Walker Percy Wednesday 56

walker percy

percycovercroppea

What do I think? The mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness.

 . . .

My eyes are almost swelled shut, breath whistles in my throat, but my heart is full of love. Love of what? Women. Which women? All women. The first night I ever spent on the acute ward, a madman looked at me and said, not knowing me from Adam: “You want to know your trouble? You don’t love God, you love pussy.

It might be true. Madmen like possessed men usually tell the truth.

. . .

I had been reading my usual late-night fare, Stedmann’s History of World War I. For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.

. . .

(Hester is my type: post-Protestant, post-rebellion, post-ideology—reading Perry Mason here on a little ideological island!—reverted all the way she is, clear back to pagan innocence like a shepherd girl piping a tune on a Greek vase.)

. . .

Oh those lovely hollowed-out Holyoke vowels. Her voice is a Congregational bell.

. . .

“Are you telling me that with that thing you can actually register the knotheadedness of the Knotheads, the nutty objectivity of the scientists, and the mad spasms of the liberals?”

“That’s an odd way of putting it, but yes.”

“And you’re also telling me that you can treat ’em, fry ’em with your ray and make ’em human?”

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

alcohol

Having recently sampled seven rums, the Diplomatico Single Vintage 2000 really does stand out by a long shot but I do also like the Matusalem 15 Year Solera Gran Reserva. As much as I like my single malts, I sense that rum is going to be my primary winter tipple which, by the way, goes especially well with good chocolate. A good rum offers what I can only describe as the most comforting of aromas and tastes you are ever likely to come across. For the definitive history of rum check out the very excellent Wayne Curtis on And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails.

My recent acquisition Laphroaig An Cuan Mor I found to be rather disappointing — the smokey peatiness so characteristic of Laphroaig has in my view been smothered.

Starman as Jazzman

david bowie

With the usual hype beginning to emerge people seem to forget that Bowie had such a deep sense of musical discrimination, allowing his musicians to get on with it, one of the most notable cases being that of jazz musician Mike Garson (Bowie’s Piano Man) who brilliantly lifted what was, by Bowie’s standards, a rather middling effort (and not just with hindsight). Here’s Mike:

I had told Bowie about the avant-garde thing. When I was recording the “Aladdin Sane” track for Bowie, it was just two chords, an A and a G chord, and the band was playing very simple English rock and roll. And Bowie said: ‘play a solo on this.’ I had just met him, so I played a blues solo, but then he said: ‘No, that’s not what I want.’ And then I played a latin solo. Again, Bowie said: ‘No no, that’s not what I want.’ He then continued: ‘You told me you play that avant-garde music. Play that stuff!’ And I said: ‘Are you sure? ‘Cause you might not be working anymore!’. So I did the solo that everybody knows today, in one take. And to this day, I still receive emails about it. Every day. I always tell people that Bowie is the best producer I ever met, because he lets me do my thing.

As Mike rightly says Mick Ronson is another musician who added so much to Bowie’s music — someone I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I didn’t know that it was Ronson who auditioned Garson — good to know that given the high esteem I have for Ronson — and really good advice from Mick to Mike:

Here is the famous Aladdin Sane piece:

EPISTEME 12:4

episteme

New issue just published. Of particular interest is Benjamin Jarvis’ “Epistemology and Radically Extended Cognition.” I have long since made the case that externalism has much to offer (social) epistemology.

This paper concerns the relationship between epistemology and radically extended cognition. Radically extended cognition (REC) – as advanced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – is cognition that is partly located outside the biological boundaries of the cognizing subject. Epistemologists have begun to wonder whether REC has any consequences for theories of knowledge. For instance, while Duncan Pritchard suggests that REC might have implications for which virtue epistemology is acceptable, J. Adam Carter wonders whether REC threatens anti-luck epistemology. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of REC has no systematic consequences for theorizing in epistemology. I suggest an alternative relationship between the two: epistemology can play a role in diagnosing cases of REC. Thus, by establishing that entities partially located outside biological boundaries don’t play certain epistemic roles, one can establish that they don’t play the related cognitive roles either. I conclude the paper by illustrating this last point.

Drinking for Chaps: How to Choose One’s Booze

alcohol

Just published. Hopefully this will be as amusing and insightful as Temple and Darkwood’s “The Semiotics of Drinking” republished in my signed copy of The Chap Almanac (2002).

Amy Winehouse

music

I have always been of the view that Amy Winehouse was the only female artist that was on Etta James’ plane — the parallels are all too obvious — a profound expression of “love and trouble” experience going back to Billie Holiday. Now that the dust has settled in the four years since Amy’s death I was very impressed with the feature length documentary Amy, a close-grained, subtle and unflinching look at the toxic cocktail of the dark-sided clash of contemporary fame and artistic authenticity, an authenticity conspicuously absent from the current crop of phony “divas”. A favorite scene is Amy recording a duet with Tony Bennett. Priceless!

WALKER PERCY WEDNESDAY 55

walker percy

percycovercroppea

Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

. . .

If you measure the pineal activity of a monkey—or any other subhuman animal—with my lapsometer, you will invariably record identical readings at Layers I and II. Its self, that is to say, coincides with itself. Only in man do you find a discrepancy: Layer I, the outer social self, ticking over, say, at a sprightly 5.4 mmv, while Layer II just lies there, barely alive at 0.7 mmv, or even zero!—a nought, a gap, an aching wound. Only in man does the self miss itself, fall from itself (hence lapsometer!) Suppose—! Suppose I could hit on the right dosage and weld the broken self whole! What if man could reenter paradise, so to speak, and live there both as man and spirit, whole and intact man-spirit, as solid flesh as a speckled trout, a dappled thing, yet aware of itself as a self!

. . .

“I mean like this morning I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, Charley, who in the hell are you? What does it all mean? It was strange, Doc. What does it all mean, is the thing.”
“What does what all mean?”

. . .

I nodded, taking hope. He could be right.

A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.

 

Kafka’s Metamorphosis Turns 100

Kafka

Micah White in Biography.

Kafka used this grotesque scenario as a springboard to explore the confusion and turmoil he experienced as a human living in an uncontrollable modern world. As our world is just as disorderly and unruly as Kafka’s, if not more so, we would be wise to keep The Metamorphosis in mind and to take its implications to heart.

Consciousness and the Extended Mind

consciousness