the self

 There are several solutions to the problem of the self. 

In Calvinism, the worthlessness of the self is simply a given.  You don't have to worry about your worthiness, because all is forgiven if you recognize that you are worthless, and only saved by admitting it.  

It doesn't seem very healthy. It seems, in fact, brilliantly perverse, because it is based on something very real: we are imperfect and know our imperfections perfectly well.    

In modern positive psychology, the self must be bolstered ("self-esteem").  The problem here is that we know our selves too intimately, with all the flaws. Holding up and affirming the self constantly gets very tiring. For people who haven't accomplished very much yet or who have experienced trauma, wounds to the self. the idea of self-esteem seems like a lie.  On the other hand, self-esteem allows narcissists to simply float along with a false sense of merit. (Although they also have to do a lot of work to make sure other people recognize their merit!).   

In zen, the self is unknowable or doesn't exist. You don't have to be bound up, then, with either a sense of inherent depravity (Calvinism) or with a struggle to keep your finger in the dike all night, the existential threat to the self. After all, if you have high self-esteem, then there is always the risk of having low self-esteem, if you don't know how to sustain it on a daily basis. It seems better to put more effort into helping other people than in endless "self-improvement."   

You can still have a basic sense of self-worth based on the idea that everyone has value, and the secondary self-esteem based on real accomplishments. You can be proud of things you've done, or take pleasure in doing things well, that you know how to do. But the self is already beside the point.   

Dream of F'O'H and Taylor Swift

 I was a in bookstore, and saw a book, The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara (Taylor Swift edition). It had a picture of Taylor superimposed on the original cover.  I was taking a picture of it with my phone, and my friend Tom was asking me what I was doing. 

In my dream the image was imprecise. The actual image on the cover is the drawing by Larry Rivers. I had this book as a kid and wore it out by reading it so much, and later got the original Collected Poems with the same image. It's a funny story: the family didn't like this image, and so the original version is more valuable than subsequent printings with an anodyne cover. If you do a google search for this image it won't come up. 

***

Later in the morning, a phrase came into my head: "So much power in a single blade of grass."  

Self-acceptance

 I get in the doldrums once in a while. I recently snapped out of it with a sudden realization.  I have been struggling for years with something I call "self-acceptance." How can I achieve that?  It seems impossible.  Today, in the dentist's chair, of all places, I realized that I could not achieve this, ever, because the goal is badly formulated. I don't need to accept myself, but rather turn my attention away from myself to other people.  The focus on the self is itself the problem. 

This does not resolve anything; the same struggle for self-acceptance will persist, I'm sure. But this realization takes the pressure off.  Whether I decide I am good enough is simply not that important an issue. Nothing is really at stake any more, if I can simply find a way to remember this insight and put it to work for myself--and for others.  

I hate the humanities

 I don't hate the humanities on an individual basis.  I like art history, musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, film studies.  What I hate are THE HUMANITIES as a giant vaguification of all of this. "What is means to be human." "The human condition." "The human endeavor."  Surely nobody is convinced by this kind of verbiage.  Once you lump those fields into one catchall phrase all the specificity disappears.  

***

A colleague laments that the critical thinking module will be absent from the CORE curriculum.  My response should be that every college course should be about "critical thinking."   

First: hear it

 Suppose you were deciding whether you liked Philly Joe Jones or Jimmy Cobb better.  A precondition to that question is whether you know the difference, whether you could listen and tell who the drummer is without being told. Otherwise, your preference would be meaningless. You would just be saying you liked something because someone told you to. In this sense, what you like is kind of secondary: what you perceive is much more important.  Once you know you are perceiving correctly then taste is just that last little bit.   

I cannot tell always who the drummer is. With a few of them I have some sense of what to listen for.  But at least I try.  

I used to do that on the master's exam. If I give you a poem by Jorge Guillén, how do you know it is by him? What would you look for? 

KB

 I've been trying to find this passage in Kenneth Burke. A truck comes up to a gate. The truck driver has a conversation with someone manning that gate. The driver backs up and continues down the road, based on this conversation: he has the wrong address.  

So the point was that the symbolic action of the conversation had the effect of turning around his massive vehicle and sending it somewhere else.  

I'm sure that this passage exists, because I wouldn't have hallucinated it, but I can't find it by perusing all my Kenneth Burke books, or by googling Kenneth Burke and truck.  

[Update]

I've found a reference here: 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Realism_and_Relativism/IA7K2T30ATwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Kenneth+Burke+truck&pg=PA127&printsec=frontcover

Language as Symbolic Action 482.  

finding my own name

 I was looking at some poetry by Alice Notley; I was trying to find something like that as fearless and honest in Spanish poetry, so I thought of Isla Correyero.  I had seen a book by her on my shelf the day before so I took it down. I found that the intro quotes me:

"Está en vanguardia cuando no queda nada de las vanguardias; así lo ve Jonathan Mayhew, quien la cuenta 'entre los que se mantienen, todavía, fieles a las premisas de la modernidad cultural.'"  

The book came out in 2018; I don't know when I bought it, but it looks like it is from La Central (Madrid or Barcelona).  I don't remember if I read the intro and saw my name before now, but it is a weird sensation. It sounds like something I would have written, but I'm not sure where, probably in The Twilight of the Avant-Garde.