The Wolf Man Looks at Phenomenalistic Thinking

What the Hell?
I found the definition of "phenomenalism" among some old soiled and encrusted notes on a clipboard I'd discarded into a neglected corner probably five years ago...

I am living a blues idiom life now--and that's phenomenal--at least it is to me.

And I was arguing with a poet about his statement that poetry is the language of art and I said, no, it's the art of language--and he said shut up you're a novelist and I slugged him with an open copy of Across the River and Through the Trees right in his nose--there, you poet bastard, you insult me--I'm a novelist, which means I paint murals with language--and, he, putting a cold towel over his ruptured nose, said, just like I said--I mean, you idiot, we're in agreement--I'm a painter of language--my poems are the language of art, which, isn't it, the same as you're saying if you say your novels are murals? I was about to slug him again, I was reaching for the The Collected Letters of Aldous Huxley a huge volume--Aldous Huxley a wordy son of a bitch, a Brave New World man of letters who wrote his best stuff while tanked up on 5 ccs of lysergic acid diethylamide living in the New Brave World of Hollywood--I can see Aldous, Gore Vidal, and Paul Bowles getting high together!

Read me a few words of The Sheltering Sky and I'll tell you it's Paul Bowles. Play me only a few notes of a Mingus solo and I'll tell you it's Charles Mingus. Or I'll tell you it's Ray Brown, if it's Ray Brown. Or now I'm beginning to be able to tell you of even those who make even the slightest of phenomenal effects on me, like the guitar playing of Teddy Bunn recently--or the pumping away of Lil Hardin Armstrong on an album Bill Grauer recorded on his Riverside label in 1961, when Lil was 62, with her using a band of Chicago musicians she picked herself out of the Earl Hines Band--and I was blindfolded and I said, "Damn, that's Lil Hardin Armstrong, but I have no idea who the rest of the dudes are...Hell, that's Lil's tune 'Clip Joint.'" "That's phenomenal, man, phenomenal," said the blind-fold tester. "I dig it," said I, proudly howling toward that old Bilbao Moon! Ah-hooooooo-eeee, a hoooooo-eee, de-hooo-eeee!

Hear the train a'comin', hear those rails a'hummin'--hooooooeeeeee! Comin' 'cross the trestle...a'hooooooooo-eee!

I've known old railroad men who could tell you what locomotive it was if you played them a recording of locomotives chugging and exploding and letting off their steam whistles--"That's a 2-8-4 Berkshire." Phenomenal, right?

A 2-8-4 Berkshire wearing the Nickel Plate Road emblem crossing a steel trestle bridge.

"Can You Hume a Few Bars of Phenomenalism for Us, Wolfie?"
Sure: The doctrine, set forth by David Hume and his successors, that percepts and concepts constitute the sole objects of knowledge, with the objects of perception and the nature of the mind itself remaining unknowable.

Boy, that really must have pissed Freud off when he read that! We accept whatever perception of something our minds have without understanding how our damn minds concluded it! Like how do our brains work? I've listened to the learned trying to explain the brain and they do the best they can but there are still some mental mechanisms that are phenomenal, like how languages have evolved out of us, very complicated languages, all meaning the same thing simultaneously, like Sanskrit, wow, that's a pretty phenomenal language to me. Wouldn't the ultimate poem then, to my poet friend, be one constructed in Sanskrit then translated immediately back into whatever language out of which you constructed your Sanskrit?--like is a Russian's knowledge of Sanskrit the same as that of any other person's knowledge of it whatever the language? Or.... Yep, I'm thinking linearly--I was listening to a business freak, a twenty-something phenom, explaining vertical ascension or something strange like that in the world of NEW WORLD business! Is that anything like Pappy Bush's New World Order--that illuminated by a thousand points of light?! Pappy's greatest-ever speech--even greater than his wonderful "read my lips" speech or the speech where he tells us here in New York City to kiss his old gnarly sweaty ass. Can't you see Donald Trump naked in one of his fabulous penthouse apartments in one of his fabulous Trump Cities somewhere and making his trophy hotty swimsuit-model wife stick her sweet nose deep in his old miasmic crack in respect of his glory over her--especially since she blessed his Foul Hind-ness with a goofball, wigheaded, popeyed son! Little Prince Donald! Is Donald Trump a phenom? NO! Donald Trump inherited every thing he is from his real-estate-developer Big Daddy, the original builder of the Trump Cities out in the boroughs. Donald ain't no phenom. Billy Boy Gates? Hell no, nothing phenomenal in stealing an operating system out from under the noses of a small Seattle systems developer. Nor is his wife a phenom! She may have been when she was one of Billy Boy's "game-designing" phenoms, but after becoming his celebate wife, she lost her phenom status. Marrying a filthy rich man is not phenomenal! Any pretty and dumb babe can get a rich bastard to marry her--all she has to do is spend hours upon hours playing with his wanting-to-shrivel-old-cock--it's easy--check out Anna Nicole Smith! The good Anna, who is no longer in the news. I'll bet she makes a comeback one day--oh, God, the phenomenal thing about Anna Nicole Smith is that she grabbed headlines away from some of the most historic news stories ever--like the Taliban kicking our ass in Afghanistan and the Iraq government turning against us and people starving all over the world, horrible starving, thousands of children dying every hour of starvation, some dying sucking on their mothers's dried-up titties--and phenomenally our anguish is about "What's going to happen to Anna's illegitmate kid, the kid with two daddies, both daddies a little strange--hell, more than strange?" Those hang-along dudes sucking old Anna Nicole's bank account dry! Then finally killing her off after she had one of them's child ("them's child"--that's phenom language, isn't it?)--don't you think her lovers killed her?--look at the bucks they reaped off her death and then fighting over her kid and shit like that--parasites these dudes were! In the meantime, in Iraq human beings were being enslaved to work for the US-invading contractors (KGB (sorry, I mean, KBR), for instance)--the story of 6 Nepalese men who were lured to Jordan by the promise of big-buck jobs in swanky Jordan hotels and restaurants and shit like that. Once in Jordan, however, these lured souls had their passports taken away from them and were then force-transported into Iraq and there put into virtual slavery--taken into Iraq where they were turned over to gangs like the KGB (again, I mean KBR)--the six Nepalese were then summarily found dead on the streets of Baghdad...but that's a story Amuricans could care less about.

It was also kind'a disgusting to see Obama and Hillbilly Hill loving one another before a crowd of crowing thousands, mostly old pruny looking women! Neither of them addressing issues, like why Obama and Hillbilly Hill are for giving the telecoms immunity from prosecution when they break our laws and spy on Amurican citizens supposedly protected from such things by privacy acts and the Constitutional right of not incriminating ourselves--5th Amendment! Also, I'd like to know why Obama is for offshore drilling and drilling in the Alaskan Wilderness Reserve and also why both of them are backing the resurging passion for building nuclear power plants and keepin' on using coal? Nope, that's not what they discussed. Rather they just trumpeted out how great each of them were, how wonderful, how so wanting change they are--yet they approved a couple'a more hundred billion for Bush's Trumped-up Attack on Iraq (his illegal invasion and occupation of a foreign sovereign nation, something for which he should have been impeached years ago)! On the Iraq issue, I'm sad to say, Obama, Hillary, and John "Nutjob" McCain are all in loving agreement! Here's what's phenomenal about these politicians and this spying-on-us system they are approving wholeheartedly: now you say the wrong thing, like word it wrong, on your cell phone or in an email or over your dialup and you could be arrested and held without bail for as long as good ole Uncle Sam (archaic) wants to keep you! Yahoo, Obama, way to go with this "change" bullshit you're peddling. How phenomenal was it when Ralph "Spoilsport" Nader called Obama a Half-Black this week? Has Ralph been reading The Daily Growler?

By the Bye
I just read the 17th Chapter of my dear Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and, yes, thewomantrumpetplayer, the dialog so disgusted me I almost flipped the book into the virtual garbage--however, I soon found Charlotte's lust, that which she's portraying between the lines of her lousy dialog, phenomenal--she was one horny woman (writer) and putting such a load on poor always-stepped-on Jane--and Jane's folding fast--her once rather stoic I thought nature and evolution has now suddenly disappeared, smoked over from the fires she's set between her hot and burning thighs that are oven-like surrounding her even hotter Vestibule of Love--Charlotte writing and thinking of her soppy love for the Belgium dude who was the spitting image of Jane's precious Mr. Rochester--does Jane even know his first name yet? I got to the part where Mr. Rochester accosts demure Janey in a dank hallway as Jane's trying to slip away from the "goings on" in Mr. Rochester's party room--his foppish guests are in there and those guests include the fabulous Miss Ingram, who according to Mrs. Fairfax is Charlotte Bronte's ideal beautiful woman, something we more than know by now doesn't fit the orphan Jane one damn bit. Yet, we know Charlotte wants to break loose and write Mr. Rochester grabbing young Jane and ripping off her clothes and baring her lithe young body as he gasps while devouring, "Ah, a body worthy of comparison with that of the Winged Victory in Rome--with all its marbly-smooth symmetry like yours, ooooh, these ripe young breasts...ah, Jane, please forgive my rampant passion." And there and then Jane is "spoiled" by Mr. Rochester's lunging and lugging plunging and the novel will then continue with Jane lying bleeding on Mr. Robinson's fine big musty four-poster, confused, with Mr. Rochester pounding his still rampant prick on one of those bedposts while his dog Pilot licks his master's wounds--"Bad boy, go lick that wench's cunt if you're so wanting to lick." And when Jane hears herself called a wench, ah, then the novel will perhaps return to its great beginning--for a while there I was thinking about luring Charlotte into my vain playground for some fantasy sex--you know, of the literary type! The Seducing of Charlotte Bronte my novel-in-progress--or should I say my mural-in-progress?


Charlotte Bronte from the Cornell U. Library Collection. Not bad. I wouldn't kick her out...if you catch me drift.

yeoldegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler