Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2363.

Letter from Heath’s grandson, Irvan Thomas O’Connell with the Marines in Korea, MABS-12 MAG-12, MAG-12, FMAW PMP c/o FPO San Francisco, to Heath’s grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum

March 8, 1954

 

 

You are coming to deserve your name, 0 Spencer Heath. Instead of sending me the exchange of letters between Popdaddy and Mr. Kirk, you sent me two copies of Popdaddy’s. So send me a copy of the reply, if you would.

     My honcho’s house burned down last night. Korean houses are made of mud and thatch; when once the thatch lights the occupant is lucky to get himself out alive. Honcho woke up, got himself out alive with his wife in one arm and his new sewing machine under the other. Everything else, “All gone, no anything left.” My cooks took up a collection for him. Today I was inquiring into the price and rents of houses roundabout the base. I find that a small, good native house costs $75.00 to build. I base my dollar calculations on an exchange rate of 400 Hwan to the Dollar, a rate that can be obtained after negotiations of some intricacy and risk. A house of this type in turn rents for $75.00 a year. If I had known these things before I would have gone into the business here. I could own fifty houses by now. On purpose I have not bothered to find out the difficulties involved in this venture. 100% return does not grow on trees. Without having to ask I can imagine some good reasons for investing elsewhere.     Since 1950 the Communists have come down into this area twice. Very discouraging those people to budding landlords. The Hwan depreciates at one third of a percent per day. If the free rate of exchange continues in greenbacks, the decline need not discourage an investor in real estate. At present there is no rent control and no exchange control, not that the state here wants these matters to be free so much as it lacks the means for manipulating them — at present. I can assume that there is a confiscatory rate of taxation. That could be adjusted.    The governor here is a good man, but he is only paid 1500 Hwan a month. Still, I would like to own some mud huts.

     Learn all you can from Popdaddy, Spencer. He has got hold of some hunks of The Truth. Some night he is going to run his automobile into an immovable object of one sort or another. It will be a little lonely not having our own oracle to go to any more. As you have found out yourself I suppose, if you can get him to work on an idea that is new to him, or to go beyond in his thinking where he was before, you will find yourself following along with his thoughts and therefore interested. Or perhaps it is that one becomes familiar with what I would call his ‘frame of reference’. He has a vocabulary of special words which have special meanings of his own. These must be learnt. Even to admit that the word ‘market’ or ‘politician’ can be used validly as he uses them is to admit the validity of half his thesis. One is not going to understand his language until one knows his words. But no one will learn his words if one thinks the whole language is gibberish, as it is unless one knows what he means by his terms. But I have reduced this simile into too simple terms myself. Then again original thinkers do not think like other people. Nor does Popdaddy. There are a swarm of logical objections that any fool knows to the thinking of any new thought. If there were not many logical objections, any fool would have thought the idea up long ago. The real mind had to feel its way through and somehow above these ‘reasons against’, sensing that there are hidden fallacies in them somewhere and that he will only find them by continuing his line of thought beyond where the others have stopped. When the thinker finds something in ‘the beyond’ that seems to justify his excursion, for a long time it will only seem to him to justify it. The chances are that the objections to his line of thought are based on a whole wrong theory, be it of oxidation or the solar system, and it will take months of examination to right these fallacies even in the thinker’s own mind. His examination of the fallacy would be in terms of pure common logic, but his ‘lead’ without which he cannot examine the fallacy fruitfully has come to him part guess-work part feeling. You know Popdaddy on inspiration and the Holy Spirit, and he is good here. So that a valuable thinker appears at times to be quite without logic. Certainly our Grandfather is not bothered by other people’s thought-trains.  Whether or not this is a prerequisite to original thought, as I have tried to show that it is, this is a poor type of mind for converting people. That type of priest must be aware of just what his pupil thinks he is thinking and, more important, of what the pupil is feeling. But then this man could not think for himself. Rather, his mind is like a vine than a tree.

     For the sources of Popdaddy’s thought, or at least for the tools with which he has worked, go to Emerson’s essays for some bits of his philosophy and to Henry George for some of the economic terms. Popdaddy would explode at this last, but he was involved with these people for so long that he does use certain of their terms even though he disagrees with them. Indeed, PD would not like my tracing sources of any kind; such activities ought to be left for scholars and other low-life. Though Emerson is America’s one philosopher and George her one political theorist. Emerson is not fashionable now, not enough dogma to him, but he is a great man.

     Spence, write me a real letter sometime. And I must write your brother and my cousin, and his family. I try to work something out on the typewriter each evening to maintain some kind of motion in the fluids upstairs. Let me read this thing over and see what the Hell I have written..

Yours,

Cpl O’Connell

He has been promoted though, and is now ‘The Lieutenant’