What do You Mean?

One day I was stopped by a man. He 
Had the face of a Mexican bandit; 
Brown as tequila and as round as a 
Clock. Or maybe he was an Andean 

Herder of llamas who lamented the 
Heights. With the throaty voice of someone 
Who had eaten the worm and English 
So broken that no kings, horses, nor men 

Could mend it, he asked with a slight smile: 
"Please, what is time?" 
From soaring heights my genius came to ground 
To sweep up his query and write my answer 

In the sky. I replied: "Time, you see, is the 
Celestial movements of the firmament. The 
Shifting of the smoldering stars; the ebb 
And the flow of the sandy shores; the surge 

And receding of your Mind. Time is the 
Limitless limit. It is the pendulum 
Of your coyest lover's undulating heart. 
It is more but we haven’t time to say.” 

On the same day I met another man. 
He had a Socratic brow as heavy as 
The dome above that lent it the weight. 
His face and brow were etched with lines, engraved 

By his hours and days like a complex map 
To guide me to where he stood at the moment. 
With grave import he asked me the question: 
"What is time?" 

With just the smallest of thought, I replied: 
"Dear Sir, you obviously want to know 
The hour of the day. I can help you here. 
If you want to see one raise a wrist, 

You must learn the way it is asked. You must 
Rather ask 'What time is it?' It is just to 
Our form of living that you must abide; 
Just a tweak of the language." I said this 

With affection and care. I then walked on 
Admiring my two hats. The upturned 
Corners of my smile must have looked like 
The minute hand at ten and the hour on two. 

September 11, 2001 and a Mysterious Little Building

New Jerseyans will know what I mean.  What I mean is they will know what I mean geographically.  In the year 2001, I was working for a company in Clifton, New Jersey that was located just off one of the many exits off of Route 3.  The exit, and therefore the building, was on the side going east.  For those non-New Jersey types who might be curious, this route, when going east, leads directly to the Lincoln Tunnel bringing you as dry as a bone under the Hudson River and, inevitably, with frazzled nerves, into what I believe to be one of the greatest cities in the world.

On the morning of September 11th 2001 I was inside this little building just off good old Route 3.  I, along with two other diligent workers--earnest worker bees!--showed up a little earlier than the usual lemming-like crowd that would fall in yawningly at something like five minutes to nine.  What a beautiful morning!  Do you remember?  I hope I don’t state with untethered hyperbole that the morning was absolutely crystal clear.  One really thought one could see for my miles.  Add to this those little whispers of clouds and you had exquisiteness come alive!  It was exquisiteness directly projected through a large employee kitchen window, in a small building off of Route 3, in Clifton New Jersey.  What gorgeousness!  I mean in that rejuvenating of the spirit kind of way.  It really was transcending. Forgive my over indulgence but, I really do remember!  Truth be told, I was neither partaking in its rejuvenating charm nor was I enjoying the view from this particular employee kitchen window.  But, I would be using it as a projection screen in a matter of minutes.  And in a matter of minutes it would be projecting on me something less than exquisite.

You see, this window encompassed a whole wall and  looked directly eastward.  It overlooked a skyline roughly 6 miles away cut from the sky  and, on any given season of the year, could pass as a wide shot for the credits of a Woody Allan film—shot, of course-- at any time of the year.  This day was exquisite.  I’ve said that already. When looking out this window on such a September morning meant a luscious scattered  assemblage of trees on the Jersey side that managed to both vie for the sky’s attention in their intensity, but also obscure a good deal of Manhattan’s skyline.  Don’t get me wrong.  One could still work out different parts of this cityscape through the negative spaces of the trees. In fact, the amalgamation of trees and skyline made the whole all the more charming.  One would not have wished for lesser trees or more skyline.  It was a unified whole except---except those two incongruous twins lunging skyward over on the right side.  They seemed to stick out like a pair of sore thumbs!

It was when I sat having coffee with a colleague that we were interrupted by another colleague who, I shall just say, was prone to (I want to put it politely) “over-excitedness.”  On this morning he did not let down.  As if on cue, he came through in the form of racing around the corner shouting that there was something we just had to see.  We had to see it and we could, in fact, if we just made our way over to the employee kitchen window with him.  When we got the obligatory eye roll out of the way we concurred and did just that by following him through the halls and to said window.  Arriving at the window we did not need to be told where to set our gaze because on initial site we both saw one of those “sore thumbs” billowing smoke out of the top of it like a military man with perfect posture puffing out a contemplative ring of cigar smoke.  We were shocked to say the least.  I think here it might be important to remember that it was early.  So, when I tell you my over-eager colleague laughed at the fact that initial reports were saying one of those single engine Cessna planes had just accidentally flown into one of the twin towers, I’m hoping he can be partially forgiven.  Believe me when I tell you, as someone who does not always see things abstractly, (even from a distance) I was shocked that even this would be considered funny.  The irony mounts.  It is the kind I do not like.

We stood in absolute awe.  There is no demarcating line here.  It is one of those situations where sight and sound work together in a kind of double dream-like state. So, I cannot point to a particular moment when I realized what was going on.  Three of us stood at a window as the sight unfolded and the sound unfolded simultaneously as fragments of news that built together like a terrible crescendo.  One's ears were a cymbal and one’s eyes were another and they came crashing together to make your head ring. This was not a small Cessna.  This was light years from funny.  And, in those moments that seemed to freeze the nervous system in to a thousand hours while sight and sound still played upon them in real time, I shall never forget my colleague—a friend—ask like a curious child almost in a whisper what that strange small dot was coming seemingly closer to the building.  Before even his breath came to a halt after the last word, the small dot melted into the other building.  In seconds, it too was smoking.

By this time people came pouring in and the employee kitchen was beyond capacity.  They also brought news from the outside.  “We’re under attack,” I remember someone say almost to themselves while shaking an unbelieving head.  It all seemed simply confusing.  However, time and information melt away this confusion, but only a little.  Confusion mingles with reality.  It mingles with reality and it becomes a kind of buzzing noise that you want to stop for fear of slowly driving you mad.  But this buzzing can become an all too alarum bell; One that takes your nervous system out of its slumber by thawing it with one particular echoic din.  Mine was a scream.

Mine came less than an hour after first setting eyes on the sight.  Strangely, as the number of people swelled, the whole environment became quieter.  It was an eerie quiet.  We all watched as if collectively knowing what could happen but dared not say it.  Less than an hour later I stood there frozen in disbelief with more than a dozen other like-minded people.  It was then first tower crumbled before our eyes in a grey and dusty implosion. It was made all the more surreal in that it was noiseless.  But, the room was no longer noiseless. There was the scream.  A female employee standing next to me screamed that scream, one I had never heard before in my life.  The buildings came down simultaneously with the most natural, most primal scream I think my ears ever witnessed.  I am attempted here to amend that and say one my soul never witnessed.  I didn’t even twitch. It just served to melt my nervous system back to reality.  It went through every single fiber in my body almost peacefully before reaching something very deep that told me of the often tragedy of living.

I revisited that window several times afterward.  In fact, well into the next year.  But, what played upon my psyche was a little image that seemed to do nothing beyond poke my sub-consciousness.  I think now the reason why I it took that long to fully bore in to the consciousness was that the image was on the side where the towers no longer existed. But, I couldn’t help myself.  I finally looked in that direction. It was the outline of a small building off in the distance so far away that it appeared almost ghost-like in its smoky blue haze.   It seems like a mirage.  It stood alone and the mystery was in its solitary uniqueness as well as its distance.  But it was within sight. Even if I had to wonder if it actually did exist, it did nothing to take away from the piquancy it played upon me.  Even if it were of the imagination it did not lessen the impact of such a poignant little sight.  A little wispy smoke of a building.  I think, too, that it seemed to come out of nowhere as if it didn’t exist until then.  With further observation and some cold insight, I came to finally realize it was a building far off into the distance I had never seen before, nor could I see it because it had until then been obscured by the two buildings since gone.

Private Thoughts: Ideas on the Privacy of the Mind as Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Have you often heard people say things like, “We could never know what she’s really thinking,” or, “Only he knows for himself,” perpetuating the belief that all thoughts are somehow private?  In some strange way, this is not true.  In a kind of manner of speaking we can be using the word ‘private’ here in another way.  We could, for example, be saying meaning that thoughts are private in a way that we might not outwardly share them. In this sense, we might just keep thoughts to ourselves. 

However, this sounds too simple and not the way philosophers like Wittgenstein meant it when challenged. We sometimes believe that thoughts are private, much like sensations like pain, as if no one else can have access to them, as if cordoned off from other people.  But even this is just metaphorical.  The fact is that a thought is no more accessible to yourself never mind anyone else.  We believe a thought is ‘inside’ us the way a brain is inside us but this is actually mistaking two categories.  Let me bring it back to a sensation like pain for a minute.  If I say I believe P has a gold tooth but I do not know it, this could become hidden from view. If I then say P has a toothache but I can never know it, this is not because it is inaccessible.  I can open his mouth and not ‘find’ toothache’ because there is nothing to find.  He is just having a sensation.  I am privy to it because he has told me or has exhibited pain behavior.  Whether he fakes it or not has nothing to do with whether the pain is private or not.  He does not own it, he merely has it.  But, what of these thoughts?

We very often think that our thoughts reside in the head or behind the eyes, or at least somewhere potentially private as if they could be locked away for our own consumption. It becomes like a private attic where you, and only you, have a magic access. These modes of thinking, as I stated above, are just figures of speech.  They are metaphors for something not literate.  If we open up someone’s head, we find no thoughts any more than we’d be expected to find a miniature city.  It is the same when we say we ‘hold’ someone in our heart or something is ‘buried’ deep down in the bosom of a heart (As a side note, and to highlight this metaphorical speak, we’ll compare it to a literate example; If two people have a cherished object that each wants to keep a secret from other people they might want to bury it as a way of preserving their object.  One person might bury it just six inches under the ground.  The other person might cherish his object so much so that he may go to the trouble of digging a hole twenty feet underground.  We could then say of the latter person that they really went to the greater lengths to keep his object a secret.  May be this is why we then go to great lengths with our metaphor when we say something is ‘buried’ deep down.) So we think thoughts are private things that, when desired, can be privy only to the person thinking them.   

However, this is a problem in a few ways one of which I’ll highlight here.  Often, as I said above, we think we can’t have access to a person’s mind which often lets a person off the hook when they play the personal card by saying things like, “You can never really know my real feelings” or, “Only I know how I really feel.”  But my contention is that we can and do in fact ‘know’ a person’s feelings if we are using the word ‘know’ as I think we’re using it.  To say we ‘know’ something on the way we normally use it does more than highlight a positive proposition.  To say we ‘know’ something also pertains to the possibility of not knowing something.  Can we say that of ourselves?  Can I speak of knowing something about myself like a pain or sensation while at the same time holding the corollary possibility of not knowing it?  These questions create a small but significant crack within our own minds as to the difference between ‘knowing’ our own feelings and simply ‘having’ them.

Imagine for a moment you just got your haircut and you meet a very good friend who knows you better than anyone.  Your friend then tells you she really like your new haircut.  It makes your face look nice.  Now, knowing this person as well as you do, imagine that though you were happy to hear these words from her, you are skeptical.  You seem to have an intuitive knowledge, through years of intimacy, of when your friend is lying.  It may be that their nose always wrinkled up at the moment or that they immediately look at the ground as a tell-tale sign, or it may just be a feeling.   You seem to instinctively know, may be through years sub-conscious practice, when they are not telling the truth.  In this case it is difficult because liking a haircut is just a matter of an opinion though one could still be lying about the opinion.  However, in a situation like this you may fall back on the notion that, in the end, your friend is really only the one who knows if  she is lying or not.  You cannot know her innermost feelings (remember, this is just a metaphor). But let’s try to jump the hurdle. 

Let’s further imagine that someone comes down from on high and grants you the possibility to get ‘inside’ your friends head so as to hear every thought that goes on inside it.  Of course, this would mean that you still have your own thoughts as a way of comprehending things, in this case hearing her thoughts and deciphering them.  So you have been granted access to her deepest thoughts (Again, deepest?).  May be weeks go by and you’ve been relegated to listening to all the gibberish and incomprehensible thoughts we all have just about every waking hour.  This person has had to deal with the torrent of white noise that seems to take place in seemingly every one’s head (never mind the embarrassing things that we do prefer to keep secret).  Yet weeks go by when finally your friend ‘thinks’ in her mind, “I really did like that haircut.”  You think that this, finally, is the proof you were waiting for all this time!  It must be true!  What then, if in another five minutes, you hear her ‘think’ the phrase,” No, I didn’t like the haircut.”  You are now witness to a cerebral tennis match.  Imagine this volleying goes on for days and days.  In this case, one might then be tempted to just wait to hear her say “I did like the haircut,” one last time then hastily  leave her thoughts and only then decide you have your answer.  But is this honest? What then are your criteria?  Is it that you think you finally have the truth?  Or is this just a case that you decided to take what you heard last and call that a truth?  Is this a case of now truly knowing what your friend was thinking? In the end, even with the ability to hear someone else’s thoughts, as in this case, the criteria you are left with is, “It is the last thing she said.” And even then you abandoned things at a certain point.

The above scenario is no different than thinking you’ve got to the truth if your friend said these things out loud.  It is still criteria you’ve had to base on an outward sense of knowing but not in some ‘inner’ sense, as if you went deep down to get your answer.  Remember, that to understand—or ‘know’—her mind, you still needed yours to comprehend what you were hearing in order to know. You still required your own cognitive process to understand what she was thinking.  It seems this leaves us with the notion that in order to know her inner most thoughts the way we would like we would then have to become our friend, meaning everything from atoms on up, in which case, as I mentioned above, you could no longer speak of ‘knowing’ but rather of having sensations.  You would just be having those thoughts without the benefit of what we might deem knowing or not knowing. You would become your friend, no longer comprehending in a third person kind of way, but you would be her. This is what I mean by knowing.  We always need outward criteria or proof (no matter how wrong) to know something in the world.  But we cannot do that with ourselves because we cannot then speak of knowing things but rather just having thoughts.  It’s almost as if someone asked if we were in pain and we told them we were not sure and we had to check:  “Wait a moment. Let me see. One minute, please. Ah! No, I was mistaken.  I’m not in pain.”  We don’t do this kind of thing in any meaningful way.  

If these ideas do anything, they may highlight the fact that we know things in the world about other people in a meaningful way by inferring outward appearances as a way of being right or wrong. In this way, we can meaningfully speak of knowing and not knowing in the world. It also reminds me of something said by the man that inspired all these thoughts, Ludwig Wittgenstein, when he surmised that the best picture of the human soul is the body.  It’s not as airy-fairy as some would like, but it speaks to something more intellectually honest than thinking it is two separate things.  At least we can be right or wrong.