refuting Berkeley

August 12, 2001

This Year's Bird List:
Plum Island Bird List

Today's Reading:
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Rolando Arrojo - but the real story was Tim Wakefield in relief

On Saturday morning I was barely up in time to walk with Priscilla and Rita at 10:00 AM. I think the unpredictable variable length commute is taking as much out of me as adjusting to working "full time" again. I was wiped out last night. Anyway, I made it before Rita so they weren't waiting on me for a change. Now that the mushroom has fallen off its tree, we don't really have a specific destination for the Saturday morning walk, but Priscilla wanted to show Rita this big old sycamore tree that sheds bark like crazy. I mean, sycamores are supposed to do that but this one is a real champion.

Other than the sycamore tree and a really spectacular garden a couple of blocks away not much came up in conversation except how hard it was for Priscilla to find my front door to leave a copy of the "welcoming congregation" questionnaire in my mailbox (nobody but the mailman and the little white dog next door ever uses the front entrance.)

Anyway, a while back West Parish decided to become a "welcoming congregation", as in welcoming gay people. They sent out a questionnaire, which hardly anybody bothered returning, asking people about what kind of educational activities they wanted to help them understand the Bible's teaching on the subject, gay people's lifestyles, and so on. Priscilla interpreted some of the questions as asking people to come out in front of the congregation, which she thought was outrageous. So naturally, my being the only gay person she knows that she knows (how do I say that grammatically correctly?) she asked me what I thought about it.

The way Priscilla described the survey, I had visions of people standing up in church and addressing the congregation about their lifestyles. This week we'll have the married heterosexual people talk about their sex lives, next week the homosexual people, the following week the single people ... After I read the survey through a couple of times, I realized they were just asking if having a workshop where gay people talked about their lives (not just their sex lives) would help people feel more comfortable. They weren't expecting all the gay people in the congregation to announce themselves. Rita read the survey too and came to the same conclusion. We convinced Priscilla that it wasn't as bad as she thought.

Y'know it was way too early in the morning for that kind of discussion and I hadn't even had any coffee yet. And it's not like anything I say is going to influence the West Parish congregation one way or the other. They do have a great yard sale though. So on to the rest of my day...

URI is sweeping the cat shelter again so no new kitty pics. No air conditioner moving event either. The only issue for me was that Betty should know better than to leave me an urgent message in my snail mail box at the shelter, especially nowadays when I don't get there as often. And it was after the deadline for the volunteer newsletter but since it was the results of having our booth at Yankee Homecoming I had to redo the newsletter to fit it in. I'm just soooo flexible.

Despite not really having time to do this, I drove over to the refuge. The young ospreys apparently have finally flown. I saw one adult sitting on the nest and no sign of the young. Alas I had no time to sort out the vast numbers of shorebirds at the salt pannes and be on time to pick up Nancy at the bus station. The day just got away from me. I did get some nice photos of evening primrose just opening up, goldenrod, and some kind of fleabane though.

I somehow made it to Boston from Salisbury on time to pick up Nancy at the bus station. We decided on dinner at House of Tibet Kitchen. We always pick House of Tibet Kitchen. I completely forgot I was wearing my "great wall" (in Chinese) hat - sure evidence of collaboration with the Chinese. So I sauntered into the restaurant wearing it. That was my first dumb move.

After dinner I'm getting into the car and suddenly exclaim: "I just left my Chinese hat in a Tibetan restaurant!" I went back for it and the waitress who found it just couldn't give it back to me fast enough. Next time, I'll leave the hat in the car.

We had talked about going to a movie but decided to do the used book thing at McIntyre and Moore instead. On the way there we watched bicycles with fluttering flags riding two abreast blocking traffic in Davis Square and idiots in SUVs honking at them. It was pretty funny. The bicycles were very high. The riders were seated higher than the tops of the SUVs. It was like a very strange surreal parade.

Used book shopping was very successful. I finally got a complete copy of Birds of Siberia, plus Nancy found a wonderful book of tree poems and a wonderful book of Hungarian poems in translation (I have made zero progress in learning Hungarian since I started working at Starship Startup).

I browsed around in the philosophy section looking for Berkeley in America, since it wasn't in the biography section. I did find it and browse it, but Nancy decided she didn't want it after all as it didn't deal much with his tar-water obsession. Besides espousing tar-water as a panacea, Berkeley is famous for preaching anti-materialism. He claimed that all material objects were illusory, true reality existing only in the mind of God. Famously, James Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson were once discussing his philosophy. Boswell said he did not believe in it, but he lacked the logic to refute it. Dr. Johnson kicked a stone in the street and said, "Thus I refute Berkeley." That's about as much as I know about anti-materialism. And the guy I want to refute is Owen Barfield anyway.

I had never heard of Barfield until I read Steve Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute at the beginning of my sabbatical. I struggled with the notion that the invention of written language somehow cut us off from our true selves or that "mediated" experience is necessarily all bad. And no matter how hard I banged my head against Talbott's arguments I could never understand how anything inherent in the nature of the computer made it necessary to use it in the basement cut off from nature and society. At the time I thought if I could just read Barfield I might understand it better. That idea stayed in the back of my (mediated) mind but I never found any Barfield on the shelves of bookstores or Philosophy Larry's basement. Today I finally found some Barfield tomes on the shelf at McIntyre and Moore, browsed them, realized philosophy will probably remain impenetrable to me, and failed to buy any of them. I'm happier with Birds of Siberia and Hungarian poems in translation.

So, on to Sunday.

Debating Berkeley, and what little I know of Owen Barfield, in bed this morning I suddenly had this great insight into the whole subject of philosophy. I summed it up as western philosophy is not the "finger pointing at the moon" it's the finger pointing at the finger pointing at the moon. I wish I had the philosophical chops to flesh out that idea some more but readers will have to wait until I've achieved enlightenment or refuted Berkeley.

Finally I gave up discussing philosophy and drove Nancy to Quincy for her social workers support group meeting then headed to Central Square alone for Indian food and yet more giving in to my used book addiction at Rodney's (who doesn't have a web site for the Central Square location so I'll have to give you Rodney's (the Cape Cod incarnation)). By the way, both McIntyre and Moore and Rodney's are described (with pictures even) in Booking the Red Line. I stumbled upon Tibetan Marches by André Migot, which I could not leave in the store. Migot visited Tibet and China in the late 1940's and I can't wait to read his experiences. Do I read this before or after the two volume set of Birds of Siberia?