What's Really Scary is People That Say "Awesome!" All the Time

            I spent a lot of Sunday alternating between re-reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and “The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali”.

            I finished a second reading of “The Wasteland” out loud and then I copied it to a Word document. I started removing all of the notes that accompany the text and translating to English all the parts that are in other languages. I’m hoping that way I can get a better sense of the flow and meaning of the text when I read it.

            As for the Al-Ghazali text, I find it way too religious and I don’t know why my philosophy professor thought it important enough to link us to it.

October 30- Although the heat was on on Monday morning, when I opened the windows there was a cold breeze blowing in, and though it didn’t cancel out the ovenness, it at least made it a little more tolerable.

            I had to work around midday for Diane Pugen at OCADU. It was the first time I’d posed for Diane since before she had her stroke last year. I was twenty minutes early for class and there was another model just packing up to leave as I arrived. She didn’t remember my name and I didn’t remember hers but I remembered the last time we ran into each other how she’d impressed me by remembering my name after a short struggle. This time she was dressed in a kind of casual Middle Eastern or Gypsy costume. We had to ask each other’s names this tie and she said hers is Susan though she kind of looks like she could be Persian.

            At start time Diane hadn’t yet arrived, which is not unusual, but I decided to start working without her because I know she likes that kind of thing. I was most of the way through a set of one-minute gestures when she came in. When I took a break she introduced me to the class, “This is Christian. He’s one of our very best models, as I’m sure you could tell from his poses.” That was nice.

            Diane lectured for several minutes. She seems to be mostly recovered from her stroke, though she does seem more than a year older and talks a little bit slower than before.

            She had me stand on the stage naked while she stood beside me and pointed at my anatomical parts with the handle end of her paintbrush. The only problem was that touched every part of my body that she pointed to. She must know that she’s not supposed to do that but maybe she couldn’t help herself. If it had been anyone else but her I would have complained to the model coordinator.

            During my coffee break I finished reading “The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali”. It’s pretty dogmatic and he seems to think that all of the other philosophers are infidels, including the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna.

            I stopped at the Bank of Montreal between Spadina and Bathurst on my way home to take out my rent and some spending money. The bank was empty of customers because I think they were about to close. The teller asked how I was and I told him I was okay. “Awesome” he responded, not very convincingly. I keyed in my pin and he said, “Awesome.” I think he told me to have an awesome day or something like that after giving me the money I’d asked for.

           

           

            

Branding Buddha

            It was a relief to get up on Saturday without the heat being on. There is no way to control the heat in my apartment and so when it is on it is on full blast no matter what the temperature is outside. It was nice this time to do my yoga in comfort.

            I got ready to go to the food bank at 9:30 and even packed an umbrella in anticipation of standing for several minutes in the rain. When I got there though there was one unattended cart in the rain on the sidewalk and only two people standing in the entryway. I had the thought that maybe there’d been a memo that I had not received. Before bothering lock my bike I went to the door to ask if the food bank was open. The Ethiopian guy who’s usually there with his little dog was standing inside with another regular food bank client. He told me that the food bank had already opened and they were just waiting to be called down. I went back to lock my bike and then returned to the doorway. The Ethiopian guy said he was going to go downstairs but the other man warned that they were probably just going to tell him to go back up here and wait. He went anyway. The other man told me I could go ahead and try but I insisted on staying because he was ahead of me. He informed me that he’d already gotten his food and he was just getting ready to leave, so I went downstairs. The Ethiopian guy was standing outside of the shopping room and I went to stand behind him, but Angie saw us through the window and shouted that we weren’t supposed to come down until someone had called us, so we went back upstairs where he stood inside the doorway and I stood outside under the canopy but leaning on the door to keep it open. I asked him where his pom-chi was and he answered that he’d left him at home because of the rain. Two young men arrived together and we explained the situation. They waited inside and complained that Social Services was not releasing the cheque until October 31^st and so they wouldn’t have any money for Halloween weekend. I checked my bank account online later out of curiosity and saw that it looks like the an amount similar to my usual cheque was deposited. When money goes in at midnight on Friday my account doesn’t show the name of the depositor until the next business day but it’ll probably say “Metro Toronto MSP/DIV” on Monday, so I don’t know what those guys were talking about. Maybe they are on ODSP and it has a different deposit date than my Ontario Works cheques.

            To my left, under the canopy, under her sleeping bag, with a green PVC tarpaulin sheet on top of that, was the still-sleeping homeless woman. I wondered out loud what she was going to do when it got colder. The Ethiopian guy looked out at her and shook his head in pity. The two young men looked at her as well and one of them asked, “The Native woman?”

            A few people with groceries came up from downstairs. The young guys were getting impatient and so they went to the basement. The big Jamaican woman came up with her food and the Ethiopian guy asked her if anybody was down there. She shook her head. He told me he was going down. I waited because I didn’t want to get yelled at again, but after a couple of minutes, since the others didn’t seem to have been booted back upstairs, I went down as well. When I got there I saw that they were being served. That’ll teach me to do what I’m told!

            I guess because they had started so early (I assume because of the rain) that not all of the volunteers had arrived, the food bank was understaffed. The woman that processed me at the computer jumped up from the desk to run over and serve me in the meat and dairy section.

            They were offering two-litre cartons of milk this time but I turned it down because I had three bags at home and I didn’t think I could go through it all fast enough for some of it to not go sour. The yogourt was a 650-gram container of probiotic lactose free vanilla yogourt. After checking to make sure it wasn’t artificially sweetened, I took it. The meat selections as usual were a choice between frozen ground chicken and frozen halal chicken wieners. I still have two tubes of chicken in my freezer so I chose the hot dogs. She asked if I wanted a pack of soy cheese slices but I told her they taste like horse sweat.

            Then Angie came out from the back and served me from the vegetable section. There was a bag of frozen peas, three cobs of corn, a large red pepper, two 680-gram bags of mini-potatoes, three onions and two hard black avocadoes. While Angie was serving me, Sylvia came out from the back said, “Hi Sweetie!” to me and stood beside Angie to wait for her to go back to her usual station, which she did. But since there was no client coming up for vegetables next, Sylvia decided to go ahead and serve me at the shelves.

            Like last time, the only cereal available was the Special K protein crunch, so I took a box. It’s not bad and actually better than the regular Special K, though I find it strange that they’ve branded it as a type of Special K, since it has no flavour or even texture characteristics that would justify it being derived from the original. By contrast, Honey Nut Cheerios still have the character of Cheerios and Cocoa Crispies remain recognizable as being a type of Rice Crispies.

            There was plenty of pasta and rice but the only thing I took from that section was a can of organic tomato sauce.

            The canned tuna was absent this time but there were little cans of sardines in tomato sauce. Canned beans were plentiful and I took a tin of chickpeas.

            The only canned soup they had were ones of chicken broth, but I saw among them a package and I guess I was sold by the words “spicy chicken” so I grabbed that. I’d thought it was a soup mix to which one would add boiling water and it would turn into a delicious spicy chicken soup. When I got it home though I realized it was a “soup kit” and it required the additions of chicken broth, chicken, a red pepper and a can of diced tomatoes. Oh well, it wasn’t going to go bad before the next time I had those ingredients.

            I took a bottle of Greek feta and Oregano salad dressing.

            Sylvia handed me five Star Wars vanilla cake granola bars just like the kind that Jedi knights eat. Next to those were 40-gram bags of Hungry Buddha pumpkin spice flavoured coconut chips with turmeric. On another shelf, to wash that down were half-litre containers of Thirsty Buddha coconut water. Both products were Buddha brand with the same image of a little bald and chubby cartoon Buddha sitting in the lotus position and holding his hands in the prayer position. There are so many products using the name of Buddha that it seems the Christians and Muslims are missing out on a wealth of marketing opportunities. There is no “Ravenous Jesus Pasta and Sauce” or “Jesus Brand Loaves and Fishes”. I was about to say that there is no Jesus brand wine but then I looked it up. There was a California wine called “Jesus Juice” but they had to fold under religious pressure. There is a brand of peanut butter port beer though with the name “Sweet Baby Jesus”. There are surf products under the title “Jesus Surfed” but don’t try to put out any lines of clothing with the name “Jesus” because the Italian company, “Jesus Jeans” have copyrighted the name “Jesus” for any clothing and they will sue your pants off. As for Mohammed, there are obvious reasons why that religious figure’s name is not commercialized, but it goes even further. Despite the fact that Mohammed is a popular name for boys, the Muslim community didn’t even want the name to be put on personalized bottles of Coca Cola.

            The last section was the bread, but I had plenty at home.

            As I was unlocking my bike, the homeless Native woman partially pulled don her sleeping bag and half sat up, grumbling to herself. One of the younger guys that I’d seen earlier came out with his food, said “Here Hon!” and handed her a package of saltines. “Oh, thank you!” she said, and it seemed to cheer her up.

            I was finished at the food bank by 10:15, fifteen minutes before it was supposed to open. If the rain were to always cause them to open that early I would have no problem with it raining every Saturday morning. I would almost be willing to get yelled at too.

            When I got home I put my groceries down and, taking advantage of the fact that I was still dressed to go out, went out to the liquor store to buy two cans of Creemore.

            I spent a lot of the rest of the day writing about my food bank adventure.

            That night I decided to try to use the spicy chicken soup kit to make pasta sauce. I sautéed some garlic and an onion, added a yellow pepper and some of the pork I’d cooked the night before, then I added two cans of sauce and the soup kit ingredients. It took quite a while for the dried soup mix to dissolve in the sauce and then I had to add and re-add salt, Worcestershire and scotch bonnet sauce until it started tasting good.

            There was a message on Facebook from Nick Cushing saying that he was in the neighbourhood to film a band and he could drop by beforehand, so I said okay. Nick arrived just as I was about to eat my sauce with some pasta. He said he’d just had some chicken so I ate by myself while we chatted. He told me a funny story about a relative that was so cheap that when he was prescribed Warfarin pills as heart medicine he thought he could save money by making his own pills out of Warfarin rat poison. Someone stopped him before he could go through with it.

            After I’d eaten I went to make some coffee for us and realized that I’d absent-mindedly forgotten to turn off the element on which I’d cooked the pasta and I’d put the pot with the pasta sauce on that element and left it there. My beautiful sauce was burnt on the bottom so that burnt taste might have ruined it for a second meal.

            Past experience with Nick as a guest taught me that he likes his coffee less strong than I do and so I made two batches in the French press. I made mine first and set it on the table, but Nick thought it was his and drank some. I took it back but he said he wasn’t feeling great and so the germs on the cup might not be good for sharing and besides, it turned out that my tasted good for him, so I let him use my cup and I made another for myself. After he left I poured boiling water over the cup he’d used just in case he really did have cooties.

            I finished reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. It’s interesting but it’s hard to read with a flow because of the switches of language and identity. I began reading it again out loud, without reading all the notes to see if I could feel it better.

Laughing Moon

            On Friday I was with my parents walking in the city. I looked up at the full moon and it was not only enormous but it was alive with a laughing face that one might see in an old cartoon from the 1930s. I wanted to take a picture of it but I thought that my camera was at home. My plan was to get the camera but that led to another part of the dream that I don’t remember other than that I realized that I’d had my camera with me all along as usual but I still never took the picture. The desire to do so was there but the will seemed to be absent.

            I typed out my lecture notes from Thursday’s philosophy class then I looked online and found that the TAs had posted the weekly question on time. I re-read the relevant section of Avicenna’s Metaphysics and answered the question, “Why does the Necessary Existent have to understand everything through itself and in a universal manner?  Relate your answer to the nature of necessary existence.” Here’s my response:

            The Necessary Existent is considered by Avicenna to be the justification for everything that exists. He thinks that anything that is created must have a creator and that such a creator must be omniscient. If even some of the Necessary Existent’s understanding came from outside of itself then it would not be omniscient and it would not owe its existence to itself because complete understanding is synonymous with its existence. For its existence to be complete its understanding must be complete. Understanding cannot be an attribute that it has because that would make understanding a mere part of it and so understanding has to be what the Necessary Existent is. Understanding from outside of itself would be subject to change and if it depended on such understanding that would make the Necessary Existent subject to change, which for Avicenna would be an absurdity. If the Necessary Existent could be taught that would mean its understanding could be caused which would mean that aspects of its own understanding would be merely possible and therefore non-existent. Therefore if god could learn it would have to not exist.

            I’ve been reading T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and found it interesting that Eliot uses the personage of the ancient Greek prophet Tiresias as the spectator and a bridge between the past and present and between the female and male elements. The legend of Tiresias is that he struck a tangle of two snakes with his staff and was transformed into a woman. Seven years later he struck two snakes again and was turned back into a man. With the knowledge that he’d gained from his experience he intervened in an argument between Zeus and Hera. She had insisted that men receive more pleasure from sex than women do but Zeus disagreed. Tiresias confirmed that Zeus was right and it made Hera so angry that she cursed him with blindness. Zeus couldn’t undo the curse but he compensated Tiresias by giving him the gift of prophecy.

            That night I rubbed a boneless pork sirloin roast with olive oil, garlic, rosemary, thyme, sage and orange zest and roasted it for dinner.

            I took out the garbage and as usual for that hour I saw my next roof neighbour, Taro. I told him about the pigeon hitting my face but what was on his mind, like last time, was the fact that Caesar, the guy who lives above me is always standing at his back window and staring down at him. He asked me why he does that. I said, “I don’t know, but maybe he wants to see if you’re smoking pot.” “Why would that matter?” “Maybe he thinks that it’s wrong.” Taro declared that it’s very annoying because he can see Caesar’s shadow cast down on him when he’s standing up there in his window and it might get to the point where he’s going to throw a rock at his window. I suggested that might make things a lot worse and related to him how I lived on the street for ten years and had to deal with a lot of different kinds of people. What I learned is that some people can’t help themselves. They’re like bad weather and have no control over their actions but you can’t throw a rock at a rainstorm.

Taxi Dancer

            On Thursday morning the heat was on for the first time in at least seven months. I opened all the windows but it was still hotter in my apartment then it had been all summer. At first I was feeling dopey from the excessive warmth. The temperature felt a little more tolerable during song practice and after that the furnace went off.

I took my laptop with me to philosophy class because I’d planned on typing out my English lecture notes but when I got there I realized that I’d left my notes at home. Instead I read some of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. It’s so complicated with all of its references that it’s hard to get a flow going in reading it the way poetry is supposed to be read.

            When the prior class was done I went in and chatted with Ryan. I told him about the pigeon slamming into my face and he said he’d never heard of anything like that happening before. I recounted the story from the 90s of when the face of Fabio the male supermodel had collided with a Canada goose while he was riding a roller coaster. Ryan thinks he would have fallen off his bike if it had happened to him. He said he rides to campus from the Beaches and a trip that long is a new experience for him. He told me he’d taken the TTC that day because it was too cold for him. I informed him that I ride all winter but he responded that he didn’t think he could handle it and is always worried about something life threatening occurring. He confessed that he’s a very anxious person.

            Professor Black began her lecture with the comment that it’s fun to think about how similar the proofs of the soul are in the writings of the Christian philosopher Anselm and the Islamic philosopher Avicenna.

            When the Islamic philosophers began developing their cosmology the best explanation up to then had been that of Ptolemy.

            Avicenna excelled in psychology and metaphysics and his ideas influenced Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza.

            In his philosophical autobiography, Avicenna wrote about having mastered medicine by the age of 16. he taught himself philosophy but he was stumped by Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He claims to have read it 40 times but it wasn’t until he read Al-Farabi’s “The Aims of Aristotle’s Metaphysics” that the veil was lifted.

            Most Islamics saw metaphysics in terms of theology but Avicenna didn’t. For him it was Ontology – the study of Being and its properties. Everything common to all beings is not the study of the divine, but the end of metaphysics is to prove immaterial beings.

            About ten minutes into the lecture I suddenly realized that I’d left my leather jacket draped over the back of a chair outside the classroom. As quietly as possible I got up, edged myself behind two students, carefully opened the door so as not to disturb the class, closed it behind me and found my jacket where I’d left it. I guess I only missed a minute of the lecture.

            Primary concepts

            Existence/Being

            Essence → Reality

  → Quiddity → Whatness

  → Thing (Primary concepts) To claim something can and cannot be at

the same time. No proposition is neither true nor false. There must also be primary concepts.

            The implicit of the understanding of anything is to conceive of the thing and its essence, even of a baby. It’s built into our understanding from the start. It’s primary.

The basic structure of reality.

Modal concepts

Necessary

Possible

Impossible (Not part of any content)

Everything that exists is either necessary or possible.

The world includes two concepts existent or thing, mutually implied, cannot be separated but distinct.

Take random concepts of different essences.

Professor Black confesses that she is addicted to vampire movies.

So compare a horse and a vampire. We can’t tell what kinds of beings these are. Being in reality or in singulars. Singular horses with the essence of horseness. Both vampires and horses exist in the mind. Essences are neutral with respect to existence.

This influenced Thomas Aquinas.

Ryan asked her if Aquinas would have read this directly from Avicenna. She answered that the Jesuits might have gone to the original texts. Jewish scholars of the middle period would have read it as well.

Deborah Black, since she was talking about vampires because of Halloween, suggested that we could dress up as a Phoenix but urged us not to spontaneously combust.

So of the horse and the vampire, the vampire exists in the mind alone.

Defining necessary and possible in terms of one another.

Avicenna offers proof of the divine but decides that it’s not possible to discover the divine in the physical world. He thinks he’s found a metaphysical solution.

Proof: a priori (ontological) or cosmological?

Cosmological – Taking something and arguing that god caused it.

Inference from sensible things based on immersible, intelligible properties. God’s acts → Creation. Didn’t require looking at god’s effects. Existence bears evidence of god. The Kalam is a cosmological argument for the existence of god. Every created thing must have a creator.

Avicenna is more a priori. He starts with the two modal concepts.

The difference between necessity and possibility.

Necessary existence → Non-existence implies a contradiction.

                                 → Has no cause and just exists in virtue of essence

Possible existence    → Like the vampire, neither its existence or non-existence is contradictory.

                                 → Its existence requires a cause. If something exists in essence something else has to be added for it to exist in reality.

Can you have a world of only possible existents?

When horseness is realized in the horse the possible becomes necessary.

Necessary – in itself

Possible – through another

Causality is necessary for existence

Possible made necessary through itself.

Necessary existence or possible existence.

If something is possibly existent it is equally possible that it could exist or not but it would need a cause.

He says that there is no doubt that there is existence.

Professor Black says that is pretty empirical.

He says one cannot doubt primary concepts.

She says that ontological arguments are controversial.

What about the cause itself? Is it possible or necessary. One can’t have a necessary regress of causes. Finding an infinite chain of possible being still won’t bring us to the cause of everything.

On the way home, at around Ossington I saw and stopped to chat with one of my favourite art teachers whom I hadn’t seen in a few years since he retired. I think the last time I saw him was four years ago when he was working one day as a substitute teacher for a class for which I happened to be posing. He was down at Ossington and Queen because he was going to meet his daughter who was staying in a shelter at CAMH. I told him that I was still going to U of T and he was impressed. He thought that the 20^th Century US Lit course I’m taking right now sounded interesting. He said he thinks that he should do something like that to get his 66-year-old brain working.

That night I watched an episode of Mike Hammer that had some interesting elements. Women working as taxi dancers at a nightclub were disappearing and so Hammer came to investigate. It turned out to be a front for a white slavery market headed by a stern looking but not unattractive middle-aged woman who referred to the girls as her “stock”. 

Passing

            On Wednesday I spent a lot of time typing out Tuesday’s lecture notes.

            Before leaving for English class I went out to buy a can of beer for later. I headed out 15 minutes later than usual because I still had some writing to do and there was really no point arriving too early since I’d just be standing outside the classroom anyway.

            When our instructor, Scott Rayter arrived he came with a guest lecturer about his age or a little younger. She had tattoos that came out from under her top to her collar, from her sleeves to her wrists and from the bottoms of her pants to the tops of her feet, so I assume they all connected completely underneath her clothing. She put her information up on the screen and her name is Margeaux Feldman and she’s a PHD candidate in English and sexual diversity studies, so though I don’t think she’s one of our TAs, she’s certainly been a TA. She began by telling us that her dissertation explores hideous portrayals of teenage girls in literature and other media.

            She highly recommended a viral video called “Dirty Girls”.

            I watched it later and was surprised by how long ago it was shot but it fits into Margeaux’s area of study. The documentary centers on a group of 13 year old girls in a private school somewhere in the States who were following the Grunge movement and not trying to look attractive according to the mainstream standards. They were given the name “The Dirty Girls” by people that saw them from a distance. The film features interviews with the girls and with students that were critical of them. They also had a zine which they’d circulated featuring art and poetry, some of it Feminist and some deeply personal but a lot of their fellow students thought that was laughable as well.

            Her lecture was on Nella Larsen’s “Passing”. She began by asking, “Why does Irene continue to see Clare?” There is something perverse about Irene’s desire. She is ambivalent.

            The first section of the book is entitled “An Encounter”. What is an encounter? There is an element of aggressiveness to the meaning, of conflict and of meeting in battle. It comes from roots meaning “in” and “against”. There is something charged about the meeting.

            We were asked to do a deep reading of the first two paragraphs. This was mine: Irene’s pile of morning reading is “little” but Clare’s letter is “big”. The letter is a “thin, sly thing” like Clare. It stands out like Clare does and yet she also blends in with her ability to pass as White. The writing on the envelope was “illegible”, meaning hard to read. Clare is hard to read.

Other words are “flaunting” and “furtive” (flying below the radar). The ink is purple. The letter and Clare disrupt Irene’s routine. There is no return address. The letter is all appearance, foreign, excessive, too much, too large. Irene knows right away who wrote it. The letter creates distance.

The stranger is framed as an out of place other that does not belong and is almost not a subject. The stranger might pass as belonging. Irene disliked opening and reading the letter - There is a crisis of reading the other so as to place and mark them. Irene is not a good reader and she knows it. When Irene encounters Clare after ten years and says, “I can’t seem to place you” it’s a crisis of reading. Too remote to seize or define but familiar. A lack of recognition like with the letter. Irene is submissive.

No one is chill about passing. It’s a breach of the social and class orders.

Margeaux quoted Lola Young’s “Fear of the Dark”: Racial passing is a sign of duplicity that threatens to undermine the stability of racial categorization.

Passing is a breach of racial privilege. One can pass into space and buildings. For Irene, passing is a leaving of closeness.

When I looked up Lola Young I found that she’s actually Lady Lola Young and she’s a British baroness.

At the Negro dance a scholarly White friend of Irene’s asks her about the man named Hazelton that all the White women are dancing with and if she thinks he is “ravishingly beautiful”. She says that what the women are feeling is a kind of emotional excitement felt in the presence of something strange and even a bit repugnant. It’s something from the opposite end of the pole of customary notions of beauty. She is really talking about Clare.

Irene talks about people that pass and how one can’t tell by looking. She says that White people could not pass as Negro. In response to that Margeaux brought up the most famous example of a White person passing as Black. Rachel Dolezal for many years passed as Black. She was president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Margeaux said that Dolezal had been a professor of Black history and Dolezal herself had put the word “professor” in her profile but she was merely an instructor in Black studies and it had always been a temporary position.

When asked point blank if she was African American she said she didn’t understand the question. She clarified in a later interview that she was not African American but that she identified as Black, though she was born White. In 2016 she published a memoir entitled, “In Full Colour”.

Margeaux showed us a clip from a CNN interview with Dolezal. The heading read “Journey to Trans Blackness”. At age four, when asked to draw a picture of herself she portrayed herself as Black. Her aunt gave her a Black Raggedy Ann doll because she recognized that was what she would prefer. The interviewer compared her to Caitlyn Jenner.

I commented that, in the interview at least, she was honest and did not claim to be African American, but rather that she identified as Black.

Others said that she showed a lack of consideration for her own power and privilege. There’s a difference between appreciating a culture and appropriating it.

Later she changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo. She was later interviewed by Ijeoma Oluo, who was surprised that Dolezal had changed her name to “Nkechi” because that happened to be her sister’s name.

I made the comparison of people with body integrity identity disorder who perceive one or more of their limbs as being alien to their body and suggested that if doing so makes them feel complete, why not let them amputate? So if Nkechi wants to be Black, why not let her be Black?

Diallo has argued that everyone is passing in some way. The response is that universalizing passing is problematic.

Sarah Ahmed says passing is also about passing in or through. Not to pass as White means you could be stopped. Not passing as White is a sensory intrusion.

Sensation denotes a psychological state evoking a strong emotion.

In “Passing” Clare says, “Passing is frightfully easy if you have a little nerve.”

The definition of “pass” is “onward motion, going, moving, carried, drawn, driven, impelled.” The Latin is “Passus”, meaning a step or pace.

Drives are manifestations of desire. Freud says the pleasure principle is a drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. For Freud there are two main drives or instincts: The life instincts (Eros) and the death instincts (Thanatos).

Freud observed his 18-month-old grandson playing a game called “Fort/Da (Gone/Here)” whenever his mother was away. He would throw objects into places from which they could not be retrieved and say, “Gone”. Later he saw him toss a spool tied to a string and say “gone” when the spool was out of sight, then when he pulled it back into view he would say “here”. Freud concluded from this that the two drives are fused. Margeaux compared it to swearing off dating not nice people but then continuing to date them in the form of another person.

The stranger is both familiar and unfamiliar. Irene cannot only not read Clare but she can’t read herself either. She is not reason oriented.

Clare is about having and havingness regardless of danger. Clare is the embodiment of passing.

Frenemies can cause high blood pressure.

Freud says we are all ambivalent animals. I can’t find an actual quote in which Freud uses the term but he is said to have borrowed it from another psychologist to indicate the simultaneous presence of love and hate toward the same object. Clare’s death is ambivalent. When you are an element of two worlds you must decide or die. 

A Bird in the Face

            On Tuesday morning I still hadn’t finished my third reading of Avicenna’s account of the soul so as to understand it well enough to answer and comment on one of the two questions about it posted by the TAs. I was worried about not getting it done in time before I left for class and yet in the back of my mind I was confident enough that I would get it done that I didn’t bother to cut any corners by taking time from my other regular activities. I decided that I would leave fifteen minutes later than usual if I had to since I’m always twenty minutes early anyway.

            I managed to get it done and write the paragraph:

           

Avicenna, through his “Flying Man” scenario is trying to show that the self exists independent of the body and that the body is merely a vehicle for the self or the soul. I don’t find his argument to be convincing. I have been in a sensory deprivation tank and have found that the removal from some of the senses does not take away awareness of the body because the body has a sense of itself. I argue that the self is actually a kind of culture created by the brain’s coordination of the senses. In the ultimate situation that Avicenna is aiming for in which the senses are entirely cut off from the mind, the self would not exist at all.

I only left ten minutes later than usual and arrived about ten minutes early for class. The lecture hall was almost empty anyway.

I asked Ryan if he’d made any notes of last Tuesday’s lecture. He said that he didn’t have much but he showed me what he’d put down in his little notebook. I was surprised to see that he prints his notes and asked him if it wasn’t a little slow the way he did it. He told me that he’d never really learned cursive writing. He said they touched on it a bit in grade school but never actually taught it. I was surprised. I asked him how old he was and he said 21. My daughter is almost 26 and I remember all of the endless cursive writing exercises she had to do of copying a printed phrase in longhand. I still have all of the notebooks. He expressed that he wished he’d learned it because it would have made note taking easier, but it didn’t happen. I asked the young woman next to him if it had been the same for her and she answered that it was. I found it interesting that they’d phased out longhand for their entire generation. I looked it up later and it seems that cursive was phased out in grade school shortly after my daughter learned it. I’m not saying it’s wrong to not teach it, but it is interesting.

Professor Black continued to talk about the Islamic medieval philosopher, Avicenna. His book, “The Salvation” is a reworking of his book, “The Cure”. He’s trying to prove the nature of god, and then show the consequences for the human soul and the implications for immortality.

She suggested that his Flying Man thought experiment makes some fallacious deductions, but it’s meant to alert and to point.

The deep primitive is always there with a sense of our selves.

Avicenna tries to prove that the human soul (rational soul) is independent of the body. Under what conditions can the rational soul grasp universals? No physical organ can represent universals. The rational soul is only connected extrinsically to the body. It’s indivisible and infinite if we take the universal. It’s infinite because to know humanity is to know every human. The world is eternal so potentially there are infinite individuals. Abstracting material from universal (distinctions). The rational soul is not impressed on the body. Implying his theories of causality. Making sure that the soul is not an exception though it is an anomaly.

Humanity is our essence. In that sense we are one as a single species and concept, though we are numerically multiplied as individuals, differing by virtue of our matter. Spot and Fido differ by virtue of their matter but not their caninity. This is a basic Aristotelian view: A multiplicity of individuals in the same species comes about through matter. But species is one because its matter is one substance. Each angel though is a separate essence and species with separate pure minds. Michael and Gabriel differ as horseness differs from felinity. Avicenna says humans do not differ from one another as a species. He applies this to the creation of human souls and thinks that the mechanism is a kind of creation.

Creation is emanation or outpouring, always in self-contemplation, outpouring forms that give structure to the universe and the sub-lunar world. Angels act as intermediaries. This is a natural outpouring as angels spend their time contemplating god.

Physical things prepare matter for the appropriate form of individual. Essence prepared for by human procreation is of a higher nature. The Christians adopted some of this but for them god just creates souls. Avicenna says the soul needs a particular body that will receive appropriate essence. Whatever is created by procreation and emanation must conform to the nature of the soul. It’s not dependent on the body. The individual that is produced has capacities that transcend matter. We are not eternal but when individuated we have special characteristics. Experience continues to individuate us. Everyone has a distinct origin and self-awareness is each our own unique experience. We each have our own flying man. Self-awareness defines the existence of the human soul. We acquire different sets of intelligibles, different mental content and different moral dispositions. But he says he is not sure and is worried about the details. He still has to prove that the soul is incorruptible.

Avicenna rules out pre-existence of the soul, so there is no reincarnation. Al-Razi on the other hand believed in transmigration of the soul. It survives death and remains an individual. Avicenna is the only Islamic Aristotelian who upholds personal immortality but he doesn’t think there is bodily resurrection or a corporeal afterlife. But maybe separate intellects could be rewarded or punished by latching onto a sphere.

This poses a problem if the world is eternal. We have an infinite number of souls populating the universe and ever increasing. He tries to fix this by saying that it’s not a vicious infinity.

A rational soul might be corruptible. Only the rational soul has operations independent of the body. If the body was the cause of the soul then it would die when the body does. The body is not the intrinsic cause of the soul. The soul is to the body what form is to matter. In humans the body is the occasion of the soul but not the cause.

The four causes are:

Matter

Form

Agent/Efficient (Separate causes and parents)

The soul itself.

The set-up has looseness about it but he thinks he’s shown that the rational soul is independent. The rational soul is incorruptible because to be corruptible it would have to be composite.

In closing she urged us to go, “Go and perfect your intellect and you will be happy this afternoon.”

After class, since I was down to the last five pages of my lecture notebook, I went to Staples. Since I couldn’t find another pretty purple one like the one that was almost full, I just picked the cheapest, which was a dollar and I bought an extra to take notes at Shab-e She’r. I also bought a weekly planner for 2018.

I was about 15 minutes early for tutorial so I sat and did some reading. James came about five minutes later, and I asked him if he ever takes notes in class. He said he doesn’t now that he’s in third year because everything is pretty much review, but he did in first and second year. I inquired as to whether he used cursive or not and he said he used cursive. He told me that he’d overheard my conversation with Ryan and offered the explanation that teachers don’t want to try to read in-class essays written in long hand and so it’s not something students are encouraged to learn.

Our tutorial was on the subject of Avicenna’s ideas about the soul. For him the mind and soul are the same. He reasons through a difficult process of elimination.

If we were brain dead we would still be self-aware.

Does the soul exist before the body? If so we are either many individual souls or we all make up one human soul.

If we are many different souls:

they either are a quiddity (kind) But humans are the same kind so no.

or accidents such as being in a different place and a different size depend on matter.

            If we are one soul:

            we either all have part of one soul, which would mean the soul is divisible and then we would have a quantitative extension but the soul is immaterial so no.

            or we are all individuals sharing one common soul, but then all minds would be identical and we could read each other’s thoughts like the Borg.

            So the soul must not exist before the body.

            Avicenna says that there are other intellects of ten different species. We are different by our mental content.

            Medievals, including the Islamic philosophers, didn’t think that life began at conception. It started when the mother could feel the baby moving inside of her.

            Does the soul die with the body? If so the case would be either:

            essential coexistence between the soul and the body and they would die together. This would contrast with co-essential coexistence, in which there would be no connection.

            or the soul would be prior to the body, not temporally but essentially, in which case the body would die if the soul dies. But the body dies of conditions that don’t affect the soul.

            Or the soul is posterior to the body. The body can’t cause the soul.

            Only god can kill the soul.

            Are the body and soul identical? It would be like saying clay and cat-shaped are identical. They must be two different features of the same but the soul is simple so it can’t be mortal.

            I asked her, “How can the soul be simple and be the mind at the same time?”

            She was puzzled by that one and said she’d get back to me.

            After class I was riding west on Queen with a strong wind blowing against me when suddenly a pigeon that was flying down from the upper right was trying to cross in front of me when the wind blew it off course and slammed it sideways into my face. It was like being slapped rather than punched very hard by a human but full onto the face instead of from one side or the other like the traditional slap. It really hurt! My lips were numb from the impact. When I got home I went straight to the mirror and was surprised to not see a mark.

           

           

           

           

            

Diamonds Are Forever

            On Monday I had to work my two least favourite times of day: early morning and late at night. Mornings I have lots of stuff to do at home and working at night screws up my dinner hour. The ideal workday for me would be in the six-hour period after noon. So before sunrise I rushed through my song practice set. I had time to eat one sausage and finish a cup of coffee before leaving. In another month, if I get any early gigs I'll have to put my flashers on while riding. As I started out I didn’t see until it was too late the body of a freshly squashed sparrow with a bright stream of red trickling away from it and couldn’t avoid running over it.

            As I arrived at the Village by the Grange, I passed through the food court and saw a guy reading the newspaper at a restaurant table in the dark. I figured that they were just conserving power before the restaurants opened but I found out later that the power was out down there.

            I worked for Nick Aoki. He asked his students if they knew what a hipbone looks like but nobody said anything. Then he asked if anyone had drawn a skeleton, but they hadn't. He advised them to try to get a chance to draw a skeleton so they could learn about body structure.
            He told them to imagine that I was wearing a box costume. I told him I'd wear it if he brought one in. He said he'd been thinking about trying to get hold of one. Later I was looking for a pillow in the prop room and found a skeleton and a half in there. It seems he’d never looked for one there.

            When I was leaving through the food court the power was still out, though the overhead fans were on. A guy I’ve known at the college for twenty years but who hasn’t been a student for ten came in as I was going out and I chatted with him for a while. I think he has an apartment in the Village By the Grange but he kind of looks these days like he sleeps in the furnace room. He told me that Toronto has enough gas to fuel a generator that would power the city for five days.

            When I got home I had time for lunch, goofing around, sleep and then some writing before heading out for work again.

I finished reading Nella Larsen's “Passing”. Though the subject, about a Black woman passing as White in 1927, was interesting, it's really not a very good novel. I've seen better writing in Harlequin Romances.  

            It was raining when I rode back downtown to work again. The yellow leaves that have fallen on each side of the street are especially shiny and golden when they are wet. I was halfway between damp and wet when I got to OCAD. I noticed that there were three Hydro trucks parked on McCaul and that the power looked like it was still off at the Village by the Grange. I worked in the main building, so I didn't have to walk through a dark food court.

            I worked for Sara Sniderhan. Her general facial kind of reminds me of Sarah Gilbert from Rosanne. She seems a bit somber and serious but I think that's probably her business face and she's probably quite warm and jovial.

            When I was posing for my third twenty minute set Sarah announced that the diamond from her engagement ring had fallen somewhere in the studio, just in case anyone saw it. One of her students asked what it was shaped like and she told him, “It was diamond shaped.” She kept on walking around and helping her students with their paintings but she had her head down to scan the floor as she moved between them. During the break I asked her when she’d last seen the ring intact and she answered that it had been when she was washing her hands before class. She admitted that she could have sent it down the drain. I suggested that maybe if she shown a light horizontally it might pick up the gem better. At the end of class she waited behind to give the room a thorough check. I advised her that she should maybe focus on the areas where she’d done a lot of work with her hands, like when she’d brought the chair for my pose to the stage and set up the drapery behind me. I wished her luck and left.

            The rain had let up quite a bit and so I didn’t get wet again riding home.

Armed

            Almost all of my morning song practice is in the dark nowadays, as it finishes right around sunrise. One good thing about that is that I don’t have to comb my hair before standing in front of the window with my guitar.

            I had to do laundry on Sunday and so I went out at around midday. After loading my stuff in the washer I walked to Shoppers Drug Mart to look for deodorant. They certainly have the largest selection I’ve seen but the shelves are all weaponized with spring-loaded pushers that bring an item forward as soon as the one in front of it is taken. The thing is that if one doesn’t take an item firmly in hand it sends it shooting off the shelf. It happened to me with two or three deodorant brands I was trying to look at.

            The laundromat was busier than I’d ever seen it and people were holding onto laundry carts that they weren’t using, I guess because they were afraid of not being able to find one later, I had to get the last free one out of the other room. Customers were also blocking the aisles with their stuff so I couldn’t get to the dryers in the first room and so I had to go to the second half. The second room is less convenient because there are no tables in front of the dryers. Since I had a bottom dryer I just sat on the floor while emptying my dryer and stuffed everything into my two shopping bags.

            I wanted to work on my paragraph for philosophy tutorial but as of Sunday evening the TAs hadn’t posted the questions. They usually have them up by Thursday night. I’ve done all the reading but there were two readings and without the specific question I didn’t know what to read twice. I turned out though that I had time to read everything twice and late that night the questions were sent by email.

            That evening I heard the skinny woman with the curly auburn hair panhandling outside my window on Queen Street. She looks like she's in her 70s but since her hair isn't grey and I assume she can't afford to dye it so maybe she's only in her 50s. I listened to her tell someone that she'd worked all her life and it surprised me that it hadn't occurred to me that might be the case.

            Later I heard her arguing with her boyfriend, Paul, who wanted $5 from her so he could buy a submarine sandwich. She reminded him that she'd already given him some money and that was all she could afford to give him. I always hear him hanging around and talking to people while she's begging but I never notice him doing it himself. Maybe he's a kept man.

            That night I heard a woman shouting in a panicky voice. I looked out and there were two older women on the sidewalk, both of them seemed poor from their clothing, though one of them was dressed more flamboyantly than the other and pulling a cart. She was the one doing the shouting. It looked like they had just jaywalked to the north side of Queen and they were standing there with their unleashed dirty little toy poodle and calling desperately to their other disheveled pooch, which was standing on the streetcar tracks and looking confused. Finally they coaxed it to the curb before any cars came and the woman that wasn't pulling the cart picked up both dogs and held them under each arm. The two women argued for a minute and then continued on their way together.

            I watched another episode of Mike Hammer and one thing I've noticed five-shows-in is that although everyone has guns there are no gun fights. There is always at least one fancy fistfight though.

Indifferently Duelling Theatres of the Absurd

            On Saturday morning I went to the food bank for the first time in three weeks. I assume I missed the Thanksgiving turkey handout but it had been unavoidable because I had an essay to write and couldn’t spare the time to go and stand in a lineup.

            After locking my bike I asked the African guy standing off from the back of the line if he knew who the last person in line was. He told me it was the guy in the black baseball cap. I guess though that I should have confirmed that with somebody else just to be sure.

            Both Wayne and Bart were further ahead in line and each was ranting as incomprehensibly as ever, except that Wayne is louder, funnier and he dances while doing it. Bart is a little more grotesque in the things he blurts out but instead of dancing he sometimes assumes Hip-hop poses. They never seem to interact or respond to one another in any way through their coprolalia and so having them both in the same place at the same time is like hearing the blasting of two different radios tuned to two separate broadcasts of two distinct monologues from two unrelated branches of the theatre of the absurd.

            My position in line seemed to be very close to the epicenter of that line-up’s smoking community, and so I wandered off to breathe cleaner air while reading Nella Larsen’s “Passing” for my 20^th Century United States Literature course. Set in the late 1920s when segregation was in full force, the novel is one of the classics of the Harlem Renaissance. It centers on a Black woman named Irene, who could pass for White but has never tried. Irene reencounters after an old friend named Clare who had disappeared from Irene’s community for several years. It turns out that Clare has all this time been fully passing for White and is somewhat trapped in the lifestyle. She is married to a racist White man who does not know she is a Negro and who in fact despises people of African descent to the point that he would never even sink to speaking to one of them. Clare has reached out to Irene because she is the only bridge to her own past. It’s an interesting story but I find Larsen’s writing to be full of bad, poorly used adjectives and amateurish compared to other writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

            When the tall man who seems to, at least on Saturdays, manage the food bank came walking slowly up the street, Wayne called out, “Everybody on their knees and bow down!” I doubt if Wayne made the same association, but the man really does carry himself like a Nubian king.

            It seems to be a new and welcome trend that the food bank opens on time on Saturdays. I stayed parallel with my position in line as it moved, but further out on the sidewalk, to avoid the smoke. When I finally stepped into my spot I had to affirm to an older Polish man and a young Black woman that I was indeed ahead of them. The Polish man though shed some doubt on my having been there before him. When he shrugged and declared that he didn’t care I decided that he might be right so I told him he could go ahead of me.

            I looked over at Wayne and saw him with his head back, holding an empty plastic wine bottle vertically in his mouth without using his hands. Then he walked to the garbage can near me to drop it in the slot but the man in front of me held out his hand for the bottle. Wayne pulled the bottle away from him and shook his head, saying, “You don’t want that! It’s got germs!” and then he dropped it in the slot. Wayne didn’t understand that he wanted the bottle so he could cash it in at the Beer Store for the twenty-cent deposit. It seemed a waste to throw good money away.

            The Tool Library had an A-frame blackboard sign on the street in front of the entrance, near where the food bank doorkeeper was standing. From a little further back in line, a skinny older man who looked like he might be either Somalian or Ethiopian came forward to ask her about it. She only had the patience to tell him that it wasn’t a book library but a tool library. When he came back to sit down I explained to him that if one pays $50 a year to the Tool Library they can come and borrow any of their tools, including some musical instruments. He was impressed and thought $50 to be a reasonable price. He said he’d like to learn to play guitar. I told him that he could also borrow musical instruments from the Toronto Public Library but I assumed that might be only at certain branches. I found out later that it’s only our very own Parkdale branch of the library that lends instruments. That’s another of the many reasons to love Parkdale.

            The man I’d just spoken with noticed that the shopping cart belonging to the young woman behind me had a list of major European cities such as Rome and Paris. He proudly told her that he had traveled to most of those places. He said he had worked in Dubai where salaries are tax free and where once a year one gets to fly for free to anywhere in the world. I guess that’s how he went to all of those cities.

            I was curious later to find out if a renowned rich country like Dubai had food banks. There are two, and they not only coordinate with several supermarkets, food factories and farms, but also with eighty mosques that each have charity fridges to which worshippers are encouraged to bring donations. The food banks in Dubai not only feed the local poor but they export food to refugee camps outside of the country.

            At one point the man slipped through the wooden gate that leads to the alley between 1499 and 1501 Queen Street West. While there he spent at least a minute shooting off snot rockets with long and loud sonic trails. The woman behind me let out a disgusted groan.

            Downstairs I got number 30.

            Angie’s meat and dairy section had no eggs for the first time in months. She gave me two half-liters of milk, four small fruit-bottom yogourt cups, two cans of club soda, and two cans of Rubicon soda, one of pomegranate and the other of pineapple-coconut. Finally she gave me a tube of frozen ground chicken and asked me how my reading was going. I said, “Pretty good.”

            Samantha was minding the vegetable section. I turned down the offer of a bag of frozen peas because I still had two from before and my freezer is in severe need of defrosting to the point that, if I don’t chisel the ice away from time to time the storage area is in danger of shrinking to the size of single slice toaster slot. She gave me a handful of oddly shaped carrots, another of potatoes, two apples, five radishes, two cobs of corn and a yellow pepper.

            There was a bit of a backup for the shelves, despite the fact that there were four volunteers helping people shop. While we were waiting, the Polish man ahead of me turned and handed me a tube of frozen ground chicken. I thought that I must have dropped mine and he’d picked it up, but I realized when I got home that I had two.

            I had hoped that one of the other volunteers would serve me because I didn’t want to deal with the woman who’d told me to “hurry up” the last time I’d been there. Sure enough though, it was her I got. Before we started I wanted to make it clear to her what she had done and that she should never do it again. I told her that if she were working in a supermarket she would not be allowed to tell her customers to “hurry up”. She told me she didn’t remember saying what I’d recounted but she apologized if she had. I stated that as long as she’d confirm that she’d never talk to me that way again we could proceed. She agreed and we went through the shelves.

            The only cereal they had were boxes of vanilla flavoured Special K, so I took one. Under those were tubes of wasabi-flavoured potato chips.

            There was plenty of pasta and rice but as usual I didn’t take any. I did take a can of pasta sauce though.

            There were hand packed, half-kilo bags of flour and a choice between white or whole wheat, so I took the darker stuff.

            The shelves were fairly well stocked for the first time in several weeks, with more protein than usual. There was peanut butter, though the kind with sugar added, so I passed. There was canned meat and tuna and so I took the fish. There were a variety of canned beans from which I grabbed some chickpeas. From the soups I chose a can of organic lentil.

            From the bin of snack bars she gave me four sweet and salty peanut bars, a blueberry fruit crisp bar, a peanut breakfast square and a small bag of duck shaped cheddar crackers.

            One shelf offered various boxes of crackers, one brand of which she recommended, but I chose a bag of sweet chili whole grain tortilla chips flecked with sprouted flax, quinoa, chia, broccoli and radish seeds. I was curious how they got all of that stuff into one chip.

            She directed me to the bread but I told her I was fine in that regard and that I was done. On my way out she called, “Sorry again about last time!”

            When I got home, since I hadn’t planned on going out again once my boots were off, I went back out to the liquor store to buy a couple of cans of Creemore to go with my Saturday and Sunday dinners.

            That night after putting some Italian sausages in the oven I took the garbage out back. As usual, my next roof neighbour, Taro was sitting outside and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. We chatted a bit and then he asked me, “What’s with the old guy on the third floor?” He said he’s always looking out his window at him and taking pictures. I explained that Caesar is a bit of a curmudgeon and that he’s always taking the landlord to court, including our previous landlord, Henry. I told him that there was a time a few years ago when he thought that I was using my computer to screw up his television reception.