MY LIFE IN THE GOLDEN AGE

OF EPISTEMOLOGY

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

Commencement Address Delivered By Sunshine Baroni, E.D.

Before The Waldorf School of The Biminis

"Oh Money, Pad My Home!"

-- Motto of The American Confederation of Epistemologists

 

his is what we had: Soul.  Artistic sensibility.  Spiritual insight.

This is what they had:  Money.

While we ex-Flower Children played musical saucepans under the leaks in our starter homes, the yuppies cut coke in their Bahamian condos.  We had opted for the higher things.  They had chosen the mundane.  But our kids, just like theirs, yammered for rollerblades, college educations and motorized miniature Porsches.

We had to come to an accommodation.  It's a simple equation: soul for dollars.  We knew that somewhere along the line, the fat cats would start to feel the itch of what they were missing.  They'd start clipping those "WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS" ads from the back pages of Fortune and Money.  They'd haunt art galleries and endow grant-giving foundations for geniuses of this sort or that.  Maybelle did a reading and assured us that the time was near.

I'm the one who did the actual footwork.  I fronted small bucks for a post office box and a phone listing.  A guy at Kinko's helped me design the letterhead for the A.C.E. (American Confederation of Epistemologists).  I donated twenty-five  to the Policemen's Ball and registered with a few strategic Chambers of Commerce -- Mill Valley, Martha's Vineyard, Scarsdale, East Lansing, low profile venues with high real estate values.

I lobbied for licensing laws.  I figured, if Nixon could legitimize dominoes and Reagon could sell trickledown, I've at least got a shot with La Nausee (A Disorder of the Apperceptive Faculty).  Turns out, I was right, and in a big way.  California -- no surprise -- was the first state to establish a Board of Epistemological Examiners, but Massachusetts and Guam were close behind.

My first move, personnel-wise, was to locate B.A.'s in Philosophy or the Arts.  I found them everywhere -- washing dishes, driving diaper trucks, doing Performance Art in church coffee houses, pushing grocery carts full of deposit bottles, you name it.  Anywhere there's no money.  All of them had bills, kids, and grey hair.  Signing them on was no problemo.

We ran our first ad in The Wall Street Journal:

 

WHO ARE YOU?

WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW?

La Nausee (A Disorder of the Apperceptive Faculty)

strikes one out of four yuppies!

The A.C.E. recommends that businesspersons above the age of 33

see their Family Epistemologist twice yearly

for a Routine Checkup and Sensorial Cleaning.

(CALL 1-555-WHO-ISIT FOR REGIONAL REFERRALS!)

 

I wanted to make it one in three yuppies, but Maybelle cautioned me not to be greedy.  Four, she said, was a numerologically appealing figure.

This ad appeared just about the time that the midlife crisis thing was getting big and Japanese corporations were threatening American money.  We got so many responses we had to hire on a dozen secretaries to deal with them.  Actually, it would have taken only three or four, but we insisted on postgrad work in an artistic discipline or philosophy.

 

oday when people walk into an epistemologist's office with all the glittering mind lenses, the chrome-plated mobile epistemometers and sterile trays of personality components, they often fail to realize that a mere ten years ago, epistemology was an armchair science.  It had no more basis in fact than handicapping college football or guessing celebrity sun signs.

Today, nobody in six figures lifts a brow without an epistemological scan.  After all, it might not be your brow.  And how do you know you're lifting it and not knitting it or furrowing it or, if they actually turn out to be lips, for example, pursing or puckering or blowing a kiss.  Everybody asks themselves things like that nowadays.  But honestly, it wasn't always so.

My first patient, for example, was a mid-level executive from  a well known optical processing concern.  "I don't know who I am," is what he told my receptionist, a Comparative Religions major from Oberlin.  She gave him the usual form to fill out, which requires new patients to record, in their own hand, the date, their annual income in both letters and numerals, and their name -- in cursive.  Basically, it's to make sure that, in spite of any cognitive ambiguities, they can still write a cashable check.

Maybelle ushered Hannibal Lewis, II into a small waiting room and invited him to exchange his three-piece charcoal grey for a white hospital gown, split down the back.  This immediately establishes the proper doctor-patient status relation.

"Doctor Baroni will see you shortly."  Then she flipped two flags above the door outside -- a red one (annual income in the high six figures, with stock options) and a blue one (Air sign with impending Saturn return -- candy from a baby).

After a suitably intimidating pause I sauntered in, grimacing at my clipboard -- I had been unable to soak off the bar code sticker, and I was squinting to see if there was a message hidden in the pattern, as Maybelle had told us at the last A.C.E. koffeeklatch. "Well, what seems to be the problem, Mr. . . . uh . . . Lupis, was it?"

"Uh, Lewis, yes. I saw this ad in The Wall Street Journal . . ."

"Are you sure it was you who saw it?"

"I remember seeing it."

"Yes, but is the one who remembers the same as the one who saw?"

Pinter pause.

"Why, I think so."

"Mmmm!  Put this on."  I pulled the now-familiar Noematic Mask™ from its rotary canister over the magazine rack (The Monist, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, The Journal of Metaphysics and Ontology, Money).

He pressed his face into the ring of nose putty along the rim of the Noematic Mask ™, an objet I had designed with three Conceptual Artists from Berkeley, using World War II surplus items.  "I see a dark surface," he said, I think, although it was hard to tell with that thing over his puss.  "There are fluid colors, iridescent blue and red.  And they smell like garlic."  That was the rotini I'd had for lunch; I had used the thing to cover my eyes for my aftermeal siesta.

"Yes, very good!  Now, who's seeing it?"

"Why, I am, Doctor Baroni . . . aren't I?"

"Mr. Loomis -- or whomever I am addressing right now -- I don't want to alarm you at this early juncture -- Further tests are indicated -- but I believe you are suffering from an Acute Noetic Dysfunction [PATENT PENDING]."

"My God!  It isn't . . . la nausee?"

But it's treatable, of course.  The initial visit runs them seven seventy-five to twelve hundred or so, depending on the patient's line 32 gross income and whether they ask me any questions (at $79.99 a pop).  Tests and procedures are extra, of course.  What with the cost of acrylics, gold leaf and reprographics for the flash cards and slides, the Eidetic Variation Inventory ™ alone can run into fairly big bucks.

But that's just pin money for a decent epistemologist.  Identity Shift is where the serious revenue pours in.

We start in the street outside the office.  Those indigents you see in our professional plazas, building bonfires near the dumpster, are all pro actors earning Equity scale.  Nobody with a briefcase or sensible heels can get past them.  Their mission?  (Listen up now.  This is subtle.)  To act as if the yuppies aren't there; to shoulder right past them to gotanickel someone else.

Timing is everything.  Using Maybelle's mood ring method, along with an amber pendulum she received from a Theosophical mail order house, we have metered veritable Grand Canyons and Matterhorns of adrenaline.  When the suits first spot our episto-shills, their levels spike.  Then, when the bum squad gives them the bum's rush, their encephalograms, believe you me, are strictly static and tide foam.  You should see the jaws drop.

Then comes the sign-in.  Typical exchange:

"Miss . . . ?  Miss . . . ?  Miss . . . ?  Miss . . . ?"

"Oh, sorry.  Have you been standing there long?"

"Yes, I . . .   Miss . . . ?  Miss . . . ?  Miss . . . ?"

"May I help you?"

"I'm Hannibal Lewis, II.  I have a two o'clock with Dr. Baroni."

"Were you speaking just now?"

"Yes, I have a two o'clock . . . "

"I don't see it in my book, Mr. Bloom."

"Lewis.  I confirmed it yester . . .   Miss . . . ? Miss . . . ?"

"Yes?  Is there something I can do for you?"

"I just told you.  I've come to see an epistemologist."

"No need to be snooty.  Whom is the appointment for?"

"Why, for me, Hannibal Bloo, I mean, Lewis, II."

"Will he be coming into the office today?"

"I'm already . . .  Miss . . . ?  Miss . . . ?"

The point, of course, is to undermine the patient's sense of his or her own solidity as an individual entity, or both.  Honestly, it's very therapeutic.  Read the Diamond Sutra -- Nobody really exists anyway, see what I mean?  (That's my defense when my karma ripens and they sue.  Anyway, we're insured against malpractice actions, and many of the strategic judges are patients.)

You can see -- assuming it's really you, ha ha! -- that by the time Maybelle checks the afflicted into their little rooms and flips those colored flags, the groundwork has been carefully laid, or laid bare would be a better phrase.  I often find them studying their driver's license photo to see if it's definitely them; given human vanity and the current state of ID photography, this generally works to my advantage.

After the Noematic Mask ™ shakedown, they're ready for the sockdolager:  "Mr. Lukash -- or whoever you are -- before we go any further, I have a rather important question.  How do you earn your living?"  I generally try to say this while facing a little to the patient's left, and when they squirm into view, I switch to the right to wait for the answer.

"I coordinate team building and multi-level planning at Kodox, Incorporated."  For example.

"Are you sure that's you you're talking about?"

"Huh?"

On this cue, as predictable as a virgin's blush, Maybelle knocks.  I let her in, and she hands me a large manila envelope.  She frowns at me, flashes a concerned look at a spot just to the patient's right, shakes her head gravely, and leaves us.

"Look here, Mr. Mumblefzz, this is a hypostatic scan of your sensorium."  I unsheath the collage my staff of Fine Arts Master's Candidates has prepared for just this maneuver.  It's about the size of a complete spinal x-ray, and it comprises singed ephemeris clippings, Library of Congress call numbers, FBI line drawings of at-large multiple felons, and bar graphs of pork butt futures from The Wall Street Journal.  "Do you see yourself at Kodox anywhere on this stat?"

"Why, I can't say that I do."

"Now this is my hypostat . . . "  -- Unfolding a similar sheet from my stethoscope pocket -- "Look here . . . " -- Mars transiting three counterfeiters, The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini and a run on strategic metals -- "See that set of impressions in the upper left corner, the apperceptive psychonoeses next to the alaya vijnana limen?  See the Kodox sign over the door?  The oval conference tables?  The mission statements, the Ropes Sessions and executive retreats?  Mr. Bluet, that's my job you described.  I'm the one who's the Kodox executive.  You, sir, have an Epistemological Displacement with severe Identity Shift.  And you've been collecting my paycheck."

"Oh my God, can you help me?"

They don't always immediately sign all their paychecks over.  The bank accounts and securities can take as long as six weeks.  But they generally come round.

Let's face it.  Most people nowadays don't have a clue as to who they really are, and major portions of their lives are blindspotlit and darkling.  Folks with dough will swallow anything; I mean, anything they haven't already swallowed.  Look at Scientology.  Look at Zen.  Look at EST, In Pursuit of Excellence, the Catholic Church, for heaven's sake.  We epistemologists are just making a little pocket change compared to them.  We aren't even tax exempt yet.  And our smoke and mirrors are Toys-R-Us next to the F.A.O. Schwartz of the major religions, for example.

I say, it's about time we soulful dudes, the artists and thinkers and spiritual mavens, got our piece of the pie.  Bon apetit, my fellow epistemologists and future epistemologists!  And thank God for the unexamined life.  As Maybelle says, it foots the bills for us examined ones.