Poetic Thinking

           

            I didn’t have time to break my fast on Friday morning because I had to head off to my philosophy tutorial. I did though drink a cup of black tea that made me a little high after two weeks without caffeine.

            I rode my bike, even though the back wheel had a broken spoke and it was bumping worrisomely against my brake pads, but I drove so slowly that even women were passing me.

            I’ve been memorizing Boris Vian’s song, “Le Déserteur” and I’ve managed to retain the first one and a half verses. I was practicing as I pedaled, and when I finished what I knew, I switched to Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam”, but it kept coming out in the same melody as the Vian song. Once a year or so that seems to happen and I have to wait a while before I can dredge up the correct melody.

            I was waiting in the hall for the prior tutorial to be finished. The door was open and the TA was talking about how people didn’t really think the earth was flat even long before Columbus. He also asked the class if we are in the Matrix.

            When Sean arrived I told him that I thought his lecture was too fast and that I hadn’t had time to write everything he’d said down. He thanked me for letting him know.

            As the tutorial began, Sean asked for reactions to Heidegger. Someone said that he uses the word “Being” in every sentence.

            Sean commented that Heidegger’s use of the term “neighbourhood” makes him sound like Mr Rodgers.

            Everything participates in Being but the water bottle is not Being itself.

            Theocratic metaphysics is not the way to Being.

            Heidegger is interested in the imminent reality. Being is not Cartesian, with a subject, an object and everything grounded by god. Subject and object are a distraction from Being.

            Heidegger took the ordinary German word, “dasein”, which means “being there” and which had been used in the same sense as “over there”, and turned it into a word for the essence of all human being.

            Sean says that his wife’s friend has a boy that they’ve named “Dasein” and when Sean sees him he says, “Hey There!”

            We are stitched into the world with a level of interpenetradedness.

            Language helps us to question meaning.

            I asked what the difference was between approaching self-awareness and approaching Being. Sean answered that self-awareness has nothing to do with Being.

            Being is time.

            He said the way to Being is thinking. “But poetic thinking?” I added tentatively. Sean confirmed that Heidegger thinks that philosophy needs to be more like poetry. I asked, “Is that because poets can put thoughts inside of things?’ He said that was a very eloquent way of putting it and that metaphor is an important part of the type of language that he proposes.

            Heidegger’s idea of “letting go” is very Kierkegardian. I inquired whether “being open” would be a good term, and Sean said that it would.

            If a Star Trek type teleporter sends your blueprint to the Moon and reconstructs you perfectly there from available atoms, is it really you? What if an accident makes two of you? Are they both you? Is it a double success?

            Heidegger says that animals have Being but they are poor in Being. Someone asked if he would say the same thing about a developmentally challenged human being, and Sean confirmed that he would. Heidegger thinks that humans are the most special things in the universe.

            Language has the capacity to stitch us into reality but it needs to be subtly retooled.

            A being thing is not the same as what it is a form of.

            Being becomes primary and time participates. Later however, Heidegger reversed this interaction. Sean said it is better to say that neither is primary over the other but they still participate in one another.

            Sean told us about the video of a song called “Put Your Phone Down” by a hip-hop band called Fog and Smog. At the beginning the rapper is on a date and he’s talking to the girl about the fact that because of social media people just don’t talk to one another any more. While he’s talking she’s texting a friend with the message, “I’m with that Whole Foods rap guy and he won’t stop talking!!!!”

            This is the technological accretion of Cartesian thinking. When you think that an emoticon is an emotion, you are homeless.

            Sean told us that there is an error online where our essay questions are posted. It says, “Do answer all sub-questions”. It’s supposed to be “do not answer all sub-questions”.

            I thought this tutorial was the best we’d had so far and I told Sean so on my way out.

            I received a text from Anna, telling me that she wouldn’t be coming to my yoga class. I didn’t expect anyone to show up, but Michelle came.

            That night I watched the eleventh episode from season two of Dragnet. The true story was interesting. A woman calls the police to say that a mother had handed her a baby to hold while she went to do something, but she never came back. She described the woman as being short; with red hair and that she’d sat on the bus with her from Texas. The police put the child in care and tried to track down the mother, but they in interviewing the bus driver they found out that no woman matching that description had gotten on his bus that day. In fact, the only woman on the vehicle with a baby was the woman who’d called the police. She finally confessed that it was her baby. She explained that her husband was an officer, stationed over seas and he had been gone for over a year. After a while she couldn’t stand being alone and started going to parties and drinking too much. She ended up getting pregnant and had the baby, but when her husband was returning she decided to give the baby up so he wouldn’t know. But her husband forgave her and asked the police to take them to the hospital so they could pick up their son.