GRADUS

My appeal to God was like a samurai asking for anesthesia while committing hara-kiri

The steps in my philosophical journey to "redemption" can be described misleadingly as: meaning of life, epistemology, dualism, mind, and specific self. The most misleading of all is the first one, which usually elicits a deep sarcastic vein in Manhattanites, like the ironical contortions they go into at the mention of "don't worry". This is not a piffling threat to a serious thinker like me as these people are reputed by some to be the cream of creation and to go about all day using the magical incantations fuggedabaddit and waddayanutz. It is an opinion I certainly do not share--it makes me gag--but which in my profession I must at least make a semblance of respecting. This incidentally makes me gag twice. Such is life!

      As there is some bite in the hilarity that the concept of the meaning of life evokes, let me explain that from the start I was quite unambiguous in defining any such thing as the least possible pain. This could be generously interpreted as the relief from a headache that an aspirin provides, unless you suffer from ulcers, in which case the brief experience of meaning quickly founders into the absolute meaninglessness of very painful stomach cramps. But I must contextualize.

      In the previous chapter, I mentioned how in consequence of many errors, particularly the beatings I took speculating in futures, I had turned to God. It might then have seemed as if my financial losses had converted me from a nearly life-long atheist into a mystic. This left me somewhat nonplussed on a question of orthography which dear reader might find inconsequential. Even expressing the dilemma is itself a dilemma--which is in the way of a bonus as it provides a taste of the difficulties involved in philosophizing without just seeming to be using words grammatically--for how do you coherently ask: should the word god be capitalized? If I capitalize it, I am answering the question, thus denying that it is a question. But if I don't capitalize it, I am saying "god" is just a word and since common nouns in English are not capitalized again the question is a non-question. I could write: Should the word god be capitalized, which I do not now capitalize on the understanding that I will once I have explored the issue sufficiently? But if I later find that God exists, I cannot go back and recapitalize "god" in my original question, and this implies that God exists now but did not exist then, a patently extravagant claim.

      There are precedents that could be of use in solving the capitalization issue. I remember that in Costaguana and in The Republic the word state when referring to government was ALWAYS capitalized or you could, in certain situations, face the equivalent of a firing squad. But I also remember that government in those places was not exactly exemplary and I saw no reason to accord it anything but the barest respect in matters that did not involve my own moral conscience, which told me when I had to act sociably without needing the Costaguanan state to do so. From this experience I can conclude, one, that in Costaguana "god" surely belongs in the same privileged category as "state", and so the word should be capitalized; but, two, that since the Costaguanan government does not merit any respect whatsoever, "god" need not be capitalized. However, the force of these arguments is vitiated by the fact that, thank God, I am not in Costaguana. Another argument is that many people believe in god (with a capital g) and in respect for their sensibilities I should write God and not god, but this would mean I am showing respect not for God but for "many people" and I am not sure that some of them--even one would do for this purpose--are not as contemptible as the Costaguanan state, so why should I capitalize god to please some moral worm I don't even know?

      I will not continue with these casuistries, which could go on endlessly, and I will state very summarily why it is I will capitalize the word "god" whenever it comes up in the remainder of this text. Even though for a time I was a God-nut who eventually became disappointed at not being rewarded for his devotion, I have concluded that I am a "practical atheist" (the explanation for this will surface in due time), but that, since I am not about to believe I am responsible for whatever happens to me, if it turns out to be good I will not hesitate to thank God whether I am wasting my breath or not. I realize this is the barest of threads, but at least it is something and it could hang indefinitely as long as I do not attempt a trapeze act.

      The long and the short of it is that I became a believer out of despair. Here again I face a dilemma of expression, for it would be more accurate to say that I turned to God in despair at the financial losses I was having and since I claimed before that my losses could very well have been self-inflicted, I would then have to conclude I turned to God in order to have Him eliminate the pain stemming from the losses I was deliberately inflicting on myself. My appeal to God was as if a samurai had asked for anesthesia in the process of committing harakiri. And this, however arcane or incoherent, had to be the only possible meaning life had for me at the period in question. Now, you can live with these ideas for a time, interesting perhaps but not unlimited, for eventually they tend to unravel. Believing in God was definitely not what you might call a self-evident proposition and it mostly consisted in praying.

Maybe God would take me into his bosom and throw me down to Earth again and have the parachute open miraculously ten feet from ground zero

I wrote my own prayers, which tended to be longish and complex. I started by asking, say, to be a millionaire again. It wasn't really this crude. I knew I had a lot of competition in the asking department, so I had to figure out a way I could get to ask for the same things as every one else but to seem not to be asking for the same things as every one else. In other words, if you think that for me believing in God was easy, think again, although I would not put my own experiences on a par with those of old Kierkegaard--the Dane the Dumbos at Kings mistook for Swedenborg--who in turn modelled his own faith on Abraham's. Kierkegaard made a big row--he called it "fear and trembling"--about the remoteness and the terribleness of God. Can you imagine, was the question he dramatically put to his readers, how badly Abraham must have felt when God asked him to sacrifice Isaac, the heir he had been waiting for about one hundred years? Can you conceive, thundered Kierkegaard, the magnitude of a faith that can lead a man to take his only male child to the top of a mountain, prepare a pyre, unsheath a knife, and be ready to slit the innocent, unsuspecting boy's throat? Well, yes and no.

      If I had been a witness to Abraham's shenanigans I would have considered him mad and done my level best to have him incarcerated, albeit later favouring an insanity plea on his part. If I had been in Abraham's sandals, on the other hand, I could not say for sure what I would have done. If I was certain I was hearing a voice telling me to kill my own son--an insistent, loud-and-clear, coherent voice, which also answered questions I put to it, though maybe not necessarily in the usual Hollywood cavernous bass--I would, I think, have had two reactions. In one, I would have danced a jig. I mean, compared to my own darkness, Abraham was basking in a light that did not burn but illumined everything. He could have a perfect suntan without lotion, he had Technicolor see-through vision, he needn't trouble himself about unanswered questions any longer because he knew for sure that someone had all the answers, and that someone was actually talking to him!

      There was of course Isaac to consider, which would have involved my other reaction. OK, I know God is talking to me, and I feel duly humbled and grateful and obviously overawed, but He is asking me to do something which even the lowest of the low among the most brutal of all Mafiosi ever would hesitate doing! The interpretative possibilities at that stage multiply exponentially. Did God truly mean it? Could I try to ignore Him? Could I maybe play dumb? Act as if my name wasn't really Abraham? For starters, was it God talking? If God could speak to me, theoretically so could the Devil. But would God let the Devil get away with a dirty trick like that? And if it was really and truly God speaking and I did slit my own child's throat, would God then go and leave me in the lurch God knew for how long? Or would He reward me as no mortal has ever been rewarded? But if God was capable of such a demand, what kind of reward would He have in store for me? Making my life miserable until my very last day, which would be of unbounded joy? Or letting me die of a heart attack instead of from a slow and painful and incurable cancer? He could take me into His bosom and throw me down to Earth again and have the parachute open miraculously at the last ten feet or so. And finally there was the terrifying possibility that I, Abraham, could be mad. But would Abraham have known that he was mad if he was indeed mad? That question usually got me back to my own concerns.

      I had to find out whether I was mad and I had to proceed from the premise that I was not mad however paradoxical this may sound. Especially, which would have solved everything, I had to know about neurosis and my exact relation to it. If, for instance, I knew exactly in what way and why I was a neurotic, I could safely disregard the possibility of insanity. And if I was capable of specifying neurosis, I certainly couldn't have been charged with idiocy. As to Kierkegaard and Abraham, well, I was willing to admit they had a lot of meanings to impart, but they weren't imparting any to me.

      At first maybe I did try to make myself believe that God had a personal interest in me. After all, I had survived some hairy episodes. My chances of getting it in Pottyville during my fateful second escapade at The Mount had certainly been much greater than if I had been in a war situation. I had also had close brushes during my flying days. I wasn't devoid of insights on politics, art, or life in general. I had grounds for trying to convince myself that I could be a tool for God's purpose. This sounded unassuming, but obviously being God's instrument had to involve some privileges. In any way, manner or form I conceived or tried to conceive a special personal relationship (SPR) to God, the result was that I should be having a better time than I was, and this took care once and for all of humility.

      I wasn't about to give up though. As I saw it, it was either back to the void of despairing non-belief or clinging to some kind of hope however improbable. Since the expression of faith was prayer, I had to devise prayers which would dissimulate without discarding my pretensions to an SPR and the perks that came with it, which realistically placed me in a situation in which all I was doing was talking to myself.

As every time I thought of a vagina I had the intense desire to penetrate it (except my mother's, which badly tainted my thought of other vaginas), then my seemingly venial sins were quite mortal

One particularly intractable problem was predestination. In going back over my life, I remembered times when I had considered the issue of freedom versus determinism. Mostly what I rescued from these "incursions" into my past were some shreds of inconclusive thoughts. My Catholic upbringing had been loaded towards the idea that it was possible to make choices in life and that you were responsible for your actions. It was the rationale for the confessional. There were the commandments. You could either obey them or break them. It was up to you, but if you broke them you were sinning and you had to carry around your sins, which was like having a lot of undigested food in your stomach. In order to get rid of your sins, you went to a priest and confessed and you were given penance and that was supposed to be like digestive enzymes. This was the theory. This is the way it really worked.

      The priests told me on very high authority that having impure thoughts was a sin. Therefore, as soon as the thought of Carmen's hairy vagina came to my mind, I would be in sin if I did not put it out of my mind. But it was already there so technically I had already sinned and had to go to the confessional and tell the priest about the sin itself (not the vagina which would have been disrespectful), upon which he would impose each time--if it wasn't Carmen's vagina, it was Solange's, or any woman's who caught my fancy in the street; temptations were rife--approximately the same penance of so many prayers, usually Hail Marys. I would then proceed to recite them kneeling in the church, hoping intently that on my way home I would not cross a woman who was not a nun. If I had thought of a nun's vagina, I would have required therapeutic preventative castration rather than absolution. At home there was the chance I could catch a glance of my own mother's vagina and although this would have inspired the usual revulsion it probably would have stuck in my mind, which was in itself as dirty and low as you can get. Basically, then, my only moral choice on confession nights was going to bed, but not going for the dirty Blondie cartoons I had hidden under my mattress and this compensated for nevertheless thinking of her legs wide open to Dagwood's oversized log.

      Admittedly, these are penny-ante sins. I had been taught the distinction between venial and mortal sins. Presumably, my sexual peccadilloes were venial sins. Mortal sins were in another dimension altogether. They consisted in going beyond vagina-thoughts to actual vaginal penetration, but as I had also been taught that intentions were almost as bad as deeds and as every time I thought of a vagina I had the intense desire to penetrate it (except my mother's, which badly tainted my thought of other vaginas), then my seemingly venial sins were quite mortal. As it was also doctrinal that you went straight to hell if you died in a state of mortal sin, it followed as ejaculation follows upon penile manipulation that I would be in Satan's clutches if I had cashed in as I caught a glimpse of Solange and that to make sure I would go to the longed-for celestial abode I had to spend the rest of my life looking at nuns in their black, chalk-stained bouffant robes and their starched white coifs, which was monotonous enough to be considered a heavy-duty purgatory. The upshot was that the doors of heaven would never open for me, even though a detached perspective on my way of life up to the time of my seduction at the Taxiarch's house would have seemed to prove a prima facie case for angelhood.

      All in all, I could safely claim that I was as untainted by great sins as I was by small ones to the extent that there appeared to be no small sins. This was not conducive to a robust belief in sin itself, but, and therein lay the rub, I could not do away with my feelings of guilt. I was, you might say, guilty of nothing yet I definitely felt guilty, so I had to be guilty of everything, but as I was not guilty of anything I had to be guilty by the mere act of existing. This sounded a lot like despair, which was like spitting in God’s face (itself multiply blasphemous) unless I considered that despair was a blessing from God, which suggested the idea of the man without a larynx being accepted into the Celestial Chorus.

Despite Beethoven's controvertible hero credentials, I personally would go into ecstasies of heroic self-determination whenever I heard the famous four chords "dum dum dum dummmmmmmmmm", give or take a few m's

At this point, I am tempted to say that, bottom line, ethics and religion had no meaning whatever for me, but the reality is somewhat more complex. The difficulties I was having with moral issues were compounded by the feelings I occasionally had of being a closet sociopath. I had observed that in sexual matters as in certain other areas of life, like politics, I did not have the same reactions as "ordinary folk". There were no perversions that could astound me. It is true my obssession with death had been transmuted into a phobia, which was closer to the norm, but this did not make me feel morally superior to what are "normally" considered the dregs of humanity. For me, at the indefinite "then" I am talking about, "normal" was a dirty word, as repugnant as if people had started calling me "good old Charlie". But this comported an apparent inversion of ethical values rather than the complete absence of ethics.

      I have described my abjuration of religion as a consequence of a misunderstanding in the confessional involving the theft of a carton of Lucky Strikes. The priest who conditioned absolution on my making monetary restitution cannot have intended that I expose myself publicly as a thief. If I chose to interpret him in that fashion, it can only have been because I had previously lost interest in religion. I was carrying a chip on my shoulder and I chose the incident in which to have it knocked off. If it hadn't been in the confessional, it would have been on the way to it or coming out of it. In brief, I became an atheist because I wanted to be one. It was as if I had taken a pistol, cocked it, aimed it, fired it, and then blamed the victim for getting in the way. But if I took the trouble of consciously turning my back on religion and justifying my act instead of just lapsing from laziness or indifference as most people did, then it had to be because religion, even in its denial, was significant to me.

      Giving up religion does not entail that one is amoral. However, priests had instilled in me the belief that religion and morality went hand in glove. This was presumptuous, but it was part of their job and it wasn't half as pernicious as Buzakri's assurance that he could predict the way markets moved. It was understandable, therefore, that renouncing religion, which I did without making a public show of it, should have seemed in my mind tantamount to becoming a moral pariah. No religion, no morals; no morals, a sociopath. This was a misperception.

      Just because I wasn't out to prove I could be a sadistic killer, hence that I was good by choice, did not mean my behaviour did not follow moral guidelines. Why it was moral in every possible sense of the word will also be explained in due course. But during the time before I gained that understanding, all I did seemed to be bathed in amorality. This was not necessarily bad, mind you. The way I saw it moral was immoral and immoral was necessary to goodness, although goodness was not the exact word I had in mind. To my way of thinking being "good" was being insensitive and to be truly good you had to be immoral. A conventionally moral person was not just unkind but also smug. To make the world a better place you had to execute a lot of "good" people. That was one important pillar of my politics. If you get the feeling that I was wandering about in a dark forest, you may be right, in which case, even though you may not know it, we are now inside Paradise after having gone through Hell and Purgatory. All I ask is for Dear Reader to be patient while all these seemingly wayward ideas find their assigned places.

      For the moment, what I am trying to get at is that these thoughts about morality and amorality implied that things in this domain were not exactly the way the priests had described them. Many events took place in my mind of which I was not aware. People tend to react incredulously to a statement such as this one, as if they were also inside their gut when food is being turned into drumsticks of turd. In a similar vein, I might not have liked some of those mental events if I had "extruded" them the way Dummett said Frege claimed he could do with his thoughts, which can be described as a very unlikely analogy to defecation. In other words, I had to put my shit together and understandably I kept putting that off to an indefinite future. The odds-on bet was that my behaviour was determined, but I did not want to dissipate the illusion that I was choosing all the time, to sustain which I clutched at all sorts of straws.

      There was Beethoven, who still is often proclaimed to be the prototype of heroism, apparently because he went deaf. Heroes, as every one knows, are free. Heroism is never ever determined, although deafness is. So, Beethoven was the ultimate hero because of an affliction over which he had no control whatever, having to admit nonetheless that if he had suffered however stoically from chronic diarrhea his stature would not have been thereby enhanced. Despite Beethoven's controvertible hero credentials, I personally would go into ecstasies of heroic self-determination whenever I heard the famous four chords "dum dum dum dummmmmmmmmm", give or take a few m's.

      Nietzsche was also a hero type, but he had two strikes against him: one, that he discriminated between heroes and non-heroes (which implied a dim mysterious zone between freedom and determinism), and two, that he was a paranoid-schizophrenic, a potentially heroic problem (especially if you believe you are Caesar or Napoleon) but one you didn't want to be caught up in. Although not any of Nietzsche's fault, his great musical disciple, Richard Strauss, who even wrote a Tondichtung titled A Hero's Life, had the disadvantage that he became a Nazi, the sort of heroism which in our time appeals mainly to dead-from-the-neck-up skinheads. Definitely not my sort.

      The ultimate ploy in my search for freedom of will was Sartre's concept of nihilation, whereby, plus or minus a few obscurities, every action is preceded by the destruction of all that went before it. Sartre at least understood perfectly, which is more than you can say for analytical philosophers, who consider him no better than a voodoo priest, that if there is a "before" to every action, then no action can be free. However, his solution is quite as unwieldy as the problem. How does nihilation take place? For how long is the individual nihilated? Does nihilation turn you however briefly into a zombie? If nihililation operates worldwide, is it possible that at any one moment in time the Earth could be peopled entirely by zombies? Are Dennett's zombies descended from Hollywood extras, from Sartre, or from another as yet undiscovered homeland? What possibilities are there that you might be permanently affected by nihilation? Assuming after nihilation everything goes back to "normal", how is "continuity" re-established? Why, in fact, is it re-established at all? Is re-establishment after nihilation determinate? And if it is, couldn't it be said that we are determined by nihilation, somewhat like bragging about having had dinner at the Ritz if you had been to a soup kitchen?

      This last question might sound facetious but it was Sartre himself who spoke of the nothingness at the heart of being. What nihilation did justify, historically, was a great deal of heroic attitudinizing, such as feeling the heavy existential burden of choice, the utter loneliness of the long-distance chooser, the "absurdity" of all choices, etc. Many trace these attitudes to the rumour that Sartre spent most of the Second World War reading in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a choice some find incompatible with true heroism.

For a true believer, arguments for God's existence were like telling some one thoroughly rich that he has a lot of money, or conversely, like informing a prostrate half-conscious pedestrian that he forgot to look the other way 

My deep-down, long-haul inclination was for a determinist solution and the reason for my hesitation in espousing it was my ongoing search for an answer that gave some leeway to choice. In time I have come to realize that the real obstacle on my way to a deterministic commitment was not so much what the priests had taught me--I had given up on priests completely after the monk who had a ball with my hyperbolic soul-cleansing, which was sincere, really!--as the fact that language is a compendium of the experience of mankind and in most highly sophisticated languages there are words for the concepts of will, responsibility, guilt, et al, all of which imply freedom of choice, itself a phrase that, like "howdy", trips off the tongue as if it were the most natural and uncontroversial thing to say.

      The main source of difficulties for me was God Himself, which sounds like a very arrogant thing to say, but which is in fact a reference to my own shortcomings as a believer. My faith had sprung out of my problems and not through argumentation. In this I was in the purest of Christian traditions, if you believe Jiri Pelikan, who affirmed that the early Fathers of the Church never bothered trying to demonstrate God's existence. They had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, which might also be called prix fixe. You either believed God existed or you didn't. Fixed prices are a feature of advanced merchandising, for, say what you will, most people don't like haggling, which is predicated on the premises that you're a target and all merchants are crooks, an unpleasant qualification either way. In this sense, the Patristic was admirably straightforward, although it also must be admitted that early Christian thinkers were not opposed by atheists but by Pagan believers in a surfeit of gods, who were also inclined to a fixed-price attitude, expressed in their case as take-them-or-leave-them, often extending the concept of leaving to life itself, a practice Christians adopted as soon as they could.

      Pelikan further said that the so-called proofs of God's existence were like the frosting on the cake or like the crowing of the rooster. They represented the intellectual coronation of the Church Triumphant after its centuries-long struggle for predominance. Now, what this implies at a certain level is that no intelligent person is going to be persuaded by arguments for God's existence, which, if faith is truly there, are like telling some one thoroughly rich that he has a lot of money, or conversely like telling a prostrate half-conscious pedestrian that he forgot to look the other way. I concurred on this point.

      Although proofs of God's existence can be home-made or custom-made to fit any taste or intellectual size--they all come down to an extension of the cogito: I exist, therefore God must exist--there are two standard non-personal arguments: the cosmological and the ontological. There are also various other respectable arguments, but they are based on premises which require as much or more faith than believing in God cold turkey.

Cosmological morons were waylaying people and asking: "So, then, where did you come from? Just tell me that!"

The cosmological argument appeals to most every one because it is uncomplicated and provides a rush of intellectual brio inversely proportional to the intellect of the user. If an aggressive believer wants to brag about his faith--a frequent occurrence in low-IQ gatherings with high-tedium content--he comes up to the first person he meets and asks point blank: "So, then, where did you come from? Just tell me that!" If you happen to be that person and you're not as stupid as your importunate interlocutor, you already know what a stupid question like that followed by an even more stupid demand portend and the best bet is to turn tail without saying goodbye--you're probably in the wrong party anyway--because even emphatic protestations of terminal deafness will not daunt a determined practitioner of the cosmological gambit.

      Dear Reader might probably at this point be waiting with bated breath for my refutation of cosmological morons, but I am afraid I will have to disappoint and suggest instead that breath be unbated. My ignorance of Big Bang cosmology is just short of identifying basic concepts and recognizing a good analogy when I meet one, so I cannot dare advance even the hint of an opinion of where we come from, but I do know two things: one is that the problem is not as simple as cobbling shoes and that even if I knew physics backward and forward I doubt I would find in such knowledge sufficient cause for believing in God. I mean, supposing God was behind the Big Bang, which according to some thinkers is eternal anyway, why would he choose such an ungodly way to create human beings, and especially morons who ask where we come from when they themselves haven't the foggiest notion?

      The ontological argument is even easier to refute and for this I don't even have to beat my own brain. It is so simplistic even cosmological morons, who don't understand it at first, wouldn't be caught using it after it is explained to them. My own life, and even my faith, was a straight, no-nonsense refutation of it, a situation which resulted in that I believed in the teeth of at least one traditional and powerful reason for believing. Like Tertullian I might have believed, during the time I did believe in a near-normal way (which wasn't long) because it was preposterous to do so; or like Pascal, because I needed to in order to keep the cold out of my bones (a problem, incidentally, I don't experience at any time in these latitudes, particularly during the monsoon season even on a clear, cool, windy day like this one).

      Getting back to my subject, the ontological argument is roughly that God is conceived as the perfect being and existence has to be an attribute of perfection. If you don't believe me, read any dictionary of philosophy, or better yet go to Anselm who first used it. It was on the real worth of such theological arguments that Pelikan built his thesis that Medieval theology was more or less supererogatory, which qualifier, for those unversed or more likely uninterested in questions of soteriology or salvation, means doing more than your share. What Kant did was to point out that you can think of as many dollars as you please but they will not make a whit of difference to your personal finances, and this was something I could heartily attest to, for was my faith not predicated, partly at least, on the financial problems I was having, which, if Anselm had been right, I could have solved by mere thinking? I will admit, though, that in turning towards God I was indulging myself in a bit of wishful thinking, for I knew that I could not conjure up a fortune in my mind, but, by God, He certainly could! And then hand it over to me! This was to be a stumbling block in my career as believer.

Kali with her black tongue sticking out could turn a real big macho pig into a panic-stricken hare doing a very fast hop-skip-and-jump

Now, faith had its pros and its cons, its pluses and its minuses. I will do the pros and pluses first, because in these matters it suffices for one con and one minus to level a mountain of the others, and to do the inverse order would be like building a humongous sand castle below high tide line or like getting a good barbecue fire going on the off chance that some one might turn up with the ribs and the beer.

      When I turned to God--I was wearing socks and a dark blue suit with white shirt and tie and I am pretty sure I had my shoes on--I did it without reservations about His omnipotence, which I humbly tried to complement by withholding any reservations on my worshipfulness. On occasions I expressed this by getting into a lather over Darwin or Huxley. Darwin was an easy target because he was a racist and in his old age he had a decidedly simian look about him. But I knew that my indignation was feigned. Like Augustus crying for his legions, I went about crying for my millions, and blaming Buzakri which wasn't quite fair as I had done a lot of squandering on my own, and anyhow I wasn't going get them back by calling Darwin an ape or Nietzsche a walrus. I might have been thinking of gaining points directly with God, for I was basing my whole life-strategy on Him, although in thinking that He could not see through my impostures I was practically calling Him stupid.

      God's omnipotence meant that He could intervene in the affairs of mortals at any time and in any manner He chose. It is virtually impossible to belittle the concept of divine omnipotence. In my studies of Hinduism I had found a powerful, even sinister, way of illustrating it. At first, like any novice, it was hard for me to understand why Indians with such ancient deities as Brahma, Varuna, Indra, and Agni, and with such kind gods like Vishnu and Lord Krishna, had made the fearful Shiva the virtual master of their pantheon in terms of shrines, dedications, and number of worshippers.

      Lord Shiva is represented in southern Indian sculpture as dancing the tandava, the dance of destruction in which his hair flies out as if he were enjoying a one-thousand volt shot. He is also the husband of Kali, who was partial to necklaces of skulls and with her black tongue sticking out could turn a real big macho pig into a panic-stricken hare doing a very fast hop-skip-and-jump. I finally got out of my quandary when I read somewhere that Shiva had all the powers that were not attributed to other gods, and that made him terrifyingly powerful indeed. It made him more powerful than his powerful colleagues and that meant he was omnipotent. Now, if this immense power could so sway believers in a very polytheistic religion, can you imagine the power that devolved to the concept of a Single Deity in the entire universe?

      Omnipotence had its problematic side, which in my initial enthusiasm--it was more like a violent twitching in my joints or like a silly grin trying to pass itself off as peals of laughter--I pretended to ignore, but this situation was not tenable for very long in an inveterate sceptic like me. If Hamlet was the king of indecision, I could have been described as the mighty khagan of suspicion.

      If God was as omnipotent as I believed (or wanted to believe), why, he could have made Pavarottis out of bullfrogs or he could have eliminated most of the buttons on remote controls with a flick of his finger. It was obvious to me that if he could do these or any of countless other inconceivable marvels, then the universe was even less friendly and more threatening than was usually believed. It was possible, for instance, that a huge asteroid could come out of nowhere and doom the Earth and its inhabitants, or just vanish seconds before striking but give everybody one heck of a scare, something to tell their grandchildren if after that they were still in the mood to have grandchildren. Similarly, the world of cartoons was a paradigm of logic. Old Tom being steamrollered and looking like thick wallpaper rather than disgusting roadkill was more in the nature of things than the regularities that surrounded us, like getting out of the way of a speeding train and never ever jumping off a high cliff in a hang glider without a wind. Omnipotence, in sum, could be construed as a denial of a rule-governed universe.

      Such considerations about the potential vagaries of omnipotence took a back seat to my obstinacy in attributing summary attributes to God, which were absolutely needed if I was to get any benefits from my faith. To have entertained alternatives to this belief, specifically to believe in God but not that He was omnipotent, would be comparable to mankind having entered into the social contract in order to, say, put together a football squad. Don't, however, please, go believing my faith was built solely on my expectation that God's omnipotence would be of benefit to me. Of course, it had a large quota of calculated self-interest, but there was in it a lot, and I mean a whole lot, of sincere and disinterested self-abasement. The two had to go together, or, conversely, it was as if the social contract had been deliberately engineered by humans for the pleasure of licking the feet, and the very dirty feet at that, of some of their fellow humans.

      But of course the social contract is a sham--it mostly helps to keep political departments open--and what I mean to say is that my faith was both selfless and in some deep down way feigned. If you don't believe this is possible, ask yourself if Hobbes or Rousseau had incontrovertible evidence for the social-contract theories they concocted, one (Hobbes), to justify absolutism, and two (Rousseau), to make lively conversation for his liberal aristocratic friends and benefactors. Assuming then that one part of my mind, the part that was making like Jenghis Khan--you could call it an overweening, queue-jumping, loud-voiced homuncule--believed in this omnipotent God, then this arrogant homuncule also believed that He, or She--this is a transparent token, as I do not, any more than the most ardent feminist, believe that God has a vagina, although He could of course if He wanted to--had the power to help me whether I deserved it or not.

      The only way to convince Him to do it was through prayer. Prayer is in some ways bigger than a BPI. BPIs, you will recall, are what philosophers allege when they are reduced to scratching their heads, which is often, although it is usually done in private. Prayer can be approached philosophically, in which case it is eo ipso a BPI, or it can be approached on a take-it-as-you-find-it basis. I did once try to approach prayer philosophically--after all, I had indited many of my prayers in a philosophical spirit--but I got no further than a classification, which is not too bad considering the complexities of the issue.

As there was a lot of competition in the asking department, in my prayers I was careful not to say anything that might even have sounded like: "Hey, Lord, forget the others and give me a million smackeroos"

Prayers, in my scheme, were canonical, invocative or apotropaic, and philosophical. Canonical prayers were what every one else also prayed. My preference, despite the closet-atheist priest in London, was for some Psalms (those that did not insist too much on Jews as the Chosen People, a belief I do not begrudge them but obviously do not share). Apotropaic, according to a dictionary definition, refers to warding off evil, and in those days I could think of no better way to ward off evil than to recuperate my money, although, let's be clear on this point, not necessarily through commission-generating financial transactions: what I really wanted--which I confess reluctantly for I am not entirely comfortable by letting Dear Reader into all my thoughts--was a series of successful books like Churning of the Milky Ocean. The distinction between canonical and invocative prayers was wafer-thin. In fact, there was none, because in my apotropaic prayers I was careful not to say anything that might even have sounded like: "Hey, Lord, forget the others and give me a million smackeroos".

      Philosophical prayers were in a totally different category and in retrospect I could even agree that they were not prayers at all but mini-opuscules designed to quash my uncertainties by hewing as close as possible to some implication of faith. For instance: if God took a keen interest in the history of mankind, then I prayed that I be allowed to go swimming in what I called the "mainstream of history". Since I did not seem to be doing a freestroke in that river, I used another ruse: "The rational disqualification of a specific fideistic interpretation, does not exclude the possibility of fideistic reinterpretation: if the circumstances of my life change, then I must reinterpret my life”.

      What I was "praying" here, implied that God had once again not seen fit to crown with success some plea I had made--like finding a taker for my novel Felodese, which I had written very quickly during the hours I did not devote to my studies--so instead of giving up either on my vision of what I was destined for in life or on God's benevolence towards my vision, I would merely assume that He was postponing his benevolence for another occasion in the near future. Prayer was a very malleable concept and what emerged from these thoughts was that I badly wanted something I was not likely to get. This deduction was discouraging and I had other devices to avoid it. For these, it is better not to beat around the bush.

      God was the panacea. Prayer was the prescription for it. It involved an SPR. An SPR was hard to conceive, but wasn't God omnipotent? He wouldn't have been the panacea if he wasn't, would He? Did I deserve an SPR with God? Certainly not! But wasn't that what the omnipotence argument was all about? The answer to this had a ball-cutting secret edge to it (to which we shall get soon enough), but it could be tentatively answered in the affirmative.

      On the mercenary side to all this, it's much less serious than I am making it seem. I could have done with some financial security, enough to blunt the awl of rage and regret boring into my brain, but this did not mean I had to be a millionaire. "Millionaire" had a reassuring sound to it, but hadn't I been a millionaire and squandered my money? That of course depended on how you defined millionaire, but even though I wanted to put as much distance as possible from that time in my past, I knew I had lost much more than one million dollars. It stood to reason that what I wanted was not just a million dollars but the sense of security that a million dollars provides, which meant having a better broker than Buzakri or a magic sack from which I could extract another million dollars every time I slashed-and-burned my way through one supply. 

      Concerning the competition in the asking department, all I could do was to humble myself in the extreme, which meant a notch below my immense, unbearable arrogance, and that basically in a verbal sense. Did I really think I would have been fooling God with a show of verbal humility if, as I said, I believed He existed and was omnipotent? I presume my hope was that having to humble myself however little hurt so damn much He would take my pain as a powerful extenuating circumstance and, assuming others were as guilty as I was, or thereabouts, He would take a special interest in my case.

      In a competition on who bowed the lowest before God--and for this visualize the vast open space in, say, Delhi's Jama Masjid on a Friday (to make it more explicit: the place is big and Jama means Friday)--I was bowing so low I could smell my fellow worshippers' feet, which they were supposed to wash but often just assumed were clean inside well-worn and sweat-impregnated socks. To best all the other supplicants before God, then, I did not assume a holier-than-thou but a humbler-than-all-you-filthy-buggers attitude, and this was getting me perilously close to a position where I might be tempted to tell God to shove it.

The thought that there are over three times as many human beings as cows meant that not every one gets to eat tenderloin

The final and perhaps most important condition to obtain God's help was that I should be going through all these propitiatory and apotropaic moves from a station in which I could freely choose. If I couldn't, then all my exertions were no better than those of a galley slave who worked the oar or else, and who given half a chance would have roasted his tormentors alive and eaten them with Roman fish sauce. This presented the greatest of all the problems, to explain which I must invoke the concept of ontological chain.

      This is not to be confused with the chain of being. The latter is the belief that in evolutionary biology organisms ascend from simplicity to complexity and life forms tend to become better adapted to the environment over time. In our days of extreme and well-remunerated specializations, these propositions are constantly being challenged. The most famous of all challenges is the claim that dinosaurs were just about perfect and would still be around roaring away and killing each other and causing a lot of mayhem if an asteroid hadn't slammed into the Earth and turned day into night for ages (a trick Hollywood had later rediscovered and used frequently in B-type cowboy movies).

      The trouble with this perspective is that it seems to put brutality and intelligence on the same level. Claims about the marvels of dinosaurs would not have been possible if those beasts hadn't disappeared to permit the genus homo to develop in time, and this doesn't do the dinosaurs' cause much good. However, if behaviorists got away for a long time with bragging about their mindlessness, why shouldn't specialists not be indulged now in their evolutionary exaltation of dinosaurs and trivialization of human intelligence?

      Be that as it may, I am not keen on embarking on a losing crusade--specialists outnumbering generalists today by a ratio of nearly a zillion to one--and I only brought the chain of being up to help in defining the ontological chain, by which what I mean, roughly, is that between the age of the dinosaurs and the following ages the biological order was not rebuilt from scratch. To put it another way: extinctions, which have their big fans, are not likely to have been total. Being, in sum, is continuous, and if so, there has been an unbroken chain of causes going back to infinity. Of course, you could argue that the ontological chain, in a broad sense, would not have been broken by an extinction of all earthly life, but this raises a lot of unnecessary issues and I only needed the concept of the continuity of life on Earth to illustrate another continuity entailing a basic form of determinism. 

      The ontological chain had entered my mind with the same ease with which freedom of choice exits the mouths of others. But if I was to merit God's favour I had to find some way to avoid determinism. The only one that occurred to me was that, through being aware of my insertion in the ontological chain, I could influence the ontological chain itself. I didn't see exactly how this could be, because my being aware of my insertion in the ontological chain was itself part of the ontological chain. Nevertheless, I did not have to find a refutation to this argument immediately and I could distract myself with the thought that the answer lay in consciousness.

      On the say-so of many illustrious thinkers, consciousness was mysterious, quite in some ways as inscrutable as God. If anywhere, it was in consciousness that the key to self-determination had to be found, and furthermore consciousness pointed directly to its own divine origin. This was the ideal formulation of the I-exist-therefore-God-must-exist argument. But that consciousness could be the escape hatch from the ontological chain because it somehow had the power to affect the ontological chain, amounted to claiming you could not be imprisoned in a jail you had helped to build or that once you were in jail you were bound to escape from it, a consummation most jailbirds long for but few achieve.

      Besides these insidious, negative arguments for determinism, two other things were gumming up the works for me. One was that no matter how many prayers I composed and how much I humbled myself I did not seem to be getting any closer to an SPR with God. Given my antecedents--wasn't my dipping into life a virulent form of despair, the greatest of all sins?--I should have been at the point of exasperation with God. Unfortunately, I wasn't the devil-may-care experimenter I had been in the past. I had been both scientist and laboratory rat and I now found myself stuck inside a cage without any chance of walking away. My nerves were pretty much shot and I was afraid of what would happen if I started acting uppity with Him after I had turned to Him and confessed my total impotence. I had become, in one word, su-per-sti-tious. If faith was reduced to superstition, I was in terminal difficulties.

      One way out of my troubles would have been suicide. My father had done it, and who knew how many of our ancestors. It would have been in a way like keeping up the family tradition. However, I might have been inventing a genealogy and besides I had inklings that I could still be on to something in this life. So I decided to carry on although I didn't believe for one moment that it was some sort of reasoning that prevented me from taking my own life.

      One of the inklings was that I wasn't really done with trying to get on the good side of God. That God would be taking a particular interest in me, the SPR thing, was preposterous to say the least. It was like being Abraham and being told instead of the terrible order he got: "Hey, relax, make yourself a drink, lay on a hammock, enjoy the view". Unfortunately, I was only one of about some six thousand million human beings or more, which considering that there are one thousand five hundred million cows is an exceedingly large figure indeed. I was one little ant in an interminable column a thousand or more abreast moving in unison from one dark nook in the jungle to another dark nook. Yet it was in the middle of that darkness that something lit up.

I invent a concept that turns out to be as useful as DNA junk  

Alright, I was a nobody, a perfect cipher, a nonentity, but the sum of humanity wasn't. The sum of humanity was history and God must certainly have been concerned by history. If God had gone to the trouble of creating a species that could think of Him and kept looking to Him, a species that had the gall to think it could be like Him and even to try to know Him, then its history could not be a matter of indifference to Him. It was as if you had built a huge railway model with hundreds of feet of tracks and the engines and rolling stock and meadows with little white and black cows and woodlands and villages and even a little city with buildings and a railway station and little animated humanoids, and you plugged it into the main and then went on an indefinite vacation. 

      No, history was definitely God's concern. What's more, if history had its positive aspects--and if you wanted to be basic in that regard, that humanity still existed was quite conclusive--God could very well have had his hand in it. I went even further. Yes, mankind had survived MAD. Against the odds, so it might have appeared to many alarmists, the red buttons had not been pushed. This did not necessarily mean that collective destruction was out of the question. However, every one, even the most pessimistic amongst us, acted as if nothing terrible was going to happen in the near future. Many, including myself, were working for a long-term future, even beyond death.

      I had previously been dipping into life because my destiny was to be engaged in this intellectual search, which would eventually enrich humanity by increasing its own self-understanding. So, if we went about our business in the trust that the world was going to survive for a long time to come, it had to be because every man jack of us believed in a kind of suprahistorical warranty, and the only one who could extend such a warranty was God. QED!

      This argument had various facets, some of which merit mentioning. One flashed that it was God's doing that humanity had not destroyed itself when Khrushchev and Kennedy were playing chicken in Cuba. A larger facet was that God intervened at any crucial moment when things could go very wrong to ensure a favourable resolution for His creatures. Another still was that if God did not intervene, He had at least made sure by some means, maybe ingrained in us, that we did not kill each other.

      There existed another possibility, which was that humans had in them all the necessary information to assure their own survival. This information could have been a distillation of eons of life. It did not require God. But I put this thought to one side.

      My dealings with history, however, were not over, because what I was interested in was not what happened to my fellow humans after I died but my own salvation here on Earth, and let me confess unequivocally that despite all my faith in God at that time I did not believe in an after-life, on which more soon (for it has to do with the definition of "practical atheist", which I promised a while back).

      It was then down to these two premises: God had to do with history and I wanted to be successful within history. The ergo was that my being part of history meant that God had to do with me. That was it! I even invented a special phrase for the knowledge of being part of history: Mode of Historical Awareness (MHA). It had a good ring to it. It sounded German and existentialist. It was something Heidegger could have written. I could even imagine my trouvaille being translated into German as a word with about hundred syllables and a definite drumming rhythm to it, much more impressive than Geistesgeschichte or even the awesome Westverbesserungswahn.

      Even though the issue of my insignificance had not been settled, there was no question of my historical awareness. I was sure I was more aware of history than any one I knew, which wasn't that hard considering most of my previous friends had been prostitutes, who didn't even know or care they were practicing what some one, probably a shrewd old whoremonger, called the oldest profession.

      If I needed more proof of the strength within me of the MHA I had only to revisit certain places in my past where I had foreseen a trend or found myself spontaneously in the midst of another. I had realized the futility of third worldism even when its faithful still acted as if international non-alignment was a "moral power" and not the occasion for dictators to get together every so often and compare suits. Conversely, the rise of Reaganism did not surprise me, although Reagan himself was puzzling, possibly because I only upgraded my opinion of actors when I became penniless and was green with envy every time I read that actor this or actor that got not one but various million dollars for doing next to nothing while I struggled on obscurely in the knowledge of my unrecognized wisdom and culture (which it must be obvious to Dear Reader is exactly what I am doing now).

      Given the trend in the world for the rich to get richer and the poor to be stuck (occasionally by choice) with murderous and thieving despots, it hadn't been hard for me to visualize the deep desire of peoples from underdeveloped countries to move collectively to the USA and Europe, which was obviously bound to produce a strong resistance. I suspected that the transition to post-communist societies was not going to be easy and that mostly the same people that had ruled under communism would live to rule another day. The contrary would have been as if under capitalism, CEO's and other big shots ended up in the street if they lost their jobs. I knew the art market was going to go through the ceiling although I expected Alma-Tadema to be a high-flier, which he has never become (although time is probably on his side). I was certain that film-making would move from old cardboard sets to new realisms. Even before I went into deep philosophical waters, I already had some insights on the issues that concerned philosophers of mind. I mean, if some one was in the MHA it was yours truly, and make no mistake.  

      There were a few hitches. I had the suspicion, which I did not want to voice too loudly, that being aware of history did not require a special mode of thinking. But this was just a small problem that could be dealt with using a lot of words in long and complicated paragraphs. This method had pedigree. If as they say most of DNA is junk, then not surprisingly most of philosophy too is a lot of difficult sounding rubbish. More important by far was the other problem that was gumming up the works for me, which was actually a variant on the SPR thing.

I refused to enter history as the man who emptied Bill Gates' secretary's waste paper basket

Being omnipotent, God wasn't about to be fooled by a flanking move like my MHA gambit. I was getting on and I wasn't receiving any recognition from the world, not to mention that I was not making any progress on my financial recuperation. This was explicable mostly because I wasn't even trying to make money. I had made some half-hearted attempts at getting financial support--one being the application for a genius grant, which I already mentioned--but the responses had not been encouraging. I wasn't even buying lottery tickets, not just because I did not think I could be a winner (which doesn't deter any one from buying them), but because I honestly did not want to make my comeback on the strength of pure luck.

      In other words, sure I was part of history and I had a very strong awareness of the process of history, but this did not entail that God was tending to my career and my ambitions. For all He cared, I could have been the man who emptied Bill Gates' secretary's waste paper basket. This was undoubtedly historical, but not in the way I wanted to be historical. Besides, if the MHA had some meaning beyond ordinary cognition, it had to be in reference to some collective manner of thinking about history and I was, as Dear Reader knows very well, a very individualistic and egocentrical fellow. (Incidentally, I still am and don't go thinking that because I mention "redemption" at the drop of a hat it means I have become some sort of moral paradigm.)

      The real problem behind my lack of celebratory recognition was the ball-cutting side to the concept of God's omnipotence, for this entailed that not only was I not achieving an SPR with God, but that it wasn't to be expected that God would ever use His omnipotence to establish one with me. After all, why should He? It wasn't as if I were doing him a favor by constantly dunning him for my lost millions. This understanding came to me sitting one very hot, stormy day on the garden steps to a house I was renting in Havana. But when I say "came to me" I might be giving a misleading impression, for the understanding was already fully formed inside me and the only thing lacking was my having it in the proscenium of awareness.

      All anti-Cartesians will by now have thought: "Aha! The old misleading mind-is-a-stage analogy!", which means they brought to their proscenia what they had been suspecting all along about me. Wrongly. The process here was that my reasoning powers are not at rest because I am not aware of them. They had already discovered the booby trap in divine omnipotence and had occasionally sent hints up to the level of consciousness where they occupied but passing instants, not because the hints lacked importance in themselves, but because in the same laboratories where they had been developed, the conditions were not yet favourable to their acceptance. Analogically, the Jenghis Khan homuncule was still boss and it had no interest in a perfectly sound idea that contravened its obsession with God's omnipotence and the possibility of an SPR.

      The stormy-day insight was further enhanced when the clouds passed to reveal a deep, star-clustered night. Havana's power system was of Neolithic vintage because Castro had spent a long time living in a tree, which he thought was heroic. And now that I mention Castro, I can also cite Pinochet, the scourge of some of my fellow redactors in Blow-up, who said that not a leaf stirred in his domains without his knowing it, a presumptuous claim that came to haunt him when as a tourist in London for a while he became the pursued rather than the pursuer. But neither Castro nor Pinochet were gods, appearances to the contrary. And let me tone down my own arrogance by recognizing that had I lived in Cuba--my stay at the time of the insight I am talking about now was purely circumstantial--or in Chile during the time when the other would-be-deity ruled, I might very likely--keep in mind though that this is purely contrafactual, hence a smidgin away from bilge--have been obliged at least to pay lip service to their respective divinities.  Nevertheless, no matter what Castro and Pinochet claimed, they weren't one inch closer to being God than I was.

      The omnipotence of God entailed His omniscience, in fact His omni-everything. If God was not omniscient--analogously, as if Bill Gates' secretary were having lunch when he wanted her or him to bring him coffee (about the only thing he would need a secretary for if he used Windows, according to his own claim)--then the same universal situation might have obtained as if that pesky meteorite had materialized out of nowhere and threatened the Earth. If God was not omniscient He was not in total control, and what kind of God would He then have been? Things might have been going on in the possibly infinite number of universes He had bespoken of which He was not aware and they could very well be getting out of hand. Now, you could argue back: "So what? What is omnipotence for if it isn't to allow you to make good your own oversights? Who are we talking about here? The absent-minded professor? Spare me!"

      There was one slight problem with this rejoinder. If something was happening somewhere in the unimaginable expanses of infinity and eternity and God was not aware of it or He had not foreseen it, then ipso facto--this is the same as eo ipso, which I already used once--He was not omniscient and if He was not omniscient He was not omnipotent and if God was not omnipotent he was just an asshole like the rest of us. What's worse, Castro and Pinochet might be getting away with their spurious claims!

      Nope, there was no getting away from it: God was omnipotent, which meant that He was omniscient, and creation (any way you wanted to describe it) was fixed for eternity in His mind (and even attributing mind to Him had a sacrilegious tang to it), and this made all my thoughts and efforts and scribblings superfluous. Except of course as they stand, which in a way made them very pertinent indeed. In a sort of perverse way. In brief, I was either fooling myself or I was the lord of the universe himself (herself if I wanted), who, blind as I was, had stumbled on absolute eternal verities. Do I hear the Celestial Chorus enjoining “Morra, Cesare, morra”, or, if it was formed entirely by cosmological morons, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog”, and me croaking out of tune “no, no, no”.

Another insight into relativity was that if you lost your penis your potency did not do you a damn bit of good

On the strictly personal, I-me level, the consequences of these thoughts were devastating. Maybe, just maybe, all my efforts weren't going to waste. Possibly I was indeed a significant historical actor and an instrument of God's will (incidentally, another sacrilegious attribution of a human trait to Him) but I certainly wasn't going to become one for all the self-humiliating and praying and begging and crying I could do, even if I did it all in public, which I wasn't thinking of doing any time soon. I was trapped. I had to go on in the knowledge that I really knew nothing. Maybe knowing how little I knew and would ever know was a great achievement in itself--I had thought of titling my theological disquisitions A Bearable Darkness--but it didn't feel that way to me, and I wasn't likely to find any taker for my ideas on the strength of a title. Having reached this point, however, there are benefits to be had in respect to some of the promises I made earlier to Dear Reader.

      As I could not claim that beyond my absolutising conclusions about God I knew more than I did when I had, fully-suited, turned to Him in despair at most about everything, why, I could play the Dumbo and say something to this effect: "Well, even so, even if God is omniscient and He is not going to be changing His mind about the way He has the ontological chain strung out, which if He did would mean he was more fallible than Castro (who, like a good Galician, never as far as is known ever changed his mind about anything), He is still inscrutable and He could very well do something that goes against the grain of omniscience and not lose his omnipotence for all that." That sounded good. So damned good I went over it again in an equally quotable variant form: "God was omnipotent and this meant he could not be constrained by His omniscience. Forget that if he was not omniscient He lost his omnipotence. With God, who was inscrutable, anything was possible."

      In human terms, of course, this was not valid, because if you lost your penis your potency did not do you a damn bit of good, unless you could keep it (the penis) in a cooler with ice and had time to reach a surgeon before bleeding to death. But I still had that thin thread of faith which could hang there indefinitely. If I pulled on it, it would break for sure. But if I just let it be, then I had not entirely broken with God.

      All these reasons convinced me that I was not as superstitious as I had been tempted to believe before. I could thank God for any bit of good fortune that came along, but not acknowledge Him much otherwise, except for the occasional God-damn when I missed an easy putt in a push-over par three. (I will allow me an aside here to explain that although I do not live in Cebu proper, but in the jungly hills behind it, with a view to the anchorage across to Mactan, there are golf courses in Cebu to which I have regular access, on which point I will not now expatiate.)

      One thing that was entirely denied to me--not that important because I had never actually believed in it--was the possibility of an after-life. The idea was absurd in countless ways. I mean, if you were married more than once, who would be your legitimate spouse after death and the resurrection of the flesh, especially if you died after a divorce, and divorces do tend to shorten people's lives as a rule (frequently broken by grief-stricken rich widows)? There was also the complication of your former spouses' possible re-marriages to previously non-married people, which meant that you were left out in the cold, unless in some way you were allowed to re-marry in heaven if you still had a penchant for that after your earthly marriages.

      My life had not been an exemplar of stability but I had lived through a lot of drudgery. Would I have been assigned in heaven to one of those tedious routines? After all, in Heaven as on Earth there had to be means to kill time, for I must confess I have never understood mystic doubletalk about wanting to spend eternity in the presence of the Divine Inscrutability, which is like wanting to be an eternal glutton of an ignorant tourist hugely increasing herhis ignorance by the second.

      It was remotely conceivable that God would be willing to share His inscrutability with His most ardent fans in life, but this sounded like Tiger Woods wanting to share his skills with others. Not likely, even if he could. Conceivably, I could be forced to spend a lot of time with a cosmological moron, who would have used it to tell me over and over: "I told you so, didn't I?" This would not have been Heaven but Hell, and what would he have been doing in Hell if he was such a firm believer in Heaven? Unless he had the usual sins of fundamentalists (idiocy, fanaticism, hypocrisy, etc.), which were in my view quite mortal and deserving of eternal damnation.

If you really believe in samsara, what you have to worry about is reincarnating as a rat in a house full of cats, which would make your karma a worse nightmare than it already was  

But it was not up to me to determine who would and who would not inherit the Kingdom and all these were joke scenarios (though not entirely illogical), particularly the concept of eternal damnation, which in all dissuaded me absolutely from the possibility of accepting any soteriology whatsoever, whether the Hindu Purusa, or the Buddhist Nirvana, or the Christian or Muslim heaven or hell. Nirvana, like Purusa, is admittedly ambiguous as an after-life but most Buddhists don't believe a word of what Buddha apparently said and they, like most every one else, trust in another lease on life and having a high old time, which is what they understand by Nirvana. As to Hinduism and Purusa, it could be argued that, if you really believe in samsara, what you have to worry about is reincarnating as a rat in a house full of cats, which would make your karma a worse nightmare than it already was.

      The crux here was that my radical disbelief on the issue of immortality flew in the face of the consensus of humankind, shared and propagated by even its most powerful and presumably intelligent specimens through the ages. To mention the pharaohs was too trite, but Chinese archaeologists recently discovered the tomb of a Han monarch which contained a stone toilet complete with flushing mechanism (not quite as sophisticated of course as the British late-19th century patent). The Chinese, whose religious beliefs are anybody's guess, are so certain they will live again that in Manila their cemetery is to all appearances a tony neighborhood, complete with mansions and upper-middle class duplexes, except on the fringes where you get the usual riff-raff. It is certainly a heaven in comparison to the niches the squatters carve into the rubbish. The same thing was happening in Cairo until the dumpster-folk took over the City of the Dead and evicted whoever had been occupying the abodes for the spirits of the dearly departed.

      On the issue of faith, Jews are as unfathomable as the Chinese, but in a different sense. Their religious beliefs are not difficult to grasp and if you're willing to learn a slew of feasts' names and not ask for pork if you're invited to a Sabbath and don't mind doing like a dervish at weddings, you can make a passable lapsed Jew as long as nobody asks to see if you're circumcised, which wouldn't be probatory because Muslims also have that practice. But do Jews believe in an after-life? Easier to know what a Chinaman's religion is!

      However, least Dear Reader start suspecting me of cultural prejudices I do not have, let me say that my deep down conviction is that most people everywhere tend to have the same religious beliefs, which are that God exists, that He has secretaries who take down requests (Jews are not about to fall for this line), that you can by going through certain motions actually foil or bribe those secretaries and "make" God behave in a certain way, and that (and this is the it!) you don't deserve to die and you're not going to die whatever corpses look like they are doing besides looking dead. Now, if I was still willing to thank God even though I wasn't expecting to get a "You're welcome; any time" in return, then my gratitude was totally gratuitous and my faith could be considered Tertullian and perhaps more accurately I was what could be called a practical or functional atheist. The upshot was that the meaning-of-life phase of my life was ended. But it hadn’t been entirely useless, for I could go over all I had written, over and over, in search of loopholes, very likely but as if Dante had been forced to rewrite his Divine Comedy to make it consistent with particle physics.  

Neurosis was a male thing, for women were quite content with being called hysterical, especially if it made their husbands run for cover 

Even in the midst of my struggles with God--squabbles in my own brain would be a more accurate and less pretentious way of putting it--I never forgot my number one problem which was still neurosis, whatever I might have said about lunacy before, and this consisted, as the reader could be justified in thinking, in my fear that if I made another million dollars I could go and fritter it away as I had done before on account of feelings of guilt bordering on paranoia, a disposition I acquired through my conflictual relationship with my deceased father.

      So, you might well ask, why was neurosis my number one priority? My assault on neurosis was the most important undertaking of my life because it was conceived to answer the questions that arose on Lightningbolt Night and this meant that if my life before had been warfare--against the Apocrisiary, against the World, etc.--then this war, which just might have been about myself--more like a civil war then--was the one to end all wars as far as I was concerned, and if I won it I could proclaim myself Imperator Invictus Universalis or something to that efect.

      On the question of what it was that Freud had specified, about which I have done a lot of shilly-shallying before, I did finally achieve some understandings. Madmen had always existed. It was through them that humanity discovered the concept of normality. But there were many people who weren't sure where they belonged, although they didn't publicize it, and they certainly didn't like being called hysterical, which is what they would have had to settle for if Freud hadn't come along and called them neurotics. This was a male thing, incidentally, for women were quite content with being called hysterical, especially if it made their husbands run for cover. In a wide sense--and Freud is always elusive when you try narrowing him down, but then even theoretical physicists have this problem--neurosis is caused, compulsive, anxiety-producing, and self-reinforcing behavior, which is altogether too imprecise for I could as well be talking here of the effects that Stalin or Hitler had on people.

My religious vocation could be compared to a man without larynx wanting to join the Celestial Choir 

I was including thought under the category of behaviour and I knew of course that this inclusion was controversial for philosophers--to a physician it would have amounted to being called a quack by a hypochondriac--but, just as I had the goods on quacks, so I was also certain--precisely one of the reasons I was a neurotic--that intentions and other mental events were often not easy to distinguish from physical actions, and not just because of what the priests and nuns had taught me about intending and sinning. I was absolutely positive on this because it was obvious that all behaviour had to be caused--I only included causality as being specifically neurotic to serve as a cornerstone for the other neurotic traits--and the causes had to be inside me or the world was as topsy-turvy as if God was not only omnipotent but insane. I mean, if behaviour did not originate in something like some previous mental event then Sartre was right about nihilation, only it would not have been a justification for freedom of choice or for a nous sommes tous des assassins kind of attitude, but a highly controversial theory on why Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny cartoons were the highest form of realism.

      Compulsiveness meant of course phobias and manias, which were one of Freud's clinical areas, if not the main source of his income, the principal material for his case studies, with some whopper headings like "The Horse Man" and "The Rat Woman" and so on. Incidentally, they were whoppers in both the sense of bigness and of lying because the hapless neurotics they described were not really circus freaks but just obsessed individuals. Defining neurosis as compulsive behaviour was a concession on my part because I was very neurotic but not especially manic or phobic, or not noticeably so, although my obsession with control, which I had occasion to illustrate in connection to my half-baked syntheses of my half-digested readings on modern physics--please excuse the disgusting idea of baking stomach contents, but that's the metaphoric order I found appropriate here--would not have passed muster with an idiot as mere neatness.

      My father had been famously manic since his Antihypatus days when he got the hated nickname of Mad Lizard and I too had my discreet tendencies, especially when I was on a talking jag. I have not heard it said that alcoholism is a particularly neurotic trait, but it did tend to bring out the manic in me, although if the conditions were right it could also make me very mellow. My theories on alcoholism--that, for instance, alcohol does not change people but accentuates what they already are--were held with some insouciance and I wouldn't have bothered to make a case with them, one reason why I am as wary of aggressive reformed alcoholics, especially if they believe that their former affliction is heritable, as of cosmological morons. As to phobias, aside from my variable misanthropy, I will only plead to clean-ass obsessiveness and this is a very private thing I'll keep to myself, if you don't mind, especially because it can be embarrassing in public, as when on a visit to Samuel Johnson's house I asked about privy facilities of the period and the attendant told me they had very clean toilets in a hotel nearby.

      Anxiety-production and self-reinforcement were, however, of the essence. Anxiety was one of the reasons I hadn't the slightest hesitation about classifying thought as a form of behavior. I often did not have to do anything at all to feel as much anxiety as if I had done something truly regrettable, which could mean anything depending on my mood.

      In the No play Kanto's Pillow a character on the way to the city sleeps in an inn and dreams of an entire lifetime so convincingly that when he awakens he decides to go back to his village. Well, you could say I was like that except I never had the chance of renouncing the world. And it wasn't because the opportunity had not presented itself--it had as when as a boy I thought I had a religious vocation, which in retrospect could be compared to a man without larynx wanting to join the Celestial Choir--but because I no more could have avoided dipping into life than I could have stopped breathing.

      As to my susceptibility to self-reproach, you could say that it was the same when I was having these ideas about neurosis as when as a child I began to have thoughts on how I could take revenge on my parents, so neurotic behaviour had to be self-reinforcing because by the time I am referring to now, just prior to embarking on my grand philosophical synthesis (GPS), both my parents had been dead for a long time, one possibly the victim of the ultimate act of revenge, and I was still reproaching myself, not for that possibility, which would have been understandable as true moral guilt, but about such trivialities as I do not even care to mention.

      In sum, then, I had cause for considering myself very neurotic and this explains why the theme was so uppermost in my thought. That I could do nothing about it wasn't going to change a thing, because it was like knowing how much I wanted to fuck Fanny in New York, which, even though (as I explained) was not that easy to do in a dignified manner, did not prevent me from desiring it every moment of wakefulness. And the main reason Freud could do nothing for me was that I had to trust his explanations--can you imagine some one's last words being (to his physician): "I am cured, I am cured"?--and to me the OEdipus thingamajig was as believable as if Buzakri had come back in one piece from Hama and told me he had kept my money intact in a secret account in Bull Bull & Dong. It was more likely for me to have inherited Puss-in-Boots or that Gina or Tessie had made vows of chastity after we separated. However, I was grateful to Freud for having opened my eyes to the subconscious--which sounds, but isn't, like being grateful for having been blinded--and for baptizing the frequent bad feelings I had with the name of "anxiety"--which was like having a real grudge instead of just unfocused hatred--and for having pointed out that most of the bad things that happen in life happen early on, although this need not mean I was willing to go with him inside a mare's nest in which my father was chasing me with a pair of scissors while I chased my naked mother in my undies.

The astonishing discovery that you could train your mind to salivate

Jettisoning Freud--and I didn't do it quite as thoroughly as I might be making it seem here--did not mean, as I already confessed, that I had something to put in his place, something substantial anyway, because I did replace him but mostly with a lot of impressive phrases, very descriptive maybe, surely very literary, but hardly clarifying. The most basic was: "Neurosis is a disruption of the normal functioning of consciousness", which was a duh formula with an implicit question amounting to begging the issue altogether. So what was "consciousness"? And what was "normal consciousness"? And how do you define "normal" to start with? As Dear Reader will eventually see that I end my researches with questions of this sort, it would have been advisable if I had started by asking them, but not rhetorically as I am doing now. A much more sophisticated description of neurosis--so sophisticated I myself am not sure exactly I meant--was: "a referential non-discursive refusal of the world and time", which was followed by the merely metaphorical: "perplexities digging one another by the hair".

      There was both a large problem here and some progress. The problem was that these were, as I said, descriptions. Neurosis was feeling vaguely dissatisfied. When this dissatisfaction got bad, you could, if you wanted to be clever, call it angst, which was the German word for anxiety transferred to English from the Danish of Kierkegaard, thus making it a portmanteau, a French word pilfered by English to mean carry-all, in a figurative sense. But anyway you went about it, neurosis meant not feeling good. Wasn't that what Woody Allen went on about? Why aren't I feeling good today? More generally: why do I have money to burn and I live in Cosmopolis and I get ass and I am not happy?

      Freud, in brief, had reached the level of his mediocrity with his disciples going about supplying psychological massages. In a way, he was the perfect illustration of the Peter Principle, which sounded too good to be true, for wasn't Little Peter at the heart of his "research"? A privileged little fellow next to whom all the Little Pussies felt sorely deprived? Neurotics were a dime a dozen. All the ingredients required were the need to confess your insecurities and the resources, usually in securities, to pay for some one to hear you out. And it wasn't only in New York, because I remembered in Manila, after explaining what this book was about during a sit-down dinner, how the Ambassador from Fredonia jumped up and asked if I was writing about him. The one from Lower Slobovia even insisted on being interviewed. But that wasn't the neurosis I had in mind.

      The progress involved in my descriptions of neurosis was that in toying with them, as with my initial quadruple characterization of neurotic behavior, I came up with explanations of sorts, which eventually, and for good reasons, didn't do any good either, but they did contribute later to my theory of cognition, and this was finally to be the key. One of the explanations I discovered was the concept of "neurotic forms" and this in turn made it possible for me to start focusing on certain general manifestations of neurosis. I wanted to avoid the specificities of neurosis--I didn't want to sound as if I were whining--yet I wanted to be more specific than angst or something like it. But let's see what I did achieve and how I achieved it. (I must warn Dear Reader that here I will be recurring to my writings from the time and he or she will be subjected to the dreariness of pedantic quotes, but rest assured that they occcupy only an insignificant fraction of the text.)

      Ironically, the discovery of neurotic forms started with the concept of conditioning, which comes from a version of the behaviorism I have done so much to revile here. You'll remember that conditioning was a trick Pavlov played on dogs about the time when the American maverick psychologist Watson launched the fashion of saying that people were mindless. Another behaviorist--the inventor of the empty MIT box for raising children--thought he could apply Pavlov's technique to mindless humans. Basically, Skinner's idea was a race of happy automatons, which he didn't know already existed in the busy-busy scullions in New York's Automats. Starting from the premise that thought was behavioural, what I did was apply the concept of conditioning to mind.

      Suppose, I asked, that instead of training dogs to salivate--which they are doing all the time anyway and as a trick wouldn't have gone over big with a demanding circus audience--it were possible to transpose conditioning from a purely canine level to the level of awareness or wherever it is that humans feel guilty or anxious without having cause to do so? Why not? Given the right sort of mistraining in infancy, you could have in adults a result like canine salivation. The Pavlov reflex had already been successfully carried over into movies when Gabby Hayes (he was an old timer who acted without dentures) banged a pot and all the cowhands appeared out of nowhere asking: "Where are the flapjacks? Where are the flapjacks?"

      My concerns were not hungry buckaroos, but the kind of people who heard dishes crash in a restaurant and spontaneously jumped up and said: "I did it! I did it!" For example, I suspected that, even though I did want to be shot of Henry Oldman when I took the blame for the scratching of his record of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, I had also done it, like a bored paranoic, from a willingness to assume any undistributed or unclaimed guiltiness laying around. This trait might have been the reason for my feeling like a closet psychopath and even a potential rapist. I called my discovery "consciousness conditioning".

The psychoanalytic struggle against repression was an inexhaustible source of Hollywood happy endings

This was from the start a source of difficulties because when I used the word “consciousness” I wasn't sure of its meaning. At that stage in my thinking I could not conceive that dogs could be conscious, which implies that they could not distinguish between an intruder and the "thought" of a large gory bone streaked with webs of fat and bits of grizzle. And as to human consciousness, I had the idea in the tip of my mind that it was always just an instant and it could hardly as such be conditioned. I had to take a further short step which I did not take, incredibly, until I had gone through a laborious ascent to the summit of philosophy, which was as if I had been within fifty yards of Mt Everest and remembered I forgot my camera and went down to base camp to get it and came back.

      Given the development of human intelligence in the individual, another problem was why this sort of mental conditioning persisted into adulthood and even old age (and I knew of some very neurotic old men, who are called grumps and the butt of much good-natured chuckling)? Here again it took a long philosophical process before I could discern an answer, theoretical but serviceable.

      Freud's explanation on the origins of neurosis was that all neurotics had a particularly traumatic moment in their infancy which they hoarded like the Ring of the Nibelungen but had forgotten where they hid it, and it was only with a mind cartographer like him that the possessor of the Ring could discover its whereabouts. It usually turned out that the trauma wasn't a ring but the memory of your prostitute of a mother getting beat up by a drunken sailor, and that shouldn't have been so easy to forget, which put neurotics in the Freudian scheme of things a notch above fruit-flies, and all fruit-flies know is how to reproduce, something by the way some neurotics do not.

      Now, my transposition of behavioral conditioning to the mind sounded very clever, especially if I eliminated the "consciousness" part, but it lacked continuity, so to speak. Like Freud, I was looking at the cause of neurosis, but not for the reasons why neurosis persisted and there was the problem of the neurotic still being neurotic after the cathartic revelation that his or her mother had serviced violent, intoxicated swabbies, which was not something to brag about but no reason to over-react either.

      I put the problem in this brutal manner because I want to emphasize that, despite Freud's therapeutic claims, neurotics keep going back to their analysts who after many reciprocal consultations and uncounted psychoanalytic congresses have spinned out innumerable variations on the OEdipus complex, a classic one being that neurotics are not in love with their mothers but with their mothers' chicken soup or gefilte fish, as the case may be, a source of many merry neurotic Jewish jokes. It hardly needs saying that my talk here about whores and drunken sailors was itself just another illustrative joke via Hitchcock. It is well known that in Hollywood Freud and neurosis are plot devices and the psychoanalytic struggle against repression, an inexhaustible source of happy endings.

      The explanation for the persistence of neurosis is what I later solved with a plausible theory of cognition (actually I am only being modest and I really mean the definitive theory of cognition). The means for the persistence of neurotic traits was another issue altogether and it was part and parcel of mental conditioning. For this breakthrough I needed the crucial concept of "neurotic forms".

      Anybody who knows the rudiments of anything has to know that there is a distinction between substance and form. Most people might not go much beyond that, but it is easy to see that form is something that repeats itself a lot. Substance too, like wooden chairs, tables, and spoons, but form is what makes it possible to say that a plastic mushroon at a luncheonette is a table or a beat up old Volkswagen a car.

      What I had in hand with neurosis was the problem of reducing multiplicity--and some smart neurotics are very multiplicitous--to a manageable number of categories. That was what I thought neurotic forms would help me achieve. The basic argument was that, just as anything, as long it wasn't vertical or too inclined to rest things upon it, could work as a table, so all those moments that made people feel extremely bored or dissatisfied with life could be reduced to certain abstract categories, what Locke called "sortals"--as in "sort of"--and I prefer to call "types". Neurotic forms were types of neurotic tokens. Tokens are substitute coins you put in slots, but they are also specific happenings although sometimes philosophers use "token" to mean "type", but you cannot in this life go around thinking that philosophers are always agreed on the meaning of what they are saying.

On the other hand, there was the cheering thought that in the near future first class travellers will be able to shower with economy class waste

Consciousness conditioning (for conveniences's sake provisionally I will go on using this controvertible phrase) and neurotic forms were intimately related. Consciousness conditioning was the general designation for neurotic forms. It engendered neurotic forms and it was thus also the general designation for neurosis-producing traumatic experiences. Now, it would, I should think, surprise any one that infantile traumas should go on recurring through life if only because infants outgrow their condition sooner or later. Theoretically, reason takes over at some stage in an individual's evolution and puts the things that happened during infancy in perspective.

      Going back to my previous jokey example, sure having a whore for a mother is no cause for pride, but if you examine the situation cooly you should be able to conclude that you had nothing to do with what she did and if you're not an incurable blabber there's no reason why any one else should find out about it, and even if some one did, there was the obvious retort that, though you loved your mother warts and all, you yourself were not a whore, unless you happened to be one in which case you probably would not feel shame for what your mother did. That this is not always the way it plays out is due to the operation of neurotic forms.

      In consciousness conditioning, the mind remains vulnerable after the infantile traumas have been hidden from memory. In detaching themselves from infantile conditioning, neurotic forms, like the ghost of Christmas Past, hover or float over experience to which they attach or adhere without any perceivable cause or under no recognizable pattern of circumstances. What is worse, neurotic forms not only persist but also tend to reinforce themselves, thus bringing about that neurosis instead of diminishing tends to increase and that conditioning can actually take place in solitude.

      This may seem implausible, but it is quite inconsequential compared to breeder reactors which are fed spent uranium fuel and produce more atomic fuel, in the form of plutonium, than they were fed. For the ecology minded, it is as if a factory were being fed shit and producing larger piles of it without any improvement in the quality. This is not expecting too much since there are devices which are fed something very much like liquid shit and can produce pure water, a technological feat that may make shower stalls in first class quite common in future long-haul flights.

      But getting back to my speculations on neurosis, what I was claiming was that a neurotic remains a neurotic always, which is something psychoanalysts of course knew whatever they might say to the contrary, and also that neurotics tend to become more neurotic and that their lives are not only the result of infantile traumas but in themselves one unending trauma interrupted only by the daily respite of sleep (and some neurotics are insomniacs). All of this was a far cry from Freud who, in my expanding perspective, seemed to have discovered neurosis only because he had fantasies about his mother and possessed a large penis.

      As in any scientific endeavor, I had not gone about my work in a fully systematic manner, which in this case would have consisted in finding first consciousness conditioning, then the general concept of neurotic forms, then instances of neurotic forms, and so on. As a matter of fact, I started with one specific neurotic form and from there went on to the general concept, for which I could only account through consciousness conditioning. I was, as I said, unsure of the terminology and its implications, but the concepts seemed coherent enough. And as to my seemingly presumptuous comparison to a scientist, let me just say that relativity, particle physics, and Big Bang cosmology were not discovered in an orderly step-one-to-step-two way and that, unless I am misreading pop-scientific analogies, these fields of research have not yet been unified, which if they had would be called a GUT (one of the grossest analogies I have come across).

      Be that as it may, I came up with a sum total of three or four neurotic forms, which seems like a ridiculously small figure, but only because I cut short my research for reasons I will explain in brief. As to why I say "three or four" and not an exact number (as would be expected in any scientific project worth its salt), it is due solely to the earnestness with which I proceeded in my work, which made me doubt whether I should include obsessiveness as a neurotic form, not just because I did not explore said phenomenon deeply enough, but because I already had "fixation".

My fixation on why the Mandolin Player made better speeches than I did

Fixation was the first of the neurotic forms I identified. This is how it came about. I was, as usual, having problems with some contemptibly trivial matter. The specific circumstances are irrelevant--say, why the Mandolin Player from the time of my political career made better speeches than I did--because as I have already explained neurosis is a burden that can't be shaken and tends to get heavier. Wisely, I told myself: "Take the long view", in its exact Keynesian meaning. To my utter surprise, the problem disappeared. I obliterated the Mandolin Player.

      I was overjoyed. It was like the time old Spyberg was pumping me with drugs and I thought I had gotten over my sickly longing for Fanny and even my resentment over Life With Mother. When I tried the same alakazam-trick again, it worked again and I thought I had life licked. It was like boiling Marcus Aurelius to Himself down to one numinous sentence, which was so simple but so pregnant with wisdom the thought I would ever forget it was like courting absolute disbelief. However, the third or fourth time I went into my routine I had to use the magic formula not once or twice but many times and even then the Mandolin Player refused to go away, and not only did he not disappear, but the "take the long view" injunction, which seemed to be failing miserably against such a pitiable obstacle, itself became a problem. 

      Do not be misled by the satirical inflection in these writings into thinking I was not serious about neurosis. This, for instance, is the very serious way in which I defined fixation at that time (the asides I added as I went along now): "Fixation is an arbitrary hiatus in the stream of consciousness. It may originate in a pleasurable or revelatory, or pleasurable because revelatory, intuition or realization [the obliteration of the Mandolin Player] that is insensibly transformed into empty syllogizing [why is the Mandolin Player not obliterated?] and into verbal circularity, where even meaning finally disappears." This last was the awful thought that it was possible the Mandolin Player could never be obliterated.

      This is the even more serious manner in which I conceived the long-view example used above: "In the presence of an existential dilemma, reason may prompt: ‘Take the long view' [the not unreasonable expectation that the Mandolin Player would be obliterated], producing release of tension. At this stage fixation involves two distinct steps: one, even if [the Mandolin Player] does not disappear, [he] can be ejected from awareness, but neurotic fixation keeps returning to the injunction ‘Take the long view' until it is transmuted it into a formula without rational force or even meaning; and two, exhaustion within or reality outside the mind will finally make the ‘long view' operative [the Mandolin Player gets tired and goes away], but by then release and intentionality, even the unity of self, will have been transformed out of all recognition." I didn't know why neurotic fixation kept doing this to me unlesss it was because I couldn't believe I had actually obliterated the pertinacious Mandolin Player.

      Anyway, all that sounded quite impressive except that most of the concepts had not been properly defined. This definition thing kept appearing as the main obstacle in the smooth flow of my thinking, and there were many obstacles. Above, "pleasurable" and "revelatory" were alright but what was "intuition"? It was fine if it just meant "knowing something", but what I want to underscore here is the looseness in the use of terms.

      Again, "empty syllogizing" had a lot going for it--after all, I had been at Clearwater and I knew what Wittgenstein had said about logic going around in circles like a Ferris wheel--but why would any form of syllogizing not be considered "reason", which all it made it was another swinging chair hung on the Ferris wheel? And the last part about exhaustion allowing reality to take charge [presumably after the obliteration of the stubborn Mandolin Player] said something I knew only too well--so well I can still recognize it at a considerable distance--but would it be clear enough to an audience, even if it was entirely composed of certified neurotics, among whom you couldn't be sure there wouldn't be a mandolin player or two? Anyhow, it was the one significant lesson I derived from my analysis of fixation and I will refer to it again shortly.

If you were wasted by a rig, you could at least be certain that you were not going to be run over by a train, and that would be a relief, wouldn't it?

To complicate matters, the neurosis-phase in my life was part of the meaning-of-life period. I said before that I was clear on that meaning-of-life could only signify absence of pain. That was a lie. I told it because I did not want to seem too naive without a lot of previous contextualization, which would have given sophisticated Manhattanites a lot to sneer at. This contextualization I think I have done and I can now admit I was slightly more specific about meaning-of-life than that. What I further intended by meaning-of-life was that at every moment of experience you could have a knowledge such that would make you impervious to pain.

      OK, you will be asking: "So what's the difference?" The difference is that it wasn't just a no-pain thing that was involved in meaning-of-life but an insight into why in the normal course of life there was no cause to feel unnecessary pain unless of course you were being made to feel actual physical pain, like getting hit by a truck, in which case life would have no meaning at all.

      But there I go again with my ironies and jokes! Even getting hit by a truck could be meaningful if you had some clear understandings, such as that you weren't the only one in the universe in that predicament, that maybe the damage wasn't that bad, or that if it was that bad, even terminal, you could at least be certain that you were not going to be run over by a train, and that would be a relief, wouldn't it? What I meant was that there are always reasons for not seeing the underbelly of life, which if you managed to obtain would be very meaningful indeed, and the problem was that those reasons were not instantly available in every circumstance. You could reduce them to a peppy phrase such as "Take the long view", but how much faster could you take the long view than a speeding rig could hit you if you weren't looking in its direction?

      Possibly the imminence of death did make your entire life pass in front of your eyes (possibly; not likely, mind you), but you certainly weren't going to extract in that instant all the wisdom you had accumulated over many years. And fixation consisted in trying to do precisely the contrary all the time, which could have led to not doing anything at all ever and feeling anxious about it. You could end up in a permanent state of pure, unmitigated anxiety. I am certain that some will be thinking: "This is not neurotic; this is just plain dumb", and let me tell you, for once without giving in an inch, that everyone has little dodges to hand and that neurotics, precisely because they are neurotic, are prone to put more stock on them than the rest of mankind.

      There was one deduction from the concept of fixation I would not forget and would later make the key to my final position on these issues and it was that no matter how hard fixation tried to stick to a bit of spurious wisdom [what good was it if it didn't work against the Mandolin Player?] or some formula for alleviating pain, reality finally barged in and dragged awareness along [leaving the Mandolin Player behind]. The implication here was that time willy nilly overcame fixation and anything that neurosis wanted to throw at it. This understanding did not deter me from pursuing other neurotic forms.

In future to avoid macho grammar I will use the bisexual "shehe", which raises the question of why not "she-he-it", but this sounds too much like "you-know-what", and it also begs the question of eunuchs

The next neurotic form I explored, dispersion, sounds as if it had been obtained through a contrast with fixation, but I was not working in this frivolous manner. It did follow upon fixation but not in the aprioristic way that contrasting a term suggests. If fixation could lead to being hit by a truck--because you were, say, not fixating on left-side of the road driving, which often happens to tourists in England--then dispersion was the sense of extreme disorientation you experience after impact. The likeliest thing would be that you did not know where the truck came from and you yourself ignored whether you were coming or going. In such extreme situations, you don't even know whether you should expect an ambulance or try to drag yourself to the nearest sidewalk and hope that cars are not allowed on them. But then of course there are bicycles, which are, but I think you get my point.

      This, incidentally, can happen even to locals in London and I remember the occasion near Trafalgar I saw a young man, seemingly trying to outrun a bus, but possibly confused about the direction of traffic, get thrown like an inexperienced torero by a very big and angry bull. He did not die but was pretty shaken and hunkered against a metal casing on a traffic island looking dazed.

      When I later told a cabbie about it, he said impassively: "He was in good shape", which did sound sensible and not encouraging to further elaboration. London taxi drivers do not, in my opinion, live up to their reputation of being the princes of politesse. Of course, New York taxi drivers will throw small coins in your face and will even spit on you, unless you call them god-damned sob's, upon which they will tone it down and contain their rage until they get their claws into another dispersed individual. 

      I experienced dispersion usually after a period of fixation, but not exclusively under such circumstances. In fixation, as I explained, you wanted to be rid of the Mandolin Player and you tried to do it through a verbal thaumaturgy. Words worked at first, but after a while the incantation literally lost its magic and you still had the annoying Mandolin Player and in addition the befuddlement at the failure of your strongest weapon against him. But time waits for no one and after a wasting struggle you were so tired, you just had to move on with or without the Mandolin Player. But when you wanted to move on, you discovered that you didn't really know what it was you wanted to move on to. This was dispersion.

      It happens to authors after they finish a chapter or even just one day's production and the next day they sit looking at a blank page and not certain where to go from there. It doesn't happen to accountants, nor in most professions. Medical doctors could be faced with unusual symptoms that would dictate a pause in the seamless rollover over of placebo prescriptions. CEO's too will find themselves unsure as to where to go after a merger unless the merger occurred through a very clear vision of what it was supposed to achieve, not usually the case as they are generally the result of greed. What I am trying to get at is that dispersion as momentary disorientation is not exclusive to neurotics although it doesn't seem to afflict "ordinary people" much. On the other hand, it happens to neurotics in circumstances where so-called ordinary people just waltz or drag themselves through (depending on how much sleep they got the previous night or how much coffee they have to consume to come alive again).

      I saw dispersion in a much more hystrionic manner, which I dressed up in metaphorical and abstract language: "When awareness goes on a rampage of disconnected thoughts and images, it is trying to avoid the purposeful movement of thought. It digs in its heels against time, groping for an anchor within itself." From a certain perspective fixation and dispersion were after the same thing: the suspension of time or what I called a "hiatus in purpose and willing".  

      Now, apart from its impossibility, which could be compared to the young man hit by the bus wishing he could have run backward instead of forward, most people would probably not understand why some one would try to accomplish the stopping or reversing of the flow of time, but for a neurotic any ordinary, relatively painless state of life was preferable to the becoming of experience, because whatever came after carried the threat of pain, and remember--solely for the sake of the coherence of these ideas; not necesarily their accuracy--that the problem I started with was pain and its persistence in the neurotic condition.

      In other words, for most people life was generally good but it had its downside; the neurotic instead was always looking at the underbelly which was why she or he--in future to avoid macho grammar I will use the bisexual "shehe", which raises the question of why not "she-he-it", but this sounds to much like "you-know-what", and it also begs the question of eunuchs--wanted to find the means to avoid pain entirely. This was patently fond wishing, so shehe reverted to the one self-evident cure-all, and this was to stop things from happening, to stop the flow of time, to stay in any parcel of time that wasn't painful, however inconsequential it might have been. But this was even less possible than a verbal wand to ward off pain. In other words, it was impossible to be sure the Mandolin Player would disappear forever.

After dispersion, there came a period of disorientation during which you didn't know exactly what you wanted to do and didn't even care if you were stuck with the Mandolin Player the rest of your life

So where, the alert Dear Reader will ask, did the neurotic get this foolish notion that it would be possible to stop time? I think the answer to that one was consciousness, or more aptly the illusion of consciousness. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself by belittling awareness before I have presented all the preliminary work needed to do that. Of couse, this already is like asking the trick question: "Which is heavier: a kilo of cotton or a kilo of iron?", and adding: "Remember, now, that one kilo cannot be heavier than another kilo".

      What I can do without giving anything else away is to concentrate on what I thought about consciousness at the time I was investigating neurosis. It turns out that, even though I was irreligious and a functional atheist, I imagined consciousness very much as something that was a person but could get outside of said person and look back on the person it was, exactly like a soul or spirit departing the body of the unlucky person we have so often seen before getting hit by a rig and suffering terminal damage. In a living person, consciousness consisted in observing oneself, which was like the ability to observe things different from oneself, except that one could also pick up things and move them about and keep them or throw them away, and could consciousness do that little trick too? Why, yes! And more!

      Through consciousness I could see myself in experience and as soon as I did my experience was transformed. The "sincerity" was gone. Every time I thought of myself I was in what Sartre calls mauvaise foi. Whereas I could not change the nature of a stone when I saw it and picked it up, when I became aware of my feelings I felt I was not really having those feelings. I was changing them just from the fact of "seeing" them, which in a way is understandanble enough because if I was telling a woman how much I loved her, my awareness of loving her was not the act of love itself, but since loving and the awareness of loving were attributable to the same person at the same time I was both loving and not loving the same woman.

      This process got very complicated if you also became aware of being aware. The reduplication of awareness could give rise to the multiple-personality kind of situation involved in my wanting a pizza with anchovies, and having second thoughts and wanting pepperoni instead, and considering why not pepperoni and anchovies? And then, just for balance, extra mozzarella? But there were the calories to think about, and so on, until I finally had to make a specific choice.

      Involved here was a false premise I will only hint at now to the extent of crediting Ryle, the dispositions man, with having seen it and making a big stink over it, which had impressed Dennet so much he went and started calling people zombies as you already know from my account of the proceedings at Clearwater.

      The point was that mind could seem manipulable to consciousness and it was this illusion that nurtured the neurotic fallacy that maybe you could hold time back, or more accurately, that you could put a leash on the mind and not let it stray from such a simple situation as: I am feeling OK now, so let's not go and spoil things by going into an uncertain future where for sure for sure I am not going to be feeling as OK as I feel now. Life does not work this way, but neurotics live a lot in the consciousness of themselves.

      Getting back to dispersion and my favourite metaphor for neurosis, it was "a hiatus in purpose and willing". It was also like a form of abulia, which can be compared to a virulent form of anorexia. However, in dispersion, as in fixation, organized voluntary activity eventually returned, "like casual, unwilled manifestations of the unity of self", and all this meant was that even anorexics will allow themselves the occasional munch.

      One of the dangers that always lay in the future was "recurrence". This was another neurotic form. Let's start by putting it very simply: after you had spent an exhausting time fixated on some hopeless ploy to obliterate the Mandolin Player from your mind, you finally gave up relented and tension eased off, followed by a period of disorientation during which you didn't know exactly what you wanted to do or where you wanted to go [didn't care if the Mandolin Player came along], and when you finally got your bearings, wham!, you were floored by the memory of how much time you had just squandered in fixation and disperson and you became ashamed of yourself and afraid that it was possible you might have to go through the same rigmarole again, maybe soon, like the useless sessions in Sundance's cell. This was recurrence.

      Now, if you think that recurrence sounds like a serious case of nothing much, just remember I had lost a lot of money in a most regrettable manner and even though I knew it was useless to regret those unfortunate events, that did not change the way I felt about them and I could not prevent my regret from recurring time and again. Recurrence then had to do with regret. It was the critical awareness of self constantly coming back to mind in the form of regret. Here too there is a pedantic version: "Neurotic recurrence acts as a mechanism for the subsconscious dredging of the past resulting in anxiety-riddled and anxiety-producing states of mind. It seems to be engendered by itself and to have no other purpose than to reinforce itself. Recurrence frequently appears as feelings of guilt, which are an unspecified form of regret." This was a mouthful and it requires some old-fashioned explication de texte.

      The concept of "dredging" was viable, but I did not pause to consider the qualifier "subconscious". Presumably I could be dredging the past "consciously", but the past had to be subconscious because then consciousness would have contained the past and the present at the same time and this would have been like a two- or even a three-headed ostrich, or, God forbid!, a mandolin orchestra. Dredging usually involved a purpose, often unsavory, like destroying the environment or looking for corpses, and that was close to what happened in recurrence. 

I signed my doodles "Monet" and put a brave front when some one told me to my face: "Hey, that's not a Monet" 

A significant aspect to this text (a "subtext" if I wanted to sound very knowing), as in the others I have dredged from my voluminous diaries, is that a strong distinction was made between the neurotic and the "normal" condition. In the so-called normal condition the past was colorless. In the neurotic condition it was dabbed with shrill colours, like entering your house and discovering that a madman had trashed the interior and painted a huge tiger on a wall. This might have had the imprint of genius, but any one, I am sure, would have preferred to return to a more humdrum domesticity.

      The key to neurotic forms was "malaise". It was a word with pedigree. It might have been what killed Chatterton. Baudelaire suffered from it. The post-war French existentialists used it to describe the way they usually felt, which was why they either wore black or gave clothes a good tumbling before putting them on (unless they were one-piece leotards like those Juliette Greco slinked into). It didn't help that their favorite pasttime was to sit dejectedly in bars making caustic remarks about others and life in general. Arguably, it was the other way around, but whatever the truth in this matter, malaise was of the essence. Malaise was like tedium or ennui, but even less precise, the exact correlate of angst, which could be anything from a premonition to a hangover. And it was precisely the use of malaise to characterize neurotic forms that chrystalized my doubts about the way I was going about in my investigations.

      However hard I tried specifying fixation, I kept seeing it as part and parcel of the search for so-called meaning, the potential parodic content of which remained undefused. Alright, I admit I hate ridicule, in which I am like my father, but it wasn't in this case so much my fear of the ridicule of others as of the ridicule I made of my own ideas. Meaning? Spare me! Absence of pain? What? You think I've got my thumb up my ass? I no more believed that "non-neurotics" did not experience pain than I could imagine engaging in a debate on how many heads an ostrich could have, even though with its neck there was plenty of room for more than one.

      I wasn't entirely wasting time in my dealings with neurotic forms, but maybe I had the wrong take. Dispersion was less significant as a source of anxiety than it was as a clue to the definition of willing. It seemed to point to a subconscious process rather than to the religious scenario of the self in command of its faculties looking at a kind of multiple choice question and after due deliberation plumping for one answer which was duly registered as a deed accomplished for which consequently the self was totally accountable.

      The evidence I had that undermined this scenario was as good for others as it was for me. Even though I was quite sure I was different from all the other ducklings, whom I intimately detested, I couldn't get away from the fact that I waddled and quacked and swam like them. In trying to single out certain psychological quirks, which turned out not to be so different from the reported experience of others, I was only succeeding in sounding like a pompous ass and as between this and a plain ordinary duck I probably preferred the latter. 

      In addition to not being unique to neurosis, neurotic forms were also hard to distinguish from one another for various reasons. One was that they were all like travesties of reality, as if I had been doodling and afterwards labelled my doodles "by Da Vinci", "by Rembrandt", "by Monet", and so on. Another reason was that to insist on my arbitrary attributions was skirting extreme subjectivity, as if some one had said: "Hey, that's not a Monet", and I kept saying it was. What invalidated my claim conclusively was that all my doodles looked the same, so if I stuck to the authenticity of my "forgeries" I would have to claim that they were either by Da Vinci, by Rembrandt, or by Monet, but not by the three.

      Concretely (so to speak), disperson and recurrence resembled fixation, but also dispersion could provide fertile ground for recurrence or fixation, and fixation for recurrence or dispersion, and so on. What's more, even if after every one had seen through my doodles I still refused to back down, the final acid test was that no one was going to buy them not only because I was an impostor but because my doodles were worthless. This is by way of saying that neurosis made dealing with the world complicated and even painful, but reality could not be ignored: it always in the end required some rational response. And in this sense, even though neurosis might have seemed, upon a very persnickety inspection, different from malaise (feeling out of sorts), they were fundamentally indistinguishable. The nearer I tried to get to a rational reduction of its multiplicity, the more elusive the neurotic condition became.

The modern discoverer of fellatio is redeemed by his ugly German wife

Ironically, I was closest to psychological singularity in the one neurotic form which I only toyed with and gave up on because I already had its twin in fixation. This was what I called obsessiveness. I have mentioned many times my obsessive idea of torturing torturers. I travelled in Uzbekistan and I was not once consumed with indignation at the huge statues they had erected there in honor of Tamerlane. Nor did the glorification of Jenghis Khan excite extreme anger the winter I spent in Ulan Bator, maybe because I had my hands full trying not to freeze to death. I had thoughts of torture in connection with individuals I remembered from my own past, but I knew that, since I could not have charged them with any great crime, these thoughts depended on my changing moods.

      Nevertheless, my obsession could seem very real and when I heard of children being mutilated in atrocious civil wars I thought that I could take those responsible for such deeds and pinion them to a table. Then I'd have one of Gerard David's torturers take each one in turn and cut off one ball (or one ovary, as the case may be) and dangle it in front of shehe's eyes, then do the same to the other ball (ovary), then have his prick (her clitoris) cut off and stuck in shehe's mouth, which I would sew up tightly, and finally I'd have shehe placed in a sack full of cats which I would hang from a rafter and prod with pitchforks, although this would be unfair to the cats. As you can see, the torture-the-torturers obsession pursues me. It can be quite exhausting.

      Another obsession was sexual. I knew of course some classic examples. Sade turned me off with his references to coprophagia which did not accord with my clean-ass mania. Lionized at one time, Henry Miller can now be safely dismissed as the founder of x-ratings, an honour once reserved for D H Lawrence, the modern discoverer of fellatio, until he redeemed himself through his loyalty to his ugly German wife. The last of the great studio men, Stanley Kubrick--he believed sets were more real than life--appeared to have been obsessed with sex towards the end of his life. However, compared to, say, Buñuel's Belle de Jour, which is a real prick-raiser, his last film Eyes Wide Shut is risible and comic-book fantasy: in one scene a masked man in a tux parades inside a circle of naked women saying to each one what sounds like the highly irrelevant "vaiii fanguuullooo". 

      My own obsession was simple but mesmerizing. In it I was leading one of my ex-wives or ex-lovers by the hand half-naked into a place where everything went. I can hear Dear Reader saying "Big Deal", and, yes, I will admit the rejoinder is possibly deserved. Anyway, what sent me up was not so much the licentiousness implicit in my dream, not even the thought of the direct sexual delectations that awaited me, as that the woman I had in tow--whom, crucially, I had made an unblushing addict to unbridled sex (excuse the lurid clichés, which seem appropriate here)--was my sexual slave and not just in doing everything I commanded her to but in that her mind and her sensuality belonged entirely to me and I could experience exactly what she thought and what she did and what she felt. This meant that what I was going to do had to be coordinated with what she was doing--for instance, if she was being screwed out of her fucking mind, I might have been screwing some one else, but only so that I could increase my enjoyment screwing her later--and you could say that I was as much her slave as she was mine. Whatever, I tell it as I remember it and besides obsessiveness had no future in a theory of neurosis which itself had no future, and this was as unpromising as an idea can be.

My feelings of regret were as if in a circus an awful man-eating tiger had escaped from its cage and as I successfully ran away from it I was faced by a rampaging elephant

I did say before I had not wasted entirely the time I gave to my work on neurosis and there were solid grounds for believing this. They had to do with recurrence, the neurotic form associated with guilt. Actually, what I claimed was that recurrence resembled regret, but I was experiencing difficulties because regret and guilt appeared to be indistinguishable and whereas guilt by definition had to have some basis in ethical beliefs, regret was or seemed fundamentally irrational. It was like that piece of Chinese wisdom about not worrying if there was a solution and not worrying if there wasn't, which I don't want to vouch for as either wise or Chinese but which is impeccably logical.

      In any event, even if some regret disappeared or could be explained away, it was the recalcitrant discomfort of regret that best defined neurotic recurrence and it was much stronger than the pangs of guilt. Since from childhood I knew about sin and Hell and the Devil, my adult feelings of regret were as if in a circus an awful man-eating tiger had escaped from its cage and as I successfully ran away from it I was faced by a rampaging elephant.

      Let me paraphrase the problem to make my dilemma perfectly clear. Moral guilt was supposed to be very bad but, as it turned out, regret, which was nonsense, had all the earmarks of moral guilt. Either moral guilt was nonsense or regret was not nonsensical at all. It could also be that both were bad. The good part here was that, since I could not avoid regretting, I felt at least secure in my deterministic perspective on behaviour, although it didn't do any good in alleviating regret either. The upshot was that after prolonged searching I discovered that my search was useless or that I had been strenously searching for nothing.

      But wait a god-damned second here! It wasn't entirely useless. I wasn't completely empty-handed. I was sure of this from various irresistible arguments. I knew that ethics was real because, like me, most people were neither serial murderers nor habitual thieves. Alright, maybe there was a lot of pilferage going on, like using company computers for your e-mailings, but this was not as if ordinary folk went around robbing banks or defrauding their employers.

      I was moral and relatively free of blame--unless being totally flawed as a person was a sin--and what was it that made me so moral? That I habitually was on the good side of the law. And why was I so law-abiding? Well, because social norms had somehow been instilled in me and were determining my conduct. The infringement of laws had the same import as the breaking of moral commandments. Lawfulness and morality were exactly the same thing. Moral guilt was explicable in reference to moral norms and moral norms were valid as expressions of collective beliefs. Even if determined, my behaviour was, as I had promised before to explain, moral in every possible sense because it was unavoidably social.

      Dostoyevsky was wrong and Nietzsche was right. "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The Brothers Karamazov--the biggest piece of padding in the history of literature--had it all wrong. It wasn't the fear of God that made humans behave in an acceptably social manner but the pressure of society itself. And Nietzsche had been correct in surmising there were no foundational arguments for being moral and the lower you went in the social scale the more people were intimidated by society. It stood to reason that the Duchesse de Guermantes wasn't going to feel the same social pressure to behave properly as her lackeys, even though ironically it was she who set the social tone in Proust's Paris but this was mere show and vanity. Nothing to do with murder and larceny. But I wasn't free and clear yet.

      Why were people so amenable to social norms? There had to be a deep personal cause or else society was like a small cop saying: "I am gonna hit you over the head with this nightstick", which was obviously made of soft rubber; or pulling out a bright-red revolver with a tiny hole at the end of what was obviously a blocked cannon: "So, OK. Go ahead and squirt me, you stunted piece of pig fuzz!" I wasn't anywhere near an answer to that one, probably because I was interested in other issues, specifically in how guilt and regret were different.

      Guilt obviously arose when you infringed the norms that society instilled. Regret, if it meant anything, was something like "psychological guilt". There were good social reasons for moral guilt. Regret was the desire that something that actually happened had not happened and in that sense it was like moral guilt. But psychological guilt involved regret without an apparent rational cause and this was as if you were being intimidated by the runty cop with the soft-rubber stick and the plastic water gun, which didn't make any sense at all.

      I did not have final answers to all these ethical issues, but I had at least established certain premises and categories. Morality and legality were the same. Guilt and regret were different, although both were forms of regret. More accurately there was moral guilt and psychological guilt and although moral guilt involved regret, regret mostly attached to psychological guilt.

      The missing equation was between regret and anxiety and a further missing piece was the specific self. But with what I had achieved, I could put ethical issues to rest for a while. Besides, ethics had never been central to my preoccupations. It was just a given, which was why I did not understand St. Augustine and the big son et lumière he put on about his conversion. Then again, he, unlike me, believed in an after-life. It was even difficult for me to believe that he believed in an after-life. His belief, or any belief, in an after-life, for me was like people saying they were addicted to dog biscuits, which I could understand only if there was a big scarcity of other food. Well, St. Augustine lived at a time when there was a big scarcity of knowledge about most everything.

Although I deserved a knighthood more than Karl Popper, I knew my chances of being dubbed Sir Carlos were not good

Whatever doubts remained (and this is pure understatement), my neurosis and meaning-of-life periods were over. Which ended first? I know the meaning-of-life phase commenced first and that neurosis was like a cycle inside that phase. Possibly the neurosis cycle went beyond the meaning-of-life phase. More likely the neurosis cycle was the last gasp of the meaning-of-life phase. But the coup de grâce for both was the discovery that what I needed was a theory of knowledge and this in turn made possible a distinction between private and public philosophies.

      I had started my philosophical career--all the previous dabblings had not had lasting consequences--with my going bust and turning to God. Put this way, my conversion compared badly with going to Damascus or In Hoc Signo Vinces, which would have been as if Paul and Constantine had become Christians because they suddenly realized that they stood to make a killing by renouncing their previous beliefs and embracing the cross. This was literally the case of Constantine who did kill a lot of people in the Milvian Bridge, but Paul, who was sure to lose his previous job as head of a permanent anti-Christian posse, was not going to make any kind of profit through his conversion.

      Well, my appeal to God was not that banausic either and I only emphasize the materialistic component to make my attitude easily understandable without having to get soppy about my other strictly personal problems. However, the seemingly quantifiable cause of my conversion soon became mired in rather murky considerations about the meaning of life. I tried reducing the fuzziness through the idea of absence of pain, which was feeling good or what materialists like to call fun.

      In the materialist creed the purpose of life is fun. Millionaires have fun. When Lawson, Thatcher's banished rival in her own cabinet, wanted to say how satisfactory his youthful career as a journalist in the FT had been he said he was having fun. It was fun going to art exhibitions with calves fetuses in formaldehyde or paintings of Christ that smelled of piss. Boy, was it fun! Give the masses fun (not bread and circus) was the winning formula of capitalism rampant in the 80s and 90s, although the fun thing went way back and I remember a Panamanian I once met on a flight to whom I explained that I was working for some cause or other--probably for the socialist/commies in Costaguana--and he looked askance and said that didn't sound like "fun", in which he was absolutely right of course. He was having a lot of fun in Miami living the "good life" and having a lot of fun evading taxes until somebody had a lot of fun turning him in after which some IRS auditors had a lot of fun chasing him back to Panama where he got caught up in the wrong side of the fun collaring Noriega, who until then had been having a lot of fun selling cocaine to Americans avid for loads of long-lasting fun. So I was right on in the meaning-of-life department as long as it was about fun. Unfortunately, I was not having fun and this meant I was having pain and the pain as I saw it had to do with neurosis and to deal with neurosis I did not have any convenient materialist concepts to hand such as going bust or having fun.

      Neurosis could be as palpable as the nose on your face when it had to do with manias and phobias and you could speak of the rat man and the horsy woman but when it was just a question of feeling out of sorts, talk of neurosis became highly subjective--not that anything was ever not subjective--and it was possible to make very debatable claims, or to put it trenchantly: it was impossible to make statements that were not debatable. Even a seemingly innocuous common denominator of neurosis such as malaise could be a source of puzzlement as I observed when I used the phrase the "malaise of awareness" to an Irish priest with a good theological background acquired in the Vatican itself--I had imagined a man versed in the subtleties of original sin and guilt would at least have an inkling of what I was talking about--and he looked as if I had switched from English to Tuareg.

      Now, it is a fact that many writers, probably most writers, certainly all tenured academics in political and other social studies departments, have thrived by scrupulously eschewing hard facts and knowing how to string together a lot of fuzzy sentences, but I hadn't had much wordly success in that mode of thinking and writing. I didn't know exactly why, but I figured it was because I did not have the right connections, which was probably due to my stiff neck, an attitude I had no intention of even trying to soften that late into my life.

      I knew that for certain my speculations on consciousness conditioning and neurotic forms, which were undeveloped and gappy but much superior to penis envy and OEdipus complex, had as much chance of being accepted for publication as I had of being dubbed Sir Carlos. My lack of a knighthood might seem understandable, especially to some prejudiced reader of these memoirs (from whom I deliberately withhold the "dear"), but it wasn't quite that self-evident to me who considered that Karl Popper had been knighted on the strength of piles of baloney so big they might have undercut the price of salami for decades if they had been the real stuff. It may seem unfair to single out Popper here when I could have mentioned Karl Jaspers or Teilhard de Chardin or so many many others as well, and I did it only because of his knighthood as being an honour never to be within my reach, whereas conceivably I could still, through some double or treble fluke, acquire a reputation as an existentialist theologian, which basically means whining about how tough it is to believe in God, which made believing all the more imperative, and so on, and as Dear Reader knows I had abundant experience in that department.

      But even if I had found publishers for my fuzzy writings, I don't think I would have been content because in my heart of hearts I loved facts and I hated imprecision and groundless speculation and in what I had to do in life, which was to know what business I had being alive, I wanted to have an idea of at least the ground I was stepping on. What I mean is: philosophy was a matter of life and death and even if I did not discover anything that could be of use in making my life more, how would I put it?, more fun, I still wanted to know how reliable my statements were and why in some cases if I made statements that were not totally reliable it was because it was not possible to make reliable statements at all. I know Dear Reader will find many occasions to find my statements unreliable even when I consider them the least unreliable that can be had, and I can only ask shehe, in what follows, to be indulgent and to try to give me at least a passing grade for trying.

Some of my beliefs were as if I had gone to a congress of astrophysics and lectured on how I had finally learned to identify Orion    

A theory of knowledge, which was the next step in my investigations, implied certain observations concerning the nature of the work I had done during the meaning-of-life phase and, further to that, a distinction between private and public philosophies. Faith and praying and particularly expecting prayer to have some influence on what happened to me in life were very private affairs, but when in my philosophical prayers I tried to square my hopes for God's intervention with the facts of life, where miracles are as common as snow in the Galapagos, I was philosophizing. Admittedly, it was starry-eyed and hopeless, but I was making an effort. For instance: I believed in the ontological chain--the same as determinism--so I appealed to God's omnipotence, which raised, as we saw, many complicated issue, with the result that I ended up the recitation of my philosophical orisons with canonical prayers to demonstrate submission and credo quia absurdum. This was an affirmation of faith against the weight of evidence, like believing that you could get out of the IRT even in the midst of a rush hour mob.

      Even before I began my search for a theory of knowledge, I knew there were propositions that, unlike seeing a rig headed in my direction and quickly jumping out of its way, could not be verified. But this did not mean that my theological fantasies, which were intended to make me feel good, were in the same category as probabilities such as that if it was very overcast, like today in Cebu, and the humidity got any thicker, it would probably rain, a very likely event though not as surefire as what would happen if I did not get out of a rig's way.

      However, suppose there existed strictly private beliefs about myself not dependent on miracles? If my boss told me I was in for a promotion and a raise, I could certainly allow myself a modest celebratory mood even though I had not yet gotten them. If I then went into a bar and shouted the good news in wildly enthusiastic terms expecting raised glasses and congratulations all around, I could be setting myself up for a big disappointment unless I had also offered to stand drinks for everyone present. In this scenario private philosophy had nothing to do with miracles but with beliefs that were dear to me but produced in others a state of complete and utter torpor. It was as if shehe had gone to a congress of astrophysicists and lectured them on how shehe had finally learned to identify Orion.

      After a while it became obvious that a private philosophy had to do not with the reliability of my beliefs--although my theological ideas were certainly unreliable--but with how exclusively they related to me. A public philosophy--or any sort of proposition which could justifiably be called public--could be very interesting for me but it also had to be of concern to others. A public philosophy was related to the world, among other ways in the all-important sense that it was ultimately the historical sanction implicit in the concept of world that validated any philosophy. Without world-historical sanction any public philosophy would be of dubious value.

      I could not deduce from these arguments that my self, the object of a private philosophy, subsisted and functioned independently of the world. I would have been like the man without a larynx having actually been accepted in the celestial choir. The world was different from me, but it was also the reality which encompassed me. Therefore, my own self could not escape the world's sanction and since a private philosophy related necessarily to my self, there was no way that there could be a private philosophy independent of public philosophy. There was in fact no such thing as a private philosophy, not even in matters pertaining to prayer and faith.

Where I confess my deep, sincere love for Dear Reader

If Dear Reader thinks that during this period I was locked up in my room sitting at a desk completely absorbed by my own self every second of the day--except when I went out for my ten Raffles and hamburgers at a McDonalds or Greek food across the street--shehe would be sorely mistaken, because these thoughts came to me during the times when I wasn't reading under the rotonda of the British Library--by the time they inaugurated the St Pancras site I had already moved to the Philippines--or making outlines of my readings in a special logical tachygraphy I had developed inspired by Frege's preposterous ambition to develop a metalanguage which would make expression more precise.

      I had few illusions about my own version of predicate logic which was so elementary it would have been laughed to scorn in a congress of logicians yet so complex I was the only person in the whole wide world who could read it. I didn't brag because it was only a mnemonic device, for all I did was reduce specific statements to x's, y's, or z's and related them by implication, entailment, inclusion, exclusion, and so on, especially "so on" because the relations between the "variables" were often extremely vague. The system helped when I got into very deep waters in that I did not have to follow a line of thought from the very beginning and I could lull my mind into believing I had done all the previous steps irreproachably. This might or might not have been true, but it expedited thought and I could always go back and see where I had taken a wrong turn if I came up with a patently laughable proposition.

      What I was mostly about during this time, then, was reading and doing outlines of my readings. It is to be presumed that I was reading philosophy but I feel it is only fair I should be more specific. I mean, for all shehe knows I could have been parsing the Durants or memorizing all the philosophical entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but this was not true. I could at this point copy the long bibliography I compiled during this time but that would be testing Dear Reader's power of endurance to the breaking point and, despite my often sardonic tone, I really do feel deep enduring love for shehe. I mean it. I do. And in proof I am going to try to be entertaining about a bibliography, which normally would be as funny as sick jokes in a cancer ward.

      My core reading program was constituted by the works of the luminaries at Clearwater, although this is not as explicative as it sounds because there were various tiers or magnitudes in that category. I will try to eschew names so as not to offend sensibilities, for philosophers tend to be touchy and offstandish in the tradition of Diogenes the Dog, who fittingly lived in a barrel, for doing which he awakened the admiration of Alexander the Great. Archimedes tried a similar the-world-go-hang stunt with Roman troops inside Syracuse but he didn't impress them much and got the pointy end of a sword in his ribs. Before I proceed to a gingerly explanation of who I was reading, and why, I should make an even more crucial clarification.

      My primary interest was philosophy of mind. Now, philosophy of mind excites in some thinkers the same reaction as a moving car wheel does in a restless dog. Even guys who take Popper seriously and attend seminars on his work will get snotty with you and say something like: "I am a philosopher and I can tell you that if philosophy is the love of knowledge, philosophy of mind is like loving to know nothing", which I found more pertinent to tourists and a mite hubristic. Marxists were particularly prone to such witticisms, but as we have seen many times before Marxism and terminal befuddlement are about on a par, and don't just take my word for it: read Das Kapital, which I guarantee will leave you feeling like a dog after a strenuous day of chasing car wheels.

Whatever haters of philosophy of mind could come up in the way of sarcasm, the facts were that there was such a thing and that the phrase had been coined in the context of analytical philosophy, whose practitioners could be even more contemptuous than Marxists about the whole enterprise. Nevertheless, the towering figures of analyticity--Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, et al (this coda is protocolary)--had been, if only by strong implication, promoters of philosophy of mind. Rigorously, they should have been behaviorists, but I am sure they didn't like to think of themselves as mindless, so they said things such as that mind was "intensional" (Frege and Russell), meaning that shehe was capable of believing in any kind of crap; or that the only access to mind was through "language" (Wittgentein), meaning what he specifically meant, which no one really knew; or that while mind could not yield reliable knowledge about itself, it was the only possible source of knowledge about knowledge, a weird theory which was called "naturalized epistemology" (Quine).

      There were some analytical philosophers--and, by the way, although Quine is always included in the family, he himself believed he had done the ultimate refutation of his analytical peers, which makes him a very aggressive black sheep--who truly didn't give a damn for mind, but they were mostly logicians and guys who believed they could turn philosophy into a science and usually admitted they had failed, which was also considered very analytical. I mostly avoided these purists, although I read many articles on them (so I know their names well but will adhere to the principle of omertà I stated at the start).

      Below the big stars, there were front-line stars, whose names I used in "Dips" and will not reiterate. It was these that I read most assiduously, even to perusing early works they had superseded, even abjured, or the works they had written on issues other than those raised by mind.

      Let me make very clear that by concentrating on analytical philosophy of mind it wasn't as if I were cutting myself off from the rest of philosophy. Philosophers of mind had different attitudes to the history of philosophy. Some traced their lineage back to Thales. The more technically inclined thought that Bill Gates had invented philosophy. Most would have said the founder of their discipline was Descartes, adding in the same breath the French philosopher couldn't have been more wrong if he had deliberately set out to tell lies. To my inquisitive mind--and I already had some grounding on the history of philosophy and had worshipped at the dark cave of the GMH at Kings--the Cartesian pedigree was not Brahminical or exclusionary but an incitement to seek wider horizons. However, I do not want to abuse shehe's trust with overzealous claims. I will let examples speak for themselves as I go along in my quest, on which I still have to be more specific than I have been until now.

      In closing this summary on my readings, I would like to mention the last tier in the philosophy-of-mind firmament of stars and these were the specialists on the concept of concept, on perception, on memory, even on consciousness (which sounds like specializing on everything). It was from these ranks that people like Strutting and heads of philosophy departments and admission boards were usually recruited. Their historical perspectives, as would be expected, were as wide as those of a horse with blinkers. But not all of them were like that and some could reach as far back as Aristotle to argue, for instance, that mind is propositional. It was this tier I most neglected, but I have to confess that I did not read every damn book ever written on philosophy of mind and that at least in keeping up with the second tier of philosophers of mind I had pigeonholes into which I could stuff those in the third tier.

      I can almost sense Dear Reader tsk-tsking and shaking his head as if I had farted loudly at a black tie affair, but let me say that I don't care. I had my reasons for not reading all the philosophy books mentioned weekly in the TLS and I realize that my three-tier system is surely flawed and that I used it because of what I wanted to achieve, for which if I had not used one flawed system I would have used another flawed system.

Had God granted my desire He would have been a real threat to the survival of mankind

What exactly was I trying to achieve? After all my previous argumentation, asking a question like this sounds as if I had arrived in Tajikistan at night after travelling around the world and asked myself what I was doing there. But this is not quite so. I have claimed from the start that what got me going on my quest was Thunder Bolt Night, which occurred long before I had even a foggy notion of neurosis. What I realized then was that I had been born to decipher what had happened that night, which was that I shied away from going to a club for fear of meeting people. Well, I shrugged that off but then came my experiences at Kings and I definitely embarked on a quest for neurosis, although I got off on the wrong foot by taking seriously the fantasies of the man who had discovered that condition.

      After my studies I dipped a lot in life, which went to confirm what I had suspected on Thunder Bolt Night: that I was definitely a queer bird, though not queer in the gay sense, although in making this distinction I am also admitting that I might not have been certain of whether I was really queer or not, more likely just confused, the one unmistakable sign of stubborn, incurable neurosis. Then, came my financial ruin and my decision, not having any more money to squander, to devote myself to serious thinking on my condition. The seriousness of this purpose was immediately compromised from the fact that my reaction to my precarious financial situation was to turn to God and abase myself extremely in the hope and expectation that He would restore to me the monies I had so thoughtlessly thrown away, which, if He had done, would have made Him a real threat to the survival of mankind, for he would have been capable of even crazier deeds.

      Faith involved meaning of life, which meant absence of pain, the biggest obstacle to which was, obviously, neurosis, on which I made little progress and by rebound settled on continuing my philosophical studies in a straightforward manner. So, in answer to the question of what I was trying to achieve, I can say unequivocally: I am not sure.

      Nevertheless, on many occasions I have used the word "redemption", hopefully with what can be understood as ironical connotations, but irony is as irony does and I don't think that Dear Reader would be so silly as to believe I would write a work of over 500 pages just to be cute. In sum, what I have been trying to express is that somehow philosophy eventually relieved me of the more disquieting symptoms of my neurosis. But I have also said that it only did so in an indirect fashion in the sense that I achieved something that I had not intended.

      Neurosis was indeed put to one side--like, say, when a cook drains the meat and saves the stock--and I became literally a lover of wisdom. This role so engrossed me that I did not bother with neurosis, that is, the stock, until I had concluded my studies, that is, finished preparing the table d'hôte, upon which I tasted the stock and found it rather insipid. In brief, it turned out that whatever I had first intended I obtained something else but the result was not entirely disappointing. Along the way also various events from the past, which I had thought extinguished, came to life again, like my father's suicide, which haunted me to death, and Buzakri's mysterious disappearance, and even my rather unequal struggles with God.

How I managed not to die of tedium in London from daily doses of visits to the BL, ten cigarettes, and fast food  

There are two question I would like to mention before I decamp from my claustrophobic London existence: one being what I mean when I say that my studies were concluded and two how I managed not to die of tedium from a daily diet of visits to the BL, ten cigarettes, and fast food. On the latter question, I will admit I have exaggerated somewhat. I did give up my gay old life (there I go again) with prostitutes but I did not become entirely a hermit. I found occasions to socialize now and then.

      For instance: even though I hated Costaguana with boundless intensity, I wangled an invitation to a diplomatic reception at its embassy. This led to acquaintances and occasional get-togethers. They never grew to real friendships or what any normal person might call a circle of friends. A similar fate overtook my relations with the members of a firm of solicitors I had had occasion to employ during my high-living days.

      I could go on enumerating such events, but why bother with banalities? Besides, the pattern would repeat itself in Manila and I will have occasion to repeat myself, so the cumulative effect should give the reader an idea of what my social life was like outside the confines of the BL rotonda or of my austere but panoramic lodgings in the Cebu jungle.

      But truth, however unbelievable, be said, how I got my real kicks was something that would send mortal shivers down a rocker's back. I went to art shows in the usual venues (South Bank, Barbican, Tate, so on) and I saw opera and plays and movies. Most of what I saw was conventional fare, but what I most remember are the oddities, and there were plenty of these because I could not afford regular entry to the Temples of the Conventional such as, exemplarily, Covent Garden (which is also why I ate cheeseburgers instead of lunching and dining at the Connaught or at Pied à Terre).

      The exhibitions were in the category of the conventional but affordable. Perhaps the greatest insight I had from them--shehe will already be steeled against an anticlimax and I will try not to disappoint--was a possible answer to the question of: where does art go from here? This was part of the post-modernist debate, which was supposed to be the one to end all debates, although I was wise enough mostly to ignore it. I must say that in the matter of evading fashions I have been consistent all my life, which on the whole, maybe, has been good. Anyhow, the answer I found, in a showing of Tony Cragg's sculptures (or whatever they should be called), was simply: style. The future of art depended on individual genius and not on a trend or a school.

      Outside of my admiration for the style of genius, I inclined to hyper-realism, so I wasn't at the cutting edge of art criticism. That did not trouble me overmuch because I thought I had answered the question I had posed in a manner I found satisfactory, but only if I did not consider the issue of who was in a position to distinguish between the "style of genius" and the "style of would-be geniuses". This I found disquieting because my vague answer to that was history and when I tried to be more precise I came up with such suspicious candidates as auction houses, gallery owners, museum curators, and even Souren Melikian.

      Concerning the rest of what I saw in London I think I wasted a lot of time, like going to the exhibition of the very early Cézanne, a painter I normally enjoy, which made the critics rave but to me suggested my own doodles with impasto. They could explain why his family thought he was a natural-born loser and also might have served to show that even genius could not predict its own course, let alone the history of art. And while we are on the latter subject, I musn't forget to mention the exhibition Angry Penguins, which is where I learned that Melbourne existed, although in justice I had seen some depressing episodes of Neighbors, one of the reasons I became so depressed I accepted going to a psychiatric clinic.

      If, as I estimate, I have seen over one thousand and a half films in my life, about two thirds of which I must have seen in London, why do I keep going back to Falbalas, a French thriller filmed during the Occupation? Or to A Season in Hakkari, a Turkish film I couldn't understand at first and then one day, long after seeing it, realized it was an ever so subtle attempt to criticize Kemal Ataturk, which is the Turkish equivalent of a freshman congressman in America proposing the abolition of Mother's Day? I can only explain this as one of the inevitable consequences of being such a prodigious collector of trivia.

      I was similarly selective in the matter of drama. I went to see Il Candelaio because it suprised me that Giordano Bruno should have written a play, especially one having to do with fire--although naturally he couldn't have foreseen his own definitive brush with it--but I found it so unmemorable I can't even recall what it is about.

      La fura dels baus is another story and I remember it very well although it doesn't have any plot whatsoever. The first interesting thing about it was that you were advised not to wear formal clothes: soiled jeans and rubber shoes were recommended. Then you were picked up on Carlton House Terrace and taken by bus to a warehouse on the Further East End, somewhere in London so remote to me even the pubs looked exotic. Part of this huge warehouse in the middle of nowhere was lit up and when you got there these Catalans--the title of the happening could be freely and puzzlingly translated as "angry moles"--started doing incomprehensible things, some of which seemed dangerous to themselves, others appeared threatening to the shehes present, although nothing worse that getting floured and wet, making us candidates for dough. I once thought I knew what it was about but I forgot. It was noisy and bright with spates of stage fog--without which no London production is complete--and rather like a madcap circus without a dog show and it ended when the performers were exhausted and the lights were put out and the ushers or whatever lit torches for the shehes to find their way to the bus or buses.

      I went with a friend and she had a fit of giggles all through the show, which I put up with because I took it to mean I had made a brilliant choice of entertainment. I was right in my assessment and was rewarded accordingly. Her enthusiasm waned very quickly the night I took her to "Metanoia", a very slow program of atonal chamber music whose title actually means "beyond boredom". I might have done it on purpose, although I have no idea why I would have done such a thing as I enjoyed going out with this woman. 

      In the matter of cryptic titles, however, nothing beat the Glagolitic Mass, which sounds as if it were played with stone instruments, but really refers to Old Church Slavonic (which was invented in the early obscure middle ages). But where I think I established a couple of records was in the matter of operas, for I must have seen every production at the ENO and not content with that I never missed any rara avis that happened to be flying anywhere in London if only for one night, and if this was not a record I was absolutely certain I had dozed off more times than anybody ever had in a musical spectacle when I went to the The Mask of Orpheus, a record which stood intact until I saw The Stone Guest, in turn absolutely bested by the night I slept through the entire Margot La Rouge. When asked about this presentation I lied that it was about a communist whore.

      The quirkiest of all the stagings I saw was Gluck's Iphigenias, set in the Early Stone Age, although not inspired by the Glagolithic Mass but possibly by Piero di Cosimo or even The Flintstones. I found it startling, but the critics execrated it so badly even the cast quit after the second or third evening. Well, why go on if after all is said and done my London years were basically like The Diary of a Man who Disappeared (another out of the ordinary production) and my life finally became like The Closing of Planet 8 and gave way to Pacific Overtures, literally true for me but also the first musical celebration of the Jewish obsession with all things Japanese, especially the women.

A fortunate coincidence for me is the occasion for the reader to make erroneous inferences about my intentions towards herhis behind

By the time I had ended, more precisely, suspended, the neurosis cycle of my research, I also believed I had seen all there was to see in the field of odd stage productions and more significantly I also concluded I had read all I needed to read on philosophy of mind. By a happy coincidence, this was also the time I realized I could no longer afford to live in London, poorly as I did, with the royalties I was getting from my book on South East Asia. Again, I can hear Dear Reader grousing: "Very convenient! So what makes him so sure he had done all the research on philosophy of mind?"

      To answer this I have to explain that the readings in themselves were not my ultimate purpose. A life-long familiar with the quirks of mind, I wasn't about to be led by the nose by philosophers in any of the three tiers I previously described. I was merely consulting them for my own purpose, which was to structure explanations I could believe in. Was I prejudging them? Maybe, but aren't we all initially suspicious of whatever isn't "ours" or under our thumb?

      And besides I never rejected any philosopher's position outright. Only after the first two lines of the introduction. I lie! I travelled long conversational distances with many of them and if we did not always agree on what we were talking about, it is because humans simply are not reduplicative. The possibility of variations are infinite and in dealing with infinite quantities anything is possible, especially disagreement. But I duly recognized debts and I followed leads when I found them promising.

      Shehe will have herhis way and insist: "But that still doesn't answer the question. This guy's trying to blow smoke up my ass and I think I'll try to get a refund on this book." Not likely if you've come this far, Dear Shehe. Besides I am not trying to evade the issue. Obviously, I could have gone on reading till my eyeballs burst, but I wasn't reading for its own sake and I have said that as I read I made outlines. What happened was I had read enough to be able to see my way to blending all the outlines into one GPS, which is what I would be doing in a place where I would not feel the pressure of my dwindling income, namely Cebu, although when I decided to move to the Philippines I did not have Cebu specifically in mind. Conceivably I could have gone on reading and conceivably also my GPS--not to be confused with our old acquaintance GUT--would have been different. But not that different. And besides, unlike GUTs, GPSs are subject to personal decision-making, which, whatever analytical philosophers claim, is still acceptable where mathematics is not de rigueur.

The chinless wonder in Manila who claimed he was dumber than a chicken 

I have already mentioned that I lived in Manila when I did my extensive travelling and sojourning in different parts of South East Asia. In my previous stays, I was technically a tourist in the Philippines. But this time I was not thinking of transiency but of permanence. Mind you, I wasn't thinking of a "future", but for my purposes, paradoxical though it may sound, I had to be assured of my immediate future, which meant getting something more durable than a tourist visa.

      Fortunately, in London, under circumstances I cannot recall, I had met Elias Shemberg, the King of Carrageenan. We hit it off very nicely, because he was very cordial to me--maybe he mistook me for some one important, which suggests we might have met at the reception in the hated Costaguanan embassy--and I encouraged his cordiality through my keen interest in carrageenan, a seaweed which is dried for industrial use, or in Ireland, where the name comes form, for human consumption as a kind of porridge. I was later telling this story to a Welsh friend and he suddenly looked up and told me he had been raised on the stuff only he called it "lava bread".

      It was Elias, who had many seaweed processing plants (the main one was near Cebu), who vouched for me with the Filipino authorities and helped me get a residency permit. Furthermore, he also helped me find the place I settled in to carry on the work on my GPS. Although we did not meet that often, he was like a lifeline to the rest of the world and when I got so lonely I thought the parrots were talking to me in Visayan, and I was understanding them, I could usually count on accompanying Shemberg to Manila, where he was a frequent guest at diplomatic receptions and I with him.

      These gatherings were not always pleasant, as the time I somehow got invited to a reception of University of London alumni and for some reason I rubbed the British ambassador the wrong way and this man, a chinless wonder who had never gotten past a first degree, went and said that holders of PhD's (namely me in that reunion) couldn't sign their names, which by implication made him the next thing to a chicken, an animal so stupid it has been the object of some extremely dumb laboratory experiments. But most receptions I attended with Elias were good--you will remember the interest I excited in the ambassadors from Fredonia and Lower Slobovia--and I enjoyed doing the social rounds in Manila with him.

      Let me explain on the issue of solitude that it was most definitely a choice on my part, and considering the 100,000 filipinos that transit every corner of that land at any one moment in time, not an easy one to implement. Also, any one who has been to Manila knows that traffic there crawls more than anywhere else which permits you to see that the city has more hotels and dives than inhabitants. I was, then, not immune to its attractions and I would have gotten stuck there if it hadn't been through my strong sense of not wanting to die in a cathouse. I knew that was a distinct possibility. I had the strong suspicion that my philosophical quest was not likely to end in heavenly visions such as Dante's or Blake's. The likeliest scenario was nihilism. So if that was going to be the conclusion of my efforts, why not do a reverse Kanto's Pillow and go into the world with the intention of being absorbed and smothered in its embrace?

      I still don't know how I managed to resist such a "logical" temptation. I mean, I now do know how I did it--it is implicit in my theory of volition--but having a good, respectable theory on anything does not mean that you have to apply it every time some issue or event comes up. You wouldn't have time to live if you did. My situation now is not unlike that of Husserl, who invented the phenomenological method and provided it with a sound philosophical structure but never once used it for anything. But I lie again. Aside from applying it to my own past, I even used my theory of volition at least once in a practical sense, when I was trying to give up smoking, and it helped, allied to the fact that, aside from a morning nicotine rush after coffee, which was kept alive through the first four or five cigarettes, all I got from smoking were continuous headaches and a permanently queasy stomach accompanied by much belching.

      But I sense Dear Reader might be getting impatient with my dawdling about so I must get on with my touted GPS, although I cannot avoid mentioning, if only in this incidental manner, that my move all the way across the globe, even before I achieved my own personal "redemption", did lift a great weight I laboured under in London. At the very least here I can see as far as the Chocolate Hills of Bohol and some days are almost like paradise whereas over there my days always ended in the dankness of a so-called garden flat which gave me an unimpeded if blurry perspective on footwear.

      If I wanted to philosophize, rather than follow the philosophizing of others, which was mostly what I was hitherto doing, I had to go to basics. I could not linger on complex side issues such as God. Clearly by this I do not mean minor issues but issues that surfaced when people set aside their collective prejudices and decide to use reason alone as far as that is possible. For Jews, for instance, this could mean having to accept the unthinkable thought that God was prone to work-fatigue and needed one whole day to recuperate. The Japanese, who are known literally to die from overwork, have a name for this problem, and although I cannot recall it offhand, the significant point here is the alarming thought that God actually could be Japanese, a prospect that would be particularly unsettling to some Ultra-Orthodox Jews (not the garden variety lapsed types who couldn't care if He had a vagina).

      The most basic of all issues concerned a property I could not deny to my worst enemy, because if I did shehes wouldn't even have existed. That property was being. Being encompasses everything, even the vacuum (whatever or wherever that is), even non-being, for if zero had not been invented it is to be doubted that science could have come as far as it has. In a sense, being is akin to the omnipotence of God. There is no limit to either, which means that you could argue that God is being and being is God. This doctrine is called pantheism and it is not fully understood except as an exercise in deductive reasoning.

      Speaking in a rather vague way, the concept of being as such does not pose any particular problem, because it is so portmanteau it can be said that everything is part of being. The real problem lies elsewhere, although not in the parallel or successive or mirror-image universes that very complex calculations allow mind to imagine, the end result being that we are so insignificant as to be nothing but thought. This has the further implication that cosmologists, who thought up these universes, have a special claim on being, but since everything can be reduced to dust--which has been around since not long after the Big Bang or even at the Big Bang itself (depending on the definition of dust)--and water, we are talking here basically of mud, and who wants to be the owner of a lot of that?

      The real problem with being was not the infinity factor--how far and for how long does being extend?--but dualism, of which I had made a big if superficial to-do while I was still in London and which I have now to contextualize in the vast concept of being. How does dualism arise? One immediate and self-evident answer is that in order to be talking or writing about being it is necessary to know of being. Knowing is a part of being, but knowing is also a special form of being, which is also a form of knowing, and so on, which is just a replay of the pizza problem and of the nature-of-consciousness issue we saw in connection to neurosis and concretely the problem of fixation. Consciousness, as I have said more than once before, is overrated, and if I start toying with the circularities involved in the concepts of being and knowing I would be stuck forever and I am impatient to develop my GPS.

The essence of dualism was as if a flat-earther asked professorially: "If the Earth wasn't flat all over people would fall over the edge, wouldn't they?"   

Let us assume, then, the being/knowing duality. Let us also say that, for instance, a very unambiguous form of being such as a stone is not capable of knowing. And finally let us point out that a material substance such as the brain is capable of knowing. Baldly stated, dualism sounds harmless, but it has so many booby traps around it that in comparison the Vietcong were leaving lemon drops and peppermint sticks in the Vietnamese jungle for GIs to pick up. I had to concentrate on one track and not go chasing around for a way to get lost or immobilized in the middle of a minefield.

      Ultimately, dualism could be defined as the difference between a stone and the thought of a stone. This meant that it was also the difference between the sensitive and the insensitive. Once there was sensitivity in matter, there was knowing and with knowing dualism reared up, for how can matter as such know anything? How can lifeless substances become sensitive and reactive to their surroundings? It could be said that the essence of dualism is the principle of life. But this was as if a flat-earther asked professorially: "If the Earth wasn't flat all over people would fall over the edge, wouldn't they?" Or, embarrassingly, as if Columbus had offered to prove to the assembled cream of Spanish friardom how to make an egg stand and instead squashed it on a table.

      The problem of the origins of life is properly a branch of biology. There is no dualism in reference to astrophysics or even to physiology. Strictly speaking, dualism acquires force only in reference to mind. Mind has a material and a propositional side. Unfortunately, even when you are in the basics-stage of philosophy, you tend to move ahead, which is as if a person went for a leisurely walk but saw an angry, unleashed bull pit terrier and had to do a one-hundred-meter dash. Let us just say that "propositional" means thought. So far, so good (hopefully), but things soon start getting complex.

      These two sides of mind, the propositional or thinking side and the material or brain side, conjointly admit of convergent explanations. If these explanations are proper and relatively sufficient they should complement each other and there would be no dualism. Most phenomena can have various possible takes. Wood, for instance, can be studied and specified physically, chemically, even "historically". There is no reason why mind should be different. Of course, everything is atomical. But, one, this is not an argument for pure materialism and against thought or propositionality, for the laws of micromatter are different from the laws of matter period, so it cannot be said that there is one undisputed version of materialism. And, two, why should propositions ultimately not be atomical? Dualism arises when a compelling explanatory system for mind breaks down and a non-propositional system tries to take over provoking a parting of the ways, like a guy spitting in two different spitoons.

      Dualism then is a parting of the ways on mind between two explanatory series: one propositional and one material. Since mind, which is propositional, is different from brain, which is material, it is usually said that there is dualism between mind and brain-matter. Matter is a manifestation of being. Mind, or something like it, is the seat of knowledge. Therefore, mind/matter dualism is a token or subspecies of the knowing/being type. If I could show that being and knowing were equivalent, then dualism generally fell. In order to do this, it was necessary to explore knowing, because otherwise I would be stuck in being and in the being/knowing circularity, which would have been as if I had gone for a spin and literally drove around the same block over and over. Besides, the question of being was either too general or the subject of too many specialized disciplines. Knowing, on the other hand, could be studied in disciplines specifically oriented towards mind.

The best answer if asked about something you ignored entirely was: "Not yet"; alternatively: "For a while"

It should be obvious at this point that I did not want my GPS to get bogged down in subjectivism of the grosser sort, by which I mean that even at the start of my investigation I already knew that pure objectivity was no better than airy-fairy baloney even though objectivists relished their big-he-man, idol-bashing, tough-nosed, no-nonsense reputation (thoroughly undeserved), and by letting mind tiptoe in, even as timid as a canary, I was taking a big risk. The risk was not that objectivist bullies would rough me up in my back-of-Cebu fastness. There were some of them in the area, even an MIT professor who went cycling close to my house, but mostly they might not have taken umbrage at my harmless satirical characterization. It lay in that I could look over my tachygraphic notes and find that I was on a tangent leading back to the neurosis morass. I argued strenously for mind/matter as a subspecies of knowing/being, because, since the latter duality was as neutral about mind as you can get without wholly repudiating it, that would show any analytical weirdo or view-from-nowhere freak that I wasn't going to put up with lip.

      Although I am telescoping far ahead, what I eventually found was an analogical, heuristic solution to the mind/matter problem and an equivalence between being and knowing which was reciprocal to my solution to the mind/matter problem. Don't let this throw you because what I discovered was something like that if 2 + 2 = 4 and 4 = 1 + 3, then 2 + 2 = 1 + 3. And just to keep things simple, view-from-nowhere is another form of saying objectivism, and both are like any person's claim that shehe is totally right and not prejudiced. This is common as dirt. It has no consequences among the hoi polloi, but it can be unuseful in public debate. An "analogical solution" is a confession that the solution is not total because there is no total solution and heuristic refers to anything conducive to understanding, a shortcut maybe, like my tachygraphy. My discovery consisted in that being and knowing were the same, or at least that they could, from a certain perspective or in the light of certain arguments, be considered similar, and that this relative similarity was reinforced by the not-entirely-satisfactory solution to the mind/matter duality.

      Having taken the preliminary steps on dualism I have described, I found myself confronting my old acquaintance "theory of knowledge", not this time as the means to make a distinction between my shamelessly subjectivist private-philosophy attitude and my robust public-philosophy stand, but as a proposition for which I had to find more meaning than just a fuzzy reference to an explanation on what it meant to say "I know this" and much less frequently "I do not know this"; or as my filipino friends told me when I asked them if they knew something they did not know: "Not yet", or alternatively: "For a while", a reflection no doubt of their admirably incurable optimism.

       The bottom-line of knowing is the awareness of things. By awareness I simply mean the ability of mind to distinguish between perception and thought and to recognize the objects of perception and the contents of mind. I will add parenthetically that the lack of this ability is the bottom-line of lunacy, which is by way saying that any one who disagrees with me deserves to be straightjacketed. Shehe will see below if there is a problem of consciousness beyond this elementary definition of awareness. However, even in this unassuming guise, awareness is a damnable question in that it gives rise to the paradox of awareness, which is that we can know what is not knowledge.

      This is what Russell and others called the "intensionality of mind" and illustrated with word-games that yielded contradictory deductions, of which the forebear was Frege's evening star/morning star ambiguity. The German father of analyticity apparently got very confused when he discovered that one very bright luminary could have two names. He had this problem in triplicate when he discovered that both names referred to the planet Venus. Russell was by far the more clever when he showed that any ignoramus could actually be led to believe that George III could both know and not know Sir Walter Scott. In modern terms, this would be as if I said I did not know who Elvis Presley was because I ignored that some one was calling himself a hound dog, altough this argument would be worth diddly if it involved a pit bull terrier, or if for instance Elvis had sung "You ain't nothing but an American Staffordshire terrier".

      Intensionality ultimately derived from the can of worms that Descartes had opened when he thought he was sure he existed but couldn't be sure the rest of the world did. For reasons best attributed to superstition (like the fear of losing your rabbit foot), Descartes was considered a rationalist, but others who took him very seriously were either solipsists or idealists. Solipsism, you'll remember, was the extreme version of the erection problem, in which it was either demons or sexual fantasies and only sexual fantasies (presumably with demons) that were responsible. You will also remember that Samuel Johnson, a man not given to mincing words, refuted the idealist Berkeley by stomping his cane on the floor. Descartes would have recanted even faster if Johnson had offered to strike him across the shins. However, I could not fault Cartesian doubt flat out because I had been going through the process of determining reliably whether I was mad, moronic, or hallucinatory, which by the time I settled in Cebu I had down to merely paranoid, without prejudging neurosis.

To make the correspondence theory of truth work I had to call on Mr Rubber-Man, a much-neglected comic-book hero I knew from childhood

I knew that the paradox of knowing what is not knowledge had to have a solution, because knowledge, of which awareness was the simplest expression, entailed truth and falsehood. In principle, knowledge is what is true and what is not true, that is, false, is not knowledge. Truth itself however was a problematical concept. For one thing, it was not as if there was only truth and falsehood, for every shehe knows that there is a lot of grey area between the two. For instance: it was true that I thought, but it wasn't true that my thought was necessarily true, for I could imagine many things I would like to have and never would. It wasn't likely I would ever be with a naked Hedy Lamarr on a deserted island (at that point in time she was already dead and even if she wasn't I would much have preferred being alone with, say, Kim Bassinger); or that Buzakri would give me back the million bucks he so unconscionably wiped out from my Bull Bull & Dong account.

      If truth be told (and as we shall see it hardly can), most of what people knew apart from their daily routines were only probabilities. It was even arguable that, since but for the instant of awareness all is past and the past is only probable--did I or did I not just hear a parrot talking to me in Visayan?--no one could claim that anything was provably true. Most of the things I or any one knew or thought we knew were not true in a strict sense, but I was also aware that I was exaggerating, especially on the question of the past being merely probable, because I knew that if I didn't sleep well I wouldn't feel good the following day and feeling bad in a certain way, apart from the memory of not having slept, was prima facie proof that I had indeed not slept well. Simply put, this reasoning responded to the law that if something truly hurts, no amount of thinking on the meaning of life is going to relieve the pain.

      Even though, then, there was a great deal of half-truth and quarter-truth and two-thirds-truth around, it was undeniable that there was something called truth. But how to define truth was not so easy. The classic definition of truth was called correspondence and it refers to the fact that an object outside of me corresponds to the meaning I have in my mind signifying said object. However, this did not necessarily mean I could touch such an object, unless I was Rubber-Man, a classic but much-neglected comic-book super-hero. Therefore, for my perception of an object to be true I needed a witness who could stand outside of me to tell me that there really was I and there really was the object I was looking at and calling by its name. But this wouldn't do the trick, because the witness was not Rubber-Man either and he couldn't touch me and the object I was seeing to corroborate my story conclusively, unless the object was very close to me, like my hand, which did not require Rubber-Man but also left out a great deal of the universe. So perhaps another witness was needed, but if the first witness was useless, why should a second witness have been more useful?    
      One solution to this conundrum would have been to assume that I was Rubber Man and that my seeing an object was tantamount to my reaching out and touching it. Philosophers would have none of this Rubber-Man nonsense. They had come up with what they considered a better theory which I will remit straightaway even though Dear Reader might possibly not believe me and will probably prefer my Rubber-Man hypothesis. The philosophers I am talking about now were certain of one thing and that was the reliability of perception (which if the past is merely probable cannot be categoricallly said to be that reliable). The reader will already have guessed I am talking about the school of scientifically-minded analytical philosophers.

      Well, these philosophers went for what they thought of as the essence of the problem and discovered that to perceive an object was the same as saying: "I perceive that such and such". Their favorite example was: "I can see that the snow is white" (which meant they hadn't lived in New York City long enough to see the aftermath of a snowstorm). They had also heard of propositions such as: "I am Gorgeous George", or: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country". As we did with the broth in another illustration, these propositions we shall set aside. What our philosophers came up with as the definition of truth was--now, every one hold your breath, please!--that if you could claim: "The snow is white", without actually having to say: "I see that the snow is white", then that was truth. Since the statement "the snow is white" can be used without attribution to any one in particular, the theory became known as "disquotation", which is in a way pretty darn clever.

      The problem with this definition was that George could say or write that he was Gorgeous without using quotation marks and the man who made the claim about General Motors certainly did it without using quotation marks, all of which meant that there were no hard-and-fast rules about when to use and when not to use quotation marks. The authors of the disquotation theory could fall back on the claim that it was self-evident that Gorgeous George was not that gorgeous and that the statement about General Motors had been made by the chairman of General Motors, but all this did was raise the problem of the witnesses required for the correspondence theory to be valid.

      The flaw in "correspondence" and "disquotation" was that rather than true definitions they were devices for doing away with the need to define truth. Their authors knew what sort of hornets' nest they would be prodding if they tried that. Besides, there were other more adequate ways to encompass truth which actually avoided the problem of defining truth.

      Dear Reader will have seen through the dipsy doodle of substituting "encompassing" for "defining", so I will not even try to pull the wool over his eyes and I will admit right off the bat that these other "ways" were only slightly less satisfactory than the failed analytical attempts at definition and that I only bring them centerstage for an ulterior purpose I had in my quest for the GPS. This constitutes an admission on my part that whatever pretensions to unpremeditated step-by-step precision I might be trying to communicate here, I wasn't without a compass and a map.

Why Socrates really died from elephantiasis

Truth could legitimately be defined as the totality of true propositions, assuming true propositions of course. Now, this was not as easy as defining dogs as the totality of all dogs, because whereas defining a true proposition was very difficult defining a dog was not difficult at all. There were various ways for rounding up true propositions, which was much more difficult than just saying: "Git along, little doggies!" I could make such claims as: "Factual propositions are true", or: "Logical and mathematical derivations are true", and so on, and this would result in my corralling truth, which wasn't exactly defining it but getting as close as possible to a definition. However, where did I get off saying that these and those statements were true if I did not have a touchstone for testing them, the way one could lasso a stray doggie and see whether it had the old Bar B Q iron branded into the skin of its hindquarters? I was not eluding the definition problem but falling back into it again.

      The way out of that one seemed easy enough. I didn't have to specify which were true propositions and which were doubtful propositions. I could simply say that truth was the totality of true propositions without specifying factual or logical or whatever propositions. That is to say, I could specify, say, factual propositions, but if I said that only factual propositions were true, I would be making a claim that was not factual, so my claim was not true at all. Basically, then, my conclusion here was: the hell with types of true propositions! Just say true propositions and let it go at that.

      Every one knew that truth was a given. Every language had a word for truth, and in this case I did not even have to add the qualification of every highly-developed, sophisticated language, because even the most primitive tribesman on Earth knew how to tell the difference between a truth and a fib. If I was an Amazonian warrior, for example, and my son or my nephew on my sister's side, or some related brat depending on kinship lines, came to me with the unlikely story that he had seen an anteater munching leaves, I would certainly have known what truth meant: in this case, that my boy, since he was confusing an anteater with an iguana, was not going to grow up to be a big, brave warrior like me.

      The problem with the indiscriminate, wholesale gathering of all true propositions as an alternative to specifying truth without defining it, was that without a true definition of truth there was no way I could say I had gathered together all true propositions. And this meant that even a loose specification of truth such as this phony round up of so-called true propositions was not true, aside from leaving all the mangy half-truths and quarter-truths and part-truths in general out in the lone prairie.

      Dear Reader will at this stage be growing impatient with all these quiddities and quodlibets and that's good because that's exactly where I wanted to get. Truth exists yet it is impossible to define it. Plato's dialogues are mostly variations on the general proposition that if you take any one, be it a yokel or a city slicker, and ask herhim enough questions about anything shehe holds dear, never mind truth, shehe sooner or later is going to trip up. If Plato was, as he claimed, remitting Socrates' midwifery, then no wonder the Athenian authorities, who did not relish being shown to be superstitious dupes, condemned Socrates to death by hemlock (in which incidentally the first symptoms are that your legs get heavy as if you had drank a ton of the stuff, which of course suggested a form of elephantiasis).

      For our purpose here, this event, one of the most momentous in the history of Western civilization, could mean either that everything is relative--that Socrates was right in his low opinion of Athenian bureaucrats--or that philosophy is just a lot of gas. It was just talk if you got stuck in primitive circularities such as were evoked by the concepts of being and knowing, but it was somewhat more substantive if you did not give up on the concept of truth and tried to accommodate it in some "plausible" way--I hesitate saying "coherent" because, for analytical thinkers, this is like another turning carwheel for neurotic mutts--after which you could go on to other subjects.

Introducing propositionality as some kind of big Provolone was like inviting the reader to have another fit of scoffing

I already had premonitions of where I would end up on the issue of truth: something to the effect that we can know for sure that some of our beliefs are true because they are reliable. For instance: unless we are blind, we move around a room without bumping into things--analytical philosophers of mind made a big fuss of something called "blindsight", but this was mostly good guesswork--and from this simple evidence we could also know that such a thing as truth exists. However, we cannot apply the concept of truth to some categories of reality, for example, to a proposition coming from Pinocchio, although this does not justify the conclusion that this category of propositions does not exist. Knowledge, whether mine or anybody's, could be true and less-than-true but not necessarily false.

      If false was the necessary complement of true, then it was impossible to arrive at a consistent definition of truth. But this was like the argument that you had to bury people alive to prove that you were really capable of being good. What I needed, then, was a term which could stand in for "truth" without the complications of the concept of truth and that term was "validity". Instead of "true statements", we could speak of "valid statements"--which, unlike truth, admitted the possibility of "relative validity"--and instead of "false statements", we could say "invalid statements". In this way, I covered true and less-than-true propositions and I needn't bother trying to find a "valid", undefeasible definiton of truth and I was losing nothing because I had a right to claim that the functions of "truthful propositions" were totally covered by those of "valid propositions", that is, "valid" for deriving other "valid propositions", "valid" as in reliable, etc.

      With valid and validation and all the other cognates, I had reached an important juncture in my journey. Since I had taken care of truth the troublemaker, I could appeal to other criteria. I could even use the Rubber-Man assumption. I was after a theory of knowledge and validity was about the best certification of knowledge that could be found. An important dividend lay in that the reference of truth was usually to the person, to any shehe, as in the correspondence and disquotation theories, whereas the reference of validity was to propositions, for you were not likely to say of some one that shehe was valid or invalid (herhis passport maybe if you were an INS hawkeye on the look out for sneaky thirdworlders trying to do the expat dodge).

      Now, introducing propositions to Dear Reader as some kind of big Provolone is like inviting another fit of scoffing and I must try to demonstrate that it would be thoroughly undeserved. Propositionality solved the paradox of awareness, for one thing, and we shall soon get to that. More importantly, validity implied that mind was propositional. I could here invoke the Rubber-Man technique (a de facto answer to an unsolvable dilemma) or go into very long arguments. As usual in human affairs I will plump for an in-between solution.

      I have already proposed that "propositional" relates to thought. Now I am saying that this claim is reinforced from the concept of validity. Since our thoughts can be valid or invalid and valid or invalid are properties of propositions, our thoughts are propositional. I am sure that Dear Reader will see through this ploy. I could hedge it with lots of additional propositions, but they will not convince a steadfast sceptic. Where then do I go? Why, obviously, to the source of the scepticism! What was so inherently unconvincing about mind being propositional?

      Let me be even more frank--put my heart on my sleeve, so to speak, which is apt enough considering the closeness of the heart to the lungs and Aristotle's theory that we thought thereabouts--and say I had reasons to claim that mind was propositional because in my wonder-working tachygraphy, which allowed me to fly almost at the speed of thought, I had already elaborated many arguments that justified the proposition that mind is propositional. I cannot invoke those arguments just now because that would be premature and would turn my systematic presentation into something of a hash.

      In keeping with the sincerity maneuver I am hewing to here, I must confess that prima facie there were reasons to believe that the propositionality or the propositional nature of mind was like the claim that pigs could fly (into my mouth maybe, after a good baking, the ironical Dear Reader will be thinking). Even seasoned philosophers had problems with this idea--Aristotle didn't, but he had been very mistaken about the space-occupying function of the brain--mainly because it has to encompass perception to be valid, and we do not perceive "propositions" but "things".

      Russell tried to circumvent this problem with his category of "knowledge by acquaintance", which sounded as if he were saying: "How do you do, chair?", "How do you, table?", "How do you, fork?", and so on, every time something tangible came within reach of his senses, not likely for a high-class Englishman like him, unless the "something" was a female of course. Fodor spoke of "encapsulation", as if perception were a process separate from other cognitive functions, which meant that if he saw a pig he could conceivably imagine it could fly, a conceit that memory would normally squelch inside a nanosecond.

      Personally (in the sense of personal history, you sly Dear Reader), I had many powerful reasons for doubting that the mind could be propositional. It was true--despite all my arguments for validity in lieu of truth, you will observe that I keep making colloquial use of "truth", but this is like the legitimate use by a determinist of the verb "to choose" (on which more anon, which in Spanish means pineapple)--that I had written a lot of propositions in these memoirs and that these propositions originated in my mind, but they didn't come to awareness the easy way a tasty, baked pig could enter my mouth.

If thinking was sentential, why, my interlocutor, perhaps even a great many people in an audience, could shout at me: "Hey, jerk, you forgot to put a comma before (or after) ‘and'"  

Going back to one of the great days in my life, the day I first found that I could read fluently, I was aware of a huge difference between my mind and the propositions on the page, although honestly the things on the page to me were sentences and not propositions and it was later that I got the mistaken idea that proposition and sentence were synonyms. I lived with that conviction for many decades and it was only after I started philosophizing that the separation between mind and propositions started to crumble, although even now I could argue (or pretend to argue) that the propositions in these memoirs have nothing to do with the way in which my mind functions.

      What was even more damaging to propositionality, many of the things I have written about seem as propositional as the beating I got from the cops in Pottyville. I mean, propositions are supposed to obey rules, that is the essence of propositionality, and rules must, they absolutely must, be logical. So having proclaimed this, what was so "propositional" about the various irrational ventures I had undertaken and described under the heading of "Dips", in itself a rather odd way to designate living? And how about neurosis and all the paraphernalia of my theory involving "fixation", "dispersion", "obsessiveness", and what not? What was propositional about that? If anything neurosis was the utter contradiction of reason and therefore of propositionality. And then there was suicide! There was no way in the world that killing yourself could be said to be "propositional" and since you killed yourself because you thought about doing it, which is why all suicides leave suicide notes, then how could mind, where thinking occurred, be considered "propositional"?

      The case against propositionality seemed strong and I am sure that Dear Sceptical Reader will be thinking: "So there: I told you so". However, the case wasn't that strong, and not for anything like having religious faith against the overhwhelming reasons for not having it, the Tertullian gambit I mentioned in the theological phase of my life. It could be undone with the simple argument that it was not necessary for propositions to be written in a conventional, communicational language. Equations were propositions. Even interjections such as "Hey!" and "Wow!" were propositions. Even gestures. Especially gestures, like getting or giving the finger, which was very propositional. My mind could be propositional even if I did not think in terms of sentences. In fact, it was obvious I never thought in terms of propositions or fully rounded sentences because then I would spend more time thinking than doing things--even writing, which can easily be outrun by thought--and an illiterate could not think at all, not to mention dear old Pushkin, my tragic thinking pooch.

      If we accepted that propositions were sentences and cognition was sentential, which meant we thought in sentences, shehe could well imagine all the incredible things that could happen. If illiterates would not be able to think, literates, save Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter, and just maybe La Rochefoucault, would speak haltingly and say such things as: "I forgot to put a comma before when I said `and' and, by the way, that comma is after the `and'", or: "I just used the concept `bad' but I did not mean exactly ‘bad' but `bad improvable' and not `hopelessly bad' (like my golf game)", and so on and on.

      This also meant that my interlocutor, perhaps even a great many people in an audience, could shout at me: "Hey, jerk, you forgot to put a comma before (or after) `and'", and any one could take umbrage at my use of "bad" and reply: "Bad your ass, buddy", which made me a badass and not so bad if it did not mean constipated. If we actually thought in sentences, why, this book would be twice as long as it is now because it would not require so much re-reading and re-writing, which is a relief if Dear Reader considers that if I could write as fast as I think the book would be ten times longer and probably not the best-seller it was meant to be (assuming it wasn't because of its length).

      These affirmations alone, however, did not undercut the strength of the evidence I have just culled from my memoirs, such as neurosis and suicide. But this so-called evidence did not show that mind was not propositional either. What it showed if anything was that I had to find "propositional explanations" for my "dips" and for neurosis and for suicide. In the real world, when I took the step towards propositionality--"real world", by the way, only because it went before I wrote all this, so not really any more "real" than what I am writing now--I did so under the cover of a kind of Rubber-Man hypothesis, that is, I do not know how thinking is done, but propositions constitute a good possibility, which I will use for now and see how things turn out.

I wasn't even a certified gadfly, which is what minor philosophers are called

As I keep harping on propositionality, the reader will obviously suspect that as far as my lights went, the propositional hypothesis had turned out just fine. But how far did my lights go? I am not exactly a lighthouse or even a certified gadfly--minor philosophers are usually called gadflies--so I have to start by demonstrating that my lights are quite sufficient. One of the reasons for believing this is that propositionality solved the paradox of awareness, although as we shall see this was no great guns and propositionality had a more transcendental immediate consequence.

      With our recently acquired concept of validity, the paradox of awareness can be rephrased as that we can believe in propositions that are not valid. Obviously, this did not mean that we could actually believe that pigs could fly, but it could mean that we could believe that some ignorant shehe believed that the morning star and the evening star referred to different heavenly bodies (Frege), or that a befuddled shehe both knew and did not know Walter Scott (in this case, an attribution of the thoroughly anti-royalist Russell to George III).      

      Underlying the paradox of awareness was intensionality. Intension means connotation, which entails ambiguity and unreliable thought processes, a reason for not pursuing philosophy of mind. Ambiguity could be illustrated with the word "piba" which if a Russian used it meant he wanted a Baltika or if an Argentinian did it meant he wanted a young girl, a possible signpost to underlying cultural differences. Really radical critics of mind (not counting Aristotle who had no use for brains) actually preferred to say "opacity" rather than "intensionality" in that the former term connoted a greater degree of uncertainty. Opaque could mean that you bumped into things even if you were not blind and that was something you wanted to avoid, especially if you had lots of metal furniture.

      A famous gadfly had refuted the concept of the opacity of mind with the dubious claim that propositional attitudes are "determinate". Propositional attitudes are statements from subjectivity, such as "I think", "I believe", "I this", "I that", and so on. The highly subjective "I" bit makes them unreliable. Propositional attitudes made possible intensionality and opacity. What belief, for example, could I inspire in any one if I went around saying: "Yep, it looks like snow", on a sunny day in the middle of summer, in the Philippines. Determinate means definable or knowable. Objectivists who like to throw their weight around prefer "quantifiable" to "determinate", which is nonsense and clearly indicates that they weigh less than they think, as if our runty policeman, the one that wouldn't have cowed a spooked chicken, wanted to be cast in the role of Gorgeous George (famously corpulent).

      Now, propositional attitudes obviously are not determinate at all, because I can claim to believe anything I say and there is no way in the world anybody can "determine" whether I truly mean it or not. I could tell a broad in Ermita that I loved her madly, and who, except her (if she was a sparky whore), would be the wiser? What does solve the paradox of awareness (and intensionality and opacity along with it) is that propositions have bases and contents.

      The bases of propositions are their explicit or implicit attribution to some one. In a wide sense, the contents of propositions are their meanings. The proposition "Higgs' bosons exist" is equivalent to "Some one believes that Higgs' bosons exist". Whether "Higgs' bosons" exist or not is a question for particle physicists to determine. The contents of propositions in this sense are determinate. They can be valid or invalid.

      The bases of propositions are necessarily valid. Whether some one has actually found and felt Higgs' bosons, the proposition "Some one believes that Higgs' bosons exist" is valid not only for that person--self-evidently no one would be making such an inherently hinky claim without good reason--but for every one else, because no one has any means to know that such is or is not the case. In other words, no one could object if I said: "Yes, that person believes or says he believes that Higgs' bosons exist".

      The bases of propositions are propositional attitudes in connection to some determinate object. There was no question of propositional attitudes being determinate or quantifiable. Propositions such as "I like fun" or "I enjoy orgasm" are wholly indisputable and that's all there is to it, although behaviorists might claim that if I was in a fun party with a long face that would prove I did not like fun, which is hardly conclusive--I might have just been told I was HIV-positive by my doctor at the same party--and still another take on why behaviorists went around calling people "mindless".

      In the same line of reasoning, a man who did not have an erection when shown you-know-what would be impotent, which again would not necessarily be the case. If something beyond the person's penile reaction was invoked, there was the danger of falling into premises involving attitudes, moods, sexual orientation, etc., none of which could be reduced to immediate observable reactions.

Shehe was not in my shoes and did not know how urgently I needed to find my GPS, which anyway was much more appealing than finding Higgs' bosons

The distinction between bases and contents did away with the paradoxes of intensionality, such as the one having the much-maligned King George III as its butt and which went like this: King George III knows Sir Walter Scott; King George III does not know the author of Waverley; therefore, King George III knows and does not know Walter Scott. If the King said that he did not know Walter Scott, why, that was perfectly valid, because what he meant was that he believed he did not know a determinate person, and this was just a propositional attitude, which was irrefutable and entailed that there was no paradox. However, the contents of the proposition--whether King George III knew or did not know Walter Scott--were perfectly determinate, because Walter Scott had been personally knighted by George III and the King was not lying or being paradoxical but at worse adverting to his disinclination to Scott's novels or to read.

      I must here admit that my own device to disarm the paradox seemed itself to be paradoxical. Propositions such as "I like having fun" or "I enjoy orgasm" appeared to have only propositional bases and this contradicted the basis of the distinction for all propositions between bases and contents, for who could determine anything about my feelings. Why, according to behaviorists, even I wouldn't have been able to, which meant that after I had my broad in Ermita and she either had orgasm or went through the routine of feigning it, I could say: "You certainly enjoyed that. The question is, did I?" Such propositions also implied that they had no propositional contents which meant that they were meaningless. Well, the only answer I had was that "fun" and "orgasm" referred to propositions that basically described the objects of my propositional attitudes. "I like having fun" could mean "I enjoy orgasm" and "I enjoy orgasm" could be translated as "I enjoy what happens to the urethra when it is converted from a conduit for urine to a motorway for semen", which was the equivalent of the Ermita experience, for me of course, for I am sure my broad must have gone through the same private show at least ten or more times a night.

      Anyhow, if you think I am making a big fuss because of some silly-ass paradox that isn't a paradox, you are in error because what I wanted to get to with my distinction between the bases and the contents of propositions was another thing altogether. In other words, the paradoxes themselves were pretty primitive and my analysis of propositions wasn't exactly an intellectual triumph of immeasurable proportions. However, when I mentioned propositional bases I alluded not only to propositional attitudes but also to the sources of propositional attitudes--there had to be a process which induced belief whether mistaken or not--and this was the window of opportunity I would use to get out of a discussion that seemed justifiably futile. If the bases of propositions were necessarily valid (because there was no way to refute them), then the reference to "sources" was also necessarily valid. Propositional attitudes had to arise from somewhere and this somewhere was cognition.

      This argument implicitly contained my argument against uncaused behaviour and the kind of cartoon-like, topsy-turvy universe that would produce. The problem here was that to posit cognition meant that we were making what sounded awfully like a claim that required verification--after all, who cared whether I loved a broad I had picked up in some dive in Ermita?--which put us square in the middle of propositional contents and these could be valid or invalid.

      Well, it looked as if I had fallen into yet another one of those circular situations--like the being/knowing duality or trying to define truth--and it also seemed about time to call for Mr Rubber-Man again. All I wanted him to guarantee this time was that accepting the concept of cognition implied nothing more than cognition itself, a concept expressing something complex that mind did.

      Regardless of how I had obtained it, the important thing was that I had the concept of cognition as a result of serial thought and this was consistent with my clearly stated intention of finding a theory of knowledge. But it was more than just being consistent because whereas knowledge was a slippery concept, always wanting to turn into froth and bubbles--according to a great theoretician of consciousness a thermostat was capable of "knowledge"--cognition was very concrete and there was little chance it could change on me into a fish or a bar of soap. There was no way a thermostat could be capable of cognition, unless you wanted to stretch a point to an unsustainable extreme, such as that a thermostat, faithful servant that it was, much preferred for me a setting of 70 degrees F than a sweltering 80 or a freezing 30, where it would be feeling unhelpful, perhaps even a little neurotic.

      I knew that there could only be one successful theory of cognition, yet there were many pretenders, whose ranks I was about to join, and this sounded like the improbable proposition that I would voluntarily join a bread queue in Havana. The reason there were many pretenders for only one difficult prize was that to have a successful theory of cognition you had to posit an object-self, by which I meant--and this was not something I lifted from some gadfly or other--you had to assume the view-from-nowhere and as I have already explained this was like believing in Goldilocks.

      However, this also worked for me, because if there was no view-from-nowhere, then I had as much right as any one else to try my hand at formulating a reasonably consistent theory of knowledge, which made the bread-queue metaphor vanish instantly. The most important thing was that I proceed with the conviction that I could be as objective about cognition as any shehe dead or alive. Put in still another way, it was to be assumed that there was a type-theory of cognition, but researchers had to settle for token-theories. I was going for a token-theory and the fact that the type-theory was unreachable was not going to deter me.

      On this point, I would dearly love to remind the reader that I was not in this quest for the glory but because I wasn't getting out of life as much fun as I expected. Dear Reader will surely comment: "Hell of a way to have fun!" And that's as may be, but shehe was not in my shoes and did not know how urgently I needed to find my GPS, which anyway was much more appealing than finding Higgs bosons, at least for me.

I am reminded of the woman who thought she had been given a job in the Taliban institute for gender studies

Needless to say, I have been compressing time in these memoirs and this could be communicating a wrong impression of the time lapses involved in these speculations. It might seem, for instance, that the previous account of my philosophical progress spanned a period of a day or even hours when in fact we're talking here of weeks and months and even years.

      This compression of very gradual processes could also encourage the notion that I was skimming over the surface of philosophy, in which a sure, ponderous pace is preferable to quick-stepping through a situation, like charting a bog as opposed to wanting to get out of it quickly, which is not meant to mock the methodicity of philosophers. Insights were possible, useful, and exhilarating, but mostly arguments underwent a process of maturation during which they were written down many times in different versions and from different angles until you felt confident that they were reasonably unassailable.

      These summaries of very long processes might also mislead the reader to underrate my ability to endure a solitary life, comparatively as if I could only do one pool's length underwater and not the four or five I was capable of before coming up for air. You could say that I was fit and had a lot of resistance--I had cut my heavy drinking a long time before and I had given up my ten cigarettes a day--but I had to surface occasionally and that was what I regularly did, although, to start with, Back-of-Cebu was not exactly the Back of the Beyond, which anyway isn't the back of anything anymore. Nothing is, really, except places where you might be mugged by a taxi driver, and this, which not so long ago was possible even in NYC, is now restricted to a few areas where you could enter inadvertently only if you were so confused you had no idea where you were going, like the night visitor to Tajikistan who didn't know what he was doing there. Or the woman who landed in Kabul thinking she had been offered a job in the Taliban Institute for Gender Studies.

Even though I lived far from urban sprawl, I had all basic services within reach--crucially, being connected to the web--so I wasn't isolated by any means. I did not have cable television because I did not want it. But I did have a TV set and a VCR and I ordered movies from web retailers, including filmings of the big operas I could not afford to see regularly in London. I had mostly given up on new films because there never was anything new under the sun and all plots were rehashes for new generations of actors who in some cases looked like those of previous generations.

      But I lived alone and I knew it was time for rubbing elbows when I started answering the parrots as if they were talking to me, although our dialogues were incomprehensible because they spoke Visayan--the odd stray parrot spoke Tagalog, but this I could tell from the airs it put on--and I answered in heavily accented Old Church Slavonic, which might have been why our conversations were halting, punctuated by reciprocal, quizzical stares. Another symptom was running out of new videocassettes to see and not wanting to view another "classic" for the umpteenth time and tuning to local TV, which made the Visayan parrots happy but did nothing for my linguistic skills.

I get to meet Mr Buggered, the greatest intellectual luminary in the expat community

For my occasional surfacings, I usually tagged along with Elias Shemberg on a Pacific Cebu flight to Manila, or if he was away or busy, I would fly on my own. I spent so little money in my jungle hideaway that my royalties, skimpier as they tended to get at first, sufficed to keep my bank account full, so when I went to Manila I had money to spend if I avoided the five star hotels in Makati, and there was no reason not to avoid them. The action was elsewhere and you were much more likely to come across it in a seamy one and a half star fleabag than in one with a lobby that suggested your bill would have enough surcharge to pay for a regiment of masseuses, an excess which could only be justified if you were strongly addicted to all-stops-out high tea, better known in the Philippines as merienda, and I was so far from being in that group I once spent a week at The Churchill and only found out afterwards that it was famous for its watercress and cucumber sandwiches, something I regretted as much as if I had not eaten contaminated shellfish.

      However, avoiding unnecessary expenses did not mean these were necessarily low. I was not about to be driving around by myself, so when I visited Manila I availed myself of Edmundo Vinoya, a driver from Pangasinan, and his rickety Volvo, which still had enough visible lustre to allow me to make a splashy entrance anywhere, although this was probably subjective because in Manila the plushier nightspots were not designed to accomodate tightwads, so I would have had a hard time trying to compete in conspicuous consumption as opposed to thinking to myself that I made a passable potentate. Besides, I did not feel the need for that sort of competition and I never put myself in a situation where I could experience the discomfort of being economically pinched.

      Through different chance encounters--and I am talking here about the many occasions when I was on my own rather than with Elias and the diplomatic crowd--I knew groups of expatriates and the places they gathered at for drinks and fun. These were like golf invitationals and people went there if they could afford it. There were no formalities and all you had to do was adapt to the local expat mores, which were not complicated at all: basically having a taste for vast quantities of beer, being of good cheer, and considering that Manila was paradise, an opinion I hardly shared but did not make an issue of.

      Conversation ran to jogging your memory about the latest nocturnal escapade, the cost of travel, some choice events back home (like how Orientals were flushed out trying to do reverse expats), recent golf games, and stuff like that. The highest intellectual distinction in that milieu was achieved in my time by a fellow who presented himself as I B Buggered. At least that's how I knew him and after a few drinks I realized he didn't mind, he actually preferred, being addressed by his assumed surname. Mr Buggered, then, was very proud of the law he had discovered and enunciated in a book he wrote, which I never saw, according to which in any given city the price of a whore was ten times the price of a haircut.

      The preferred daytime activity of most expats was golf, on which I will expatiate later. It was an addiction they usually had not brought with them but acquired in the Philippines. I shared that inclination to the extent of eventually joining the Manila Woods Club--a patent travesty of Vienna Woods, for there were no real woods there--which was exclusive and mid-range expensive, and especially had the advantage of being relatively close to the city, which says everything for any one who knows anything about Manila traffic, the closests you can get to a nightmare eyes wide open and wishing they were shut. This fact incidentally made Manileños very proud and prone to touchy if some one said traffic was worse in another city.

      In the matter of whoring, which with beer-swilling and desultory talk was another favourite pasttime among some of my expat friends, Manila offered anything that any one could want, from the multi-storied industrialized brothels in which prices increased as you went up the floors, to the intimate massage parlors, to the places which were one thing during the day and evening and another towards midnight, to the street hookers, who apparently operated on the principle that if you had drunk enough you might still be in the mood for a nightcap and didn't mind what went into the cocktail. Often their clients got the scare (or the revelation) of their lives. Or they knew and were closet bisexuals and preferred going sideways into an aspect of their sexual persona they did not like to exhibit too openly.

      Given my background in the matter of whores, Manila should have been a God-send, but in fact I did not much enjoy whoring there and I did it only to be part of the scene or when I had imbibed the right quantity of beer, maybe mixed with some Scotch, to get up a good head. To have done less than this with my expat friends would have been like going to sleep in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or being teetotal in one by Jordaens.

      There is one aspect of the night life (although the whoring went on day and night) that I should mention to be consistent with my sincerity stance throughout these memoirs, but it requires going into it sideways, like the bisexuals who could only assume their role when they were plastered. The whores I had looked very young, even when undressed, and it was often a surprise for me to learn after sex that they had four children and sometimes even grandchildren, which meant of course I had just had a grandmother, albeit young.

      It didn't make any difference after the facts, so to speak, but it did awaken in me a latent paedophilic inclination. I mean, here I was believing I was getting the real article when I was only buying fourth-hand goods. In my lurid imagination I began having fantasies which I barely dare confess now, but which were then strong enough for me to do some research on my own. For this I visited for a time the better hotels and their swimming pools. I will not be a hypocrite and say I did not enjoy the cut of bathing suits along edges that had the promise of budding adolescence, nor will I deny that I approached the flowers that bloom in the spring tra-la, but I am not fool enough to tell Dear Reader what success I had or did not have in these explorations. All I will say is that, unlike the case of the "idiot girl" I almost had in my youth in The Republic, I did not hear a voice inside me saying: "Whoa there, Carlitos", because, put it down to age or to cynicism, I did not think I was committing a crime, as I did not feel disposed to deliver myself bound hand and foot to a life of perversion.

The presentation of my philosophical ideas was like the Liberace half-hour interpretation of the complete piano works of Mozart

More than for moral reasons, I backed away from such a commitment because of the nature of my work, which was life-or-death for me, so that other activities, however prurient and pleasurable, were simulations or respites from my prolonged intellectual exertions. It was also possible that cryptorchidism, after the dirty trick the resentful surgeon pulled, might have been catching up to me, although I do not really accept the latter hypothesis because I did have a significant affair and I knew my capacity for passion involving emotional attachment and sexual desire was intact, or hardly diminished. Whatever it was, my socializing in Manila, whether with Shemberg or with the expats, responded more to a natural need than to something I truly enjoyed, comparable to going to the can or taking a leak which I do because I have to and not as if I was having a ball, unless my bladder seems as if it were about to burst, and emptying it is a spurious kind of joy, like some one having a ball because shehe stopped banging herhis own head with a hammer.

      The affair I have just mentioned was with a Brazilian diplomat named Sonia with whom I shared a liking for Clara Petraglia, a folk singer from her own country even she knew little about. All we knew was that we had heard the same songs in the same recording and derived the same enjoyment from them. I told her that for a time one of my musical heroes was a guy named Fernando Valenti who had recorded the entire Domenico Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas and then either the Earth had swallowed him or it was discovered his recordings had been spliced together from the occasional snatches of music he got right. Anyway, Valenti and Petraglia were non-intriguing mysteries and we had a good laugh and we went on laughing all the way to bed and after that I went to Manila mostly to see her, with good cause because Sonia was dark and shapely but she wasn't just clove and cinnamon but a professional diplomat with a sharp mind.

      Being somewhat jaded and contrarian, I still devoted most of my time to philosophy. Sonia did not seem to mind although I suspected she would have preferred that I left my retreat and moved to Manila and I was on the verge of doing just that--the greater part of my foundational philosophical work, though not some crucial parts, having been completed--when the news arrived from Ytamarati that she was being transferred to Rabat. We took it stoically and promised to keep in touch through the internet. But after that my visits to Manila became dismal and I decided to stop them the night during a binge I had a dark circle made in the area in my chest exactly over where an old stethoscope belonging to the tattoo artist revealed my heart was beating.

      Dear Reader might be wondering how, with my depleted resources, totally engaged in what seemed like economically worthless pursuits, I managed to do all I did during the period in question and it is time that I let herhim in on a secret which I have not revealed because it is hard to explain in itself without some information which I do not want to disclose just now for "structural" reasons relevant to this work. This means I want to create some suspense having to do also with the patently symbolic tattoo I had done over my heart. In the end I hope to round out these memoirs with an asynchronous parallel sequence, which is like when Pauline was tied to the railroad tracks and the train had time to run over her about twenty times before she was finally rescued. Or when the five seconds before a timed bomb goes off last about ten minutes of film time and conclude exactly one fraction of a second before detonation.

      What happened was that my account was being regularly replenished by transfers from London the source of which was not entirely clear to me. Although I had sold another work to a London publisher and I had much hope pinned on it--I have not mentioned it so as not to distract from the account of the development of my philosophy--all I could show for this new effort was a measly one thousand five hundred pound advance. Towards the money I was mysteriously receiving I obviously took the prescribed attitude in the case of a gift horse. But since this was almost like a miracle, and the reader knows how scant were my expectations about such phenomena, I now had two accounts, in different banks, one for my royalties and my expenses and one from these mysterious monies, so that if some one later had the idea of reclaiming the horse I could say that he could have the stable, which of course wasn't mine. For the moment I will say no more on these strange but welcome contributions to my material sustenance.

      Besides, it is now time once again to return to Cebu and to my philosophical disquisitions, which we left before with two important achievements: validity and propositionality. This is also as good a time as any to remind Dear Reader again that the time-compression I have been forced to apply to my thought has also made simplifications unavoidable. Much development has been omitted. Some bridging has been obviated, which, without implying even the remotest comparison to genius, has resulted in something like the disco version of the Choral Symphony or the Liberace half-hour interpretation of the complete piano works of Chopin.

Neurological research had produced an imaginary freak with a tongue the size of his face, a hand as big as his torso, and a huge toe whose nail could only be cut with a hedge trimmer (presumably the freak also suffered from gout) 

Unlike other organs and functions--the liver, for instance, which you know will get jaundiced and lazy the more booze you imbibe--mind is not specified  by the description of the brain, not even by a hypothetical systematic correlation between mental events and brain states, because this leaves standing the fundamental problem of how matter can think. Why not, for instance, a thinking liver, which all in all is not so different from its owner if we judge by its reaction to excessive drinking? Nevertheless, for mind, as for the liver, understanding has to be propositional, a treatise of psychology in sign language being hardly imaginable.

      Since mind was in itself propositional, my search for cognition had to conclude in a set of propositions about propositions, which was not the case of the liver at all, for this basically involved propositions about meat. What's more, the operation of mind as cognition came down to a set, albeit a very large set, of propositions, and as propositions were expressions and mind was representational, the result was that relative to thought expression was the same as representation.

      I want to be clear on these ideas, so I will expand on them, which is the only experimental method I know of in philosophy--it goes to the pre-emption of flanking movements by sneaky critics--save for pseudo-scientific claims by contemporary analytical philosophers of mind and they are so far behind Microsoft and advanced chip technology it is pathetic. Mind can only be understood and defined as the expression of what it does. Theoretically, it could also be contained in descriptions of the brain. However, this line of research had led, among other punctate results, to the depiction of an imaginary freak with a tongue the size of his face, a hand as big as his torso, and a huge toe whose nail could only be cut with a hedge trimmer (presumably the freak also suffered from gout). It was, incidentally, concocted by a Canadian neurologist named Penfield, which is more proof that Canadians shouldn't be underestimated, or in this case over-rated. The reason for those distortions has to do with the relative sizes of the areas of the brain which were sensitive to these disproportionate parts of the anatomy. It was with foundations like these that neurophilosophers believed they would eventually achieve a grasp on the minds of Shakespeare or Einstein (or so they said).

      Since mind was the expression of what it did, then in reference to the knowledge of mind representation and expression were equivalent and cognition was constituted by processes which could only be grasped in propositions, and not like a fat yellow liver which could be seen, touched, and (ugly thought) even smelled. Those propositions about cognition were not cognition itself, but they were the only sufficiently comprehensive and necessary means to understand and specify cognition. It was in this sense and only in this sense that it could be said that expression was equivalent to representation, the essential reality of mind. This is also what was meant by the propositionality of mind.

      Since a description of a liver hardly sufficed to exhaust the reality of the liver--had it done so, a chronic alcoholic could have talked it down to its normal size and to its natural healthy pink--then in this case expression was hardly equivalent to the pesky liver, which just went on getting fatter and lazier the more you drank. In sum, my fundamental claim was that my mind was not only propositional but that the totality of the contents of mind were propositions. I had a lot going on this thesis regarding my future tranquility, which, not knowing exactly what it consisted in, I had already started calling names such as ataraxia and eudaemonia that under normal conditions could be considered fighting words by others.

      Now, it was obvious that human beings, who were born and developed and grew old and died--unless they died before in untoward or premature circumstances, which could even happen to babies in their cribs if they weren't good at swallowing their own saliva--had to acquire over that expanse of time a great many propositions. Since propositions did not arise ex nihilo, there had to be propositions from which other propositions could derive, or it would be as if plants were spawned from dirt. We might not know exactly how, but everything in thought had antecedents. This entailed that we were born with thoughts, or more precisely, with propositions, which explained why babies after the cross-eyed phase entered the phase in which they eyed the people around them suspiciously, a more than justified attitude in babies destined to be neurotics later in life.  If we did not have innate propositions, how could we think logically without having gone to Kings college, where in the logics course I took I learned nothing I did not know before except a bunch of Jewish jokes I do not now remember. Or want to? Logic was present when a baby distinguished between a rattle and herhis feet. For this, the baby did not need precise instructions from adults. As this might sound as if I were trying to pick a quarrel about the nature of logic and that is not my intention now, let us proceed to another argument, one that is even more unobjectionable.

      No one taught the selfsame baby how to recognize the yellow-plastic rattle or the red-plastic hammer and how to tell them apart and the baby also managed these astounding feats without the aid of others. This meant the baby had innate instructions on how to assemble sensations and make files on these assemblies which shehe then put inside a directory or a folder and went into herhis memory to be brought forth wholly or in part whenever they were required. Not so en passant, an objection to the innateness of propositions was that no normal baby in his right mind would actually have propositions, so how could I say herhis mind was propositional? But this difficulty was as trifling as spitting out olive pits, because we already saw that mental propositions did not have to be linguistic sentences, so the baby's mind could still be as propositional as mine without herhis command of a language.

      I know there are still superannuated empiricists out there who will object: "How about tabula rasa?" and I am not going to address the issue at all even if some of them did buy this book, which does not come with a guarantee of universal harmony and understanding. However, I will remind one and all that we are no longer living in the mechanistic world of Newtonian physics in which things are things and "non-material things" are not things and time and space are the same everywhere as they are in my Back-of-Cebu den. If this were the case, the straight line I draw here on a notepad could remain straight to infinity, as if the universe was like my notepad (hardly likely!); and that I take my afternoon merienda (served by France, my servant from nearby Olympia) when I get hungry around 4:30 p.m., which is exactly the same time in Alpha Centauri, or wherever. In fact, there is even such a thing as air conditioning, which British empiricists did not know about and which I use when mornings are excessively humid until I start having a dry cough and turn it off.

Perceiving without memory was as possible as walking without legs (riding maybe, which is a poor equivalent)

The basic process of cognition, then, was the application of propositions to propositions to obtain derivations. As there were innate propositions and acquired or derived propositions, it behooved me to make a distinction, which meant I had to find verbal expressions for both entities. Experience, or what is learned after birth, could be adequately served by "derived propositions". The innate propositions were another matter. Since I was exploring the fundamentals of cognition I invented the expression "basic cognitive propositions". Why not "innate cognitive propositions"? Well, to be quite honest, it only crossed my mind later and I had already derived the snappy, rather neat-sounding version "basic-cog's", whereas "in-cog's", apart from being late, might suggest that propositions were trying to behave like Greta Garbo.

      Basic-cog's--the apostrophe was necessary to indicate it was a personal discovery and not something you would find in a dictionary, an absence I fully expected would be made good in time--suggested cogs (without the apostrophe), as in "he has a cog loose", but also such as would constitute the heart of a contraption, like the engine in an automobile or the hard disk in a computer. These basic-cog's were used to process information from outside the mind. They were what made possible the transformation of sensory inputs into propositions, although to fully round out this argument, as well as defuse the objection that babies at first couldn't distinguish between themselves and a rattle let alone have propositions, I needed entities even more basic than basic-cog's, which are what we dubbed "squiggles", but we will come to that shortly (and believe me, Dear Reader, when I say that I am compressing time furiously even as I write these words).

      Summarizing, then, basic-cog's were applied to inputs and this process resulted in further propositions. All propositions could be divided into basic-cog's and derivations. However, through other reasonings I won't bother to expound in detail, basic-cog's could enter into other basic-cog's, as in the case of the interaction between perception and memory, which is like legs and walking, but the other way around, if you follow my drift, which you probably don't, and what I mean is that perception is not possible without memory just as walking without legs is impossible (riding maybe, which is a poor equivalent).

      Basic-cog's should ideally be expressed in logical formulae, which like my tachygraphy are also propositions. The results of such formulae are deductions from basic-cog's. Cognition is the totality of the basic-cog's that determine cognitive processes (I am taking liberties here but I think that by now on this matter I do not require excuses or explanations). Although the distinction between basic-cog's and cognitive processes is hair-thin, this only means that cognition can be either all possible basic-cog's or all possible cognitive processes. Now, for all I knew, there could be an infinite number of basic-cog's. Maybe it was possible to know this, maybe not, but I did know absolutely that I wasn't about to undertake the discovery of all basic-cog's whatever their number because there had to be so many of them I did not have the time or the resources to suss them out.

      Figuratively speaking, if I started out by admitting that in my voyage of discovery I was going to be satisfied if I discovered an island and decided to stay there the rest of my life, then why do the voyage at all? Was it worth it? Maybe not but doing the voyage was inevitable for me--I had already started anyway and these thoughts were as if Leif Ericson in the middle of the wintry North Atlantic suddenly started complaining about the cold--so what I really wanted was to find some reassurance to the effect that I was not going for a token discovery but for a discovery with truly fabulous consequences.

      With the admission of my limited ambitions, the situation I was in could be compared to a hypothetical Columbus telling His Most Catholic Majesties: "I need three ships to find India but don't be expecting me to bring back gold and spices and silk and stuff like that", which is exactly how it turned out unless macaws and trinkets and a couple of Amerindians could stand in for the riches of the Orient. And notwithstanding this jiggery pokery, the real Columbus had made an extraordinary, if not an original, discovery; and like the real Columbus I too had to have a story to justify the voyage and this is the one I came up with.

      A theory of knowledge ideally consists in a detailed description of all basic-cog's. Such an enterprise assumes the existence of an object-self, which is not a self you can put on a shelf except as being admirably efficient and objective about cognitive processes. But you couldn't take any body's word about this, which meant there was no object-self at all. Another way to put it was that the achievement of a completely satisfactory type-theory of cognition was very unlikely and that all we could have were specific or token theories which tried to approximate the actual workings of mind. Specific theories of cognition, such as the one I was elaborating, were tokens of the type of an ideal theory based on the concept of an object-self. However, tokens of the type-theory could themselves function as types to explain the tokens of experience. I was once again recurring to Mr. Rubber-Man, for my argument in essence was: "In the absence of something better, let's just assume this and let's wait and see if the assumption is good". In very specific terms, what I assumed was that I could attain adequate if not complete accounts of sensation, perception, memory, and logic, which sounds like a limited program of research only if you believe that Brothers Grimm wrote the definitive history of the world.

The Big Bang or why babies often look cross-eyed

Without further ado, then, I will proceed to time-compress my elucubrations on how, ultimately, elucubration takes place. This will involve some repetition which I beg Dear Reader to view as reinforcement rather than flogging a dead horse, an activity inspiring in me the most profound revulsion.

      Sensation is a pre-perceptual process in individuals. Only babies were capable of experiencing it, but this only sounds like a privilege because they are often cross-eyed and tend to confuse their feet with rattles. Sensation is the one irreducible cognitive process in which specific inputs to mind are the same as basic-cog's. To illustrate this assertion, it is somewhat like saying a "flour cake", which is true enough but only if you keep in mind that flour happens to be an ingredient in any cake worth its salt (incidentally, another basic ingredient of cakes).

      However, sensation is a transitory phase which is quickly superseded by perception or the act of recognition. In time (in a very brief time), perception overwhelms sensation entirely, but it is possible to "decompose" perception, which is one of the functions of representative or visual arts. (This sly little obiter dictum is a gift.) The only basic-cog of sensation is x --> a, that is, the world impinges on mind. Once this is entered, mind can derive logically every type of sensation (sight, hearing, smelling, etc.) and every specific sensation  (hovering shade, goo-goo, crappy smell, etc.), because specification and generalization are logical axioms that intervene in sensation and perception.

      In perception it is already possible to distinguish between the faculty and the act of perceiving. If basic-cog's are principles that operate on the inputs of experience, then the results of their operation must be inferences. Since perception is the interactive result of sensation, memory, and logic, it is possible to argue that there might not be basic-cog's proper to perception, but, in keeping with my previous illustration, it would be like saying that a cake tastes like flour, milk, eggs, sugar, etc., depending on the recipe. In any event, since none of these rule-governed processes is learned--not logic, nor memory, certainly not perception--it is to be assumed that they have to be innate, which, carrying the metaphor further (a reason metaphors shouldn't be carried too far), is like saying that a newborn knows how to bake a cake.

      The rules of perception direct the binding of sensations, which is done according to the deductive forms of intuitive logic. This is not entirely unlike a jigsaw puzzle, except that the pieces are much smaller and you don't have the cover of the box to serve as a model. The process is really much more complicated than any analogy with jigsaw puzzles could ever make it seem, so this is said just for the sake of an elementary illustration. Perception is recognition and in this it is almost indistinguishable from memory. However, memory is the necessary basis of every cognitive process so it cannot be restricted to perception. These arguments point to the total and constant and necessary interactiveness of all basic-cog's, for otherwise you would have individuals who spent all day remembering nothing, or others who looked on the world as a congeries of colours and lines, and others still who whiled away the time of life doing syllogisms, no doubt the paradigm Wittgenstein had in mind when he ungraciously lambasted Russell and other logicians.

      The reader has come across various times my perfectly amateurish interest in physics, so shehe should not be surprised at what comes next. At birth, the human being has the full complement of basic-cog's that determine cognitive processes. These cognitive processes do not all become active at once. Their development is determined by genetics. However, since all basic-cog's and all potential cognitive processes are innate, birth can be described as a cognitive "big bang". The development of cognitive abilities is analogously like the formation of clusters, galaxies, and stars, which may be why babies sometimes look cross-eyed. In this initial explosion there are no fundamental precedences. All that can be said is that cognitive processes begin to develop at a basic level and develop according to general patterns but in ways specific to each individual.

      The attentive reader will have noticed that I did not even do a token exploration of memory, but this is not because I am trying to give herhim the run-around. I have too much respect for herhis intelligence to do that. There are reasons for this apparent disappearing act. One literally is that next to perception memory does tend to disappear because the two are almost impossible to distinguish. When we perceive any given object, how different is this from retrieving the necessary information in memory to permit the act of recognition? Is perception at all possible without memory? And were it so, would it be possible to distinguish perception and sensation? Why, without memory we would be like the ignorant young Amerindian who went home, visibly agitated, and told his parents he had seen some awful beast that emitted smoke and was farting all the time, which turned out to be a truck.

      Ultimately, however, memory and perception are different if only because other mental events besides perception also depend on memory and perception involves the senses, which are hardly identical with the brain, where memory surely resides. Further than this would takes us far afield, but let me also say that it is inaccurate that I neglected memory before, because there was reference to specification and generalization and these functions are proper to memory (and to logic, which raises another identity issue and complicates matters more than I think is justified). 

      I will insist on two important points. One is: do not believe the bunk about neurologists finding the seat of memory here or there in the brain, because memory is everywhere and if it weren't, there wouldn't be mind and behaviorists would be right, a dismal prospect indeed. The other is that the distinction between short-term and long-term memories is also bunk, because definitions of short-term and long-term are relativistic and events long ago can seem more real than all the trivia around us, which we remember as if they were as bright and shining as Platonic ideas.

      Although it was hardly probatory, I knew this perfectly because as I was writing this work, which is based mostly on long-term memory, I was also remembering constantly where I had put the stuff I needed to write it--like paper and folders and ink cartridges and so on; was my command of WP, for example, short-term or long-term?--and I can assure the reader that there is absolutely no difference to be made between the presumed and baseless temporal categories of memory, except for justifying grants and laboratories where rats are made to run on treadmills, like overweight businessmen, and tyrannized in other ways.

Even amoebas had to know that a crowd meant good food, but also that to get to it you had to do the equivalent of bribing the maître

I assumed and argued for a distinction between intuitive logic and formal logic. I have previously derided the British philosopher Dummett because he believed in Frege's pretension to the "extrusion of thought", which in certain human specimens, like Nazis or people who bang their heads on a wall, would be something like mental defecation. However, Dummett was clever enough to admit that there might exist a logic different from formal logic. His insight was flawed by his abject adherence to the Wittgensteinian linguistic approach to mind, which only Wittgenstein knew how to use, and this implied that the alternative to formal logic that Dummett envisioned was not inside mind, which opened the dreadful possibility that he could have been a mindless behaviorist. His proud claim of adherence to the linguistic turn, which as we have emphasized only Wittgenstein really understood, might also imply that Dummet didn't know what he was talking about, another distinct possibility given that Wittgenstein probably didn't know either.

      Intuitive logic was constituted by basic-cog's. Symbolic logic and all formal deductive systems were derivations from the exploration by intuitive logic of itself, but they did not exhaust intuitive logic. This is what Putnam meant by mind transcending anything that it can formalize, which unfortunately he based on Gödel's numbering system designed to prove that 2 + 2 equals not-4, a patently uphill struggle.

      It can be shown that intuitive logic has principles and axioms which formal logic ignores. However, it is impossible for intuitive logic to fully comprehend itself, which can be roughly illustrated with the story of the military base the Americans built on a warren of Vietcong tunnels. They thought they had covered all the ground and discovered their error when the only logical conclusion was that grunts were shooting at each other at night. This shortcoming in our cognitive abilities is a fundamental reason why propositionality can only be predicated of mind in a restricted way. However, that the expression of representations such as logic can never be exactly equivalent may not be a bad thing if you consider, for instance, that if OPEC had all the oil reserves in the world a barrel of crude could conceivably become as expensive as a barrel of VSOP. In sum, formal systems are only approximations or token-theories in the sense that formal logic and predicate logic and so on are token-theories of intuitive logic (the type-theory of logic), and I think it is always good to have something to look for in life. This is the opposite of the Abraham Fallacy, which you will remember as blind trust in a cavernous voice ordering you to go and slit your own child's throat.

      Although by no means the only argument for intuitive logic, the fundamental distinction between intuitive and formal logic lay in the inapplicability, as per the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals, of the relation of identity to reality (excluding logic and mathematics) and its applicability to logical and mathematical propositions. You will remember the indiscernibility of identicals as the principle of identity or the Duck Principle. By contrast with formal logic, the principle of identity was the cornerstone of intuitive logic and it was possible to develop from it not only the empirical principle that two bodies cannot occupy the same space but also the principle of successiveness (two events cannot occur during the same interval of time), from which all deductive or inferential forms can be worked out. Even amoebas, for example, had to know that a crowd meant good food, but also that to get to it you had to do the equivalent of bribing the maître.

      There were other deductions relative to the cognitive process of reason or intuitive logic. It was the impact of things on originary life that set off the process towards the formation of human intuitive logic. There was no contradiction between basic-cog's being innate and intuitive logic developing in the individual. If it were true that the basic-cog's of logic were derivations, each individual mind would be repeating unnecessarily the work of evolution, and this was the equivalent of waking up each morning and not knowing what to do with your legs. The key to the development of intuitive logic had to be genetic programming. Evolution could be described as the process of the derivation of basic-cog's. This applied equally to humans and other animals. The basic contents of intuitive logic were the forms of inference. These permitted different types of derivations depending on the types of inputs.

      All basic-cog's depended on the basic-cog's of intuitive logic. Perception was a logical derivation, or as Helmholtz put it, an "unconscious inference", from the obvious fact that we could see and hear and so on very fast indeed and were not aware of using something like a computer to carry out these apparent simple operations. Since logic was innate and entered into every cognitive process, mind was necessarily logical. It was impossible for mind to suspend its own rationality, as surrealism fraudulently claimed (another gift I am offering the watchful reader). In fact, every one assumed this to be true, or you could have scam artists getting away with the claim that they honestly didn't know your money was not theirs, as had happened to me with Buzakri, and I knew and he knew that such was not the case at all.

Einstein's panic at the thought that he could become an unappetizing omelet

You will remember that there is no question of verifying propositional attitudes because no one can tell me I am lying when I claim I like eating ordure, unless I did like the Shit-Eater in the Costaguanan jail, whom I wouldn't even dream of emulating. If the contrary were the case, then my propositional attitudes would be determinate. However, that some propositions were not verifiable did not necessarily mean that they could not be subject to some degree of determinacy. To demonstrate this we have to do a typology of propositions, because the version of determinacy we want to define is that we can tell, just as surely as we use intuitive logic, the "truth-value of propositions", not always with the precision of fixed prices, but never less than with the certainty that the first price you get at the bazaar isn't the only price you can get, unless you are a veritably stupid backpacker.

      The expression "truth-value" is a problem, to start with, because it includes the controversial term "truth", but as we have already argued for the concept of validity in lieu of truth, we can put that objection aside and assume that "truth-value" means "validity-value", an ungainly expression we shall ignore in favour of the less accurate "truth-value", which all it amounts to is quoting in Pounds Sterling rather than in US Dollars or vice versa, and this is alright as long as you do not do the pricing in imaginary Thalers or in Costaguanan Forints.

      The real problem with "truth-value" is that it suggests that you can say that proposition x is worth one dollar whereas proposition y is worth only a quarter, and so on, which is hardly the case. Assuming the dollar to be the standard of the truth-value of propositions--and why not since it is the standard of everything else?--most of Einstein's propositions were worth one dollar each, some were worth nothing, but of others, like the cosmological constant, you could say that their value has oscillated from three quarters to a dime.

      It was very difficult to determine the truth-value of propositions in that precise sense. Nevertheless, the expression was useful because you could argue that, in terms of their validity, it was possible to classify propositions according to a relative table of values which licensed the non-absolutist claim that some propositions were more valuable than others. Just to make a snide little aside on Mssrs High-and-Mighty Physicists, the cosmological constant was something Einstein dreamed up when he saw his equations predicting that the universe was going to get squashed into an unappetizing omelet, which made him less than enthusiastic as it meant that he himself was an ingredient in a dish that would eventually be scraped into a dustbin.

      Maybe having a typology of propositions would be useful, maybe not, but it was worth a try. At the very least I would be closing certain flanks in my speculations. I could also perhaps avoid the fate of the poor fox who got into the wrong meadow. Alright, so a fox is a fox, but what about me and futures? I got into the wrong meadow there. Perhaps I did it because I was a zombie. But in what would a typology of propositions help to prevent that? Well, whatever the answer to that one, my circularity barometer was dropping fast and it was time for decisions. I had to proceed on the assumption that I wasn't a zombie and that I was an uncautious fox only figuratively.

An incomplete typology of propositions was as compelling as a drunk coming out his coma and challenging any one to a drinking contest

There were various ways of devising a typology of propositions. One was to refer back to the cognitive processes I have described, namely, perception (which as we saw subsumed sensation), memory, and logic. Could I classify propositions as perceptual, mnemonic, and logical?

      There arose some problems here (wouldn't you know it?). I said before that I could not do a type-theory of cognition, so how could I know that I had covered all possible cognitive processes? Which if I hadn't meant that my typology of propositions could hardly be said to be thorough, and who wanted an unthorough typology (something like a drunk coming out of his coma and challenging any one to a drinking contest)?

      However, it was not likely that there were undiscovered cognitive processes significantly different from the ones I singled out, or, to be less categorical (and give less hostages to fate than I had to), there might have been but they were surely related to those I had described. And in this connection I won't even bother expanding on the ESP fiasco at the height of the invasion of the Earth by flying saucers from Roswell, New Mexico, and their nefarious fluoridization plot. The bigger problem was that maybe there were perceptual propositions, but all propositions involved memory and logic and this crossing over cognitive boundaries was hardly a property any one wanted in a typology (like including flies under mammals or elephants under insects). Additionally, even perception did not give grounds to a discrete category, because there were all kinds of perceptions, some more reliable than others, and anyway after the instant of perception, otherwise known as the act of recognition, memory entered the picture and memory was not any one's idea of a machine for making invariably reliable propositions, the way you had sausage-machines that cranked them out alike even to the stray bits of bone and grizzle.

      One of the basic cognitive processes mentioned, however, did seem to offer a more promising lead and that was logic. In both intuitive and formal logic, depending on the premises, there were three types of inferences: apodictic, necessary, and probabilistic. Premises, analogically, could be like top quality tenderloin, nice chunks of stewing beef, or offal (which wasn't valueless as you will remember that Scotties grind it before cooking and down it with lots of Scotch). Dear Reader must make allowances here for my inability when I wrote these thoughts to foresee that soon cows would start going mad and do away with the pricing systems that humans had been applying to their anatomy.

      Apodictic inferences--the top quality tenderloin--were possible only in logic and mathematics. Necessary inferences--the meat that went into a good bourguigon--were paradigmatically those that are made from the application of scientific laws. But we were constantly making necessary inferences. Perception was a necessary inference, although it was possible to misperceive, in which case we would be making probabilistic inferences from the same basic-cog's that usually yielded necessary inferences, like the time of my regrettable landing in the Airstrip-from-Hell.

      Probabilistic inferences--the dregs of the slaughterhouse the Scots and my former Amerindian compatriots relished--were those whose premises were not necessarily useless. This meant that probabilistic inferences were not necessarily invalid (as, analogically, haggis demonstrated). What it did mean was that error was always a possibility of cognition. It was possible to misperceive and it was also possible to do erroneous logical and mathematical calculations. However, there were objective or quantitative means to correct such errors. No such means were available for probabilistic inferences. The extreme case of these were the infallible methods for beating the roulette at Monte Carlo.

    Since propositions were and could only be the results of inferential processes, all mental contents, save innate basic-cog's, were themselves inferences derived from the interaction of basic-cog's. This entailed that some mental contents were more reliable than others. Furthermore, from the typology of inferences, it was possible to elaborate a typology of propositions, which included: (1) logical and mathematical propositions; (2) factual propositions;  and (3) interpretative propositions.

      The well-formed propositions of logic and mathematics were universally valid. In so far as they could be valid or invalid and in so far as both logic and mathematics were historical, they were a form of knowledge and not, as Wittgenstein claimed, empty tautologies.

      Factual propositions were necessary inferences. The temporality of cognition could provide grounds for scepticism about the reliability of perception. If perception was constituted by instants of recognition, how could we "prove" that past instants were not mere probabilities in the sense in which it was only probable that I took a bath this morning and I smell like a skunk only because I forgot to use deodorant? But this would be carrying doubt to an inordinate, unnecessary, and unproductive extreme. It was more likely that I forgot the deodorant than that I would forget going through the process of taking a bath.

      Interpretative propositions were those for which justification was not tantamount to validation. If interpretations on all possible issues converged, they would be necessary inferences, but such was not the case, and interpretation was nearly synonymous with divergence and controversy. The inferential forms through which they were derived were the same as those through which other propositions were derived, but the results were only probabilistic, which should amaze no one as a prospector can find gold in the same river where another comes up with nice clean silt.

Just you try doing three and a half spins diving back from the spring board in a twenty-foot tower or a triple somersault after a double twisting hand stand on a five-foot pommel horse without knowing how to and see where you end up 

I was finally in a position to give a definition of knowledge. It relied on the argument that doing is the most exemplary form of knowing, which is not the cop out it sounds like, for just you try doing three and a half spins diving back from the spring board in a twenty-foot tower or a triple somersault after a double twisting hand stand on a five-foot pommel horse without knowing how to and see where you end up. But it wasn't necessary to go to such extremes.

      Knowledge was the same as cognition and it consisted in the use of basic-cog's, which were mainly innate. Although cognition was complete at birth and fundamentally the same in all individuals, there was no reason not to suppose that: (a) it developed through stages genetically determined; and (b) it admitted of variations on its fundamental sameness. Ultimately, knowledge was what humans did every day, which was remembering, perceiving, and reasoning.

      There was the problem of error. There was also the problem of belief, for, if we could not be sure whether we smelled like a skunk because we hadn't bathed or we hadn't used deodorant, then cognition did not necessarily determine what we believed. And there was finally the problem of the reliability of our cognitive processes. How did we know that remembering, perceiving, and reasoning were reliable?

      The only answer I could come up for this one was that we knew because there was an implicit consensus about the reliability of cognition going back to the beginning of life. I mean, amoebas knew how to find other amoebas to eat as well or better than we knew how to avoid sitting on the air and falling on our asses, unless naturally some amoeba-like fellow human was playing an unfunny practical joke on us.

      When I looked on my theory of knowledge I felt like a painter looking at a canvass into which he had put a lot of effort and imagination and skill. If I stood back, the result, though incomplete and sketchy in many places, looked good. There were patches that required filling in with details of line or color or both and there were details that required reworking. But even though all in all it seemed like a job well done, I could not help feeling that something very important was missing from the entire work, not just something in the nature of details. It was while thinking of my work as a two-dimensional surface that I realized what exactly was missing.

      A canvass is two-dimensional but figurative or representational paintings usually include at least some suggestion of three-dimensionality, except of course when painters do not know how to do perspective or deliberately choose a flatness effect, like Gaughin, to cite one case, whose perverseness in that sense drove van Gogh to snipe off an ear lobe (although he wasn't too keen on perspective either, which didn't lead to cutting off his other ear lobe but to suicide when he saw some crows in the distance).

      The concept of three dimensionality posed no problem for moviegoers during the 50s, who put on 3D goggles to watch a horrifying film in which people or corpses were dropped into vats filled with molten wax. One of the most horrid effects was that the wax figures were so realistic you could not distinguish them from murderous humans posing as wax figures. I knew this was inherently mendacious because I had seen photographs of Madame Tussaud's gallery and excluding the bearded ones I could not tell the difference between the figures (which they actually had the gall to call sculptures).

      Be that as it may, three-dimensionality was a necessary feature of space. It had nothing to do with height, width, and depth, for these could only be represented as lines, and a line is a line is a line. Space, however, is inconceivable without time, because for anything to exist there has to be duration, without which there is exactly nothing and Porgy, whatever he was bragging about, was just full of it. Time was what missing from my lovely representation of cognition. It was the fourth dimension that would make "my" creation--the quotes are an expression of modesty--come fully alive. This was a pregnant realization and one whose description I enter into with great trepidation at the prospect that I might not say what I have to say exactly right.

My discovery that, despite previous jokey allusions, pigs could actually fly

Let us use for starters the apothegm that time waits for no one. I was referring to the proverbial impatience of time in my inconclusive study of neurotic forms where I mentioned that any state of anxiety eventually is resolved, which means it gives in or disappears. But this is much too gross a quantity.

      As I write this work, hitting a key is a piece of existence that quickly arises and as quickly becomes the past. Humans have a perfectly comprehensible tendency to think of death as something in an indeterminate future, until suddenly they realize it is time for their shot at famous last words, if they aren't past caring or death hits them like a huge line backer smashing into an unsuspecting quarterback as he lifts his arm with the futile intention of throwing the pigskin, which just might indicate my jokey allusions to flying pigs could have been unwarranted. In other words, the present is a concept that seems as solid as steel until you try to define it, when it disappears like water through a sieve. In reference to cognition, the only possible way to specify the present is as each act of recognition, and this isn't enough time even for the quarterback to know what hit him.

      We have had occasions before to speak of relativity--even to the extent of claiming that a relative proposition is practically worthless--and the fact is that nothing that we have mentioned is quite as relative as the present, except maybe the story about the three blind men who palpated en elephant and each came to a different conclusion about what it was like: the one who grabbed its tail thought an elephant was sexually inactive, the one who felt its trunk thought it was extremely excitable, and the one who touched its belly thought it was pregnant.

      The limen or instant of recognition can actually be measured as a single one of the 24 frames per second that it takes to reproduce normally-perceived motion in films. This explains why Charlie Chaplin walked as if he was always in a hurry (a serendipitous component of his shtick) and why it could be said that when Hollywood finally solved this kink in its mechanics the way was opened for the final discovery of the essence of awareness, even though Jewish Hollywood moguls with their understandable obsession with casting couches were not aware of it.

      Despite the fugacity of the present, time does exist, and as the present is an unavoidable if ephemeral component of time between the past and the future, then it too exists, and if our previous definition of it as the instant of recognition has some claim to validity, then the present is as real as awareness. Since we argued that behaviour including thought (or exclude it if you want so as not to put too fine point on a side issue) is part of a chain of events (which we called the ontological chain, but you can call as you wish), and we also argued that cognition is a very complex process involving basic-cog's and the application of propositions to propositions to obtain derived propositions (which is saying next to nothing about its complexity), then obviously any event in awareness (like thought, which we will let in again now) must be the result of the process of cognition, but since awareness is but a fraction of time and the present vanishes quicker than a Higgs' boson would if it was ever discovered, the process of cognition has to be taking place elsewhere than in awareness and that elsewhere cannot be anything other than the subconscious.

      My previous references to this phenomenon were like throwaway lines, but now I can almost hear Dear Reader scoffing so hard shehe will either stop reading now, or go on but only to get herhis money's worth of this nonsense (a patently nonsensical attitude). It is also possible that the implications of my previous claim might not have fully sunk in, so I will try to make them as explicit as possible for Dear Reader to scoff even harder.

      We can have the results of cognitive processes in the mind, including thinking and awareness (and incidentally not excluding dreams), but it is not possible to have at the same time the processes whereby we can think or be aware. This is not possible because, one, each mind can only entertain one event at a time; two, no shehe would get any thinking or acting done if shehe had to be aware of cognitive processes in order to think or to act; three, even if a shehe wanted to be as deliberate as possible in herhis thought, no shehe knows how cognition actually functions; four, the complexity of cognition precludes even the thought of it being ever encompassed by any shehe; five, ultimately all the reasons why the grasp of cognitive processes are beyond any shehe can be reduced to the simple but appallingly indefeasible fact that time is inexorable and the present lasts less than an instant. Ergo, once more, we think in the subconscious and not only do we think in the subconscious but the greatest and noblest faculties that we attribute to ourselves exist and operate in the subconscious entirely beyond our reach and power of manipulation, for how could any shehe in less than an instant become aware of such a complex mechanism as thought and in that same instant manage to bend, twist, take away, add, shape, or do anything significant to it, as if it were vessel on a potter's wheel?

      What's more, and here I realize I am going beyond my immediately stated objective, not only is each one of us a creature of our subconscious, but all of history is the result of subconscious processes and humanity is being driven to whatever destiny awaits it by forces over which it has no control but which so far seem to be imbued by principles that favour its survival and not so much its improvement as a state of affairs in which basic necessities of existence are met and in general Average Joe (whose parents are Melting and Pot) feels very much at his ease (or hers of course in the case of an Average Jane).

      Having said this, the reader would be justified in wondering why, with these ideas, which I had even as I was writing the anteceding text, I kept making sport of the claim that we might indeed be the zombies that Dennett liked calling us? Why was I previously so reluctant to admit I was a zombie? When a fortiori I must even admit that not only did I have reasons for thinking of myself as a zombie, but also, given my propensity to insomnia, after long sleepless or restless nights I did frequently feel absolutely like a zombie?

      I have various reservations on the question of zombiehood. For one thing, I do not like the concept. A zombie, from authoritative accounts I have read, is a person who has been drugged and buried for a time--either a very short time or in a very large grave--and after being dug up is either so disoriented or so grateful to whoever dug him up that he is willing to become a docile slave for the rest of his life. Usually candidates for zombiehood are feeble-minded illiterates. Shehes might have been as subconsciously determined as I argued, but they were certainly not all imbeciles, so on the strength of this alone the word zombie was highly inappropriate.

      But there was another reason for rejecting zombiehood. So-called zombies have these ideas about freedom of the will and immortality and God which seem to derive from something called consciousness and at the stage I had arrived I did not yet have an account of consciousness that could debunk such un-zombie-like aspirations. Let me foreshadow here that consciousness did not in my view turn out to be anything to write home about and, what was worse, that in my dogged search for some hopeful specification for it, I dredged up something which was not hopeful at all and it was that, if my thesis about cognition and the subconscious was right, then the brief on my father's death could be re-opened if not in a court of law in the court of my own conscience.

I had my first practical lessons in quantum physics on the golf fields when I discovered that the shrinking ball often was not where I expected it to be but in a determinate area where it could be, which is called the Düsenberg effect

The reader might remember (it was so long ago) my first encounter with golf, which was the time that, forced to practice it by the Antihypatus, I swung a borrowed iron so hard I lost my grip and it flew like a boomerang into the glare of the powerful reflectors in a Florida driving range. I never gave golf another thought until I was living in Havana, where would-be god Castro had prohibited golf as unfit for a socialist society, but to humour diplomats and potentially usable foreigners he had kept open one nine-hole course, once the haunt of British expatriates, which had been renamed Diploclub, a most unglamorous, dinosaur-like name deliberately chosen for the venue of a sport Castro olympically despised.

      Getting back to my case, I had observed that the Diploclub, which was reached from an inconspicuous small road out of the highway to the airport, was usually empty during the day, especially at hours when I had nothing particularly pressing in my hands. I also discovered that some one had been selling for years a set of used golf clubs with their respective golf bag at a risible price, which was understandable considering the dearth of demand for those goods in Cuba.

      After due consideration, I decided I had nothing to lose by taking up a sport I had hated at first sight when my father tried to impose it on me, but which involved the simple act of hitting a small ball as far as possible and this in my heart of hearts I dearly wanted to do, especially as I thought it would be as easy as wearing shorts, not necessarily easy for me who hate exhibiting my thick peasant's legs. Thus I took up golf in the unlikeliest of places because I wanted to do something that seemed pleasurable and I could do it without witnesses to what were sure to be the embarrassing stumblings of a beginner.

      It turned out exactly as I thought it would: I stumbled a lot and there were few or no witnesses, but I enjoyed hitting the little ball, although, as I quickly learned, hitting it a long way was perhaps the most obviously difficult part and hitting it in all other ways, including making it roll a few feet to fall into a diminutive aperture in the ground, known as the hole (usually brownish rather than black), was also far from easy, the ease with which mistakes were possible and common being a part of the game I also had not foreseen. And not only did I not foresee the infinity of difficulties, but I foresaw what I was not justified in foreseeing, for during the period of my initiation, which lasted for some months, I kept believing I could totally master the game, as if one astrophysicist could master the universe--which is approximately the hyper level on which in my over-eagerness I saw golf standing--and that there was no reason why through the utmost concentration, the way astronomers gaze into their telescopes, I could not play as good as any shehe in the world.

      As it turned out, I was very wrong and not only did my game improve but little from what it was at the very beginning, even before I had tried all the different golfing instruments, particularly the harmless seeming putter the Cuban caddies called "pote"--a befitting name meaning "can", especially empty--but I realized that even women players, who were supposed to be weaker than I was and were conventionally allowed to tee off closer to the green, could hit the ball distances that were unimaginable for me, except when I did it, invariably followed by a doubletake.

      The golf ball I had initially recognized as little began in time to seem tiny with a tendency to shrink and I had my first practical lessons in quantum physics on the golf fields when I discovered that the shrinking ball often was not where I expected it to be but in a determinate area where it could be and where I did find it after I had made a whooshingly powerful swing and looked down and saw the ball occupying its quite diminutive parcel of space, which is called the Düsenberg effect.

      But I exaggerate. I did improve somewhat as the weeks went by and there were days when I played so well that a caddy once told me I had entered a "new dimension", but this only lasted for about three holes, after which I was in the same old four dimensions I knew too well. I will mention the first tournament I entered, which I did not do out of self-confidence but because I knew an Italian who was going to participate and he played worse than I did. In fact, in my now long experience I can certify he was the worst golf player in the universe.

      I played a terrible front nine, during which a tart Dutchman kept sneering at me, but I broke 50 cleanly for the first time in my life in the back nine. That still left me far behind the better competitors, but my improved game afforded me the satisfaction of jerking the Dutchman's chain, who couldn't believe I had driven the ball so far from the makeshift 17th tee and asked how I got there, so I told him: "Threw it with my arm four times, do you mind?" He did not enjoy the sarcasm and his sneer became an unmistakable growl. So fuck him! He was probably embittered at being sent to Cuba as ambassador at the close of his career. The Italian, incidentally, never improved and he also never tired of grousing to his wife, a good athlete and a much better golf player than he was, and complaining about men not being allowed to tee off from the whites.

      After Cuba I played on and off and my scores remained above 100, usually substantially above, except when I cheated by allowing myself an inordinate number of Mulligans, which I did sometimes, especially when I played alone, and this meant that I was cheating on myself! Mulligan, by the way, is the name of a legendary Irish anarchist who played golf drunk at night. But my cheating was not quite as irrational as it sounds.

Had I saved a putt here, a stroke there, I could have played under 50, but this was like saying that by tightening up the pace occasionally and by speeding up just a little all the time I was perfectly capable of doing a four-minute mile 

I knew my exceptionally good scores (basically breaking one hundred twice or thrice a year) would not be acceptable at a PGA-style competition and I wasn't fooling myself that those were my real scores or reflections of my true abilities. In trimming my scores on the course I was trying to prove that I could play better than the bum game I was actually having, because--and this is an experience that for golfers is as common as dirt (which is what they most hate to hit barring hard surfaces or rocks)--when I invoked the Mulligan anti-rule I usually did better the second time around. As a result, I could claim with some degree of dishonest sincerity or sincere dishonesty that my fluffed stroke was corrigible but for some inconsequential little error I had made and would avoid making for ever and anon (which was as likely as swallowing a pineapple whole), and all in exchange for an insignificant Mulligan.

      However, my intentions were as good as a kleptomaniac's New Year's resolution and though I did try concentrating more in my play following a spurious Mulligan, and occasionally I did see better results, mostly I made the same mistakes again and then made the same resolution to concentrate more and play better the rest of my life, and so it went. There was a limit to these subterfuges and past a certain excess or in certain situations that were hopelessly misplayed I did not take Mulligans.

      These on-the-fairway score-trimmings were basically psychological props as were my ex post facto reconstructions of games which allowed me to conclude that had I saved a putt here, a stroke there, I could have played under 50, but this was like telling yourself that, since the fifteen-minute mile is less than four times the four-minute mile, by tightening up the pace here and there and by speeding up just a little all the time, you were perfectly capable of doing a four-minute mile. Alternatively, it was as if I had reviewed my life, found it deficient in many places, and as a reward for my contriteness had been granted a space of future time in which to correct my mistakes (which I naturally wasted playing golf).

      Since golf was just a sport, it brought into play every conceivable means for self-deception. This was understandable considering that the difference between a good and a bad game was a few measly strokes and the barrier to self-deception was the kind of time, quality time, that you could live over and over--as long as certain perfectly feasible conditions were met--and not the kind of time, nightmare time, that you only lived once, maybe for a short time, but regretted for a long time, maybe all of the time.

      If golf gave leeway for occasional scientific and philosophical musings, its links to psychology were very strong. It was a game of skill, despite the scoffers who thought it was a decadent or a hallucinatory pastime for fat smokers and heavy drinkers to think they were doing something healthy without giving up their vices or losing an ounce of weight.

      It was also a highly demanding game, because golf players always had only one chance to do well and they were always by themselves at the moment of play, whether they were alone or playing with others. In going to play, golfers had to prepare themselves, which always involved some swaggering and looking intent as if knowing exactly what they were doing, which wasn't always the case, and when they finally played, it could turn out badly even for the best professionals in front of millions of spectators, like the time Tiger Woods went to the side, ended up in hard topsoil, hit the ball low, and got to the green only because the ball bounced off the carpath, which were errors (and flukes) not unlike the ones I made.

I fail in my efforts to stare the golf ball into submission like a Maori trying to tenderize an enemy previous to having him for lunch 

In tennis the fast action conceals the mistakes unless you lose by 18 games to zero and in most sports there are always group actions you can hide behind, like the sprinter who finishes last but no one notices because in field-and-track only the winner gets any attention. But in golf the attention at some time has to be on the solitary player and potential bungler and I didn't need millions watching me to feel the pressure. I actually only needed to think of the Apocrisiary.

      To overcome the psychological handicap, I tried to decompose mentally the swing into its different phases--which is like trying to visualize where a mosquito went humming after you tried to squash it in your swinging fist and failed--and in particular I concentrated on the moment of impact between the club head and that elusive little white ball, which to me has always looked as if it had had smallpox (manufacturers call its scars dimples).

      Because of such contradictory evidence, I dared not come to a conclusion and only understood that no one could see the instant of impact when I heard some loudmouth say: "No way that's possible", a conclusion I could have arrived at by myself if I had only remembered the jerky movements of the Little Tramp, but I did not trust my perception of the game and I did not want to let go of a myth that could instill some self-confidence into my erratic swing. In finally having to surrender this myth, I got in exchange the concept of the instant of perception and the 24th of a second it takes mind to process movement, and this more than compensated for any illusory advantages I obtained playing golf.

      I was going to derive even greater philosophical benefits from my addiction to the game, which I must say I came close to renouncing on various occasions, especially when I gagged at the idea of adding up a score of something like ten over par in one hole, which happened now and again, especially if I had to struggle with bunkers or if I got stuck trying to cross an insignificant gulch.

      I played irregularly: I played in Costaguana, I played in The Republic, I played in Kissena in Queens, I played in Tierra del Sol in Aruba, I played in many places, but I never played on a regular basis and with a regularly constituted group of players until I moved to the Philippines, where I joined the expats and became a regular player, though never quite taking the game as seriously as they did.

      I learned a lot about the rules and traditions of the game. By chance I discovered the traditional names of the clubs: apart from well-known names such as driver or wedge, there were the mashies and the niblicks. I learned that a putter in a hard bunker is called a Texas wedge--though not by Texans--and that a ball stuck in a sand trap is a plug and that sometimes through sheer incompetence you will hit a ball twice with the same stroke to get out of a plug, which is called double Dutch and should count as two strokes but you try to avoid this by looking like a dumb Dutch. I learned all the rules better than any one did, because most people bent the free drop rule, usually to get clear of a man-made obstacle, when the intention is only to allow a swing and not to get a line on the green.

      Anyhow, it was through Elias Shemberg that I began my Filipino golfing career, for he was a member of all the golf clubs in Cebu and he got me a membership in one by passing me off as a diplomat. And then came the expats and my joining the Manila Woods which I managed with the unexplained remittances from London.

      My game had hardly improved from the best it got in Cuba and this naturally worried me, not because I still harboured the illusion of playing golf perfectly, but because I just wanted to have the feeling that I could regularly break one hundred, or at the very least fifty, if I really tried, which wasn't expecting that much considering that I would frequently hear people say that they had scores under 45 or even under 80 and these people did not look different from me or, when I played with them, were not so good I could not occasionally beat them in a hole or two.

Realizing that my swing was the product of a cognitive process did not mean so much that I could correct as that I could skew it, which was somewhat as if in school they forced you to write a thousand times a grossly mispelled word

So I decided to carry on with my analysis of the golf swing, which I had left very incomplete at the end of my Cuban sojourn. OK, so I could not see the moment of impact, but this did take place, as it also happened that I would go for an object and I could see my hand move until it finally grasped it. Most of the time, I didn't see any such thing, but sometimes I did, and anyway what I did with the hand was the same as I tried to do with the golf club and sometimes, often in fact, succeeded in doing. So how did I succeed?

      Well, the hand analogy was good up to a point, but only up to point, because in golf there was the "club factor", which was an extension of my body. It was as if instead of using my hand directly to scratch the small of my back I had to use a manual backscratcher, but when I used a backscratcher I got it right 100% of the time whereas with my golf clubs if I got it right 75% of the time I was doing great.

      I had to think of the times I got it right and the back scratcher wasn't such a good idea and it wasn't going to help me much because, yes, 100% of the time I scratched where it itched but only after a very short, almost imperceptible period of trial-and-error during which I scratched the wrong place and the error sent information back to my brain which corrected the direction of the backscratcher so that in a jiffy it was scratching away where I wanted it to and needless to say I had a great feeling of relief, not unlike when I emptied my overloaded bladder. In golf there was no trial and error except when you took a Mulligan, which was to compound an error with cheating for nothing (which made it trebly pathetic), or when you took practice swings.

      Anyhow, thinking about the swing, I realized that it was the product of a cognitive process and in fact that it was part of the cognitive process itself, which did not mean so much that you could correct as that you could skew a swing, and this was somewhat as if in school they forced you to write a thousand times a grossly mispelled word. But let me be more explicit.

      When I took a swing at the pockmarked little ball, first my mind measured the distance to it and then I swung back and every infinitesimal fraction of that movement was being controlled by the information my mind was processing and then sending as instructions to the muscles that were activating the golf club, so that when the club came down my muscles were receiving the most precise indications on how to go about hitting the smug little SOB of a white ball and sending it flying like a sucker straight over the fairway--called a Blondie or a fair crack down the middle (golfers are macho pig chauvinists and I would be a liar if I tried to prevaricate here)--while my arms finished their movement somewhere to the side of my body after having exhausted all the instructions that were compressed into the swing when it started to the moment of impact and on to the follow through.

      When I thought about all that I had to do to hit the ball, it seemed improbable that I could do it, and if I went into play just then it was likely I would play badly. But most of the time my body did obey the instructions that my mind communicated and even though I did not see when the club head struck the ball, I knew that the moment of impact was going to take place. So if I knew so much, I asked myself, why did I not play better? And that necessitated another bout of reasoning.

      First of all, when exactly did I play badly? At first, I used the driver unreliably and this was what most bothered me about my game. But I was hitting the midiron and the mid-mashie and even the driving iron, so I decided to ditch the driver and use either the midiron or the driving iron to tee off, and it worked for a time, but then I was doing the same kind of unreliable swings with the heavy irons as I did with the driver proper.

      This was the time I seriously considered giving up the game, which I did not want to, so when I was finishing a particularly disappointing round and wasn't giving much of a damn, I would tell myself: "If you close well, you can go on playing", and I generally closed acceptably and this gave me an excuse to go on poisoning my life with the vast quantities of bile my golfing induced in my liver; and let me tell you that if I have ever submitted to the commandment of not taking the Lord's name in vain, in golf I have always blasphemed as if God was responsible for my playing badly, which, remember, I believed He actually had to be if He was omnipotent and what I did not believe was that He would change the order of the cosmos to accommodate my golfing aspirations. On the other hand, these were so unambitious I could not understand what difference it would make to the universe if instead of missing a tee off or an easy putt He had some hireling like Grabriel or Michael give my ball just the right push or direction? Angels, archangels, and the rest are invisible and golfers aren't that observant--except of other golfers when they are betting--and mostly they are accustomed to seeing what happens on the course as a result of their genius or of miracles.

To my horror, I realized I was in the grip of the hideous golf gremlin

Anyhow, I never stopped playing and instead spent many afternoons practicing in Kagitingan, a driving range in Bonifacio, during which time I tried swinging the driver back all the way to the left side of my neck and if I did that and kept my eye on the ball, to my amazement I could be nearly mathematical about hitting it, and not just at the tee off, with the ball about a meter above the grass, but with the ball sunk in a rough about a foot high. So, even though I was not sure why, this worked and I wasn't worried any more about the driver. If worse came to worse, I could always say, and prove, that driving the ball accurately for about 220 or 230 yards under optimum conditions was the one thing I learned in golf, which wasn't that much, just something.

      Strangely, when I started hitting the driver well I began to miss with the driving iron and the midiron, but since I had the driver under control--in a manner of speaking, of course, for I wasn't as clockwork as all that--I just stopped using those irons. The irons down to the seven, known as the mashie nibblick, were more or less responsive to my command. My performances with the pitching iron, the pitching nibblick, and the nibblick were about the same as with the sand iron. The remaining problems were with the mid-mashie, the mashie-iron, the mashie, and the spade mashie. With these it was hit-and-miss. Sometimes I was using them so well I felt totally cocky and would just step up to the ball and hit it without thinking twice (or so I thought), and since for some reason it was easier for me to hit the ball on the fairway or on the roughs than on the tee off with these irons, I was alright there too. Withal, my scores were not improving.

      I mean, here was the situation: I knew exactly how to play each one of the clubs, but even though the areas where I could improve on the knowledge I had when I did well were more and more restricted, these skills were not being reflected in my scores. So I had to think more on where I was missing the boat and I finally discovered at least one mistake I was making, which was so elementary I am ashamed to confess it and will so do only as a dependent clause of this already long sentence: I was taking my eye off the ball as if I were afraid of it, which was the first no-no any dodo golfer learned. And I was doing it even when I ogled the ball and tried to psyche it into submission.

      Even with all this analysis and all this training--for I would usually go and practice what I was analyzing as soon as I could--I was still not playing so that I could claim I had made it as a golfer and was regularly breaking 100 or even occasionally fifty. What was I doing wrong that I could still correct? There must have been a thousand things I was doing wrong, but my question was really conceived in the sense of: what was I doing so wrong that I kept fluffing the ball like an amateur, which I was of course, but I meant a real under-brained, obtuse, uncoordinated, hopelessly and incurably incompetent beginner? 

      There were two methods I saw I could apply here. One was to ask: why did I lift my head? The other was: why did I do perfect practice swings and the real swings were often such inexcusable disasters?

      As to lifting the head, the answer was anticipation. Every time I was in a dicky situation--and dicky for me was falling into a trap or having to chip onto a narrow green--I looked up just before the instant of hitting the ball, because I was so anxious about the result I wanted to see it even before I played, which meant I wasn't going to get it right because I wasn't looking and what I was going to see was the regrettable result of my own apprehensions.

      This rule I could apply to any situation in all conceivable circumstances. For instance: if it rained I was sure to start worrying about my grip, and even though my grip was fine, when I drove I looked up before finishing the down swing, which meant I hit the ball on the head and I saw it running for cover like Chicken Little into some unnecessary landscaping (I do not know one golfer who gives a damn about flowers!).

      The solution obviously was concentration and not the quite impratical idea a fellow golfer had about tying barbed wire from his pecker and around the neck so that if he looked up he would experience a painful, instantaneous, and false erection. Alright, more concentration was sensible enough, but how about those terrific practice swings? And then it all came back to me: it was the psychology gremlin, which was so scary that fanatical golfers did not even mention it without making the sign of the cross.

      I did not do perfect real swings after perfect practice swings, because the readings my eyes were taking became inputs in the processing center for cognitive processes which were being interfered with by psychological interlopers bent on preventing me from obtaining what I desired to get from the game of golf, namely, the satisfaction that comes from pure competence and reasonable expertise, for, given my setbacks, such as that I had started late in golf and did not have a fraction of the strength of Jack Niklaus (who was about my age), what more could I expect other than these middling goals?

      As to the identity of the interlopers, I thought that if I tried to do a list it would be the equivalent in the present to rewriting "Mire", which I wouldn't do now even if I lost the entire file, and would not have done then for all the dollars that Buzakri had pilfered from my account in Bull Bull & Dong. But the gremlin concept was alright and I knew at least the general cause of the golf problem even if I did not have a magic formula with which to solve it, which was the same as saying that I had not yet found an answer to the neurosis problem, and there was the possibility--remote but still a possibility--that if I pinned neurosis down I would also pin down the golf gremlin, so that I was not about to go chasing after the latter when my philosophical quest had not yet concluded.

Honing my golf game would have been like having and orgasm and swimming in the semen at the same time

Without having deliberately looked for it, the main result I got from all my speculations on golf was an optimal confirmation for my theory of knowledge. It was there for eyes to read and minds to understand. My game, the entire game of golf, was the result of the cognitive processes I had "discovered": it had to do with perception, with memory, with logic; it was as complex as anything I did in my philosophical research, but it was much more explicit on my controversial claim about the subconsciousness of cognition.

      Even though in playing golf all cognitive processes were on alert, I knew nothing about them when I played golf. I was seeing and remembering and reasoning, but obviously I could not be aware of all this and play golf at the same time. This would have been a hell of a trick: like having orgasm and swimming in my semen and into an uterus, or the void. In golf, apart from physical movement and trying to repeat the good movements and trying to eliminate the bad movements, I did nothing to affect the cognitive processes themselves. I did not "see" them and I did not control them. Tiger Woods did not see them either, but unlike me he was capable of repeating the good movements to a degree that I would never attain even in my dreams. So I had to conclude I was the victim of the golf gremlin, who was impeding my attempts not obviously to best Woods but any of countless presumptuous Filipinos who knew they weren't big-shot professionals either but sure as hell were sure they could beat the crap out of me any time.

      In compensation, despite my incompetence as a golfer all I had just written about golf was peanuts next to what I could write, not about golf, but about just the act of looking at that obnoxious little ball, and all the information my eyes, not me, mind, but my eyes, sent to the brain, which in an instant, in a fraction of an instant, were volumes and volumes of so much data they would overflow the pages of an encyclopedia. So what was I doing supposedly begetting a theory of knowledge?

      Well, it wasn't my responsibility, and I had said so from the start, to discover and describe every cognitive process and every basic-cog involved in cognition. Assuming I was a sperm in my previous metaphor, I did not have to be on a first-name basis with all the other sperms to know what was happening to me. On cognition, the best I could hope for were guidelines, the larger picture, so to speak, but solely on the subject of golf I had discovered the psychology gremlin and I had found tomes of arguments on the inevitability that cognition was subconscious.

      There was one final discovery pertinent to my theory of knowledge. I said before that a drunkard could not talk his liver back to its normal size and to its natural, rosy coloration. I also said that the expression of mind--so far here, my outline of a theory of knowledge--was the same as its representation, that is, as mind itself. My token-theory of cognition was supposed to be cognition. Yet I knew that a token-theory would never embrace the reality of cognition. But even though I knew this, I wasn't about to turn back, and I wasn't turning back because what I wanted was not total knowledge but sufficient knowledge.

      "Sufficient knowledge" meant that I knew what I was doing when I played golf, but it did not mean that I knew how to do right what I was doing wrong. A successful theory of knowledge would be one that represented cognition sufficiently. However, I had no cause to crow, because, as the drunk-and-his-liver argument showed, I had not yet tackled the fundamental problem of dualism, or how it was that it was the brain, and not the liver, that had thoughts. As to my golf game, well, the other day I hit a 42, which I had never thought would be within my reach in my lifetime, but after that I have been slumping badly.

Being subconscious, cognition did not cease when I stopped playing golf, although it might have seemed to when I started

As I went over my text upon my return from a golfing trip to Manila, I realized that a theory of knowledge did not solve the crucial problem of belief and it never even touched the questions of affects and of volition.  I needed a new type of theory to deal with these problems, but before going into that I had to take up two issues. One of those issues had to do with my involuntary persistence in doing things the wrong way. This involved doing a flip on the epistemic premise of the object-self, and I will consider it further below. The other issue was the question of dualism, on which I will dwell twice, but briefly each time, because I am so close to my objective in this long book that I can almost smell it and I am feeling like the Katzenjammer kids when pie odours wafted from their mother's or grandmother's German kitchen in the middle of an African jungle.

      Since cognition was subconscious and continuous--it did not stop when I stopped playing golf, although it might have seemed to when I started--it stood to reason that it had to occur somewhere else besides my "mind", which strictly speaking was the instant of recognition. This somewhere was discovered, long after Aristotle's mistaken location of it in the gut, in the brain and its extensions, for which the general designation was the nervous system. The latter was constituted by a special type of cells called neurons, in which ultimately cognition could be said to function, for after all if cognition involved, among a host of other things, grasping objects and walking--as per our definition of knowledge as doing--there was no way you could do either if the brain was not in touch through the neurons with the hands and the feet.

      In my theory of knowledge, cognition was the result of cognitive processes constituted by basic-cog's. This system, which could misleadingly be called "mental"--we do so only to make a distinction with "nervous" (which is even more misleading considering that nervous people also have minds)--could only be manifest in propositions, unlike the brain and the nervous system which can actually be "grasped" visually during the dissection of a corpse. The very sensitive will have fainted or will be barfing by the time the nerves are extricated from the mass of bones, flesh, grizzle, and fat, which is why those who oppose mentalist, anti-materialist views are usually recruited from the ranks of the highly insensitive. This also explains in part why physicians all have Boomers, except when they become forensic pathologists out of an addiction for fondling dead human meat and develop huge appetites in the process of dissecting corpses.

      The point of these apparently gratuitous sidebars on cadavers (which might have the reader on the point of grousing again) is that no matter how minutely the brain was described, these descriptions were only marginally relevant to cognition. Cognition was solely the expression of its rule-governed functions. This was what we meant by mind being propositional and why, although they can be described in propositions, the brain and the liver can also be eaten, even those of humans, a much frowned on practice unless you are going to die if you don't, which you surely will if your only food consists of propositions.

      Now, as we saw, the propositionality of cognition was itself a dubious proposition if you thought, as I did during much of my life, that propositions and sentences were synonymous. Propositions could be anything, even a brain or a liver translated into mental "meaning", that is, a concept (which is like: "a thing, whatever thing, is or exists"), but sentences are what this book is made of and I will not bother defining them so as not have the reader complaining that I am treating herhim as if shehe were an illiterate.

      That mind is propositional but not sentential means that the propositions it entertains must be represented in the mind (expressed is another matter) in some language-like instrument exclusively mental and different from a conventional communicable language. The expression of mental propositions could be done in a kind of shorthand like Frege's propositional calculus or my own purely personal tachygraphy, but this did not matter as long as it was understood that in order to think mind had to use a system of symbols which was not the alphabet and its constructions (syllables and words), or hieroglyphs, or Chinese characters. This was what I meant earlier when I claimed that in order to understand cognition it was necessary to have entities more basic than basic-cog's, which was like making the irrefutable claim that in order to season a dish, before having salt, you need to have sodium and chloride, which must combine into salt, of course, for otherwise you would have a potent recipe for a terminally quick digestion.

      At one time--maybe even now, but I went beyond this issue long ago--the current name for this language-like instrument of thought was "mentalese", whose inventor thought he could rest on his laurels with that achievement, as if the priest who baptized Charlemagne had retired the afternoon of the same day. His carelessness in letting mentalese stand, tantamount to doing it to a soufflé, would later give Dummett the chance to call it an "idiolect", which is not a language for idiots even though the disparaging intention is obvious (and highly merited  for any one who lets a soufflé stand) but a private language, and this is another thing altogether, in fact a non-thing, for whoever heard of anybody in his right mind inventing a language only shehe can speak and understand? 

      I went our cognitivist philosopher one better because I named the means of cognition "mindioma"--no big eureka as both this coinage and "mentalese" will surely go the way of Esperanto, whose last fluent speaker died last year--and, on an analogy between cognitive processes and the representations in computer monitors of the contents of program files. I also called its component parts "squiggles". Mental squiggles were roughly like the letters of the alphabet, but with infinitely many meanings and functions in themselves. They were how inputs from the world translated into perception in the mind and how reading was possible and how words connoted and how all cognitive processes--perception and memory and logic--related among each other and why they seemed so alike, particularly because they ultimately were alike, in the sense, for example, in which there are flat and medium-sized and aubergine and retroussé and all other sorts of noses and they all originate in the same tiny snippet of DNA, the way cognitive processes "originate" in squiggles (the inverted commas or quotes are so that Dear Reader will not be making wry faces).

A gadfly's famous solution to the problem of dualism becomes a bone of contention between the reader and me

Now, if I could be so flip about my own ideas, shehe will be wondering why shehe should take them any more seriously than I did myself and I will tell herhim why. With mindioma and squiggles, I, like the fairy-tale Little Tailor, would be killing seven in one blow, so to speak. Actually, I was only trying to kill one big fly, but I am sure all those who have seen the different movie versions of the famous story of that title will understand that this was a much greater feat than the ambiguous one the arrogant tailorette went about the world arrogating to himself. What I was attempting to do, in brief, was to solve the problem of dualism at one level, not the abstract, metaphysical level of knowing and being, but at the first-order, immediate, concrete level of mind and matter.

      I called my solution "analogous monism", for it began with the admission that there was no factual way to explain how it was possible for matter to be aware, which was like admitting that the big, ugly fly could not be killed. I wasn't the first person to have come up with an analogous solution for dualism. The most famous one was proposed by Nagel--who, incidentally, had also invented the view-from-nowhere formula, not that he believed in it any more than I did--and it consisted in saying that mind and matter were identical in the sense that water and H2O are identical, which to me was as clever as the disquotional theory of truth. Boy, you couldn't beat philosophers for witty, clever ideas!

      The problem consisted in that this analogy was based on two previous analogies: that mind was like water--which, stretching a point, it could be in some very simple-minded persons; myself, in fact, on some occasions--and that brain was H2O, which it obviously wasn't. The analogies could be reversed and it didn't make a bit of difference, and this went to the root of the matter, for this solution was as if in my difficulties with money I had said that my rich former self was like my present poor self; since I was the same self in both cases, my poor present self was the same as my rich past self, which was a damned lie!

      The impatient reader will fairly snarl: "What's the big deal with your stupid solution involving the ridiculous word `squiggles', corresponding to nothing whatever, whereas Prof. Nagel at least used water and H2O, which every one but every one knows all about?"

      OK, take it easy! To start with--and I am getting fed up with being shoved around, by the way!--Nagel was nothing but a gadfly, but that's immaterial and what was material was that analogous monism involved only one analogy: between neurons and squiggles, and as no one disputed neurons, my only big-deal claim consisted in that there exists a mentalese or mindiona whose "alphabet" I named squiggles. And the reason I invented squiggles in the first place was that I wanted to endow my analogy with all the appurtenances, not so much of a scientific theory, as of a hypothesis on thought, the only usefulness of which resided in that it could work as a means for real scientific research; and the basis of my reasoning was the inevitability that no matter how much we could deduce about cognition from a disciplined and "restricted" use of the awareness or the recall of cognition, we would always in the end have to take our claims back to the neurological level or venue.

      My attitude was therefore monistic (please note underlining), for which I even went as far as to admit that my claim could only be productive if the squiggles and the deductions from them could be squared with what was known--but really consensually known, and not the misshapen neurological freak with the big toe--about the functioning of the brain and its cells. I could not make any claim about squiggles, or about cognition, that would contradict our knowledge of the workings of the brain. But by making our knowledge of thought reliant on hypothesized entities, that is, the squiggles, which were conceptually as close as possible to neurons, then it might be possible to advance the knowledge of mind from the mere awareness or recall of our cognitive processes. In sum, I thought that I could bridge from mind to matter through a productive analogy between the symbols involved in thought and the knowledge that we have about the brain and the way it functions, which is no reason for the sceptical and ill-mannered reader to be snarling at me!

In my attempt to tackle the problem of consciousness, I make the underweight torero look like Mike Tyson not in the mood to take any bull

With this first full-scale assault on dualism--the second assault would come later--I hadn't gotten anywhere near the neurosis problem (I wasn't even thinking about it), but I had advanced enough in my GPS to be feeling my oats, which meant I was ready and willing to take on the formidable issue of consciousness, one that made even tough-as-nails materialists shudder and had them kneeling and praying to a virgin like a scrawny torero before facing a mountainous brave bull.

      The reason why consciousness made the doughtiest fighter cower was that it laid the philosophical grounds for freedom, the soul, and immortality. Consciousness was such a fearsome ruffian that there had even been a philosopher who proposed that there was immortality but no God, which raised the interesting question of what all those souls would be doing after resurrection (and who was doing the resurrecting anyhow?). And the reason I, next to whom the underweight torero was a hungry Mike Tyson not in the mood to take any bull, was willing to take on consciousness resided in my persistence in relating thought to matter, which reminded me of the time I faced a gang of hooligans by myself because I was too proud to turn back when I saw their numbers (also of course that I was certain they weren't going to kill me in a street corner in broad daylight).

      Let me add, as a perfectly pertinent afterthought--this makes me think that I am being much too ceremonious with the inconsiderate reader!--that another one of the problems with consciousness was its ethereality, which is the polar opposite of materiality, the only way in which usually matter can become ethereal being if you heat it up to gazillion degrees, and that is much more than awareness can tolerate comfortably, not that awareness is a stranger to discomforts, even in the case of my shallow golfing partners who were wont to feel that the world was steeped in hellish darkness when they missed a very short putt. Evidently, they would not have been susceptible to such glumness if they had been mere awareness-less machines, which on the other hand means they probably would not be making stupid golfing errors. But enough!

      I had alluded to awareness as a source of knowledge. Yet I claimed before that cognitive processes were subconscious. These two lines of reasoning appeared to be orthogonal. (An orthogon does not exist; it is formed when two view points diverge radically, as when two persons side-by-side spit at two different spitoons.) I had already proposed a minimalist, functional definition of awareness. I had also referred to awareness as specifically the awareness of cognition. If consciousness was anything beyond perception, thought, and the ability to distinguish between both, then what was it?

      I knew it wasn't a theory of knowledge, or of any sort. Evidently, any sort of theory of knowledge involved recall, but this did not mean that the theory was recall. It would have been as if remembering what I had for breakfast constituted a "theory of breakfast". Obviously absurd (though you never can tell with all the specialists going around nowadays)!

      Now, the awareness of cognition was thinking back to the experience of the results of cognitive processes. It was a kind of circular process consisting, for example, in remembering memory, although, truth to say, remembering a perception was only circular if we assumed that perception and memory were similar, which was only valid up to a point. Assuming that to specify consciousness we had to proceed in the same way as with cognition, then the essence of consciousness had to be something like the awareness of awareness and this amounted to recalling memory and perception and logic, which was exactly what awareness did, and ultimately what all this implied was that consciousness amounted to an epiphenomenon. It was an unnecessary manner of calling something for which we already had the name of awareness.

      The word epiphenomenon itself is something of a teaser--although it can be illustrated in a gross Goliard way as breaking winding (euphemism for farting) as an "epiphenomenon" of gurgling in the gut--so I will devote a few additional words to it. Consciousness as an epiphenomenon means that it is an unessential consequence of another phenomenon and what this involves is that the recall per se of perception or of memory is not, except as part of a study of either, as consequential as the acts of perception or memory themselves, which is not unlike the old argument about one solitary dollar being more real than a million imaginary bucks. Another way to put it is that the recall of memory was just memory and need not be ennobled by the grandiloquent name of consciousness.

Actions were naturally ascribable or else I could be saying that I ganged up on the hooligans who beat the stuffing out of me back in my adolescence

However, if I thought I would be disposing of consciousness in such a derivative and offhandish manner I was wrong, because I was honest enough to let questions proliferate even when I was sure I had a half-nelson and an arm-lock on a problem, which literally meant I could figuratively break its neck and dislocate its shoulder. I had made the strong claim (which is probably what has the reader all riled up) that cognition is subconscious, that we act under the influence of subconscious cognitive processes, that even all of history can be traced back to these cognitive mechanisms. But in defining consciousness as the awareness of awareness, was it not possible for consciousness, however, instantaneous, to affect the subconscious processes of cognition?

      This specific question addressed the problem dubbed by a philosopher--the same one who was so free-and-easy in calling people "zombies" (why doesn't the reader get riled up at him instead of buying his books like hot cakes?)--with the jokey name of "what-to-do-next", which sounds like a bad parlour game in a boring party which had just started. Or alternatively, like the party in Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, which no one could leave although every one was bored to tears.

      If the obtuse reader takes but a minute to think about the seemingly harmless question of what-to-do-next, shehe will realize that if we act impelled by our subconscious such a question is superfluous yet we are capable of formulating it and we are formulating it all the time. But this was just one problem, and minor at that. After all, if cognition was indeed subconscious, then it had to be subconscious from the start and ever after. Was there any reason why our cognitive processes, subconscious in infancy, would cease being subconscious at some time during the development of cognition, as if childhood were a sort of coma?

      I had no valid reason to suppose that instants of awareness had any say in the directions cognitive processes took. The act of recognition could contribute to the material that cognition worked with, but the act of recognition itself, even when it was the outcome of concentration, that is, "directed awareness", was and could only be a product of subconscious cognitive processes organized and directed by subconscious and subconsciously operating basic-cog's. In so-called directed awareness, the decision to concentrate was subconscious and the process of excluding other thoughts was also subconscious.

      The repetitiveness, in case some captious reader should be thinking I do not re-read what I write, is for em-pha-sis, and it implies that I will later try to modulate this seeming impotence of the human condition, which any way is not meant to suggest that people do not know what they are about when they are in bed or making money, and this seems to be ultimately what life in general is about.

      On all those awesome things that consciousness was supposed to license, that is, free-will, immortality, and God (as if He were no better than a dog!), I had certain rejoinders. It seemed that it was from our awareness of awareness that we had the illusion of self-determination, as I have shown in the part on neurotic forms where I said that thinking could be compared to the act of moving an object.

      To be perfectly frank, I had no conclusive arguments on whether we were determined or not, as no one had on so-called freedom of the will. I assumed that we were, but I had to face the problem that languages practically prescribed that we express ourselves as if we were free. We usually said: "I preferred or chose doing this", and not: "I did this because my cognitive processes forced me to do this instead of that", although the expressions were equivalent, and languages are, whatever reservations I might have on an excessive reliance on them as the font of all philosophical knowledge, important.

      However, determinism was perfectly compatible with talk of self-determination, for actions are naturally ascribable to individuals--and proscribable when they pose a threat to society--or else I could be saying that I ganged up on the hooligans that beat the stuffing out of me back in my adolescence in The Republic. It was possible to speak of determined behaviour in self-deterministic terms. This denoted the essence of compatibilism, which was what usually broke down in most failed marriages, but which in this case actually "married" the apparently incompatible categories of free-will and determinism.

      As to those even more awesome predicates of consciousness--God and immortality--I have shown myself to be a kind of passive but tenacious sceptic in the sense that I would not mind coming back to life after I died, but I would probably get the shock of my life, or after-life, to be more precise, if I did. And concerning God, I wasn't too hopeful about his benevolence towards me, but I was always willing to give Him the benefit of the doubt and of my gratitude, which I am sure for Him would not have amounted to a mountain of flattened bottle caps. But then some people do value highly their coaster or matchbook collections.

      Paradoxes were one of those rational events that defied rationality, as if André Agassis trotted into the central court at Wimbledon waving his arms at the wildly cheering crowd and promptly proceeded to trip himself up, and lose his earring in the process. Or as if Tiger Woods was about to putt casually half a foot and the ball went past the hole under the astounded magnification of hundreds of TV cameras (they would all simultaneously lose focus).

      The "infinitely" regressive process of the awareness of awareness might have been the labyrinthine source of all paradoxes. But would this take us any further in singularizing consciousness? It could very well be that without the awareness of awareness we would not have Gödel's theorems--which, remember, are useless to start with--but it was also possible to argue that paradoxes were defeasible from the use of intuitive logic as a corrective to the misapplication of formal logic to reality, which resulted in the silly-ass intensionality paradoxes involving Walter Scott and the different names for Venus.

      There was one final possibility for specifying consciousness. In my attempt to specify neurosis through neurotic forms, I mentioned that it was characterized by circular thought, which as we have seen is associated with awareness. There existed a vague tendency to see in neurosis a kind of higher awareness. If my speculations about neurotic forms had some basis in fact--and I will remind the impertinent reader that I have said a thousand times if I have said it once that I am very neurotic and also very thoughtful, and shehe can do with this as shehe damn well pleases!--then the neurotic circularity of thought consisted in the notion of thought obsessively chasing itself for various unlikely ends: to pin itself down like an insect, to remove pain from mind, even to digging in one's heels against time, all of which were both difficult to be precise about--even more difficult to achieve--and highly stimulative to feelings of frustration and anxiety.

      But even so, when I posed the question again from a neurotic perspective, I came up with the same answer: that consciousness was an epiphenomenon and that as neurotic awareness it was either the exaltation or the exacerbation of a mere epiphenomenon, or of a fart to revert to my previous vulgar illustration. It could be claimed that neurosis demonstrated the reality of consciousness beyond its epiphenomenal condition. The trouble with such a claim consisted in that it was not from neurosis alone that consciousness could be observed or recognized and that what neurosis actually did was to distort in an anxiety-producing manner an ability of mind, which reminded of the time I farted in front of fifty elegantly attired Brits.

The specificity of all propositions was like some very ignorant and pig-headed individual going about saying that "two plus two equals one million three hundred and thirty four thousand"

Before I could enter another phase in the development of my GPS, I had to return to an issue I left hanging before: Why did I make stupid errors playing golf? The brief answer, which I will proceed to develop, was that in doing theory of knowledge I had to assume the object-self. This was a bit like presuming I was a perfect golfer, which was of course a crock, and I had to settle for a less demanding criterion, like that I wasn't whining too much (which professional golfers do a lot, along with cussing).

      The principle of the indiscernibility of identicals justified the claim that all propositions were specific. We possessed both types and tokens of all recognizable entities. There was the concept of dog, which came to me as a knowledge from which I could pick features (like drinking water from toilet bowls or chasing carwheels), and there was the image of Pushkin (actually many images and I could choose the best pose, as if he were the dog who ran the Ittyderotty).

      This possibility was based on the logical principles of generalization and specification. Within their type, all nervous systems were necessarily specific to individuals. Since mind was propositional, the self was the aggregate of all its inferences, and since every proposition and each individual nervous system were specific, then every self was a specific self and the object-self was only a convenient construct in theory of knowledge.

      One very significant reason to discard a presumed object-self for the reality of the specific self, was that belief was not necessarily the product of objective cognitive processes and could only arise in the context of the set of specific propositions that constituted the specific self. Assuming the world was populated by object-selves, which was as if all shehes were walking cardboard cut-outs, they would tend to agree on everything and there would be no reason to believe in one proposition more than in another. Belief, in other words, involved some kind of self-interest, which was not possible if all selves happened to think alike.

      In addition, if there were only coldly cognitive object-selves, there would be no need for the desire for self-preservation. The specificity of propositions entailed the specificity of self and its powerful--though not necessarily invincible--propensity towards its own perpetuation in time, which also, and no less importantly, underlay the self-interest that prompted belief. It was as simple as that.

      From a perfectly objective point of view, mental propositions required explicit ascription, which was like the statement "two plus two equals four" wandering about without an owner. But the specificity of all propositions--which was like some very ignorant and pig-headed individual going about saying that "two plus two equals one million three hundred and thirty four thousand"--obviated the need for ascription. For a flesh-and-bones specific self ascription and self-preservation were intuitive. Specific propositions could not be ascribed to a merely theoretical and abstract entity. All propositions had specific owners and there was no need for some formula to sort them out. The study of the specificity of self inevitably led to the formulation of a theory of mind. Even though it was derived from and based on the theory of knowledge, the theory of mind stood apart because of the importance of the themes it embraced, particularly volition and affects.

      The difficulties involved in volition or will power--which wasn't free will, mind, for if volition was like driving, free-will was like driving on purpose against a brick wall (the carping reader will find this illustration prejudicial, but I chose it to expunge ambiguities)--stemmed from its manifestation as observable behaviour and I was constrained by my theory of the propositionality of mind. This was somewhat (but only somewhat) like the story of the delusional alcoholic telling herhis liver: "Hey, fellow, how about shaping up and stop cramping my style"; for how could mere propositions affect material things like bodily parts?

      However, there were sufficient grounds for considering thought to be a form of behaviour and since we knew--I will assume the royal "we" from now as proof of our total self-confidence at this point in our own ideas and arguments--that the chain of thoughts in any individual could be explained in terms of the workings of cognitive processes, the study of volition had to be about how thought or mental action translated into physical action, which was the transformation of behaviour from one form to another.

      To understand volition--as well, incidentally, as affects--we needed to have the specificity of self. Volition had to be explained as a result of the interactiveness of the specific propositions that conformed the self. An "act of will", in sum, was the resultant of an interaction in which a proposition or a set of propositions achieved "supremacy"--we also had a choice of the word "hegemony", but we used the former for individualistic reasons--as either mental or physical behaviour. Given that thought was subconscious and determined, volition too had to be subconscious and determined and it had no reality other than the reality of the propositionality of mind. Analogously, volition was what happened when the ill-mannered, smarty-pants, Jenghis Khan homuncule got the best of his more polite fellows, although in the struggle I waged against my passion for Tessie it felt like Jenghis Khan versus Tamerlane.

My desire for self preservation enters into dramatic not to say hysterical confrontation with a tidal wave

On the scabrous question of affects, it was possible to make a distinction between physical and propositional affects. The causes of physical affects were relatively straightforward. Physical affects were the result of the direct stimulation of the nervous system. The awareness of physical affects was perhaps the ultimate demonstration of the unsustainability of mind/matter dualism. There was no way it could be said or argued that awareness, which was propositional, could not be awareness of pain and pleasure. It was known that awareness could affect our experience of physical pain and pleasure, but these effects were marginal and not etiological in any reasonable sense, like breaking a leg and feeling more pain because it wasn't broken before.

      We know that the unduly exigent readers will be crying to high heaven and saying that they were not idiots and that they already knew that dying in the electric chair involved some pain and that we weren't exactly offering any insights here, and we shall tell them that they have no grounds for their yapping because we have gone over and over the squiggles thing and all we are saying now is that physical affects are felt by the neurons in the body and represented in the mind as squiggles; and need we remind the bellyaching, nitpicking readers that we made no greater claim for squiggles than that they were a heuristic analogy?

      The real difficulty, and not the readers' gratuituous squawking, was not in physical pain and pleasure, which, as we were saying, are easy enough to grasp, but in propositional affects, for we know that getting knocked on the head hurts but it is true, trite and childish though it may sound, that words do not actually have the power to pinch, destroy, compress, pull, or any other manner affect nerves. Or so it would seem.

      There was, for example, the experience of anxiety, in which propositions, and propositions alone, can directly produce physical symptoms, another well-documented reason for the indissolubility of the mental and the physical, which we must insist was all we intended with our perfectly plausible analogous monism thesis. But anxiety is not the only form of propositional pain.

      We need only refer to Hamlet's catalogue of "slings and arrows" in his spurious suicide soliloquy, from which all we have to do is pluck a few examples to prove our point, such as that being the object of "unrequited love" or the butt of the "proud man's contumely" (something you intuitively reject) are not like the prospects or the memories of going on a picnic with a well provided hamper or taking a walk in a nice secluded cove at the end of a hot day with the tail-end of a refreshing breeze in our faces (royal wes always have two faces and our imagery here is meant to show that just as there is propositional pain, there can also be propositional pleasure). In sum, since propositions are in themselves affectively neutral, propositional affects are not as easily explained or understood as physical affects.

      A possibility towards which we inclined was propositional clash: propositional pain or pleasure are felt when propositional inputs constitute a threat or are favorable to our beliefs or desires. For instance: if we left the hamper open and the pâté was covered by rapacious ants, or if in the midst of our beach stroll a huge wave arose and threatened to suck us out to sea, our state of mind would surely change very quickly from pleasure to displeasure due to the obvious clash between what we had been enjoying, and wanted to enjoy, and what we were getting or were about to be getting instead. The strong dislike we would experience upon the unexpected change of fortunes on the beach would be enhanced by the fact that the situation we would be facing, duly translated into squiggles, would enter into immediate and dramatic not to say hysterical conflict with our strong bent towards the self-preservation of our specific self at any moment in time.

      Finally, on propositional clash and the origin of propositional affects we would like to explain that the operation of the propositionality of mind was such that the self changed over time but that it was at any time disposed to defend its integrity. Thus, the child who initially resisted the process of socialization, like not minding doing number two in public, eventually would be the adult intent on imposing on his own children the prohibition about number two, or number one for that matter, except in the Philippines where it doesn't count. This complex process which was implicit in the apparently simple tendency towards self-preservation and which arose from, and was applied to, the self under whatever circumstances, needs remarking because it was to be the key to the lessons on neurosis I derived from my theory of mind, and this, more than the approval of bellyaching readers, is what I have been pursuing since the beginning of this text in the very distant past.

There were terrifying civil wars everywhere, except in Wall Street and in the other important bourses, whose employees only seemed to be engaged in fighting

With the analysis of affects--much abbreviated here, I will grant (though no more than this)--we looked back and found ourselves staring at a wasteland. It was not just that from what we could deduce humans were determined and their lives obeyed the operations of subconscious forces, but there was no way we could alter this scheme of things, and specifically we ourselves were doomed to live until we died with our heavy load of regret, which, as we could do very little about our own propensities, or dispositions--we, unlike certain folk we know, have never had any problems about adopting other points of view if reason justified them--was only likely to get bigger in the not overly long future still ahead of us, as if we had been condemned to go around the monopoly board over and over without ever collecting 200, not an encouraging perspective as what it implied was living in a wasteland of cardboard, more boring and less attractive than the prairie of glue flies confused for a honey paradise.

      We were facing total nihilism. This was the philosophical nadir of a decline that set in when Sonia left for Morocco, which became unmistakable with our realization that our golf game would never improve, unless, like Tiger Woods, we started practicing 3,000 balls a day with only the faintest hope of beating the next hotshot filipino we were teamed up with at the tee off.

      True to our diagnosis of mind, these untoward influences were subconscious and had been reflecting themselves in our daily habits. We were sleeping badly again and we were back on pills, which we had to cadge, a month's ration at a time, from some quack by paying his consultation fees, which could go as high as 1,000 pesos, not high by American standards but more than our finances should have been putting up with, although we were not feeling economically pinched because the mysterious London remittances kept on arriving. These, however, were only a relative consolation, because, as we did not know their source, we had no way of knowing when they would cease, and this was not unlike being in death row, except that it could not be said that we were living on borrowed time, but that we weren't dead because we had been granted an indeterminate stay of execution, which meant that for all we knew it could be terminated any time without our knowing it, not by any means a good situation to be in and one that was supported by us with pure intestinal fortitude (read constipation).

      It was in such a lamentable frame of mind that we decided (or more accurately: our subconscious cognitive processes impelled us) to undertake a trip to London. We knew what we were going back to as well as what we were going back for. The brave new world of post-communism was a shambles: there were terrifying civil wars everywhere, except in Wall Street and in the other important bourses, whose employees only seemed to be engaged in fighting, especially in backward places like Chicago, where ultimately my money was sunk by Buzakri. The USSR had fallen into a poverty-stricken, dispirited Russia, and the former Soviet Empire was barely managing to avoid sinking into chaos by retaining the old dictatorial methods in exchange for which most of its former components had to sacrifice economic development. We had even become sceptical of our former hero Mikhail Gorbachev, although, sad to say, the Chinese model, which was better than the eternal poverty of India, was hardly appealing because of its highhandedness and lack of tolerance and mastodonic deviousness. We did not even want to look at Africa or Latin America, although The Republic was making a big splash by celebrating a record-setting twelve or so elections in one year all of which turned up the same results.

There was a fly in the ointment, which sounds like pig food but is a synonym of Unguent, a common Indian name

We went to London principally to sign a contract for a new book with which we hoped to re-invigorate our stagnating economic situation. The work in question was a dictionary of world history in which we listed every significant political entity since the beginning of civilization. It was a mammoth project (a mammoth is a relative of the mastodon), although quite honestly we had the outline of it in our heads (royal wes also have two heads) after over five and a half decades of existence during which we had read as much as we had lived (assuming as many do that reading is a waste of time).

      Our work could be said to be more exhaustive than an encyclopedia and much more explicit than a historico-geographical gazeteer, on which we really must offer a brief word of explanation (although please note that we have not mentioned the full title or the publisher and that the only clue the suspicious reader has is our name and we were not about to adopt a pseudonym just to satisfy herhis scruples). Encyclopedias had all the information that we were hawking but under general entry headings and gazeteers might have had all the entries in our work but only gave thumbnail descriptions. Our entries were not as extensive as the information in encyclopedias, but they certainly were ten times or larger than thumbnails. In sum, we provided between two covers basic information on all the labels that humans have attached to every inch of territory on the globe since the beginning of records.

      There was a fly in the ointment, maybe the same pertinacious insect that we wanted to exterminate in our onslaught on dualism, although our quarry would have been much too voluminous to be in ointment, which sounds like pig food but is a synonym of Unguent, a common Indian name. Whereas we had conceived our project as a compact reference book to orient lovers of history when they came across some mean-sounding Oriental terms like Kara-khanids or Dzungarians (not to mention Assassins, Brigantes, and Thugees), our editors wanted a big reference work and when we sent a puny 250 pages they were aghast and threatened to leave us out in the street if we did not provide more material, so we doubled what we had, upon which we learned that it was their intention to price the resulting book at an exorbitant $150.

      We were dejected--this also influenced our black-dog mood in Cebu--but we decided to go to London anyway hoping that the people there knew what they were doing. In situ, We did our level best to turn them around to our way of conceiving our own work, which as any idiot could see was the only logical way of doing it, but we did not manage it. It would be barely an exaggeration to say that, despite all the hypocritical praise our publishers lavished on our efforts, we were all but received on the sidewalk.

      Another important objective of our London trip was to find out about the remittances, but in this we were even more implacably frustrated. The transfers appeared in our account at Regional Buckminster--they of the solemn oath about money-laundering--but only in the plus column without any explanation, and obviously when we asked about the source they said no and this time, as they had nothing to gain by being obliging (unlike the time we placed a check for $500,000 in front of their noses), they stood their ground. So here again we had no cause to rejoice overmuch, which could have influenced our decision not even to bother inquiring about the progress of our suit against Bull Bull & Dong.

With a glee worthy of a marmoset and to our utter indignation, Jardinier asks point blank: "Wherever did you get squiggles, Mr Ramirez?" 

However, the two previous misunderstandings, so to say, were nothing compared to what happened on the philosophical front. We had corresponded with a few professional philosophers. We have mentioned Scanlon, so keen on showing us the stuffed corpse of Bentham. We saw eye to eye with him on determinism and we even had convergent ideas on dualism. He had written some farrrago about "mental-neural couplings" (apparently he was also a railroad-nut), which might have influenced our analogous monism routine, although he was far too solemn about his and as far as we knew he was not being hailed as the high-and-mighty conqueror of dualism. With solid ground under us we were talking different languages.

      For one thing, he invited us to the faculty dining room at his college and he kept insisting that we order anything we wanted, which as far as we could tell was an incitation to have a ploughman's lunch (not exactly Maxim's fare). For another, when we expressed our desire to see our arguments in print, he said the equivalent of that our chances were about on a par with his having to pay the price of a Maxim's lunch for us. We were so bold as to ask how he had gotten published, which he did not appreciate and after ascertaining that we were to the right of him politically he went into a tirade about terrorism we did not even deign to listen to. Worse was to come.

      Notwithstanding our claims on behalf of our philosophical speculations--certainly notches above our speculations in futures, proven, besides, in practice, as we have taken pains to show the ungrateful readers, and further to be proven in what remains of this text--we knew we would not be going to find takers for our work unless we got the nod from some big philosophical honcho (a kind of Mexican boss in Hollywood, like an entire-floor cleaner), which, after Scanlon, we knew we were unlikely to get unless we did a lot of slavering over some mediocrity's writings and sayings (and not a chance of that!); or we enroled for a degree in some philosophy department. We had applied at two: one turned us down flat and the other offered us an interview and we were in London also for that purpose. Need we say that the interview was not successful?

      Perhaps there had been a possibility of some sort of understanding at the outset, but it was not really too large especially as our interviewer commenced by qualifying our GPS work as "vague". It took some doing to keep our temper under control--especially as we felt quite near a nervous collapse and so were prepared to go whole hog at even the passing mention of ointment--but we did, notwithstanding that we were particularly inclined to have a go at the smug British kisser staring impassively at us after having hurled its unwarranted imprecations.

      We knew who we had in front of us, a fellow named John Jardinier, whose articles we had read in the TLS, and we answered that we thought his crap was totally irrelevant. Jardinier asked about the relevancy of our point and we riposted that it was as justified as his initial comment on our work. Jardinier discreetly pointed out upon whose initiative that interview was taking place and we answered with great composure that we could very well not have kept the appointment.

      It was at that point that Jardinier began to seem a little petulant--because actually our interview had been more circular and futile than we have made it seem--and we knew we would only have one shot at him, as we also knew that if we blinked we would regret it for the rest of our days. We were reminded of our encounter with Sartre, when we managed to extract from him the sacred buzz word "nihilation", so we knew there was a term to how much we could pause. So we went the limit and asked Jardinier to be more specific in his accusation of vagueness and this parry must have hit home because it was now his turn to pause and not only to pause but actually to hem and haw, like any dumb beast with a sore throat, and we knew we had him!

      Jardinier reiterated his previous accusation, which he had in fact consigned to a letter we received before our journey to London, and we insisted on our stance. At this juncture, Jardinier felt it his duty to open the dossier he had on us and look inside, obviously at some notation he must have put next to our communication, which seemed to inspire him with a glee worthy of a marmoset, and closing the folder he said (and we swear we are not lying): "Wherever did you get squiggles, Mr Ramirez?" 

      As we had been quite explicit in our papers on the etymology of that word in the context of our strictly philosophical work (as explicit as we have been in these memoirs), we were certain that Jardinier, who incidentally always styled himself as "doctor", had not read our work with the care and understanding it deserved, if he had read it at all, as opposed to having skimmed over it like a fruit fly or something, so we opted for a flanking strategy and shot back at him: "Where do you get off withholding our well-earned 'doctor', Mr Jardinier?" And it was on hearing this that our interlocutor's mug changed from its stiff-upper-lip attitude to one of moderate to extreme dislike, as if we had planted a turd on his desk, and he picked up our file and slammed it exclaiming (loudly): "I am pissed off".

      Well, we were pissed off too and we had hundreds, nay thousands, even a million, reasons to be pissed off, but we were no longer in the mood to carry on a conversation which we already knew was not going to lead anywhere. Nevertheless, we could not terminate the encounter that way, so we added: "There are more valid arguments in that folder on your desk that you have entertained in your head", which was not something Jardinier was expecting, and as if to be done with us forever, he actually took out our papers and in front of our faces tore them up and flung them in front of us.

      Now, I thought that was pretty childish and it brought me quickly back to my senses. I was interested in doing philosophy in some London college or other, but I was not that interested. I knew that sooner or later I would get a lot of readers to peruse my ideas and I was not about to apologize to Dr Jardinier, nor do anything to replace the precious material he had so unthinkingly destroyed. I looked at him one more time, shrugged my shoulders, and used the well-tested formula in such situations: "I will let myself out".

      As I walked along Gower Street I thought of the joke about the guy--I will flaunt my own no-macho code here, but I am certain no female will be offended by not casting her in the sorry role I am about to relate--who had a flat and no jack, and as he walked towards a house further along the road to ask for help, he had a dialogue with himself in which he imagined he asked for the loan of a jack and the other person was suspicious and kept asking exasperating question until the guy with the flat got to the real-life house, pressed the bell, and when somebody opened the door he shouted: "You can take you're damned jack and stick it up your ass!" And that was giving Jardinier more than his due.

For a problem of cobras in your backyard, a 38 was a less effective weapon than an exterminator

London, in sum, had been a wild-goose chase, and extremely hot for May, especially in the cheapo hotels I stayed in, which were the only ones I could afford. Consequently, I was not cheerful on my trip back to Manila via Frankfurt.     When I got there I played some golf and a golfing partner--an expat Welshman so large he was the highest elevation in his country when he went there--offered to sell me a gun he didn't want around the house. Why he chose me, I don't remember, but I could have said something before about needing or wanting to have a gun. His own problem were cobras in his backyard and for that an exterminator worked better than a 38.

      It was an old revolver and my friend didn't even know if it still worked, but he was selling it so cheap I bought it. In the worst of all possibilities it would do as an antique, although in the scenario I had in mind, I would have used it only once, and that was as bad as things could get.

      It had been manufactured in Clermont-Ferrand and it even had the patent date inscribed on it, which was 1898, but the gun had all the telltale signs of having been an officer's weapon during the Great War. It had at the butt a ring which surely was used to let it hang from a cord and its barrel was not rifled but polygonal which had to mean it was only used for close firing. In any event, I tested it in the thick jungle behind my house and it worked just fine.

      Testing weapons was the least of my concerns in Back-of-Cebu. Always aware of the precarious state of my finances, I decided to bite the bullet and retrench drastically. This meant no more Manila trips and if I were to play golf it would have to be locally either alone or with Elias.

      In going back over my notes for these memoirs, I realized I had been overhasty in relegating hallucinations. This was evident in the hectoring tone I assumed towards the reader which clearly showed symptons of acute paranoia. As I was a ward of myself, I had acted as if an inmate told me he was Napoleon and I answered: "You definitely have to do something about Waterloo". Or alternatively, if he had been claiming to be Julius Caesar and I said: "Beware the ides of March, but this time really pay attention, hear?" Nevertheless, I will let the text stand as it is because it is a faithful reflection of a frame of mind which was later to have momentous consequences.

      More to the point, these re-appraisals of my behaviour made all the more urgent that I take up the theme of neurosis, which, as I've said, I had neglected carried away by the momentum of my purely philosophical concerns, forgetting that these had originated in my preoccupations with my own deep-seated quirks. This indicated that despite my previous conclusions I still lived in the faint hope of a cure, as if Plato did believe that his regimented, fascistic, philosophical republic could be the cradle of human bliss, not that I had been harbouring many illusions concerning my own philosophical ideas.

      My "previous conclusions" about neurosis were none such. The reader will remember I suspended my elucubrations on the subject after having developed the concepts of mind-conditioning and of neurotic forms and reached the conclusion that neurotic forms were like ordinary human preoccupations and insecurities, which additionally were indistinguishable from each other. But, as I was still a familiar of a strange condition involving anxiety and a tendency to regret and my philosophy was much advanced, it was just a matter of pushing coming to shove, even if I had no cause to believe I would be getting anywhere by either pushing or shoving. In any event, whatever I was going on about, I was totally calm and collected.

Even a very neurotic individual does not go through life tripping up and having false near-death impressions

The reason I gave myself for going back into the trap-strewn neurotic fields was that I had some debits on the answers side of my personal biographical ledger and I was still unconditionally loyal to knowledge for its own sake. My basic program then was to review neurosis in the context of the ideas I had found in theory of mind, principally specific-self and its concomitant of self-preservation. The latter sounded like what I had been taught here and there at different times as the instinct of survival, but, one, I did not like "instinct"--it was what a dumb movie-cop would say if shehe wanted to railroad a suspect, especially if it came from the gut, where Aristotle claimed cops had their brains--and two, there was no point in survival--which suggested the "Raft of the Medusa" or whining yuppies, neither of which applied to my situation--unless there was the specific-self.

      There was also the matter of squiggles, which had become something of a sensitive point for me and I was hoping I could "use" them in some actual-life simulation to see if they would fit. Jardinier's sniggering dismissal had been summarily dismissed by me the very day I went and left his office and so I could think that my own scruples were what was making me sensitive about them. And in fact I lost no time in calling for squiggles to make their appearance, as if I was a ringmaster and I wanted to get through the bombing-prone skits as soon as possible, which suggested I might still have been smarting subconsciously from Jardinier's irony, something that would have been utterly consistent with my ideas on cognition.

      I started with the proposition that anxiety was the most intractable aspect of neurosis, which was like saying that the toughest thing about fever was the heat: self-evident but difficult to explain. I could vaguely relate the body heating up with a greater expenditure of energy in a situation where dangerous invaders had set up an enclave and were going around raiding the territory. Well, anxiety too was difficult to explain and I had already had occasion to mention this as irrefutable proof of the break down of mind/matter dualism, although not as if giving an example would have constituted a solution to the issue. So what exactly was anxiety?

      To answer this, I remembered one time I had tripped over myself--which as I was no André Agassis could have been any number of occasions in my life--and that my fear then had been entirely disproportionate to the danger I faced. I had felt edgy during the next few days, as if I had been on the verge of dying. That was definitely anxiety. Fear I associated with a man-eating tiger or a rampaging elephant and what my fall had exposed me to was the near instantenous approach of a concrete sidewalk to my nearly but not entirely unprotected head. Moreover, even as I fell, I knew my chances of surviving the fall were greater than they were if I had met the hungry tiger or the crazy elephant face to face. So why was I so shaken by a mere fall?

      The answer was that the experience resembled the fear of death even if the cause of the fear was not life-threatening. This was anxiety: propositions--maybe slightly more than propositions, but less that a big tiger or an even bigger elephant--that made you fear for your life. Anxiety always in some way however distant or indirect had to do with death and death was always accompanied by anxiety unless it crept up on you unannounced, which could mean the poor bloke who was wasted by a rig was not so unlucky after all, for he was going to die anyway--being so unattentive he was probably getting on--and he saved himself a lot of anxiety.

      Harking back to my theory of propositional clash, the propositions my mind was processing as I fell were most unmistakably clashing with the highly motivational self-preservation proposition inherent in the fact of my being specific. In other words, I did not want to die and even the hint of death was enough to throw me into an anxiety-funk. How did squiggles come into the picture? When inputs (the fall) clashed with the specific-self, squiggles were activated in a way which simultaneously replicated the activity of neurons in a state of pain (anxiety). Physical pain went with propositional activity, which was in itself usually affectively neutral. The signal for the transference of pain from matter to mind was propositional clash, which was the anxiety produced by the very physical event of a painful and unrehearsed pratfall.

      Basically, then, just as pain, which happened in the neurons, did not distinguish between going to die and just having a sore elbow, so propositions entered the mind through the operation of squiggles, which did not prejudge about the results and took at their face value the blind stimulation of the nervous system. Being the instruments of propositionality, squiggles would naturally tend to prolong the anxiety caused by the fall even after it was obvious that we had survived it. The affective consequences of my frightening but non-life-threatening fall was a case of the sort of "mirroring" between the physical and the mental that could be represented and explained by these squiggles that Dr Jardinier had been so derisive about. This example might or might not convince the sceptical Dear Reader--I was at this stage much more in control of my reactions than I was before flying to London--but it was just an example which I don't want to belabor because if I did not promise a rose garden I did not promise a briar patch either.

      The relevance these thoughts to the issue of neurosis might not seem immediately apparent, but it was very strong. Neurosis was recurrent anxiety, but neither I nor anybody mostly went through life tripping up and having false imminent-death impressions. However, it was possible to experience anxiety, the source of which was the fear of death, in quite trivial circumstances and even for perceived causes that were not justified by the facts. Paradigmatically, guilt was in some ways worse than death in that, if you were religious, it could pursue you after death, and the neurotic was riddled by guilt even when shehe was guilty of nothing, discarding of course that old French canard about every one being an assassin.

Psychological as opposed to moral guilt was like saying that God, if He existed, had made his displeasure known to some Brit who had badmouthed the Queen Mother

Having brought in anxiety and guilt off the bat, so to speak, my mind at once recalled that there were also some questions left over from my ethical musings. Essentially, this was the lie of the land: regret and guilt were in principle different. Theoretically moral guilt, involving higher principles, should have been affectively the greater of the two, yet I had the feeling that regret, sometimes involving mere faux pas, seemed to have a stronger impact than remorse, and my confession to the insensitive, laughing monk had been sincere. In fact, I still kept the chromo he had given me, for the same reason I occasionally said a Paternoster: because neither was taking up much space or time.

      But, and this was immediately self-evident, there were instances in which propositions could cause anxiety, for what was regret and what was remorse if not the product of propositions about the past without the power to hurt or even to threaten me? There wasn't here even the kind of replication that you had between neurons being mistreated and squiggles having fellow feelings for them. This was a question of squiggles hurting for no reason at all and neurons being empathetic, which sounded gratuitous but was of the essence if any solution to mind/matter dualism was to be had.

      In order to go about this question I thought as I might as well start by assuming that regret was a form of guilt, which could be called psychological as opposed to moral guilt. This was like saying that God, if He existed, had made his displeasure known to some Brit who had badmouthed the Queen Mother. Or the way adult American males, if they were very sensitive to unfounded accusations, felt if you called them bleeding-heart liberals. Remember, however, we are talking neurosis here and neurosis, as I said, was difficult to specify because it could be so contradictory.

      It could then be said that guilt was a token of anxiety and that it came in two variants: the moral and the psychological. Since guilt was properly an ethical concept, it had epistemic precedence even if it turned out to be of less importance in the analysis than regret or psychological guilt, which could be compared to an anxious, chain smoking father expecting a baby boy and being shown a hermaphrodite by a deviously smiling nurse.

      The next obvious step in my reasoning had to be that for moral guilt to be the source of anxiety it had to represent a threat to the specific self. Now, I was absolutely certain that the priests and brothers who had taken charge of my moral education in my infancy had not made an impression on me such that I would have made their words part of myself. The truth is that apart from being grateful for having taught me to read--and this I might have done sonner or later even if I hadn't gone to school--what they mostly inspired in me was contempt.

      However, I had argued that it was difficult to distinguish between social and ethical norms and as any child was the constant object of teachings and strong pressures on acceptable social behaviour anywhere shehe turned, at home, in school, and in the streets and public places between the two, I made the respectable inference that social/ethical norms were "internalized" and became, like all the properties of the self, the object of self-love, which only amounted to saying that I might have been the possessor of a lot of shoddy goods but they were my goods. There existed sociopaths but this was more grist for the mill because in sociopathy obviously norms were either not internalized or remained in some way outside the protective embrace of the specific self. Since it was impossible to quantify affectivity, the capacity for guilt was a trait of the specific self and you had people who experienced a hell of a lot of guilt and people who experienced no guilt at all. Obviously, neurotics were wont--"wont" I read somewhere is the same as "want" but being reluctant to admit it--to experience a great deal of guilt. And so we were smack in psychological guilt which was the sort for which neurotics had a strong affinity. 

      Just as we had converted regret into psychological guilt, so we could say that moral guilt was also accompanied by regret. Regret like anxiety was a common denominator of guilt. What's more, exactly like the moral and social norms implicit in moral guilt, psychological guilt involved norms which had become internalized as part of the self. Neurotics were burdened with social constraints plus other constraints that had nothing to do with the interests of society. About here, however, the going got rough, because those additional anxiety-producing norms and constraits were inexplicable: they were part of the specific-self, hence deserving or meriting self-preservation, yet they were as useful for survival as volunteering to take out a machine-gun nest with a pea shooter.

      This might sound hyperbolic but the fact was--if fact is a word that can be used in relation to neurosis--that the guilt and the recurrent anxiety characteristic of neurotic behaviour (including moods) had to obey some ingrained constraints to which other people were not exposed. This meant approximately that a neurotic not only had to heed the commandment: "Thou shalt not kill", but also the subsection: "Thou shalt not be nigh a murder scene or thou art liable to take the blame for the killing"; or the commandment: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife", but as well: "Thou shalt not know the other neighbour is having an affair with thy neigbour's wife, because thou might feelest inclined to think thou art having her also", which would be a pity indeed if you were coveting her and never told her because the guilt you were going to assume prevented you from doing it.

      There were important differences between moral and psychological guilt, but all I could do was give some indications, none of which were essential. Psychological guilt self-bred, which was as if the expectant father instead of one hermaphrodite had five of them. It was inherently recurrent. The specific self burdened by psychological guilt was recurrently beset by anxiety. In psychological guilt, regret did not have concrete reference to understandable norms, but instead of going away (as if the expectant father had only had a nightmare), it was more pervasive and provided more margin for regret than moral guilt.

      There were, to be sure, incidents of guilt over infringements of moral commandments, including those which came close to being but never actually were illegal actions. These incidents could be painful and regrettable, but the affectivity involved was less than in the memory of incidents of psychological guilt. Recurrence was much more frequent in psychological guilt than in moral guilt. What was even odder, when I tried listing the things I most regretted, they were trivial incidents that harmed no one but had a tendency to annoy me, like the recurrent itching I was feeling in the chest area where I had my tattoo, which was surprising because I had it done some time ago and I had not had symptoms before.

The strong internalization of guilt was as if self-preservation led to self-liquidation, patently incongruent

Having more or less taken care of the loose ends about morality, which I concluded was as truly humbug as Nietzsche claimed--this made me think again about the possibility of incurable paranoia--I went straight into some of the concrete issues that neurosis raised. How could a tendency to recurrent anxiety become ingrained as part of the specific self? This was like a contradiction in terms and even more like being in a sandtrap after about five strokes and looking at the diabolical little sphere and wishing intensely it were on the green a few feet away, a truly-anxiety generating situation and another good example of how propositions could produce physical affects, which were also a possibility if your golfing partners finally decided to lynch you.

      It was even worse if you were a child and you were very hungry and the people who were supposed to feed you were arguing about some trifle like whether one of them had not really spend all day in a sandtrap but elsewhere and the other person saying it was bad enough having had to spend the day in a sandtrap without having the other person rub it in by saying he could have been out of the sandtrap and doing something else. In such a situation the child would be quite willing to go and take the blame for being in the sandtrap, or anywhere, and so who cared as long as the dinner got served! And then if this sort of thing went on for a long time, the child could actually think that the noise going on around herhim always ended because shehe was willing to take the blame for being in the damned sandtrap and so, if shehe did not accept being in the sandtrap, shehe was going to go without food for a long long time.

      Obviously, then, one reason for psychological guilt and regret, perhaps the main reason, had to do with childhood, because it was only in childhood that the specific self was dumb enough to be affected by propositional clashes and self-specifications that under a more rational perspective would seem trivial and forgettable. In childhood perceived threats to the self were not easy to shrug off or to analyze, because the lack of a fully developed rationality let through and fixed in the self forms of thinking and behaving which could produce unnecessary anxiety. This was of course discounting the very real possibility that the dumb child grew into a very dumb adult.

      A specific self was a sum of specific propositions in a hierarchical arrangement "shielded" by the self-love implicit in specificity itself. This shielding function was non-selective. It would protect even propositions that were unfriendly to the self, somewhat like having a pet cobra. If you wanted to get very robotic about the whole thing, the specific self was a "motivational system" that wanted to go on existing. Implicitly, the norm of self-preservation should have prevented such a thing as recurrent anxiety over nothing from happening. In reality, it appeared not to discriminate between what was beneficial and what was harmful in the process of self-specification, which seemed to imply that self-preservation operated in a stupid way.

      Nevertheless, the strong internalization of guilt that characterized neurosis must at its source have been acceptable to the self. Self-specification could lead eventually to a lot of unnecessary anxiety, but the process as such could not be harmful to existence, for this would have been as if self-preservation led to self-liquidation, patently incongruent.

      The onset of guilt was the result of propositional clash, but propositional clash itself, like the norm of self-preservation, could be neutral: just as it could instill guilt in the individual it could also serve to counter or even to extirpate it. In instilling guilt, propositional clash need not be functioning as a destructive mechanism. It could even be contributing to lessening other painful effects of the process of self-specification, which meant that despite all the ruckus and the fact that the child was not getting herhis food on time, by taking on the guilt of being or not being in the god-damned sandtrap, as the case might be, shehe thought shehe was making sure that shehe would eventually eat and shehe did not have to be worrying about where the next meal was coming from.

      This did not mean, for instance, that every Auschwitz child had to be a neurotic. Nazis inspired fear and a lot of anxiety, but the neurotic shehe had a big problem because herhis reasoning was all askew and the Auschwitz child was reasoning on target when shehe thought shehe was not going to get fed by a jackbooted Nazi Kraut.

      There was an almost inevitable question, the sort you dread when you goof in front of an unfriendly audience: why couldn't reason later in life undo neurosis? Why did regret and its neurotic consequences remain a feature of the specific self beyond the stage when shehe was dependent on a pair of mental defectives and onto a mature rational stage when shehe could very well be the one getting into a real sandtrap? Why couldn't reason dissolve the link of the self to psychological guilt, which was no guilt at all except in that like guilt it was regretful and beset by anxiety?

      The persistence of neurosis had to entail one of two things: (1) that the shedding of neurotic traits did not enhance the self and did not come in for special attention from the principle of self-preservation, which was prototypically the case of neurosis stimulating creativity or self-advancement; or (2) that circumstances were such that there did not come about such propositional clash as would lead to the elimination of neurotic traits. Therefore, even if, as was likely, childhood was the incubator of neurosis, at least it could not be said that the persistence of neurosis could also be attributed to childhood. The fact of the matter seemed to be that neurosis in an adult shehe was either a bearable burden, like any other specific trait, or actually benefited the neurotic self.

Suicide was suicide and there was no way that any body could argue that it could do the self any good, like arguing that a kick in the balls really made a man out of you

These thoughts had two consequences. One was of no consequence: the rash on my chest became stronger. At first, I began to feel as if it hadn't been such a good idea to have my chest tattooed and that maybe the instruments used by the tattoo-artist--this sounds like the description of an exceptionally good drummer, which is unfair because tattooing has the place it deserves next to massage parlours--were contaminated and I was having the first symptons of AIDS. However, this did not turn out to be the case. The other consequence was purely speculative but in a way as overwhelming as anything I had ever thought in my life.

      The self has an innate tendency to self-preservation. It changes through propositional clash in which propositions are replaced or modified. The interactiveness between the environment and the specific self should serve to enhance the self. In the case of neurosis, change through propositional clash does not enhance but diminish the specific self, and it is this result which paradoxically is subjected to the influence of self-preservation.

      But self-preservation should not lead to what amounts to a denial of the self and this meant that the only conceivable explanation for this situation was that the neurotic diminution of the self resulted in its inconceivable enhancement. In analogical terms, my extremely anxiety-generating situation in the sandtrap, that had all the earmarks of going to last forever, meant I was a good golf player, or at least, that I should think of myself as a good golf player, which my fellow golfplayers would have pooh-poohed in the literal sense of shitted upon. However--and this was when my tattoo really began to itch--there existed an event in which the extreme paradox that neurosis posed could not be resolved in any way whasoever. After all, some one who had spent a longer time in a sandtrap than I had would have to admit I was the better golfer, irrational as that may have sounded. The paradoxical event in question was suicide.

      I was here assuming that suicide was neurotic, which might or might not have been the case, although for sure it was not attributable to insanity because psychotics usually took so well to tranquilizers they found reasons to live even in the streets in the middle of winter, a prospect that would have driven a mere neurotic to jump in front of a speeding train. Whether neurotic or not, the issue of suicide also addressed the question of its propositionality and speculation on this matter would be helpful for my over-all view of existence as embodied in my dual theories of knowledge and of mind.

      Self-preservation suffused all the propositions that constituted the self. These were organized in a hierarchical order. Among them some were the source of unresolved propositional clashes and could represent a denial of self-preservation. In the case of neurosis I argued that such a contradiction in fact did the work of self-preservation in a roundabout way, like the little shehe who, in exchange for a lot of guilt, did not have to worry about herhis next meal (or so shehe thought, which didn't matter because shehe was not guilty either).

      But with suicide I was assuming that there was no mitigation whatever in the propositions themselves. Suicide was suicide and there was no way that any body could argue that it could do the self any good, like arguing that a kick in the balls really made a man out of you.

      I had to start from the obvious fact that propositions conducive to suicide were not normally dominant in any mind. Most propositions tended, on the contrary, to reinforce the operation of the self-preservation norm. This meant that suicide was an uncommon occurence. But it did occur, and the question was how such a patently paradoxical event could take place.

      The propositional explanation I constructed was that, in suicide, self-destructive propositions--which themselves, like all the others in the hierarchy of the specific self, were suffused by the self-preservation norm--managed to take the ascendancy. This could only happen through propositional clash of a particularly "violent" nature, as when certain propositions conclusively demonstrated that not only were you an incurably bad golfer but that golf was what you did best in life.

      That suicide itself did not escape the propositional nature of the self, was palpable in the near-inevitability with which shehes who killed themselves left pathetic suicide notes, often trying to explain the huge paradox that self-preservation should participate in its own destruction, which was something they understood to perfection although their passion to communicate what they "knew" proved beyond doubt that their thinking was not as clear as they believed.

      What I was arguing, then, was that self-preservation could actually be the instrument of its own negation and that suicide was as propositional as anxiety and physical affects: it was a matter of the propositions that became predominant in the mind of any shehe. This did not mean this suicidal shehe had to be neurotic, although obviously neurotics were more susceptible to dark thoughts, and it was even possible--admittedly an extreme situation, but are shehes not creatures of unthinkable extremes?--that a golfer who took his game very seriously could commit suicide if shehe found that herhis game was hopeless. At least I knew the case of a golfer who had suffered a nearly fatal stroke when he missed a close putt in a match-play after he had been warned by some quack--in this case a quack who was on target--to avoid the links.

Neurosis could conceivably be a set of specific selves--like, say, the set of brown cows or the set of black sheep--but the common properties were missing, and at least brown cows could understand English

I had done a lot of work on neurosis, but I had still to face the crudest reality about it. It had nothing to do with suicide, paradoxical as this seemed, but with that, after all was said and done, there was a question about the very existence of neurosis, and this was as if a scientist had been pursuing a GUT all herhis life and suddenly understood that the only gut shehe was ever going to have had been inside herhis belly all the time. Now, in my view this was not likely. That nature should be determined by a law here and a law there and that these laws should not be related among themselves was as if, Hell's bells, the universe could collapse without giving Little Chicken the chance to warn the rest of the barnyard. It was Einstein's thing about God not being a gambler. In my honest ignorance, it meant topsy turvy, which was but a notch above helter skelter.

      Now, I wasn't claiming that my GPS had anything near the importance of a GUT, but to me it was very significant that there seemed to be a fatal flaw in the concept of neurosis, and there was not one but various arguments for this claim. On a very basic level, the category of neurosis contradicted the fundamental principle of the specificity of self. All categories were dubious, especially those that divided humanity into neurotics and non-neurotics. Dualities like this one were in themselves suspicious, defeasible by the more realistic assesment that all shehes were divided into those shehes who thought the world was divided into two groups of shehes and those who didn't, which might have been true enough but wasn't that world-shaking. 

      Even more to the point, the same grounds for erecting neurosis could be used for pulling down the category of neurosis. It was the specificity of self that was the basis for neurosis, but the specificity of self also precluded the categorization of neurosis. The components from which neurosis was constructed--anxiety, guilt, recurrence, etc.--were universal traits in humanity. Since they were also unquantifiable, it was hardly useful to argue that it was their quantity that defined neurosis.

      Neurosis could conceivably be a set of specific selves--like, say, the set of brown cows or the set of black sheep--but apart from the difficulty of making valid statements about the properties which would define such a set--admittedly brown cows could understand English--there was the problem that self-specificity was created by specific traits. Every neurosis necessarily had to be specific and this made it difficult to create the set of specific selves that would define neurosis. The peculiarities that characterized neurosis were not of so singular a nature as to justify the creation of a type. The category of neurosis took me back to the foolish taxonomical classification of big and small dogs, which could seem plausible in that you would no more imagine a Great Dane and a Chihuahua copulating than you could visualize sex between an elephant and an ant, but it wasn't "factual" enough because there were more similarities than dissimilarists between big and small dogs and it was even claimed in some very backward places that with Vaseline and tons of patience an elephant could eventually stick it up an ant's.

      That took care of the quack-quack problem, because if there was no way that you could categorize neurosis, the way you could a duck trying to pass itself off as a swan, then "neurosis" referred to ways of being miserable. But we did not get to the root of misery from "categories". We got to the root of misery through the understanding of the specific self. Every neurotic was simply an individual. Assuming self-confessed neurotics, the facts were that no neurotic was like another, that there could be no set of neurotics, and that neurosis itself was empty of logical reference.

      None of this was a denial of anxiety and neurosis as a vague designation for proneness to anxiety was still a convincing if abstract metaphor for unhappiness. If we wanted to be extremely speculative, we could argue that neurosis was a designation for the flaws that history exploited to grind down the losers. But winners and losers were also precarious pigeonholes, whatever Hollywood movies kept saying, especially the low-quality stuff that went directly to the TV.

      There were those who said that happiness was laughing all the way to the bank. Well, Liberace, who according to a version had invented the phrase, certainly could have lived somewhat longer if he had used condoms, which was really a shame as he made enough money to buy a condom factory. Was he a winner or a loser?

      Instead of neurosis what we had discovered were specific ways of being unhappy and specific ways of being perplexed. But since it will be easily granted that neurosis and being unhappy were not necessarily synonymous, then even this subjective, justificatory use of the term was devoid of sense, and there was no percentage at all in chasing a beast that could not be identified properly, that would never be caught, and that if caught could not be eaten. Might as well have been chasing a Snark out of hunger, which had to be very hungry indeed.

      With these thoughts I had finally put neurosis aside. I had them as a result of studies that had nothing to do with neurosis. It was as if in experimenting with a vaccine for hemorrhoids, a scientist had discovered a cure for heart disease, although there was nothing serendipitous about my final solution to the "problem" of neurosis (the quotes are there as a token of my certitude on the issue).

      But there was no joy in Mudville either. The specific self could not change itself. It functioned through the action of subconscious cognitive processes. The concept of determinism was empty. A function of philosophy was to fill this emptiness. I had done it, but it felt like a very hollow achievement. It was as if I had spent a lifetime searching for nothing, which was even worse than chasing a Snark. Or like regret in which I remember because I think someone remembers because I remember.

      After me there could be no more talk of neurosis. I was the last of the great neurotics, the discoverer that neurosis was a myth, a not unworthy achievement if you consider how long it took Deep Throat to convince Woodward and Bernstein that Nixon often said "expletive deleted". But there was only one way I could make sure of retaining my eminence and on that hot, muggy, grey day with little wind, half naked in my den, I thought I was ready to take it. Two "obstructions" intervened. One was almost gratuitous and I could have dispensed with it. The other one was ludicrous.

Logic was not dependent on experience, but math certainly seemed to be dependent on the experience of toes

The first obstruction came to my mind as I was ready to go to the room next to my den. It was really part of the den and I had it separated by a bamboo curtain. There was a bed there.

      As I was getting up from in front of my computer, whose last page I had not even bothered to close, I thought vaguely of opening a new page and leaving a note, but I could only address it to Elias and all that occurred to me was something like "Good golfing", for obviously it would have been extremely ungrateful to have him read the last confession of a dead man as if he had had anything to do with my death, which reminded me of the time the Apocrisiary tried to put the blame for the landslide his contractors had provoked on the guy who lived at the foot of the hill.

      In that brief pause it also occurred to me that I had not solved the issue of probabilistic propositions and that was a gap that I, who was about to become one big gap, felt I had to fill in. God knows why.

      The other obstruction actually offered an easier way for me--the revolver was OK but it was heavy and I was drunk when I used the stethoscope and I could have misread the thump-thump--but first I had to take care of the cognitive business I had not finalized.

      The reader will remember that, based on the operation of logic, I had classified propositions as apodictic, factual, and probabilistic. The first type embraced logics and mathematics. Those propositions were universally true. Factual propositions were like perception and science. They were not universally true because, as any one who has even heard of Einstein knows, time and space are relative to the observer.

      However, if you could work out the equations, all perspectives on all things could be made to agree. Taking this to a very ordinary level, if you saw a car from the front, it looked as if it were wider than it was long, which you could believe if you were feeble-minded, although it was true enough from that perspective. However, if you had seen any car at all in the round--which you surely had and was the reason you would be a moron to be fooled by perspective--you had to know it was longer than it was wide. Given these qualifications, then, it could be said that factual propositions were also universally true.

      Nevertheless, there was a difference between apodictic and factual propositions having to do with logic and math not being dependent on experience, the way science was, but as I cannot vouch 100% for this claim--math certainly seemed to be dependent on the experience of toes--I will let the matter drop, especially as both apodictic and factual propositions are valid and very reliable.

      Besides, the problem was not with those propositions. The problem was probability and it was easier to illustrate than to solve. I mentioned that perception was probabilistic because it was always past perception, but this, as I cheerfully admitted later, was an exaggeration, for if perception had been probabilistic, we wouldn't even get out of bed, assuming that there was a bed under us, which wasn't necessarily true if probability ruled the universe the way time undoubtedly did, making space possible of course, whatever Einstein might have said from his extensive experience with relativity.

      Not including factual propositions, then, probability referred to any proposition that could not be conclusively shown to be valid, like inferring that some one had recently smoked in a room where an ashtray contained a butt. This was likely if there was the tell tale smell of tobacco, which, however, if it was mixed with the scent of dog poop, could also mean the occupant of that room was very sloppy or filthy or both.

      Even though the range of probabilities was immense at any given time in a cognitive process--and this really meant "at any given time for any one (even dreaming which was also propositional and fuzzily logical)"--yet another point that had to be made was that such inferences need not be invalid. The question that we had to address was how such probabilities could be validated and the reason we had to validate them was that, as nobody can predict the future, it was good to expect, for instance, that we were not foredoomed to die just because we boarded an airplane as safe and as carefully maintained as the Concorde.

Having been named by Mao curators of Chinese antiquities, the Gang of Four promptly proceeded to demolish Confucius' tomb

The answer I proposed was that we let ourselves be guided by history, a method I named vox historiae (VH), or "the voice of history", derived from Alcuin's famous elliptical dictum Vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God, not a thesis political losers would endorse). My essential claim about VH was that, unless it was directly our business, we did not have to choose between alternative interpretations, because "history" could be trusted to select the valid one for us.

      There were various sorts of problems here. One was the personification fallacy. This problem extended to Alcuin's pronoucement on collective wisdom, for, even though the "populi" or "people" he had in mind were "persons", it was nonetheless unjustified to call "people" a "person". It was certainly something that I, who put so much personal stock into the concept of specific-self, would not take lying down. But here was I, my own specific cognitive self, doing like Alcuin, and worse, because "history" could not even be said to be only "persons".

      My answer to the charge of unjustified personification was that, in respect to controversial issues--and probabilities and interpretations were nothing if not that--what counted was not what Tom, Dick, or Harry believed but what those-in-the-know had to say about them. Now, this did not entirely preclude the charge of personification--I was personifying those works that represented the consensual (or the erroneous, for that matter) view on a controversy, in the sense that I was having them speak as one voice--but at least I had brought down the issue from Mount Helicon, where the muses lived, and among them Clio, the muse of history, to the perfectly mundane world where those-in-the-know behaved like phagocytes and where political authorities imposed the points of view they favoured, the way Stalin had imposed Lysenko as the foremost authority on genetics, which was like having named the Gang of Four curators of Chinese antiquities (who promptly proceeded to demolish Confucius' tomb), or putting John Paul II in charge of family planning in the Philippines.

      More troubling for me was that with the phrase "those-in-the-know" (for which the only originality I claim are the hyphens) I was behaving exactly like, gasp!, Mr Strutting in Clearwater, the one who had told us to vacate the premises--not referring to logics but to the property where the congress of philosophy was being held--because we dimwits not in the panels of experts had no clue about what was going on. On this I have no alternative but to say peccavi. In other words, I was eating crow. And about a probabilistic issue, of all things!

      The issue of probability in the final instance resolved into one of consensus, which was, as I argued in my definition of knowledge, the basis of the reliability of perception, and this implied that probabilistic judgments if not as reliable as science were of the same kind and went through the same process, which could mean either that scientists couldn't be absolutely certain of their discoveries or that philosophers were right on about their claims. I knew the latter proposition was wrong--if only because of the nonsense about souls wandering about without a God--and in strict logic, then, scientists could feel confident about what they were doing. But it wasn't quite that simple.

      Some scientific discoveries were immediately accepted. The decipherment of the Rosetta Stone was self-evident. The discovery of the double helix of DNA was such an instantaneous success that it led to an orgy of ballroom dancing by Watson, one of its discoverers. Einstein's special theory of relativity, which was made possible in part because his ex-wife agreed to do his laundry--not something to be underestimated as the reader will see further on--obtained immediate recognition among his peer. But the structure of the atom was not an epiphany and it had taken decades for quantum physics to become scientific doctrine, which was nothing compared to the half century it took for plate tectonics--the theory that continents moved around like nervous expectant fathers in hospital waiting rooms--to become standard textbook material.

It was like looking forward to a great flight and a splendid dinner, something to make me feel good about living, but ending ended up barbecued with aluminium debris trimmings

On the other hand, history was chock-a-block with errors and there were plenty of unresolved issues about. The merits of democracy were still not universally acknowledged, if only because more than one thousand million Chinese were still ruled in an undemocratic way. About Aristotle, whose metaphysics were very influential on and off for more than 1500 years, the consensus was that he was a brilliant all-rounder and a role model, but that he wouldn't have gained admission to Red Hook Junior Preparatory Community College, and if he had, he wouldn't have graduated, although he certainly hit the nail on the head with the propositionality of perception (assuming translators have not betrayed his thought). Kant was another philosophical star of the first magnitude--the consensual scientific measurement of star magnitudes, incidentally, being a good example of a casualty of the progress of science-based technology--about whom other philosophers raved but with so many reservations in the end you didn't what they were raving about. And so it went.

      VH was particularly in evidence in the arts, where fashion--which was like saying utter obscurity--often dictated contemporary preferences, but even sceptics on the judgement of history had to admit that amidst the Babel of "artistic geniuses" and their promoters (usually a critic or two and some buyers) and gallery owners and curators and auctioneers--urbane as they were in this field, and not like the ones in farm fairs, who sound like the animals they are trying to sell--it was often advisable to allow for a simmering down period before coming to conclusions about who were destined to immortality and who weren't. And this was the crux of the problem, for VH was a version of historicism and historicism could be defined as that the living have an advantage over the dead, even if it is an advantage which is constantly shifting.

      The best defense of VH in the arts was that as time passed there grew a tendency to "rescue" or re-assess all previous accomplishments and styles, which might let sneak in the view that figurativism revealed basic skills which, in combination with a certain choice of themes, were the most reliable measure of artistic merit, and incidentally would put me back at the cutting edge of art criticism, a possibility I openly mocked in "Dips". This did not disqualify abstraction and all the personal non-figurative or semi-figurative or minimally figurative styles that had been the vogue during much of the 20th century. It did disqualify the repetition ad nauseam of such styles, which reminded me of the surrealist poets of Costaguana, most of whom were devotees of Apollinaire and St Leger Leger because they couldn't rhyme, or their rhymes were on the level of "Jack and Jill", but less witty. In any event, VH was the strongest, possibly the only, argument against the vulgar claim that in matters of taste all beliefs are on a par.

      In the history of politics, however, there was the Hitler Problem, which could also be called the Lemming Paradox, for Hitler had become the leader of one of the greatest nations in history and had quickly turned it into a horde of sadistic or hungry lemmings as, in their march to the sea, they destroyed or ate anything that stood in their way. (As I have not heard recently of any lemming exploits, it could be that their infamous migrations were a thing of the past, or maybe even a one-off thing that left the Norwegians very stunned. Or me if it comes that.)

      For a time Hitler and the Germans were contenders for world domination and there might even have been some very confused blacks who were Nazi sympathizers. Among slightly less dark peoples, they certainly existed. But the Hitler problem was not that formidable, because the consensus even during the Hitler years was against Hitler and against Nazism and genocide, and the judgment of history, hence the concrete expression of VH, was Germany's destruction and Hitler's suicide.

      These relatively upbeat thoughts on history nevertheless were not contributing to lighten my mood. It was as if I had been looking forward to a great flight and splendid dinner in first class, something to make me feel good about living, and I ended up barbecued with aluminium debris trimmings.

      If we could manage to see things in their entirety, VH entailed a theory on the movement of history which was the only means to put an end to the regress implicit in that the living and the mighty were the measure of the valid. Regress meant that, since more was to come (a hopeful thought in a sad sort of manner), there was no way to have knowledge, but really to have it, and this was as if you were in a treasure hunt and the clues led to more clues and to more clues and you never saw the treasure, not a program calculated to hold an audience for more than a certain period of time yet in essence the only fare that humanity was being offered by history.

      If VH was to work the way I wanted it to, then history had somehow to be "rational" and "forward-looking". But the only way we could be certain of any such thing was if God existed and He was not the cruel jester in the Abraham story or a crazy interventionist but a level-headed guide concerned about the future of humanity. However, I knew the huge if not insurmountable difficulties of faith. It was easier to believe in my father--maybe why I had believed in God--and I had killed him. As to praying, in my experience it was as efficacious as asking the god of the storms to help you after the ship had been dismasted.

As it stood my theory of history would have been as if gravity applied everywhere but in the Himalayas

As I wrote down these increasingly disconnected and discouraging musings, it occurred to me that I had not finished what I set out to do in my philosophy, which was to close the chapter on dualism, a subject that seemed abstract and urgent enough to distract my mind from its melancholy bent. For this, I had to convert history into time. If history were constituted only by public and collective events, then VH-validation would be leaving undecided or untouched a host of issues. As a theory it would have been as if gravity applied everywhere but in the Himalayas.

      Since it was time and not history that embraced everything, if we wanted to equate knowing and being, it could only be from the perspective of time. If history was time and time was being and history was knowing, then knowledge was being, all of which sounds very complicated but was like saying that, as in the case of our much disappointed expectant father, if conception was the joining of male and female reproductive cells, the child had to be a hermaphrodite (not likely, of course, but just humour me on this one, which I need badly).

      And in fact, the distinction between what is and what is not historical was rather blurry. A sensible position would be that all events were potentially historical. If Francis I was history, then he was history even when he was in bed, which was often, especially with other men's wives, and Diderot's birthday was historical even if later he had not written Le Neveu de Rameau, even if he hadn't learned to read and write, which could have been because of this or that, maybe he had died young, which implied that more geniuses had died than had survived.   If history was time, then everything was historical. History would have to include error, transiency, private matters (even masturbation, which fortunately was seldom documented, except in the famous cases of Amiel and of an American author who masturbated into his wife's fried eggs).

      One important implication of this was that knowledge comprised not only what was accepted as valid but what was potentially valid, like the time paleontologists were in a tizzy over the age of the first hominids, with one group wanting it very far back in time so that they could brag about how advanced we humans were, and the other group, especially an anthropologist who looked like a Neanderthal, insisting, on good evidence as it turned out, that our species had only recently diverged from its ancestors, at the same time as the chimps and the konobos. I knew exactly in which side of this debate I stood because of my opinion that konobos were brighter than the analysts at the Hunt Gotham Superbank.

      It could be argued convincingly that even when issues were undecidable, it didn't necessarily mean that they were not knowledge, just as it would be unjustified to say that a scientific hypothesis was not knowledge until it was validated, for if this were the case science would have come to a screeching halt. The discovery of error was itself a form of knowing--not that controversial a proposition as it was in line with the dictum that the more you know the less you know (something of a paradox but widely assumed)--and all of pastness was valid, at least in the sense of defining being.

Any hopeful theory on history in turn was at odds with my interpretation of twentieth century history as neurosis on a big, nay (the opposite of yeay), on the scale of a larger-than-usual Diplodocus

If the distinction between history and time was inexistent--and it was only like distinguishing between sand and stone, or between a garbage dump and compacted trash--given that nothing escaped the embrace of time, I could uphold the claim that history was the becoming of being, in my gloomier simile, like compacting rubbish. Since history also validated controversial propositions, the being/knowing equivalence held on very solid grounds. Finally, since my theory of knowledge contained a solution to the mind/matter problem and since knowing and being were equivalent, then my theory of knowledge was justified from the concept of being. The equivalence between being and its representation reinforced the squiggles/neurons analogy, itself a corroboration of the equivalence between knowing and being. In sum, we could not make a coherent distinction between what was and what was known, which included knowing that we do not know everything there is to know. This sounded and probably was as if I owned the store and was my best customer, but I wasn't in the mood for revisions and I could still use the philosophical gimmick of the BPI.

      My philosophy explained everything but even this wasn't making me feel good. As I had interpreted my struggle against neurosis as the war to end all wars, I could claim that I was the winner, but since I now knew that it was like shadow-boxing--the favorite hobby of Joe Canvassback, my brief acquaintance from about an eon ago--I felt more as if I had done the whole Divine Comedy circuit but in the end instead of being in "Paradiso" was again at the gate of "Inferno". Perhaps it was that these insights were arriving relatively late in life, which could be one way of understanding my suspicion about my possible retardation.

      I was doing what I had to do, yet what I was doing was quite likely a waste of time. I was trying to prove it wasn't. But I might not be able to. Back-of-Cebu was as good as it got. The only real struggle was to sleep and that almost had me licked. I could still lick it. All I had to do was step into the Back-of-my-Den and "get on with it". See if that wouldn't lick anything around me and all outstanding accounts to boot!

      Curiously, even as I was having these dreary thoughts, I felt overcome by such a feeling of drowsiness that I actually went to sleep. It was instantaneous, as if I had downed a fistful of tranquilizers, and I was immediately plunged into a dream in which I saw my father sitting nearby squeezing his brow with his right hand. Although he wasn't looking at me, he was talking to me--I knew you cannot escape logic even in dreams--but what he said was so brief as to be sibylline. "We have made so many mistakes" were his words and, even though I could retort that his mistakes and mine were different, I had no heart to contradict him. When I awoke, I was surprised he wasn't there, so real had he been in the dream, which cannot have lasted more than seconds. I couldn't help it and sobbed like a child for a long time.

      But nothing had changed. I shook my head and got up ashamed of myself. 

      Almost absent-mindedly (everything seemed to be "almost" and I was getting tired of that too), I connected to the server--I was almost about to write "my server" when I realized that would have been a bit of brainwashing as I had no shares in that or any company--I opened the e-mail program, which I hadn't done in a long time, and I fed it my password (to make it really difficult for the inquisitive I had chosen my birthday, and when I needed another code I used my acronym). All of this was also a waste of time for nothing ever arrived and I wasn't expecting anything in particular.

      There was an alternative possibility for the movement of history. If it was towards the "advancement" of humanity, it had to be because humanity itself was "wise". This "wisdom" could simply be a result of the norm or principle of self-preservation. Self-preservation did not entail a theory of history. But if humanity was "wise", we could make predictions about its future, and "some prediction" was all we expected from a theory on history. "Predictabilities" were inescapable in any theory or explanation involving history. But who would not bet on the likelihood of the next instant whatever the odds? Even though this sounded somewhat ironic in my circumstances, it was generally true. However, any hopeful theory on history in turn was at odds with my interpretation of twentieth century history as neurosis on a gigantic, nay (the opposite of yeay), on the scale of a larger-than-usual Diplodocus, and the reader already knows my firmly negative opinions on dinosaurs.

      History seemed to be on some kind of erratic but not entirely directionless path, like a drunk who stumbles but knows where his bed is. It certainly was not about justice. Extremes were discarded. History embodied humanity's impulse to betterment, but no will or choice was involved. I was tempted to call it the rise of mediocrity, but I did not know and did not have the time to define mediocrity. More specifically, it was about winners and losers, but the losers did not get to write it.

      I remembered my old misguided days as a pseudo-commie and I could not help regretting my old idealisms, which hadn't been bad in themselves. But they were make-believe. All we could have was the specific self, which we could view with detachment, as I was viewing the revolver and thinking very seriously now of putting the cannon to the blackish tattoo barely to the left of my sternum.

My very last message to harrowed shehes: committing suicide was like making a contact print

In the final reckoning, however, it was impossible even to have one's specific self, because time was inexorable and the present was an instant. The chain of events went on. All I could do in the best of all cases was to try to keep the things around me in order, like kill the cockroaches, not to mention the pesky mosquitoes, who always got away anyhow.

      The world beyond would always be there. One could ignore it. It would certainly ignore me. And the bit about the last of the great neurotics was the overarching irony. Since there was no neurosis and there was nothing I could hope to deal with or cure, then it was a delusion. Everything was flawed in one way or another. Things did even out: you put down, you get put down. Have a pension plan. Try to keep memory to functional basics. A bit late for that though.

      Before doing an exeunt omnes, I knew one thing I did not want was to bungle it. But it was a .38 and if it just grazed the heart that would do it, for even if I had a change of heart, which at the point I hardly could, I wouldn't get very far down the road. Maybe as I was blacking out I would stumble over the side of the road and into the gully and, who knows, even on a Filipino's piggery. You never knew. (And by the way that's not Filipino but Pilipino, because Tagalog-speakers cannot pronounce the f, although Visayans might.)

      The thing is done like this: I cock the hammer and very carefully put the muzzle to my chest. I do not have to put finger to trigger until the very end. And I do not have to use two fingers. One will do just fine. The tattoo is the target. It was like doing a contact-print. Right or wrong.

      As I think of these motions before undertaking them (and the reader will know by now this work is my suicide note), I realize it is inevitable I use only one finger. The right thumb. One hand will steady the other. One last thing I can boast of is that I am perfectly calm, which might be because it will only take a second or so.

      Rereading what I had just written (which I leave exactly as it is), there should have been a blank where I am writing now. However, just as I was about to squeeze the trigger, I heard a strange sound. It wasn't really strange, except under the circumstances, in which the next sound I expected was a very loud bang and not the "ta ta ta-tan ta-tan" of the starting gate, but like an electronic marimba--music being the least of my concerns at that moment--until I realized it was the Eudora signal for: "You have mail".

      Theoretically, that was a dilemma and what decided it was I had fed the damn thing my password at least ten minutes before and it had been downloading all that time!

      I had once sent an attached-file which had taken that long, but it contained photographs with texts I had scanned and had to zip before I mailed. So, who the hell would be sending me photographs, assuming it was that?

      More likely it was some dogs fart out of nowhere, maybe the wrong address, but curiosity was getting the best of me and I figured I could always get back to what I had been doing with more resolution than before.

      I got up and walked the few steps to the computer and after clicking OK, I saw I had received about thirty messages! Most were junk. Even I got those, which now and then had the Bob-Dylan effect of dialing to hear a voice even if it was a recorded message. But that trick wasn't going to work this time.

      However, as I looked past and through the junk, I found something I was not expecting. In fact--shades of the Threepenny Opera!--I found many unexpected and significant communications mixed in the junk.

      The first important letter was from Sonia. She wrote exactly like she was. I couldn't explain this. She hadn't written because of many complications. She had had to go to Brazil before going to Morocco. And then there had been some hassle at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Brasilia, which hadn't made her feel good. Eventually, things got sorted out and she had finally arrived at her new posting and after getting organized and settled in, her first e-mail was for me. That was excellent, but I still hadn't solved my money problems and I wasn't about to become her dependent.

      The second non-junk letter I opened was from none other than, I couldn't believe it!, Buzakri. It was a long letter and I am not going to copy it for Dear Dear Reader, because his grammar was atrocious and I can do a gist better than Buzakri can write his own name. In sum, the mysterious transfers of funds were from him. He knew I was a kind-hearted man. He also knew I had sued Bull Bull & Dong and, even though he knew my suit was not going anywhere (which had to be a lie), he had escaped alive and well from Hama a long time ago and was trying to rebuild his life in London, for which he needed his broker's license and he was certain that I would appreciate his good intentions in trying to return at least part of the money he had taken from me and if I would agree to drop my suit against his former employers, it would go the distance he needed to be back in business.

In a final gesture of defiance, I resolutely reject Jardinier's offer to wash my laundry and/or fondle my willy

Now, I knew most of what he was telling me were lies. I had lost touch with my solicitors who had a power of attorney from me and self-evidently they must have had Bull Bull & Dong down by law, which probably meant I stood to recover more money than Buzakri had returned so far, and was offering to send still.

      He mentioned another eight months. I knew I had him by the balls. Actually, I didn't know this. I merely supposed it, but I figured if he agreed to take care of my legal costs I would do what I could for him, which I am sure was exactly what he had been expecting to hear. He had sent a huge document on my legal hassle with Bull Bull & Dong, which was the reason the downloading had taken so long.

      Eight months was about all I needed, because the next real message I opened was from my publishers, or rather, from a lot of publishers. Those of the historical dictionary informed me they had come around to my view that the work was perfect in an economical edition accessible to all history aficionados and world travelers in need of quickie information about far-off places. This did not mean necessarily I had a best-seller in my future--after all, it still was an academic work--but at least it had a fighting chance, and who knew?

      The other publishers, and they were about an even dozen, were interested in Schroedinger's Cat, which I had started peddling in advance of its now very forthcoming termination. I had what the French call l'embarrass du choix, which means I was so embarrassed I could choke.

      In other words, after due consultation with the Association of Writers and after making my own estimates, I would have to send at least half those publishers letters of "Thanks for your interest" (of the type it was usually they who sent) and the rest I would keep on a string until I obtained the best possible terms, which meant I could forget my old Clermont-Ferrand .38, for the moment at least, and finish instead what was left of my memoirs, basically the next three paragraphs, plus rereads.

      To round things out I got an e-mail from Jardinier--and this was the most incredible of all the miracles that occurred that evening in, what, like maybe the space of half an hour--in which he told me he had consulted with Scanlon about my philosophical project and that, even though they still thought my work was "somewhat vague", it was a vagueness his college could live with, reason enough, then, for me to be accepted as a graduate student to read for a master's degree, which, if my work was as promising as it seemed, would soon transform me into a candidate for another PhD to add to the one I already had from the LSE. Additionally, Dr Jardinier offered to stand as sponsor if I did decide to remove to London and he all but offered to wash my laundry and/or fondle my willy, which I wasn't about to let him do.

      To this day, I am not sure what made him change his mind, but I didn't care then nor now, because what mattered was I knew for certain my days in the Philippines were numbered, not that I wasn't grateful, but I did have an appointment in Rabat.

      I had become like old Abraham but as if God had also told him: "Hey, Abe, I am winking, but you can't see Me because if you did what you were going to do to Isaac in comparison was like taking him to Disneyland or Disneyworld, which ever is closer". The human condition, as I promised Dear Reader, was definitely looking up! I was finally swimming in the mainstream of history! Ironic, isn't it?