in Australia, to give a four-week seminar. I arrived several days late, and had to explain to Graham Nerlich that on my stop-over in California I had been with friends. I had missed my connecting flight, and had to rebook. Nerlich was very gracious about this. When in the next week, talking about local dance festivals, I mentioned that I knew a whole coven of belly-dancers in Santa Barbara, there was fleetingly a knowing smile. I wanted to say that whatever he was thinking, it was certainly wrong — but well, better not draw more attention ….

At that time belly-dancing was salient in women’s liberation, a rebellion against male chauvinist constraints on free expression. Driving north on the coastal highway I would pass long, low, soft hills, the eucalyptus trees at the bottom studded in places with broken hang-gliders. In Santa Barbara I would drive past the mission into the eastern hills where my friends lived, a place of hot tubs and hummingbirds.

The local belly-dance coven had a fluctuating number of dancers, varying from half a dozen to ten. One of the dancers had returned from a time in Britain to find that her partner had taken up with another woman. While he was at work she went out, bought paint and brushes, and spent the day copying deceitful sentences from his letters to her, on his living room walls. Less flamboyant in her personal life, the main dancer in the coven, Ariadne, was a rather large woman, exhibitingamazing, snake-like grace on stage. She would come out slowly, little bells on her ankles and wrists ringing a background music, and accelerate slowly into ever widening gyres.

In the evening we would all sit in the hot tub, drinking wine and practicing mindfulness, though Ariadne would tease her husband, an engineer, about engineer’s ways of thinking.

Native Californians often have an unconscious moral high tone, likely to sound somewhat self-righteous to others, reflecting a conviction that they already exemplify their new-age ideals. Looking back to that time I do not cease to admire the ideals, or the moral fervor exhibited by the Beats, the Hippies, the folksingers that everyone loved, … but I can also see that consciousness-raising was, by their own lights, at best gradual.

I was in Santa Barbara also in 1979, time of the ‘second’ oil crisis, when President Carter urged everyone to limit their energy consumption (he actually installed solar panels at the White House, which Reagan later removed). Ariadne’s husband, in practical engineer mode, said that if there was going to be gas and oil rationing, it would be like with the water: what they would allow you as normal usage was determined by your past usage. So the thing to do was to use a lot very liberally right now. No one responded with “But what about the earth? Our suffering environment?” The moral insight was already there, I am sure, but seemingly not yet entirely internalized. We enjoyed the extravagance of hot tubs, morally at peace.

The weeks in Adelaide passed peacefully also. There were no belly-dancers, but Graham and his family took me to a Saturday evening country dance and sing along. I sat in a corner and thought about elective affinities, feeling almost sure that I could discern affinities between those two cultures, where I could be present as a guest.

Yosemite and Cuisine

In the spring of ’92, on a walk by the Santa Cruz shore, Ric Otte asked me if I would like to come rock climbing with him and his friends, in Yosemite.  There was another of those things you should do at least once in your life … I thought. Actually it was another of those things that you can get hooked on, like sugar and olives in martinis. My trip did not begin well: the airline shipped my baggage into the unknown.  So the first night Alvin Plantinga shared his tent with me.

We camped in (in)famous Camp Four. Dinner in camp was, remarkably, a beef stew that Jim and Dan had brought along from Michigan.  While we ate someone told a story about how in a shared tent one person dreamt he was being attacked by the other, and starting hitting back.  It must have made an impression on me, for when a lot of noise around midnight woke us up I was sure, in my sleepy state, that in the next tent Jim’s son Dan must have dreamt he was being attacked.  But Al was more awake, he sat up and called “Are you all right?” and crawled out of his sleeping bag to investigate.

Jim and Dan had left a pack with some food outside the tent, and Jim, waking up to shuffling outside, was sure that Ric was as usual playing some practical joke. So he stuck his head out, and yelled “Hey!”  The bear hauled back and slammed him back into the tent — then followed up by sticking his head in.  This bear wasn’t vindictive though, for then he just left.

The ranger came and gave Jim a ticket for leaving food out. Al took Jim to the clinic, where the doctor put eleven stitches into his bleeding scalp. I carried the food out of our tent, looking sheepishly at Ric who pointed to the bear box … It was dramatic even for a night in Camp Four.

Nevertheless we stuck to the plan for the next day, to climb Fairview Dome.  Ric and Dan took charge of me. The others made up a second party.  When they had climbed a pitch, though, Jim had too much of a headache, and they went back to camp.  It is a wonder, in retrospect, that Ric and Dan managed to get me up all those pitches, and I was slowing them down considerably.  We also hadn’t left early. Much of our conversation was about the peach milkshakes to be had in Curry Village once we got down, whether we would meet the others there in the pizza place … bit by bit the talk turned from what we would eat to whether we would get there in time, and then to whether we would be walking down in the dark ….

The last pitch, I remember, we climbed in the light of the moon.  Ric had happily brought a flashlight, but it was a long way down, in increasing, eventually total, darkness.  And Fairview is in Tuolumne so it was quite a drive back too.  We got back to camp at about two in the morning.  Ric and Dan sat down to eat but I managed only to take off my jacket and shoes, lay down in the tent, and was comatose.

There are many, many climbing stories to be told, from the next twenty-five years, but for now I just want to touch on life in Camp Four. It is a very lively, but in itself truly lugubrious place, with a single bathroom, a few water taps for an awful lot of people. But there is a picnic table and bear boxes for each site.  No showers, but Ric found a key to the outdoor showers belonging to the Yosemite Lodge across the road, and those we enjoyed until, a few years later, a flood took out that entire area.  

When it came to cooking we all took turns, but certainly Ric was the most inventive.  I remember especially a time when friends of mine, John and Marie, came there for a hiking holiday.  They got a site in Camp Four, and pitched next to us.  What makes Ric’s cooking memorable on that occasion was a certain contrast.  On the way in we had stopped to shop for food. Ric told me to find the turkey stuffing.  “But we’re not going to have turkey”, I said.  No, the idea is to heat a can of  cream of mushroom soup, you pour it over the stuffing, and Yumm!  

So, come supper time, Ric brings out the stuffing and the mushroom soup.  And I glanced over to the next site.  There was John, tending the camp stove. I was staring.  There was a cloth neatly draped over the picnic table, there were candles, and a bottle of wine, Marie was putting out real wine glasses. I could smell the steak.  Well, probably it was filet mignon that John was preparing, in a cast iron skillet, the way it should be.

I sighed.  I looked at Ric who was happily, nay, proudly, dividing his special dish on our plates.  I thought, well, just in case, I’ll put out some bread and butter ….  Not that I specially wanted a romantic dinner by candle light, of course  ….

The Prima Donnas (2)

What exactly counts as an intellectual prima donna?  Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty were still in Princeton when I arrived there.  Both were famous in the world beyond Princeton, both had enjoyed impact well beyond their own discipline, both were courted for endowed lectures and international conferences.  

But that could be said about such reclusive figures as Kurt Goedel, surely the farthest from even faint prima donna-hood. 

In common usage, literally, a prima donna is the lead singer in an opera; the connotations vary from “temperamental” and “charismatic” through “vain” and “autocratic”, even “petulant”.  I did not mean to play on the negative connotations, but rather on the performance, charisma, and grip on the audience that qualifies a prima donna to be a prima donna.

Meeting in person such characteristics were not obvious in Kuhn or Rorty. Dinners or parties with American academics are not generally feasts of wit and scintillating conversation — Stuart Hampshire gave me the term ADP, “awful dinner party”, when he thought back to his years there — so perhaps I should blame it all on social context.  No one got Kuhn to speak engagingly about paradigms, or even engagingly about anything.  

But Rorty did have personal charisma, in a quiet and understated form.  At that time, at least, it would not be evident until he was off guard: a shy smile, gentle humor, though greatly modified by his deep pessimism.  Sometimes the pessimism seemed to turn dark, even despondent.  I met him one morning outside 1879 Hall, and congratulated him, he had just won the MacArthur ‘genius’ award. “Hmmm …” he said, “It’s meant for people to change their lives.  [pause] I don’t want to change my life.”  He was looking at the ground, sadly reflecting on himself, and on this cultural phenomenon of life-changing grants.

Umberto Eco

 How different everything was among Italians!  In any conversation one could blossom and shine, charm and flatter, be on stage or just quietly glow and bask.  

Umberto Eco was a master in all of these.  It was actually in America that we first met — a party at Rutgers where he came to a symposium.  My friend Ernie introduced me and Eco said, looking at me, artfully puzzled “Oh?  perhaps the son of the logician?”  

This was after he had risen from literary icon to public glory by publishing his novel The Name of the Rose. The book is enormous with lots of bits of Latin and theology, but, as a reviewer wrote, the summer it came out you found it on all the beaches in Europe.  

Eco was a big man with a big personality.  I think it was in 1984 that he spent a longer time in New York, at Columbia University.  One evening after dinner I walked back with him to his apartment in the West Village.  On one street he suddenly stopped, in front of a window display of a crystal ball.  “Let’s have our palms read!”  

As we went in a dark-haired young woman appeared from behind a curtain.  My hand first … all the news was good, except that my crucial life-line was broken in several places, which pointed to abrupt and shattering changes.  Then she sat down with Eco’s hand and became troubled and seemingly disturbed. “I’m sorry but I have to tell you, you will never have much money ….  But you will see happiness, unexpected”.  , He had just sold the movie rights to The Name of the Rose, with Sean Connery in the star role, probably for a million or so. I don’t know about the unforeseen happiness.

Later among friends Eco was telling some raunchy jokes that poked fun at academics, and he told of our evening in suggestive tones: “We came upon a door with a red light above it, of course we had to go in …”.  

Norwood Russell Hanson

My paradigm of a prima donna: Russ Hanson, a greater than life-size philosopher with a buccaneer’s joy in life. 

When I came to Yale, fresh out of graduate school in 1966, they assigned me an office next to Hanson’s, on the 3rd floor of a smallish building, Connecticut Hall.  It was an idyllic time for me, with free time, seclusion up there in the attic, and good friends.  On sunny days I would sometimes climb out of the window to eat my lunch on the roof, like the people in Frayn’s Landing on the Sun.  It was a while before I had much contact with Hanson, who seemed always to be traveling, whether to lecture or to fly his Bearcat, a World War Two fighter plane.  So to begin there were just the stories, how he had challenged the university over a tenure case by flying over the Yale Bowl to drop leaflets, how he had come unscathed out of a lawsuit through expert testimony that the witnesses could not tell whether he was flying just ten feet above the golf course … or farther back, that as a Marine fighter pilot he had been grounded for looping the loop around the Golden Gate bridge.

But he materialized soon enough: the few of us in logic and philosophy of science had a little reading club in Danny’s, Charles Daniels’, rooms.  When Hanson walked in it was less like a human entrance than like a theater’s scene change — he filled the room with both mind and body.  

 For Hanson was not a prima donna of just the stage, his character had no sides, he was what he was through and through.  Or at least, what I saw of him never stopped.  Sometimes I looked a little askance, I guess, but  he would just laugh out loud.  It didn’t matter. He had convinced the world that our language is irremediably theory-laden, that perception was never untutored, and that science could be discussed with literary flair.  I could forgive him anything.

Hanson would ask universities to pay for his gas so he could fly himself instead of paying for airfare for him.  Later that year, in the spring, a phone call woke me up at around midnight, from a colleague, Ron Jager.  “Bas, I’m calling to tell you that Russ died.  He was flying to Cornell, we just got the news, he crashed.”  

There was endless speculation about how he managed to fly into a hill, in the relatively flat country around Ithaca, as he did.  But he died the way he lived, and the way he had said he wanted to die.

j

The Prima Donnas (1)

When I was sixteen our family acquired a black-and-white television set and for a while I was spell-bound.  With my little sisters I would watch Miss Pam show for children, and shows that featured songs like “Remember the Red River Valley” (“and the cowboy who loved you so true”). 

There, on television, is also where I encountered the first of a long series of intellectual prima donnas.  Sometimes malgré moi, given their views — I could not help but admire the ways they had to grip their audience.  

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen 

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a handsome, ascetic man, always fully decked out in bishop’s regalia, could lead you with irresistible logic to the conclusion he would expressed with passion and fury.  

He would begin calmly, a theology professor amiably addressing a seminar, joking with the audience, getting some good-feeling laughs — segueing into a syllogistically designed argument, and then, when the inevitable conclusion came close, burst out:

But men are not pigs!!

Now I know that this man, the voice of orthodox Catholicism, was the prime Christian anti-Communist crusader in America for some thirty years.  But what a speaker!  Think of the efficacy of this technique:  

the argument, carried out in full rigor, cannot possibly reach the conclusion that is his aim — but just before that conclusion is due, he shouts his value judgment with full demagogic force, with overwhelming conviction, and takes us across the logical gap! 

Television lost its appeal for me fairly soon, as I went to college — as it happens, I met Miss Pam there, who was in one of my college classes.  We even went for a walk, but was too shy and too scared, I was truly out of my depth.  My brush with stardom …  Oh well … Anyway, now logic began to shape my critical faculties, and Sheen was quickly forgotten, television lost its glamor.   However, philosophy turned out to have its prima donnas too: philosophers who could grip the imagination through intellectual charisma, and whose public persona loomed large on the philosophical scene. 

Paul Feyerabend

The first I actually saw in person was Paul Feyerabend, who came to a symposium in Pittsburg when  I was a student there.  He strode on to the stage, supporting himself with crutch, a Byronic figure with open shirt collar, and a half-cynical, half-challenging smile.  The whispers among us students were about a war wound, was it from the battle of Berlin? Fighting in the German army, or perhaps the Hitler Jügend — forbidden glamor, linked to intellectual prowess.

Eventually of course I learned the facts (he was in the army as a young officer, in the retreat from Russia), but to my regret I did not meet Feyerabend very often. He came to Yale in my second year there, on a visit to discuss the department’s attempt to recruit him.  As a junior faculty, ready to give my time, I was delegated to show him around the campus and the town center, and generally entertain him between official functions.  By this time Feyerabend delighted in his role of philosophy’s enfant terrible.  On the world stage he was the Berkeley revolutionaries’ idol.  And for many he was what a writer in the ScientificAmerican magazine called him, The Worst Enemy of Science.  But for me he was the revolutionary writer on philosophy of quantum mechanics, empiricism, and realism, who had helped to shape the sea change in philosophy of science in the fifties and sixties.

The last time we met was memorable (the photos here are from that occasion).  In 1992 we were both in a weeklong conference in the Netherlands, with meetings spread out over several towns.  Feyerabend, who had come with his wife Grazia, gave a tremendous lecture in the famous Hooglandse Church in Leiden. For me, who had frankly never escaped from his spell, after all those years still in thrall, that was the exactly right setting.

Michael Scriven and William F. Buckley Jr.

In an earlier post I described my first meeting with Michael Scriven.  A few years later, when I spent a year in Indiana on a visiting appointment, Scriven had already moved to San Francisco.  Pinned on the departmental bulletin board was a California newspaper article that mentioned a fashionable party at his mansion.  But Scriven was coming back, to debate William Buckley.

Buckley was truly famous, on the national stage, the most important writer and lecturer on the political right.  Just a few years before he had debated James Baldwin, and TV was always eager to show his acrimonious but wonderfully witty confrontations with Gore Vidal, the most visible speaker on the left.  It was a coup for the University to stage this debate

So in October 1968, shortly after John Barth presented a reading of his recent novel Giles Goatboy, thematizing the university as universe, Convocation Hall hosted the great debate.  The evening before we had a party for Scriven in the history and philosophy of science department, everyone excited about this return of a glamorous colleague.  Wesley Salmon’s wife, told him “You will love this, Michael, another great chance to project your image!” and Scriven retorted, “Yes, and that needs a very big screen!”.

Certainly, Scriven had dramatic presence on stage. But it paled to insignificance, in my view, when Buckley stood up.  With his patrician New England accent, his seemingly choreographed body language as he spoke, his Shakespearean fluency, he projected not simply his own image but the image of a world.  Buckley’s logic and rigor could distract you from his unspoken premises, and his conclusion he would throw away, as it were, just turning away from the audience to cast it as an aside … I had never, and would never again, see such debating skill.  

In the fifties Buckley had come on the scene with his exposé God and Man at Yale, starting a rightwing revolt against liberal elitism. Looking around us today, we can see that hasn’t run its course yet. In fact, it has migrated down from his patrician, elitist early audience to a large chunk of America.

  Detest the song!  Yes, but there is no begrudging the sheer, though nonchalant, brilliance of the singer.

The president of the student union, who had presided over the debate, announced that it would be judged by the volume of applause.  Michael Scriven, local hero, won hands down.  But that was wrong.

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Feyerabend’s Centennial will be celebrated in 2024, preparations are underway. I do not know what philosophy will have turned out to be in the twenty-first century, but the twentieth was a time of heroes.  

Enough for now, enough for one post.