Fatima

           

            On Sunday morning I started learning to sing Serge Gainsbourg’s song, “Marabout” in French and realized that I’d have alter my translation because it’s in chain verse, with the last word or sound in each line becoming the first word in the next. It was going to take a little longer to create the same effect in English and still retain the meaning.

            In the early afternoon I worked for the alumni at OCADU. It’s an open drawing studio with no instructor and each person has to pay ten dollars, which they give to the college to pay the model. I’ve never understood why they just don’t pay the model directly. I guess they would if the OCADU model coordinator didn’t do the booking. Maybe it’s a union issue. I don’t know.

            Nick Cushing came by to install another hard drive in my computer, but I opted for just keeping the hard drive to use externally. Given that my previous computer only lasted two years, it seemed like a hassle to put things inside my system that would work just as well externally in that they would be more easily transferable to another computer if I had to buy one.

            I watched the eleventh episode of the first season of Dragnet from 1951. All of the shows were based on true stories. This one was about a murder of a young woman and the investigators eventually found out that her religious fanatic ex-boyfriend had killed her with a lead pipe because she was a sinner. I didn’t find it particularly interesting, especially the deadpan manner of the cops. I’ve downloaded a few episodes from seasons two and three, but after watching those I won’t bother with any more.

            The sponsor of the show was Fatima cigarettes, which is a brand I’d never heard of. They had been around since the 19^th Century and had traditionally featured a Turkish woman on the cover. Jack Webb, who created Dragnet and played Joe Friday on the radio and on TV, became a poster boy for the brand, but they faded from popularity because they couldn’t compete with hipper brands.

            It felt by the end of the day that I might have been coming down with another cold. My throat felt raw and I was coughing and sniffling a bit.

Lee Marvin

           

            On Saturday, just after midnight, I received a call telling me that my container was ready for delivery. They couldn’t bring it directly to my place because there was no room and so they said they would drop it off near the railroad tracks a little east of my place within the next half an hour. I got dressed and rode out on my bike but I overshot the spot where they said it would be delivered. I could already see the truck back a little ways west and I could hear the driver shouting impatiently. It was one of those long containers that one sees stacked up high and side-by-side in masses at freight yards, looking altogether like windowless rusted metal apartment buildings. It was on wheels though and I remembered that I’d pushed ones like it by myself along the street with some effort in the past. When I got to the container I realized that it wasn’t me the driver had been shouting for and it wasn’t even the driver that had been shouting but rather the drivers boss. He was a short but stocky old man with white hair. He was angry with the driver for having dropped the container at the wrong spot and was violently attacking him in response. There were large pieces of furniture that he was grabbing and shoving at the driver, which smashed into his body and sent him flying. He even slammed the container into the driver as well. Before I had a chance to deal with the old man myself, I woke up and went to take a pee.

            There never seems to be a day when I don’t have to go out and forego reading and essay writing for at least a couple of hours.

            On Saturday I had to do laundry. Again! What’s the point of washing one’s clothing if they are just going to get dirty again in a couple of weeks?

            At the Laundromat I put a toonie and then a loonie into the change machine, but I came out a quarter short. I told the manager, who was standing over his work table looking down at a spread out newspaper, and his already somber visage, still visible beneath his surgical mask, showed impatience as he quickly shook his head and declared without looking at me, “Machine not make mistake! Look on floor!” I assured him that I hadn’t heard anything drop, I nonetheless stepped back and looked down, but saw no coin on the floor. He acted like I was pushing him over the edge, as he had to move away from his reading and deal with me. He assured me, “Machine not lie! People lie! Look on floor!” Just to the left of the change machine, he moved a rack that held free magazines aside and close to the wall was a quarter. “There!” he barked. “”I told you to look!” Seriously? His machine throws my money on the floor and it’s my responsibility to go on a treasure hunt looking for it? I asked him when he was going to fix his machine so that it didn’t throw people’s money around. He told me that if I had a complaint about the machine I should call up the company that made it. I pointed out that I don’t have to call up the manufacturer if one of his washing machines malfunctions because it’s his responsibility, and so is the coin machine because the Laundromat owns it. He thought it was funny that he should be responsible for calling the manufacturer of the coin machine. He said something about how he shouldn’t have to follow me around like a five-year-old kid, helping me find my money. I asked him if he was born without people skills or if he had acquired the lack of them on his own. He was immune to anything I could possibly say anyway, living in his bitter world. They should make people take a kind of social driving test before they are allowed to work with the public.

            I finished reading Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”, though I’ll need to read it again to even get a precarious grip on it.

            I read Shyam Selvadurai’s “Pigs Can’t Fly” about a little boy in Sri Lanka that gets reprimanded for playing dress-up with his female cousins. The game of “Bride-Bride” was his greatest joy because he got to be bride, until the adults found out. The story deals with his confusion about their reaction and how their response made him an exile from both sexes.

            I watched the fifth episode of the first season of the Dragnet TV series, from 1951. A young Lee Marvin put on a great performance as the murderer with no real motive. I didn’t recognize Marvin at all in this role, as he didn’t look anything like he did when he became well known. His hair had yet to turn prematurely white.

What Would Nietzsche Think of Donald Trump?

           

            When I got up on Friday morning the street was glistening so that I thought that it was frozen, but it turned out that it was only wet from the snow that was melting as it landed.

            Also when I got up I felt slightly dizzy, and that dizziness persisted through my yoga until it gradually faded from my attention during song practice. I don’t know if it had anything to do with my fast, which I was just over halfway through at that point, but it had certainly never happened before when fasting or not.

            I rode through the dirty mess of slush to get to the Sidney Smith building for tutorial, and when I got there I saw that my pants had been splattered with mud.

            In the hallway while we were waiting for our room to be free, someone asked Sean why Nietzsche talks so much about Buddhism. Sean answered that Nietzsche liked Buddhists because they were atheists but disliked them because they were nihilists.

            Before starting his tutorial, Sean asked if any of us were gamers, and quite a few were. He asked if anyone had heard of the World of Warcraft player created character Leeroy Jenkins. Then he told us that that morning when he went to wake up his six year old for school, he leaned down to gently shake his son awake when the boy suddenly shouted in his ear, “Leeroy Jenkins!”

            Of our paper grades, Sean explained that he gave out a few A minuses and a few Cs, but mostly he gave out Bs. He complained that only ten to fifteen people came to see him about their essays.

            He urged us to take advantage of the fact that he actually gives a shit and predicted that no one else would care about us as much as him for the rest of our time at the academy. I’m not sure what “the academy” is.

            He had intended to only finish up about Nietzsche and get into Heidegger, but we still had so many questions about Nietzsche that it ate up all the time.

            Sedimentation becomes reified in the ascetic ideal. The ascetic ideal is the reification of resentment. It is grounded in the psychology of resentment.

            We use the internalization of the will to create systems that obscure the capacity of the will. Are ideals really merely a bi-product of this? Could you function without ideals? How do we oppose the priestly way of life?

            Nietzsche was against bad conscience but not conscience. He was not anti-discipline.

            Nietzsche is pointing out the problem but he is not the embodiment of the solution.

            The system of self-destruction is traditionally Judeo-Christian, but it doesn’t have to be.

            Nietzsche is calling for a reevaluation of all values. For him it is always a question of value.

            What does knowing do to your capacity to overcome yourself.

            Science is a pretension to objectivity.

            Professor Gibbs had said that the will to power is about dominating others, but I asked if that was really necessary. Couldn’t one turn the will outward without oppressing? Sean said that the domination is inadvertent and that people without the will to power would just be dominated whether that’s someone’s intention or not.

            Knowledge doesn’t care about human beings.

            The two main questions that Nietzsche asks about anything:

            What is its value?

            What is its origin?

            Then, what is its potential?

            Nietzsche doesn’t think that science is bad, just that science doesn’t have the resources to answer these questions.

            For Nietzsche it’s all about health. Crush anything that isn’t good for you. Nietzsche is very moral. He is the first embodied mind theorist.

            God is dead but the damage lives on.

            Someone asked what Nietzsche would think of Donald Trump and Sean thought that was a very good question. He said he would find him course. One needs to hold Nietzsche at the right distance. Too close and he could destroy you. Too far away and he could appear superficially like Donald Trump. Trump has no subtlety and Nietzsche would say that it’s weak to want the kind of power that Trump wants. Trump represents a niche of the US psyche, so he is not surprising.

            We didn’t have a chance to talk about Heidegger, but Sean wanted to throw us a few quick things about him to take with us. Heidegger is a very special thinker. He is both easier and harder than Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Think of him alone in a little cottage in the Black Forest thinking. One needs a nice chair and to read him slowly.

            Heidegger was also an egomaniac who wanted to be the last word in philosophy, after which there would be only poetry.

            I had time after tutorial to go home and sleep for an hour before teaching my yoga class at PARC. Only Anna showed up, late as usual. She lives in the infamous West Lodge Apartments. She said that there was a big safety meeting at the building that day and the media were there. She said that although she is the president of the tenants association, someone else was handling it that day. That struck me as odd. We discussed various methods of getting rid of cockroaches and bedbugs before I started instructing her.

            That evening a guy was walking along the street shouting, but not in an angry way. At one point he picked up one of those orange plastic traffic pylons, which was dirty and full of snow, then put it to his mouth like a megaphone to shout more effectively. I ran for my camera to take a video, but it was too late. I keep forgetting that I have a balcony seat in Parkdale and that I should always have my camera ready. A minute or so later, another man came walking a dog in the other direction. He was shouting that all the terrorists come from Israel.

            That night I finished watching Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, “The Mangler”. Has Tobe Hooper done anything good besides the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The villain got top billing because he was played by Robert Englund, who of course is most famous for playing Freddy in the Nightmare On Elm Street series of films. He is so over the top as the bad guy, who wasn’t even in the original story, that his performance is really the only interesting thing about the movie. Ted Irvine, who co-starred in the Monk TV series, played the depressed cop. I deleted the movie when I finished watching it.

Heidegger

           

            On my way to class along College Street on Thursday morning, just before St George, a guy on a construction crew held up a stop sign to block eastbound traffic while a truck was turning into the site. While we were arrested, three of the guy’s colleagues took advantage of the halt to nonchalantly cross to the site. One of them appeared to be toasting us with his coffee, but he did have a coffee in each fist so he might have been simply talking to his pals with his hands.

At Alumni Hall, a student was sitting outside of the lecture theatre, still all bundled up for outdoors and working on his laptop. He looked like he was waiting for a bus.

When Naama arrived she asked how I’d done on my essay. It turned out that we got the exact same mark of 72, but I suggested to her that for her to get a B-minus while writing in English as a second language, it’s probably the equivalent of her getting a much higher mark.

            After Professor Gibbs came in, as part of another comment, he joked sarcastically about the moneymaking prospects of philosophy. It made me think of a skit that had been on the old SCTV show and so I asked Naama if she’d seen any SCTV reruns since she’d been in Canada. The professor smiled in recognition of the show. She answered that she hadn’t. With Professor Gibbs eavesdropping, I told her that they had done a fake TV spot advertising “Careers in Philosophy” and that the selling line was, “Many philosophers can make as much money as some poets!” The professor laughed.

            Naama told me that she grew up watching Middle Eastern television because there weren’t a lot of Israeli channels. She said that she’d learned English by reading the subtitles of Christian cartoons broadcast from Lebanon. She described one such show that featured a Bible quoting robot that would give quotations in response to given situations. I looked this up and what I found that fits this description closest is a show from the early 80s called Superbook, in which some kids and their robot go traveling in time through various Bible stories.

            I related a Christian claymation show called Davey & Goliath in which Goliath was a boy’s talking dog. It was a Lutheran Church vehicle but it was produced by the same company that created Gumby.

            Naama said that her family didn’t have cable till she was twelve. I told her that we got our first TV when I was four but we didn’t have an indoor bathroom till I was ten. She thought it was funny that we got a TV before we got a bathroom.

            As he began the lecture, Professor Gibbs announced that the Blackboard glitch had been cleared up and he found out that he has even more internet power as a professor than he previously thought. He said that he can change anyone’s grade from any course at any time and he can also tell what students were eating when they logged onto Blackboard.

            The professor had a few last words on Nietzsche before moving onto Heidegger.

            Human beings would rather will nothingness than not will anything. The will to nothingness was stronger in the 20^th Century than in the 19^th. But what can resist this will to nothingness?

            Free thinkers? No, because belief in truth is dangerous. Maybe we need to abandon truth.

            Science? No, because there is an unwillingness to evaluate it. There is a notion that all knowledge is good. Modern Science is derived from Protestantism. ‘

            Historians? No, because their discipline serves to try to prove that nothing matters.

            Philosophers? They wear the mask of asceticism. They are critical of others and themselves. They use reason to limit the self because they hate the self and they even use reason to fight reason.

            Cyborgs? Siri?

            Transferring power to god allows us to deny power to the self.

            The desire to be honest with oneself destroys morality. Suffering has too much meaning and so it hides the will to nothingness.

            Possession of the will to power could be the engine of self-overcoming. But how does one do this without killing the self? Will we be able to turn to human suffering and say it’s meaningless? Is that the way out or in?

            “Reading Nietzsche is like listening to a bombastic friend,” the professor said, “Reading Heidegger is like I don’t know what.”

            Heidegger wants to untie thinking.

            His “Being and Time” was the most important philosophical work of the 20^th Century. It asks what is the meaning of being.

            Martin Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University in 1933 and joined the Nazi party a little over a week later. He expressed limited but real praise for Adolph Hitler. He removed Jews from high positions at the university. Later, he sort of apologized.

            The Nazi’s found that Heidegger’s philosophy was well suited to their idea of historical destiny. Perhaps Heidegger was flattered to have a national government backing up his ideas.

            He spent most of the 1930s arguing in his mind with Nietzsche’s philosophy. Later he moved to poetic thinking or thinking with words. He tried to argue the closeness of poetry and philosophy.

            Professor Gibbs told us that you don’t have to be German to be an existentialist or an atheist. He said that even Schelling was an existentialist.

            Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is a bashing of Jean Paul Sartre. The ideas put forth in the letter are confusing, hard to understand and impossible to prove.

            Kierkegaard is funny. Heidegger is not.

            Every time Heidegger discloses something he hides something else. His work does not read like philosophy. It’s poetic and obscure and does not communicate readily. At this point the professor stressed that we have to communicate readily. We can’t write our essays the way that Heidegger wrote his Letter on Humanism.

            Language is the house of being and it costs less in Winnipeg.

            In the motion of essence from action to being, thinking carries the ball. Thinking is the highest action. Professor Gibbs commented at this point that Heidegger sounds here like Aristotle, but he added that he means that thinking is an activity in a different sense than Aristotle. Thinking lets human beings be what they are, which is thinking beings. Language is how being shows up. When we think and speak, stuff gets manifest. Language is where being lives and is addressed. Being needs a place. Thinking guards the house of being. The core of thinking is letting, which is openness welcoming into being.

            Nobody knows what being is, but it has a history. History has not housed being very well. Can thinking free us from that history?

            Our model of knowledge is bound up with technology controlling skill sets.

            The professor said that philosophy wants to become a science. Philosophy wants to focus on problem solving and to teach people to make better, sounder and more valid arguments. Heidegger says that we gave up thinking for technology. He wants a new reflection on science.

            On the word “humanism”, we only get “ism”s at the end of the day when things are no longer working. “Ism” looks like it is going to be essence. Every kind of humanism is metaphysical. Metaphysics presents entities in their being but doesn’t think there’s a difference between being and entities. How can we think the difference between whatever being is and the way things are? Can we imagine being that is not another object?

            Thinking is the thinking of being. Being needs thinking. The essence of being human is to think about being in such a way that being is changed. Language is a mode of access to things that don’t fit into language. For language to approach being we have to take the risk that there is nothing to say. Language negotiates in the boundary zone where it doesn’t work. What we need is language to house but not to own or pin down.

            Humans are unusual because they think about being.

            After the lecture I rode up to The Jackman Humanities building at St George and Bloor to meet with Sean during his TA office hours and to go over his comments on my essay. He said that there were too many comments for him to cover all the points, so I just asked him to give me some overall advice as to how I could improve and get a better mark the next time around. He told me that I’d had a good thesis but I hadn’t supported it throughout my paper. He also said that I should never do any writing on the body of my essay on the day that it’s scheduled to be handed in. I couldn’t see how that could be avoided. He argued that one should have a first draft of their essay a week before the deadline. Of course, I always aim to start the essay as soon as possible, but the material in this case was so difficult that I had to read it three times. He advised me not to try to have a full grasp on the whole topic for a seven-page essay but to just pick an aspect of it to address. Reading the complete work over and over is what one would do for a dissertation. I was the only student that came to see Sean that day.

            In reference to the situation that Sean had related to us in tutorial of a six year old having attacked Sean’s six year old with a brick, I told him that when I went to school, we played war every single recess. We threw snowballs, apples or potatoes at each other, depending on the season, but we never threw rocks at one another. I suggested that it’s because we got our frustrations out. He said that it wasn’t in his experience that schools are schools are more restrictive of children’s aggressions than they were when he went to school.

            After leaving Jackman, my plan had been to ride home and take a siesta, but it was snowing when I came out. I decided that I might go to University College and just read or sleep on the bench again, so I rode down there but on the way the prospect of sitting around for four hours seemed too tedious. The streets were merely wet with snow rather than covered in it, so I changed my mind and went home. I had about twenty minutes to spend on the computer and then I slept for about an hour and a half before heading back downtown.

            On Thursdays, though I’m always half an hour early, I’m never the first one in class. There are two or three students that are always there before me. When Madeline, who sits beside me, came in I greeted her and since she was absent from class on Tuesday, she asked me for the highlights.

            We spent the hour talking about Sinclair Ross’s “The Painted Door”.

            Women’s writing is the articulation of inarticulate experience. In “The Painted Door”, Anne struggles for narrative control.

            “It” represents unvoiced desires. Anne both denies and cultivates “it”. Maybe she knows “it” but refuses to understand “it”. Or maybe she understands “it” but won’t go there.

            The storm reflects Anne’s desires. When she tries to go out into it she wears men’s clothes. But “little snakelike tongues of snow discover her”. The snake represents forbidden desire. The story has Freudian overtones. The storm beats her back into the house. The shadow that Anne sees, whether it was really John’s shadow or not, is the shadow of her guilt. Having guilt is not being guilty but as a woman she will get the blame anyway.

            Andrew said that the phrase, “texture of the moment” made him wonder if Sinclair Ross had ever read Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”. I looked it up and found that he had a copy of it in French in his duffel bag, along with a French-English dictionary when he shipped off to fight in World War II.

            That night I watched the second third of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, “The Mangler”. The dialogue is pretty horrible. I guess that in adapting a short story they had to add a lot of extra story. There are a lot of deviations.

Helping a Little Old Lady Across the Street

           

            When I got up on Wednesday I looked out my living room window on the way to the bathroom and perused the aftermath of the storm of the night before. It was white and silent at 5:15 but the street didn’t look like it was too snowy for traffic. I was glad though that I didn’t have to take my bike anyplace on it that day. Later, after the sun had been up for a while and it started to melt, I was even gladder that I wouldn’t be slapping around in that cold sploshy mess. I would have the whole day inside to write and read and to occasionally look out the window and appreciate the fact that I was not where I was looking. I wouldn’t have to bundle up like everyone I was looking down upon from the second floor.

            At around 10:30 there was a knock on my door. It was Sundar come to collect the rent. Suddenly I realized that I would have to bundle up and go out after all, because I’d forgotten to take the rent money out of the bank. I got a few things done first and then headed out.

            I was standing with my bike at the corner, waiting for the light. There was a little mound of snow as there often is, pushed up to the corner by passing snowplows, slightly blocking the way for crossers, but fairly easy for able bodied people to step through. An elderly woman came down the street with a cane. She stopped because she was obviously intending to cross, but when she looked at the snowy obstacle she exclaimed, “Oh my goodness!” I asked her if she would like a hand getting across. She answered, “I would be so grateful!” So with my bike between her and myself, I held out my arm and she took my hand. Once we were over the blockage, I continued to hold her hand as we walked across the cleared street. It was awkward to push my bike and to support her at the same time, but I managed. The other side had the same kind of little snow bank and that was why I kept holding her hand. I helped her over that and she said, “Thank you so much sweetheart!” before I got onto my bike.

            I rode down Cowan, past the food bank, where I saw the Second Harvest truck unloading, and then turned left on King to go to the money bank. Another thing that I’d forgotten was to pay for my phone service for March, and so I took some extra money out and went to Wind Mobile before going home. I walked my bike home from there. I saw the woman I call “the shouting bag lady” but she was neither shouting nor pushing her tower of possessions in her usual shopping cart. She was just quietly going down the street with her walker and stopping to rest from time to time. I had been thinking about her during the cold spell and was glad now to see that she hadn’t died. On my block, the sidewalk had been narrowed by the snow and so where I could normally get past slow walking people, I had to just slow down until I got to my door.

            I spent most of the rest of the day writing.

            I moved some music files to my external hard drive and ended up making the same mistake with my music folder as I did with the video folder a few days before. I had moved a King Crimson concert into the G-drive and then tried to delete the file from my C-drive. There was a message telling me that the folder had names too big for the recycle bin and so did I just want to delete the folder. I clicked “ok” and my Music folder was gone. Even though I had highlighted the folder in my C-drive, the one in my G-drive was also apparently highlighted and so that’s the one that was deleted. I’m fairly sure that nothing important was in the folder because I think I’d just moved stuff into it from the G-drive, and that would be stuff that I still have on my C-drive, I think.

            That night I watched the first half hour of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mangler”. They’d changed it a bit and compressed the events. Plus they added this demoniacal disabled laundry owner who seems to have something to do with the demonically possessed folding machine.

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.

Pomelos Are A Rip-off

           

            Every four years there is an extra day in February but most people don’t know that every four February 29ths the day has an extra hour and every sixteen February 29ths that hour has an extra minute and every sixty-four February 29ths that minute has an extra second.

            On Monday when I got up I wasn’t groggy as I often am on waking. This was a sign that my fast had entered its second phase. This is something that I’ve noticed over the thirty-eight years that I’ve been doing this annual fast. On the fourth day I start feeling light. I sleep deeply and wake up fully awake and yet I’m not full of energy. I feel like a ghost.

            On my way out I saw my across the west hall neighbour standing in front of his door with his arms full of electrical equipment, a power cord and some duct tape. He looked at me a little sadly and told me he was moving out. I reached out my hand and told him that it had been nice having him as a neighbour. He struggled shift the cord and the tape over to his left arm and then shook my hand, saying, “Respect!” He told me he had some bottles for me and I said I’d pick them up out back later on. I asked him if he’d found a better place and he said, “I think so.” Though he didn’t sound entirely convincing. “I’m tired of this bullshit!” he declared. I nodded and opined that his bachelor was a little small, but he just scowled and pointed his finger directly above him at the apartment of Caesar, the old Italian guy who was here before either he or I, to indicate that that was the bullshit he was tired of. Caesar is a complainer about a lot of things, and I recall that he’s complained to me a few times about my across the hall neighbour’s lack of cleanliness. My neighbour seems to drink a lot, judging from all the empty, large sized liquor bottles he’s given me over the years. He used to have a lot of parties in the wee hours of the morning with Indian pop music blasting and lots of cooking and sometimes burning of food. He used to spend a lot of time out on the deck in the summer with his friends, but over the last year he seems to have kept to himself. There was a loud knock on the front door to which he growled, “Fuck off!” and explained, “That’s the mover.” As I followed him with my bike down the stairs he complained angrily that, “Some people think they own this building.” I suggested that Caesar has milked a sense of privilege from having been here through three landlords. He said, “I don’t give a fuck about that!” as he opened the door to the tall, innocent looking, friendly mover. I squeezed my bike and myself out the door, wished him luck and went to work.

            I posed for Peter Chan on the top floor of OCADU and on my breaks read a little bit of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”. Language is the loving caretaker of thought, or something like that. After the halftime break there suddenly came a sound like a torrent was blasting against the windows. I felt the stage shaking underneath me. During my next break I looked outside and it looked like a blizzard had cut loose from the sky. I was dreading riding home in it but then when I looked outside on my next break there was no trace of a storm.

            After work I went to unlock my bike and was surprised to find that the seat was dry. The pencil box that sits on top of the old OCA building extends to above the inner edge of the sidewalk. Though my bike was not directly under the canopy, the wind had been blowing from the west and so the extension blocked it from getting to my bike.

            It must have been a pretty strong wind because a lot of the cardboard that had been put out for recycling in the neighbourhood that evening got blown into the street. One wet and dirty curled up piece between the streetcar tracks looked like the carcass of a dog.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home and picked up a lot of fruit and avocadoes. I bought a few things that I wouldn’t normally buy if I wasn’t fasting, such as a mini seedless watermelon and something I don’t think I’ve ever bought: a honey pomelo. I didn’t buy any bananas because I was so bored with them but I bought apples, globe grapes, mangoes and seven and a half litres of real orange juice. I had unloaded everything onto the checkout belt but then I realized just as the cashier was going to ring my items up, that I’d forgotten the avocadoes, so I started to put everything back in the basket. But the cashier told me she’d wait for me while I went to get them. I was really surprised by the final price of almost seventy dollars though.

            Shortly after coming home I was curious about the taste of the honey pomelo, so I tore open the red netting around it and peeled off the shrink-wrap under that. It looked like a very large, slightly oblong grapefruit. I cut it open to discover that it’s mostly a very thick skin and that it tasted nothing like honey, but was in fact not as sweet or flavourful as many grapefruit that I’ve had. What a waste of $3.99!

            I watched “La Chute de la Maison Usher”, which was Jean Epstein’s 1928 silent film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The overall story was disappointing because it deviated drastically from the original. Madeline was not Roderick’s sister and lover but just his wife, and on top of that everyone lived in the end. What was great about the film was the cinematography and the spooky, nerve wracking avante garde musical soundtrack, perhaps by Ivan Fedele, that was added to the film many years later.

            Just before going to bed early, I was taking the cat poop out to the sealed bucket I keep for it on the deck, and when I opened the back door it clinked loudly against several of the bottles that my neighbour had left for me. I carried some of them back to my place and was coming back for more when my next-door neighbour opened his door because he’d been wondering where the noise had come from. He may have just been looking for someone to gossip with because he immediately started talking about our neighbour that had just moved out. He said that the landlord had asked him to leave because his place was so filthy it had been impossible to enter.