Ariana's Confusing Musings

The Shape of Meaning: Spirals in Art, Literature and Life

2007-05-07T22:08:00.000-06:00

Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.
Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. . . . Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning.
- Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (18-19)

Here, the philosopher Michel Foucault has recognized what I will argue is the natural way in which meaning expands, changes, intertwines, and otherwise moves, “gravitates,” as he so evocatively suggests, into ever more complex associations through the visual metaphor of the spiral. Foucault correctly recognizes the potentials, the metamorphoses, and the possible insanities this notion of ever-connected and ever-proliferating meaning can conjure as well as the ways in which it permits an interplay of meaning amongst literature, art, dreams, and life. Although the spiral can lead to madness, it can also lead to meaning. To explore this territory, we must travel in the manner in which this meaning is created, we must gravitate about our own madness.

The spiral is central to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the very shape of our galaxy; it is responsible for the patterns we find in daisies, pine cones, snails, snakes, spider webs, and ram’s horns, as well as hurricanes, tornados, whirlpools, and black holes. It can be found in finger prints, the shape of the inner ear, and our very DNA. We use the natural properties of spiraling energy to run clocks and to throw clay on a spinning wheel to create pottery. The complex creative and destructive powers of the spiral are just one set of its inherent contradictions which allow the spiral to suggest near-infinite layers and variations of meaning. Just as a phone cord is spiral in shape so that it can expand and contract, images and archetypes in literature can be both simple and complex, both literal and metaphorical at the same time, containing a discrete meaning and infinite layers and webs of meaning simultaneously. If one were to say that the phone cord is both two feet and four feet in length, this would not be a contradiction; neither statement would be false; both would be true, neither less so than the other due to its spiral nature. This shape is created through a process of the repetition of a roughly circular shape in successive, and thus different, spatial and temporal incarnations which are all connected. Repetition with variation is the essence of the spiral, and, thus, through continual accretion and reincarnation, spiral is the shape of meaning; it is a visual manifestation of archetype.

For this theory of meaning and archetype it is particularly instructive to view the spiral as a three dimensional figure. From this perspective, time’s work can more readily be seen in the spiral than in a flat version. One layer or ring of the spiral depends for its identity on its placement in relation to the others, and rings from the “present” end of the spiral are predicated on the existence and can draw on the existence of the previous rings for their meaning. A later segment of the spiral does not abolish anything before it, even if it is in direct opposition to previous segments or leads the spiral in new directions; thus, multiple meanings coexist simultaneously. The spiral does not lend itself to the reduction of meaning often found in binaries. Because it can move and change to hold all possible compass points (and all points are theoretically possible), it is never entirely stable so no fixed meaning is ever implied. One can thus move forwards and backwards, in and out of the spiral, in an orderly or leaping fashion, swiftly or slowly. One can also choose from a myriad of perspectives on and in it, each of which will present different configurations of analogies and associations. While any person’s knowledge of any spiral may only be in small measure, one’s knowledge and depth of association can always grow through linkage, moving from one loop of the spiral to others and from one spiral to others.

Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, in his recent book I Am a Strange Loop, posits the theory that human construction of self, or “I”-ness is the result of a strange loop,
not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upward’ shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. . . . In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (102)
This depends on the mind not merely receiving successively nested images, as a video feedback loop does, but truly perceiving them. This requires many levels of perception which loop back to each other to create essentially a spiraling shape of meaning containing infinite self-reflecting items (thoughts, symbols, concepts, ideas, images) which gain their significance in their interrelationships represented most readily by the spiral. By continually bouncing from the receptor (self) to the received, perceiving this new information and changing accordingly in virtually infinite repetition, this process allows the I its multi-faceted existence and its ability to change by taking new stimuli into account. This continual back and forth repetition with variation forms Hofstadter’s strange loop, which because each loop is connected to the previous ones and so on ad infinitem, this image, this construction of meaning for the self becomes a spiral. Not only is this similar to the relationship between spirals and labyrinths, but if human consciousness exists in this spiraling strange loop, then it is only reasonable to see the meanings our minds perceive and attribute to other phenomena, including literary archetypes, must also function in a similarly spiraling and reflecting manner.

Also, according to Hofstadter, not all subsets of associations need be triggered when we think of something, and some concepts may lie just under the surface while others break out into the forefront. We can also keep combining concepts so that a nested concept (with all its associations in there somewhere) can be combined with another unconnected idea to create a new, even more complex concept which takes all associations of each item into account, but which may still be selective in what we actually choose to recognize as associations (Hofstadter 85). This is what I would call the interplay of multiple spirals of meaning.

It will first be helpful to unpack some of the meanings latent in the concepts of spirals and labyrinths and the complex relationships between the two. Ideas of paradox and pattern are central to Hofstadter’s thesis just as they are to the complex meanings found when examining the nature and role of spirals and labyrinths in life and literature. The essence of the spiral is in its curling shape, whether near repetitive, as in a bed spring, logarithmic, as in a nautilus shell, or wildly varying and unpredictable, as many man-made designs are; the variation will guide the interpretation, although, because spiral, as the shape of archetype, is a complex variable, all interpretation is possible all of the time[1]. In one instance the spiral can provide be the comfort of repetition which allows space and time for reflection; in another, it may be a path leading one into the dark underworld where chaos reigns; in yet another, it may be the shape of the quest which one must go on to be a conquering hero.

The spiral is an abstraction from nature codified by the labyrinth. While the labyrinth and the spiral, as images, as types, are intimately related and interconnected, each has occurrences and connotations, elements which the other does not share and may even be in direct opposition to. The spiral is the natural-world precursor of the labyrinth, and the labyrinth can be seen as a flattened spiral, operating in two dimensions rather than three or more. Strictly speaking, a labyrinth is a man-made structure which often resembles a spiral, and so it is no surprise that spirals and labyrinths share many qualities. But it is not a necessarily simple or straightforward relationship, for neither element is simple or straightforward in and of itself. Ovid describes the labyrinth on Crete as a place
where blind
and complicated corridors entwine.
The famous builder, Daedalus, designs
and then constructs this maze. He tricks the eye
with many twisting paths that double back –
one’s left without a point of reference.
As in the Phyrgian fields, the clear Meander
delights in flowing back and forth, a course
that is ambiguous; it doubles back
and so beholds its waves before they go
and come; and now it faces its own source,
and now the open sea; and so its waves
are never sure that they’ve not gone astray;
just so did Daedalus, within his maze,
along the endless ways disseminate
uncertainty; in fact the artifex
himself could scarcely trace the proper path
back to the gate – it was that intricate. (253)

And thus, we confront much of what we have already ascribed to the nature of spirals and loops, the ambiguities and contradictions, the entwinings and the loss of perspective, the ordered chaos, designed by a brilliant mind but difficult even for its creator to safely traverse.

In spite of these convergences, some aspects of labyrinths are in direct opposition to their spiral counterparts some of the time. For example, both are formed around a center, but while the core of the spiral is often associated with the calm eye of the storm or the centering absence of motion (stability), the labyrinth becomes most dangerous when the hero encounters the beast at its focal point. Additionally, while the existence of the minotaur (as in Crete) or sphinx (as in Harry Potter) is expected in the labyrinth, the spiral is its own monster as can be seen in the sea which holds spiraling vortexes, leading victims to the watery depths. The labyrinth can also metaphorically function as a beast which the hero must attempt to conquer. The literary critic Edward Said writes “Society, then, is a true labyrinth of incarnations . . . the richness of which it is possible to suggest in written language. A ‘labyrinth’ because of a complexity that has no discernible end or beginning ” (12). Thus, Said brings the labyrinth analogy to bear on both the human constructions of society and writing, and thus any created meaning, to demonstrate the complexity of each individually and the even greater complexity of their relationships to each other, forming yet another example of layering labyrinths to create a spiral with its back and forth reflection. While we can suggest this richness, we can never fully represent it, thus the descriptions of labyrinths and spirals here will not be able to contain all permutations or all interrelations, but will only be a suggestive sampling.

While the spiral is often portrayed as a relatively predictable pattern and the labyrinth is determinedly mysterious in its wendings, the predictability of the spiral is still often associated with the idea of spiraling down into madness, chaos, fear, and uncontrollability, and the unmapped (for the journeyer) paths of the labyrinth suggest that somewhere in them lies a definitive goal, a stopping place, the reaching of a reachable objective, thus implying order and linearity. Illogically, the form of each is the antithesis of its actual or connotative meanings and conclusions. That spirals can be both predictable and not, that labyrinths can be both knowable and mysterious is important to an understanding of their functions in literature.
So, in a sense, the spiral and the labyrinth are the same, while simultaneously, they often appear or work as opposites. According the Northrop Frye’s discussion of archetypes in Anatomy of Criticism, this is not problematic; in fact, this complexity, multiplicity, and even contradictoriness is necessary for archetypes, which Frye says, “are associate clusters, and differ from signs in being complex variables” (102). Therein lies the beauty, for they hold limitless meaning and are created anew in each instance while still carrying the weight of centuries of association. While context may give clues as to some useful meanings, many more are waiting under the surface, implicit in the very usage of a spiral or labyrinth, literally, conceptually, or metaphorically. When we follow one ring of the spiral to its many connected sister rings, we become like Alice descending to an underworld full of apparently (though rarely actually) contradictory meaning and rife with a sense of loss and disorientation.

The labyrinth is a physical, mythical, and conceptual manifestation of the spiral as well as an archetypal element found throughout literature. The labyrinth is its own dimension, separated from the outside world, often literally underground. Once the hero enters the labyrinth, he must learn to function by its rules which include this spiraling proliferation of meaning and the inevitability of loss which, in The Dream and the Underworld, the post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman argues is an aspect of the underworld we enter in dreams (52-53). The Japanese author Haruki Murakami has the narrator of his 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, whom I shall call Boku[2], function in several labyrinthine underworlds; Boku’s story can be read as a modern displacement of the myth surrounding Daedalus' labyrinth wherein the hero, Theseus, ventured to slay the Minotaur[3]. I propose to stretch the spiral of meaning and expose the layers of archetype in this text in order to demonstrate the operation of the complex relationships amongst spirals, labyrinths, mirrors, time, and loss. To do this, Northrop Frye’s conception of romance will be key as the labyrinth archetype is closely associated with this genre and as Murakami’s novel clearly fits Frye’s parameters for romance.
Murakami plays on the importance of the complexity introduced by contradictions throughout A Wild Sheep Chase. He uses them to express inexpressibility and to describe the indescribable, and for this to work, the notion of a spiral shape to meaning, the elasticity of significance, is vital. In much the same way, we can return to the seeming contradictions in the relationships between spirals and labyrinths which ultimately work to enhance the associative powers of each. That the spiral and the labyrinth are not exclusive or exact opposites but in their convergence form a whole multi-layered and multi-hued picture which, while it can be stretched to emphasize this complexity, is much more than the sum of its pieces, and as such, is impossible to completely separate the parts and still have any of them mean much of anything. In a similar manner,
Hillman argues that dreams and the items in them cannot be seen as compensatory for the dreamer’s dayworld, but are to be read wholly in and of themselves. Enigmatically he says,

Everything necessary to the situation is there, so that everything there is necessary. Each dream has its own fulcrum and balance, compensates itself, is complete as it is. Now this is the underworld perspective. It takes the image as all there is – everything else has vanished and cannot be introduced into the underworld until it becomes like the underworld. We cannot see the soul until we experience it, and we cannot understand the dream until we enter it. (80)

Similarly, the spiral is seen to convey the most meaning when viewed as a whole and does not depend upon entries outside its revolutions for interpretation, and in fact, due to the interconnectedness of meaning indicated by the spiral theory, any spiral necessarily contains all referential and connotative elements, anything which is related to the spiral is in some way a part of the spiral. Although a level of distance from the spiral seems to be indicated here, its meanings are clearest when it is entered or experienced and one becomes lost, as it were, in them, as Hillman suggests is similarly necessary to understandings of the soul and dreams. While spirals and labyrinths are not always literally represented in literature, they do exist as theoretical and interpretive space which require these kinds of full, experiential integration of the reader to more fully understand their significances to the proliferation of meaning within and among texts. Like Murakami’s sheep, they often work behind the scenes, and they greatly alter anything they infuse, whether the mind, the dream or the story. And, like the sheep, they cannot be fully comprehended without experience. Spiraling in literature often describes the experience of reading or the shape of the plot so that the reader is entwined in the experience of reading. Thus, the fullest spirals are highly complex, dense, never fully knowable (but always explorable) and even intertwined with other spirals.

In dreams and literature, appearances of labyrinths, mazes, or spirals themselves may not be as common as the sense or actuality of repetition and loss. Loss of time, loss of the sense of direction, or apparent loss of control are common expressions of the spiral, as endless twisted passages and convoluted traveling are of the labyrinth. At their very core, these images and occurrences set the stage of the underworld and convey its laws, moods, and unique logic. Unlike classical writers who blithely give their readers explicit pictures of their hells and labyrinths through detailed and unapologetic (even unquestioning) description, as a postmodern writer, Murakami can only tell us what they are not. Thus, important and possibly problematic information is wreathed in contradictions, and the incidental is minutely transcribed, prompting the reader to construct meaning from the meaningless. This lack of certainty from Murakami is suggestive of the ontological labyrinth in which his characters are operating, vividly, even frustratingly demonstrating their disorientation.

The hero of romance, as Frye explains, must go on a journey wherein he conquers a destructive force and sometimes fall himself, but from which he always returns in some manner or another (Anatomy 187). The labyrinth is perhaps the most vivid and succinct snapshot of the hero’s journey, encompassing the vagaries of others’ designs, the peril of vicious beasts, and the distress of the psyche, all requiring the hero’s utmost courage, skill, strength, and cleverness. While the hero may appear to exit the labyrinth unscathed, a sense of loss (and often some actual loss during or after the labyrinth experience) still pervades, for he has gone into the underworld and come out again through experiences which may not be comprehensible in the light of day or explainable using the logic and rules of the world outside of the labyrinth. Hillman argues that, “Loss does characterize underworld experiences, from mourning to the dream, which its peculiar feeling of incompleteness, as if there is still more to come that we didn’t get, always a concealment within it, a lost bit” (52-53). The labyrinth is a prime literary manifestation of underworld experience and the loss (of time, sanity, life, loved ones, or limb) that it demands. Entrance into it often mirrors or suggests a descent into Hades, journeying out of one world and into another. In Murakami’s novel a character known as the Sheep Professor describes life without the sheep thus: “It’s hell. A maze of subterranean hell” (219), further connecting this tale to the idea of the labyrinth.

Hillman goes on to complicate this sense of loss in a way that rings true to the often contradictory nature of spirals and labyrinths: “Loss is not the whole of it, however, because the dimension sensed as loss is actually the presence of the void. Actually, we are experiencing a different dimension, and the price of admission to it is the loss of the material viewpoint” (53). Once the hero enters the labyrinth, he is stripped of his normal “material viewpoint” and must adjust to function in this new place by its rules. Murakami’s narrator seems to have a similar philosophy on loss. On the realization that he really had lost his wife forever, Boku ruminates: “Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy” (26), and this statement, in fact, foreshadows the kinds of loss this narrator will experience throughout the novel.

Other aspects of loss are explored by Frye in The Secular Scripture, where he argues that loss is necessary in romance in order to separate the hero from his world and its comfortable accoutrements that he may go on his journey and return changed. Frye writes, “But the structural core [of the beginning of Romance] is the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of identity, and this has analogies to falling asleep and entering a dream world” (104). This is a necessary loss which is also associated with moving from one world to another. Murakami’s narrator describes his return from the labyrinthine underworld of his adventure thus: “One way or another, I’d made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre it might be, this was my world” (348). Descent into other worlds causes inevitable fundamental changes in the journeyer which Frye labels as metamorphoses (105), something Murakami’s characters vividly experience and discuss throughout the narrative.

The essence of Murakami’s novel is the quest that the narrator goes on to find a “sheep that by all rights should not exist” (131) which has been entering people in order to use them for its nefarious and shadowy purposes[4] (223). This, at least, is the premise. Actually, the narrator has no personal interest in finding the sheep other than that it seems to have a connection to his old friend, the Rat, and Boku is at a point in his life where he is lost; he has lost his wife, his business, his partner, his twenties, his childhood home, and his friend, the Rat (175); eventually, he loses his new girlfriend and, for awhile, even his cat. He has lost control of the direction of his life; Boku is an extraordinarily passive character who has even lost the will to act. As this journey begins its spiral momentum, the hero is accompanied by other characters and motives which at first drive the story but which gradually fall away, leaving him alone and in a state of reflection and purification which is the essence of his true quest: lost time and his lost self[5] which has been encumbered with all of the meaningless trivia of modern life and is floating directionless in a sea of empty ritual. This state of abandonment by the previously active forces around him compels Boku to examine his current state and then finally to act based on his own will. The narrator ultimately discovers that while he cannot go home again, and he cannot turn back clocks, he can, in a way, take some control of the spiral and shape it like a potter shapes clay to create new meaning. He decides to abandon passivity and become an active element in the larger spirals of life and the surrounding world.

Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase has resonances from the mythologies, archetypes, and legends of ancient and modern Japan, ancient Greece, Christianity, and the detective story, whose spirals merge and play off each other throughout this novel. In this respect, Murakami becomes a truly global author[6], deftly weaving elements from many traditions to create an entry in all of these spirals that enriches both that which he appropriates and that which he has created by this interplay.

Thus, their interplay creates spiraling layers in much the same way that Umberto Eco argues repetition turns the seemingly simple Charlie Brown cast into three dimensional characters. In “Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics,” Eco uses the spiral to discuss the phenomenon of literature and other forms of storytelling whereby repetition results in character development. He states that “The spiral is another variation of the series. In the stories of Charlie Brown, apparently nothing happens, and any character is obsessively repeating his/ her standard performance. And yet in every strip the character of Charlie Brown or Snoopy is enriched and deepened” (196). The character may seem to cover the same ground constantly, but the spiral insists that it is not really true repetition for, even if the revolutions match up in space, they are yet different, occurring in successive times. And thus later parts of the spiral build on earlier layers. The nuanced nature of the spiral is thus a useful means of subtle change and accumulated connotations which lead to the kinds of packed meaning Joyce’s portmanteau words are renowned for. As Eco recognized, spiraling repetition and variation have almost mystical creative and evocative powers which it would be a shame to leave underused and underappreciated as I believe they currently are.

In Dreams, Myths, and Fairy Tales in Japan, the depth psychologist Hayao Kawai argues that, in Japanese mythology, in the center of a mass of repetitive contradictions and warring gods is the Moon God, “highly valued, but carrying out the paradoxical role of standing at the center of the pantheon and doing nothing” (77), in marked contrast to the Greek Zeus or the Christian Almighty God. This concept is highly provocative for the postulation of meaning as a spiral for the nature of a spiral suggests an empty center around which all the loops gravitate. A similar structure can be seen in A Wild Sheep Chase where we have Boku, notorious for inaction, at the center and surrounded by multiple opposing forces who are active but whose actions require Boku’s existence in the narrative for value. The subtly varying repetition of themes, narrative detail (and lack thereof), rituals of eating, drinking, sex, and travel circulate around Boku creating a spiral where details mentioned early slowly accrue more and more meaning throughout the narrative until these minutiae take on mythic significances. They start in the more random spiral of general knowledge; we are all familiar with the seemingly slow motion of time in uncomfortable circumstances, as Murakami shows us when the Secretary comes to visit Boku’s partner and is required to wait for thirty minutes as the receptionist anxiously watches the clock (60-63). But by the end of the novel, time and clocks are fraught with many more levels of significance distinct to this work which have slowly been deposited like sediment until they form a streambed whose layers tell its history; thus when the grandfather clock is introduced in the description of the Rat’s old family vacation home, its significance cannot be ignored. So, spiraling accretion is not only descriptive of the shape of archetype as it is found across texts, but this method is also suggestive of the inner workings of individual narratives. Murakami’s focus on time has initial, exterior to the novel, connotations as well as the interior associations he builds through this spiraling of repetition with variation.

The spiral is often associated with the nature of time; in its evocation of movement, the spiral must necessarily involve both time and space. In dreams, one often feels as if one were repeating an action or journey in a timeless world. While the labyrinth may or may not be physically repetitive, its psychological effect is to make every turn feel like every other one in a disorienting and unsettling manner. Because the other world of the labyrinth is so disconnected with that of the outside, time in the labyrinth is also similarly distorted, seeming to slow down, speed up, or have no existence, leaving the hero essentially outside of time while he is in the labyrinth. He is in a lost time, for while there, he cannot participate in that which exists outside his labyrinthine quest. Significantly, when the Rat’s ghost comes to visit Boku in the form he had in life, he insists on stopping the aforementioned grandfather clock, literally. At this point, Murakami writes, “All sound, all time, vanished” (332).

Time is also the great agent of change. Over time, people and places change, evolving and devolving, and the hero of the labyrinth is fundamentally changed by his experiences there. His entry into it is a kind of death, and his successful return to the “real” world above ground is a rebirth. He has been challenged and regenerated; he has entered the revolutions of the spiral in one way and exited them in another. Murakami’s narrator has twice remembered his ex-wife’s comments that, due to cellular regeneration, the person one was last month is physically, fundamentally not the same person one is now, and thus, living things are always in this constant state of change (Murakami 197, 325). This also complicates the loss of connection between people and the theoretical impossibility of human relationships for one can never know another person, even on the basest level, for an individual is not even the same from moment to moment. Time creates the familiar and the unfamiliar. Something is recognizable because it has been seen in another time, but because time is a primary agent of change, that which was familiar now becomes unfamiliar.

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats used the image of the gyre, which is variably interpreted as another word for spiral or as a closely related variation on the spiral, to illustrate his cyclical theory of time and history in “The Second Coming.” Frye sees this theory involving, particularly, dominant historical eras and the prevailing philosophies of each (Secular 90). The spiral suggests an unceasing movement of time, although, particularly as Yeats suggests, this time may not always move at the same speed or in the same direction; as the gyre waxes and wanes, it may be usurped, superseded, or overtaken by a faster moving or more powerful motion which then becomes the ascendant era. While it creates the repetitive cycle of the gyre, it vacillates between diminishing and accelerating, almost like a rollercoaster. Yeats writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, . . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. (60)

This continual movement seems to have frustrated communication as perhaps the called and the caller (or the text and the reader) now exist in separate turns of the gyre, or the message has been lost in the unavoidable movement around them. So, not only is time implicated in these lines, but the very thing poets depend upon, the successful transmission of meaning through language, has been frustrated; communication has proved more complex than first thought and is represented as being in a period of disintegration. But this should not lead to despair for Yeats’ speaker sees that as one gyre reaches the point at which it loses its meaning and power, another reincarnation begins to take shape which brings with it “some revelation.” The idea of the “Second Coming” itself, whether it refers to Christ, a philosophy, an era, or some other re-manifestation, suggests that this cyclicality is responsible for the creation of new meanings predicated on previous incarnations, bringing new life to something old by resurrecting it in new form.

Yeats’ poem, then, displays intricate intimations of the spiral theory of meaning. Hillman channels Yeats when he suggests that,

The circular states of repetitiveness, turning and turning in the gyres of our own conditions, force us to recognize that these conditions are our very essence and that the soul’s circular motion (which is its native motion, according to Plotinus) cannot be distinguished from blind fate. It is as if the soul frees itself not from blindness but by its continuing turning in it. (162)

I would argue that Hillman’s psychological description of the human condition as concocting meaning from its “circular states of repetitiveness,” although vague and even mystical, is the same theory that can be seen in Hofstadter’s more empirical or logic-based exploration of what it is to have a soul, to be an “I.” Again, one is confronted with the notion of the spiral as inherent in “our very essence”; thus, it should not be surprising that meaning itself takes this multiply-signifying and creating shape.

In the novella, Hardboiled, Banana Yoshimoto suggests that the spiraling nature of time can be restricting, leading towards a center or a goal, or it can be expanding, leading to more possibilities and endless, changing destinations. She writes, “Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go very easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded in the darkness” (24). Murakami’s narrator is caught by time in similar ways. When he returns to his hometown, he attempts to recapture some intangible element from his past by visiting J’s Bar and walking in the dark where the shoreline had been (99-109). Both had significantly changed since his youth, but still seemed to hold some promise of time past interacting with time present. Of a text of Japanese myths, Kawai writes, “As I was reading the stories in the USM, I began to feel the people of that time believed that reality had many layers, and that its appearance differed greatly according to the layer being seen” (19), perhaps relative to the many layers Boku discovers in his understanding of the nature of time and of what had seemed his simple urban life and self.

Dreams also feature prominently in Yoshimoto’s time-bending work, including one dream where the protagonist finds herself in a maze. She is trying to come to terms with her reaction to the death of her ex-lover, and in the process, she experiences confluence and confusion between dreams and reality, between the afterlife and this physical temporal world. Kawai notes that “the free interpenetration of this world and the dream world [is] a common feature of medieval Japanese stories concerning dreams” (15), something Sigmund Freud could relate to, but James Hillman might find problematic. I believe that this “free interpenetration” is merely a wider view of the spirals of meaning which connect this world and other worlds. The manner in which dreams work in Yoshimoto’s and Murakami’s texts suggest that this “real” world is not as uncomplicated or literal as it sometimes pretends to be and that the dream world may be just as real if equally frustrating due to its labyrinthine features. This confusion is a common effect of the spiral and is one of the intentions of the blind alleys and wrong turns pervading the labyrinth. In a spiraling moment, Yoshimoto’s narrator remarks, “I really felt as if time could run backward,” (46) and in the worlds of the spiral, the labyrinth, and the dream, it really can.

While I argue that the labyrinth is the organizing myth of A Wild Sheep Chase, and the text as a whole (and in many ways) is labyrinthine, the narrator himself embarks on multiple quests (literal, obvious, metaphorical, and hidden) with multiple beasts to slay. Though part of the quest for Boku is a return to the past, a search for lost time, an attempt to return home, he knows these things are impossible. The quests themselves are impossible without some help, and yet in the end, as with Theseus, after being guided towards the goal, the hero must slay the beast alone. Frye argues that the hero is often imbued with luck in the beginning of the tale of Romance, enticing many followers to circle around him and help him, but as he closes in upon his goal, the luck fades and the followers disappear (Secular 67). Similarly, when Theseus lands on Crete with a party of at least six other innocents slated to die in the labyrinth, fortunately, King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, sees him from afar and is so enamoured that she chooses to betray her father and her half-brother, the Minotaur, by giving Theseus the twine he will need to find his way out of the labyrinth[7] (Ovid 254). But, ultimately, Theseus must enter the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur alone.

Similarly, Murakami’s narrator benefits from a girlfriend with a sixth sense which always seems to lead them on the right path towards the sheep, from her initial premonition of the phone call to her choice of the Dolphin Hotel. During the search for the sheep, Boku has the Rat’s letters, his partner’s background knowledge, the Sheep Professor’s unique expertise, and the additional information and pressure from the Secretary to prod him on the quest and keep him going in the right directions. Slowly these aides fall away, until Boku is left alone in the farmhouse to discover what has become of his friend the Rat and the mysterious sheep. Here, Murakami departs, for Boku’s original search is rendered void when he discovers that the Rat has already defeated the sheep; Boku then is confronted with the need to conquer the beasts of complacency and inactivity within himself; he must also use this new active and reflective self to destroy the Secretary whose Will still poses a threat to humanity (140-141; 345-347).

The sheep is important in that it suggests both the creator and the creation, both Daedalus and the Minotaur: the sheep has plans for humanity and has left clues, from the Boss to the Sheep Professor, as to its intentions and location, but at the same time, the sheep is the monster whose Will possesses men, forming creatures who are half-man and half-beast, or perhaps, half-mortal and half-divine[8]. The sheep has been manipulating mankind and must be destroyed. Yet another monster is the sheep-like nature of humanity, particularly the Japanese, in Murakami’s construction, who follow complacently and unquestioningly, who mindlessly perform the pointless rituals of modern life in the post-industrial information age. Boku is representative of this and through his own shift from inactive observer to active participant, he is able to complete the destruction of the sheep who is in part responsible for the similar imprisonment of Boku’s fellow Japanese. This also mirrors a story Kawai retells, wherein a twelfth century politician realizes that greed is responsible for much of the evil in the society around him and, lamenting that the problem is too big and too intertwined with human nature to solve, he is advised to address his own greed for then the rest of the culture would follow suit (31-32). Murakami’s narrator’s personal quest has similar wide implications, and these connections among the individual, other nearby persons, the larger society, and the world function in a spiral-like manner.

Another means of creating the sense of the spiral is the mirror. Hofstadter describes the loop created by a “mirror mirroring a mirror” (59), where the mirror is the starting point of a visual spiral. The idea of mirrors and mirroring have great significance for textual spirals as well. Perhaps the most important connotations of the mirror are the ideas of reflecting and thus reflection which create powerful convergences of meaning and are also, along with time, necessary for change. Without the true spiraling of meaning brought about by reflection, lives are merely repetitive actions (or the complacent inaction found in Murakami’s Boku). Yet when one descends deeply into such powerful reflection, one can lose the self and the dayworld in the spiraling interconnectedness recognizable through such an act. Hillman would not see this as a negative loss, for he argues that we must leave the dayworld meanings behind us and seek the metaphoric in underworld imaginings (13).

The reflecting power of mirrors is also used by Murakami to bring about Boku’s moment of epiphany when he realizes that the Rat is dead, a ghost who has visited him initially in the form of the Sheep Man, and more solidly setting Boku on a path of self-reflection and the realization that his true quest was personal rather than solely for the mysterious star-marked sheep (322). After cleaning the mirror during his purification of the house (and symbolically of himself)[9], Murakami’s narrator relates:

The mirror reflected my image from head to toe, without warping, almost pristinely. I stood there and looked at myself. Nothing new. I was me, with my usual nothing-special expression. My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me. (318-319)

This is a clear example of Frye’s comment in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance that, “When the action passes from one level to another through the recognition scene, we have a feeling of going through some sort of gyre or vortex, to use another Yeats image, a feeling we express in the phrase we so inevitably use when summarizing a romantic plot: ‘it turns out that . . .” (91). In Boku’s case, it turns out that that which he thought he was seeking was not the true goal or the transcendent result of his quest. Hillman places great value on the implications of the mirror when he writes that,

So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what is going on here. (52)

So, not only is Murakami using this scene to bring about transformation through reflection, but he is also indicating that Boku is now entering another underworld labyrinth, the labyrinth of the self. He has dedicatedly avoided this throughout the novel as evidenced by his detached, almost apathetic, attitude and demeanor when presented with situations and information that would provoke reactions and emotions from characters who do not demand this kind of distance.

That Boku’s revelatory experience happens when he sees himself in the mirror but not the form of the Sheep Man who he can see in the room (and who leaves physical evidence of his presence in the form of a whisky glass and cigarette butts), hints at the close relationship between this spiral and madness. Boku comments, “I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine” (322).
In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault suggests that, “The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” (27). While Boku may very well be mad, this incident marks an important point in his transition from passive to active, and if it is madness, it results in a healthy self-preservation and the culmination of his quest, and thus is a madness which works in his favor, allowing him to perceive some truth about himself and his wild sheep chase. In Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, translator and critic Jay Rubin suggests another reading of this potential madness: “Whether we view Boku’s successful reunion with his deceased friend as ‘real’ or a product of delirium, it is the culmination of his quest. He has managed, if only for a few moments, to recapture his lost past – ‘the old days’” (89). Rubin then ruminates on the relationships suggested by a literal translation of the title of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, saying, “Proust’s title sounds like pure Murakami . . . ‘Searching for Lost Time’ – which is exactly what Boku has been doing” (89). Here we are confronted again with the need to recognize the centrality of notions of time to the spiral, the labyrinth, and to Murakami’s novel.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye also recognizes this moment as an association of the spiral and the labyrinth with the hero’s point of epiphany, “the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment” (203). Perhaps in this schema, it is actually the very contradictions and convergences between the spiral and the labyrinth which compose the epiphany. The labyrinth can be seen as the “undisplaced apocalyptic world,” and the spiral suggests the “cyclical world of nature,” and in the conversation between these elements, one is assaulted with their multiple, convergent, closely related, and yet contradictory aspects. In the act of interpretation, it is important to accept the possibility of an endless spiral of meaning circumscribed by the tall walls of the labyrinth. The point of epiphany would thus be a rare moment of alignment which allows one to see the beauty and complexity of these relationships as a manic, dynamic whole.

The variety of perspectives from which spirals of meaning can be viewed allow for even more constructions of sense than the spiral alone bears in itself, and thus, the reader’s awareness of his or her perspective is what will allow the shifting from local to global, from temporal to spatial, from within a text to among many texts, from literature to life, and back and forth among all of these views of the spiral to achieve truly epiphanic interpretive moments and revelations. Applying an understanding of the spiral construction of meaning to literary studies should allow for even more complex meanings and a denser richness of the recognition, understanding, and appreciation of the relationships among texts and archetypes as well as between elements within a text than without this mental perspective. In literary discussions, the spiral of meaning can include texts as well as critical interpretations, so that discourse on a text can be incorporated into the meanings of the text by those who are aware of the conversation but do not change the earlier part of the spiral where the text itself resides. Discussion, associations, analogies, allusions, and archetypes can all add to the spiral of meaning for any text or textual element. I also imagine that any spiral can have infinite offshoots and intersections with other spirals so that, ultimately, all meaning is connected for those who seek such connections.

Works Cited:
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003.
Eco, Umberto. “Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Postmodern Aesthetics.”
Daedalus Fall 2005. 191-207.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1973.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.
-----. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1976.
Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper, 1979.
Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Kawai, Hayao. Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan. Einsiedeln, Switzerland:
Daimon, 1995.
Murakami, Haruki. A Wild Sheep Chase. Originally published in Japanese unter the title
Hitsuji o meguru boken in 1982. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum (1989). New York:
Vintage, 2002.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego: Harvest, 1995.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Vintage, 2003.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2002.
Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” W. B. Yeats. Selected by John Kelly.
London: Phoenix Poetry, 2002.

[1] See Kawai pages 33-34, Hillman page 4 (and throughout), and Frye page 136 (and throughout).
[2] Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s primary English translators, has adopted Boku as a referential name for Murakami’s notoriously nameless narrators, and I will do the same. In explanation, Rubin writes, “the word Murakami uses for ‘I’ throughout is boku. Although the ‘I-novel’ is a long-established fixture of serious Japanese fiction, the word most commonly used for the ‘I’ narrator has a formal tone: watakushi or watashi. Murakami chose instead the casual boku, another pronoun-like word for ‘I’, but an unpretentious one used primarily by young men in informal circumstances” (37).

[3] I shall draw from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VIII for discussion of this myth.

[5] See Rubin pages 87-89.
[6] See the conclusion, “World Enough and Time,” of David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? Damrosch suggests that the interplay of perspectives creates the situation of reading literature from a world perspective rather than defining world literature as a set canon of texts or specifications. He writes that, “Reading and studying world literature, by contrast, is inherently a more detached mode of engagement; it enters into a different kind of dialogue with the work, not one involving identification or mastery but the discipline of distance and of difference. We encounter the work not at the heart of its source culture but in the field of force generated among works that may come from very different cultures and eras” (300).
[7] Interestingly, Ariadne’s actions mirror those of Scylla whom King Minos encountered during the siege of Megara. Scylla’s tale also ended with loss.and disappointment as the man she helped continued to victory thanks to her aid and then left her.
[8] In this, the sheep also resonates with the Cretan Bull with whom Pasiphae mated (assisted by Daedalus) to produce the Minotaur just as the sheep’s union with its chosen humans creates the semi-monstrous beings they become.
[9] See Rubin page 87.

Copyright Ariana Paliobagis 2007
Of course, most of my formatting died when I pasted the text here. Maybe I'll fix that later, but you get the idea.

550: Final Poems

2007-05-01T14:34:00.000-06:00

Living Room

Hope is not snuffed like a candle – well, at first, yes, but then it clings like a parasite –
it slowly suffocates yet again as the dawn light extinguishes a sleepless night
tearless eye and empty mind, creeping like a thug with a baseball bat. Unuttered
obscenities crawl through shaking limbs, pleading their pointless release into a cluttered
abyss. Then, giving in to primal screams an unearthly delight, a godless rite rights
the prostrate form, laid out not in a shroud and not in a shrine but on shabby carpets
in a disintegrating home, alone and writhing, scratching, writing. The sole soul
keeper of some memories, denied others, fades in a blaze of frantic being. One must
keep busy to cope and to suffer through hope.

Living Room, Part Two

At the end of the semester – well, not quite THE END, but, say, a week away – you do this dance – at least I do. Goes somethin’ like this: read a chapter & take some notes. They look so productive, marching across the yellow paper. Don’t worry that ten minutes later you can’t recall why they were important or anything else about the book between the notes. It will all come to you IN THE MOMENT. Type the heading for a paper. Now you’ve DONE something. A little gremlin called Procrastination jumps up and down in front of your face (in front of your computer) says this is the PERFECT day to vacuum behind furniture, clear out flower beds, organize unopened mail on the kitchen table. IT_ALL_MUST_BE_DONE_NOW. But being such a dedicated student – and after realizing the mail consists only of unpaid bills, it’s too early to plant anything & the vacuum cleaner died last month – you return to the computer, stare, and REALLY think for a minute: a game of solitaire is just what you need to clear your mind. Then another. & another. you just have to win ONE, then you’ll feel smart & accomplished & can really get down to work. By now you’ve forgotten what the assignment was & have to dig through stacks of books & papers to find one precious loose sheet that will answer all your questions and doubts. It says: Write a paper on any three class texts. You think, oh, that won’t be difficult; I read them all, kind of. I’ll make a list, you say. After an intense two minutes, the list has twelve vague items and fancy flaming bullets. This means you are ORGANIZED. This means you have IDEAS. Now it’s time for a sandwich & beer – you’ve earned it after all. That paper will practically write itself. Tomorrow.

The New North Side

Twelve hundred dandelions no match for one red tulip
Cats screech like babies being tortured and
Ducks fight as they bob down the creek
Sticky cottonwood seed pods invade all as
Spiders hurry through thoroughfares of dead leaves

My affluent neighbor smugly surveys his territory from the new cedar
deck on his new custom home approving the two yappy dogs
who patrol the bank opposite. Always on the phone and
gazing knowingly over here, he will march soon with bankers, brokers,
lawyers & councilmen, statutes & eminent domain. My wild paradise
his golf course utopia. Takeover is imminent. The American dream of conquest, conformity, & illusion. If it looks like a happy home, it must be one.
Such a threat my tiny rented cottage poses his tidy bloated empire.

510: From my draft, here is a reworked discussion of the mirror and the spiral

2007-04-24T11:50:00.000-06:00

The mirror can be the starting point of a visual spiral of reality as is seen when, in Higuchinsky’s film Uzumaki[1], Shuichi’s father films himself reflecting in a mirror on his way to a watery, spiraling death in a washing machine. This then also becomes a spiraling point of reflection for the other characters who are then able to piece together the possessing power spirals hold over their town. As they attempt to decipher the meaning in the particulars of this death, they discover that the word transliterated as kagami is the same set of syllables (although written with different characters) meaning both mirror and snake, the snake’s coils being a natural version of the uzumaki or spiral[2]. The snake is also here connected with eternal life, which in this instance this can only be seen as infinite through reincarnation, or a spiraling transmutation of soul. This town seems susceptible to this spiral possession – as well a lack of the recognition of this fact until it is too late – in part because most of its members are living so fully on the surface that they do not have the depth needed of and for reflection. Without the true spiraling of meaning brought about by reflection, their lives are merely repetitive actions. Yet when one descends deeply into such powerful reflection, one can lose the self and the dayworld in the spiraling interconnectedness recognizable through such an act. Hillman would not see this as a negative loss, for he argues that we must leave the dayworld meanings behind us and seek the metaphoric in underworld imaginings.

The reflecting power of mirrors is also used by Murakami to bring about Boku’s moment of epiphany when he realizes that the Rat is dead, a ghost who has visited him initially in the form of the Sheep Man, and more solidly setting Boku on a path of self-reflection and the realization that his true quest was personal rather than solely for the mysterious star-marked sheep. After cleaning the mirror during his purification of the house (and symbolically of himself), Murakami’s narrator relates:

The mirror reflected my image from head to toe, without warping, almost pristinely. I stood there and looked at myself. Nothing new. I was me, with my usual nothing-special expression. My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me. (318-319)

This is a clear example of Frye’s comment in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance that, “When the action passes from one level to another through the recognition scene, we have a feeling of going through some sort of gyre or vortex, to use another Yeats image, a feeling we express in the phrase we so inevitably use when summarizing a romantic plot: ‘it turns out that . . .” (91). Hillman places great value on the implications of the mirror when he writes that,

So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what is going on here. (52)

So, not only is Murakami using this scene to bring about transformation through reflection, but he is also indicating that Boku is now entering another underworld labyrinth, the labyrinth of the self.

That Boku’s revelatory experience happens when he sees himself in the mirror but not the form of the Sheep Man who he can see in the room (and who leaves physical evidence of his presence in the form of a whisky glass and cigarette butts), hints at the close relationship between this spiral and madness. Boku comments, “I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine” (322). In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault suggests that, “The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” (27). While Boku may very well be mad, this incident marks an important point in his transition from passive to active, and if it is madness, it results in a healthy self-preservation and the culmination of his quest, and thus is a madness which works in his favor, allowing himself to perceive some truth about himself and his wild sheep chase.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye also recognizes this as an association of the spiral and the labyrinth with the hero’s point of epiphany, “the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment” (203). Perhaps in this schema, it is actually the very contradictions and convergences between the spiral and the labyrinth which compose the epiphany. The labyrinth can be seen as the “undisplaced apocalyptic world,” and the spiral suggests the “cyclical world of nature,” and in the conversation between these elements, one is assaulted with their multiple, convergent, closely related, and yet contradictory aspects. In the act of interpretation, it is important to accept the possibility of an endless spiral of meaning circumscribed by the tall walls of the labyrinth. The point of epiphany would thus be a rare moment of alignment which allows one to see the beauty and complexity of these relationships as a manic, dynamic whole.

[1] This title is translated as Spiral or Vortex, and the word is used throughout the film for these ideas.

[2] In an interesting counterpoint to this Japanese perspective, Frye argues that the snake is generally seen as a demonic animal, and yet even in the West, he acknowledges, the snake is also used to symbolize infinity when fashioned into an ouroboros. In spite of the snake’s positive connotations for this character in Uzumaki, it does lead to his physical death, and the audience is not given to believe that reincarnation is taken seriously by any of the other characters, rendering this highly symbolic death futile.

550: Ode to Spring, Vishnu & Hercules

2007-04-24T11:46:00.000-06:00

24 April 2007

Ode to Spring

The grass leaps four inches after the first spring rains
Soon it will reach sky and I sink,
sink – return to the primordial muck, then deeper still
a reverse Persephone descending by choice away
from burning memories of sun. New life is a cruel joke when
Gone ones sing out of ether, through portals like oracles,
and I demand silence.

I past our house – refilled with a circus of bells
of happy hippie party people whom I want to crush – and cringe.
I only returned when I had killed all senses, to move, to escape
to run not far. Ghost or not, it is haunted. Twice
you called into the dungeon; I answered, and for my faith, no reply,
Pleas be damned; you emptied the crawling silence again
like a morning without magpies.

They call to sell you cable services and ask if I am
Mrs. E. Do I make them feel like shit and tell them you’re dead
the hard irrevocable sounds shaming them to silence and stutters?
I want to just hang up. Which is more rude? I don’t care.
They plead through the mail for you to open a credit card
account. Do their powers really extend that far? Will you
purchase sheet music and repay them with arpeggios and chords?
Their fliers attempt enticements for lawn care and mattress
sales. Apparently you can take it with you.
I rip into tiny – invisible, I hope – pieces.

I hate the new me newbie, forced to swim, envious of drowning
Angry, empty, pretending. When my mask slips, I want to
consume Belladonna, drift into night’s shade. But what difference
does it make when I already live eternally with Hades.
Sun and dewy grass bring no pleasure, only shadows and ice.
Frost is softer with its scent of death, the illusion that winter murdered all.

Vishnu and Hercules

The flurry of ideas passes, replaced by a squall of nothingness
a stormy void obliterating all remnant of thought. Vishnu,
god of creation and destruction, creates destruction – truth
beauty melts into ash. Contemplation leads to confusion,
combustion, like crossing iron-spiked fields, leaving a trail of
shredded flesh and entrails. At the edge, the bones fall
and shatter into shrapnel piercing the unsuspecting with
thought fragments. No one embarks on the impossible task,
no Hercules emerges to piece this skeleton together, no god
rushes to breathe spirit into shards.

550: Jim Harrison

2007-04-24T11:42:00.000-06:00

17 April 2007
Jim Harrison: The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Dr. Keeler pointed out my tendency to “take you on the journey” of how I came to appreciate each of the class poets, I had intended to avoid that. But, as one who has tried to read some of Harrison’s novels and has had countless personal interactions with the man and his family, I did not look forward to taking his poetry seriously (or for him to take it seriously, thoughtfully, and elegantly as he does); I really didn’t think I could do it. But once I quit imagining his voice reading them (intolerable), I (with a self-professed distaste for nature poetry) thoroughly enjoyed these. Harrison manages to blur the lines and exploit the expectations of the human/animal (nature) dichotomy without losing respect for either, and he does this in an incredibly eloquent way. His natural places are fully encroached upon by cabins and canoes, and yet there is no synthesis or true understanding in either direction between Humanity (and all the crap, physically and conceptually, that it brings) and Nature. Following are some comments on passages which struck me in this volume.

The Theory & Practice of Rivers
4 This is the ascent out of water:
there is no time but that
of convenience, time so that everything
won’t happen at once; dark
doesn’t fall – dark comes up
out of the earth, an exhalation.
This grabbed me, in part, due to its relevance to Sexson’s class with its ascents and descents, elements, underworld, time, and of course for me, spirals – “time so that everything won’t happen at once.” The spiral exists in interesting relation to both space and time so that nothing is every exactly simultaneous or exactly repeated. Time is here seen as so intractable that it is portrayed as the earth breathing. A similar theme is returned to on page 14 with a musing on circles and time: “And because of time, circles / that no longer close / or return to themselves.” Harrison shows his understanding that there are no neat and tidy resolutions, no simple or complete answers, and no returning to an imagined idyllic past where everything was “as it should be.” Harrison seems to struggle with nostalgia in this volume. He frequently uses the past tense, tells stories, and reminisces, but something always seems to be frustrated in the remembering, in the telling, or in the attempt to pull meaning out of these incidents. Perhaps this refrain is central to his project in these pages: “The days are stacked against / what we think we are” (6-8).
*****
15 . . . Who among us whites, child
or adult, will sing while we die?
How is the way a culture “deals” with death indicative of the way it lives and the meaning and peace it ascribes to a life? Does this suggest that “we” are less close to nature, and thus more separated from understandings of life and death, than are other peoples? This passage is followed by the story of a guy who, when he thinks he is about to die, can only think that it is appropriate, even necessary, to drink. This tale concludes:
16 . . . It is hard to learn how
to be lost after so much training.
I read this very reflexively. This aspect of an education in literature is one of the things that bothers me greatly. We become blind to so much because we are trained to look for and do other things. There is much to be gained from being lost. I liken it to my musical education. I was given piano lessons for several years growing up; I learned how to read music, musical theory, classical and hymn music, and just a little on how to improvise the accompaniment of hymns. Sadly, because of all this training, I find exploring on the piano, attempting to play by ear, improvising without a guide, or playing more contemporary pieces to be damn near impossible. And even though I’ve forgotten most of the technicalities and my playing is embarrassingly rusty, I cannot forget how to read music; I cannot feel my way around the keys; I cannot seem to lose myself without unconsciously falling back on my training to guide me. And because of this, I have not truly felt the joy of creating music, of being lost in that beautiful way that allows all possibilities. I have too much “system” and not enough room for texture and possibility, as Harrison here laments:
23 A “system” suggests the cutting off
i.e., in channel morphology, the reduction,
the suppression of texture to simplify
**** A couple passages which pulled me up short:
24 . . . Writers
and politicians share an embarrassed moment
when they are sure all problems will disappear
if you get the language right.
Damn it. I’m guilty of this. I just watched Labyrinth this weekend for the first time since childhood, and I was struck by its emphasis on getting the language right. Sarah can’t accomplish anything without the right words, but it is, after all, just a fantasy. I will admit, though, that I haven’t quite given up on the power of language, though I am not naïve enough to believe that “all problems will disappear.”
28 This was nature’s own, a beauty too strong
for life; a place to drown not live.
Is this menacing fumarole more natural or more important or more revealing about nature than a peaceful, life-sustaining pond with drinkable water? Nature’s beauty is “too strong” for us to understand or truly appreciate.
******
What He Said When I Was Eleven
56 . . . When I miss
flies three times with the swatter //
they go free for good. Fair is fair.
There is too much nature pressing against
the window as if it were a green night;
Cabin Poem
63 I reject oneness with bears.
She has two cubs and thinks she
owns the swamp I thought I bought.
While Harrison presents his speaker constantly surrounded by nature, he cannot get away from realizing that there is an inevitable, unbreachable distance between, on the one hand, the human, concepts of ownership and fairness, meditations on death and aging, and, on the other, the natural (Nature?), the land, plants, and animals, that which we only think we have conquered and understood.

550: Dipping into the veins of some contemporary poets

2007-04-24T11:39:00.000-06:00

10 April 2007

Komunyakaa on the brain for this one, particularly his “Ode to the Maggot.”

Ode to the Calendar

Cousin of the wristwatch
and maple; you decree order.
Deaf hedonists and sloths ignore
while obedient slaves kneel

to your prophecies. Neglect
in turning your scales will not
reverse rings, erase lines,
summon rain out of season,

enact or subvert justice.
Perpetually March 19th, a mirage
fooling no one. You lie not of your
will but of my forgetfulness.

The truth is underneath, inside.
Ambassador of time yet
Insensitive to its verdicts.
False now; to the future,

never; historian and oracle
but dumb you are; numbers ceaselessly
parade across your skin. Even were you
not forged from kin, time’s law

writes itself
on her, on all.

Inspired by William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”

Walking to School

After cereal on the false cherry
table, I herd the children out of the door, pulling
on hats and backpacks. To their myriad questions
I have no answers, but still I search for words to satisfy.

Meanwhile, they have moved on to the next puddle.
The mud is thin and grey under a cloudy sky. A water main burst
yesterday next to the creek; it rained last night.
Lamme Street is still barricaded.

Uniformed men sweep away evidence of the failure.
The water department using more water, from hoses
this time, to clean up the mess of pipes, creek,
and rain united with soil, grass, and hedge.

The boys’ only interest is checking that the hole is filled,
while I stand before crossing the street. Did the tamed city water
and wild streams meet again or did the quarantine hold.
Was there joyful reunion, triumph, or suspicion, fear of contamination?

The sky holds no prejudice – all mingle there now.
Soon it will rain.

550: Alcosser

2007-04-24T11:37:00.000-06:00

Perhaps I’m overgenerous, but for each piece (or author) that I read, I genuinely try to like it or to find something worthwhile or interesting in it. If I should find this difficult, then I try to see why someone else would (for someone obviously did). This is what I had to do with Sandra Alcosser. And of course, if you try hard enough, you can surprise yourself. For the first few poems, I was, admittedly, quite lost. I couldn’t seem to find a foothold (other than the obvious Southern setting, exploratory and almost adventurous nature of the speakers), and I didn’t like finding myself in the stifling humidity amid unsettling images and thoughts. The South is not a place I have fond memories of or want to return to, and Alcosser paints it vividly, luridly, grotesquely, pulling you into it and yet pushing you away at the same time. I felt as if I drowned with her there. But even by the end of this section, I was growing accustomed to her voice and able to honestly appreciate some of the poems, “In the Jittering World,” in particular: “Perhaps we are both lost in our landscape, / woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin” (20). So then, you can imagine my relief when the next section’s introduction whisked me away to another time and another place, and when upon looking ahead, I saw reference to my beloved Mission Mountains and indications of a much more genial and familiar setting. I’m not sure why this should make a difference, but it did.

Side note: I can’t decide if Alcosser owes a debt to the surrealists or if there is something else holding her seemingly scattered verse together. I am not always able to follow her leaps. Perhaps I’m not meant to.

The bittersweet nature of “Possessions” (21) and “The Red Dress” (35) gave both of these poems an interesting take on nostalgia and both the patterns and unpredictability of the people we think we are close to. Though I have to admit that I’m a little baffled by the idea of prose poems: I don’t quite understand how they are poetry instead of vignettes or short stories. Plenty of other authors write prose poetically but don’t call it poetry. So, of course, off to trusty Google where I find that the form originated in France in the 19th century from whence it was borrowed into English. Modernists like Pound and Eliot rejected it while Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson embraced it. The only line between prose poems and short fiction (particularly flash fiction and short short fiction) appears to be the choice of the author in naming it. Rachel Barenblat of In Posse Review (online) puts it this way, “if a writer calls something a prose poem, then it's a prose poem,” and that’s that. This mingling of genres and frustrating of expectations is a positive movement in literature as far as I’m concerned. I almost wish we didn’t have to name and categorize everything and that this could be a non-issue, but that is, of course, not the case.

Subversiveness seems to be a common element of the prose poem in both its paradoxical name and form and in its content or attitude. It is purposely breaking rules, and thus, while some may try to constrain it for a while and define it (I found some rather restrictive definitions in my internet search, laughable, actually), it repeatedly defies definitions, continually evolving. I can see its beauty and its use, but I am still a little confounded by the notion of prose poetry or perhaps just by the naming of it. Though I find it interesting that at the bookstore where I worked until recently, sudden fiction and flash fiction collections grabbed people’s attentions and sold remarkably well, while “poetry” sold rarely. Is there something in the familiarity, the appearance of a lack of pretense, the approachability of prose poetry that (like Billy Collins) will draw in unexpected readers to poetry while sometimes rebuffing the more snobbish elements of the literati? I have to admit that of all her poems, Alcosser’s prose poems are the ones that stick in my mind the most. But even then, they didn’t feel as poetic as I perhaps wanted them to. I didn’t encounter the kinds of metaphors and use of language in them as I did in her poem poems, and for this, I am slightly disappointed. I wonder how the process of writing these is different and/or similar to the process of writing in a recognizable versified form.

I also read some poems by the three authors listed on Dr. Keeler’s website, and I don’t quite know what to do with them yet. I think that, especially with poets who are writing unconventional poetry, I have to become acquainted with them in order to really understand what they are doing and what they are saying. I guess I have to make the Other not so Other by forging a familiarity or a relationship with it. In Alcosser’s case, after reading her whole collection, I got a feel for her style and her preoccupations. I got comfortable with her and was thus better able to appreciate that which I didn’t understand or didn’t like before. I was able then to feel her feminism, her sexuality, her relationship with nature, the way she explodes myths while sometimes still embracing her essence (this I found to be particularly the case in “The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores” [61]), the way she explores the humanity in nature and the nature in humanity, as when she expresses envy for the “Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel” (65). I was particularly struck by the end of “Trajectory” where she writes, “like orbiting / the planet on a tempered glass // windshield, one crash / and all would shatter, not shatter exactly, / but fracture full spectrum, like life / as we know it – radiant beyond rescue” (68). This is beautiful, sad, and true; it paints a vivid picture and says something recognizable in a way I had never experienced before. As I have only read a handful of poems by each of the others, I have not yet been able to grasp their voices or appreciate their choices, although I did find them interesting and provocative. They are still Other to me. And while I know that each poem should work on its own, I also think that the context is important. A book of poems can become its own (relatively) self-contained universe wherein each piece has its place and can build upon the themes, images, feelings, and rhythms of the ones around it. I didn’t expect to like Alcosser at first, but this experience of a whole and the way the sections fit with each other or contrasted or complicated each other has given me an appreciation for her poetry that I might not have had if I had encountered just one poem singly.

Spiraling madness, dreams, and Foucault

2007-04-03T09:48:00.000-06:00

The following passage from Foucault's Madness and Civilization is something I have been pondering. Soon I will try to expose those thoughts that are comprehensible or communicable. I'm really fascinated by the phrase, "the image begins to gravitate about its own madness." Any thoughts you all might have on this passage would be welcome as well.

The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of madness. The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to speak, to remind, to teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.

Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. . . . Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. (18-19)

550: Attempt at longer poems

2007-04-02T13:14:00.000-06:00

Wind Language

Hurricane breezes play zylophone on
metal shingles with birch hammers
Clangy, sudden, disharmonic
Now silent and safe
Or so it seems

After dinner the back porch door
she thrust down, lying out
lying to the earth
claiming to protect but
no longer serve

Except now it holds hors d’oeuvres
As an obnoxious new-old table top
it protests the burden of light
conversation, wishes again
for wind sorcery

to release from stability
and duty back to swinging
free yet not
hanging from hinges like nooses

deciphering wind-powered
Morse-code in the rain

The Day the Cat Died

I opened the windows and
pulled down the shades
I hate to admit – I cooked
salmon, ate none, then left.
Destination unknown
transport reliability, some

Dancing leaves mocked
her coat of many colors

so I followed then became
the wind chasing debris
swirls of dust then dirt
and mud, pebbles and bricks
fled before me though I tried

to creep and slink, leap
and pounce, my windness – no match
for her catness – gave me away
Apparent, I was; invisible
my thoughts no more

The sun erupted, then belched
away the clouds, scolding me for
impertinence. Angry, I banished my
airy self to the netherworld.
Finally – oh, finally! – I

crumbled like stale biscuits
my pieces scattered and disintegrated
the diaspora of me now infecting
streams or declaring oneness
with country lanes.

The sun conceded rule
to the rain, reigning heavily
on the conscience
bombing my streaming remnants
a million miniature mushroom
clouds of solid water bursting
from iridescent murk

but I remained unmarked
unremarked, free to sink
colliding softly with the
bed, drifting purposely
through protective stones
amulets of the deep

Resting, I wondered if
she returned to nibble,
invisible, the pungent
offering abandoned amid
frenzied shutters flinging.

550: Attempts at Surrealist Free Association Poems

2007-03-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

Here they are, in no particular order. I'm not sure that I like them much, but there are some moments that work for me. I just don't know how such a conscious, physical act of writing, using language, can ever be fully free or unconscious. So, I know that some intention may have crept in here, but I found it difficult to "short-cut the mind."

Solitaire
ascending and descending cards
descending to the labyrinth
and Gollum’s cave through the
light of guitars the effusion
of mustiness and youth like an
elixir of gravy pouring from buckets
ever-present length of rope and
sand downing drowning

Bamboo
milky green and grapefruit
multi-hued multi-toned segments
of song brimming off the page leaving
nothing of substance except the
scent of brainwaves carrying the
message of turns through childhood
the elusive moral of sharing never
quite learned until mirrors morph
candles into clocks

Black and White
The animated soul of the pen
stumbles
creeping on all fours back to
the first love of page
and knight
castle and chorus join hands to
celebrate the marriage of money
and sense forever foraging
forests
of lines and squiggles for the one
which won’t escape
like a penguin in the Sahara

Search and Destroy
Blueberry skies and periwinkle oceans
blend into eggplant horizons
keeping the mind at bay while
the brain frolics through frosty
puzzles winning none leaving
some for the errant spider who
asks where we put the pie

Bubblegum
Pink Britney Spears Elephants again
Where did the asparagus go How
am I getting home Does the emperor
eat the ice cream Maybe his brain
is full of fluffy pink robots marching
to a mariachi tune I don’t know
where South America spills into
North America What comes from
purple pairings? Yellow submarines
dancing in a grassy field Snow
Harbor Why is the ghost in a sheep
costume and where are my cigarettes
Waterfalls trails tripping on stones
three blind mice coming at me
with a knife Awkward moments
of silence mashed potatoes and
cream

Glass Doctor
We fix your panes
My pains are the elegant delicate
old lady kind genteel in their torture
generously wracking
Muddy is messy and my heart
aches for pancakes but all will
be well when the lion roars
through my toes like the light
of a remote control

Dreams and Premonitions

2007-03-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

So I know we aren't supposed to bring our dreams into the dayworld, but what about premonition dreams? How do we account for dreams that ARE related to the dayworld through no choice or actions of our own? Perhaps I should backtrack. Night before last I had a dream where, among other things, my car was stolen. For no particular reason, I was telling a friend about that dream this morning. A couple hours later, when I went to go to my car, a vandal had smashed one of the windows. While I realize that theft and vandalism are not the same thing, I don't normally think about, much less dream about, my car. Why would I have this time? My friend immediately connected my dream to the discovery of broken glass and called it a premonition. So, my question is, is it at all reasonable to connect these or is it mere coincidence or??? Is this at all related to Melanie's theory of deja vu? All I'm saying, is I'm a little unsettled.

One more point of confusion: why would a Hillmanian interpret/analyze/discuss dreams at all? If they tell us nothing about the dayworld, and if we cannot live wholly in the underworld, what is to be gained? Also, if dreams are not to be brought into the light of day, then haven't we already compromised their underworld status by conscious telling or writing of them in the dayworld? Just by telling our dreams we bring them into the dayworld where they do not belong and have no connection. How can our conscious minds then deal with dreams?

Jamie's post about lucid dreaming caught my attention. I am notorious for having dreams from which I can awake and even do something (turn off the alarm, answer the phone, let the cat out, etc) before falling asleep and falling right back into the dream where I left off, often on purpose. I want to finish the dream, although it never reaches an end. I want to go back to that world. As if the dreamworld were an actual place I could go to. Another what about: what about when you dream and in the dream you know you are dreaming?

Yeat's Second Coming

2007-03-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

I am posting the text of this poem because it seems to be following me this semester. I find it interesting that the spiral and the labyrinth both revolve or turn around a center that is often thought of as the eye of the storm, the calm, still, unchanging, stable center surrounded by the chaotic and destructive motion all around it. Yet Yeats suggests that this is not strong enough to hold things together, and that "mere anarchy" will eventually reign. And I am not inclined to disagree with him. Achebe and Derrida both reference this in a spiral of connections. The second stanza holds a sphinx creature and an unborn beast, a la mythological labyrinths. Perhaps time itself is the labyrinth or spiral in which we are caught and which will eventually destroy us, to start its revolutions again. I'm probably simplifying this too much, but that is where my thoughts are at the moment. Connections between revolutions (turnings not necessarily wars, though I suppose that too) and revelations.

The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Convolutions

2007-03-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

More random notes on spirals and labyrinths. This topic is HUGE, and I'm getting sucked in.

The spiral is an abstraction from nature codified by the labyrinth.

Labyrinth/maze
- string, guide
- minotaur/ sphinx/ guardian
- hero
- creator/ genius figure
- sacrifice/ sparagmos
- sacrificial victims
- quest / goal / treasure
- ordered, knowable
- descent, downward, underworld, Hades
- man-made
- woods as labyrinthine: dark, mysterious
mazelike: pan as god of woods: pan as one
who leads victims out of the dayworld

Spiral/ Vortex
- chaotic yet patterned enough to be also ordered
- represented by snakes, snails, tornados, whirlpools, fingerprints, ear, intestines, ram’s horn
- association with mirrors, reflection, repetition, opening up of consciousness
- descent, downward
- constant motion, movement, nothing static
- natural
- unsuspecting victims
- is its own monster

Both
- underworld, Hades, downward motion, descent, below surface
- chaos and order
- violence; beast, minotaur, dragon, sphinx, leviathan?, whale?
- regeneration, rebirth, going under and coming out again, changed, transformation, eternal return?
- time, cycles, cyclical; space
- center: calm and safe?
- radiation
- mystery and that which is hidden
- wandering, loss
- webs of connections, spiders

Other manifestations:
- ouroboros: self-consuming serpent
- caduceus: staff of Hermes/Mercury (guide to underworld and messenger of eternal life) with wings and intertwined serpents; symbol of health, healing, medicine
- DNA: spiraling double helix
- symbol of infinity

Notes from Frye
Frye 77 “all arts possess both a temporal and a spatial aspect” - As do spirals and labyrinths.
Frye 99 “archetype: that is, a typical or recurring image. I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience . . . archetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication”
- could this very connection be seen as spiral-like?
Frye 102 “Archetypes are associative clusters, and differ from signs in being complex variables” learned associations; some are obvious but none are necessary or inherent. I keep finding that the spiral and labyrinth can simultaneously hold or suggest or imply many and contradictory meanings, images, connotations, importances.

In the case of King Minos of Crete, the labyrinth held something of which he was both deeply ashamed and deeply fearful. Something he could not destroy because it was of divine origin. Thus it forced him to act as a tyrant, exacting fourteen (two sets of seven) sacrificial victims from the Athenians every eight years. Ultimately, it cost him his daughter.

Wild Sheep Chase

2007-03-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

So, of course, everything I read lately seems to be obsessed with dreams. Permit me to quote somewhat extensively a dream sequence from Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. As I said earlier, I am interested in the dreams of fictional creations. How should we read these dreams? I'm also interested in this discussion of dreams for its own merit. If you want to skip past the minutiae of the dream to the discussion of dreams and symbols, please feel free to only read the bolded parts.

I dreamed about a dairy cow. Rather nice and small this cow, the type that looked like she'd been through a lot. We passed each other on a big bridge. It was a pleasant spring afternoon. The cow was carrying an old electric fan in one hoof, and she asked whether I wouldn't buy it from her cheap.

"I don't have much money," I said. Really, I didn't.

"Well then," said the cow, "I might trade it to you for a pair of pliers."

Not a bad deal. So the cow and I went home together, and I turned the house upside down looking for the pliers. But they were nowhere to be found.

"Odd," I said, "they were here just yesterday."

I had just brought a chair over so I could get up and look on top of the cabinet when the chauffeur tapped me on the shoulder. "We're here," he said succinctly.

The car door opened and the waning light lof a summer afteroon fell across my face. Thousands of cicadas were singing at a high pitch like the winding of a clockspring. There was the rich smell of earth.

I got out of the limo, stretched, and took a deep breath. I prayed that there wasn't some kind of symbolism to the dream.

There are symbolic dreams - dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities - realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.

Yet the fact that the cow chose me to obtain her pliers changes everything. This plunges me into a whole universe of alternative considerations. And in this universe of alternative considerations, the major problem is that everything becomes protracted and complex. I ask the cow, "Why do you want pliers?" And the cow answers, "I'm really hungry." So I ask, "Why do you need pliers if you're hungry?" The cow answers, "To attach them to branches of the peach tree." I ask, "Why a peach tree?" To which the cow replies, "Well, that's why I traded away my fan, isn't it?" And so on and so forth. The thing is never resolved, I begin to resent the cow, and the cow begins to resent me. That's a worm's eye view of its universe. The only way to get out of that worm universe is to dream another symbolic dream.

The place where that enormous four-wheeled vehicle transported me this September afternoon was surely the epicenter of the worm universe. In other words, my prayer had been denied.

2007-02-28T23:12:00.000-07:00

The labyrinth is a mythical manifestation of the spiral concept, but while the labyrinth has its minotaur or sphinx (as in Harry Potter), the spiral is its own monster. Heroes attempt to maneuver the labyrinth and conquer the beast within, while the spiral captures and manipulates. All become victims to the spiral. If the sea is a labyrinth, then perhaps leviathan and the whale are its monsters. But the sea also holds spiraling vortexes, sucking in unsuspecting victims to its watery depths.

Wayne - More to come . . .

Leviathan and Labyrinth

2007-02-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

Interesting to see how pop culture revels in and appropriates the images and archetypes of myth. Here is an explanation of something to do with Hellraiser (I actually don't know what this is; must look it up), something I found when searching for Leviathan and Labyrinth together because for some reason I associate with both closely, and therefore wondered if anyone else did.

Random thoughts on labyrinths and spirals

2007-02-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

The labyrinth works as a truncation of the quest phase of myth. The quest itself becomes or is representative of the labyrinth. While labyrinths are more often metaphorical than literal, the psychological implications are the same for each.

The connection of the concept of labyrinth with that of the spiral is inherent, yet while the spiral is a relatively predictable pattern and the labyrinth is determinedly mysterious in its wendings, the predictability of the spiral is still associated with the idea of spiraling down into madness, chaos, fear, and uncontrollability, and the unmapped paths of the labyrinth suggest that somewhere in them lies a definitive goal, a final stopping place, the reaching of a reachable objective, thus implying order and linearity. Illogically, the form of each is the antithesis of its actual or connotative meaning and conclusion. The spiral is a naturally occurring concept and image, while the labyrinth is man-made, consciously designed and thus knowable. Both are often associated with downward movement, but what this means, I don’t yet know.

Review of The Mythological Unconscious

2007-02-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Book review on The Mythological Unconscious (By Michael Vannoy Adams; Reviewed by Dennis Patrick Slattery) which includes some interesting quotes from Jung and useful references to the labyrinth and spiral. Here is the excerpt which intrigued me:

For students of mythology, especially, but not exclusively, chapters on the Centaur, Pegasus, the Bull, the Minotaur, the Unicorn and the Griffin envisioned in myth, literature and dream provide some provocative bridges between the poetic, mythic and personal imaginations. These figures, often given their own chapter, constitute the bulk of the book's content. Without stating it directly, Adams' study is concerned with the richness of the imaginationís ability and propensity to engage in what Aristotle called a mimetic action. Mimesis was understood as a making, a forming and shaping into a coherent form some construction or image, from what had been suggested or confronted in daily life, or had been imagined out of whole cloth by one's individual imagination. Part of the suggestion here is that the unconscious may not only be mythological but poetic at ground level.

By keeping the reader closely involved with these mythic images, Adams describes how the psyche seeks a confluence of experiences that graze around a central image to make sense of experience, be its source imbedded in dream, literature, mythology or waking life. He quotes Jung half way through his discussion: "symbols function to transform libido, or psychic energy." (This is what he means by "symbols of transformation.") (p.236) Given the metamorphic nature of symbols, their strength seems to rest in their power, Jung continues, "to act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a lower to a higheríform." (p.236) Such a transformation suggests that the energy of libido can be raised to a mythic or symbolic level. Jung's interest in the transformative nature of symbols suggests that energy from libido is altered, refined, shaped into a higher form of consciousness, which may be termed symbolic.

In fact, the symbolic nature of the psyche reaches into the heart of Adams' explorations, which use individual dreams, including his own, as major texts throughout the study. Here he is careful to make some clear distinctions between mythological and archetypal dreams. His idea is that all mythic dreams are archetypal, but not all archetypal dreams are mythological. (p.245) He takes this opportunity to point out a common error regarding archetypes, an error worth noting. Again, and this is one of the strongest qualities of his study, he returns to Jung's own words for us to contemplate: "It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a very limited degree." (p.246) Adams underscores Jung's insistent distinction: archetypes are not images. An image becomes archetypal only when it functions as the specific content of an archetype, but the image that serves this purpose only occasionally is not the archetype. While the archetypes are more akin to "constant forms," the archetypal image is are "particular contents of these forms." This difference is well-known to Jungians, but for many entering the deep waters of Jung's Collected Works, it is a difference worth repeating.

This important distinction Adams leverages into the foreground of his study and keeps it there. The distinction offers rich possibilities for investigating the nature of poetic form in poetry, mimesis as the heart of poetic action, and the nature of poetic coherence in a narrative. It also allows one to muse that perhaps poetry, as much if not more than dreams and mythic images by themselves, takes up the material world in language in such a way that it leads psyche back to these primordial forms. Such may be poetryís archetypal fundament and its most intimate association with the paradoxical world of mythology.

Also central to his study, in addition to the images mentioned above, are the shapes or structures of the labyrinth and the spiral, which he investigates through Freud and Jung, as well as the thought of James Grotstein. What emerges from his discussion is a provocative connection between, for example, the labyrinth and the interior of the body. A strength of the study resides in the manner in which Adams will offer several major thinkersí interpretations of the same theme; the overall effect is a large and sustained comparative approach to psyche and myth, all finding their common ground in the unconscious. "For Freud (and at least some contemporary Freudians), the mythological unconscious is ultimately an anatomical unconscious." (p.268) One can easily make some connections between Freud and Joseph Campbell's work on mythology and the organs of the body through what Adams evoked here in psyche's anatomical unconscious. Campbell's fundamental belief that mythology has its genesis "in the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other." (The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988, p. 39)

He also treats the spiral well through both his own insights and those of Jung: "According to him[Jung] the analytic process is not linear but circular (or cyclical), or, more accurately, spiral, and finally centripetal." (p.279) The spiral is the sine qua non archetypal image for psychological development. In Dante's Commedia, for instance, this image is essential for the pilgrim's progress through the territories of Inferno and Purgatorio, both of which consist of continuous spiral movements as they lead to the central image of the Griffin in Paradiso. This same spiraling assumes the form of the whirlpool generated by the white whale in Melville's epic Moby-Dick as it pulls the Pequod with its entire crew down into the realms of the unfathomable Pacific ocean, leaving only Ishmael, swirling and spiraling at the margins of the whirlpool, finally popping to the surface and rescued to tell the tale of the hunt to us.

Dreams: My Mother Won't Leave Me Alone

2007-02-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

To all my dream analysts (it's a good thing I don't have to pay you . . .): Last night I had another dream where I was having a conversation with my mother about very mundane things. So boring and ordinary, I can't remember what they were. This is not the kind of conversation I ever have with my mother. Lately, I've been talking to my mother in my dreams far more than I ever do in real life.

When we look at patterns in literature and in life, when we talk about not knowing the story we are in, what does it mean that my pattern is the same as my mother's? I don't know what story it is, but the log rolls down the hill and I can't stop it. I am sometimes conscious that I am about to make one of the same choices or mistakes that she made, and yet I do it anyway, as if I were not in control. If we are all in a story, I think Dylan knew his. "The radio says the good times are killing me but I'm not afraid to die." - written shortly before his death. But what does it mean to find these patterns? What do we do with them? (I know I sound like a broken record and I've been writing in cliches all day, but I can't quite answer these questions and I can't quite ignore them either. Help is appreciated.)

By the way, if my morbid talk bothers you, let me know and I'll try to lighten things up. I'm really sorry. Everything in these classes is hitting too close to home for me to ignore. I can't seem to talk about these topics without talking about death, loss, and chaos.

550: Surrealism

2007-02-26T22:41:00.000-07:00

I have appreciated elements of surrealism in fiction for a long time (Aimee Bender, Tom Robbins, Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Murakami, and Ryu Murakami, to name a few), and while I enjoyed some of the poets I looked up, I have had a little difficulty getting into Michael Earl Craig’s Yes, Master. What I like about surrealism is the feeling I get from it; it manipulates my feelings, yet I can’t always explain very well how or why. I can try to describe my feelings after reading it, but cannot seem to tie them to anything in particular about the poem, much less find any decipherable meaning in the poems. It may sound corny, but I am sympathetic to the methods of surrealism, even if I don’t always agree with the reasoning behind it (well, sometimes that, too). I can be a bit of an anarchist, if that is not too anachronistic to say. I feel rebellious towards categories, genres, modes, rules, and expectations, sense and censoring, in the realm of literature. I feel that both literature and experience are too complicated to divide cleanly into discrete sections or order with too many rules, much like I don’t understand people who don’t like different foods touching each other or who have to eat all of one kind of food before moving on to the next. Give me food that is enhanced by the food around it, layer and sauce it up. Give me casserole. If it tastes good, I’m not much concerned about what’s in it or how it’s made. And the person who made it probably couldn’t duplicate it if they tried. And that’s okay.

Surrealism is so simple in its concept that I would suggest it must be actually very difficult to do well. Anyone can string together disparate images, stream-of-consciousness narratives, idiosyncrasies, or non-sequiturs, but not anyone can do this in a truly evocative way. Though, I have to admit, I’m still not sure how to read or judge surrealist verse. What should I be looking for? How do I discern mediocrity from genius? How much can a surrealist poem really be analyzed (at least where meaning is concerned)? What do we do with only the occasional surreal moment? Actually, I think the unexpectedly surreal pleases me the most. This is why I love Haruki Murakami. His novels, no matter how many surreal elements, phrases, characters, moments, are usually intensely grounded in the tangible and very real kind of world where you can’t go off on an adventure without having someone to take care of your cat or where you have to wash dishes and buy groceries, travel takes time and some days are really boring. Then the surreal bits kick in and you see the mundane world in a whole new light, oceans of possibilities, rivers of meaning flood your mind. It’s exhilarating and wonderful.

Neruda has been a favorite of mine for a few years now, but for some reason, I never thought of him as a Surrealist. After Dylan passed away, it was a while before I could read anything. Nothing made sense. Because Dylan and I had read Neruda together for a class the year before and had both enjoyed his work (and because Dylan, in fact, dabbled in surrealism, taking images from dreams and hallucinations, delighting in taking the reader on a mental trip through unexplored territory, where elephants dance on ceilings, where discussion of fall foliage leads to condemnation of the mindlessly wealthy), I finally decided to start with that. And somehow, the way Neruda talks about death, and love, and life, in its insanity, in its surrealism, made sense. The real had become surreal to me, and thus the surreal became real and resonated like nothing else could at the time. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that war marked many Surrealist poets and artists. With so much senseless bloodshed and violence, rules and order become meaningless and devoid of the necessary communicative or restorative powers. In the presence or aftermath of this kind of horror, I think that we need to believe in something beyond our puny, conscious, decision-making, destructive, killing selves; we need to believe that there is something yet that is beautiful and honest, even if we can’t control it or can’t fully comprehend it.

Getting back to Michael Earl Craig, I take back my initial hesitation. I enjoyed reading his work, even if it confounded me. I particularly liked “Notes on Robert Musil,” “We Picture the President,” “Axiom,” “Piece,” “I’ll Fight Depression for You,” and “Ways of Dealing.” And while I can point out lines that brought me up short or muse on feelings for a while, I can’t seem to describe or analyze these in any sensible way. And I think that’s the way it should be. Sometimes the quest for explicit meaning robs the joy of the journey. Surrealism is a trip I like to take sometimes, but I can’t give you directions.

Dream: They won't let me in

2007-02-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Small scene from a larger dream. The rest is gone; this remains:

I walk by an open door and look in. It appears to be a church, Catholic, probably, although I've never been in a Catholic church. It is full of people sitting in pews, and at the front of the room, on a platform is Dylan, playing his guitar. At least I can see him playing, but I can't hear anything. I can't believe that it is really him, and I try to enter the room. I want to hear him play; I want to talk to him. But the doorman stops me and refuses to let me in. I protest to no avail. The doorman does not give any reasons; in fact, I'm not sure he speaks at all, but he is adamant that I not be allowed in. I think I can see a youngish clergyman at the front of the room but below Dylan and off to the side, like he is supervising. I think Dylan might have seen me, but I have to go away because they will not let me in.

A Dream Within a Dream - Edgar Allan Poe

2007-02-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Last night I was watching a film called "The Black Cat," about Edgar Allan Poe, and in it the actor playing Mr. Poe recited from this poem. And of course we are back to Shakespeare as well. Seemed appropriate.

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

Psyche: Images and Shadows, Snakes and Mirrors

2007-02-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

This section of Hillman most clearly, to me, seemed like a call to attend to the psyche, which I understand as that which is deeper, unspoken, intangible, non-literal, not obvious, and must be sought as opposed to the appearance and existence of the dayworld which is much more on a surface level, things taken at face value. The psyche is the ideation of the underworld, and therefore, we associate it with shadows, yet not normal shadows cast by light (because we must get to the more metaphoric kinds of understanding). Logically, Hillman asks,

How can there be shadows in the dark? The problem is very much like trying to sense the movement of one's own shadow. Trying to catch a glimmer in the shape behind the scenes [etymologically, Hillman says that the Greek versions of shadow "skia" and scene are related], to tune into what else is going on in what seems to be a natural action or simple conversation is precisely "trying to see shadows in the dark." It is to notice the fantasy in the moment, to witness the psyche's shadow play in our unconscious daily living. - 52, my emphasis

It is here that I feel Hillman is seconding the notion brought up in class relative to Frye: OF COURSE WE HAVE TO READ INTO THINGS, for this is how meaning is created, how meaning becomes, how we enter into the meaning of a text. Which moves me nicely back to the labyrinth. Two paragraphs down, Hillman writes,

So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what is going on there. - 52

The labyrinth Daedelus designed for Minos required descent under the palace; other incarnations of labyrinth suggest descent into chaos or madness, the depths of human existence, the depth psychology of Hillman. In the film Uzumaki, this labyrinth imagery is further connected to the idea of mirroring, of reflection, when a character carefully places a mythically-infused mirror into a washing machine before going down to experience and die in its vortex. He also films himself doing this. As other characters are trying to decipher the meaning in this, they discover that the word transliterated "kagami" is the same, although written differently, set of syllables used to mean both mirror and snake, the snake's coils being a natural version of the uzumaki or spiral. The whole town in this film is slowly being sucked into or possessed by the uzumaki, something most are unable to recognize because they are living so fully on the surface, without a depth of and for reflection. Sometimes when we descend deep into reflection, we lose ourselves, we lose the dayworld in the spiralling, pulling interconnectedness. And that is as it should be, for as Hillman argues, we must leave the dayworld meanings behind us and seek the metaphoric in our underworld imaginings.

550: Chasing the Dragon

2007-02-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

The following is inspired by the Chris Ellis poem of previous postings. I was at first most concerned with sound work as that is what at first drew me to Ellis' verse; somehow the sense followed. "Chasing the Dragon" is my tentative title, in homage to Ellis' "Finding the Dragon," and as I was also interested in the idea of addiction, the evocation of an opium den pleased me.

Coffee is percolating; clouds
of grounds infest the festive
waters in the press. I have
ground the beans and boiled

the water, measured, poured,
and waited. The silty silky-brown
scent of a dense, humid clime assaults
the anxious senses as I pace the

square squat rented rooms. The
drowsy feline seems to pay me no
mind as I will the elapse of minutes,
the evisceration of time until my

morning dew settles in a tacky mug,
unfit for ambrosia. Dust motes
tangle in the sunlight, vying for the
thrill of not landing first, basking in

being, rebelling as they float beyond
dictates of space, time, or gravity.
The cat has noticed them, though,
as the tense muscles in her hind legs

attest, watching, waiting for them to pose
more of a threat to her slumber. My life
quickens anew as the caffeinated
brew begins its dirty work.

550: Shoeless at the Sweatshop

2007-02-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

This poem is a parody of one on Valpo Review. If you have read the source, you will probably recognize it.
With 14 lines and one instance of endline repetition, I'm guessing this is a bastardized sonnet. I could go on and on about how much I dislike the original, but I might offend some.

This one is for Jack.

SHOELESS AT THE SWEATSHOP

Shoes on the bench. Toe the perfect
line of grey Mister Marks, the harsh
taskmaster of red blood-stained fingers:
stretch their white knuckles right into an arch.
Contemplate your knobby knees
covered in undone black leather piece work.
Weep at the weeks and years
lost this way, where two feel like ten.
Stare at indecipherable symbols: you could
learn to read them in school, not here. Sore
young feet desirous of first shoes; cuts,
bruises aching to heal; feet
trapped under the workbench; feet
bare of shoes.

Romance: Death and Ecstasy

2007-02-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

I found a website with a useful comparative chart of the stages of each mythos from Frye: romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony & satire. His discussion of each then receives its own page. My group's presentation is on Romance.

In seemingly unrelated thoughts, I read Yukio Mishima's short story, "Patriotism," last night and was struck by the feeling of myth which pervaded it. "Patriotism" tells the story of the ritual suicide of a young military man, Shinji, and his wife, Reiko. My initial thought was to place it in the realm of tragedy, but now I am reconsidering. Although it ends in two deaths, the deaths are meant to keep the couple together, and are shown as honorable, worthy of respect, admiration, and even celebration, like marriage is in romance or comedy. Purity and propriety are very important to these characters and the reader is shown nothing to suggest any hypocrisy. Shinji has an almost romantic notion of loyalty to empire. If the husband is the hero, then a life without conviction might be the enemy. After looking at the clear descriptions on the above Frye website, I'm thinking now that it might fall more into the realm of irony and satire. After some more thought, I will try to further explicate this. I agree with Charity that it may be important to expand our discussion of archeypal criticism to include examples from outside of the Western tradition. At least if this means of organizing and discussing literature is to be meaningful for me, I would like to see a broader application. If archetypes go beyond Greek and biblical myth, then perhaps they have some origin in humanity. Like I said in my response to Breeman, stories are our way to make sense of life and thereby to make sense of death. Mortality is an essential element of the definition of human.

550: Sea swirling like a labyrinth unfurling

2007-02-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

“Finding the Dragon” by Chris Ellis

Chris Ellis’ “Finding the Dragon” caught me from the first stanza with its rhythmic, repetitive, almost incantatory sound. The silky alliteration of "How silent the sea sounds" is immediately followed by the cleverly effective manipulation, even inversion, of inland and island, and then, without a break, the "churlish surge" is upon me. I love the sound, the feel, the sense of being lost or in an untamed world. I also have close connections to the main myth that I feel has been displaced in this poem, that of Theseus and the minotaur, because I am named after King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, who aided Theseus in his successful maneuvering of the labyrinth and his triumph over the beast. Also, the images of the labyrinth and the spiral, ideas of chaos, order, and spinning out of control are captivating me right now. I like that the poem exudes an air of mystery, depth, and wildness, and that it is observant rather than active. It doesn’t tell me how to think or feel, but it shows thought and feeling. Ultimately, I'm fascinated by Ellis’ manipulation of sound, though sometimes I feel it more than I can express it.

The density of sound, image, and association is palpable. I felt this poem as much as I read it. And although I've never been to the Caribbean or to Greece, this poem can somehow take me to both places at the same time. With regard to the mythological subtext, the "stringless" speaker of the poem seems to be an anti-Theseus, bearing no weapon or guide or safety line, only bait, ripe bananas, journeying just for the sake of "finding the dragon," of maneuvering through the maze, no taming, or slaying or chasing involved. He courts the privilege of seeing the monster, but has no latent intent or desire to harm or otherwise subjugate. This seems to be a case of fascination and allure of the rare or appeal of the difficult rather than fear and blind daring such as we see with Theseus.

The "no sealing wax" image takes me to another sea, to Lewis Carroll, where the monsters are more mundane, but no less vicious in their silliness:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

The mention of wax might be out of place if it did not so vividly bring to mind other poems and other stories, such as Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and the tale of Icarus whose wings held together with wax were his (pardon the pun) downfall. Interestingly enough, this myth is also closely related to that of the minotaur, for both involved King Minos, the labyrinth, and the island of Crete. Which might also bring us to the birds populating Ellis’ poem. Yet we are not on Crete or on the bottom of the sea; our labyrinth is made of powerful, untamed plant life which seem almost as dangerous as any proposed dragon: "delinquent papaya, feral coconuts . . . yucca-like succulents . . . snarls of stickery vine."

I’m delighted by Ellis’ use of interior rhyme (or near rhyme) in stanzas three and seven, and the occasional tongue-twister: yucca-like succulents, pink flick, obsidian ellipses, shushing dry brush, oddly aqualine cabocons. The repetition of tasting reminds me of checking a sound system: “Testing, testing.” This works as a transition to the idea of touchstone (a word I had to look up to more fully understand). According to the OED, a touchstone “tries the genuineness or value of something” and is black or dark which takes me back to the obsidian ellipses. I’m not sure I even know what this stanza is about, but it seems to work with metaphors to maintain the mysterious, almost alchemistical atmosphere of the poem.

Finally, I am intrigued by the possessive phrase “my summer warblers” in the last stanza. Again, I’m not sure what to do with it, what to make of it, but it seems to shift the whole poem for me somehow. Also, the reference to summer takes me back to the birds in the fifth stanza who are called “winter cousins.” These opposing references are almost disconcerting.

550: Valparaiso Review Choice

2007-02-12T00:13:00.000-07:00

As Melanie said, here's my choice. Discussion to come. Though I do know I intend to explore the labyrinth and minotaur imagery here. Perhaps finding the dragon is just as important as defeating it. Maybe too much empahsis is often placed on the slaying aspect of the monster archetype. It exists for a reason, but the monster serves an important role. Here I go blending. I can't help it.

Finding the Dragon
by Chris Ellis

How silent the sea sounds,
inland on this island, the churlish
surge dampened outside this ruined
plantation. I have walked

a black track, stringless,
no sealing wax, bearing only
bananas, their yellow smell ripe
in Caribbean air. There,

where the asphalt bleeds
into sand, this is where I was told
he would be. By the sea,
some forgotten foundation,

an old groundskeeper's cave,
limestone slabs tipped by delinquent
papaya, feral coconuts pressing
native palms for each acre

of sky. Migrant warblers flip,
off bananaquits, winter cousins weaving
a dense mat of yucca-like succulents, quarreling
among snarls of stickery vine. There are eyes

watching, oddly aqualine cabocons,
vertically slit. That dead bough might stir,
from some stray ray, sun spangling
stripped bark into beaded brown

leather, cold blood warmed
on gold stone. I might hear
that ancient gait, each step
intent, and the serpentine twist,

a long tail shushing dry brush. Maybe
see the saurian face, dewlap unfurling
a masculine flag, the meaty tongue's
pink flick, tasting, tasting.

Obsidian ellipses slant
my landscape, touchstones
spiraling on updrafts.
I lob my last bit of banana

back at a vacant grove,
to some unseen iguana
lost among relics, deadfall
scattered under sentinel stones

overthrown by the sweet
thrill of my summer
warblers, the sloe scent
of cherries.

© by Chris Ellis

Safety and Chaos

2007-02-12T00:09:00.000-07:00

I’m afraid that through patterns, we are somehow looking for safety, for recognition. I always want literature to be unsafe, to find recognition perhaps, but also to not recognize. For an English-type person this may be sacrilegious, but I don’t want explanations. I want to be lost. I'm not so concerned with finding my way out. Are we trying to order the chaos of literature in an unhealthy way? Which is more instructive, order or chaos? Sometimes I think this ordering oversimplifies and demystifies that which needs a certain level of complexity, chaos, and mystification. Are we trying to tame a dragon or conquer it when we should be observing in awe?

Circle or Spiral

2007-02-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

I'm reminded of a line from one of Dylan's (Etchingham, but named after both Bob and Thomas) songs, "Life is a circle, nothing more," though sometimes I'm inclined to view life as more of a spiral. The eerie centrality and the multiple and simlutaneous meanings and incarnations of which in the Japanese film, Uzumaki (translated Spiral or Vortex and of course, based on a manga), are places I keep going back to also. Interestingly, I also just discovered that a popular children's character (of manga and anime) from Japan who also has an audience here bears the last name Uzumaki. Coincidence? I think not. Suggestive? Important? I think so.

Like Wayne, I am interested in the labyrinth and its stories and accoutrements. To begin with, I am named after Ariadne (of Theseus, the minotaur, and the labyrinth fame). I was even noticing spiral motifs in Pan's Labyrinth which put me in mind of Uzumaki.

There is something deliciously disconcerting about the spiral, for in a 3-D form, it can traverse the same territory as before but in a different time or at a different speed, or only partially. It evokes movement even more vividly for me than does a circle. And while it can repeat itself, it can also go in unpredictable and uncontrollable directions, much like life. A circle is comforting, while a spiral is frightening, unnerving.

If I were to list my areas of intrigue at this moment which might propel themselves into a paper topic(s), I might come up with something like this:
memories, fictional dreams, spiral/circle/vortex/labyrinth

Questions while reading D'Aulaires'

2007-02-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

So, I've been reading D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths to my son, and tonight, some questions occurred to me while reading. How do we treat the dreams that occur in myth and fairy-tale and literature? How are invented dreams related to/ relatable to "naturally occurring" dreams? What do we do with these created dreams, other than looking at their relationship to the other elements of the piece in which they are found?

And, while I still have my questions concerning the usefulness of analyzing archetypal patterns (What do we do with these, really? What "real" purpose does this activity serve? Is this meant to bring us to some deeper meaning or understanding of humanity, the world, or literature, or? etc.), how do we approach the origin of such patterns? Or do we? How do we account for their existence at all? What purpose do they serve? Can we ever get away from them? For example, Classical Greco-Roman mythology and the Bible have countless convergences. Does this mean that there is some kind of Ur-myth, Ur-story lurking behind it all?

Also, the term displaced forces many questions upon me. Is the "original" the proper place and the displacement improper or out of place in a negative way? If these stories are somehow central to our culture, civilization, or humanity, then from whence come the stories? Do the stories form our culture or does the culture create the stories? When is a story considered original or "placed" and what does it really mean to say displaced? What do we mean by place? I can't escape connotations of perversion (per-version?) and impropriety when I think of displaced, yet I can't help thinking that displacement isn't a bad thing. I'm confusing myself now.

Frye on Romance

2007-02-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

I'm sure everyone wanted to see my ridiculous notes on Frye on Romance,
but here they are anyway. Now, when I expose my thoughts more fully, there will be
something to refer to (for me at least).

Most notes are direct quotes from Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye. Page numbers
appear above the relevant section.

186
BASICS
Wish-fulfillment dream
feeds on hopes and desires; ever-present
childlike and nostalgic for a golden age
plot is adventure; the quest
187
THREE STAGES (importance of threes)
1) AGON – conflict (perilous journey and minor conflicts)
2) PATHOS – death struggle (crucial struggle ends in at least one death)
3) ANAGNORISIS – discovery (exaltation of the hero)

OTHER IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF ROMANCE
Protagonist/hero & Antagonist/enemy
Form is dialectical
Hero (upper world) --> Our world <-- Enemy (lower world)
188
Inescapable connection to solar myth and sun-god
Reading as critics vs. Reading for fun
Divine ® myth ® canonical ® heavier weight of conceptual meaning
Myth as metaphorical key to the displacements of romance
189
Dragon-killing theme
Monster/Leviathan = sterility, sin, death
190 Labyrinth in the belly
Killing monster releases former victims from belly
Ariadne figure
191
Two concentric quest-myths in the Bible
1. Genesis – apocalypse
2. Exodus – millennium
Importance of sea/water symbolism
192
If leviathan = death, then hero enters death, dies, rebirth, resurrection

Now, we have a FOUR PART QUEST-MYTH
1) AGON – conflict
2) PATHOS – death, often of both the hero and the enemy
3) SPARAGMOS – disappearance of the hero (tearing to pieces)
4) ANAGNORISIS – reappearance and recognition of hero

These are also the FOUR PARTS OF A CENTRAL UNIFYING MYTH
1) ANAGNORISIS = COMEDY
2) AGON = ROMANCE
3) PATHOS = TRAGEDY
4) SPARAGMOS = IRONY

Treasure -- wealth -- power/wisdom (prophet/oracle/sibyl) requires mutilation or
handicap
193
Quest-romance translates to
DREAM as Deliverance from anxieties of reality, but will still contain that reality
RITUAL as Victory of fertility over wasteland
195-6
CHARACTERIZATION in Romance is not usually subtle or complex
· for quest or against
· two women – duty and pleasure
· faithful companion and traitor
· heroine and siren/beautiful witch
· dragon and friendly animals
· those who are morally neutral and have connections with the natural world
197
FOUR POLES OF CHARACTERIZATION
ROMANCE COMEDY
1) hero eiron
2) enemy alazon
3) nature spirits buffoon or master of ceremonies
PURPOSE is to intensify and provide focus for romantic mood
4) ???? agroikos (rustic clown)
PURPOSE would be to call attention to realistic aspects of life; practical;
the more realistic the story, the more important this character would be
198-203
SIX ISOLATABLE PHASES which form a cyclical sequence
1) Myth of the birth of the hero
a) water-based
b) flood, ark, animals
c) false father
d) false mother
2) Innocent youth
a) malaise; longing to enter the world of action
b) may be close to taboos; sexual barrier
3) Normal quest theme
4) Maintaining the integrity of the innocent world against assault of experience
a) May be individual, social, or both
b) image of the monster tamed and controlled by a virgin
5) Reflective, idyllic view of experience from above
a) natural cycle is prominent
b) contemplative withdrawal from action
c) experience as comprehended NOT as mystery
d) moral stratification of characters
6) End of movement from active to contemplative adventure
a) image of old man in tower
b) return to beginning
c) framing “cuddle fiction” device may be used
d) apocalyptic floods and life must begin anew (see many examples in sci-fi)
203-206
Point of Epiphany
- associated with mountain tops
- connection between earth and heaven or sun
- may be erotic – the summit of natural experience
- top of the wheel of fortune

Fryed Dreaming

2007-02-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

So after reading sixty pages of Northrup Frye last night, I dreamt about Anatomy of Criticism. I’m not sure about the details, but I think it was a case of life following the six phases of romance (see pages 198-203), and I recognized the pattern, determining where we were in the cycle and what, to an extent, we could expect next. I think I was comforting someone who didn’t know what was going on by explaining the predictable, cyclical nature of life/romance. I know I mentioned Frye by name.

A dream from last week involved a small mountain valley town overshadowed by a building-sized boulder precariously balanced (almost roadrunner and coyote style, but naturally occurring). A rain of fire from the sky (I don’t think it was a “natural” phenomenon; it seems like it was “enemy fire” of some kind) sent the boulder down into the town. People had to run. Many did not escape. Somehow I was involved in rescue and relief effort. Conscious that we were going to have to rebuild the community (human civilization?) with our little band of people. I know it was much more detailed, but I can’t remember more than this for sure. This dream has stayed with me in an ominous way, so I finally decided to record it.

Rethinking Frye

2007-02-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

I really like the idea of looking at myth and fairy tale and the idea of displacement, but I have to admit that I was very resistant to Frye's obsessive compulsive categorization. In one of the previously mentioned notebooks, I found class and reading notes Dylan had made on Frye, and found such gems as, "Was he constipated? What would make someone do something like this?" referring (I think) to the preponderance of schemata and organization in Frye. I couldn't help taking some comfort in such a small moment of agreement and convergence, even coincidence that I happened upon that passage in the notebooks, even from beyond the veil, as it were. While I still have reservations, I think that rereading is softening my heart and making me somewhat willing to go along for the ride, even if I'm not sure if the destination has much to offer.

One of my major reservations has been the issue of universality or the euro-centric nature of Frye's work, wondering what it might have to offer for an increasingly interconnected world or literature that does not owe debts to the Bible or Greco-Roman mythology. But at least Frye is aware of this bias and understands it as one of the unavoidable limitations with which he is working. If nothing else, this is making me want to read more. Where goes the time?

550 Original Poetry: The Notebooks

2007-02-05T21:15:00.000-07:00

Will never be written in again,
those holders of his boundless ideas,
frameless words,
and cryptic thoughts.
Yet they could never
hold him.
None of us could,
hard as we tried.

He lived art
uncensored,
breathed through lungs sans ribcage,
free from the constraints
of most mortals – or immortals, for that matter.
I like to think that Pan himself was jealous
of those mountain highs.

Untamed time melts into chaos as
past and further past mingle
dripping into each other.
But they harbor no present nor future;
stunted like trees buffeted by winds,
they will grow no more tangled branches.

Reading them is like a trip
into another mind,
another world,
into the past which is not a boomerang
coming back to its place of origin
to be thrown again.

Reading them is trippy;
your imbalance is his design.
Don't be afraid to fall as you follow
the words recklessly leaping in all directions,
taking you places you never knew existed,
and some where you never could then –
nor can now – go,
for the moss, fog, and fungi,
while not solid or stable,
are eerily forgiving.

550 Original Poetry: Pock Marks

2007-02-05T21:11:00.000-07:00

Her trail is precise, strategic,
the work of study and thought,
leading straight to the creek,
a destination
whose purpose I can’t decipher.

Like a sentry making rounds
her path is preordained,
veering neither right nor left. Perhaps
she is obligated to make a report;
her superior is awaiting her reconnaissance,
the legwork an integral part of a greater plan.

A sudden dash into the shed creates a ‘V’
and you can’t help but think she knows she was spotted.
Her cover, perhaps, blown by the little bird
whose twirp gave him away in excitement
at discerning the tortoiseshell’s plan.

Once she has forged the path,
once the snow bears the pock-marked evidence of her travels,
she makes the perilous journey again
and again,
each time mindfully placing her paws
in their designated receptacles,
molds of snow fit just for her.

And then I wonder if the retracing of steps is not
for her work as a spy or bounty hunter,
but is the rehearsal for her Broadway debut,
as she goes over her choreographed stage movements,
the slow-motion dance required for the delicate negotiation
of crystalline minefields.

At other times, I’m skeptical
and brush off her repetition as mere coincidence,
or the workings of a well-oiled machine,
whose pace and stride never vary, so of course
the padded paws find the same indents as before.

But deep down I know her efforts are deliberate,
methodical plotting
to someday catch the little bird unawares;
she plots to overthrow our aimless wanderings
and to usher in the age of the cat.

On Reading in the Morning Paper That Dreams May Be Only Nonsense

2007-02-02T17:37:00.000-07:00

by Billy Collins, from Questions About Angels

We might have guessed as much, given the nightly
absurdities, the extravagant circus of the dark.
You hit the pillow and moments later your mother
appears as a llama, shouting at you in another language.

Or you find yourself drowning in a sea of breasts,
or drowning in as sea of basketballs –
those who have attended night school will be quick
to explain the difference.

Or the nonsense is just a scrambling of the day before,
everyone walking around the office stark naked,
the elevator doors opening on to deep space,
the clamshells from lunch floating by in slow motion.

Too bad Freud isn’t here to hear this news,
maybe some pharaohs too, druids and wide-eyed diviners,
all gathered around my kitchen table
in their exotic clothes, their pale mouths moving
silently, as in a dream,

and me pouring coffee for everyone, proffering smokes,
pacing around in my bathrobe reading the paper out loud.

But the scene would soon swirl away
and I would find myself alone in some fix,
screaming within the confines of an hourglass,
being driven to the opera by a blind chauffeur

or waking up to the chilling evidence on the bedroom floor:
a small pile of sand, a white bow tie.

Reluctant Dreams Week One

2007-01-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

I know I said I was NOT going to put dreams here, but, what the hell. No point in being shy now.

My dreams are always very scattered and disconnected. Kind of like me. And quite frankly, I think most of them are just a form of processing recent events with no other significance. At least the not unpleasant ones. My dreams tend to be either completely benign and pointless or else extremely disturbing and scary. I have trouble remembering the former and do everything I can to forget the latter. Then there is the matter of those peaceful ten minutes to write down dreams before getting out of bed in the morning. Yeah, right. They don't exist when you have small children. Trust me, I tried to write things down, but they escape very quickly when you are constantly interrupted with, "Mom, did you know . . .?," "I'm hungry. What can I have for breakfast," "What are we doing today?," "Can I have a friend over" all at six in the morning.

With that said, here's what I've got:

1. After playing with a friend’s unbelievably soft, friendly, and playful – demanding, actually – dog, I dreamt of a creature that seemed to be a cross between Fred the Dog, a manatee, and a hippo. Large and shaped like an aquatically-inclined mammal, but very soft, slightly furry, and insistent upon playtime with me. By the way, I saw two manatees at the Dallas World Aquarium and was fascinated by the way their mouths moved when they ate. This creature had a manatee mouth.

2. Last night I dreamt that for some unexplained reason I went to teach Melanie’s 121 class, but when I got there, they were the wrong students. Last semester’s students were in this term’s class and no one who was supposed to be there was. I guess your students really liked you, Melanie; and maybe I liked them. Then I went to teach my class, and no one showed up. The students were boycotting my class, or in some other way made an organized decision not to come.

3. In one dream that I only have a brief memory of left (I do know it got much more interesting, but I can't remember how), I was having a very ordinary and trivial conversation with my mother in an office. It was right on a busy, noisy highway which was extremely distracting (waking life note: North Rouse Ave was closed that morning and traffic was redirected down my street). My mother got really upset about underage driving which of course I also associated with underage drinking. It was a weekday morning, but the local high school band and assorted floats went by. I remember having the impression that it was a rehearsal for a parade and not the "real" thing. Though in waking life, I'm not sure I understand the difference. If you are parading down a street, it's a parade, right?

4. One last dream. For this one you get my almost completely unedited notes. Good luck deciphering.

I forgot how much fun it was playing in the snow. Chris comes. great train/bus - not moving. Kitchen worker, working a double on a holiday? Gripes when I order a latte and I almost reconsider, but don't because I'd been helping with a coffee "situation" - overflow on counters due to clogged filters. She asks me if I've seen the small cake mixes but I know that the larger boxes have the smaller recipe on them. Then she wants to know where the boxes are now. I want to go back to my seat. She makes my coffee and even puts a sticky note with my name on it on the lid. Chris had enough coffee already. The people around us all seem to be well-off, dripping money, as it were. I'm invited to this dinner, but when I get there, everyone is done and already paying. They were all old people.

If this makes any sense to you, then there must be something wrong with you.

Let's throw some poetry into the mix, shall we?

2007-01-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the dark side of this corner of cyberspace, where I will randomly (meaning here, once a week) post entries for Greg Keeler's Contemporary American Poetry class (550). I warned you this might get confusing . . . and I realize this is all very personal, and I am sorry.

I’m taking “informal” very much to heart. These are my scattershot musings on poetry still in a very disconnected, incomplete, and questioning form. I claim to have no answers, just lots of thoughts, often not fully ensconced in sentences or paragraphs. Perhaps I’m practicing paying attention to the sounds of words and phrases in preparation for actually writing poetry (a rather scary prospect in my book).

So, I’ve decided that there is not enough poetry in my life. Though I wonder if one really needs as much spare time as Billy seems to have to be a poet. If that is a prerequisite, I’ll never be even a hobby poet, but I can find time to enjoy poetry, and perhaps, I’ll manage to write something this term that evokes the insanity of my life. Or perhaps I will counterfeit. The idyllic world he describes, full of quiet moments, peaceful scenery, calm, patterned, methodical living doesn’t much match the world I know. While it is beautiful and makes for a nice escape, it also makes me a little discontent with my current life. Why don’t I have time and opportunity to lie in a field and watch the clouds? What is necessary for poetry? Other questions I’ve been asking, just in an exploratory manner, mind you, include: What does poetry do? What is its purpose and role in our culture/society/world right now? Is the reception of poetry all that different now from what it was, say a hundred and fifty years ago? (i.e., are audiences for poetry really that much smaller or more “elite” or vice versa?) What is the power of poetry? What are our expectations of it? What are its requirements of us? How do you talk about poetry? How is our discussion of contemporary American poetry the same as, similar to, and/or essentially unlike our discussion of the older poetic tradition? Where is poetry going next? What will be the major catalysts for the next major change?

So what do I think poetry is doing or can do or should do? I have a phrase in my notes from last week, but am not sure if it was said or hinted at in class or if it is something I heard somewhere else and decided to jot down just then. “What does poetry do? Gives the imagination for the world to change.” By which, I think I mean, a new vision of the world (to be interpreted in as wide or narrow a manner as the situation calls for) is necessary to exist (somewhere) before it can be realized. The poet is perhaps the ideal creator of this new imagining, experimenting with alternate worlds and alternate understandings. The everyday nature of contemporary American poetry serves the essential purpose of making us appreciate and notice. Billy Collins is right now making me appreciate, savor, and celebrate the joy of my morning coffee. Something that is often only seen as perfunctory and unnoticed, regarded merely as a caffeine injection becomes an acknowledgment and celebration of the fact that I woke up today. The more I notice the taste and texture of the coffee (dark and silt-y, I think of the coffee grounds impregnating the boiling water to create an entirely new molecule), the more I take time to feel the sensation of the warm and heavy mug in my hands, the more alive I am, the more invested I am in the act of living and being here now. The power of poetry is in its ability to make us re-see, to slow us down and show what was in front of us all along but to change the angle and reposition the light.

I think my favorite Billy Collins poems are the ones which treat the bookster’s life (my own word, perhaps related to huckster, meaning one circumscribed and defined by books and words, one who lives through and by and in language). In fact, I copied for and read “Marginalia” to my 121 class. I’m not sure what they thought of it, but I hope it makes them re-examine the way they consume written words. “What I Learned Today,” “Journal,” and “Japan” belong to this group, sharing the experience of the written word.

I would also be lying if I said that I didn’t greedily grab hold of anything treating death and grief, still desperately seeking some understanding, some strategy, some new way of seeing and dealing with these experiences.

I am a little concerned that I don’t really know how to talk or write about poetry in a critical manner. I have my impressions and my personal taste, but I feel the need to develop a vocabulary to deal with the what and how of a poem, why it provokes certain reactions and resonances.

What I think I most love about poetry is its oral/aural nature. The feel of the words on the tongue, the way they insinuate themselves into the ear. A symbiotic life form inhabiting one’s head, stuck there like a song. Every now and then I have to get out my tattered copy of A Coney Island of the Mind and read “I am Waiting” aloud to my empty house, almost as if it were a magical or religious incantation.

After looking Billy Collins up on good ol’ Google, I am struck with his almost evangelical fervor and missionary activity concerning poetry and contemporary society. For example, I was already familiar with the existence of the two Poetry 180 volumes, but I didn’t realize his motivation or the significance of the number 180. Getting poetry into every high school student’s day is a lofty and admirable goal, and I realize my sympathy with this endeavor when I remember how delighted I was to hear that my son’s first grade class last year had a poet of the month. Jericho’s favorite was William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Even I can’t explain his fascination with that particular poem or pretend to know what it meant to him, but I do know that he made me read it to him before bed on a regular basis. Many other poems not specifically written for children followed. I know that his positive attitude towards poetry greatly contrasts mine from youth, and this delights me. I could not be more pleased. The literary missionary fever has me firmly in its grasp. I told my students today that I have an incurable literature disease. I didn’t tell them that I hope it’s contagious. The other example of Billy’s democratic approach to poetry which I discovered today is that one may legally download (for free) The Best Cigarette, which contains thirty-four tracks of him reading his own poetry with some commentary, generally prefatory remarks. It is the soundtrack for this paper. Imagine his calm, slightly self-deprecating, yet secretly proud voice, words, pauses punctuating my own.

Deadly Nightshade: A Displaced Fairy Tale

2007-01-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

Jericho, Pace, and Simon were idealistic but bored and rebellious youth, united by the recent outcast status conferred on them by the authority of Bozeman High’s disciplinary committee. The offense need not be detailed here; suffice it to say that the stunt included a vacuum cleaner, four volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, twelve paper clips, and a disgruntled co-conspirator who eventually ratted them out and thus remains nameless. She knows who she is. The implicated students narrowly missed being brought up on charges of mail fraud, impersonating members of the royal family, and scaring small rodents (officially known as animal cruelty). Luckily, the punishment remained in school hands and the errant students were not remanded to the custody of government officials.

At first the freedom of suspension excited Jericho, who suggested they use the time to form a band, gain riches, and parley their fame into an MTV reality show. Pace and Simon couldn’t think of anything better to do, so they started practicing loud instruments and writing sappy songs. While things didn’t quite work out as planned, the threesome’s ingenuity and energy resulted in the most creatively written, produced, and performed indication of repentance and rehabilitation in the history of the school, a three-act rock opera replete with glittery costumes, dangerous pyrotechnics, and dogs walking on their hind legs. Not only did this extravaganza win them friends and fans across the school, it also convinced the administration to allow the wayward student musicians to return to classes before their term of punishment was quite complete.

Everything was going swimmingly. Simon started dating the most beautiful girl in the senior class, Jericho’s repeated existential crises earned him a perpetual spotlight with the emo crowd, and Pace reinvented himself as a dreamy but conflicted chanteuse with a legion of dedicated hangers-on at his beck and call. This new order of things was, of course, too good to last.

Once again, an impressively offensive and life-threatening deed literally rocked the school. Although nothing could be proven, Jericho, Pace, and Simon were the immediate suspects. Conveniently, the school administration discovered a technicality whereby it could promptly and without warning expel the troublesome threesome. No amount of evidence, no number of alibis or professions of innocence could reverse the decision.

Again having inordinate amounts of time on their hands, the boys reinvested their energies into the band. Stellar MySpace and YouTube receptions vaulted the trio, now known as Deadly Nightshade, into overnight stardom. As you might imagine, this forged a deep rift between the teenage musicians and their former high school classmates. As you might also imagine, the band fielded many offers for professional, legal, and financial representation.

Belladonna, a highly-experienced, spotlight-hungry manager with a major record company offered the most lucrative deal and won the contract. Deadly Nightshade worked hard writing songs, rehearsing for shows, and creating memorable sound bites for interviews. They had little time to worry about the money that was pouring in as a result of all their success and so they left Belladonna in charge of their investments. After a record-breaking world tour, the boys decided a sabbatical was in order. Jericho called the manager to inform her of this decision. To his surprise, she disclosed the fine print of the band’s contract, giving them no voice in such decisions and naming herself as the sole trustee for the boys’ wealth. She demanded that they begin preparing immediately for their upcoming recording sessions and photo shoots and hung up. Vacation was not on the schedule.

Pace then came up with a plan. After a few days of the band dutifully following orders, he invited Belladonna to discuss business over drinks at a trendy nightclub. After plying her with drinks and charm, paparazzi and poses, Pace confessed his attraction for the much older woman. Flattered and drunk, she took the (jail)bait to her room, all the while muttering lewd suggestions. Upon entering the suite (paid for by the band, of course) and stripping off her designer clothes and imported jewelry (also included in her contract), Belladonna began advancing towards the boy. At that moment, Pace uttered the word “oven” in the direction of a barely-visible lump under his shirt. On cue, the doors to the suite opened, crowded with gawking photographers and reporters.

The ensuing scandal revealed many other of Belladonna’s indiscretions and less-than-legal activities. She submitted a change of address forwarding her mail to a federal prison outside of Tacoma. The contract with Deadly Nightshade was deemed null and void, giving the boys control of a considerable fortune. But this was also the end of their fifteen minutes of fame. Rock operas were so last week. Not entirely saddened, the boys returned to their hometown, and although they still were not allowed to return to school, the boys’ classmates welcomed them back as heroes.

The money paid for damages to the school and the requisite completion of the boys’ interrupted high school education. Simon would never be a geometry whiz, but he did get to teach keyboards to a succession of rather cute and admiring pupils. Jericho started a karaoke coffee bar and gave himself top billing every night. And Pace? Pace underwent gender reassignment treatment and now goes by the name of Sofia.

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-01-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Some random notes on Guillermo del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth which should be expanded at a later date. As the title suggests, it has much to offer for examination of myth and fairy tale transposed, translated, displaced, reinvented.

An attempt to understand the main character, Ofelia, begins with her name. Serpent, immortality, help, innocence. Hamlet, madness, youth, fantasy, romance, hope in a mad world.

Mother and daughter, in utero son and evil step-father, the captain. Set in Spain 1944, remnants of the civil war. Guerrillas in the hills and the captain manning his little kingdom. An insect which turns into a fairy along the model of an illustration in one of Ofelia’s books of fairy tales. Actually, it all begins with a narrator telling the story of an underworld monarch whose daughter escapes to the world of light, whence she immediately loses her memory and any sense of her identity, with strong intimations of Plato’s cave. She dies of exposure and starvation, because her immortality leaves her when she rebels, yet her spirit is destined to return to the underworld and portals are opened around the earth by her father. Ofelia is led to one by a flying insect and told by the housekeeper, Mercedes, that the labyrinth has been there essentially beyond human memory: “Since before the mill.” Ofelia is then led back there one night (as if in a dream; the insect wakes Ofelia who is at first fearful and tries to wake her mother sleeping next to her to no avail; the insect changes form to that of what we traditionally recognize as a fairy – the name Ofelia has been calling it all along – and leads the girl to Pan’s Labyrinth).

There she meets the faun who gives her a book full of blank pages, telling her that she is the Princess Moanna of the underworld (somehow related to the moon; a quarter-moon-shaped mark on her left shoulder verifies her legitimacy as such) and must accomplish three tasks by the next full moon in order to establish both her legitimacy and that her immortality has not been lost, at which time she will be restored as the princess and live eternally under the ground. The book will give her instructions. We are not shown Ofelia returning to her bed or the world of mortals, yet the next scene places her clearly there as if she returned magically (or as if it were all a dream). The mythological/ fairy tale scenes are alternated with the unflinchingly “real” and violent ones in the compound in the war. I won’t give any more away in case anyone here is interested in seeing it firsthand. I would highly recommend it. Note: NOT a family film.

Other items of note: at one point Ofelia wears a dress very reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The faun also gives her a mandrake root to put under her sick mother’s bed with specific instructions. Once she does this, her mother’s health abruptly shifts for the better. And I’m sure we all know how mandrake is associated with witches, the supernatural, the otherworld.

Dreams, underworld, vision (the Pale Man has eyes in his hands, empty holes in his face), fairy tale, life, myth all is here for the taking.

Memories and Dreams . . . song title . . . the melody is haunting me . . . here and not here at the same time

2007-01-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

This class is already dredging up much in the realm of memory for me. Frankly, much unpleasantness which I would prefer were not in my experience or memory, but is. As such, I’m contemplating the role of memories in this examination of dreams, myth, and life. For it can be argued that our dreams may rely upon memory, particularly those we might desire not to consider overmuch in our waking life. Our dreams disallow forgetting. It is also the function of memory which allows us to compare and analyze texts and patterns at all, to recognize in one place a translated form of something else, to see the mythological nature of any narrative.

A brief examination of recurring instances in my dreams include much fear, places that can be reached once and never found again although much effort is extended in the search, secret or hidden places that seem familiar or that I feel I knew all along and yet am discovering for the first time. Desperate irreversibility.

My new identity of Ice and Cold, although I know not yet what Hillman has to say about, conjures many personal associations and resonances. Numbness, death, preservation (interesting juxtaposition if I do say so myself), the mercurial nature of time in my dreams wherein it often feels as if the time I am acting in is frozen while the rest of the world rushes along breakneck as my frozenness, my inability to act finally results in apathy, cold waters threatening to wash all away.

Have you ever kissed a corpse? The body cools at a frightening pace once breath and blood still. Then what? Memory, dream, life exterminated. But not myth. Perhaps each experience both feeds myth and feeds on myth in an endless snake-eating-its-tail/tale cycle.

The spirit of Dylan is with us. He would approve.