Preview Of One Fugitive's Flight From The Cave

From "Letter to Kate" (May26, 2003)

It started on April 7, l973. I set out into California's Sonoma Mountains packing a teensy typewriter (Hermes "Rocket") to complete John Dewey's Reconstruction of Philosophy. I had been planning a stream-of-consciousness style for it all winter—suggested by Plato's Dialogues and the Irish masters—while working awhile as legal editor for Commerce Clearing House (in San Rafael) learning to condense long cases into brief "headnotes." This was then a temporary workplace center for drop-out intellects; including our friends Ken and Rhinestone Jim from law school.

Fellow editors had tutored me on the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and general semantics: providing an approach to Dewey's project which I had only skimmed over in the universities. Ken then suggested writing a book-about-how-the-book-was-written.

That format sealed my fate. It bored into my subconscious in such a way that, after actually writing a few days (up in the mountains around my cabin), I could very physically feel my mind turning around—inside out—shifting from a verbal mode of thought to a more visual one. After seven days my mind took off like a "big bird"--beyond words—triggering what the Indians call a "dream-while-awake."

My mind was flooded with abstractly archetypal imagery—presented like a "movie in the head"--unfolding as dramatic lessons about life. It was readable symbolically—as in any dream interpretation—which has been discussed throughout this website as a neglected source of information; notably under "Abstraction . . .The Split Brain."

The experience introduced potents of thinking aesthetically—in symbolic pictures—which clears up a lot of what we have been trying to figure out with words alone. It has taken all these thirty years though to piece the puzzle together. (After the first few weeks I crashed, burned and got myself locked up in a Ken Keysesque "cuckoo's nest"--San Francisco's funny farm—for over a week. Long enough to get overdosed with thorazine. It shocked me back but arrested too suddenly a rebirth process. The worst agony of my life ensued—rather like the "cold turkey" of withdrawing addicts—from which I am only now recovering.)

In any event the whole experience unveiled meaning for Plato's story about any fugitive's flight from the basement dungeon of a childish mind like mine. Victor Hugo also described the experience, in his astonishing study of SHAKESPEARE (who must have experienced it too, whoever he was). In Hugo's words: "Every man has his Patmos."

It also amounts to the shaman's journey. Like the Indian vision-quest described by Neihardt in the 1930's (BLACK ELK SPEAKS). It seems a common enough experience; although verboten for us palefaces since the Church denounced such unauthorized excursions as "evil" centuries ago. Yet it creeps out in futuresque novels and movies: like "THX-ll36" and "Logan's Run" (escapes from "bubble worlds"). Joseph Campbell beautifully compiled mythological scholarship concerning the experience some decades ago in HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES.

My whole mind came alive, traumatically with terror. I have had one struggle since containing the memory. There has been a race to calm down before the excitement kills me. Yet it has become my foundation for empirical science—to spin out a technique of holistic thought—in pictures as well as words.

Incidentally, the previous website essay on "Abstraction" is structured like the array of lessons learned in flight from the cave—upon a mythologically-rumored "Jacob's ladder"--to the glorious OBVIOUS; and to what Santayana called the IMMEDIATE (paradoxically back to reality in all directions: outward toward the "farthest reaches" and inward to the very pit of experience).

We student captives have been missing reality with distracting talk. It is astonishing how much the unbalanced "chatter" clouds our appreciation of nature. This is one glitch in our thinking which Dewey was looking for. It can be seen in his own complicated prose.

By contrast Wittgenstein suggested (in PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS) loosening up discourse with "ordinary" language: tapping for one thing an unheralded suggestiveness in colloquial usages. I am trying to write accordingly in a "high vernacular" of the Ozarks inspired by James Joyce (ULYSSES especially) and J.P. Donleavy (THE GINGER MAN). Dante too (THE DIVINE COMEDY.)

The idea in what follows is to describe the whole vision-quest—holistically—including pictures of the Sonoma Mountains where it started. It has been the damdest adventure of my life: a "river of no return." I frankly bit off more than I could chew, but my mind never broke.

It has demonstrated that the "new human" you say the world needs is manifestly an adult version of all ourselves: revealed among our higher (non-verbal) mental faculties. Nothing "paranormal" about it. Just ride out the Shakespearean "tempest." The adventure has already forced me to burn off –karmically—much of the childhood you knew; in order to survive.

Anyway I jumped—up in those mountains. Later someone asked what I had seen out there. The unhesitating response was, "It's a big school." Like Plato said.