OF A GOLDEN AGE

in class the other day we talked about kerouac’s self-portrait character in dharma bums and how much he loves to be around people.

with a little bit of leisure time again — although i still have an abundance of work, it is no longer looming in a staggering fashion — i have picked up charles bukowski’s letters again. (if i have not mentioned these before, i bought three volumes of bukowski’s letters at avol’s, a used bookstore in madison next to where i took a gre class.)

bukowski is an inadvertent composite of ray and japhy because he deeply loves humanity but simultaneously stands away from it. most of bukowski’s work follows raylike paths, though. he lives a very people-centered life, works shitty jobs, meets women, drinks with friends. not a lot of natural reflection time, but a lot of dark nights of the soul alone in some sleazy hotel.

bukowski is one of those figures whose work i love and admire greatly, but people are always surprised to learn this. i remember saying in class the other day that kerouac drives me crazy because his prose is too visceral, and shawn gillen pointed out something i’d said about another author being too abstract — the middle ground, apparently, is MELVILLE. and that part was a joke but it is also true! i love me some melville!

music is one of the things i can always use to ground myself when stress steals my gravity away. today i made a playlist of upbeat songs (“get rhythm” by johnny cash, “country song” by pure prairie league, “19th nervous breakdown” by the rolling stones, “it ain’t me babe” by the turtles, and so on), put it on loud, and jumped around a little. my math class ended today; i handed in eighteen pages of papers yesterday; and my work at this point has dramatically tapered off — it was time for something both distracting and mentally cleansing.

a friend of mine is making mix cds for people based on prompts they gave him. mine was an anne lamott quote, which is, of course, an enormous surprise. (that is a joke because if i were any religion it would be lamottism.) another friend chose “songs to steal by,” which we were brainstorming tonight. he sent me a goofy latin-flavored cover of “drive my car,” and mentioned in passing the stevie wonder cover of “we can work it out.”

BACK UP. that song is not only one of my favorite songs of all time but definitely, without question, my favorite cover. stevie wonder pumps so much feeling into the music — especially for a song that is already so heartfelt! — that i want to work it out.

for my final paper for philosophy, i am studying Friedrich Nietzsche and one of his primary standalone contributions to philosophy: perspectivism. especially after spending a semester studying the self-aware and willingly contradictory transcendentalists, along with plays-all-the-sides Soren Kierkegaard, perspectivism is a beautiful intellectual capstone for my studies for the last four months. i have loved Nietzsche’s writing for its eloquence and literary quality since we read it as part of English 205 (intro to creative writing) class, which was the first English class i took — back when i was still planning to be a math major, a dream whose abandonment i realize more and more was a really prudent choice.

perspectivism is tremendous, though. i really love it. basically, the only way to define what we call “objectivity” is as the combination of all possible perspectives on anything. more importantly, there is no set of “KNOWLEDGE” sitting somewhere waiting to be tapped into, which is how most philosophers have thought of the human pursuit of knowledge. we define the world through our different perspectives.

my heart goes out to Margaret Fuller.

for the last few weeks i have been rereading Summer on the Lakes, finding myself charmed again at her discussion of my hometown, but mostly combing for her frequent references to Native Americans: encounters with them, thoughts on their ways of life, unflattering depictions of whites and their cultures in contrast. i’ve also been wading through reams of secondary sources. NEAT.

her writing is often bursting with earnestness and full of the evidence of her perpetual willingness to educate herself on new subjects. and i love that.

my favorite passage from summer on the lakes is this portion of Fuller’s “slight sketch” of the life of her school friend Mariana.

“Yet there was a vein of haughty caprice in her character; a love of solitude, which made her at times wish to retire entirely, and at these times she would expect to be thoroughly understood, and let alone, yet to be welcomed back when she returned. She did not thwart others in their humors, but she never doubted of great indulgence from them.”

ever germane during finals. when i have a lot of work to do, i resent my friends for having fun. in the breaks between big commitments, i resent them for having work!

last night was the 48 hour film festival, the film commission’s four-year-old brainchild. one of my best friends runs the club along with two of our other friends, so i volunteered to do various bitchwork during the event itself — handing out tiny pencils, for instance; handing out, collecting, and counting ballots. the not-so-secret secret is, i love doing this kind of thing. watching the logistics of an event take shape warms my logical, order-loving heart.

our discussion of pragmatism in class the other day really stuck in my mind because my mom has been telling me how pragmatic i am for as long as i can remember. in philosophy class we always, whether indirectly or head-on, ask ourselves and our classmates how we can apply these philosophies to our lives. some fields, like applied ethics, are much easier to view in a practical light — most writings in ethics deal specifically with one issue and draw parallels to help the reader to abstract it. in any comprehensive philosophy, especially those of Marx and Hegel this semester, there is a gulf between buying the philosophy and living it somehow. this is, i think, one of the biggest reasons why the general public either dislikes philosophy or thinks philosophers have no common sense.

however, pragmatism is not without its own hangups. saying that i just do what i think is right, and that truth is what i believe to be true, is an interesting and practical way of doing things, yes. it is also impossible to generalize and apply on more than an individual or small-group level, which leads me to think it may not be a philosophy at all so much as a lifestyle or belief system. not sure!