family matters!

Here is another excerpt from Mona’s February letter, containing a question that might be taken up in the shuttle between your lives and ours:

I feel very deeply that if all soldiers were required to study philosophy for one year prior to military training, our world, and our armed forces, would be something to admire.  The kids and I watched “Forest Gump” the other day, and I think it was their first look into the horrors of war, and a look at what it meant to protest against your country, as well as a look into life from the vantage of a good man.  The world has forgotten that part of our history — do you think we are better for it?

I need help understanding the question.  Does it mean: are we better for having forgotten this period?  Or are we better thanks to all the peole who did protest the direction their country was taking?   I wonder how Uncle Tom Jenkins would answer those questions.  I wonder how my sons would answer them.  And Marguerita and Nancy for example.  Above all, I wonder how Brian would take off for one of his flights after the long runway of “Forest Gump.”

There’s an unforgettable image in “Pulp Fiction” when John Travolta, the greatest disco dancer of the 80s, shoots up with heroin.  There’s a close-up of the teaspoon heating up, then the needle, majestic, enticing, like the biblical tree of knowledge, and then one of his face, smooth and blissful to be in the grips of an artificial paradise.  This was an unforgettable reminder of the power and promise of heroin, to provide pleasure and ecstasy.  I’d like to compare that image with one from “Forest Gump.”  We see him running, awkwardly because he’s got those braces on, but then he picks up speed, and it’s another runway, and all of a sudden the air-currents and the muscle movements are too much for those braces and they just fall to the wayside.  There too, for anyone but the most jaded of spectators, we suddenly confront waves of pleasure and ecstasy, on the screen and in our hearts.  Here’s a man who is about to take off, destination unknown.  What strikes me about his trajectory is how home-grown he is, how close to his mother, how confident and trusting and well, how utterly “country bumpkin” he is.  Something close to a moron, to be honest.  And yet his speed will take him far from these original coordinates, before it brings him back home.  And I think we have here the figure of his protest: the man saw his country slowing down, getting bogged down, becoming cautious and dishonest and self-seeking, spending useless hours in front of the mirror of national identity when the sky above was beckoning.  So he said, naively, in his unforgettable Southern accent: hey guys, this is not for me.  I’m not used to this sinking into molasses.  I’ve known other skies, and other more satisfying and exhilerating cruises.  Even ping-pong is better than what you’re doing over there in Vietnam!  Wake up guys, and shake off your shackles! 

Are we better for having seen Forest Gump on his own glide path back to his birthplace?  I’ll say only this: it’s unforgettable.  And, to register a criticism of Robert Ebert, I find Forest Gump far more inspiring as a role-model and source of that tinkling in the spine than Mickael Jordan fighting against his flu to beat the Utah Jazz.  There’s no protest there, and, despite the case made by Ebert, it’s bargain basement heroism. 

I wonder what Dean would say about Mona pondering a year of obligatory philosophy for soldiers?  If she only knew how bored Dean was with religion classes, she might think twice before concluding that philosophy would be, once made obligatory and subjected to grades, something that might help our soldiers.  Today soldiers don’t need obligatory philosophy to operate their conversion to a higher plane: circumstances in their theatres of operation are providing them with opportunities like that day in and day out.  It’s called winning the battle for the hearts and minds of peoples.  The Petraeus doctrine.  One of the prouder moments of the American experience.  And one that will send the philospher’s back to their drawing board.

We all think we know quite a bit about getting old, and about those in the middle of that adventure.  (I said “adventure” Brian!)  I don’t think we know a god-damned thing about this.  Or, rather, there is an elite out there who have the great privilege of an inside track to what the old know and experience, and this “information” is beginning to trickle down to the poor beasts of burden we all are.  We’ll be hearing more and more about this as time goes on, because, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run we’ll all be dead, but first there’s the short term, and than the middle term, before that other thing that makes no sense at all. 

It may well be that old people manage to totally forget that they are supposed to be confronting death.  That sounds to me like something a middle-aged man or woman might say, off-handedly, scarcely aware of the fact that it’s her problem and not necessarily out there at some future stage.

Here’s a 93 year-old woman, sitting in a chair a few weeks after her husband of 73 years has passed.  The geriatric psychologist or nurse or hired hand walks up, with all manner of compuction and empathy (oozing empathy), and whispers gently about sharing the pain of such a loss, and takes the woman’s hand in hers or his, and adds: it’ll take time, but time heals all.  But tell me ma’am, how does it feel, in your own words?

Response: “It feels like I’m in heaven!”  The woman was simply not graced with a wonderful spouse, but someone a little bit too lackluster for her tastes, and someone whose rut had begun long ago looking like a prison gate, and at his death, she felt liberated and ready to begin an entirely new life.  The ward assistant or doctor or hired hand had once again fallen into what William James called the psychologist’s fallacy, which is to assume incorrectly that you know what the other person is experiencing.  What the psychologist, at least in most brands of psychology uninformed by the wisdom of Diotima in Plato’s Banquet, ignores is that love and aspiration are like endlessly blossoming flowers that are on call 7/24 to reach hundreds of different forms of expression.

Here is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on this mystery:

“For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

An adult sleeps at night.  But an old person’s sky at night is filled with stars, and among them there are patterns and indications that insist on being followed out.  I’m convinced of this.  I’m only 60, so it’s not that I’m preaching for my own parish.  I’m just rooting for a return to family matters as quickly as possible. 

(this post is based by a 1 March NYT article by Doctor Marc E. Agronin entitled “Old Age, from Youth’s Narrow Prism.”

I quote from Mona’s most recent letter:

Aunt Nina used to talk about not fighting what God has in store for us.  I think there was alot of wisdom in this stance.

This is one of the major, oft-recurring themes on this blog.  This wisdom is Dad’s, Aunt Nina’s, and Laure’s.  There’s no wheeling and dealing with what God has in store for us.  I think it’s high time we gave this a little thought.  I’d like to do it with several members of my family, though.  What do you say?

There are many problems with this view.  I know I go along with this, but I don’t know how to talk about it.  I complain that my parents and sisters remain silent on religious subjects, as if talking about them would be a breach of privacy, like Chinese hackers getting into precious data-banks on Google.  And yet, for such a blabber-mouth as myself, I have precious little to say about this.  Except that it seems complicated, and dangerous, and fascinating.  I wonder what God thinks about this stance of not fighting his will.  My boys were baptized under a huge painting of Jacob fighting God’s angel.  And it left a mark on Jacob.  And seems to have stood him in good stead.

I’ll stop here.  I wish we could all come together and be serious about a few of the themes and questions set out on this blog.  This one seems so close to the history of our family that I would imagine it wouldn’t take much to get the ball rolling.  Let’s wait and see.

In the meantime, I have a book to recommend.  “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” by Rebecca Goldstein.  It’s a novel.  A novel about a person who thinks and knows himself to be an atheist, but an athiest with a soul.  Is that possible?  Isn’t that what we are eventually going to confront?  The soul as something shared by everyone, in different ways, regardless of their religious “positions.”  I wouldn’t recommend this book if it were not such an impressive achievement.  It’s the kind of book you can surely put down (as against all those books that are so good you can’t put them down until you’ve come to the plot’s resolution.)  It’s all about the psychology of belief.  That’s a family matter if there ever was one!  I dream one day of something like a trans-atlantic book club with a sign outside reading: “for family only.”  Dream on, Tom.  Rebecca Goldstein divorced her first husband to marry Steven Pinker, author of “The Language Instinct.”  These two people have to be the most glamorous pair of teachers in the history of the profession.  Go and check em out.  Both of them are knock-down gorgeous.  It doesn’t seem to have impacted negatively on their work.  It’s as if they were unconscious of the faces and bodies and voices and general allure.  The students, reportedly, go bananas over both of them. 

My sister and I worked up a plan to get our family voices onto a shuttle that would go back and forth over the pond.  The project is still on, I hope: on this end it’s PJ who has the tape, with voices of what it’s like to have hamburgers and ice-cream at 704 North Webster in Catlin, and to be concerned with hearing problems.  I hope that tape keeps circulating.

Still remember Stephen Vincent Benêt?  The author of “John Brown’s Body” which was later transformed into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  That what he is most famous for, but there’s lot lot more where that came from.  For instance, this:

Oh yes, I know the faults and the other side, The lyncher’s rope, the bought justice, the wasted land,

The scale on the leaf, the borers in the corn, The finks with thier clubs, the grey sky of relief,

And the long shame of our hearts and the long disunion.  I am merely remarking — as a country, we try.  As a country, I think we try.

Perhaps PJ no longer remembers taking that tape home with him.  In that case, I have only my memory to rely on, which is to say, not all that much any more.  Here’s what stands out, though.  Our dad, who has been a republican for his entire life, and who spent much of his time as a young man with a step-father with rabid go-out-and-kill Roosevelt instincts, starts talking on the tape about Obama.  And you know what he says on that tape.  He says he thinks the boy is trying.  That there is no doubt he is trying.  And that that’s about all you can expect from a man. 

Your soul goes marching on, my dear Dad. 

The Chicago Sun-Times has a columnist on its payroll who has to be one of the 4 or 5 most famous men in Illinois.  He’s savvy in sports (he began his career writing about the fighting Illini) and has become one of the most astute and popular of American film critics.  Everybody knows the guy, or should.  It ought to be embarrassing not to have heard of him.

In Esquire magazine this month, there is a long write-up about him by Chris Jones called “The Essential Man.”  The piece is centered on the cancer that has removed Ebert’s chin, jaw and upper neck, making it impossible for him to eat, drink or talk.  This horrendous state has lasted now for four years.  the news, however, is elsewhere.

Ebert is constantly at pains (no play on words intended) to explain to people that they shouldn’t be distraught over his ailment and handicap, that he has in fact never been happier!  And he can prove it!  He has never been writing as well as now that he must find another voice.  Of course there is a wide array of technical voices he can choose from, and has, as well as a gamut of signs to use to “communicate.”  But the essential man is in his writerly voice.  It appears that, as important as film criticism has been for him and his family (a livelihood), it pales now in comparison with the urgent rush of things he must get down while there’s still time.  And he’s right.  Right to be slightly obsessed, and right to feel it’s urgent.  If he doesn’t do it, no one will. 

Several comments on this precious man.  First of all, he is a staunch atheist.  And when he finally goes out, I’d be surprised if any priest or minister be allowed to smooth things over on this score.  It’s wonderful to see, in writing, how adamant he is on this subject, and how curious he is to explore the holes in his own “system” while continuing to shoot holes through the system of belief, which, as we all know, is an easy target for rationallyinclined beings.  If I were in a position of power, I would make Roger Ebert on the subject of the valor and distinction of atheism obligatory in all high schools.  His example, and his thought, are definitive rebuttals of all the lank stuff going around, turning the USA into something like a religious backwoods. 

Secondly, and relatedly, one of the most interesting posts he’s put up over this four year period is one called “I feel good.  I knew that I would.”  Readers of this blog know how important that song was, done by two people in the 80s in one of last year’s best film documentaries.  But Ebert writes about something else: he wants to know what scientific basis he can find for the tingling he feels up his spine every time he sees a fine or great movie.  The feeling of elevation, the emotion that people describe as being uplifted.  He first of all gives examples of what he’s talking about (the journal entry is dated 14 January, 2009), from film and from the career of Michael Jordan.  He quotes extensively from an article by Emily Yoffe at the Slate site.  To quote her again:

 ”powerful moments of elevation sommetimes seem to push a mental reset button, wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.”  Ebert goes on to ground this “feeling” or “sense” in the innervation of the vagus nerve, the only nerve that starts in the brainstem and extends down below the head, to the neck, chest and abdomen, where it contributes to the stimulation of the viscera.” 

That why one’s spine tingles in the presence of beauty, or greatness, or fittingness.

Lastly, there is something incredible in the man’s legacy as a blogger.  He has always had huge numbers of comments to his posts, but huge is a relative term.  (His career in television makes this a little easier to stomach)  Since he has let loose in his new and more perfect voice, the number of comments has sky-rocketed.  From 800 to a thousand comments for a single post!  Of course this makes my spine tingle.  He has a way with words.  Unlike Claire in the novel “On Beauty,” who has “a way of saying things that couldn’t be answered,” Ebert finds his way into your heart: he seems to have found a direct track to the vagus nerve.  On the other side of the Claire people who talk so overwhelmingly that there is nothing left to say, there are all the people who remain silent out of fears, or, once again in the terms of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”:

“the silence that ensued was not silence because nobody had anything to say — quite the opposite.  You could feel it.  Howard could feel it, millions of things to say brewing in this classroom, so strong sometimes that they seem to shoot from the students telepthically and bounce off the furniture.  … But none of the students would speak.  They had an intense fear of their peers.  And, more than that, of Howard himself.  When he first began teaching he had tried, stupidly, to coax them out of this fear — now he positively relished it.” 

We all know situations like this.  The miracle and the saintliness of Ebert’s new bag is in the democratic vistas he is opening up as he wanes away.  The speed and power of the two-faced process is awesome, and humbling for the likes of me. 

There would be no better way to spend your time than to go to this man’s blog and read what he has to say, what all of a sudden must be said, and to which thousands of people in America find the time to respond, lovingly and with unusual honesty.  This is a million light years from the talk show, and the op-ed scene of major american newspapers.  this is something entirely unexpected, and people who go there know what that means, and what it’s worth.  Go there, please. 

A few lines, for posterity’s sake.  I’ve got a quote (like James Brown singing, to many people’s despair, “papa’s got a brand new bag”) for my son, but first of all, an inner image of utmost delight.  PJ gets a phone call, from Helen perhaps, or maybe from his mother, or yet again from his brother.  The content of the message: you father is dead.  Perhaps I am incapable of imagining anything pertinent around this inner prospective image, besides the obvious pleasure and enjoyment I find therein.  How wonderful it would be to be able to haunt this man.  My heart’s desire, really!  First of all, send him into a blue funk of regret and remorse, then surprise him with sudden beyond the grave visits, heralded by short bursts of laughter around things that cannot be mistaken, things that hail back to the happy days of childhood.  Laughing like a devil, like an evil-intentioned devil, over the mere pronunciation of something like “happy days.”  Break out immediately into song, into the corny kind of songs the man by now detests with a passion.  Then to swoop down and begin the work of honest haunting.  O what a delight.  O happy days, not when Jesus rises, but when papa gets going to get under the skin of his undutiful son!  “I know what procures enjoyment for myself” (Philippe Sollers)  It makes no difference at all to “know” that haunting is not possible, and no doubt not even recommendable, or disirable.  I am the man will would possibilize, recommend and desire a serious, decade long ordeal of haunting.  And I would enjoy every minute of it.  That’s because of my makeup.  That’s who I am.  And not only do I have no objections to who I am, I am rather amused, (sometimes bemused) by the person I have become.  and I would wish that that person could lean on PJ, for a determinate length of time.

So here’s the quote, from “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith.  Enjoy, PJ, and watch out that it doesn’t return to snip your ankle when you’re tired one fine day, after a great or not so great concert.  It may be a dog; it may be your dad!

“Uh-huh” said PJ, because there was no point in worrying people unnecessarily.  He made his farewells, pulling on his Michelin Man coat, thumping first sister and then brother hard between their shoulder blades.  He pressed play on his IPod (the earphones of these have never left his ears).  He got lucky.  It was a beautiful song by the fattest man in rap: a 400 pound, Bronx-born, Hispanic genius.  Only twenty-five years old when he died of a coronary, but still very much alive to PJ and millions of kids like he was, at that age.  Out of the coffee shop and down the street PJ bounced to the fat man’s ingenious boasts, similar in their formality to those epic boasts one finds in Milton, say, or in the Iliad.  These comparisons meant nothing at all to PJ.  His body simply loved this song; he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was dancing down the street, the wind at his back making him as fleet of foot as Gene Kelly.  Soon he could see the church steeple ….

It would take hours to wean out what applies and what doesn’t apply to PJ “as a person.”  What matters to me is the astounding effects of music on a human body.  I think I know what PJ would do with that statement.  He’d diss it.  But I would maintain it, because it’s a truth-indicator.  (And an accurate indication of the books to be withheld from the da fe after my death.)  The man will never be able to wiggle out of this one: music, man, music, baby, that and nothing else.

The most important thing to write about “Elementary, my dear Watson” was of course overlooked.  Here it is: it’s typical that the stream of memories come after seeing a movie devoted to the life of Sherlock Holmes.  That’s what I liked and admired the most in that piece.  Connecting these two moments — the very idea of coming out of a movie theatre and deciding not to let the associations fly by without more ado.  Deciding to write them down.  And publish them.  Share them.

There are other examples of this particular style one decides to give to the life of the mind.  Call it the sharing style.  David Lodge, for example, is famous for his books making fun of university life.  I think he’s done more damage than good, despite all the good laughs that are there to be enjoyed.  Elain Scarry is on a better, slower track with this judgment: “a university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.”  Stimulated by Dick’s work, I’ve decided to reread the novel “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith, where, if I haven’t forgotten everything about it, there is much praise of the beauty of life in and around an american campus.

Then there is something else, something more difficult, something that will take up a huge amount of time.  There is an experimental college in California called Deep Springs.  It was founded in 1917 by L.L. Nunn, who was the headmaster until his death in 1926.  This is, in itself, a fascinating story of someone taking responsibility for the education of young engineers so as to provide America with a nation-wide electric grid network, amidst fierce and cutthroat competition from the likes of Tom Edison!  But the Elghammer effect only kicks in when you realise that the work of memory and judgment (somewhere on the spectrum between deductive and inductive judgment!) was done by a student of Deep Springs, who couldn’t get on with his life without telling the story of that school in all its glory and into the dark recesses of everything that otherwise would not be told.  The student’s name is William T. Vollmann.  And the novel with so much “information” or, rather, memory material, is called “You Bright and Risen Angels.”  1987.  Little of Vollmann’s subsequent work has anything to do with this first novel, which threw everyone for a loop, because of its ambition and because of its simplicity.  There are  only good guys and vilains in this novel, and no stops in between.  Like in the New Testament.   Let your yes be a yes, and your no a no.  You’re either with me or against me.  The literary critics did not appreciate that at all.

Most people today remember the novel as a fictional history of the information technology revolution, and especially of the huge importance of video games within that revolution.  That’s true as far as it goes, but, following the Elghammer effect, the reader suspects that this doesn’t go far enough.  The video game and the computer run on electricity, and electricity is a story as big as the great outdoors of the USA!  Bigger than the story of trans-continental railroads.  And, at this level, in this corner, sitting in your reading chair watching the dust fall onto a desk, it is the story of a man who can no longer count on anyone but himself to solve the problem of training and education young people so that they can withstand all the hardships involved in delivering electricity into everyone’s household!  The gamers are blissfully ignorant of the ground beneath their feet, and at their fingertips.  Vollmann is many things, but he’s not ignorant.  And out of college, he had a story to tell. 

Dear Tom

I’m 83 now and my writing is hurting, and so is everything else

BUT

I’ve had a good life and I feel fine.  So I’m sore and stiff and happy.

(comments from Tom!)

1)This is called a keeper.  It will be scanned and put on this blog so that people can contemplate the physical trace of a man’s passage on earth.  All of us can recognize Dad’s handwriting in a nanosecond, and, just as with the legs of beautiful women, it doesn’t change all that much.  The last thing standing.  Thousands of paragaphs, and countless letters, are as dust compared to something like this.

2) The Jack Benny effect in our family.  I have a mariage certificate signed by Father Siesel giving essential information on mom and dad on the day of the mariage.  Thanks to this document, we learn that both were born in 1926.  But today, the Jack Benny effect, they both say and write that they are 83, whisking away a year that would have ruined everything.  This is funny, and certainly the kind of thing that will be remembered for ages.  Here are two people who couldn’t care less about dates.  Their time frame is something intimate, and cosmic at the same time.

3) What can I say, except thank you.  I’m sure the boys will get a commotion when they see this. 

4) God Bless You All.

I applauded at the conclusion to Dick’s “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.”  Here it is, slightly ammended: “At at time in history when students are told that the only purpose of an education is a means to an end, in other words, getting a diploma solely to make money, it is refreshing and important to go back to the year 1887, when Sir Conan Doyle created the character of Sherlock Holmes to serve as a model for what learning, knowledge and education are really about: the ability to think, to speak, to write, to cultivate one’s heart and soul with a viewd to becoming a moral force for the betterment of society.  So as to leave the world a little better off than it was before you arrived.  Elementary, my dear Watson!”

Can anyone not applaud?  Of course I’m thinking of my sister Sue, who may smile at this conclusion, and point out how far it seems from present-day urgent issues of funding and adult education and the crisis of authority.  This would no doubt devolve into a huge and fascinating conversation, because I can’t think of anything Sue might say that Dr. Elghammer would not find grist for his mill.  And vice versa.  Perhaps in another time frame, or in a parallel universe, or on the Champs Elyssées (not the one in Paris of course, but the real one!) we’ll get tidbits of that exchange.

I applauded.  I’d sign that conclusion with both hands, and I’d campaign to get my brother-in-law voted in as education minister, or, as I read in a children’s book to my grand-daughter, as “the minister, not of foregin affairs, but of strange affairs.”  (”Kamo” by Daniel Pennac)  But here I have the luxury of doing something else, which is to reread the piece, and to organise my thoughts as they occur and rearrange themselves, prompted and shifted about by the argument.  “Sharing our thoughts” as the title of the blog has it.

There are three characteristics of Sherlock Holmes.  First of all, his ability to think.  Then his love of knowledge.  And finally, his multidimensional skills.  His ability to think enables him to solve problems, and to find solutions to mysteries.  He can determine the motivation of the murderer by using logic, deductive reasoning, and the scientific method.  Secondly, he has a love of knowledge.  His mind is a treasure trove of data.  Dick capitalizes the folders or headings of this data.  Botany.  Geology.  Chemistry.  Anatomy.  Literature.  Law.  Weapons.  (in fact, “weapons” is not capitalized.)  And, the man has multidimensional skills: he can play the violin, box, fence; he’s a cryptologist and a black belt, and an expert in disguises and masks.

The word that I can’t get out of my mind is the word “multidimensional.”  Why is the third list of characteristics multi-dimensional?  I don’t want to push this too far, because I would like it to become a conversation.  If only an imaginary one, a written one, one based on hardly a trace.  Let me make an opening comment on the way to this endless conversation.  What comes as a shock with the word “multidimensional” is that the first two sets of characteristics are mono-dimensional: they are indeed characteristic of the problem of solipsism.  Read them again: they describe what it’s like to be penned up inside your brain, and to have serious problems not only dealing with, but even imagining other people’s existence.  The primary dimension in these lists is the mind: logic and knowledge.  To be used after the fact.  To determine the shape and meaning of traces.  Mutlidimensionality comes with intercourse and exchange, and those are the characteristics described in the third list.  Playing the violin, boxing and fencing, the martial arts, and disguises all require an intense engagement with someone else.  That’s why I would have put cryptology in the list of his treasure trove of knowledge.  Am I on to something here?  Does anybody else feel the shock, once the meaning of “multidimensional” is searched and captured like lint on its way down, by the presence of violin playing in this list?  Isn’t this the beginning of the end of the use of Sherlock Holmes in a military academy?  Is this hyper-stable list on the point of explosion the stuff of which the “Hound of the Baskervilles” was concocted? 

Here’s a quote from a strange novel by a well-educated Englishman named McCarthy.  Not Cormac McCarthy, who would say that this is probably not literature at all.  But TOM McCarthy.  I like his surname.  God knows why.  Here is what he has to say.  It’s my opening gambit in the balm of conversation with my brother-in-law:

“Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less.  No I’ll go further, it’s higher, more refined, than any art form.  Why?  Because it’s real.  Take just one aspect of it — say the diagrams … They’re records of atrocities.  Each line, each figure, every angle — the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of the white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.  ‘It’s just like cricket,” I told Naz one day.  ‘In what sense?’ he asked.  ‘Each time the ball’s been past,’ I said, ‘and the white lines are still zinging where it hit, and the seam’s left a mark, and …’  ‘I don’t follow,’ he said.  ‘It … well, it just is,’ I told him.  ‘Each ball is like a crime, a murder.  And then they do it again, and again and again, and the comentator has to commentate, or he’ll die too.”  (Remainder by Tom McCarthy, 2006)

I’m still reading my brother in law’s reminiscence of his first interview with Colonel Persing.  There’s much to ponder there, and I consider it a stimulus package all by itself.  To further the aim of the education of the emotions.

I was an ROTC cadet also, but in less stringent conditions than those of Dick.  One of the things I didn’t mention about his first interview was the pile of books at the Colonel’s feet, and the general impression that this office was more like a library than a bivuoac.  Anyone in the Danville area who knew coach Paul Shebby well enough to be invited to his home knows something about this general impression.  Paul Shebby was as cultivated as any Greek philosopher, and that made a huge impression on me.  Perhaps it was the same with Colonel Persing, but I have my doubts.

Recently my dad had been through a harrowing experience.  According to some, he ran over an elderly woman, breaking her leg.  According to him, this old hag was trying to pull a fast one on him in order to rein in a little mullah.  the courts will decide whose version is the true one.  What I have in mind today is how humbling this experience must be: to have your licence taken away, and having to be lugged around by dutiful women or kind uncles.  I never talk about this very much, but I was a miserable failure as a ROTC cadet.  First of all, there was the problem of the hat part of the uniform.  There was no adequate hat size for my big head (more the head of mongolism than any head of superior intelligence.)  What I was finally issued looked more like a Jewish skull cap than the hat of a second lieutenant.  Each time I would march up to the front of my platoon, the guys would split their guts laughing at the sight of the wayward rabbi shouting out marching orders.  Then there were the real-life exams, with platoons facing off against each other with opposing plans for victory.  I never made it past the proposal to surrender and stay in prison for the duration.

This too was humbling.  I mean, it really was.  My commanding officer must have understood this, and, instead of raving about deductive reasoning, he started a conversation with me about the love there was in the word philosophy, and wanted to know what a philosophy major was doing in the ROTC.  The conversation lasted throughout my  junior year at Notre Dame, and was among the most fruitful relationships I was able to have there.  It’s humbling in a way to see yourself referred to as a lover of wisdom.  There too, people tend to crack up.  But my commanding officer didn’t.  He was interested in who I was.  To my utter surprise.  You can go through a whole college career and never feel considered in the etymological sense of the term: looked at long and hard and non-judgmentally.  It was, as a matter of fact, a process of getting cured from the humbling experiences I had undergone.  Slowly, my confidence returned.  And the laughter continued, but edged with a kind of envy, because I was the guy that had dined with the officer and his family.  In his home outside of South Bend, there was a collection of the great books, and they looked as though they had been read.  All of a sudden, this morning, I realise that in another context, in a battle situation, I would do anything I could to save this man’s life.

The draft was abolished before the beginning of my senior year.  That was the last straw of my resolve to stay with the ROTC on through to a career in clinical psychology.  That’s what tingles in the comments I’m making now about Dick’s article.  It’s important work, clinical psychology.  I maintain that it has nothing to do with deductive judgments, except insofar as clinical psycholgy can devolve into forensic investigation.  That’s another story, which I hope my brother in law will share with us here.

I thank my uncle Tom for taking my Dad around.  There is virtue in simple conversation.  And its instances are few and far between.