From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Wed Oct 12 2005 - 14:23:37 BST
> Ant McWatt comments:
>
> Platt, sometimes I do get worried about you. It sounds like you didn’t
> enjoy the Sixties quite as much as you could have done. Did Jimi Hendrix
> refuse to sign your Pat Boone songbook or something?
Not to worry. Unlike you I guess, blowing my mind was not something I
"enjoyed." Pirsig writing about the 60s" "Drugs that destroyed one's ability to
reason was almost a sacrament." (Lila 24) I never considered destroying
reason to be "groovy."
> BTW, for Ian’s benefit, the proper rendition of the first line of “I Am the
> Walrus” is “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”
> and was inspired by the other master of English surrealism, Lewis Carroll
> and his nonsense poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. In a 1980 interview
> John Lennon remarked that he should have titled his 1967 psychedelic sound
> portrait “I Am the Carpenter” as the Carpenter is the good guy in the poem
> and the Walrus is the George Bush one. Ever the artist, Lennon did note
> anyway that “I Am the Carpenter” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “I
> Am the Walrus”!
Yes, sitting around a circle holding hands in a haze of hashish and
singing "I am a walrus" is surreal all right. I prefer real myself, as in
Pirsig's description of the 60's flower children: "Anarchy become the
most popular politics and squalor and poverty and chaos the most popular
lifestyles." (Lila, 24).
> Finally, (as Matt Kundert, Brent Vizeau and Rebecca Temmer will no doubt be
> aware), Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it Like to be a Bat?” is a 1970s
> philosophy classic often given to philosophy undergraduates to discuss
> consciousness and the mind-body problem in a relatively different, Dynamic
> way. So if Platt does indeed occasionally think himself as a walrus (or,
> even a Fox’s parrot?) rather than a human being then he will be in good
> company and – Zeus forbid - might even learn something.
Nagel is one of my favorites, believing as I do that consciousness cannot
be reduced to brain activity. I'm with Sheldrake in considering
consciousness a field that the brain taps into, i.e., pre-intellectual
Quality embodying the Principle of Rightness.
Platt
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