The Erotic Triangle

           

            On Tuesday morning Naomi sat behind me as she usually does on Tuesdays because she has to rush off to another class and so she needed an end seat so she wouldn’t be disturbing other students. I asked her if she’d been able to access her essay mark online. They had been scheduled to be posted the day before but I’d gotten a red highlighted error message every time I’d tried to access mine. She told me that she’d used her phone and gotten no error message but her grade hadn’t been there.

            She said that she was recently sick for a whole week and since she’d never been ill for that long she thinks there might be something wrong with her other than having a cold. She suspects that she might be anaemic and in need of supplements. She complained that she has not adjusted well to the food here in Canada. I asked her if the produce is better in Israel. She nodded and informed me that all the food animals are free range in Israel. I looked this up though and found that it’s not true. Most livestock in Israel is penned, though there might be a slight difference in what they are fed. Israel, Canada and the US use antibiotics on their livestock, though Canada is moving away from that practice. Europe and New Zealand use no antibiotics whatsoever. Israeli dairy cattle though are the greatest milk producers in the world, at least in terms of volume.

            Professor Gibbs was late but got set up right away. He asked if anybody took the subway there, which was apparently a joke because it wasn’t running along the Bloor line. It made me glad again that I ride a bike. Naomi said she’d had to take a taxi.

            He was aware of the problem with accessing our marks and asked what happens when we try. I told him there was an error message. He assured us that no one made any mistakes and that we were not in error, because that would mean that we were sinners.

            In Nietzsche’s second essay from the Genealogy of Morals there are three questions:

            Is an ideal set up or pulled down by this essay?
            It is set up in the future and pulled down in the past.

            To whom should we look to save us?

            Not the good, but rather the healthy.

            Is this possible?

            I didn’t hear him answer this but I assume it’s up in the air.

            The future also shapes today. To be anything is to be part of the future.

            The third essay is about ascetic ideals. Ascetic ideals take away something. Ascetic ideals are ideals towards nothingness. Nietzsche was not a fan of ideals.

            At the beginning of the essay is a quote from Thus Spake Zarathustra about Wisdom being a woman (Sophia) and what women love are warriors.

            At stake is the doctrine of will. We become through will. W e achieve essence through agency. Nature and will are usually balanced, but not for Nietzsche. Human nature is an artefact of the will. The will can either extend to power, nothingness or somewhere in between. The power of will is to dominate another.

            Wagner is humbug.

            Kant’s aesthetics were victims of his ascetic ideal. Beauty was useless and unsexy to Kant. Art was an escape.

            Philosophers want to be along to do nothing but think. Ascetic ideals give one nothing but power over oneself.  There is pleasure in willing against the self. The ascetic ideal is a mask for philosophers. They disguise themselves as priests. But there is a risk when putting on a mask, as there may be no essence of identity underneath.

            Before the days of marriage as the private ownership of women, women were public property. One was a direct result of the other.

Despite many of the things Nietzsche says about women, many feminists have lauded his philosophy as an inspiration for women striving to rise above the yoke of servitude.

Can the philosopher transform asceticism to the will to power?

The priest’s ascetic ideal is a weapon against and a hatred of life. Their goal is to preserve life by denying it. This is a degenerate form of will.  The sick want revenge against the healthy. The priest is a defender of the sick who anaesthetizes them with emotion. He creates illusions of happiness. He creates guilt and teaches the unawareness of suffering. He uses enthusiasm as opposed to action to take his followers nowhere. Freudian psychology understands Nietzsche. Guilt is the cheapest of all cheap emotions and the zenith of self-denial. Guilt has destroyed Europe with psychopathy and sickness. All of the disorders we can list are the triumph of the ascetic ideal.

What ruined our taste is the will-less whining of the New Testament. Luther talked to god like it was a bowling buddy. But the Old Testament was full of real struggle.

Secularism is bound by the ascetic ideal even when it is opposed to Christianity. It’s not enough to be an atheist.

Science’s lack of faith in itself shows that it is also infected with the ascetic ideal. It is content to simply know and so it has no will to power and serves as another hiding place for bad conscience. The belief in science is still Christian.

Free thinkers still believe in truth and this is a metaphysical commitment. The will to truth is part of the problem, as it is not far removed from the will to nothingness. Moral conscience is overgrown with theology. Morality is destroyed by the will to truth or science inherited from Christianity. There is a belief that it is better to will nothingness than not willing.

A week or so ago I found a photo of Nietzsche standing naked from the waist up with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée. The implication is that they are also naked from the waist down. Rée is pinching Salomé’s nipple while Nietzsche looks on. I have since made it the background picture on my laptop. When the lecture was over I showed it to the professor and asked him if he’d ever seen it. He looked and said he hadn’t, and he didn’t know whether it made him like or dislike Nietzsche more. He added that the erotic triangle is a universally coveted combination.

When I left Alumni Hall there was snow on the ground and it was still snowing. My plan had been to go home to take a short siesta before coming back for Short Story class. The street though looked like it might be slippery. I weighed the prospect of me riding home, riding back and finally home again on that surface, against me just going to University College and finding a place to read and doze for four hours, and the latter seemed the most logical.

I found a cushioned bench on the second floor, just a few doors down from my classroom. I intermittently read, half slept and ate the Red Prince apples that I’d brought with me. I got a little stiff from sitting, but I made it through.

When I went into the classroom, the Greek language teacher greeted me and asked, “How’s life?” I said I was waiting for marks. He asked, “Is that life for you? Waiting for marks?” I explained that I meant in the context of where we were when the question was asked. He requested again to tell my professor that the writing on the board was not from his class, but I told him I was just going to erase the board myself, because if I told him then he’d know that I’d erased the board for him and he might think that I was kissing up to him. He commented that that was a very Canadian way of thinking, but that he understood.

In our two hour Short Story class we looked at three stories by Sinclair Ross. Andrew Lesk said that he wrote is dissertation on Sinclair Ross.

Andrew talked about Ross’s use of pathetic fallacy, which is making the external environment reflect the internal moods of the person.

Ross’s writing on gender and sexuality is much more interesting when he uses women’s voices. He doesn’t necessarily condescend to his female characters and he reflects patriarchal codes without necessarily favouring them.

Sinclair Ross was Gay and Andrew made the point that not all queers are progressive. He said that as a queer person himself he could attest to that.

Sinclair Ross’s writing had an unparalleled rhythm.

In the story “The Lamp at Noon” there is the use of pathetic fallacy in referring to the “demented wind”, suggesting that on of the characters is demented. Is it Ellen, who runs off with her baby into a dust storm or is it Paul, who refuses to listen to reason from his wife?

Ellen is subaltern, of lower rank in her marriage to Paul. She had been a schoolteacher but now she lives in stasis in a house in the middle of the prairie. She is both smart and supplicating at the same time.

They live in two interacting environments: physical and social. Their physical environment is referred to ironically as virile, even though the crops are failing to grow. “Clenched virility,” indicates that nothing is growing. This is essentialism, meaning that there is a set of attributes essential to the identity of the environment as opposed to the socially constructed attributes. Paul wears his environment.

Reference is made to Ellen’s “nervous dread”, which Andrew interprets as another way of painting a woman as hysterical. I think he might be reaching here.

Ellen was defined by her father and now by her husband. Paul’s behaviour is described as being instinctive which implies that he is animalistic, but it is more likely that it is learned behaviour.

The section of the story in which Paul is alone has him making godlike decisions.

Ellen becomes the land. The sacrifice of their baby restores a kind of balance.

In the story “A Field of Wheat” Martha’s will is a perversion of the natural order.

The field of wheat is sexualized and this is emphasized by the fact that John and Martha are not having sex.

The invincibility of nature is at odds with human desire. Human nature is at odds with itself.

After the terrible hailstorm that destroyed their crop, killed their dog and ravaged their house, the most frightening thing for Martha is seeing John cry.

In “The Painted Door” there are moments of selective omniscience. The phrase, “Always it was there” is repeated. We never really know what “it” is. There are two men in the story and the use of the word “he” is the literary trope of free indirect discourse. “He” is a free-floating pronoun that is deliberately vague. We don’t know which man “he” is referring to.

The snow had been very gradually falling during the time I had been on campus. It street was still manageable though as I started riding my bike home. My bike was handling strangely though, as if I had a flat tire, but I had checked my back tire before I started riding. On College, just after Bathurst, I decided to pull over and check. My back tire was still firm, but the front one was flat. I started walking. I could have taken the TTC but I was stubborn about keeping my non-transit-riding record clean, so I sacrificed probably an extra half an hour.

On my way down Brock Avenue, a middle aged Chinese woman that was shoveling her walk smiled at me as I passed, as if to ask, “Isn’t weather funny how it makes us do stuff like this?”

I passed my place and went directly to Bike Pirates, which was full of good cooking smells and not very full of customers. There were two men and one woman fixing their bikes. One of the volunteers offered rice and soup to the guy he was helping out but my volunteer, an overly helpful but glum looking teenager, didn’t offer me anything. Of course I was fasting, but he didn’t know that. I bought a new tube and put it on, but kept the old one because I wasn’t sure if I really had a puncture. I was there for about half an hour. It was about 18:45 when I got home, so I’d lost about an hour and a quarter because of the flat.

That night I watched a short animated adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” that was narrated by James Mason. He had a great voice. It was interesting that the viewer saw the entire story from the narrator’s visual perspective.