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Understanding Philosophy (finally!)--Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes by Cathcart & Klein

PLATO AND A PLATYPUS WALK INTO A BAR…Understanding Philosophy through Jokes

By Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein (Abrams Image, June, 2007)

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, the Writing Doctor and Would-be Philosopher,
www.writingdoctor.typepad.com//nywriter@rochester.rr.com
585-385-1515/ 16 San Rafael Dr, Rochester, NY 14618

 
         Once, in the bluest of moons, a volume sneaks out from under the book tower and begs for review. So it was  with the enticingly titled Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes (Abrams Image, June, 2007).

         An instant best seller, beating out the anti-Hilary pontifications on the best-seller list, P&P establishes “philogagging,” a neologism for using jokes to illustrate arcane philosophical precepts, as a modus operandi. Yes, the jokes are old.  So?  Most accepted philosophical constructs and struggles with meaning are even older than the jokes. 

        What is the principle of philogagging? C&K believe:
        “The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in the same ways…philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.”

         Just who are these philogaggers par excellence?  What did Paul Tillich, who taught these typically sixties characters, predict for their future? What does happen to two Harvard 1960s philosophy majors as the years pass? Just what you know happens to the rest of us. The Philosophy of Time and the tricks of Relativity catch up with them—just as their jokes did. Their beards are white. Their hair—what’s left—is combed over the top to pretend there’s more wisps than meet the eye. But their wit and their grasp of philosophy remain rich and fertile. Maybe even richer than half a century ago.

         Do all the years demonstrate whether time and truth are relative or absolute?  C&K don’t know the answer any more than do the rest of us. But they try to figure it out. Focusing on varying perceptions of time’s relativity, they illustrate with these jokes:

        This one:

        “A snail was mugged by two turtles. When the police asked him what happened, he said, ‘I don’t know. It all happened so fast.’”

        Or this:

        “A man is praying to God…’Lord, is it true that a millions years to you is but a second?’
‘Yes, that is true.’
‘Well, then, what is a million dollars to you?’
‘A million dollars to me is but a penny.’
‘Ah, then, Lord,’ says the man, ‘may I have a penny?’
‘Sure,’ says the Lord. ‘Just a second.’”

        Not to be outdone by philosophy’s age-old wrestling match with the meaning of meaning, Cathcart and Klein play with definitions of “meaning” through the centuries. In one of their best chapters, “Philosophy of Language,” which sees philosophy as semantics, they remember “When William Jefferson Clinton responded to a query, ‘It depends on what your definition of “is” is.’” Clinton was employing Language Philosophy, note C&K, adding, “He also may have been doing other things.”

       Willing to comment on philosophical history, C&K outline “Great Moments in the History of Philosophy” in the back of the book. Their history includes such stellar occasions as “399 A.D. A review in Alexandria Asp dismisses Hypatia’s Neoplatonism as ‘chick lit’”; C&K add that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1958 suffered the same fate; “1328 William Occam invents the Gillette Mach 3”; “1650 Rene Descartes stops thinking for a second and dies.”

         Their glossary is equally enlightening—and pertinent. They define a priori as “Known prior to experience. For example, one can know, prior to ever watching the show, that all American Idol contestants believe they are singers because American Idol is a singing contest for people who—for reasons best known to themselves—believe they are singers.” The zinger here comments, “Contrast a posteriori,” which means “Known by experience; known empirically.”

         When you walk into C&K’s literary bar (just where is it located?) with Plato & a Platypus, do a quick reading for the jokes and then reread their little book for all the philosophical definitions and comments that aren’t as simple as they seem. The subjects range from metaphysics, logic, epistemology, philosophy of language and relativity (my favorites) to existentialism and ethics.

         What to do with such a little book? Digest the philosophy, try to remember it (that’s the tough part), and use the philogags, no matter how tired. At your next cocktail party when the conversation lags and your feet hurt despite your Doctor Scholl’s pads, confound your drinking confreres with your philosophical know-how. Then, buy the book for all those know-it-alls who disagree with you.

 

The Circus Comes to Town--WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books, 2007).

In our American youth-worshiping culture, Jacob Jankowski, the narrator of Sara Gruen’s WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, turns out to be the most engaging male character appearing in many a moon. For Jacob is a direct lineal descendant of that ever-young American hero, Huck Finn.

But time has turned Jacob into Huck-grown-old, incarcerated in a nursing facility, not a “home,” run by the Aunt Sallies of the world.  Jacob can’t stand to see himself in the mirror. He is “ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” He’s not quite sure. Yet Jacob’s memories of his youth with the 25th-rate, squalid Benzini Brothers circus still haunt—and define--him.

Unlike Huck, Jacob didn’t willingly “light out for the territory.” At 21, just as he was finishing his veterinary studies at Cornell, he lost his carefree collegiate existence. His parents’ deaths, killed in an auto accident, left him penniless after their struggles to pay his college tuition.

Paralyzed by shock and loss, Jacob can’t write a word in his blue books during his final exams.  He runs away.  Luck, bad and good, throws him on the squalid Benzini circus train.

On the train, he finds a new, sordid world of mostly downtrodden, lost, lonely isolatos barely holding themselves together with “hooch.” Uncle Al, a money-hungry, fraudulent circus impresario, and August Rosenbluth, a vicious animal trainer and paranoid schizophrenic, rule this gang of life’s losers with an iron fist. They underpay or don’t pay, casually beat—and sometimes kill—the roustabouts, grifters, workers, and even performers with brutal efficiency. Because the animals bring in the “rubes” who pay money to see their circus acts, Al and August don’t kill them. That would be too expensive. They save their gratuitous cruelty for torturing the mangy underfed, chained creatures. Only human beings are “redlighted,” “tossed” and murdered under a handy train trestle.

Attached to the circus as a vet, Jacob and his fortunes wax and wane, mostly wane. He falls in love with the beautiful animal trainer, Marlena, who is married to the insanely jealous August. He trains Rosie, an apparently stupid bull elephant, by giving her directions in Polish.

When the animals stampede from their open cages (Gruen never tells you how the cages happened to be open), disaster strikes the circus and frees the ill-assorted crew.  Marlena, Jacob, Rosie, Marlena’s 11 horses, Bobo, the loving chimp, and Queenie, the murdered midget’s dog escape. Marlena finds jobs, a seven-year performing hitch with Ringling Brothers. After that, Jacob gets his veterinarian’s license and they all, elephant, chimp, horses, and five children move onto a suburban life that “all zipped by.” Ruefully, Jacob recalls, “One minute Marlena and I were up to our eyeballs, and next thing we knew the kids were borrowing the car and fleeing the coop for college. And now,” Jacob mourns, here I am. In my nineties and alone.”

Gruen, like Jacob, spends most of the story on the Benzini circus, where Jacob learned to grow up, love, and assume responsibility. The stark contest between the circus’s freaky illusion and its terrible, dog-eat-dog reality consumes Jacob’s tale.

Yet although Gruen obviously did her circus homework, the gritty piling up of fights, the brutality for the sake of brutality becomes tedious in many places. The circus train bumps against too many hazards. The territory holding the young Jacob is too mean. His final flight is too easy.

In the end, Gruen saves the day.  She inserts classical photographs of old-time circuses that lend reality to this tale of circus life devoted to fostering illusion among the rubes—and in an old man’s memories. Better yet, she gives us a fairy-tale ending that satisfies the reader’s desire for illusion much as the circus served the country rubes’ yearning for a better life amid the Depression’s despair. Caviling aside, who could ask for anything more?

FINDING LOST SHADOWS--THE SHADOW CATCHER by Marianne Wiggins

Marianne Wiggins, THE SHADOW  CATCHER. (Simon & Schuster, June, 2007)

Where are we going? How do we get there? What journeys must  we take to find our way? How can we find our lost fathers? What will their lives tell us?  These questions are central to Marianne Wiggins’s double-pronged, SHADOW  CATCHER. (Simon & Schuster, June, 2007).

On Wiggins’s particularly American roads, the central character, a fictional persona, AKA as Marianne Wiggins, searches for her father as a way of finding answers to the questions beleaguering her.

Marianne-as-persona is a witty, self-deprecating, detailed-oriented observer in the Sebald mold. Rushing through a shortcut in Beverly Hills, she first appears pitching her new novel to a Hollywood producer.

Marianne has just completed a novel revealing hidden truths about the brutal life of  20th-century photographer,  Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952).  Curtis called himself “the shadow catcher” because his images of  Native American Indians delineated them as a noble, lost savages. But it is Marianne who is the shadow catcher of ghosts haunting the journeys through the novel.

Wiggins, compulsive researcher into Curtis’s pitiless family-abandoning life, tries to convince Hollywood that most of Curtis’s life is propaganda, "all lies." But despite Curtis's extortion of exorbitant emotional, sexual, and financial sacrifices from his wife, Clara, Hollywood only believes Curtis’s self-aggrandizing myths about himself.  Producer and agent envision Curtis’s life as adventurous grist for the movie mill. Cleaving to the Curtis myth of a larger-than-life photographer obsessed with documenting the faces of Native-Americans and the Old West before they and it are no more, the producer—like so many American historians (see Google) would perpetuate Curtis’s self-promotion as preserver of a “vanishing race.”

After her failed Hollywood meeting, Wiggins receives a call from the intensive care unit of a Las Vegas hospital. Her father, John Wiggins, says the social worker, is dying of cardiac arrest.  But her father, John Wiggins, committed suicide 30 years ago. Still, this John Wiggins carries a clipping about Marianne in his wallet, her father’s social security card and driver’s license. Tellingly, he lists her as his next-of-kin.

Despite her sister’s nay-saying, Wiggins resolves to drive to Las Vegas to unravel the mystery of the dying stranger’s appearance as her long-dead father. She yearns to find  reasons that her father walked out on her family and subsequently committed suicide. What did he run from or to, she wonders? And to or from what?

Wiggins rationalizes, that “for someone as used to chasing shadows for a living, used to searching history’s mists to tell a story, how can I  refuse this chance to face this ghost?”

But before she sets out, Wiggins, the author, abruptly inserts 100 pages of novella going back in time and tone. The story, “Edward and Clara, traces their early life from Clara’s perspective. Like Marianne’s and Curtis Edwards’s abandoned mothers (Wiggins plays fast and loose with names), the lovely young Clara Philips becomes one of “these silent women who are lost to history.”  She is lost to herself and to her children. When the long-suffering Clara finally divorces Edward (a story told in a later narrative called “Clara and Edward”), her children abandon her—in another manifestation of how little children know about their parents. They prefer their father’s myths to their mother’s sacrifices.
         
As abruptly as Edward and Clara enter the narrative, Wiggins leaves them behind and picks up the persona-Marianne’s drive from California to Las Vegas. Despite this apparent disjointedness, the threads all connect (some better than others). For the novel asks what truths we seek, whom do we believe, what myths shore up our lives.

Wiggins focuses on the American devotion to—insistence on--myth. Curtis fostered the myths about his photographs of  Indians by doctoring the images and removing present-day artifacts.  His children embrace their father’s myth rather than their mother’s deprived reality. In Forest Lawn, that cemetery devoted to myth, all four children are buried beside their father, whose stone reads only  “Loving Father.”

In the ICU, Marianna finds Lester, a native American, who serves as a Greek chorus on the action. Unlike Curtis, Marianne’s father, and Curtis Edwards who assumed John Wiggins’s identity, Lester’s father, named “Owns His Shadow,” wouldn’t let anyone photograph him, lived to be 97, and died in his own bed. It is as though Lester’s father who stayed--bequeathed him a sense of knowing who he is and where he is going while Marianne’s and Curtis Edwards’s fathers deprived them of the knowledge that they seek. Wiggins idealizes the living Lester in contrast to Curtis's freezing the unsmiling images of his "vanished tribe."

Late in the novel, Curtis Edwards’s son begs his comatose, dying father, “Pop, what did you do with your life.”  But the only answer, says Wiggins, is …”the same—-fleeting and unknowable—-for everyone of us,…we, generic humans, as a tribe,--create whatever stories we need to just so we can cope.”

Myths help us cope, says THE SHADOW CATCHER. For Wiggins, using W.G. Sebald’s photographic technique merged with her prose is not merely a device. Curtis’s famous photographs and Wiggins’s family pictures perpetuate their own myths—for they, too, tell lies about what once was “when we were happy.”

THE SHADOW CATCHER  is a journey about roads taken and not taken, about trying to catch shadows of lives gone before, finding guideposts to help cope, settling for a lives we can live. Although THE SHADOW CATCHER’s  brilliant prose may not yield answers, it is filled with questions, beliefs, even photographs that may help us find our way.