WITTGENSTEIN TAKES TO THE STREETS

123. WITTGENSTEIN TAKES TO THE STREETS, (NYC, Aug., 1967)

'Immolient amostacia cartana mesia' meaning (I was told) something like 'if I ever get your head I'm going to burn it in acid' was pretty much the feeling on the streets back then for the landed gentry and the rich and ruling classes (as they were called) and there was envy everywhere and the people who had nothing seemed filled with hatred for those who had something anything and everyone wanted place and attribute literally WANTED what others had but thought it to be theirs somehow by birthright - which of course it never is and never can be - but there's no solution for envy or bad taste either and the two of them together make for some powerful medicine : here I remembered a little rhyming thing I'd heard about the average life of the average man and started smiling to myself because it was still funny and still fitting so well 'first you get puking and mewling / then very pissed off with your schooling / then fucks and then fights / then judging chaps' rights / then sitting in slippers - then drooling' that was by Robert Conquest and it was like a new riddle of the Sphinx or something even though we didn't need it of course but when your head's filled with words most anything's liable to pop out and the storehouse of memory has many strange pillows stuffed into it and the rabbi says 'God isn't redundant' which I guess I can understand and they use it as a reason to read a text and then come up with a totally different interpretation of it - which was always somehow puzzling to me but much of it was based on the old magical rites of an old religion and these rabbis of course were always trying to burnish their credentials for wisdom and religious knowledge and I guess that was OK too but sometimes it makes a person weary after a while - how much of all this stuff can a person take anyway ? and after a while every little bit of this was getting to be contentious and annoying to me - the rabble in streets shouting for 'rights' the soldiers unhappy with the war they had to fight the parents and voters at home protesting in the streets the atrocity of their own war the daily body counts the foolish newscasters mouthing the lines they thought they really meant and everywhere it was the same the bewailings of stupid lost folk - without reference past any point except an immediate and dead culture right there at the ends of their noses and what were called 'limousine liberals' walking through poor neighborhoods to show their 'solidarity' (yeah that made me laugh) and the unfettered tongues of a hundred Jew leftists bellowing about this or that about a holocaust and an old dead war while their little NY ghettos were stripped of everything else INCLUDING them and like Wittgenstein said 'what is your aim in philosophy? - to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle' but I can never remember if that was a question or a statement as he said it.