In the last act of Thornton Wilder's Our Town

In the last act of Thornton Wilder's Our Town

Often my days are like the quiet stillness of that hill.
The hours of each day pass.
The concerns of working life fade into quiet memory and fade again further away.

The need to teach becomes a need
To question again,
To learn...

The Island, an Essay in a Tempest

The Island, an Essay in a Tempest

Dramatis Personae

Emerson, Horkheimer, Adorno, Roth, Prospero, Ariel. The Writer

(On a ship at sea; a tempestuous storm. Enter Roth and The Writer.)

Roth: Horkheimer and Adorno see progress? (Enlightenment?) as a kind of trap; discuss their thoughts in relation to another thinker  who also saw progress as a trap.

(A brilliant strike of lighting. Enter Horkheimer/Adorno)

Horkheimer/Adorno: Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. (Thunder) Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

(Enter Ariel floating above the ship.)

Ariel: Where the bee sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry. (He waves his hand and the storm worsens.)

Horkheimer/Adorno: (Astonished seeing Ariel. Faces.) Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.

(Enter Emerson.)

Horkheimer/Adorno: Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.

(The storm worsens.)

Emerson: At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.

Horkheimer/Adorno: What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.

Emerson: The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.

(The storm becomes violent.)

The Writer: We are about to die at sea. I need real help finding a balance between this ship and nature!

Horkheimer/Adorno: Nature, stripped of qualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes a mere having, an abstract identity.

Emerson: The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.

The Writer: We are ALL about to die at sea.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small.

Emerson: It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own  ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped; it is the new form of blindness.

Emerson: To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door… the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law.

The Writer: Gentlemen, we truly are ALL about to die at sea.

(Prospero appears. The ship vanishes. We are on a rocky island.)

PROSPERO: Be connected;


No more amazement; tell your piteous heart

There's no harm done.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied only in art.

Roth: (Re-appearing) Art rescues the past. This is important for Horkheimer and Adorno because the past contains alternatives to the status quo… The seeds of alternatives to the status quo.

PROSPERO: My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,

And they shall be themselves.

I have be-dimm'd

The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,

And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault

Set roaring war.But this rough magic

I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd

Some heavenly music-which even now I do-

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,


And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

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Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Emerson, Nature

At Walden Pond

The present writer intentionally responds to prompts in forms that he hopes are unexpected.

(Lights slowly rise. An image of Walden Pond shrouded in early morning mist is projected across the back of an empty stage) 

Voice: How is the cultivation of self-reliance (in Emerson) a continuation of the Enlightenment tradition? Compare Emerson with at least one other thinker from the course.

(Enter Left Ken Ilgunas. He stares at the image of Walden pond in wonder and then sits, back to the audience facing the pond.)

Kant: (Off stage loudly) The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude!

(Enter Right Emmanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in animated discussion. Ilgunas stands to meet them.)

Kant: Have the courage to use your own understanding! Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.

(Ilgunas and Thoreau recognize each other and sit down facing the pond.)

Emerson: But Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

 Kant: Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men gladly remain immature for life.

Emerson: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Kant: There will always be a few who think for themselves, a public can only achieve enlightenment slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism, as in this Massachusetts, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass. If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all to think for myself.

Emerson: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Kant: Yes, it is difficult for each separate individual to work his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him.  

Emerson: Yet, there is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.

Kant: In that we disagree, I believe that a philosopher should study Thought rather than Reality.

Emerson: I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code.

(Lights dim on Emerson and Kant. Spotlight on Thoreau and Ilgunas who rise and walk Front Right in the spotlight.)

Emerson: ( As Ilgunas and Thoreau speak, Emerson softly repeats these lines over and over) We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Ilgunas: I’ve read your books. Thank you, they opened a path for me that would have been harder to find without them.

Thoreau: How so?

Ilgunas: I was pushing carts at Home Depot to pay off college debt, and living a life of quiet

Thoreau: desperation? Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Ilgunas: I decided to free myself of debt by moving to the Alaskan woods and living by your principles of Economy.

Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
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The Skin of our Teeth, Wilder

The Walden on Wheels, Ilgunas, 2013

Art, Woolf, and Freud

Art, Woolf, and Freud

-- Does the present writer intend on responding to the topic with a formal academic essay?

No!

-- How will the writer respond to the topic?

In a manner suggested by the seventeenth chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. (Woolf thought that  Joyce wrote for a clique. The present writer is a member of that clique in good standing.)

-- Did Woolf  read Freud’s writings?

The Woolfs owned the Hogarth Press which published translations of Freud’s papers. Woolf wrote to a friend,  “...we are publishing all Dr Freud, and I glance at the proof and read how Mr. A.B. threw a bottle of red ink in the sheets of his marriage bed to excuse his impotence to the housemaid, but threw it in the wrong place, which unhinged his wife’s mind, - and to this day she pours claret on the dinner table. We could all go on like that for hours; and yet these Germans think it proves something - besides their own gull-like imbecility.”

-- On what occasions did Virgina Woolf meet Sigmund Freud

Once, on January 28, 1939. Freud gave her a narcissus.

--  Her impression?

“A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert...Difficult talk. … an old fire now flickering...”

Woolf did not read Freud seriously until after meeting him.

-- Did Freud deliver lectures on the value of Art?

Yes.

"Art as Unrepressed Wish-Fulfillment" - -

“In phantasy,  man can continue to enjoy a freedom from the grip of the external world, (a freedom) which he has long relinquished in actuality. The meager satisfaction that (man) can extract from reality leaves him starving … There is, in fact, a path from phantasy back again to reality, and that is—art.”

-- What value does Freud think Art has for society?

The repressed desires of the artist are sublimated into an artistic product that fulfills the unconscious wishes of the spectators. Art transforms common neuroses into fantasies that are then shared by the culture.

-- In Civilization and it’s Discontents did Freud explain the necessity of Art?

“Life, as we find it, it too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointment, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures”.

-- What is a “palliative measure?

A measure for relieving pain or alleviating a problem without dealing with the underlying cause such as giving a person who has a broken leg an aspirin.

-- What proofs does Woolf’s  biographical evidence offer that Art was a palliative measure for relieving her suffering?

Woolf created more than twenty work of fiction, autobiography, and criticism that are still read, admired, and have great influence today.

As a child Woolf took great pleasure in trying to find the perfect pen for writing on paper.

From the age of 13 and for the next 46 years of  her life she suffered periods of severe depression, attempting suicide four times.

For a summer, Woolf believed that the birds were chirping in Greek and King Edward VII was uttering curses from behind nearby shrubbery.

-- At what point in her life did “Art” cease to be palliative for the underlying causes of her suffering?

On 28 March 1941, she put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself.

Her  body was not found until 18 April 1941.

-- Number of days from Saturday, January 28, 1939 to Friday, March 28, 1941?

790

-- Number of years?

2 years, 2 months, 1 day

-- On what important philosophical or psychological point did Woolf and Freud disagree?

On the perception of a harmony with the universe.

-- What perceptions of harmony does Mrs. Ramsey experience in To the Lighthouse?

At dinner she seats a group of acquaintances who have demonstrated their conflicts and alienation through many chapters. For the period of the meal, all come together in harmony with themselves and each other, an experience which, although transitory, binds them.

-- Does Freud affirm a personal experience of harmony with the universe?

“I cannot discover this 'oceanic' feeling in myself. that is to say, ... a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.  It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling.”

"But this gives me no right to deny that it does in fact occur in other people."_______________________________________
References

The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume One. P. 92.

"Mr. Virginia Woolf". Commentary Magazine. Retrieved 8 September 2008.

"Art as Unrepressed Wish-Fulfillment" by Sigmund Freud

In a balloon over Paris

The brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier were scientists interested in exploring manned flight. On 19 September 1783, they launched  a hot air balloon attached to a large basket containing: a sheep, a duck and a rooster. The sheep was selected because its anatomy somewhat resembled that of a human. The duck because it could fly and the rooster because it could not. The flight lasted eight minutes, the passengers traveled eleven miles and landed safely. The brothers Montgolfier concluded that their balloon could safely carry human passengers. 

On September 24, 1860 the details of this experiment were explained to Charles Darwin as he climbed into the basket of a Montgolfier and prepared for a balloon tour of Paris.  He had been invited on this tour by Baron Haussmann, the chief city planner of Paris. It was Haussman who had redesigned the city, tearing down much of the medieval city, building wide boulevards that could not be barricaded by revolutionaries, and creating a transit system that for the first time caused the rich, the middle class, and the poor to pass by each other daily.

A third passenger, the poet Charles Baudelaire, arrived late. Darwin observed that in England this man would be called a “dandy.” He reeked of alcohol and opium smoke. He seemed to be in a permanent dark mood - a spleen. As the balloon floated over the city, the sullen Baudelaire commented on the location of each “maison close” and pointed out every opium den they passed over. His tone, his gestures were permeated with aggression, and an animal lust.   

Darwin thought to himself, "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,” and continued his conversation with Haussmann, who had read Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Darwin explained, “The main conclusion I arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.”

Haussmann was about to comment when Baudelaire interjected, "There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."

Darwin continued,”We have seen that man incessantly presents individual differences in all parts of his body and in his mental faculties. These differences or variations seem to be induced by the same general causes, and to obey the same laws as with the lower animals. In both cases similar laws of inheritance prevail.”

Baudelaire pointed out a favorite “maison close” and said, "The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is good at coupling, copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another–and the artist never emerges from himself."

Trying to ignore the drunken poet, Haussmann asked Darwin if his book had not encountered violent criticism from the church. Before Darwin could answer, Baudelaire turned a contorted face toward them and shouted, "Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil. But what matters an eternity of damnation to one who has found an infinity of joy in a single second?"

Darwin responded, “A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.”

For a moment Baudelaire seemed almost sober, his face reflective, he responded, “The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof -- if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature -- of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.”

“There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet.” continued Baudelaire. “ To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable..."

“The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.” Darwin responded. “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”

Think of it this way

Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

Chromebooks

I'm writing this on a Samsung Chromebook.

I've had lots of experience with the Chrome browser, so the operating system is comfortable. The hardware is going to require a period of adjustment. The computer is light, only two and a half pounds, comfortable to hold on my lap. So far the keyboard is as comfortable a my MacBook Pro. The screen is a matte finish. Some people prefer matte to glossy. They even pay a lot of money to Apple for the opinion. I miss the depth of color.

Wow! This keyboard is really nice. Best feature of the machine.

I bought my first Chromebook yesterday, an Acer with a fast Intel processor and four gigs of memory. It was thick, heavy, unbalanced and uncomfortable to hold -- basically an Acer netbook running Chrome OS. Only four hours or less of battery life. It was however very fast! Much faster than this Samsung. After less than ninety minutes of typing the spacebar and the M key stopped working. You really don't know how important the spacebar is until you don't have one. James Joyce and E.E. Cumming might get by without the spacebar for a while, but not me.

I repeat, this keyboard is really nice. I'm hoping it holds up more than ninety minutes.