Goulash II

My last goulash post was well over a year ago, but since I don't want to repeat myself too often, I'll just make this second in a series. (A random series of nothing in particular, but we've all watched TV, haven't we?)

It's a cloudless, breezy, and none-too-warm (43 deg. at 11:30 AM) Sunday, and Kate and I are preparing for a park/supermarket expedition before Eva chows down for lunch and drops off for her afternoon nap. (To say nothing of Kate, who hauled herself groggily out of bed today around quarter of ten...though she did make a kick-ass breakfast, and was sadly gracious when I told her that I dislike the cheddar she loves adding to scrambled eggs. So she responded by saying that she despises the olive oil which I love in scrambled eggs. Ah, married life...)

Anyhow, this post will span the midday shopping trip for Eva's exercise and the family's basic food (and again, the Crock-Pot has become our salvation. Easy, energy-efficient, tasty and complete meals...this is not an advertisement--it's more of a gloat). But as I type Kate's nearly ready to head out the door.

As I wait out the unemployment, having applied to dozens of jobs for which I'm marginally qualified (being more of an offshore geologist, not onshore), I'm letting my spirit sing by delving into the literature I've neglected for a long time. And the list of things I want to read is still long. Homer in the original (not translated). Dante in the original (made it through the Inferno a few years ago). The Aeneid in the original. But right now I've devoted myself, in addition to a little math, to two of the most hard-core writings in the west: Joyce's Finnegans Wake, as I've been posting about for a week or so now, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

The Wake is all about dreams, about the things which emerge in our minds when consciousness, filled with light, bounded by rules and littered with goals, is absent. The unconscious, at its most primitive and paranoid, rules the nighttime of sleep. No human can verify--as Joyce himself realized--that Finnegans Wake is an accurate reproduction of a complete cycle of sleep. Most likely it isn't. However, the fragmented and repetitive aesthetic and the timeless, funhouse-mirror versions of events are based on the brain's activity during sleep. As the title of one prominent commentary states, the Wake is Joyce's book of the dark.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804. He was an intellectual giant of his age who wrote about philosophy, astronomy (he discovered that the earth's rotation is gradually slowing down) and history. He is most remembered now for his theory of transcendental ideas, or you might even say fundamental ideas: aspects of perception which exist in the human mind before all experience begins. Neuroscience and prenatal research didn't exist when Kant wrote, so we have much more to say now about the development of the human brain, but Kant's two transcendental ideas within the brain are time and space. Without an inherent awareness of these two things, all experience, including everything we learn, would be impossible for us.

So Kant was into metaphysics. Metaphysics through the centuries has referred to many things. In Aristotle's time, metaphysics basically meant astronomy. In the time of Aquinas it meant theology. Nearer to Kant's own time, and later, it referred to psychology. But Kant himself stepped outside psychology, avoiding the mechanics of how the brain apprehends, remembers and imagines things, and explored how it is that humans can apprehend and imagine things at all. By thinking along those lines he developed his theory of transcendental ideas.

Thoreau and his buddies--Emerson and others--were known as Transcendentalists, for their devotion to Kant and to the very active reality that ideas play in our daily lives. In writing Walden, Thoreau was trying to make a transcendental, idea-driven life as actual as possible. Devotion to ideas, in Thoreau's mind, meant simplifying his life and living as much in harmony with nature as he could, while not ignoring human society.

I find it intriguing that while Thoreau discusses many works of fiction and at least Hindu philosophy, he never overtly discusses Kant anywhere in his published works. Writers don't always disclose their models. It's commonly thought that Dante received the idea of writing about a journey through hell from at least two Muslim works, the Isra and the Mirage. Especially worthy of notice here is that the lowest circle of Dante's hell, the ninth (where Satan is a prisoner), is frozen. Ice doesn't occur in writings about Christian hell until Dante; but it was not unknown in Muslim writing. And you can sure bet that Dante wouldn't concede an Islamic source for his supremely Christian work.

Not that Thoreau feared charges of apostasy or heresy, or even of being a hypocrite, by admitting that he admired the writing of Immanuel Kant. I think it more likely that he so thoroughly incorporated Kant's thinking into his own, that to discuss Kant would be beside the point, as if he were merely cataloguing his own bones and muscles: better to use the bones and muscles to go on a walk, and talk about the things seen, heard and smelled, than to dwell on his bones and muscles. He simply treated the philosophical structure as a given and spent his time on other topics.

I respect that, and it makes me all the more eager to read Kant for myself and understand what he wrote about. The little I've written above is from the first chapter, the bare introduction. Things get complicated quickly after that.

But another thing appeals to me in deciding to tackle this book of philosophy now: the contrast with Joyce. Kant wrote in the mid- to late 1700's, before much of anything was known about what we'd now call psychology. (The 1800's saw many writers exploring the human mind, like Blake, and finding many different, warring aspects within each of us. Much later, Joseph Campbell wrote about how 20th century psychology merely stamped the "QED" ("Quod Erat Demonstrandum", or "We've proven what we set out to prove") on 19th century literature.) But Kant wrote in a time when most still thought dreams to be divine, prophetic gifts, and not products of our own brains.

And he wasn't concerned with any of that. Kant wrote about the fully wakeful, highly rational mind, and how it can perceive things. Reducing his philosophy to a simplified cartoon, Kant wrote about the day, while Joyce wrote about the night.

So that's what I'm doing now: reading and trying to understand the daylightiest and darknightiest works from our civilization.

Hey, it's a way to cope with unemployment!

Spring is nominally here, and it's certainly warmer, but the three of us went to the park this morning and within about ten minutes Kate's and my fingers were pretty cold. Eva, whose fingers are smaller, had red hands, but she was oblivious. It's still not all that clear how aware she is of her different body parts. She's futher along than she was, say, four months ago, when she was closing a toy plastic phone on her thumb, and crying about the pain at the same time. She now has the sense to remove her thumb. But she doesn't have the language skill right now to tell us that a specific body part is, for example, cold. If she hits her hand, she will often hold it out as she cries. So the awareness is dawning, but with anything other than sharp, immediate pain, it still seems to Kate and me that we need to be pretty vigilant on Eva's behalf.

This is the case especially now with physical accidents. As Eva grows more mobile and her inquisitiveness has longer legs and longer arms, she has a vastly increased ability to get herself hurt. She reaches for drawers now, including the ones with sharp knives. Other than closing the drawers again and firmly warning her away from them, Kate and I have yet to take any action on these (like putting in smaller versions of the plastic safety latches we have on several cupboards). But most worriesome right now is Eva's tendency to approach an open door from behind, peek through the open crack at the hinges, and sneak her fingers through.

Since Kate and I commonly keep Eva away from the open side of the refrigerator door when we're getting something, this is her way of still getting a peek at things. Even more worrisome is when she does the same thing at the pantry. If Eva were to sneak her fingers through the crack in hinge side of the refrigerator door, at least the rubber molding would cusion the pressure on her hand and prevent serious injury. But the other night Eva got behind the pantry door and snuck a hand through while I was getting dinner fixings. I didn't see her and if Kate hadn't yelled I'd've shut the door firmly on my little girl's right hand, and I would've broken or possibly severed all four of her fingers. Needless to say I never would have forgiven myself and the thought that I very nearly maimed my own daughter still gives me chills.

Wow, are kids their own worst enemies at times! (I was my own especially in college, but that's not worth dwelling on now. Or maybe ever.)

So Eva has survived past her eighteenth month. Every time Kate and I look at her early ultrasounds, where her spine and teeth within the jaw are visible, it seems always more and more miraculous.