Maverick Philosopher

My theory is that the above depicted stray, here shown outside my front door, is a 'foreclosure cat,' a pet abandoned by an erstwhile homeowner whose house was foreclosed upon. I don't think much of such two-legged varmints. Anyone who domesticates an animal and then releases him into a partially wild area replete with bobcats, coyotes, rattlesnakes and the occasional mountain lion ought to be shot, figuratively speaking of course. But Max is one tough pussy and has survived for a number of weeks or months on his own. Many a tale have I heard of his exploits as he wanders far and wide. One old man told me that a rude encounter with a coyote had disembarrassed him of a chunk of flesh. My guess is that Max has gone feral.

Permanently on the prowl, Max makes the rounds from cat house to cat house. He always gets a good meal whenever he shows up at my door. At first I was going to capture him and bring him to the pound, but then I figured that would be a sure death sentence. Now my plan is to get him to trust me and hang around my house where I can keep an eye on him. He is too wild to bring in and outside I am afraid he won't last long. But at least he will live free until he dies 'with his boots on.'

I was originally going to name him 'Satan' or 'Mephistopheles' until my wife strenuously objected. So I hit upon 'Max Black' in honor of the distinguished analytic philosopher Max Black (1909-1988). In an oft-cited paper on the Identity of Indiscernibles he made his points against the backdrop of a thought-experiment involving two indiscernible iron balls. Well, the eponymous cat sports iron balls as well as he keeps himself alive by day and by night.

The Buster Martin story. Take a lesson, Phil. But is this guy really 101?

The Nils Antezana story. I've said it more than once: the strenuous life is best by test. But I distinguish strenuosity from getting oneself killed in a fit of hubris. So, respecting my limitations, I stick to hiking and backpacking and read about the exploits of those who suffer and die on Everest and K2 and the Eiger Nordwand while safely ensconced in my La-Z-Boy recliner.

Companion post: Strenuous, but Without Destination

Work is being completed on a Silly Mountain trail system. I can cover most of these trails in a two to three hour jaunt right out my door. The saguaro on the left sports six — count 'em six — arms, though one suffers from partial erectile dysfunction. It's one old saguaro as is its vis-à-vis on the other side of the trail depicted in the second shot. If you enlarge the second photo you should be able to see the half moon.

Spring is here in the Sonoran desert, the days are warm and balmy, the nights refreshingly cool, the breezes scented with the first outprickings of wildflowers. All manner of critter is joyful, especially us varmints of the two-legged kind.

This one goes out to Darci M, then of Brookline, Mass., with fond thoughts and thanks for introducing me to Jackson Browne way back when. This tune was a standard running warm-up number for me in the '70s. Running on empty is what I'll be doing tomorrow at a local half-marathon.

Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive. This light does not consume, like fire, but allows things to appear. It licks, like flames, but does not incinerate. ('Lambent' from L. lambere, to lick.)

James Ament compares the two books here. From Ament's post you can get to mine on the topic of Jon Krakauer's book about Christopher J. McCandless.

A bandanna is his ascot and scree collars are his spats. With a staff as his cane, a steep and rocky trail is his promenade. A beat-to-hell, sweat-stained, sun-bleached, Aussie-style canvas job serves as his top hat. Thus accoutred, he sallies forth into the high society of rock and lizard, sun and scorpion, there to see, but not be seen. His calling cards he leaves in the form of bootprints legible only to the coyote and the javelina. His game is Desert Solitaire and his drink water, the philosopher's drink.

In the weight room the other day I made the acquaintance of a man from Alaska. As you might guess, I steered the conversation onto Chris McCandless and others of the wild and crazy crew who seek Something More in the last American frontier. My interlocutor was not familiar with the McCandless story, but he reminded me of the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the tale. And here is his final letter.

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the ummistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or whatever.

Barrett Pashak e-mails:

I took your advice, read the book and then went to the movie. I went with my 21-year-old son. Thanks so much. It was a great read, a great movie, and a true opportunity for father-son rapport. I have much to chew over philosophically speaking. How I yearn now to visit the Southwest!

It must have been an intense experience viewing the movie with your son, alternately projecting yourself into Chris McCandless and into his father. To get a feel for the Southwest, I recommend the writings of Edward Abbey, who has been described as the "Thoreau of the American Southwest." An excerpt from an earlier post:

I stop often, leaning on my stick, to take in the beauty of rock and sky and cactus that I never tire of. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve done this loop. It’s always different in some respect or other. That cave over there — never saw that before. How green the manzanita and juniper this year! There are magic moments. The long vistas in the lambent light serve as catalyst for romantic reverie. A perfectly-formed Saguaro stands sentinel on a distant ridge: it beckons me into an Elsewhere and an Elsewhen. It is what it is, but it is also a symbol pointing to something Beyond. It draws out my vision, but also my nostalgia, a sort of metaphysical nostalgia for something lost in an irretrievable past.

The strange experiences a hiking body/mind can have under a blazing sun in the broad spaces and lambent light of the desert Southwest. Edward “Cactus Ed” Abbey had these experiences:

I can see for fifty miles or more into this ‘strange mystic unknown’ Southwest. There’s a mesa out there on the horizon, a beautiful high steep-sided flat-topped mesa. Blue, purple, dark, far-away, never-to-be-known-looking. (Confessions of a Barbarian, p. 107)

Yonder mesa is not just a flat-topped hunk of rock. It bears the look of the Unknowable. Its beauty refers us beyond it to its Being, which cannot be captured in any of its empirical attributes.

Any of you cocky young whippersnappers out there who might be thinking of 'pulling a McCandless' ought to think very carefully before going off 'half-cocked.' At least take a map with you. Here is a page of links relevant to the McCandless story.

Into the Wild, the movie I saw yesterday in Scottsdale, impressed me and held my attention for its two and a half hours. But I'm understating: it moved me and will be added to my list of most memorable movies, there to rub shoulders with the likes of Zorba the Greek and La Strada. Not that I would rate it as high as those two classics. Here is a reviewer who didn't get it:

Krakauer and Penn see themselves as kindred spirits to McCandless, rugged individualists seeking the fullness of life in nature. And that probably explains why they both attribute McCandless' reckless adventures to a philosophical quest rather than to what appears to be an obvious act of youthful rebellion.

No doubt McCandless was reckless, and his recklessness got him killed. But only someone who is spiritually dead could dismiss McCandless' quest as a mere act of youthful rebellion. The jaded, the security-obsessed, and those devoid of all idealism will find it easy to mock as hyperromantic and melodramatic the posturings of "Alexander Supertramp." But unlike they, the living dead, he was searching for something more, for the Real, for the truth of his existence. Life without a quest for the Real beyond the sham taken-for-real of one's society is just not worth living. Either you see that or you are spiritually blind.

Only someone who, like Krakauer, sees a bit of himself in McCandless will be able to appreciate what was genuine and worthwhile in him. That is one reason why Krakauer's book is so good. I was pleased to see that the movie stays very close to the book.

Before Chris McCandless, there was Everett Ruess, "a Kerouac of the canyonlands."

I thought that there were two rules in life — never count the cost and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. Now is the time to live.

Say that I starved, that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream!

More Ruess epigrams here.

I started the month right with a walk out and back on the Lost Goldmine Trail out of the Cloudview Trailhead. Commenced hiking at 5:20 and finished up at 9:40. At a two mile per hour pace, I covered about eight miles. The highs this week are in the triple digits — today it is supposed to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit — but it's that famous dry heat, dry, that is, until the monsoon season begins. But if one starts early, one avoids the high. It was maybe only 100 when I finished Monday's hike, and at the start, perhaps 85. Here are some shots. Look hard and you will see a baby rattlesnake coiled and rattling, good to go. (Left-click on images to enlarge.) The only varmint of the two-legged kind out there that day is the one depicted.

This is a scene from Monday morning's hike. I made a loop in the Goldfield Mountains commencing at 5:10 and finishing at 10:30. It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around. But I can easily understand how many would feel differently about this.

I once proposed to a woman that she and her husband accompany me and my wife on a little hike. She reacted as if I had proposed that she have all her teeth extracted without benefit of anaesthetic. She seemed shocked that anyone would suggest such a thing. Finally she said, "Well, maybe, if there's a destination."

A destination? Each footfall, each handhold, each bracing breath of cold mountain air is the destination. Did John Muir have a destination when he roamed the Range of Light? Was Henry Thoreau trying to get somewhere during his crosscountry rambles?

Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live. Surrounded by beauty, he is yet oblivious to it, rushing to his destination. If one does not have the time to meditate on the moonset, celebrate the sunrise, or marvel at a stately Saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridgeline, it is a serious question whether one is alive in any human sense at all.

You may end up at your destination all right — in a box, never having lived.

In our litigious society, made so in no small measure by a surfeit of shysters, we are awash in disclaimers. Some of these have a tongue-in-cheek quality. I gave an example the other day. A reader from Northern Virginia points us to this disclaimer, an even better example, the final paragraph of which follows:

By entering the Preserve, you are agreeing that we owe you no duty of care or any other duty. We promise you nothing. We do not and will not even try to keep the premises safe for any purpose. The premises are not safe for any purpose. This is no joke. We won't even try to warn you about any dangerous or hazardous condition, whether we know about it or not. If we do decide to warn you about something, that doesn't mean we will try to warn you about anything else. If we do make an effort to fix an unsafe condition, we may not try to correct any others, and we may make matters worse! We and our employees or agents may do things that are unwise and dangerous. Sorry, we're not responsible. We may give you bad advice. Don't listen to us. In short, ENTER AND USE THE PRESERVE AT YOUR OWN RISK. And have fun!

You will enjoy the whole thing.

In a society made litigious by an excess of lawyers, the need for various CYA maneuvers is correspondingly great. One such is the disclaimer. I particularly enjoy the disclaimers found in well-written hiking books. Rare is the hiking book that doesn't have one these days. The following is from Ted Tenny, Goldfield Mountain Hikes, p. 4:

The risks of desert hiking include, but are not limited to: heatstroke, heat exhaustion, heat prostration, heat cramps, sunburn, dehydration, flash floods, drowning, freezing, hypothermia, getting lost, getting stranded after dark, falling, tripping, being stung, clawed or bitten by venomous or non-venomous creatures, being scratched or stuck by thorny plants, being struck by lightning, falling rocks, natural or artificial objects falling from the sky, or a comet colliding with the Earth.

Still up for a hike?

In one of these shots you can see a trail. That is the Peralta trail as it climbs to Fremont Saddle, named after John C. Fremont. The shot was taken from high up on the Bluff Spring Trail before the ankle-busting descent of the stretch of trail known to the locals (on the ascent) as Heart Attack hill. I actually prefer going up this sucker, taxing the ticker but saving the knees, but for the Heraclitean hiker possessed of the requisite equanimity, the way up and the way down are the same. (Fragment 60)

You think you're a tough guy? Check this out. Hat tip: Dennis M.

What we need are mens sana in corpore sano endurance events, combined physical-mental events. I have a nice hiking route in mind for anyone willing to accept my challenge: it's a 7-8 hour circumperambulation of Weaver's Needle in the Superstition Wilderness with 2850 feet of elevation gain. We follow that up with a four hour chess match consisting of two G/60 games. We then repair to a local Mexican dive, Tres Banderas, perhaps, for cheap chow and a generous cerveza con tequila libation.

Here is what a world class runner looks like. Note that both feet are off the ground. (Compare the foot placement in my photos.) This was Rodger's fourth Boston win. He completed the 26.2 mile course in 2:12:11. In second place was the Italian M. Marchei at 2:13:20. 1980 was the year Rosie Ruiz pulled her stunt. More here.

When I hike and backpack, I almost always go alone. As Thoreau says somewhere in his journal, “I have no walks to throw away on company.” Sounds rather unfriendly, doesn’t it? But look at it this way. Nature is modest, and won’t expose her charms to just anyone, least of all to the merely social animal with his endless yap, yap, yapping, about noth, noth, nothing. I have hiked with guys who, if you hike for five hours, will talk for five hours, and if for ten hours, then for ten hours.

Apparently, such loquacious individuals apperceive nature as mere backdrop to the social. Nature for them is but a stage upon which they play their parts and instantiate their social roles, roles into which they quite delusively empty their very being. A strange kenosis, this self-emptying into the social role. I will have none of it.

Yesterday I ran the Lost Dutchman Half Marathon. It has become an annual event for me. Two miles into it, I was chugging along Lost Dutchman Boulevard and crossing State Route 88 when I noticed a pack of runners heading northeast on SR 88 toward Canyon Lake. "What race is that?" I asked the runner next to me. "Can't be the 10 K -- it hasn't started yet, and it can't be the 8 K trail run or the marathon which is coming from Peralta trailhead." It turned out that the front runners had taken a wrong turn, and a sizeable contingent played follow the leader.

There are marathoners bare of foot and marathoners bare of butt. But are there any marathoners who bare it all?

What do they have in common? I thought about them near the end of Friday morning's hike. I am an uphill specialist. I love the upgrade, the pull, gravity's testing of legs and lungs, the depth of breath, the honest sweat. The downclimb is less to my liking. Fearing a fall, I am too cautious to go with the flow.

So my mind turned to Till Eulenspiegel, described by Theodor Reik as follows:

German folklore tells many tales of the peculiar behavior of the foolish yet clever lad Till Eulenspiegel. This rogue used to feel dejected on his wanderings whenever he walked downhill striding easily, but he seemed very cheerful when he had to climb uphill laboriously. His explanation of his behavior was that in going downhill he could not help thinking of the effort and toil involved in climbing the next hill. While engaged in the toil of climbing he anticipated and enjoyed in his imagination the approach of his downhill stroll.

The "foolish yet clever lad" put me in mind of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus. Philosophically considered, it matters not at all whether one is climbing or descending. "The way up and the way down are the same."

If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise? Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

There is the beauty, the silence, the peace, the nonsocial reality of nature, but there is also the shift away from the mind back to the sweating, toiling body on earth. Exercise in an artificial environment is not the same, nor is 'windshield tourism.' You should take your Nature straight, not mediated through glass.

I arrived a little before sunrise and signed the hiker's log. In the metal box in which it is kept, someone had left a message:

If I see any of you bottomfeeders on the trail leaving trash or cigarette butts, I'll break your fingers one by one. Now have a nice day!

My sentiments exactly, except perhaps for the inapt 'bottomfeeder' metaphor. Said sentiments expressed more elegantly in Pack It In/Pack It Out.

All in all, an excellent leisurely six hour, ten mile hike commencing at sunrise and ending a little shy of high noon. The trails were overgrown, so my bare legs got bloodied a bit by the catclaw and other flora, but that is part of the wilderness 'experience.' Best of all, I saw not one varmint of the two-legged kind. But I did spy a Sonoran horny toad and spent some time marvelling at his detailed camouflage -- his color was almost exactly that of the adjoining rock and soil -- and how he held himself completely motionless even as I gently prodded him with my walking stick. As I retreated, he remained motionless and did not scurry off, probably in part because of the ants he was eyeing for his lunch.

"The way up and the way down are the same." This Heraclitean affront to the discursive intellect points to the truth beyond duality.

There are old mountaineers and bold mountaineers. But there are no old bold mountaineers.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two men, both veteran law enforcement officers, suffered fatal heart attacks while running in Sunday's Los Angeles Marathon, marking the first deaths in the event since 1990, organizers said on Monday. Read the rest.

To die in an act of self-transcendence, battling the hebetude of the flesh, is to die a noble death.

Saturday morning's session on the black mat lasted from 4:30 to 5:34. Sometime during the end of this period, a certain unfamiliar noise began to obtrude itself upon my mind. Pulling back the monkish cowl of my jersey, I discerned the sounds of rain, a rain that broke 143 days of drought. It rained, and it rained all day, and didn't stop until about four this morning. I had to miss yesterday's mountain bike workout, but when I left for this morning's two hour run at 6:45, the sky was clear and the Superstitions sported more snow than I have ever seen. At one vantage on the running route, I could see to Peralta Canyon and it looked as if the snow was almost down to the trailhead and a few inches thick. From another vantage I could see that even the low-lying Goldfield Mountains got a dusting. As I write, the Superstition ridgeline gleams a brilliant white in the desert's lambent light. But it has already melted about 30% since this morning and tomorrow it will be gone.

Sic transit, etc.

EXCLUSIVITY: "Any idiot can run a marathon, but it takes a special kind of idiot to run an ultra."

TO PUSH THE ENVELOPE: "If we didn't run these, how would we ever know how far we could go?"

EXISTENTIALISM: "To those who know, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, no explanation will suffice."

TO LIVE LONGER (OR AT LEAST FEEL THAT WAY): "Some folks complain that life passes too quickly. Not in an ultra."

ANATOMICAL AESTHETICS: "Your feet look better without toenails."

(Runner's World, February 2005, p. 65)

In the interests of full disclosure, my official finishing time yesterday was 2:25:47.1 which is of course nothing to crow about. I am not crowing, merely recording: the unrecorded, and not merely the unexamined, life is not worth living. And that is part of what a weblog is for.

This morning I had occasion once again to verify the proposition that the strenuous life is best by test, but also the proposition that I am not much of a runner: it took me 2:26 to jog through the 13.1 mile Lost Dutchman half-marathon course. But we do the best we can with what we've got, and given my age, modest training base, and paucity of fast-twitch fibers, I am more than satisfied. I have never regretted any road race, hike, backpacking trip, or indeed any Jamesian 'strenuosity' whether physical, mental, moral, or spiritual. We are simply not made for sloth but for exertion, with Hegel's Anstrengung des Begriffs as important as any. Whatever the reason, experience teaches that we are most happy when active, or better, when actuating our powers, including our powers of contemplative repose.

This morning I hiked for five and a half hours through rugged country verifying once again that the strenuous life is best by test.

Time was when I called myself a runner and corrected those who referred to me as a jogger. I even had the chutzpah to correct a man who interviewed me for a job. (And I got the job!) Pressed for the distinction, I would cite the 8-minute mile. At or above that pace, one is running; below, jogging.

But now I favor a three-fold distinction. (Philosophers have an affinity for the triadic and the tripartite.) At or below a 10 minute per mile pace one becomes a plodder, the running equivalent of the patzer in chess. But just as pazters can be dangerous, plodders can go the distance and pour it on when it suits them.

In the 70's I was a runner, in the 80's a jogger, and in the 90's a plodder. But now I am back in the ranks of the joggers (on good days anyway) and next decade I will be a runner again -- or die trying.

Think you are tough? See how you stack up against Ultramarathon Man. I read his book a couple of months back. Excerpt:

I'd also come to realize that the simplicity of running was quite liberating. Modern man has virtually everything one could desire, but too often we're still not fulfilled. "Things" don't bring happiness. Some of my finest moments came while running down the open road, little more than a pair of shoes and shorts to my name. A runner doesn't need much. Thoreau once said that a man's riches are based on what he can do without. Perhaps in needing less, you're actually getting more.

Review here. Interview here.