BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
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Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Radical Phenomenology (from the New School Catalog)
Stefano Gonnella
To be a scholar in phenomenology does not mean to be a phenomenologist. To do phenomenology does not mean to know thoroughly the precepts of Husserlian scholarship, but rather to be able to apply the phenomenological method to precise analytical fields. This is not to say that scholarship, history of thought, or philological exegesis of manuscripts are useless; this is merely to say that they are quite different things in regard to the actual practice of phenomenological analysis. The future of phenomenology relies on the understanding of this basic difference.
The Husserlian method requires the purification of all the unexplored assumptions that underlie and support our everyday life. (1) It is the neutralization of background presuppositions, by applying a sophisticated technique of suspension known as epoché, that allows to access a field of investigation where one should apprehend the “things themselves.” This field of manifestation is the field of “pure phenomena.” According to Husserl, “to one truly without prejudice it is immaterial whether certainty comes to us from Kant or Thomas Aquinas, from Darwin or Aristotle, from Helmholtz or Paracelsus.” (2) We have to see with our own eyes and we must not change under the pressure of preconceptions what we plainly see. (3) Here we find, worded in a very precise formulation, the intuitive and descriptive nature of phenomenological method. Nevertheless, while acknowledging Husserl’s thoroughness and exactness, there is further room to raise an essential question: is the epoché really able to hit and to put out of circuit all possible presuppositions, completely purifying the field of investigation from prejudices and not yet acquired assumptions? (4) Can we proceed along the path of phenomenology, trusting its method as a well arranged and reliable theoretical tool, or must we begin instead, as impenitent sceptics, with an attentive critique of phenomenology itself?
These are not new questions, yet they acquire particular meaning for contemporary and future phenomenology. The value of an analytical method, its significance, is located in the ability to transmit the method itself from its founder to other researchers. In this way the method, being employed by quite different scholars to carry on new analyses in the field, can be directly verified and proved with regard to its function and effectiveness. (5) To test a method, one needs to practice it. This sentence, perhaps stating the obvious, may not be the truism it seems. From what other external criteria should the query into the phenomenological method be guided? Could phenomenology be submitted to a non-phenomenological inquiry? Once again, nothing new: phenomenology, as Husserl used to exhort himself, should be submitted to a phenomenological analysis. (6) So, one of the unavoidable tasks for a future phenomenology is to carry out a phenomenology of phenomenology. How could one approach and realize such a paradoxical task?
Once the epoché is performed and the thesis of natural attitude has been bracketed, the sphere of pure phenomena offers itself to the phenomenologist’s eyes. The field of the originary is open, so the analysis and the phenomenological description can finally be developed. Inside the phenomenological practice we find intuition, as the so-called “principle of all principles” teaches us. (7) Intuition is the actual core of phenomenologist’s gaze is. It is the rightly intended intuition, according to Husserlian fundamental rules, that would drive us to the exact phenomenological apprehension of essences.
In a slightly more technical way, what is phenomenologically originary persists as irreducible after the performance of epoché. Without further reference to anything else, this originary manifests itself as self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit), as something that a peculiar intuition can grasp as its adequate fulfilling (Erfüllung). One of the questions left open by this theoretic engine is just the phenomenological purity of Anschauungen, of the intuitions that would hold and corroborate phenomenologist’s work. In other words, the rigour and the authenticity of phenomenological attitude involves a correct singling out of the horizon of the so-called originary self-givenness, the Selbstgegebenheiten which are the direct objects of intuition and the sole warranty of the validity and the consistency of analysis. To clarify the role of intuition would help us decipher the well-known motto “zurück zu den Sachen selbst!” and to finally grasp the phenomenological sense of that movement backwards (zurückgehen) towards the “things themselves”. (8)
Therefore, proceeding phenomenologically into phenomenology itself primarily implies inquiring into the intuitive ground of Husserl’s method. This is just the task undertaken by Domenico Antonino Conci, an Italian phenomenologist whose work is mainly known to a narrow range of scholars and students. Since the seventies, Conci set up a reform of the classical Husserlian method opening a research stream that could be properly named “Radical Phenomenology”. With “Radical Phenomenology” one intends a kind of analysis dealing with phenomenological residues singled out by radical epoché: this epoché, unlike the Husserlian one, does not only bracket the natural attitude, but also suspends the wider and more complex sphere of objectivation. This sphere is actually the matrix of some obstacles that turned up to vitiate Husserl’s own research.
The risk of aporetic paths inside classical phenomenology has been clearly noticed and then handled by other phenomenologists as well. But, it is precisely this “phenomenology of phenomenological method”(9) that managed to display a week point of the Husserlian analytic, showing how its intuitive ground is affected with some presuppositions of non-phenomenological nature. It has been Conci’s endeavour to bring phenomenology to its utmost consequences, radicalizing the epoché and suspending what can really be suspended in the field of presence, without paying hidden tributes to the Western philosophical tradition. This is exactly what Husserl did not avoid doing and therefore remained imprisoned within what Conci calls “categorial structure” (10). In virtue of this structure, classical phenomenology proceeds to a concealed objectivation of phenomenological data, identifying the origins of sense with immanent lived-experiences (Erlebnisse) of a transcendental ego. (11) The radical epoché extends the classical Husserlian epoché and thereby suspends what according to Husserl was in fact irreducible, i.e., the egological pole, the sphere of the transcendental I. (12)
While the distinction between consciousness and the ego has been established by Husserl himself, radical phenomenology further suggests that the irreducible residue of radical epoché is a basic impersonal lived-experience. It is a non-ego-centered consciousness that manifest itself as actual “self-givenness”, i.e. as a datum that really “gives itself by itself” (always into the phenomenological praxis, certainly not into the physics or the natural sciences): this is identified as the authentic Selbstgegebenheit. (13)
Schematically speaking, the subject appears to be constituted in virtue of the structure that remains invisible through the Husserlian method: the variation/invariance structure. (14) This categorial structure is the basic intentional structure of Western thought, our objectivating logos. It consists of a functional relationship between an invariant pole (eidos) and a plane made by an indefinite sequence of variations (to be intended as individual metamorphosis of the eidos). The variations get their lacking sense, either ontological or logical, from the invariance, meanwhile the invariance works as a principle, as a rule, and as a unity of connection for the whole range of variations.(15)
Radical epoché affects each intentional construction and thus also the I that is enclosed therein. By striking the assessment of the ego as an obvious datum, by placing into question the idea that the ego would be endowed with absolute and exclusive existence, the radical epoché comes to show how the ego is nothing more than the unity pole (eidos) of the sequence of numberless activities (variations) usually referred to consciousness. The ego-centered consciousness then does not enjoy any preferential statute, but rather is constituted like any other object.
In virtue of its radicalization, phenomenology dismantles the idea that the categorial attitude is the only possible attitude (16), the unique and absolute form of consciousness. The Western basic intentional structure, underlying our natural attitude, is an objectifying structure. Radical phenomenological analysis shows how this logos of objectivation, ruling both common and scientific cognitive posture, comes to effect on the basis of the variation/invariance structure. So the possibility of suspending this structure within the analytical domain discloses a further huge field of research. To deal with the impersonal consciousness implies a widening of the traditional phenomenological interests towards the domains of cultural anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, paleoethnology, etc., in other words, of every human science that under some respect deals with cultures and human communities far from the Western logos, in either space or time. (17)
In brief, this new phenomenological frontier marks the land of a transcultural anthropology which can be fruitfully explored only through an analytical method that suspends the absoluteness of Western logical and categorial principles. (18) This means trying to analyze sense-structures bound and embodied in the most dissimilar cultural signs. After all, the question about the method could be taken on and resolved in this way, for in phenomenology there is an unavoidable interaction between method and field of analysis. Usually one begins by employing broad models, and then along the way, tools and techniques undergo improvement through the direct comparison with evidences and signs. But to assert that phenomenological method forms itself through phenomenological analysis is also to say that the real theoretic and technical value of the method can arrive at a critical explication as the phenomenological field of observation extends and fixes itself, and vice versa. (19)
Notes
(1)“Access to phenomenology demands a radical reversal of our total existence reaching into our depths, a change of every prescientifically-immediate comportment to world and things as well as of the disposition of our life lying at the basis of all scientific and traditionally-philosophical attitudes of knowledge.” Eugen Fink, “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?,” Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), p. 6.
(2)Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press - The Harvester Press, 1981), p. 196.
(3)Cf. ibid.
(4)Cf. Edward G. Ballard, “On the Method of Phenomenological Reduction, Its Presuppositions, and Its Future,” Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 110.
(5)Cf. Domenico A. Conci, Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del profondo (Roma: Università di Roma, 1970), p. 11.
(6)Cf. Enzo Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1963), p. 249.
(7)The principle declares that“every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 44f.
(8)Antonio Zirión Q., “The Call ‘Back to the Things Themselves’ and the Notion of Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 22 (2006), p. 31f.
(9) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale. Contributi ad una fenomenologia del metodo fenomenologico (Roma: Edizioni Abete, 1967).
(10) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, L’universo artificiale. Per una epistemologia fenomenologica (Roma: Spada, 1978) n. 3, p. 14.
(11)“This search for an ultimate and final apodictic foundation, which, following the Cartesian paradigm, can only lie in the ego (cogito, ergo sum), is never given up by Husserl, no matter how much his actual emphasis might be directed at other “phenomena.”” Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between Life-World and Cartesianism,” Research in Phenomenology, 34 (2004), p. 207.
(12)“On what authentically phenomenological basis is the unsuspendable residue to be identified, as Husserl would have it, with the sphere of transcendental subjectivity?” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics,” Analecta Husserliana LVII (1998), p. 50.
(13)Cf. ibid., p. 52.
(14)Cf. ibid., p. 53.
(15)Cf. Domenico A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Il tempo e l'originario. Un dibattito fenomenologico,” Il Contributo, II, 5-6 (Roma 1978), p. 16.
(16)“The logos of objectivation (…) is a sense structure polarized in an invariant moment (…) and in a moment to be understood as an orderable sequence of individual variations crossed by the invariant as the unitary principle towards which all these moments must necessarily converge. Functionally related with each other, these polarities constitute an altogether general intentional structure, a structure of connection, order and comprehension,” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise”, p. 51.
(17)Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale,p. 79.
(18)“Thus, it is quite evident that the phenomenological residue of a radical epoché is constituted by a true ‘cultural continent’ (…) where the elementary lived experiences reveal a morphology and a lawfulness of connection which go beyond those already visualized by classical analysis, which has confined itself to complex Western experiences.” D. A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Phenomenology as the semiotics of archaic or ‘different’ life experiences. Toward an Analysis of the Sacred,” Phenomenology Inquiry, XV (1991), p. 125.
(19)Cf. ibid., pp. 110ff.
Radical Phenomenology (from the New School Catalog)
Stefano Gonnella
To be a scholar in phenomenology does not mean to be a phenomenologist. To do phenomenology does not mean to know thoroughly the precepts of Husserlian scholarship, but rather to be able to apply the phenomenological method to precise analytical fields. This is not to say that scholarship, history of thought, or philological exegesis of manuscripts are useless; this is merely to say that they are quite different things in regard to the actual practice of phenomenological analysis. The future of phenomenology relies on the understanding of this basic difference.
The Husserlian method requires the purification of all the unexplored assumptions that underlie and support our everyday life. (1) It is the neutralization of background presuppositions, by applying a sophisticated technique of suspension known as epoché, that allows to access a field of investigation where one should apprehend the “things themselves.” This field of manifestation is the field of “pure phenomena.” According to Husserl, “to one truly without prejudice it is immaterial whether certainty comes to us from Kant or Thomas Aquinas, from Darwin or Aristotle, from Helmholtz or Paracelsus.” (2) We have to see with our own eyes and we must not change under the pressure of preconceptions what we plainly see. (3) Here we find, worded in a very precise formulation, the intuitive and descriptive nature of phenomenological method. Nevertheless, while acknowledging Husserl’s thoroughness and exactness, there is further room to raise an essential question: is the epoché really able to hit and to put out of circuit all possible presuppositions, completely purifying the field of investigation from prejudices and not yet acquired assumptions? (4) Can we proceed along the path of phenomenology, trusting its method as a well arranged and reliable theoretical tool, or must we begin instead, as impenitent sceptics, with an attentive critique of phenomenology itself?
These are not new questions, yet they acquire particular meaning for contemporary and future phenomenology. The value of an analytical method, its significance, is located in the ability to transmit the method itself from its founder to other researchers. In this way the method, being employed by quite different scholars to carry on new analyses in the field, can be directly verified and proved with regard to its function and effectiveness. (5) To test a method, one needs to practice it. This sentence, perhaps stating the obvious, may not be the truism it seems. From what other external criteria should the query into the phenomenological method be guided? Could phenomenology be submitted to a non-phenomenological inquiry? Once again, nothing new: phenomenology, as Husserl used to exhort himself, should be submitted to a phenomenological analysis. (6) So, one of the unavoidable tasks for a future phenomenology is to carry out a phenomenology of phenomenology. How could one approach and realize such a paradoxical task?
Once the epoché is performed and the thesis of natural attitude has been bracketed, the sphere of pure phenomena offers itself to the phenomenologist’s eyes. The field of the originary is open, so the analysis and the phenomenological description can finally be developed. Inside the phenomenological practice we find intuition, as the so-called “principle of all principles” teaches us. (7) Intuition is the actual core of phenomenologist’s gaze is. It is the rightly intended intuition, according to Husserlian fundamental rules, that would drive us to the exact phenomenological apprehension of essences.
In a slightly more technical way, what is phenomenologically originary persists as irreducible after the performance of epoché. Without further reference to anything else, this originary manifests itself as self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit), as something that a peculiar intuition can grasp as its adequate fulfilling (Erfüllung). One of the questions left open by this theoretic engine is just the phenomenological purity of Anschauungen, of the intuitions that would hold and corroborate phenomenologist’s work. In other words, the rigour and the authenticity of phenomenological attitude involves a correct singling out of the horizon of the so-called originary self-givenness, the Selbstgegebenheiten which are the direct objects of intuition and the sole warranty of the validity and the consistency of analysis. To clarify the role of intuition would help us decipher the well-known motto “zurück zu den Sachen selbst!” and to finally grasp the phenomenological sense of that movement backwards (zurückgehen) towards the “things themselves”. (8)
Therefore, proceeding phenomenologically into phenomenology itself primarily implies inquiring into the intuitive ground of Husserl’s method. This is just the task undertaken by Domenico Antonino Conci, an Italian phenomenologist whose work is mainly known to a narrow range of scholars and students. Since the seventies, Conci set up a reform of the classical Husserlian method opening a research stream that could be properly named “Radical Phenomenology”. With “Radical Phenomenology” one intends a kind of analysis dealing with phenomenological residues singled out by radical epoché: this epoché, unlike the Husserlian one, does not only bracket the natural attitude, but also suspends the wider and more complex sphere of objectivation. This sphere is actually the matrix of some obstacles that turned up to vitiate Husserl’s own research.
The risk of aporetic paths inside classical phenomenology has been clearly noticed and then handled by other phenomenologists as well. But, it is precisely this “phenomenology of phenomenological method”(9) that managed to display a week point of the Husserlian analytic, showing how its intuitive ground is affected with some presuppositions of non-phenomenological nature. It has been Conci’s endeavour to bring phenomenology to its utmost consequences, radicalizing the epoché and suspending what can really be suspended in the field of presence, without paying hidden tributes to the Western philosophical tradition. This is exactly what Husserl did not avoid doing and therefore remained imprisoned within what Conci calls “categorial structure” (10). In virtue of this structure, classical phenomenology proceeds to a concealed objectivation of phenomenological data, identifying the origins of sense with immanent lived-experiences (Erlebnisse) of a transcendental ego. (11) The radical epoché extends the classical Husserlian epoché and thereby suspends what according to Husserl was in fact irreducible, i.e., the egological pole, the sphere of the transcendental I. (12)
While the distinction between consciousness and the ego has been established by Husserl himself, radical phenomenology further suggests that the irreducible residue of radical epoché is a basic impersonal lived-experience. It is a non-ego-centered consciousness that manifest itself as actual “self-givenness”, i.e. as a datum that really “gives itself by itself” (always into the phenomenological praxis, certainly not into the physics or the natural sciences): this is identified as the authentic Selbstgegebenheit. (13)
Schematically speaking, the subject appears to be constituted in virtue of the structure that remains invisible through the Husserlian method: the variation/invariance structure. (14) This categorial structure is the basic intentional structure of Western thought, our objectivating logos. It consists of a functional relationship between an invariant pole (eidos) and a plane made by an indefinite sequence of variations (to be intended as individual metamorphosis of the eidos). The variations get their lacking sense, either ontological or logical, from the invariance, meanwhile the invariance works as a principle, as a rule, and as a unity of connection for the whole range of variations.(15)
Radical epoché affects each intentional construction and thus also the I that is enclosed therein. By striking the assessment of the ego as an obvious datum, by placing into question the idea that the ego would be endowed with absolute and exclusive existence, the radical epoché comes to show how the ego is nothing more than the unity pole (eidos) of the sequence of numberless activities (variations) usually referred to consciousness. The ego-centered consciousness then does not enjoy any preferential statute, but rather is constituted like any other object.
In virtue of its radicalization, phenomenology dismantles the idea that the categorial attitude is the only possible attitude (16), the unique and absolute form of consciousness. The Western basic intentional structure, underlying our natural attitude, is an objectifying structure. Radical phenomenological analysis shows how this logos of objectivation, ruling both common and scientific cognitive posture, comes to effect on the basis of the variation/invariance structure. So the possibility of suspending this structure within the analytical domain discloses a further huge field of research. To deal with the impersonal consciousness implies a widening of the traditional phenomenological interests towards the domains of cultural anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, paleoethnology, etc., in other words, of every human science that under some respect deals with cultures and human communities far from the Western logos, in either space or time. (17)
In brief, this new phenomenological frontier marks the land of a transcultural anthropology which can be fruitfully explored only through an analytical method that suspends the absoluteness of Western logical and categorial principles. (18) This means trying to analyze sense-structures bound and embodied in the most dissimilar cultural signs. After all, the question about the method could be taken on and resolved in this way, for in phenomenology there is an unavoidable interaction between method and field of analysis. Usually one begins by employing broad models, and then along the way, tools and techniques undergo improvement through the direct comparison with evidences and signs. But to assert that phenomenological method forms itself through phenomenological analysis is also to say that the real theoretic and technical value of the method can arrive at a critical explication as the phenomenological field of observation extends and fixes itself, and vice versa. (19)
Notes
(1)“Access to phenomenology demands a radical reversal of our total existence reaching into our depths, a change of every prescientifically-immediate comportment to world and things as well as of the disposition of our life lying at the basis of all scientific and traditionally-philosophical attitudes of knowledge.” Eugen Fink, “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?,” Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), p. 6.
(2)Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press - The Harvester Press, 1981), p. 196.
(3)Cf. ibid.
(4)Cf. Edward G. Ballard, “On the Method of Phenomenological Reduction, Its Presuppositions, and Its Future,” Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 110.
(5)Cf. Domenico A. Conci, Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del profondo (Roma: Università di Roma, 1970), p. 11.
(6)Cf. Enzo Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1963), p. 249.
(7)The principle declares that“every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 44f.
(8)Antonio Zirión Q., “The Call ‘Back to the Things Themselves’ and the Notion of Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 22 (2006), p. 31f.
(9) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale. Contributi ad una fenomenologia del metodo fenomenologico (Roma: Edizioni Abete, 1967).
(10) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, L’universo artificiale. Per una epistemologia fenomenologica (Roma: Spada, 1978) n. 3, p. 14.
(11)“This search for an ultimate and final apodictic foundation, which, following the Cartesian paradigm, can only lie in the ego (cogito, ergo sum), is never given up by Husserl, no matter how much his actual emphasis might be directed at other “phenomena.”” Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between Life-World and Cartesianism,” Research in Phenomenology, 34 (2004), p. 207.
(12)“On what authentically phenomenological basis is the unsuspendable residue to be identified, as Husserl would have it, with the sphere of transcendental subjectivity?” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics,” Analecta Husserliana LVII (1998), p. 50.
(13)Cf. ibid., p. 52.
(14)Cf. ibid., p. 53.
(15)Cf. Domenico A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Il tempo e l'originario. Un dibattito fenomenologico,” Il Contributo, II, 5-6 (Roma 1978), p. 16.
(16)“The logos of objectivation (…) is a sense structure polarized in an invariant moment (…) and in a moment to be understood as an orderable sequence of individual variations crossed by the invariant as the unitary principle towards which all these moments must necessarily converge. Functionally related with each other, these polarities constitute an altogether general intentional structure, a structure of connection, order and comprehension,” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise”, p. 51.
(17)Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale,p. 79.
(18)“Thus, it is quite evident that the phenomenological residue of a radical epoché is constituted by a true ‘cultural continent’ (…) where the elementary lived experiences reveal a morphology and a lawfulness of connection which go beyond those already visualized by classical analysis, which has confined itself to complex Western experiences.” D. A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Phenomenology as the semiotics of archaic or ‘different’ life experiences. Toward an Analysis of the Sacred,” Phenomenology Inquiry, XV (1991), p. 125.
(19)Cf. ibid., pp. 110ff.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Early this morning I woke and as I reached for my glasses on the night table so that I could read the clock that turned out to indicate 3:30, I recalled a dream involving a group of men and one woman who came to the drug store regularly to send Western Union Money Transfers. At the time, there was a government regulation that transactions of $10,000, and more should be reported to a government entity--which one escapes me.
Each of the transactions brought to me by this group were under $10,000, usually between $8,500 and $9,500. After the first few transactions I realized that this must be a group of drug dealers, probably marijuana, but then I really wasn't expert enough that I could discern the difference between marijuana dealers and heroin or cocaine dealers.
The money would always be brought by a single member of this group of four or five people, and after a while I decided that it would be safer to accept the cash only at the bank, where I would deposit it before actually sending the money transfer. The group readily accepted this arrangement, as they (or their leader) understood the danger to which I was exposed when I kept the money in the store and brought it to the bank.
These transactions were very profitable for me, bringing me commissions of $130 to $150 each. There would be three or four transactions each week, and they were a factor in the on-going success of my store. By success I mean the ongoing prevention of failure or bankruptcy.
In time I discerned a pattern. Always there would be a transaction on Monday afternoons. The others would be made irregularly but never on Sundays. After Mondays there would be two or three more. I became very interested in or perhaps intrigued by in the group, and wondered what they were actually doing,--were they wholesalers, what was their product, who was actually in charge, was the person in charge one of the people who brought me money? I wondered.
A time came when I was at Estrella de Ponce a bar on Broadway in Bushwick, at that time one of the seedier parts of Brooklyn, much more so than the part of Williamsburg in which my store was located.
I knew the owners of the bar, as they were my customers at the drug store. Their names were Tonto and Luis, and they were trying to interest me in a real estate deal, which, of course, I passed on; but which, of course, would have made my life much easier to day. Tonto now lives in Sands Point and Luis and his wife live on Riverside Drive. So you can understand what kind of partners I might have had. I led them to my friend Ruben, the architect, but as far as money was concerned, he was already over his head due to his attraction to cunt, cocaine, and cognac, and he passed also. -- Only one of many mistakes for both of us.
While I sat at a table with Tonto and Luis, three members of the group entered the bar. They sat at the bar and ordered tequila, and seemed very happy about something that had occurred that very day. They spoke in Spanish far too quickly for me to understand, but Tonto, a perceptive man if there ever was one, understood that my attention had been diverted, that it had left the table at which I sat, and that I was carefully watching and attuned to the men at the bar.
Tonto cautioned me not to watch so closely. "Why not?" I asked. He explained that they were very dangerous men, that they controlled the neighborhood and that they were not to be toyed with. Two thoughts immediately came to mind. First, that I had nothing to fear from these men, as I was one of them. Second, that my innocent naivete would continue to protect me--as it always had.
Tonto cautioned me not to watch so closely. "Why not?" I asked. He explained that they were very dangerous men, that they controlled the neighborhood and that they were not to be toyed with. Two thoughts immediately came to mind. First, that I had nothing to fear from these men, as I was one of them. Second, that my innocent naivete would continue to protect me--as it always had.
In my mind, there was never a question of reporting them. When I began to write to write this piece I described it as a "dilemma" but a dilemma occurs when there are difficult choices to be made. In this case, there were no choices--I knew that I would continue my service to the group.
Should I have used the phrase "my part in the crime," instead of "my service" to the group?
Friday, February 20, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
When I think about Hal I try to bring together each of the facets that made up his personality. He wanted to be outsize and memorable but he banged up against his limitations and couldn't bring himself to accept them. He was in a business surrounded by creative types but he wasn't one of them. He wasn't 'talent' but he wasn't a 'suit' either.
He kept his insecurities to himself, he was very closed, very private, so it is doubly hard to put him together in a written sketch. He hid so much of himself from us, and only occasionally, when he was bleeding, did we glimpse a little of what lived under his skin.
His self-protective shield was anger, not a blistering anger, but rather a blustering anger. I loved him for it. It was clear to me that he used his anger to keep himself separate from his life's accumulation of ticks and harrumphs, experience and memory.
When Hal dressed for his role -- the role he played before us, his audience -- when he prepared the fiction that became his self, his character, he dropped deep into his unconscious and the role he played actualized into himself, without deliberate intention, and therefore, paradoxically, into a genuine self. The man we saw on on stage was real.
He never told us that he was dying. We are not sure whether he knew it or whether he was in denial. By not telling us, he deprived himself (and us) of a farewell; we never got to tell him directly how much he meant to each of us, how important to us he was, and, most important, how much we loved him.
Mike
This is beauifully written and a rare tribute to a friend. However, I disagree when you say Hal was surrounded by creative people but he wasn't one of them ..In my occasional get-togethers with Hal over the years we often talked about business, first his advertising work and later his role as producer/director of TV commercials. It was his job to be creative, and I think he did his job well.
John
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
When I think about Hal I try to bring together each of the facets that made up his personality. He wanted to be outsize and memorable but he banged up against his limitations and couldn't bring himself to accept them. He was in a business surrounded by creative types but he wasn't one of them. He wasn't 'talent' but he wasn't a 'suit' either.
He kept his insecurities to himself, he was very closed, very private, so it is doubly hard to put him together in a written sketch. He hid so much of himself from us, and only occasionally, when he was bleeding, did we glimpse a little of what lived under his skin.
His self-protective shield was anger, not a blistering anger, but rather a blustering anger. I loved him for it. It was clear to me that he used his anger to keep himself separate from his life's accumulation of ticks and harrumphs, experience and memory.
When Hal dressed for his role -- the role he played before us, his audience -- when he prepared the fiction that became his self, his character, he dropped deep into his unconscious and the role he played actualized into himself, without deliberate intention, and therefore, paradoxically, into a genuine self. The man we saw on on stage was real.
He never told us that he was dying. We are not sure whether he knew it or whether he was in denial. By not telling us, he deprived himself (and us) of a farewell; we never got to tell him directly how much he meant to each of us, how important to us he was, and, most important, how much we loved him.
Monday, February 16, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
2. Moni was Hal's second wife. She was unfriendly toward Carl and Nonine from the very beginning, going as far as not permitting them to live in the apartment in Boston where Phil lived with Moni. According to Phil, the children lived alone in an apartment on Beacon Hill after Phil's first wife, Brenda, left them in the apartment and took off for North Carolina with an orthodox Jew. (But that's another story and I don't know the details.)
3. Carl had a very early script writing success in California. According to Phil, he spent all the money within a year or two including a wedding in Venice that Phil alleged cost $250,000. But after his early success with two scripts (never filmed, but bought and paid for) Carl never sold another script. Never.
4. Therefore, young Carl was a constant financial drain on Phil, that led Phil to rationalize stripping the trust, and further, caused a rift between Phil and Carl. Phil ended up loathing Carl.
5. Carl found out about the Trust stripping only after Phil's death. He looked to Moni, a woman he had always despised (that's one thing that Phil and Carl had in common) for relief. None was forthcoming.
After the funeral, the old friends, went to Oeste where Carl walked in by chance. I called to him and he sat with us and spewed the aforementioned venom all over the table, over our food and onto my lap and even my shoes. Worse, he did not pay for his drinks.
6. Moni received Phil's entire estate including Carl and Nonine's Grandmother's very high end antique furniture, jewelry, china, and gold flatware. According to Carl Moni shared none of it. I suspect that some or all of the money went to the purchase of the condo in Hancock Park, or as Phil would say, "Beverly Hills adjacent." So Moni got all that plus the house in Hancock Park & the house in the Adirondacks.
7. I cannot understand why Phil did not write or amend a proper will. Phil admired himself for his "producer values." "producer values" meant that he took care of everything, and made sure that there were no loose ends.
8. Moni died five weeks after Phil. She had inherited everything. She gave that "everything" to her relatives and friends. Nothing to Carl, nothing to Nonine . Not even a memento.
9. Carl (and Nonine?) are suing Phil's Estate and Moni's Estate.
10. Basically I take Carl's point of view--Two of the friends think that Carl is a low-life. (Those unpaid drinks, I guess.) Another is quiet on the issue. Carl might be a low-life but he is still right.
11. I told Carl that he has script made of gold here and that he should start writing it. He says he is too close to the situation right now. I replied that the cliche that you should write what you know is a cliche because of its essential truth.
It's been a struggle all weekend I want to write as accurately as possible. I want to let you know how I feel and what I saw, but it's hopeless. I can't dig up the preciseness that I'd like to.
Yes, it's hopeless, and I know that no one will understand--that is if I could actually say the truth...So, preciseness and the truth each elude me.
But what follows is a listing of facts (as I know them, mostly through Phil)
Yes, it's hopeless, and I know that no one will understand--that is if I could actually say the truth...So, preciseness and the truth each elude me.
But what follows is a listing of facts (as I know them, mostly through Phil)
Ah yes. That venom.
1.Carl and Nonine, Phil's children, had a trust set up by their grandparents (Phil's parents) that Phil invaded-- in fact, completely stripped. There was zero money in it at Phil's death.
2. Moni was Hal's second wife. She was unfriendly toward Carl and Nonine from the very beginning, going as far as not permitting them to live in the apartment in Boston where Phil lived with Moni. According to Phil, the children lived alone in an apartment on Beacon Hill after Phil's first wife, Brenda, left them in the apartment and took off for North Carolina with an orthodox Jew. (But that's another story and I don't know the details.)
3. Carl had a very early script writing success in California. According to Phil, he spent all the money within a year or two including a wedding in Venice that Phil alleged cost $250,000. But after his early success with two scripts (never filmed, but bought and paid for) Carl never sold another script. Never.
4. Therefore, young Carl was a constant financial drain on Phil, that led Phil to rationalize stripping the trust, and further, caused a rift between Phil and Carl. Phil ended up loathing Carl.
5. Carl found out about the Trust stripping only after Phil's death. He looked to Moni, a woman he had always despised (that's one thing that Phil and Carl had in common) for relief. None was forthcoming.
After the funeral, the old friends, went to Oeste where Carl walked in by chance. I called to him and he sat with us and spewed the aforementioned venom all over the table, over our food and onto my lap and even my shoes. Worse, he did not pay for his drinks.
6. Moni received Phil's entire estate including Carl and Nonine's Grandmother's very high end antique furniture, jewelry, china, and gold flatware. According to Carl Moni shared none of it. I suspect that some or all of the money went to the purchase of the condo in Hancock Park, or as Phil would say, "Beverly Hills adjacent." So Moni got all that plus the house in Hancock Park & the house in the Adirondacks.
7. I cannot understand why Phil did not write or amend a proper will. Phil admired himself for his "producer values." "producer values" meant that he took care of everything, and made sure that there were no loose ends.
8. Moni died five weeks after Phil. She had inherited everything. She gave that "everything" to her relatives and friends. Nothing to Carl, nothing to Nonine . Not even a memento.
9. Carl (and Nonine?) are suing Phil's Estate and Moni's Estate.
10. Basically I take Carl's point of view--Two of the friends think that Carl is a low-life. (Those unpaid drinks, I guess.) Another is quiet on the issue. Carl might be a low-life but he is still right.
11. I told Carl that he has script made of gold here and that he should start writing it. He says he is too close to the situation right now. I replied that the cliche that you should write what you know is a cliche because of its essential truth.
mek
Friday, February 13, 2009
Sunday, February 08, 2009
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