Something No One Could Take Away

I’m reading Proust and the Squid – The story and science of the reading brain and did you know that Socrates was worried about the written word?

He was worried about what it would do to memory; worried about the power of memory when there is the “crutch” (my word) of the written word as a reminder.

Sound a little inane to you?

Well this middle aged googled-brained sapien wants his memory back. I’m not talking anything major but considering the power of my memory in undergrad that allowed me to ace a perfect score on a Continental Rationalism Spinoza exam and with now and how if I get rolling in a conversation I can’t recall this or that actor’s name or the bass player on Kinda Blue (Paul Cobb? Mr. PC?) or yaddi yadda, it would be nice to not have to google things or IMDB them. (Just used IMDB as a verb)

Consider this passage from the book:

                Certainly my children’s eighty-six year-old Jewish grandmother, Lotte Noam, would flummox future generations. On almost any occasion she can supply an appropriate three-stanza poem from Rilke, a passage from Goethe, or a bawdy limerick--to the infinite delight of her grandsons. Once, in a burst of envy, I asked Lotte how she could ever memorize so many poems and jokes. She answered simply, “I always wanted to have something no one could take away if I was ever put into a concentration camp.” Lotte prompts us to pause and consider the place of memory in our lives, and what the incremental atrophying of this quality, generation by generation, ultimately means.

 And I complain about traffic. SMH. But...

Strong word: atrophying.

It is, your memory, atrophying.

One of the first songs I wrote that would be played in front of people went something like this:

Do you remember, when we were kids?
Life so easy and so carefree
take me back now because I need to see
Do you remember?
I remember
Do you remember?
I remember

From the oral to the written and from the written to the digital…the times they are uh changin’.

Maybe I’m just wistful.
Maybe I’m just scared for my kids.
Maybe I can still recall the definition of god – being consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Mode – that which the intellect perceives of substance as if constituting its essence.

Memory is essential, from the greek ontos – that without which a thing cannot exist.

Who Gave Us Modernity? Becasue I Want My Money Back.

I need to invent a word to capture the something like irony, something like paradox, something like paradigm-less superimposition, radical objectivity meets facticity and both lose, feelings/ideas I had reading Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

As someone who feels like he is fighting his history and facticity, like Rebecca Goldstein feels Spinoza did on some level, but with the hope that there is some intellectual/rational solution to my facticity, as Spinoza ultimately felt there was to his own, via his radical objectivity (pantheism),...

I…

have my doubts.

Just can’t help thinking that happiness can’t be derived from a priori knowledge like 2+2=4. 

Human, all too human I guess.

Re the subtitle: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

Historians like Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve, might offer that Spinoza played a part in modernity but that it began with Lucretius.

After all, modernity is time sensitive, by definition.

Rationality isn’t time sensitive though.

Or is it…

(cue ominous music)

 

Do you know where your pantheism is?

What does it all mean?

The all in this case being, my shit…as in all of my concerns about all of my issues and responsibilities and why some of these aren’t more concerning to me and how this impacts my marriage which in turn impacts my overall concern level about concerns, both individual and en totum. 

Because it’s all connected right? You don’t have to be Spinoza to see this. You don’t have to have pantheism in your vocabulary to know that your mommy and daddy issues affect you and your potential mate and potential children and rearing of children and interpersonal relationships and then you remember that your parents’ parents influenced them and how your dad’s old man was as cold as ice in August and blah blah blah…

But I digress. 

Speaking of regressing, did you catch the epic regression of the United States on tv the other night? Wow. The beginning of the end right? 

Which brings us back to it all being connected. Reminds me of a joke by George Carlin on education:

"Not too bright, folks. Not too fucking bright. But if you talk to one of them about this, if you isolate one of them, you sit 'em down rationally, you talk to 'em about the low IQ's and the dumb behavior and the bad decisions; right away they start talking about education. That's the big answer to everything: Education. They say, 'We need more money for education. We need more books, more teachers, more classrooms, more schools. We need more testing for the kids!' You say to 'em, 'Well, you know, we've tried all that and the kids still can't pass the tests'. They say, 'Aw, don't you worry about that, we're gonna lower the passing grades!' And that's what they do in a lot of these schools now, they lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody's happy; the IQ of the country slips another two or three points and pretty soon, all you'll need to get into college is a fucking pencil! 'Gotta pencil? Get the fuck in there, it's physics!' Then everyone wonders why 17 other countries graduate more scientists than we do. Education!
Politicians know that word; they use it on you. Politicians have traditionally hidden behind three things: the flag, the Bible and children. 'No Child Left Behind! No Child Left Behind!' 'Oh really, well it wasn't long ago you were talking about giving kids a Head Start! Head Start, Left Behind, someone's losing fucking ground here!' But there's a reason. There's a reason. There's a reason for this. There's a reason education sucks and it's the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that.
I'm talking about the real owners now. The big, wealthy...The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They've got you by the balls! They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking.
They're not interested in that! That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right! You know something? They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that! You know what they want? They want Obedient Workers – Obedient Workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club - and you ain't in it! You and I are not in the big club.
By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long and they tell you what to believe...All day long, beating you over the head in the media, what to believe, what to think and what to buy...The table is tilted, folks! The game is rigged! And nobody seems to notice, and nobody seems to care! Good honest, hard-working people! White collar, blue collar... Doesn't matter what color shirt you have on! Good honest, hard-working people continue...These are people of modest means!...continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them! They don't give a fuck about you! They don't give a fuck about you! They don't care about you! At all! At all! At all! Yeah! You know? And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans probably will remain willfully ignorant of the big red white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day! Because the owners of this country know the truth - it's called the American Dream: because you have to be asleep to believe it."