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.

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

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.