The Loom of Lachesis, Vol. 8, Book 8, Chapter 3
Reflections in a Temporal Life - Philosophy as Tool Kit in Later Life; Pattern Seeking as Raison d’être
Philosophy asks the questions - and keeps on truckin’ with the questions – which is bound to piss people off, but by questioning…we sharpen our own critical thinking skills and remain vigilant against demagoguery, tyrannical dictates, fascist creeds, religious fiats…we even question our own ability, capacity, thinking, and feelings. Ask…and you shall receive…wisdom.
If I am seeking dogma or doctrine or a creed or a code that someone else has concocted – then philosophy is not for me to begin with – I have already conceded my thinking to someone else. “It” (or they, or he or she, or an institution) already has the answers – to it all – which sounds really good, easy, and living (and going along) without much effort. Just sign here. And with aging (that is…at my age…), I do not want rage against the dying light, I just want to keep the basic dignity and capacity to continue to say…well, this…what I am writing. And if it can help you with your journey across the life course – great. But this is not a canonical treatise, rather the writing is a sharing of experiences (which when distilled with a bit of intelligence and common sense and modesty – and a check on hubris) through a narrative format. This is not THE narrative, rather it is a narrative style – the essay format.
Now…even with all of the terroir issues respected and accounted for, entered into the equation, added to the overall portrait of the artist as an older man, where environment(s) is (are) a factor, where the nurturing roles are a part of the essence of being (thus my insistence for socialization as critical step toward humanization in human development), I still keep my eyes on the foundation role of the brain/body as essential (as necessary) when understanding consciousness (the self).
Let me restate: Biologization, Socialization, and Humanization. These are building blocks for me in order to discover a fuller examination of the self…and I think this examination takes time such that a deeper examination is a part of the aging process. But along the way (which started over 45 years ago), I have learned to discard, modify, refine, update, and question these “building blocks” a hundred times over. I am still with it and the heuristic structure has served me well, and in return I think I have added to it with my own research and discovery as a scientist in the social-behavioral domain (not by any H-index or Google Scholar metric or citation index), rather a modest contribution at best. Yes, I have a science-oriented mind, but also a deeply artistic mind, but then balanced (third leg of the mental stool) with a questioning mind.
I fully embrace this description, but then hubris is easily checked by going through by the reading again of these essays; but then again I got through Kanusgaard’s - My Struggle), that is obviously what “questioning minds” can be to it’s full fruition. The title is: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport & Hugh Kenner (edited by Edward M. Burns, 2018) and textual discourse (via old school letters) between the two scholars is like watching (via reading) two minds (or I should say – two great styles of consciousness) unfold and reveal their “thinking” over the course of many years (1958-2002) on a plethora of topics, especially in regards to the other literary figures such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett.
I read these books as though they were written records of consciousness unbound over time. The endnotes are incredibly rich and provide deeper connections with an array of threads leading to other threads: such as Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett as The Stoic Comedians {Stoic?} Thus I find out more}; the Pound and Eliot thread with The Waste Land {that I knew about in regards to the role of Ezra Pound in editing The Waste Land, and then in terms of the book edited by Valerie Eliot (1971) which presented a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts, including the annotations of Ezra Pound, and it looked like Pound went through the original version with a chain saw…like entire pages with a line drawn down through it…“cut” [gone], and me reading an opening quote from Joseph Conrad…”The horror! The horror!” [that also got cut], which has me jumping over to the movie Apocalypse Now (1979) and Col. Kurtz saying the same thing, the epigraph at the beginning of "The Hollow Men" reads: "Mistah Kurtz—he dead”…Heart of Darkness and T. S Eliot and Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” and T. S. Eliot and Dante, but then Virgil, and then The Aeneid, and Georgics, and then to the Forest of Arden (Shakespeare)…but I am drifting here, and yet love the connections that become a spider web of threads joined together - this is perhaps an Epicurean delight?}, so perhaps it is the relentless (okay – constant) drive to form the connections – the patterns – that is the essence of my mind, yes the questioning {philosophically speaking}, but more so the patterning.
Thus, I find the systematic efforts of seeking patterns as a joy…but the patterns are specific to selected fields of discovery: 1) Ecology (within biology); and 2) within Literature, Art, Music, and Film. Therefore, pattern seeking within these domains.
What is connected – and why? But then what about the space between the things not connected? Are they not of interest too? Perhaps the negative space is part of patterning? Perhaps it is both spaces that work together to form (and create) a better picture of the image – in mind.
Sure I can get carried away with the over-the-top colors, figures, historical, romantic images, myths found in the (as example) paintings of Eugène Delacroix (e.g., The Death of Sardanapalus; or Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius), but then there are the metamorphosis prints of M. C. Escher (e.g., Metamorphis II; Day and Night) which integrates contrasting “spaces” to create an interesting effect on our consciousness with optical illusions formed on a 2-D print. The patterning is in both paintings and without…leading to other connections, and dots, and not-dots.
From Escher, I connect to the cave art in the Lascaux Cave (France) and better yet the Chauvet Cave of painted animals (e.g., deer, lions, rhinos) although replicated as Caverne du Pont-d'Arc. From Delacroix’s Shipwreck on the Coast, I am back to Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice, and from there I can “Jump into the Fire” with the song of Harry Nilsson (1971) (“You can climb a mountain, you can swim the sea…”), but instead of “fire” (Dante’s Inferno), it is really a Dante's Cocytus – the frozen lake in hell (illustrated by Gustave Doré (1832-1883), where Virgil will lead Dante out to Purgatory, and I stay a while with Virgil to discuss Georgics, and The Aeneid (translated by David Ferry, 2017) and Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, and then connect back to Daniel Mendelsohn’s article in The New Yorker (October 15, 2018), Epic Fail? {“Two thousand years after the Aeneid’s publication we still can’t decide whether it’s a celebration or a critique of imperial rule”}.
Well, Daniel what shall I say? I agree with you on the bella horrida bella…in my time: Korean War, {Cold War}, Vietnam War, Gulf War, and the War in Afghanistan (2001- present). No red pills to take on that perspective. The story of Rome is not the story of the United States, but the story of a homecoming (Ithaca – the place!) after war (The Iliad and The Odyssey), or the story of finding a new home after war (The Aeneid), or the story of a war that consumes individual psyches and a nation (Matterhorn, Karl Malantes, 2010), a war that is impossibly complex and told from one soldier’s perspective, "the cartography of one man's consciousness" (The Yellow Birds, 2012), these are perennial.
In effect, the essays are a distillation of my consciousness – at least as I know it – and there it is – connecting the dots – {and knowing the not-dots} - weaving the threads on the loom – that is my calling, and destiny – yes, and if so, then to what purpose? Is this a calling? {ha! more like a persistence and pesky itch in need of scratching}, is it a semblance of some the inner daemon, or some external force at work prodding me onward so that I, as some piece of the grand puzzle will drop into place, and all of the celestial wheels and gears will now turn for perpetuity – as though I am really responding to environmental stimuli as some Hegelian tool – so that I can turn the wheel in order to form some Platonian paradise.
Patterning for what? What is the purpose? An evolutionary anomaly that is mutation-like and waiting for the right moment to flourish in a world gone randomly mad? Or maybe I, Consciousness is the patterning of connections and dots and so I am a stochastic arrow shot into the metadata of human civilization? Patterning for the Clouds? The Cave? Or for some purpose…here and now on Earth? What shall it be then? Could I be privy to these ultimate purposes or some teleological puzzle? If there is a Glass Bead Game at work here, I would dearly (and clearly) be appreciative to know this, at some point in the life course – preferably now, like today….
Or is this the patterning my genetic and hereditary gift that has sustained the pedigree over hundreds and of years and generations henceforth? Only and perhaps, they saw it is a distraction, a delusion, and a strangeness for one to be so…busy with connections that no one really cared about the forest, it was all trees…What is this daemon inside that pushes and cajoles, guides and directs, is needling and obsessing, and has me thinking as though I were an astrological puppet, some role playing actor reading a Shakespearean script, and I not seeing the big picture of the master designer and whatever they had I mind as I become simply an actor on the stage. And we have to be careful here: This is not running parallel with Karl Popper’s thesis of the business of delusional creations fueled by conspiracy theories (which seems to be a form of “secular superstition”) and cognitive biases.
Rather, the seeking of connections keeps and embraces the science in one hand - and the significance of the artistic in the other. As example, ecology as the science and photography and verse to go with it. Person - environment - connections.
If patterning is the gift – then what is the function and purpose? I, Consciousness is where I am there (in this place) and thinking this is all kairos in the finite time I have…so that I am temporally developed (here I am, but tempus fugit) to connect-the-dots, and this is due to my character, personality, traits, terroir, milieu, umwelt, and my ecologically minded lens that is akin to what John Muir said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”, and this is what I do, and I am thinking this is a human Being…with the consciousness that I have – here and now.
And I summarize via a bread-crumb-trail:
Literature > Philosophy > Self > Being > Humanization
Literature presents (to me) the foundational layer to begin to “think” about Self, Being, Life, and magisterial questions about it all. Which is the next step to Philosophy. I am not a Wittgenstein fan, but I do agree with Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, (A Different Order of Difficulty; 2020) who proposes that the Wittgenstein scholarship (e.g., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) is “…a complex, mock- theoretical puzzle designed to engage readers in the therapeutic self-clarification Wittgenstein saw as the true work of philosophy.”
Therapeutic Self-clarification.
Well said. Well said.
And paramount to the Self, Being, and Humanization.
I corrected - Vigil to Virgil in this essay in one sentence; which then raised another question: is it Vergil or Virgil ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil
https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/25055/vergil-or-virgil
You are obviously a creative artistic and scientific person. You have to write. it's part of your self-expression. This is all part of you getting into flow. Keep up the good work.