Category Archives: Biography

Exuberance

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Christmas was one of those times it was wonderful to be growing up in Germany.
Everywhere, there was Christmas. I would walk home in the snow, and pausing to look up and see a sky full of stars as the church bells all rang the hour. We would sled down the half mile of the Osterberg. I would walk downtown to the Christmas market at the town square, with all the merchants with brightly colored umbrellas over their stalls and tables, picking my way through the apples and oranges and nuts, through the tables of hand-carved wooden toys, though the beautiful ornaments, and all the while, the air was filled with the smell of gingerbread, and of crepes, but most of all, the smell of candied almonds being made in a big barrel.

One year, our youth sponsors took us on a hike the week before Christmas. It was a long hike, thorough the woods. As the afternoon wore on, it got darker and darker, and we walked closer and closer to each other. We were in a thick pine forest, and beyond our flashlights, there was almost no light—that is why they call it the Black Forest.
It began to snow, coming down quickly in huge white flakes, and coating the ground ahead of us. The line tightened even more, and the littler children walked in the footprints of the larger kids. The snow began coming down even harder, so that one could barely see the dark shadows of the trees before and behind us, and covering our footprints behind us. It was now pitch black, covered over with a flurry cloud of white.

Suddenly, we stumbled into a clearing.

In the middle of the clearing was a pine tree covered from top to bottom with burning candles. The dazzling light turned the dark world we were in into a blinding white sphere. As each heavy snowflake would drift into view, it would suddenly shine. It remains one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and one of the most extravagant. There was also a candle-lit table with hot cocoa and Christmas cookies, and we warmed up and ate and sang songs, all the while staring at the beautiful tree covered with dozens and dozens of burning candles. In the middle of the chaos and darkness of the forest, a wonderful, dazzling bit of light had been planted. It served no purpose, but it defied the cold dreariness of winter, and, by its exuberance, turned it dazzling white.

Courage

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Anybody who knows me knows that I have a tendency to lose things—notes, books, pens, spectacles, kidneys, my left hand, etc. Once I almost lost my brother.

It happened like this:
James & I were out for a long walk in the woods a mile or so from the apartment we lived in. I admit, I was a little unhappy to have my brother tagging along, and was wishing I were with cooler friends, but there it was. We were late getting home (again, anybody who knows me knows that I am almost always late; I have a fairly good sense of time, but choose to ignore it). We were late, and I was worried about getting into trouble, so we took a short-cut.
There was a huge construction site near our house, and by cutting across it (I love a good steeple chase, always have) I felt we could make better time. It was probably to be a new apartment building—20 stories or so, so they had dug a good basement/foundation, and left a pile of dirt. The pile of dirt was about a story and a half tall, and maybe a block wide—in the Midwest, this would qualify as a mountain.  We began to climb,
…and climb,
…and climb.

At the top, there was a huge plateau of dirt, stretching as far as I could see; I couldn’t even see the 16 story building we lived in, just a world of dirt. It had been raining for a few days, so it was muddy, and we sunk in as we walked, but I had the confidence of an 11-year-old who lives life as a disinherited nobleman, so I wasn’t worried.
Maybe a little worried about what my Mom would say, but not terribly worried.

We started across the mud, two small explorers alone in a wasteland.

About half way through, we encountered a big patch of clay, and James began to sink. You sink a little bit in mud, but clay pulls you down like quicksand, and holds you tight.
He sank, and started to yell.
I told him to keep very, very still, otherwise he would sink deeper.
He kept still, but started to cry.
He was chest deep in vicious clay, still sinking, and I had no firm footing to pull him out.
These were some of the most terrifying minutes I have ever spent.

Talking to him, trying to calm him, I worked my way to where he was stuck. He looked at me with his watery pale blue eyes, panicked, but absolutely convinced that I would take care of him. I wish I had been as sure.

I only knew that the thought of losing him was more than I could bear.

Gradually—I am not entirely sure how—I worked him out of that hole he was sinking into. All of him except one shoe, which I couldn’t recover.
We slogged home in silence, and were in big trouble; we were late, we were covered head to toe in mud, and he was missing one shoe.

I have a retarded brother.
I realize that anyone who has a brother has thought that at some time, but my brother has Down Syndrome. It is a genetic disorder—one of those failed meiosis things—meaning he has an extra 21st chromosome. This leads to a variety of developmental delays and physical differences. He can communicate English, German and ASL, and, when he isn’t cranky and mule-headed, has an amazing level of empathy, but he does have cognitive and social limitations. As his younger brother (he loves to remind me he is the older one and the good-looking one; my sister is incredibly smart, that left me as the creative, eccentric one), this was generally difficult.

Let me make perfectly clear that I do not like the word retarded, and I hate hearing it used as a pejorative.

Until I started High School, we had never been in the same school. If any of you remember the High School Cafeteria, you will remember that there are rigid social divisions—who can sit with whom, who the cool or popular kids are, which are the pariahs. You might remember the nerdy or geek tables as being the outcasts—the freaks—but there was always one table that was even lower on the scale: The Special Education Table. In those days, the Special Education kids were kept far way—often in a trailer—but invisible, except in the cafeteria. Each day, I would see him there with his buddies, and each day, I would turn my face, afraid to be shamed by being associated with “them.”

This was terrible.
I was wracked with guilt for weeks.
Each day I resolved I would say Hi, and each day I would chicken out, and them kick myself for my cowardice. “He’s your brother! How can you disown him?!?” However, each time I walked by, I turned away, afraid of what my friends might say. I thought about it constantly,  lay awake at night brooding on it, prayed about it, worked it through, but I felt so awful.

Finally, after a month or so, I worked up the courage, and, as I walked by, in a little timid voice, I said: “Hi, Jimmy.”

He stared at me with those blue eyes.
Terror and shame played across them.
He turned away, and covered his face, hoping his friends hadn’t noticed that this “freshman,” this geeky kid with glasses and braces and a voice that cracked had talked to him.

I laughed.

After that, each day I made it a point to stop, and in as loud a voice as I could to yell: “Hey, Jim-bo!”

That’s what brothers do.

PS: He turns 52 next Saturday. If you want to send him a card, send a message, and I’ll send you his address. He loves to have a fuss made over him (who doesn’t?)

1205signature courage

The Doctor hates endings.

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Europe 2013 321I strongly dislike closed doors.

I tend to leave hallway doors and office doors open, and even closets and cabinets; I simply dislike the idea of a door being closed. I even dislike closed windows, and will open them whenever I can; related to this, I dislike curtains.
Neurotically, I tend to not close bottles & jars.

An open door is a sign of freedom, but, even more, a sign of possibility, of infinite new Tout est Possible Paris (2)paths waiting to be explored. An open door implies new roads and new discoveries. An open door is freedom. Even if you don’t walk through it, an open door means you could walk through it if you chose to. An open door is the closest I am able to come to hope.

I dislike goodbyes, or any kind of ending.

A goodbye is always a loss, because it closes off possibilities and certainties that once were and now are not, and, perhaps, never more will be. I dislike being left behind, but—just as much–I dislike leaving. I am generally late because I can never actually leave a place.

I dislike endings in general.

However, I do recognize that endings are necessary to beginnings.
I wish I philosophical enough to convince my heart that that each ending is a new beginning, but it doesn’t feel that way. Regardless of what my mind may say, to my heart each ending feels like…..

Codetta

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Slow night at the Bistro.
No Customers; everybody must be getting ready for the Rhythm & Roots Festival in Bristol. We’re leaving Peirce to close up, and Wode Toad is taking me to a firing range.
Peirce has Sinatra playing as we leave.

No customers, and I’ve run out of things to say, or I have just tired of talking to myself.
Writing is like engraving love letters on feathers, casting them into the wind and wondering if someone will read them.

Send me questions; at some time I’ll come back around.315signature

This big ol’ goofy world

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My dearest reader, who doesn’t write,

I’ve been thinking lately about worlds underneath the world—Gaiman is wonderful for that, as of course, was Rowling. Clive Barker does that well with the parallel world of Ararat (of course, terrifyingly in his other books),  and I suppose that is part of the framing of many zombie and other un-dead stories—the idea that there is another reality lurking right beneath the one in which we go about our lives. I really enjoy Latin American Magic Realism for the same reason—that there is magic right below the surface.
I wonder why this appeals to us?
Sometimes, this brings us back to the world we had when we were children exploring it for the first time, when it was all new and crystalline.
Sometimes, it just shatters the mundane, dull, inanity of this working day world which we find so numbing.

I don’t know about magic, and I don’t believe I have ever really gone looking for it.
I only know the reality of the world as I live in it, and it is as filled with wonder as a good cookie is filled with chips and nuts.

Let me give you an example:
I can sit at a table in Cootie Browns and watch the solidity of my glass,Cootie Browns (5) the table, the college students playing at wait staff, the Arsenal match on the telly. It is all quite pleasantly normal, and the Middle American wasteland of North Roan Street beyond it is frighteningly normal.

But if, after Cootie Browns, I turn left and go two blocks, suddenly I am in a different world.
Dairy Farm best 1There is a creek slowly winding its way through the grass, cutting banks into the clay and stone, over-shadowed by tall trees. There are birds singing, and dragonflies buzzing in the sun and shadows. In one tree, I can see more bluebirds than I have ever seen at one time—at least a dozen.

There is a well-tended but worn red barn, and in Dairy Farm best 4little knots in the grass, there are muddy white cows going about their lives, calmly unaware of the radical incongruity of being surrounded by a town.

Stranger, however, is the little self-contained world that meets me if I turn right instead of left.
Behind the Honda dealer, and down the hill, in the shadow, there is a darker world, another city.
The first time I stumbled across it, it seemed like a little medieval village tucked away, out of view. There are car dealerships, shops and restaurants all around, but here are several blocks of trailers that form their own city within the city, with its own roads and rules. In the hollow, the street winds down into Spring City.
Spring City Trailer Park (1)The street winds around, and turns off into gravel roads that become dead ends and driveways, little homes gathered together and looking inwards. By the dozens, these trailers are close by each other, and are shaded over by big trees, so that it always seems a little darker in the narrow twists and turns of Spring City. As you would expect, there are run down trailers and run down cars and run down people, but here and there you also see well-tended places, happily and tackily decorated with octopus’s gardens of planters and lawn jockeys. I have a friend who is a probation officer who has had clients here, but I suspect there are also folks here who have their own notion of order, and would handle minor disturbances on their own—not that the police are never called in.
Children play, running or riding old bikes, and people sitting on their stoops watch me as I walk by, inhaling from their cigarettes and letting out the smoke without ever taking their eyes off me. I pass a big truck full of furniture, because every day somebody is moving in or moving out of Spring City.

I have been a lot of places. I can spot elephants in the stones of European cities, but I have also spotted live giraffes as I have driven to Knoxville, and completely new worlds walking through Johnson City, Tennessee.
My dreams often seem dull, because my waking world leaves me marveling.912signature marvel

Ireland

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Europe 2013 055It is hard to believe that only a month ago, we were flying out of Charlotte and into Ireland.
Ireland was beautiful and very, very green. It really is called the Emerald Isle for a good reason.

If you have a low tolerance level for quaintness, I would advise you never to visit.

We flew into Shannon, because we decided that we wanted to force ourselves to see the Irish countryside, and were afraid that otherwise we might get stuck just seeing Dublin—lovely in its own right, but a city.Europe 2013 071
We knew we would be arriving at 6:30 am local time, and that it would feel like 2:30 am to us, so we didn’t have anything specific planned. We managed to find our way to the bus, and climbed up to the second story. Apparently, all Irish (and most Scottish and English) bus drivers are expected to drive like the night bus from Harry Potter—lurching back and forth, taking turns at frightening speeds, etc.—but we were also driving across green rolling hills, past stone cottages & castles, all under a brilliantly stormy sky. We unfolded ourselves at the train station in Limerick, and found the Railway Hotel.
Europe 2013 105The check-in time was 2:00 in the afternoon, and the clerk frowned as we walked in. She suggested we eat breakfast, and I realized she was frowning because she was trying to think of a way to allow us to check into our rooms early. That first breakfast in Limerick was one of the best meals we had—Irish brown bread toast and jam, strong Irish breakfast tea, scones, a full Irish breakfast (rashers? black pudding? white pudding?), porridge—it was so good, I have tried to duplicate the bread.
After a nap into the afternoon, we wandered about Limerick, and found a local farmer’s market that was just shutting down. The very Irish and very sturdy Europe 2013 031looking lady behind the counter at the cheese mongers frowned at us, then gave us samples of several cheeses, discussing where each had come from, and how long each was aged, and we left with supplies for a plowman’s lunch down by the wharf.

Again and again, we encountered Irish natives who were friendly and kind—the bartender at the Bram Stocker hotel warning that the people in Cork “spoke funny and are hard to understand,” cab driver who refused to take us as customers—“Oh, I’d be embarrassed; it’s only t’ree blocks, now. Just cross the bridge and through those tall buildings” (I knew how far it was—6 blocks—and I had a 20 pound pack)—although often, the kindness was about fixing something that had gone wrong.
Things going wrong is apparently common in Ireland, and they all seem to have developed what I think of as “a bemused complacency towards the fecked-up-ness of it all” (“Oh, I can’t sell you a ticket on the bus; you can only get those from a machine, and that one there, it is broken. Marvelous!”)

Another odd observation, though: any given block in Ireland seems to have two pubs, a bookie shop, a homeless person or two and their dogs, and a pro-life billboard. It seems to me that there are vices that might be more important to fight than allowing a woman the right to choose, but, then again, Ireland only reluctantly legalized birth control.

It did surprise me that I had trouble getting used to both the stern face and the b.c.t.f., since those are both things with which I face the world. That and the heavy lidded Irish eyes that are part of my genetic heritage.

I did love Ireland.
Irish HarpistIt was one marvel after another–a beautiful countryside here, a harpist there, music in a pub, the stormy skies at sunset, the voices–Irish is not so much an accent as a cadence, a lilt, a language sung softly. Kind people, great ale, and wonderful food–yes! the French were polite and the British Isles had good food; re-examine your prejudices!

If you are ever in Dublin, drop by the Murphy Brother’s Ice Cream Shop. They are always smiling.

Of course, who wouldn’t, spending the day around ice cream hand-made in Dingle.
(“hand-made in Dingle” that makes me giggle.)ending321

Why I write

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The Writers Museum, EdinburghAn audio version of tonight’s Entrée is available at this link.

My dear Kirsten–

You once suggested that I write a blog explaining why I write a blog; I recall you suggested it as my first blog, but I think I have run out of other questions at the moment, and I want to avoid writing too much about Europe, so I think I will come back to it now.

I cannot remember a time that I did not want to be writing. As a child, I was always imagining, so imagining first games and then increasingly complex stories came naturally to me. For the past 40 years, I have generally fallen asleep to some story or other I am telling myself. When I did write as a teenager, the bad poetry and the stories became shorter and shorter—compressed. By the time I was in college, I was always thinking of short stories, and occasionally showed somebody else one.
Eventually, marriage, work, and academia came to exhaust my time, and I simply stopped writing.

The blog was a last ditch effort to try to start again.

I wish I could be content training horses, as you do, or working a little farm up in the mountains, or even gardening, but for me, these are just chores. I wish I could be happy only working in a bookstore, or a restaurant, or teaching, or baking bread; I love doing all these things, but they are just pleasant occupations. I enjoy spending my time with them, they relax me and refresh me, and I enjoy the company of others they offer, but my mind is drawn again and again to the world of words and ideas.

I love the way words feel as they flow off the tongue, and the way they look flowing writing2across the page. I love the way words fit together, finding their way into a seamless weave in a well-crafted sentence. I love the welcome pain of beauty that clicks into the mind and the heart upon having completed a sentence or paragraph or phrase or story or lecture and just knowing it is right. I love feeling ideas explode when I read, and explode when I write, as if I am discovering new universes within a book or within myself. More than anything else, I love the moment of the gentle bond with some other soul as a phrase or idea connects, and for just one moment we are in the same place, together.

However, as far as writing goes, here is the problem, this has always been my problem as a writer: I can’t just write.
I am a conversationalist. I need someone to write at. I am happiest in conversation.

Not a single person who knows me will find this in the least surprising, but I really am happiest in conversation. I love the banter and give and take, the flow of ideas and stories and wit. I love telling my weird stories, and listening to the fascinating experiences others have to offer. Even in Philosophy, I see the whole enterprise as a long conversation going back to Socrates and even before; I love the banter of Philosophy and the ongoing shared examination of this big ol’ goofy world. I love the stories of the people in it—I love to tell them, and I love to hear them.

I both love and am pained by writing this blog: it gives me a chance to throw a just little bit of that conversation out there, but it is all terribly one-sided. A conversation without another voice is, “alas, like an ale without a wench, or an egg without salt.” It relieves the urge, but is still sadly unfulfilling.

You know I love you, gentle readers, but I do dislike the loneliness of writing.
Would it kill you to write back?
315signature

Wandering

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papa & beth in LondonMy darling “hobohemian” daughter—

You once asked me why I feel less lost wandering, and more at rest when I was moving. Since we are about to embark on a long journey—perhaps even the beginning of several changes, shifts and moves—I decided this would be a good time to try to figure out why.

The first reason, of course, is the search for wonder.
When I was young, I really disliked going to bed; the world was so full of wonder and excitement that I was afraid that I would miss something. Maybe it was just because my parents were (and still are) exciting, brilliant people, maybe it was because they instilled and cultivated a sense of wonder in us, but every moment seemed to be a potentially enthralling adventure. When my brother James’ breathing slowed to a regular rhythm, I would sneak out and sit as close as I could to the living room, listening. You may recall that I am still generally theDSC_0815 last one to bed and the first one up; I still don’t want to miss anything.

I feel that way about the big wonderful world, too. There is just so much there—thousands and thousands of wonders to be observed, to be felt and smelled and tasted, to be experienced, to be made into stories. There are giant mountains and castles and oceans, and tiny flowers growing out of sidewalks and boulders, food in bright curried and wine rich colors, new songs and noises to be heard, and a mysterious, fantastical cast of human beings, each with their own little charms.
I like to think that I am a connoisseur of wonder, but I might just be a hopeless junkie. I am hopelessly addicted to new experiences, and I get shaky and cranky when I have to go without wonder.
It is almost like going without the sight of a smile.

Secondly, it keeps the forces of my lost-ness and entropy at bay.
DSC_0557Entropy, my dear, is not a fierce storm or a wild maelstrom; it is a slow decay into a constant state of stasis and stability. A static homogeneity fills me with dread. Creation, on the other hand, is chaos. Movement is a force against entropy, a refusal to the inevitable decay,  a brilliant—though erratic and dangerous—foray against the dullness of aging and decline; it is a choice to force oneself to live each moment fully. Not all who are lost wander, but we lost wanderers find so much that we can always be guests to each new day.

Finally, there are few things in this world—in fact, you might be the only thing—that I value more than freedom.In general, freedom is at the core of what it means to be human; DSC_0765we have survived and persevered because we are not dependent upon the intuition of instinct, but can choose and adapt ourselves. This ability to transcend where we were born and what we are born with has allowed us to flourish from the icy Yukon to the burning Kalahari.
Freedom allows us to become who we chose to become. We are thrown into this world without a fixed essence, a pre-set purpose, and we create and constantly recreate our selves. We even have the privilege of creating meaning, of finding meaning, in this indifferent but wonderful world.Herder and Sartre aside (yes, those are their ideas), you know that I fear a cage or a prison—even an enclosed space—more than anything else—it is one of the things you and I have in common. To be happy, I must be free; I must have choices. To be trapped, DSC_0029even in a benevolent trap, is to fall into neurotic decay and slowly wither inside. Even through the physical pain—and it was powerful and terrifying—of my lost arm and kidney failures, what I feared most was losing my freedom.
To be on the open road is to fly, unencumbered, and to feel the glorious stretching of muscle and sinew against the weight of inertia and gravity.

DSC_0321

“Allons! the road is before us!” Wonder, creation, and freedom await us. That is why I travel.

Oh, also because the food is great.

Your travel companion and Papa—

 

PS: Speaking of wandering, I will be out of the Bistro for the next 4 weeks. I leave it in Brandon & Peirce’s capable hands. I might post, but I might just be in the moment. I am more likely to post pictures to my tumblr account, since that is what it does best. I certainly will not post recipes, since I will be away from my laboratory, but I will be gathering ideas in Germany, Switzerland, France, Ireland, Scotland, and England.
I will miss you all.620signature.png

How I came to talk to myself

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still life dr bearSome people assume I have always talked to myself.

My wife likes to tell the story of walking into the kitchen one morning early in our marriage and asking:

What are you doing?
Nothing, really.
You were waving your arms.
Oh. I was lecturing.
To who?
Hmm. The toaster, I think.

I remember exactly when I started talking to myself.
I was 12 and sitting all alone at a window seat on a crowded bus.

Earlier that spring, at school, as the result of some extreme creativity not encumbered by the least bit of common sense, I had broken my left arm. The accident splintered the humerus into several fragments and badly damaged the radial nerve serving the top side of my arm. As a result, I lost most of the feeling and muscle control of my left arm beneath the elbow and the top of my left hand. While the ER doctor was trying to set the bone without any pain killers, but with the jagged bone grinding down upon the nerve, I learned the meaning of pain; the next 6 months of physical therapy would teach me even more about pain, but also the meaning of perseverance. The experience remains the third or fourth most painful experience of my life. Because extreme pain pulls you into yourself, it is inherently isolating and lonely; for me, perseverance is also nested in loneliness.
Unlike my previous hospitalizations, which had been for my epilepsy, the broken arm was something tangible, physical and manageable, so there were things I could do; I could own and work at a broken arm. It also helped that I could earn tips smuggling beer, wine, cigars and cigarettes into the injury ward, and that the men I was with looked out for me.
My parents also helped me with this, both by being very supportive and by encouraging me to take ownership of my own healing (also by not dwelling on how serious this was and the possibility I might never regain use of that arm). After I had come home from the hospital, my dad sat me down and explained that my brother could not be left alone in the afternoons, and that I would have to learn to take the bus, by myself, clear across town twice a week for physical therapy.

At Jack with WodeSeveral weeks later, I remember being on the bus on the way home, and feeling terribly lonesome for somebody to share the bus ride with me. I was proud of my independence, and knew I could manage, but the long solitude of the rides and the waiting rooms wore on me. I am not sure that I am exactly an extrovert, but most people who know me will point out that I certainly am talkative, and not having anyone to talk to is difficult for me.
Out of my desperate need for someone to talk to, I suddenly realized that I could have a conversation with myself. It might strike some people as odd that I had never considered this before, but I was the youngest of a talkative family and shared a room with my brother, and so getting solitude had always been more of a concern than getting company.
The dialogue that started then and continued for decades tended to be17 looking between two sides of myself—the more emotional, dreamy part of me and the more rational, logical, controlled part. This is a pretty natural division within me, and also was good for this situation, since the emotional part of me was scared and lonely and the rational side of me was reassuring. As the years went by, it was also handy, since the rational side of me tended to be my conscience and also more cautious and sensible. It is a conversation, an internal dialogue, that has continued now for more than 3 decades.

Yes, there is almost always a dialogue going on in my head, and always at least one song playing. Most of the time, there is also some drama; there is at least one—often several—really strong emotions wrestling it out beneath the visible surface—anger, passion, desire, despair, joy, grief, and a lot of affection. There is usually, some food, too. It is like having a rather bizarre (and poorly lit) Café every hour that I am awake.

So, because I have a really bad case of writers block, I decided to start blogging, and to see if externalizing the dialogue would get me going. When Brandon suggested that the blog be “Robert’s Philosophy Bistro,” the idea was perfect. It still is, and, believe it or not, this is the 20th Entrée.

Thank you for dropping by, feel free to leave a question, can I get you a menu?315signature

Turing, Touring, Turn, Turn, Turn.

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One of the most important ideas of the 20th Century came from a rather odd but terribly brilliant man, the Cambridge Mathematician and Philosopher Alan Turing.WT brownies2

Normally, I would spend a few minutes telling you stories about Turing, but Wode Toad is holding a tray of brownies with peanut butter cream frosting hostage. (Thanks, Jodie—we stand in awe to your magical skills. The lemon bars last month were great, too)

The problem this mathematician was facing was how to design a machine that could answer your mathematical questions. His solution was to rethink the problem. Most of us would have thought of trying to program answers into the machine, so that you had a huge number of answers like “2+2=4.”
The problem is that the amount of information to be programmed in is not just huge, it’s prohibitive.

TuringIn a paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem,” Turing rethought the problem. Imagine a movable machine and a long line of squares laid out on paper strip. We call this imaginary device a Turing Machine. Put the machine at the second square, and teach it that “+2” mean to travel two squares, which put it at the fourth. Put another way, what the machine needs to know is not that “2+2=4,” but that if it is on second and somebody yells “Plus Two!” it needs to hustle two spaces, which puts it on the four.
If, instead of the infinite line of squares, we can allow the machine to have an astronomically high number of binary combinations, we have the basis of modern computing.

The key here is this: don’t think of the machine as knowing an infinite amount of little things; it only needs to know one thing, one very important thing.
It needs to know what to do next.

At roughly the same time and the same place, the philosopher WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein applied a similar idea to how language works. Languages are not logical representational structures; to use a language is to understand that when Wode Toad mutters “Order Up,” my response should be to finish the presentation (he ignores that) and get it to one of our guests.
What I need to know is what to do next.

This week, I have discovered that this fundamental question seems to be vexing a large number of my close friends, and the Bistro’s staff and patrons, and seems to be at the core of my own perplexity. What to do next?

Passage DifficileOur world keeps changing, and all the plans and dreams we thought we have keep shifting. Everybody I know seems to be either at the beginning of adulthood looking for how to start or in the middle looking to start anew. The ground beneath our feet, the markets and workplaces, even the professions themselves seem to be at least shifting, and possibly evaporating. This next week, a brand new crop of graduates will be cast out into the world (geworfenheit, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth).
The challenge is knowing what to do next.

We are all in the uncomfortable position of knowing we must move, Shakespeare & Co stairsbut not knowing to where. We found ourselves thrown, but are still figuring out where to go, perhaps even still spinning and trying to figure out which direction to stand up. If we knew what we wanted, we might be able to figure out how to get there, but we don’t even know that.

At this point in my weekly entrée, I wish I had an answer to neatly tie this up, serve you dessert and coffee, and send you back into the night like the proverbial existentialist sparrow.

I wish I did.

I do not.

At best, I have two observations.

Remember that there is the dream and there is the plan.
The dream is not the plan, but may shape it. Since the plan may or may not fail, you had might as well make the dream big. The dream will tell you what you want, so don’t be a Jeff-says-I-can’t with your dreams. Plans will always be cut down to size by the actual circumstances, reality will force you to improvise, so don’t begin by cutting the dream down to size.
Let it be grand and glorious and very much you.

You don’t need to have figured out everything, just what to do next.

…and if you can’t figure out what’s next, sometimes if you just start you will figure out where you are going before you get there.
It’s how I got to the Philosophy Bistro.

We don’t know how Wode Toad got here; I think he is a fugitive from something, but is quite vague. He also denies having manipulated the Asian currency markets, whatever that means.

Myself, I haven’t figuredRoan Mountain Walk 013 out the next step. I seem to have become boxed in a dead-end, or rather trapped like a wolf in a pit. So, I have decided to take a step back. This summer, I will be backtracking to the city I lived in for a big chunk of the 70s, Tübingen in Germany. Once upon a time, I assumed that I would either live there or in New York or London. Maybe the open road will give me an idea of where I am going before I get there.

One dream I have accomplished though, I managed to become who I 44signatuream, and I have had the good luck to be,  your affectionate friend,