September 28, 2006

Dear Robin and Susan

I have been hiking for a few days and am back for a day or two

I bought a cell phone. The number is 707 407 9501. You could use that number when I am out of town or if the other number is unavailable (I have set the regular phone to not accept messages till I come back.) However, even though I will take the cell phone on the drive out, I will not take it when I walk into the hills…

I had a very strange dream the other night. It was at A-8, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. Mum was going off on a rickshaw and we were all worried that she was unprotected (there wasn’t any identified danger but the source of our worry may have been that she used to be scared of rickshaw rides.) In any case the rickshaw didn’t get far and soon came back. The rickshawalla turned out to be a Mexican, short and stout with a moustache, about 5' 6". He explained that he didn’t want to go anywhere because the Dhar’s were abusing their son. The rickshawalla turned into a woman. She was about the same height as her male self but very slender, had light olive skin, long black hair, and was wearing a very clean white sari with a thin blue border (she was, I thought, very cute and desirable.) It was dinner time. Except for me, everyone (Mitras and Dhars) was sitting down to dinner. The slender, olive, sexy woman wanted to join us. I would not let her in. She kept trying and I kept pushing her back every time she tried to enter the front door. I rather wanted her to come in, so I didn’t know why I was stopping her except that I had the vague sense that that was what I was expected to do (and expected I was expected to do when attracted to a woman.) I did not like pushing her and I wondered out loud whether anyone else would care to take over guard duty. No one responded. Robin said ‘I won’t.’ I said ‘well in that case she can eat with us.’ While dinner was being eaten, I went in to the kitchen where Krishna Janna (our cook) was eating a huge plate of rice and dal. He had a puzzled look on his face that seemed to say why is she eating in the dining room and that perhaps he would like to as well but felt too uncomfortable to ask. Somehow all this inspired me to want a sex change operation. I was going to change my name to Inez da Cunha. (I’d been reading about someone called Gerson da Cunha but I don’t know where Inez came from. It’s curious though that later that day I read of a Polish woman named called Ines.) I woke up feeling quite good about my self…

Today began rather pleasantly. I was planning to drive out after my morning coffee ritual. I was reading the recent version of ‘Journey in Being’ and drinking coffee when some ideas for changes occurred. It took about two hours to finalize the changes, upload them to http://www.horizons-2000.org/Journey in Being-New World.html (for other versions go to http://www.horizons-2000.org then click ‘Essays on Being.’) and to print out a list of corrections (there’s a new book form and have been printing it in batches of fifteen and if changes are made before the next batch, I have been including a corrections sheet when I send copies out. This is a better plan than printing out 100 copies and then having 99 copies with known mistakes that I have to send or throw away – which is what I did with the 2004 version. Incidentally, I see this version as realizing what was below ground before 2002, germinated in 2002, implicit and potential in 2003, and ill and partially realized in 2004.) I then played with the cell phone for a while to figure out some basic features, decided I wanted a case for it and went into town to buy a leather case, mail off my power bill, and mail a copy of Journey in Being to Arvind Jain who is now living in Montreal. I chatted with the cell phone people for a while and wondered that since yesterday was my birthday and since I had just bought a brand new phone from them on my birthday, would they give me a complimentary case. They gave me a discount and I paid $9.99 for something priced at $14.99 and probably worth $0.99. The queue at the downtown Arcata post office was obscenely long so I went to the Bayside post office which is out of town on lovely Old Arcata Road. I found that surface mail to Canada would cost about $2.50 and take 4 – 6 weeks while airmail was $1.56 and would take 5 – 7 business days. The mail clerk joked that rent was included in the surface mail cost. On the way back to town, still on Old Arcata Road, I was planning to get a sandwich at the ‘Hole in the Wall’ sandwich shop when I passed by Hank’s Coffee Shop and stopped in thinking I might have a sandwich and some coffee. The sandwiches were exorbitantly priced so I settled for a double Cappuccino. It was the best Cappuccino I’ve had in a while and, even though I forgot to say not to, they didn’t rain the hated cinnamon sprinkles on top. While sitting at a table I read in the Arcata Eye Newspaper that the North Country fair, one of my favorite local festivals with good food, arts and crafts, and eye stopping fair goers (it's legal for women to go topless,) had been a drunken orgy with minors having access to beer and bums drinking hard alcohol from bottles in brown paper bags due to a lack of security (I didn’t go this year.) At ‘Hole in the Wall’ I ordered a pastrami on sourdough sandwich with mayonnaise, lettuce, red onions, jalapeños, Swiss cheese, salt and pepper and oil and vinegar but no mustard or sprouts or tomatoes. If you like sandwiches you should visit ‘Hole in the Wall.’ I took the sandwich to the Arcata Marsh. The morning fog (heavy mist for Londoners who call Fog what we in California call Smog) had cleared and I ate a lovely sandwich under the sun

Since ‘Journey in Being’ has reached a milestone (much of the fog of the 2004 edition has been cleared up and the power of the basic ideas made explicit and applied) I have been thinking I should keep good on my promise to look for alternate work. Therefore, the day proceeded onward to Humboldt State University where I once used to teach. Day parking was $2.50 and the parking meter gave me $14.50 change for $20.00 (‘money making creeps’ I thought.) I went to the employment office. They have one job for a computer scientist and a number of temporary jobs. One of my old friends from my teaching years grumbles about how work conditions have been getting worse and worse. There are some temporary jobs that I will review to see if my qualifications match. I then went to the library. Whereas there used to be a few hundred new books on display they now have about 25 (all uninteresting to me) with a sign that says ‘very few new books due to decreased budget.’ The library air was stale and musty. Students wore a uniform drab denim (I remember the ‘I’m an intellectual so what I wear doesn’t matter’ attitude quite well; however it isn’t cool to be intellectual anymore so ‘what’s their excuse’ I mused not very consistently.) I looked out of the window, clouds were coming back. I wondered ‘do I really want to work here?’ My earlier good mood was beginning to plummet. No doubt the endorphin system or something like it was beginning to crash from the earlier excess caffeine intake. Additionally my knees were hurting from the hiking. I decided to walk to the HSU bookstore – I enjoy bookstores. Everyone was wearing hair that was brilliant yellow or brilliant green (HSU’s colors are green and gold.) I wondered whether I should get my hair some brilliant color when I go back to work. The books were fun in the beginning. I browsed some textbooks – mathematics. I looked at an engineering textbook on ‘Numerical Analysis.’ The introductory comments by the author said something about how engineering education had recently become ‘dumbed down.’ I recalled how, in response to student and faculty requests, I had dumbed down my teaching at Humboldt; I tried a little dumber each quarter but was not able to quite reach the low standards that had been set – I had failed to recognize that ‘dumb’ did not mean making the mathematics and analysis easy, it meant not doing mathematics at all; I failed the standards of dumbness and now, apparently, things were really taking a dive. Would I be able to fly in that rarified atmosphere I wondered? The book had examples on how to use Excel in engineering (ugh.) Low mood began to give way to ‘stinking’ mood. Onward to the general sale books. Literature was fun – lots of good books including the classics. Political science, however, was depressing – much on the miserable scene in American and World politics – you can imagine the sort of material… depressing – (a) same old tired liberal rhetoric but (b) it’s true and (c) how in heaven’s name do we get out of this cycle (turn) of events. Money and power are God. I saw a parallel between the general loss of values and the loss of educational values. Finally on to philosophy. In that section there wasn’t a single book on philosophy – there was much on meditation, on the Dalai Lama’s formula for peace and so on. The presence of that material, fluff or otherwise, wasn’t problematic but the absence of real philosophy was. Western Civilization is hitting a cultural low, I thought – it couldn’t be random… there must be a design, there must be a State Department in some cellar in Washington where drafting clerks and tired and spent intellectuals pore over medieval manuals titled ‘The anti-intellect, the Divine Manifesto of a Devil’ and cackled in delight like some old witch as they discovered –invented– new paradigms of ignorance-in-the-attire-of-learning. That’s OK came the return thought – everything goes in cycles and we deceive ourselves into believing that it was our ability or our reason that permitted self-extraction from a dim past into a brilliant future. (Note to self. Enjoy light when you happen upon it.) Hmm but it’ll get worse before it gets better and I’ll be 90 (I pictured myself as white haired, with crooked white stick like legs and a croaking voice) or dead by then…

On the way home I thought, ‘I’ll write an email to Susan and Robin. It’ll be therapeutic.’ Now I’m wondering whether I should send this or not… If our parents (Mitra) were alive I certainly wouldn’t send it to them. Mum would be wringing her body parts in sympathetic misery. Dad would be saying ‘this is the result of too much self-indulgence…’ There would be speculation on the causes of unhappiness in the first born son. There would be self-loathing and blame ‘We shouldn’t have sent them to boarding school. We should have let them play more’ would come one voice, ‘Ani was never disciplined. He never had respect. This is why he does not get along with his professors and why he will die a lonely, unhappy and poor old man in isolation and dire circumstance,’ would come another… ‘He was so willful’ they might chime in matrimonial unison. A conference with relatives and old friends might be held. A bleak two hours would be extrapolated into a lifetime. The causes of the impending lifetime of doom and emptiness would be identified. Professors and wives would pontificate, cooks would serve samosas with concerned and intelligent looks on their faces, students would offer hopeful solutions that would be shot down and ridiculed, children with flakes of Indian pastries on their faces would shriek with glee and receive withering glances while they danced without care, dogs would perk up their ears as if they understood what was going on, God herself would take note of an unusual intensity of action and interaction among her subjects, and cats with just one leg obscenely pointed toward heaven would vigorously lick their bellies in unison as if no other activity could have any importance and then yawn in feigned absence of concern regarding canine and human and super-human. Solutions would be hammered out. A letter would be drafted. ‘I think you’re too serious Ani. You should let some sunshine in. But Dad thinks you’re too dissipated. He says you need to apply yourself to your career otherwise you will be very unhappy in your old age. Dad says that you must grind and grind and grind.’ The letter would be mailed, received, and read; a reply would be written – ‘not to worry’ I would say, ‘it was just a temporary thing.’ They would think ‘the poor misguided soul doesn’t even realize how truly miserable he is’ (read: he needs us to save him… ‘Do you think he needs a girl friend, Shanti?’ ‘Too much indulgence in sex is not good!’ would come the stern reply, and then the knowing observation, ‘All the good women in America are already married.’) An ever downward cycle of tangential communication and counter-communication, of misinterpretation and counter-misinterpretation would continue on. The cycles and epi-cycles of Ptolemy would pale in comparison. Frustration would build on both sides. In a phone conversation Dad would sternly admonish the first born ‘It is attitudes like yours that are responsible for all the wars and poverty in the world’ and when said firstborn would mumble something about ‘excess’ or ‘bounds of reason’ or ‘we are different’ there would be a resonant reply ‘we are poles apart’ … and finally, a doleful but calculated male parental voice might ruminate ‘I have failed you as a father.’ Finally, Mum would realize that they were not getting through to the misguided one. ‘Another approach,’ she would think, ‘is needed… Perhaps we should forget the wringing of hands, the beating of breasts, the gnashing of teeth and heaviness of emotions and just write a nice breezy letter as if nothing had happened, as if all were light.’ Said breezy letter would be written, would begin ‘Dear Silky Head,’ would end ‘Love for ever and ever, and lots of kisses, your loving Mum, P.S. Dad really loves you – it’s just that he’s concerned… he was just reflecting on how wonderfully successfully the two Mishra boys turned out’ would be sent, received and read. The bleak one would be a little puzzled and a little amused but only for a moment. Mostly there would be relief that that bout of parental torture had come to an end. Peace would come to a poor tortured soul ‘I’m loved’ he would think with a warm feeling and he would look out of his window and think ‘I do love you, world.’ He would however have an occasional and passing picture of the parental figures sitting around a living room table somewhere in a house set in a large garden in an IIT campus on the edge of a forest. Sometimes, as part of that picture, a younger brother with curly hair would be seen. He would occasionally wonder what part, if any, that younger brother might be assigned in the imaginary proceedings, what thoughts might flit through the young curly head… (This paragraph was rather fun to write)

In two weeks from now I will be in or leaving San Francisco. I will have done the citizenship interview. I am actually pleased at the prospect. It will be nice to feel part of the place where I live and the people with whom I live. I do not like the idea of being alien to India although I would probably feel somewhat alien if I were there. If I am still in San Francisco I will be planning to look into job prospects – including teaching jobs at universities

Tomorrow I go back to the hills. It will be sunny and lovely for a few days. I will do some hiking. I wonder how my knees will do. They are aching today. I anticipate that they will do well enough – the mountains are usually physically therapeutic. I will spend an afternoon lying on my back looking up at blue skies and white clouds. I will encounter hunters with rifles on their way to hunt deer. Some of them will know me from previous years. Others will shake their heads at someone who is neither hunting nor fishing. Still others might marvel at someone carrying a load fit for a horse. A few might strike a conversation and be offered morning coffee for their friendliness… In all likelihood no one will learn anything other than where I live and work and perhaps that I write. Over the years meals, tents and nights have been shared perhaps three or four times (once when I had gotten trapped in a snow storm that had turned to freezing slush and had been offered warmth on the way out.) I hope to get up to my favorite lake – a place beyond walls so steep that the hunter’s horse cannot climb the faint game trails. There, I will be alone but for wild things, trees, ruffles of breeze on the lake, a cirque of peaks that form black silhouettes at night and come alive in the day. There will be small birds and chipmunk by day, deer in the evening and night. I’ve encountered black bear on trails, seen signs of but never an actual bear at the lake; have seen occasional ducks, eagles, fish hawk… Wild duck in flight are lovely and beautiful – sometimes graceful and occasionally exhibiting a power in flight that is surprising for such peaceful animal; they fly in pairs or groups; when in pairs I think ‘there’s a couple in love’ and how could one think otherwise given the perfect unison in flight; once I saw by fading purple evening light, as mist descended and encircled to form an ill defined horizontal curtain that shrouded peaks and tops of tall trees, two duck swimming on a lake set in a mountain cirque and leaving behind them a bow wave like that of a liner navigating a calm ocean. I sometimes puzzle that since those experiences – or even a sunset or a stormy day in Arcata are so beautiful and so full (I’m amazed that these things have not become commonplace even though they may be common) why I slave at my writing… Perception is greater than thought. Perception has always been one of my closest allies as has attunement of body and movement to the contours of my environment. On the way home from work, I often stop in farmland to experience the infinite wonder of shades of black and grey at night (sometimes while sipping beer)

I will be sending you a copy of ‘Journey in Being’ – will wait till the next printing but before I read it and find further mistakes and needs. I’m happy with the ideas but not altogether happy with the expression of them. When I try to explain not just the ideas themselves but also their significance and application, their depth and breadth, I invariably feel that I am talking in circles, that I have said too much and not enough. As I said to Robin, I feel as though I have accomplished things. I don’t think I’m arrogant although I know I could be mistaken - about accomplishment and about arrogance. I hesitate to say ‘great’ things for various reasons; what does great mean; if it is great relative to trivia is it really great; am I elitist; and then there is the question – even if it is great is it I who created the ideas or am I lucky just to have stumbled upon them in the way that an explorer may stumble upon a lost world or the source of a river and not know what has been found; and even if the universe is contained in a word – so what… what good comes of it (the answer is of course yes there is good for if true it displaces a 1000 untruths and if real then it becomes a basis for real action… and this is why even though the writing is at an end, my ‘work’ must now take up the phase of ‘experiment.’) I wonder how others will react – will they understand? If I have achieved what I think I may have it would negate 100 years and be an advance on 2,500 years of (some parts of) philosophy. Others –Leibniz and Wittgenstein particularly and the Vedanta in the East– have had intimations of ‘my’ thoughts (this is encouraging to me) but, as far as I know, no thinker (the term does not include those with ‘religious’ insight or those whose path has been one of action) has taken the thoughts where I have. A concern is that the thoughts are not removed once but a number of times from a first apprehension of the world, each time representing a personal revolution in understanding – and, so, a difficulty in communication (which is perhaps common in discovery) and a strangeness in the ideas – a strangeness that is devious since it is the concepts that are abstract so as to include even while the words are common. Leibniz and Wittgenstein left their ideas on this issue as fragments, the Vedanta’s fundamental insights were intuitive rather than logical and it is the development of the logic (inspired by my insight) that has permitted and encouraged the development beyond the fundamental insights (first of the nature of the world and second how to think about that nature.) Then I think, since the thoughts are so simple at core – how ridiculous is it that no one seems to have thought of or through them before. Perhaps there is a conspiracy (runs the imagination) among those who know to keep a ‘secret’ and I am a fool for, first, not being intelligent enough to see the truth but instead in having to labor at it and, second, for letting the secret out. They are having secret meetings in which they ridicule my sense of accomplishment over something so trivial but and my childlike pride at wanting to publish such trivial but still so necessarily exclusive ideas – Mitra should practice continence of thought. The idea that the deepest truth is simple must never become public (say the priests of intellect who, through pretense, would curry favor with the rich and the powerful.) Or, perhaps goes that same imagination, there is a conspiracy of silence, so that philosophers can go on publishing papers and wearing suits to important meetings, pretending to find puzzles where there are none and to solve problems that do not exist and to write mutually congratulatory reviews of one another’s works and to interpret and reinterpret the profound and great ones –Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein and others– among their ranks thus hoping to shine in the way of the moon that only reflects the light of the sun. I might add two comments here. (1) Even though I am seriously critical of analytic philosophy, I do not question that a lot of good work on the technical side of philosophy has been done and that the analytic approach of clarity in meaning and care in thought has value (except when it avoids looking at what is there with the thought that only what is crystal clear should be contemplated, and the hubris laden idea dressed up in humility and service to truth and therefore courage in the face of insignificance that only what is positively known can exist.) (2) Looking at the sheer volume of publication in philosophy over the last 100 or so years it is simply not possible that any significant fraction of it will be of lasting fundamental interest

I wonder what response my ‘essay’ will draw. Perhaps only silence. Here is one possibility. I will just describe one well known person and how he might perceive my work. Imagine that you are Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in physics for your work on unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces; you eminently reasonable and rational; you are respected and frequently called upon for your views on science and its place in the world. You believe that the universe is as revealed in physics – with reasonable reservation based in the observation that physics hasn’t yet (quite) come to an end. Still, you see no reason to doubt that the large picture revealed in physics. You are an atheist because you see no place for God in what you see as the empirical universe, you think yourself courageous because physics reveals humankind to be a lonely accident but you face the world with optimism, you think that the empirical universe is the universe, and you think that there is no evidence of life after death or before birth and are therefore happy to believe that your life is circumscribed by your birth some seventy years ago and your death sometime in the next twenty five to fifty years. This is not just your view… these are the ideas that you breath, this is who you are and the facts that you are well respected and that similar views are shared by the majority of your peers and are markers of that modern substitute for religion labeled ‘secular humanism’ can only enhance these feelings. Now, some unknown writer suggests… no is talking about ideas whose consequences include that these views that are part of your identity are as far as truth is concerned but a contingent approximation and as far as revealing the extent and variety of the universe is concerned show only a speck. Furthermore this writer is not saying, ‘look, we truly know nothing about what lies beyond the pale of the empirical as we commonly hold it to be but he is also saying that there is an infinity of extent, duration and variety beyond that pale’ and he is not suggesting merely that he thinks that this is true but that he has demonstrated its truth and what’s more he has painted a picture with many of the details that that infinity should contain… admittedly he agrees that what has been revealed through (what he thinks is his) reason is only a minute fraction of what there is. The unknown writer is not critical of physics but he is critical of any world view based even very roughly in it – even without the claim that the non-physical modes of description –the biological, the psychological, the social and so on– can be reduced to the physical mode; he admits the importance of atomism and evolutionary biology but rejects them as paradigms of all being; he is not anti-philosophical –he appears to write some philosophy– but he would rather not be thought of as a philosopher – he talks of a journey based in a metaphysics that he claims to have developed and emphasizes the importance of action even in the presence of ignorance or partial ignorance; and though he is not critical of analysis as a method of philosophy he is relentlessly critical of analysis as the way and of the common paradigmatic assumptions of the analytic school –he is saying that the paradigm that the philosophers claim enable them to see clearly are also blinding them and stunting their thought and to human possibility– that stretches back 150 years and straddles the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, the logical empiricists, the language philosophers, the emergence of philosophy of mind as central in analysis; he admires Whitehead; it seems that he is not saying that mind and matter are duals or the same thing but that, if we understand things not just correctly but as best they can be understood i.e. logically in this case… they cannot be distinct i.e. they are logically identical; he is saying –and these claims are hard to believe– that his metaphysics founds or may found my physics, that he has resolved many –even most– of the fundamental problems of general philosophy and metaphysics which is a broader claim than it may sound to be since numerous ‘special’ disciplines of philosophy have, when appropriately understood, identities with the general –and not in the nihilist manner of the logical empiricists or of Wittgenstein or the existentialists– and numerous problems at the intersection of philosophy and the academic disciplines where he claims to have introduced clarity and a much greater degree of completion than hitherto imagined possible even by Hegel the arch philosopher of system, that the entire program of analytic philosophy of mind is founded upon unclear thinking and he comes close to suggesting that thought might be better off without the thousands of professors of philosophy that populate our universities while allowing that it is only a misapplication the principle of democracy that can reasonably permit their tenure. I wonder if you, if you were Steven Weinberg, would even get far enough to see that this is what I am saying and stop reading my work as soon as you begin to suspect what it is that I might be saying – or even earlier with the thought that the unknown writer belongs to the lunatic fringe or is perhaps merely pathetic; and should you read enough to see that there is a simple logic that founds my thought I wonder if you would see that logic for what it is and then tackle it for its truth or otherwise i.e. without pre-judice

Love

Ani