That was what was wrong with making a film about his book. You can’t film insanity.
Maybe if, during the show, the whole theater collapsed and the audience found themselves among the stars with just space all around and no support, wondering what a stupid thing this is, sitting here among the stars watching this film that has nothing to do with them and then suddenly realizing that this film is the only reality there is and that they had better get interested in it because what they see and what they are is the same thing and once it stops they will stop too…
That’s it. Everything! Gone!!
Nothing left!!
And then after a while this dream of some kind going on, and them in it.
That’s the way it was. He’d gotten so used to being in this dream called sanity he hardly ever thought about it any more. Just once in a while, when something like this reminded him of it. Now he could see the light just rarely, once in a while, like tonight. But back then the light had been everything.
It wasn’t that any particular thing looked different. It was that the whole context of everything was completely different although it contained the same things.
He remembered a metaphor that had occurred to him of a bug that had been crawling around in some smelly sock all his life and now someone or something had turned the sock inside out. The terrain he covered, the details of his life, were all the same, but now somehow everything seemed open and free and all the horrible confining smell of everything was gone.
Another metaphor that had occurred to him was that he’d been on a tight-rope all of his life. Now he’d fallen off and found that instead of crashing he was flying, a strange new talent he never knew he had.
He remembered how he kept to himself the feeling of exhilaration, of old mysteries being solved and new mysteries being explored. He remembered how it seemed to him that he hadn’t entered any cataleptic trance. He had fallen out of one. He was free of a static pattern of life he’d thought was unchangeable.
The boat rocked a little and he became aware again of where he was. Crazy. He was going to be insane again if he didn’t get some sleep. Too much chaos… streets, noises, people he hadn’t seen for more than a year, Robert Redford, suddenly juxtaposed against all this boat background… and now this Lila business on top of it all. Too much… It all keeps changing, changing, changing. He’d wanted not to get stuck in some static pattern, but this was too fluid. There ought to be some halfway mixture of chaos and stability. He was getting too old for all this.
Maybe he should read for a while. Here he was, at a dock, all plugged into 120-volt power for the first time in weeks and he hadn’t enjoyed it once. He could read all the new mail. That would calm him down, maybe.
After a while he got up, got the 120-volt reading lamp out of its bin, plugged it in and switched it. It didn’t work. Probably the power line was disconnected at the dock. That always seemed to happen. It was cold in here too. He would have to get the fire going again.
He put his trousers and sweater on, got a flashlight and a voltmeter from the tool box and opened the hatch to fix the light.
Outside, the rain had stopped but the sky was still overcast and reflecting the lights of the city. The rain would continue later, maybe. He’d find out in the morning.
On the dock he saw his electric cord was plugged in. He went over to its post, unplugged it and substituted voltmeter leads. No electricity there.
It wasn’t so good, he supposed, to stand barefoot on a wet dock checking 120-volt circuits. He opened a cover on one side of the post and found it, a switch that, sure enough, was OFF. They always do that to you. When he turned it on, the voltmeter showed 114 volts.
Back in the boat the lamp worked too. He got some alcohol and restored the fire in the stove.
He guessed he didn’t want to read the mail yet. That took special concentration. After hundreds of fan letters saying almost identical things it got harder and harder to read them with a fresh mind. More of the celebrity problem, and he didn’t want to get into that any more today.
There were those books he’d bought. He could read them. One of the disadvantages of this boat life is you don’t get to use public libraries. But he had found a bookstore with an old two-volume biography of William James that should hold him for a while. Nothing like some good old philosophology to put someone to sleep. He took the top volume out of the canvas bag, climbed into the sleeping bag and looked at the book’s cover for a while.
26
He liked that word philosophology. It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he’d been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.
Literature people are sometimes puzzled by the hatred many creative writers have for them. Art historians can’t understand the venom either. He supposed the same was true with musicologists but he didn’t know enough about them. But philosophologists don’t have this problem at all because the philosophers who would normally condemn them are a null-class. They don’t exist. Philosophologists, calling themselves philosophers, are just about all there are.
You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving them degrees that say they are accomplished artists. They’ve never held a brush or a mallet and chisel in their hands. All they know is art history.
Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself philosophy. Students aren’t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would hardly know what to say if they did. They’d probably compare the student’s writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student’s work grossly inferior, and tell him to abandon it. As a student Phædrus had been warned that he would come a cropper if he got too attached to any philosophical ideas of his own.
Literature, musicology, art history and philosophology thrive in academic institutions because they are easy to teach. You just Xerox something some philosopher has said and make the students discuss it, make them memorize it, and then flunk them at the end of the quarter if they forget it. Actual painting, music composition and creative writing are almost impossible to teach and so they barely get in the academic door. True philosophy doesn’t get in at all. Philosophologists often have an interest in creating philosophy but, as philosophologists, they subordinate it, much as a literary scholar might subordinate his own interest in creative writing. Unless they are exceptional they don’t consider the creation of philosophy their real line of work.
As an author, Phædrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly because he didn’t like it, and partly to avoid putting a philosophological cart before the philosophical horse. Philosophologists not only start by putting the cart first; they usually forget the horse entirely. They say first you should read what all the great philosophers of history have said and then you should decide what you want to say. The catch here is that by the time you’ve read what all the great philosophers of history have said you’ll be at least two hundred years old. A second catch is that these great philosophers are very persuasive people and if you read them innocently you may be carried away by what they say and never see what they missed.