On Thursday morning I was in the lecture hall waiting for
Philosophy class when Naomi arrived, saying “Good morning!” I asked her how she
was and she answered, “Same old same old!” adding, “It’s hard to believe that
it’s Thursday again already!” I nodded in agreement, saying, “Time goes fast
when you’re busy!”
As she was
unbundling herself, I asked her if the weather was a big adjustment for her
when she first came from Israel to Canada. She said, “A little bit, but it
wasn’t too bad.” I suggested that maybe she had some resistance to the cold in
her DNA and then asked from where her family had come when they first moved to
Israel. She told me that it had been Europe, of course, but that it wasn’t
exactly clear what part. I told her that I got a Hungarian vibe from her. She
said that her last name, Budin, originated from a region that is now in the
Czech Republic, but she thinks that the family had been in Poland for a long
time leading up to the war. Some joined the Russian army or worked in the salt
mines there and there were a few years in Brazil. She said there are a lot of
blank spaces about the history of her family. I told her that she could
probably find out a lot but it would be time consuming.
Naomi told me
that she’d love to learn to speak Yiddish. I commented that it’s a fun sounding
language and that the sound of each word seems to fit the meaning, like
“farmisht”, meaning “mixed up”. She added that there are no swear words in
Yiddish. She said that the worst word in Yiddish is “schmuck”. When I looked up
her claim about swearing in Yiddish there seemed to be plenty of profanity. In
a certain sense there are no swear words in any language because words that
were once in common use or meant something else, only became offensive later
on. I’m pretty sure there are words in Yiddish that are used for cursing. What
about “fakakata”?
Professor Gibbs
began by clearing his throat and then described it as a type of “preliminary
expectoration”, which is the name of a chapter in another work by Soren
Kierkegaard.
He announced that
he has adjusted our schedule of readings and our first paper deadline by one
week. He also reminded us that 25% of our fiscal investment in this course is
in the tutorials.
We returned to
Kierkegaard’s paradox, the nature of which can’t be understood.
A hidden lover is
not a lover. If I love someone and they don’t see my love, I am miserable.
Socrates does not
love his students. He flirts with them but never puts out. When he is in bed
with the sexiest boy in Athens, the boy says to Socrates, “I’m cold!” but
Socrates just tells him to put on another blanket. The meaning here is both
erotic and cognitive. Socrates does not give his ideas but rather cultivates
them in his student.
Gnosis comes from
the emptying of the self. We will leave this course, knowing and being less. I
will be less me in the end.
Is there a
relationship with another that changes the self?
The philosophy of
the New Testament is too crazy to have been made up by human beings.
The conclusion of
chapter two of “Philosophical Fragments” is that we can’t imagine this. The
conclusion of chapter three is that we can’t understand this.
Of the title of
chapter three: “The Absolute Paradox: a Metaphysical Crotchet”, to crotchet,
unlike to knit, requires only one needle.
A paradox can
stump the mind, but the absolute paradox destroys both the subject and the self
that thinks about it. Deconstruction.
Creatures like
Pegasus and the gorgon are mixed creatures. They are heathen prototypes of
Christian theology.
The thinker
without a paradox is like a lover without passion. Always reach for the paradox
because it shows what you can’t do with reason. Real passion wants to be
dissolved. To discover the supreme paradox is to discover what thought can’t
think. It’s there in all thinking.
To know what the
human is, is self-love. But then the religion of love comes along and says to
“love thy neighbour as thy self”. Uh oh! The lover when transformed by love
loses touch with its own self. Self-love is the engine of loving another but it
turns against itself and becomes someone else, and so self-love perishes.
What happens when
reason tries to understand the unknown?
If there is no
god you can’t prove it and if there is a god you can’t prove it. The tautology
is: assume god exists, and then prove it. We can’t demonstrate that anything
exists, let alone god. If we have the works, mustn’t there be a god? Not
really.
The professor
encouraged each of us to feel that if we made the world, it wouldn’t be like it
is.
Let go of proof.
Say you don’t know and thereby prove the unknown.
The leap is that
when one stops trying, the unknown comes.
Instead of the
unknown though, let’s call it “the absolutely different”.
If it is not like
me it must be god. To look for what is not like me is to cause confusion as to
what “not me” is. The human falls apart in searching for the non-human and
that’s how we get gorgons and Pegasus.
The B hypothesis
is that I produce the unlikeness for myself but depend upon god to know the
difference.
If you want to
know the unknown, look for the absolutely different and then go crazy. The
absolute paradox declares that there is an absolute difference that needs to be
overcome with an absolute likeness.
Understanding
can’t understand the moment when everything changes.
The self loses
the self and regains it when someone gives it back.
If passion is not
happy, reason takes offence. The offence is reactive rather than aggressive.
The agent that causes that offence is the absolute paradox. The acoustic
illusion is that the paradox is speaking but it sounds like it is coming from
the offended one’s rage. The offence has a pathos all its own.
Professor Gibbs
concluded the lecture by saying, “If I made this clear, you haven’t been
reading the right book. I hope you don’t understand this book.”
Naomi said to me
that every time she thinks she understands it, she realizes that she doesn’t.
I nodded in
agreement and asked her if she was free to go for coffee. She answered that she
had to rush off to the office. She explained that her boss fired her because
she couldn’t commit to full time but he keeps calling her back. The paradox is
that she is training her own full time replacement but she’s spending more time
on the job than the new girl. She said she might be able to go for coffee next
week, but I told her I had to work next Thursday.
I rode home and
sent an email to Andrew Lesk, sharing some ideas I had on James Joyce’s Araby. I
had time to sleep for about an hour and fifteen minutes before heading back out
to my Short Story lecture. Before the lecture, Andrew read to the class most of
what I’d written in the email. I won’t repeat them here because they were all
comments that I’d made in my journal entry from two days before that spoke
about the Araby lecture.
This lecture
started with James Joyce’s “The Dead”, which has five sections: the musicale;
the dinner; the speech; the farewells and Gabriel’s vision. Each scene leads to
a kind of climax that is more compressed each time. Gabriel is our mode of
consciousness but he can’t assimilate all the activity. He identifies with
things that are not Irish. Someone calls him a “West Briton”. Britain is east
of Ireland and so a West Briton would be an Irishman who acts like an
Englishman. Gabriel thinks that being Irish is low rent. He reads Browning, an
English poet; he wears galoshes, which are Continental; he went to Trinity
College in Dublin, which is Anglican; there is a statue of Wellington, who
downplayed his own Irish birth and there is a reference to William III, who
conquered Ireland.
Gabriel carries with him an air of superiority. He thinks
that people should be in tune with his beliefs. He gives a tip to someone he
knows, which is a faux pas. He proposes a pompous toast.
He wants to have sex with his wife but she is thinking of
someone else who died for his passion.
There is a sense of timelessness in the finale. Vision and
sympathy is expanded together.
“Snow was general all over Ireland.” This is a fantasy
because the weather is never the same all over Ireland.
Instead of a lecture of James Joyce’s story, “Eveline”,
Andrew handed out a sheet of seven questions and split us into seven groups. I
was in group one with three young women, dealing with the question of the
significance of the fact that Eveline, the third story in “Dubliners”, is the
first to shift from a first person to a third person narrative. I offered that
the third person perspective gave a better view with which to view Eveline’s
suffering. Someone else though had an idea that hadn’t occurred to me, which
was that Joyce has never written in the first person from a woman’s
perspective. When we had all spent about twenty minutes workshopping the
questions, Andrew called on our group first.
I immediately pointed to the woman behind me and declared that she’d had
a great idea. She accused me of throwing her under the bus and Andrew joked
about me smoothly passing the buck like he said he often does. I explained that
her idea just happened to be the one that every one of our group thought was a
good one. Our clever colleague though seemed to choose not to speak. Instead,
the woman with whom I’d been in Children’s Literature last fall explained the
point about James Joyce not having written in the first person as a woman.
Andrew told us though that he had in fact written from a woman’s perspective at
the end of Ulysses. I’d forgotten that.
Andrew skipped the second question and went on to the
third, which asks the significance of the reference to “Damned Italians!”
Apparently Italian immigrants, especially in North America, were often
considered to be people of colour back in the 19th Century.
The fourth asked why Eveline is pleasantly confused by the
song, “The Lass That Loves a Sailor”?
It’s a song of conquest by English sailors, but also a love song. It
perhaps confused Eveline because it hinted at bad intentions on the part of her
suitor.
Who is the man from Belfast who built the houses on the
field where Eveline used to play?” He is British.
The word “dusty” appears twice and “dust” and “Dusted”
appear once. Why so much dust? The accumulation of dust relates to time and it
also covers things up.
The usual interpretation of the end is that Eveline is in a
state of stasis. How might this not be the case? She is resisting, which is not
static. She also “sets her face” which implies activity.
That
night, Nick Cushing had planned on dropping by at around 19:00, to drop off a
scanner he was giving me and to make a recording of a revised script for his
animated movie. It was after 22:00 when he finally called. It was too late to
ask our brains to tackle a script, but he brought the scanner and a couple of cans
of beer. We chatted and drank
in the echo of the underpass
two dogs howl like wolves
at rush hour
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