I’ve been too busy trying not to lose my job as a high school teacher this semester to rate my philosophy graduate program in good or bad terms. But I did meet some of the funniest, most interesting people in there. You see, most of my effort this fall involved fighting to stay awake during the evenings, which was also the time when lectures took place. While my friend Bart helped by photocopying his Hegel outlines for me whenever I did space out, my friend Olas kept me awake during class with his loud munching noises from his peanut snacks and during the subway ride back to Queens, joining me in engaged debates over the innate qualities in a red square. Olas is the only person I know from the program who is from Colorado and, for only this reason, enjoys camping out and being around “nature” (whatever that is). He tends to blame his lack of people skills on his job, given that he takes care of mentally challenged adults for a living. A lot of the people I met in graduate school tend to blame their lack of people skills on their jobs, or on the fact that they spend too much time reading Philosophy. But I don’t know what comes first and I am no one to make comments about that, at this stage.
*
“At this stage” seems to be a predominant theme in my life lately: “I cannot afford to make any more bad decisions at this stage.” “I think that, at this stage, I should know better than to go ahead with this plan, or than to go out with this person etc.” “At this stage I should just be happy to have my sanity.” Saying things and later adding at this stage makes me feel wise, but it also reminds me of how old I am getting.
*
Back to Olas, although discussing our papers and our jobs led to a friendship, what really made us bond was the fact that we both have a dad who is currently unemployed. It is the last fact that makes us similarly edgy and watchful people, always looking for the funny side in everything and always willing to share stories, as a form of self prescribed therapy lasting as long as our rides in the seven train do. At times I have wondered why most of my best friendships have started out with a common denominator personal misery, but that’s just how it seems to work for me. Such is the case that when I realized my friend Jasmine also has a currently unemployed dad; I began to feel a sense of community that allowed me to realize that unemployed Dads are not that different from one another. Now then, I have some good news for you sons and daughters of unemployed dads. After the initial period of re-adjustment, and once dads accept that they will be home alone for long periods during the day, they also come up with a daily routine that is as predictable as it is humorous.
*
Lately, when I think of comedy, the people who make me laugh my head off are the Marx Brothers. I don’t find Woody Allen funny anymore, although I did follow him down Lexington Avenue last month, when chance made us cross paths one morning. I was already late to work and he was wearing a green hat, those huge glasses, and was carrying a coffee mug. He noticed I recognized him as he walked past me, and accelerated his walk to avoid me. But this is not the reason why Woody Allen stopped being funny to me. Something happened and suddenly his repetitive philosophical insights about death and suicide, his portrayal of failed relationships all felt too unrealistic compared to my own experiences. And at this stage there is nothing worse to me than superficial comedy. But the Marx Brothers still do make me laugh because there is something tragic about them. These men are too sweet to survive in this world, and are in danger all the time because of this, and they could be so easily disappointed.
*
Speaking of disappointments, my sister asked me today, why was it that I did not read as many (or any) Philosophy books anymore. During the holiday break she has witnessed my new hobbies which center on watching low budget action movies and Hollywood romantic comedies through Netflix in my computer. And she’s starting to get worried whenever she suggests polish films, or argentine philosophers, and I answer with things such as: “I don’t want to be exposed to anything that will make me think or feel any sort of empathy for anyone or anything anymore. I can’t handle that now.”
Another example, I woke up this morning as the snow blizzard covered NYC, and instead of staying home reading, I decided I wanted to go into Manhattan to take a Ballet class. To my credit, I am rehearsing, and I am also preparing to audition as a bear for the Radio City performances. So I convinced my sister to join me and we walked into the blizzard and headed to Ballet. After class she suggested I just change my MA to Dance, and added:
“If you devoted all the hours you spend taking Ballet classes and watching bad Hollywood movies to reading and writing Philosophy, you would probably be Foucault by now.”
But that’s not how things really work, is it? And I did not explain to her that sometimes, what we spend so much time avoiding, is what actually really matters to us.
*
Before I end this monologue, I would like to tell you that these are the major characteristics of unemployed dads, and that if you are a friend, relative, or child of an unemployed dad, you should know that you are not alone. There are many of us who are adjusting to Dad’s new lifestyle in the recession, and many of us, including our dads, who have learned how to see the humorous side of these circumstances.
1) Unemployed Dads make friends with the Customer Service people: Now that there is less income coming in, unemployed dads make sure they call every customer service number in the afternoon to complain about any extra charges in their cell phone, gas, water, or cable bills. They do not mind being put on hold: they can wait. Secretly, unemployed dads are looking for new opportunities to be social. They give themselves away by asking the customer service guy what he thinks about the weather, for example.
2) Unemployed Dads have projects: It can begin with the idea for a t-shirt company, or an online investment project. Sometimes it involves creative projects such as writing a novel. It recently occurred to me that, maybe our dads should start a band together.
3) Unemployed Dads spend a substantial portion of their day training the house pet: I got a kitten this summer and due to my job and graduate school schedule I was not in the house during the day. The cat spent most of its formative months with my Dad, who feeds him, chases him around the house, and talks to him. Jasmine’s Dad also talks to the cat, and to the houseplants. Olas once got back home to find his Dad “training the house pet” which meant that his father was rolling around the rug with the dog.
4) Unemployed Dads are constantly trying to “re-invent” themselves, and they constantly use this word: Olas’ Dad got really serious about his T-Shirt Company for a while. My Dad figured he might have a chance working at a law firm, so he stopped by the local college in Queens to find out if he could transfer some credits from UCLA (which he attended in the seventies) to get his degree in constitutional law. Yes, you heard it, constitutional law: the degree that usually takes students ten years to complete. Now that’s a feasible career. Jasmine’s dad was a scientist, but is now thinking about photography as a new career path.
5) Unemployed Dad’s discover that there is no line at Costco or Target at 11:30 am: And they don’t mind waiting in line. It secretly gives them another opportunity to be social, and ask the cashier what she thinks about the weather today.
6) Unemployed Dads check out four hundred page medieval history novels they find at the public library and wonder why nobody else has bothered to discover such great literature: My Dad also checks out four hour Polish films with lots of religious symbolism and titles such as “The Deluge.” He later wonders why nobody else in the house but him has discovered such great cinema.
Before I get out of here, I am including some online sources for those of you who have an unemployed Dad:
Aaron Crowe’s “Tales of an Unemployed Dad” Blog: http://www.aaroncrowe.net/category/unemp/
NY Times articles on unemployed Dads.
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/unemployed-dads-at-home/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/fashion/23dads.html
Unemployed Dad comic:
http://en.wordpress.com/tag/unemployed-dad/
Hi Ho.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Something I am writing for my Phenomenology Class
While in "Eye and Mind" the central claim is that vision is more than thought, in "Phenomenology of Perception" Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is more than the sensible.
The case of the missing limb provides us with a good example to reconnect, or revisit the affective dimension of the self through the notion of embodied memory. The case goes like this: A soldier is injured in battle and his arm is torn and shattered by splinters. His arm is amputated but he still feels it as if it were a part of his body. Merleau-Ponty writes that “a man wounded in battle can still feel in his phantom arm the shell splinters that lacerated his real one.” (p. 88) He feels the arm resting on top of his chest when he lies in bed; he sees doorknobs and feels how his now absent arm leans forward to open the door. And the world as he knows it still responds to his body as if his arm were still there. Eventually, when the world is reconstituted so that it corresponds to his new way of occupying space, the phantom limb disappears. The phantom limb case is just another example of how the self continuously escapes through the cracks of the strict categories of presence and absence of the objective world.
The case cannot strictly be explained by alluding to psychology, and yet a physiological explanation would also be insufficient. Later, in "Eye and Mind" Merleau-Ponty refers to our own image in the mirror and explains how a strict Cartesian model of thought, would only conceive of this image as “a dummy,” an effect of the mechanic of things, or a specter that is not precisely coming from inside our minds but from an outside. The phantom limb that is still felt in the body long after the arm is gone would also be, under this traditional model of thought, unexplainable- a ghost.
“How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we could exorcise these specters, make illusions, or object-less perceptions out of them, and keep them on the edge of the world that does not equivocate!” (Eye and Min p. 169)
But of course we can’t, because in some way, these specters have affected us, still affect us. Here I think, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can allow us to move away from the largely cognitive dimension of experience through which we think of art and move towards an affective experience of art. Merleau-Ponty remarks that we cannot explain this case, these ghosts, if not by alluding to a state of memory and emotion that call up this phantom limb.
“if we put back emotion into being-in-the-world, we can understand how it can be the origin of the phantom limb. To feel emotion is to be involved in a situation which one is not managing to face, and from which, nerveless, one does not want to escape.” (p. 99)
This medical case about loss might also allow us to understand the process of grief and its relationship to the embodied self. For example, we do not understand the absence or the death of a friend until the times comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realize that we shall never again receive one. In this case, pretending that the friend is still around and denying the loss, or feeling his presence long after the loss, are both modes of representing the world that go beyond the presence/absence categories. Merleau-Ponty explains how in such a case, at first we avoid asking in order not to notice this silence, we turn away from areas in life were we might meet this nothingness, “but this very fact highlights, necessitates that we intuit them.” (p. 93). So the subject, caught up in the dilemma of having lost a part of himself “breaks in pieces the objective world which stands in his way and seeks symbolical satisfaction in magic acts.” (p. 99)
After the sudden death of her husband, Joan Didion wrote a famous memoir titled "The Year of Magical Thinking" were she presents us with an account of her grief. I think this short passage provides us with an example of how grief is an affective process that breaks apart the categories of presence and absence. But also, how writing as an expressive form is always more than thought because one writes about perception.
“Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news (…) yet I was myself in no way to prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone (…) I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.” (p. 33).
These “magic acts” that Merleau-Ponty alludes to in the case of the phantom limb become rituals of habit when a part of our world is gone, and thus, a part of ourselves appears to be caught in between the categories of presence and absence until we manage to restructure our world. When the patient who lost his limb restructures his/her world in such a manner that the things in the world do not beckon to the lost limb, then the experience of it vanishes. But until then, the consciousness of the phantom limb remains itself unclear. The man with one arm feels the missing limb, same way as I feel keenly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not before my eyes. The patient has not lost his arm because he continues to allow for it. So the phantom limb is, not a representation of the limb, but rather the ambivalent presence of the limb. Merleau-Ponty concludes from this case that “the psycho-physical event can no longer be conceived after the model of Cartesian physiology” that considers though and extension as separate modes because “the union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought together by arbitrary decree.” (p. 102). Instead, what the phantom limb case shows us is that the body is more than the mere sensible, more than a mode of extension and cannot be reduced to it. Merleau-Ponty concludes by stating that “the awareness of the amputated arm as present is not of the kind “I think…” Only once the memory stops affecting my daily experience can I restructure my world.
Without attempting to solve the ambiguity, the affective dimension of experience that still haunts the patient with the splinters in his long gone arm, can allow us to re-think how we categorize presence and absence. It may also allow us to think about the body in broader terms that connect to art, but also to an ethics of the other. So far as memory and emotion can call up the phantom limb, this is not comparable to the action of a thought necessitating another thought. But rather an existential attitude motivates another and “memory, emotion, and phantom limb are equivalents in the context of being in the world.” (p. 99).
The case of the missing limb provides us with a good example to reconnect, or revisit the affective dimension of the self through the notion of embodied memory. The case goes like this: A soldier is injured in battle and his arm is torn and shattered by splinters. His arm is amputated but he still feels it as if it were a part of his body. Merleau-Ponty writes that “a man wounded in battle can still feel in his phantom arm the shell splinters that lacerated his real one.” (p. 88) He feels the arm resting on top of his chest when he lies in bed; he sees doorknobs and feels how his now absent arm leans forward to open the door. And the world as he knows it still responds to his body as if his arm were still there. Eventually, when the world is reconstituted so that it corresponds to his new way of occupying space, the phantom limb disappears. The phantom limb case is just another example of how the self continuously escapes through the cracks of the strict categories of presence and absence of the objective world.
The case cannot strictly be explained by alluding to psychology, and yet a physiological explanation would also be insufficient. Later, in "Eye and Mind" Merleau-Ponty refers to our own image in the mirror and explains how a strict Cartesian model of thought, would only conceive of this image as “a dummy,” an effect of the mechanic of things, or a specter that is not precisely coming from inside our minds but from an outside. The phantom limb that is still felt in the body long after the arm is gone would also be, under this traditional model of thought, unexplainable- a ghost.
“How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we could exorcise these specters, make illusions, or object-less perceptions out of them, and keep them on the edge of the world that does not equivocate!” (Eye and Min p. 169)
But of course we can’t, because in some way, these specters have affected us, still affect us. Here I think, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can allow us to move away from the largely cognitive dimension of experience through which we think of art and move towards an affective experience of art. Merleau-Ponty remarks that we cannot explain this case, these ghosts, if not by alluding to a state of memory and emotion that call up this phantom limb.
“if we put back emotion into being-in-the-world, we can understand how it can be the origin of the phantom limb. To feel emotion is to be involved in a situation which one is not managing to face, and from which, nerveless, one does not want to escape.” (p. 99)
This medical case about loss might also allow us to understand the process of grief and its relationship to the embodied self. For example, we do not understand the absence or the death of a friend until the times comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realize that we shall never again receive one. In this case, pretending that the friend is still around and denying the loss, or feeling his presence long after the loss, are both modes of representing the world that go beyond the presence/absence categories. Merleau-Ponty explains how in such a case, at first we avoid asking in order not to notice this silence, we turn away from areas in life were we might meet this nothingness, “but this very fact highlights, necessitates that we intuit them.” (p. 93). So the subject, caught up in the dilemma of having lost a part of himself “breaks in pieces the objective world which stands in his way and seeks symbolical satisfaction in magic acts.” (p. 99)
After the sudden death of her husband, Joan Didion wrote a famous memoir titled "The Year of Magical Thinking" were she presents us with an account of her grief. I think this short passage provides us with an example of how grief is an affective process that breaks apart the categories of presence and absence. But also, how writing as an expressive form is always more than thought because one writes about perception.
“Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news (…) yet I was myself in no way to prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone (…) I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.” (p. 33).
These “magic acts” that Merleau-Ponty alludes to in the case of the phantom limb become rituals of habit when a part of our world is gone, and thus, a part of ourselves appears to be caught in between the categories of presence and absence until we manage to restructure our world. When the patient who lost his limb restructures his/her world in such a manner that the things in the world do not beckon to the lost limb, then the experience of it vanishes. But until then, the consciousness of the phantom limb remains itself unclear. The man with one arm feels the missing limb, same way as I feel keenly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not before my eyes. The patient has not lost his arm because he continues to allow for it. So the phantom limb is, not a representation of the limb, but rather the ambivalent presence of the limb. Merleau-Ponty concludes from this case that “the psycho-physical event can no longer be conceived after the model of Cartesian physiology” that considers though and extension as separate modes because “the union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought together by arbitrary decree.” (p. 102). Instead, what the phantom limb case shows us is that the body is more than the mere sensible, more than a mode of extension and cannot be reduced to it. Merleau-Ponty concludes by stating that “the awareness of the amputated arm as present is not of the kind “I think…” Only once the memory stops affecting my daily experience can I restructure my world.
Without attempting to solve the ambiguity, the affective dimension of experience that still haunts the patient with the splinters in his long gone arm, can allow us to re-think how we categorize presence and absence. It may also allow us to think about the body in broader terms that connect to art, but also to an ethics of the other. So far as memory and emotion can call up the phantom limb, this is not comparable to the action of a thought necessitating another thought. But rather an existential attitude motivates another and “memory, emotion, and phantom limb are equivalents in the context of being in the world.” (p. 99).
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