Final Thoughts.

Well, the semester is just about over now. One more class and a final and we will be leaving for the summer. The other day in class, Prof. Sexson asked us to write a summative statement about the semester as the final post on our blogs. Here's mine.

I wanted to say that I absolutely enjoyed this class. Rare as it is to take a class in which one feels genuine enjoyment of discussions all the time, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I'll say it simply. We had fun! And we learned a lot as well.

At the start, I was shocked when Prof. Sexson learned everyone's names by the second day. That stunt, especially on a college campus, is practically unheard of. From the very beginning, the class felt personal to me, even though Sexson kept repeating that none of us were original and he'd met us all before. This wasn't just another core class where you can tell the professor honestly doesn't care if you really get it or not. Sexson actually knows about what he's talking about; hell, he quotes Shakespeare as if he's actually reading it!

As a class, I think we were more comfortable as well. Sexson didn't constantly split us up into awkward groups to talk about things, yet our class seemed more comfortable together. No one likes giving presentations in front of a whole group of people we feel are judging us every waking second. In spite of this, however, everyone got up there and spoke openly about what they'd been thinking about, what they'd experienced, what they actually felt. We staged group presentations that, from the audience, must have seemed like parties! We drew on the board, we volunteered to read, we marveled at things like Rio's famous pen.

We talked about the ancient tragedians or comedians and their abuse of the audience. I feel like we saw a little of that in the class, whether it be our classmates volunteering us to participate (against our will) or them throwing candy hard enough to injure someone. Or indeed, whether it be Prof. Sexson telling us we are stupid or, in my case while reading Lysistrata, "The person who will read this will have to be quite shameless. Christina! You look pretty shameless today!"

Now, as the semester draws to a close, we are looking back at a semester's worth of interaction. We remember being shocked at coincidences (that are never coincidences) whose odds of happening are (let's all say it now) one in three. We remember the smiles, the silly discussions that went on and on about philosophy and about Stewie Griffin or Groundhog Day. We remember the low points, the great tragedies of the past and our own great tragedies. We remember sacred rocks passed delicately from person to person as we learned to love the simplest things. We remember, when it is all over, how connected we are, not only to one another, but to the world as a whole, past and future. We remember not to be circumstantially bound, but rather to branch out beyond even ourselves. We remember.....all the things we have only forgotten.

As a fitting end to the journey, to our laughter and the tragedy, we conclude our class with revelry. Dancing and drinking (even if it is only cherry Kool-Aid) and laughing together, we leave all this behind. Until the day when we choose, once again, to remember.

Looking Back

Rather than making up for every post I may have missed, rather than begging for more points by posting over and over in the next few hours, I would look back on the semester and laugh at every seeming digression, every oddity, every singular moment of true joyfulness. I've been looking through my notes. Every time some phrase catches my ear or makes me laugh, I jot it down, right next to heady discussions on Plato or Euripedes. I'd like to post them here.

First, I'll post some drawings I made in my sketchbook during class or about something we said. There aren't many, but one in particular always makes me laugh (if i do say so myself). =D It's about "A tree. A rock. A cloud" (i think that title's right....)

This second one is just some quotes from Plato I jotted down with a few sketches I did in class:

Here are more random moments, quotes, etc. from the semester:

"There are no boring things, only boring people."

"It's the ordinary things that change our lives."

"I was there."

(music) "it is not some academic thing we study; it is the heart and soul of who we are"

"make mischief and make music!"

"Hermes lives. His name is now Stewie."

"that which is awesome is awful"

"we all share these things, and some of us have the scars to prove it"

"Here for a moment and then it's gone, fleeting like a light between the womb and the tomb, is life"

"We don't have problems anymore. We have issues!!"

"We need to transcend this kind of world to get to what's important"

"our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting"

"What did you do in classical literature today? ...We felt rocks."

"I know how to hover. I do it fairly well"

"We need to explain to stupid people that they're stupid."

"I've been teaching now for.....good God" =D

"that's cool!! Like dolphins!"

"ignorance is not bliss; it's oblivion. If you want oblivion, then be ignorant."

"We've stricken two questions from Jillian. Stricken? I was about to say stroked!"

"we don't have real tests in this class. So the answer is? Stag."

"it really is a horse of a different color! ..... where were we.....Oh, Aristotle!"

"there is no resolution. you never get your shit together. EVER."

"father may I sleep with you? If you incest! .....sorry."

"Jupiter says, 'Oh my god!' Wait, he can't say that. He is a god. He says, 'Oh my!!'"

"you're sort of......sorry about this, stupid."

"There are no people! There are only these machines that do these horrible things to you!"

"Would you get the door here? I fear there are people...listening in." =D

(And of course, from the group presentations the other day: "Nothing says love like a flaming toilet.")

Posting Furiously

Well, I have a feeling many of us will be posting furiously tonight in a mad dash to make up for past procrastinations in this class, desperately searching through their memories for any topic they may have forgotten to blog about then frantically putting it all into words. I will be honest and say I myself was sorely tempted to do this. I've never blogged for a class before, so I never really knew all semester what was expected of me. I simply wrote about things that moved me. Prof. Sexson would give us assignments like "have a bad day," and I would think about them a lot, but not always did I write about them because in many cases I had already worked it out in my head. If I was at peace with an idea or concept, I did not always feel the need to write about it. Writing...is for when you have something to say. Or something to discover in the words. This was when I wrote for this class.

I don't know if this blog will stand up to all the criteria Prof. Sexson gave us. I don't know if I have enough. Still, I would argue that, as in life, this is not about quantity, it is about quality. I believe that I have written with some level of analysis and introspection. I am proud of all my posts as I am proud of the thought behind each one. Honestly, I didn't think I'd like blogging much, but now, I definitely see the benefit (even if not many of us actually read the others' posts). I never thought I would have more than one of these...but now I have three. =D

Group One: A Modern Day Symposium

As requested, here are my thoughts on love as presented in our group presentation on Friday. I chose to approach this topic for our modern symposium by viewing the idea of love through the lens of the arts...and also my own belief that love is not, as this society professes so openly, a system of codependence fueled by past scars and barely concealed bitterness, nor is it something paltry and inconsequential. Rather, love is....more than all this....yet contained in everything we ever see.... We cannot think of it divorced somehow from who we are or from this world. We cannot think of it as existing with no connection whatsoever to our souls and our lives, the purpose of our existence.

"In the arts, love is a constant, beating energy as real as the canvas before us, the brush held in our hands. It feeds our every inspiration. Love of life, love of passion, love of truth. Every painting you have ever seen has something to do with some form of love in this life, or the absence thereof.


In my case, I am in love with life. I am in love with the light in a street puddle. I am in love with the bare branches of a dormant tree lit up by one lonely street lamp. I see my life, my art, my love, in every wistful cloud, every full and perfect morning, every single breath of air. In these moments, I am in love, perhaps not even with the sight itself, but with my ability to see it and with my heart for its ability to withstand such joy. Love is no passing compulsion; it is not a pastime or luxury. Love is life.


In one writer’s words, “It is with a sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness” (Ayn Rand’s Romantic Manifesto). True love, then, is the quickening in the heart of this recognition, the meeting of souls as from a great distance.


Far too many speak of love as some sort of bondage. From the moment one feels its touch, they say one is taken prisoner. Love is a sickness. Love is blind. We have all heard these expressions. Love is none of these things. Love is freedom.


When we feel love, we feel the falling away of all fleeting ambitions, all preconceived notions, and every self-imposed boundary or limitation. While in its grasp, we are the fullest versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. And that thought terrifies us. No other force on earth reveals so fully or so truthfully exactly who we are. In our choice of partner we betray the secrets of our soul.


So, you see, love is not something of chains and imprisonment, nor of battered hearts besieged. The height of love is the height of true, absolute freedom. One writer put it most succinctly, “Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance” (Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead).


We crave love in this life because we crave the fulfillment of our true selves. This does not come from another. It comes from ourselves in the presence of another, our equal.


As an artist, I have chosen to follow an ongoing tradition of those dedicated to their love. I hope thereby to find my freedom."

Individual Presentations

First of all, I'd like to say congratulations to everyone for a job well done with the individual presentations. You guys really thought about what you had to say and presented some really good material. Here are a few topics that certainly grabbed my attention:

Misaki's use of props with her presentation was incredibly creative. I don't think I've seen it done quite that way before, where visual aids folded out. It was very interactive, like a graphic presentation more than a show-and-tell, point and shoot approach.

Heather's analysis of love and death was interesting as well. Some phrases she said that caught my eye (or ears, rather): "even death needs to be loved" and "death is the tool to keep people together".

Erica's argument, "if catharsis is so effective, why do we need to suffer in life at all?" is arresting in its simplicity. What a question!

Of all the presentations, however, a few were more personal than others. It requires a lot of courage to speak openly and truthfully about oneself, one's own life, especially with thirty or so kids staring at you in breathless expectation. I admire the people who took that on. Nick made us laugh with his "i'm terrified that you're all looking at me right now" comment. Kris spoke to a personal battle and ongoing tragedy. Zach Morris told us the touching story of his mother and the lullaby she sings. Each momentary presentation spoke volumes about the person behind it, and it was nice to see so much attention to detail in their execution.

Thank you all for doing a great job! I'm looking forward to the upcoming group presentations.

Absolute Man: The Pursuit of Transformation

Truly, we like to think of ourselves as entirely individual and isolated entities, following solitary paths of pain and love imperceptible to the average passerby. We devise new ways of conceptually cutting ourselves off from the world and its masses by defining our role within that greater continuum in terms of differences alone. Yet, there exists a struggle in us between this fascination with total autonomy from the unknown forces of this world and our ultimate need to let go and be wholly encompassed by those same forces. We remake ourselves again and again, following the shifting shapes of serial transformations in order to achieve one or both of these ideals. For Ovid in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, these transformations of self occur through the power of imagination as he walks through waking dreams more real than any life restricted by the bonds of place or time.


In the first of five parts of Malouf’s work, the character of Ovid struggles to transcend his circumstantially bound identity in order to achieve some sense of peace in exile. The novel opens with Ovid’s lonely isolation and with two dreams of great significance. In the first dream, Ovid travels across a vast and terrible valley in order to dig into the earth itself only to find wolves digging alongside him with increasing fervor. The dream stems from Ovid’s fear of death and brings to light his attachment to the world as he knows it. In the second dream, hordes of centaurs gallop towards a meeting with Ovid, frightening him enough so as to wake him abruptly. “Let us into your lives. Believe in us” they call, and something of a divine, animal nature rises up in Ovid to converse with the centaurs; the world of myth demands this recognition if only in dreams (24). Ovid grapples with this fear of relinquishing control even until the final words of this passage when suddenly, he finds some revelation. In the form of the poppy, he sees the path to true awakening, a way to, as he states, “work the spring” within himself (32). In naming there is becoming. By letting go of his former self, Ovid can define and awaken the forces within him needed to fuel the transformation of self and achieve ultimate transcendence of this physical world. “You will be separated from yourself and yet be alive” (33). These are the words he reflects upon in this passage, the words he dedicates to the beginning of a journey.


The second portion of the novel then continues, building on this initial revelation. Now, rather than thinking only of his superiority over the rural people he has come to live with, Ovid tries to understand the forces of nature, and of the divine, inherent in them. Speaking of Ryzak, the clan leader, he says “believing in nothing I couldn’t see [. . .]—what can I know of the forces that have made this man, this tamer of horses, whose animal nature he somehow takes into himself and gentles” (40). In this reference to Hector of Troy, we gain new insight into the dream of the centaurs in the previous section. In the centaur, the melding of horse and man into one being, we see the natural world and the world of the mind working in absolute harmony with one another. Ovid wonders as to how Ryzak is able to retain his humanity, his individuality, while simultaneously embracing the unknown, the uncontrollable in nature. Rather than completely surrendering himself to the unknown, Ovid still desires to maintain some sort of control over forces too great and too subtle for him to define in concrete terms. This desire to retain some sense of ultimate individuality or sovereignty over himself can be seen in the dream he has deep in the woods in the presence of the Child. “We have all been transformed,” he dreams, “the whole group of us, and become part of the woods [. . .] I am a pool of water” (61). This pool of water does not fear the deer or the Child drinking it up; he fears the wolf gorging himself on the sweet liquid just as the waking Ovid fears the violence of passions he cannot control, the violence of falling completely away into seeming nothingness. In this same passage, Ovid’s eventual death is foreshadowed in the brief words, “I sleep. I wake” (62). The sleep of death will be an awakening, though Ovid has not entirely reconciled himself to this concept in his waking consciousness.


The revelation in this passage comes with the identification of “some power in us that knows its own ends” (64). Ovid realizes that every version of himself that he could possibly become, all aspects of the universe are contained within him. “We have only to find the spring and release it,” he says (64). By embracing the entirety of the world, one does not lose oneself, for the entirety of the world is contained within that self. Though the passage ends with the shockingly violent capture of the Child, the vital weight of this realization cannot be subdued.


The violence inherent in the physical bonds used to restrain the Child does not last long, however, in the third and fourth sections of the novel. A shift begins to occur from the physical bonds, representative of place or time, to the figurative bonds of attachment similar to that of perceived nationality, family ties, or possession. Ovid teaches the Child ownership by giving him a ball to play with, creating, as Ovid describes, “the web of feeling that is this room [. . .] I feel, even in darkness, the invisible twitching of strings” (82). Here lies Ovid’s final attempt, through the person of the Child to control nature, to define that nature, human or otherwise, in terms of circumstantially bound definitions of place. Aptly, he uses the word web, a trap, to define this state of being.


By wondering at the ancestry of the Child, Ovid betrays his lingering fear of complete abandonment of the restricted self he has known, yet he also wonders “does not knowing make him free?” (89). Because the Child is not rooted to the physicality of life contained in concepts such as time and place, he is free and completely his own being. When he imitates birds and other creatures, Ovid says, “he is not, like our mimics, copying [. . .] He is allowing it to speak out of him” (92). Here again we see the child as the ultimate form of individuality enmeshed in the greater web of life. He exists completely unto himself yet enfolding all things; all forms of life live in him, in the singular aspect of his body, his soul. Perhaps paradoxically, by being all things, the Child finds a wholeness in his singular identity more original than any other. Finally, Ovid begins to achieve a transcendence of self, saying, “I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. [. . .] The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole. Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men” (96).


In the final section of the novel, in a world beyond metamorphoses, beyond even imagination, Ovid achieves true wholeness of self and everlasting peace. The chapters begin with “No more dreams” (141). No longer needing to remake himself because he has achieved the entirety of his awakening, dreams and the imagination are needless as well. They are but agents of change between transformations.


Malouf ends his novel with Ovid’s final transformation and the words, “I am there” (152). Our Ovid has achieved the ultimate level of awareness, a state of being in which he encapsulates all that ever went before him and all there is to come, the fullness of man as he was meant to be. This man exists wholly unto himself and wholly within the world. The Child and his natural fire and spirit fade away upon the breeze just as the mind of Ovid sinks into the earth, into the sky. Somehow, he exists even then in all things.


While reading Malouf’s work, perhaps we recognize some silent force within us, some ancient spring that will trigger a change of consciousness. As we fully succumb to this next great transformation, perhaps we will glimpse a bit of ourselves in all things and feel wholly connected with all of life, past and present. Perhaps, we will see, rising within us, the birth of a new man, a god that breathes in tandem with the beating of our hearts. In this, and in all aspects of awakening, we are reborn.

Sterilized Lives.

Prof. Sexson made an offhand comment the other day on our modern day adaptation of the power of love in the form of Cupid. We have taken the god himself and transformed him into a "fat baby with wings" in Prof. Sexson's words. What an idea!

What role does love play in our society? In every part of the world, love is a mainstay of creative thought and the focus of most, if not all of our energies. Yet, we have no idea what it is or even how to truly define it. Love is something that shows itself in many forms, something ephemera,l and it defies our pitiful attempts to place it in some sort of sterilized box for safekeeping. It moves us....beyond the limits of acceptable conduct....and with only the slightest touch. By transforming the youthful god of tricks and dreamlike rapture into that of a commercialized baby figure with fat rolls and disproportionate wings, we attempt to create some distance from this power, the power of love. We like to fool ourselves into thinking that we actually succeed in this.

Few people would ever admit to being fools in love; those that do are rarely fools as they know more of the true nature of love than most who claim to retain some small semblance of control, yet that is what we all are. Simple fools. We say that love is blind. Rather, we cannot know this concept in its entirety. Anything we cannot explain we then qualify. With platitudes such as these we escape culpability for our choice of companion, our mirror in this life. "Love is blind," we say and say no more about it so as not to have to examine ourselves fully in the light of truth. But there is so much more that needs to be said! Love is not blind simply because we are blind to its meaning.

Sadly, we like to think of ourselves as truly modern, unable to be fooled by such silly, naive concepts of love and beauty, honor or integrity. Those are the dreams of bygone eras, the souls of greater men than us perished in the black abyss of time. I am taking another English class this semester, and what I have found in our class discussions on certain pieces of literature was a revelation to me. Every piece that affected me the most, for the author spoke of nobility, of integrity of spirit, every such piece was ridiculed and picked apart in class days after I had scanned the final lines. The knight is an antiquated, unrealistic concept. The love between brother knights is homoerotic and nothing more. The author seems narrow-minded. The hero is a wimp. The glorification of this hero is but the implementation of European ideals on the savage mind. He's not really that courageous, there's just no other way he can be.

These were some "insights" I gained from my peers during these sessions of outright skepticism and derisive criticism.

I leave these classes feeling worn and...disappointed.

Far from being naive, I have seen as well. I have witnessed the degradation of mankind in so many venues and in so many ways. Yet...somehow, I continue to believe in the heroic potential of the human spirit. I continue to believe in a version of man who lives with integrity and strength of self. I continue to believe in a passionate love that leaves one senseless to the condemnation of the world. I believe in ultimate truth, though it may not be conceivable as we are now. I believe...in man.

Yet these people, these masses, for I cannot term them truly individual when they lack the courage to embrace life itself, pitifully and regrettably seek to distance themselves from their own ideal. The best version of who they themselves could be stands directly before them, waiting to be recognized and sought after, yet they continue to deny, efface, and condemn him. With platitudes and off-color remarks, fat babies and sissy knights, they turn away from the power of that sight, the power of that other world. This world, devoid of qualifications and other injustices.

Psyche held the absolute power of love, devoid of such qualifications, in her very "soul". By seeking some sort of contextual definition in the form of a beautiful shape, she sought to gain some power over her situation, over love. For this she was punished, not because she saw Eros in his fullest form, but because she tried to distance herself from, to give a name to some great force that must only be embraced with wild abandon.

In the same way, we must embrace our lives without those self-imposed boundaries and petty fears. Give up fat babies and live in the glorious presence and power of something greater than yet contained in ourselves...in our souls.

The Art of Psyche

This video has many of the hundreds of representations of this story of Psyche. So many great works....

The Story of Psyche in Drawings and Film

Truth be told, I have neglected this blog of late. Call it an excess of things to do with little time to do it in, call it lack of inspiration...whatever it was, I am determined to circumvent my own procrastination. While googling slash youtubing Apuleius, I came across this video on the story of Psyche. There are three parts which combined make it rather long, but visually, this is absolutely worth your time. The drawings are phenomenal and the Greek culture comes across really well in the film. I hope you take the time to check it out.

Velazquez and Arachne

Here are some wonderful depictions of Ovid's story of Arachne by the painter Velazquez.

Echoes of the Past: Classical Literature and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life

At first glance, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf appeared to be merely the fanciful imaginings of the author of the work and not, as I would have hoped, the astounding literary account I had looked forward to. The work seemed short-sighted, even mundane at times; I found the piece as a whole entirely too “circumstantially bound” to the life of Ovid and to this one solitary occurrence in that life as a whole. Hoping against hope, however, I read on. It was then that I realized that I had, as Thoreau would say, been reading the times when I should have been reading eternities. Hereafter, as layer upon layer of meaning revealed itself, the astounding literary merit of Malouf’s work, especially in relation to the content of this particular class, became increasingly irrefutable.


Nearly all imagery in this little book harkens back to the act of transformation or metamorphoses, a theme thoroughly explored by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. One line begins quite simply the miraculous transformation of Ovid the cynic in exile to Ovid the spiritual being. That one line, “I love this poppy. I shall watch over it” parallels the short story we read earlier entitled “A tree. A rock. A cloud.” (32). In this same passage, Malouf makes direct reference to the myth of Persephone. Here we see the act of love as a transforming agent. By it, we become something more than what we appear to be; we actually change our mental or emotional makeup to become divine, as Ovid in effect becomes Persephone, that “flower-faced” girl.


Furthermore, through this fictionalized Ovid’s eyes, we witness the transformative powers of ritual practice and ceremony. Ovid recalls the ceremonies of his youth in which he “will have replaced him,” here speaking of his brother’s death merely by believing in the ceremony for an instant of time (87). Malouf then references Hector of Troy, that tamer of horses, in his description of the old man later identified as Ryzak and his relation to the ceremonies performed by the men to the dead and the gods themselves (40). Just as in the Eleusinian mysteries when a simple ear of corn is transformed into something awe-inspiring, through ritual, Ovid and this hunting party are transformed, themselves, becoming “part of the woods. We are mushrooms [. . .] I am a pool of water” Ovid dreams (61).


Perhaps the most astounding classical reference, however, is the recurrence of the five states of drama identified by Steiner in his analysis of the play Antigone. The men of the village and the women separate themselves from one another, struggle with, and against, each other keeping their sacred ceremonies and rituals completely private. Here, the concept of the ever-chaste Diana hiding her nakedness from the prying eyes of Actaeon comes to the foreground. Age and youth are at odds as can be seen in the interaction of the Child and his elders, and in the strained relationship between Ovid and his father. Ovid, himself, represents the individual striving against the will of state in his exiles, both decreed and self-imposed. The wild Child’s struggle to exist in Ovid’s world embodies this struggle as well. The fear and reverence inherent in the villagers to the dead brings to light yet another Steiner conflict This conflict presents itself most horrifically in the death ritual performed on Ryzak. Finally, the traditional rituals to appease the gods as well as Ovid’s previous skepticism of these beings true existence create the final parallel to the dramatic themes identified by Steiner.


In Malouf’s Imaginary Life we see a mother’s grief at the prospective loss of a child, so similar the tragedy of Andromache’s plight in The Trojan Women among countless other references to the great works we have studied in classical literature. The novel as a whole depicts a transformation. We ourselves are transformed in the reading. And out of the death of our previous existence comes yet another new and glorious beginning. In the words of Malouf himself, “What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become” (135). Herein lies the myth of our lives, the ultimate convergence of past and present in wondrous unity. By letting go of our previous states, we are reborn. In this way every ending becomes merely a beginning and our first hesitant step on the path to ultimate oneness.

"Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe"

Searching for more pictures from Ovid, I found this...wrenching...depiction of the death of Niobe's children. The painting is by David who worked during the period of the French Revolution.

"Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itylus" by Peter Paul Rubens

As promised, here is the gorgeous painting by Rubens entitled Tereus Confronted With the Head of His Son Itylus depicting the climactic scene in the story of Tereus, Philomela, and Procne. Enjoy!

The Art of Ovid

I was browsing through some articles on Ovid this morning, trying to find some interesting information to cite and I found this website. If you scroll down through the information to the web links, there is one entitled "The Ovid Project". Here there are hundreds of engravings from Ancient illustrated works of Ovid. The captions in the engravings themselves are not in English, but one can recognize some names if mentioned. The pictures are absolutely gorgeous works, full of energy. I definitely recommend checking them out.

Willing Supplicants to Jealous Gods

After having read my small part of Ovid's Metamorphoses and thinking of it throughout class today, I simply could not reconcile the humanistic view of the Greek civilization with the idea of jealous, domineering gods who always always get their way. I asked Prof. Sexson about it just after class, and we had a pretty interesting, if short, discussion about this idea.

Think about humanism, this system of thought in which the individual is glorified, wherein human achievement is not only appreciated but expected. Think about it... Creation! Could there be anything so wonderful as this. We, acting as gods ourselves, create. Regardless of discipline, intent, or circumstance, we create. We cannot help it. Even the simple course of day to day life is a sort of creation. We bring ourselves into being, and we define ourselves as we choose.

How can there be, in this time of utmost enlightenment, of achievement and movement, how can there be room in this world for superstition, for the cruel reign of gods and goddesses? How could these men prostrate themselves before an idea not contained within their own being? The greatness we strive for without lives in wait within. How could these men, particularly the men of ideas and wonder, how could they not see this? How could they make themselves so...lowly.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his Brothers Karamazov, says simply "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship." We actively seek out places to fall and lords to worship. Why? Because standing on our own two feet, without any sort of safety net or eternal scapegoat, is too terrifying.

And yet...

Who are these gods we worship? For the Greeks, they were love embodied in Aphrodite or war embodied in Ares. Wisdom lives through Athena and mischief reigns in Hermes. These are but attributes after all! We define these things we cannot see, hear, or explain within the body of a human being! The fact that we make them live forever as something "not human" betrays only wishful thinking...or the fact that these attributes live on as man lives on. There has always been love and wisdom and as long as we live, it lives in us.

Prof. Sexson said it is the defiance of the gods that is revolutionary here. Though they are all-powerful and though the individual gets torn apart in the end, the idea of even challenging the gods is revolutionary and humanistic. As humans, we are as powerful as the gods, we can be better than they are, sing sweeter, weave better.... but they will conquer us. The abstract concepts of love or hate, death or wisdom, will always hold sway, regardless of our circumstance or any ability. Because these concepts live in all, they will win in all and are inescapable. In this lies the true "will of the gods".

Howling Hecuba

Tragedy.

Over and over in recent classes, Prof. Sexson repeats one phrase, "the tragic sense of life". It seems simple enough....but I keep coming back to that phrase, that exact combination of words, in my mind. What does it mean to perceive life in a tragic sense? Or to wallow in that rich and horrifying, dark and foreboding side of the everyday? Perhaps this simple combination of words means to truly experience life, an act that in itself is hopelessly tragic and endlessly terrifying.

Shakespeare once said that we are actors on a stage. Well if we are, what is the theme of our days? Do we frolic in the throes of comedy? Or do we spurt onto the stage our tragedy and pain...like blood, so real and...undeniable. Perhaps we act the tragedy, a tragedy so hopelessly absurd in the immensity of its own pain that it transcends itself, skimming along that all too insubstantial line alongside comedy. Laughter and tears, we cycle through laughter and tears in our days on earth, in all the varied turns of fortune's wheel.

Hecuba laments in Euripides' Trojan Women, "Fortune is a whirling dervish that twists and turns and leaps now this way, now that. Success is not of man's own making." And, in the end, our Chorus reiterates, "Like smoke blown to heaven on the wings of the wind, our country, our conquered country, perishes. Its palaces are overrun by the fierce flames and the murderous spear." "The name of the land will pass into oblivion. [. . .] Hapless Troy is finished."

Tragedy.

Regardless of what we think of Hecuba, what we assign to her through the multifaceted veils of time and place, we should but witness her pain, the pain of an entire nation screaming in agony. Actors attempts to embody the complete desolation of hundreds of thousands of people somehow fail to meet the ultimate crescendo of the tragic sense of life. Always, they hold back, unable or unwilling to fully prostrate themselves before the vision. Too often we turn away from tragedy because we cannot take the pain. We must. Go back to it. Witness it; make it a small something of what you are so that those people never truly die. To live faithfully one must contain all of life, tragedy and comedy combined.

Hecuba watches, helpless, utterly helpless as her nation is destroyed. The blood runs in the streets and the haunting cries of the slaughtered reach even the palace walls. Her warriors are defeated and dishonored. The army has fallen. She sees the loss of two sons in a war of folly. Her husband is murdered, her children scattered. In this tiny play, we see this woman receive the news of a daughter's death, another's grim fate as concubine to her enemy....and the third.... her fate is unspeakable. This daughter, Andromache, loses a part of her self and her soul. Her child is torn from her arms to be smashed into all too unforgiving stone. She will marry another enemy. Hecuba buries Astyanax's frail body and with it, Troy itself. In the final scenes, the entire city is engulfed in flames, its children scattered to all the far-reaching corners of Greece.

Imagine for a moment....going on in that knowledge, with that sight seared into your very soul. Imagine living the rest of that life, as a slave when once you were great....a queen. We witness it. Through Euripides, we live it, and Hecuba herself lives in our living.

How can we go on? How does Hecuba....go on. Somehow we do. Call it laughter, call it hope....somehow, and without pretense, we go on, even when the very heart of darkness fills our cup of life with acidic nectar.

There is something within us. And that something....goes on.

The Cry of Andromache

In Luke's most recent blog, he spoke about why we laughed at that first howl by Andromache in the climactic scene we watched in class. I have to say, in many ways, I absolutely agree with what he has to say.

Mr. Sexson has spoken many times of our need to laugh in order to keep from crying, but in certain situations, crying is one's only alternative. I know I've often felt some major pain or another, some upset of my world, and laughed at the sheer senselessness of it all. There is a huge difference, however, between this situation and those moments when one is moved to the point of tears because what we are seeing is too much, too evil a pain for our sensibilites to sustain and carry on with fortitude. The howl by Andromache in the Trojan Women seemed altogether too...forced. Though the actress perhaps sought to convey the rising up of this long and tortured wail from the very root of her soul, what she actually managed was far from this. And somehow, we laughed, when we should have cried. All one has to do is watch specific news broadcasts of earthquake victims or of relatives of suicide bomb victims, in order to hear a truly arresting and heartwrenching sob, the terror in a person's eyes...and the despair.

I will say this; throughout the course of her speech, I was drawn in to the unfolding drama. I disagree with Luke when it comes to long speeches being ineffective in demonstrating tragedy. Granted, they are less true to life than disturbing sobs and incoherent phrases, but one cannot say the greatest tragic monologues of all time have no pathos. They do. Rather than assaulting only our hearts, they barrage our minds as well, allowing us no escape from the extended moment. If these words were simply acted to their fullest potential....if they were given the weight and the passion they deserve, then there would be few who are bored with Shakespeare and who can remain uneffected by the speech of Andromache among others. Without the impact, without the arresting passionate cries of pain and anguish, these spoken words of those great tragedians of our past are just that, words, and have no greater consequence.

I think I'm Infected

If, at the beginning of this class, someone would have said I'd be the kind of person with multiple blogs, I'd be skeptical, but, as it turns out, I'm infected by it. After reading a blog entry by Zach Morris, I started thinking about some of the quotes I absolutely adore, words I memorize and repeat softly to myself sporadically throughout my days. There are a few which I can roll off the top of my head, but most of my favorite thoughts or phrases, jokes, etc. I keep in a book dedicated to that purpose alone. My sister always told me that I'd never look at that thing again, but I wound up using it ALL the time. When I don't know what to say, sometimes I look there. I go there for inspiration, and sometimes for strength. Other times, I go there because I have absolutely nothing better to do and a few quotes make me laugh.

I am nowhere near close to having all the words that make me feel something, anything, but I'm okay with that. These are mere snapshots, things that catch my eye or make me laugh, flashes of who I am or what I care for. After reading Zach's post, I thought I'd set up another blog dedicated just to these quotes. I'll be posting some soon and every so often later. Feel free to comment or leave quotes of your own! I'm ALWAYS looking for good ones.

"beauty only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting"

"divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life"

Today in class, Professor Sexson spoke about mankind's eternal quest for beauty. He defined it in two terms: immortality and the good. Upon hearing these words, and reading this tiny passage in the Symposium, I kept flashing back to a movie I have just recently seen, American Beauty. A friend recommended I watch this, and at first I was skeptical. His movie tastes often differ from mine. Now, I am eternally grateful for his recommendation. It's more than a movie to me. It's an awakening.

I've posted a link to a monologue that...at the basest level is completely concurrent to what we talked about in class. But in the sense of the divine....this is...an eternity. The movie opened my eyes to how I see the world, giving definition to concepts I have struggled to define for quite some time. I hope that you all watch the film in its entirety, but even without doing so, these few scenes are powerful enough. They are not circumstantially bound to the contextual limitations of the film itself.

The first is the monologue I mentioned before and my favorite monologue in the movie.

The second is the very last monologue. Though it starts out circumstantially bound, the last three or four lines are...the crux of the movie, the revelation, the beginning and essence of understanding. And beautiful.

She's Mine.

"'When a man loves the beautiful, what does he love?' I answered her, 'That the beautiful may be his."

These are the words of Diotima to Socrates in the Symposium. Furthermore she says, " love may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good". The question of what love is has plagued mankind since the dawn of his creation. What does it mean, to feel something seemingly inexplicable and with power beyond our means? Love is a strange and captivating force, and we do preposterous things for our loves and our love itself. And none of us know what it means.

If we are to examine what Diotima says about the nature of loving in these lines, we can infer that to be loved is to be good. But what does that mean? We are taught that being "good" is entirely subjective, so what then does it truly mean to be "good", to be loved? Perhaps to be loved means to be seen as good in the eyes of another, our other half as Aristophanes would say. Is it true that we can only see the good in one we love?

Ditotima's words also bring up the concept of possession in love: "that the beautiful may be his." What does it mean to truly possess another, that which is good? What does it mean to say, "This is mine." The concept of possession, after all, is a strange one when one really thinks about it. We assign a part of ourselves to an object in order that it does not leave us. We are subservient to it at that point because we fear it's departure. We have all felt that tiny sense of sheer panic at the perceived departure of our cell phones or car keys. And in that moment, we seem less than what we were before, somehow bereft of concrete definition. In effect, we seek to assimilate these objects or beings outside of ourselves into our definition of who we are, into our very being. In our attempt to define these objects as "mine," however, they begin to define us. So what does it mean, really, to say a thing is ours? To be someones? As we can never truly assimilate that which is without into that which is within, the ability to own remains forever beyond our grasp; therefore, the idea of holding another as our own is but the attempt to integrate that other into ourselves as much as we can. Is this love? Maybe. Or maybe the very act of love is not that of holding as Diotima says, but of becoming.

Yay Youtube!

For my introduction into Plato's Symposium, I surfed the god of all search engines, Google, for a few hours finding mostly scholarly articles, which, though informative, were less interesting than a few random videos I found on Youtube on the same subject. I'm posting them here. Enjoy!

The first one is a French video on the origin of the genders as explained in the speech of Aristophanes. There are English subtitles, and, while it can be bizarre at times, it gives a pretty clear picture of what he was saying (if you haven't imagined something close to this already) =)



This one is a song by Rufus Wainwright called "Origin of Love" on the same subject:




I'm not sure about the credibility of this video on Diotima, but it raised some interesting points on the importance of Diotima to the discourse on love.



This last link is to the first of 8 videos from a french movie entitled "Le Banquet". It's a reenactment of Plato's Symposium. The film quality is not the best that it could be, but if you understand French (or Spanish subtitles)....or if you just want to watch this or other parts of the movie and try to guess what they're saying, here's the link.

"All I had ever felt was gathered together around this woman. Nothing lay around loose in me any more but was finished up by her."
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"What happened?" the boy asked.

The old man's voice was high and clear: "Peace," he answered."

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"A tree. A rock. A cloud."

State of Hysteria.

To follow up on an earlier post, I give you direct quotes from a sampling of laws on the books from around this country and around the world. Enjoy!

In Germany:
A pillow can be considered a “passive” weapon.

Every office must have a view of the sky, however small.

In Sweden:
While prostitution is legal, it is illegal to use the services of a prostitute.

You may only own half a meter down in the ground of any land you own.

In the UK:
Any boy under the age of 10 may not see a naked manequin.

Since 1313, MPs are not allowed to don armor in Parliament.

And in the good old USA:
It is illegal to ride a horse while under the influence

It is illegal to wear a bullet-proof vest while committing a murder.

It is illegal to delay or detain a homing pigeon.

When two trains come to a crossing, neither shall go until the other has passed.

Hunting camels is prohibited.

(Montana):
In Montana, it is illegal for married women to go fishing alone on Sundays, and illegal for unmarried women to fish alone at all.

It is a felony for a wife to open her husband’s mail.

It is illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone.

Seven or more indians are considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them.


If you want to see more outrageous rules, check out the website. It's good for a laugh. =D

The laws of mere mortals.

Laws are made by men, not by the Gods.

We've been conditioned, programmed as it were, to do as we're told, to the point where if an authority figure tells us to do something against our normal inclinations, we do it with barely a question. I learned of a certain experiment conducted some years ago to test how far we will go to follow orders.

The study was called the Milgrams Obedience Experiment. I won't go too much into the specifics of the experiment here; if you want to learn more, click on the hyperlink. A bare bones outline of what the study entailed however, is a willing participant who was told to repeatedly shock another participant if they answered incorrectly to the questions the first participant was told to ask. They were told this study was organized in order to test the learning ability of the subject, but in fact they were the ones being studied. Unbeknownst to the participant, the subject being shocked was an actor and no real shocks were administered. Yet even when the participants became worried as to the state of the individual they were, in effect, torturing, they did not stop the experiment. "Shock" after shock was administered. The tortured cries of the pretend subject can be heard reverberating through the testing area. The shocks keep coming. And then the screaming stops.

Wading through mountains of videos by present-day imitators, I finally found a link to some original footage of one of Milgram's test subjects. The video goes on and on as the subject gets shocked over and over. When asked, after the true nature of the experiment was revealed to the participant, why he didn't stop administering shocks, no clear answer was given. The man repeats, "I wanted to stop, but he (the scientist) kept going 'keep going'!"

Another researcher who saught to perform the same experiment in our time published his findings in an article I found while searching for more information on Milgram. He says in his final paragraphs, "I found no evidence for gender differences in obedience." and "Participants who were high in empathic concern expressed a reluctance to continue the procedure earlier than did those who were low on this trait. But this early reluctance did not translate into a greater likelihood of refusing to continue."


We will do as we are told, even when such an order means pain or death to another human being. An order is an order, and, like good soldiers, we obey. In the end, 65 percent of the participants did not stop the experiment. Sixty-five percent. Do you know where you lie?

The fact of the matter is, people like our Antigone who stand against laws or the orders of the state are far and few in between. We look up to them, admire them for their strength to be one against many. Or...we destroy them, condemn them as outcasts; after all, the state cannot survive if too many individuals refuse to follow orders. So what do these findings make of us? Are we intelligent, rational beings with a choice to do right or wrong? Or are we slaves to figures of authority, doing anything and everything simply because we are told to do so? Why do we believe we are less to blame if we are told to do something than if we do that something of our own accord? Are we Antigones or Ismenes? Can we ever really know.

Life and Death and Department Stores...Oh My.

Where I work, we often get some....shall we say...interesting... items to sell. While I stood there at the fitting rooms for what seemed like hours....well, it probably was hours, watching people come in and out with armfuls of prospective purchases, I started to think about the English homework I should be doing. I started thinking about some of the concepts brought up in Sexson's lectures and talking about some of them with some of my coworkers. "All that is past possesses our present." We're probably going to be incredibly tired of hearing that after a while, but nevertheless the words keep ringing in my ears. Everywhere I go, I'm confronted by myth. The characters of the ancient tales pervade every aspect of our existence, whether we know it or not.

On the last truck, we got a lot of these tanktops. And all of a sudden, there he was, the smiling face of Cupid, mischievous bringer of love... and all the drama associated with it. I couldn't believe the incredible timing of it all (though I suspect the proximity of Valentine's Day had something to do with it...) =)

Shrugging this off, I turned back to my work and the steady stream of people coming in and out of the fitting rooms. And then I saw a piece of clothing so disturbing... I had no idea what would entice someone to buy it. Here, right before my very eyes was a bright pink barely-there lingerie top with soft pink hearts all over it....and massive skulls playfully dancing over it all. It even came with a matching thong for Christ's sake. I thought to myself, what is the point of it all? Why would anyone want to buy lingerie on which the face of death stares back at you?...or rather...at your boyfriend... Well, someone wanted that effect I suppose, because when I went back to get a photograph for this blog, they were all gone. That's right. We sold out. And then I realized. That piece was just the beginning. Like the warning on a bottle of deadly poison, skulls were everywhere:

on girly yellow bras with pretty pink hearts....

and on fuzzy pink sleeping shorts.....

And then I realized. What if these countless skulls really are warnings? What if they are but premonitions of the dangers held within that most dramatic of relationships, between men and women.... like the idea of the individual's death in marriage or our bodies' eventual marriage with death. Antigone characterizes death as "my tomb, my marriage, my hollow, scraped in dirt, I'm coming home forever". Home. What an odd word she uses. Even the impersonal Chorus says a few words about Antigone, "soon to gain the marriage bed where everyone must sleep".

Still, even with the wider ramifications of the symbols I was witnessing reverberating through my mind, the whole concept seemed all too disturbing. Why do we even think of associating so dark a concept as death with that spring of life, and that basis of love within all of us? Is it because we seek to diminish the power of something we fear most of all by juxtaposing its image with that of the single greatest attribute of our life on earth? Or is it as simple as a warning sign.... the label on a bottle of cyanide we just can't help drinking...down to the last drop.

Reincarnation. That's when you come back as a frog isn't it?

Throughout my years of study, I remain continually astounded by how little most people know or care to know about this concept. All sorts of theories come to light on the subject, most of which are founded from a lack of information. In our attempt to stay westernized and "sophisticated," we often ignore the cultures most unique from our own; we deem this concept of cyclical time as ludicrous. This lack of diversity is a disturbing, yet pervasive trend. In high school, I remember the classes about "cultural diversity" we were required to take. Native American History, etc. We read books about slavery. And about "Indians". Having passed the class, we were given a figurative stamp on our foreheads that said we were "educated" and "diverse". I hated these classes.

I found it an insult to my intelligence to assume that I would be happy with this sloppily fabricated version of a diversified world view. At the same time, it sickened me that world history was a semester long class, the same as American history. The world has been around for thousands of years. We have only been here around 2oo. Yet the combined history of the entire world has the same weight and value as our measely two hundred years? How can we have the arrogance to assume we know everything there ever was or will be? Where is our humility?

As I was entirely unsatisfied with the educational system's definition of diversity, I began reading on my own time. I read about the army coup in Burma against which a staunch advocate of democracy was fighting silently. Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for the majority of her life. Yet we learn nothing of this conflict. Even when thousands of monks march in peaceful protest, we know nothing.



I read first hand accounts of the war in Afghanistan. I read books written by the prisoners in Guantanamo. I read poetry from the East and the Mediterranean. I read stories of war and love, poetry from France, novels from Russia....I sought out the "classics" that were deemed less than relevant to our diversification in schools. There is such a wealth of information, of beauty in this world that we are not allowed to see! Is it any wonder our children grow up to think America is the center of the world? Is it any wonder we go overseas and expect these cultures to conform to our language and standards? We are not exposed to the immensity of life! How can we know better?

Understanding. We can teach our children to see themselves as individuals belonging to a World of information, of people, of culture. We can teach them to see themselves as citizens of this vast and wonderfully diverse planetary body rather than as citizens of a single nation or thought process. We can expose this next generation to every idea, every culture, every religion and great innovation, rather than confining them...condemning them...to a life of stunted and singularly "Westernized" perspectives of the world.



Western cultures see time and our lives on this earth as linear....progressing to a final stopping point from which there is no return. To our eventual dismay, this world view continues to remain incompatible to our observations of the world. We see the seasons come and go in cycles of death and rebirth. We see history repeat itself endlessly, and we find no explanation. We see ourselves developing in terms of cyclical stages of time, and we stand confounded by the phenomenon. Why? We have attempted to impose an unbending rule of the straight line onto the ephemeral diversity of nature, both in the earth and in ourselves.










When Sexson spoke the other day of the eternal return, I found his words on the subject both surprising and extremely engaging. He gave an example: Kayla may die but she will come back later in a different body, at a different time, and with different memories but she will still be Kayla. Finally! This is reincarnation. I was immensely greatful to see it so aptly explained in terms even a Westerner can understand. Reincarnation isn't the chance to come back as a frog...or a fruitfly. It's the chance of time, a chance to learn what needs to be learned in this life, this one chapter, and if need be return again to learn what is still needed. After one has developed to his utmost potential, to the very zenith of his capabilities, he frees himself from the turning wheel of life, the cycles of death and rebirth. His soul travels on to other dimensions of learning and growth. Reincarnation is the freedom from an end, the chance to be continually better than what we were.

I googled the word "reincarnation" just to see what would come up and I found this quote by Henry Ford. Here is an excerpt: "Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock". In a world of cycles and continued understanding, we have the time to read the eternities. We are the eternities.

The music... the legend.

On Wednesday, Prof. Sexson asked us to think about the greatest musical moment in "history". Well I thought about it. A lot. And there are simply too many to say for certain one moment outshines them all. Perhaps the first moment the first instrument was played for the first time is the greatest....for in that moment, all those to come is contained. What of Mozart? And Beethoven? Playing for their first concertos at six or seven. This is the stuff of myth! How about the jazz musicians in Harlem playing their smooth rhythmns before an ever increasing, astounded audience? And of course, we cannot forget the ever immortal Elvis Presley. But before Presley, there were others, like him, bravely setting out and making their music despite all the naysayers, against all the criticism. How about when Johnny Cash, musical superstar, finally married the love of his life, the also musical June Carter? So much myth is contained in their story to be sure. There are the Beatles who took the world by storm; they must be mentioned too. How can we choose a single moment to sum up the entire course of musical "history"?

And what of all the anonymous music makers around the world? Those sweaty jungle beats of the Serengeti, the hypnotic strum of an Indian sitar, the sweet, piercing melancholy of a Japanese trill... What of the lives behind the music we never hear? The young thug who finds music remakes him. The mother softly humming to her child. A new band's very first gig. How can we measure and equate all such mysteries in a single span of time?

We cannot. Or at least we shouldn't. For each experience, each singular moment in time, is part of a great and incomprehensible legend...or myth.

Death in Love.

"Love is what drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us."

[. . .]

"I am not deceived. This new emotion is Her doing; the desire that possesses me is Her bewitchment. Lucidity passes from me; in a moment I'll cry 'Love!' bury myself in Her side, and be 'transfigured.' Which is to say, I die already; this fellow transported by passion is not I; I am he who abjures and rejects the night-sea journey! I....
"I am all love. 'Come!' She whispers, and I have no will."
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After class today, I thought I'd do a little more research on Sexson's reference to "Night Sea Journey" by John Barth which I found in its entirety in what I think is a Japanese blog of some sort. Still, the story is in English. At first, I was a little skeptical as to the literary genius behind a story told from the perspective of a sperm, but I was proven wrong within the first few paragraphs. What an odd perspective to find myself listening to! I thought it an absurdity at the very least, yet...this is a very literate sperm who uses words like "beset", "abhorrent", and "tautological" and who theorizes over the goal and nature of his very existence. His nameless character becomes a synecdoche for mankind as a whole. He struggles "Onward, Upward", as he says, with only the vaguest notion as to his ultimat epurpose in the tormenting darkness which he finds himself. At the end of his tortured journey, he can only hope that he leaves a legacy, something we, ourselves, strive to achieve every day of our lives. The difference between his story and our own is that we supposedly end in death, the sperm ends in love. The very last line of the story itself is an esctatic, horrified, "Love! Love! Love!" which can only echo Kurtz's last words in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "The horror, the horror."

This character fears love because it represents the ending of self. He knows not what he will be, if anything, after he becomes a part of something, someone, else....after he loses any concrete definition as he plunges into the unknown. He fears the death of himself as as separate entity. Could that be what is proposed in one aspect by the Homeric Hymn of Demeter? Persephone plunges into the Underworld, into death itself by her marriage to Aidoneus. Perhaps the fear we often associate with marriage is but the deathly fear of the extermination of our preconditioned, circumstantially bound definitions of who we are. After all, what are we...really...when we cease to be completely disconnected from another...when we become something more than our individual selves? Do we still exist? Or are we lost within that single living organism existing in two seperate entities?

Though the entire short story presents some interesting concepts, the lines quoted above struck me most of all. Ignoring for a moment the fact that they are written almost as poetry itself, the word choice compells further analysis. The sperm uses the word "bewitchment" to describe his driving need to be "in" love. He says he has already died, for he has lost all reason. "I am all love" he says. A simple whisper converts his most ardent analysis, his antagonistic convictions; all of it is lost, destroyed, in a single word. this power of the female race to compel and liquefy defies definition just as the mother-daughter connection remains a mystery or "mustes" to the entire male race. There is a power in that silent communication, in love as well, something that cannot be combated through physical or mental force, that is terrifying. Our greatest fears stem from a fear of the unknown, for we know not how to face something we cannot begin to comprehend rationally. How then do we arm ourselves for the battlefield? What defences are left to us when we know not what we face or when we'll face it? Without question, death is one inarguable truth of life... inescapable. Love is another. And we have no will to fight it.

"We like to wait until kids are a little older to talk to them about things like...condoms and ritualistic human sacrifice for harvest"

When Prof. Sexson mentioned "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson in class today, a lightbulb went off right above my head......figuratively. =D I don't really watch South Park, but in one of the episodes I have seen, they parody this very short story! In the South Park episode, the entire world is making Britney Spears' life a living hell so that she'll kill herself and the farmers will have a good corn harvest. In the end, they have to kill her with their cameras. If you watch the full episode, the last scene is the most eerie...the townspeople turn to a running newscast of Miley Cyrus...their next victim. I couldn't believe how accurate their storyline was in relation to the original text! They even threw in a line about "little Davy", a character from the short story. Anyway, check out the story if you're interested and then watch this clip I found.

I thought I'd set up a few links to the myth Prof. Sexson related in class about the abduction of Helen of Troy by Theseus years before. When he mentioned Castor and Pollux, her brothers who come to her rescue, I couldn't help being overwhelmed by the sheer irony, the "an eye for an eye and the world goes blind" of it all. Theseus kidnaps Helen, Pirithous tries to kidnap Persephone, Heracles kidnaps Theseus from the underworld, Castor and Pollux kidnap their sister (from her abductor), and eventually Castor and Pollux kidnap the daughters of Leucippus for their own. The sheer irony of it all is just downright ridiculous. (The above painting is The Rape of the Daughters Leucippus by Rubens).

All that is past...(you know the rest)

Today in class, Prof. Sexson related the story of Zeus and Semele to the class. After reading Shoni's blog on the topic, I remembered this song by Russell Crowe that follows the same major themes. The most recurrent line is quite fitting to the story of Zeus and Semele: "Are you ready to take the weight of a man?" Semele was not, and it begs the question "why?" Why do we only want to deal with a diminished, restricted version of who a person is rather than the fullness of passion and fear, virtue and vice that make us human? Why can we not "handle the truth"?

Love and Hatred....with a side of Destruction

"Man and woman face each other in immensities of inadmissible and, therefore, destructive need..."

Steiner says the moment from which all forms of drama are born is the moment when a man meets a woman. But from where does this conflict stem? In the above quotation from one of his passages, the word "need" struck me most of all. In class the other day, we spoke of the origin myth in which men and women were once bound to one another but were then separated, creating the genders. I did a little research to find more on this topic, but with what little time I had, I couldn't find what I was looking for. All google searches pulled up unrelated articles about Paganism and worship of the mother (earth). Needless to say, that was pretty much a completely failed endeavor. However, that didn't stop me from thinking more in depth about what we discussed in class.

Keeping this concept in mind, I read some of Steiner's Antigones. By and by, I stumbled on this line (above) about such an "inadmissible" and "destructive need". And that's the root of it. Steiner goes on to speak of language and other interactions, but I think it's simpler than that. Despite any differences in social interaction, despite any fundamentally different perspectives inherent to each gender, perhaps the root of all the drama is this "need", our need to be close to another from whom we are inexplicably separated. We feel a kinship, an irresistible pull to the other, yet we have no means of defining it mainly because we are so tied to our own restrictions....the pleasantries of social interaction. And so, together we breed the white elephant in the room as it were.

Steiner characterizes these encounters on page 235 as "the oneness of love and hatred, of the need for union between man and woman and of the compulsions toward mutual destruction in woven in that need". Why does this meeting mean destruction? What is the nature of our interaction that drives us to our end? In the Homeric Hymn of Demeter, Persephone's life on earth ends with the opening up of a great chasm underneath her feet. She will never be the same after her abduction by a force greater than herself. The lord of the underworld doesn't simply grab her and run. The very ground opens up and swallows her completely. Destruction runs rampant in the tales of Greek mythology. Almost every interaction between man and woman (mortal or godlike), ends in tragedy or has some form of suffering and conflict inherent in that meeting. Do we really spell our own doom? Or is it societal restrictions on these interactions, in a word, the fear of feeling something beyond our means of control that cripples us?

From infancy we are taught to be separate from one another, yet at the same time, we are told that isolation is wrong. We spend the entirety of our lives trying to reconcile these opposing concepts. It starts innocently enough, with pink ballerina blankets and blue football jerseys. At first we don't really care; when we are really little, we don't see gender in terms of separation. Then, somewhere in the middle, we reach the stage where "girls have cooties" and "boys are gross". Sadly, we never really leave that behind. Even when the need to be together is unbearable, we never fully allow ourselves to become the same, to feel a certain oneness with another, see a bit of ourselves in someone else. We frantically search for differences. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". We adopt phrases like "men!" (spoken with disdain and frustration) and "chicks..." (spoken with an edge of the completely foreign and incomprehensible). Why?

If, as the Ancients believed, we were cut from the same being, if we are indeed two incomplete pieces of a perfect whole....why do we insist on destroying our counterparts, while, simultaneously perfecting our own self-destruction through inexcusable criticism and incomprehensible cruelty? Are we really that afraid to be whole?

"Mythology is the truth, history is fact"

When I heard this quote in class the other day, I started thinking of the concept of facts and their irrelevance in terms of truth. In a forward thinking, scientifically minded society like the one we live in, we strive to look at our lives, past of present, objectively. We think that, regardless of intuition, perception, or emotion, there lies a single standard of truth or fact that unites us all....only...by doing so, we lose all the intricacies of this greater picture. We try so hard to discover an objective truth only to find that we can never be fully objective. Why?

We are all subjective observers of our world, each with our own truths. Perhaps, somewhere, there exists one unifying truth, a factual basis for all our actions, but we, as human beings can never know what that basis is. Our only means of understanding our world is by observation, followed by reason. Observation is inexorably tied to perception, therefore, we can never distance ourselves from our own individualized perspectives of the world as a whole in order to see a clear base line....if such a thing truly exists. We like to think of the "circumstantially bounded" definitions of who we are as individuals or what really happened at any point in time as the totality of our existence....or importance. For example, when meeting someone for the first time, the most important question we ask (for we always ask it) is "what do you do for a living?". This single question is followed by other vital questions such as "where are you from?" or "how old are you?", for college students, this question is "what's your major?". It makes no difference to us what a person believes, what they fear or hope for...what they live for. Our only concern is with circumstance, as if this were vital, important, or true. Why are we so hung up on the basest definition of who a person is?

I rarely think of myself as an "American" or a "Montanan" or even a "college student". I know I am so much more than that "circumstatially bounded" definition of who I am. Where I was born is of no consequence when compared to what I believe. I would rather be seen for the totality of who I am rather than confined by the fixed classification of who I appear to be. Time and place do not define who we are, we do.

"Mythology is truth, history is fact". Perhaps what is meant by this is that mythology is the creation of man by man, his attempt to understand human nature through the relative truth inherent in all living beings. Mythology lies closer to truth because it allows for subjectivity, relativity. It allows for emotion, drama, movement and spans the full range of human interaction. Myths are timeless, living things that refuse to be confined in a linear fashion to a historical timeline. They defy our need to contain and classify, to pin things down nice and neatly in whatever we determine to be factual truth.

What if we allowed ourselves to let go of simple definitions and mindless classifications? Would our structured little society descend into chaos? Or would we, by letting go of our rigidity, our passivity, become fuller versions of who we are, regardless of the paltry definitions that keep us rooted in linear time. While we remain confined by the limitations of our "circumstatially bounded" selves, can we ever really know the fullness of who we are, who we can be?

First Post

Well, I've never had a blog before (if you don't count Myspace), so I'm excited to find out where this leads. First real blog post coming soon... =D