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.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
550: Final Poems
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
510: From my draft, here is a reworked discussion of the mirror and the spiral
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Spiraling madness, dreams, and Foucault
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)
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)
Monday, April 2, 2007
550: Attempt at longer poems
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
550: Attempts at Surrealist Free Association Poems
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
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
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Dreams and Premonitions
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?
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?
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Yeat's Second Coming
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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