Erratum Magnificum, mea culpa....

From William Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury":

"I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field reveals to a man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

This came to me at work, unsolicited--like most of them--by Email from a scientific site which comes up as an article about the effects of 20 minutes of hypoxemia (low oxygen in the blood) and is under the rubric of "Tech Support" Now it all makes sense; but I'll have to make it up as I go 'long.

Now it is true indeed that we should not waste our breath; that much we will assume for the moment. Faulkner, "Count No Account" did keep on breathing until his last breath, in spite of his many "faux faulks".

And it is true that the effect of hypoxemia is usually bad, as perceived by those of us who value our breathing parts very much. Parting would be such sorrow! But it is also true that not only hypoxemia but anoxemia, like gravity, will get us in the (proximate) end. So why bother with artificial ventilators, which is the apparent opposite of the point of the scientific article? Zounds, sounds like another scientist at the end of his tether, like HG Wells.

The dialogues of Beckett reflect that of Faulkner and--why not?--postmodern "science": "No use struggling." "No use wriggling." "One is what one is." "Nothing to be done about it." But Frank Zappa still sang about it-why so? (Is it a reflex, like the gastrocolic?)

I suppose this is why philosophers don't get much funding; while artists are "idols" and the successful artist can be one of the richest people in the world. (George Soros thinks he is a philosopher--but he sure didn't earn that kind of money in philo-sophistics. But doesn't it appear that Faulkner equates esp. political philosophers in the same category as fools? Sartre would, no question-- yet the proles must rebel, even so! That is, absurd.

What caused me to expound on this theme is the irony that, as soon as I finished my comments on "The Plague" it came to me through the BBC that English hospitals are now seeing staph infections from the third world resistant to ALL antibiotics. So we may be, worst case scenario, on the cusp of another Dark Age, even darker than the last one. And it may take more than the Irish--even or esp. Beckett and Joyce and Yeats et all--to save civilization this time around. Yea, tho I walk through the valley of shadow of death, the hands of our still primitive sciences may yet also be tied. This is the struggle to which Camus semi-hopefully referred, somewhat like the end of "The War of the Worlds"-- which did not end there but vaulted irrationally beyond Design to chaos, "The World at the end of its Tether." Actually it was Wells at the end of his exceedingly short tether but...

"Let it pass, let it pass...."

"It would have passed anyway." "Yes; but not so quickly!" --Waiting for Godot.


But wait! There's more....either deadly more or Dudley Moore, we shall see, won't we, Didi?


(They do not move.)