The responses to my observations about anxiety dreams got me
thinking about Willard Van Orman Quine, Erik Erikson, and Calypso. What, you might ask, could the connection
possibly be? It is like this:
Erikson, somewhere [I think in Childhood and Society], observes that people have styles in
dreaming. Some people always dream in Technicolor,
others dream in Black and White. Some
folks have cluttered dreams, filled with all manner of dream elements, as
psychoanalysts call them; others have
very spare dreams, with only a few elements.
This does seem to be a matter of style -- those who dream in Technicolor,
for example, will do so whether the feeling tone of the dream is anxiety,
erotic desire, anger, or simple curiosity.
Inasmuch as I graduated from Harvard in 1953 after taking
one undergraduate and two graduate logic courses with Quine, I naturally was
reminded by Erikson's observation of a line in Quine's elegant little
collection, From a Logical Point of View,
which was published that year. In the lead essay, "On What There
Is," Quine describes himself at one point as having a "taste for
desert landscapes" -- a fact, he suggests, that inclines him to spare ontologies.
Quine, all of us students knew, had rather eclectic cultural
tastes, and so it was obvious where he had found the title for his book. The source was a Calypso song made popular by
the young Harry Belafonte whose refrain is "So from a logical point of
view/Always marry a woman uglier than you." I recall thinking that this was a really
nifty choice of a title.
1 comment:
The song "Ugly Woman" was popularized by Roaring Lion back in the 30s. I don't know of a version by Belafonte, but he may very well have done it in his live shows. Actor Robert Mitchum did a version of the song re-titled as "From a Logical Point of View" in the late 50s.
The huge hit "If You Wanna Be Happy" which was recorded by Jimmy Soul in '63 was a rocked-up cover version of "Ugly Woman" but in that version the lyric is changed to "From my personal point of view . . ."
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