Wednesday, April 30, 2025

 


My Academic Apex, and the Girl Who Was Not There


It was a warm spring day.  It may have been in the spring of 1972, more likely the spring of 1973, which was my last term at Cornell.

I was studying philosophy, with a particular focus on philosophy of mind and language.  (This, I thought, was the secret to everything.)  And I had discovered within that field a man -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- whom I found to be utterly compelling in both his philosophy and his person.  As luck would have it, Wittgenstein's closest American friend was Norman Malcolm, an eccentric son of the prairie who had sat in on Wittgenstein's famed lectures at Cambridge in the early 1930s.  Forty years later, with Wittgenstein at the peak of his power in the academic world (he had died the year I was born -- 1951), I was assigned Professor Norman Malcolm as my academic advisor.

By this time I had exhausted the undergraduate course catalog when it came to my narrow field of concentration.  I had developed another love, for Russian language, that more than filled my plate, but I also wandered into existentialism and ethics, without much passion for either.  Further, as a natural complement to all this, I took introductory and intermediate courses in linguistics.

In the early 1970s, linguistics was undergoing a revolution (there were many others).  On the wane was descriptive linguistics, which arose out of anthropology.  It featured what purported to be a universal "script" that told you how to pronounce words in virtually any language.  (I forget how, or whether, it really dealt with tonal languages like Chinese.)  And it provided and fleshed out the standard taxonomy of tongues, grouping them into familiar families and sub-families, and tracing back their histories where that was possible.  ("Old Church Slavonic" was to Modern Russian perhaps as Middle English was to Modern, but don't hold me to that.)

On the rise was something entirely different.   A young radical at M.I.T. of all places, whose name was Noam Chomsky, had puzzled over the fact that any random child of two or three could be plunked into a community anywhere in the world, and in short order and with relative ease that child would master the language of his or her community.  This could only be possible if there was a common core underlying every language, and only if every child maintained within his/her brain some sort of template upon which disparate languages could be mapped.  Chomsky called this core "deep structure."  Having mapped, say, Swahili onto this deep structure, the child, in fact if not on any conscious level, had plotted out a series of "transformations" that strictly, rigorously brought one from the common deep structure to the "surface structure" of Swahili, which is to say actual Swahili sentences spoken by actual human beings (hence the term "transformational grammar," used to describe the new linguistics that was to displace the old.)  Chomsky and his minions could actually plot out on paper what these transformations looked like, which was largely like trees, with branchings most but not all of which were binary-- male/female, statement/interrogation, but also past/present/future.

This whole process was, of course, innate.  You couldn't ask little Billy which subliminal path he had taken from the common core to get to "Momma! Daniel bit me on the nose!"  In this sense, in old philosophical terms, it was very much in the tradition of Cartesian idealism, which counseled us to look inside ourselves for the ideal truth (Descartes himself grounded in this respect in Platonism). 

And here is where Chomsky bumped up against Wittgenstein, among whose most famous aphorisms was "nothing is hidden."  Wittgenstein saw language as intertwined with life and culture.  One of the collections of his thoughts, gathered by his acolytes and published after his death, was called "Remarks on Colour."  If memory serves, it was especially in these remarks that he attacked the idea that, to recognize a fire engine as red, we somehow compare the color of the engine to a perfect template of red that we maintain ... anywhere, it matters not whether we situate it in it mind, subconscious or brain.  For how were we to know that the template itself was red!?  Were we comparing it to a further, deeper red template and, if so, did that process go on ad infinitum?  Did we have a little homunculus within our heads that was doing all of the real thinking for us, just subliminally? 

I had a further problem with Chomsky and his minions that went to their academic integrity.  All of their work, all of their boring little tree structures, purported to explain syntax -- the rules for combining words into phrases or sentences.  But it should go without saying that the purpose of language is to convey meaning.  Accordingly, no account of language can be complete without accounting not only for syntax but also for semantics.  Here, Chomsky and the troops posited that something very similar to what his syntactical rules were doing was happening in the world of meaning as well.  Atomic elements of meaning at the deep level bubbled up into atomic expressions of meaning at the surface level.  (By "atomic" I mean that there are sharp edges to all of these semantic components, even in actual spoken languages.)  But when asked to describe these transformations, Chomsky and his pals pulled a carnival trick, in effect saying "those beautiful little beans are under that other walnut shell over there!"  And the beans would never be revealed; rather, the revolutionaries made reference to what amounted to a mere dictionary, and then tried to dress it up as the Holy Grail of Meaning. These moves were not only misguided, they were dishonest.

I should say that this latter criticism was largely of my own making, with echoes, no doubt, from an essay or two, in counterpoint to the great Chomsky, that was included in our readings in Linguistics 204.  I had no friends or even acquaintances among my colleagues in the faculties of philosophy or linguistics with whom I could discuss such things, and I never took advantage of the opportunity to engage, one on one, with my professors, except for two or three mandatory sessions in the chambers of Professor Malcolm.  I was intensely shy, and I considered my very presence at Cornell to have been a gift that I was to take in hand and thereafter just do the work and keep my mouth shut.  "Domine, non sum dignus ..." we used to say before the host was put on the tongue.

And so in that spring, with the special dispensation of Malcolm, I had been allowed to take the only graduate-level course I ever took at Cornell, Philosophy 40X, which was called something like "Advanced Studies in Wittgenstein."  I recall that the class was small, maybe fifteen students, and I have a mental picture only of one of the students, a young woman with short-cropped blondish hair and a hippie mien.  Hardly anyone spoke in the class except for Malcolm himself unless Malcolm invited it; the overall mood, as in many of my philosophy courses, was oddly sullen!  And I myself could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in my entire career up to that point when I had volunteered to say something in a philosophy class.

It is sometimes said that Wittgenstein was such a powerful personality that some of his teaching eccentricities, like stopping mid-sentence for two or three minutes with a grimace, demanding, it seemed, further inspiration from the gods before completing the sentence, rubbed off on his disciples, and it was also said that Malcolm was among them.

So here we are.  On that day and in that class, Malcolm got around, eventually, to the heart of the course as he saw it.  He gave his own short explanation of the Chomsky revolution.  (Even though this was a graduate course, I might have been better schooled in the subject than most of the Ph.D candidates in the room, who would have seen this subject as a detour from some esoteric thing that they would address, as no one had ever quite done before, in a brilliant dissertation.)  

Malcolm paused.  "What," he asked, "would Wittgenstein have said about Chomsky?"  After a little pause, on sudden impulse, I raised my hand.  "Yes, Donovan."  (It was a vestige of his Oxbridge days for Malcolm to refer to students by their last names, with no honorific "Mr." or, at the time, "Miss.")  With uncharacteristic confidence I replied -- "Wittgenstein would say that Chomsky's entire enterprise is itself in need of interpretation; it is not self-interpreting."

Malcolm just kept lecturing, as if the question had not been asked, let alone answered.  But after five, maybe seven, minutes, he circled back.  "As Donovan said ..."  My reaction to this was inner elation.  Here was a very profound question that required some authentic understanding of perhaps the greatest thinker of the 20th century and also of the upstart who would dominate linguistics (and, of course, leftist political theory) for the remainder of my life, and I had answered it correctly, even elegantly perhaps, notwithstanding the fact that Wittgenstein died before Chomsky's linguistic revolution, and Chomsky, so far as I know, never directly confronted Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and meaning.

But after class, walking back toward my dubious Collegetown digs on the south side of campus, my elation gave way to something else.  With whom would I share this little triumph?  There was no one.  It would be impossible to provide the context for it in my letters home, to siblings or to my mom and dad, both of them high school graduates only.  I had good friends at Cornell, but they were struggling with engineering, the pre-med curriculum, or economics; they did not have even a theoretical interest in what I was studying.  And I knew that I had no need even to credential myself in philosophy, to build a reputation among the faculty, because I would go to law school, not to graduate school.  So this would just be an ephemeral little bauble that I could clench in my palm for a bit.

Since I was a melancholic, and never more so than in those days, during that walk I thought about an alternative life, one in which there was a pretty girl waiting for me in my crummy Collegetown apartment.  In her arms, in post-coital pillow talk, I would lay all of this out for her.  She would be proud of me.  Perhaps she would reciprocate with a story of having won some classroom debate about whether Dickens was essentially British and whether Proust was essentially French.  I would be equally proud of her!  And our little bubble would insulate us from the prevailing Ithaca loneliness.



Friday, April 25, 2025

 


Terminal Advice, from the Sage of Warwick, Rhode Island


"We should not attempt to understand the world," said Harald Malmgren, about three weeks before his passing on February 13 of this year.  "It just is."

And yet Harald had an indefatigable moral compass.  He sinned, no doubt, many times, but it mattered to him that he sinned.  He belied the old maxim that "a good man cannot be a great man."




 


The Journey from Youth to Old Age


... is a journey from joie de vivre to cris de coeur.



Thursday, April 17, 2025

 


At Cross Purposes


On the one hand, I have an urge to discard all of my unneeded factoids, like a bomber crew frantically tossing stuff overboard because a fuel leak otherwise may leave the plane crippled, short of its goal.

What factoids?  Oh, for example, in the heat of summer, the clarity of the water inside the burst tar bubbles that lined the very edge of the road where I grew up.  The myth, or reality, of the head of Ted Williams sitting in a frozen vault.  But at least 100,000 more. And "Everything Must Go!"

Without the factoids, does anything of me remain?  Perhaps that's the point.  Let it all become confetti.

And yet, when an artist labors to create meaning from a blank canvas, the meaning is built up from the meaningless.  Consider, for example, this first paragraph of a Leonid Rankov story, with its details almost all of which could be otherwise, as he leads us towards things of more importance -- dolphins, idiots savants, the diaspora:

Already a light rain had begun to fall.  It was the first October rain, always unexpected after the close humidity of summer days.  It mixed in with the smell of asphalt and the swollen blades of grass in the lawns, spotted the windshields with beads, hung in the air from the grey clouds to the very earth.  

"Speak, Memory!"


Wednesday, March 26, 2025

 


Renaissance in Three Acts


It's said that when a theoretical physicist or a grandmaster turns 30, the greatest personal triumphs of the person's career will be, even then, in the rear-view mirror.

Not so for the giants of popular music, or at least for some of them very roughly of my generation.  They produced what I would consider their best work in their forties and fifties, after having made a big splash in late twenties/early thirties and fallen fallow, at least for a time.

I speak of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen.  Early on, each fell into the category that the Soviets used to call "bards" -- simple songsters with no more elaborate accompaniment for their voices than a humble guitar.  (Joni rather famously had hers "open tuned," because childhood polio left her not very dexterous (sorry) with the left hand.)  A man named Bulat Okudzhava was the king of the hill among Soviet bards of the high Cold War era.

My thesis here, to which I adhere with very little confidence, and mainly for the sake of having a thesis, is that in each of these three cases an ambitious and captivating musical branching out in middle age propelled more personal power and passion on the poetic side of the ledger than had shown itself in the earlier years.

The consensus view is that Blue, released when Joni Mitchell was in her late twenties, is her best album and, indeed, one of the greatest popular albums ever recorded.  To me, Night Ride Home, released when she was in her late forties, has it beat.  Her voice by 1991 had sunk from a piercing soprano to contralto (all to the good).  She was no longer a bard per se, rather venturing into jazz/syth/fusion territory.  (The very first thing one hears in the title track is a pulsing simulacrum of crickets that carries one all the way home on the magical and very Hawaiian Fourth of July that inspires the song.):

Round the curve, and a big dark horse with tail lights on his hide

Is keeping right alongside, rev for stride ...

And elsewhere on the album her lyrics move far beyond her old themes of broken romances and general self-absorption to more broadly spiritual and philosophical palettes.  "Passion Play" has me completely drawn in from its opening, perfect metaphor -- "Magdalene's trembling like a washing on a line ..."  And then:

All around the marketplace

The buzzing of the flies

The buzzing and the stinging.

Divinely barren and wickedly wise

The killer nails are ringing ...

Tragedy ... now you tell me

Who ya gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

And Joni tops it off with a faithful yet free reworking of Yeats' "Second Coming" in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," the apocalyptic verses punctuated by synthetic sirens and a booming, explosive timpani on the fade out.

Simon's rebirth can be sourced to his gravitation to so-called World Music when he was in his forties.  About 20 years before, with Art Garfunkel, he had had the top-selling album of all time, at the time, in Bridge Over Troubled Water.  That album had its strengths and its beauties but, let's face it, it sank into sappiness from time to time, as in the title cut, which seemed impossible to escape in 1970 if the car radio was on.

But the flowing musical freedom of South Africa (Graceland) and Brazil (Rhythm of the Saints) seemed to liberate Simon lyrically just as jazz fusion catapulted Joni to a more exalted lyrical space.  As proof I will cite not "Proof," which is on the same album, but rather "Further to Fly," because in my view it is among the most unsung masterpieces of popular music of all time, both rhythmically and lyrically:

And maybe you'll find a love

That you discover accidentally

That falls against you gently

As a pickpocket brushes your thigh,

Further to fly ...

There may come a time when I will lose you,

Lose you as I lose my sight

Days falling backward into velvet night.

The Open Palm of Desire,

The Rose of Jericho,

The soil as soft as summer,

The strength to let you go.

Leonard Cohen, in his youth, was almost a caricature of the bard.  A soft and hesitant voice and just a few chords -- "Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river ..."  But his lyrics were phenomenal even in the earlier days --

The Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone.

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.

And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

I hope you run into them, you who've been traveling so long ...

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn

They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

Yes, taking the entire body of work, it is Leonard and not Bob Dylan who should have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  And it is a sin and a bit of a scandal that he is known to most in the 21st century only as the writer of "Hallelujah," not least of all a scandal because those who take the song as a religious anthem, which is to say nearly everybody, have never bothered to understand it.  They think it is some kind of more sophisticated, more hip version of "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life," when it embodies one of Cohen's most recurrent themes -- romantic, sexual passion as a flawed and futile window into what we are really after, which is merger with the Divine -- 

They say there is a God above

But all I ever learned from love

Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya.  (Hallelujah)

It's bitter, but amen to that.

My main point about Cohen, though, is that he hit his artistic peak only in his mid- to late-fifties, with I'm Your Man and The Future, and that the catalyst for those brilliant albums was his embrace of synthetic enhancements to his music and also of seldom-heard and exotic natural instruments, such as the Middle Eastern oud, which we minstrels might call a form of lute.

"Hallelujah" is a fine song, but some of the tunes on these two albums leave it in the dust, frankly, and far more deserve to define what Leonard was up to:

A man never got a woman back

Not by begging on his knees,

Or I'd crawl to you baby and I'd fall at your feet

I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat

I'd claw at your heart;

I'd tear at your sheet;

I'd say "PLEEZE!!"

(I'm your man.)

And of course the title tune on The Future, seemingly inspired by Cormac McCarthy:

When they said "Repent! Repent!"

I wonder what they meant...

And now the Wheels of Heaven stop

You feel the Devil's riding crop

Get ready for the Future

It is murder...

There'll be the breaking of the Ancient Western Code.

Your private life will suddenly explode.

They'll be phantoms, they'll be fires on the road

And a white man dancin.'

You'll see your woman hanging upside down,

Her features covered by her fallen gown,

And all the lousy little poets comin' round

Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson.

(And the white man dancin.')

Which of these great voices will still be heard 50 years from now?  From whence came their inspiration, and will it come again?



Wednesday, March 19, 2025

 


In the Place of God's Own Loneliness


Zoltan Bathory is a Hungarian-born heavy metallist and martial artist.  He is also what you might call a part-time shaman.  His particular shamanic magic carpet is DMT, sometimes called "the spirit molecule."  Bathory has inhaled it many hundreds of times.  Where he goes on the carpet depends on multiple variables -- how much he takes of course, his state of mental preparation, and also, it seems, the whims of the Others that he sometimes meets in his travels, in alternative "consensus realities," each as valid as our own.  Sometimes, for example, the Others ask him what is the purpose of his visit, and they don't take kindly to the answer "Just passing through!"

How deep can one go on DMT?  According to Zoltan, in the ultimate journey there is complete ego death.  The Pure Light is not so much experienced; one merges with it and there is nothing else; there is no experiencer.

Perhaps more interesting than this, though, because Bathory thinks that it explains the life mission of all creatures, is an intermediate place that one can reach on DMT, where one experiences a loneliness that is God's own.  It is the pre-creation environment of God.  It is magnificent, but the sense of isolation is overwhelming, devastating to the ego.  (Even Robinson Crusoe could talk to a sand crab from time to time.)

In Bathory's telling, God Him/Herself felt this same isolation in this same space, and it was to escape it that (S)he created all creatures great and small in a vast and variegated cosmos.

In the here and now, and at every moment, we are tied, subliminally, to the Source that is God.  As if via transmission of a computer code, we feed back to the Source everything that we experience.  In this way, it is never lost.  Our immortality lies in the infinitesimal contribution that we make in our communication with the Source.  (Intimations of Carl Jung here.)

I have difficulty with this cosmology.  I have difficulty with the idea that there was a Before and After for God, but more fundamentally with the idea that things were set up seemingly incorrectly, at first, for a God who is assumed to be perfect.  But it should go without saying that I know precisely nothing.




Tuesday, March 18, 2025

 


A Question Answered


"Why in the world would you read The New Criterion?"

Two sentences, intended to explain the relationship between Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon and the wife of Anthony Eden, and Pamela Digby Harriman, the wife of Averill Harriman -- "The woman who became Pamela Harriman, and la plus grande des grandes horizontales, died after taking a swim in the pool at the Ritz in Paris, where she was serving as the American ambassador ... Lady Avon could not resist observing that Harriman 'died staring at the ceiling of the Ritz: as so often in life.'"