Upon watching the video of a seminar: "What is Guilt", a link sent to me by Professor Michael Eigen. "A" and "B" are my self-talk.

• ...
• A: But I never heard anyone talk like that at Westchester Institute^[1].
• B: But would you have recognized it if they would have?
• A: I'm not sure. I may only have learned to appreciate it from my studies at Teachers College, or maybe just recently in the pandemic.
• B: It sounds like you are not quite finished there?
• A: Yes. Shouldn't they have helped me appreciate it if I didn't?
• B: Aren't you asking what pedagogy should be about?
• A: I think you're right there. What is a teacher's responsibility? What is a student's responsibility?
• B: Keep going. Tell me more.
• A: Well, just now I'm thinking it's not just about words, but also like – facial gestures.^[2] I don't mean that exactly. [A pulls out a picture of Professor McClintock (below) and both A and B look at it.]
  

• B: Looks like he's studying.
• A: Yes. Reading or writing. And thinking.
• B: So what does this picture say to you?
• A: It – he – the picture inspires me. It motivates me to study and says studying is worthwhile.
• B: Studying is worthwhile? Isn't it?
• A: Well, life is short. And I don't believe in an afterlife.
• B: And?
• A: And I'm not really sure what "after I'm dead" means. You might call that the question of solipsism. Anyway, after studying – or at least taking classes in – philosophy in college, I don't know what anything outside my experience – uh, "is".
• B: I think you have written about that?
• A: I have. I've written that – uh, individual – human experience is the – uh, place – wherein all space and all time and all things find their place, so there is really nothing else outside it^[3], except --
• B: Except what?

• A: Except for other such "places", I mean "other people" for example, you, B. And if there are any, other such "beings" like G-d if He, She or Other exists. Or extraterrestrials. Or spirits in animals or other things. Like cats.^[4] Question mark.
• B: I think you have said you love what you call house cats.
• A: Yes. I currently have one who is really sweet. To borrow from the Japanese, a living personal cultural treasure, or at least: cultural property. Of course, she doesn't study – at least not books and such.
• B: Do you want to return to "What is studying?"?
• A: Sure. I think my thoughts and feelings about studying are evolving with the corona virus pandemic.
• B: Please, tell me more.
• A: Just before I came here I read a New York Times piece about doctors' and nurses' pandemic experiences. Sort of history of the future.
• B: What did it make you feel?
• A: For one thing, I'm even more sure than before that I don't want to catch the virus. I don't want to be put on a ventilator. It must be awful. The doctors and nurses are really having a hard time of it – too.
• B: Did I hear a pause just now?
• A: Yeah. Because all the talk is about the essential workers being heroes. Everyday heroes, everybody calls them. But I woke up this morning thinking that the patients, maybe especially those who get put on the ventilators, are heroes too, at least the ones who are conscious when they come off and either make it or are going to die.
• B: I hear that really troubles you.
• A: It does. And just before that I was watching BBC videos about persons in England who are burying the dead. Well, also France. Do you mind if I read to you the accompanying text?
• B: No. Please go ahead.
• A: I quote: "Coronavirus: France's ancient burial brotherhood defies Covid-19. The Covid-19 epidemic and the risk of infection have led to new rules in many countries about how we treat the dead. In France, like anywhere else, the restrictions make the process of bereavement even more difficult to bear. In Béthune, in the northern part of the country, the Charitable Brothers of Saint-Eloi were founded in the 12th Century to help families bury their loved ones. More than 800 years on, the Brotherhood is not just about folklore; it's part of the city's daily life and death. And its work is more relevant than ever in this period of the Covid-19 pandemic." Apparently these are not celibate priests. They're Everyman^[5], from all ranks of civil society. They're volunteers, like the volunteer fire department and such.
• B: I see you are tearing up.
• A: Yes, I cried watching them. I had to wipe my eye glasses. You know I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's book about the fourteemth century^[6]?
• B: Yes. you told me.
• A: So much of now is like then. Not all of it, like the sport of tying a cat to a post and men competing to kill it by headbutting it with their hands tied behind their backs.
• B: Hmmm.
• A: And I thought about The Shining Prince, Genji, from Heian Japan.^[7] I don't think the Japanese were ever such brutes.
• B: I wonder why exactly you were thinking about this at all.
• A: It's how I cope with things these days. Imaginatively appropriating the horrors and – the worse, by which I mean (POTUS №45) Donald J. Trump and Mitch McConnell and all their fellow travellers^[8].
• B: Clearly they make you angry.
• A: I don't think I ever before talked back to the television or gave the pixel configurations on it "the finger".
• B: I hear you.
• A: I use phrases like "pixel configurations" to label things that don't qualify as really human but are bipedal anthropoids, like (POTUS №45) Trump.
• B: I feel your anger. But do you want to pursue this chain of associations or would you like to return to "studying"?
• A: We can return to studying. As you psychoanalysts say, Everything is grist for the mill, so why not D J T? I even laugh at what comes out of his big fish maw. I once did a Google search and apparently there is at least some jewish humor about the Holocaust, too.
• B: So you're saying you are kind of amused in a not funny way?
• A: Right. I just can't help laughing at the Messiah appearing on earth for a photo op at that church across the street from the White House^[9]. Do you know the movie "Greaser's Palace"?
• B: No. Should I?
• A: It's really good, about Jesus parachuting down to earth and doing a soft shoe dance on the water and other stuff I forget now. But that's not about studying. It's a digression. And, may I digress for you?
• B: Of course. It's your therapy session.
• A: Well, I think this does get back to studying. Martin Heidegger has a book "Holzwege", which means loggers' paths in the forest. Heidegger – a brilliant philosopher who was I think also emotionally defective – anyway, Heidegger says that "to be off on a logger's path", for a person who is not familiar with the forest, is to be lost in a maze of paths leading – everywhere and nowhere. Not good, yes?
• B: It doesn't sound good to me.
• A: OK. I think studying is about becoming a logger and being able to get around in the forest. Especially, now, the really big forest of everything that's on the Internet. And you – at least I – don't even know much of it is there.
• B: So studying is about not getting lost?
• A: Right. But also about venturing along the paths, to see what you – I – haven't seen. And, of course, also seeing old things in new lights.
• B: Anything else?
• A: Yes. Back to the Robbie picture [above]. Is he reading or writing or maybe both? I am finding now that long before I'm finished reading I want to start writing about it. And I really want somebody to read it.^[10] I'm not into solipsistic writing, say, diaries.
• B: You sound lonely.
• A: I have a cat who trills every time she moves a major muscle or maybe even just wants to. It's sweet. I'm wanting somebody to talk to all the time.
• B: Do you have such a person?
• A: No.
• B: So, what do you do, or feel?
• A: Since Robbie invited me to contribute to A place to study, I've pretty much been writing stuff there. I'm not sure that's exactly what he had in mind, though.
• B: But I think I gather that you think that is also studying.
• A: I do. I do think while I write. Or, in thinking, I write. And I go off on logger's paths. But I think I know enough – as Socrates sort of said, I don't know very much – but I think I know enough not to get irretrievably lost.
• B: I think that's all we have time for today.^[11]
• A: Thanks for listening.

• [A and B stand up. B accompanies A to B's office door and sees him out. B closes the door, writes some notes and prepares for his or her next patient.]

How did I (BMcC) meet Gordon Hirshhorn?

I met Gordon L. Hirshhorn through a recommendation from a fellow IBM employee, Alan Tritter. Tritter was too smart to be able to finish his doctorate at Oxford/Cambridge. He was also so overweight that he was certified to use the freight elevator at the IBM Watson Lab. One day when he had an infectious disease, he pressured me to drive him home, which is how I got asthma and bronchitis intermittently ever after. Tritter and Gordon Hirshhorn had earlier in life swapped wives, literally, each divorcing and remarrying the other's now former wife. Tritter worked in the IBM APL2 group where he did things that included solving puzzles to write complex programs in 1 line of APL code. The APL2 group, manager Adin Falcoff (who may have earlier worked with Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL), was not a "good" place to be in IBM Research because APL was not on IBM's strategic agenda. The only way APL had ever seen shipment as a product was when an APL group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania leaked it. Anyway, I believe tritter was eventually retired by IBM for reason not altogether clear to me, but probably in part becaue his obesity cum diabetes was killing him.

Back to GLH: Alan Tritter is how I met Gordon Hirshhorn. It is possible – memory here fails me! – that I had told Tritter I had given up on psychotherapists, and Tritter had replied something like Why not try his friend, since I had nothing to lose by it?