Category: Blog Post

I don’t read philosophy for answers to the meaning of life or any of the other ridiculous questions that have caused lunatics to bang their heads against the wall for as long as humans have been able to babble. What attracts me again and again to books of philosophy is the marginalia, the odd biographical details and digressions and just plain absurd minutiae that these old fools cough up on such a regular basis. The best biographies –hands down– are of the philosophers. The unhappy little hunchbacks who waddled around the streets of their towns and endured the taunts of rock-throwing children (Kierkegaard). The closet gnomes, martyrs, and maniacs. Empedocles wrote, “Wretches! Utter wretches! Keep your hands from beans!” Three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s eight siblings committed suicide. Kant wrote a treatise on rainbows. And the great master of gloom Schopenhauer took issue with Spinoza’s Ethics over what he perceived to be their disregard for the virtue and dignity of dogs.

I was reading Schopenhauer’s History of Philosophy last night when I discovered the old crank railing against Spinoza for “his as unworthy as false deliverances about animals.” From assertions in the Ethics Schopenhauer concludes, “Dogs [Spinoza] seems not to have known at all. To the monstrous proposition with which the 26th appendix [of the Ethics] opens…the best answer is given by a Spanish literateur of our day (Larra, pseudonym Figaro), ‘He who has never kept a dog does not know what it is to love and be loved.’”

I went and dug around in my basement for a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics to locate the passage that so offended Schopenhauer. Here it is: “Besides men, we know of no particular thing in nature in whose mind we may rejoice, and whom we can associate with ourselves in friendship or any sort of fellowship; therefore, whatsoever there be in nature besides man, a regard for our advantage does not call on us to preserve, but to preserve or destroy according to its various capabilities, and to adapt to our use as best we can.”

I’m officially on the side of Schopenhauer on this important argument, by the way, and was pleased to later run across this additional tribute to dogs (in his own Ethics): “Hence comes the four-legged friendships of so many of the better kind of men, for on what indeed should one refresh oneself from the endless deceit, falseness, and cunning of men if it were not for the dogs into whose faithful countenance one may look without distrust?”

All cows go to heaven

Harmful things of the youth

Odd books

Galley of jazz and blues figurines

Thump Queen: Meryl Truett

New Hampshire Political Primary Trading Cards

J Bradley Johnson

Children’s Books in 1920s Japan

The Karl Fund

Belly Dancers and Harem Girls

This country has long been appalling and astonishing in equal measure, but these days the opportunities to be appalled are mounting by the day, and the sort of astonishment America most commonly traffics in is more and more often the stuff of incredulity and shock rather than genuine and appreciative wonder.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that we are governed by a legion of nitwits and bland, blindly ambitious louts, an almost incomprehensibly undistinguished group of career politicians presided over by an imbecile who is rapidly approaching vulnerable adult status. An imbecile who favors gargantuan belt buckles of the sort most often associated with characters who make a living being tossed from bulls. A stwaggering (half staggering, half swaggering) imbecile who gives new meaning to the term “invalid,” and is possessed of a tragic and cocksure set of delusions of adequacy.

How else to explain how it is that we have found ourselves living in a country where the horizon always seems to blurred with the bruise of some recent horror or pending tragedy?

We could blame ourselves, of course. I’m all for that. And we could certainly blame each other, whatever and whomever we might include under that leaky umbrella of “each other.” The above-mentioned imbecile, after all, has twice had his position of power conferred upon him by people I could not now with a straight face or a clean conscience refer to as “my fellow Americans.”

Every day –and many times throughout every day– I am blindsided by despair at the thought that I am out of token opportunities to officially reject the imbecile who is the President of the United States, and also by the recognition that the ultimate refutation of everything he stands for will now be the responsibility of history, which has a pretty poor track record of responsibility in such matters.

My own refutation, of course, is strictly unofficial, and more irrational (and complete) by the day.

The other thing we could all do at the moment, in response to the horrors and embarrassments of this country and this administration, would be to simply look away. Many people, of course, will and do choose this option, and though it’s tempting, I don’t recommend it.

Instead I’d recommend you take a good long look at what’s happening and where we are. And hold out hope: hold onto it, and also extend it (a seeming contradiction whose real possibility is a testament to the versatility of hope), offer as much of it as you can spare to someone who needs it more than you do. There are always plenty –too many– of those people out there.

Make of your refutation an action and an embrace, however small and ultimately unsatisfying.

Here are some ways that you can hold out your hope, all of them good ways:

Mercy Corps

Acorn

Feed the Children

HurricaneHousing.Org

The Humane Society’s Disaster Relief Fund

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent round-up of flood/hurricane relief efforts at Instapundit

And finally, as usual, there’s a great collection of links at Peter Scholtes’ always virtuous (and exhaustive) Complicated Fun. Peter’s on my short list of local candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I’d ask you to wipe that smirk off your face. This is a serious matter.

This world is plunging further into darkness.

Okay, so maybe I’m being overly dramatic, but I can barely hold my head up. It’s damned hard to hold your head up when you’re living in a crawl space.

Ordinarily in a situation like this I would warn you: Here comes another stream of incoherence, but at the moment there’s something you can perhaps explain to me.

The other night, when I was out walking with the visiting black angel, I kept seeing these neighborhood watch signs that read, “If I Don’t Call the Police, My Neighbor Will.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Does that not sound like a complete cop-out to you? Doesn’t that sound like passing the fucking buck? It’s so American, yet I’ve no doubt it’s supposed to be seen as some kind of deterrent to criminals. Why would it be, though?

Because, look, that sign is logically fucked. It’s a shrug of indifference, or at least a smug acknowledgment that, hey, don’t sweat it; somebody else will take care of it.

Let’s suppose, for instance, that each of us assumes the position of the ‘I’ on that sign, that each of us takes that attitude. Do you see what I’m trying to say? If up and down the block each neighbor automatically assumes that his neighbor will call the police, then of course nobody calls the police.

Maybe, come to think of it, that would be for the best after all. No sense in getting messed up in something that’s none of our business in the first place.

In the end, what it comes down to is appetite–

the enforced idleness, the solitude:

nothing, hectares of nothing, litanies of nothing on microfiche.

—August Kleinzahler, from “Epistle XIV”

The future is stupid.

—Jenny Holzer

I have always been clueless, but I am discovering that my cluelessness is constantly extending itself into entirely new continents of ignorance, and even moving resolutely like a glacier over existing continents in my skull that were once green-swept and shot through with sunlight.

I guess I could choose to see this development as a sort of personal growth, as long as I am willing to extend the concept of growth to include such things as mold and bacteria.

Stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It’s just that sometimes, at a certain point, you just stop telling them.

–Mary Norton, The Borrowers

The tree outside the window wobbled and tossed off light, little sparks like Instamatic flashbulbs in the moonlight. Was it a wagon or a wheelbarrow that so much depended on? Either way, nothing depends on them now.

I watched a dog creeping through the backyard shadows, stunned to still be doing God’s work early in the 21st century. He paused and listened to what he did not know was a train, a nice rhythm, the night murmuring at some safe distance. Big moving water, perhaps, where another race of dogs lived with its secrets.

The first plodding steps into September, moving resolutely into the black teeth. Soon enough the house will be smelling like a wet blanket baking, winter heat limbering up in the floorboards. And out there somewhere, sprawled behind me in the vacuum of another long night completing its free fall, are the remains of the blankest summer I can ever recall: three months on my back in the dead grass, staring up into the confused canopy of a condemned elm that obliterated the stars. A summer without a soundtrack, without a scrapbook, without a single snapshot or picture postcard to remember it by.

The wading pool in the park across the street has been drained, and the days will be marked now by nothing but the dull racket of jumping jacks and shoulder pads and the insolent gaggle of high school students shuffling along the sidewalks on their way to Taco Bell.

The cicadas are almost done; death, I suppose, the Arizona they fly off to for the winter. They burn down entire villages every autumn and flee to angel dusks. Soon enough the shuddering ghost-crying of geese evacuating across the moon and disappearing into the clouds.

It was on a night like this, somewhere across the world, that I watched as a shirtless man leaned back and coughed fire into the fog. He would swish his canteen of gasoline and nudge with his boot the tin cup at his feet. “It costs money!” he shouted. “Don’t just look!”

“How long can a man possibly breathe fire?” a bored Frenchman asked his date. “There must be other things as well. It is the same thing every night.”

“Perhaps that is what gives it the power it has,” the woman said. “The fact that there is nothing more, that this is all he has: just the fire, just the instant, repeated again and again. The poor man is clearly dying. Give him ten francs.”

A Statement From Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu