Rimbaud’s poetry would not be complete without his salacious poems Conneries. Picasso’s oeuvre cannot exclude the erotic drawings that reflect so much of his life. Similarly, a eulogy to my friend Leslie Marenchin would not be complete without mentioning his humor, irreverence, and blunt directness. Fate spared me from seeing Leslie’s face at his last moment. It would have disappointed me to see anything but laughter in it. Making him laugh always brought me great pleasure because his laughter was so frank and joyous, and because he himself had a great sense of humor. One of the last photographs I took of him catches him in open laughter. It was at a Thanksgiving dinner at Fernando Casas’s house in Magnolia just a couple of weeks ago. It is probably the last picture taken of him.
It turns out that I have taken the last pictures of a couple of my friends and now, those still alive don’t want me to photograph them anymore. Leslie would have laughed at the insinuation that perhaps my camera is cursed. After all, we are philosophers and we do not believe in omens, superstition, or other-wordly existence. Moreover, everybody’s last picture was taken by somebody.
Last Thanskgiving I brought to Magnolia a slide presentation of photographs I have taken at Fernando’s house since 1982. Oddly, enough although I did take some of Leslie I could not find them among my negatives and he was not in the presentation. Leslie did not seem to mind. Rather, upon seeing a picture of Fernando’s sister Becky, as a younger sexier woman, Leslie told her bluntly, “Damn, you were so sexy, I should have fucked you then.” That was the Leslie that we all knew: the Pennsylvania son of a car mechanic and a school teacher who decided to dedicate himself to the understanding of the ideas that make us think and act one way or another.
Leslie and I went to graduate school at Rice University. He had gotten there one before I did, but we attended several seminars together. At the time all philosophy graduate students were forced to take a seminar with a certain professor whose vision of philosophy was rather shallow. In a faculty party, he went up the department chairman to ask why we had to take this professor’s seminar. After hearing an evasive and unconvincing answer, Leslie said to him, “Oh come on, you know he sucks.”
So it was that that son of Pennsylvania and this son of Lima and New York became friends. It was I who brought Leslie to the philosophy reading group that began at Fernando Casas’ apartment and at my apartment on Bartlett street. Leslie came on board after Fernando and Steve Adams built their house in Magnolia in 1982 and the reading group moved there. I baptized it with the name “The Magnolia Circle” –alluding to the Vienna Circle, the group of philosophers that congregated around Moritz Schlick in the 1920s in Vienna. The irony in the naming did not hinge on our depth of philosophical thinking but rather on the uneven comparison between Magnolia and Vienna. As to the circle part, we were always too few to even suggest a circle, we were a quadrilateral at best and when we were five we would not have called ourselves “The Magnolia Pentagon.” Fernando Casas, our philosopher/painter, made a notable painting titled “The Magnolia Circle” that excludes me (I believe I was too busy playing soccer) but includes a depiction of Leslie.
If I remember correctly, when Leslie joined the group we were reading Sir Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge, or maybe it was “Gödel, Escher, Bach.” I am not sure. Before I introduced Leslie to Fernando, I described the latter as one of the most sincere and generous persons I have ever met, but I warned Leslie, that he did not have much of a sense of humor. So they met and we read and discussed, after which we usually had wine, cheese and freshly-baked bread that Steve would prepare for us. One of the first jokes that Leslie told in Fernando’s presence was “Why do dogs lick their balls?” Of course the punch-line is “Because they can.” Everybody laughed except Fernando who kept asking for explanations and Leslie laughed even more because he realized my warning had been on target. That is how our friendship was cemented: through meals, jokes, readings, discussions, and arguments about some of the great books of philosophy. Leslie’s manner of philosophizing was always piercing, somewhat skeptical and always well-informed. When he was not informed about something, he never feigned knowledge he did not have.
One of my favorite anecdotes about Leslie occurred during a very formal New Year’s Eve party that Becky Soria and Bruce Leutwyler hosted at their home. The guests were spread out through the dining and living rooms and speaking rather quietly and demurely. Some may have even been wearing tuxedos. It was just too quiet for Leslie, rather like a… dare I say it? Funeral. So Leslie walked into the room and yelled out so everyone could hear, “OK everybody drop your pants and show your dicks.”
Socrates, the father of philosophy, died by his own hand, Bertrand Russell died of influenza, Ludwig Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer, our Leslie died as a result of falling down the stairs. It was an accident. In philosophy accidental properties are those that something does not need to have to be what it is. Philosophers have generally not focused on accidental properties, but on essential properties. Yet life is full of accidents that substantially affect it one way or another. Our lives today have been affected by an accident. It was an accident that I met Leslie and that I introduced him to many of the people who today are eulogizing him. We could argue healthily about whether Leslie’s humor was essential or accidental to who he was. If we judge by the statements of his students in the blog that honors him, his humor and his often irreverent language was constitutive of who Leslie was. What was not accidental was that he took his students on a journey across the ideas that affect our lives and ways of thinking: causality, mind, justice, nation, truth, knowledge, God, freedom, beauty, life, etc. These ideas are not mere descriptions; some of them are philosophical or deserve philosophical scrutiny. They have a history and they fall inside a web of connections that deeply affect us. The life that Leslie led ended with an accident, but it was essentially a philosophical life. - Fernando Castro
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