Cromwell's Head

Day one of the journey to Cambridge, England is almost in the history books. All in all, it’s been a pretty good day. Travel was not as mind numbing as it might have been—knee numbing, yes; mind numbing, no. I even made it through TSA PRECHK without having to remove belt, suspenders, garter belt, knee braces, my three pounds of bling (actually, I did have to toss the bling into a tray), or even my shoes.

Flight to Detroit was about 45 minutes. I de-planed at Gate A2 and had to make my way to Gate A69. Oy! But fear not, gentle reader. I used two moving walk-ways, one escalator, and the express tram to get to my gate. When I de-tramed, I was within 30 feet of my gate. Oh frabjous day! I barely broke a sweat.

The second leg of the flight to Buffalo was also a breeze. And there must have been a good one because we were on the ground in Buffalo 20 minutes early. So early that our gate was occupied by another plane, but the delay was about five minutes. We followed a storm front from Detroit to Buffalo. The pilot said, paraphrasing Bette Davis in All About Eve, “fasten your seat belts; you’re in for a bumpy ride.” No beverage service because of the turbulence. But, gentle reader, there was no turbulence. The ride into Buffalo was as smooth as a baby’s butt. But, speaking of buts, there was rain a plenty on the ground. Roads around the airport were closed due to flooding. The situation reminded me of a song by Johnny Cash: Five Feet High and Risin’. https://youtu.be/5mf-BIZumaA

My soon-to-be traveling partner, and host here in Buffalo, Dennis Ryan, was able to retrieve me without difficulty, however, and eventually we made our way to the Anchor Bar, skirting several more flooded roads, for Buffalo chicken wings. Twenty of the medium hot, thank you very much. An order of ten seemed too small, an order of 50 too excessive, but twenty was four too many. That, by the way, was twenty wings total, ten a piece.

I did somehow manage to lose my luggage claim check. I have no idea where it might be. Luckily, I did not need it.

Most enjoyably, the flight to Buffalo featured a flight attendant, the one who made all the announcements, whose voice was very much the voice of Marjorie Main in her iconic role of Ma Kettle. I wondered if she might not also look like Ma Kettle. As it turned out, she did. But, God bless her, she had Bette Davis eyes!

If you scroll down to the bottom of all the postings, over in the left hand corner there’s a widget counting down the time before I shuffle off to Buffalo and then, ultimately, to Cambridge. It reminds me of an old song written by the inimitable Shel Silverstein but made famous by Johnny Cash: 25 Minutes To Go. https://youtu.be/LzJhJXuPMEc

I am not, I don’t think, facing the same fate as the poor soul in the song, but there are times I feel like it as I prepare for my journey. Because, dammit all, I have to pack a freaking bag and the question is: How light can I travel? Decisions, decisions, decisions. I think I’ll not take that frilly little black thing, and the heels are out. Underwear? Sure, why not. Throw in a pair or two. Socks, an extra pair of walking shoes, a photograph or two, books, medicine cabinet, Dopp kit.

Dopp kit. Did you ever wonder why a toiletry bag is called a Dopp kit? Since this is a blog purportedly dedicated to searching out the answers to life’s persistent questions, I am going to tell you why a Dopp kit is called a Dopp kit.

From the Word Detective online, I discovered that “the Dopp Kit was first produced by Charles Doppelt, a leather goods designer who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the early 1900s. Although it may have been Doppelt’s nephew and employee, Jerome Harris, who actually invented the snazzy leather toiletries case, Doppelt was the boss and so the finished product bore a cropped form of his name, giving us the ‘Dopp Kit.'”

Oh Geez, now I’ve got 22 minutes to go, metaphorically speaking, so I’d best be about my business. As Sam Gamgee’s old duffer was fond of saying, “Job’s soonest finished as soonest begun.” 21 minutes to go.

On July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin began their storied journey to the moon in Apollo 11. Four days latter, on July 20, all the world heard Neil Armstrong announce that “The Eagle has landed.” Shortly thereafter, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. It was a stupendous technological achievement that fulfilled America’s dream, articulated in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, to put humans on the moon by the end of the decade.  Is it mere coincidence that Dennis Ryan and I will begin our soon-to-become-storied journey to Cambridge, England 48 years to the day after the launching of Apollo 11? We need only recall Sherlock Holmes’s reply to his brother Mycroft’s question, “Oh Sherlock. What do we say about coincidence?” Sherlock responded, “The universe is rarely so lazy.” How many coincidences have to pile up on the ground before we say, “Is something happening here?”

Well, gentle reader, something happened here in the bunker yesterday that, from my perspective, is as stupendous a technological achievement as was landing humans on the moon in 1969 and no coincidence. Yesterday, my good and great friend of almost 50 years, Roger “Insurance is My Life” Venden, succeeded in transferring 11,000 documents and more than 16,000 pictures, as well as two email accounts, and all my bookmarked favorites (there were hundreds) from my desk computer to my new laptop. The process took 3½ hours and there were no glitches. An amazing performance by Roger whose expertise I applaud, and whose good humor and bonhomie never waived and serves as my standard against which to measure all others who come within my ambit.

Proof of Roger’s success is found in the fact that I am composing this post on the laptop that I hope will function well in Cambridge and allow me to post from that storied City the adventures of the APs as they search out Cromwell’s Head and Wittgenstein’s Brain. If that can happen, then the Eagle will well and truly have landed.

You remember HAL 9000 don’t you? HAL is the computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship’s crew in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 (Can you believe that?) film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  HAL is a villain, you’ll recall, and eventually is deactivated after causing the death of one of the crew members. A cautionary tale about computers found in a story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Sentinel. Clarke wrote the movie’s screenplay along with Kubrick. The movie also introduced a broader audience to Richard Strauss’s tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, when it used the composition’s opening Sunrise fanfare as the opening scene of the movie. As you read this post, hear that opening fanfare in your mind’s ear. I am going to tell you a tale that I hope does not become a cautionary tale.

Dennis Ryan and I are about to embark on our own odyssey of sorts as we make our way to Cambridge, England in search of Cromwell’s Head and Wittgenstein’s Brain.  Dennis, happily, has succeeded in gaining us admission to Wittgenstein’s papers and notebooks archived in the Wren Library. The Wren is the library of Trinity College where Wittgenstein taught from 1929-1947. The library was designed by Christopher Wren in 1676. Apart from Wittgenstein’s papers, the Wren has a collection of other books and manuscripts that I’ll try to make the subject of a later post.

I’ll try, IF I can actually manage to make my latest purchase, a HAL junior, usable on this journey of discovery. Today I purchased my first laptop computer, an HP laptop with a 15.6″ screen, Intel® Core™ i5,  8GB Memory,  1TB Hard Drive, Windows® 10 Home whatever all that means. This Friday, my good friend, Roger Venden—a man versed in the arcania of computers—is going to come here to Stately Johnson Manor and attempt to plink whatever magic twangers need to be plunked to enable me to blog from faraway places with strange sounding names including Cambridge. He assures me that he can transfer data from my HP desk computer to the laptop and that, in doing so, my desire to blog, and the only reason I bought the laptop, will be fulfilled. “No problem,” Roger assured me on the phone. Now, when somebody says to me “no problem,” you know, from reading earlier postings, that my eyes glaze over. But, as Little Johnny said to Señor Wences on so many occasions when Señor Wences would complain that something or another was difficult , ”Deeffeecult for you, easy for me.” If Venden says the horse can do, can do; if he says the horse can do, can do, can do. I have every reason to believe that Roger is no tinhorn and is up to the job and will break HAL junior to the bridle of Roger’s expertise and will.  “Deefeecult for me, easy for him.”

Two weeks from today, if all goes well (and what could possibly go wrong?), Dennis Ryan and I will be in Cambridge, England where, at 12:22 pm Cambridge time, July 5, it is 73ºF with 53% humidity.

I am sorry that I didn’t name this blog Cromwell’s Head & Wittgenstein’s Brain. After all, the primary reason that Dennis and I are traveling to Cambridge is to pursue Dennis’s passion for all things Wittgensteinian. Dennis is a philosopher by nature and academic training.  His doctoral dissertation explores aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophical works. He’s no Ludwig-come-lately to the subject.

I, on the other hand, am not a philosopher. I am not even sure that I know what it really means to be a philosopher. Ironically, though, I, and several other students with whom I worked during my PhD program in the Department of Communicating Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison back in the early 70s, tried to read Wittgenstein and extract principles from his work that would help us build communication theory. We were not altogether successful but the failure was less Wittgenstein’s than our inability to make sense of his writings. Because Wittgenstein has a good deal to teach those of us who call ourselves rhetoricians or communicologists, we should have stuck with him. We should have labored longer in Wittgenstein’s vineyard and perhaps, in the fullness of time,  we could have produced a wine of rare distinction. As it turned out, we only produced a common varietal of whines, more’s the pity.

Had  we ears to listen and the minds to make sense of what we heard, what is it that Wittgenstein was saying? And what was he saying that attracted Dennis Ryan and came to play so central a role in Dennis’s life that Dennis was able to convince me, a dedicated non-traveler—must I remind you once more of my prime directive of travel? If you have to pack a bag, it’s too far to go—to pack a bag and travel with him to Cambridge to seek out Wittgenstein’s haunts?

I should let Dennis make his own argument here, but Dennis is not here, and though I do not purport to speak for him, here’s my take on the appeal of Wittgenstein for so many people, rhetoricians and philosophers alike. At the core of Wittgenstein’s work is his “theory” of language. Now look, there have been thousands of articles and books written about Wittgenstein’s philosophy (although not by Wittgenstein who published only one book in his life, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ) so you’re not going to get much out of a paragraph or two written by me. But language is also at the heart of what we were studying in my PhD program, so Wittgenstein was saying some interesting things that could have been useful to us in theory building.  For example, Wittgenstein wrote “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” Yes, and in the public arena, problems arise when language goes on holiday. Never more so than in these troubled times does this proposition seem valid. Wittgenstein—and, Boy Howdy, is this reducing his philosophy to cheese and crackers—sought to emphasize the role of ordinary language in describing the world. “What we do,” he wrote, “is bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” So, in some ways I guess, Wittgenstein’s work is a sort of therapy to help us avoid error and confusion as we make our way through the world—a world that is constrained by language: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Wittgenstein once said that the aim of philosophy, at least his philosophy, was “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Thus it is that a  philosopher and a rhetorician can find common cause in trying to understand Wittgenstein and discovering how he helps us find some of the answers to some of life’s persistent questions.

Now that you have been steeped in Wittgensteinian arcania, let’s get back to Dennis and me and our travel to Cambridge. Cambridge is where Wittgenstein was briefly a student and where, from 1929-1947, he was a professor of philosophy at Trinity College. He is buried in Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, and his writings are archived in the Wren Library in Cambridge, admission to which Dennis is working on now. So this is a pilgrimage of sorts. Not unlike Elvis aficionados who travel to Graceland, or Teddy Roosevelt admirers who travel to Sagamore Hill, Dennis and I travel to Cambridge. You got a problem with that? (oops, there’s that Gryffindor short-temper coming to the fore)

It turns out that Cromwell’s head is just the icing on the cake. But Wittgenstein’s brain in Cromwell’s skull: What a cake and what an icing!

I received an email today from one of my internet chums, Dr. David Kamens, emeritus professor of history at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. I’ve never met the good Dr. Kamens face-to-face, but we have developed a most enjoyable email friendship over the last few years made possible by our mutual friendship with Richard Harris. Richard is my high school classmate, East High, Superior, WI, class of ’63. He is also the legendary, much beloved, and now retired director of Ball State’s highly acclaimed Disability Services program.

David was commenting on my original posting on Cromwell’s Head entitled A Rhetorician and a Philosopher Walk Into A Bar…”  He was waiting for the punchline. It not being forthcoming quickly enough (in truth, without prodding from David, there never would have been a punchline), Dr. Kamens decided to supply his own punchline. “Try this,” he wrote: “. . . & when the bartender asks ‘whussup?’ the two trip over themselves to respond first.”

Okay. It’s a start. I replied: “The rhetorician will always win the race to be first to respond. The philosopher will lose time as he fills his pipe, struggles to get it drawing properly, and then begins to muse dreamily about the nature of up vs. down. By that time, the rhetorician will have spewed enough words that, if properly rearranged, would make a decent translation of War & Peace.”

Upon further thought, I decided that my response was not in the spirit of the “….walks into a bar” game. So I offer this: “A rhetorician and a philosopher walk into a bar where they are recognized by the bartender who had taken classes from the aging professors as an undergraduate. Remembering their loquaciousness, the bartender decided to cut off discussion and asked them: “What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?” Think about it. When you get it, you’ll laugh and laugh and laugh.

Fine; if you think you can do better than David or I, go ahead, give it a shot. But let me warn you, comedy is not easy. Send me an email at attystanjohnson@charter.net

Assuming that the APs do not get stopped at the border and refused entry into Canada, Johnson and Ryan will fly out of Toronto’s Pearson Airport non-stop to London’s Heathrow Airport on a British Airways Boeing 744 in the mind-boggling time of seven hours and 15 minutes.  Yes, our travel agent, the always delightful, if somewhat dawdling, Donna, finally plunked her magic twanger and we are booked—not in a “book ’em, Dano” sense but in a “book ’em, Donna” sense. We are scheduled to depart Toronto at 6:35pm on July 16, a Sunday, and arrive at Heathrow at 6:50am on Monday, July 17. The plane cruises at about 575 mph though it is capable of flying at 614 mph, just short of the speed of sound. In truth, it is the world’s fastest commercial jetliner. Ever wonder how fast your jetliner is going when it takes off and lands? Wonder no more. The 744 takes off at a speed of 180 mph, and lands at a speed of 160 mph.The world’s fleet of 744s has carried 3.5 billion passengers, roughly half of the world’s population. Oh Brave New World of flight.

But here’s the mysterious thing: when I Googled Boeing 744 jet, I did not initially discover any such entity.  Not to be deterred, and given the fact that the APs are, after all, masters of  research, further and exhaustive (not to mention exhausting) investigation revealed that a Boeing 744 is actually a Boeing 747-400. In a fashion entirely too cavalier for my taste, one site, offhandedly and with no further explanation, says that the Boeing 747-400 is sometimes called the Boeing 744. Mystery solved, the 744 discovered. But I, for one, would like to know why, and under what conditions, the 747-400 is sometimes called a 744. Maybe it’s a diminutive, a term of endearment. It seems that the 744’s most distinguishing feature versus preceding 747s (or 744s, as the case may be), are 6-foot winglets mounted on 6-foot wing tip extensions (sounds like something you’d use on your fancy shoes). Winglets: sounds awfully cute doesn’t it? Also sounds like an appetizer of the amuse bouche variety: “I’d like an order of winglets with Frank’s hot sauce, some bangers and mash, and a plum duff. And bring us a bottle of your finest grog.”

So, we have a plane with an unexplained, sometimes  diminutive, and  distinguishing (but not necessarily distinguished) cute features. And no flight engineer. Yes, you read that right: no flight engineer. That’s because the 747-400 (let’s call it by its full name, shall we?) is equipped with a two-crew glass cockpit which Wikipedia says dispenses with the need for a flight engineer. How a glass cockpit dispenses with a flight engineer is beyond me. Maybe the glass cockpit allows the pilot and co-pilot to see much farther than in earlier versions of the 747, or 744s as the case may be; but is that all the flight engineer did was to provide distant vision? Possibly. Navigation at sea was done by eyesight until about 1500. Flying through the air is akin to plying the ocean is it not? I just don’t know—aeronautics is not my field of expertise.

The plane can fly non-stop 7,670 nautical miles. The distance from Toronto’s Pearson Airport to London’s Heathrow Airport is 3,085 nautical miles, so we do have some leeway. I suppose it’s easier to see 3,085 nautical miles than 7,670 nautical miles. But if a flight attendant wanders through the cabin desperately searching for a dispensed-with flight engineer, in vain most likely, don’t think that I won’t be a trifle irritated.