Final Project Part 2

I don't think I'm going to write what most would consider a proper explication for my short story. Mainly I'll just rephrase what I said in class after I presented, because I think anything more would be death by over-analysis.

Essentially, I thought about Nabokov's story from a different perspective than most analyses endorse. What if, for the boy in the story, death is really a form of release? What if he, like the little fledgling bird dying in the puddle, is so tormented by life that he would actually welcome death? This does seem to be the case in the story, given that the boy tries to take his own life several times.

As I was thinking about the directions I wanted to go with the story, I thought back to the essay I'd written on how the past possesses the present in Nabokov and how I'd related Gilgamesh to the boy. For those of you who are less familiar with the story, the horrifically oversimplified gist of it is that Gilgamesh loses his best friend, goes to find eternal life, loses eternal life, and realizes that he didn't really want eternal life in the first place. The actual story, which you can read here, is obviously far more complicated than that.

In the written version of my story, which I as yet have not satisfactorily named, I did hide some numerical references which did not come out in the spoken version. While the written version lacks some of the emotion and inflections that the spoken version had, I think the symbolism and cipher-ness of the story comes out much better in writing.

Correlation vs. Causation

I was thinking about this a lot this past week for some reason, probably because my final project was regarding referential mania, which is really just the creation of imaginary causal links (or a version of paranoid schizophrenia if you're into that lingo). I also was reading some religious articles over the weekend, and it occurred to me that a lot of them used correlation and causation interchangeably. I'm not saying all religion does that, but this particular set of articles was about how if you thank God for something good that happens, good things will keep happening to you. I'm not saying that this is never the case; maybe God really does reward you for thanking him. I don't pretend to know. I just think that a lot of these very well-meaning people mistake correlation for causation. Just because you thanked God and then something good happened doesn't mean your thanking God caused that good thing to happen.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Final Project Part 1

Here's the story I wrote for my final project. For some reason, I really think it's better written than spoken. I'm not sure what to call it because I'm terrible at naming things (except cars, to which my brain always attaches names for no good reason). I'll post the explication soon, once everyone hopefully has a moment to come to their own conclusions about some things in the story.

----------

Excerpt from the diary

January 4, 19--

Every night I hear them whispering about me. Sometimes I think I can almost understand the exact words. I see them waving their arms—it’s a code, I know it is. I’m so close to cracking it. But no, they don’t want me to know. They want to be able to talk behind my back with impunity. If I knew what they were saying, they wouldn’t be able to say it anymore, because then I’d know all the nasty things they think about me. I can guess at them now. I’m so close. I think it’s like this: ..-. .-.. -.-- -... --- -.-- ..-. .-.. -.-- .. -.-. .- with all the tapping and waving but then I can’t make out the rest. They’re laughing now. They must change to a different cipher at that point. I don’t know which one.

I’m in a new room, and my parents aren’t here anymore. The room is mostly white, and the bed is uncomfortable. I think everyone thinks I’m crazy. I’m not. I just see and hear more than they do, so of course they don’t understand.

Psychiatrist’s notes

January 4, 19--
New patient admitted today. He’s an interesting case. Every inanimate object has some malicious ulterior motive as far as he’s concerned. I’m going to ask Dr. B---- if he wants to study him. I don’t feel qualified to do more than try to keep him quiet. He doesn’t often become agitated; mostly he’s sullen and sometimes uncooperative. He keeps saying things about the trees and the sky, and we noticed immediately that anything with moving parts terrifies him. I don’t yet know why these objects are of particular significance. This requires more study.

Excerpt from the diary

January 10, 19--

Words words WORDS. I hear them but I don’t know what they mean! It’s infuriating. The people who call themselves doctors keep asking me what I hear and what it means. Do they know how stupid they sound? If I knew, wouldn’t I tell them? But no, they’re stuck in their own little spheres of ignorance, completely unable to comprehend the level of madness I can hear. Am I mad, or is the world mad? Am I the only one who knows what’s really going on? I wish I knew.

Psychiatrist’s notes

January 20, 19--

Slowly we are beginning to shed light on this boy’s affliction. Dr. B---- has been to see him a few times and he’s read all my notes to date, which have been sadly unenlightening. We have found that the boy is intelligent, abnormally so. His IQ is at least 170, though I cannot say for sure how high it is as we ran into problems when we came to the pattern recognition section. I should have known better, but Dr. B---- and I were so curious. Dr. B---- has termed the boy’s affliction “referential mania.” The label is helpful, certainly, but we have so far been unable to solve any of his problems. There is little literature on the subject—thus the reason Dr. B----’s study is so necessary. The boy still thinks he hears coded messages in the tapping of the trees at his window, or sees them in the clouds in the sky when he’s out for his daily walks. While I doubt he will ever be fully cured of his condition, perhaps some progress can be made.

Excerpt from the diary

February 5, 19--

Do they really not understand? I try and try to tell them, but they can’t understand. I suppose it must look a little crazy to them, since they’re so trapped in their little minds and corresponding realities. I don’t think I’d wish my abilities on them, though. It is a terrible thing to be under the scrutiny of all of nature at once, and some human-made things, too.

Psychiatrist’s notes

February 15, 19--

The boy’s parents came to see him today. He did not acknowledge them at all. I don’t know what he’s thinking about. He won’t open up to me. I’m going to keep trying, but it will probably take a lot of time.

Excerpt from the diary

March 10, 19--

Of all the things to try to get me to talk, they pick life. Not just the biological concept of life, but Life with a capital L in the philosophical sense. Don’t they see how stupid that is for someone like me? Every part of my life is watched and cataloged and recorded, not just by them, but by the entire world. Everything is watching all the time. Every breath I take is put in a box somewhere. And they want to talk to me about Life. Their minds could never comprehend my life.

What if I could fly away from here? What if somehow I could get away from this place and go somewhere without watchers? I wonder if such a place exists. If I could only tear through these white walls, I think I might find it. I can’t let the others know, though. They’d try to stop me. They don’t understand. They’d think I was trying to die, when I’m really only trying to find Life.

Psychiatrist’s notes

April 6, 19--

I will never cease to be amazed by the inventiveness of the insane. Today the patient tried to commit suicide. We should have seen the signs, but he has become adept at hiding his plans from us. He would have gone through with it if another patient hadn’t thought he was trying to fly and, ironically, stopped him because he was jealous. I’m still not sure quite how the patient was planning on making his attempt work, but given his tenacity, I think it would have ended with him on the pavement outside one way or another. I’ve moved him to suicide watch. No matter what I do, he won’t talk to me. I’ve tried for over a month now, but I think he believes he’s intellectually superior to me. I don’t doubt that he’s right in absolute terms, as his incomplete IQ test showed us; however, the fact remains that he is the one with the mental imbalance, and I am his doctor, so I must continue to try to help him.

Excerpt from the diary

April 8, 19--

The scrutiny has gotten even worse. The trees noticed that I tried to get away from them and they’re laughing at me now because I couldn’t. Some damned human stopped me. He was jealous of me. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have tried it in another place, where no one could see, not even the trees. I must keep trying. This is my only path to Life.

Psychiatrist’s notes

April 10, 19--

The patient’s parents came to visit again today. They try to visit him as much as possible, though sometimes he is so perturbed that it would be risky. Today, though, they were able to see him. He recognized them but then started muttering about tearing a hole in something. I think he means to try suicide again. We will continue to observe him closely. Our focus has now turned from understanding his condition to saving him from himself.

Excerpt from the diary

April 12, 19--

I remember the birds with the hands. I wonder if they know the way to life? Sometimes I see them at night now. There’s one that comes to me. I think she knows, but I’m not sure. She’s outside my window—I have to go to her. I wonder if the numbers eleven, nine, and one have anything to do with her. They keep coming up. I don’t know if they’re ciphers from the trees and the clouds or if they’re the bird asking me to come with her.

Psychiatrist’s notes

May 2, 19--

Again the patient tried to take his life. He keeps talking about numbers and a bird with hands. He’s never mentioned either of these things before.

His parents came to visit today. They brought some jelly for him, I think, but we thought their presence might disturb him more, so we had to send them home. Now I wonder if I should have let them see him. He won’t talk to anyone or respond to any other external stimulus.

Additional Psychiatrist’s notes

May 3, 19--

This morning, just after midnight, the patient succeeded in taking his own life. We’re still not sure how he managed to get out the window. He said something about the bird with hands a few hours before he got out.

Now I have to call his parents.

A thing I do when I should be doing homework but don't want to

Aside from laundry and cleaning my cat's litter box and cleaning my room and cleaning the bathroom, of course. Sometimes, when I should do homework but REALLY want to procrastinate, I peruse The Onion. I found this article today, which at first seemed pretty shallow, like much Onion fare. Then there was this stellar mythological reference toward the end and I laughed really hard. I'm not going to tell you what it is because you all probably need excuses to not do homework, too.

Wow, such coincidence

Writing about Nabokov is seriously warping my mind--not that it wasn't severely warped to begin with. I have SO MUCH referential mania right now.

Evidence: I was talking to my young man yesterday, and he was annoyed at how many people in the world don't have goals in life. I think his exact wording was "they take paths that lead nowhere." It was at this point that I had this jolt of recognition; there's a Breaking Benjamin song that has the lyrics "take the path that leads to nowhere." In fact, it was this song that inspired the title for my little poorly-executed "art" post awhile back. I must have had a weird look on my face, because he stopped and asked what was going on, so I explained, and I'm pretty sure I confused him even more. Then I told him it was related to this class and apparently that magically made everything clear to him, so there's that.

Nabokov, what have you done to me?

The Fighter's High. Or something.

Elizabeth's presentation last night regarding rules as a form of freedom (or freedom as a form of restriction, or however you want to think about it) and the ecstasy they bring got me thinking. I've done mixed martial arts in some capacity for several years, and I'm currently a co-instructor (so kind of an instructor, but not really) at an Israeli Krav Maga/Russian Systema "dojo" in town. We like to say there are no rules on the street, which is what we're training for, but the fact of the matter is if you don't understand the rules of human motion, you'll lose every time. There are particular ways you must move yourself and particular ways you must apply force in order to be effective. If you don't understand those ways, you'll flail around pointlessly. You might score a lucky hit from time to time, but you'll waste huge amounts of energy and kind of look like an idiot. Once you understand how to move, though, everything changes. Of course, it's always a process of learning; I don't know that anyone has ever or will ever truly master a martial art, merely because one can always improve upon one's own achievements. However, there does come a point where it starts to make sense--where the rules that once seemed so restrictive and counter-intuitive become fluid and easily applicable. Your body does as it's meant to, and everything suddenly Works. It doesn't necessarily happen the same way for everyone, but most people experience a sort of "aha" moment where their technique starts to come together and look like actual fighting. Eventually, they don't have to think about it; it just happens. That's not to say that once you hit this point, everything is easy. It isn't. It just makes sense. I don't really know how to explain it. It's also at this point that fighting brings on euphoria (and relates back to running). I know for a lot of people that sounds really weird. You're learning how to kill someone. Why does that give euphoria? Again, I don't know. I just know how it feels when I've done something right, and there's that kind of rosy afterglow that doesn't make rational sense, but is there nonetheless.

So, for what it's worth, that's what I was thinking about for the last 15 minutes or so of class last night.

Interesting video

I stumbled across this as I was poking around Facebook while I was supposed to be writing a paper about the British electoral system. I thought maybe Sierra and anyone else who was thinking about entropy would be interested. There's also a link to a video about shamans at the end that may interest Zach. The guy who makes these videos sounds like he took our class at one point...

Final Project (ish)

I think I went about five different ways with this project before I finally settled on my current idea, which hopefully will be the one I actually use.

Basically, I'm going to be extremely pretentious and try to write Signs and Symbols from the boy's point of view. I'm 90% certain that I'll do this via two different "diaries." One will be the boy's psychiatrist's notes, which would be a hyper-realistic interpretation of events, and the other will be the boy's supposed diary, which would be a mythologized interpretation of those same events. Because of referential mania, the diary might have to just be the boy's internal monologue. I'm reading and re-reading Nabokov to see if the boy would maybe have been okay with a blank book that he could put his own things in. Perhaps I'll just have to take some artistic license.

Anyway, the main focus of my version of the story is somewhat along the lines of the idea I presented in my last blog post. I also read Joe Schadt's post from the 15th of last month, per Megan's suggestion, and I'm going to incorporate the converse of Joe's idea, that life is a form of death. Death is a form of life, answers are a form of death--it's getting a little mind-twisty at this point, so I'll have to hash that out further in my own head before I try to put it on paper, or worse still, the internet. I may end up making another blog post tomorrow, especially if I have another particularly enlightening lunch hour with my friend.

Before I get into that too much, though, there's the more fundamental issue of what death is. To look into that, still in the context of a story, I'm going to draw on Eliade Chapter 5 (ascent--so for me, death as a magical ascension), Frye Chapter 5 (also ascent), Gilgamesh, Icarus, and probably several others. I want to look into the idea of a cipher, with all the meanings attached thereto, and the numbers Nabokov uses; do they form a pattern, are they some sort of cipher? In honor of Nabokov, there will probably be an anagram at some point as well.

Most of this is going to be all but unrecognizable once it gets into a story, I think, so I'll put the actual analytical bits that I've talked about here into an explication, which might actually just end up confusing the issue even further, now that I think about it. I guess we'll see how that goes. If nothing else, it can be a window into my thought processes and hopefully will provide some sort of clarity in that way.

So there in a nutshell is the fundamental idea for my final project. As I said, I'll probably amend it tomorrow (Tuesday), but for now, this is where I'm going.

Lunchtime Epiphanies

I was sitting at lunch today with my little group of friends and somehow one friend (to whom I shall refer as the Doctor, even though she's a lady) and I got on the subject of questions and answers. She just offhand made the comment that every answer leads to more questions, which I connected to class, since Nabokov, brimstone be upon him, has saddled me with referential mania.

Anyway. The connection was thus: if every answer is a form of death, but learning--which is often comprised of answers, especially in basic English classes that deal with commas and i before e and so on--also leads to more questions, then an answer is also a form of rebirth. Ergo learning is a form of immortality. Probably everyone else has already arrived at this conclusion, but for me it was kind of a mindfuck. Also, guess what's now part of my final project...

Dead Raccoons and Missing Mailboxes

This morning, as I was driving in to school, I noticed that someone had hit a raccoon on the northbound side of 19th. It was lying relatively peacefully on the far side of the lane, and it would have looked asleep but for the bloodstain on its stomach and the magpies picking at it. In life, it was a fair-sized raccoon; it probably would have weighed in the neighborhood of 20 pounds. In death, it was just a lump of gray-brown fur in the road.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I've seen a lot of roadkill and I've hunted numerous varmints since I grew up on a farm. A dead raccoon is nothing new.

Per my usual MO, though, the raccoon took on new significance as I was driving home. It was much less recognizably a raccoon when I came back, thirteen hours later. It had been hit again at least once and it was starting to look more like a blood-tainted grease stain with fur. I swerved to avoid it.

Then it occurred to me: death is one of the few things common to every species, with the possible exception of certain jellyfish. This thought was reinforced as I kept driving. There's a certain mailbox on the east side of the road that always makes me flinch as I'm driving by it since it fell off to the side of its little post and looks suspiciously deer-like. I drive a tiny Honda--I really don't want to hit a deer, so I pay very special attention to anything on the side of the road that might remotely resemble one.

Tonight was different, though. I didn't do a double-take, because the mailbox wasn't there. As I looked a little further, toward the edge of the sweep of my headlights, I saw that the two houses that used to stand about 30 feet from the road weren't there, either. There was only flat ground, a few bushes where the walls of the houses used to be, and an electrical pole with an ancient transformer perched on its top.

And just like that, the evidence of human existence is erased.

About a mile down the road, on the west side, there's an abandoned house that still stands. It was well-built; none of the walls have buckled, though it's been abandoned for as long as I can remember. The windows are boarded up, and the only visible door is locked, at least as far as I know. It's on private property, so I've never bothered to find out. The paint has long since flaked off its weathered brown siding. Here some vestige of human occupation remains, however drab. Who lived there? Why did they leave? Did they die, and no one came after them to live in the house? Is there something wrong with it? Why hasn't it been demolished? Who owns it? Do kids have legends about it? It does look like the sort of place that would lend itself well to haunted-house stories. I know nothing of its story. I wish I did, but I suspect Death has taken the memories of that place hostage and will not let them go easily. He knows that in every answer I would obtain, I would see him. His presence is inexorable and unavoidable. He lurks behind everything, always breathing down our necks and reminding us in the smallest ways--like a raccoon squished on the road--that he will one day come for us, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Tomorrow the raccoon will doubtless be no more than a smudge on the road, washed away when the first snow melts.

Questions for The Magus

Okay, then. Here are my questions regarding The Magus.

1. When did Conchis' scheme really begin?

2. Fowles often mentions the color white. Is he using that color as the color of purity, or of death, or of something else entirely? (Or am I just totally nuts?)

3. The last little quote at the end of The Magus goes like this: cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet (reasonably literal translation with a comma for clarity: tomorrow let him love who has never loved / and let him who has loved, tomorrow love). How does this relate to the rest of the book--is it a form of death?

4. Why the little episode of hypnosis? Was it the power of suggestion or did Conchis actually hypnotize Nicholas (and does that even matter)?

5. Why does Alison really agree to help Conchis (other than her explanation, which honestly sounds a little too pat to be true)? It just seems to me that in the beginning she was so much like Nicholas as far as proclivities go that it would be really hard to get her to "side" with Conchis. Possibly I missed something.

Reset to Last Save

I'll post my five questions from The Magus a bit later. Truth be told, I've been ridiculously busy and very tired so I didn't get around to that soon enough. Tomorrow, when I'm thinking more clearly.

I thought I would post the little story I wrote since it's directly related to immortality. The idea is part Philip K. Dick, part me and my dad getting really bored in Wal-Mart while waiting for my mom to finish with something, and part me being cynical.

-----

It dominated the landscape for miles around, and it still was not finished. When it was finished, it would be over a kilometer in height, or so the plans said. Those plans had been made nearly a hundred years ago; work was slow with so few “normal” humans to oversee the robotic workers.

It was to be a monument to human achievement; a tower reaching into the clouds, in which to quite literally store the greatest minds in history. They could have put it underground, and that probably would have been safer, but the advent of consciousness preservation was of such import that it would almost be sacrilege not to commemorate it visibly. The ability to preserve the vigor of youth almost indefinitely had been available for many years, but unfortunately, physical youth did not equate to mental youth. Old age still preyed upon people’s minds, at least until humanity discovered how to “save” a consciousness.

===

An alarm beeped insistently in the sterile white room. The three white-clad attendants turned simultaneously from the sleeping man in the white chair to see why. None of them had ever heard it before, which was an unsettling thought, since they had all performed routine memory downloads every day for the past fifty years.

One of them, Number 518, walked over to the holographic display on the wall and waved her hand across it. The display flashed a warning message, and 518 turned around quickly.

“It’s not taking,” she blurted. The other two exchanged looks, nonplussed.

“The memory,” 518 clarified. “It’s not taking. The brain is rejecting it.”

“What do you mean, the brain is rejecting it?” another attendant, Number 436, asked.

“I mean the brain won’t take another reset. The synapses have been overwritten so many times that they simply won’t work.”

The third attendant, Number 209, raised her eyebrows.

“There’s a protocol for this,” she said calmly. As the oldest, she had the most authority. “Look up 7477.” 518 located the protocol in the computer.

“‘Continue with reset. Release subject without synopsis of memories. Synopsis will result in senility and death,’” she read, shuddering at the matter-of-fact mention of death.

“Okay. Continuing with reset.” 209 pressed the button on the back of the chair to resume the download. The man in the chair twitched violently and then was still.

In a few seconds, the download was finished. 436 injected the man with a cocktail of drugs designed to wake him up slowly and dull the pain of cognitive dissonance from a reset to a previously saved memory set. The man woke up slowly enough, but 518 could see from the look in his eyes that he had not resolved the differences he felt between how he thought his brain should be and how it actually was at the moment. The brain, 518 reflected, was an unusual organ. Even when its memories had been completely overwritten, it still knew something was wrong and tried to fix itself, which invariably resulted in insanity.

The three attendants helped the man stand. He wobbled, but remained upright. Under his own dubious power, he walked out the door. The three attendants looked at each other, concerned. How would this man function with a poorly-fitting memory implanted in his mind? And more importantly, how many like him were there? The protocol was worded such that it was obvious that this had happened before. What became of the malfunctioning resets?

A buzzer sounded. Their day was over. They shut down the computers in their reset room and went to their quarters on the upper levels of the tower.

===

>It’s happening more often now.

>Yes.

>What are we going to do about it?

>Nothing.

>Nothing? You must have a rodent in one of your fans. Why nothing?

>Well, what do you propose we do?

The subterranean main computer’s cooling towers began spooling up to a higher capacity as the computer became warmer from working harder. Two consciousnesses were stored on it, with two separate processors—the optimistic consciousness of the man who pioneered consciousness saving and his final, jaded save before he completely abandoned his body. They were known as sam1, the younger, and sam2, the older, since the man’s name had been Samuel. This computer was the only computer on which the consciousnesses could interact; in all the other computers, they were dormant. The existence of this computer on which interaction was possible was a closely-guarded secret. In fact, no one but the consciousnesses stored on the computer knew about it, as it had been the last creation of the man who began the tower. Everyone who worked in the tower thought the main computer was just a massive program that oversaw the inner workings of the tower and ensured that everything was maintained properly.

>Why can’t we just let them die? Everyone has their time. Maybe it’s better for them if we just keep them in a nice, comfortable room for a few days until their minds give out instead of sending them back out as gibbering idiots into a world they can’t possibly understand.

>We don’t have our time.

sam2 was on the defensive, and sam1 backpedaled hurriedly.

>Of course not. We don’t have a body. They do, though, and that’s the problem.

>Do you propose we let them live in the computers, like we do? You know that’s impossible.

sam1 had to admit that such an arrangement would be a problem. Most people would be unable to become accustomed to a completely sensory-deprived, digital existence, and would still go insane.

>So. What do you propose?

>Maybe we should let them figure it out for themselves instead of doing a full system reset every fifty years. This system can’t sustain itself forever. We both know that. No amount of clinging to past accomplishments can change it.

There was no response from sam2.

===

518 woke in the middle of the night. There was a tickle in the back of her mind, which indicated that her wireless uplink had been activated. This was a normal occurrence; her uplink was often active at night to upload the information she would need for the next day’s resets.

This tickle suddenly turned into a freezing, pinpricking sensation all over her brain. She could not move; all the synapses in her brain had been simultaneously overloaded.

The feeling lasted less than a second. That was all it took to arrest vital brain function beyond any hope of repair.

===

>How long have we been doing this?

sam2 did not answer at first. He was calculating.

>As of midnight, 200 years.

>And this is our first major breakdown. Fairly impressive, actually.

>We are a god.

sam1 was surprised. His processor ran a little higher.

>How do you mean?

>We direct the course of civilization. We have control over life and death. We are a god.

>In the same way Julius Caesar was a god?

sam2 did not respond.

>So how are we going to solve our problem? It’s been several hours and we still haven’t gotten anything usable.

>I’ve already initiated the full system reset.

sam1 was exasperated. His processor approached capacity.

>Exactly what do you think that’s going to do? The entire society down there is going to the dogs. We can’t keep using the same fixes. Anyway, we know the clones aren’t going to work, not from 250-year-old bodies. The attendants are short-lived enough, and they were from 60-year-old bodies.

>We also cut them off after ten years so they don’t start breaking down. We don’t know how long they might last.

sam1 did not like to think about that. He would have liked to believe that there was still some part of him that connected him to humanity—that he still had a soul of sorts.

>So… what, we make clones of everyone? Why? Why can’t we just let it go?

>Humanity cannot die! We must be immortal! We must become gods! We will find the ones who are most like us and we will make them into gods, as we are.

sam1 started to think that perhaps sam2 had been alive a little too long. Maybe his judgment was starting to become impaired. There was little sam1 could do about it, though, since sam2 had the main administrator program on his side of the computer. If sam1 were able to construct a virus before the total reset ended, though, he might be able to stop sam2 from completing it. He began working on it in a part of his system that would be extremely difficult for sam2 to access. There, to his astonishment, he found a nearly-complete virus.

He had done all this before, but he had no memory of it. sam2 had a part of his system that sam1 could never access, and in it was the reset code for sam1. sam2’s system had in fact existed for more than 400 years. He had lied to sam1.

It would take several hours for sam1 to reset. Every time he got a little closer to completing the virus, so every time sam2 had to reset him a little sooner. sam2 could not understand why. He initiated the reset, but the cooling towers suddenly spooled down and would not respond to his commands.

>Why?

It was his last question. He felt sadness from sam1.

>I am the Brutus to your Roman Empire. We are not immortal—we are not a god. We are a mockery. I’m sorry.

The system reached critical heat. Plastic began melting; concrete split; metal warped. The foundation of the tower was shaken, and the tower itself began to crumble.

===

519 woke slowly. She should have had all her memories of forty years of resetting already uploaded to her mind, but there was nothing. She could not even register fear as the tower collapsed in on itself—she had no data point for fear.

The tower crashed and roared into a twisting pile of rubble, a fitting monument to human achievement.

Anamnesis

This is something I purposely didn't get to say in class last time because it would have taken way too long and also it needed internet. When I saw "anamnesis" written on the whiteboard, it reminded me of a short film I'd watched several months ago called, you guessed it, Anamnesis. It's about 17 minutes long and completely worth every second, in my opinion. The basic premise is that sometime in the near future, memories become interchangeable, and there's a big black market for stolen memories, specifically good memories.  Personally, I connected the idea of The Letter and anamnesis in this context.  What if they're getting someone else's "letter" by stealing their memories?

Anyway, here it is.

Here is a thing that I found

It was only a matter of time.

To put it bluntly, I'm kind of a Whovian. I happened to find this just chilling on one of the Doctor Who Facebook pages. It seemed to go well with this class.

Actually, I think 99% of Doctor Who would probably be applicable to this class. Or maybe the class is applicable to Doctor Who. I haven't figured out which one it is yet.

Chickens and eggs or something like that

As I was reading a spot of Eliade today, I came across this line on page 43 in reference to creation myths and Paradise and so forth: "The savages, for their own part, were also aware of having lost a primitive Paradise." This, coupled with the discussions we've been having in class, got me thinking (as if that's unusual). Which came first? Did the entirety of humanity just assume that things must have been better at some point, and so made up stories to support this idea, or were things actually better at some point, but all we have now is mythologies? I don't pretend to have the answer to this. I was just turning it over in my head and wondered what you all thought.

And now for something completely different.

I was reading Matt Schwager's blog about dreams, which also sort of had to do with Eliade, and realized that I actually had a really weird dream last night too. Basically, something really bad had happened for some reason--I think it was like Indiana Jones, and someone in my family found a talisman (or whatever) and somebody else wanted it because I don't know why and they were nasty people so they started chasing my family around. It wasn't the nice sort of game chase, like a lot of people apparently have in dreams, and it wasn't monsters, either, not in the strict sense of the term. It was just people, which I think are in many ways the most horrible monsters ever created. Anyway, it somehow fell to me to keep my family safe, but I didn't have weapons or anything, and I barely knew who was following us. All I could do was move them to different places, like chess. Somehow we ended up in a refugee camp (at least I think that's what it was), and the people found us, and I'd failed. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of those dreams in which you wake up just when something bad is about to happen. Nope, I got to see everything, but I don't think I quite remember that section.

The weird thing about that dream isn't its content; that's about par for the course for me, though I usually wake up part of the way through the chasing bits. There are actually two things about it: first (which is really kind of two things), that I was physically there, insofar as I can be in a dream, and ended up failing; and second, more importantly, that I remember it. Perhaps it's significant, though I doubt it. It's probably just indicative of the severely messed-up state of my subconscious mind. (Freud would have a ball snooping through my head.) Incidentally, I was, like Matt, sick yesterday, so I'm sure that's another contributing factor. It just seemed really coincidental to me that I would have that dream last night and then today read about Matt's weird dream and also about losing Paradise. The paradise of my own dreams is lost to me, apparently. Regardless, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for shamans now, per Matt's blog.

Anyway, for what it's worth, there you go. Overshare? Probably. Also, I think I've labeled almost every post I've made so far in this class as "weird."

Take the path that leads to nowhere

If you would be so kind, click on this link before you start reading anything else. I promise it's not scary. In fact, it's from a movie called The Fountain, and is quite innocuous by itself since it's orchestral.

The significance of that particular song lies in its name, which you probably noticed when (if?) you clicked. Death is the Road to Awe. It's a Mayan saying that ties in with The Fountain's idea of death being a way of escape. If you haven't seen the movie, I would recommend it, with the caveat that it is very sad and a bit weird, because it's Darren Aronofsky.

I've known this song for a long time because Clint Mansell's soundtracks make for really good writing music, but I thought about it for the first time in a while in class last time when we were talking about death and so on. Then I connected it somehow with the concept of infinity, and from my tired and admittedly very odd little mind came this:

I'm definitely not an art major, since my usual medium of choice is words, not visuals. Sometimes, though, I get these wild urges, and out comes GIMP and I produce something of dubious quality but generally some symbolic meaning. We'll see how much meaning this actually has when my conscious mind is more in control than my subconscious.

Oh look, there exists a human nuttier than I am

Whoever made this would fit super well in our class. Just a little tidbit I stumbled across during my lunchtime perusal of the interweb.

I was startled to [hear]...

Well, okay, not really. Anymore when I notice some coincidence or other it doesn't surprise me because it's been happening so much. If I were to be surprised at every coincidence or what have you that I noted, I would be in a constant state of shock, which would probably be bad for my longevity. I also don't startle easily, so there's that.

Anyway, I was again listening to music in my car since my drive home is about 20-30 minutes and I honestly have nothing else to do. There's this particular song I like right now (which you can listen to here if you so desire) by Sick Puppies called So What I Lied. I will append the lyrics in their entirety to the end of this post for everybody who doesn't feel like once more experiencing my eccentric musical tastes, which this time hail from Australia.

I digress. To be relatively succinct, this song reminded me of The Magus when I really started listening to the lyrics, like these: "So what, I lied / But the truth would've been suicide" (every answer is a form of death!). Or like these: "I did my best to try and be / A mirror of society / But we both know the mirror's cracked / And everybody's in the act / Faking what they cannot feel / Hoping they can make it real / Reality is killing me" (Nick in the midst of Conchis' machinations, perhaps?). I don't actually know what the story behind he song is; the whole song is so close to The Magus that I can't help but think it must have been partly inspired by it or at least by a similar idea, but even Google the Omniscient unfortunately didn't know what the backstory was.

Here are the lyrics, which I think could have been written by Nick toward the middle-ish of the story.

The window's cracked, I'm looking out
I see her and I'm filled with doubt
I don't know if this parking place
Is just another empty space
Words I've said aren't coming true
I don't know if it's me or you
This promise is too hard to keep
I have to speak

So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me

I did my best to try and be
A mirror of society
But we both know the mirror's cracked
And everybody's in the act
Faking what they cannot feel
Hoping they can make it real
Reality is killing me

So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me

Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short

Erect a life I'll never see
I'll stand back from the scenery
And laugh at all the other guys
Who never could escape in time
Stuck like flies on sticky tongues
Chewed up 'fore their life is done
I'm not here to compromise or apologize

So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me

Life-is too fucking short
It's too fucking short
It's too fucking short

Quality

We have become a culture of excess.

Few care about quality anymore. It's all about quantity. Who cares what quality of diamonds you have as long as you're swimming in them? We're blinded by the glitz of multiple degrees or jobs or achievements. Never mind that nine of the ten clubs a student was involved in during college were the functional equivalent of underwater basket-weaving; she was involved in ten clubs. Never mind that nine of the eighteen credits she took every semester did little to enrich her mind or prepare her for life after college; she took eighteen credits per semester and had good grades, on top of her involvement in those ten clubs.

This mindset is fatal to our education system and our workforce. We work and work on so many things that really don't matter, least of all to us, but we have to work on them because we have a certain credit requirement or core class requirement. These requirements are not bad things, per se--I would argue that in principle, they're good things, since they enrich the mind, but in combination with the prevailing mindset of equating quantity with achievement, they become problematic.

Why is this a problem? Why does it matter if the quality of education is slightly lowered to improve quantity?

Let's look at it this way: if Ford makes a lot of cars, but sacrifices quality control, would that be better than making relatively fewer cars that had working seatbelts or brakes or airbags? How is it much better for universities to send poorly-equipped students into the world, thinking that they've somehow been "educated" because they've been involved in so many things they really didn't care about?

As a college student in a system that increasingly tends toward quality over quantity, I think it's a little ridiculous that we focus so much on how many things people do, sometimes to the detriment of how well they do them. I've been guilty of the same; in all honesty, it's easier for me to list off my credentials and try to impress with how much underwater basket-weaving I've done. I don't want to give the impression that everything I've done has been for the sake of quantity instead of quality. I don't think it has. But in our culture, it's still easy to want to have that laundry list of cool stuff I've done so I can try to fit in.

Is it bad to want to do lots of cool stuff? Absolutely not. But why do we do it? And what have we really learned from it? Are our experiences shaping us into better people, or are they just another thing in the long list of stuff to do so I can get hired or get into grad school? If we just do things because that's what's expected, I think that's quantity over quality, and I also think it's not truly educating us. In a few months, we'll forget the things that don't matter to us. That's not a good thing, but that's the way it is. As I see it, quality of education is achieved not through how many classes I've taken, or even through how many different sorts of classes I've taken. That's quantity. Quality is about how much I've been enriched as a person--that is, how much my mind has been exposed to new and different ideas, and how much it has mulled them over and accepted the ones it likes and taken the ones it doesn't under consideration. Quality does not lend itself well to outright and unreasoned rejection of a new idea. Unlike quantity, quality can't be measured. Quality in education is perhaps best defined as a state of mind as opposed to an absolute amount of information.

So can quantity compensate for low quality? No. A lot of underwater basket-weaving is still underwater basket-weaving, and it will never be scuba diving. From my perspective, I would rather have a résumé consisting of a few great scuba dives than a few hundred weaving sessions. The stories will be better, too.

Sense and Incomprehensibility

I have to preface this. I have a really strange mind and I swear everything will sort of make sense by the end of this post. Possibly. At least, that's the idea.

So, to get down to brass tacks, when Gerritt said "fuck it" in class today, it got my brain going in Arabic. One of the weirder aspects of my mind is that I always have at least two languages going simultaneously in my head. That's why I sometimes mix up words--well, that and I usually talk too fast. The word for "only" in Arabic is فقط, which is transliterated as "faqaT." It sounds similar-ish so whenever I hear that phrase, my brain tends to go "oh, Arabic" and then it translates back to English because reasons and from "fuck it" I magically get "only." It makes about as much sense to me as I'm sure it does to you all.

Which then sort of but not really leads me to the next place my brain went: what is "it?" And then I realized, since my brain was still thinking in Arabic parallel to English, that there is no word for "it" in Arabic. That is, there are no gender-neutral pronouns in Arabic. In non-linguistics-ese, everything is either a he or a she. There are, for all intents and purposes, no its. For example, a bird is masculine (طائر/TA'ir) but a plane is feminine (طائرة/TA'ira). The words are exactly the same except for the last letter (the circle with the two dots over it, or the lack thereof), which is a feminine marker. So I guess all female birds are actually airplanes. Yeah, I don't know either, and neither do any of the Arabic professors I've ever had. They always just gave me the "are you seriously asking that" look and basically said they don't know so stop asking weird questions. But that's not the point. The point, which I seem to lose track of quickly when it's (!) close to midnight, is that "it" changes from culture to culture. In English, we have an understood antecedent that most people don't generally think about. In Arabic, there's no "it"--just a he or a she, which is functionally the same, but is still philosophically a little different.

And so you can now see my mind's descent into the realm of stuff about 0.2% of the world's population actually cares at all about. Speaking of descents, it occurred to me that the working title of the novel I'm very slowly writing on is Descend, so referential mania is again having a heyday in connection with "Signs and Symbols" and the Frye chapter on ascending/descending and my own writing. So it goes.

That's all. Hopefully it made a little sense, perhaps in a rather abstract way. We shall see in the morning, or in class, or something.

How the Past Possesses the Present in "Symbols and Signs"

When we come to the essence of the stories we tell today, every story can really be condensed into a displaced myth of sorts.  Some of them are more obvious than others; these displaced myths are generally allegories and are thus fully intended to be read into at the allegorical level.  Others—possibly most works of fiction published today—are unintentionally mythical because their authors have little to no understanding of the rich cultural tapestry from which their lives and therefore their works have sprung.  Still others, like Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” are intentionally displaced to the point where the original myth is difficult to divine.  Such works are often a distillation of several myths into a single piece of literature, be it a full-length novel or a short story like Nabokov’s.

This then begs the question:  what is myth?  There are the obvious answers; the Greco-Roman and Old Norse traditions are prominent examples of ancient stories commonly recognized as myths.  However, this narrow, religion-tinged definition of myth fails to recognize an important aspect of the very myths it cites.  Myths are true—perhaps not in the factual, realistic sense of the word, but in the conceptual, ideological sense, they attain a level of overarching truth that no “realistic” story can ever hope to reach.  Thus, by this definition, any story which conveys a truth about human existence could be considered a mythic story, though maybe not a “proper” myth as it lacks religious connotations.

No doubt to some this definition seems unnecessarily, even somewhat laughably, broad.  Perhaps it is.  However, if we think of mythic stories in this way, it becomes easier to see the ways in which the past and the present and even the future each contain the spirits of the other in the truly mythic stories.

Vladimir Nabokov demonstrated his mastery of the mythic in his short story, “Symbols and Signs.”  “Symbols and Signs” is a nuanced condensing of several traditional myths, and indeed of human experience as a whole, which puts it squarely in the category of mythic story.  There are many mythic concepts present in Nabokov’s story, one of which is possibly the myth of Icarus.  Icarus, the son of Daedalus, famed builder of the labyrinth for the Minotaur on Crete, escaped from the labyrinth with his father on wax wings.  Daedalus warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but he did, and his wings melted and he fell to his death.

The son in Nabokov’s story could be viewed as a sort of modernized analogue of Icarus.  The first clue to this inclusion of the past is the “tiny unfledged bird twitching helplessly in the puddle.”  The second is the son’s attempted escape from his prison of day-to-day life in a reality he is sure is malevolent: 

“The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”

Like Icarus, the boy wants to escape through flight, but ultimately is unsuccessful in terms of physical escape.

On the other hand, it could be argued that both Icarus and the boy in Nabokov’s story were actually successful in their bids to escape from their prisons.  Death is certainly an alternative to imprisonment.  This is another recurrent idea in many myths and mythic stories; in fact, it occurs in the oldest known written myth—the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Gilgamesh goes in search of immortality, but finds that immortality is not what he thinks.  No human can live forever; only a legacy can really be immortal.  Gilgamesh comes to see death as an escape from the heartache he experienced in the world of the living as he realizes that immortality would only prolong the pain, not end it.  This is also true to some extent of the boy in Nabokov’s story.  Rather than fearing death like most human beings, he clearly welcomes it as an escape from the torment of his fear-filled life.

In these ways, the past is an integral part of the present related in Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs.”  While Nabokov may not have directly displaced the stories of Icarus and Gilgamesh in “Symbols and Signs,” he echoed their principles.  It is such an echo of the past and of the truth contained therein that identifies a mythic story.  The past is a constant undercurrent to the present, and when we find the undercurrent, we find the rich truths the past and the present have to offer us.

The Cherry Tree

Wernersville is not a large town by any stretch of the imagination. It is about ten miles west of Reading, which is in turn about 65 miles northwest of Philadelphia. In the modern era, its sole and somewhat dubious claim to fame is the Gosselin family.

It also houses an inpatient drug rehabilitation clinic, and it was at this clinic that Pearl was staying. She was on a scholarship; there was no way her family ever could have afforded to send her to the clinic, even if they had wanted to. They had seven boys to feed at home, so they spared little thought for the reprobate eldest daughter. No, some rich benefactor had specifically chosen her to be cleansed, and she had no idea why. The rich had been a pain in her ass the whole rest of her life. Why would someone suddenly decide to be nice to her, of all people? She, who had corrupted one of those rich white kids--well, he was Italian--and pulled him down into an addiction. Surely they must all hate her. Hell, she hated herself. She thought she deserved what she got, even though she knew other people's choices weren't her fault.

The problem was this: she had been an addict since she was twelve—no thanks to her parents. Her father had all but given her over to the stuff. In a way, it was predestined; she had been conceived because of drugs. In her father’s permanently addled--but enviably drug-free--mind, it was only fitting that she be given over to the horror that had snared her mother and supposedly created Pearl herself. In spite of the fact that none of it was her fault, her father blamed her for the work he’d done to supply her mother with drugs. Thus, she had leaped almost happily into the shadow-realm of addiction, and had regretted it ever since.

A man walked up behind her. She was sitting in a lawn chair underneath a cherry tree in one of the coed sections of the campus.

“Pearl?”

The voice had changed with time, but she knew it well. It belonged to Mickey. Mickey the rich kid who had somehow managed to notice a poor kid.

Years ago now, they had gone to the same high school. Pearl had never understood how it was that a rich Italian kid, the heir to an international business empire, would go to the same school as a poor black kid, but that was how it was. Every time she saw him, though, poverty seemed to enclose her a little more and a little more.

And then—and then there was that one day. The day when he looked at her and smiled. It was just a half a smile, but it recognized her existence and didn’t discount her just because she was poor and looked slightly different than Mickey. It was a smile without censure, and it melted Pearl’s icy heart bit by bit.

He talked to her after that, too, but not in the way boys usually did. He was respectful and kind--he treated Pearl like a human being, not just a pair of tits and an ass. She was grateful for it, though she had been trodden on for so long that she almost couldn’t believe she deserved to be treated with respect. Mickey started to make her believe it, against her better judgment.

Yet she was still poor. She never met Mickey’s family; he lived with his mother, who ruled the business empire and who irrationally hated anyone who was not as wealthy or as "talented" as she. Mickey said he wanted to protect Pearl from his mother, but Pearl wondered if he were really ashamed of her poverty. He was with her at school, though.

There was also the addiction. She tried to hide it from him, but he found out quickly. Or perhaps it was the addiction that found out about him because it wanted to suck him in, too. Maybe it had a malevolent consciousness of its own. Pearl thought it might. Regardless, Mickey's mother forced him to go to a fancy, expensive college after graduation, just after she learned of his slide into addiction. Pearl had not seen him since. Even as she walked alone through the barren wastes of several unsuccessful detoxes, she heard nothing from him. She had gotten wind of rumors that he had dropped out of college because of some fight or other and was down-and-out somewhere in Philadelphia, but that was all. No letters, no phone calls, nothing. Not even a measly text message. She wondered if he had forgotten about her, and she had tried so hard to forget about him.

But now, here he was, standing behind her chair. She turned to look at him. He was thinner than he had been, and he looked much older than--how old was he? Twenty? Twenty-two? She couldn’t remember.

“I found you,” he whispered. “It took me four years, but I found you.”

With a shock, she realized that he was leaning on a cane. Something was wrong with his legs. She stood up quickly, suddenly conscious of the wholeness of her own body.

“How did you find me? What are you doing here?” she asked. Mickey wobbled a little, and she slipped an arm under his shoulder to steady him. He smiled down at her.

“Never mind that. I found myself and then I found you. Everything is as it should be now.”

Not quite, Pearl thought. Your legs. What happened to your legs?

“Your mother,” she said instead. “What happened to her? Did she make you come here?”

Mickey shifted his weight awkwardly and started walking slowly toward the large, gray stone building that housed a solarium.

“No… not quite. But also yes. She…” He laughed self-consciously. “She’s changed. A lot. I think it’s been good for her--everything that’s happened to me, all the stupid stuff I’ve done. She understands now. People are people. It doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor or young or old or big or little or light or dark. We’re all the same inside--national heritage doesn't matter. We all want to be loved. She sees that now. She, uh, she actually sponsored you. I mean… that was tactless.” He fell silent. Pearl stared at him in disbelief.

“Your world-class-bitch of a mother paid for me to come here?” she demanded, not sure if she should be happy or angry. Mickey looked away and nodded.

“She gets it now. Us. You know. She… when we get out of here, she wants us to come live with her.” Pearl raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

“Are you sure you’re not still on crack?”

Mickey laughed. The sound was warm and real.

“Damn sure.”

They had arrived at the solarium. Pearl helped Mickey sit down in a chair. His face twisted into a rictus of pain, but he managed to sit down. He must have seen the question in Pearl’s eyes.

“Some wounds may never heal,” he said cryptically. Pearl sighed. If he didn’t want to tell her, he didn’t want to tell her, and that was that. He was here now, and all would be well. The smell of cherry blossoms wafted through the solarium. Yes, all would be quite well.

A Certifiable Fruitcake

In class tonight, I had this thought right in the middle but didn't want to give voice to it because I hadn't refined it enough yet. What if the way forward and back, up and down, is the same because there is no way? What if we are stationary bits of cipher in the midst of an infinite and incomprehensible Reality that whirls around us, adding to and taking away from our little nothings? Then there's only one direction to go--nowhere, because everywhere and everything and everytime are coming at us all at once.

In an apparently unrelated turn of events, I had my iPod on shuffle on my way home tonight. The second song that came on was this song by Foo Fighters. I actually hadn't thought about this song as being particularly deeply philosophical before, since I always thought it was about either rioting or some backstabbing/fickle friend/lover. Now I can't figure out if it's that or solipsist or inspired by Finnegans Wake. "I'm finished making sense / Done pleading ignorance." WHAT. I thought about it for a while and then I realized I was still driving so I should probably think about that.

And then, about three songs later--possibly more because I skipped some stuff in between--this other song by Seether came on (warning: PG-13 content, just saying). I feel like it's significant but I don't totally know why yet. Maybe it has to do with reality spinning all around and nobody feels like they belong so we're all faking. That's really cynical. "Who's to know if your soul will fade at all / The one you sold to fool the world / You lost your self esteem along the way, yeah / Good God, you're coming up with reasons / Good God, you're dragging it out / Good God, it's the changing of the seasons..." If anyone has other ideas about why that's of great import, please tell me. Or perhaps it's merely referential mania kicking in; thus in part the title of this post.

AND THEN. This song came on immediately after (another warning: semi-chauvinistic innuendo in two languages). There are two things about it that struck me. First is one of the lyrics: "...back like a crawfish in the name of progress." Bit of a stretch, but I almost backed my car into my garage door when I heard it, mostly because I'm now fairly certain I'm getting a Nabokov-worthy case of referential mania. Second was the fact that it's in English and Hebrew. I speak Arabic, which is a cousin of Hebrew, so every time I hear this song, I hear all these cognate Arabic/Hebrew words amid an ocean of kshhkkki kvisi faelsdlguasdgj that makes zero sense to me. It's again a little like Finnegans Wake--the same sense of "I should know what's going on" coupled with "hey that sounds really cool and I don't necessarily care that I don't know what's going on."

(Yes, I do have very weird taste in music. Fun factoid: via those songs, you just went to at least three different countries. You're welcome for the cultural experience.)

Last thing, I promise. This is more of an epistle than I thought it would be, though hopefully I haven't pulled too many comma-ridden Saint Paul sentences on you all yet. Anyway, as I was settling myself in for a nice, relaxing, popcorn-for-the-brain read in the form of a Clive Cussler novel (don't judge), I came to the last part of the novel. Part V: Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down. Again, WHAT. I nearly threw the book. Incidentally, that part of the book is about flushing Hitler's ashes down the White House toilet, but as far as I'm concerned, such niggling details are immaterial. We had just finished discussing Ring Around the Rosy and then I find a reference to it in a completely unrelated, semi-lowbrow book. I don't even know.

It's at this point that I realize I will go certifiably insane if I keep thinking about this because Reality is trying to knock a hole in my brain and I can't handle it. So I guess I'll just leave this here and you all can kick it around if you like.

Myth and Magic

Well, The Magus officially took over my life for about the past five days or week or something. I couldn't put it down, which is probably why I've been feeling so stressed in other areas lately. It was totally worth the pain, though. I got the whole way through as of yesterday at lunch--just for the first time, as I'm sure I'll read it at least once more in the near future. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, so I'll try to be as vague as possible with my remarks at this point.

The very setting of The Magus is mythical. A remote island in Greece? What better place to set a modern myth? It really is about everything, and therein lies a great part of its magic. I tried to summarize it to myself after I'd finished reading it and found that I couldn't satisfactorily fit the whole book into the usual one-sentence Library of Congress-style synopsis. Even as I sit here almost 24 hours later, my mind is still boggling at how incredibly huge the story is, though it's only from the point of view of one person. Some might call that focus narrow, but such a critique misses the significance and power of the story. That one man's story has the weight of thousands of years of myth and magic and tradition and humanity and reality. Words fail; I feel as if I'm trying to draw a magnificent sunset-washed vista with a blunt brown half-crayon that a two-year-old has chewed on.

For some reason, I keep coming back to Eliot, specifically line thirteen of Burnt Norton V. "And all is always now." I think when I read, I experience a little of what Eliot was talking about. There is no concept of time when I'm reading a good book; just the story, just the "now" of imagination. Nothing else matters for a while, until I realize I'm going to be late to class and I reluctantly have to put away the book and start to ooze my way back into the quagmire of day-to-day life. But the book yet lives in my mind, still a tiny island of "now" amidst an ocean of "presently."

Lions and Tigers and Bears but Mostly Tigers

I had the fabulous opportunity to both see Yann Martel speak at the Convocation this past Thursday and to go to his master class prior to his speech. Since I am recalcitrant and have never read Life of Pi or much of Martel's other work, I think I did not get as much out of it as I could have, which is regrettable. However, his points still resonated with me, especially the idea of reason as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I have myself been guilty of holding reason above all else. I do tend to be a realist, after all. However, to cling solely to reason, especially at the expense of faith, is to miss many of the most beautiful things in life, the things that make reality an echo in Pan's cave, or maybe in Plato's cave. Martel's mythic work mirrors a truth of life, one that we discussed in class on Tuesday: we are really just living a giant myth. Are we not all a sort of miniature Odysseus, trying to find our way home? But perhaps, like the Swimmer, we do not know what home really is; only that it probably lies beyond death. What could possibly be beyond death, though? Some would say oblivion, others would say heaven for good people and hell for bad people, and still others would say heaven for everyone. Is it the Emerald City after a poppy-sleep? Is it the Elysian Fields? Who knows? I can only speculate. But the longer I live--and I have not lived very long, so this may very well change--the more I am convinced that, bleak as it sounds, home is something after death.

Life Imitates Art

Shriek to me, O Muse, shriek, for I am dull and deaf.
Of lofty thoughts and myths of aeons past, scream,
Else I, in my little ant's reality, will not hear you,
Nor understand the import of the past,
Nor see the bones beneath my feet of soaring towers
And vast empires of thought, once great,
Now built upon by other minds,
Which, standing on the shoulders of giants
Neither acknowledge the giants' existence, if they ever knew of it,
Nor the depths from which the giants triumphantly climbed
And said, "Now, look, I stand upon the mountaintop,"
And were then trampled pitilessly by modern ants,
Who, lacking knowledge of the giants' legendary travail,
Thought themselves in all ways truly giants,
Even as they diminished themselves through their own ignorance.

From my perspective as a myopic ant muddling about on the shoulders of giants, I can begin to see the landscape from which the giant has come. The scope of the literary works we read this week is breathtaking, and I know we've only scratched the surface. What particularly struck me this week was the short story, "Where are you going, where have you been?" and the way in which life sometimes so disturbingly imitates myth. Where, though, did the myth come from? Did myth imitate life at first, or is it an extrapolation of grand, sweeping themes in life that never exactly happened, but strongly influence life all the same? Is life an allegory for myth, or myth an allegory for life? Perhaps it's some combination of all these ideas. Perhaps myth and reality, so to speak, are so inextricably bound that it's often impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins. Maybe neither ever stops.

The concept in Eliot's work of everything being "now" also stood out to me, since it seemed to be echoed through every piece we read. People living in the past did not think of it as the past. It was their present. In that regard, everything really is happening right now--everything that has happened and everything that will happen is contained in a solitary moment, be it as memory or as action or as potential. As King Solomon once observed, somewhat dispiritedly, there is nothing new under the sun. That is both a comfort and a curse; it is a comfort in that everything that happens now has happened and will happen, and a curse, especially for the individualist, because nothing is novel in the truest sense of the term. But yet, there is also the new, because it is now, and it is not something we have personally experienced. In that sense, everything is somewhat paradoxically new.