My previous post was generated in part by conversations with my brothers and my son about music and about cover tunes. Here’s a cover that undresses and redresses the original, discovering something in it, something warm and real, that Van Halen could not have discovered. (The guitar solo at the end is done, I am convinced, with Roddy Frame’s guitar pick firmly in his cheek.)
Music Recommended: Tempting–Jenny Toomey Sings the Songs of Franklin Bruno
Here’s a terrrific album. Jenny Toomey singing Franklin Bruno tunes. A sample:
One of the songs Toomey covers (“Only a Monster”) has recently been covered by Molly Ringwald (no, really).
Happy Anniversary!
Two years ago I began this blog, sitting here, as I am now, at my parent’s home in southern Ohio. Much has changed for me in that time and much remains the same. I began serious reading of Montaigne and Marcel and Merleau-Ponty; I kept working on Wittgenstein and Frege. This blog has been my commonplace book and my testing ground as I have struggled to knead the new into the old, to find my way through a ubiquitous change–not so much of what I believe philosophically, but of how I believe it. I have made plenty of false starts. I have written quite a bit of–well, why shrink from it?–crap. Still, the blog has been of great use to me, primarily because of those among you who have been reading and responding, helping me along. –I don’t plan to go anywhere. There’s still so much to think about.
PI’s Opening Remark
The final paragraph of a paper I am now finishing:
Wittgenstein puts away the common notions that a book, particularly a book of philosophy, should open either by presenting its undeniable first premise or by defining its terms or by telling you what is coming. He does nothing of the sort. He begins instead with a quotation from St. Augustine. That quotation serves as a blessing from St. Augustine, who Wittgenstein venerated; as an example of authority or the lack of it in philosophy, or at least of its nature and its acknowledgment or denial; as a reminder of the way in which philosophy can shape even what seem relatively unremarkable remarks, as if philosophy were always stealing a march on us, out ahead of and so determining what we have it in us to think or to say; as a critical target, carrying with it a germ, a contagion, a communicable if not wholly communicated picture of communication; as a lexicon-in-use, a first glimpse of a use (or attempt at a use) of the words whose use (and non-use) will preoccupy the pages of PI; as invoking connections between philosophy and childhood and education, of the ways in which philosophy is now accessible, now inaccessible to childhood, and of the ways in which childhood is now accessible, now inaccessible to philosophy (what makes more merry or kills more joy than childhood, than philosophy?), and of the ways in which philosophy requires us to learn how to learn and how not to learn and how to unlearn what there is to learn or what we have learnt. But of course not all of that can be clear on a first reading of the first remark. Which means, I take it, that the remark has not been read until it has been double-read, until it can be read in relation to the rest of the book and the rest of the book in relation to it. As I said, PI begins but has no beginning, ends but has no ending. When we open it at the first page and we confront its first remark, we are confronting the whole of PI, not just one remark. We may make PI’s acquaintance one remark at a time, but we do not come to understand it that way. In for a dime, in for a dollar–the book makes no small change.
I Don’t Believe You (Video)
Maybe the greatest video of all time. Maybe. (Someone commented on it: “This video taught me how to love.”)
One of my favorite songs by Magnetic Fields. I particularly love the shifts from use to mention that begin and end the song, insisting on a distancing from language that mirrors the disbelief in the “lover’s” claims.
Lancelot Andrews
Edith Stein on Sister Clara and Husserl
Edith Stein writes from beside the death-bed of her Sister Clara to her Sister Adelgundis, who was herself beside the death-bed of their teacher, Husserl:
Pax Christi!
Dear Sister Adelgundis,
Our greetings go from one death-bed to the other. Our Sister Clara departed today for eternity, very gently, after a year of suffering. I commended our dear Master [Husserl] to her often, and will do so again tonight at the wake. I believe one is well taken care of in her company. She was our eldest lay sister, tireless in the lowliest of tasks, but a strong and manly character who had grasped and lived the Carmelite ideal with complete determination. So faith turned it into a completely spiritual life. I am not at all worried about our dear Master. It has always been far from me to think that God’s mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church’s boundaries. God is truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not…
Most cordially, your
Teresa Benedicta a Cruce
Staying Put
Here are a few lines from Fr. Stephen Freeman, addressing place and stability:
In monastic tradition, a monk makes four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. Most people are familiar with the first three but not with the fourth. In classical monastic practice it meant that a monk stayed put: he did not move from monastery to monastery. It was not a new idea. Before this vow was formalized in various Rules, there was already the saying from the Desert: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”
I have been lucky to have been able to stay put. Perhaps, if I had been more talented or more ambitious or both, I would not have stayed put. Perhaps I would have aimed more seriously at career upward mobility. But I was not more talented and was not and am not more ambitious. So, here I am. So, here I stay. Here I hope to stay–until I stay put permanently, resting, I hope, in peace.
When I got my job at Auburn, my teacher, Lewis White Beck, was very pleased. He grew up not far from here. His brother still lived (in those days) just north up 85, in Westpoint, Ga. (I used to visit him to hear stories of Lewis’ childhood.) Beck counseled me about Auburn: “Don’t go and leave. Stay and make it the kind of place where you want to be.” The philosophy department at Auburn has become that, although I deserve little of the credit. But I do think that staying has made me more of the person I have wanted to be. I do not mean I am not deeply flawed; of course I am, of course. Still, staying put has been a revelator and tutor: I have learnt something about fidelity and commitment, about what it means to work with others to build something bigger and better than the builders. I have learnt something about being unknown and unremarked, and about first being restively reconciled to it and later accepting it and still later coming to desire it. “Live hidden” is good advice. (Beck was once asked by the NYTimes (if I remember correctly) if they could do a feature on him, a sort of Elder Philosopher at Home bit. He declined, telling them that he was determined to enjoy “the beneficent obscurity of senectitude”. –Is that a line from Gibbon?) I guess I still have a few years before I enter my senectitude, but it is not too early for obscurity to be beneficent.
As I grow older, my classes and my students fascinate me more than ever before. Philosophical problems incarnate are now my meditation. Philosophical problems disincarnate no longer exert much pull on me. Perhaps what I have come to appreciate more fully is that there is a strict specificity about philosophical problems–they exist only in a specific person and they can be grappled with only in conjunction with that person and they can be solved–in whatever sense they are solved–only by that person. Where I am not that person, I can help or hurt (from the lectern, from the page); but I can only help or hurt; but I can no more solve the problem for him or her than I can be prudent for him or her. Philosophical problems arise from and are finally only responsive to the living experience of a specific person. I believe I have learnt that from Socrates–himself a master of staying put.
As Robert Frost once recommended: “Don’t get converted. Stay.”
Gaston Bachelard (Photo)
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 