The Last Post

I think the only thing I really have left to say is Thank you to Professor Sexon. This class is exactly what I think education should be and it because of you. I echo many of classmates when I say you are an inspiration. I am very glad I happened to have taken this class and it will change the way I see and interpret the world around me.

My Life as a Mythic Detective

From the very beginning of this class things have fit together, connected to one another by such beautiful synchronicity I doubt I will ever be the same. One of the first things we discussed, in quite depth, was trees. Specifically the Laurel tree.  My given first name is Lauren, which means from the place of the laurel trees. I’ve never gone by Lauren; I’ve always gone by my middle name. I’ve often wondered why my parents would name me something they never actually intended to call me. But having learned the significance of Laurel trees I thought, maybe that’s why, maybe it’s mythological.  And so I began realizing how important it was that I was taking this class, at this specific point in time. I began to appreciate the brilliantly ordinary happenstance that landed me here at the exact time I was meant to be. A few big things further reinforced that notion over the course of the semester.

            One of the first things I blogged about was a song by Blind Willie Johnson called Dark Was the Night. I talked about this song in my post about the theme of loneliness in creation myths. This song was put on something called the Voyager Golden Record, a phonograph, sent up by NASA on the Voyager spacecraft. The record includes sounds and songs of Earth in the case that it was found by intelligent extraterrestrial life. Blind Willie Johnson’s song was put on to describe the human emotion of loneliness. So when we came to the end of the class, which is really just the beginning, it was kismet that Dr. Sexon decided to share a song by none other than Blind Willie Johnson. As we listened to John the Revelator I wondered if Blind Willie could ever have known as he sung those songs that they would be launched up into space for aliens to hear or listened to by a group of college students. Then I realized how profoundly mythological it was that he was Blind Willie Johnson. He was blinded as a child when his mother threw lye in his face. Maybe, like Tiresias he saw something he ought not have or gave an answer he never should have.  So it makes beautiful, perfect sense that Blind Willie Johnson would have this power of music, a sort of foresight that has reached through all these years, into outer space. It makes me wonder if he didn’t know all along.

            All semester I have happened to read a bunch of things out of class that have consistently and perfectly echoed what we discuss in class. From the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Roald Dahl to Kurt Vonnegut, I have read certain things with impeccable timing. One of the most profound synchronicities was my reading of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Incidentally, I have been trying to read this book for over a year now but couldn’t because it was constantly checked out from the library. I now realize there is no other time I could have read it than the exact time I did.  The book is about a made up religion and the end of the world.  I shared this quote in my blog:

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebodies hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

Which as I shared in my before, just fits so appropriately to Nabokov’s short story and “referential mania”.  Maybe we are all looking for something that isn’t there, whether is be in cat’s cradles, jars of jellies, or old blues songs. Which momentarily but the brakes on my intellectual excitement about everything connecting.  “Wait” I thought, I’m finding all this meaning in things that say there is no meaning…what does that mean? But then I realized I was missing the point, of course things are only meaningful because we make them so, but that’s irrelevant we ourselves are meaningful. Therefore the meaning we prescribe to things is equally so. The connections are equally valuable. To quote, if I may, Albus Dumbledore; “of course it’s all been happening in your head but why on earth should that mean it isn’t real”.

      So, through the course of those events, the class discussions, and the recent presentations have been immeasurably valuable to me. It has affirmed me in my desire to study and make films. Stories are perhaps the most valuable thing in human possession, and I do believe its something we each posses. We are all proceeded by it, and so we all have a share in it. Ovid knew that, he knew how important art, and literature, and stories were. They serve as an infinite power that exceeds time and space to assure us that others have gone before.

 

              

End Times--"No Cat, No Cradle"

A few days before we started discussing the end times I finished reading the book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which is a profoundly mythological work that centers around the story of the end of the world as we know it. It involves a made up religion called Bokonism that professes it self as lies all fabricated to comfort humans in the face of meaningless. Bokonism even includes its own mythological creation story.  The novel focuses on the creator of the atomic bomb, which is alluded to as the end of the world due to our own knowledge. Which is extremely biblical and mythological, the idea that we know what we shouldn't, that we've seen what we ought not have.  The end civilization in Cat's Cradle comes at the hands of an invention that essentially turns the whole world to ice. End times are ushered in at the hands of our own knowledge. The whole novel is a great allegory of the human quest for meaning, a quest that is perhaps is fruitless. As suggested in tis quote:

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebodies hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

When I read that of course immediately thought of the "referential mania" in Nabokov’s short story. And then I reread that verse in Ecclesiastes that says: 

                                       "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity."

And then I thought of how "Vanity" refers to the Hebrew term hebel meaning "mere breath", and in the NIV version it actually uses the word "meaningless" instead of vanity.

 I was slightly intellectually overwhelmed at how everything started connecting to everything else, and even more so by the thought that I was finding so much meaning in all these things saying there is no meaning.  There were so many connections that I found it really hard to mentally organize them enough for this post, which is why I'm sure it seems rambling. I'm also sure there are a ton more mythological references and connections in Cat's Cradle but I'll leave those for my final paper.

No Ordinary Day

Our discussion of ordinary days reminded me of this particularly poignant quote:
 
"If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it: accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls allowed none of the sounds of the world to reach your senses, would you not still always have your childhood, that precious royal richness, that treasure house of memories?"

    That is a quote by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke from his book Letters To A Young Poet.  It's a compilation of ten letters he sent to a 19 year old poet. I'm no poet, but I am 19, so I've found the book particularly apropos to my life and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Myth, as the precedent to all action, serves as a kind of collective memory in which we all share. A recollection we all posses and can call upon to bring beauty and significance to even the most mundane of circumstances.  At the risk of sounding repetitive I echo what I have said in my previous posts; we are irrevocably connected by myth and literature. It is a wonderful thing to be so moved by something written over 100 years ago to a different 19 year old, and then to realize its real significance lies in stories much older.