By George

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana
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Hello Stuart
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Philosophy is a deep pit which once you fall into it you might not get out. But it's walls are painted with fabulous and beautiful scenes. There are strange objects to discover, precious jewels and lights in a vast array of colors, some of them very bright. One of those who left his gems down in the pit was the Spanish philosopher Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás (George Santayana , 1863 - 1952).

As a philosopher Santayana was also a prophet. He was a naturalist before it was popular. He was a multiculturalist before it was popular. And he believed in philosophy as literature which eventually became the style of many American philosophers.

He wrote on art:

"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."

"Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors."

"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."

He wrote of knowledge:

"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."

"Knowledge is recognition of something absent, it is a salutation, not an embrace."

"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the idea of those facts in the human head."

On living in general:

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; when happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

"Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body."

"For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity."
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I love philosophy and philosophers. If you want to know where I am, I'm down in the pit picking through more of Santayana's gems of wisdom.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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On Wisdom

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T S Eliot
(Thank you Jim)
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Hello George
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Lately I have been concerned with some topics that often make me crawl a little bit, or a lot. The main heading on the banner that flaps above my head is the word "importance." What is important and what is not and how do we know which is which.

I look around my home and I see stacks of books, too many books. I bought the books because I considered them important. They are books about things that I consider important, or used to. I think back over the years and realize I have spent many hours in obligatory reading, too many hours. Now I have a stack of books I will donate to the library, not because they aren't important but because I will never get to them. There are some books that will never leave me until the moment I step out of the dark forest.

Then there is the time wasted doing nothing. I don't mean recreation and relaxation, sports, dinner parties, having drinks and laughs with the boys. I mean hours spent shamelessly doing nothing, Maybe years.

The really terrible part of those wastes is the heart breaking sense of loss one eventually feels. Opportunities we didn't take advantage of, mistakes we made that were never corrected, people we should have remembered but forgot about, can grip us like a biting, relentless winter wind until we know how to get past them.

What do you do when all your obligations are no more? Maybe your life was filled with a lot of happiness and so you have some great memories. It is tempting to sit and contemplate the good old days. But to me that's as bad as obligatory reading, not bad to dip into now and then but not to spend the years of one's life in the past. Memories are good if they are good ones, but they are of the past, not of the present or the future. And there are still a lot more good memories to make.

You may have accumulated a lot of knowledge along the way, but you are never too young to ask yourself how much wisdom you have really won for yourself. To know things is good, to understand them is even better, but to really see how all things fit in the overall cosmic scheme of things, to have a universal awareness, to be enlightened, is best. Every step in that direction is a joyful one. a vital one.

True wisdom is far above information and knowledge. I have a lot of information, some knowledge, a spoonful of wisdom, but I am humbled in the realization of what it is possible for me to experience. I am in a dark forest of ignorance and fear, but I know the light is there and once I step into it information, knowledge, ignorance and fear will disappear, leaving the clear, still waters of wisdom as my preparation for enlightenment.

Dana Bate - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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Solving The Puzzle

Some of the mountains I have climbed turned out to be made of Paper Mache, while some of the simple jig saw puzzles of life seem to have an infinite number of pieces.

Dana Bate
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Hello Atlantica, Bolivia
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One of the most amusing exercises in the arena of mental competition is when a philosopher or other thinker propounds a solid, sturdy idea and creates a phalanx of those who are armed and ready to prove him wrong and is met by another one just as determined to prove he's right. A whistle is blown and the fight is on. What makes it even more interesting is that there is no end game.

People are still trying to prove the Socrates was right, or wrong. But Socrates said "For knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge, and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known."

Well !! That sort of erases the lines on the playing field and takes down the goal posts. So why are we trying to know things if all we know is there is nothing to be known? (I'm sure Socrates had a sense of humor, a guy I would have liked.)

The gray bearded, brass knuckle fact is that everything is in transition. Does that mean we should stop trying to know anything since there is nothing that can be known. If that's so then we should close all the schools, burn the books, bury the paintings, lock up the labs, stop playing music and, in short, stop thinking. I once read about a Swami in India who spent his life staring at the sun until he was totally blind because the sun was the only thing that didn't change.

I also remembering reading a solipsistic music critic of the 17th Century who said that all the possible combinations of tones had already been invented and there would be nothing new in the field of music. That was before Bach, Handel, Haydn. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mahler, Wagner, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Ellington and Brubeck.

A physicist was asked if he didn't find it frustrating that the theories of natural law kept changing with new discoveries. He replied that that's what made it so exciting. An old cactus in the desert will suddenly sprout a blossom. A new galaxy will be discovered. An eagles egg will crack open and a new life will emerge into the world.

One should not claim that the mountain is solid, impenetrable rock and not Paper Mache until one climbs it, as Socrates and many other have done. He who collects the largest number of jig saw puzzle pieces may know a lot more than I do, but he will never know it all.

DB - The Vagabond
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Never Give Up
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

6 answers so far

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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Useless Information

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heart break.

Michael Marino
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If you are standing directly on the South Pole, (I wouldn't advise it unless you are extremely well dressed and have some company) no matter which way you look there is only one direction you can go and that's north. Once you take a step you've added east and west to your limited possibilities. A few more steps and a few more directions are added. If you keep moving soon there are a great many directions you can move.

It's the same with your front door. There's only one step out, but once out you have some possibilities. Choose one of those to move in and you are gradually increasing the number of ways you can go.

I was quite sure of what I was going to do with myself when I retired. I had spent my adult life as an actor, I fully intended to keep doing that. But I didn't realize how hungry I was going to be, not for food but for knowledge.

In my career I knew actors, and I was one of them, who were prepared with the lines and behaviors of the character they played and with the intricacies of the drama. But there were other actors who came into rehearsals with much more. They had traced down the political, social and geographical contexts of the plays and the playwrights. If it was an historical drama they were acquainted with the events of the time and they had read biographical items of the main characters. Some of the other actors would yawn and consider it useless information. But I learned to be very interested in that approach. To me in added so many more dimensions and directions to move in while developing the play.

In "Educating Rita" specific reference are made to books by E. M. Forster and Rita Mae Brown. When I performed the play in Cincinnati the actress I worked with and I read both of those books. When I played a supporting roloe in "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial" I read the whole novel about the Caine mutiny by Herman Wouk. If I found that a play touched on an ancient myth, as many modern plays do, I would track down the myth.

So what have I done since I retired? Bought books. I have books on philosophy, art, music, history, biography, science, psychology, religion and many other topics. Will I ever get to read all of those books? It doesn't matter. Whichever direction I go in I'm learning something. It's a love affair.

DB
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Weekend Puzzle

Here are 12 names. Which one does not belong on the list. It's easy.

Neville Chamberlain
Winston Churchill
Charles de Gaulle
Dwight Eisenhower
Adolph Hitler
Bernard Montgomery
Benito Mussolini
Erwin Rommel
Theodore Roosevelt
Joseph Stalin
Harry Truman
Georgi Zhukhov

Good luck
DB
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What's Your Opinion?

Holding an opinion which is in fact correct, without being able to give a reason for it, is neither true knowledge nor ignorance

Plato
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You've heard the remark "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." To those suffering from ignorance it is a comforting thought. There is no crime in trying to be right without the basic knowledge and even though one misses the mark most of the time at least to aim at it is worthy.

But some people simply play lottery with knowledge, taking for granted that something is true because one heard it somewhere or because one thinks of it oneself. People will aggressively hold on to and defend an opinion for many reasons. One of them is so they won't appear stupid. There are those who will ridicule you if you don't know the answer to something. I used to get that treatment a lot when I was growing up. It took me most of my life to accept the idea that "I don't know" is a legitimate answer to something. It seemed to me there was no compassion for ignorance anywhere in the world.

Having incorrect facts is another reason for holding an opinion. One's opinion may be correct but it's based on wrong information. You take the right road for all the wrong reasons but you get there anyway.

Another type of opinion defender has nothing to do with reasons or knowledge of the facts. It's based on a hunch, intuition, a gut reaction. Someone expresses an opinion as if it was a fact. When you ask him why he thins tht way he will say "I don't know. I just think it's right." If it turns out that he has one of those stopped clock times, he will be trusting his own guts instead of the truth of things.

Given the reasons for opinion building as stated above and many others, the worst kind of opinion not based on knowledge is the opinion we might have of another person. We re frequently put in a position of having to make a value judgment about someone else for some reason. Maybe we are interviewing them for a job, or deciding if we want to see them socially, or if we want to buy something from them or sell it to them. Without living someone else's life we can't possible know everything we need to know about them to make the correct assessment. So it is very important how we frame an opinion about that person and we must avoid doing it superficially by the way they look or the sound of their voice. I've served on juries and it was usually very difficult to figure out who was lying and who was telling the truth. I pity the poor judge who has to do that day in and day out.

Thee is an ocean of difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is curable.

DB - The Vagabond
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Mind's Halftime

There is an unlimited universe of mentality about which most of us know almost nothing.

DB - The Vagabond
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One day, years ago, I was talking with a commercial airline pilot. He spoke of the difficulties of piloting a plane, particularly a large commercial jet. He said that the taking off and landing procedures were tricky maneuvers, especially landing. I asked him why landing was more difficult than taking off or flying. He explained that the aircraft was designed to fly. Flying is something it does very well. When you land it you are coaxing it to do something it wasn't necessarily designed to do.

It was in the 40's here today. For the first time in many days I could open the window and let some fresh air into my apartment. Relieving my stuffy apartment reminded me at how stuffed up my mind can get sometimes. My mind was designed to think, not to stop thinking. But sometimes I want to blow the whistle and say "Time out. Halftime. Stop!"

In the intellectual race between the tortoise and the hare I am definitely the tortoise. I admire people who can quickly grasp a concept and start applying it. That's not me. I plod through books as if they were written in a language I only vaguely understand. I don't read books. I eat them.

But while digesting the morsels of information contained in the wide variety of literature I read I now and then come across something that could be called knowledge. "Ay, there's the rub." Whenever that happens my own mind kicks in and I start thinking (heaven forbid).

Knowledge comes to us in two ways. Most of us know what we know because it was passed along to us by those who received it from someone else, and so on. And the further back that passing comes from the more venerated that knowledge is. It is known as "wisdom." But is it? Every once in a while someone will kick that "received wisdom" in the butt and come up with a more enlightened understanding of the information, and thus obtain more information, more knowledge.

In the case of music, for example, Mozart and Beethoven both bit their thumbs at the conventional modes of composing, and thank goodness they did. That same irreverence has happened in all areas of life and on all continents. But then it becomes received wisdom which then must be passed along in it's turn. We study harmony and counterpoint not to learn how to write music but to learn how music has been written up to the moment.

What is it that allows, prompts someone to turn away from this hand-me-down knowledge and find a newer understanding of things? It's inspiration. Inspiration doesn't come from books or teaching. Those things can inspire us to seek out what has been uncovered in our own thoughts. But it isn't until those things are articulated by us that they have any reality or existence except as microchips of the brain, a nice gift tucked away on the shelf. When they are articulated a channel begins to open up for more understanding, more inspiration, more wisdom. When you get to the point where you are wondering where all this "good stuff" is coming from you are on the door step of realizing the infinity of mentality. The middle men of books, teachers, Internet search programs and received knowledge are dispensed with or take an appropriate seat at the back. When you reach that state of enlightenment do what the sages do. Take a break. But not a long one. Halftime only. Absorb what you've done, what's happened to you, what it means, and then go back to work.

DB -The Vagabond

Xenophilic Xylograph 9/11/09

We are all still in elementary school.

DB - The Vagabond
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Come in and join the party.
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I want to know everything there is to know. I read the newspaper because I want to know everything there is to know. I subscribe to a number of different magazines and journals because I want to know everything there is to know. I own a huge 2,230 page dictionary of the English language because I want to know everything there is to know. I have a large and varied collection of books about: early Scandinavian history, Medieval Spanish philosophy, horse racing, World War II Russian military tactics, the psychology of revolution, Civil War weaponry, stock market investing (as if I had any money), Roman Stoicism, Native American Tribal history, the rise of Nazism, Chinese mystical traditions, astrophysics, human anatomy, the Dead Sea scrolls, the journey of the Mayflower, contemporary gang warfare, biographies of several American Presidents, calculus and cooking, just to "scratch the surface" because I want to know everything. And what do I know? I know that if I lived for a thousand years I would still not know everything I want to know.

Unfortunately, or maybe not, the small family I grew up in was not intellectually curious. I tried in vain to get my mother to consider ideas that were outside of her tidy little mental box. She simply refused. What was worse is that if I was reading a book on Buddhism, let's say, someone would remark "Oh, I suppose you're becoming one of them now." I often felt I had to hide whatever I was reading under the mattress as if it was pornography.

During my career I became very frustrated with actors who were so involved with their own emotional lives they never took the time to do any research. I once did a public reading of a play in which the title of a Wagnerian opera was mentioned several times. The other members of the cast called it "Tanhowser" instead of "Tahnhoyzer" which is as near correct as English speakers are going to get it. Ironically, I was the only actor in the play who didn't have the word in my script. I tried to give them the right pronunciation but no one believed me.

Einstein once said that he wasn't all that smart but he was just very curious. Well, I beg to differ, Al. If it was just curiosity that made a genius I would be there with the Nobel Prize around my neck.

Some people dive down and scoop up what's in the ocean, some go digging in the desert, some go peering through telescopes. I never had the luxury to do any of those things. So, instead, I go poking my nose into books. It's about discovery, expansion, realization, improvement, satisfaction. I want to know something today that I didn't know yesterday. To know it, not to say I know it.

I admire people who can make a garden flourish, who are masters of a musical instrument or who can figure out the income tax. I respect people who know things I don't know and if they write a book about it I'll read the book and enjoy it.

Some people still scorn my curiosity. They think I'm being presumptuous, or playing trivia games, or something. If a fact fascinates me then it's a fascinating fact and I don't care what someone on a mental chain gang has to say about it.

Every bit of knowledge, understanding and wisdom you have is yours. You own it and it's a valuable possession. Stock up, I say.

DB - The Vagabond
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May you always be blessed with amiable companions.
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SUMMER QUIZ

This is not a contest.



A young man out west just took home 88 million dollars from the lottery.



Whether you play the lottery or not, if you suddenly had 88 million dollars, or the equivalent of whatever your currency is, what are the first three things you would do with it?



You have all summer to answer if you wish.

21 responses so far.



DB

Knowledge Kindling 7/03/09

We need men who can dream of things that never were.

President John Kennedy
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Hail !
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Whenever I experience an original work of art I want to be astonished. Whether it's a song, a dance, a picture or a story, I want the artist to take me someplace I've never been before, somewhere beyond knowledge, beyond my knowledge. I want to see even more perceptively than ever a challenge to the so-called authority of realism. I want existence redefined for me. I want to see a new world, or an old world in a new place. I want to see the stars rearranged. I want to see something that has never been become a reality.

Is such art possible? Or is it something beyond art? A new art perhaps. Will it be possible some day for an artist to eliminate the technically limited and create purely from imagination, to make the image become reality by the imagining of it?

If so it could only be done by someone pure and innocent who can imagine only the beautiful and true. Such a one would be an ubermensch of an artist. I believe it is not outside of the realm of possibility.

As an artist I know, as every artist knows, there are moments when the creative process seems to be going on by itself, when the artist is merely an observer of it. Those are the moments when I feel that there is another character, another intelligence at work and it is between imagination and the art, having freed itself from the middle man, me, the artist, At those times it is interesting to ponder who or what is the real artist. the real creator.

Now ponder what that same mysterious process would be like in the realms of nation building, invention, exploration and discovery. That is a question that has puzzled some inspired philosophers over the years. Do we believe what we see or do we see what we believe? Is reality what we think it is or does it become what we think it is? And is it possible to change the reality we see, creating a new reality by how we imagine it. This all may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but so was going to the moon a few decades ago.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
_____________________
TGIF - Thank God I'm Functioning
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SUMMER QUIZ

This is not a contest.



A young man out west just took home 88 million dollars from the lottery.



Whether you play the lottery or not, if you suddenly had 88 million dollars, or the equivalent of whatever your currency is, what are the first three things you would do with it?



You have all summer to answer if you wish.

7 responses so far.



DB

Tested Truth 6/16/09

Life is a library.

Joe Theismann
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Good day to you.
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Ignorance is a terrible thing, but it's curable. Arrogance is also terrible, but much harder to cure, it seems. Some people have a nasty habit, when they learn something new, of acting as if they always knew it and putting down people who don't. I got a lot of that growing up. "You don't know such and such? What's the matter with you/" or "Where have you been?" Those remarks were usually accompanied by a scornful snicker.

"I'm better than you because I know something you don't."
"Well, then tell me and we'll both be better and the world will be a slightly nicer place."

Knowledge is not something worth getting arrogant about. Superior knowledge is nothing compared to a superior life.

"Life is a library." And we are all librarians, The tomes in your life may be different from those in mine, but they are all leading toward the same goal, which is wisdom. There's a saying, "When an old person dies a library burns down."

I like to think of life also as a farm. In our early years the harvest is small and we find we've garnered some useless crops. As we grow so does the farm and we become more careful about what seeds we sew.

As time goes by we gain a better harvest. We learn how to separate the true grain from the regrets, errors, mistakes, hates, rages, prejudices, fears and failures. We sift through what's left and one day we find we have more grain in the silo and more seeds in the bag than we can use. Then it's payback time. Time to provide for the young farmers just learning. Time to open wide the library and share the knowledge, free for all.

As senior citizens we have the right and privilege to do that. A life lived is an obligation to life. We have a sacred stock of wisdom, however great or small, to share with those who are no longer arrogant in their ways.

And that is what Vagabond Journeys is all about.

DB
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May a nice spring breeze tickle your chin and mess up your hair.
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Weird Ways 3/02/09

One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.

Morris West
???????????
Here we go.
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One of the strangest places I was ever in was a small city in the Southwest that was built literally in the middle of the desert. There was a road that came into town, but it didn't go through it. I walked to the end of the road and I was on the edge of the city, There was a sidewalk. Houses were built along the side walk. It turned a right angle and there were more houses, with back yards, trees. bushes and children playing in the yards But when you stepped off the sidewalk you stepped immediately into the desert. If you turned your back to the houses all you would see in front of you was desert. I don't remember the name of that city or what state it was in, but I imagine it has expanded out into that desert by now.

I often think of that experience of taking a single step from civilization into wilderness. To me it was the same as taking a step from the safe and known into the dark world of ignorance. Ignorance is not a bad thing. Stupidity is bad, ignorance is not the same thing. When able to admit my ignorance about something, I am poised to step into the wild world of darkness and doubt. If I take that step it could be scary. What some people call foolishness, other people call courage. One has to agree to walk in darkness before one can see the light.

If some did not have the courage to peer into a telescope or a microscope, to crawl around in dark caves or on the ocean floor, or peek into the machinations of the human mind, we wouldn't know anything.

I once visited a Museum of Philosophy. In it there was a computer program that asked me a series of questions about my beliefs and opinions. Then it came up with a list of philosophers whose writings, more or less, conformed to my own philosophy of things. I thought, how nice, I can read the works of great writers who agree with me. I could bask in the easy sunshine of coordinate thinking.

It didn't take but a few days before I became bored with that idea, and went searching out the rare and troublesome works of thinkers who were antagonistic to my easy, sunny, back porch studies and who posed ideas that were difficult to understand and even harder to harmonize with what I thought was true. I began to grapple with new ideas. Some of them were very ancient, but they were new to me. And I found dark and doubtful places in my own thinking that needed to have a microscope trained on them.

Oh, I'm still ignorant. Who isn't? But that part of my vagabond journey has been fascinating, fulfilling and infuriating. And I won't stop until I know something.

DB
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May you hear the silent, distant winds of Spring.

Bashful Blessing 12/11/08

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Ray Bradbury
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There has been a bit of talk concerning my last entry about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. A consensus strikes at the combination of having knowledge and knowing how to use it.

We are all receptacles of information, too much sometimes. The passing fads and the gossip tend to take up too much importance in our lives. Well, all right, in some people's lives. It almost seems that you don't know anything if you don't know the latest bit of superficial information that passes into oblivion almost as soon as it emerges from the public fog.

I like gathering information, that's why I'm a addicted reader of everything that passes before my eyes. I like to know what's in my can of beans as much as what the historians say about Thermapolae. But when does it become knowledge? When does it get tucked away in the tool box or the paint box for later use?

That's where the artist steps in, the artist that lives inside everyone, the maker of things. There's art and there's art. There are simple songs and symphonies, embroidered samplers and murals, limericks and novels. teaspoons and temples The woman who collect yarn of different colors because she knows what to do with them is going to turn her knowledge into something beautiful. It's because she wants to make something beautiful that gives her the wisdom.

To echo what I wrote yesterday, in the process of turning knowledge into wisdom,, whether in art or in life, settling for less than the best you can do is not an option.


DB


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