You’ll find various things I’ve written on this website. Most of my life I’ve identified as a playwright and director. I am a creature of the theater. I decided to make a repository for my miscellaneous outpourings, usually attempts to clarify something. I have become aware that I have some dominant preoccupations. It is in relationship to one of my main preoccupations that I’ve chosen the name ‘Kick the Boulder’.

 

The phrase refers to an incident involving Samuel Johnson. Frustrated with an argument touted by Bishop Berkeley, he wanted to prove that physical phenomena are not a matter of what we think, but rather, exist regardless of us. Here is a quote from James Boswell, the chronicler of Johnson’s life:

 

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it THUS.’ […] To me it is not conceivable how Berkeley can be answered by pure reasoning; but I know that the nice and difficult task was to have been undertaken by one of the most luminous minds of the present age, had not politicks “turned him from calm philosophy aside.” What an admirable display of subtlty, united with brilliance, might his contending with Berkeley have afforded us! How must we, when we reflect on the loss of such an intellectual feast, regret that he should be characterised as the man,
“Who born for the universe narrow’d his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind?”

 

Even though I have learned that Berkeley was misunderstood, and would, in fact, have agreed with Johnson, Berkeley’s focus is unintentionally suggestive of something we face today, namely, the widespread belief or at least the common invocation of the belief that we each have ‘our own reality’. Many of my essays concern themselves with variations on the ways in which people describe to themselves their relationship to the world outside their skin. Many aspects of being, of what we call personality, and therefore which determine our actions, depend on whether we see ourselves as a part of a whole, or as a mystical creature, hermetically sealed, with sacrosanct ‘subjective’ ideas. The dialectical system functions at about 2% efficiency, and it’s my view that that’s destructive for us all, besides taking all the fun out of things.

 

The image of proving a logical point while injuring one’s foot fills me with love.