I think he must have felt at the time that what he was saying was true and it didn’t matter if his manner or presentation was outrageous or not. There was so much to it he didn’t have time for prettying it up. If the University of Chicago was interested in the esthetics of what he was saying rather than the rational content, they were failing their fundamental purpose as a University.
This was it. He really believed. It wasn’t just another interesting idea to be tested by existing rational methods. It was a modification of the existing rational methods themselves. Normally when you have a new idea to present in an academic environment you’re supposed to be objective and disinterested in it. But this idea of Quality took issue with that very supposition… of objectivity and disinterestedness. These were mannerisms appropriate only to dualistic reason. Dualistic excellence is achieved by objectivity, but creative excellence is not.
He had the faith that he had solved a huge riddle of the universe, cut a Gordian knot of dualistic thought with one word, Quality, and he wasn’t about to let anyone tie that word down again. And in believing, he couldn’t see how outrageously megalomaniacal his words sounded to others. Or if he saw it, didn’t care. What he said was megalomaniacal, but suppose it was true? If he was wrong, who would care? But suppose he was right? To be right and throw it away in order to please the predilections of his teachers, that would be the monstrosity!
And so he just did not care how he sounded to others. It was a totally fanatic thing. He lived in a solitary universe of discourse in those days. No one understood him. And the more people showed how they failed to understand him and disliked what they did understand, the more fanatic and unlikable he became.
His provocation to dismissal was given an expected reception. Since his substantive field was philosophy, he should apply to the philosophy department, not the committee.
Phædrus dutifully did this, then he and his family loaded their car and trailer with all they owned and said goodbye to their friends and were about to start. Just as he locked the doors of the house for the last time the mailman appeared with a letter. It was from the University of Chicago. It said he was not admitted there. Nothing more.
Obviously the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods had influenced the decision.
Phædrus borrowed some stationery from the neighbors and wrote back to the Chairman that since he had already been admitted to the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods he would have to remain there. This was a rather legalistic maneuver, but Phædrus by this time had developed a kind of combative canniness. This deviousness, the quick shuffle out the philosophy door seemed to indicate that the Chairman for some reason was unable to throw him out the front door of the committee, even with that outrageous letter in hand, and that gave Phædrus some confidence. No side doors, please. They were going to have to throw him out the front door or not at all. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to. Good. He wanted this thesis not to owe anyone anything.
We travel down the eastern shore of Klamath Lake on a three-lane highway that contains a lot of nineteen-twenties feeling. That’s when these three-laners were all made. We pull in for lunch at a roadhouse which belongs to this era too. Wooden frame badly in need of paint, neon beer signs in the window, gravel and engine drippings for a front lawn.
Inside, the toilet seat is cracked and the washbowl is covered with grease streaks, but on my way back to our booth I take a second look at the owner behind the bar. A nineteen-twenties face. Uncomplicated, uncool and unbowed. This is his castle. We’re his guests. And if we don’t like his hamburgers we’d better shut up.
When they arrive, the hamburgers, with giant raw onions, are tasty and the bottle beer is fine. A whole meal for a lot less than you’d pay at one of those old-ladies places with plastic flowers in the window. As we eat I see on the map we’ve taken a wrong turn way back and could have gotten to the ocean much quicker by another route. It’s hot now, a West Coast sticky hotness which after the Western Desert hotness is very depressing. Really, this is just transported East, all of this scene, and I’d like to get to the ocean where it’s cool as soon as possible.
I think about this all around the southern shore of Klamath Lake. Sticky hotness and nineteen-twenties funk. — That was the feeling of Chicago that summer.
When Phædrus and his family arrived in Chicago, he took up residence near the University and, since he had no scholarship, began full-time teaching of rhetoric at the University of Illinois, which was then downtown at Navy Pier, sticking out into the lake, funky and hot.
Classes were different from those in Montana. The top high-school students had been skimmed off to the Champaign and Urbana campuses and almost all the students he taught were a solid monotonous C. When their papers were judged in class for Quality it was hard to distinguish among them. Phædrus, in other circumstances, probably would have invented something to get around this, but now this was just bread-and-butter work for which he couldn’t spare creative energy. His interest lay to the south at the other University.
He entered the University of Chicago registration lineup, announced his name to the registering Professor of Philosophy and noticed a slight setting of the eyes. The Professor of Philosophy said, Oh, yes, the Chairman had asked that he be registered in an Ideas and Methods course which the Chairman himself was teaching, and give him the schedule of the course. Phædrus noted that the time set for the class conflicted with his schedule at Navy Pier and chose instead another one, Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric. Since rhetoric was his own field, he felt a little more at home here. And the lecturer wasn’t the Chairman. The lecturer was the Professor of Philosophy now registering him. The Professor of Philosophy’s eyes, formerly set, now became wide.
Phædrus returned to his teaching at Navy Pier and his reading for his first class. It was now absolutely necessary that he study as he had never studied before to learn the thought of Classic Greece in general and of one Classic Greek in particular… Aristotle.
Of all the thousands of students at the University of Chicago who had studied the ancient classics it’s doubtful that there was ever a more dedicated one. The main struggle of the University’s Great Books program was against the modern belief that the classics had nothing of any real importance to say to a twentieth-century society. To be sure, the majority of students taking the courses must have played the game of nice manners with their teachers, and accepted, for purposes of understanding, the prerequisite belief that the ancients had something meaningful to say. But Phædrus, playing no games at all, didn’t just accept this idea. He passionately and fanatically knew it. He came to hate them vehemently, and to assail them with every kind of invective he could think of, not because they were irrelevant but for exactly the opposite reason. The more he studied, the more convinced he became that no one had yet told the damage to this world that had resulted from our unconscious acceptance of their thought.
Around the southern shore of Klamath Lake we pass through some suburban-type development, and then leave the lake to the west, toward the coast. The road goes up now into the forests of huge trees not at all like the rain-starved forests we’ve been through. Huge Douglas firs are on either side of the road. On the cycle we can look up along their trunks, straight up, for hundreds of feet as we pass between them. Chris wants to stop and walk among them and so we stop.
While he goes for a walk I lean my back as carefully as possible against a big slab of Douglas fir bark and look up and try to remember. —
The details of what he learned are lost now, but from events that occurred later I know he absorbed tremendous quantities of information. He was capable of doing this on a near-photographic basis. To understand how he arrived at his condemnation of the Classic Greeks it’s necessary to review in summary form the “mythos over logos” argument, which is well known to scholars of Greek and is often a cause of fascination with that area of study.
The term logos, the root word of “logic”, refers to the su
m total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There’s no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size.
Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy. One finds that in the Judeo-Christian culture in which the Old Testament “Word” had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God”, and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport this court to India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of perjury because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is not felt in the same way. Similar problems have occurred in this country among minority groups with different cultural backgrounds. There are endless examples of how mythos differences direct behavior differences and they’re all fascinating.
The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.
There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is “insane.” To go outside the mythos is to become insane. —
My God, that just came to me now. I never knew that before.
He knew! He must have known what was about to happen. It’s starting to open up.
You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don’t go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That’s a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos.
Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That’s it. That’s what he meant when he said, “Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.” Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side… that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That’s why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
I see Chris returning through the trees now. He looks relaxed and happy. He shows me a piece of bark and asks if he can save it as a souvenir. I haven’t been fond of loading the cycle with these bits and pieces he finds and will probably throw away when he gets home, but this time say okay anyway.
After a few minutes the road reaches a summit and then drops steeply into a valley that becomes more exquisite as we descend. I never thought I would call a valley that… exquisite… but there’s something about this whole coastal country so different from any other mountainous region in America that it brings out the word. Here, a little farther south, is where all our good wine comes from. The hills are somehow tucked and folded differently… exquisitely. The road twists and banks and curlecues and descends and we and the cycle smoothly roll with it, following it in a separate grace of our own, almost touching the waxen leaves of shrubs and overhanging boughs of trees. The firs and rocks of the higher country are behind us now and around us are soft hills and vines and purple and red flowers, fragrance mixed with woodsmoke up from the distant fog along the valley floor and from beyond that, unseen… a vague scent of ocean. —
– How can I love all this so much and be insane? —
– I don’t believe it!
The mythos. The mythos is insane. That’s what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
And in Aristotle and the ancient Greeks he believed he had found the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity as reality.
That. That now. That ties it all together. It feels relieving when that happens. It’s so hard sometimes to conjure all this up, a strange sort of exhaustion follows. Sometimes I think I’m just making it up myself. Sometimes I’m not sure. And sometimes I know I’m not. But the mythos and insanity, and the centrality of this… this I’m sure is from him.
When we’re through the folded hills we come to Medford and a freeway leading to Grants Pass and it’s almost evening. A heavy head wind keeps us just up with traffic on upgrades, even with the throttle wide open. Coming into Grants Pass we hear a frightening, loud, clanking noise and stop to discover that the chain guard has become caught in the chain somehow and now is all torn up. Not too serious, but enough to lay us up for a while to get it replaced. Foolish to replace it, perhaps, when the cycle will be sold in a few days.
Grants Pass looks like a big enough town to have a motorcycle place open the next morning and when we arrive I look for a motel.
We haven’t seen a bed since Bozeman, Montana.
We find one with color TV, heated swimming pool, a coffee maker for the next morning, soap, white towels, a shower all tiled and clean beds.
We lie down on the clean beds and Chris just bounces on his for a while. Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
Tomorrow, somehow, all this can be worked out, maybe. Not now. Chris goes down for a heated swim while I lie quietly on the clean bed and put everything out of mind.
29
In the process of taking stuff out of the saddlebags and cramming it back ever since Bozeman, and doing the same with the backpacks, we’ve acquired some exceptionally beat-up gear. Spread out all over the floor in the morning light it looks a mess. The plastic bag with the oily stuff in it has broken and oil has gotten onto the roll of toilet paper. The clothes have been so squashed they look as if they have permanent, built-in wrinkles. The soft metal tube of sunburn ointment has burst, leaving white crud all over the machete scabbard and a fragrant smell everywhere. The tube of ignition grease has burst too. What a mess. In my shirt-pocket notebook I write down: “Buy tackle box for squeezed stuff” and then add “Do laundry.” Then, “Buy toenail scissors, sunburn cream, ignition grease, chain guard, toilet pap
er.” This is a lot of things to do before checkout time, so I wake up Chris and tell him to get up. We have to do the laundry.
At the Laundromat I instruct Chris on how to operate the drier, start the washing machines and take off for the other items.
I get everything but a chain guard. The parts man says they don’t have one and don’t expect to get one. I think about riding without the chain guard for what little time is left but that will throw crud all over and could be dangerous. Also, I don’t want to do things with that presumption. That commits me to it.
Down the street I find a welder’s sign and enter.
Cleanest welding place I’ve ever seen. Great high trees and deep grass line an open space in back, giving a kind of village-smithy appearance. All the tools are hung up with care, everything tidy, but no one is home. I’ll come back later.
I wheel back and stop for Chris, check the laundry he’s put in the drier and putt along through the cheerful streets looking for a restaurant. Traffic everywhere, alert, well-maintained cars, most of them. West Coast. Hazy clean sunlight of a town out of the range of the coal vendors.
At the edge of town we find a restaurant and sit and wait at a red and white tableclothed table. Chris unfolds a copy of Motorcycle News, which I bought at the cycle shop, and reads out loud who has won all the races, and an item about cross-country cycling. The waitress looks at him, a little curiously, and then at me, then at my cycle boots, then jots down our order. She goes back into the kitchen and comes out again and looks at us. I guess that she’s paying so much attention to us because we’re alone here. While we wait she puts some coins in the jukebox and when breakfast comes… waffles, syrup and sausages, ah… we have music with it. Chris and I talk about what he sees in Motorcycle News and we are talking over the noise of the record in the relaxed way people talk who have been many days on the road together and out of the corner of my eye I see that this is watched with a steady gaze. After a while Chris has to ask me some questions a second time because that gaze kind of beats on me, and it’s hard to think of what he’s saying. The record is a country western about a truck driver. — I finish the conversation with Chris.