Maverick Philosopher

On Travel

Travel introduces a salutary perturbation into one's quotidian orbit. It reduces self-satisfied complacency, putting in its place a useful unease.  Useful for what? For a renewed seriousness in pursuit of what finally matters. This is why it is good for the soul.

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996.

Leader of the Stack.

Travel

Mention that you are travelling abroad, and you might get the slightly hostile response, "Have you seen your own country?" Such a reaction is likely to come from one of Hillary Clinton's so-called 'deplorables.' These are typically people who, apart from military service, have never been out of their home country. They tend to be provincial, narrow, limited, ignorant, and often bigoted. But is the deracinated comopolitan any better?  There is little to choose between a rooted fool and a rootless fool. Be neither. Play the maverick across the opposition.

Here is a deplorable singing about his having been everywhere.

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

Read the rest at Substack.

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia, Asia Minor

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996:

Phaselis is a romantic tangle of Graeco-Roman ruins in a beautiful natural setting. I hiked back into the brush, got scratched up, but was rewarded by ruins and views out to the Mediterranean, and up to snow-capped mountains.

From Phaselis to the resort town of Kemer. I am sitting at the moment facing the sea drinking beer at an 'Italian' bistro. Table set on the lawn. Vegetation like Arizona: prickly pear cactus, rosemary in bloom, a palm or two, oleander, ice plant. Overcast and  a bit cool. The cactus pads have names carved into them: Hasan, Samer, Erkan.

Living life versus thinking and reflecting on it and its 'meaning.' Surely this is a bogus distinction? For a man to  live thoughtlessly is not to live, and to live the thinker's life is to live in a certain way.  So what is the valid content of the distinction?  Thought interferes with the immediacy of experience. Thought distances, and distance is distortion. But total immediacy would be blindness.

Thought without life is empty; life without thought is blind. The true life is a thinking life infused with experience broad and deep.  So travel and suffer and get scratched up by the brambles of experience, but take good notes! Press the grapes of experience for the wine of wisdom. Stomp them for their juice.

Breathe and feel and take a good snort of the sea breeze. Play the fool; better to love and have lost than never to have loved. Take your best shot, put your ass on the line, go deep, pay your dues, sing the blues.

Above all, take risks! Calculated, deep thought risks. You learned long ago in your Thoreauvian adolescence that a man sits as many risks as he runs.  Go to the brink, but with cautious steps. Take it to the limit, but know the limit. Dissolution into the Apeiron can wait for later. Travel and act but don't neglect to meet the mat of  meditation often to quell both action and thought.

A Couple of Venice Characters I Met While Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my  Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify.  It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool.  But working Manpower grunt jobs  was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

One cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.'  A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D.  He lived in Venice, California, with a couple of other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath.  He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree.  Booze and dope didn't help either.  I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

 

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates.  A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel."  When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety.  He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating.  In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there.  Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it.  So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs.  And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible.  Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me.  We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon.  On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie.  John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels.  (For more on Montgomery see here.)  Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home.  I've regretted that non-meeting ever since.  Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Last Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM.  Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse.  While passing Saratoga, CA  decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats.  We couldn't get in touch with him.  So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso.  By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse.  The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.] 

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA.  [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971]  Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case.  Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before.  Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared.  Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon.  Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's.  Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM.  Thursday spent in Eugene.  I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests.  Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM.  Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel.  Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger,  Jim Huntsman.  Arranged to start working Monday morning.  So far, so good.

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short.  We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance.  And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care.  Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence.  One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know?  Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

We plan our journeys long and short.  We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance.  And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care.  Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence.  One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know?  Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

Travel

Travel is no alleviation of travail but a form of it.

The Young and the Reckless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan

To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher  McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan:

Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.

“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.

They were often proved right.

[. . .]

Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement offers astute commentary (bolding added)

Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted....I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” This rosy view of humanity suffuses Austin's blog: “Malawians and Zambians are fantastically friendly people.” And: “All throughout western Europe, when folks asked us where we were headed and we'd say Albania, their faces would drop and they'd start muttering 'Oh, no, no, no.' Albania, they'd tell us, is dangerous. The people of Albania will steal your spleen....The Albanians we come across are perhaps the warmest, friendliest, smiliest...people we've met on the continent.”

Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being[s] than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative. This is apparently a comment on the South African government's current expropriation of white farmers' land without compensation. (To be sure, when a friendly Afrikaans man advises Austin and Geoghegan to move their tent because they've pitched it too close to a black settlement and may antagonize the locals, they're quick to let him lead them to a safer spot.)

[. . .]

The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments. 

[. . .]

Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists....This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.

Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal....But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan....Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

[. . .]

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Uphold 'Muslim' Travel Ban

Yet another victory for President Trump and for common sense. And yet another embarrassment for the Never-Trumpers who refused to support Trump and who, by their refusal, indirectly supported Hillary who would never have supported any such travel ban.

And of course, if the Never-Trumpers had their way, the composition of the Court would not have been favorable to conservative rulings.

(Once more: a Never-Trumper is a conservative of some sort or other who opposes Trump. Bill Kristol for example. Remember him? Every Never-Trumper is an Anti-Trumper, but not conversely. Is this just an arbitrary stipulation on my part? No. This is the way the terms are used by those in the know who value clarity of thought and the distinctions that support it.)

Predictably, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that is rather less than intelligent:

“This repackaging does little to cleanse [the policy] of the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created,” she said. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”

On the contrary, a reasonable observer would conclude that Sotomayor should not be sitting on the Supreme Court. I'll give her this, though: she has a beautiful name.

Imagine the composition of the Court after eight years of Hillarity. 

Seeing as how we are in the vicinity of Islamist issues, I now refer you to William Kilpatrick's latest,  Islamization in the Schools.

On Travel

A man does not escape his trials by travel. He merely gives them a change of venue.

Travel

Travel can be good when it is a flight from the familiar that breaks the complacency of the daily round to expose the insecurity ever present but hidden by and behind the quotidian.

Venice in August

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 163:

Venice in August and the swarms of tourists, who flock to St. Mark's Square at the same time as the pigeons, peck at impressions, and give themselves vacations and ugliness.

Related articles

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Of Socialism, Violets, and Asphalt

Camus on Crybullies, Safe Spaces, and Trigger Warnings

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

BEATific October Again

And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973.  I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack.  I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of the piece, pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

Related articles

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The Ghost Town Of Dunmovin, California

Dunmovin is a California ghost town, now little more than a wide spot in the road on U. S. 395, one of my favorite highways.  I have driven past it many a time, but never stopped to explore, not that there is much there to explore.  An Internet search turned up an interesting post, dated 15 September 2008, The Ghost Town of Dunmovin, California.  It was written by the late Harry Helms and is copied below  in toto from his defunct weblog. 

After reading the post, I brought up the topmost page of the Harry Helms Blog and was both surprised and saddened to find that the relatively young Mr. Helms lost his battle with cancer.  Here is his farewell post. May we all accept our deaths with as much peace and equanimity.

...............................

Highway 395 in California runs from Interstate 15 (just beyond Cajon Pass) up to the Nevada state line. For much of its route, it parallels the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada range and offers jaw-dropping mountain scenery. It is a road I have driven dozens and dozens of times, and is one of my all-time favorite highways. And along it you can see the ghost town of Dunmovin, California. If you like Dunmovin, you can buy it! Take a look at this photo:



Dunmovin is located about three miles north of the Coso Junction rest stop along Highway 395, but getting there is complicated because the rest stop is located on the northbound side of Highway 395 but Dunmovin is on the southbound side; you'll have to drive a little north and then loop back south. When you arrive, you'll find the town site is enclosed behind a fence (or at least it was last time I visited back in 2003). It's a very isolated area, and the chances of anyone knowing (or caring) that you trespassed on the property are remote. However, I preferred to respect the property rights of the owner(s) and instead looked at it from afar. Below is what seems to have been a store, judging from that faded and now illegible sign atop the front:


I've had zero luck in finding out anything about Dunmovin. According to post office records, there was never a post office there nor does the state of California have any record of an incorporated town at this location. It appears on some road maps (especially those from the AAA) but not others. My guess is this location served travelers back when Highway 395 was the main route between Los Angeles and Reno. The neon sign below was probably a welcome sight in the night for weary travelers way back when:


I'm guessing the structures below are some of the guest cabins, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of them also housed workers-----Dunmovin is a long way from any place to live (CalTrans workers at the nearby Coso Junction rest stop live in mobile homes belonging to the state). You can see a mobile home in the photo below, but looking at it through binoculars I saw that it was abandoned (door and windows open, etc.), The whole site seemed 100% deserted, with not even a caretaker on the premises:


I get the feeling this structure may have been a restaurant; it has "the look" of one, especially with those windows and curtains:


What is most puzzling about Dunmovin is its enigmatic web site, which offers no history or background about Dunmovin but does offer several photos of the construction of a mountain home (click the "Now Showing" link at the site) along with hosting server data (click the other links at the site). If anyone knows more about Dunmovin, I'd certainly like to hear from you!

Posted by Harry Helms at 5:20 PM

 

Labels: Ghost Towns

Homo Viator

We are not at home in this world, a fact more likely to be revealed by travelling than by staying home. 

Travel Disruptive, but Good for the Soul

For me, travel is disruptive and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit, out of the familiar with its gauzy filters, into the strangeness of things.  Even an overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track. I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.

More on travel in the Travel category in which you will find Emersonian and Pascalian reasons against it.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Travel, Travail, Transition

Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere, man, crossed the deserts bare, man/I've breathed the mountain air, man/Of travel I've had my share, man/I've been everywhere.
Pete Seeger, Passing Through.  "Yankee, Russian, white or tan, Lord a man is just a man/We're all brothers and we're only passing through."
Soggy Mountain Boys, I am a Man of Constant Sorrow
Peter, Paul, and Mary, 500 Miles
EmmyLou Harris, Wayfaring Stranger
Ralph Stanley, Will the Circle be Unbroken
Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide.  Is there a better treatment?
Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers.  If you've read Jack London's Martin Eden, you will figure out what this song is about.

The Secret of Travelling

Freya Stark, Beyond Euphrates, p. 246:

The secret of travelling is to leave one's past behind, and to keep a mind a little blank and empty for  the new to be received.

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and the Vallicellan. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us into temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

The first reason is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's wonderful essay, "Self-Reliance," wherein he writes, "Travelling is a fool's  paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places." (Selected Essays, ed. Ziff, p. 198) This notion of the indifference of places is one I believe Emerson borrowed from the Roman Stoic Seneca (4 B.C. - 65 A.D.), though I can't remember where Seneca says this. The idea is simple and sound.

Wherever we are, we see the world through the same pair of eyeballs, and filter its deliverances through the same set of conceptions, preconceptions, anxieties, aversions, and what-not. If I travel to Naples, thinking to get away from myself, what I find when I wake up there is "...the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from." (Ibid.) Shift your spatial horizon as you will, you may not effect any change in your mental horizon. If you can't find enlightenment in Buffalo, where the water is potable and mosquitoes are rare, what makes you think you will find it in Benares where mosquitoes are ubiquitous and the water will give you dysentery?

Forty years ago I had a conversation with a young Austrian at the train station in Salzburg, Austria. He told me he was headed for Istanbul "to make holiness." But could he not have made holiness in Salzburg? Could he not have found a Pauline 'closet' somewhere in that beautiful city of Mozart wherein to shut himself away from the world and pray to his Father in secret?

But to the young and romantic the lure of foreign destinations is well-nigh irresistible.

The second reason is from Blaise Pascal who sees "the sole cause of man's unhappiness" in the fact that "he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." (Pensees, trans. Krailsheimer, p. 67.) Sallying forth from his monastery, the monk exposes himself to every manner of distraction and vexation. The alluring world may even lure him to his destruction. Had Thomas Merton remained in his hermitage at Gethsemane, instead of flying off to a useless conference in Bangkok, he would not have met his early death by accidental electrocution.

The third reason is that vacations tend to require a recovery period for getting reestablished in our natural orbits. In the summer of  2000, two weeks in Poland and Germany cost me another two weeks of recovery time before I could get back into the philosophy writing groove. Is the time spent travelling wisely used? It is not clear to me. But then I may have been unduly influenced by Kant, who never   strayed from Koenigsberg. Your mileage may vary.

His Inner Kantian

Becoming increasingly in touch with his 'inner Kantian,' he travelled less and less as the years rolled on.  He decided he had seen enough phenomena, and that seeing more would not bring him closer to any noumena.

Kerouac October Quotation #11: For the Sake of Absolute Freedom

It's October 11th today, Columbus Day.  This is a month to be savored day by day, hour by hour.  To aid in the savoring, here is today's Kerouac quotation, from "The Vanishing American Hobo" in Lonesome Traveler, p. 173 of the 1970 Black Cat edition.  (Purchased my copy in a shop on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on 12 April 1973, while on the road, enroute to Boston from Los Angeles.  From that point of the trip on I had two Kerouac books in my rucksack, the just mentioned and, you guessed it, On the Road.)

There is nothing nobler than to put up with a few incoveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.

Dunmovin and a Blogger's Final Post

Dunmovin is a California ghost town, now little more than a wide spot in the road on U. S. 395, one of my favorite highways.  I have driven past it many a time, but never stopped to explore, not that there is much there to explore.  But I thought of it today, did a search and found an interesting post, dated 15 September 2008, The Ghost Town of Dunmovin, California.

After reading the post, I brought up the current page of the Harry Helms Blog and was both surprised and saddened to find that the relatively young Mr. Helms is losing his battle with cancer.  Here is his farewell post. May we all accept our deaths with as much peace and equanimity.