DUSTY RHODES, AND ANOTHER AUTODIDACT!

DUSTY RHODES, AND ANOTHER AUTODIDACT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2009

“Leaning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 42 B.C.), Roman orator

* * *
In my walk today, I thought some readers would be interested knowing a little bit more about Dusty. People called him “Dusty” as there was a Major League baseball player with the same sobriquet at the time.

Dusty loved mathematics and physics as math and science was a breeze for him. Somewhat of an impatient type, differential and integral calculus were so easy that he could hardly wait to get into differential equations and more sophisticated theoretical mathematics. The same was true with physics.

What really aggravated him were the core courses he had to take in order to earn his degree. He found them a waste of time. These were courses in English, Literature, and Social Science.

He knew that I liked those courses and had a natural affinity for them. So, over coffee after calculus one day, he asked me if I would tutor him for his final in literature. He found James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Dostoyesky well beyond the pale of his comprehension.

“Come by tonight and go over this stuff for the final. You can stay the night.”

It was hard to refuse as he had been my calculus mentor. Besides, I lived in the Hillcrest Dormitory and so it would be no problem. He shared an apartment right downtown in Iowa City with three other guys, all military veterans on the G.I. Bill.

We spent more than three hours going over the works they had covered in class. Meanwhile, he chained smoked one cigarette after another. He smiled through the haze. “You dig this shit!”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You should teach this stuff. It makes more sense coming out of your mouth than the professor's.”

I’ve thought many times about that comment and realized that students are the best teachers of other students because they connect. I’ve also learned that in teaching someone else you become more understanding of what you are teaching.

The next morning when I got up, and stumbled into the kitchen, Dusty put a bowl of cornflakes in front of me with a beer. The beer shocked me because I was not a drinker. All the other guys were drinking beers and smoking cigarettes, and not eating at all. I thought afterwards that maybe Dusty was eating something as a courtesy to me. I nursed the beer, and by the time we were ready to go to class I must have drank about two ounces. I could never understand how people could like beer, or anything alcoholic.

The mere thought of it gave me a migraine. Why I don’t know. It has never been a challenge not to drink because of headaches. Violent migraines could put me out of commission for days. Virtually anything that might contribute to these headaches would monitor my intake. That included food. For example, I’ve never liked greasy food or pork or bacon, or anything fatty.

I’ve had a very bland Irish pallet. On the other hand, I’ve naturally loved fresh fruits and vegetables, never liked carbonated beverages or anything salty. Even as a kid playing over at the Courthouse, the guys would buy Korn Kurls, which would make me gag. I didn’t like processed food with the exception of hotdogs. Now, I eat these hotdogs that are 99 percent fat free, which BB finds tasteless.

After WWII, I read Ernie Pyle’s biography, the war correspondent, who said he eat to live but didn’t live to eat, glad to find someone as odd as I was about food.

I hope you enjoyed the brief sketch of John Moffat as the “Ultimate Autodidact.” There is another autodidact I should mention. He is an author friend who lives and works in Alaska. He is the best writer I know, writing fiction and nonfiction, and is also a fine philosopher in his own right.

Like John Moffat, he never finished high school, but joined the U.S. Marines, then came home and was a police officer in Texas for a time, relocating to Alaska to work for British Petroleum. He writes like an angel, and was invited by the University of Alaska to give a lecture on his works.

In the audience was a provost of University of London, London, England. After the lecture, he asked Charles Douglas Hayes to come to Great Britain and be a Ph.D. candidate at the university.

Charles told him he wasn’t even a high school graduate. The provost told Charles he was well beyond a college graduate, and would do well in the graduate program.

Charles turned the opportunity down for a number of reasons, I’m sure, but I’ve always been saddened by his decision because there is no field more wanting than that of philosophy at the moment. It is ironic that in the rapid rise of technology in the twentieth century, philosophy has been lost in analytical and existential philosophy, both of which lack the staying power philosophies of centuries before. You may have noticed, I seldom quote twentieth century philosophers.

Occasionally, I offer “Fragments of a Philosophy,” but have never developed any philosophical system. I take courage in this stand from Einstein.

Einstein was the great artist of the “thought experiment” where he would devise a metaphor to transport his thinking, such as the idea of chasing a light beam, and then imagining intuitively what that experience would be like. We forget that there was a romantic notion to his genius which found him following his intuition to create a perfect theory.

We live in a cognitive age, which is increasingly analytical to the exclusion of intuition, and I have resisted it. Perhaps that is why Dusty Rhodes came to mind. Charles Hayes, philosophically speaking, to my mind is on the bubble between the cognitive and intuitive dimensions of ideas, whereas I see myself gestating patiently in the intuitive dimension. I wait for ideas to surface to reveal themselves rather than attempting to coax them into life cognitively.

Charles D. Hayes publishes through the Autodidactic Press. I would strongly recommend that you purchase or check out at your local library his novel, “Portals in a Northern Sky,” which is about Alaska. You won’t be disappointed.

* * *