From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Wed Oct 12 2005 - 02:52:31 BST
Ian G stated to Arlo October 10th 2005:
Platt is an American citizen first.
I am a human part of a natural whole, anything else second.
The difference is in where we choose to draw boundaries round me / we
and you / them. (Pinker is very interesting on this stuff. And John
Lennon too - “I am the Walrus” I am he and you is me and we are all
together, koo koo kerchoo, as I recall very approximately.)
Platt Holden commented to Ian G October 10th 2005:
OK, now I get it. If I think of myself as a man rather than a walrus or
some other beast in the great Gaia, I'm unenlightened.
Lennon, please pass the needle.
Ant McWatt comments:
Platt, sometimes I do get worried about you. It sounds like you didn’t
enjoy the Sixties quite as much as you could have done. Did Jimi Hendrix
refuse to sign your Pat Boone songbook or something?
BTW, for Ian’s benefit, the proper rendition of the first line of “I Am the
Walrus” is “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” and
was inspired by the other master of English surrealism, Lewis Carroll and
his nonsense poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. In a 1980 interview John
Lennon remarked that he should have titled his 1967 psychedelic sound
portrait “I Am the Carpenter” as the Carpenter is the good guy in the poem
and the Walrus is the George Bush one. Ever the artist, Lennon did note
anyway that “I Am the Carpenter” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “I
Am the Walrus”!
Finally, (as Matt Kundert, Brent Vizeau and Rebecca Temmer will no doubt be
aware), Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it Like to be a Bat?” is a 1970s
philosophy classic often given to philosophy undergraduates to discuss
consciousness and the mind-body problem in a relatively different, Dynamic
way. So if Platt does indeed occasionally think himself as a walrus (or,
even a Fox’s parrot?) rather than a human being then he will be in good
company and – Zeus forbid - might even learn something.
Goo Goo - Goo Joob!
P.S. I take it the reference to “needle” is a sly dig at Yoko Ono’s secret
membership of the Haight-Ashbury knitting circle?
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
And cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”
(Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, verse number 11)
.
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