I will be the philosopher

'No, no, I must think. Even if you ought not to I must. It's okay for me. That's my job. They'll have mentioned me. You see, I'm the philosopher."

From time to time I encounter an odd reaction to the way I think and speak and look at the world. My father most of all is bothered by my choice. I do not mind this. It shows that he loves me. It is the reaction of those who have read a little in the Eastern Tradition. They do not know that I will be the philosopher mentioned in the passages they read.

'Leave it to the philosophers,' says the sage. I will be one of the philosophers. Go ahead, chop wood and carry water. Do not take the first step on that thousand mile journey. Try to be in the sense of being. I cannot, because I must be as a philosopher.

It is not those who have read enough to know exactly what harm I do or in what way Western thought fails to understand the world, it is those who know only enough to know that in some odd way it is wrong. It does fail. How? Father do not know this. I know, and as such love Eastern philosophy.

For me and for others like me it is that good friend who is the compliment of our own thought. It is the friend who you meet in a class or well having lunch, who warms you and challenges you and makes your life richer and you can never understand how they can be so wonderful until one day they tell you that they think the same of you.

Japanese philosophy, the only branch I have studied at length, drank deep of Western thought. What it produced is it's own but you can hear the words of Heraclitus echo there also.

They do not know this, the people who fear and question me. Father does not know, and I never thought to tell him that I revel in Western thought without - in fact because I am not -- blinded to it's short comings. I would not dare play as I do if I thought that the goddess of wisdom was perfect. If I thought she her without a sense of humour, put off by teasing and ragging then I would not dare.

It is the same in the East, although I do not with those thoughts quite as often. The East can encourage giving up of the self, which is a dangerous idea in a community of people who do not do the same. There are other faults I do not know. But I know that neither is the East nor the West perfect, nor are they fully divided but for me they are equally wonderful.

Picture by Jessica Kern. Olympic Hotsprings, Washington.

"Wow, that's so deep."

My brother works on log houses. I came to visit him in his hotel and made small talk with his boss, Frank, well he made some phone calls. His boss, on hearing that I am a philosophy major, responded in the way that many people respond.

"Quick, say something deep."

I was a bit caught off guard. I live philosophy. Not to say that I am particularly good at it, particularly dedicated or particularly clever, just that that is I cannot distinguish between thoughts that are deep and those that are everyday. So I responded with the everyday.

"Is there beer in the fridge?"

"Yes," replied my brother. He did not realise what I was about and assumed I wanted a drink, so he proceeded to recommend one over another, obviously uncomfortable at the notion of his baby sister drinking with the boys.

I bounced over to the fridge and opened it. There was in fact beer in the fridge. "Ah! ha! I have discovered truth." I grinned foolishly at Frank.


So what do people mean by deep? I suppose that the thing changes the way the world looks. Joggles up the senses. That is why I love philosophy. Things look different upside down and backwards.

What changes my life? Carnivorous tomatoes. The fact that picture on the right is cinnamon and on the left, the object I have believed to be cinnamon my entire life, is cassia. I've always wondered why cinnamon tastes slightly different then it ought to. I think my wondering this was simply happenstance, but still. I've been eating cassia my whole life without knowing it's name.

But when someone comments that something I think is 'deep' I feel cheap and commercial. This post I thought on before I wrote. I worked on it in my head. I considered what I could say. This post should be something deep, something meaningful. It is not. What is meaningful? A clever turn of phrase. A twist in the way of saying things. They do not mean the thoughts are deep but that they are witty. It is not wisdom I am sharing with them, but a joke. 'Getting' the joke they think they have encountered the universe.

 Why do I hold such disdain? Was I not once one of those people who found philosophy deep? Do I think think that it will offer me those further things I wish to learn about the world? Knowledge of the universe? Yes. But I also hated it. I never thought it was deep, simply perilous and shattering. I knew that I could lose who I was in it. I did lose who I was in it.

 When I was in grade ten I came up with the witty phrase 'perfection is a delusion of the mind.' I used it as my tagline on msn. Now I know that it means god does not exist, we can never attain our ideals, and perfectionism is unhealthy. Now I know I disagree. I disagreed then too, but did not say so. My perfectionist friend informed me a few years later that it had mattered to her, that being a perfectionist she struggled with and embraced that idea.

So some of the things said can have meaning, but not meaning that I intend which means, I suppose, that even if I do not think anything of what I say it should not bother me when others do.

Consult your preferences

I give up. Everyone else has a cell phone. Apparently my not having a cell phone is almost as inconvenient as my not eating meat.

'What, I can't call you whenever I like? But what if I need to get in touch with you when you are in class? What if I want you to work an extra shift? In fact I think you do have a cell phone. You're lying because you don't want to work.'


None of these things are ever said outright, but from time to time they are meant. So I will conform, I suppose, to this unnecessary object. Rather, they do seem like a bit of fun, although I realise I do not need one that is 'fun' but merely functional.

I don't know much about cell phones. I started by quizzing my friends. It turns out there isn't much to know according to them. The most common response was, 'I pay more then I should because I have unnecessary features, I should change that.'

I turned to the internet. What did I find?

'In order to acquire a phone that is RIGHT FOR YOU consult YOUR PREFERENCES.'

Umm? What? I believe these pages must only exist to waste my time long enough that I will click on an ad. I've never had a cell phone. I don't know what my preferences are and that is why I am reading this page. Why are you telling me to consult my preferences? What preferences? What should I prefer? I don't even know what options I have. Yes of course if it is right for me it will be the one I prefer. What I want is information.

This is not the first time I have encountered this inane rhetoric. I found the same thing when attempting to purchase a laptop and a toaster oven. So far I have always found what is right, not simply for me but as a common sense choice. I find the page that says 'get something over this price or it will break.' That's helpful!

Galileo's persecution

Astrology is only as illogical as my childhood belief that trees created wind. The system, a complicated one, does not come from nowhere. It is based on an Aristotelian cosmology adopted and adapted by the Arabian intellectuals, from whom I believe we acquired astrology somewhere in the 12th century renaissance. When the Aristotelian cosmology was replaced this was not because it was 'hockie superstitution,' but on the good scientific reason of it simply not having as efficient predictive powers when you treated the planets on a spherical orbit as an elliptical one. Astrology was a necessary cost of adopting a more efficient astronomical theory.

I studied Galileo. I did not understand. I know that the Church held certain views. I know that Galileo was one of those men who stood up and said, 'you cannot hold to this, you cannot let it become dogma. It will be your downfall. I beg you. I love my church, please do not say a thing that may show you as fallible.'  This in itself might be presumptuous enough to get you dead, but that was not it. That is how it is told in the play of Bertolt Brecht and in the history we read and they do not mention that what Galileo said shatters whole cosmologies.

Galileo was not killed for his work but he was imprisoned, censored, and ultimately died in silence having renounced what he believed to be true. He is considered a martyr of science. He isn't, because he did not die for it. He renounced it and lived to work in secrecy. He is not a martyr and although I respect his practicality I am disgusted by his failure to hold to what he held to be true. We die. It cannot be helped. For goodness sakes die for something if you can!

For Aristotle and as such for most all of the medieval tradition there were two realms. There was a superlunary and the sublunary. The sublunary is earth. Earth is mutable, changing, subject to birth and decay. Earth is imperfection at the center of a perfect universe. Past the vapours of the earth is the moon, the first superlunary body. All superlunary bodies are perfect, never-changing, and divine. The thing of it is the Catholic church still had bits of paganism in it, the worst of them being Aristotle. All we need do is remember that these are people who still worshiped the stars. It is never mentioned. There is a bit of talk about the need for earth to be at the centre of God's plan, but it is never mentioned that these are people who looked at the stars as holy bodies. The Arabic philosophy, which bleeds into western thought, considers them manifestations of God. It was believed that beyond the earth moved the heavenly spheres. These perfect bodies moved on crystalline tracks and made music unheard by any human creature; it was sometimes said that the animals could hear the music, especially birds and nighttime things.

So Galileo's science destroyed one of the last holding places of pagan belief. It forced the acceptance of one more thing not infested with spirits, not alive, not meaningful. Of course they fought him! Of course they were angry!

Whale skin

It was my birthday on Easter and I asked my father to take us out into the woods for a hike. I live in the city now and I miss having access to the parks and paths.

On Friday there was a huge storm. Trees were on the path in a few places. We had to climb around and over. For a bit we walked on the beach. Coming around a corner I saw a crowd of people. Then I gasped. On the beach in the circle of people was a dead grey whale. Never having seen a wild whale, either dead or alive, I was in awe.

It was definitely dead, although the barnacles were not. The tail was in the water and the barnacles there were still feeding as the tide washed in plankton. It stank. It only stank sometimes. It would be fine and then there would be a moment when the smell would wash over everything.

I watched the people touching the whale, a real whale! I found it disturbing, as did my little sister who watched from a distance. But I have always been curious. I could not bring myself to touch the flesh, but I did touch the baleen. It brought back all my desire to be a biologist, a dream until the first year of University when I realised how unsuitable I am for the sciences.

My boyfriend told the story to his disgusted co-workers. They expressed moral indignation at the importunity of the spectators. He agreed with them and then told them about how he had seen the whale, and touched the whale, and taken some pieces of it's skin. He gave me some for my birthday. A less disturbing gift then last year but only because last year he gave me Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

I have the same view of this as of the Garden Protest. Wrong but rather wonderful.

My mother is dead.

This is not a happy post, but one I felt compelled to write.

My mother is dead. I feel angry. I feel guilty. I want her back. I need her back. For her, form me, for her family and friends and poetry. I feel jealous of those who have both parents. There are so many who are less deserving of a mother. I am. I loved my mother. I told her how much she mattered to me and I told the truth. How can she be dead? How can she be dead when others less deserving still live? People are alive who just go on killing time and when they are gone it will not matter. This was not her. Why could not one of them have gone in her place? It is not right. It is unfair. Death always seems unfair, but this one was particularly so. She died at fifty four. I am in my twenties. It is wrong. I should have been 50, not her. She was too young; I am too young to lose my mother and too old to not remember her now that I have.

I know she is dead. I am not in denial, which is the little I can say. I saw her body. I could tell from how it lay that it would not move again, like a soiled bed or a doll left in the ditch or an apple forgotten in the fruit bowl. Once death was a metaphor for those things, but to explain it I used them as a metaphor for her body. The body was no good. It could not harbour human life any longer.

I wish it called for revenge. I want someone to pay. I want someone to suffer for taking her from me. How dare the world do such a thing? But it is life, and no particular person. But there is no one. It is for the best, I would only get myself into trouble. I have a little anyhow. A man on the street was nearly hit by a car in his own negligence. He was angry at the car and I pointed out that the driver was simply upset at having nearly caused a death. He became angry with me. Insisted he was in the right. Following me. I slapped him. All the time I thought, I would like this man to suffer a little. I would like to take this out on him. What right does he have to live in a world that my mother no longer inhabits? There are others like him. I could hurt them too. Angry, stupid people who call attention to themselves when there are beautiful people in this world, people like my mother who would never ask for such attention.

I will not do these things, but I think of them as consolation. I pretend I will because it makes it hurt less.

I knew how lucky I was and I know how unlucky I now am. To lose a parent is devastation. For me to lose my mother is worse, worse in circumstance and worse again because she was so warm and so wonderful and gifted. My mother was Tanya Kern.

Shrine to student housing

We gave away the household budgie today and I proceeded to rearrange the room. I ended up with what Amber calls an oubliette. It is one of those awkward spaces in the corner of a room that is not quite accessible and cannot quite be used for anything, as such things gather there that you do not wish to use but do not wish to store too far from use. Amber pointed this out and I decided that the corner needed a plant. We ended up with what appears to be a shrine to student housing.

Storage, childhood crafts, and an empty bottle bottle once used to hold candles.

Note the UVic bunny, power cord, and router.