"Why Don't You Join the Rosicrucians?"

           

            On Tuesday morning I rode through a light rain to philosophy class and as usual I was the first one there. I set up my laptop and tried to make sense of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”. About fifteen minutes later Miriam came in.

            She sat to my left with one seat empty between us.

I commented that I guess we weren’t in the same tutorial after all. She said that she was in Sean’s session. So was I, but it turned out she had the one he gave two hours later. She observed that he’s very passionate. I think she meant “intense” and I added in agreement that he’s sort of like the Henry Rollins of philosophy.

            She stripped her upper wear down to a tank top. A tattoo took up the whole of her right arm and disappeared into the fabric at her shoulder. She began massaging the tattoo clinically but sensually with her left hand for a while and then she ran a small pad of tissue, which I assume was soaked with alcohol, over her body art. I got the impression this was treatment for a recently acquired tattoo, so I asked her about it and she confirmed that it was new. She said it wasn’t finished though and pointed out the outlines still waiting to be filled in. She told me that she’s been working on it for the last ten years. It’s her design but someone else is doing the drawing. I didn’t stare that closely at the imagery but I did notice something like a fairy with bat wings among the complex visual display. I asked her for the story behind it all but she answered, “Too long!” She told me that the tattoo runs from her right arm, down her right shoulder, cross the top of her back at a downward angle to finish or start on her left ribs.

            I told her I couldn’t think of a single image that I wouldn’t get bored with after about five minutes. She explained that it’s not about the images but rather what they represent. I told her I knew that but I don’t even like wearing t-shirts with images on them. She said that every time she looks at her tattoo she gets excited.

            We discussed the course and she complained that so far, after two lectures, they are still just talking about what we are going to talk about, without delving into the material itself. I said that I find Nietzsche a lot easier to understand than Kierkegaard. She commented that they spent a fair amount of time on Nietzsche in Introductory Philosophy. She confirmed when I enquired, that this was her second Philosophy course. She added that Philosophy is her major but she was thinking of changing that. Her plan had been to go into Criminology but she failed the required Sociology course. She said she was somewhat handicapped by English being her second language. I had detected a slight accent when she spoke and now asked her what her first language was and she told me it was Hebrew.

            “So you’re from Israel!” I said, “That explains the name Miriam!”

            “My name’s Naomi.” She told me, without annoyance.
            ”Naomi!” I was embarrassed, “Where did I get Miriam from?”

            “It doesn’t matter. It’s almost the same thing!”

            “No it’s not!” I argued, “Other than having three syllables, it’s not the same at all!

            “Well, they’re both Biblical names.”

            “So did you serve in the army?”

            “Yes, I was in special ops, though I didn’t know what I was doing and still don’t know what I did. I wanted to be in combat.”

            “How long were you in the army?”

            “Girls serve two years and boys serve three, though you can apply to serve longer. “My sister liked it, so she did another year.” She paused and added, “I didn’t kill anybody though.”

            “But you said that you wanted to go into combat. You might have killed people if you’d gotten in.”

            “Well, I was eighteen when I joined. At that age everybody wants to do combat. There’s a sense of …”

            “Romance?”

            “Yeah”. She told me that kids know for a long time that military service is something they have to do, so they are mentally prepared for it when it happens.

            Professor Gibbs came in, looking recovered from his illness. He seems like an extremely good-natured person even when he isn’t saying anything.

            He began by describing where our peripatetic course has gone so far. At Emmanuel College there had been no room for us at the United Church Theological Seminary. He joked that it was maybe too much philosophy for the United Church but then added that in fact the United Church is one of the most open minded of the Christian churches. We were moved before our first lecture to the Koffler multi-faith centre but then we were bumped from there by a history course. Finally, there we were as he spoke, at Alumni Hall, on the campus of St Michael’s College.

            The professor thanked Keegan for lecturing in his place on the previous Thursday, but commented that Keegan must not have read chapter two of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments” because he had ASCENDED to the balcony.

            Then, finally, at the beginning of the third week of a course that is supposed to begin with Kierkegaard, Robert Gibbs began talking about Kierkegaard. He said that Kierkegaard is confusing in important ways. But then he stepped away from Kierkegaard again to touch on some of the philosopher’s we will be studying later. Heidegger, the greatest 20^th Century philosopher, was a Nazi. He asked, “Can philosophy recover from that? He added that the later writers talk a lot about the earlier writers in a kind of snowball.

            When we read works by Kierkegaard for which he used pseudonyms, Kierkegaard wants us to think about the books as if they were by other authors than himself. Behind “Philosophical Fragments”, for instance, Kierkegaard, a devout Christian, as Johannes Climacus, is posing as a non-Christian. Climacus’s task is to make Christianity unintelligible. Chapter two is plagiarized from the New Testament. Chapter three is an attack on Plato.

            The question here is, can we make rational sense of this? Kierkegaard is writing to an audience that knows Christianity but telling them that what they think they know they don’t. He is driven by his own commitment to Christ to deconstruct Christianity.

            In Chapter one he asks, “Can truth be learned?”

            Plato told of the traitor General Meno. Can virtue be taught? Not to Meno!

Plato said that knowledge is recollection, which is a pre-echo of Hegel.

            Socrates failed with almost everybody he taught. From a Socratic perspective, there is no course in which you are learning, “So I hope people are worried!” Did Socrates want to give to people what they already know, or take it away? Climacus is deeply Socratic. Socrates would have been a lousy philosophy professor.

            In the first chapter of “Philosophical Fragments” there is lots of language related to birth and midwifery.

            Meeting the teacher is an “occasion”.

            You are less of a human being if you received the knowledge from someone else.

            Hegel was like a philosophical rock star and people thronged to universities where he was lecturing. I wonder if there was a mosh pit. Then Schelling came along and took the matters with which Hegel dealt to an even higher level. It was Kierkegaard though who declared, wait a minute, that isn’t knowledge! The teacher’s goal is to help you fin it in yourself. The teacher should withdraw and disappear.

            The A premise then is that you can’t get much from anyone. You have autonomy. Think and judge for yourself.

            The antecedent state is the moment of decisive significance.

            The B premise is that a new kind of teacher must provide the condition for understanding. The highest kind of relationship between human beings is a Socratic one, but god can transform the learner. God already gave the learner that capacity and the learner lost it.

            The acoustical paradox is that understanding cannot of itself conceive, understand or resolve.               One can only be in error by one’s own action. The decisive moment then was not when the teacher gave the knowledge, but when we threw away our freedom to know.

            The Aristotelian moment is that you can’t pull back an act of free will. It’s not freedom unless you can give it away. Freedom is the principal that you can divest yourself of freedom. It wouldn’t be freedom unless you could abandon it.

            If the moment of teaching is to be decisive it must recreate the learner.

            Socrates does not allow you to be reborn.

            Can we imagine divine love from outside? No.

            Chapter two of “Philosophical Fragments” changes the register. It’s all about love and will.                 There’s a bit of Kierkegaard’s contemporary, Hans Christian Anderson, in this chapter. Love equalizes. Love creates understanding and then goes looking for it. If love is not equal it is unhappy.               The higher one will be miserable. Is there a happy love story in existence? Pygmalian. The professor said, “Bring me a poet! We need help!”

            Socratic ignorance is a way of equality.

            In the way of descent, the king descends as a servant. Love does not alter the beloved but rather alters itself.

            During the last few minutes of the lecture, Naomi was putting on her clothes. At the end, she stuck a cigarette in her mouth, said she’d see me Thursday, and rushed out the door just like she did the last time we had a Tuesday lecture, which was our first lecture.

            I rode home and had time to sleep for an hour before riding back downtown for my Short Story lecture.

            This week were looking at a few stories from James Joyce’s “Dubliners”.

            All the stories are connected and speak to a sense of community.

            One of Joyce’s main concerns was with how Ireland was being held back by Catholicism. He saw that it leads to paralysis of the mind.

            There are no joyful Joycian stories, except perhaps in parts of Ulysses.

            “The Sisters” tells of actual sisters but also means nuns. They also represent Irish culture.

            The third stroke of the clock refers to the Trinity.

            A simple story, dense with meaning that criticizes the Catholic Church.

            The word “queer” refers to corruption.

            Someone is referred to as a “Rosicrucian” and Andrew stopped to ask if anyone knows what they are. I said the Rosicrucians are a secret society and they used to post ads in comic books for people to send away for reading material. Andrew Lesk, who also teaches the Graphic Novel course didn’t know that. I added that in Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Dress Rehearsal Rag”, from his album, “Songs of Love and Hate”, he sings, “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians, they will give you back your hope, You can find your love in diagrams in a plain brown envelope.”

            The priest is referred to as being paralytic.

            A simoniac is someone that profits from selling sacred things.

            A mortal sin is a harmful sin that kills the babtismal spirit while a venial sin may only be a little hurtful.

            The last sacraments are given to dying Catholics.

            Andrew was talking about the priests body rotting and going into that good night when suddenly, as if of its own free will, the projector light came on, shining on the blackboard.

            A breviary is a collection of scriptures.

            The priest’s life was crossed.

            The chalice contained nothing. There was nothing in it and nothing to it. Catholicism is empty.

            In the story “Araby” we began with the end of the story in which the boy is inexplicably angry. Then we went into the story to see if we could figure it out.

            In the home of a Catholic priest that died, the boy finds three books:

            “The Abbot” by Walter Scott, which centres on Mary Queen of Scott’s imprisonment, escape and defeat.

            "The Devout Communicant: Rules for holy week”, which was written by an Anglican.

            “The Memoirs of Vidocq” are the story of the French criminal turned criminologist who is said to be the father of criminology.

            Behind the dead priests house is a ruined garden with an apple tree in the centre. The place of original sin.

            Andrew, who was raised Catholic, saw something fishy in the priest having an estate to distribute in his will, because he thought that all priests take a vow of poverty. I looked this up and found that this is not the case. Certain orders like the Jesuits and the Dominicans require a vow of poverty from their members and some individual priests may choose to take the vow, but there is no rule that says a priest that hasn’t taken the vow can’t make money or even be rich.

            Mangan’s sister is symbolic of sexuality and commercialism. The boy has a perverse adoration for her, watching her from his window. She plays him like a harp, which is the symbol of Ireland. Again there is the idea of sister and nun. Mangan’s sister speaks of her convent.

Caroline Norton’s “The Arab’s Farewell” is a parallel story to this.

            The boy’s uncle gives him a florin, which would have had the image of Queen Victoria, representing colonialism. He has no father, like the boy in The Sisters.

            The Araby bazaar was in a cathedral like hall. The kiosk keepers had English accents.

            The boy finds his epiphany while looking into darkness.

            He buys nothing. He doesn’t buy it. Commercialism.

            As I was getting ready to leave at the end of class, some of us were discussing with Andrew the days when drugs like opium and cocaine were not illegal. I mentioned that Sherlock Holmes took cocaine, but Andrew thought it had been opium. I said I was pretty sure that he used cocaine to keep himself on the ball. Since then I’ve confirmed that the idea of the “seven percent solution” relates to cocaine injection.

            That night I watched an episode of the Walt Disney “Davy Crockett” TV series. They’d run out of stories from his journal, so they made movies out of some of the made up legends. It was a pretty horrible story about a keelboat river race.