Used back to back in reverse, the repetition of words can compress a lot of meaning into a small space: Love of philosophy? Philosophy of love? I turn on the burner and melt butter in a pan. I scent the onion, in layers, and I begin to cry. ‘Philo’ means ‘love,’ the outer layer, and ‘sophy’ means ‘wisdom.’ ‘Love’ means ‘love’, of course. Love of the philo of wisdom? Philo of the wisdom of love? I shake my head and wooden spoon the sauté. Tear it up, language falls apart. Take it in pieces, it makes a puzzle.
Regardless, as these words sit in the saddle of antimetabole, as we cling to words as horses fording the big river from one consciousness to another, ‘loving’ philosophy doesn’t mean you agree with or even have a particular philosophy or read philosophy or write philosophy.
Google it or whatever. ‘Love of philosophy’ plugged into the search engine yields—you got it, first hit—philosophy of love. Try it. People don’t seem to talk (or publish) so much about their love of wisdom. Yet they have quite an interest in the wisdom of love, which is why we have so many rock, folk, blues, bluegrass, swing, postmodern, and bubblegum songs about love from back in the day, a cultural anthropologist’s delight. Some of them, especially some choice rock and blues tunes, today, are raw, ugly, sexist, perverted, racist, blatantly obscene. Rick Estrin’s song lyrics are comedic masterpieces of euphemistic poetry celebrating and satirizing and paying homage to this blue rock genre almost lost in time. (I have a philosophical appetite for genre theory and the blues.)
When I was taking General Education courses at IVCC in the early 1970s, I transiently wanted to ‘be’ and ‘do’ philosophy as my job. Mr. Publow, Professor for my Survey of American Literature, sat on his desk and talked about Emily Dickinson as an existentialist confounded not by contingency nor fear and trembling, but by the inadequacy of the leather of language as a saddle for word horses to carry our meanings, made from living in concrete substance, across a metaphorical desert or river to the oases or shores of another’s consciousness, a horse with no name so goeth the song. As I sat in Publow’s class a battle raged within: Should I study music? or literature?
As an English major (BA, MA, 1976, Illinois State University), I took a long, lingering look at literature, linguistics, American rhetoric, and both creative and expository writing. When I transferred to ISU in 1973, I inclined toward becoming a poet. I wasn’t clear on the fact that you couldn’t apply to be a poet as you can apply to be a philosopher if you have the right degrees; that there was no job description for a poet, no list of courses to teach, no departments to chair (I had no concept of the department chair job itself). A job ought to have been important to me but it wasn’t—a truth. I’d been making money as a musician since I was 13 years old.
Instead of taking education courses as a minor giving me a teaching credential and a potential job, instead of starting the grueling work of minoring in music, I flirted with a philosophy minor, earning 12 units, including three for a course titled “Modern Existentialism,” which fascinated me almost as profoundly as it alienated me. After completing a course in philosophy of aesthetics, I wound up doing a double major, racking up almost triple the number of credits I needed for a degree in English. I loved it—a truth. Soon I made a conscious decision to close the door on music after years of playing drums in bands. After 1976 I didn’t touch a drum set for twenty-five years. But I bought a Martin and practiced guitar. And I wrote and wrote and wrote…
Except for sporadic gigs teaching English at community colleges in the 1980s, my degree didn’t have much to do with my making a living. But my time at ISU transformed my consciousness; my memory is studded with moments of reentry into imaginary worlds scripted from the words of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bukowski, Marlowe, Bly, Frost, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Austen, Whitman, Blake, Sir Philip Sydney (imagine having to apologize for poetry), Melville, Browning, Plath, Sexton… … …
Chaucer’s sweet bird in the Parson’s window (Was it the Parson or the Farmer) still cracks me up (O, Speke sweet brid…). Hamlet and Ophelia are real. Romeo and Juliet still bring a lump to my throat. I know for whom the bell tolls—and why. Lord Jim has jumped ship many times: “In the destructive element immerse yourself.” I’ve seen red-eyed, sharped-toothed rats in their cages strapped to the head of Winston Smith for disobeying Big Brother, his face frozen in terror (I’ve not seen the movie, another topic entirely), the green light across the water on the dock and tried to turn away; cowered as the foghorns in Long Days Journey into Night entered my waking dreams. I’ve marveled at red wheelbarrows glazed with rainwater, white chickens buck-buck-bucking in brilliant sunlight.
You might suspect an eclecticism suggesting a disorganized knowledge base reorganized in the folds of time, and you’d be right. I never specialized. I danced down the halls of the curriculum during registration periods, only much later aware of what I’d done. To switch up the analogy, I was a human shopping cart traversing the aisles of the curriculum. I learned to walk upright through the real world, to feel it more acutely, from fiction and poetry. I learned to write from my professors—poetry and prose.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, if we fail to feed our consciousness with the magic of literature—poetry, plays, prose, lyrics, stories. You can lead a horse to water, but if your horse isn’t thirsty, that horse won’t drink. Stay thirsty for words.
Which brings me to Bob Dylan. Of course, you already know he won a Nobel Prize for literature.
