Gary. C. Moore's Humean Hermenuetics

DAVID HUME: PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORIAN

A Discussion of an Introductory Essay by David Fate Norton to the anthology DAVID HUME: PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORIAN

                              Discussants: Gary. C. Moore, Richard Sansom and Jud Evans

JUD EVANS: Sorry to get off to a bad start Gary, but I hold that *time* is an abstraction that doesn't exist. That which was once Caesar still exists of course - though in other forms. Perhaps amongst the particles in your genuine macaroni imported from Wellington-boot land, perhaps in the compositional fabric of the washbasin in the toilet of the La Casa delle Vecchie Persone at the corner of Via della Botteghe Oscure and Via d Aracoeli which leads to St Mark's Square? The fact that the earth revolves around the sun is not some alchemical wizardry that produces *time* out of a a medieval conical cosmic hat.

GARY. C. MOORE: Actually it is a great start. I play at the start with common parlance - not intentionally - and do not emphasize great issues that need more analysis. It is part of my scatterbrained philosophical approach. Yes, time as acknowledging as real existence in the same sense as the present-at-hand keys of this key board is abstract nonsense. This is a key problem here with Locke and Hume. You can only truly *know* in this present NOW that has no real duration at all and need to use words like these, tagged heavily with an immense history most of which is not conscious or even ever known as experienced. One has to use abstractions to *communicate* with words and I have here brought up merely one huge problem when actually there are a dozen more still to approach. But I hate long letters. As abstractions distance themselves from the real knowledge of immediate experience, for various different reasons, they greatly diminish in various kinds of validity. The authority of immediate experience is what everything else is always founded upon. Abstractions based on it are merely logical pawns serving a pragmatic purpose. That is one reason why I equate *time* with *history* because all the problems of validating historical research reflect directly on the very nature of common parlance time.

JUD EVANS:

*That which is* minus time = *That which is,* for *that which is* is indestructible, and that which isn't isn't.

If a philosopher is part of *that which is* then he is timeless - though *he* be reconstituted in other combinations of *that which is. Now if upon his death, Heidegger's *that which is* had been cremated and mixed with the potash used in the production of German toilet sanitary ware, I would have never been off the loo during my many visits to the land of sauerkraut.

In that sense for me, philosophicality is an existential mode of a human philosopher, and is therefore an abstraction, it takes its place with *the historical* and *time* as abstractions which are NOT constituents of *that which exists.* So Gary only if you are employing the word * the historical* in the sense of meaning those entities which historically existed. i. e., the forms of *that which is* which now exists in other forms [modes] is it possible for me to accept Green's and Grose's supposition. But I cannot include *Time* in this metaphysical bargain-bundle, for *Time* doesn't exist, it being just a name we give to the processes of change and the interstices between when we don't notice these changes so much which continuously and irredeemable eventuate to *that which exists.*

GARY. C. MOORE:

Exactly. No person at all, but a complex variety of verbal forms. It all also, Jud, relates to my problems with your use of the words *holism* and *wholeness* in the discussions of abstraction wherein those words cannot possibly operate as abstractions, and if not abstractions, then what? That is essentially a literally rhetorical question that actually formulates, in its asking, its own answer.

It is the true drastic state of *isn't* that Locke so fearfully tries to approach. It reveals that a tremendous amount of common parlance knowledge that we commonly regard as certain is actually very uncertain if examined stringently. And when done so, one starts seeing implications in practical life of knowing there is no such thing as *repetition*. There is no automatic mechanical repetition. That is merely a slurred convenience of common parlance thinking in order to avoid what seems an irrelevant over-analysis of a practical situation. But in time this analysis bears pragmatic results - if nothing else when the machine breaks down, when the human body dies. One problem that arises is why we notice changes when they are changes from a real immediately experienced now to a fictional abstraction - though convenient and very useful - of the past which is pure fiction - or it could not be past at all.

JUD EVANS: I use the word *holism* primary as a significatum which points to the complete human bodybrain - but MORE than that to assert the lack of any kind of dualism in the human unity - not only the crude infantilism of
*mind* or *consciousness* as opposed to the existential carnal body, but also to dispel the idea of some hierarchical disparity between the mutually dependent body parts. Whilst a toenail cannot be said to play such an important role as the heart, lungs or brain, the question of importance of function is no more than a human notion, and at the moment I am addressing the entity itself as an ontological unity rather than carrying out an inventory of importance.

GARY. C. MOORE: I have dealt with infected toenails also. Be respectful.

JUD EVANS: When I do that - the word *holism* becomes the significatum of the nominatum to which it refers - that unity is the human holism. The criteria for me when evaluating words is whether they point to or talk ABOUT an existing entity on the one hand, or whether they point to and talk about a non-existent abstraction. That is my prime sphere of interest.

GARY. C. MOORE: Yes, I agree. But * complete human bodybrain* is very hard to point to. And your whole sensorium of the world, perception, really belongs ONLY to that body. This great ambiguity one can cut into clearly understood - or maybe not so clearly - parts. But what is it exactly - as real immediate experience of a whole - you are cutting apart? If you are cutting it apart then you are only thinking of that part. But when one part dominates like the ass hole, one does have a sense of the whole, but definitely not in the sense one would like. This is just speculative. In the discussions of Heidegger, I finally came to the conclusion that anything worthwhile in Heidegger had already been dealt with much better by Hume. Heidegger and Hume essentially went in opposing directions, though, so this connection is not easily recognized. But, using Heidegger as a sort of precursor to Hume as the Neoplatonists used Aristotle for Plato, Heidegger formulates certain problems in a way that is poorly approached by most Hume scholars One such approach is the question *What is a thing?* Heidegger shows that, with abstract definitions, a thing is something easily torn down to become absolutely nothing, that it cannot BE something abstractable, but in different terms than these. It is not *the thing* that is important, but the *what?* that physically directs our attention to the subject at hand. It is a material [?] act, specific in time and place that places [topos] the question.

JUD EVANS: The use of the abstraction *thing* has always seemed to me to be no more than a useful fiction, and frankly is used in most cases as a suitcase term to save a long explanatory explanation of a circumstance, or as a stand-in for a detailed description of something that is known only vaguely.

GARY. C. MOORE: Exactly. Locke brings up the example of the observation of water in a stream at a specific time on a specific day. In the immediate moment it is experienced as a holistic whole. But as remembered, Locke finds it breaking down into abstract elements because remembered is abstract understanding, not experience.

JUD EVANS: I agree, and you can see the wisdom of placing the importance of your *what* is certain word-strings [human utterances] in the following examples:

*The thing is - no matter what he does to regain her affection, she doesn't love him anymore.*

*I had no idea what the thing was, so I dumped it in a bucket of water and covered the bucket with sand just in case.*

In sentence (1) we can see that the *thing-word * is acting as a suitcase word for whatever attempts at reconciliation the male lover is making in order to try to win back the affections of his beloved.

In sentence (2) we can see that the *thing-word* is a marker-word used to identify an unknown object.

GARY. C. MOORE: Interesting. If love does not depend on definable particularities what does it depend on? And you have MADE an unknown thing within a known bucket and then made the bucket unknown by burying it. Bears more thought. Yes. No hierarchy! Merely because we are not aware of the importance of some body part in the middle of a passionate political speech to a mob does not mean that body part cannot assert, in a specific situation, its overwhelming importance. This is hard to incorporate into philosophical thought. Michel Foucoult could do it quite well but at great length. There is a joke at work: The body parts are arguing which are most important. The brain, the heart say . . . etc. But the ass-hole has the last word.

*When I stop working, all the rest of you go to pieces*. Hmmm . . .Green and Grose essentially introduce the thinking of Hume by an in depth analysis of the problem of abstraction in John Locke. "The essence of a thing with Locke, in the only sense in which we can know or intelligibly speak of it, is the meaning of its name." Whenever we speak or write we only discuss such essences. You can already see that the jug Heidegger is contemplating or the pair of boots van Gogh draws is an infinite distance away from
*essence*

JUD EVANS: For me the *what* or the *essence* is something that we attribute to a jug or a pair of old muddy boots. These Humanly or Humeanly attributed *properties do not physically inhere in the objects, for the objects simply exist in the way that they exist. It is US Humans or US Humeans who decide a jar is old or capacious, or a boot is cracked, or worn, or smelly. Age, capaciousness, crackedness, worness and smelliness are human opinions [and they differ too - for one man's *old* is another's *fairly new etc.)

GARY. C. MOORE: This is another problem with experience versus time/history. One can think of Iraq and Afghanistan. One can think of Taiwan. Then one can think of the fall of the USSR because it over extended its resources, Angola, Cuba, Vietnam, Warsaw Pact, etc. - and other reasons. One can think of the Peloponesian War and the Sicilian expedition. Then suddenly Thucydides becomes a TV newscaster on the screen of the mind. Within language, the here and now jug or boots are linguistically, and therefore intellectually, *nothing*.

JUD EVANS: Language does not exist to have anything *within it* it is the thinking, speaking human who judges the jug or boots to be sensorially present. I lift the jug and feel its round body, I smell its empty interior, flick it with my fingernail and hear it ring - It is ME that makes the ontological decisions and judgements and not the code I employ to reach out to others.

GARY. C. MOORE: I would also emphasize this * thinking, speaking human * is always an individual with name and serial number, but, most of all, who can and, at times, does act upon their own cognizance to the total surprise of their responsible political leaders. It does not happen often in a clearly discernible manner but the unnamed masses Former Soviet Republics have shown they do not blindly follow their self-appointed leaders. You are perfectly correct. But do not people ask other people to die for what is merely within words? And is this not an impending and immediate problem for everyone? But how can anyone address such a thing politically? You cannot put a real jug into a sentence.

JUD EVANS: No, the job of language is not to act as delivery company for crockery. The human language facility is to indicate [hence AIT - Analytical INDICANT Theory] to point to and draw the attention of others to an object, then add a predicate as to one's opinion of how it exists. Thus in: *the jug is full of water.* the word *jug* indicates that which is the subject of the communication, and the additional information informs the addressee as to the speakers existential claim about the way the jug appears for him to exist - i. e., that it is *full of water.*

GARY. C. MOORE: But that is how it is used in pseudo-practical everyday parlance. That is one of the main reasons both Hume and Marx break away from philosophy and metaphysics to woke within the heart of the pragmatic to show people, all kinds of people, what is really there. Both of them would agree economics is one of the fundamental basics of being human. A sentence can only be a sentence, a sentence can only be words. It conveys, in fact, only connections to more and more words.

JUD EVANS: Not in all cases. In the example of my existential claim that: *The jug is full of water*, if you are satisfied that:

(A) The jug actually exists. and
(B) It is really full of water [and not half full or full of whiskey]

Then there may be no further need of more words in this particular exchange of information. If you DISPUTED my claim, then maybe you would come up with a lot more words to put you alternative point of view. But in general the human activity of communicating by the use of words usually leads to the production of more words, but there is nothing wrong with this if it leads to additional clarification rather than disputation.

GARY. C. MOORE: What you say is true, but one important element is left out. The statement is true ONLY of an immediately experienced situation. Even if you put the jug down and go do other things, the statement can no longer be true in the same way OR IN THE SAME DEGREE OF VALIDITY. Its validity becomes mere probability whose validity diminishes rapidly with the changing of time. And I have put a question mark on what that changing actually is. These things all ramify . . . The only justification of the words is the experienced jug at hand right now. But once the jug is gone, there are only words left.

JUD EVANS: The words alone cannot be left anywhere. They are just meaningless signs which can only be meaningful in the presence of humans capable of interpreting their humanly attributed meanings to the squiggles. Memories of the jug may remain, but the memories are only wordified again when they are retrieved and symbolically re-represented as the phoneme-combinations we call *words.*

RICHARD SANSOM: Jud says "Memory does not exist." While I agree with this, if I accept Jud's definition of existence - which admittedly gives me a headache sometimes. ;-) I will say this about memory: Memory (the recall of events and objects, etc.) is a composite of multilateral neuronal connections and activities that come together, upon receiving some input stimulus, to form some kind of "picture" that is recognized as relevant to the input. I may recall my childhood home (perhaps quite incorrectly) not because my house and its environs is stored as such in my brain, but because the various components are collected from an array of related spatial/temporal contiguous "patterns" (for lack of a better term). In fact, that contiguity is the connecting matrix that results in a composite recall. I believe those patterns are scattered across the brain and are only connected by the form and substance of the input stimuli. As I have mentioned in one of my little essays, when one mentions the city of Houston, (where I spent the first eight years of my life) many things come to mind:

Our house and its environs

The summer heats

My frail grandmother

The First Christian Church

My alcoholic father

My bridge playing mother

My red bicycle

The heavy summer rains

My friend with only one good eye

Making tin-foil balls for the war effort

My white cat

Our catalpa tree in the back yard

Our "club house"

(many others)

In fact, as I was writing the essay, these are the things that came to mind upon thinking about Houston. I can imagine the wonderful dance my mind was doing in compiling this list of places and events that are contained relative to "Houston." Houston as a city or place, has no other meaning for me.

While memory does not "exist" as Jud sees that concept, it must surely be called an event or a process of the mind.

JUD EVANS: I enjoyed that. I agree with all you say above and also with your conceptual view of a composite of multilateral neuronal connections and activities that come together, upon receiving some input stimulus, to form some kind of "picture" that is recognised as relevant to the input. The latter seems a very reasonable view of what is going on, the processes and activities that are involved during recall, etc. What I mean when I claim that *memory* does not exist is really just another way of sating that *process and activity* don't exist, but are modalities of how that which DOES exist [the human holism] exists.

Hyman says: *To provide some idea of the magnitude of the information processing capacity of the human brain, its 10^(11) neurones make, on average, about 1000 connections or synapses, at which communication occurs with other neurones. The range of synapses per cell is very large; the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum may receive
100,000 contacts from input cells. Overall the human brain may contain between 10^(14) and 10^(15) synaptic connections.*

In view of the above it is certain that there exists such a plenitude of available neurones that the retrieval of the emotionally moving images referred to in your *Houston* piece are easily accommodated [the fact that you CAN recall this proves it.] So too all the other vast complexity of latent cognitive processes whereby past experience is remembered and which has accumulated in your brain since the time when the storage function became operational in your babyhood or later.

The fact that there is a certain vast number of neurones in your brain in reticular formation linked in such a fashion that the connections form an image that can be recalled, does not mean that the *memory* exists, but rather that *the connected neurons exist* in a certain modality. that allows another net of *image rendering* neurones elswhere in the brain to transact and re-represent those symbolic connections into an interior visual image.

GARY. C. MOORE: Exactly Locke's problem. They [words] must be left literally somewhere because I can recall them and use them in different ways. But I could not literally say they are left in my brain because that is infinitely beyond my ability to experience. But words can be found literally in other peoples brains. Neurosurgery could not exist without abstractions, yet that does not make abstraction real. That is the great advantage and use of words. The experience of the jug is completely nothing once it is out of hand.

RICHARD SANSOM: Gary, could it not also be said that words are every bit as ephemeral as the jug? Do they not come into and go out of existence as the situation demands and I would suggest never or seldom mean exactly the same thing? As for the reality of the jug if it is only a memory, while as a practical matter there is obviously a difference between a memory and the immediate presence of a thing, I wonder what difference that really makes to the neurons and synapses? As Jud has pointed out and I agree with him, there is no such thing as a "generic jug" as far as its "existence" goes, however without some kind of cognitive "library" of things, which includes "jugs," one not only cannot speak of jugs, they would not know one if they saw one. If, upon seeing a jug, I said: That's a jug! My companion might ask: How do you know - I just made it and you have never seen it before? My response: Well, it looks like a jug to me. While this does not show that "jug-ness" is a Platonic reality, it does indicate that "jug" as a spoken symbol, constructs, upon its use, a fact. - at least as far as the observer/speaker is concerned: "That is a jug." is a proposition that can only be tested via the speaker's experience. My companion, who made the thing might object, saying: No, it is a jar. And both of us can be correct. I wonder what kind of flutter of synaptic activity occurs when we see a jug, versus merely thinking about one? We can certainly think of things that have and do not have physical existence, again, as Jud has pointed out. There must be some kind of comfort level of the brain when something is recognized, as opposed to being completely unknown. And I guess, upon being told that what I am seeing is a ring-and- pinion steering system, those words would supply some degree of brain comfort - even if I had no idea what "ring and pinion" meant and had never before seen one. I don't think we like things that have no known purpose and especially no name. Words can get us into trouble, but they also get us out.

JUD EVANS: The *experience* didn't exist even when the jug WAS in hand - only the human experiencer exists - the jug is insensate and experiences nothing.

GARY. C. MOORE: But how do I experience myself? And it must be * I * because that is the only human I can experience. Everything you use to 're-call' the jug REFERS to sensations, brings up new sensational memories supposedly associated with it, but even these operate like pictures in the text of a book. They have no place, no existence, outside the discussion that brings them up.

JUD EVANS: Spot on - but you are falling into the Humean trap of the so-called existence of sensations. Sensations do not exist any more than the *memories* exist. Sensations and memories don't exist [As an old man I say that with a certain amount of sadness] only the human sensor and memorialisor exists. When one remembers the scenes of one's youth one is simply existing in a CURRENT existential modality of recall.

GARY. C. MOORE: I think Hume is well aware of this problem but faces the problem of communication with ALL - his explicit desire - and not just a tiny few. Talking of sensation does point one in the right direction. Then he makes sensation problematic. But then you are making common parlance itself problematic. And, on the whole, this is where he wants to leave you. He doesn't try to tell you every detail as authoritatively fixed like Heidegger at times seems to do. In fact, he put in question all authority, even mathematical and geometrical. The tremendous advantage of words is that they endure. They are always available for recall as EXACTLY what they are. They easily form connections because their very form always and naturally assumes a position in a hypothetical sentence. However, the jug you talk about, that justifies the whole scheme, is not here. Theoretically, linguistically, it is supposedly *available*. But the reality is, if it is not in hand, it is not.

JUD EVANS: All true and well put, but it is not the *words* which have endured IT IS YOU - the flesh and blood master of the use of signification which you indubitably are Gary.

GARY. C. MOORE: Aye! There's the rub! If I die, the universe is forgotten - literally. Even Heidegger fudged and said * The universe goes on * in a certain context while in an existential context the universe is erased absolutely. The problem is, if I die, ALL CONTEXT dies with me.

JUD EVANS: Without Gary, Gary's words and memories would not endure. *words* would not endure. It may happen because I value your words so highly, that if you go before me that I will remember some of your words, but they will BE MY WORDS then - even if I am at great pains to attribute them to you.

GARY. C. MOORE: Jud, they are wholly your words right here and now. It can be no other way. Locke desperately wants to find a material reality in the abstraction to justify its being logically true, that is, a *real* referent to the justifying reality of direct and immediate experience. Green and Grose show this desperate search leads him either back to the truth of situation or to ambiguous compromises of evasion.

JUD EVANS:

*Situation* doesn't exist - only that which is situated exists. The human notions [perceptions] of *truth* or *reality* only exist IN ONE LOCATION and that is in the actual way in which an existing entity exists.

GARY. C. MOORE:

* Hell is all places and wherever I am is Hell. * Mephistopheles. I know you do not mean situated by someone because that could only be God. Now, I am situated but by the context around me. Nothing very divine at all. Rather the opposite. But then there is an exterior and an interior situation . . . or is there really such a clear distinction at all? Does not extreme constipation disrupt one's whole world-view? In fact, HUMILIATED YOU . . . By whom? . . . Yourself? But one is not one's colon. But one has to be one's colon. Samuel Beckett time. This bears more thinking."In other words, according to the only consistent doctrine that we have been able to elicit from Locke, it is a knowledge which consists in a consciousness, upon occasion of a present sensation - say, a sensation of redness - that some object is present here and now causing the sensation; an object which, accordingly, must be 'particular' or transitory as the sensation." Literally, then, out of sight, out of mind.

JUD EVANS: Lockian *knowledge, consciousness, sensation, redness, cause don't exist. What exists is the conscious human knower, the human sensor, the human transactor of incoming photonic activity on the eyeball and thence brain. The *cause* doesn't exist only the fructary causer - the *orange coloured* orange exists. I know you Gary - but
*the knowing of Gary* doesn't exist only Jud the Gary-knower exists.

GARY. C. MOORE: Absolutely fantastic! One of the things this will lead to in Hume, in opposition to Heidegger, is a retreat from the supposed logical exactness of language that is the ideal goal of philosophy into common parlance where one really communicates things to other people and "gets things done".

JUD EVANS: This is an IMPOSSIBLE TASK with Heideggerians. To enter into discussion with a Heideggerian is to walk beneath a portal inscribed;

*Abandon all hope [of logicality] Ye who enter here!*

GARY. C. MOORE: This does not mean that he wants to use language sloppily but rather language is sloppy by nature and has to be constantly re-affirmed by real here and now experience as constantly as possible.

JUD EVANS: I believe that language need not be sloppy. It is laziness to be sloppy.

GARY. C. MOORE: But it is truly difficult not to be sloppy. And I delude myself if I attain exactitude in one fashion just to find that exactitude simply has no place in a dozen other fashions. That is why Hume drops philosophy and goes into politics, economics, and history big time. In even inadequately defining what was, one gives much more depth to what is now. And he is thoroughly aware of the inadequacies of his historical research.

JUD EVANS: Heideggerians are the sloppiest writers I have ever met in my life - they are like slippery eels in the meaning-department - they DON'T WANT to be understood, for to be understood is to invite ridicule, and so they make it harder to be ridiculed by being obfuscational and learning to live with the lower-level ridicule. Wonderful things have been explained using the tremendous vocabulary and phraseology of our English tongue. We have the King James Bible, Shakespeare, the great discoveries of Darwin and Einstein explained, the great metaphysical poetry of poetry of John Donne, the delights of Dylan Thomas and Eliot, Churchill's and Lincoln's great speeches. Are we to say that the metaphysical crap of a two-bit crackpot *philosopher* from the Heimat cannot be rendered into that great flexible semantic compendium of superior communication that is The English Language, from the ponderous, lumbering, grammatically ossified fat-assed hausfrau-speak that is German? {The modern equivalent of Ancient Greek! Heidegger was speaking through his rectum as usual.} Hahaha! What a laugh!

GARY. C. MOORE: And I am saying, on pitiful evidence but some, that Heidegger plagiarized Hume and Germanized him, literally turning him on his head like Marx did to Hegel.

This means a complete rejection of any kind of certainty, including mathematical and geometrical - which becomes obvious when you insert such concepts within the structure of a sentence truly meant to communicate - for probabilities in every and all occasions.

JUD EVANS: BRAVO - SPOT ON. ALL STATEMENTS AND PROPOSITIONS ARE CHALLENGEABLE!

GARY. C. MOORE:

02. 05.2005 - 5:50 AM CST. The stomach's work is never done. I must go to work.

GARY. C. MOORE: In language's great usefulness as supposedly always enduring as the so-called same throughout time, what you actually have is a structure that simply justifies itself. And in such justification it must absolutely divorce itself from all here and now experience - because *here and now* is all that it can ever be. The whole concept of *repetition* of the same becomes totally bogus because, if nothing else is even considered, each *here and now* is absolutely unique AND is also *always already* gone, non-existent, nothing. Ein Augenblick. Everything you live for is *always already* nothing.

JUD EVANS: Again you are quite right except it is not the structure that simply justifies itself [it has no *self* to justify anything]. Humans justify the old linguistic forms and [feeling comfortable and emotionally attached to their use] cling to them. If they cease to work as meaningful conveyances for the transfer of feeling from one human to another they are gradually replaced.

GARY. C. MOORE: Green and Grose point this out clearly in their quotation and analysis of Locke describing experience. "All such patterns and standards being quite laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential; and everything, in each individual, will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all," TREATISE ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, Book III, chapter vi, section 5.

JUD EVANS: What Locke is unconsciously describing in the above passage is not his experience - but HIMSELF as a physical embodiment of all that he has experienced. Which is what you and I are Gary - living, breathing and laughing *experiences* of that which exists which we have experienced.

GARY. C. MOORE: So Jud, as it stands in my understanding right at this dissolving moment, your *holism* is your unique experience.

JUD EVANS: Strange - [and I do not read ahead] but comparing my penultimate sentence with your ultimate one, we have now reached agreement in this matter though by different routes as we so often do,

GARY. C. MOORE: It seems to fit well in my language, but, as Green and Grose put it, ". . . If by a 'particular being' is meant the mere [or "pure"] individuum . . . it certainly can have no essential qualities, since it has no qualities at all. It is a something which equals nothing."

JUD EVANS: Bully for them too - I too hold that qualities do not exist.

GARY. C. MOORE: Now, all this is mere speculation on my part to show everyone I am not dead yet. None of it is meant to be final or authoritative. But, then, how can anyone be *final and authoritative* in anything but words?

JUD EVANS: The thought of you ever not being around makes me weep.

GARY. C. MOORE: [Hamlet mocking Polonius]

What do you read, my lord?/ Words, words, words./ What is the matter, my lord?/ Between who?/ I mean the matter that you read, my lord./

Slanders sir. For the satirical rogue says here that old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams - all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down. For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am - if like a crab you could go backward.

JUD EVANS: Beautifully selected/expressed - how happy your messages make me - your are a zephyr of wisdom blowing through this dry desert of Dasein and on whichever list thou listeth.

Viva Gary! Viva!