Día de los Muertos

Día de los Muertos (the day of the dead) is a mexican holiday where families gather in remembrance of the deceased on October 31 (All Hallows' Eve), November 1 (All Saints' Day) and November 2 (All Souls' Day). In this culture, the dead and the living aren't separated, they are components of a cyclical process of coexistence. On this day, instead of mourning, it's a celebration. They welcome the spirits of the dead with music and dancing and food. They visit the cemeteries honor the dead with stories and trinkets and food. Unlike our culture, they deal with death by living alongside it and almost mocking it. They gives nicknames to death such as la calaca (the skeleton), la pelota (baldy), la flaca (skinny), or la huesada (bony). I think that the US puts too much fear and anger on death. We try to escape or cheat it, as dillard says, no man believes that he himself will die. We have these horrid funerals where everyone has to wear black and sit on hard rows of pews for hours on end. Yes, death sucks and mourning is necessary. But Americans fear the dead, they don't respect or celebrate them. And in this, we also fear old age. In the hispanic culture the elderly are revered and respected. They don't get sent to nursing homes, they are brought into the homes of their children to continue to take part in their lives. I think we need to celebrate both life and death more...

Traditional Dancing 

The costumes portraying death

An elaborate altar to the deceased

An altar in home complete with the pan (bread) and cempasuchil (marigolds)

cempasuchil

papel picado, a traditional craft

pan de muerto, a traditional offering

sugar skulls for offerings

the graveyard

the families stay with the tombstones all night

celebrating death with humor

death isn't looked upon with fear

Arcadia

Here is a link to the text of Arcadia...

Thoughts...

-There's a pervasion of superiority throughout the play. In the sexual jokes the adults know the literal meanings while Thomasina is somewhat confused, the older generation keeps the young naive about certain topics. Additionally, there's the social system of power where Lady Croom for instance has much more superiority over Noakes or Jellaby. And we (the readers) also know more than the characters do for the most part. We know the math and advanced technologies that Thomasina and Septimus lacked and we know the true course of events that Bernard is so desperate to figure out. (This is much unlike The Magus, where we never knew much more than Nick. Interesting, the correlation between knowledge and the feeling of superiority)

-"we shed as we pick up" everything lost will return, just as actions, objects, and ideas are repeated in both time periods in the play. This is how the researchers of today are piecing together the past.

-the confluence of math and nature (is art??)

-the true meaning of things, and how they're distorted within these levels of superiority, for instance when Lady Croom incorrectly stated the author of a work

-Noakes' superimposed watercolors are like the two superimposed time periods present in the work 

-there are constantly people deluding themselves in order to avoid truth

-so the Croom's property is real, built in the mid 1700's by this pervasive "Capability Brown". So were Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb

Also, there seemed to be a lot of references to pieces of art, so I included them below. There is math that is art throughout the entire play as well. 

Act One Scene One

-septimus says "Et in Arcadia ego" the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)

-salvator rosa is mentioned

-noakes' superimposed watercolors are admired

-thomasina mentions "st. john the baptist in the wilderness"

Act One Scene Two

-Noakes' sketches are now admired

-hannah says "english landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors" and gives an example

Act One Scene Four

-"maths left the real world behind like modern art" nature was classical and maths picasso

Act Two Scene One

-Henry Fuseli Sketching Lord Byron

Act Two Scene Three

-the drawing lesson with geometrical solids vs naked ladies

-a mention again of fuseli sketching lord byron

-thomasina sketching septimus and the turtle

Why does life require truth?

Why do humans need truth? What if we blurred the lines of fiction and fact like the Magus does? I think that our race would probably go extinct. All of nature functions on a basis of truth for survival. If we attempted to exist in a state where nothing was certain and reality was fluid, we would be unable to utilize our past to make predictions of the future. This cycle of past and future is how our universe remains in motion. Nature (four quartets, dillard, fry), ritual and tradition (four quartets, dillard, fry, eliade), birth and death (four quartets, dillard), ascent and descent (fry), myth (eliade and fry). 

Why do things have to be cyclic though? In order to learn? To develop relationships with things and with people? Couldn’t both of these be achieved in a linear state of time, perhaps even more so than before since nothing would be repeated. Maybe, but I don't believe that linearity is possible, how could we never repeat what has happened before? We would run out of imagination and ideas. We couldn't build on the past and so everything would be less than mediocre, everything would be a first draft. Our current world is based on thousands of years of revisions on original ideas. 

Even so, most of us are unable to face the full truth of reality. That's why we have these shields of religion and alcohol and the media and our own self involvement. There are two concepts of truth in Buddhism. Saṃvṛti-satya is the empirical truth, the "reality usually accepted in everyday life and can be admitted for practical purposes of communication". Paramārtha-satya is the ultimate truth, the "universal emptiness, sunyata, regarded as the true nature of the phenomenal world, which has no independent substantiality". This second truth is the one we have trouble facing. It's the size of the universe, the exposition of our flaws, the fact that we are all going to die. We throw up these shields in order to prolong our own ignorance and try and make peace with ourselves. 

Fiction and Conchis

I think that fiction can belong in one of two categories: useless and useful. The useless category is filled with brain numbing works that don't do you much good except to let you escape from thinking. The second category is of fiction used almost like a weapon, its engrossing and vivid, but sneakily forces you to think about reality. I don't think fiction can be discredited. It can be specifically tailored to connect a far larger audience emotionally to a subject than a nonfiction personal experience generally could. Most of what we "know" of even science is pure theory and hypothesis (based on a few key known facts) just as all fiction is based on some aspect of reality.
Conchis doesn't hate fiction either ("I do not object to the principles of fiction. Simply that in print, in books, they remain mere principles.") he objects to fiction that hasn't been brought alive. He objects to the useless fiction. It's just as Lily says about a repeated bit of Greek "Just the sound. She said "when I first arrived, I couldn't believe it. Thousands and thousands of little black squiggles suddenly alive. Not past, but present"." The specific words of fiction don't matter, the importance of fiction lies in the emotions and thoughts it provokes. Lily had no assigned meaning to the words she spoke, but she nonetheless gained overall in terms of thought.

Also, I found this link to the effect of fiction coming alive on the author (John Cheever). It stoked me into thinking about the effects on Conchis of all the charades that he put on...

Thoughts from Class

I enjoyed the end of the Magus. For one, it wasn't a definitive end. If it had ended either way (with he and Alison together or not) it would have gone against the entire grain of the book. The entirety of The Magus is one huge mystery, the majority of what we do know stems from being told what is not true (versus being told straight truths). Secondly, Nicholas states near the end that he feels that he is finally free (eleuthera) from "their" watch. Our whole lives we've witnessed the pattern of human life, we can predict the outcomes of interactions between people fairly easily. All his time spent and decisions made on Phraxos were heavily influenced by Conchis; his life didn't follow a pattern we could anticipate because he wasn't under much of his own willpower. At the end however, he feels free of this erratic influence. In the final few pages we can finally use our history of witnessed interactions to decide what will happen next as he is finally under his own control. He slips back into the pattern of normal human life, because people can't exist without following a pattern of living laid down before them. Nicholas had no less freedom to live his life under Conchis as he did without Conchis.

Education

Classes based on last minute rote memorization to be spewed up on test day are great, but the real learning stems from the classes that we will remember for longer than it takes to get the desired grade. The classes that are loosely structured so that you have to work to fill in the blanks are the best: the free response chemistry test, the biology lab that you must create a procedure for, the seminar based on texts that every aspect of life. It doesn't have to be just art and philosophy classes that encourage you to think about and change how you live, there are successful biology and chemistry classes that accomplish the same thing. It's not about the subject so much as how it is taught. I think that there isn't enough emphasis on the importance of professors creating situations in their classrooms where students must synthesize their knowledge and use that as a base to create from. True learning comes from applying your knowledge, not just storing facts.

Dillard

The general idea of each of the ten subsections are pervasive each of the other sections. This parallels our lives, where no interaction we have is completely separate from another. The headings aren't enough to let us make these connections, the vignettes following give context. I don't think that these subheadings are the only ones that could be used either. I think Dillard's point is that everything is connected, babies and evil and clouds, by life and death, by a 'god', but mostly through ourselves. Gerrit mentioned this idea that our universe doesn't exist without us. Our unique combination of past interactions has sculpted this present universe that no one else has.

All the statistics and numbers scattered throughout this story are incomprehensible. They're so extraordinarily large that we can't truly comprehend. To sandwich two ideas: imagine 138,000 people, then multiply that by all your singularity, importance, love and complexity. I think that these numbers show us the difference in faith of concrete things versus faith in the intangible. I always thought numbers were concrete, but I'm starting to think they belong more in the world of the intangible and indescribable. When I'm reading this novel, with all the concrete images, and then these outrageous numbers appear, it just makes them seem ridiculous.

I don't find this novel depressing, I find it terribly interesting. I wield this shield of scientific curiosity that keeps a barrier between my emotions and the gain of knowledge. Just as religion supplies some people with a shield not to have to face the unknown, I wield scientific curiosity in order to not have to face my emotions.

All Dillard wants is the why of things, as everyone does.