Many modern writers have said there is no way a modern writer of any sort can write without irony. That's fine except then there is no point in purposely indulging oneself in it to the point of incomprehensibility when, it seems to me, the main effort of any line of thought should be to objectize those ironies, lay them out in the open, instead of letting them dominate you like leafy ornamentation gone wild in a Victorian illustration. This is part of my complaint against Derrida. His arrogance is no longer justified, his thought has become the worst kind of mysticism, trying to pin down what he is saying leaves me holding nothing. This is a man who lives in a time and a country where he has absolutely no restraints on his speech yet he deliberately distorts it into pointless obscurity. There is no point in a relatively good philosopher he started out to be deliberately becoming a very bad 'poet.'

You bring up the example of Shakespeare as Bakhtin brought up Rabelais. These are people who lived in extremely dangerous times. They had extreme restraints on their words. Shakespeare almost for sure knew Giordano Bruno when he was in England and his horrible execution in Rome would have to have been on his mind. Rabelais had a fellow worker and friend, a secretary to Cardinal Joachim du Bellay for whom Rabelais also worked, burned at the stake. So even having powerful connections was no sure protection. These people had to be intensely literary to say anything at all serious. NO RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHER EVEN BEGINS TO MATCH EITHER OF THOSE POET'S DEPTH OF THOUGHT! They could only go so far and say so much or be burned at the stake. This was not an idle threat even in Great Britain. Either Adam Smith or David Hume witnessed the wretched burning at the stake in Edinburgh of a man that denied that the first five books of the Old Testament were by Moses so that even in the British enlightenment people like Hume and Smith lived everyday at the edge of violent death. People like Derrida trivialize all that. These people would loved to have been able to say what they truly thought in plain language for everyone to hear or read. To do what they did demanded great courage because the slightest slip meant a hard death.

That is why I consider Shakespeare not only to be incontestably the greatest philosopher of his age but of all time. His thought is his life. He spoke far more plainly than he should have, and it is a miracle he survived at all. Again, he had the dubious fate of someone he probably knew well, Christopher Marlowe and his strangely convenient death, to keep clearly before him what he risked. And maybe Sir Walter Raleigh? What do you think?

One of the things I am stumbling toward in considering the real mentality of other animals is that in a materialist and atheist scheme, a bad word but at least an open one, being an animal and enjoying being an animal would be the only 'inherent' and "essential" value to life. Instead of love of God, simplistically there would be love of life. But in considering the INTENSITY of living in animals compared to my dullard, sluggish life, I see in their mortal, finite way they have all those things other men wanted to find in God. Like Rabelais and Shakespeare you have to flush the idea of immortality down the toilet but actually considering immortality as a real possibility should strike sane people as the most boring and pointless concept ever dreamed up by religious man. Its actuality is incredibly stupid if one considers such a ridiculous thing happening to a real person. Live forever! That would kill every value life has. Remember how Homer portrayed the gods as essentially spoiled brats and vicious psychopaths. What else could a real immortal anything be? Once again we get back to the point of trying to discover real purpose in what we do. Immortality has no purpose. Being 'literary' is one of the worse kinds of fake immortality. Shakespeare is alive because we read our lives in him, he gives us the words that light up our own selves to ourselves that otherwise we would never know as truly as through him. One might say he is 'immortal' precisely because he gives such depth and understanding to one's own personal mortality and truly fleeting temporality. He lives 'forever' because he shows us only death is "immortal." So an atheist, knowing death is going to absolutely erase both the importance and existence of everything he does, does not enjoy the materiality of being an animal purely and simply, that utterly confounds me. Even when one thinks of animals that live in almost constant fear like rabbits, mice, and deer, even that fear is a way of expressing their being materially alive and totally vibrant, intense in living this desperate moment, now, and not like some human shithead plotting how to put something over on someone as the consummating summit of his life. Animals are aware. That is a very different mode of thinking than our tangles of words where most often, willingly or unwillingly, we let other people do our thinking--and feeling!--for us! They are aware, they are totally absorbed in the perception of reality as it really is for its own sake, not building idiotic castles of intellectual irony or pretentious literariness to impress the already nearly dead by their own doing and desire. My crazed mind is wandering . . .

Was the movie you saw BABETT'S FEAST? I never saw it, but you make it sound interesting. I will try to get a copy. It is, if I remember right (God, my mind is going) based on a story by Issak Dinesen who handled irony deftly and with great spiritliness and was a very alive person. Meryl Streep got her hardness and determination right in OUT OF AFRICA bungled the delicacy of her intense spritliness which could be very cruel as the mythology and gods of the Celts could be. I'm trying to learn more about the Celts. They were a very formidable and imaginative people, making Germanic types like me very dull. They could kill with ferocity or with great subtlety, but they loved killing greatly, and yet were just as great as artists. As a people they are the most fascinating who ever lived. Only the Greeks can compare to them, which makes me wonder how different they really were.

To stop: I shall try to touch on Richard Bodeus' ARISTOTLE AND THE LIVING IMMORTALS sometime soon. His argument, simple in statement but hard to get my mind on track with is that monotheistic religion got him completely twisted around wrong. He was not trying to say anything about God or prove its existence. Rather, everyone always already knew about the gods and knew all they needed to know about them, and that what Aristotle is trying to do is use the "divine," "divinity," "God" as METAPHORS to describe the principles of reality as enduring 'forever', as powerful and unchanging, always the same, that in understanding the fundamental principles of reality one is contemplating the closest possible thing to the mind of God there really is, that all the adjectives wasted on describing a useless and superfluous monotheistic God are only meaningful to a mortal, finite being contemplating an everlasting and unchanging reality such as the heavens by which that mortal gets a tiny taste of what it is to be divine. But more on that later.