In the near future our good host Hiller M. Westchop will give a more formal and detailed introduction of who I am, but in the meantime I will provide my own informal greeting to my new audience of readers.  Salutations. I am Laurence White, American pragmatist, and I will be a contributing editor at Rhapsodic Nonsense for as long as Hiller has a modicum of mental stability, self-respect, and sense of duty.

I have known Hiller for a long time now, much longer than potherbs, and it is fair to say that we have had a fairly complex relationship. I will let Hiller decide whether he wants to provide more details, but needless to say we began our younger years as agreeing friends only to find ourselves now on the opposite ends of quite a few intellectual spectrums.  This gap eventually led Hiller to refuse to talk to me ever again.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself speaking with him over the phone being invited to post articles on his blog.  Considering we were at this point rivals bordering on enemies, I was suspicious of his offer and refused.  It was only after I deliberated over a long and slow glass of whiskey in my office that I decided to call him back and accept. He was overjoyed, and eager.

Why did I reverse my decision? Why had he called me? Why overjoyed, and why eager?

In one word: war.

In boxing, there are three loose categorizations of fighting style that each boxer fits into.  These styles are notable in that they have a rock-paper-scissors relationship in which one is advantageous over one and weak against the other.  What these categorizations are is beyond the scope of this post; suffice to say, each style emphasizes certain strengths and exposes certain weaknesses.  A boxer tends to have no choice in the style he chooses because he has certain physical characteristics that lend themselves to one style over the other.

There are, if we are fortunate, great moments in boxing when two incredible fighters with opposite styles meet and battle in a series of title bouts.  These moments are rare, but punctuate the history of boxing and make it more than a simple sport; the physical battle becomes a clash of natures, of essence.

As is true in boxing, so too in the engagement of ideas.  We should all feel fortunate when finding our final opponent, that rare mind that runs in the opposite grain.  I will be locked in battle with Hiller for my entire life, and, therefore, I will be closer to him than any wife or any lover, for only in hatred and competition do we drive ourselves to fully know a mind, if only to destroy it. Negative other-destruction will lead to positive self-construction, and the reader can only benefit.

While large businesses have a well-established reputation as dehumanizing, emotionless, and out of control by the men who made them, they do offer one distinct positive advantage over the oft-praised “small business,” which the US Government and populace commonly attempt to deify. Small businesses tend to be dominated by one individual, or perhaps a family, and this small group tends to rule their kingdom with a clenched iron fist. Because the public eye is not aimed at these individual businesses, such owners’ policies are rarely disseminated by the mainstream media or challenged in the court of public opinion. For that reason, these businesses tend to be inefficient, and their workers abused.

It is necessary to stress this last point, for the cultural consensus is that larger businesses offer infinite rows of cubicles lit by glaring fluorescent lights coupled with a soul-crushing bureaucracy that rarely obeys laws of logic or common sense. The point of this article is not to comment on whether these criticisms are true, but only to suggest that such bureaucracy offers distinct advantages over the “mom-and-pop” small business that is often mentioned in the speeches of politicians with a positive spin.  The workers in such a small business rarely have any institutional recourse to protest the decisions of their superiors.  It is “shape up or ship out,” “get with the program,” et cetera, et cetera.  One must follow the rigid rules set forth by one or two individuals; these rules have no institutional merit and are not standardized, allowing the owners to do and say what they want, whenever they want, without accountability.

Blanche Dubois

I find myself repugnant.  A daily cleansing wash is necessary, for this blog has undergone a hideous transformation into a blog of Philosophy, an exposition on bag-grab logic tricks performed by hollow men whose vaulted ideas consistently fail to speak to actual human experience.  But, as I have repeated numerous times (and of course I must repeat myself, for those without intelligence need such intellectual points to be driven into their minds with all the subtlety of a kodiak roaming the arctic tundra), we must know the enemy in order to destroy him. I have already spoken of Royce’s argument, the connection of dualism (the belief in both a corporeal mind and an incorporeal spirit) of the mind with metaphysics (or religion, if so inclined) in order to argue a materialist position on the mind (there is no spirit or soul, only the physical brain(and I will not repeat myself again. Already I tire of this needless retread.  My readers sometimes seem akin to potherbs in terms of pot-addled brain deficiencies)).

I will suspend hyperbole and rhapsodic machinations to further some foolish and constantly-failing pursuit of beauty for a moment here.  This is important.  I will reduce, as in Paul Auster, my words to pure symbolic impenetrability in order to facilitate understanding.  Or, that seems nonsensical.  I will present my points concisely, simply.  I will reduce.  I will simplify.  Cleansing wash, again.  I am repugnant (I hate myself!). Let us continue.

Royce’s argument is Hobbesian in its base.  The following are points Royce will agree with, that Hobbes formulated in his materialistic view of the universe, and are quotes from Hobbes’s famous treatise Leviathan.

1.  The world…that is, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal…and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth…that which is not body, is no part of the universe.” Simple enough, is it not?

2.  ”When a body is once in motion, it moveth, unless something else hinder it, eternally.”  A body, in this case, is any object in the universe.

3.  ”For seeing life is but a motion of limbs…For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels…”  A man is a body in motion.  Nothing more. We are, in Royce’s words, fragile meat. Or in Hobbesian terms, automata.

This follows with Royce, and general science, does it not?  And of course, these ideas lead to an intensely frightening understanding of the world we live in, an idea on which the axiomatic method of science relies upon: the concept of causality, or cause and effect. A cause and effect which must be rooted temporally: “Whatsoever effects are hereafter produced, shall have a necessary cause, so that all the effects have been or shall be produced have their necessity in things antecedent.”  In modern terms, the cause must come before the effect.

In this reading, in a universe of cause and effect,  all is but one endless chain, and you and I, our thoughts, our emotions, all LIFE, is included in this chain. A rigidly deterministic chain, one without free will, and, most importantly, one without direction, without value, without teleology, without purpose. An aimless universe.

Does that not horrify you as it horrifies me?  I have lain awake, cursing the air I breathe out of fear for the monstrous nothing that exists (or doesn’t exist) around us.  Do not denigrate my thoughts with Sartrean “existentialism” and worms in the heart.  This is true endlessness, and lazy-eyed frenchmen cannot encapsulate such…things with mere words.

But there is a strange problem, one of those seeming philosophical bag-grab tricks I spoke of earlier.  Materialism, causality, leads to strange conclusions, infinite regressions, self-defeating arguments.  For we, our brains and senses, are part of this causal flux. Our senses erected the edifice of science, just so science, in its infinite wisdom, could tell us that we do not understand our own brains, our senses are often incorrect, and that we are not in control. And so, science, in destroying the intuitive reliability of the senses and the mind, seems to destroy itself.  In Leo Strauss’s words, “consistent materialism necessarily culminates in skepticism.”  And of course, any “scientific materialism could not become possible if one did not first succeed in guaranteeing the possibility of science against the skepticism engendered by materialism…One had to discover or invent an island that would be exempt from the flux of mechanical causation.”

I have spoken often of the wave that we stand up to, our teeth bared.  As the roaring water whirls in white, ready to crash on our near-broken bodies, we must stand tall, and forever keep from being brushed aside.  We are, in a word, an island.  I myself, have no answer to Royce’s argument.  Perhaps, the world is mechanistic, and free will is lost.  But this skepticism that comes from materialism was a thorn in Hobbes’s side.  It precluded science and knowledge of the world.  His solution was to decide that “we have absolutely certain or scientific knowledge only of those subjects of which we are the causes, or whose construction is in our own power or depends on our arbitrary will.” Hobbes used this idea to promote math as a way to understand and draw knowledge from the world, the construction and definition of which was an entirely human cause (an anchor, a foundation).  But I will move in a different direction.  For construction, creation, leads us, inevitably and forever, to my beloved, to beauty, to rapture, to art, to art, to art.  And it is art, that act of human creation, that imagined and fictional world, that allows us, for but a moment, to provide “a cold glass of water on a hot day,” to allow us to know this unknowable universe we exist in, for things to feel right, to not be rooted in uncaring chaos, to be purposeful.  Perhaps it is a fiction, but it is a lovely fiction, and I could not live without it.  In the words of Blanche Dubois, my heroine forever: “I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”

O, my Island in murky waters, may I starve to death on your lonely shores!

The Young Couple Threatened by Death

I have tried to accomplish so much in these precious few pages, and yet I feel I have done nothing – nothing! – to expel certain notions.  I perhaps started too far along in the journey, and what is important is to start at the beginning.  We must break down the problems into their composite parts, into atoms, and reconnect them to create a new synthesis of idea that will carry you forward in the future.

So we start.  And we will start with my journey, or, more particularly, the rabid journey of ideas that I have had to contend with.  I have been exceedingly critical of philosophy and science, and so it may seem strange to you that I have a distinct admiration for those rattling and hollowing austere thinkers of the past.  I will address this seeming hypocrisy in the future, but let it be known to the Tomfool and to all corners of the known, civilized world that a certain basic knowledge of philosophy is necessary in order to counteract its dire influences.  ”Know thy enemy,” and certainly thy must!, for we must be able to defend ourselves.

When I was young, a good friend of mine was arguing in favor of atheism.  I have always been troubled with atheists, their pseudo-nihilism and their preening, pretentiousness.  One must be careful, for the atheist commonly disparages the dogma and close-minded religious monk, while striking out like a snake at any one who may think differently then them.  Perhaps Jesus Camp should be counteracted by the amateur scientists and Computer programming majors in the academic institutions who make up the ranks of this vile and contemptible hypocrisy.

Needless to say, with these thoughts running in my mind, I argued with my friend Xavier P. Royce, a talented and notoriously devious thinker, for an agnostic point-of-view, one that rejects organized religion while preaching in favor of the fact that both the “there is nothing after we die” and the “after we die there is another world” were equally dogmatic positions that assume the rules of death follow our rules of life.  ”Who knows where we will be after we die?” I concluded with a grin of smugness and slight satisfaction, for so far I had managed to block his advances and leave him treading water.  He was unable to push forward, climb the ladders and have at the walls with his previous skirmishes, and went back to retreat.  But then the words “we and I” suddenly stopped him.  There was no facial expression, only a realization, a new path, a crack in the strong exterior I had built that he knew he could exploit.  It wasn’t a poking or a testing argument; it was a secret tunnel that was right before his eyes.  He merely had to lay the gunpowder and the siege would end.  ”‘We’” he said, more to himself.  Then he presented a simple argument that left me reeling.

He presented my argument for me in new light.

1) You are arguing that either could be or couldn’t be an afterlife, and that it is impossible to tell, since we live that there is one or not, are you not?  Yes, I replied.

2) So, he said.  You must believe that, in order for the afterlife to exist, that there is something akin to a soul.  Something that is not material that allows us to retain a semblance of identity in the afterlife, as you say.

3)The tunnel was there, and I knew at the point there was a trap, a pressure plate I couldn’t see, but my perception was failing me.  My heart was beating, I knew defeat was waiting to spring its debilitating trap. “I suppose,” I said, uncertain.

4) You are a dualist, then?  And the word, that Cartesian hell, broke my spirit.  ”No!” I cried. “No!” I began to throw out words and terms in a great effusion, akin to throwing whatever rock or object lays at hand, in order to defend myself.  I started speaking of functionalism, phenomenology, the color red, exterior states, all sorts of nonsense that I could not coalesce into a proper argument.

5) Royce continued for some time, and then, with a conclusion, said: “I cannot believe in such a position.  For it is difficult for me to accept, but all evidence points to the fact that me, everything that I am, all of my thoughts, are tied up in this fragile piece of meat and mass of neurons that are my brain and body.  Everything that I am. There is no evidence of such a soul, and I leave room open for such a development…but then again, even such a fantastic discovery wouldn’t improve your position, would it?” He stopped for a second.  ”Some have asked me, how can you believe this?  Doesn’t it make the world and our lives empty? (And it does! Oh dear reader, my god it does).  I say, and this I believe, that the sum of what we are is greater then the parts.  That we are functional, as a computer is, but complex beyond belief, and it allows us to do amazing things, to be amazing things.”  He stopped, looking at my face, and seeing my crushed look he started to say, with some regret, “It is difficult to accept I know.  But I cannot see it any other way.”  We shared a moment perhaps, of crushing defeat, his having come with this revelation when it first came to him, mine happening in that then present time, with his sharing of an idea that made me feel as if I was but an ant, less then an ant, less then a grain of sand.  Nothing.  I was no sum, no parts, just an empty program that “moveth unless something else hinder it, eternally.” And so it ended.

Royce had concocted a powerful potion.  He had connected dualism to metaphysics. The only way to argue in favor of a religious position was to argue for dualism, which is as close to philosophical poison  as there is.   I left in a disgrace, although I was impressed.  We left on good terms, and he told me he appreciated the argument, and my willingness to discuss.  Our other friend had left the room in disgust, perhaps because he had already experienced this “truth” and refused to be exposed to its interminable power.

I have a response, which I will present in the next post.  But I have thought often of this problem.  I want you, the dear reader, to ponder it as well.  My response will probably not be enough, but I still believe that there is more to the human mind then the neurons.  I also think this argument can lead to absurd conclusions, as there is an implicit position in this conflation of dualism and metaphysics that we must route out, akin to the implicit dualism of metaphysics.  It is not enough to defeat Royce, but it may be enough to have us start anew.  My god, let us start anew!

I, Hiller M. Westchop, am an individualist.  I despise  communitarians and their ilk (although do not be fooled by the current political debate; I am no Randian, as I do not believe in listening to sophomoric and intellectually (and almost certainly physically) sterile women bespeak to the age old-conflict between public and private), and this hatred finds its rallying cry, its symbol, in the wanton compartmentalization of particular men into abstract groups by politicians, academic institutions, psychologists, and philosophers.  Such monikers – conservative or liberal, Myers-Briggs, Type A or Type B, Hedgehog or Fox - routinely fail to capture reality, to even partially describe the complexity of the individual mind.  So conservative-liberal begins to shift to “feeling thermometers,” the two types become the five factors become the Jungian 8 become the 16 personality factors.  The categories, inevitably, break down.

But categorization can hold at times, can it not?  Even Bivalence will have its occasional victories, and we must give credit where credit is due, and there are certain examples where the world can be reduced to a simple and shaky but not altogether unpleasant black-and-white picture.  I think we can agree that West has dominated over East intellectually and culturally (as much as the sad fetishizations of the anthropologist would argue otherwise; “Does the truth come in blows?” Saul Bellow asks, and the anthropologist must face the truth: you are nothing more than a modern-day Gauguin, a soft, fat, opulent white man with curious ways obsessed with the orient (I don’t blame the lust, merely the abject denial of reality!)).  There is, of course, the racial element, although I do not propose that whites are superior to the minorities, only that, recently, we have been winning the war (and it is a war; all is conflict).  And, finally, I would propose my own categorization, with help from Sigrid Nunez’s “A Feather on the Breath of God,” those who have been ravished and those who have not.

Of course, the word ravish usually refers to the rape of a woman, but my use of the word is not altogether inappropriate.  For you who have been ravished have had…something…taken away by life.  It could be a death of a family member, an accident as a child, a crippling disease.  What matters is that you have been dominated.  Your ideals, your expectations for what life would bring, has been stamped out of you against your will.  And you see those who have not been ravished, those who have a concrete and whole family, where life has proceeded on an uninterrupted track, and you hate them, or subvert them, or reject them outright. There is a realization, that life is chaotic and things are not under your control, that the cavemen who would stare up at the stars in fear, wondering whether the sun would rise again the next day, were right. That the modern man, playing god, convinced he can control his own destiny, is wrong.  And neuroses ensue, phobias and fears, sadsack attempts to get things to be how you intended them to be.  They fail.  And you age.  And then perhaps you find God, perhaps you grow bitter, perhaps you are apathetic or driven or cannot live on.  What is certain is that your hate for those that have not been ravished quickly switches to pity, for you know something they don’t.

Everyone is ravished eventually.

“Joey Chang had two little siblings, a girl and a boy. As we sat eating spareribs, these two were all over my father, climbing into his lap, swinging from his arms until finally he gave up trying to eat and let them drag him off. For the rest of the afternoon he played with them nearby on the lawn… Back home from the barbecue, my sisters and I were downcast.  ”He never played like that with us.”  A revelation and a shock, that brief glimpse of a happy active father.  Our mother didn’t see anything shocking about it.  ”Ach, such adorable little Chinese kids — what do you expect?  You have to forgive him.  I would probably be the same with German children”…”Why did you go with this man?  What did you want?” The doctor sitting across from me is a woman. A stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face.  I look at that face and think: “How can she possibly understand?  This woman has never been ravished.”  ~Sigrid Nunez

But you know, there are some things about hipsters I don’t really like all that much. Well, it isn’t about not liking, it’s just about…what is bothering to me.  It is the fashion of it. The clothes. The hipster symbol.  It’s the skinny jeans and the Urban Outfitter clothes. The styled hair and emphasis on layers and winter hats during the summer.  Little holes in chicks’ shirts where you can stick your thumb out.  Listen, I don’t mind them, but they are kind of bad.  Okay, here’s an example.  So there is this guy I know, I may have mentioned him before, I just call him Mushroom Man (I don’t know if he’ll see this).  You know, he is just so fake!  He has long hair, beard, wears plaid and hipster jeans.  He looks like a hipster.  But the parts I like about hipsters, aren’t about looks.  It is about meaning, about principles and caring, isn’t it? Mushroom man…he is a fashion expert.  He has personally told me that he thinks of himself as a living work of art.  I mean, how fucking superficial can you be?  All he cares about is looks! He doesn’t go to the local sustainable grocery store and eat beet soup all winter like me.  He doesn’t pick up trash and try and clean up our neighborhood.  He doesn’t bike (wait, that is wrong, he has some store-bought mountain bike with 28 gears or whatever). He just smokes pot and talks about some guy named Coetzee all the time.  He works out at a gym! He has a job at a law firm! But Dina just looks at him with these stars in her eyes, and I’m over here, skinny as a rail and working as a tour guide at an organic chocolate factory…

Listen, I didn’t mean for this to become a post about my personal stuff.  And this isn’t a post about hipsterdom or just hipster fashion; this is a post about fashion in general. And in general people’s concern with fashionable clothes is a waste of time.  It is superficial.  It is consumerism at its worst.  I hate how the people I know always talk about sustainability, but then they go and buy up tons of clothes  from designer stores.   Even clothes from thrift stores aren’t much better, because it is our understanding of clothes themselves that needs to change.  Clothes are supposed to be practical.  I only have a week’s worth of outfits myself, and I do laundry every Saturday night. From a practical standpoint, that is just enough so that I don’t smell bad.  Makes sense right?  That’s how we should approach clothes.  We don’t need 100 different cuts or 20 different pairs of different colored work shoes or any of that.  If it is hot out, we don’t need clothes, except for maybe protection against thorns and stuff.  If it is cold, then we have economical and efficient sweaters, or coats. Shoes to protect and insulate our feet.  Simple things.    I think before textiles and clothes factories, that is how people approached clothes.  Thinking of them as tools, as things to be used, with a function.  I mean, I guess you had different dress for different classes, and the nobles had tons of dressy, useless clothes, but that was a bad thing, wasn’t it? A bad function.  And I guess, has it really changed?  Nowadays we all fancy ourselves a bunch of nobles, all looking for the best clothes.  Because we still think that if we have the right clothes, we can convince anyone of anything.  We can convince them we are thin, or that we are rich, or smart.  Everyone is so well groomed, but meanwhile there is trash on the ground, species going extinct, water wasted with every flush,  invasive species, global warming, oil spills; a dying planet, but another perfect world, filled with deceit and unnatural beauty, that will live forever.

I just thought of something.  Dina once said fashion and clothes are Art.  And I am an Artist.  I respect and appreciate Art. Am I being hypocritical?  I don’t know.  But I can’t honestly look at Free People, at Urban Outfitters, at Gap and Banana Republic, and see anything but sheer capitalism, the bottom line, the red or the black.  I can’t look at Mushroom Man and his skinny jeans and perfectly-fitted euro shirts and bright neon green shoes, or those skinny models walking down the runway, or those pictures in Cosmopolitan or People or Vogue and think, he’s been fooled, she’s been fooled, Mushroom Man and Dina and even me, for caring so much and writing this post and for being jealous and angry; everyone has been taken for a big, stupid fool.

Oh dear reader, I worry for your safety and your mental health.  Much of the difficulty in fighting the darkness, in fighting the black wind which threatens to suffocate the light, is in the revealing of delicate and unfortunate truths, such as in my previous post.  It would be so easy to read of this world, to learn more of its inner workings and inconsistencies, to finally see the spiral of decadent decay, the wave rearing, curling, crashing, breaking and tearing us asunder…it would be so easy to stop fighting and give up hope, to let that wave sweep us from our feet because we believe that then the pain will stop, that the curse will lift, and we can just drift, drift in peace along the current…

But no! Never! Sadness reigns, but we fight!  And there is glory, romance, beauty in that! We all must remember that the darkness, the hate, the ugly and fearful; that will always exist and never end.  We will never be able to clear that wave, it will always threaten us and provide anxiety and torment, but the swim! the resistance, the digging of our feet in the sand with our teeth bared, salt water and sweat and blood dripping from our hair into the rising tide…that is worth something! The stubbornness to survive, to power your body through the wave, to swim and to tread as long as it takes, that defines success!

I will leave you with a villanelle by Dylan Thomas, one I often return to when the water seems too deep:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There have been many days, dear reader, when I have felt the world has crushed my spirit.  ”A vague statement filled with overblown rhetoric” you may say with a loud sniff, and I would not blame you, yet I implore you to suspend your belief for but a brief moment and try and ignore how typical and overwrought my prose must sound.  Instead, bring yourself back to the times when the world has seemingly destroyed your will, whether through ill luck or doubt and regret.  There are those dark times in the middle of the night when you lie awake, eyes staring at some spot on the ceiling, and, in a vision, a failed moment or a poor choice you once made looms before your eyes and you curse aloud at the fool you once were, and your eyes brim with regret, and you clutch your covers, trembling with a mixture of rage and fear as well as a distinct feeling that the past is both gone and omnipresent, conditioning your life and your thoughts even now, to the point where you yourself don’t even exist.

I question if you, dear reader, oh tomfool in the dark, can possibly understand my words, yet I hope you do, because these regrets are the concern of this post and, in some ways, all my posts.  This concern stems from Malcolm Gladwell and his self-congratulatory exercise Outliers, the “story of success.”   Those floating moments, those days when the darkness has seemed to sink into every cranny of my being and I can do nothing but claw at the walls of my modern prison in frustrated anguish, occur because I still cling to an antiquated definition of success, a definition I believe Gladwell implicitly believes to be true (one of the great failures of his work is that he never properly defines “success” through words, instead only bringing forth examples as varied as Bill Gates to Jewish lawyers to entire Asian populations): success is built through the eyes of one’s peers.  In Gladwell, this manifests itself in both a general pop-cultural assumption (a Lawyer or computer expert is automatically successful) or in some kind of measurement, almost always money (the exception being the Asians with their math test scores, although, as we saw with the IQ tests, testing does not lead to success in Gladwell’s mind (any confusion you may have is just a greater argument against the intellectual rigor of Gladwell’s work)).  These two manifestations are closely linked, as, in America, money is generally assumed to equal success. The ironically idiotic movie “Idiocracy” uses all of its lack of cleverness and blunt force trauma to drive this point home, all the while making the entirely stupid assumption that the rich are somehow smarter than the poor; I have met both groups in equal measure, and I can say with confidence that there are similar(ly small) numbers of those that see the light and similar(ly large) numbers of those that filled with the dank stench of mental incompetence and lack of intelligence.  I will not dally with the witless barbarian in these matters, for if you believe that the rich are smarter than the poor I suggest (no, I command!) you leave this webpage and never return again.  I always remember that I try the shepherd (my “burden,” if you will) the weak tomfool from intellectual decay, not the weak savage who has had the misfortune to be born in some sweltering filthy hovel.

I have gotten away from the point, so let us assume in manner of thought experiment that Gladwell’s suppositions are true, that his definition of success relies more on whimsy chance and fate and less on pure talent or intelligence. I believe there is a clear metaphor here which can part the heady clouds that threaten to unravel my mind even at this moment: the effect of determinism on moral responsibility for action.  Quite simply, if everything we do is determined for us beforehand, we, by definition, have no control over our actions.  If we have no control, and my person were to commit some moral travesty, well, how could you hold me responsible?  I had no control; I was fated by the gods, or by science, whatever you wish, they accomplish the same thing.  There is no moral responsibility in a deterministic universe.  Similarly, if Gladwell’s success stories owe much of their success (again, Gladwell’s terms)  to chance and fate, then how can we consider them a success?  Perhaps they made some important choices, but more often then not they were lucky, and that luck translated into a series of slight advantages that built over time. There success is illusory; it was, as Gladwell put it, a “gift”!  Yes! And there we reach a problem with Gladwell’s definition of success, or any definition of success involving some external factor, including your peers.  A definition of success must be based on your choices.  And any “peers” are external factors are outside of your control.  Perhaps you are a painter that has produced the most exquisite painting in the world,  but, for whatever reason, your work is not recognized.  Were you unsuccessful? What if your peers are all much worse than you?  What if you were poor, and the painting was never seen?  What if it was burned in a fire?  Doesn’t it still matter?  Aren’t you still a success!?  Didn’t what you accomplished still matter!?? Wouldn’t it have mattered more, been better, than some painting by a lesser painter who, through his birth and luck, was internationally recognized?  What of the nurse who touches souls left and right with his or her soft words of encouragement and hope?  Who brings more happiness with a touch of kindness or smile than the mealy doctor with his hooked nose and pompous attitude who prolongs life with all of the pompousness and disrespect that only ego and luck can furbish?  If she is not recognized, don’t her actions still matter?  Remember as a younger pre-adolescent, arguing foolish philosophical concepts, some friend bringing up that hated topic, the tree that falls and the sound that no one hears.  Was there a sound?  Did it exist?  Infuriating, I know; simplistic, I know;  naive, ignorant, overblown, inconsequential, so you say.  But there are trees falling left and right, all around us, and no one hears, and I cry a sad song because they matter, goddamnit, I know somewhere they have to matter.

My Ideal Woman

Okay, so imagine a tree.  This tree is a giant, but he was a grandiose tree.  I mean, for love and life, right?  For love and life.  Anyway, this tree, he is old.  Have you ever walked with the redwoods? I mean, go to Muir Woods.  John Muir, like an idol, right? I mean, just go there.  You’ll see things, you’ll realize, you are a speck! A speck! These trees, they are big, massive, with this kind of fibrous bark that you can just pull right off. It’s resistant to fire, you know?  It’s beautiful.  Nature, man…nature! Anyway, so you have this tree, and its a husk.  Now what do you do with it? The wimps out there, those broken fucking suburbanites…those assholes will hire some workers, hire some kind of illegal immigrants or something that will chop down the tree for them, that will use chainsaws and ropes.  This husk man…only chop down a husk, don’t chop down anything living, I don’t roll with anything living…I mean, just look at the husk.  Stare at it.  This was a tree, man.  A tree of wisdom.  But we gotta survive, right?  Nature, man…nature! So we chop down the tree…ourselves. We take an axe, and we chop it down.  We break up the wood, make a fire for the night.  Post our tent.  And we spend days just chopping up that wood.  I’ve got a saw, an old school back-and-forth, not one of those bullshit internal combustion engine dingdongs, a real saw where you use your muscles.  We post our tent, maybe get ready to start chopping up that wood for fires, breaking up the logs, making a fire to last through the night.  Find a rabbit trail, use some string I found dumpster diving and place it on the rabbit run, hoping to trip one of those suckers up.  Say we start chopping that wood up to make a little cabin.  Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. Read it, cherish it, feel it.  It’s real! Anyway, we start putting this wood together.  We have some tools, gonna make some boards.  Lay down those boards.  Check the rabbit traps, nothing yet.  We’re hungry, it’s been about a week, but that’s okay, humans have always been hungry, I’m just being human now.  I wasn’t human before in the grungy apartment, drinking Nantucket Nectars (only 12% real fruit juice!), fixy biking to the white-collar job.  Linoleum! Ceiling lighting! My god! Where is the real world?  Where is the green?  Not that green, not money green, but LIFE green! The Life!  I mean, here I am, in a forest, chopped down a wisdom tree, hunting for rabbits and building a cabin! My god! It’s beautiful! The exultation, the wonder of it all, I feel connected to everything,  my muscles go weak and give away with the ecstasy and the forest seems to orbit around my mind. I want to hug every tree, tap every tree for sap and let it run through my veins! This is the dream! Let Mushroom Man and his bullshit see me now! I’m living the life! The Naturalist Life! The true life! I mean, I fucking chopped down a tree! And made logs! Hah! I made fucking logs!  Everything’s going black.

I woke up four weeks later in the hospital.  Apparently, I was dying from starvation and some couple hiking through the White Mountains found me passed out. Malnutrition led to some kind of coma? I’m not sure.  It was also extremely cold, so I think hypothermia was in the mix too. But when I woke up, with lighted machines beeping next to me, an IV pumping some strange chemical in my veins, my parents looking as if they were deciding between sobbing or hugging me or choking me to death, you know what I thought?

Nature, man…nature! My god (I don’t believe in God, but I say God sometimes, just putting it out there) that was real!  Tip your cap to the mother!  Mushroom man never chopped down a tree, and even if he did, he never almost starved out in the woods.  I nearly starved out there in the woods!  That’s way above organic, slow food, fixy bike, dumpster dive, any of that hipster shit, that’s the real ish, the numero uno, that was…that was Ginsberg.  Kerouac.  The Original! Man, love it. My beard is just curling up in pride right now.

Ole Westy is making me go through some introduction, but I think the above story should tell you all you need to know about me.  But, just to be careful, here it is: Hey, they call me potherbs.  I would say I think about the food I ate, eat and am going to eat for about seven to eight hours a day.  And that doesn’t include actual meal times.  I love to bike, urban explore, or just explore in general.  I used to have a chicken coop (they’re all dead now, but I tried to fletch some arrows), an SLR, and I eventually want to work in an organic farm.  That is, unless I move to Alaska, which is also in the works.  I love art, photography especially.  I’m an artist. Westchop’s Note: He is nothing of the sort. Things are moving fast, but just remember, nothing shines through the indelible love of my soul, or yours, and also remember to always think about what and how and when and where and why you eat.  All the questions.  Food! And Nature!

Ole Berty Russell

The truth, dear reader, is that Gladwell’s idiosyncratic tabulations, the precis of his pontifications on the role of the rice paddy, the Asians’ relationship to math, his exaltations of their single-minded nature, their refusal to give in, to fight against the dying of the light, their beehive, their socialistic practices that even now make my heart beat harder in my chest, the blood surging as a current of rage, it all is part of a grander battle, the battle to end all battles, the intellectual crusade of the past 200 years,(from the death of Romanticism to the Victorian progress, to the dead thrush pecking at the hollowed Chestnut tree, an image in stark contrast to the nightingale of Keats) the war between the Humanities and the Sciences!

In this cursed country that I live in, Art is thought of as little more than some kind of local, neighborhood investment.  A museum is no different to a ballpark, to a city square, to a mall or shopping center.   Only market forces drive its creation, the rich elite and its donor-based tax subsidization,  these institutions which cater to these idiotic socialites.  There was once a cultural impetus in the humanities, in Art.  There was a time when Art stood for culture and pride! James Joyce wrote Ulysses to propel the Irish to and above the level of the British. He was competing with Shakespeare, with Homer and his Odyssey, with Oliver Wilde and his northern Irish sensibilities.  Of course, his works meant something to those intellectual elites who read him, but his success meant something to the common Irish people as well, to Dublin and all that inhabited that wondrous city.  It was a fight! That is the power it can claim.  W.E.B. Dubois once claimed “Art is Propaganda,” and he was right.  Dubois was afraid that the southerners that had enslaved the black populations for so long would try and define their culture for them and, in fact, were, from early poems written by whites about blacks, all the way to the 1930s and The Jazz Singer.  Black Face is reprehensible in this country precisely because of what it means for a white to attempt to define a black…through art! Through theatre, or dance, or music, or film, or poetry, or prose, through anything! Dubois knew that Art must be claimed by his culture, must be made its own.  Hence propaganda.

A blog post is never enough space for a protracted argument on what art means for society, so I merely want the dear reader to keep this attack, concerted attack, in mind.  The Analytics would have you believe that any axiological consideration, any statement of value, is near-useless; the logical positivists denigrate and slander ethics and aesthetics at every opportunity, instead espousing the virtues of a philosophy of science, of epistemology and, in their greatest sin, the philosophy of language.  In their attempts to decode language, to try and “clarify,” they seek to dissemble and destroy the beauty that can be derived from the written word.  Beauty is absent clarification, it is non-scientific, it is the antithesis to logic.  Poetry is ambiguity, it is the comparison created by puns, the absurd connections created by metaphor, the irony of a narrative turn.  ”Clarify.” I do not speak such a word, I spit it out as poison.  There is a delicate potential for beauty in every word we speak.  It can be arranged in such a way, its meter can be held, it can trip us up, or slow us down, or allow us to flow with a rhythm, or bring us to tears.  If we try and codify, reduce everything to an either/or, to a logical notation…where is the beauty in logical notation?  The world is grey, it is not black and white.  Our understanding is limited, and even science can never profess to allow us to “know” anything.  Every theory is waiting to be disproven, even the supposed untouchable Newton’s laws were proven wrong by Einstein.  Every law falls apart, and in the end, can we ever really know? Can we start from a beginning and move down the chain of time, from cause to cause to cause, to find us here?  Can we reconstruct ourselves through the laws of science? Is every experience I’ve had, every sadness and happiness I felt, explainable by this neuron firing here, a neuron that evolved from this animal, that was created because of this sun exploding, that exploded because of this law, and that law and here, and there, until we are at the beginning, and the gods are dead, and magic is dead, and everything, me, you him, her, art, life and love have all become nothing more than part of some grandiose equation, a variable, explainable, dismissable, meaningless in the “grand scheme.” The battle lines are drawn for me, as I refuse to believe such understanding is possible.  One side seeks, implicitly or explicitly, to define me completely and, in doing so, denature me, destroy me, render me as a machine, programmed and explainable.  Functional.  Simple.  A series of numbers.  I call this blog Rhapsodic Nonsense, because I refuse to accept anything but nonsense.  I worship nonsense and its impossibility, its stupidity, its unreasonableness.  I love it.  I sing a rhapsody.