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.