Beware of Corn in Peanut's Clothing

            The food bank line-up was quite short on Saturday, mainly because the Social Service cheques had arrived. I think that I was the 19th person there and I was behind the middle-aged East Asian woman, although I was actually behind the guy in the red baseball cap who was behind her, except that he wasn’t there until later.
            I almost immediately had to step out of line to avoid the second hand smoke, which seemed particularly thick, as if mostly only the smokers felt the need to go to the food bank so soon after their welfare cheques had arrived. Fortunately the wind was not indecisive this time around and so as long as I stood east and upwind of any burning cigarettes I was choke free.
            Bart was there, sometimes as usual throwing out twisted and obscene phrases into the cold morning air, but at one point though I caught him giving someone a detailed and it seemed coherent comparison of the popular gaming consoles. He told him that X-Box is for people that like to watch TV and who like to brag about how good they are at games. Nintendo has better sound as well as other qualities that I didn’t catch. Bart expressed the desire to get a Nintendo Switch.
            Wayne was also present, but not dancing wildly as he tends to do. I have noticed him lately in the neighbourhood with what looks like a medically issued aluminium cane and he had it on this day as well. Perhaps he’d tripped over the light fantastic and hurt himself.
            On my way downstairs to use the washroom, among those staying out of the cold in the entryway was the hyper-enthusiastic young blond woman who was there a couple of months ago, though she wasn’t quite as fully blond as she’d been back in September. She was singing Del Shannon’s “Runaway” with a guy old enough to know it better than her, and more impressively, she was clapping out the beat with her hands.
            The e-cigarette guy, who lately has been back to smoking real cigarettes, was brandishing a shiny new black vaping device as he recounted on of his stories from his glory days of being a film technician on movie sets. I didn’t follow the conversation and so I may be wrong, but what it sounded like he was saying was that only the prime minister gets to have bacon on a movie set.
            A guy that was a couple of spaces ahead of me in line asked me with no words but a look and an upward nod, what I was reading. I turned the book around and showed him the Norton Anthology of American Literature and shared that right then I was reading some poems by Robert Frost. He told me that he’d watch a documentary about Edgar Allan Poe and learned that despite his reputation he’d only written twelve horror stories. Having only read two stories and one poem, I couldn’t really argue with him on that point. But looking through the descriptions of several of Poe’s stories, I guess it depends on what one calls “horror”. He wrote a lot more than twelve Gothic mystery stories that were all pretty haunting, and many poems of that sort too.
            I only read three Frost poems while I was waiting, but I read them each three times. There was “The Pasture”, about going to fetch the newborn calf; “Mowing” about the whispering message of his scythe as he made hay; but of the three, the one I liked best was “Mending Fence”, about walking with his neighbour as they repaired the stone fence that separated their properties, but being separated from his neighbour by the fence even as they were fixing it. He wonders why they have a fence, since neither of them has cows but rather he has apple trees and his neighbour has pine trees and so his apples won’t cross over to eat his neighbour’s pinecones. The other farmer keeps insisting anyway, “Good fences make good neighbours”.
            I had to put the book away because it was getting too chilly to comfortably read. I got back into line and heard the woman in front of me talking to herself about hot coffee and toast while glancing back and forth to the restaurant across the street.
            The food bank opened on time. As I arrived in the reception and shopping room there was a man I hadn’t seen before sitting in a chair to the left of the desk. When I was handing my card to Desmond, the stranger approached the desk and asked if Steve was there. He was told that Steve would be there in a little while but right now he was waiting for a driver. The man informed them that he was the driver.
            Angie gave me a couple of one-litre cartons of 3.25% milk. I’ve gotten so used to 2% milk that 3.5% might feel like I’m drinking cream. There was a choice between a 500-gram container of cottage cheese and another the same size of 3.25% yogourt. I picked the cottage cheese but Angie let me take the yogourt as well. There was the usual bag of four eggs but the only meat on offer were packs of frozen chicken wieners, so I turned those down, since I already have some and my freezer is choked with more ice than storage space.
            For the same reason I eschewed the frozen peas that Sylvia wanted to give me. I also didn’t need any bags of little potatoes, as I hadn’t even started on the two bags I’d received last time. She gave me one onion, two red peppers and three different colours of carrots: a handful of the regular orange ones, a few yellow ones and a few more that were yellowish orange. On the floor beside the other items was a large box of beautiful red kuri squash. The final vegetable was a long bunch of organic collard greens. We didn’t have collard greens where I grew up in New Brunswick and the first time I’d even heard of them was when Granny Moses and Pat Boone were literally singing their praises on an episode of the Beverley Hillbillies.
            My guide through the shelves was the guy that hardly ever says anything and just walks beside you while gesturing at each shelf.
            There was a variety of cereal on this occasion and I noticed a bag of spoon size shredded wheat without the box. That’s one of my favourite kinds but it tends to be too expensive at the supermarket.
            I took a small can of pizza sauce and also a tube of Mutti tomato sauce with vegetables from Parma, Italy.
            There was no soup-shelf this trip and there was no canned tuna either, but there were cans of luncheon meat. I selected a can of chickpeas and a container of mustard with jalapeno. He gave me five vanilla flavoured granola bars and I grabbed a bag of ginger flavoured coconut chips. My final selection was a snack, the packaging of which fooled me into picking it. I thought I was taking peanuts because the picture on the cover of the bag shows peanut shaped and coloured treats and the word “peanuts” is prominently displayed on the package as well. But it turns out that the main ingredient is corn flour, fashioned into the shape of peanuts while ground peanuts are part of the coating, along with tomato powder and yeast. That seems like a sleazily deceptive way to package a product.
            I skipped the bread because I had some at home.
            My food bank visit scored a fair amount of dairy this time and a pretty good selection of vegetables, though the meat was pretty sparse.
            When I was unlocking my bike, the hyper enthusiastic blond woman came out with her box of groceries. She turned around and backed herself up to a guy in line and because her hands were full, she asked him to pull up her pants for her, which I guess under her coat were slipping down. He obliged her and as she was walking away she asked, “Did that make you hard?” “Not yet!” he replied.
            That night as I was about to make dinner there was a knock on my door and it was my upstairs neighbour, David. He’d locked himself out of his apartment and since my next-door neighbour, Benji had just told him how I’d gotten his door open a few weeks ago, David wanted to know if I had some magic that I could do. He said he just got home from work and he really wanted to get inside and have something to eat. I told him I’d give it a try and got my chisel, my hammer and my screwdriver. He told me on the way upstairs that he’d just gotten back from Ethiopia a little while ago. Unlike with Benji’s door, which took half an hour, all I had to do with David’s is to hammer the chisel in between the lock and the frame until the door was open a crack. Then I rammed the door with my shoulder and it opened, though it broke the moulding on the doorframe. He didn’t seem to mind. Benji was at the bottom of the stairs saying, “Christian’s a handy guy to have around!” David asked if he could give me something but I just said that since I was there I could take back the beer glass I’d leant him back at the end of the summer. He gave it to me and thanked me. I didn’t notice till later that he’d stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into the pilsner glass.

Haunted House On Ted

            On Friday around noon I went out to Fullworth to buy garbage bags. The cashier asked if I wanted a bag. I told her if I wanted one I’d open up the bag of garbage bags, take out one of the bags and then put all the other bags in that bag.
            Dinner is haunted. I mean dinner is on Ted.
            There was some kind of hassle with the eastbound streetcar and maybe a pedestrian in front of my window. I didn’t see how it started but a guy on the street was arguing with the tram driver through his window. The driver told him to wait on the sidewalk and he called someone. A guy standing beside the pedestrian took pictures of the front of the streetcar with an expensive looking camera rather than a phone. A man in red wearing a baseball cap crossed the street in front of the streetcar and said to the driver, “I saw the whole thing man! He had his elbow up! You have a great day!” but when the guy in red got to my side of the street and saw that the streetcar wasn’t moving because he was still on the phone and waiting for instructions, the guy in red started shouting to him, “Hey streetcar man, get going! You’re holdin’ up traffic! The city’s gotta move! What’a you got to prove man?” He kept on calling to him to move until the streetcar driver, still on the phone, held up his hand and said chastisingly, “Excuse me!” and he stopped shouting. Since nothing was happening but the streetcar just sitting there, I didn’t watch anymore. The next time I looked, which was a couple of hours later, the streetcar was gone.
            Maybe people are seducers, kindness is seduction and the anti-social are the least selfish communicators.

Cause and Effect

            One of my upstairs neighbours was moving out as I was leaving for philosophy class, with a real moving company doing the job just like I used to do before my back got sprained.   
            I spent my time before class doing research to try to prove to someone online that most terrorist attacks in North America in the last four years have been committed by non-Muslims. I found that I was right but I doubted if my proof would mean anything to bigots with their minds already made up.   
            Professor Black said she was going to finish her talk on Avicenna and either start her talk on Ghazali or let us off a little early for reading week.
            Causality. Everything in Avicenna’s metaphysics converges around this topic. There are four causes. Causality is a mode of being and not just theology. It’s a study of basic reality and how primary concepts are manifested.
            Aristotle explores this same type of causality from a broader perspective. For him cause is very broad. He is including any principle offering explanation (intrinsic principles).
         
            Material}Intrinsic
            Formal} Intrinsic
            Final} Extrinsic
            Efficient} Extrinsic

            Thing (example: bed) – form – shape
            Matter – material from which it is made.
            Matter might be elements (intrinsic) or the matter from which the thing is constructed (extrinsic).
            For Avicenna the final cause is central. The final cause is the cause of the causality of other causes.

God is an efficient cause.

Aristotle’s four causes in physics; material, formal, efficient and final.Avicenna never outright criticizes Aristotle but says his is a more proper account of the efficient cause.

Efficient cause → Physics → Moving cause or cause of motion or any alteration such as changing my hair colour or any physical changes.

Efficient cause → Metaphysics → Agent cause → to do with being and the existence of the effect rather than its motion. It must also account for why the existence is.

Cause and effect are distinct → Agent and patient are two distinct things.

God and the supra-lunar intellects don’t resemble effects like a human father and son.

Agent cause → Causes being after non-being.

This cannot explain absolute non-being. Effect did not exist before.

An agent cause must be sufficient.

True agent → Sufficient for effect.

There are two causes: the physical cause and the proper true agent. It must be completely active to be a sufficient agent and make agency actual.

The only true agent is one whose effects are never thwarted – god.

Al-kindi incorporated Aristotelian thought into an Islamic philosophical framework. He described god as the creator. This means it acts as both a final and efficient cause. He conceived of god as an active agent. For him god was the agent. God acts through created intermediaries which in turn act on one another - through a chain of cause and effect – to produce the desired result. But the intermediaries do not act at all and are merely conduits for god’s action. This made Aristotle’s first cause and unmoved mover compatible with Islamic philosophy.

If you put these together the agent that is the cause must hold the effect up for its entire existence.

True agency → Creation

True Agency → Concentration in being

The necessary existent in itself

The possible existent in itself – is purely possible but it does not have to exist. It never loses the possibility of existing. Even when it exists its existence is still possible in its own essence. But if you take away the agent cause of the possible existent the PE will disappear.

Avicenna says that the agent cause spills over to give existence to other things.

Plato says that good is naturally diffusive of self. It pours itself out.

We need to tell another causal story over and above.

If creation and conservation in being are part of the same agency there is simultaneity of cause and effect. If all causes are in place, effect follows immediately. If the effect disappears the cause has stopped trying.

Avicenna offers three examples of types of physical change that show the simultaneity principle across the board.

Father → Son – the father doesn’t make a human but rather prepares the matter.

Builder → House – the builder does not cause the building but rather arranges the materials in form.

Fire → Water – the fire is the cause of the change in nature of the water.
Father → Son      } Helping or preparatory causes
Builder → House} simultaneous with their effects

Fire → Water      } preparing or disposing their matter.

The father and the builder are prior to their effects. The father does not cause the son’s nature. There has to be a further cause.

Givers of form. Physical causes prepare matter.

The proximate or nearest cause is the agent intellect. God does not micromanage the universe. It just thinks and thinks and overflows with form. The agent intellect is always doing its thing.

As soon as the physical human body develops, what emanates is the human being.

The body is the preparatory cause for the afterlife. 
           On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought grapes and a sirloin tip roast, among other things. Plus I finally remembered to buy dental floss. Also on the way home I bypassed home because I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to pay for my November phone service.
           I bought a beer to make up for not getting one on Wednesday, even though Thursday is not a beer day in my diet.
           I took a very late siesta and when I woke up before 19:00 I was confused because I’d thought that I was in bed for the night and wondered why I hadn’t brushed my teeth before hitting the sack.
           When I argued with a post on a bigoted social media page, a woman said I was “really dummy”. I pointed out that she’d just qualified a noun with an adverb.

Tiresias in the Wasteland

   

     

            On Wednesday morning when I got up the toilet flushed itself while I was peeing. Spooky!
            I forgot to go to the liquor store before leaving for English class.
            Our instructor, Scott Rayter, right away showed us a 23-minute video about T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, featuring selections read by Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gough, plus interview with various academics about the text. Except that Scott said the actress was Irene Richards. He gets a lot of stuff wrong.
            The video said that The Wasteland was influenced by one of Beethoven’s string quartets and that he wanted to achieve that same sad musical expression in a poem. Looking this up I see that it was Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that was directly inspired in this way but some scholars think that the five part structure of the poem is an attempt to achieve in poetry the characteristics of a symphony.
            The Wasteland was the most famous poem of the 20th Century. One of the British scholars being interviewed declared that T. S. Eliot was a better poet than W. B. Yeats.
            Eliot’s grandfather established a Unitarian Church in St Louis. His family were American aristocrats and Eliot was raised in a sheltered environment. He went to Harvard where he took long, lonely walks.
            In 1915, at the age of 23 Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which was his first major work. He reworked clichés into something new. The poem did not conform to the accepted styles of the day. He had already moved to England by this time, which was the preferred place for American aristocrats. It was Ezra Pound that advocated for the publication of Prufrock.                    Pound was a major figure in the early Modernist movement from which he developed Imagism. Pound, Wyndham Lewis and some others founded the Rebel Art Centre. Inspired by Cubism they formed their own Modernist movement, which Pound coined as Vorticism. They published an artistically radical literary magazine called Blast, with the intention of blasting away Romanticism. They wanted to create a modern tradition that pushed back into the ancient past.
            Eliot was called a company of actors in one suit and the greatest dramatic poet of the period.                Prufrock anticipates The Wasteland with its theme of failing to live. Prufrock was uptight as a rolled umbrella.
            Eliot began writing The Wasteland in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. He claimed that it took direct inspiration from The Golden Bough: a Study in Comparative religion by Sir James Fraser and From Ritual to Romance, an examination of the King Arthur legends by Jessie Weston. His manuscript title for the poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. The original poem was much longer but Ezra Pound as editor, excised about half of it. He uses language from the streets of London and deliberately chose the settings to be the dirty canals and the gasworks rather than the traditional English countryside.
            The poem was happening but it was hard to follow. Critics complained that it was an incoherent poem of fragments. But the poem spoke directly to the spirit of the age. It’s meant to appeal to the logical imagination.
            In The Wasteland, Eliot found his own voice by co-opting the voices of others. The work is composed of his own words combined with those of historical poets. He created poetically the music of our age by borrowing music from before.
            The sensuality of the poem is more apparent than real. Eliot’s wife went mad and he had a nervous breakdown, writing much of the poem in a sanatorium and incorporating his personal tribulations into the text. His problems became symbols of the age and his private career stood for the decline and collapse of the West, which had entered into a sort of spiritual desert after the war. The poem links up with the line by W. B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction.”
            The character of Tiresias sees the whole of history simultaneously. Modern decadence is not unique. It’s part of civilization.
            The poet is a burglar that throws meat to the watchdog. He wrote the poem specifically for the academics.
            When a woman was seduced and fell in those days, she killed herself.
            Five years after publishing The Wasteland, Eliot joined the Anglican Church. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, married his secretary in 1957 and died in 1965. He represented in his own person international culture. He declared that he’d paid too high a price to be a poet. The Wasteland is religious despair.
            After the movie we took a break.
            I asked Scott about the readings from “Up From Slavery” but he said he didn’t know offhand. He suggested that I check the Norton website. I found out later that the text selection in the 9th edition was no different from my earlier version. Scott must have just read part of the first chapter as part of his lecture.
            After the break, Scott began by saying that The Wasteland is an amazingly dense and difficult poem. It can’t be separated from Modernism. It’s the urtext of Modernism. It produced its own industry and it was designed to be studied by scholars. One in three lines is an allusion to an ancient text. Scott quoted Eliot as having said, “Poor poets imitate; good poets steal” but the actual quote is, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” It’s a collage of analytic Cubism that takes things from newspapers. The footnotes are disruptive and some people think they were included deliberately to drive people out of their minds. The Wasteland speaks seven languages. It’s overwhelming.
            Is it a commentary on death? Is it a visit to the underworld? Is it madness? The voices are having fun. It is not meant to be understood. It is erudite and show offy. None of the voices have quotation marks. The Wasteland is waste, wreckage, garbage, pain, suffering and ruin. In particular it is the ruined bodies of women. It is the recycling of waste. Although written during the war he denied that it was a reflection of the conflict. A guy bites his own tongue off in the narrative.
            The poem is not a unity but a hankering for unity. There was a redrawing of boundaries after the war with displacements of large groups of people and disruptions of culture. Is studying English a waste? Is The Wasteland about industrialization, the production of waste? Is it about wasted lives? Is it about wasted bodies and infertility?
            Why is Thebes a wasteland? There was a curse that made it that way. Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and ended the wasteland. Oedipus is all over Hamlet. Freud’s Oedipus complex is the envy and revulsion of the father. In Parsifal there is also an infertile kingdom that became that way because the maidens of the land had been raped. There are fertility and infertility myths. All of the relationships in the poem are infertile and full of failed ideas of love. What one wants one cannot have.
            Sibyl is immortal and yet continues to age and so her only wish is to die.
            The Burial of the Dead is an ironic title since the whole poem is about digging up bodies.
            The “April is the cruellest month” opening is a parody of the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but inverted in meaning so that April is the opposite of sweet. Why is April cruel? I suggested because it’s tax time. April is cruel because most people are happy and if you are not happy everyone else’s joy is just salt in your wound.
            Each line of the opening has words that indicate life at the end of each line, but the body of each line contrasts by emphasizing words that indicate death.
            Winter kept us warm because we were inside in unfeeling suspended animation.
            Countess Marie von Moennich, the niece of Empress Elizabeth of Austria was the go-between for Elizabeth’s son Rudolph and his lover. She thought that she was helping to arrange a tryst but they died in either a suicide pact or a murder-suicide. Marie spent the rest of her life atoning and travelling. Offing oneself for love is pretty stupid but very idealistic.
            Hyacinth, in Ovid’s Metamorphosis is Apollo’s cupbearer. He ended up taking a discus toss in the head but his blood became the hyacinth flower. Scott wondered though why Hyacinth is a girl in The Wasteland. Maybe the hyacinth girl is not supposed to have anything to do with the Greek myth.             “Pearls for eyes” comes from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.
            Eliot admitted that he knew nothing of the Tarot and just made up everything that he said about it in the poem.
            Everything is about water.
            The mention of Mylae refers to another horrible war. The poem wouldn’t work if he were writing directly about WWI.
            A Game of Chess is the heart of the poem. The title of the section references a Thomas Middleton play of the same name.
            Philomel was a princess of Athens who, after being raped and having her tongue and hands removed by her sister’s husband, is transformed into a nightingale. Her sister Procne took revenge on her husband by boiling his son by her and then feeding him as a meal. After he had finished eating she showed him the severed head of his child. Why so much rape? Is being turned into a nightingale any kind of consolation? I assume that in this case Philomel was turned into a nightingale because female nightingales don’t sing but Eliot might not have known that. The line “jug jug to dirty ears” means that to a dirty mind the song of a bird will still sound vulgar. Where does human suffering fit into all of this? If it’s about fertility he is not finding it.
            “Hurry up please it’s time!” is the call by the bartender in a pub that it’s closing time. Fertility is killing Lil. “Goodnight sweet ladies” is a line by Ophelia from Hamlet.
            Suffragette women took control of when they would have children. The reference to “Mrs Porter and her daughter / they wash their feet in soda water” is from a song sung about a Madame and her daughter and what they washed were their cunts as a means of both birth control and of warding off syphilis.
            Of the reference to Mr Eugenides and a weekend at the Metropole, Scott says the Metropole was a famous meeting place for homosexuals.
            “The young man carbuncular” Scott says it means he is full of boils but apparently it’s also a saying to describe someone with a lot of pimples. His rape of the secretary is in sonnet form.
            The London Bridge rhyme is sung, leaving out “my fair lady”.
            The Wasteland is set between the promise of Christ’s resurrection and the event.
            T. S. Eliot was a virgin when he married his first wife. Sexual anxiety about women’s bodies permeates The Wasteland. Things changed in the modern era as women began to reveal their bodies and began speaking about subject that had been taboo for them before.
            Eliot said that Ezra Pound rescued The Wasteland from the womb by caesarean section.
            After The Wasteland was published people were talking and writing about it so much that Eliot began to claim that it had all been planned from the start. In his Theory of Impersonal Poetry he declared that the poet in a depersonalized vessel. He turned the personal into something resonant in culture. The poet is most unique when the least personal and falls back on schooling.
            The Wasteland ends in Sanskrit, which is supposedly the source of all European languages, with “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih” or “all peace”. Is eastern religion a comforting end?
            The Wasteland was as radical a poem as had ever been done.
            Argued with Scott about Tiresias. He insisted that he had been turned into a woman by Hera for taking Zeus’s side in an argument about whether men or women have the most pleasure in love. I told him that it says right in Eliot’s notes that Tiresias turned himself into a woman and that’s how after seven years he had the authority to confirm that women have more pleasure. His punishment by Hera was to be turned blind. Scott said that Eliot was wrong. I said, "How could he be wrong?" If he based his poem on the wrong information then the wrong information in the context of the poem becomes the right information.
            On the way home I tried to make it to a liquor store. I’d heard that the one on Spadina was open till 22:00 but it wasn’t, so I had to go without beer. Talk about a waste!

Writing with your Shadow on Halloween

            It was a good night for Halloween. It was not too cold but cool enough to send a chill down your spine when it was needed. It was clear enough to see the white clouds moving like ghostly puppets of the darkness above them.

            My arrival at the church of St Stephen in the Fields for the monthly Shab-e She’r poetry event always seems to correspond with Bänoo Zan having a cigarette across the sidewalk from the front door.  I approached her while singing “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette!” But before I could get to the second line, “Smoke, smoke, smoke until you smoke yourself to death!” She confessed that she had given up giving up. I acknowledged that it’s a hard habit to break although I have no personal experience nicotine addiction. I recounted how both of my parents had smoked before I became a teenager and that my father had suddenly quit, never to start again but that my mother kept on smoking for the rest of her life. She said that it was her father that smoked and her mother that unsuccessfully nagged him to quit. I didn’t tell Bänoo that my mother died of cancer when she was 55 because that information seemed to set the wrong mood for the occasion. Maybe there should be a special annual holiday for telling depressing stories. (Depressmas?) 

            When we went inside, Giovanna Riccio was sitting at the reception desk with Laboni Islam. I hadn’t seen Giovanna since the last time she was at Shab-e She’r at the end of April. She said she’d just gotten back from Halifax where Dalhousie University had presented him with a lifetime achievement award. She asked me about my courses this year and when I told her I was taking 20^th Century United States literature and Early Medieval Philosophy she told me that she had majored in philosophy and that I was still one of her great loves. I expressed disappointment about having gotten a C-plus on my recent essay about Augustine of Hippo and against his argument that one can have knowledge.

            I asked her what had happened to her and George back in May when he was scheduled to host the Haiku Canada Conference dinner at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. I’d heard that they’d gotten lost and wondered if this was a chronic problem for George like the way he kind of gets lost when he’s lecturing. She explained that it’s more a matter of George being late as usual and then taking a wrong turn only to end up in Georgetown.

            When I went to take a seat I saw Cad sitting behind me. I acknowledged him but not enthusiastically because he’d recently said something on Facebook about “destroying” me, which I did not appreciate reading from a friend. I would really like to see him learn how to behave himself on social media but that may be an impossible dream. I guess I’m forgetting the essay that I wrote a few years ago in which I argued that social media is a type of mind reading because people just can’t help expressing their thoughts in that medium no matter how self-damaging the expression of those thoughts would be. 

            I saw also that Cad’s roommate/sort of girlfriend, Goldie was there for the first time, but sitting in the back. I said hi to her and sat down.

            A tall young woman arrived, dressed as a white witch, complete with a peaked at the top and wide brimmed white hat. Even her hair was so blonde that it was almost white.

            There was a much smaller turn out this time, with less than thirty people, as far as I could tell. Bänoo got things rolling at 19:05. She introduced Rula Kahil, who would be photographing the event with her phone. Bänoo suggested that the featured poets of the night would be a step towards healing the rift between spoken word poets and written word poets. She assured us that at least one language would be spoken during the readings. She announced that Maggie Helwig, the minister of St Stephen in the Fields has told her that they could rent the space for Shab-e She’r for at least one more year. Then she called Laboni up to do the Native land acknowledgement.

            The first open stage poet was Kate Marshall Flaherty, who began by announcing that Quattro Books is launching the “Canada’s Best New Poet” contest and that there will be three winners of the prize of having each a book published.

            Her poem was called “Sel” – “I will never scold an onion for making me cry … The salt content of tears is the same as blood and the sea … Grey Dead Sea salt is the same as pink Himalayan salt, so far from home … They dissolve the borders… Let us not wait for another boy to be washed up on shore …”

            Kate is right about tears and blood plasma having the same salt content as tears but the ocean is 4 times saltier than tears and the Dead Sea is 40 times saltier. Only 12% of Dead Sea salt is sodium chloride while Himalayan salt is 97.41% sodium chloride, so they are not even close to being the same, other than both being salts.

            Bänoo called me next. In the spirit of Halloween I posed as someone else, not visually, but in voice. I explained that when my daughter was small I used to get her to make up stories that I would write down. I mused that in a sense I was the grandfather of those stories and I told everyone that I was going read one of her pieces, called “Scary, by Astrid” – “It all started on a day when the wind was howling and then a ghost came out of the window with all of the monsters you could imagine and then a vampire came upstairs into someone’s bed and sucked their blood and then instead of becoming a vampire they became a ghost and then sucked their blood and then it kept on going until everyone in the whole town was turned into ghosts and they kept getting bigger and bigger until the universe got destroyed with the world and then a vampire hunter came along made by god and killed all of those vampires including you and me and then that’s how the story went.”

            Julia Yusupova, the aforementioned white witch, read a poem entitled “White” – “What is white? Where would white wander? Wallowing in walkways … with whom will white walk? Wastrels and well-wishers … When white withdraws … white is warm … This wonderful web is worthwhile weaving.”

            Nick Micelli, before he came to the stage removed the golden colombina mask he’d been wearing in the audience. He shared with us that he’d made himself late for work writing his poem “New Harvest” – “Beautiful loving creature and whole all in one unity / power, I’m told … The old world of selfish desire is dead … Death fades all life under the earth … We are all one / the blossoming word … That wealth is our common possession today … Towers of glory no longer.”

            From Rula Kahil’s poem – “From the death of the fog that settles within … In the heart of the soul, the wound resides … I hold onto the pain, the anger and the resentment … His prophecy of forgiveness … People driven by the alibi of the predator unforgiven.”

            Bänoo pointed out that she was wearing a top decorated with Persian imagery and wondered if she was culturally appropriating herself. She said she didn’t have an answer.

            Weda Shareqi read “Sorrow” – “How it feels … How it takes your heart … and how it makes your tears drop … allowing your soul to bond with it.”

            Bänoo announced that on November 28^th they will be celebrating the 5^th anniversary of Shab-e She’r with not only two features but also two musical guests. Because of this the open stage will be slightly shorter than usual.

            At this point it was time for the first featured reader, Ayesha Chatterjee. Bänoo told us that she is the former president of the League of Canadian Poets and that when she was in charge she made the organization more diverse.

            Ayesha opened with a poem called “The Mask”, about a piece that her and her husband bought in Mexico – “It is in the rosewood … the smooth beauty … not extraneous … in the eyes … in the fragrant mouth … gaping.”

            She told us that her poem, “The Past Makes Its Way Through” mentioned the koel or Indian cuckoo, which has a beautiful, honeyed call so loud that it rises above the city noises of Kolkata. Also in the poem is the raat ki rani, a night blooming jasmine – “ … a voice rises through the air … clean as a koel’s / Nothing can stop it / The sirens …have paused / There it is, breathing raat ki rani / through imaginary curtains, turning / your throat to dust.”

            Ayesha shared that she is from Kolkata where they don’t have a Halloween tradition but it might be starting to catch on now. But this time of year many of the world’s cultures have other festivals to mark the coming of winter. “We celebrate Kali Puja (October 19). Kali is the goddess of death and destruction and do not mess with her.” Her skin is depicted as black which that does not denote a skin tone but rather the absence of colour. She is shown as fierce, with her tongue hanging out, wearing a skirt of hands and a necklace of human skulls.

            Ayesha confessed that she has no sense of smell and it is said that people that are close to death lose their olfactory sense. She wondered then what it means for her to have been without it her whole life.

            From “Kali” – “I cannot smell life either … what we have in common … I was distracted by the drums.”

            She informed us that Mexico celebrates the Day of the Dead on November 2. The traditional flower that is part of that holiday is the marigold. Ayesha has a poem called “Marigolds” but it is about digital technology – “Everything is for sale /especially the front page … so satisfyingly other … Fold the paper over like marigolds.”

            She let us know that the tuberose in Bengal is also associated with death. When her grandmother died there was a delay for her cremation and so she was kept in the house, surrounded by tuberoses. From “Etude in Tuberose” – “We carried … weapons to ward off / hungry souls … she filled / the house with her smooth / waxy petals / even after she had gone.”

From “Powdered Myrrh” – “Insect preserved over millennia … The spirit of what? … Pure intelligence … leaving ashes behind.”

Ayesha recounted how she started writing poems about fragrances, perfumes and the sense of smell itself. She discovered that the first recorded perfume makers were women. When Chanel no5 was being developed they wanted to recreate the clean scent of the Arctic and of water at midnight. From her poem – “She’s afraid of water and the dark … Rich, oily thing with no reflection / new Moon is no Moon … I could suffocate you with what I see.”

            Ayesha divulged that although she was born in India, English is her first language. From “Somewhere Borrowed, Somewhere Blue” – “ … I shift my truths / like furniture in a rented house … what does it / matter if my memory draws blanks … I must be careful with my words / They are borrowed currency.”        

            She said she made up her own name for a perfume and a poem called “The Moon and Ginger” – “You grew up with it, this light / It swelled with your bones / Your words radiating moonlight … You thought it ossified certainties … ginger notes in the background / clearly, in darkness.”

            From Ayesha’s final poem – “Atar of Earth” – “Smell of first rains … Before the first rains the air tenses … a kind of concentrated fragrance … only just roused itself back into consciousness … All the shutters drawn in imitation night … The first heady drops hurtle through the air and we smell the earth.”

            Ayesha Chatterjee’s short poems are often well-crafted gems, alive with sensuality. They touch on her personal life just enough to draw from it imagery that only intimate experience can capture.  She manages to incorporate into her writing aspects of her feelings of cultural alienation but there is also a hint of avoidance that she uses, consciously or not, to evoke a sense of mystery.

            As usual, after the first feature we had a break. I went to the washroom at the back of the church adjacent to the gym, which for the first time since I’d been coming there had no meeting going on and so the lights were out and the space was spookily dark. While I was waiting for a free washroom, Johnny Trinh came to wait behind me and declared, in reference to the piece by my daughter that I’d read, “Great story!”

            There were three lazily moving little church toilet flies walking on the washroom wall.

            I went back to stand by my seat and Cy Strom came over to chat. He offered me some work for the last three Fridays in November. He told me that he was just getting over a case of mononucleosis and I was surprised to learn that one can only get it once. He said one is supposed to get it in adolescence. I reminded him that it’s called “the kissing disease” because it’s passed through the saliva.  He admitted that he might have gotten it from Bänoo.

            After the break, Bänoo decided that she would be the warm up poet this time for the final feature – “There is a voice that sings your song / opens your veins to your blood … who is not you … invites you to the allegory of the cave … in whose tales you are a myth … that claims you / abyss and wings and all… that is yours / when you cross / your borders … Take yourself out of its way …”

            Johnny Trinh began by telling us about Kanao Inouye, the first Canadian war criminal. He was in Japan when Canada declared was on Japan and his family was interned. He joined the Japanese army and became a torturer at a prison camp for Canadian soldiers. Johnny played him in a production of “Interrogation: the Life and Times of the Kamloops Kid”.

            From “It Cannot Be Helped” – “Nothing to be done / It’s 1941 … Grandfather … Why do we stay by the sea? / Voices on the CBC / guide us to concentration camps … The use of 9-11 … No one listened to the voices of love … I’m not gonna make it home tonight … It’s yesterday … on a hotel hospital floor … I can’t see mom, where’s my ball … It’s 2017, and in the name of an orthodox god it’s okay to kill the Gays … They stand for the man given right to kill one … love is love … Nothing to be done …”

            Johnny joked that he writes funny poems.

            From his second piece – “ … I am a lonely canary… I was once flying free … forced migration to the west … We have always been the expendable specialists … A Canadian heritage moment … Our sun drenched feathers are dyed denim blue … If I cannot die, let me speak.”

            Johnny then turned to the subject of the Fort McMurray fire, which he said created a crisis for many migrant workers. Johnny began his piece by singing the first verse of “Fire” by Bruce Springsteen – “You’re riding in my car/  I turn on the radio / I’m pulling you close / You say you don’t like it / but I know you’re a liar / Cause when we kiss / Fire” “Fire makes the asphalt snap, crackle, pop … SUV after SUV, all in single file … Nothing romantic about the flames … Alberta looks a lot like Syria … The world’s on fire … It’s more than you can handle … I reach to change the station … Climate change … They deserve it … It’s been five hours … 500 kilometres to go … Trying to find space, now one of the few things we have left … The streets are full of animals running scared … They act more human every day … This is what it’s like to be a refugee … We finally hit an open road … I just need to feel the wind … I half asleep at the wheel … All I want to do is part my lips and part with a lump of coal in my throat …” He finished by singing a variation on another verse from Springsteen’s “Fire”.

            At this point Johnny called for Bänoo and they went to the back of the stage and around the corner out of our view where we heard a music player go on and off again as he showed her how to work it. Then Johnny returned to the mic, signaled to Bänoo, the music started and Johnny began his piece – “I’m a river … when she holds you … The lack of your touch … I’m weeping … Dear beloved, where are you? Wait and I will return … Moving to breathe, breathing to move … I climbed your limbs and rode your tidal force into the air … The frontier of you, the shoreline of me … I’m a river from the land of your touch … I taste the bitterness as I wade in my own tears … I fling myself into the … empty stillness on the floor … The salt has dried up the sea / see the ghosts of our duet … I float with nothing left to leave behind … I’m a river … swimming through … tomorrow …”

            The music continued and Johnny began another poem – “You say you are my father /Sometimes I don’t know what that means … I pick up the phone / voice mail / Happy Fathers Day … Full stop … I miss you … Silence  … I hope you’re well … On screen, on paper, in black and white … You say you want me to be happy … All we have are photos of us when I still looked like the son you wanted … You were raised by wars … I remind myself of the hand that slapped the queer out of me … My heart broke when you said I needed a wife … I am standing at the gate. I shake your hand. The first time we touch without hitting … pray for the day I never have to come back …” Johnny was crying at the end of the piece and he told us that when he saw his father recently he told Johnny he was bald and fat.

            Johnny’s last poem was “Wedding Vows” – “I was raised to love your skin … I will not be defined by my proximity to you … I’m not your best anything … You are my winter in these endless prairies … I can’t love you because there aren’t other options … The edges of your design … crude as my frost-bitten limbs … Rice boy willing to do good job for you … I do …”

            Johnny closed by declaring that, “It takes a community to build a better artist.”

            Johnny Trinh is an amazing performer and an impressive singer as well. When I listened to and watched him so powerfully share his work my impression was that this was very good writing. When I later looked at the text though it was clear that most of his work is not that well crafted and even a lot of it is clichéd, such as in lines like “I wade in my own tears”. He could have probably read an instruction manual to us and it would have sounded like a great poem. That isn’t to say though that some parts of his work don’t stand out. As is usually the case with slam poets, his most deeply personal pieces, like the one about his relationship with his father have impressively radiant moments. The line, “You were raised by wars” was particularly strong. Although most of his poetry was not great, his set was one of the most finely delivered spoken word presentations ever at Shab-e She’r.

            As usual after the last feature, we returned immediately to the open stage.

            Paul Edward Costa did not remove his sparkling columbina mask when he read – “Stargazing in a celestial storm … The skulls crawl gratefully … towards the flame…where they wait for disintegration.”

            Paul recited his second piece – “Vicious, elegant, hidden and ready … holding a deer’s skull … violence of reality … the poplar tree of Hades … immune to … ironic Twilight Zone interpretations … Malevolent manipulations … usually reserved for the gods.”

            Paul did his usual promo about himself and his publications and then he took a moment to comment that forest fires are getting worse. Fire season has increased from six to eight months. When he was looking north from downtown Vancouver someone had to point out to him that behind the smoke there was supposed to be a mountain.

            Rex Ricardus, a middle aged man wearing a van dyke with a sharp chin beard, announced that this was his very first venture into public speaking – “Good evening eh … Mommy used to shout ‘Ricky!’ before she slapped me down … Here we be … Let my sound drip or let me slip … God said, ‘6 days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight’ … Piss jugs full … Dead skunk in the middle of the road … I come from a long line of White trailer trash … To be ‘piss poor’ was to collect family urine and sell it to the tanner … Not a pot to piss in … Who am I to withhold life giving love from those that smell funky … As my clan would have you believe, our shit don’t stink.”

            Cad Gold Jr. read – “Do you sleep naked? Do you eat humble pie? In what way are you designed? This world is yours, all with blemishes, radicals and whores … So live your life in tough guy boots … tryin to get laid and get paid …”

            Peyton read Of Love It’s Time” – “Harvesting the old ice box … Invisible darkness … Our curling embrace … That small bibliotheca where we first met … through a pane-less window …  I named you Emerald … The divan we sat on consisted of cumulus … I could never tame all of you … It felt as though we could have hidden infinity in our caressing … Time for everything for we are old now … When we parted … Early morning shuddering light …”

            Naiha also shared that it was her first time and so, as they had done for Rex and as is the tradition at most poetry readings, the ritualistic response is for the audience to applaud. From her poem – “Let me introduce you to the reason I am this fragile way … I came to this world in April, 1994 … You never learned to unwrap a box gently … You’re a manipulator … dictator … Burn marks all over my face … Voices in my head that sound like me but speak like you … You hand me the weapon of silence and I pull the gun on you …”

            Susan read with a calm, sinister and colloquial voice – “Halloween is the empowerment of children that will trick you if you don’t treat them properly … All this fuss with children’s aid … Got no use for boys … Only good for the dogs the boys are … She was good when she was young … Those were the days … I had all those girls trained just right … That psyche ward … Damn Children’s id … They should of left everything all right … I think I gots one … I think I’ll take this one to the woods … Oh yes, we’re in Halloween now … Children who get to trick you if you don’t treat them …”

            Richard Blackburn stepped onto the stage and took a few steps towards the altar and threw up his arms in response to the cross in a gesture of bored exasperation. Then he turned around and came back to the microphone, telling us, “Losing your religion is a lot like a divorce and it’s an especially messy divorce when you’re Catholic.”

            From “A Simple Bargain” – “Consider me well lost to your rape of children with a cross … Cluster fuck I made of things … for love however hard … Trade failing light for darkness.”

            Sydney White read a poem that she wrote to entertain her kids when they were young. From “The Sentry” – The child was so gravely ill that he would die … I dreamt that I stood watch at the lower wall … Stained glass glowed in firelight … Footsteps soft … There was no sound … An iron rod … the hands were clod … This was not a house of god … knew they wanted him forever … A cross was in my hand … I woke and stumbled to the child … As to his cheek my lips were pressed I saw a cross shine on his breast.”

            Mind the Gap recited – “Shadow cast upon the wall of the cave … Tonight I came here to dance not for you … Your warmth is not with me / I am every single flower … I do not feel the need for the wind beneath my wings anymore … All I want to be is clean water … There is no tap in the wall of this cave … It’s night, I come here to dance!” and with that she threw her arms wide and spun around one time.

            Chai reminded us that he is called “the poet of choice” but declared that “today there is no choice.”

            On the front of his t-shirt was the question, “Are we serial killers of species?” Chai went on to explain his t-shirts and that he has fifty of them with environmental poems on the front and back. He stated that he would give a t-shirt to anyone that is willing to wear it frequently enough to make it Earth Day once a week.

            He informed us that one could get anti-radiation pills from the Ontario Provincial Police in case the nuclear plant in Pickering has a meltdown.

            From Chai’s poem – “Just one globe, let’s not blow it … Just one world, let’s not waste it … Just one humanity, let us not starve it … Just one race, let us not discriminate … Just one species, let us not kill it.”

            Dave Walker began with an Ojibway greeting. From “Go Sit With Them” – “The government cars come down the road past a rusted water jug truck … Rez dogs chase the truck… Grandmothers and grandfathers dressed up today for match day … Two horsemen wearing Smoky the Bear hats … They make their mark on the paper and are given their treaty money … Some buy a joint … You got a match?”

            From “Earth Woman” – “Miigwech (thanks) for everything you’ve done for us … I feel you wanting rest time … The leaves glow red and orange … Rest time is near … The creator calls me … lovingly holding this body of mine.”

            The final performer on the open stage, her face painted in black and white as a clown, a pink wig (or maybe her hair dyed pink), wearing a shiny black “police” hat, bright orange tights with black spikes in various places and bright blue, faux furry boots.”

            From her poem – “Restructure, rebuild, re-use … Disposability … direct … elementary at level one … Hitting bottom … Trigger, trigger, bam, bam … insanity … Need a fence to think … Clock is ticking fuckhead … One is not born with those stupid ideas … Fading, hurting, scared little egos … Who would’ve thought … it’ll get better.”

            Bänoo closed by warning us, “If you had a poem you wanted to share but didn’t, it’ll come back to haunt you!” She urged people to come back to read them next time.

            On my way out I stopped to ask Bänoo if the poem she’d read had been a ghazal. She said it wasn’t but she may have unconsciously incorporated ghazal elements into it. I’d been meaning to ask her for the correct pronunciation of “ghazal”, so I thought now would be a good time. She gave me the Persian version and then called Rula over to find out if the Arabic pronunciation is different. It sounded the same to me. I tried to imitate her speech and there proceeded a short lesson as I kept trying to say the word and she kept shaking her head. Finally she instructed me to begin as if I’m about to gargle and finally nodded after I’d tried it a couple of times. Bänoo gave me a hug before I left.

            Outside, Cad, Goldie and Sydney were gathered and deciding if they were going to eat something. Giovanna was standing about a meter away from them, I think she was using her phone to arrange for transportation. Goldie told me that she’d recently lost a considerable amount of weight and credited me with the achievement, based on some advice I’d supposedly given her. I pointed at Cad and told her, “You could lose a lot more weight if you got rid of this guy.” Giovanna smiled without looking up from her phone.

As Giovanna was walking away I gave her a hug but she seemed uncomfortable, perhaps because she felt vulnerable out on the street at night.

            Sydney started telling me about an article that I should read about the disappearance of the male and about chemicals in the womb that are feminizing male fetuses, then she immediately chastised me with, “Don’t give me that look!” She insisted that there are 30 toxic chemicals in the womb. I don’t doubt that there are lots of toxic chemicals in the womb, but there’s only one kind, namely phthalates, that has been linked, by only one large study so far, to the feminization of boys by exposure to phthalates in the womb. I’ve read the study and what they did was enroll over 300 women that gave urine samples while they were pregnant. After their children were older they filled out questionnaires about their children’s behaviour and then brought their children in for a play study in which the kids (up to the age of 8) were shown drawings of various types of gender play dynamics between girls and boys, boys and boys and girls and girls.  The study concluded that the male children of mothers whose urine had shown high concentrations of phthalates displayed more feminine behaviour. Obviously the study warrants many more studies that would have to be done to arrive at conclusive evidence. Certain fake news sites like Alex Jones’s Infowars have made it look like phthalates have been proven to cause gender dysphoria but that is not the case. It was noted by the researchers that the gender shifts were subtle and within the typical range, meaning that all boys display some feminine behaviour sometimes but these boys showed a little more of it. I think that other studies of phthalmates have shown actual harmful, non-gender related effects from exposure. If all phthalmates did was to cause boys to reach for dolls sometimes rather than toy guns, I wouldn’t consider it a health concern. It’s like going to a poetry reading and being influenced by Halloween to show another aspect of oneself through one’s writing that one doesn’t habitually show. On this night of Shab-e She’r the writing tended to be better than usual because of that.

             I rode home and had a late dinner. The Mike Hammer episode that I watched that night guest starred Nita Talbot who has quite a classy, scene stealing presence and is a very good character actor. She later won an Emmy for her hilarious role as the beautiful Russian double agent on Hogan’s Heroes. 

Angel of Saturn

            On Tuesday at the beginning of Philosophy class, Professor Black handed the topics for our final essay and mentioned that our exam would be on December 14^th. I was suddenly worried on hearing that because I was scheduled to work on that Thursday night. I needed to find out that the test was earlier in the day so I could stop worrying.

            Deborah Black continued to talk about the ideas of the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna.

            Emanation means creation and cause of existence. This is also a Neo-platonic metaphor. But Avicenna is distinct from the Greek approach because he gives an account of creation. Aristotle does not. God and the movers are responsible for the existence of universe. The movers each preside over one sphere (I wonder if they wear sailor suits). He links this up with the best astronomical knowledge of the time. God is the being that Exists necessarily in itself and everyone else only exists possibly. There cannot be two Necessary Existents because that would make them both merely possible. The Necessary Existent per se is one and the cause of all.

            The First Principle is the principle of unity. From the one, in so far as it is one, only one can come. God can only produce one thing like itself and so it did not directly create everything. God just purely thinks of and contemplates itself but produced other being by thinking.

            The Platonists said that the first being was one as well.

            Aristotle said the One is also intellect and being but Platonists thought the One was above the intellect.  The first intellect thinks god as being necessary in itself, thinks of self as necessary through god and thinks of self as being possible in itself.

            Avicenna focuses on human beings individuated by matter. Each of the other intellects preside over one sphere. They are universal and particular. The Earth is the sub-lunar sphere. The agent intellect causes the physical world.

            Aristotle talks of an active or producing intellect that is responsible for humans acquiring knowledge. Avicenna incorporates this. It’s the medieval version of a theory of everything.

            What kind of causality of god bringing causation into existence. Individual things are multiplied by matter. Individuals in the material world differ by virtue of their matter.

            Should Avicenna have an account of god’s knowledge? God only knows what it caused directly.

            Al Ghazali thinks Avicenna is a heretic.

            Matter for an Aristotelian is unintelligible. They think that explains why physical things change. The professor admits to decaying. No one knows individual material things, but we are acquainted with them. We have direct sensory contact with individuals and this is true for the entire physical world. Knowing them does not increase knowledge.

            Avicenna does think god is aware that the different kinds of things exist but how is this possible for a self contemplating being? It doesn’t see particulars, except in a universal way in so far as they are insubtantiations. If you look at the supralunar spheres and could find individuals fully individuated by their essences then god could know them. It can know Saturn and the other entities as individuals in a universal way.

            Eclipses are relations between two of these entities. God knows eclipses and their particulars through all time by universal astronomy but that does not extend to us. God knows every mote but is not watching the details of our lives. Humans are weird. Why doesn’t everything immaterial fall under god’s providence?

            After class I rode across one of the paths that connect St George to Kink’s College Circle. A very tall and slim young woman wearing green makeup, I think to represent Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, was walking in the opposite direction that I was riding. I was staring at her and smiling. She noticed my gaze and stumbled slightly at the same time, I assume because I’d made her feel self-conscious.

            As I continued on I approached from the back someone dressed in a bear suit but it turned out that she was just wearing a jacket that had a hood with bear ears.

            When I got to University College I had more than half an hour to kill before tutorial so I went up to the East Hall, sat at a desk near a plug and went online.

            In tutorial Cicilia talked about the Necessary Existent.

            In order to learn the Necessary Existent would have to change, which according to Avicenna would be impossible.

            The Possible Existent is like a teeter-totter balanced between non-existence and existence. It would need a toddler to sit at one end or the other to exist or not. The Necessary Existent immediately exists, uncaused, unique and wholly one.

            Avicenna got into trouble because he said that god can’t know that individual people exist.

                Start with something that exists. N or P. If N → NE.

If P it needs a cause to exist. What is the cause?

Either NE or infinite cosmic theories of all PEs.

NE or … (to infinity) ← P → P → P → P (but even this needs NE).

            Series as a whole:

     P     or      N (No whole composed of parts can be NE)

            If P is the cause it must be:

            Internal or External

             P or N        P or N

            To be the internal cause of this series P would have to cause itself and several others.

            N could not be the internal cause because because one can’t have NE in a group of all or only PEs.

            P could not be the external cause because one can’t have anything outside totality.

            NE has to be the external cause QED.

            Captain Cook brought a dead Platypus back to England but even people that saw it up close believed it was a hoax. They thought that someone had sewn parts of several animals together. The Necessary Existent has to be real. One can’t say, “This is god, but god is not real.”

            The PE cannot explain itself. Existence in the world or in the mind. Why is something real and not an idea.

            If the possible existents go on forever then nothing is caused.

            You can be a parent because you are human. It doesn’t matter if you had a parent.

            PE needs to borrow causal power and the ability to cause. It has to be necessitated.

            At the end of the tutorial we got our essays back. I was very disappointed to get a C-plus. I felt an ache in my chest on the way home and wondered if it was anxiety about the next essay and the exam in light of my low essay mark.