If I Know My Own Mind

I look at these forums

and the confident assertions of

academicians and

academician aspirants

and witness confident statements:

If we could just have the scraps of Peirce’s scrap-uscripts

this way instead of that

(chronologically not topically

and so forth)

we might be better able to get at what he thought.

And I think laughing in a grave might be a good

reason to reconsider giving my body to the hospital

because though no one

will want to plumb my deficient brain

it is silly to think you can plumb a brain other than

arrive at what YOU think and admit it.

+

I do feel

some affinity with Peirce,

both of us sprung from Watertown

as it were, and both were highly deficient in various ways that would

test even a Mark Twain.

I think I know enough to know

how silly it is for anyone to think they can plumb a brain

by organizing his or her texts.

Which is why I toss my texts up on Kindle and when someone obviously

has problems with them I go back and work

and why when I contemplate things

I realize that I thought things as a five year old

that are precisely what I have come to think now.

Now Peirce was a copious scientist who could not

keep his own affairs in order

but could alienate on sight,

and he was tutored by people who are

completely lost to us and whose names never come up in the Forum.

And I am certain that what anyone makes of his texts

from any period will only be

what they make of it

and have nothing or little to do

with what he may be thinking now as I am sure he continues to do

or thought then.

That is the problem with academia and scholarship

and why there is one scholarly book in a hundred worth reading.

This is not special pleading because I am no great shakes

though I do live near a Shake Shack and I am certainly no scholar.

There is too much to claim one knows as much as scholars say they do.

That is all I want to say.

Well…

You cannot understand Nietzsche or Peirce

if you take the Heidegger-Derrida route of looking at scraps

versus believing that the books, published, are the gold standard.

The gold standard, people,

is whatever YOU think right now.

Period.

That’s my point.

But I cannot even pen a missive to that forum because

I will be skewered for thinking as I do.

Already have been.

That and scorned and rejected.

If I cared

I could get myself a ruddy Martyr Complex.

But I have better things to do.

Writing here and now

things I thought

75 years ago.