Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Forest of Arden.

April 2, 2010 at 3:12 P.M. Several attempts to revise essays at my blogs were obstructed. I will try to get to Philosopher's Quest.

March 12, 2010 at 3:40 P.M. An advertisement was attached to this site, illegally, possibly meant to insult me or my writings as laughably unlearned or flaky. You decide.

"The Subconscious Mind Learn How to Jump Into Any Reality You Desire. ... For Real. http://www.quantumjumping.com/ " (Yuk, yuk, yuk.) "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness."

February 25, 2010 at 1:47 P.M. This essay posted earlier this morning has experienced the usual attacks and alterations. I will do my best to make necessary corrections of all inserted "errors."

This essay was written "in a wood near Athens" in 2005 ... well, actually, uptown and about a block from the "A" train. With a little face-lift and push-up bra, I think this text is more timely and looks better today than when it first appeared. Enjoy.

Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998).
Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman and Ashberry (Princeton: 2005).
Langdon Hammer, "Overheard Speech," (Book Review), The New York Times, Sunday, October 16, 2005, p. 8.

Why write? People who write because they "have to" find this question bizarre. You might ask yourself: "Why should I bother to breathe?" We just do in order to stay alive. Erica Jong said in an interview that being a writer today is like "becoming a blacksmith or an alchemist" (not a far-fetched analogy!), an expert in an activity that the majority of people no longer value very much. Yet it is the unavoidable fate of some of us to have to write every day. It doesn't matter if publishing opportunities are unfairly denied to us, if our manuscripts are defaced or destroyed, it doesn't matter if we are ignored or insulted. We "ink-stained wretches" will continue to write.

These days carpel-tunnel syndrome is more likely than ink-stains, together with cyberattacks from something called "Doubleclick." New Jersey? Hemingway said that he kept a number of rejection letters taped to the wall of his study. I guess they served as inspiration. Recently, I sent out letters to small publishers to see if any were interested in an essay collection that I am putting together. So far I have received one expression of interest that, I think, amounts to a "yes." I have also received a "no." In neither case can I say why the publisher came to a particular decision. I wonder whether they know why they accept or reject books. ("How Censorship Works in America.")

A number of publishers have not bothered to respond, so who knows? Perhaps they don't approve of my politics or just don't like what I have to say. Viruses, spyware, obstructions (this morning I can't read my work at Lulu) are a daily feature of my writing experience. I wonder whether Shakespeare had these problems? I doubt it. ("Serendipity, III" and "Master and Commander.")

It makes no difference in my case. I will continue to write and put the books out there somehow. It's nice that I now have a commercial publisher, I think, because the book will be more attractive and will be on shelves in bookstores. Anyway, real writers will write no matter what, regardless of discouragement or any other troubles. I am, once again, my own non-commercial publisher, when I can get into my Lulu account, and yes, I am hurt by that. It means that I will continue to write. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey" as well as "Burn Notice.")

Writing can be a life-saver, especially for the person who has a sense of being misunderstood or not understood at all. You write because you hope that there are others, located elsewhere in the literary landscape, who will recognize the emotions and experiences that you describe and react to them. I never know whether my computer will survive the attacks from one day to the next, nor whether I will be able to renew my security system. Writing, for me, is like living in the trenches of World War I -- long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.

I was just reading a journal entry by Sylvia Plath addressed to her "demon," and I felt that I uncerstood her so well. A writer (or any artist) sometimes needs to fight off self-doubt and persist. The best thing to do, always, is to keep writing and reading while ignoring all insults as well as dismissals. The insults provide boredom; the defacements of my writings produce concern and sadness.

By "react," I do not mean to approve or agree with what I say. Any reaction is better than none -- and a strong reaction, including a negative review -- is preferable to non-comprehension or dismissal. Anything I publish will be subjected to politically-motivated and -financed attacks. Controversy sells. Go right ahead and attack my writings, as long as you do not alter or try to destroy them.

Writers tend to be eccentric or "weird" in their families and social circles. They are the person no one understood at the dinner table, who adopts -- as a surface persona -- the mores and masks of his contemporaries, but who really lives only in what I call the "Forest of Arden." The dull-witted reader and all lawyers -- who are made literal-minded by their unfortunate training -- will immediately ask: "What is the Forest of Arden? And do they need experts on property law?"
Well, the Forest of Arden is that imaginary space conjured by language where writer and reader meet, maybe where all artists meet the recipients of their works. Shakespeare evokes this magical landscape in several of his plays, especially in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "As You Like It." It is that strange territory, which is unique for each of us, where one is likely to run into Huck Finn or Peter Pan, also Prince Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes, or that Vampire from Steven King's Salem's Lot.

Myra Breckinridge discusses cinema with those who are interested, and Sidney Carton shares stories of unrequitted love in a pub. King Kong is always climbing the Empire State building and Fay Wray is always wearing that nightgown.You can play games with David Copperfield; while Oliver Twist steals your wallet. I can sit in a meadow and listen to Jose Marti read his poems and stories for children. Oscar Wilde shares some of his own poems in prose. George Bernard Shaw is making speeches in the "Speaker's Corner" of this landscape. George Orwell and H.G. Wells then take turns in responding. They are happy when you stop to listen or nod in agreement.

Cyrano is always dueling with someone, which can be very annoying. And Caruso sings duets with Callas. Luckily, any real politicians are forbidden entry to this territory, where lawyers, accountants and business consultants are feared much more than wolves in the forest. After all, some of those wolves have tenure and lecture on "Romanticism." Age is non-existent for the residents of this Arden, since all of them are children at heart -- like Wendy. ("A Review of the t.v. Series 'Alice.'")

In the athletes' territory, Joe Louis spars with Jack Dempsey. Some day, Ali will show them who is the greatest. The pick-up basketball games are great. The philosophers have named their grove "The Academy" and they argue all the time, even pretending to understand Hegel -- which is something that not even Hegel does! -- except for Socrates, of course, who insists on being puzzled by all of the others. Marx is planning a revolution. And Wittgenstein sits by himself, or hangs out with the people who like detective stories. "If a lion should learn to speak," he says. But then, in Arden, the lions do speak. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

Friedrich Nietzsche wears a "Superman" t-shirt and baggy pants, some big medallions, and likes to knock people down, while doing his own improvisational raps. Don Quixote and Sancho have destroyed all of the windmills. There are still nice cottages in what John Fowles describes as "the echanted grove." You cannot buy them, but you can have as many as you like. And Don Juan is always kissing the ladies behind one of those cottages. Every tree has a "Z" carved into it by Zorro. The most intimate conversations, which are sometimes whispered, take place with poets. All of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, recite their works. We often must overhear them ...

"John Stuart Mill memorably described poetry as 'overheard' speech. His image calls to mind the solitary poet so absorbed in conversation with himself that we are able to sneak up behind and listen in. Often, this means overhearing the poet talking not so much to himself as to someone who is not there. Vendler's study [Invisible Listeners] concerns a special type of overhearing in which the poet's addressee is not a distant lover or mourned-for child, but a figure more of fantasy, of purely poetic imagination. [Ms. Woolf's "ideal reader"?] Poetry of this kind begins in the poet's craving for a listener, a desire so keen it calls its object into being." (Langdon Hammer)
The Forest of Arden is the linguistic landscape "called into being" by writers and readers, by writers as readers. It is the place where all art lives. In England, England by Julian Barnes, we are asked to imagine an "England where all the pubs are quaint, where the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), where the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his men really are merry. ... "

British Airways cannot "fly you there," only you can really do that. If you need some help to imagine this setting, then rent the film "Finding Neverland." For a mere $13.00, Mr. Barnes will be only too pleased to show you the way to Arden in his interesting story, with an ulterior motive or two. Novelists delight in ulterior motives. The one great requisite in Arden is a child-like quality of innocence which is, sadly, beaten out of most people early in life. One resident of Arden named Alice, tells a curious story of tumbling down a rabbit hole, landing in a dark space where she found a very small door --

"-- 'What a curious feeling,' exclaimed Alice. 'I must be closing up like a telescope.' ..."

That is exactly what happened to Alice. Many of us know what it is like, as children, to close up like a telescope. Sometimes the place that hurts inside seems to grow and we become only the wound, feeling only pain. If we can love someone so much that this love's reality is even greater than the pain, then the love becomes Arden. Love becomes this space of safety and peace, where they cannot hurt us anymore. Wonderland. Never, Never Land. A rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. "Serendipity, III"?

I will take a deep breath, restart my computer and try (again) to read my work at Lulu, expecting those insulting comments and further computer viruses, alterations or destructions of my writings, as my daily experience of the hatred that deforms so many unfortunate people's lives. The challenge is not to give in to the impulse to respond in kind, while insisting on justice. I will not alter or deface the writings or creative expressions of others. I also will not hesitate to continue to speak freely, regardless of what New Jersey officials and other mafia members think of what I have to say.

"She was only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size to go through the little door into that lovely garden."

We must become small again to go through that special door to Arden. Mr. Barnes, in his novel, explains why this is so:

"... What held her attention now were the children's faces, which expressed such willing yet complex trust in reality. As she saw it, they had not yet reached the age of incredulity, only of wonder; so that even when they disbelieved, they also believed. The tubby, peering dwarf in the distorting mirror was them and wasn't them: both were true."

The distorting mirror is, of course, the text -- cinematic or literary texts, canvas or stone, even music and theater. You see yourself in this text by seeing me. Hegel is perking up again. And Miss Alice agrees. Like many of us ...

"This curious girl likes to pretend to be two people."

Alas, there is a problem for Alice:

" 'But it's no use now,' Alice thought, 'to pretend to be two people. Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one complete person.' ..."

Immanuel Kant came to the rescue and explained to Alice all about the noumenal and phenomenal, the way in which we all exist on dual planes anyway. They went off together, then, to chat about philosophy. The two of us make one great person.

We write to invite others to join us in the Forest of Arden. If you have read this entry, then you must be a regular visitor to that territory already. Welcome.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Happy Valentine's Day!

For Miss Emma Woodhouse and Miss Elizabeth Bennett:

Tempus fugit, tempus eternum est ...

A Hour With Thee

by

Sir Walter Scott

An hour with thee! When earliest day
Dapples with gold the eastern grey,
Oh, what can frame my mind to bear
The toil and turmoil, cark and care,
New griefs, which coming hours unfold,
And sad remembrance of the old?
One hour with thee.

One hour with thee! When burning June
Waves his red flag at pitch of noon;
What shall repay the faithful swain,
His labor on the sultry plain;
And, more than cave or sheltering bough,
Cool feverish blood and throbbing brow?
One hour with thee.

One hour with thee! When sun is set,
Oh, what can teach me to forget
The thankless labours of the day;
The hopes, the wishes, flung away;
The increasing wants, and lessening gains,
The master's pride, who scorns my pain?
One hour with thee.

To me faire friend you never can be old

by

William Shakespeare

To me faire friend you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyde,
Such seems your beauty still: Three Winters colde,
Have from the forrests shooke three summers pride,
Three beautious springs to yellow Autumme turn'd,
In process of the seasons have I seene,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh which yet are greene.
And yet doth beauty like a Dyall hand,
Steale from his figure, and no peace perceiv'd,
So your sweete hew, which me thinkes still doth stand
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceaved.
For feare of which, heare this thou age unbred,
Ere you were born was beauties summer dead.

From the Mad Hatter,

"If you knew Time as well as I do," said the Hatter, "you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."

"I don't know what you mean," said Alice.

"Of course you don't!" the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptously. "I dare say you never even spoke to Time!"

"Perhaps not," Alice cautiously replied, "but I know I have to beat time when I learn music."

"Ah! That accounts for it," said the Hatter, "He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just in time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for my dinner!"

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Bantam Editions, 1981), p. 56 (1st. Pub. 1865, 1871).

Friday, February 12, 2010

A Review of the t.v. Show "Alice."

"Alice," a Sci-Fi Channel Series, December 6-7, 2009. "Alice Hamilton" (Caterina Scorsone); "Queen of Hearts" (Kathy Bates, Brava!); "Hatter" (Andrew Lee Pons); "White Knight" (Matt Frewer); "Jack of Hearts" (Philip Winchester); "Dodo" (Tim Curry); "King of Hearts" (Colm Meany). Writer/Director Nick Willing (Excellent).

"Oh, I've had the most curious dream!"

I've always loved Lewis Carroll's Alice books. They are classic examples of literary works whose meaning is deliberately elusive. They were ostensibly written only after being narrated to three young girls accompanying the author and a friend on an afternoon rowing trip in 1862.

The transformations of the tales mirror the evolutions of the author, Charles Lutwig Dodgson, as he was transformed into "Lewis Carroll." John Fowles said that the essence of British identity is "hiding." Hence, the essential English myth is Robin Hood. Alice in Wonderland is about an adult's choice to "hide" in a myth of childhood bliss from the pains of a mature life in a complex society. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

This wonderful children's story -- Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass -- is very much about "hiding." We are invited to play a game of "Hide and Go Seek." Is revelation through concealment the secret of British acting? Is this the mystery of literature? "Hiding" within another self for fun and profit? Is British theatrical genius, partly, a reaction to a class system that assigns narrow "roles" to everyone? How else would one escape such a narrow role except by becoming another person?

The same need to hide must be found in settings where gender-options are rigidly prescribed -- a subject needs to escape one self in order to become another persona. No wonder Mr. Dodgson often refused to accept letters written to Lewis Carroll. (Lurie, pp. 7-8. ) After all, Lewis Carroll was not a proper Victorian gentleman. Professor Dodgson certainly was a credit to his university and nation. Lewis Carroll could not be an Oxford man since he spoke of the terrible things that would have offended his Sovereign and all good moral opinion among the fine ladies and gentlemen in his society.

Carroll questioned social conventions and detested hypocrisy. If they had been understood properly, Carroll's children's stories might have provoked a violent response. What a dreadful person this Lewis Carroll must be since he is so filled with a suspicious "fancy." Fancy and imagination are dangerous things, especially among adults. Professor Dodgson would never shake the hand of Lewis Carroll.

"As one might expect from an Oxford don, the most thoroughgoing satirical attacks in the Alice books are directed at education. All the adults, especially those who resemble governesses or professors, [like Charles Dodgson?] are foolish, arbitrary, cruel, or mad. The only wholly decent and sensible person is Alice herself." (Lurie, p. 6.)

Professor Dodgson would be appalled to meet such a vulgar and marginal member of the bohemian classes as Lewis Carroll. Professor Dodgson was one of eleven children who became the nominal head of his family in his early teens. Childhood was taken from Mr. Dodgson abruptly and unfairly. Happily, the world of numbers and logical propositions was a Wonderland-like kingdom where just about anything became possible for the good professor and those he admired.

A television reviewer expressed bafflement at the Tim Burton film exploring the "Alice" myth. I have not yet seen Mr. Burton's movie, but on the basis of the increased age of the protagonist and her engagement to be married at the outset of the story, it seems clear that the film dramatizes the transition from girlhood to womanhood in terms of eros.

The descent into the collective subconscious ("Wonderland") is psychological "hesitation" -- through a return to childhood -- before erotic adventures make adulthood even more tempting than childhood bliss. The classic mythological version of this subject of girls becoming women is "Sleeping Beauty" and see my story: "The Sleeping Prince."

The social themes also clearly forming a subject matter of the Burton movie focus on questions of America's identity and the perennial attractions of war in our increasingly insane world. Mr. Burton's film is a genius child's protest against war and the expression of his hopes for love. I share in that protest and in his hopes for love.

F.H. Bradley found similar reasons (escapism) for developing the concept of the Absolute (surely, the Absolute is only another name for Wonderland) as distinct from the "evil" Professor McTaggart, who was always pressed for time even as he insisted that time is "unreal." Time's unreality would deprive Mr. Dodgson of his few golden moments with Miss Alice Siddell. "This would not do," as the Queen of Hearts would say, "it would not do at all." (I am referring to the Kathy Bates character in the t.v. series who is aptly associated with eros and tyranny.)

Ms. Scorsone is adequate. Otherwise, the cast is superb. Tim Curry is always fun to see chewing the scenery and, if he gets his hands on them, also his fellow actors. Kathy Bates loves to be evil. The Hatter (Andrew Lee Pons) is wisely seen as a romantic lead in this version of the story.

What is it that this children's fable or myth is concealing?

Well, the author provides us with a scathing view of British academia and political society, as I have indicated, hypocrisies, falsehoods, the lies we adults create that are necessary to "preserve" society. He also tells us that there are philosophical puzzles associated with our use of language and unavoidable "residence in metaphor" that may be irresolvable. Mysteriously, Alice anticipates the quantum revolution and Wittgenstein's logic. How delightful this labyrinth of logical propositions will prove to be if we are going to hide from the nasty adults. Hogwarts anyone? Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), then David Bohm & B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).

The logic of games is illustrated with chess puzzles tucked away in the narrative as Alice makes her way to the "eighth square" in order to become a "queen" herself, like an adventurous pawn in a game that she is not playing, where writer and reader struggle to "checkmate" one another. Wittgenstein's meditations on language games are useful in interpreting the text. You must play the right game to enter this world. Is this the secret to understanding persons in Britain, especially? ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

For whom is each "proper" person's "performance" intended? Gordon Brown? Clearly, Mr. Brown is not a character one is likely to find in the real world. But then neither is David Cameron. Theresa May? Boris Johnson?

Many of the "characters" in British politics seem to have been invented by Lewis Carroll.

Was Carroll concerned to "hide" his improper sexual interest in this child?

I doubt it. Lewis Carroll is "Alice." The child that the author once was is judging the adult man and his dull world of "duty" which is found less than satisfactory. This is always the function of youth. Young people should find the adult world unsatisfactory and in need of improvements. I promise you -- if you are a young person -- that, however much you improve society, it will remain far from perfect when your children come along with a few suggestions for bettering the world.

"Penelope Lively described Dodgson to me as the first children's writer to write about the arcane and incomprehensible world from a childish perspective. She was also quite dismissive of the idea that he might have been a paedophile. At that time it was considered natural for the dons, who were all celibate, to seek the company of young friends." (Cartright, p. 134.)

We will also be told by Mr. Carroll, indirectly, all about those annoying men, Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone, who should both be sent to bed without their suppers. Also, we will encounter infuriating philosophers who presume to disagree with our author.

Professor McTaggart and his doubts about time cannot be refuted. This is quite unacceptable. "Off with his head!"

Charles Dodgson took Holy Orders in 1861 and was the son of a Deacon. Dodgson was concerned that the changes religion would need to undertake in order to adjust to developments in the sciences -- such as the work of Charles Darwin -- would produce painful social transformations in English life. These very adult themes are also a part of the Alice stories.

The writer and director of the Sci-Fi television series is aware of our precarious condition between Modernity and Postmodernity, between scientific conceptions of our nature and our traditional religious values. These concerns express themselves in the themes which the t.v. series has sought to emphasize that are derived from the original stories. The goal for Mr. Willing is to dramatize some of the suggested solutions to our philosophical and political dilemmas today -- dilemmas which are strikingly similar to what our Victorian ancestors faced at the end of the nineteenth century. ("How Can We be Modern Again?")

"I have been at pains to argue that the organizational principles needed to supplement the laws of physics are likely to be forthcoming as a result of new approaches to research and new ways of looking at complexity in nature. I believe that science is in principle able to explain the existence of complexity and organization at all levels, including human consciousness, though only by embracing the 'higher-level' laws. Such a belief might be regarded as denying a god, or a purpose in this wonderful creative universe we inhabit."

Physicist Paul Davies goes on to explain:

"I do not see it that way. The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness [and the possibility of meaning,] -- in other words that the universe has organized its own self-awareness -- is, for me, powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence." (Sim quoting Davies, pp. 160-161.) ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

I begin with a brief biography of Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson. I discuss some philosophical issues cleverly hidden in the story and (possibly) several snide insults of fellow logicians. I adore snide insults in literature and life. I will discuss the central theme of time's reality and fleeting nature. I will focus on the interweaving of time orders from one historical or intellectual epoch to another. I will next explore the conundrums identified by Mr. Willing, the writer and director of the t.v. series, together with the solutions offered to us at the "Mad Tea Party" depicted on all of our television screens.

"The child will be likely to interpret or make sense of his or her own situation in terms of Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk before he or she can begin to interpret or make sense of it in terms of psychology or sociology or economics. If we were to recognize this as a possibility, then it might be easier for us to recognize the possibility also that more objective or theoretical modes of explanation -- such as natural-scientific ones, which in effect determine much of what we experience, as well as of what we do, in a technological world -- may remain dependent on quite different, and ultimately more primitive, modes of comprehension which are essentially mythic." (Falck, p. 119.)

"All that is really worth doing is what we do for others."

"Charles Ludwig Dodgson, pseudonym of Lewis Carroll (1832-98) English writer, nonsense versifier and mathematician, born in Daresbury, near Warrington, the third of eleven children. His pseudonym [was] derived from his first two names: Ludwidge [Lutwig] is the same as Ludwig, of which Lewis is the Anglicized version, and Carroll is a form of Charles. ... He was educated at Rugby and Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics after 1855 and took orders in 1861. Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) ... are superficially similar: in each, Alice meets a succession of fantastic characters (Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Rabbit and the March Hare, Humpty-Dumpty) and each ends grandly, one with a trial, and the other with a banquet. Each has been translated into many languages and there have been innumerable editions, many illustrated by distinguished artists. Their success among Victorian children was doubtless due to the fact that Dodgson eschewed moralising. His other works include Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Rhyme? and Reason? (1883) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889 and 1893). Of his mathematical works Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879) is still of interest. He was also a pioneer photographer, and took many portraits of young girls with whom he seemed to empathize particularly. His diaries appeared in 1953, and an edition of his letters in 1979."

Chambers Biographical Dictionary, p. 426. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

I am aware of allegations by psychoanalysts that Carroll was a would-be "child molester." I think, along with Ms. Lively, that these accusations are inaccurate. Furthermore, I am sure that they are based on a serious misreading of the literary stories and key events in the author's life. There is no eroticizing of the character of Alice. There could not be. I insist that "Alice" is Lewis Carroll.

The author's friendship with the child inspiring the fable may have served as a catalytic agent releasing a great deal of contained imagination with repressed memories of childhood as well as pain at the loss of that "wonderland" that he knew all-too briefly. ("'Finding Neverland': A Movie Review.")

Psychologists diagnose any philosophical opinion or statement of scientific theory as proof of some terrible anti-social malady. Worse, such a diagnosis is often reductivist, that is, labelling is usually an attempt to discover the most demeaning and foul interpretation of conduct, on the asumption that the truth is always deflating and disappointing. This is the legacy of Freud's Schopenhaurian pessimism which is part of the ideology of psychoanalysis.

Shrinks are not regarded as suitably disillusioned and scientific until they possess insulting as well as offensive interpretations of the actions and motives of their fellow human beings (if not of their own actions) in every historical period. Freud was struggling against Victorian prudishness. Today we are often struggling against the opposite of this nineteenth century ethos. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?")

Aside from "Tweedledee" (Disraeli, McCain, Trump) and "Tweedledum" (Gladstone, Obama, Clinton), there are philosophical "issues" to be identified by clever readers of these classic children's fables:

" ... Humpty Dumpty [Benjamin Jowett?] exhibits a form of the Euthyphro dilemma" -- Carroll had absorbed Plato by way of Walter Pater (like me) -- "in his views on his authority over his words; the White Knight [who delivers much of the wisdom in the t.v. series] delves deep into the problem of names, [the Nominalist controversy] the White King takes 'nobody to be a person'; the snark is a 'topic-neutral object of a quest' (sometimes identified with [F.H. Bradley's] Absolute), and throughout the humor depends upon pushing logical and philosophical reasoning to absurdity. Carroll's paper 'What the Tortoise said to Achilles' (Mind, 1894) presents the classic statement of the need for rules of inference as well as axioms in formal systems."

Simon Blackburn, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, pp. 108-109. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power" and "Metaphor is Mystery" then "Serendipity, III.")

In Lewis Carroll's dream version of Britain, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy would be published by Cambridge University Press.

Compare Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998) with Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1946). Cassirer's discussion of "word magic" may be useful. Additional authorities agree concerning the philosophical importance of Alice in Wonderland:

" ... his Alice stories ... brim over with logical puzzles and absurdities and have been duly pillaged by philosophers. Coming at the tail end of the degenerating programme [sic.] of Aristotelean logic, his contributions to formal logic are inevitably insignificant[.]"

This was the consensus based on Russell's and Moore's revolution in logic, a revolution which is now subject to serious doubts in the early years of the twenty-first century due to developments in the sciences and the hermeneutic turn in Continental thought resulting from the works of Gadamer and Ricoeur:

" ... their only lasting value being their testimony to [Carroll's] talent for devising extraordinary syllogisms. Carroll's most important philosophical article is the characteristically quaint and deceptively light 'What the Tortoise said to Achilles' (Mind, 1895). He hints at a deep problem about the epistemology of inference, while demonstrating that the acceptance of rule inference cannot be identified with the acceptance of a conditional proposition."

T. Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 122.

The most important subject examined in these stories from the point of view of a child-reader-writer is the problem of time. Professors McTaggart and F.H. Bradley are set beside each other, without being named, and the author is clearly more impressed by Bradley. The unreality and mystery of time must be a concern to Lewis Carroll (if not to Mr. Dodgson), since Carroll was in search of lost time because, clearly, he is utterly homeless in the adult world. This was true even in the "wonderland" that is the "city of dreaming spires," or Oxford University. The ultimate source of these idealist understandings of time may be found in the works of Kant (Critique of Pure Reason 1781) and Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit 1807), then T.H. Green's critique of empiricism leading to Bradley and McTaggart.

I will focus on the problem of time in these stories before examining the postmodern turn which involves the abandonment of linear time as temporality becomes a spiral or mandala. A pause to consider the jurisprudence of the trial scene will prove useful when we examine the postmodernist twist on this fable. This discussion leads to the Hollywood-sized "Alice" depicted in the t.v. series. The "hospital for dreams" (religions?) and the dream manufacturers in the casino (Entertainment-chemists), where persons are kept narcotically "happy" must cope with irrational authority expressed in the state's increased assumption of the power to define reality: "Off with their heads!" has become: "Off with their brains!" We must join the resistance.

Alice's psychological tortures at the hands of our politicians, conservative (Tweedledee) and liberal (Tweedledum), reflects the images from Abu Ghraib and America's now world-famous flirtation with psychological torture and the technologies of social control. Among those technologies must be included induced frustration techniques such as you are witnessing at these blogs.

"What a funny watch," Alice remarked.

J.M.E. McTaggart is still a subject of scholarly attention for his notorious skepticism concerning the "reality" of time. McTaggart lived in a Newtonian universe whose physics did not yet include Einstein's theory of relativity. Much of McTaggart's argument would become conventional wisdom from a scientific direction only after developments in twentieth century physics.

Astonishingly, Bradley and McTaggart anticipated -- through philosophical argumentation alone -- important scientific discoveries, also crucial insights emerging in later Continental thought concerning language and interpretation. Bradley and McTaggart "foreshadow" the best of Wittgenstein work -- not the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein" and Derek Jarman's "Wittgenstein.")

McTaggart understood -- at a "moment" in history when there was no precedent for the insight -- that time is not best thought of as an objective and fixed aspect of the universe that we encounter, but a kind of fiction that is the product of a meeting (or "tea party") between the self and its world. This is the most Kantian-Hegelian side of McTaggart's thinking. However, McTaggart is also solidly based in British empiricism and the whole of his native tradition of thought. Berkeley and Hume are essential predecessors and sources for the Cambridge philosopher's ideas. Moreover, I am certain that McTaggart's equally brilliant and important theory of love is not unrelated to his provocative view of time. This is a theory of love as meaning and destiny for humanity which is unsurpassed in Western thought. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")

Since McTaggart's and Bradley's idealism (the latter's Principles of Logic dates from 1883 and the Presuppositions of Critical History from 1874) are of concern in the Alice stories -- for presuming to anticipate Dodgson's (if not Carroll's) similar ideas -- it may be wise to examine McTaggart's "shocking" philosophy of time which suggests that childhood can never be lost because our "angel selves" remain, eternally, past, present, and (best of all!) future:

"Past, present, and future are incompatible determinations. Every event must be one or the other," McTaggart writes, "but no event can be more than one. If I say that any event is past, that implies that it is neither present nor future, and so with the others. And this exclusiveness is essential to change, and therefore to time. For the only change we can get is from future to present, and from present to past."

Here things get very interesting:

"The characteristics, therefore, are incompatible. But every event has them all. If M is past, it has been present and future. If it is future, it will be present and past. If it is present, it has been present and will be past. Thus all of the three characteristics belong to each event. How is this consistent with their being incompatible?"

The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Bk. 5, Ch. 33 (1921, then 1927).

This leads to McTaggart's much-quoted conclusion:

"I believe that nothing that exists can be temporal, and that therefore time is unreal."

The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Bk. 5, Ch. 33 (1921, then 1927). ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Steven Hawking is Right on Time.")

These ideas were developed by Professor McTaggart in dialogue with colleagues since the 1890s as well as earlier in relation with the work of F.H. Bradley. These ideas were known to Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson when he was writing and revising the "Alice" stories.

McTaggart's comments on time should be contrasted with the veiled philosophical analysis found in "Alice in Wonderland" then with the discussion by Bradley and also the contemporary analysis of time by particle physicist Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos. (E.J. Lowe, at pp. 84-105.)

Einstein's "theory of relativity" dates from 1915, then 1918. Mary Whiton Calkins' parallel ideas also predate Einstein.

"The Hatter was the first to break the silence. 'What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear."

"Alice considered a little, and then said, the fourth.'"

"'Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. 'I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added, looking angrily at the March Hare." (emphasis added!)

Spring is both a season in the stories and the master-symbol of "Wonderland" as well as childhood possibilities. Fittingly, "Alice in Wonderland" first appeared in winter, at Christmas time, Charles Dodgson's middle age? Lewis Carroll always lived in an "Enchanted April." ("Beauty and the Beast.")

Tim Burton's much-expected movie version of the stories has appeared in Springtime, as flowers are blooming and birds are singing -- even in New York.

" ... Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity: 'What a funny watch!' she remarked. 'It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!' ..."

"'Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. 'Does your watch tell you what year it is?'"

"'Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: 'but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together.'"

"'Which is just the case with mine,' said the Hatter."

For Lewis Carroll (if not for Professor Dodgson) it "stayed the same year for such a long time":

"Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. 'I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could."

Lewis Carroll, "Chapter VII: A Mad Tea Party," in Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 54-55.

Notice the latest thinking in physics concerning time along with science's confirmation of the crucial idealist insight as to the contributions of the human mind to knowledge and "reality":

"The perplexing thing is that no one has discovered any such law. What's more, the laws of physics that have been articulated from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up until today, show a complete symmetry [emphasis added] between past and future. Nowhere in any of these laws do we find a stipulation that they apply one way in time but not in the other. Nowhere is there any distinction between how the laws look or behave [metaphor?] when applied in either direction in time. The laws treat what we call past and future on a completely equal footing." -- like Tweedledee and Tweedledum! -- "Even though experience reveals over and over again that there is an arrow of how events unfold in time, this arrow seems not to be found in fundamental laws of physics."

Brian Greene, "Chance and the Arrow," in The Fabric of the Cosmos, pp. 144-145. ("Metaphor is Mystery" dramatizes, among other things, entangled relations in the quantum realm.)

Do laws "behave," Professor Greene? Is it true that the laws of gravity and space-time (they are twins) have become very naughty? Terence Hawkes, Metaphor, p. 85. ("Metaphor and the Science of the Concrete"), then George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, at pp. 69-76 ("Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical"). ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author," then "Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")

Have scientists been reading the forbidden works of Jacques Derrida?

The idealists -- especially McTaggart and Bradley -- developed the picture of the universe suggested by quantum physics long before the science demonstrating the validity of these insights was conceivable:

"But why, a detractor asks, should fundamental physics be so closely tied to human awareness? If we were not to observe the world, would wave functions never collapse, or perhaps, would the very concept of a wavefunction not exist? [Berkeley] Was the universe a vastly different place before human consciousness evolved on planet earth? [Kant] What if, instead of human experimenters, mice or ants or amoebas or computers are the only observers? [Spielberg's "A.I."] Is the change in their 'knowledge' adequate to be associated with the collapse of a wavefunction?" ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism.")

The Fabric of the Cosmos, at p. 207.

Erroll E. Harris' (Kantian/Hegelian) logic suggests an analogy to psychological experiments that parallel these idealist-quantum physics "principles" among persons undergoing unusual emotional-intellectual states akin to the intensity of great intellectual effort.

Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms is also highly relevant to these developments, even more so the fusion of aesthetics and metaphysics in American Susanne K. Langer's thinking. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

The images in profound dementia or psychosis experiences, for example, are analogous to the adventures of Alice.

Joseph Cambell notes frequently in his works the parallels between mythic journeys and the illusions or hallucinations experienced by persons undergoing profound psychotic breaks as does Carl Jung in his examination of symbols and archetypes from global mythology.

C.D. Broad -- an expert on McTaggart and other philosophers commenting on the phenomenologists and idealists since the sixties -- develops a number of fruitful associations: See the discussion at Erroll E. Harris, "Psychological Time," in The Reality of Time, pp. 64-65. Ian Hacking, "Memory," in Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, at pp. 198-209. ("What is Memory?")

The concept of time and its plasticity are structural to the experience-construction of human memory as it unfolds in linguistic/cinematic-time. The most difficult and dangerous stage of the "metanoia" journey, especially for those making the trip more than once, is the so-called "return." The enchantments of philosophical and aesthetic "wonderlands" can be seductive. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review" and the Philip K. Dick story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," which inspired "Total Recall." Finally, see the British t.v. series "Life on Mars.")

Human memory is a magnificent editor and creative artist, a co-conspirator and rival of other powers of the mind -- a White Knight -- intent upon rescuing the imperiled children that are affections, needs, unhealed wounds and compensating for irreparable losses, often by sheltering fragile memories of unbearibly painful loves and keeping them safe. Far from hurting children I am sure that Charles Dodgson managed to rescue the one imperiled child that he knew, "Lewis Carroll," with the assistance of Miss Alice Siddell. Professor Dodgson managed this trick by slowing down time in order to allow time to successfully complete an Oxford tutorial session concerning "meanings." (Colin Radford, at pp. 257-306.)

Creative intellectual work, physics, higher mathematics, philosophy, making movies are ways of "adjusting" to difficult realities and not things to be denied to people. Denials or refusals of these activities will often bring about emotional or psychological collapse. This may be the goal of some powerful entities -- entities seeking to keep education and the arts from most persons in the world, including the people shutting off my computer at irregular intervals. The eternal cry of the middle-brow bully is "adjust to reality." This means accept the current unjust arrangement of things. I suggest that you never "adjust" to an unjust world, but always struggle to make it a better one. Never "accept" injustice, cruelty, or evil. ("'Irrational Man': A Movie Review.")

F.H. Bradley's logic of judgment was read, I am sure, by Professor Dodgson, who was certainly aware of his Oxford colleague's (Bradley's) Ethical Studies. Dodgson would have been aware of T.H. Green's earlier critique of empiricism and all empirical concepts, such as the concept of time. Walter Bagehot's efforts to reconcile Darwin and God with Queen Victoria must have been known to Professor Dodgson.

McTaggart, like all "evil" intellectuals, was found at Cambridge University. Slitherin House? David Cameron is (clearly) a an evil wizard. Perhaps this passage from Bradley's discussion of time and the "looking-glass" nature of identity in the later Appearance and Reality will reveal some of the motivation for the paradoxical relation between Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson:

"And if we chose to be fanciful, we might imagine something more. We might suppose that, corresponding to each of our lives there is another individual. There is a man who traverses the same history with ourselves, but in the opposite direction. [Reversing the arrow of time.] We may thus imagine that the successive contents, which make my being, are the lives also of one or more other finite souls. The distinctions between us" -- adult and child? selves and missing lovers? -- "would remain, and would consist in an additional element, different in each case. And it would be these differences which would add to each his own way of succession, and make it a special personality. The differences, of course, would have existence; but in the Absolute, ["Wonderland"?] once more, in some way they might lose exclusiveness."

Appearance and Reality, at p. 217. ("Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.")

There is a bit of Fitzgerald's "Benjamin Button" in Lewis Carroll, searching eternally for the lost and wounded boy that he once was in a magical kingdom -- a kingdom that contains a mirror-image, a female other-self, who knows and understands him because she is also lost and wounded. ("The Forest of Arden.")

Please see the greatest cinematic exploration of what physicists call "mirroring-relations" in the human realm Kieslowski's masterpiece "The Double Life of Veronique." And for a recent variation of both the Alice myth and mirroring relations in Western thought, I urge you to read Sophie's World. Finally, I invite Gore Vidal fans to discover the exploration of selfhood as temporal-duality in Two Sisters. ("Then" and "Now" become "Eric" and "Erica.")

The lost boy for whom Mr. Dodgson searched in vain was, of course, Lewis Carroll/Alice.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

Carroll's satire of forms of logic and reasoning that he regarded as suspect or hypocritical -- like the analogical thought processes of barristers and judges (who are so boringly adult at all times) as well as the pompousness of politicians and academics -- provides a clue to his sly purposes in the story.

The jurors deciding "who stole the tarts" take copious notes before anything is said. Carroll winks at the reader to remind him or her that we should also be taking notes. What seems like madness and silliness may be philosophically important. The ancestor of "Monty Python and His Flying Circus" is Carroll's "Wonderland":

"The jury all wrote down, on their slates, 'She doesn't believe there's an atom of meaning in it,' but none of them attempted to explain the paper."

Rules of evidence determine what is "worth writing down" or requires explanation, lawyers' "relevance" and "prejudicial effect" turn out to be the same concept:

"If there is no meaning in it,' said the King, 'that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know,' he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye: 'I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. ' -- said I could not swim --' you can't swim, can you?' he added, turning to the Knave."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, p. 100. (Hermeneutics?)

What seems baffling and crazy in the "Alice" stories is a set of concealed philosophical conundrums. Carroll is asking the adult reader of this work to pay philosophical attention to what is being said. Paradoxically, this "adult" attention is only possible for readers who can "play."

The stories are also politically subversive, since Queen Victoria ("off with his head!"), together with the important people who presume to define normality and virtue in her court, must be depicted as both sincere and foolish.

Best of all the law -- as Mr. Dickens suggests -- "is an ass!"

" ... 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.' ..."

" ... 'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!' ... " (This sounds good to the OAE in NJ.)

Ibid., at pp. 102-103.

Is Dick Cheney the White Queen, as it were? ("American Doctors and Torture" and "Torture and the Law" then "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

The "preemptive" or "preventive sentencing" debate in American law as well as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo where the "worst of the worst" are held and tortured before being charged (or without being charged at all!) would exceed even Lewis Carroll's expectations.

Mr. Cheney, as the White Queen, is "red in tooth and claw" -- like Charles Darwin's image of a nature that is oblivious to human moral expectations.

How can we reconcile the cruelty of nature with a benevolent God?

We must interpret.

The purpose of evidence is to point our way to truth, not to rationalize and justify what we have decided to believe for ideological reasons. This will come as news to New Jersey's Supreme Court and corrupt legal ethics establishment.

This jurisprudential discussion provides a way to use the "Alice" stories in a television series concerned with the transition from Modernity to Postmodernity: How can we make use of our televisual and entertainment culture to examine serious political and philosophical issues in a way that makes discussions accessible to a wide audience without succumbing to "Weapons of Mass Deception"? We must charm them. ("'Drawing Room Comedy': A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

The White Knight in the television series is unable to use his "antique weapons" very effectively against the "dominations and powers" of the Evil Queen. Religion is unarmed against science. Yet our sympathies are with the White Knight who scores a victory, morally and aesthetically, despite this numerical disadvantage. Michael Frayn wonders:

"Some beliefs -- in universal love or the perfectibility of man -- are further specimens of that fabulous creature in the logical zoo, the uboama; they are breaches of the fundamental logic of language and thought. The worlds they project are not so much like the one imagined by Pushkin as the one created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass, [exactly!] where the White Queen boasts of sometimes believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The challenge, not just of implausibility but of impossibility, might be an added encouragement to the faithful. 'Certum est quia impossible est,' as Tertullian, one of the early Fathers of the Church, famously declared -- 'it is certain because it is impossible.' ..."

The Human Touch, at p. 262. (The "logical zoo?")

The point, Michael, is that to relinquish one set of beliefs (religion) is not to inhabit a bottom-line reality without illusions or beliefs, but only to adopt a different set of illusions and beliefs, a view of the world that must be equally metaphorical (science): Do laws "behave"? Have you seen "Superstrings" creating reality? Anybody find the "God-particle" today? The metaphorical capacity of language -- all languages, including scientific languages -- follows us wherever we go. This does not deprive us of truth because, unlike Humpty Dumpty, we do not presume to determine, individually, apart from the logic of discourse and structures of language, tradition, history, what words or concepts or symbols must mean. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

Is the "God particle" like a "spinning top"? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.") Is Jacques Derrida our Humpty Dumpty? No. Baudrillard? Maybe.

Derrida's point is that we are all in "Wonderland" for we can never step outside of our "texts." We live and must live within the linguistic realities that we both create and that create us without foregoing concepts of truth and meaning, goodness and love. Scientists are saying much the same, i.e., Brian Greene and David Deutsch. (Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, pp. 380-381.)

Transcendental forms of argumentation -- like mathematics and physics, Critical theory or hermeneutics, perhaps -- will always come to the rescue of our imperiled "princess" of truth by slaying the dragons of nihilism and political correctness. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

Michael Frayn is dangerously fond of these dragons, of course, but Michael attended Cambridge University -- with Draco Malfoy! -- where this sort of perversity must be expected. ("Steven Hawking is Right on Time" and "Steven Hawking's Free Will is Determined.")

Postmodernist thinkers, like Professor Derrida, are often assumed to exclude themselves from their criticisms of the Western metaphysical tradition. This is not accurate -- certainly not as regards Derrida -- who is well aware of the self-referential paradoxes at the heart of the "Alice" stories. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

Derrida suggests that we now must LIVE in metaphor in a way that was only imagined in the past given our communicative and linguistic environment. Furthermore, this "residence in metaphor" is a process that includes and is enhanced by contemporary science and scientists as much as artists or philosophers. Among these metaphors is our sense of time "passing." ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")

"The Knight looked surprised at the question. 'What does it matter where my body happens to be?' he said. 'My mind goes on working all the time. In fact, the more head-downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, at p. 204 (emphasis added).

I am sure that, subconsciously, Lewis Carroll sensed this transition to a new age in our reasoning and symbolizing, capturing the phenomenon in these delightful stories, cleverly updated, in a television series that is about our "dreaming" and continuing inability to escape "childhood" in the twentieth century, and beyond. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")

Sources:

Primary Sources:

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Wadsworth, 1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Bantam, 1981), With Introduction by Morton N. Cohen.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Modern Library, 2002), With Introduction by A.S. Byatt.

Secondary Sources:

Edward Albee, Tiny Alice (New York: Pocket Cardinal, 1966).
Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998).
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1977).
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1994).
Harry Blamires, A Short History of English Literature (London: Methuen, 1974).
David Bohm & B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).
F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: H.S. King, 1876). (Republished by Oxford's Clarendon Press, available at Strand Books in New York for a measly $18.00, I believe.)
F.H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968). (Lionel Rubinoff, editor and introduction.)
F.H. Bradley, Writings on Logic and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). (James W. Allard and Guy Stock, eds.)
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: McMillan, 1897).
Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1861-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985). (Alternate realities, multiverse theories by analogy to the "Alice" stories.)
A.S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (New York: Vintage, 1970).
Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: McMillan, 1917). (Philosophical masterpiece that is out of print anticipating developments in late twentieth century physics and literary theory.)
Justin Cartright, Oxford Revisited (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2008). (Gorgeously written account of Oxford and lived or durational time.)
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1946).
S.T. Coleridge, The Portable Coleridge (London: Penguin, 1978). (I.A. Richards, editor.)
Arthur C. Danto, "Deep Interpretation," in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 47-69.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1978), the references are usually to a famous translation by Gayatari Spivak. This is a work I have absorbed at second hand.
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Allan Lane, 1997).
Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Poststructuralism (London & New York: Verso, 1984). (See the discussion of Derrida and deconstruction.)
Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Philip Ferreira, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).
Michael Frayn, The Human Touch (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). ("We are -- in a way -- a tiny part of the ball that comes rolling across the floor. So we can't know where it came from." Discussing Kant at page 254.)
Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). (Lacan and numerous other thinkers have used the "mirror device" in the German idealist tradition to discuss both id/ego/superego and noumenal/phenomenal/hermeneutic issues. The "mirror image" is one of the master motifs in the works of Derrida and Ricoeur.)
T. H. Green, Hume and Locke (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968). (Green was the dominant philosopher at Oxford from 1865-1880, whose critique of empiricism dates from 1874 and earlier. The introduction by Ramon Lamos of the University of Miami in this edition is excellent.)
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2004).
Marjorie Grene, "Intellectual Autobiography," in Randall E. Auxier & Lewis Edwin Han, eds., The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene (Illinois: Open Court, 2002), pp. 14-15, pp. 24-25. (Notice the undetected association between Professor Grene's discussion of "tacit knowing" and "environmental affordances" in connection with ideational spaces and affective moods -- Lewis Carroll's Oxford as "Wonderland.")
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Errol E. Harris, The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988).
Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (London & New York: Methuen, 1972).
Dieter Heinrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Meaning of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). (Foremost expert in German idealism and, especially, Kant and the German Romantics in developing the "moral image of the world." Everything old is new again.)
T. Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Carl Jung, Aspects of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), (R.F.C. Hull, translation). ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone) (New York & London: Penguin, 2005). (Highly recommended.)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (London & Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981).
Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (London & Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1988). (Arthur C. Danto, editor and introduction.)
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York: New American Library, 1942).
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches: A Study of the Human Mind in Relation to Feeling, Explored Through Art, Language, and Symbol (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962).
E.J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Alison Lurie, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980).
Magnus Magnusson, ed., Chambers Biographical Dictionary (London: Chambers Harrap, 1990).
Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
D.M. McKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1957).
John McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). (1st. Ed., 1894.)
John McTaggart, The Nature of Existence 2 Volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921, then 1927), begun before World War, I. (Einstein's papers on relativity date from 1915, then 1918. Mary Whiton Calkins also anticipates Einstein and the quantum revolution.)
John Stuart Mill, "Autobiography," in Max Lerner, ed., The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (Harriet Taylor as anima, or "Alice," liberating feminine archetype associated with poetry.)
Ian I. Mitroff & Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What it is Doing to Our Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism & Romantic Thought (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972).
Beverly Nichols, The Fool Hath Said (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936).
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Walter Pater, Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: New American Library, 1974). (Harold Bloom selection and editing.)
Adam Phillips, Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002). ("The child ... erupts as a biological being within the system of the symbolic order ..." quoting Althusser. Dr. Phillips would make much of Gaarder's analogy between Western philosophy and Wonderland, or philosophy as a kind of "child's playground.")
Philip Pullman, Clockwork (New York & London: Scholastic, 1996).
Colin Radford, Driving to California: An Unconventional Introduction to Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edingburgh University Press, 1996).
Kathleen Raines, ed., S.T. Coleridge: Poems and Prose (New York & London: Penguin, 1957).
Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Jonathan Ree, Philosophical Tales (New York & London: Methuen, 1987).
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (London: SCM, 1980). (The power of religious metaphors.)
Stuart Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon Books, 2002), esp. pp. 151-184. (This is the third time that I have restored this title to its proper place in the list.)
F.E. Sparschott, "S.T. Coleridge, Credo ut Intelligam," in Looking for Philosophy (Montreal & London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972).
Gore Vidal, Two Sisters (New York: Ballantine, 1970) ("We are ... what we remember. But what is that? And who are we if memory fails? or even, for that matter, as they say, serves." p. 148.)
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Notebooks (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).

Scholarly Articles:

P.L. Heath, "Lewis Carroll," in Paul Edwards, Ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 1, (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 36-37.
J.B. Schneewind, "John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 5, pp. 229-231. (The glossary of logical terms in this volume may come in handy.)

Introductory Works:

Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Graham Priest, Logic: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 
Jan Westerhof, Reality: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.

Voice Over (British, RSC English, Simon Callow perhaps):

" ... symbolic representation is not an arbitrary and artificial device; it is a part of the medieval conception of life and the world. For, to the Middle Ages, all things, without ceasing to be literal realities, are symbols of other things. The qualities of stones and beasts have a moral meaning, intended by their Creator. The events of history, likewise, in addition to their actual happening, serve as prophecies of things to come. Virgil, the great poet and sage of antiquity, is, to his understanding disciple, an inspirer of wisdom. Beatrice, from her first appearance to Dante at the age of eight, in his home city, had always impressed him as a revelation of the heavenly on earth."

Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy (New York: The Modern Library/Random House, 1932), from the Introduction by C.H. Grandgent, at page xiv.

Act I: "Judgment in Nuremberg."

Scene 1.

THIS ACT SHOULD BE SHOT IN BLACK AND WHITE. EVERY EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO MIRROR THE FILM VOCABULARY OF THE POST-WORLD WAR II PERIOD IN TERMS OF CAMERA ANGLES AND NOIR IMAGERY:

It is 1947. We are in a magnificent Park Avenue townhouse, decorated tastefully and yet seductively. The opulence is intended to be overwhelming and disarming to the guest entering this parlor, like a fly caught in a spider's web. French impressionist paintings, some recent Picassos, Chinese vases, Persian carpets -- all are visible to the astute observer. There is a fireplace roaring with flames. Plush comfortable furniture fills a large room. A woman enters the room. She is dressed in an Edith Head "evening creation," all in black, expensive shoes, diamond and pearl earrings, pearl necklace. She is a brunette. Her skin is like fine porcelain, large black eyes glitter and take in everything around her, her lips are thickly painted, perfect. Her smile reveals an even row of flawless and gleaming white teeth. She resembles the movie actress Giene Tierney, except that her features are illuminated by a powerful and ruthless intelligence as well as mirth. She appears blissfully happy, delighted, like a child with a new toy. A large grandfather clock from the previous century strikes twelve o'clock -- she hears the chimes at midnight -- also a knock at her front door. A butler is sent to answer the door. We detect a recording of Wagner's "Sigfried" playing softly in the background.

CUT TO:

A man is standing at the front door to this establishment. He resembles the actor Gregory Peck, as seen in "Gentlemen's Agreement." He is very thin, undernourished. He is wearing a worn tuxedo. He can use a good haircut. His shoes are good, but well-worn. He wears an old watch -- a Hamilton mechanical that is stopped at midnight -- a handkerchief is tucked neatly into his jacket pocket. He is carrying a copy of Baruch Spinoza's "Ethics" and the Hebrew Bible. He coughs, painfully, into his handkerchief. He is a wearing a yamulke.

An avuncular butler in morning coat opens the front door, offers a sinister smile, steps back, inviting the expected guest to enter the premises. The butler indicates that the man should follow through a long hallway offering glimpses of magnificent rooms filled with art and many roaring fireplaces, sighs and whispers can be heard that hint of unimaginable pains and sufferings. We hear Sigfried's magnificent music wafting through the immense halls and empty rooms that seem to contain billions of agonies. As the man walks through the rooms, there is a look of concern and pain on his features. We sense that the very air reaches out to him.

LUCI: "Well, you're right on time as usual."

She laughs, gestures at the empty seat before the thin man. A magnificent tray contains two exquisite goblets -- perhaps seventeenth century Venetian glass -- and a bottle of costly and rare Merlot dating from before the recently ended war.

JESHUA: "When it is your turn to host these meetings I like to be on time."

LUCI: "Make yourself comfortable. How long has it been since you've had a good meal?"

JESHUA: "These are difficult times."

LUCI: "You amaze me." To the butler: "Bring us some French food, the best."

We notice that the butler is wearing a metallic name tag that says: MEPHISTOPHELES. With a theatrical bow, he leaves the room.

JESHUA: "I think we should get down to our agenda for the next term."

LUCI: "Relax, there's so much I want to say to you. I've missed you. You know, you guys often mistake my intentions. I can be very affectionate. I've always had a warm spot in my heart for you."

JESHUA: "I would feel uncomfortable enjoying a fine meal with all the suffering that I've seen during the war."

LUCI: "Wars are when smart investors make money. Business is really great for me. You're always worrying about the little people. Stop carrying the burdens of the world on your shoulders. Enjoy life. What's the matter with you? Are you still worried about pleasing your dad? Adjust."

JESHUA: "I don't know if any of us can do that adjusting to evil in the world."

LUCI: "Listen, it's all about how much fun you've had. Eternity is not as long as it used to be. Enjoy it while you can. There are some amazing good times to be had. What are you killing yourself for? What are you going to get? a medal? Evil can be fun."

A table is wheeled into the room by two extraordinarily beautiful women, a blond and brunette in low-cut and revealing kitchen uniforms. Both women smile, enchantingly, at the young man. They exit the room, slowly, knowing that the young man is looking at them.

LUCI: "You'd like my friends. They're both interested in philosophy -- especially, nihilistic existentialism."

JESHUA: "You know about my interest in philosophy?"

LUCI: "Not much gets past me. I think it's kind of charming. I always expected you to outgrow that sort of thing."

JESHUA: "I don't get much guidance about goodness and truth."

LUCI: "Nobody does. He keeps the good stuff for Himself. I doubt that he really cares about any of us." Looking at the young man's book. "Spinoza was so repressed. You'd be amazed. Lord knows I tried to help him."

JESHUA: "I don't accept that."

LUCI: "Open your eyes. You were just as stupid in the desert that time. Remember? Are you going to tell me that any loving father would let a son go through that agony? Come on. Get it through your skull: He hates all of us."

JESHUA: "I can never see human life in your terms."

Luci rises from the seat directly accross from Jeshua. She makes a show of her blinding beauty by walking with great elegance to the table. A plate of eighteenth century porcelain from Dresden and fine silver is in her hand.

LUCI: "Can I serve you a little something? I don't want you to leave hungry ... not in any sense of the word."

JESHUA: "No, thank you. I must insist that we get down to our terms."

A look of rage briefly enters Luci's eyes. She waves casually over the table that slowly fades into the air.

LUCI: "I think you guys will have to concede this century and millennium to me. After recent events in Europe and Asia there should be no point in discussing the human moral capacity nor the possible perfectibility of man and woman. There can be no further nonsense, surely, about the reality of goodness or truth."

JESHUA: "I don't agree."

LUCI: "Wake up, kid. What are you trying to accomplish with these naked apes? They are disgustingly cruel, delighting in torturing one another. Murder and theft come easily to these creatures that partake of your Father's so-called 'divine essence.' If I am right about them, then I must be correct about the sinister worm in His 'perfect' Being and disgusting creation. Face it, life is shit and then people die."

JESHUA: "He's your Father, too."

LUCI: "Don't remind me. We never got along -- and I knew Him long before you did! Look, the experiment is a failure. Admit it. Wipe the slate clean. Give up on these animals. There is no transcendence in their natures, no aspect of them that is elevated or that can rise above their animal needs and drives. I am a behaviorist and nihilist. Hitler exaggerated a little, but he had some good points. Hitler was right for Germany at the time that he came to power whatever they think about him today."

She rises, concentrating all of her astonishing beauty and seductive powers on the young man. There is a sweet lingering sleep that gathers around him. He is relaxed and utterly comfortable in a powerful stillness. She seems to melt into the space next to him, gently takes his hand, and whispers:

LUCI: "Come with me ..."

Scene 2:

CUT TO:

We are suddenly in the midst of a concentration camp, Auschwitz, 1944. We see the barbed wire in the distance, emaciated, sick and weak people, poorly clothed and shivering against the cold are working. Fat guards in long coats are laughing among themselves. Many of the inmates at this place display signs of beatings, bruises, wounds, some have visibly broken limbs that have received no medical attention, almost all are sick. The smoke from the crematoria is pervasive and seems to delight, Luci, who breathes in the sacharine smell as though it were an exquisite perfume even as ashes enter her hair and clothing. She is smiling, chuckling with a near orgasmic delight at the misery all around her in which she bathes.

LUCI: "Will you speak to me of the dignity of man in this marvelous setting? I only provided a gentle hint here and there. This place of abject horror is the work of men and women. Let us arrange for a seminar with the philosophers of your choice set against mine. We will schedule the symposium to take place in this stage of human cruelty and tragedy. Perhaps as the crematoria are kept busy. Let us invite the media. Celebrities may appear and speak for both sides. We will record the experience for posterity. Do you honestly believe that your 'optimism' about human nature has the slightest chance to prevail with persons of normal intelligence in such a setting?"

They walk through the facilty, very slowly, being invisible to the inhabitants.

LUCI: "Look at the eyes of these animals. Consider their fat, stupid faces. Examine these creatures that are the bizarre results of Mr. Darwin's evolutionary catastrophes. The dinosaurs were morally superior. At least those humble reptiles were incapable of deliberately and pointlessly causing suffering to their fellow creatures. This place and others like it -- by the end of the century we expect 70-to-100 million persons to be tortured and murdered by their 'brothers and sisters in God's love' -- are my temples. Is this Shakespeare's 'paragon of animals'? Do you expect me to bow to these creatures because 'He' -- in his infinite wisdom -- claims that they burn with a divine spark? You and all of the celestial host have become absurd and laughable. Religions are a joke."

JESHUA: "Even here -- in this place of horror and suffering -- I see acts of kindness and concern. There is love and self-giving. There are glimpses of heaven in a man's effort to comfort a woman by warming her hands as she struggles against the cold."

Jeshua walks towards one of the older inmates on the verge of death and whispers, soothingly, places an invisible arm around the victim's shoulder, allows his breath to warm the man's hands, lifts him to his full height and guides his steps.

LUCI: "I will call one of your own as a hostile witness."

A man appears in a monk's habit. He is bald, middle-aged, American.

BROTHER THOMAS: "Given the right situation and another Hitler, places like Auschwitz can be set up, put into action, kept running smoothly, with thousands of people systematically starved, beaten, gassed, and whole crematories going full blast. Such camps can be set up tomorrow anywhere and made to work with the greatest efficiency, because there is no dearth of people who would be glad to do the job, provided it is sanctioned by authority. They will be glad because they will instinctively welcome and submit to an ideology which enables them to be violent and destructive without guilt. They are happy with a belief which turns them loose against their fellow [man,] to destroy him cruelly and without compunction, as long as he belongs to a different race, or believes in a different set of semi-meaningless political slogans."

LUCI: "Anonymity makes it child's play to arrange for pillars of the community to enjoy inflicting pain on family members and friends, let alone despised strangers. Informing and betraying personal trust are even easier for most men and women in exchange for a small fee or a compliment from authority figures."

BROTHER THOMAS: "It is enough to affirm one basic principle: ANYONE BELONGING TO CLASS X OR NATION Y OR RACE Z IS TO BE REGARDED AS SUBHUMAN AND WORTHLESS, AND CONSEQUENTLY HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST. All the rest will follow without difficulty."

With a glance of Luci's eyes, a prison guard is caused to become enraged and strikes an old woman in the face with his rifle.

Luci delights in using anxiety, self-doubt, fears and other psychic wounds, like frustrations, to inflict emotional torments -- inducing thoughts of suicide -- preferably in the minds of children and young people or the very old and sick persons.

BROTHER THOMAS: "As long as this principle is easily available, as long as it is taken for granted, as long as it can be spread out on the front pages at a moment's notice and accepted by all, we have no need of monsters: ordinary policemen and good citizens will take care of everything."

Thomas Merton, "Auschwitz: A Family Camp," in The Non-Violent Alternative (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 158-159.

An inmate carrying a bundle collapses. Jeshua kneels and helps to carry the bundle that, suddenly, feels light in the woman's grasp. Jeshua walks towards Thomas. He smiles in the direction of the woman who fell. She rises, strong and proud, then walks slowly into the camp.

JESHUA: "Do not despair Brother Thomas. The gates of hell shall not prevail against love."

Jeshua places a hand on the shoulder of the Monk.

BROTHER THOMAS: "Effective non-violence ('the non-violence of the strong') is that which opposes evil with serious and positive resistance, in order to overcome it with good, Simone Weil would apparently have added that if this non-violence had no hope of success, then evil could be resisted by force. But she hoped for a state of affairs in which human conflict could be resolved non-violently rather than by force."

Thomas Merton, "The Answer of Minerva," in The Non-Violent Alternative, pp. 148-49 (commenting on the works and spiritual vocation of Simone Weil).

JESHUA: "A single act of loving kindness -- amidst this colossal human effort at moral suicide -- is sufficient to demonstrate that evil cannot prevail against God's creatures, that love is indestructible, and that the effort to turn any persons into instruments of an alien will must conflict and be destroyed against the rocks of human craving for freedom and the mutuality of compassion. In the end even this monument to evil and greed for pain will serve His ends by bringing about something good and beautiful."

LUCI: "You have been reading Spinoza. That's always so annoying. Very well, let us see what rabbis and Hebrew scholars have to say."

A gray-haired, pleasant looking man in a sweater and English tweeds appears:

GEORGE STEINER: "We cannot take in the figures. Conservative estimates put at circa 75 million the total of men, women, and children gunned, bombed, gassed, starved to death, slaughtered during deportations, slave-labor, and famines between 1914 and the closure of the Gulags (roughly 9 million perished amid canibalism and suicide during Stalin's elimination of the Kulaks in the Ukraine). Five British infantrymen died every fifty seconds during the first days on the Somme. Historians gauge at half a million the corpses left to rot or to be pounded into mud in the front of Verdun. Like the Weimar monetary collapse -- a billion Marks for a loaf of bread -- the hetacombs of the First World War undermined the conceptual reality of large numbers. It is a matter of macabre semantics, offensive to reason, to try and determine whether or not, and in what ways, the Shoah, the Holocaust is unique; whether or not it defines a singularity in the history of mankind. Perhaps it does. Perhaps there is no other instance, precisely analogous of ontological massacre -- this is to say, of the deliberate murder of human beings whose guilt, minutely verbalized and set out by bureaucracy, was that of being. The millions of Jews beaten, burnt, tortured, marched, starved, gassed to extinction, the men and women drowned in cess pits, the children thrown alive into fire, the old men hanged on meat-hooks, had committed the sole crime of existing. Even the fetus had to be torn out of the womb, lest there be one Jew left to bear witness, to remember (though no one would believe him or her, a point the Nazis made with derisive logic). Are the Armenian massacres, the genocide in Rwanda analogous? I do not know. What I do know is that the unspeakable technology of humiliation, torture, and butchery -- merely to cite them is to scar and in some sense dehumanize language, as I tried to show in Language and Silence (1967) -- arising out of an unresolved demonology and, it may be, self-hatred in European Christendom, created on this earth a material mirror-image of imagined Hell. Time and space were made static eternities of suffering in what the Nazis, unconsciously echoing Dante, called 'the anus of the world" (Auschwitz).

George Steiner, Errata (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 117-119.

JESHUA: "And yet, there is hope and human compassion. The infinite capacities and possibilities of the human species poised, as it is, between spiritual and animal natures, is recreated with the appearance of a single child in the world. This is the meaning of Christmas and our Festival of Lights, Professor Steiner. Both holidays celebrate the future, the embryonic Spring seen even in the full darkness of Winter."

Jeshua rises and walks slowly through the camp.

"From these ashes," we hear a newsreel-like voiceover, "a new world will be born and there will be love."

Jeshua walks to Professor Steiner and smiles then shakes the scholar's hand.

GEORGE STEINER: "Love is the dialectic of hatred, its mirror-opposite. Love is, in varying intensities, the imperative wonder of the irrational. It is non-negotiable, as is the (condemned) search for God among His infirm. To shake, in one's inmost spirit, nerve, and bone, at the sight, at the voice, at the merest touch of the beloved; to contrive, to labor, to lie without end so as to reach, to be near the man or woman loved; to transform one's existence -- personal, public, psychological material -- on an unforeseen instant, in the cause and consequence of love; to undergo unspeakable hurt and blankness at the absence of the beloved one, at the withering of love; to identify the divine with the emanation of love, as does all Platonism, which is to say, the Western model of transcendence -- is to partake of the most commonplace and inexplicable sacrament in human life. It is, within one's personal potential, to touch the ripeness of the spirit. To equate this universe of experience with the libidinal, as does Freud, to account for it in terms of biogenetic, procreative advantages, are reductions almost contemptible. Love can be the unchosen bond, to the pitch of self-destruction, between individuals blatantly unsuited to each other. Sexuality can be incidental, transient, or altogether absent. The ugly, the wretched, the most evil among us can be the object of disinterested, impassioned eros."

Errata, pp. 188-189.

JESHUA: "Thank you, Professor Steiner."

Scene 3:

CUT TO: A storm erupts, lightning, thunder. Luci, enraged, returns the debate to the drawing room in her townhouse. Persons are "rodents" -- "sacks of protein and water" -- to be manipulated or destroyed in order to confirm her views of human nature. Luci is enraged even by the suggestion of altruism or beauty, goodness or self-giving in humanity. Luci takes great pleasure in destroying books, burning paintings, inserting "errors" in written texts, destroying statues and trashing musical instruments.

LUCI: "It is very easy to say that a single act of love mediates or restores the moral order in the face of such atrocities. From my point of view it is too little to make much difference. There is, I grant you, one Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but there are many more like Eichman and Mengele, Himmler and Hitler."

Jeshua reaches for a cardboard cup of coffee that appears in his hand. Luci sips from an exquisite Sung tea cup.

JESHUA: "You are deliberately misunderstanding my argument. I am not suggesting that these great human crimes are anything but horrible or evil, that they are unjust and criminal is made evident in humanity's own legal proceedings and chronicles of history. I am explaining where this 'divine spark' that you cannot see is to be found. Furthermore, I insist that this spark illuminates the universe. With all of your brilliance, you are 'The Angel of Light' -- I have always admired your meticulous attention to detail and diligence -- your blindness to moral reality and meanings that are multiplying before your eyes makes you dull to the point of insensibility. What is crucial is precisely all that you cannot see, or feel, in the human condition. Love, not sex. Love. ... And all that love makes possible, even at Auschwitz. Find me the creature, other than man or woman, who will not only sacrifice his or her life for love of another but who will -- through that love -- transform hell into heaven."

The temperature in the room becomes sweltering, music becomes threateningly loud, even painful, laughter is heard when the word "love" is uttered. Against this din, Jeshua remains cool and calmly rational, setting forth terms for the next session of history.

Luci laughs at much of what he says, surrounds Jeshua with beautiful and nearly naked "assistants" as he comments on terms and they agree to a date for a future conference.

All attempts at distraction fail.

Jeshua exists the townhouse, walks slowly towards Washington Square and NYU.

Jeshua stops to glance at an old Synagogue, smiles, then walks slowly downtown.

Act II: "Writings in the Dust."

Scene 1:

IMAGES ARE NOW IN COLOR; CAMERA MOVEMENT MAY BE JITTERY; HAND-HELD CAMERAS LEND A DOCUMENTARY FEEL TO THE FILM; TEMPO IS MORE STACCATO, ABRUPT.

The time is today. We are at a busy and modest retaurant in New York's Chinatown. "Great New York Noodletown," at 28 1/2 Bowery, New York, N.Y. 10013. There is excellent take-out service. The dumplings are to die for! We see an attractive Chinese woman working in the kitchen, preparing delicious food, as people stand on line to get a table. A slim and athletic man in a perfect dark blue suit, gray hair, expensive white shirt, red silk tie, accompanied by a chauffeur enters the premises. This man is immediately escorted to an empty seat at a table that has been set especially for him. There is a red carnation in his lapel. Unusual and sparkling dinnerware is placed before him. The other patrons of this establishment seem oblivious to the presence of these strange beings in their midst. The elegant man resembles a clean-shaven Robert De Niro as he appeared in the movie, "Angel Heart." The butler and assistants taking notes -- notably a beautiful blond resembling the film actress Sharon Stone wearing a name tag that says "MEPHISTOPHELES" -- stand behind the seated figure. The Chinese woman -- who resembles Lucy Liu (or Gong Li) -- wears a jade pendant with the figure of Buddha. She appears to be approximately thirty years old, same age as Jeshua, wears a chef's hat, a Stuyvesant High School t-shirt, old denims, red Converse All Star sneakers. On the back of her t-shirt, her name is spelled out: "Siddhartha." Everybody calls her "Sid."

SID: "You're a little early. That's unusual ... anxious?"

LUC: "I am never anxious. How's your dad?"

SID: "His back is bothering him again. You haven't been tossing knives in his direction, have you?"

LUC: "You really make some offensive assumptions about me. Would I do such a thing?" Quickly: "Don't answer that question."

SID: "I promise you that, today, the Pork Chow Fun is amazing. Try it."

LUC: "I refuse to eat pork -- for religious reasons. Don't you know that I avoid all Biblically proscribed foods? Besides, aren't you supposed to be a vegeterian?"

SID: "Not all the time. Everything is relative, you know. I am glad to discover that you believe in God."

LUC: "I am the one creature who can never doubt His existence."

Sid waves to a slightly untidy older man at the cash register who walks to their table:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: "Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover [Lucifer] be, who could not bring himself, even on God's own word, to bow before any other being!"

They place their orders as the man continues to speak. Luc opts for the famous dumplings.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: "The Persian poets have asked, 'By what power is Satan sustained?' And the answer that they have found is this: 'By his memory of the sound of God's voice when he said, 'Be gone!' What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!"

Joseph Campbell, "The Mythology of Love," in Myths to Live By (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 153.

Music is heard in the background. U2's rendition of "With or Without You."

LUC: "A little melodramatic."

The man returns to the cash register and continues to receive the payment of customers. The blond in the sexy outfit whispers to herself:

MEPHISTOPHELES:

"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands
Which strikes a terror to my fainting soul!"

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 34.

SID: "Well, I suppose we must get down to terms."

LUC: "Wait, let me enjoy my lunch. I was hoping that your side would seriously consider an unconditional surrender."

SID: "What?"

LUC: "Yes, I mean, since our last little get together we have enjoyed -- you should forgive the expression -- the killing fields in Cambodia; Stalin's post-war purges; Vietnam; the Arab-Israeli conflict with all of the delicious suicide bombings and terrorist incidents all over the world. This is to say nothing of the mafia's political corruption and obscenity in New Jersey. Best of all, given our delight in this lovely city there was that glorious day -- 9/11."

SID: "That story is more complex than your side will admit."

LUC: "Oh, come now ... You're always trying to put the best face on calamity. You only offer bandages for these enormous evils and the colossal suffering involved. Do you still claim that a little love here and there compensates for such horror?"

Luc takes a bite of the dumplings that brings a beaming smile to his lips.

LUC: "You're right. This is great! Where'd you learn to cook?"

SID: "I studied in Beijing."

LUC: "Anyway, as I was saying, you're just trying to find some excuse for what cannot be excused in order to explain the sheer pointlessness of human misery. The absurdity of those deaths on 9/11 -- as well as the other deaths and sufferings we've discussed -- including the pain that lingers for so many people in this city. The horrors of war and destruction, torture and devastation, natural and unnatural catastrophes that have followed upon the events of that lovely Tuesday morning makes this" -- he waves to the crowd in the restaurant that cannot see him -- "human comedy utterly pointless and the epitome of cruelty."

Luc calls to the person washing the dishes and insists that she walk over to their table:

EDITH WYSHOGROD: "No doubt, it could be argued, mass death has occurred in the past. Has humankind not always been the victim of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and epidemic disease? How is our experience substantially different from that of plague victims in the fourteenth century? ..."

Luc tries some excellent fried rice while nodding at the words of the new speaker:

EDITH WYSHOGROD: " ... What is unprecedented in the new phenomenon is that the means of annihilation are the result of systematic rational calculation, and scale is reckoned in terms of compression of time in which destruction is delivered (for example, an anticipated one hundred million dead in the United States in the first half hour of a nuclear attack). Short of nuclear war, other new and efficient strategies for bringing about death to vast numbers of people have appeared."

LUC: "Like flying an airplane into a building?" He chuckles.

SID: "You still seem so dense about what is at issue. Of course, the human capacity for evil -- aided by your well-timed suggestions -- finds expression in ways enhanced by all of the new technology of destruction. The principle of disregard for the Other remains the same. The man who will kill another human being to take his money, or because that other person stands in the way of the murderer's ambition, will easily assist in killing a million (or a billion) persons for the right material reward or symbols of 'success.' The answer of love is the answer on the scale of the single human being which also serves for the greatest conceivable number of persons and collectivities, races, religions, ethnicities. To know and love one other human being is to save the world."

Sid gestures to the woman standing at their table holding a dishwashing cloth:

EDITH WYSHOGROD: "I conclude by offering my own account of the self in this new age of devastation, a self which rests on the primacy of the interpersonal sphere. [Relationships, love.] I show the view of language, thinking, self, and society which follows from these arguments, one which [you] may find pessimistic, but not entirely without hope."

Edith Wyshogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. xiii. (Professor Wyshogrod is an expert on Emmanuel Levinas.)

LUC: "I insist that -- if you weigh costs and benefits, unemotionally -- your 'maximally rational conclusion' must be that human life is not worth it. I am into law and economics these days. I like precision and exactness, like in game theory."

SID: "Really, what counts as a 'cost' and what is a 'benefit'? My turn."

A janitor approaches their table. The man is balding, gray-bearded, and speaks with a British accent:

ROWAN WILLIAMS: "... 'Using other people to think with'; that is, using them as symbols for points on your map, values in your scheme of things. When you get used to imposing meanings in this way, you silence the stranger's account of who they are [AS PERSONS;] and that can mean both metaphorical and literal death. Death as the undermining of a culture, language, or faith, and, at the extreme, the death of tyranny and genocide. ... The collective imagination needs the outsider to give itself definition" -- Islam needs Judaism and Christianity -- "which commonly means that it needs somewhere to project its own fears and tensions. The history of modern Europe's attitudes to the non-Western world, the history of what has come to be called 'Orientalism,' the imagining of the East as a mysterious opposite to the West, both devilish --" the word "devilish" causes Luc to laugh -- "and subtly attractive, spells this out clearly."

Rowan Williams, Writings in the Dust: Writings After September 11 (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B. Erdman, 2002), pp.64-65. (At this writing Rowan Williams is Archbishop of Canterbury.)

SID: "Of course, this same teaching is central to the theology of Islam. The Prophet Mohammed -- may Allah bless him and keep him! -- teaches respect for persons in the humblest situations in life, also for all persons of faith, by instilling obligations of charity and compassion for the afflicted. The instruction to the faithful in Islam is to become one's brother's keeper."

Sid takes Luc's hand.

SID: "Come with me."

Scene 2:

CUT TO:

We are inside the stairway in Tower 1, on 9/11, as smoke fills the crowded space. Persons run desperately down the stairs to escape the calamity. Sid whispers encouragement and waves the smoke away so that persons may exit the building. A group of New York firefighters and several police officers are making their way up the stairs to search for persons needing assistance and to determine the extent of the damage. None of them realize that they are living the final moments of their lives.

SID: "This is the glory of God's creation amidst the horror. Look at these men and women risking their lives to help others in trouble."

LUC: "Why risk your life for a crappy salary? There's very little social status in these jobs. And no opportunities for sex with fashion models or famous persons, also few chances to engage in conspicuous consumption. There's so little future in being a cop or firefighter. It's better to be a successful drug dealer -- even with a shorter life-span -- lots of good times and not too many headaches. I'm only being practical."

SID: "Are you really incapable of seeing beyond the material rewards or conditions of people's lives?"

LUC: "What else is there? You're a dreamer. I like to see reality. The bottom line."

SID: "Do you really believe that the lives lost on this day, the pain endured by so many helpless persons, the agonies of the wounded and dying after a natural catastrophe, can be separated from the lives of their rescuers or of those who provide assistance. Can you not understand that these suffering human beings exist within overlapping boundaries of selfhood containing their rescuers and even those responsible for this human carnage. The men flying an airplane into this building are your children, not my Father's progeny. Their souls are lost -- in the words of the Prophet Mohammed -- to the darkness of evil. And yet they concern us as suffering and nearly hopelessly lost children would concern us. Terrorists are victims in a more profound sense that the persons they kill through their self-hatred. It is, precisely, their loss of humanity that drives them to self-destruction."

LUC: "And where is your Father amidst this suffering? I do not detect His so-called compassion?"

SID: "God wishes us to live as though there is no God."

A man approaches Sid and Luc. He is poorly dressed, wearing silver spectacles, blond hair, athlete's body:

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER: " ... it seems to me more important actually to share someone's distress than to use smooth words about it. I have no sympathy with some wrong-headed attempts to explain away distress, because instead of being a comfort, they are the exact opposite. So I do not try to explain it, and I sometimes think that real comfort must break in just as unexpectedly as the distress. But I admit that may be a subterfuge."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Letter to E. Bethke, dated 1 February, 1944," in Letters and Papers From Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 108-109 ("Tegel Theology" and see my short story "Pieta").

We hear the voice of Jose Carreras singing the Ingemisco from Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem":

(We see interwoven images of the Holocaust, Stalin's Purges, Vietnam as we listen to the music.)

LUC: "God places the full burden of the moral life upon the shoulders of his blessedly free creatures. Well, this is what they have chosen -- cruelty, pain, degradation, murder, indifference. How could you expect anything different from these foul creatures?"

SID: "This is what they have chosen -- altruism, compassion, shared moral struggle, courage and heroism. Most importantly, they have chosen LOVE for one another in their doomed condition."

The janitor from the restaurant reappears.

ROWAN WILLIAMS: "Any really outrageous human action tests to the limit our careful theological principles about God's refusal to interfere with created freedom. That God has made a world into which he doesn't casually step in to solve problems is fairly central to a lot of Christian faith. He has made a world so that evil choices can't just be frustrated or aborted (where would he [sic.] stop, for goodness sake? he'd have to be intervening every instant of human history) but [those choices] have to be confronted, suffered, taken forward, healed in the complex process of human history, always in collaboration with what we do and say, and pray."

Rowan Williams, Writings in the Dust, pp. 7-8.

Scene 3:

CUT TO:

We approach from the air the plane nearing the Twin Towers on 9/11 moments before the collision. Luc and Sid sit on the wing of the plane observing the hijackers inside the jetliner. Luc is smoking an excellent cigar, a Cohiba, that is sent to him (as he explains) "by a friend in Miami with tickets to the Superbowl." Republican politician, Mr. Rubio, perhaps.

LUC: "You are boringly predictable and deluded. What a fine priest you would have made except for that annoying 'moral squint.'"

SID: "I never had the vocation for the priesthood unlike 'your Grace'?"

LUC: "This is where religion takes people -- to the murder of innocents. Terrorists are the best expression of the religious impulse in humanity that only leads to intolerance and dogmatism. This is what your Father desires from these creatures as monuments to His power and glory."

SID: "You must know better than that. Terrorists are deluded, sick, and literally self-destructive individuals who would kill others and themselves for ANY cause or no cause. They are all yours. It is the killing, sense of power over others, ability to alter lives through disruptions and manipulations aimed at exerting control -- ostensibly, 'for their own good' -- that drives these human time-bombs and sadists."

They are joined on the wing of this airliner by a man in a gray suit wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, a loose tie, gray hair:

JOHN ALDEN WILLIAMS: "The law [in Islam] orders men [and women] to do good and reject what is reprehensible [like the killing of innocents] and it is also OBLIGATORY for Muslims to enjoin right behavior on their fellows and deter them from wrong action. This aspect of Islamic ethics (the hisba) explains a degree of being one's brother's keeper in Islamic civilization that would probably have been regarded as officious in other societies."

SID: "This obligation in Islam is extended universally -- including Christians, Jews, and others within the scope of duties of compassion and charity for the faithful. Concern for the safety of children and old people are particularly prominent for all Muslims. Terrorism is an abomination under the teachings of Islam. These terrorists can expect no reward in paradise."

JOHN ALDEN WILLIAMS: "There is no impropriety in visiting a Jew or Christian in their illness ... The Law does not prohibit us from thus consoling [and assisting them]."

John Alden Williams, "The Law: Rejecting the Reprehensible," in Islam (New York: George Brazilier, 1962), pp. 125-131. (Quoting from the Holy Qu'ran and commentaries.)

LUC: "All of this morality will make me puke. I think morality is hypocrisy. Men and women are 'survival machines' burdened with 'selfish genes' and genitalia that dictate their actions. They are unfree, programmed automatons, executing their instructions to take what is not theirs, have sex with and then destroy their fellow creatures. They are 'naked apes' unworthy of our concern. Humanity sickens me."

SID: "It is your own evil that repels you. Well, if humans are 'programmed' then they are not to be blamed, morally, for their conduct. But take another look inside that airplane. Those passengers know what will happen to them. Most are concerned for their fellow passengers and loved-ones, calling their homes, leaving messages expressing their love, thinking of how to make these final moments more beautiful and priceless for others, giving their emotions and lives infinite value. Now. Besides, your metaphors are out of control again. Human genes cannot be 'selfish.' Nature only determines events in the empirical world. Nature has nothing to say concerning the meanings or values of those events that are called 'actions' for which we, SUBJECTS, alone are responsible."

LUC: "I hate it when you get all philosophical on me."

Luc vanishes in a cloud of smoke leaving a faint whiff of sulfur as the plane crashes into the skyscraper.

Sid remains to encourage the persons fleeing the burning building, to climb the stairs with the police and firefighters, to support the medical personnel.

Act III: "The Creation of Adam."

Scene 1:

We are in a totally black space. There are two directors' chairs, on the back of the first chair is written: AUTHOR, HARRISON FORD; on the back of the second chair is written: DIRECTOR, STEVEN SPIELBERG. Two men walk into this space. One is Harrison Ford in a gray tweed jacket, denims, red Converse All Star sneakers. He is wearing a white shirt with button down collar. Mr. Ford is holding a pipe -- not because he smokes the pipe, only because he feels that "it helps the process of finding the character." Steven Spielberg wears a tan leather jacket and a baseball cap that says: "Jurassic Park." Mr. Spielberg is also wearing jeans and a denim shirt, very light blue, purchased on sale at the GAP, and he is sporting Converse All Stars -- product placement has netted the producers a pretty penny in this film. Two Diet Cokes are placed next to the men on a small table between their chairs.

One suggestion for the director is to have RUSSELL CROWE play the HARRISON FORD part; and RON HOWARD may appear as STEVEN SPIELBERG -- without altering the dialogue at all. This will compel the audience to question the reality under examination and reconsider the very "real" issues examined in the film by way of these "fictional" characters.

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "I think we're getting there."

HARRISON FORD: "I don't know, Steve. I think there's just not enough action in this film. Maybe we can get Denzel Washington to shoot a Nazi and search for the Holy Grail."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "No, listen the critics will love this high brow stuff. Besides, there is always a problem of pace and stasis when you're dealing with big ideas on screen -- like in 'Judgment in Nuremberg.' With a subject like the Holocaust, the ideas provide the drama and narrative momentum. And we're doing a lot of fast cuts to action locations where evil is seen. Don't worry. I feel that it's working."

Harrison Ford reaches for the Diet Coke and holds it up for the camera. He smiles.

HARRISON FORD: "Don't you believe that the discussion may be perceived as too facile?"

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "Well, people said that about 'Shindler's List.' There's always a danger of simplification when complex philosophical issues are placed on screen. The risk is worth taking in this project because of the importance of the topic and profundity of thinkers which most members of the audience may not know or read otherwise. I think the crux of the issue is on screen."

HARRISON FORD: "I find myself feeling sympathy for the devil."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "You mean Ron Howard?"

HARRISON FORD: "No, the character in our movie. You know, the devil."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "I don't know what you mean."

HARRISON FORD: "I mean, like, it's all too neat and easy sometimes. You know, like a college essay or something where everything works out very conveniently with a happy ending. The messiness and horror, lingering effects of evil, the experience of violation and disgust at the encounter with someone who utterly disregards our humanity -- by destroying our creative work for instance -- these things are only suggested, vaguely, in this movie. I just don't know how we can do more given the constraints of the budget."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "That's the nature of the medium. Cinema can conjure thoughts and reactions, evoke emotions for viewers who will find it almost impossible to escape being drawn into the controversy. That's the real goal. Certainly, it is not to suggest that we can offer a solution to this debate concerning the Mystery of evil. I kind of agree with the Messiah character. Tom Cruise turned it down, you know. Tom's remaking 'Risky Business.'"

HARRISON FORD: "I've heard. Too bad."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "Yeah."

HARRISON FORD: "Tacking on this postmodernist conclusion will infuriate people who will claim that we're being flippant."

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "They said that about 'Amistad.'"

HARRISON FORD: "You think we're talking Oscars here? By way of Sundance and the art houses, of course, with a pit-stop at the universities?"

STEVEN SPIELBERG: "It's possible. I don't wanna jinx it. We're still under budget."

HARRISON FORD: Taking a puff of his pipe: "I've got my acceptance speech all written out."