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.

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.

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.

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.

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.