I Almost Drowned With My Cat

By David Halliday

When I was a kid I almost drowned with my cat. I remember lying on the bottom of a swimming pool, bubbles leaking out of my nose. Looking to one side and seeing my cat Lulu doing the same. And then I was choking and spitting out water, on my belly, gasping for breath and I looked to one side and Lulu was doing the same. There were a few moments where I had lost consciousness. Lulu survived. I went on years later to read about a strange fellow named Rene Descartes. 

“Renee Renee Renee,” Descartes’ mother used to say to him. “Everyday Renee. Where’s the sunshine?”

Renee Descartes was a dour child. In May 1597, his mother Jeanne Brochard, died a few days after giving birth to a still-born child. Why do they call it ‘still-born’, young Rene asked. And then added, that was a close one. 

Renee’s ambition since he was a toddler was to become a military officer. He liked their shiny uniforms and handsome moustaches. Descartes joined the Protestant Dutch States Army as a mercenary. While shooting at protesters he undertook a formal study in military engineering and thus began his preoccupation with mathematics.

Renee had poor posture. (They called it ‘poor posture’ because the poor spent most of their days in the fields picking crops.) Rene was warned by his step-mother that if he didn’t straighten up, he was going to end up looking like a question mark. Which is what happened. When he attended a lecture given by the alchemist, Nicolas de Villiers, Sieur de Chandoux, he was constantly ridiculed. I’ll never get a chick, he moaned. He was comforted by Cardinal Berulle who urged him to write an essay on his new philosophy. Chicks like guys with a new philosophy. “Just be mindful of the Inquisition”, the Cardinal said. “Those guys can really mess you up.” 

Renee suspected that there were dark and sinister forces following him. And so he spent most of his life dodging trouble. Descartes returned to the Dutch Republic in 1628 and took a job licking stamps at the local post office. “I should have gotten a job at a patent office,” he muttered to himself as he glanced over his shoulder. The next year, under the name “Poitevin”, Renee enrolled at Leiden University where he became famous for his volleyball skills even with his bad posture. In October 1630, in  Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helena Jans van der Strom. They had a daughter together who died at the age of 5 from scarlet fever. At the hospital Renee noticed that people were taking notes.

Over the next 20 years, though he moved often trying to avoid the Inquisition, he wrote most of his major work. There was at the time a move by the Catholic Church to have the number ‘5’ removed from the counting system. In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht and Descartes after hiring a cab fled to the Hague and later to a sight outside of Amsterdam. 

Renee asked himself. Who are these men in the Church who have it in for me? And he had no answer.

And then his big breakthrough came in his assertion, “I doubt therefore I am.” “How dare you doubt when the Church has all the answers,” the Church said.  The Inquisition was in the hunt. They were determined to punish this fellow, meaning Descartes, who had the afront to question the Church. But by now Descartes had become quite famous. The Queen of Sweden invited him to hide out in Sweden and teach her  how to dance. But when he arrived the Queen couldn’t believe how unattractive Renee was, especially his posture. “You can practically tie your shoelaces with your teeth,” she said. And Descartes caught pneumonia and died. Eventually he was buried in a paupers’ or orphans’ graveyard because he was Catholic and most Swedes were Protestant.

And that brings us back to consciousness. Which is what I felt after Lulu and me had been dragged out of my neighbor’s pool. Modern man is like the prisoner in the Iron Mask, imprisoned in the Bastille, and who may have been Descartes’s father. Our brain does not experience the world directly but only through our senses, like children learning macrame on YouTube. Which leads us the great fear of our time, Artificial Intelligence. We fear that AI will give us all the information we need to exist without our actually participating in the world. Consciousness, we, will become redundant. Renee labelled it ‘first causes’. And if we cannot interact with the world, what will we do with our free time?

In 1666, sixteen years after his death, Descartes’s remains were taken to France from Sweden. At that time all of the philosophic works of Descartes were banned in France. His body was buried in Saint-Etienne-du-Mont and later dug up and reburied in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. At this burial they noticed that Renee’s body was missing a finger and  a skull. It has been theorized that his skull was divided into pieces and sold to private collectors in France. His brain probably ended up in a stew someplace. Maybe he gave his finger to the Church.

But really, who can believe that?

David has published murder by Coach House Press, winner of the 2001 Eppie for poetry. Church Street is Burning was a finalist in the 2002 Eppie for poetry. Sleeping Beauty, by LTD ebooks.com. Finalist in the 2003 Dream Realm Awards. Winner of the 2004 IP Book Awards. Trash, is a finalist in the Poetry Non-Fiction/Fiction Category of the 2011 EPIC eBook Awards Competition.In 2007 he was short listed for the C.B.C. Literary Contest in poetry. Recent publications include ‘New Quarterly’ and ‘Queens Quarterly’