Captain Beefheart - January 1981

When I studied philosophy for two years beginning in 1962 at Mexico City College with the professor Ramón Xirau I received a good ground in helping me able to think. Xirau told us that while the Pre-Socratic philosopher did write on parchment Socrates refused to write anything and only because of his student Plato do we know what his thoughts on the subject of philosophy were all about.

What that means to me is that those early philosophers, even those who wrote, spent a long time thinking. There were no distracting books.

I believe that there is something to be said to being on my bed with my two cats (bed rotting it is called) and staring at the ceiling and avoiding the pile of books that I should read.

Of late I have been thinking how we are able to think because we have language. Without it how did our ancestors think? But this language we have steers us into thought with the complexity of language as it is.

In the 1957 film Desk Set with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Hepburn plays Bunny Watson who works in what was probably the main public library in New York. She and cohorts answer the phone and point out the name of the seven dwarfs in Snow White. Tracy shows up with a computer and tells them that they will not have to answer the phone anymore. Someone then asks the computer on a topic of the English grammar and the computer cannot deal with the complexity and it explodes.

To my advantage I want to point out that I speak Argentine Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Anglo Argentine English, Texan English and finally Canadian English.

Does this give me an advantage in my bed rotting?  

All the above has led me to lately wonder why it is that I keep staring of photographs I took of my Rosemary when we met and first got married and not so much of her in a few years before she died. Here I think of the writings of Jorge Luís Borges who stated that first times are infinitely followed by the same first times over and over until oblivion sets in. Because so many of my friends, relatives and people I worked with our dead, their faces parade in my mind as young persons when I first met them. I see my mother and father as if I were 5 or 6. I see my mentor abuelita in her prime not when she came back from visiting my uncle in Egypt. She looked at me and there was nobody home.

When I stare at a photograph of my Rosemary on the opposite wall from my bed, I can imagine getting ready to press on the shutter button all over again. I can hear the mechanical shutter of the Asahi Pentax S-3 I used.  I can see myself putting the roll of Tri-X into a Nikkor tank and mixing the Kodak HC-100 developer.

I cannot go on and I will not do so without quoting Captain Beefheart’s lyric from his 1972 song Ashtray Heart:

Somebody’s had too much to think