Why Are Doctors So Afraid of Apples?

           

            On Wednesday at around 10:30 I went to the food bank to get a number. Again, the line-up was already past, but I got an earlier number than the week before. When the receptionist handed me number 19 and told me she’d see me at 13:30, I complained that no one had told me about the early start the week before. She said that they hadn’t known about it either. It turned out that the news crew were there for a shorter period than they’d expected, so they just let everyone come in afterwards and so they were finished earlier than expected. She apologized that I’d been inconvenienced.

            When I went out to unlock my bike, Marlon was standing nearby and commented that I had a strong bike. I said, “I do?” He justified his comment by saying that it has to be strong to carry me around. I told him that it’s needed a lot of adjustments in order to fit my body, since it had previously belonged to my ex-girlfriend. I’d had to put an extension bar on in order to raise the seat to the proper height. He repeated the standard measurement of the seat needing to come up to one’s hip, which in my case would be way off, as my seat is far above my hip when I stand beside my bike. I pointed out that a better measurement should be between the pedal and the seat, since pedals are not all the same distance from the ground. If one is sitting on the seat with one’s foot on the pedal and one’s leg is only slightly bent, that’s a good measurement.

            I went home for a while, took a shower and tidied up, then did some writing before heading back to the food bank. They were at number 10 when I arrived, so it wasn’t a long wait.

            There were a few more choices this time around. I took a bag of glazed almonds, because almonds are expensive at the supermarket; a bag of potato thins, which kind of look like potato chips on the package but are really a cracker made from potato flour; a few granola bars; three juice boxes; a can of broad beans; a couple of quarter boxes of saltines; and a box of Shreddies, which was my favourite cereal when I was a kid. There was no room in my backpack for the Shreddies, so I opened up a Presidents Choice cloth bag and put it in there. My volunteer reached into my backpack, removed the crackers and the potato thins and put them in the bag with the Shreddies, because he said the soft stuff might get crushed.

            In Sue’s section I got some Maple yogourt. She said she hadn’t seen me for a while. I told her that I had been there the week before. It was true though that I’d been away for a whole month before that though. I got a bag of something that looked like little chunks of white granola, but I think it was frozen chunks of chopped chicken. There were also some egg patties and some ranch flavoured veggie dip.

            In the bread section I took some cranberry buns that were already wrapped in plastic, but some other loaves were not wrapped. I reached for one because it looked like raisin bread but when I saw that it had chopped olives, I put it back, but then Theresa, who was standing nearby in the vegetable section told me, “If you touch it, you have to take it, dear!” Of course, that made perfect sense and I felt thoughtless and corrected for it, but not guilty. I put the olive bread in my bag. She indicated the tongs that were hanging on the side of the shelf and I nodded that I got it. I took another loaf that had pumpkin seeds on the crust, with my hands again because I knew I wouldn’t be putting it back. Theresa had some bags of mushrooms, which I’d never seen at the food bank before, so I took one. I took an apple from her and on my way out the door she gave me another, because, “You know, they keep the doctor away!” I imagined swarms of doctors attacking me on the street and apples, like garlic against vampires, being the only effective bane.

            I read Sinclair Ross’s “The Painted Door” again. Our Short Story test would be the next Tuesday. The only stories we’d be tested on were the one’s we’d looked at since the previous test and that excluded Gabrielle Roy as well because of the essay. I wanted to re-read as many as I could before then. That would be our final class.

            Sinclair Ross was a very strong writer and “The Painted Door” is a well-composed study in loneliness in a storm, leading to infidelity.

            I watched an episode of the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show from 1953. After watching a movie about a couple that discover after several years that they’re not legally married (I think that was a rare Hitchcock comedy) Gracie gets it into her head that she and George were never really married either. George sends for Jack Benny to straighten it all out, since he had been a witness at their wedding. Gracie and Jack are having coffee. She asks if he wants sugar. He says “Two spoons please.” Gracie shrugs and puts two spoons into his cup.

The Madison Twist

            On Tuesday just before Philosophy class Naama told me that Professor Gibbs had given her an extension on her essay because she’d had to work, so she still hadn’t yet handed it in.

            The professor announced that they would be giving us the exam questions in advance so we can work out what kind of essays we will write on April 26. He told us that on that day the information chips would be removed from our brains prior to the test. He added that if we cheat we will get high marks for our understanding of truth and untruth but we will fail in ethics.

            He continued talking about Levinas’s “Meaning and Sense” and made a list of categories:

1)      Differential

2)      Cultural (covers Heidegger and the whole 20^th Century) Language is derivative. There is no outside and no prior experience. Meaning is around networks and so series of words can capture it.

3)      Economic – need. Language names what is there, or words work on horizon. But reality is human needs that produce meanings such as “feed the hungry” or “welcome the refugees”.

4)      Ethics – face. Signifies before language and calls for language. Revolves on a desire that cannot be fulfilled.

When cultures meet they don’t always fight. Sometimes they study each other.

A word points to a thing or idea and then it is spoken to someone that is not a

cultural signifier and is not given. The other person signifies in a more radical way. To speak to someone is to recognize them. Face to face the other has the capacity to signify an epiphany or visitation.

Some would say that results are not important.

The other is anyone because everyone has a face. The face is not a catalogue of traits. It challenges categories. One looks back at a disclosure. The other can deny classifications. The face breaks from its own presence and speaks. The face talks back and challenges. Meaning comes from challenge. The face is absolved from context. How to describe the face when words can’t grasp it? A face fowls the intentionality to classify. What is at stake is calling consciousness into question. Something more in overflow. But it is not the consciousness of calling into question. Consciousness creates context to deal with this. The problem is to be aware. Face to face we are disarmed. The I loses self-confidence. It is expelled from rest and sent into exile. Fall into doubt about the project of knowing. We have a summons and it is not pleasant. Being called to speak is a call to a type of pacific relationship. This call from the other creates responsibility. You can fight but they want to refound you. To be put in question is how to overcome the ego. When a beggar asks you for money you are responsible. No one can replace me. When the other summons me I can’t use a stand-in. Morality comes first. There is an infinite responsibility and no limit to the summons. We are infinitely responsible to every summons. We are responsible to infinity, which we cannot reach because it is need’s endless desire. A person is finite but the face is beyond the person and it calls me infinitely. This is radical ethics. This is where language begins. The other is a critique of my self-mastery. It has an urgent temporality. The present is too late. This is why we talk. Humility does not negate the self. The urgency does not come from me but from the other. Ethics precede language and culture is presupposed by language. In ethical experience I find something more fundamental than the world and it unmakes my world. This meaning precedes cultural signs. Check presuppositions at the door.

Others think that all relations are lateral. Western morality is colonial. When we denounce it, it is in honour of the person. The goal of a non-judgmental society, grounded in ethics is an inching toward Platonism and maybe even metaphysics. The face breaks from form and left behind is the trace, whether it is disclosed or not. The trace does not point you backstage. A symbol can bring stuff into the world. The trace signifies what is never present. A face is abstract. If we try to represent transcendence it becomes imminence. If transcendence shows up it loses transcendence. A face is not a window. There is no symbol for something that comes from elsewhere. A face is not a mask. How can we capture the beyond without imminence? A trace is gone and cannot return. It is beyond memory and cannot be brought into consciousness because it calls consciousness into question.

The trace is in the third person as “he” in thirdness as illeity. Behind in thirdness there is no you and me. It is beyond language and ontology. When we meet a person his heness is gone. In absence begins responsibility. The other disappears at the rate of appearing. You can track traces but use stones rather than breadcrumbs. Only a being that transcends can leave a trace. When things bump other things there is no trace. We cannot find the cause of a trace. A trace does not lead to the past but to an absolute past that unites all of time. Language involves tracing back to a past that is never present. It is a pastness that cannot be remembered.

The notion of divinity is anti-incarnational theology. Disincarnation theology breaks the structure of Being in the body. God is not an icon. The deep past is present whenever we meet anyone. Back to something that secures otherness. God is in the trace. To go to god is to go to the other.

Goal of the challenge from word to thing cannot be reached. It is an infinite task.

After lecture I went home to sleep for an hour and a half and then headed back downtown.

While waiting for Short Story class to start I finished reading Levinas’s “Is Ontology Fundamental?” I guess the answer is no. Then I read part one of Daniel Clowes’s “Ghost World”. I’ve downloaded the movie, but I figured I’d read the comic first so I can be super critical and disappointed when I watch the film.

For the first hour of class we discussed Thomas King’s “A Seat in the Garden”, which uses his trickster technique, but in more of a modern setting and without Coyote this time. In the story, King appropriates the trope of appropriation.

The guy that owns the garden is Joe Hovaugh. Get it? Garden and Jehovah?

In the story, a big Indian shows up every day in Joe’s garden, and all he ever says is “If you build it, they will come!” which is appropriated from W. P. Kinsella’s novel, “Shoeless Joe”, which of course was adapted into the film, “Field of Dreams”. Kinsella’s first novel was “Dance Me Outside”, which took place entirely on a Native reserve with Native characters. Some accused him of cultural appropriation, which he thought was pretty ridiculous. I agree. It would be like saying that Shakespeare had no right to create the play “Othello” because he wasn’t Black or “Romeo and Juliet” because he wasn’t a thirteen-year-old girl.

So Joe’s garden is private property. He calls his friend, Red Matthews, whose name is appropriated from an actor who played bad guys in a lot of Hollywood westerns. Every time Red looks at the big Indian in the garden, he thinks he looks like a different film actor. The first one he mentions is Jeff Chandler, who was a Jewish actor that played the Apache leader, Cochise in the film, “Broken Arrow”. Red also tells Joe about a movie in which a house becomes haunted because it was built on top of an Indian burial ground and that they had to bring in a medicine man to get rid of the spirits. He was talking about the movie “Poltergeist” but he got it wrong, since it was a little psychic woman that came. Red also claimed that the Indian looked like Sal Mineo, which was weird, because an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was Cree, had a major crush on Sal Mineo when she was a teenager. She sent him a fan letter and got back a signed photograph. Mineo was murdered. Andrew Lesk told me that they say he’d picked up some rough trade, but that wouldn’t explain why he was stabbed in an alleyway by someone that didn’t even know who he was.

It turns out that the big Indian was just in Joe and Red’s imagination, since they were the only ones that saw him. There are three Indians that come to the garden every now and then to sort cans they’ve collected. Joe decides to ask them what to do with the Indian. They pretend they see him and go into the garden to talk with him, and then they tell Joe that he wants him to build a seat in the garden.

In the second hour we looked at Rohinton Mistry’s story “Exercisers”, about a young man caught between the restrictions of his culture in India, as enforced by his mother; and his more modern relationship with a young woman of a higher class than him. Also in between are these young men who meet every night in the playground after the children have gone home. The men take their shirts off and turn the playground equipment into an improvised gym. There’s something homoerotic about the way these men are described and the main character, Jehangir, keeps thinking that he’ll join them and also become an exerciser but he never does. Joining an all male group though might free him from his mother and his girlfriend, who he feels are in a tug of war to win control over him. He’s more of a watcher than a doer as far as anything in his life goes.

That night I watched the other instalment of the Garry Moore show that I’d downloaded. Once again, Carol Burnett was very impressive in a spoof on My Fair Lady, in which she plays an uncouth Brooklyn girl trying to get a job as a salesgirl at an upscale department store. Her pronunciations of words like “girdle” as Tony Randall was trying get her to lose her Brooklyn accent were hilarious. Another interesting part of the show was when Garry told the audience that he’d caught his dancers dancing instead of resting between rehearsals. The type of dancing they were doing was type of called line dance called the Madison Twist. Garry had his dancers come out and improvise as they followed behind their choreographer.  The musical guest was Patty Page, but her music represents that dead period just before white people started listening to rock and roll.

Carol Burnett

           

            On Monday I rode through the rain to do my laundry.

            In the afternoon I did my taxes online. They make it so simple now that it’s a little worrisome. Last year I got $376 back and this year my refund will only be about $86. I wonder if I missed something. I think I did have more income in 2014 so I must have paid more taxes. Maybe that explains it. I didn’t see an option for the low income tax benefit. It’s a little more confusing now that the Ontario tax return is not included with the Canada tax return.

            Just before making dinner I realized that I’d forgotten that my kitchen lights had burnt out. I made it to the Dollarama just before closing. My purchase of the same brand of four bulbs as last time was an improvement because only one of them was a dud this time.

            I watched the last of the Father Knows Best shows that I’d downloaded. In this one Jim got frustrated with the insurance business and decided to buy a farm. His wife knew he’d never go through with it but pretended she was alright with it.

            Then I watched an instalment of the Garry Moore Show from 1960. I remember Garry Moore, but it must have been from the game shows he hosted. He smoked on stage. The guests were new artists Bob Newhart and Robert Goulet. Newhart’s style was considered groundbreaking at the time. He’d just walked away with the top three Grammy awards that year. I never considered him to be more than a bit amusing. Robert Goulet was sort of the Michael Bublé of his day. I remember him on a CBC music show before he became famous. Other guests were Julie London, whose singing I didn’t think was that outstanding. This was a show on which Carol Burnett was a regular guest and she went directly to having her own show when the Garry Moore show ended. She was in a skit with another guy where they played a couple who’d just brought their new baby home and they keep getting woken up by its crying. The funniest line came when the baby stopped crying and they were suddenly worried as to why he might have stopped crying. Carol said, “Maybe he swallowed his blanket!” and her husband said, “Well if he swallowed his blanket he’ll be cold!”

Dropbox Misbehaves On Your Computer Like a Bad House Guest

           

            On Sunday morning I had bacon and eggs for breakfast. It was the first time I’d eaten animal products in a month and a half, and it was very satisfying.

            I uploaded a video to YouTube, which took over an hour, but then when I posted it on Facebook it seemed kind of blurry in full screen, so I tried for the first time uploading directly from my computer to Facebook. I seem to recall that that didn’t used to be an option. I don’t know if it was any less blurry in full screen though.

            I read Emmanuel Levinas’s “Meaning and Sense”, though I couldn’t very well discern its meaning or its sense. He thinks that there are ethics beyond culture.

            I did a virus scan of my external hard drive that took two hours. I wonder if I really need all the Windows files from my previous system.

            The program called Dropbox that I’d downloaded in order to get the essay that my Short Story instructor had posted there had rearranged some of my files to an annoying degree, so I uninstalled it. It seems to me that when people design programs they should engineer them to behave on someone’s computer like guests in someone’s home. They should take the little space they are given and only go elsewhere when specifically invited to do so. When I open my documents folder and look up in the left hand corner where my Favourites are listed, I want to see my Downloads there. Dropbox moved my downloads so I had to search the menu to find out where they were and then I had to move them back to my Favourites. Grrrrr!

            I rubbed a rack of ribs with brown sugar, mustard, cayenne, paprika, cumin and salt; grilled it in the oven and at half while watching two episodes of Father Knows Best.

            In the first episode, the teenage son, Bud, was having trouble talking to girls. When a girl his age came to the door selling Camp Girl cookies, he hid in the closet and came out wearing a Halloween mask that had been stored there. With the mask on he took on a different, more confident persona and the girl thought he was funny and charming and told him he was “a top”. His sister, wanting to break him out of his shyness, arranged for a girl to call him on the phone, but found he even needed to wear the mask to talk to her. When he did, he was again very confident and asked her out on a date. Afterwards though, he realized that he couldn’t go out with her because he couldn’t wear the mask in public. The solution was to throw a masquerade party, but that night his mask went missing. His father told him he could recreate the mask with theatrical make-up. When he was done, Bud wanted to look in the mirror but Jim said there was no time because the guests had already arrived. So he went downstairs, not realizing that his father had tricked him and had only drawn on his face with a clear pencil. Halfway through the party he realized he didn’t have make-up on, but realized that he didn’t need it. He still had the fake persona though.

            The second episode began with Jim complaining about how no one keeps their promises anymore. Princess wanted to cancel a date with a boy that she said was a dope but her father made her keep the date. Meanwhile, the youngest daughter, Kathy, was building something out of old crates in the back yard. At dinnertime, Jim, with his mouth watering, was about to dig in to some of his wife’s roast sirloin, when Kathy reminded him of several promises he had made to her when she had the measles. He’d promised her she could have a playhouse in the back yard, that he would eat with her there and that he would also spend the night with her there. So he had to eat graham crackers with butter and sleep with Kathy out in the rickety little shack she’d put together, because he’d promised.

Woodstock for Dogs

            On Saturday I finally took all of the liquor and beer bottles that my neighbour left behind when he moved out to the Beer Store. I had previously brought them into my apartment from the deck but felt the need to dump out all the cigarette butts from the beer bottles. Every other beer bottle had between ten and twenty butts in it. For all I know the Beer Store doesn’t care, but I find cigarette butts disgusting and so I cleaned out every single bottle before storing it in my place. I filled my backpack and two large cloth grocery bags with bottles and managed to sort of keep my balance with them slung over my handlebars on the way to the Beer Store but I was like someone with enormous and unwieldy barely supported breasts trying negotiate the street on roller skates. I got a little over seven dollars in exchange for the empties, and bought a couple of cans of Creemore, one for later that night and one for Sunday. I went to the supermarket to get a few non-vegetarian supplies, since Easter Sunday would be my first day of eating meat and dairy for almost a month and a half.

            In our most recent Short Story class we had discussed Daniel Clowes’s graphic story, “Gynecology”. Andrew Lesk had made the story available for us a on a site called Drop Box, but since I already had a digital copy of the comic Eightball #17 in which “Gynecology first appeared I didn’t bother with Drop Box. It turned out though that Andrew had also posted an essay on the Clowes story by Daniel Raeburn. I tried to find it on Drop Box but perhaps I went about it the wrong way. I ended up downloading Drop Box and opening a Drop Box account and so now all I see when I access it is an inbox with one file telling me how to get started with Drop Box. Maybe there was a way beforehand to access the file without opening an account but it seems that now that I have one it’s not possible. Andrew answered my email to say that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about and that the files are there. He said it appears that I’m the only one that couldn’t find it. I said that it appears that I’m the only one who can and can’t do a lot of things. I have found an essay on Daniel Clowes by Raeburn, but Andrew had said specifically that the essay is on “Gynecology”. I’ve asked him for the exact title so I can search for it. I really hate these sites like Drop Box that make one jump through hoops to access them and then are impossible to use.

            In the evening there was a guy across the street improvising on the electric guitar. He also had two large off-leash dogs playing with one another while he played with his guitar. The brown one kept on mounting and humping the black one. Despite being unleashed and running fairly wild within the boundaries of the sidewalks, they seemed to be trained to respect that edge and to not cross it. Their caretaker seemed to trust them implicitly because he continued to be absorbed in his guitar playing no matter what the dogs were doing. At one point it appeared that someone from upstairs came down to talk to him about the noise, but he kept on playing while the guy was talking to him and didn’t stop after he went back into the building.

            I watched a couple more episodes of Father Knows Best from the first season. One of them started off as a detective story as Jim was investigating whether or not Kathy broke a window with a baseball, which she said she didn’t do. Then it turned into a court battle when Jim parked his car in front of a driveway, which he said he didn’t do. The complication was that it was something called “Boys Week” in which young students were given all the big government jobs for a week. Jim’s son Bud ended up as the court judge. He found Jim guilty and when his mother got up to protest he charged her with contempt of court.

Hot and Cold Running Media

            

            Very early on Friday morning I was visiting Mary Milne. She had a run down bungalow in a shaggy part of town. I was lying in a lounge chair outside of her place when her crotchety neighbour came along. He was a tall, thin old man with a beard and a Russian accent. He approached me and showed me his smart phone, in a leather case and asked if I wanted to buy it. I told him mine was better and he didn’t believe me; so I took mine out of my pocket tom show him. He took it in his hand to see but then wouldn’t give it back. I followed him to his place two doors down from Mary and I kept demanding that he give me my phone back, but he refused. I thought about punching him but thought better of it because of the legal can of worms that a fistfight with an old man would open up. I went back to Mary’s to call the police and she said that I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. I was about to use her old black dial phone when I woke up.

            It was 1:05 and I was wide awake, so I started working again on my essay. I realized at around that time that I didn’t agree with Nietzsche on as many details as I’d thought I did. I was with him in essence, but on most of the causal explanations I’d concluded that he was off base. That meant that I had to rewrite it a bit but it also meant that I’d have more to say on the matter, which had been a problem up till that point. He had suggested, without coming right out and mentioning evolution, that conscience had been something that nature had bred into us. Upon thinking about this I concluded that though the part of the brain where conscience exists is obviously passed on, what it contains only appears inherited because of the enduring culture into which we are born, without a conscience. Our conscience is a matter of indoctrination during our formative years. We tell a child to listen to its inner voice but it’s a voice that we put there.

            I worked until 5:30, then did my yoga, then I continued to work until 11:00, at which point I went to bed for an hour and a half.

            I was sitting at the kitchen table with my father and mother. I was verbally disagreeing with my father as I often had and he slapped me across the face as he often had when I argued with him. I noticed that I was adult in my mind, if not in my body, when I shouted out for him to “fuck off” and that he was “a fucking asshole”. My mother said that I shouldn’t talk to my father that way and I shouted for her to go fuck herself. It was me saying that out loud in my sleep that woke me up at 12:30.

            My essay was due in less than eight hours. Other than to grab snacks or use the washroom, I worked steadily the whole time. In the last three hours I got all my citations in place, except that I’d wanted to cite Sigmund Freud on my mentioning the superego as conscience, the libido as the instinctive impulses that can’t be made to feel guilty and the guilt that the ego is made to feel by the superego when it fails to hold the libido in the id. I couldn’t spare the time to download any Freud texts from which to derive citations because I was still making adjustments on the essay itself. At about ten minutes to 20:00 I went online to upload my paper, but I was having connection problems at the last stage. The deadline was about to pass when I realized I’d have to switch to the Coffeetime’s network in order to have a signal strong enough to upload the file. I switched, but found that I’d have to log off from the U of T Blackboard site and start again in order for the upload to work. I handed in the paper five minutes late, which was probably not a big deal, I hoped.

            Having my essay finished and handed in didn’t make me feel as relieved as I’d hoped it would, but I’ve found in the past that it usually takes a night’s sleep for that relaxation to kick in.

            I watched a couple of shows from the first season of Father Knows Best. In the fourth episode, Robert Young’s character, Jim Anderson had two tickets to the big annual college football game and he had a contest between his three children as to which one would get to go with him. The competition, judged by the mother, played by Jane Wyatt, involved them each stating in 26 words or less why they thought they should go to the game. Princess won the prize and a few days passed. Jim was about to leave his place of work as an insurance salesman to take his daughter to the game when a long standing client arrived and bribed him with a potential $20,000 endowment policy if he’d give him the spare ticket. Jim gave in. What a dick!

            Apparently on the original father Knows Best radio show, which also starred Robert Young, the father was even more of an asshole. He would actually call his kids “stupid”. I assume that approach didn’t work for television and I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would have to say about that. Radio is a hot medium because we take it at face value and can therefore listen to it passively. Television, on the other hand is cool because we have to engage with it in order to understand what is being presented. This would suggest that we would be more critical of what is being said on television, such as a father calling his children stupid.

            So when Jim came home to try to tell Princess that she couldn’t go to the game, even though he’d promised her, because he’d also promised his client, his ever sensible wife agreed that he would indeed have to keep his promise to the client but also to his daughter, so she told him that he would have to let his client take his daughter to the game and that he would have to stay at home.

            The thirteenth episode involved the family, on the day of their youngest daughter, “Kitten”’s birthday, suddenly being imposed upon in their home by a very annoying man that they didn’t even know but who had been briefly acquainted with a college buddy of Jim. The family wanted to get on with Kitten’s birthday dinner, and cake and then take her to the circus but they couldn’t get the guy to leave. In a good-natured way, the man manoeuvred his way into being invited for dinner, and because it had been his birthday the day before, he considered the cake to be both his and Kitten’s. Jim finally tricked him into leaving by phoning him from upstairs and disguising his voice to give him false information about an exhibit of photographs of streetcars at a certain made up address. The man had mentioned that his hobby was collecting pictures of streetcars. The man left and they went to the circus, only to find it sold out. Who should show up but the annoying man, whom it turned out was the manager of the circus, and got them front row seats? Jim felt like an asshole.

Kafka

           

            Well, there’s always one more storm after the first day of spring. When I got up on Thursday morning the sound of the sleet hitting my windows was like course sand being shaken in a pop can. Ice must have been building up in the transformer that connects to the streetcar line outside my window. Every time the tram passed it was as if it were taking a flash photograph of my apartment. I felt like such a celebrity. After each flash, the trolley pole that connects to the wires made a sound like a very large pair of pants ripping. How embarrassing!

            I bundled up for winter for the first time in a couple of weeks and headed out into the mess. I had been expecting freezing rain, but that seemed to have passed into just cold rain. O’Hara looked coated in ice, so I opted to take Queen to University. Traffic was slow and I chose most of the time not to go between cars and the curb because that space was slushy and possibly slippery. My ass and knees (pronounced “assaneeze”) were cold and wet by the time I got to University Avenue.

            As I was heading north and passing the Canada Life building, a sheet of ice about the size of an extra large pizza box came flying across the street like a Frisbee. It passed in front of me about ten meters ahead and broke up on the edge of the street.

            As usual, the lecture theatre was dark when I arrived, so I turned the lights on. Shortly after that a young woman who always sits behind me in the second row came in. We’d only spoken very briefly on a couple of occasions. This time though she said hello and asked how I was. She asked how my essay was coming along and I answered that it was “essayesque” and that I had “five pages of something”. We discussed how hard it is to figure out what Levinas is talking about. I said that I think his “other” is any entity other than oneself, including god. She said she’d thought it was something different than that. Maybe I’ll get it when I’d finally started reading him after my essay was handed in I could have a clearer opinion.

            I asked her what her name was and she told me it was Noa. I asked if it was spelled the same as the drunk guy from the Bible. She laughed and said that she was named after a female Biblical character. I looked it up later. Noa was one of the five daughters of Zelophehad and they may have been the first women to inherit property.

            When Naama came in she thanked me for sending her my lecture notes, which is something I’ve done four or five times when she’d missed class. She told me she was trying figure out where to go to file her separation papers. I was perhaps a little too surprised to find out that she was married. She seems above marriage but maybe I’ve idealized her too much. She said they’d just broken up a few months before and that she needed to file separation papers before she could get a divorce. I suggested that she try a legal clinic and that if they couldn’t legalize the papers there they could at least tell her where to go. She had no idea that such a thing as a legal clinic existed and said she would check it out.

            Just before the lecture, some students at the other end of the first aisle had just gotten the news that the class they had after ours had been cancelled. Professor Gibbs looked up from his phone to ask, “What’s cancelled?” “The class after this one!” Gibbs exclaimed, “That’s great! Oh! I mean, that’s bad!”

            He started the lecture by returning to the subject of signs. Signs have meaning. Something in the mind is expressed with a sign. Empiricism or sense experience comes from the world and a missing piece is made good with experience. For example, once you know some geometry you can learn more. Signs don’t merely build and refer. They refer to a network of cultural meanings. Take meaning from Being in that context. This world precedes experience and is a linguistified world full of signs waiting to be called into the house of Being.

            The user or speaker is also embodied in the world. The possibility of language depends upon the body.

            This philosophy is a swipe at anti-Platonism.

            Plato says that there are ideas and historical culture is not important. One should love beauty itself more than the beautiful boy because meaning is not bound to the boy. Contemporary philosophy says that one can’t throw out that relationship.

            We make sense of life from the body; therefore we can’t transcend the body or culture. I could become a victim of cultural genocide. I can lose education and overcome that but in some ways I can’t.

            Anthropology draws on this kind of cultural meaning with no escape.

            Decolonization is attached to a thought. When we try to decolonise we don’t get inversion. We get an intensely complex map of multiple worlds with no order or qualitative difference. This led him to talk about how both Canada and the United States thinks their way is best. He said that we are right to think that our way is the best.

            The anthropologists say to suspend judgement, but who are the anthropologists that say that?

            The alternative is somebody that understands pluralism. Some say that indigenous people fit that bill, while others say that’s not true.

1)      Reference

2)      World/Culture theory

3)      Economic meaning. Crude on purpose.

4)      Unique road, one-way.

The things that ground all meaning are human needs. Like water, food, shelter and gumboots. These needs are ways to foundation from where metaphors come. Call it a labour theory of value (a reference to Marx). Or what will be the gradient of lifetime earnings as a result of having studied Continental Philosophy? Economic orientation not only defends the pigs but also the Marxists who are trying to overthrow the pigs. Poverty is not a fundamental problem and may be the source of the solution.

Human needs exist in something outside of language. There are no pure human needs. Every human need is from the first interpreted culturally. Science modifies our needs. We can’t get at pure human needs. What counts as sustainability here might not count in a small fishing village. Smart phones are a first world need. Materials extracted at great human cost. We end up back with the concept of human needs related to particularities.

Is it possible in the collapse of the orientation of meaning to give language an orientation?

There’s not one totality but many, each closed off but interacting. Being is historical.

The colonial attitude is to conquer. There is lots of cultural genocide. If you think it’s worthwhile learning another language, this is radical. You could always just kill.

There used to be one meaning. In English Canada it was England.

In Quebec it was reason or god.

Gone now.

The god that dies is a transcendent helping god. The one that we needed is gone. The tit for tat god is gone.

Levinas says there is more to god. It’s metaphysical but beyond our concepts.

            We’re a bi-national state and the two sides are not obliterating each other.

            There is meaning in a relation that might be fundamental,

            Ulysses gets home. You get to come home. The self comes back to the self. Self-appropriation to thine own self be true.

            We need orientation that can have one meaning and freedom to go to the other person and freely use a word. This would be a work. It’s about being able to make something for another with no backsies and no consideration. What it means to give without return. It requires the ingratitude of the other. Never getting anything back is purpose not for me but for the other. Not pure loss but such a work betrays accounting. An asymmetry of relations. A pushing of the agent beyond their limits. The one way of meaning is for the future and beyond my death. The meaning of my work is posthumous. The horizon of my world is shattered by otherness. A radical departure from me. A liturgy. Public donations. This kind of work is about free character orientation.

            December 1941 is a hole in history. A man in prison continues to believe in the future.

            Franz Kafka said, “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.

Contrast between need and desire. Need opens world that’s for me. The motivation to give to the other comes from beyond need. Desire does continue complete but empties me and puts me in question. This is a rejection of understanding the other as enemy. The desire of other is not to own but is for the other. Insatiable compassion. It doesn’t mean I ant to meet the other. I desire the other to call me out of myself. No limit. This possibility of insatiable desire is the third dimension of language.

Word spoken to another is referring to an entity and located in a world. The one to whom the word is spoken is the one for whom language works. To whom is not a cultural signifier and not part of the horizon. Signifies beyond exegesis. Signifies the epiphany of a face. The face is like a visitation. The face breaks with its own plastic essence and divests its form. Shatters the horizon. Does this because the face speaks to me. It is absolved from society. The nudity of the face cannot be converted into representation. Something that can ask a question, that can speak and speaks in return.

            On the way out of Alumni Hall, Naama told me that somebody hacked her Pay Pal account, and she thinks it was her ex when she didn’t log off right away after an email exchange. I don’t know how that works but I told her that when I considered getting Pay Pal, the whole set up seemed weird to me.

            We said goodbye as I turned to the ice covered bike stand to unlock my ride. When I got to Queens Park Circle though, Naama was still waiting for the light, so I walked with her to the other side of the park as we chatted about chatted about our essays. We were both writing on Nietzsche.

            The rain had let up and the way was less slushy, with no backed up traffic on the way home. When I got there I hung my wet things up and took a siesta. One advantage of having a hot and dry apartment in the winter is that after a couple of hours everything but my boots were dry.

            It wasn’t raining much on the way back downtown. Our class would be covering Daniel Clowes’s “Gynaecology”, and I had just enough time to read it before the lecture started. The thing with Daniel Clowes’s work is that the writing stands up by itself, even though the art is also good. The two stories we’d covered on Tuesday would have been nothing without the artwork.

            At the beginning, Andrew Lesk asked the class if they’d read any Daniel Clowes previously. A few of us that had taken his Graphic Novel course had read his “David Boring”. A couple of people had read “Ghost World” but no one had seen the movie. Andrew was surprised and said, “C’mon! Scarlett Johansson! What’s the matter with you straight guys?”

            The characters in Clowes’s stories are often cynical.

            Transitions between scenes are virtually non-existent.

            There is a juxtaposing of subplots and ideas that is confusing.

            There is an obsession with god and a direct appeal to the reader at the beginning that poses a metaphysical question. He speaks here of the “random membrane of truth.”

            The main character, Epps, thinks he’s special.

            “An infinite number of correct interpretations.” If anything can mean anything then it all means nothing.

            Epps collected Doctor Disguise dolls when he was a kid and now changes his look a lot. Epps is also a cross dresser.

            Andrew said that he looked up “Epps” and found that it means “full of fear”. I didn’t find anything like that. Why would a name exist that means “full of fear”?

            William Bendix is mentioned in the comic. He was an actor from the 50s who starred in “The Life of Riley”.

            Clowes gets away with doing racist art because his character is a racist artist. Epps claims that his art is not racist but rather ironic. This is a ploy to not have to think.

            Epps’s friends are also plagiarists. His former girlfriend tells a story as it were hers that is lifted from something by late stand-up comic, Godfrey Cambridge.

            I noticed that when Andrew was trying to say “Nazi Germany” he said “National Journey”.

            The critic, Daniel Raeburn, in an essay on the story said “Gynaecology must be penetrated.”

            Someone suggested that the earlier mentioned “membrane of truth” is the panels between the frames. I don’t think so.

            When I got home, my clothes were a little damp.

            That night I started working on my Nietzsche essay, but I got tired very early and went to bed at 21:30. 

Out of the Loop

           

            On Wednesday, for the first time in a month, I went to the food bank. For three weeks, because of my annual fast, my diet wasn’t really compatible with what they had to offer there, plus I was occupied with essay writing. I still had my Nietzsche essay to finish, but I thought that maybe they’d have better stuff than usual just before Easter. I went earlier than usual and yet the line-up was already finished and I got number 24.

            I noticed that Joe, the manager is back to walking with a crutch. He’d had one a few months before and then he didn’t have it. Marlon, who’s been working there since the snow started falling, greeted me by name. In fact, he’s the only one there that has ever greeted me by name.

            I came back at around 13:30 to find no people outside waiting for numbers to be called. When I asked someone what number they were at, he told me that they’d stopped calling numbers at around 78. I went inside and asked, “You guys started early?” Joe answered, “We told everybody that we’d be starting at noon.” I said, “Nobody told me when I came to get a number!” He said something about the media having been there. I guess that’s why they started early but the reception people should have said, “We’re starting at noon today” when she gave me the number. I assume that Joe’s “telling everybody we’d be starting at noon” was an announcement to the people in the line-up. So, instead of having number 24, I effectively had some number close to 80. 

            I didn’t really need a lot of the regular items they keep fairly abundantly on their shelves, like pasta, rice and sauce. I took some energy bars and a bag of potato thins. I noticed that the soup shelf was empty except for a couple of cans of Campbell’s tomato. The more interesting stuff was in Sue’s section. I got a half litre of yogourt, half a dozen eggs and a choice between a turkey and a rack of ribs. I’ve never understood why some people eat turkey at Easter. Where I come from it was always ham on Easter Sunday. I took the last rack of ribs. I didn’t need any bread this time around and the only thing I took from the vegetable section was a bag of small potatoes. I already had a five-kilo sack from the supermarket at home, but small potatoes are so adorable that they’re not just small potatoes.

            I took a siesta in the afternoon for half an hour. When I got up I found one of my overhead light bulbs had shattered and fallen all over the floor. The thing is, the lights were switched off, and so I couldn’t figure out why the light would have exploded. Maybe it was just a weaker bulb and the continuous vibrations of passing streetcars finally just caused it to break. It probably didn’t explode.

            That night I watched the third episode of the first season of “Father Knows Best”. Robert Young’s character had bought his son a motor scooter, which his wife made him take back because of it being too dangerous. The son was never told about the scooter but his father felt guilty and gave him twenty dollars as a present. The boy then sold his own bicycle for ten dollars and with thirty dollars went and bought the same scooter that his father had sold back to the original owner. The oldest daughter, Princess, is obsessed with her weight and with handwriting analysis while youngest child, Kitten is a shrewd observer of her family.

            When I searched Pirate Bay for “Father Knows Best”, most of the items under that name were porn films.

Sign Language

           

            On Tuesday morning after yoga I skipped my usual song practice to edit my English essay. When the time came to leave for Continental Philosophy I put my essay on a flash drive and worked on it some more before the lecture. Maybe it’s a simple thing but for me it’s amazing that I can plug a usb storage device into my laptop to edit files and then transfer them back to my computer later.

            In his lecture, Professor Gibbs continued to talk about Levinas, which I hadn’t read yet at all because I’d been focusing on my Nietzsche essay. He began by saying, “Just when you thought it was safe to read philosophy, we gave you “Meaning and Sense”. This second essay by Levinas is quite thick, while the previous one, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” is easy, even though ontology is hard.

            With Levinas, we moved from Heidegger to something that escapes him: the Other. The other is the entity that escapes meaning. The other is the only being that I could murder, though in some sense it would escape. When I look him in the face I see the command, “Don’t murder!” The face does not signify by living in the house but rather calls me out of the house to language. To be in relation to the other face to face is to be unable to kill. This is a breach on the horizon. It is infinite but not huge, meaning it exceeds the finitude and mortality of my horizon.

            For Heidegger, death and mortality are the fulcrum, but Levinas says there is something else. A possibility of something not bound to my death resists my power without being a counter power. It resists with nakedness a signifying possibility of speech beyond the possibility to appear. It calls to me.

            Levinas is not sure if things have faces.

            Levinas is close to Kant’s practical philosophy but not his ontology. Beyond myself.

            All these issues about killing, face and signifying. Such reflection is only a personal adventure. The human presents itself to the relation that is not a power. In Levinas’s humanism, power is suspended. His is a space of ethics rather than ontology. Ontology is not fundamental (Damn! He didn’t even say “spoiler alert!” Now there’s no point even reading “Is Ontology Fundamental?” now that Gibbs gave away the ending.) Ethics is first a first philosophy. Ethics is the home of the fundamental inquiry.

            Language is about signs. “Signification” is the French word for “meaning”. 20^th Century philosophy was about language and time, but this is about signs. Semiotics is the study of signs and it used to be a big deal at U of T. Humanities have shifted away from this. Heidegger was about thinking in terms of language but Levinas is about meaning in terms of language.

            Levinas doesn’t express his own view at the beginning of his essays. Those who don’t read far enough in get the wrong impression.

            The professor talked about two kinds of metaphor. The first was an empirical intuitionist intellectualism in which reality signifies intelligibility. The sign points toward something that is not present but could be present, like a picnic basket. This as Husserl’s type of metaphor.

            The second type of metaphor is about absence. Humanity will never be present. Excess. It could never be present or contained like a horizon. It is hermeneutic, which means it is about the study of the methodology of text interpretation. In the margin beside this he wrote: horizon, world, context, culture. It’s like the place where the picnic happens. This is Heidegger’s type of metaphor.

            Of a book – it’s absent contents such as the shelves confer meaning. The book is a metaphor for things more real than the book. We can’t perceive the book without context. The book evokes it because it is prior to the metaphor.

            Signifying is poorer than perceiving.

            From the perspective of a god we have reality in the mind first and then we find words for it. Independent of particular minds signs compensate for absent things.

            The limits of language are circumscribed to the limits of consciousness.

            A metaphor as a reference to absence could indicate excellence.

            Meaning is not a consolation for a disappointing perception.

            The notion of the horizon is conceived after the model of the context. Smuggling in the model of language and culture. We use language as a model to understand language. We can’t ground words in pure thought. Language is only grasped with the linguistic image of context.

            Meaning or signification precedes and illuminates data.

            Levinas takes a familiar term, shows the horizon behind it and shows the way the word illuminates meaning.

            The given is presented from the first qua this to that experience. Experience is a reading understanding of meaning and exegesis. No hermeneutics and not intuition.

            The structure of the world resembles the order of language. The world is linguistic. Nothing just is. Everything is always against a backdrop of words. Disturbing totality in a different way. Going beyond totality.

            The body is key to signifying. I am in the world in a body. I have a mapable location but my access depends on the operation of my body. The world is deeply incarnated. I can only see with my eyes.

            For Heidegger things are illuminated on a stage of language.

            For Levinas the incarnate subject raises the curtain. The spectator is an actor. You are not outside the stage but are rather part of the drama. If you weren’t it wouldn’t be happening.

            A culture is a cultural object that we’ve made to accumulate meaning and to make whole. Thought happens in the culture of our stuff. Everything that we experience is cultural. He pointed out that we were sitting in chairs while listening to a lecture rather than sitting on the floor. Culture feeds and warms us and culture is inserted with the thoughts of incarnate minds.

            It is not fundamentally inwardness of thought that gives language meaning. We do not express our inner life. Professor Gibbs at this point declared, “I have rarely thought before speaking, though I have heard that some people do.”  Thought happens in a language that we did not invent. The meaning that we seek is already available but only in words in a fully embodied culture.

            Of overcoming the subject-object structure: the subject is not outside looking in or inside looking out. The subject is in a body. Signs refer to more than what they name. It takes effort to point to meaning and it is a bit of a lie.

            For Plato, meaning came before language. We are addicted to this thinking and grasping intellect that whistles things into reality.

            But for Levinas, meaning is not separate from the access leading to it. The scaffolding is not taken down. How we get to knowledge is part of knowledge.

            He gave us the subject of the next lecture by saying that as we are colonial subjects of the multiplicity of meaning, we can’t escape.

            When I got home I read through my essay out loud, changed two or three words and then took a siesta. Before leaving for class I had time to go through it again, changed a couple more words here and there, then I printed it up and went to campus.

            I was about twenty minutes later than usual. I could tell from the blackboard that a philosophy class had been in earlier. I erased everything but “I think, therefore I am”, just because I wanted to see Andrew’s reaction when he saw that phrase on the board. When he came in and was about to wipe it out, he hesitated and said, “There’s a debate!” before erasing it.

            In the first hour of class we looked at the last of the postmodern stories, which was Douglas Glover’s “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”.  Features of postmodernism on display in this piece are fragmentation and the use of language to obscure, separate and connect. Andrew asked what thing separates and connects, but I hadn’t heard the word “thing” in his question. I began to talk about the separations and connections in the story but he interrupted me and repeated, “What THING separates and connects?” and he seemed a little annoyed with me. There were a few wrong answers. I thought of a bridge but had forgotten whether there had been a bridge in this convoluted story. I put my hand up and Andrew took his time to acknowledge it but when he did I suggested “the river”. I guess I was close enough for him to reveal that it was the bridge. I said, “I was gonna say bridge!” and everybody laughed. When you think about it though, bridges only connect and it’s the body of water that separates.

            The bridges in this story are both real and invented embellishments.

            The plot is arbitrary and switches back and forth between two narratives that eventually connect: the narrator’s life and the story of the blind man and the dog on the river. The second narrative is a substitute climax for the first.

            All stories are found in conflict between the characters within. How a story is constructed is as important as the story itself.

            Andrew first of all made it clear that he loved dogs before he asked us the question, “Why do dogs rescue people?” He concluded that it’s because they are parasites and they are protecting their meal tickets. I think that he’s probably wrong about this. Dogs are pack animals and they see the human beings that care for them as members of their pack. They would just as naturally rescue other dogs with which they’ve bonded and here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HJTG6RRN4E

            Andrew said that the first sentence of the story can be broken into three parts: “My wife and I / decide to separate / and then suddenly we are almost happy together.”

            The first person narrator has no name. Is he being evasive?

            Since he is a first person narrator, he can’t be an omniscient narrator and so when he tells us what his wife is thinking, we know that he is probably off the mark.

            The story is fragmented and distorted by inexact recollection and so it is moving towards an unreliable truth. We can rely on the narrator to be unreliable.

            The story is a swamp of relativity.

            Trying to tell the exact truth leads to madness.

            He speaks as if the reader were a child.

            The narrator makes sure that we understand that he will frustrate and lead us astray.

            When he talks about being in the middle the text is in the middle of the paragraph. The middle of a bridge is the best perspective to have.

The narrator is two courses short of a philosophy degree he will never earn. The author though does have a philosophy degree. Both the narrator and the author worked as night editors for a local newspaper. The narrator mentions three philosophers in the story: Heraclitas, who wrote in fragments; Kierkegaard, who mocked system building; and Nietzsche, who wrote in aphorisms.

The narrator bestows free will on the reader and says, “Believe this if you wish.” Reading is always a process of modification. We are free to invent symbols as we see fit. The bridge is a symbol of change because there is always something on the other side. A bridge is an object of culture while a river is an object of uncertainty.

The narrator made a list of things that may or may not have happened in the story. Andrew went through the list with us and about two thirds of the things on the list did not happen. But the very fact that they were on the list in the story meant that they all actually did happen in the story.

In the second half of the class we looked at two graphic fiction stories.

The first was Mark Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury”. Andrew gave us some background on Mark Newgarden. He was one of the featured artists in the first issue of Raw Magazine, of which I had a copy back in the 80s though I don’t remember his work specifically. He was one of the creators of the Garbage Pail Kids, and I was the only one in the class familiar with them, I guess because they were an 80s phenomenon and my classmates hadn’t been born yet during their popularity. “Love’s Savage Fury” is based on the iconic comic strip, “Nancy”, which only Andrew and myself had ever seen. In the story, Newgarden adds Bazooka Joe, from the bazooka Bubble Gum comics as a romantic interest for Nancy. They meet on the subway and the poles are the panel dividers for the comic. There are panels that are entirely black to reflect the way the lights go out momentarily in New York subway cars.

The last story we looked at was Richard McGuire’s “Here”. Andrew projected the comic onto the screen, but while pointing out details in the frames he found a lot of dead flies in the way. Apparently flies are attracted to the screen when it is lit but then when it rolls back up they are crushed.
            Each panel of “Here” portrays the exact same location, which is where in most frames there is the corner of a living room by a window in a house. But the story goes back and forth in time to when the house wasn’t there or to when it will not be there. The house was built in 1902. Billy was born in 1957 and we see his whole life and death as we jump ahead and backward. There are sometimes smaller panels quarantined inside of larger panels as they each depict a different time. Within several frames there is a black cat in small panels dated 1999. The cat is moving in the opposite direction in which we are reading the comic and so a black cat is crossing our path. One image is mapped on another to suggest the transfer of properties from one to the other.

After class I told Andrew that I didn’t understand why we were doing graphic stories in a short story course. He dismissively said, “Why not?” and then he suggested that I should “expand my horizons.” As someone who has always been into comics all my life and who actually took Andrew’s Graphic Novel course, I don’t think he needs to tell me to expand my horizons. He argued that a graphic novel has been listed as the best novel, period, of the year. I argued that it would have been interesting if what the storyteller achieved with graphics could actually be achieved with writing. He just declared, “Sounds like an essay!” and left.

Some graphic stories have very good writing that would stand up without the artwork. I would say that if he is going to include graphic stories as short stories, he might as well include songs and television commercials as well.

Putting Brain to Bed

           

            On Monday morning, after spending about half an hour on my Nietzsche essay, I put it on hold to focus entirely on my Gabrielle Roy paper, which would be due in a little over a day. As I moved things around and worked on refining each paragraph of my argument, for hours I found myself still on page four. The only times I went online were to look up a word or to try to find a synonym for another word. I didn’t feel I could spare the time to cook anything elaborate and so I just dropped some onion soup cubes in a pot with some water, threw some broccoli into that, then a can of chick peas, a can of mixed vegetables and a jar of pasta sauce. I ate the soup while staring at my essay. By the end of the day I’d thrown in the closing statement on a five and a half page paper that my brain was too tired by that time to edit, so I put my brain to bed so it could freshly tackle the beast in the morning.

The Girl From Ipanema

            

            On Sunday I spent most of the day continuing to work on my two essays. That night I finally got an email from Andrew Lesk, telling me that my second thesis revision was clear and understandable. Of course, he didn’t tell me it was good, but I don’t think he would have. The day before that I’d had a dream about the essay, except that it involved me trying to write new lyrics for the song “Girl from Ipanema”. On Sunday I had another dream that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the paper, though I knew it did. In the dream I was with a woman who I think was Naama, my classmate in Continental Philosophy. We were investigating some kind of research facility. She was sitting in the car while I went up to a glass booth to con the guy in the white coat behind it to give us a tour. I flashed him my University of Toronto student card then told him that I was with the health department and needed to have a look around. He was just putting on his nametag when I woke up.

By the end of the day I had a day and a half left to finish the English essay and five days before the Philosophy paper was due.

The Plastiscene Reading Series was that night, but I couldn’t spare the time away from working on my two essays.

I watched an Ernie Kovacs TV special from the 1950s featuring his silent character, Eugene. It wasn’t hilariously funny but it was often clever and original.

To Not Belong Is To Be Invisible

I spent most of Saturday working back and forth on both my Short Story essay and my Continental Philosophy paper. I sent a revision of each thesis to the people that will be marking each paper. Sean Smith got back to me right away about my Nietzsche paper and approved my thesis. As for Andrew Lesk, he didn’t return my email about the Gabrielle Roy essay until that night. He told me that the first half of my thesis is fine but he couldn’t understand what I was getting at in the second half, which reads:

“The contrast between Eveline’s hills and the prairie in relation to the conflicting emotions of exile and belonging gives psychological meaning to the geographical features of each place. Behind the hills are kept secrets and curiosity, while the open prairie nurtures openness, but also familiarity. Feeling a sense of belonging to these two locations at once gives power to the distance between them, thus creating a desire to travel beyond either place.”

Not only did he say he didn’t understand it, but he stressed that as a teacher he has developed the ability to find meaning that isn’t readily apparent and yet he still couldn’t figure out what I meant.
            I found his response frustrating because it didn’t give me much to go on. I guess he wants it to be so simple that a child could understand it. Back to the drawing board.

            I rewrote the thesis and sent it back to him just before bedtime. Here’s the revised thesis:

“In the story “My Almighty Grandmother” from Gabrielle Roy’s The Road Past Altamont and in the titular story from the same collection, a Manitoba family continues to be deeply involved with the landscape they left behind in Quebec. The family matriarch is embittered by her exile on the prairie, and her daughter Eveline is haunted by a longing for the lost hills, despite having lived a good and long life in Manitoba. Eveline’s daughter Christine feels an emotional, psychological and spiritual affinity with the open plains. The geographical features of Eveline’s hills and Christine’s prairie reflect the personalities of each character. The hills are described as being withholding and evocative of curiosity, while Eveline is shown to be secretive and curious. Christine is open and starkly honest, which is also how she describes the prairies. Each character in these stories is defined by where they feel that they belong and yet the family to which they belong has about it the characteristic of being travelers who belong nowhere. They are present but not described in the earlier story while in the latter they are simply spoken of as being gone. To not belong then is to be invisible.”

Easter Seals Executives Make Big Bucks

             

            On Friday I was fifteen minutes early for my tutorial and I arrived at the same time as a young woman who seemed recognize me, though I didn’t recognize her, but maybe she didn’t know me at all and was just being friendly. We started talking about philosophy courses and we both hated Knowledge and Reality. I told her about The Philosophy of Sex and how one of the arguments we read was pro-paedophilia. I related to her that one of the things the professor in that course talked about was how in ancient Greece there had been a tradition of shepherding boys into manhood. The idea that these mentors had penetrative sex with the boys was a myth. The kind of sexual relations they had was more masturbatory because the Greeks believed that to have penetrative sex with a boy would defeat the purpose of helping him to become a man. She seemed to think this made sense, but before we could discuss it further, Sean came and she went with him to show him her essay outline.

            The tutorial began with Sean telling us that if we were still having problems understanding Hiedegger, we should do the required reading of Levinas, because it starts off with Heidegger and makes his philosophy super clear.

            Because we are tied to time, Dasein is not only about presence, but also passing away from existence. Heidegger’s philosophy is a meditation on finitude. The horizon of all possibilities is your death. Death is a structural component of your capacity for meaning. Passing away is a clearing of Being and it is part of time. We have to reckon with our own nihilation. What you are is a being who intrinsically understands your own impermanence, and this brings you closer to Being.

            If all human beings ceased to exist, Being would still be there, but there would be no one around to disclose it. Because of language, Being discloses the self as self. There is a darker current for Heidegger about nothingness. He becomes more impersonal as he begins to talk about language. Levinas has a powerful pushback to this.

            Someone asked how language is a path to Being.

            Sean explained that Jean Paul Sartre made Existentialism super sexy and cool in France and that people would be smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee and feeling cool while talking about existence. But then Heidegger came along and took a big German piss all over it. He thought that French Existentialism was superficial.

            Sean said that some students of the Philosophy of Language spend all their time just studying the meaning of the word “that”. Language helps us to express thinking.

            Sean told us that since Heidegger thought that poetry was our bridge to Being, he tried to write some poetry himself, but was a lousy poet. His favourite poet was Holderlin. I had to look him up later and found that he had been roommates with both Hegel and Schelling and was an influence on their philosophy. Here’s the third and last verse of his poem, “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny”: “A place to rest isn't given to us. 
Suffering humans decline and blindly fall from one hour to the next, like water thrown 
from cliff to cliff, year after year, down into the Unknown.”

            Sean pointed out that Heidegger became a Nazi as a result of his attempt to understand concrete experience in a localized way, that is, in terms of nationalism.

            Sean asked us if any of us were familiar with the Nine Inch Nails album “The Fragile”, but none of us were, though we were familiar with Nine Inch Nails. He seemed disappointed and said that we made him feel old. He said that there is a song on that album called “The Way Out Is Through” that relates to what we were discussing. I looked it up later. Lyrically it is very short: “Underneath it all we feel so small. The heavens fall but still we crawl. All I’ve undergone, I will keep on.”

            Most philosophy is about rejecting death, but Heidegger reconciles the self with the reality of passing on.

            Being is pure transcendence and a field of presence. Things come to be and they pass away. What questions are primordial? Any philosophy is concrete thinking between language using beings.

            I asked if we could think without language. Someone said that it depends on what I mean by language. I said the language that we speak. She suggested that when images enter our minds without words it could be a type of language. I countered that that could be just dreaming rather than thinking. Someone else gave the example of cases of people who had lived isolated from other humans but had developed some type of cognition without language. I argued that maybe that type of cognition isn’t much different from what my cat experiences.

I can see how we can blank out and allow new thoughts in, but I think that the moments when the mind is conscious but a non-verbal state of mind may not be a state of thinking but rather of resting. This non-verbal state aids thinking but may not be thinking in itself. The recognition of distinct shapes, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes and behaviours could serve to some degree as a non-verbal language because the recognition of each distinct thing would make it symbolic. All of these recognized things would become a sort of non-verbal vocabulary and we could probably imagine ourselves interacting with that environment when we are not physically doing so and perhaps use this type of imagining to plan future behaviours because we would also recognize to some extent the passage of time without words. But would this type of vocabulary allow us to think objectively about our environment or to expand our minds beyond our immediate experience?

Sean said that for both Heidegger and Levinas, language is core. They are extremely anthropocentric.

As I was getting ready to leave, I looked to the door and was pleasantly surprised to see Naama standing there. She came in and told me that she was an hour early but she’d been downtown anyway and decided she’d catch Sean’s earlier tutorial. We discussed the essay assignment a bit before I left. She told me she wouldn’t be in class until the following Thursday.

I had an appointment at 11:30 with Andrew Lesk to show him my Short Story essay thesis. University College is just a short distance from the Sidney Smith building, through a laneway off St George that runs straight into Kings College Circle. I was about fifteen minutes early, but I sat outside of Andrew’s office until he came. He looked at my thesis and immediately started crossing things out. I had begun with, “To feel a sense of belonging to two places at the same time causes each location to find a home in different parts of the mind. The place left behind becomes one’s romantic inner world and the new location is where the quotidian work of building and maintaining home and family is applied.” Only in the next sentence did I begin talking about Gabrielle Roy’s stories. Andrew told me to either move those opening sentences into the body of the essay or get rid of them all together. He said that in an essay I should get to the point of what I’m writing about right away. In my experience I’ve been steered in the opposite direction by some other instructors in the past, and so it gets confusing every time I try to pin the essay writing procedure down to a formula. Now I know what Andrew expects anyway.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home and the cashiers there were asking each customer if they want to donate two dollars for Easter Seals kids. Even if I had the money to donate to a charity I would want to research it to find out how many paid employees the charity has. I discovered when I got home and searched that some executives for Easter Seals receive salaries ranging from $100,000 to almost $300,000 a year, with added bonuses. These are 1995 figures though, so their salaries may be a lot higher now. Now I don’t feel like as much of a dick for turning them down.