I first met Herb in the late eighties. We were both Software Engineers hired by the now renamed Northeast Utilities. We ate lunch together almost always exclusively. We were hired to create a test emulator to simulate Millstone. Seemingly the entire staff was *very* Jesus religious. As such, faith often trumped reasoned discussion. The China Syndrome movie was fresh in those days. We had each other to talk to.
We talked about raising our unacknowledged concerns about the veracity of certain tests with a [German co-incidentally and darkly humorously] manager who claimed to have an open door policy. Herb helped talk me out of walking through that open door. The building we worked in on the Berlin turnpike was simply identified by a number and set into the landscape so as to feel like a bunker once inside. So along a side wall of managerial offices, our manager had arranged his office so that his back was to the door opening and his daily gaze was at an undecorated far wall.
Herb cautioned me as to the subliminal significance of the manager's back to the door. The "open door" policy was someone else's idea unless you happened not to get the signalling going on. I left a few months later and arranged an exit interview in which I gave Northeast Utilities an earful. Herb left soon after. Many years later, Northeast Utilities invited back their critics - I never bothered going back - remembering the experience as not ever being worthwhile.
I didn't know what to make of Herb at first. Intellectually, he covered a LOT of ground. We were both interested in everything but Herb not only had breadth but he had unusual depth of knowledge. Our interests were so perfectly aligned that I thought I was being fooled.
In college, when I was training to be a teacher, I had read Alvin Toffler's
Future Shock as part of the curriculum. By cosmic co-incidence, Herb had been interviewed and quoted by Toffler in the writing of the book and Herb's contribution was the education specific substance. To this day, the most famous quote that the book is known by originated with Herb, "
Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."
So a year or two later, Herb called me about a teaching position at Mohegan Community College (later renamed to Three Rivers) in Norwich, CT where he was teaching at the time (1990ish). He convinced me that the long-distressed community needed good instructors and that based on our conversations, he was convinced I was it.
Sold. I taught there part-time for approximately six years. There were young policemen, nurses, and laid off Groton shipyard workers all there to learn personal computers. That's what Herb and I did. They left knowing their stuff - maybe better than individuals being -cough- "trained" by their corporate sponsors.
Along the way, Herb and I continued our dialogues. One Holiday season I wrote a Christmas card to my Studio art mentor from the University of Nebraska, Richard Trickey, some time later I got a card from his wife telling me that Richard had died tragically in a car accident and thanked me for the card and memories it contained. We talked about this.
Herb spoke about something he had once read that essentially said that knowledge was a baton that gets passed along. When a mentor of yours expires the baton is passed to you and you are expected to expand and extend its scope. In other words, like a game of mortal tag, *you're now IT!*.
In another conversation, I had been deeply reading the Joseph Campbell and Elizabeth Pagels work on the Gnostic Gospels and followed that with concentric circles of cross-reference material. Herb, upon hearing this siad that if I thought the Gnostic Gospels were interesting then I should also read the Jewish mystics and he pointed me to The Tales of Rabbi Nachman which I subsequently devoured.
Herb knew the map and the territory like few others I have ever met - a brilliant man in a dimly lit world.
He wrote many, many poems that I advocated he self-publish. He wrote a prayer book and many many other topical essays that I hope don't get lost.
A typical email correspondence between the two of us looked like (and this is curated Nov. 2011 content):
"
Herb, I'm doing some research on post-modernism. what can you tell me about Isaac Luria?
Hi, Frank,
As always, it is good to hear from you.
-snip-
I assume you Googled "Isaac Luria" and learned that he was a 16th-century kabbalist of the Safed school, known as the Ari (lion). I would be pleased to chat with you about him in some live interactive format, such as telephone. However, I probably have little or nothing to add to what you would find online. "
Later:
"Hi again, Frank,
1. I think the most interesting aspect of kabbalistic thinking is its cosmogony. It is an unusual take on the classical philosophical conundrum: How reconcile an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God with the presence in the world of suffering and evil? In that connection, I'll quote an excerpt from commentary in a Jewish prayer book I have been writing:
Starting with the seventh line [of Psalm 92], the psalm addresses a (perhaps the) question for those who believe in a good God: how can an omnipotent good God tolerate injustice, that at least sometimes the wicked prosper and the good or innocent suffer? There have been many answers. Philosophers Epicurus and David Hume argued that God is either not omnipotent or not good. Some gnostics maintained that God is not good. Other philosophers, e.g., Plato, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Henry Huxley, suggested that God is not omnipotent. Philosopher William James concluded God is either not omnipotent or not omniscient. The psalmist asserts that prosperity by the wicked is, at most, a temporary aberration. Rashi suggested that the psalmist was referring to the time after the coming of Messiah, the “Great Sabbath,” when indeed there will be no injustice. Hindus and Hassidism's founder, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1698-1760), the Good Master of the Name, believe justice is achieved by reincarnation; many Christians believe it is achieved by afterlife in heaven or hell; many Buddhists believe suffering, just or unjust, is transcended by learning to detach from life's lures and distractions. Some Jewish mystics suggest that injustice in the world reflects flaws or “bugs” in God's creation that we humans were created to remedy [tikkun]. Philosopher F. H. Bradley had a similar view. Thomas Aquinas, the eminent thirteenth-century Catholic theologian, argued that injustice makes possible good aspects of God's creation otherwise impossible. For example, suffering by the good or innocent gives them an opportunity to exhibit the virtue of faithfully and trustingly enduring their misfortune.
Some Jewish kabbalists attributed injustice and evil to the misfit between an infinite God and God's finite creations, which at the time of Creation caused God's infinite creative energy to shatter those aspects or portions of the nascent finite universe closest to God's infinity, thereby partially reducing to chaos the universe's initial orderly beauty, and thus, by randomly intermixing Good and Bad, making the entropy of the universe higher. Consequently, God, the Great Separator/Divider ("Who separates darkness from light," etc.) is the Source of entropy reduction, and God wants humans to participate in this cosmic task, despite or notwithstanding the presence in humans of intermingled Good and Evil.
Note: the above viewpoint is a thoroughly pre-modern way of treating Good and Evil. They are, in this view, attributes, much as in medieval thinking even existence was considered an attribute (so there might be things, e.g., centaurs, that did not have the attribute of existence but otherwise were in the universe). For more on these last comments, you might want to read some of my currently favorite philosopher's writings -- Raymond Smullyan.
Wittenstein wrote in Latin in part because he wanted to discourage his ideas being read by those he considered philosophical amateurs, who, he was convinced, could not possibly understand his ideas.
Tune in later for the next thrilling episode of "Reality Faces Philosophy," in which we will hear Ma Reality say, "The older I get, the more memories I acquire that I am at risk of forgetting," and her (tor)mentor reply, "The simpler something is, the easier it is to remember. So, I am going to teach you something infinitely simple, and therefore you will be unable to forget it."
-- Herb G.
Over the decades we would meet and attempt to meet every few years. It was always hit or miss.
In recent years his grand children consumed his schedule for a while and my latest attempt to contact him garnered no response. That's when I knew something might be wrong.
I'm going to miss him.
His blog:
http://nexialistics.blogspot.com/?zx=fe72f4870f816c91Some remembrances:
http://www.kehilatchaverim.org/wp-content/uploads/KC-Newsletter-May2019.pdf
