Books in Threes

In The Magus, when Nicholas first spends the night at Bourani, Conchis selects three works for him to read. A book of pictures of women, the bible, and ghost stories. These books reminded me of The Secular Scripture, where Frye speaks of truth, myth, and fable. The book of women is truth, the bible is myth, and the ghost stories are fable.

And here's an explanation of the last line.
http://www.fowlesbooks.com/ourjohn.htm

Coincidence? I think not.

I don't believe in coincidence. I think that coincidence, luck, serendipity (whatever you call it) is simply a way of trying to come up with an explanation for the unknown. Just as believing in a god explains away the unknowns of the beginning of the universe, believing in coincidence explains away the occurrences that repeat in our lives. There is no fate. There is only a series of decisions that people make that intersect occasionally. The present - coincidences - are nothing but an accumulation of the past - people's decisions-.

REVISION: Coincidence isn't something you can believe in. Luck and serendipity are what I'm referring to. Coincidence is just two similar occurrences and a component of luck and serendipity.

Past Possesses Present

            Some humans try to add helpings of reason and fate to their lives. The reality is that the only true purpose in life is to follow the instincts that evolution has honed over millions of years. To survive and reproduce. We can add in chimeric meaning, but in reality life only exists in order to create more life. 

            In the night sea journey, the first half of how the past possesses the present in that these instincts are what drive the main purpose of these sperm’s lives (the second half of this possession of the present comes in the form of the sperm’s heroic journey. It’s a journey that is repeated throughout the myths, legend and fables of every culture, and also repeated throughout our own lives). They have thoughts of other purposes and in changing fate, but in the end, instincts from the past beat out all other options of the present. The “something beyond consciousness” that the sperm speaks of is this primal urge to do whatever it takes to reproduce, to pass millions of years of information on to the next generation. The success of a species is dependent on learning from the past, both genetically and mentally as well.

            Heritage and tradition are sort of the condensed version of genetic evolution. Over millions of years, organisms have changed as mutations occur in their DNA and the most successful change proliferates. This works the same with traditions as well. Over thousands of years, the traditions of humans have morphed as more successful and popular changes occur and are incorporated into the culture.

            However, I think that the traditions of society have recently started regressing instead of progressing. People spend so much time on technology that they’ve lost integral communication skills and the ability to be mentally and physically at peace without distraction. We’ve lost an appreciation for family. We’ve become self centered and greedy. These mutations to the genome of tradition are radical. The addition of technology could be a paradigm shift of our heritage to greater success, or it could be the beginning of the slow decline of tradition.

            Either way, we’ve stopped paying attention to the past. We still carry the physical instincts of our species, but our heritage is slipping away. The genome of tradition is eroding and we need to fix that in order to keep diversity of culture alive. 

           

Question.

Isn't the "present" just an interpretation? In the tiny amount of time it takes for sensory information to get to us, travel our nerves, and be processed, the real present is something new. It's like when you close your eyes and listen to a jet that has broken the sound barrier, you're hearing and envisioning it in one place, but it's truly in an entirely different place. Or our images from space: the farthest galaxy is 13.3 billion light years away, that means the light we're seeing originates from only 400 million years after the big bang. Are we technically eternally living in the past, and the true present actually belongs in the future?

Modern Fairy Tale

“Do you think that tartan or stripes would bring out the softer grass plantings better Davy?” Dad narrowed his eyes and pondered the merits of mowing patterns as I rolled my eyes and absentmindedly picked a rhododendron leaf to pieces.
“I think I’ll go with stripes,” Dad finally decided, striding over to the garden shed. I trailed after him, twirling some sort of lawn torture device, made for viciously uprooting young dandelions. Dad emerged from the depths of the shed pushing a glossy behemoth of a lawn mower. I’m positive he polishes it at night.
“Peeeeterrrrrrr,” my Mom posed on the porch in the latest of her matching tennis outfits.
“There’s a tropical storm warning dear,” she drawled, “come inside and watch the news.”
“Christine, you know we have a big competition coming up next weekend, I really can’t let this lawn go another hour without a mow or it will upset the nitrate balance,” my Dad replied. My mom spun back into the house, leaving us alone again.
“Dad, we should at least go get some batteries,” I pleaded. “In the last big storm the power went out.”
“Davy, look across the street there,” my dad patronized. “George Kinney has been up since six watering and pruning for the Bridlington’s Best Kept Lawn Competition. And glance down the block my boy, Tristan Michelson has obviously been at it all night. But don’t worry Davy, I think we’ve got first place lined up this year” he asserted.


A few hours later I was driven inside by the cool wind that had picked up, pushed ahead of the stout cirrus clouds stacked up on the horizon. I flopped down on the suede couch, flicked on the television, and was assaulted by a blonde news anchor declaring,
“The tropical storm warning for the southern coast issued earlier today has been upgraded to a Category Three hurricane, homeowners are encouraged to move to higher ground and all houses within a half mile of the coastline are under mandatory evacuation.” I leapt up from the couch as if I had been caught with muddy shoes on and charged outside.
“DAD, it’s classified as a hurricane now.” Dad glanced at me exasperatedly.
“Davy, George and Tristan are both still working up their lawns, I’ll leave my yard when they do,” he proclaimed and proceeded to carefully edge his rosebushes.


The clouds seemed to be streaking by faster with every hour that passed. Short squalls intermittently passed through, drenching both my father and the two stubbornly diligent neighbors in their respective yards. Finally my Mom marched out onto the lawn and threatened to dull every mower blade my Dad owned unless he drove and picked up supplies for the storm. He relented, but I could see him glaring at the Kinney’s and Michelson’s toiling away in their yards as he tore past in our suburban. Dad returned lugging a portable generator behind him.
“Got the last one Christine, almost had to fight a man for it, but I flicked him a twenty and that did the job instead,” he announced and promptly set it up.


Looking out the window, the murky clouds seem to press low upon the town, smothering light but letting the air currents howl through the streets. The wind rips the weaker branches off trees and sends them soaring through the air. Someone must have left their trashcan out and it reels drunkenly through the middle of the street, accumulating dents as it tumbles. Dad strides around the house fastening the storm windows and muttering under his breath about being so crudely and publicly wrenched from his work while both the Kinney’s and Michelson’s were watching.


Our standard poodle, Admiral, paces in the living room in front of the flatscreen that flickers with a miniature version of the storm packaged neatly next to the anchor on the nightly NESN news. The wind slams into the roof of our house and clatters down the chimney like an unwelcome Mr. Claus. Faintly above the raging storm I can hear a desperate knocking on the door. Dad goes to answer it and returns with all four Kinney’s wrapped in drenched clothing. They look somewhat abashed at showing up at our door unannounced. George Kinney clears his throat and asks if we wouldn’t mind some company, as their power went out and the pipes in their ceiling seem to have broken. My Mom accepts immediately and bustles off to the kitchen to put water on for tea.


The rain is driven completely sideways now, I step outside onto the porch and am nearly bowled over by the sheer force of the wind. Cold bullets of rain lash my face, the storm sucks at my jacket, and the wind keeps stealing my breath before I can get it into my lungs. Across the street at the Michelson’s, movement catches my eye. The top third of their stately maple tree - the sole reason for their win at the yard competition last year according to Dad - snaps off and crunches into the roof of their house, ripping down telephone lines during its final plunge. A few seconds later the entire Michelson family jumps through their front door, staggering as the wind and rain attempts to drive them into their carefully groomed hedge. They forge the foaming Ganges river that the street has become and battle their way up to our house.


Several cups of tea and hours go by, and Dad is looking smug at being the man in charge of the whole block’s welfare. It eventually grows silent and humid, all three families cautiously pile through the front door. The looming clouds are stacked high and the sunlight bounces down through a the hollow center of the hurricane, illuminating the destruction wreaked on our street. The Kinney’s hedge has been stripped of leaves and it seems as though half the shingles from their roof have been entangled in the naked twisting branches. The Michelson’s have a huge splinter of a tree impaled through their roof of their drawing room. Somehow our house survived the storm, however damply. The lawn is a mess of mud and debris, but somehow I don't think the yard is Dad's priority for once. 

Testament Handouts

I am now the proud owner of my first core religious text. An old man offered me a new testament on my walk to school today and although I didn't take a handful, I did accept one of the little books. It's well written I'd say, but I still don't understand why someone would base their existence and purpose and actions upon a slightly sodden work of fiction.

Cycles

In the four quartets I really focused in on all the cycles that are mentioned in these poems. Also, does the future and what could have been in the past hold equal merit???

Burnt Norton, the cycle of air: "time future contained in time past" "both the new world and the old" "enchainment of past and future" "whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time" "Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness" "that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there" "The detail of the pattern is movement"
I think that this first poem just introduces the reader to the concept of this cyclical time in which the past and future are in shifting arrangement.

East Coker, the cycle of earth: "Houses rise and fall" "Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf Houses live and die" "In the beginning is my end" "Round and round the fire" "The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts" "Eating and drinking. Dung and death. Dawn points, and another day""constellated wars Scorpion fights against the Sun Until the Sun and Moon go down Comets weep and Leonids fly" "They all go into the dark" "So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing" "death and birth" "You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again, Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not" "to be restored, our sickness must grow worse" "In my end is my beginning" 
I think that this next poem is introducing specific examples of this cyclic nature of things by giving examples of things in our lives that the general population doesn't really ever think about specifically but are well known and understood. In this, TS Eliot works his idea of cyclical time into your own thoughts.

Dry Salvages, the cycle of air: "waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom" "time is never ending" "many generations" "Time the destroyer is time the preserver" "Here the past and the future Are conquered, and reconciled" 
I think that in this poem TS Eliot focuses on how people can specifically interact with this cyclical time. Throughout these poems he has a theme of certain moments in time that move neither forward nor backward, this poem contains these interactions.

Little Gidding, the cycle of fire: "melting and freezing" "If you came this way Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or season, It would always be the same" "Never and always" "water and fire" "What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from" "An easy commerce of the old and the new" "Every phrase and every sentence is and end and a beginning" "We are born with the dead" "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" "When the last of the earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning" 
I think that this poem is suggesting to readers that they need to contemplate less on this introduced cyclical time and actually go and experience it. 

Taking Flight

The most accepted analysis of Nabakov's short story is that in ensnares the reader in a futile hunt to understand each of the "signs and symbols" appearing in his story. In doing this, the reader essentially has a milder and more temporary version of referential mania. I disagree. 

I think there are themes that run through this story that have more meaning than the superficial plot. I focused in on the bird/flying theme and of death...

-son's attempted suicide, ‘tear a hole in this world and escape’, thwarted by someone who thought he was "learning to fly"

 -unfledged bird dying on the ground

-son used to draw birds with human hands and feet

 -the father states ‘I can’t sleep because I am dying’

I think that the idea of flying is the idea of escaping both yourself and the confines of society. Another escape from both of these is death. The fledgling bird is just like the son, trying to escape the confines of its nest only to plummet to the ground. 

Also this.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15962_the-gruesome-origins-5-popular-fairy-tales.html

Finnegan

Though the sentences flow and you can skip through the words you know to find the basic meaning, I feel as if its more like reading a foreign language you barely know rather than English. I feel like underneath the basic story there are these intricate weavings of connotation that I cannot even begin to understand because I get distracted by trying to figure out the words themselves.

“The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words…”

Which basically means he wrote this book in a language that he invented comprising of proper English, words that are working toward being assimilated into mainstream English, multiple foreign languages, and words combined to make new ones, all arranged in elaborate puns.

Here’s a website where they attempt to create a sort of glossary, but in fact end up rewriting the book in the footnotes.

http://www.finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm

I figure that if you publish a book, your goal is to have it read by a lot of people. I can’t quite figure out why Joyce would make his book so incomprehensible.

I found another website that takes a much different approach toward comprehension too.

http://www.gadflymagazine.com/a-philosophical-framework-for-understanding-finnegans-wake/

I started out thinking that it's probably better to just look at the basic plot and not worry about understanding every pun, but as my english teacher told us back in high school (after warning us about the perils of trying to read this book) "he took seventeen years to write it, so you'd better take at least that long to read it". 

Yann Martel

I chose to attend the master class with Yann Martel in addition to the convocation, which can I add, was WAY better than Condoleezza Rice last year. An illusionist with a tiger AND the celebrated author Yann Martel, that blows away last years politician/professor who helped to falsely convince America that Iraq had WMDs.  I was stunned when ended his speech with "READ, because it will make you fragile." I'm still trying to figure out what he meant...  

Here's what I picked up from the master class...

"Faith is an interpretation of the facts of life" which nicely contradicts our class discussion on "life is an imitation of myth." I personally think it's a chicken and egg conundrum, we base our lives on these myths, but these myths have stemmed from our lives.

Empathy isn't necessary in creating art, "art is bearing witness", but empathy would be hard to live without in day-to-day life.

The abandonment of reason is necessary to avoid being creatively drained, "stop making sense and be the better for it." "It's easy to be reasonable" but I think more difficult to abandon it.

No contemporary writers for adults writes about animals or religion anymore, "what's childish about animals?" Mr. Martel added. Jack London and Kafka had no trouble creating phenomenal literature on the central idea on animals. And no one even touches religion, if they happen to brush against it they immediately recoil.

Author recommendation from Yann Martel: J.M. Coetzee

I'm still stoked on the tiger...

Bozeman Daily Chronicle 

Misreadings

33 19 17

The numbers don't quite add up... Apparently Oates refuses to give a meaning to these numbers, so here are what two readers (or misreaders I should say) have come up with.

"Actually you guys are all half right. we did a 3 day critical analysis of this piece. You're right that the bible verse is Judges 19:17 which has the title of the book [[[And when he had lifted up his eyes, he saw a wayfaring man in the street of the city: and the old man said, "Whither goest thou? and whence comest thou?"]]] but the crazy math thing to equal 666 is totally wrong. He is the devil though because of the following clues:
1. ARNOLD FRIEND: they constantly listed to Rock and Roll. Take out the two R's is ARNOLD FRIEND and you get AN OLD FIEND. The oldest fiend through time has been the devil.
2. A myth states that the devil is not alowed to enter a house un-invited. Hense the reason he never enters.
3. Also, it is believed that the devil has hooves for feet which is why his feel were at odd angles and he kept tripping.
4. He was also able to know about her family that way and lure her to him"

or more chimerically...

"33 is the age of Christ at crucifixion. The missing number in the "17, 19" sequence is, obviously 18. As was previously noted the 18th letter of the alphabet is "R" and striking the "R's" from Arnold Friend yields "An Old Fiend,". Don't just add 33+17+19=69, that gets you half-way home. (And suggests a more sexually mutually consensual act). Add 10x(33+17+19) which yields 690. Now subtract the sum of the digits (3+3+1+7+1+9) to derive "24." Subtract that 24 from the previously known 690 and you get "666" -- the "sign" of the Devil. These can be seen as arbitrary moves involving "18" and the letter "R," but for this: in the time of Constantine, he converted to Christianity after believing his success was from God. To "baptize" his troops before an important battle he had them paint the letter of Christ (P) on their shields and marched them through a river. That letter in classical Greek and old Roman (the languages known to Constantine) occupied the 18th place in the alphabet. But as the alphabet changed slightly "P" moved back 2 places and was replaced with "R," which is not an arbitrary act: you are striking Christ from the story."

Obviously some people get carried away, but that is entirely understandable. Take a look at our society. Approximately 80% of Americans base their lives around the interpretations other people have made of several works of literature. People have been twisting the words of the bible or the quran or the testaments for hundreds of years. They disregard the context that quotes are from or use the language to support their crusades against other races or religions or sexualities. No wonder we read too much into things sometimes...