My Brothers new blog
Well happy day! My brother has a new blog! You can visit it at: http://littleleelily.blogspot.com Take a look at it, I think you will enjoy it. He really is too kind in his posts and I am glad to see that he and his family are finally joinging the rest of the internet... Dean.
posted by Dean @ 12:29 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Dean,
I appreciate your thoughtfulness; but, to be honest, having my own blog makes me feel like a whale louse without a whale, floating around the internet ocean with nothing to hold on to, disoriented and pursued by a slight sense of meaninglessness. Plus, for some reason, I find it very satisfying to post in your comments section.
That being said, my blogging days are numbered. I do have a post on the Artist Formerly Known as Prince in the oven, and if it doesn't burn, it will be my farewell post.
Lily and I: A Web Log
Tuesday, October 17, 2006: Listening to the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Thinking about the Color Purple
Good evening to all you “Montoge” regulars. As this is my farewell post, I have decided to write a semi-serious post. My apologies in advance for any implausible statements, bad jokes, tenuous logic or incomprehensible prose. With that:
In the soundtrack to Purple Rain, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince (hereafter “Prince”) sings in the album’s title track:
I never meant 2 cause u any sorrow
I never meant 2 cause u any pain
I only wanted 2 one time see u laughing
I only wanted 2 see u laughing in the purple rain
In these lines, “the Kid” (played by Prince) laments his loss of the young, beautiful Apollonia (“u” above), and does his best to make a melodramatic apology sound authentic, all to our immense unease. “The Kid,” for those of you who have never seen the film, is an up-and-coming musician who has incredible promise (as hard as this is to believe with Prince playing the part), but who, because of his self-destructive tendencies, loses the one thing that is most important to him: Apollonia. Anyway, while the soundtrack to Purple Rain is said to be Prince’s best album, I do not wish to discuss this lamentable fact in this post. Rather, I would like to discuss the final line in the lyrics quoted above. The question is: What does Prince mean when he refers to “purple rain”? And I don’t mean figuratively, but literally, what does he mean?
This may seem like an easy enough question, but it’s not. “Rain,” of course, is easy to determine. The problem is with “purple.” In particular, how is it that rain can be said to be purple? Or, more importantly, how is it that anything can be said to be purple or any color at all? When we look at an object its color seems to be part and parcel of the object itself. The problem, however, is that if we dissect the object into its essential properties, it is impossible to point to the property (or properties) of the object that produce the color that our mind perceives. In other words, color does not seem to be a substantive property of material objects, even if it is perceived as such. It seems to exist in the mind alone.
This is a pretty common (partial) response to a pretty well-known philosophical problem. Whether it is true or not, I do not know. However, certain philosophers who do not wish to grant “existence” to anything other than material properties (as they define “material”) are extremely uncomfortable with the above definition of color. The reason is that it seems to imply that something could exist in the mind that does not, in turn, have a direct equivalent in the “material” world. The concern for these philosophers, I believe, is that if color is said to be real but exist in the mind alone, what other “things” might be said to “exist” in the mind that, in turn, do not have exact equivalents in the “real” world. Am I using too many quotes? Anyway, you can imagine the sleepless nights. I mean if color is real but does not exist in the material world per se, people might start pulling all sorts of rabbits out of their hats, making all sorts of imperious claims about what is “real” and what is not. Or so it is assumed.
To be honest, most of these rabbits would be fairly easy to catch, draw and quarter. After all, most people would not be convinced if I said there was such a thing as a flying, giant, killer, pig-nosed hamster just because I had dreamed about one (which I have). Furthermore, because we have no experiential reason to believe that such a hamster exists (other than my dream and perhaps the dreams of a few other people), then the hamster is said to be a construction of my imagination. It is the product of my mind taking experiences of real hamsters, real feelings of fear, and real knowledge of what both death and flight are, and, for some reason, combining them into one monstrous image. Anyway, it is easy to identify this hamster as imaginary and, thus, off he is sent to join Pegasus and the Sphinx for tea with Alice. The real problem, however, for these so-called “philosophers” is what to do when people start claiming existence for things that do not fly in the face of common sense, things that do seem to exist in the same way that color exists, things such as “love,” “goodness” (as an inherent quality), “the self” and, for a number of us, “God.”
What to do, what to do? Well, if you are a cool-headed “physicalist,” there is only one option: deny that color exists. Hence, J.J.C. Smart writes in “Sensations and Brain Processes” (1959): “When a person says ‘I see a yellowish-orange after-image’ he is saying something like this: ‘There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me’.” In other words, when I say that the orange is “yellowish-orange,” “yellowish-orange” does not refer to a color per se, but to a brain state that is produced when I see this particular fruit in this particular light. Colors are not real, and, thus, for philosophers such as Smart, neither are things such as “love,” “the self” or “God.”
So, for Smart, Prince can sing all he wants about wanting to see Apollonia “laughing in the purple rain.” It just ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. In fact, according to Smart, Prince doesn’t even love Apollonia in the first place despite the fact that he uses that word to describe how the chemicals swishing around in his brain feels when he thinks of her. And, of course, as comforting as this may be to me personally, for Smart, neither Prince nor Apollonia really exist either (not to mention Smart himself, which he, of course, overlooks whenever he writes one of his numerous essays) if by exist we mean that we have a “self” that is real and that is distinct from the material stuff that makes up our body. While, for Smart, Prince does exist in the same sense that a tree exists (which is to say, as matter), you don’t see trees falling in love, aspiring to be great musicians, but then failing to be great musicians because they follow some self-destructive path...
Anyway, the good news in all of this for Prince (if he is silly enough to believe Smart) is that he won’t get any more nasty tickets for running all those red lights on his chopper. And that, in and of itself, is probably worth several Apollonias and a few cans of hairspray to boot.
Over and out,
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