209. Don't Know Mind

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Hef

Hugh Hefner died the other day. When I first saw the notice online I didn't think much of it, but then I kept seeing more. Finally, I read the AP obit by Andrew Dalton (here). I don't think I had known he came from a strict Methodist family (northern persuasion). I didn't know he had been married three times -- and that doesn't even include his years with Barbi Benton, the ultimate Playmate. He claims to have bedded over a thousand women. But the line I found most interesting was, “He acknowledged, at age 85, that 'I never really found my soulmate.' ”

It occurs to me that tossing out a claim to have slept with over a thousand women would be a clever way to force everyone to rethink everything they thought they knew about me when I die.

I was a regular Playboy reader (yes, I read all the articles and fiction) in my teens. By the time I was in college I had too much else on my plate, and the Playboy sense of style was diverging too much from my reality. Also, at some point during my college years the women in the pictorials went from enticing to odd looking. After that I didn't pay much attention to Playboy or Hefner. He represented yet another of those culture shifts in the 1960s that were not all that interesting after the fact.

Whenever some event (or crime) at the Playboy Mansion would be in the news, it was almost like when they trot out the last survivors of the Army of the Potomac, or the last Great War survivors, or here in SF, the last people who remembered the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Cultivate Don't Know Mind

From The Five Invitations
This is the fifth invitation. This is also something I think I'm pretty good at. Reading the passage I'm about to quote got me thinking of something inappropriate for this book, but not so inappropriate when you consider the history of Japanese warrior monks,

p253 We've all had moments when we discovered solutions to our problems without needing to "figure them out." We've said things like, "All of a sudden, it became clear," or "The answer just came to me," or "There was no question in my mind what I had to do." When we slow down enough to listen carefully, we can hear what the Quakers call "the still, small voice within." What we often refer to as our intuition. It is a quality of mind that senses what is needed without relying solely on rational processes.

When we don't know where we are going, we have to remain fully present, carefully feeling our way inch by inch, moment by moment. We have to stay close to our actual experiences. When we don't know, anything is possible because we are not limited by old habits of thinking or others' points of view. We see the bigger picture. Not knowing leaves room for wisdom to arise, for the situation itself to inform us.

I still hope to run into a Zen, Japanese assessment of Admiral Spruance in the Pacific War, but failing that, this will just about do. Don't know mind is central to Clausewitz's notion of battlefield intuition. Hooker's conduct of his Chancellorsville battle was a disaster because he was so sure he knew one thing, that he couldn't recognize the signs that contradicted that belief. And this happens over and over in military history. 

At Midway, Spruance was blessed with Don't know mind when it came to the conduct of carrier operations because he had just assumed command (Halsey was ill) and was never intended to be the force commander (Fletcher had his flagship knocked out of the battle and turned command over to Spruance). And, really, since this was only the second carrier vs carrier battle, no one really knew what they were doing. Yet he was able, with his staff, to come up with an inspired plan and then to stick with it when someone else would have been tempted to respond in the way the Japanese hoped. On the night following the first day of battle, he completely thwarted the Japanese hopes and sent a frustrated Yamamoto steaming back to Japan by simply sailing away from the battle. For the Japanese, there was no possible response to his refusing battle until the following day. Had he known more, or thought he had known more, it could easily have ended very differently.

I'm reminded now of a line I quoted before from My Name is Lucy Barton,

"You will have only one story," she had said. "You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one."


The way I keep returning to Spruance, or at least to the Pacific War, makes me think that may be my story.