The Blog Name Panhandling Philosopher

The Name Panhandling Philosopher

Written by Dan McDonald, the panhandling philosopher

 

            I remember only a few reasons for selecting “The Panhandling Philosopher” as the name of my blog site. My college minor had been philosophy, but I always felt I never quite understood what I was reading. I received good grades from the classes but only because I was better at figuring out what instructors wanted to hear than what I actually understood. It took me decades to understand that I habitually read to gain personal insights while I failed to read to analyze and understand what the writers themselves were saying. By putting Philosopher into the title of my blog I signaled that the blog would be in regards to what I was thinking. Adding Panhandling to my title softened the potentially high claim that I accepted my thinking as anything authoritative. I would express my understanding of various topics as a way of speaking my mind while hearing the perspective of others.

            Originally a photograph was to capture the spirit of my blog. The photograph would include me, my dog next to me on my leash, and me holding a dry erase board with something like the following written on it – “The Panhandling Philosopher – “We will think and write for fine ales and good ribs.” A friend was to shoot the photograph. Then tragedy struck. My dog, earlier in his life had been inflicted with heart worms, and though he recovered, his heart was weakened and so he died just days before the photograph was to be taken. He was a good dog, well at least quite a character, and I still miss him.

            Recently events have helped me to appreciate the name Panhandling Philosopher in a new way. I live about three miles from where I work. On my drive to work, I drive near some overpasses and under some expressway bridges. Last year, in summer if I recall correctly, a woman began living beneath one of those bridges. I paid little attention at first. Then she remained there the entire summer, into the fall, and on into winter, into this spring, and on into this summer. Seeing her there every day became a part of my driving routine. After a while and never stopping I started to feel more like the guilty Levite that the Good Samaritan. Interestingly, she never held a sign asking for handouts. She simply lived under the bridge, and I am sure took handouts, but never advertised any need.

            I began to think about how one day I would stop and introduce myself and greet her. I wanted to make sure that I did it in a sort of neighborly manner. I figured asking her how she ended up living under a bridge would be something akin to saying “You know this isn’t the way you should be living?” I figured there had to be a better way to say hello to her than doing anything like asking her to give account for why she lived under a bridge.

            I decided on a plan. Following church one Sunday I stopped at a book store and made a few purchases. I bought a set of colored sketching pencils that included an eraser. I bought a sketch pad, a journal and a small set of pens for keeping a journal. I drove near the underpass and parked my car on a nearby street. I told her that I had passed by her living here for several months. I added “I’ve started thinking of you as someone living in our neighborhood. I presented her the items as a housewarming gift. She seemed moved and expressed that this was her first sketch pad in probably fifteen years. If I had been better at what I was doing I would have asked her if she had enjoyed sketching. I fear I acted more to be in repentance for being the Levite who passed her than as the Good Samaritan simply seeking to be kind. I realized in meeting her that she was a genuine human being and not something less or a caricature of a human being. Sometimes I fear when we talk about the down and out, or the homeless or other versions of people we imagine caricatures of a successful human being, rather than actual human beings.

            I intended to visit again a few days later. In the meantime, a man started living on the other end of the bridge. Within a couple of days she and her few possessions were no longer there.

            This experience has given me a new appreciation for being a panhandler. Things happen in life. We lose our sense of direction. Sometimes we do that without losing our jobs, or our houses. Sometimes we lose hope and then almost everything we have, we have only in a most fragile manner. I can so much imagine being the person that has lost my grip on the whole of life. I can imagine living under a bridge and a passerby hands me a sandwich from a downtown restaurant and then I think of another panhandler and offer them my sandwich because sometimes eating with someone is better than eating alone.

            I also realize I have never been an original thinker. Pretty much always I have lived as a panhandling philosopher who has been given something to think about by someone else.

My Birthday tribute to Wendell Berry

Discovering Wendell Berry through

Imagination in Place

Written by Dan McDonald

This quote is not from the book I am reading – but goes with the writing I’m doing.

 

            When, last week, I began reading Wendell Berry’s Imagination in Place I did not realize Sunday August 5, 1934 was his birthdate, and this Sunday his 84^th birthday. I have read only a few of his works, but each book I have read has made me think for a longer time than it took me to read. Today I write of what I’ve been learning about Wendell Berry and his message as I approaching the midway part of this 2010 published book.

            The first essays in this book are mostly about people who have been mentors and friends in Berry’s life. They come from different places than Berry does, but share an appreciation of their lives being connected to place and community.

            I’ve often classified Wendell Berry as a Southern Agrarian writer. However appropriate that classification might be, I am discovering how his writing as a Southerner and as an Agrarian is for Berry something of a starting point in his relationship to place and a broader more universal culture. I am learning that he recognizes an importance in discovering specific local connections if one is to learn how to interact with others in broader abstract universal matters.

            In Imagination in Place, Wendell Berry spends a good part of the book expressing gratitude for the mentors and friends who helped shape his perspective. Neither of the two I have so far most encountered are Southerners. But they can be described as writers connected to their local places. One mentor for whom Berry expresses his gratitude is Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), a man of the West. Berry tells of studying under Stegner, while only later growing to find Stegner’s impact on his life grew in the years following his studies, while not being a dramatic recognized influence when he studied under Stegner’s supervision. In a chapter entitled The Momentum of Clarity , Berry notices the sort of writer Stegner had become, that would eventually have an impact on him. He reflects on Stegner in the following paragraph:

            “[Eventually I thought there must have been a moment when he decided that he would not be the kind of writer who would look on his native country as “raw material” for his art, and leave it otherwise to take care of itself or to be cared for by other people, but that he would be a kind of writer who would be devoted to his country for its own sake, and do what he could to protect it. And then I thought that perhaps he had not decided – that perhaps there had come a moment, simply, when he realized that he had become that kind of writer. Whenever and however that moment occurred, it was a significant moment; so far as I know, no American writer had been that kind of writer before.]”[i]

            Berry’s use of country in this paragraph intrigues me. “Country” here doesn’t seem to me to equate nation, and yet there is a relationship it seems between the loving of his country and nation. It seems as though country is representative of a more specific, localized place that then is also connected to one’s commitments to life in a broader, more universal manner. I have to think on how I learned love of country in my own childhood way of understanding. I grew up in a north central Illinois farm region. My first thoughts of living in a great America, was to look over the neighboring Prairie farmland horizon and seeing a grain elevator with its peak visible over the plots of land filled with corn and soybeans. That is how I first understood I lived in a great nation. I had this specific localized vision of greatness that served as my understanding of the abstraction of a great nation named The United States of America. Seeing Berry’s debt to Stegner helps me realize that while Berry can be described as a Southern Agrarian, is certainly not one inclined to say to us “You must become a Southern man to discover truth.” He certainly did not see Stegner that way. Stegner was for Wendell Berry a fellow companion connected to place and a localized cultural way of life.

            A second writer, mentor, and friend Berry recognizes, is poet Hayden Carruth (1921-2008). Carruth’s roots were planted in a small Vermont community. In Berry’s essay on Carruth, he quotes a piece of writing Carruth did in honoring a neighbor who operated a small dairy farm. When Berry had visited Carruth in Vermont, Carruth had taken time to introduce Wendell Berry to his dairy farm operating neighbor. Berry selects Carruth’s eulogy for this dairy farmer as a sample of Carruth’s connection to his Vermont place and community:

Notice how many times

I have said “manure”?

It is serious business.

It breaks the farmers’ backs.

It makes their land.

It is the link eternal,

binding man and beast and earth.[ii]

 

            Berry made his own profound remark regarding the poem, saying “[“Cowshit,” then has an eternal value. A “cowshit farmer” is an artist whose art makes of cowshit “the link eternal.”]”[iii]

            Imagination in Place has given me a new appreciation for Wendell Berry. He is a man who understands that perhaps the best way to be a man capable of understanding universal truths is to be a man who has learned to receive from and return to his own specific local place and community. That is why he can be a Southern man who would not expect you to be southern man unless you are a man and a Southerner. He would understand paradoxically but also logically that to understand the universals of life we perhaps need to learn to be preoccupied with the local that we can see with our own eyes. I remember an associate pastor named Robert Haling, where I was once a member of the church. He would often tell us his favorite saying “Bloom where you are planted.” The universal characteristics of life are expressed in thousands of thousands of specific offerings of localized reality.

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[i] Imagination in Place; Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley p. 41

[ii] Ibid., p. 65

[iii] Ibid., p. 65