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In memoriam
Aug. 6th, 2013 12:43 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 23. Got down to 4 this morning in Bancroft.
From time to time I think I should do something like what Aurelius does in Book I of the Meditations: make an account what important things I've gotten from whom. He starts: "From my grandfather Verus: the lessons of noble character and even temper." The twelfth one catches my eye: "From Alexander the Platonist: seldom and only when absolutely necessary to say to anyone or write in a letter: 'I am too busy'; nor by such a turn of phrase to continually evade the duties incident to our relations to those who live with us, on the plea of 'present circumstances'"--it catches my eye because seldom and only when necessary to say "I am too busy" is something I sometimes say I got from Howard Adelman; I tell people how he wrote a long e-mail to me once about why the pot-dealer kid in American Beauty is an Epicurean and not a Stoic. Adelman is one of those I would list in an account of the important people I've gotten important things from.
Once Adelman was talking to some of us about Sam Mallin, for some reason, and he said that Sam had been telling him about how he would spend eight hours turning an Ice-Age Venus sculpture over and over in his hand, and he said to Sam, "Sam, you gotta eat!"
Once Sam was telling some of us about a conversation he had had with another prof in the department, about what they were going to do over the upcoming holidays--he had said something to this other prof about something like "working on his philosophy", and this other prof had said to him something like, "Oh, you think you have a philosophy?"--because this other prof took himself to be simply a scholar of philosophy.
Once upon a time, someone who I probably had no way of appreciating or dealing with well enough at the time, and whom I ultimately let down badly, told me that someday I would have a philosophy of my own. I couldn't even begin to take that seriously. As Thoreau says, there are nowadays no philosophers but only professors of philosophy; as Nietzsche says, there are only philosophical labourers.... Do I have a philosophy of my own now? I don't know, but I do have a message. "Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me, but I know you. And I've got a message to give to you." I first heard "O Superman" in one of Sam's classes. Maybe it was the same class where he played Leonard Cohen's "The Future", and I wanted to argue that it was modernist and not postmodernist ... as if it matters in the slightest.
I said of Sam in the acknowledgments of my dissertation and my book that his "sensitivity to the phenomenological life in the later Heidegger was an inspiration to mine". I don't know what I would be in relation to philosophy if not for Sam--I really have no idea. I say in my dissertation and my book that it has one of its most important roots in my childhood at the cottage. Would I ever have found a way to bring that into "philosophy" if not for Sam? His courses were the most important I ever took--and what I remember of them is him drawing swirls and waves on the blackboard, and talking about pine cones and the little dead animals that chalk is made of. And a heron that he saw once do a backflip in the air. And pouring a bit of coffee on a guy's notebook, to watch it find its way across the page. Once I was at a grad student party where another guy was insisting to me that that proved that Sam was an asshole--he poured coffee on this guy's book! Well, you know, I wouldn't have poured coffee on this guy's book, I'm too proper to do something like that, so far, probably, and so I couldn't really defend it ... but Sam was caught up in the delirium of the flow, the boundlessness of it: the boundlessness, Eros, that Socrates says is the thing that belongs to the philosopher--and also to the tyrant! The philosopher is unconcerned with proper bounds, with "justice"--the philosopher is pursuing the good, which means the opening of being, and finding a fitting response to the opening of being.
It was Sam from whom I first picked up that bit of "The Dancing Song" that is so important to me, my very favourite thing in all of philosophy: "Deeply I love only life.... But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?" I've never known anyone in "philosophy" who lived philosophy as much as Sam did--but that's to say, lived life, reflectively ... "Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable." The only time I talked to Sam about that bit of Zarathustra, he said something to me about how she closes her eyes and then opens them again--why does she do that? It's a puzzle, figure it out! Well, you never figure it out--you just keep after it, spiraling deeper and deeper. "Oh, yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her."
From time to time I think I should do something like what Aurelius does in Book I of the Meditations: make an account what important things I've gotten from whom. He starts: "From my grandfather Verus: the lessons of noble character and even temper." The twelfth one catches my eye: "From Alexander the Platonist: seldom and only when absolutely necessary to say to anyone or write in a letter: 'I am too busy'; nor by such a turn of phrase to continually evade the duties incident to our relations to those who live with us, on the plea of 'present circumstances'"--it catches my eye because seldom and only when necessary to say "I am too busy" is something I sometimes say I got from Howard Adelman; I tell people how he wrote a long e-mail to me once about why the pot-dealer kid in American Beauty is an Epicurean and not a Stoic. Adelman is one of those I would list in an account of the important people I've gotten important things from.
Once Adelman was talking to some of us about Sam Mallin, for some reason, and he said that Sam had been telling him about how he would spend eight hours turning an Ice-Age Venus sculpture over and over in his hand, and he said to Sam, "Sam, you gotta eat!"
Once Sam was telling some of us about a conversation he had had with another prof in the department, about what they were going to do over the upcoming holidays--he had said something to this other prof about something like "working on his philosophy", and this other prof had said to him something like, "Oh, you think you have a philosophy?"--because this other prof took himself to be simply a scholar of philosophy.
Once upon a time, someone who I probably had no way of appreciating or dealing with well enough at the time, and whom I ultimately let down badly, told me that someday I would have a philosophy of my own. I couldn't even begin to take that seriously. As Thoreau says, there are nowadays no philosophers but only professors of philosophy; as Nietzsche says, there are only philosophical labourers.... Do I have a philosophy of my own now? I don't know, but I do have a message. "Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me, but I know you. And I've got a message to give to you." I first heard "O Superman" in one of Sam's classes. Maybe it was the same class where he played Leonard Cohen's "The Future", and I wanted to argue that it was modernist and not postmodernist ... as if it matters in the slightest.
I said of Sam in the acknowledgments of my dissertation and my book that his "sensitivity to the phenomenological life in the later Heidegger was an inspiration to mine". I don't know what I would be in relation to philosophy if not for Sam--I really have no idea. I say in my dissertation and my book that it has one of its most important roots in my childhood at the cottage. Would I ever have found a way to bring that into "philosophy" if not for Sam? His courses were the most important I ever took--and what I remember of them is him drawing swirls and waves on the blackboard, and talking about pine cones and the little dead animals that chalk is made of. And a heron that he saw once do a backflip in the air. And pouring a bit of coffee on a guy's notebook, to watch it find its way across the page. Once I was at a grad student party where another guy was insisting to me that that proved that Sam was an asshole--he poured coffee on this guy's book! Well, you know, I wouldn't have poured coffee on this guy's book, I'm too proper to do something like that, so far, probably, and so I couldn't really defend it ... but Sam was caught up in the delirium of the flow, the boundlessness of it: the boundlessness, Eros, that Socrates says is the thing that belongs to the philosopher--and also to the tyrant! The philosopher is unconcerned with proper bounds, with "justice"--the philosopher is pursuing the good, which means the opening of being, and finding a fitting response to the opening of being.
It was Sam from whom I first picked up that bit of "The Dancing Song" that is so important to me, my very favourite thing in all of philosophy: "Deeply I love only life.... But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?" I've never known anyone in "philosophy" who lived philosophy as much as Sam did--but that's to say, lived life, reflectively ... "Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable." The only time I talked to Sam about that bit of Zarathustra, he said something to me about how she closes her eyes and then opens them again--why does she do that? It's a puzzle, figure it out! Well, you never figure it out--you just keep after it, spiraling deeper and deeper. "Oh, yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her."
