Today I will subject all I can reach to a subject or two formerly and futurely taboo. The first, I would dub “the boner of contention” between Barry Codell and myself. This concerns my efforts to be able to support myself one day in the style to which I have become accustomed in my California home, while doing worthwhile work worth my wile. I would calculate that for many years I have, in perfect rhythm, alternately selfishly and selflessly, collected monies for “Barry’s Kids” on the streets of Chicago (although evidently my calculations are not as meaningful as Codell’s). My regular tag days for his nonagenarians (and eventually his non-nonagenarians) were spent gathering funds yet unspent for my hopefully meaty salad days. That seductive slogan taped to my colorful coffee cans, “A Cure for Aging in Our Lifetime” (not so far-fetched, according to the Braille New York Times article I saw yesterday), seemed to best express my hopes for Codell’s award--winning work with the elderly--and I feel I did well for both of us.
To not inform him of my ongoing efforts perhaps was erroneous. Perhaps, too, this was a reason for the cessation of our relationship. I tend to think not, although when he came upon the details of my campaign, he responded in the way I regretfully recall today.
“If I have wronged anyone,” [I may have said, “If I did anything wrong”], “I apologize for my mistake [as I have heard many say over the years]!” Barry replied, “Mistake? Mis-take? Some mistake! Like Merkle’s Boner, it’s a mistake alright!” (Thankfully, I had learned from my previously mentioned old hero of heroes, the forever late Shalom Goodwill Aloha, that the famous “Merkle’s Boner” described the faux pas of young Giant, and eventually old Cub, Fred Merkle in running off the field instead of touching 2nd base, after Al Bridwell’s game-winning hit against the Cubs in 1908, which, starting a string of events too exciting to relate, ultimately cost the Giants the replayed game, and the pennant, which went to the Cubs and led to the last Cub World Championship that Shalom ever saw before his unprecedented “natural suicide” at age 107, following the 2008 Cub playoff loss [ending sentence and paragraph in honor of Adolf and Julie, parents of Husserl and therefore his discovery of epoche, and the end of these very parentheses!]).
Different things were never the same again. The full circle would determine the better boner between me and Merkle. Yet now I am a man aging, managing to break age with our breakage, beyond this contentious business, unfortunately today coming across one of those expensive Codell books he cruelly left at the Home--Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint by Helen Cixous. And as Codell’s Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio, I feel obligated if not obliged to relate the following version (a/version?) of nothing less than the final days of Philosophy as we know it (not to be confused with Philo-Sophia, Codell’s sadly unending tribute to the marriage of the holy Alexandrian Jew and his Wondrous Woman of Wisdom), inspired more by the title than the book, which I found too readable.
Twenty years ago today, Codell’s theory of defenestration and its effect on deconstruction fired the imaginative capabilities (as such they were) of renown scholar, basketball opponent, and Derrida editor Gerald Graff to the point of Graff’s mailing, from across their common courtyard, a written invitation to Barry to join Derrida for a special 3 p.m. Shabbos soiree, whereby the two anti-rabbis could meet at last past repast.
Upon soon seeing Graff himself approach, dribbling his way toward Barry’s apartment, Codell literally threw out his window the torn missive at the anemic academic, signaling “Defenestration Declining Derrida Dunch” (the incident I still call the “4 Ds”) and effectively ending the neighborliness and modern philosophy as, as I say, we know it! For without defenestration reaching the vulture of culture, the discipline died its long deserved death for want of disciple. Yet, knowing Codell only as I do, thoroughly through and through, and his anathema to mid-day meals (“dunch” especially, between lunch and dinner), I fear the decision was not purely philosophical. But enough for today about boners and dunches! More (Thomas) to come . . . .
August 21, 2009, A.B. (Anniversary of Birth,
first breath in this world of death)
Post script! Found and lost department, amid identity of id and entity:
Birthday Greeting to Self (El to Elf)
Hail Lure of Each Succeeding Failure!
What to Say on This August August Day
But “O, Boy! Mitigated Horror! Adulterated Joy!”
(Seminal Conception Lastly Understood--
Conceived in Honolulu, Born in Hollywood!)
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