Over the years that I’ve been practicing
every morning, at the same time I look out of my second story window onto Queen
Street, and it’s hard to have not become aware of the early morning habits of
some of the people passing by.
On Tuesday morning
my windows were wide open because of the strange warm weather we’ve had during
this first third of the winter. Maybe it was the faux spring temperature or
maybe it was coincidence, but a couple of people I’ve been watching for years
do exactly the same things suddenly changed their behaviours that morning.
A nearly elderly woman with short, dyed
red hair, who obviously still works, walks up the west side of Dunn Avenue at
the same time every weekday morning. For the first time though, she walked up
the east side of Dunn and crossed Queen Street under my window, I assume to go
into the Coffee Time.
For the last few years, a young man with
dreadlocks has parked his old red economy car every weekday morning beside the
Dollarama, and jogged across Queen Street to the donut shop beneath me. Five
minutes later, he always comes back out with a coffee and a little paper
take-out bag, runs back to his car and makes a very fast left turn and guns it
west along Queen. In all those many times that I’ve seen him crossing for his
coffee, never once has he looked up at my window, no matter how loud I’ve been
playing or singing. This time though he actually steered his jaywalk halfway
across so he was not only looking up at me, but he smiled at me, raised his arm
and gave me that two fingers in the middle down, two fingers up hand gesture
that seems to mean something positive. I smiled back and nodded.
Riding my bike to
Continental Philosophy class cleared my head until the ride was over.
Naomi came in and
asked me how the nerd life was and then commented about how we are both always
early. I suggested that my tendency to be early may go back to my mother being
a schoolteacher and me getting an early ride to school with her. When I think
about it now though, maybe that doesn’t explain it since that was only between
when I was twelve and seventeen, which are hardly formative years. Naomi said
that she just likes to feel on top of things and so that’s why she gives
herself an extra fifteen minutes. I told her I’m the same way. She said though
that since she started at U of T she has been late. I didn’t say anything, but
I’ve only been late a couple of times on days when an essay was due.
Professor Gibbs
informed us that he’d posted our essay topics online. He told us that the word
“topic” is Greek for “place” and urged us in planning our papers to figure out
how we are going to occupy that space.
Continuing with
Soren Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”, he said that every chapter of
the book ends with an uncertainty, an argument by which we can’t know what we
are trying to think about. It’s like an undertow that pulls away every
sandcastle he’d built.
Of the paradox of
the absolutely different, he said, “Think about it and go nuts!” If I can think
about something it is like me. If I know something that is absolutely different
then I must be absolutely different myself. If what is absolutely different
becomes totally available then something I can’t think becomes something I can.
The divine becomes human and we are lost. I cannot change. The absolutely
different must initiate change in me.
Philosophers need
paradox, but is the absolute paradox thinkable? No.
Is this different
from Plato talking from the viewpoint of Socrates?
Philosophers used
to think that anything could be thought about.
Climacus says
that even if god comes we won’t be able to understand. Christianity becomes not
understandable. Kierkegaard becomes the patron saint of modern theology.
Professor Gibbs
then took time to answer some of our questions.
I asked if the absolutely different could be something
other than god. He said that something like the ocean is absolutely different
from us but Climacus would say it’s not enough. He warned me that the answer
wouldn’t be very satisfying and he was right. I was thinking more of the
absolutely different within each of us and which would be there whether god
existed or not.
Somebody else asked how can god be
absolutely different if we were created in god’s image. I don’t recall the
answer to that question.
God in the flesh can’t show everyone he’s god because he is Clark
Kent all the time.
Seeing is not
believing. Faith is belief in things that aren’t seen. Empirical evidence is
distracting. But if god in the flesh
doesn’t worry, is it really human? Meeting god in the flesh is the beginning of
eternity. God in the flesh doesn’t have to be Jesus. Salvation is more than a
historical event, but rather eternal.
One cannot
understand the absolute paradox but one can understand that there is a paradox.
Kierkegaard was
Danish. The Danes were Lutheran. Luther thought a lot about faith. Kierkegaard
says that knowing the teaching is not enough.
Many felt the need
to report on the death of Socrates, but Plato, his real student didn’t feel the
need to be there. Socrates was only an occasion and his death was not
important.
The historical
moment gains eternal weight. The eternal becomes historical.
Faith is not a form of knowledge. Knowing
is an act of will but faith is not because for faith one needs the condition
from god. Faith is paradoxical.
To be contemporary with god one has to
not be bound to the historical moment. The eternal moment blows apart the
structure of time. But if god doesn’t give one the moment it can’t be
perceived.
One advantage to being a contemporary
with god in the flesh is that there would have been less gossip at the time.
After class I had time to go home long
enough to get an hour and fifteen minutes of sleep before heading back downtown
for my Short Story class. This week we were covering some of the stories of
Katherine Mansfield. Both her and James Joyce wrote of the multiple, the
fragmented and discontinuous self that became emblematic of modern literature.
People were not writing like this up until then. Ambiguity was directly
courted. She had amazing control. Her main characters have their world
destroyed by a dark vision that is noticed but not acted upon. There is a
subtle shift in narrative voice at some point in the story that we are used to
now.
The first story was “Bliss”. The message
may be that ignorance is bliss. Bliss is certainly being mocked.
“This body” refers to the constraints of
having a female body.
There is a whiff of lesbianism in the
story. Pearl is perhaps the cause of the bliss Bertha is feeling.
The colours of the fruit decorating the
table are echoed by the colours of the clothing being worn by Bertha and Pearl.
The pear tree is silver like Pearl’s clothing. She has “moonbeam fingers”.
The baby is subtly shown that it is not
Bertha’s baby. The white dress suggests that Bertha is a virgin.
The grey cat that Bertha sees in the
garden represents Pearl and the black cat represents Eddy. The pear tree is
symbolic of Bertha’s life.
“Why doth the bridegroom tarry?” is an
ironic reference to Matthew 25:5: “While the bridegroom tarried, they all
slumbered and slept.” This is the parable of the ten virgins.
To say that the guests are a “trifle too
unaware” is to mean that they are very much aware.
The phrase “pear tree” is repeated three
times, indicating a love triangle.
The second half of the class was taken up
with a study of “Something Childish But Very Natural”. It begins with a poem of
the same name by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “If I had but two little wings
and were a little feathery bird, to you I'd fly, my dear! But thoughts like
these are idle things, and I stay here. But in my sleep to you I fly: I'm
always with you in my sleep! The world is all one's own. But then one wakes,
and where am I? All, all alone. Sleep stays not, though a monarch bids: So I
love to wake ere break of day: For though my sleep be gone, yet while 'tis
dark, one shuts one's lids, and still dreams on.”
Andrew
Lesk thinks that Mansfield decided to make a story out of the poem.
Henry,
the dreamer, has no deep knowledge and is not a poet, but on seeing Edna,
thinks that his eyes are “like two drunken bees”. Andrew imitated what it would
look like if your yes were like two drunken bees to illustrate what a silly
line it is.
The
train going through the tunnel is portentous.
Henry
and Edna, in a little cottage in a little village are playing at being adults
like children with a dollhouse.
The
story, like most Mansfield stories, ends in stasis.
I
thought that the whole story, after Henry’s first meeting with Edna, was
Henry’s dream. At the end of class, Andrew gave me his argument as to why he
thinks it’s merely made to be dreamlike.
We
were also discussing his Graphic Novel course, which I took four years ago. I
told him that I was taking Digital Text at the same tie and he was curious
about the course. I told him that there was a graphic novel in the course,
published online, on which I wrote my essay, in conversation with Marshall
McCluhan’s “Understanding Media”, but at that moment I couldn’t remember the
name of the graphic novel. He said to let him know and we parted. I remembered
that it was “Body World” a minute later, but couldn’t recall the author, even
though I’d exchanged emails with the guy four years ago. When I got home I dug
up my essay and saw that it was Dash Shaw. His “Body World” is definitely one
of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.
I
watched a couple of episodes of Dennis the Menace. Dennis was explaining to his
mother that his friend Joey, who doesn’t speak, is a deep thinker. He told Joey
to show her how he thinks and so Joey shut his eyes really tight and scrunched
up his face. Joey was played by Gil Smith, who went on to become a successful
commercial photographer.
Also
playing another of Dennis’s friends was a young Ronnie Howard, just before he
became Opie on the Andy Griffith Show.
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