Farewell Blog

I was watching The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassas last weekend. It's a deeply mythological movie, and one of the moments which really stuck with me is the Guru of the temple. There is a story which needs to repeated forever or the universe will end. The devil (portrayed by Tom Waits) connives it to stop, but the universe doesn't end. The guru meditates it's because the story is being repeated somewhere else. As long as we keep on telling tales, everything will continue. That's the most important thing I want to take away from this class: the importance of stories in our lives. I had a great time this semester. I loved watching the lectures as always, the presentations were wonderful, and the blogs as well. The class was a delight, and I wish I was in another Sexson class next semester. My year just doesn't seem the same without them.

Myth in the modern age

I found a very interesting blog about myth in our modern age, and how the 18th Century Enlightenment painted myth as hokum pokum from a bygone era. Many today assume the word, "myth", is used to describe something which isn't true. The author, John Michael Greer, uses another definition, he sees it instead as "story". The age of Enlightenment drew a line in the sand between Analytical and Religious proceedings, with both Scientists and the Faithful alike often choosing to see culture's religious stories as untestable superstition or the never-faltering word of God. The author of this article doesn't like this binary and makes the interesting claim, writing: "it reveals the awkward fact that the cultural narratives we use to make sense of the world today, however new they look, are generally rehashes of myths that have been around for a very long time. The anthropologist Misia Landau pointed out some years ago, for example, that contemporary scientific accounts of the rise of Homo sapiens from its prehuman ancestors are simply rehashed hero myths that follow Joseph Campbell’s famous typology of the hero’s journey, point for point." The writer is referencing the story scientists use to describe man's emergence from barbarianism: as a straight line where man is constantly advancing. Greer says it more elegantly as "the belief that all human existence follows a single line of advance leading straight from the caves to today’s industrial societies, and beyond them to the stars." Myth is what we use to describe the world around us, and even science cannot get away from it. Not the archaeologists, chemical engineers, statisticians, or mathematicians.

There was a Russell Brand interview on reddit the other day which reminded me of Antony and Cleopatra:



We use our icons as narratives to construct a story. The people in the tabloids aren't real, they are cultural beacons, gods, who don't really exist. Yes, there are real Brad Pitt's, Angelina Jolie's, Tom Cruise's, and George Clooney's; however, the image we get of them is something more than that. They represent everything we cherish and abhor in our culture. Charlie Sheen is now a bigger cultural icon than he ever was. What do we value? Crazy men who say and do what they want? He is certainly popular in the college crowd, but probably not in the middle-age woman one. You take other celebrities like Tyler Perry or Regis Philbin or Lady Gaga. It's as if they were house gods to certain subsets of people. Myth never goes away. We need it to paint a picture of who we want to be and don't want to be. We need personal, cultural, and national narratives as well. It lets us know who we are.

I was reading a Mel Gibson interview where he talked about his public perception, who he really was, his fame and how he could not put the tooth paste back in the tube:

WEINER: But your public persona is not really you.
GIBSON: It never is. Remember old Cary Grant. People said, “Boy, what’s it like to be Cary Grant?” [Imitates Cary Grant voice and says] “I wouldn’t know.” It’s like, “I don’t know who that guy is.”

WEINER: Did you ever question that you chose the wrong occupation — especially when the tapes were released? Did you think that, 'I’m sick of this and I chose the wrong job'?
GIBSON: [Hesitates] There are a lot of instances over the years, with the loss of personal anonymity, you’ll always look back at. Nobody warns you about that. You walk into that arena and your intentions are fairly pure — you just want to be good at what you do and do what you love to do. That’s all. It takes on another side life. There are all these side streets that you really have no control over. One looks back with regret on that. There was a moment where there was a fork in the road where you could have chosen one way or the other. For example, I know people because they know me, they’ve chosen another way because they don’t like what it does. You go back and say, if I could go back and make that choice again, I’d make a different choice. It’s unfortunate that I was 21 or 22 years old when I made the choice because without benefit of experience or any kind of maturity, one makes a choice in the spur of the moment, that you again can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Mel's public image is that of a wild, crazed man--anti-Semitic and into pain. South Park has done a parody of him more than once. I do think this is how people see him, and frankly that's too bad. I don't think he is a bad person, but that's what the public does: it makes you into an "image". A god of partying, disease, virginity, bashfulness, aloofness, depression, there is a celebrity for all these things. It's just how people see the world. They need a representation of a certain absolute. It gives them choices and black and white dichotomies.

Paper, Part 2

I have spending my day really getting going on my Pulp Fiction paper, and it's turning into a part II of my essay for this class. I really didn't expect it to go there, but if anyone is interested, here is the first four paragraphs of it:



For a long time I struggled with how to start this paper. There is so much I want to cover in only eight pages, and writing in a way which is un-academic terrifies me. But honestly, what scares me the most about what I am going to attempt to do is this: I want to talk about me. In this class, we have focused on individual readers and why certain types of fiction and story appeals to a certain subset of people. Stanley Fish, in Interpreting the Variorum, believes there are interpretive communities which we are all part of (unaware or no) which dictate how we read a text, claiming that "strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around" (Theory and Criticism, 2087). I think there is a great deal of credence in this theory. We all begin to associate with a group of people and see through their collective lenses. It stretches back to man's cro-magnon days where it was important to have a cohesive community; and society does seem to have a way of getting rid of undesirables (ala Stephen King's Carrie). It has an invisible iron which flattens out the wrinkles. Everyone struggles with being accepted by others--we all put on these "masks" so we can acclimate. In this paper, I would like to focus on both sides of this binary--culture and the individual. As far as reading goes (as well as society, in general), I support giving the power back to the unit. Unit is a very utilitarian world, but it perhaps it is necessary to think of society in that way. It is a collection of units, of cells, making up the whole. A utilitarian, socialist, communist structure would seem to be an ant-hill mentality, worker drones constructing a bigger framework. But we are not ants, our sole need being pleasure, and our one aversion, pain. Humans are selfish, needy, despicable, but also gloriously intelligent, generous, and kind. This struggle between the dominant culture and the individual is an important part of what makes stories and pulp fiction so important. It gives a person a way out of the society of boundaries and social anxiety, a peak into the multi-armed god, Shiva—a grand master of creation, like Shakespeare's Prospero.

Tomas Makris says, in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, that there are two kinds of people, “Those who manufactured and maintained tedious, expensive shells, and those who did not. Those who did, lived in constant terror lest the shells of their own making crack open to display the weakness underneath, and those who did not were either crushed or toughened” (177). Literature is a transport away from this singular existence of our personalities—our rigid, separated egos which demarcate us from everything. It allows us to become anything or anyone: a pirate, a detective, a cowboy, a space alien, a 30 year-old woman desperate for a man, a governor of Venice, and a wolf in the Alaskan snow. In a novel or short story, we are everyone, every single character, every tree or stone. We are the master stage director, ordering people around and setting locales and environments in the stage of our mind, yet we are not present. We become everyone and no one--an outsider observing the show, but also the dreamer and creator of it all. What is the relationship between the inner theater (Morpheus' realm of archetypes, motifs, ogres, faeries, dwarves, and Jedi) and the outer one, our mundane constructed personalities? Why does everyone find it so easy to see through another, no matter how different they are from us (a pig in Charlotte's Web, and even a rock in short story I wrote a few years ago)?

I would also like to delve deeper into another idea which for me has been bubbling under the surface this entire semester. Something we have never explored in class is the role writing has in our lives. We have looked at pulp fiction and why that sort of literature appeals to such a wide audience, but I think I had a slightly different experience. Ever since I was a small child, I would always spend a great deal of my time constructing stories of my own. There was the massive epics depicting Jedi and Sith waging war on each other, the Pokémon, Final Fantasy, and Harry Potter fan fiction which I kept in my head, but sometimes submitted online, and the sequels to movies I loved: a group of people get stranded on Isla Nubar and are attacked by Velociraptors and T-Rex, climaxing with the survivors on a raft being chased by dino-sharks; an epic where the hero and his man-tiger friend have to escape a fantasy apocalypse; and my imagined seventh Harry Potter book where Ron Weasley sacrifices his life for Harry, and Dumbledore returns like a phoenix to save the day. There was the reconstructed story about a hero having to go through an encounter with the Minotaur, a Dinosaur, Joe Dante's Gremlins, and mummies. I would race around my living room, bouncing off furniture and banisters, making explosive noises. I lived in my imagination where there were no fetters. There could be dragons, ewoks, magic, light sabers, gods, monsters, and heroes all inhabiting the same universe, declaring war on each other, making alliances, and dying tragically. This was the realm I created. This was the kingdom I craved—a land free of inhibition, only drama and comedy, explosions and dinosaurs, and action and intrigue.

Reading did not play as large of a role in my life as did others in this class. Instead, I created my own worlds. I was, of course, influenced by different movies I watched or books I read, but on the whole, I loved being somewhere I made. The rules were my own, because I completely took the author out of the equation. There were no copyright laws in my skull--Gandalf, Dumbledore, and Yoda could dine at the same table, Batman and Wolverine could play ping-pong, and Goku could crash into Mordor and kick Sauron's eye in with a Kame-hame blast. I think there is something deeply powerful at work here, one that always seems to be bouncing up and down in my head, but I can never quite place it in the words I want to. Nothing is ever quite elegant enough. The closer I examine myself, pick myself a part for my own interest and hopefully, the interest of others I keep on discovering more layers to dig up. In class, out on the mall, in high school with the jocks, emo kids, preppies, band geeks, goths, and math nerds, I felt (I feel) isolated. I have to construct a super-composed aloof kid because I do not know how to interact. I feel the acting around me, the need for attention, and it makes me feel, well, off. I am not criticizing people's personalities; I feel a certain unwillingness to play along with it all--that, and I am scared. People scare me. They're unpredictable. What I am trying to get at is this: the bigger wall I put up towards other people, the greater the desire is to sink into my own worlds. High School was not a good time for me, the only way I really lived was through story. The universes I created grew bigger and darker. My characters became more angst-y, doubtful, and frankly demented and evil. I drew comic books. Yes, even now I am embarrassed to admit it. They were populated by the eponymous Piggy, the reluctant hero who fate would never give a break, Rooster, his arch nemesis, a chain-smoking, yes, rooster, Master Teddy, the paragon of reluctant evil who came from a parallel universe (he was a teddy bear), Heroic Man, a mixture between Superman and Coriolanus but more demented, Preston, the good nerd who wanted to conquer the world, and assorted other friends and enemies of Piggy. They emerged from the ethers, beings of my subconscious wanting to break forth and have stories written about them. I want to focus my attention on these characters, why they came from me at a specific time and place. For awhile in my life, they meant so much to me. I was lost and needed friends to guide me--they were there, my own creations. Some might call them imaginary friends, but isn't that all authors do, create non-existent people to satisfy their needs? I also want to experiment with something else. I have come to a time in my life where things are again drastically changing. Will I need Piggy and friends again? Will they return to me, or have they found someone else to live through? Can I draw a Piggy comic again?

Julie Taymor's The Tempest

I know you were interested in the new Julie Taymor "The Tempest" movie, Dr. Sexson, so here you go. I found this Boston Review review of the movie online, and the critic, Alan A. Stone, is not impressed (you know he is pretentious if he ostentatiously uses his middle initial as if it were a royal title). He claims that the movie is just too self-endulgent, too full of art, and wishy-washy, elitist cinematic tropes. I haven't seen this movie, or Julie Taymor's "Titus Andronicus", but I hear the latter is very good yet horrifying gory. However, the article Stone wrote about the two films is informative and interesting to read, at the very least. Here's what he has to say about "The Tempest":

Earlier in the century, The Tempest had remained a puzzling text. Scholars thought it incomplete and attributed parts of it to Ben Jonson. In an ingenious essay about the play, Henry James imagines that the author is a great composer and performer who goes home in the evening and begins to improvise on the harpsichord [musical instrument played with a keyboard]: the themes are familiar but different; he is revisiting the possibilities of the instrument and his own superb art. The neighbors can listen as the music wafts out the open windows, but what they hear is not for them. The analogy is apt. One can find many familiar Shakespearean themes in The Tempest, and James’s sense that it was not written for an audience is certainly not wrong. However, the standard modern interpretation is that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater, that he is Prospero, the protagonist, and the books drowned at the end of the play contain the mysterious magic of his unsurpassable greatness.

I think what the author is getting at is that Shakespeare was being self-indulgent himself when he wrote this play--that it was really for him and not an audience at all. I don't think that's entirely true. Everyone wants people to enjoy their work, and there is so much magic and mystery he dulls out, that an audience can't help but be entertained. Julie Taymor does take some liberties with the play however. She casts a woman in the role of Prospero and renames her "Prospera". Her movie is apparently about feminism. I suppose it would be, but I have to think there are more apt plays to choose than this one. Why not something like "Hamlet", "Othello", or "King Lear", wait, wait, wait... all those cast men in a bad light. This is why I can't stand feminist thinking sometimes. I mean, I realize Prospero is like the impediment of awesome but wouldn't it be slightly more progressive to see a woman with real flaws who really screws up her life? Wouldn't that be even more realistic, and hell, equal, and hell again, a more interesting portrayal?

Presentation Speech

I chose to use my paper to illuminate the topic of the roles we play. Everyone in this classroom is performing right now--their personality, their hairstyle, their clothes, the way they sit, talk, and where their feet are on the floor. Are they popular? Are they nerds? Are they interesting? Are they boring? Are they stoners? Are they Jesus lovers or atheists? Everyone is in here today, I see. Everyone sits before me sliding into the role which is most comfortable and most practiced. Who are you? Who are any of you? Shakespeare constantly dealt with the breaking down of identity, with the collapsing of not only the world around you, but you yourself. Men dressed as women and women as men to illustrate the performance of gender. Mechanics act like aristocrats before the aristocrats to make fun of culture roles. These walls we put up, of who we are and what we should be, are simply acts, shows, plays we put on for others (just as Antony and Cleopatra are never alone). You are not who you say you are! I can almost hear Shakespeare scream it across 4 centuries, an ocean, and a continent. The key to what Shakespeare was trying to say, I think, was that you have to discover the role you are performing and then perform the very best you can. If you are going to be a lover, be the best lover there ever was. If you are going to be a tragic hero, be the best damn tragic hero you can be. If you are going to be a fool, a comedian, act that fool like no other. Why half-ass something like a performance? You need to live it, ham it up, Jesus, people come on.

Shakespeare Paper - unedited

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door, Who is it for? - Eleanor Rigby, the Beatles

In the world of patriarchal authority, the world of man, laws, regulations, and boundaries, the world of Theseus, King Lear, Hamlet, Cymbeline, and Leontes—a person becomes aware of the self. Raised from a very early age to become cognizant of where the body ends and the rest of the world begins, where the carnal, mental, and spiritual beings preside. Society demarcates, splitting a person from the rest of existence, so much that they actually start to believe they are completely independent of everything. Reality is, in truth, a series of games we play with ourselves--a play, a theatre, and we are all on stage. Prospero, the great magician of the island in Shakespeare's The Tempest, was quite aware of this. He sets the pieces on the board, he moves them like pawns, he is aware of the beginning, middle, and ending. He is like the bard himself, a master of the universe. Perhaps, this is one of the many things Shakespeare was trying to get at: the power of us all to create worlds. Who is to say we are all not in Plato's cave, watching shadows on the wall? Shakespeare may have been alluding to this in his A Midsummer's Night's Dream. Throughout the play, characters often refer to "shadows", the most notorious of all these references is in Puck's final speech—he goes as far to call himself a "shadow". Suddenly, the audience sees before them echoes of their own reality, a world they just escaped into for a few hours. Puck, perhaps, is reminding them that like the prisoner's in the cave watching the mirages dance along the wall, that this was merely fancy, that life lay before them still. "You dreamed this play, and now you shall awake". Was he alluding to something more? That this life we pretend to live is just another play which we are escaping into? In this paper, I would like to delve deeper into Shakespeare's view of identity and the roles we perform for others.

Jacques, in As You Like It, says, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely plays" (Act II.7, 138-9). We all act our different roles throughout life, and Shakespeare lists through seven--the mewling infant, the whining schoolboy, the sighing lover, the oath-speaking soldier, the justice, the old whistling man, and then the second childhood. Alan Watts says Hinduism has a similar concept in Shiva, who has ten arms, or "the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara with one thousand arms. Their image of the divine is of a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it, and Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about them" (Watts 79, Myth and Religion). The multi-armed god is a representation of every person who has ever lived. We are his arms, we are all Shiva and just don't know it, pretending to be someone we are not. Watts continues, comparing theater to the Hindu god. He says:

"There are actors coming on the stage, but they are real people like you. In order for you not to see them in that way, they are going to put on their costumes and makeup, and then they are going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. And you know you want to be half convinced that what they are doing on the stage is real. The work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair, anxious, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he has almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. In the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely. And each of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, you are enjoying it like anything. (Watts 82)

Story and myth are the closest we can ever get to truth. They represent the plays which have been occurring since the big bang exploded and ballooned across the nothingness (we have creation myths) and until the end of everything (Apocalyptic myths). Shakespeare understood this (not the scientific myths obviously). He reminds us that we too are taking ourselves too seriously, that we too fear death, we too love, go insane, and can barely function some days. He reminds us that we are all actors.

Antony and Cleopatra are two the most iconic characters of the Shakespeare canon. Northrop Frye calls Antony a force of nature and a romantic legend. By draping a mythos over himself, Antony starts to become more than a man, he almost transforms into a demigod, to be remembered for ages past his death. In his hedonism, his devastating flyting with Cleopatra, his magnetic personality which means "that any army following him feels drawn together into a fighting community" (Frye 133), Antony is a man caught between the stale, stagnant, cool-headed Rome, and the fertile, fluid, passionate Egypt. Cleopatra pulls him one way, and Octavian another—the Egyptian wants him to be a pagan god, a tragic hero, while the Roman wants to white-out his name from history. In the end, Hercules abandons Antony, meaning that he "has failed to become a pagan incarnation, a Hercules or Dionysus walking the earth" (Frye 135). Antony may have denied the world a new golden age of paganism, but Cleopatra wins. Both she and Antony become immortalized across the western world--great tragic heroes with their fates written in blood and glory, a great endeavor to be a part of such a lost cause. Cleopatra herself is, according to Northrop Frye, yet another incarnation of the Mother Goddess, Isis, "in whose 'habiliments,' according to Ceasar, she publicly appeared. She is also described by Enobarbus as enthroned on her 'barge' on the water, as though she were a kind of Venus surrounded by love spirits" (Frye 134). Cleopatra's Egypt is a land of theater, overflowing and constantly changing, a world of women and completeness. Octavian's Rome is the land of IT in A Wrinkle in Time, an Apollonian kingdom of formalities and rules. It is fitting that Antony is tied to Dionysus, the opposite of Apollo according to Nietzsche. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture--essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The sensual god of many masks, he is tied to the mother Goddess as her lover/son who dies every winter and the ancient mystery schools, and is the god of theater. He shares several links with both Jesus, who was to be born in just a few more years in the play's timeline, and horned devil, Satan. All this makes an intriguing comparison, but in the end I want to tie this back to the roles (the Dionysian masks) which Cleopatra seems to be so aware. Neither Antony nor Cleopatra appears alone; they are always flanked by others—this shows how important theatrics really are to the Egyptian pharaoh. Kurt Vonnegut says in the introduction of Mother Night, "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be" (v). It is really not who we perceive ourselves to be, but what others see. They become as they appear to others, no matter who they believed they were.

The key to all this is the changing nature of identity. Rome and Octavian are associated with geometry and solidity, while Cleopatra is "the 'serpent of old Nile,' as Antony calls her, is constantly associated with seas and with two rivers, the Nile and the Cydnus" (Frye 137). Cleopatra, the woman of the sea, is the one who suggests fighting Caesar on the open sea. Both of the eponymous heroes of this play are dynamic and therefore magnetic. The whole world revolves around them, the whole universe if Cleopatra is to be believed. And this is Egypt, represented by the overflowing Nile and the winding serpent. A place without borders. A place of blurred lines. A place where women rules, like Albia in the mythical British past. It is also similar to woods in A Midsummer's Night Dream and As You Like It. Cleopatra wanted to obtain the mythic so she could live forever, Titania, the mother goddess, has already done this. She is a fairy queen, the true ruler of the forest, and Oberon is her Antony. Both represent a certain completeness—Titania's is a forest, a place which simply exists free of man's world. It also has a sense order, though you couldn't explain it. Again, Ted Hughe's concept of the "Goddess of Complete Being" echoes. The goddess' husband/son will die every year, only to be resurrected the next. We see this repeated over and over again across Western mythology: Demeter/Dionysus, Venus/Adonis, Cybele/Attis, Isis/Osiris, even the virgin Mary and Jesus. Antony is the sacrificial god. By dying, he ensures the continued cycle of nature. All the dying gods are firmly rooted in the Goddess' world, and the world she represents is everything, the good and the bad, the black and the white, the whole of existence is wrapped up in her visage. When anyone escapes into the "green world", they are leaving behind the world the Patriarchal God in Genesis split apart. They are entering the realm of Gaia. Identity breaks down here. Worlds, hierarchies, people, animals begin to merge together and become blurry. Here the Green Man roams the forest, dying year after year. Satyrs and Nymphs play. Fairies sing in the trees. Magic and mystery become real again. There is no bowing to a self-appointed ruling family, only honoring the trees, flowers, and toadstools. The forest as paradise is seen throughout mythology—specifically orchards: the Garden of Eden, Hesperides, Avalon, in the Eddas, it the beautiful god Idun who keeps the immortality-granting apples safe for the gods of Asgard. Robert Graves, in Mushrooms and Religion, claims it is related to psychedelic mushrooms, but I am not ready to go quite that far. At any rate, Shakespeare's forest is home to the mother goddess in several of his plays and poems. It is a place of identities collapsing. He ends A Midsummer's Night Dream, with a play inside a play, bringing to light the roles we all play.

One of the chief things Shakespeare does in his work is poke holes in people's masks. He makes his audience question themselves and the face they put on for the world. Women dress as men. Men dress as women. Mechanics become asses. Kings lose everything and re-find it anew. Lovers change who they lust for. Characters get beat down into a mush, a pladoh for future molding by the bard. Shakespeare composes worlds of collapsing boundaries, of changing language and rhythms. He smashes the societal lens we see through--a cultural trap only we can escape from, and he does this by demolishing walls of identity. Judith Butler, for one, suggested gender is merely a cultural play we perform for others. There is no "true" woman role, only the role we choose to perform. Hence, cross dressing reveals the illusion of gender types. When a man dresses as a woman, or a woman as a man, they clearly perform something which is often hidden to us by our own culture, bringing light to the illusion we live every day. Butler states, in her "Gender Trouble":

Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within the gay and lesbian cultures often thematize 'the natural' in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. What other foundational categories of identity--the binary of sex, gender, and the body--can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?

Often, when authors use cross-dressing as a thematic point, it is to illuminate the unfixed identity. Shakespeare uses it in A Midsummer's Night Dream when Francis Flute dresses as Thisbe and in As You Like It when Rosalind puts on the mask of Ganymede. But even before any line is spoken, there is still the fact that all the female roles are performed by men. There is much confusion and it is very pertinent that often this gender anarchy takes place in the forest or Northrop Frye's "Green World"--a realm without designators, walls, or borders, of Dionysus, the god of masks, chaos, and the theater, of the Mother Goddess, Titania, Demeter, Venus, and Isis. The Green World's wholeness reveals the made-up games we play in the masculine world. It is the obelisk versus the dome. Emotion versus rationality. Rome versus Egypt. The Federation versus the Borg. The Doctor versus the Dalek. Meg Murry versus IT.

The lives we lead are dreams that we ourselves construct. Prospero, in The Tempest, is a master of dream, myth, and story. According to Caliban, he derives his power from books, saying "thou mayest brain him, having first seized his books; [...] for without them, he's but a sot" (ACT III.2, 87-8, 91-2). However, Prospero already knows how this tale plays out, and he weaves one of forgiveness for all involved. Everyone is trapped inside a particular story or dream, and that is the power of myth, to enlighten us on which one we are in. The more we read the more power we begin to accumulate. We begin to see the stories around us, and most importantly, the story which we are playing in. Prospero would know if you were to ask him. He is the master magician, everything and nothing, and in ACT IV.1, says sublimely, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" (156-8). To the Hindus, we are the multi-armed dreaming god--tentacle points poking into "reality". Who are we really? That is a question even the great bard cannot answer, though he tried to the best of his ability.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

I was no reddit today, and this made it to the comics section. I know we aren't reading Hamlet, but what the hell...

Paper Topic

I would like to write my paper about identity and the collapsing of boundaries. I will probably leave this pretty short; however, As You Like It, A Midsummer's Night Dream, Coriolanus, and King Lear have all shown some interest in the masks we wear to deal with the world. It would be fun to explore this and delve even deeper. I would also like to see how Dionysus, the god of masks, and his thematic brethren, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris/Horus play into theatre and acting itself, and how that relates with the "wood" and the Goddess of Complete Being. Sorry, this is rambling, I am just toying with ideas right now and really have to get started.

The belly -- Coriolanus

I was reading Coriolanus last night, one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays. I was having a hard time getting enthusiastic about the material. 400 years worth of people have decided the play is no good, who am I to debate them? I am just some stupid, average English major, full of aspirations and topped off with a ginormous head! But Shakespeare opens up his play with a few amazing lines. The citizens of Rome are getting prepared to riot, but Menenius tries to dissuade them with the story of the rest of body rebelling against the stomach. Their thought is that it's just a holder of food which sits as they do all the work of bringing the food in. So they get rid of it and slowly starve to death. Here's what the belly has to say:

'True is it, my incorporate friends,' quoth he,
'That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live: and though that all at once,
You, my good friends,'--this says the belly, mark me,--
'Though all at once cannot
See what I do deliver out to each,
Yet I can make my audit up, that all
From me do back receive the flour of all,
And leave me but the bran.' (Coriolanus, Act I:I)

Shakespeare makes a wonderful case for the state. How it complete a sort of symbiotic relationship like your tum-tum does. I have heard this story before; however, like so many things, I didn't realize it had part of origins at least in Shakespeare. Apparently the fable has its true beginnings with William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine. Usually I have heard it describe the wholeness of existence, in which you cannot have the good without the bad. And apparently, it "has the distinction of being among the few Shakespeare plays banned in a democracy in modern times. It was briefly suppressed in France in the late 1930s because of its use by the fascists element" (Wikipedia). Pretty much true, if you look at it as enforcement for the government to do anything it wants. But I highly doubt that's what Shakespeare was getting at. He had spent his entire career derailing against man's constructed world (Theseus, Augustus, even King Lear), why would he start endorsing the power of the state to anything it wants at the end? Coincidentally, I just finished "Never Let Me Go", a movie based on novel by Kazuo Ishiguro with the same title. It depicts a dystopian Britain where clones' organs are harvested so the rest of the population can live longer. In other words, the belly is literally being ripped out of the countrymen. The movie is heart-breaking, and Andrew Garfield continues to prove his versatility with this and "The Social Network".

Identity

So far my break has been rather drab. I have seen several movies, some of which weren't really worth seeing ("The Virginity Hit", what an awful movie). I have read (romance novels and horror), but I have lately really been into graphic novels, chiefly The Sandman and Fables series. I am attracted to the eternal idea--the myth which survives throughout ages and across space. And that is what gods, fables, and The Endless represent: constants. y=mx+b, they are the m's and b's--the stable trends or truths which will continue until the end of life. On Monday, I saw Rango at the Shiloh movie theater in Billings. I was one of the few people there. It was pleasant and quiet, and I was quite alone, just me and the 20 foot movie screen... (not really, but it felt that way). To my surprise, Rango began with a lizard questioning who he was, locked away in away in an aquarium. He was putting on a fake show for himself. He acted all the roles and gave the inanimate objects around him personalities. This theme runs throughout the movie. He pretends to be a sheriff and gains the respect of the town. He cross dresses and puts on a play for the villains. One of the most telling sections is when he confronts "The Spirit of the West"--a proverbial god of the denizens of the desert. Golden globe awards are in a golf cart, and we see Clint Eastwood dressed in cowboy garb about to tee off. "The Man with No Name" tells Rango we are all in a play, acting our roles and playing our parts, and no one can leave his story before it is through. This is classic Shakespeare, "As You Like It", "Midsummer Night's Dream", affair. The main problem Shakespeare deals with, I THINK, is the problem of identity--who we are. who am i. who are you. And I have noticed a recurring motif throughout tales that deal with identity crisis: the cross dresser. It appears in Rango, in The Sandman "The Game of You", and "As You Like It". In The Sandman, it is Wanda, who is a man who wishes to be a woman, and Hal, another man who likes to me made-up as a gal, who achieve these motifs.

A few semesters back in Literary Criticism, I read Judith Butler. She suggested that gender is merely a cultural play we perform for others. There is no "true" woman role, only the role we choose to perform. Hence, cross dressing reveals the illusion of gender types. When a man dresses as a woman, or a woman as a man, they clearly perform something which is often hidden to us by our own culture, bringing light to the illusion we live every day. Butler states, in her "Gender Trouble", "Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within the gay and lesbian cultures often thematize 'the natural' in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. What other foundational categories of identity--the binary of sex, gender, and the body--can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?" Often, when authors use cross-dressing as a thematic point, it is to point out the unfixed identity. Shakespeare uses it in "Midsummer's Night Dream" when Francis Flute dresses as Thisbe and in "As You Like It" when Rosalind puts on the mask of Ganymede. But even before any line is spoken, there is still the fact that all the female roles are performed by men. There is much confusion and it is very pertinent that often this gender anarchy takes place in the forest or Northrop Frye's "Green World"--a realm without designators, walls, or borders, of Dionysus, the god of masks, chaos, and the theater, of the Mother Goddess, Titania, Demeter, Venus, and Isis. The Green World's wholeness reveals the made-up games we play in the masculine world. It is the obelisk versus the dome. Emotion versus rationality. Rome versus Egypt. The Federation versus the Borg. The Doctor versus the Dalek. Meg Murry versus IT.

Near the end of the "Game of You" arch in The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Barbie says, "... Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world--no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Isn't that a weird thought?" These mundane lives we lead are manifestations of the culture around us. We are filled with epics and universes, waiting to spill over into "the real world", if there is such a thing.

Assignment

I just realized that I really am a sick and twisted person, so I am not going to give an example of Kent and Oswald's argument. However, speaking of Kent and his alter ego Caius, I began to wonder if there was not some connection between Clark Kent aka Superman. So curious that I utilized wikipedia and discovered a possible connection: link! Meet Kent Shakespeare, the Superman of the 31st century! I have had my fill of silly allusions now (of course I haven't) and will continue to the second part of this assignment, flyghting (how do you spell this?). Wait, I already did that. For some reason I am thinking of a Spongebob episode where Sponge and Patrick exchange insults, but I can't think of the episode. Here's a minor scene from the show though, youtube quality of course:


Alright, now for the real second part of this. What do I need? I need my friends and family. I probably need them more than anything. Without them, well, I would be, nothing. I could survive as long as I had them.



Ian KcKellen is pretty awesome. He plays Magneto in this clip.

Senile, Mad, Old People

Senile, mad, old people. That's what I thought after leaving Tom Brokaw's speech last night. No, I am not talking about Brokaw, though I don't agree with many of his left-leaning views and my girlfriend is pretty convinced he farted on stage at one point. No, I am talking about the 97 year-old Crow Indian chief who blessed the anchorman at the hour 23 mark. He went up on to the podium and talked about Crow Country for awhile (not Montana, I might add) and its bountiful buffalo, deer, antelope, potatoes, berries, women picking berries, buffalo, and deer. Then he either mispronounced Tom's name deliberately or was senile (at this point, your guess is good as mine). Poor Brokaw then tried to tell the old chief his very PC story about riding a horse on his Park County ranch and thinking about Chief Plenty Coup, and how he tells his friends how Indians were here long before us and were still important to this country. The old man interrupted Tom at the beginning of this blaaag, saying he was going to sing now (stop talking!). So he did. He sang for a long time, stopping periodically to say, "Why is no one looking at me! I am Tom Brokaw!" Yes, the Crow Chief said that, and I don't understand why. At any rate, he ended and the anchorman could finally stop looking so damn awkward up there. I thought this was an appropriate story, since we are starting with King Lear, where an old man goes mad and senile. Maybe the geezer last night wasn't, maybe I am just really bad at judging, but his handler sure looked perturbed.

The King's Speech and Vonnegut

I have to admit I have no motivation this semester. I feel sorta like a monkey with a wrench banging himself in the head over and over again. Sometimes it stinks majoring in both English lit and Finance. My mind is spread over two disparate worlds, and sometimes I wish I could bring them together better. At any rate, Shakespeare still reverberates today as much as ever, and I know I should find it easy to reconcile the two. But I don't. I am still lost in a world of hard to comprehend sentences. I feel like my blogs this year have been half-assed, and really they have been. At any rate, I wish I knew how to continue after this. I don't though. ...

Last night I watched "The King's Speech" directed by Tom Hooper and starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush (of Captain Barbossa fame). Geoffrey Rush's character, Lionel, is a failed Shakespearean actor, but he teaches King George VI how to conquer his speech impediment. I think both actors did a fabulous job in a slightly underwhelming movie. It's good, but not academy award best movie of the year good. The film does deal explicitly with words and acting, and any English major should appreciate that.

My deduction is that all speech is acting. We are all performing a role--some a king (who really has no right to be) and some a failed-actor-turned-speech-therapist with out his doctorate. It doesn't matter if we deserve this spot in the play, it's really how well we perform it, and how well we are perceived to be performing it. That's why David Seidler, the writer, made Lionel's dream of being in a Shakespeare play a central part of his character. He wanted to bring light to perceptions and the true role of thespians. King George V, near the beginning of the movie, even comes right out and says, "actors, truly the most vile of creatures". But that's who we all are. We are all here doing things on a stage, dancing and wagging our fingers, and hopefully, it won't end up too badly. Dr. Sexson mentioned Kurt Vonnegut in class. Over winter break I read a book of his, Mother Night. In the book we discover that it doesn't matter who we think we are, it only matters who others think we are. Another of Vonnegut's short stories, Who Am I This Time?, also deals with that. It's about an actor who is a loser in real life, but when he gets on stage, he's a revelation. A woman falls in love with the man he acts to be, but discovers he is not that man. I feel like I am going somewhere with this, but I am falling off a cliff.

As You Like It and Mythology

Since yesterday was Valentines and I am still having lovey dovey hangovers (the butterflies in my tummy have five-O'clock shadows and genitalia drawn on their foreheads), I thought I would celebrate the holiday in my own way by writing about love, love, love in Shakespeare's woods and how that all mixes together in this overly long and whimsical sentence full of capricious fancy, verbal diarhea, mixed metaphors, overuse of the word 'and', and meta nonsense. Hmmm.. Okay, continuing on now. The Green World, Arden, the woods, are mythological mainstays. They function as a binary to the city--the civilized world governed by the law of man. The magical woods, on the other hand, are ruled by women, places where boundaries break down, and chaotic--of magic, mystery, and love, ungoverned by patriarchy. There are no boundaries, no dividers, no lines, or fences, or roads, there is only the faeries. Titania, the mother goddess, and Oberon (presumably the dying-and-rising spirit), rule here. Puck turns trespassers' heads into an ass-face. Orlando lives in the trees, reading them like books, more happy than he ever was in the city. Every tree, every flower, every bush, shrub, and mushroom (especially the mushroom) is in its place--not a place defined by man, a perfect location just the same. The wood is holistic. A sense of the unconstrained cosmos, that is why the bulk of the action is the forest, and why we journey here to fall in love. Sexual boundaries begin to collapse. Ganymede. Rosalind. Aliena. Celia. blah Because we can fully meld with someone like Spock with an irrate whale or something, we become one. We mesh with the green arena. We recognize the fallacy of the individual.

I wrote this about the greek God of wine, Dionysus, for a paper last semester. In it, I discuss theater and the woods, almost as if I was trying to preempt the class. Anyway, here it is:

Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to he that is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of earth; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan [and the breaking of the illusion of 'the theater']. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest.

Dionysus is a chaotic God--like the forest represented in Shakespeare's plays. He is the breaking down of walls, himself transforming into many shapes. He is the god of mushrooms, of the forest, of destruction, and of sparagmos and omaphagia.

The forest (especially orchards) are often depicted as paradise in mythology. King Arthur had his wounds remedied in Avalon, (Wikipedia: "probably from the Welsh word afal, meaning apple), an island inhabited by faeries. Hercules, in Eurystheus' eleventh labor, had to steel apples from the garden of Hesperides, which was patrolled by the monster Ladon. He tricked the titan Atlas into getting the fruit for him. In another tale, this time from Scandinavian mythology, Loki is hoodwinked into stealing the apples that make the gods immortal. And the most famous of all, the fruit in the garden of Eden eaten by Adam and Eve. These are Northrop Frye's Green Worlds, a place lost to us as we moved into towns and cities. We set out to tame the wildlands and are eternally terrified that we will lose them. I read a really strange essay by Robert Graves last semester: http://www.math.uci.edu/~vbaranov/nicetexts/eng/mushrooms.html

He wrote:

I have eaten the Mexican hallucinogenic mushroom psilocybe Heimsii in Gordon Wasson's company, with the intention of visiting the Mexican paradise called Tlal6can to which it gives access. The god Tlal6c, who was toadheaded, corresponded exactly with Agni and Dionysus. I also wanted to know whether I had been right in supposing that all religious paradises except the Christian (which is based on a first century Eastern potentate's court), such as the Hebrew, the Sumerian, the Indian, the Mexican, the Polynesian and the Greek (known as the Garden of Hesperides) were not only very much alike but corresponded also with the individual paradises seen by such mystics as the English poet Henry Vaughan, the Silurist. The word paradise means 'orchard' in the Semitic languages; an orchard-garden of fruit trees, flowers and running water. Yes, I had guessed right, though there are, I believe, certain dissimilarities: for instance, elephants appear in the Indian paradise and in others the inevitable serpent, familiar to readers of the Paradise chapter in Genesis, may appear as it did for me, as an intricately patterned gold chain. A bright snake-like formation is, by the way, a common symptom of a cerebral deoxygenization induced by hallucinogenic drugs; and seeing snakes is a common occurrence among alcoholics, saints who starve themselves, drowning sailors and sufferers from meningitis. My experiences included not only an orchard Paradise where one can see sound, hear colours, and watch trees growing leaf by leaf, but a paradise of jewels like that described in the Book of Ezekiel XXVIII, 13-14.

Is paradise really just a psychotropic illusion created by shaman? The fundamental aspect of all religion is the rupturing of this lifelong daydream. To have an apocalyptic moment and emerge with knowledge on what the world really is.... So what is reality? What is illusion and myth? The woods appear to be a hammer in which we can chip a "chink" in the wall and stare through. A place where sex and gender become confused. A place of ataxia. We are transported to a green kingdom where the rules and regulations of man no longer apply. We can run naked and free, and talk to faeries, dryads, and centaurs. We can become animals. We can find true love.

Dreams

One of A Midsummer's Night Dream" most intriguing mythological perspectives is the play within a play within a play--and who knows, within a play, within a play, within a play. This device makes us question where fantasy ends and reality begins. Are we mortals not just on display for another divine audience? Puck's final speech breaks open the audience-actor divide even further. He says directly to the viewers, "If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended--that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear" (Act V.1, lines 415-18). The introduction asks whether "'shadows refers to the fairies or the actors? [...] Is the audience being addressed by 'Puck' or by the performer who has just finished enacting Puck? We have consented, for the previous two hours, to accept the stage action as reality, shadow as substance,. Can we be sure that the world we have agreed to think of as real is anything more than a platform constructed for heavenly mirth? Where does the stage end and the world begin?" (Complete Pelican Shakesp. pg. 255). The lines become blurred. The four levels (the mechanicals being the lowest) start to collapse into each other, and the world of dreaming and waking become skewed; it is entropy, the morph to chaos.

The wood is a place of magic, mystery, and love, ungoverned by patriarchy. There are no boundaries, no dividers, no lines, or fences, or roads, there is only the faeries. Titania, the mother goddess, and Oberon (presumably the dying-and-rising spirit), rule here. Every tree, every flower, every bush, shrub, and mushroom (especially the mushroom) is in its place--not a place defined by man, a perfect location just the same. The wood is holistic. A sense of the unconstrained cosmos, and that is why the bulk of the action is the forest.

Midsummer's Night Dream and Vertigo's Sandman

Lately I have been deeply entrenched in Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. The way he uses myth in his story is captivating--Cain is killing Abel for eternity; the Maiden, the Mother, and The Crone are timeless figures (echoing the three witches from Macbeth); and Dream, Death, and their five other siblings never die, but are images of mythic authority. In the comic, we follow Morpheus (Dream) as tries to recapture his three items that will return his power. He journeys to hell, meets John Constantine (blond, unlike Keanu), and battles Doctor Destiny. Yes, it may sound stupid. Yes, in some ways it may be. But it is awesome.

The main reason why I bring it up, especially in a Shakespeare blog is the arch pertaining directly with "A Midsummer Night's Dream". In it, Morpheus contracts Shakespeare for two plays because of the man's amazing skill for story. One of the two he produces is the aforementioned "Dream". Shakespeare then puts on the play for the Titania, Auberon, Puck, and many other creatures, who have come from the faerie kingdom to watch. Wikipedia reads "Puck greatly enjoys the play and repeats the theme of the story that while the play does not directly reflect history or even some of the personalities of the characters it is still considered a true reflection of 'reality'. (In reality Puck is described as being a psychotic murderer and not a merry wanderer of the night.) Titania takes an interest in Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who plays a small role in the play."


Drawn by Charles Vess, Colored by Steve Oliff, owned by DC

The work inspired a meditation on art here. The article, written by Matthew Cheney of Gestalt Mash, describes the importance of art and the artist:

"What, then, is authentic and meaningful in art? What is art’s value and purpose? Is there something other than just entertainment — a diversion to kill some time — here?

Meaning is produced not by authenticity, but by representation. Questions of truth and fact come up many times in this issue of Sandman, and Dream himself addresses the question toward the end, when Lord Auberon says, “This diversion, though pleasant, is not true. Things never happened thus,” and the Sandman replies, “Oh, but it IS true. Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” Dream made his bargain with Shakespeare as a way to keep old stories alive, to pass along versions of truth from era to era, reality to reality — to escape the dust of memory.

Representations do not have to be authentic to be true, nor does authenticity create durability. Long-lasting art can be as artificial as one of Shakespeare’s most artificial plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play full of rhetoric and whimsy and fantasy. Such things allow a distance from the stuff of life, and within that distance we can find the objectivity to discern truths otherwise invisible to us. Artists risk loneliness and devastation when they delve into that distance, but the result can be a work — a truth — for the ages."

Myth is as endurable as the universe itself. Even if our warehouses of tradition, culture, and stories were washed away in the sands of time, there will be somebody else out there in the cosmos writing the same stories. They are caught in the wind, on the lips of children, in the fabric of stardust.

Mother Goddess

I really wanted to write a blog about the mother goddess and her place in Modernity (said in a really pretentious, smelly fart way). I was on the verge of doing it on Monday, then on Tuesday, then on Wednesday after class, then Today, and now I appear to be trying to do it. What I really wanted to say in so many words is that people are too caught up in the minutia of daily life, of numbers, words, and essentially, that they are an individual.

In the West, we are cut off from holistic world. And this is what the Mother Goddess really represents, a wholeness of the cosmos--we are cells making up a wider body, sand on a beach, drops of water in the ocean. The focus of our life is the single point, the head lights of our eyes, the male orgasm (now I am getting new age-y, damn). The Mother Goddess, on the other hand, is the subconscious mind (the super conscious as Alan Watts likes to put it). It's the sense of knowing something that we shouldn't, how we drive a car when we are talking to somebody, how we breath, how we beat our hearts, how we grow our hair--things we do without knowing how we do it...

The Mother Goddess is matter--the word eventually deriving to mother. She is everything and impossible to describe except through myth. William Blake wrote in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive." The mother Goddess does and does not fit into this role. Whereas the other "more male" gods started deviding the universe amongst themselves, the Mother Goddess and her son (the eternal dying-and-rising god) were the universe. She is the undivided universe, a sense that Modern Man has such a hard time perceiving. The cycles, the interconnectedness, are lost in our grand cities supplied by Walmart, ConocoPhillips, and lubricated with ersatz fiat money. It's the vapid world of modernity, where nothing really makes sense. The need to reconnect with a spiritual "wholeness" is overpowering. Everyone longs to die, to return to a non-chaotic state. I read an article that said low income families are less likely to be depressed if they have a window that looks out on greenery. Another article that explores similar healing properties of nature is this one. The researchers discovered that people, "who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations, [...] like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society." Any sort of natural setting seems to help stressed minds. Why is this? It is nature's ability to remind us that we can just exist, that some day we will leave this chaotic condition, that we we were once in the Garden of Eden, that we were once whole. It is much easier to be a rock than a human... The Mother Goddess reminds us that we are not individuals, that we are all playing willfully in a grand illusion. Her dying son-husband (Osiris, the Green Man, Dionysus-Bacchus, Adonis) is an analogy for the seasons...

This is what myth does so well--it shows how all of it is connected in a mass framework. Shakespeare was also making his own, which Dr. Sexson was talking of in class. I think I get it.

Women, Giants, and Venus

The image that is broadcasted in Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" is the ancient tale of the Mother Goddess. Women represent the undefined, unmeasured nature--a wholeness that permeates the universe. The grand illusion of the divided, measured, ordered cosmos is eternally threatened by the fairer sex. They are matter, where man is spirit. We find this tale in the mythological founding of England told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae. His record detailed a made-up "Trojan settlement of the land under Brutus that culminates in the glorious reign of Arthur" (xviii). The English giants were said to be descendents of the Greek king Diocletian's daughters, according to the Prose Brut. In this Norman-manufactured mythic custom, his 33 daughters refused to become docile housewives, after Diocletian ordained them to be married off. Alba and her sisters instead cut their husbands throats and were banished, set adrift on the open sea. They reached England (named Albion after Alba). There, it is said, they bred with demons and created a race of giants. When Brutus landed there, the islands were populated by the exogamic offspring, who, "according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, were the only inhabitants" (Mostly Medieval). Brutus was the great-grandson of Æneas and would come to be the eponymous founder of Britain. He destroys the uncontrollable peoples of the land and takes control so he can install law and order. To the Normans, the Celts and Anglo-Saxons were lawless barbarians who needed to be brought into the advanced society of France (however, at a very diminished serf level).

The mixture of matter-women and dark spirit is a tradition passed on to the Anglo-Normans. It was a tale told by the Hebrews and gives credence to the story of Albina and her sisters founding a new country. The Greek woman says, “‘because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country’” (Cohen 58). Cohen claims that the essence of this manufactured history is male versus female. The feminine kingdom leads to demons, giants, and incest—a lecherous backwater that can only be solved by male ‘civilization’ and ‘language’. The giant in this tale is tied to the lawless female body which only leads to corruption and demoralization. When Brutus, his best man Cornieus, and the rest of the Trojans arrive, they track down all the giants and kill them save for one: Gogmagog. His name “is lifted either from the Hebrew Bible, where it has no connection to giants, indicating a leader and his people; or, more likely, from the Book of Revelation” (35). The giant wrestles Cornieus (also often depicted as being quite large) and is thrown off a cliff onto the sea stones below—“the place of his death now called Gogmagog’s Leap” (35). Again, the giant is excluded from society for being different, but his name is used as a foundational element for a structured language. The tale of Gogmagog is similar to the fall of Lucifer (who also suffered from the sin of pride as in many giant stories). The creation of a “new heaven and earth” echoed the new kingdom Brutus was founding—a land of paradise and plenty. Brutus “orders, divides, and peoples it, until nature is rebuffed by human architecture and its superabundance tamed into tidy fields” (34). He depopulates the giants, representing chaos, and Albina’s kingdom is left in ruins. Like Brutus, when the Normans landed on the British Isles, they found them populated by peoples with equal female rights. They took these away, returning Albina’s people to their rightful, preordained place. Denying their master husbands was not in the vein of a good Norman wife. The Normans established a new set of rules, laws, and regulations, just like eponymous Brutus. And they legitimized their rule by using the culture of the people they dominated.

There is something timeless about giants. They represent the brute in us all, the primordial being who wants to abandon society and make war on everything for which it stands. This idea is displayed elegantly by Tyler Durden in David Fincher's Fight Club, "God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." Freud would see it as wanting to kill the father and return to the mother. The mother represents a sense of wholeness with the world (the metaphorical womb)--to meld into the earth or the sky, become one with the mountains, the plains, the alcoves, valleys, and oceans. Giants are the masculine form of nature, and in almost all the ancient and medieval stories--throughout hundreds of cultures separated by land, sea, and time: the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Norse, the Hindus, the Aztecs, and the Mayans--they are agents of chaos and destruction. In this paper, I will cover the origin of giants in English mythology and literature--a topic that will stretch back thousands of years. The chief giant Ysbaddaden in the Mabinogian, Grendel, Grendel's mother, The Green Knight, and a plethera of other mythological giants will be discussed from other cultures. We often find these great men emerge when men start to see their masculinity encroached upon. Paradoxically, a small "giant" exists in us all, wanting to burst forth like a Xenomorph, wage war on the rules of civilization, and bring about its collapse. It is the desire of the return to "peace"--to escape from this hollow, plastic world and be free from fetters which society places on the individual. I return to the words of Tyler Durden, "In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center" (Fight Club). The giant is an agent of destruction--a symbol for the idea Durden represents, a dead Father of Enjoyment "who commited every sin" (Cohen 19).

The hazard of giants compels as it repels. In his book Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes "this duality of the giant, this sublime dread crossed with an enjoyment that plants itself deep in the body is mainly a medieval inheritance" (Cohen xii). This is made evident in modern depiction of the Paul Bunyon as "a corporate mascot of a logging company who was manufactured as an 'authentic' legend of the lumberjacks to increase paper sales", and the jolly green giant who assures "consumers that a certain brand of frozen vegtables is fresh and enticing" (xii). The giant is both of and opposed to us. Cohen claims he becomes the most relevant to a society when the body is being "demarcated", when the masculine is being mixed with the feminine, and when the flesh's place becomes confused. Lacanian calls this extimite or "external intimacy" or "intimate alterity" (xii). The giant is an unstoppable, anarchic force existing outside, but he is also inside, an "external intimacy". "In the England of the Middle Ages," claims Cohen, "he signifies those dangerous excesses of the flesh that the process of masculine embodiment produces in order to forbid", but paradoxically, the giant also represents the pleasures and joy of the body, "to indulge in wine and food and sex" (xiii). He is the force inside all of us that kicks strays rocks, breaks ice under our boots, and burns shit for the hell of it. The giant inside wants out of this separated, measured, rule-filled society; he wants to break free and roam across the towns, prairies, fields, destroying everything he comes across. He is the Tyler Durden inside us all--we do not always know he's there, but he is working to undermine the culture in which we live. He wants to be free of being "merely human in a world that demands the austere discipline of minute self-regulation" (xiv) and "is a nostalgic figure who embodies the abandoned pleasures of the presocial, what Louise Olga Fradenburg calls the 'mourned body of freedom'" (xv). During the period of Anglo-Saxon dominance, the community in England was besieged with what seemed like a never-ending set of challenges to its "integrity and self-definition" (xvii). Monsters became a way for the fragile culture to address their anxieties about the fragile body's identity. He is a way of setting a dichotomy: "them" and "us". The "us" is the idealized Mead Hall of warrior thanes. "Them" is the daunting wilderness, the foreign terrain, and the fractured warring kingdoms. The giant is an emblem of the danger outside the door.

The Green Knight and Dionsysus, the God of Wine

The Green Man is a ubiquitous figure in many cultures. He represents the spirit of nature—the shooting of buds, the twirling of vines, the blooming of flowers, and that feeling we get as we dip our feet into a stream as a canopy of trees covers our heads in dappled shade. He is peace and seclusion from the wretched world of sin. A man completely made of leaves, shrubbery, and branches. To the different cultures that ended up inhabiting the British Isles, he represented many things. To the Celts, he was iconoclastic, a pillar to be held up in the face of growing Norman control. He represented everything that had been lost with the arrival of the French: the beauty of nature, their own vast mythology, the freedom from feudalism and patriarchal suppression. To the Anglo-Saxons, he was masculine and heroic, everything the Normans were not. To the Normans, he was a representation of life and death, echoing their allegiance with Christianity. In fact, the Green Man held characteristics similar to both Satan and Jesus. He is of the earth and “the air” (Ephesians 2:2), polluted and corrupt like the world in which we are forced to live. He is chaotic, morphing into many forms like in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—turning from a green giant to a red-bearded king (also similar to Dionysus, the god of masks, which I will cover in more detail later). How are his demonic qualities reconciled with his Christian ones? Is there any way he can be fully appropriated into a Christian, Norman culture?

For the Celts and many early cultures, trees were sacred. They saw gods and goddesses inhabiting the forests, living their eternal lives amongst the hawthorn, holly, and yew. The Green Man is another one of these immortals; personifying spring and summer, he disappears year after year, time after time, like the seasons he represents. His foliate face is often depicted as a bush of greenery with fruits and vegetables blooming along its crevices, his visage being popular on churches during the Middle-Ages. Because of his universal appeal as a vegetation god, the Green Man appears independently throughout many lands and peoples: Tammuz to the Sumerians, Osiris to the Egyptians, and Dionysus and Bacchus to the Greco-Romans. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, translated by Burton Raffel, the Green Man is described as “ghastly”. He is a truly massive creature, with a thick neck, burly legs, and so tall that he seems “half an ogre, a giant” (Fit 1, Line 140); however, his most striking character is not his size, but his color. He is green, and not just on a single part of him, but all of him: his armor and shirt, are “green, all green” (Fit 1, Line 152), the bands on his belt, the jewels in his clothes, his saddle which his horse wears, his feet, his stallion, his face, his hands, and even his beard are green. He is a spirit from the Otherworld, and forbiddingly, he carries with him a big ax and a branch of holly. Holly is a sacred tree to the Celts. Its fruit flourishes in winter, symbolizing death and rebirth. Much like Jesus, the Green Man dies and resurrects. His path follows the seasons—he is born in the spring and dies in the winter, only to be revived each year. This is cyclical and made a great deal of sense to the Celts. The sun rises every day and then sets. Flowers bloom then pass away. Maidens become mothers. Mothers become crones. We return to the image of the never ending line, a very popular theme in Celtic art.

The “dying-and-rising” myths are symbolic of the cycles of life. The ancients would see the seasons change--winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall back to winter--just as they would see a young boy transform to a man, to a geriatric and then die. His birth is just as the sun rises in the East, no different than that of spring blossom, and his later years, his twilight, winter, and death. Dying-and-rising gods are simply a vessel for this. They resurrect, just like the world after winter, and the day after night. Jesus is entangled with them. He is born close to the winter solstice like many other dying gods (correction: Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, claims the movie Zietgiest, were all born around this date, though I have found this information unverifiable). And he dies and is born again. Oddly though, there is something which separates Jesus from these other myths: Jesus’ affiliation with nature, sex, intoxication, masks, and vegetation. Gyrus, in his essay, “Dionysus Risen”, says, “When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two” (Gyrus). Jesus is a dying god, a never-ending line, but essentially, he has lost his balls; instead, Satan picks them up and wears them, displaying the characteristics of a hedonistic dying god—he represents “wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death!” (Gyrus). In Dionysus (the Greek Green Man), a syncretic reconciliation takes place. Gyrus claims that John M. Allegro “traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian." Both entities share an association with vines—Jesus as the “true vine” (John 15:1), Dionysus being “credited with the introduction of vine cultivation” (Gyrus). Jesus turned water to wine, something for which Dionysus is also famous. The god carried with him a thyris which he would strike into the ground. Roger Lancelyn Green describes the transformation as such, “at once it took root, sent out leaves, and grew great clusters of grapes. ‘The vine is my best beloved!’ [Dionysus] exclaimed in triumph” (Green 84).

Terri Windling, in her book, Tales of the Mythic Forest, describes Dionysus as the forerunner to Green Man motif. His face was also often depicted as a mass of vines and ivy leaves, and “this compelling but dangerous deity was the lord of the wilderness; he was the god of wine [...], ecstasy, and sexual abandon” (Windling). He was worshipped by women known as maenads, who would be induced into hysteria. This activity is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the king of Thebes is torn apart (sparagmos) in a bacchic frenzy by a group of women which included his own mother. These maenads would roam “ecstatically through the forest, wearing the skins of deer and fox, suckling wolf cubs from their own breasts” (Windling), but would tear apart any older animal that dared to flee, feasting on their raw flesh (omaphagia). Dionysus was also associated with satyrs—arcane beings inhabiting the wilds, and specifically the Arcadian Pan. Many scholars believe that Satan’s appearance was influenced by this lord of the Satyrs and his horns. Dionysus was born “horned, and crowned with serpents” (Gyrus).

Dionysus, like both the Green Man and Jesus, is a dying god. When his mother, Semele, is killed after witnessing Zeus’ visage while Dionysus is still inside of her, the great god places the unborn child on his thigh, where he later is granted a “second birth”. Later in life, Dionysus is again killed, but this time by Perseus. He descends to Hades and saves his mother and rises from the dead yet again. Because of these incidents and several others, Dionysus is associated with resurrection. Many similarities have been found between the Greek god and the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos. Cernunnos was the “lord of the forest in Britain and Gaul”, according to Windling. Both are associated with the consumption of mushrooms. In Robert Graves’ essay, “Mushrooms and Religion”, Graves delves deeper in mushroom’s relation with the dying-and-rising gods. Dionysus’ festival, Ambrosia, took place during October, the mushroom season. Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom speckled with little white dots famous for being associated with modern garden gnomes, would be eaten, driving the revelers “mad” with its hallucinogenic properties. Amanita muscaria occurs throughout the European continent—including England. Gyrus, in “Dionysus Risen”, makes the claim that “the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory”. Before the invention of microscopes, spores were a mystery to humans, and mushrooms would “simply appear”, miraculously—“a virgin birth indeed” (Gyrus). He continues, saying, “there was a widespread belief amongst the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning” (Gyrus). The mushroom was a “perfect symbol” for the “miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter” (Gyrus).

Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to a god that at his foundation is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of nature; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest. To the Celts, the Apollonian system of the Normans was against the order of the universe, and we see this tension playing itself out in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.

When we first see Camelot, it is a place entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. These are all mockeries of what the Green Man and Dionysus represent. Like Dionysus’ bacchic revelers tearing a man limb from limb, the Green Man’s Celts accepted death and hedonism as a part of life. The Celts would not play in a facsimile version of sex or death like these Normans participated in—they instead took this ersatz mimicry as an insult. Thus enters The Green Man as described above. He challenges these “beardless infants” to cut off his head. The man who was brave enough to step forward would receive his mighty ax. But there was a catch, in a year and a day’s time, the Green Knight would get his one clean swipe at the neck of the challenger. The crowd went into a hush. No one was brave enough to step forward save only Arthur, but Sir Gawain intervened, taking his place. After delivering a fateful blow, the Green Man’s head is severed, but the great green man still stood. Lifting his decapitated cranium, mounting his horse, he told Gawain, “be ready to ride as you promised” (Fit 1, Line 448). The next we see of The Green Man, he has switched forms and identities—similar to Dionysus, the lord of masks, theater, and illusion—for he and Morgan Le Fay play one hell of a trick on Sir Gawain, robbing him of every he stands for. The Green Man is thus directly linked to the Celtic mother goddess. Gyrus says, “Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate. [...] He was the god most favoured by woman, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites [...] were closely associated with the veneration of the mother” (Gyrus). He continues, saying that Demeter (the goddess of the harvest) or her daughter, Persephone, were sometimes said to be Dionysus’ mother. The conquered people of “the isles of the mighty”, thus made their comment on Norman culture. Christianity sees “women, sex, matter, and, of course, the Earth” as evil, and “intimately linked with Satan” (Gyrus). Gawain gets tricked by two women, teaching him a very Celtic lesson: do not underestimate the power of women—be it maiden, mother, or crone. They are closer to nature and matter than man—even the word ‘matter’ eventually derives to mater, or mother (Gyrus). This is paralleled by Gawain wearing Mary on his shield.

Finally, Gawain meets The Green Man for a final time in his “green chapel”. Instead of a church, it is a mound—specific to the Celts who believed hills are gateways to the Otherworld. Gawain comments that it is “a good place for a green knight, he could serve the devil properly, here. By Christ, it’s Satan who struck me with this meeting” (Fit 4, Lines 2191-3). Again, the Norman ties between Satan and nature are reiterated. After the Green Man reveals the horrible trick which has been played upon him, Gawain says, “in women winning men to sin, for Adam our father was deceived" (Fit 4, Lines 2415-6). He then lists through Solomon, Samson, and David as being ruined by fairer sex. Both women and the wild are now described in contempt, because the Celtic system has won—their god has humiliated the Norman’s God; women have defeated men; real men with gnarly beards have destroyed clean-shaven boys; nature has overcome civilization. In many ways, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is pointing out the conflictions in Norman society. They decorate their churches with leafy, pagan gods. They betray their own faith by participating in courtly love. They deny Jesus his vegetation elements. They even deny themselves the Earth’s cycles, shutting themselves off from the world. Dale Pendell, in his essay Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, writes, “The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, and the sacrifice of children” (Pendell 5). Pendell relates this to the modern Burning Man festival held in northern Nevada desert every year. The universe is a duality. William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. By denying the oceans of lust, needs, and hunger inside, these desires will only manifest later as corrupt sickness. There is insanity inside society, a Dionysus, a Green Man, and by denying him, we “breed pestilence”. The Celts saw the Normans as a mockery, unable to understand the basic principles of being a man or woman. They were lost to internal strife, not knowing how to properly deal with it. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends sadly, with only Gawain learning this lesson, the rest of Camelot remaining willfully ignorant. They will remain separated from nature, from their own bodies. But by seeing the confliction play out in their god, Jesus, we have a little microcosm of the struggle inside the society as a whole. As Gyrus says in the opening sentence of his essay, “A split exists in us all, and we nurse it” (Gyrus).

Conclusion

In the case of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the giant is there to reinforce maleness. He tells Gawain that the Courtly Love system in which he participates is just a sham—“a kissing game”. Real relationships mean more than chasing a virginal maid; they require love, respect, and sex. The Norman form of love is deeply troubling. It makes men into yearning, foolish man-children, never knowing the hunt or nature. It makes women into objects who can never live up to the ideal. Of course, no real person is good enough to follow such a system, and both sexes break under the pressure of Courtly Love—besides that, it is deeply hypocritical of the state religion, Christianity—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. It also falls back to the story of Albina and her offspring. Their Albion was a world without masculine rules, where women were equal to men. It is odd that the giant, so closely linked with female empowerment, represents unrestrained masculinity; but to put the Christian view of women in context with the giant, that women are flesh gone mad and the devil incarnate, perhaps it is not so hard to see why. Giants are uncontrollable storms, earthquakes, lightning, and the end of world, the place where the forces of chaos defeat the forces of order. They are the destruction of the old world order—Nimrod, Frost Giants, Titans, and dangerous Aztec building makers. They are also deeply installed in a medieval tradition of unorganized flesh, the horror of the body, and the outside wilderness.

Late and a sonnet, please don't read this in class

It's getting pretty late at night and for the hell of me I can't write a sonnet that isn't about moldy peanut butter or atomic wedgies, so I will just ramble on for awhile I suppose. I have had a lot of deep conversations with drunk people lately, and no, I am not one of those annoying types that think they can preach. Okay, I guess I actually am. Faith. Why do people who have such strong faith in something have no ability to question it? What is the point of their devout devotion to something if they cannot leave its embrace for awhile just to see if it's correct or not. I really wanted to write something fascinating or interesting or even worth sneezing snot at tonight, but I really don't think it's going to happen. Shakespeare. Who is he? Shouldn't I be writing about him? I suppose so.

Finally, after sometime, I came up with this sonnet...
I sat on the toilet, thinking about life
And decided life was good as I
squeezed out a poop
I said, blah blah blah
Hallelujah! And then I sat up and
Pulled up my pants.
It decided it was truly great
to be alive and be a glorified tube
Whoopee and all that, said I
As I walked out of the toilet room
and decided it was a good life
being a tube.

Myth and Stories -- run through

Right now I am sitting at my computer as my girlfriend reads her awful and disgustingly fascinating book about Fluid Mechanics. Her text reads in a didactic, pedantic, pretentious manner: "We must begin by responding to the question, 'What is a fluid?' Broadly speaking, a fluid is a substance that will deform continuously when it is subjected to a tangential or shear force, much as a similar type of force is exerted when a water-skier skims over the surface of a lake or butter is spread on a slice of bread" (Wilkes 3, Fluid Mechanics for Chemical Engineers). She looks at me disdainfully as I write this, but I tell her I love her and everything is okay. Then she slaps me across the face with her strong pimp hand. Though my face is red and pounding with blood barely under the surface, I do arrive at an interesting conclusion: even science needs myth to get its point across.

Myth is a road map to life. Where science looks deeper and deeper, never finding the answer, myth is life through story. Alan Watts describes it as such: "Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image. In terms of which make sense of life and the world. Supposing for example you don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you, he wants to explain about the flow of currents, well to do that he compares electricity to water, and because you understand water you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by expanding space, he'll use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies, and if you blow up the balloon they all get further away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it, we are saying it's something like it. So in the same way the human being has always used images to represent his deepest of ideas about how the universe works and what man's place in it is." Dr. Sexson has said that by finding what story you are in, what myth, you can find the true meaning of it all. The universe is living through each and everyone of us, and by tracking down each motif, arch, beginning, middle, and end, we can discover it all. The story of Adonis and Venus is a classic of example of this--it is a story that echoes across the world, as if caught in the wind. Enkidu and the whore. Adam and Eve. Mowgli. The wild man, the hunter, who is tamed and deposited to civilization. Venus is just another Isis rearing her head--

Manly P. Hall, an hierophant to the ancient mysteries, cites Apuleius account from the Golden Ass in his Secret Teaching of All Ages: "Behold, I moved by thy prayers, am present with thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of things, the queen of all the elements, the primordial progeny of ages, the supreme of Divinities, the sovereign of the spirits of the head, the first of the celestials, and the uniform resemblance of Gods and Goddesses. I, who rule by my nod the luminous summits of the heavens, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the deplorable silences of the realms beneath, and whose one divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, by different rites and a variety of appellations. Hence the primogenial Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods, the Attic Aborigines, Cecropian Miverva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus, the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and teh Eleusinians, the ancient Goddess Ceres. Some also call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others Rhamnusia. And those who are illuminated by incipient rays of that divinity the Sun, when he rises, viz. the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians silled in ancient learning, worshipping me by ceremonies perfectly appropriate, call me by my true name, Queen Isis" (Hall 105). The mother Goddess reoccurs across cultures--Queen Moo in Central America and even the Virgin Mary for the Christians. In Shakespeare's version, Venus (the earth mother) tells the dude to have sex with her and become a good cultured man. Willy could have never read the tale of Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the connections couldn't be clearer...

This is a rough draft and just a series of thoughts with typos and the ilk. I will update it and make connections tomorrow, but for the time being, here's a series of thoughts. heh. As for my girlfriend and myself, we are doing well, though she is slightly upset with me for posting this.

Shakespeare, what I know

I don't know much about Shakespeare. He appears to be a white male living in Great Britain before I was born. Lately I have been really into Doctor Who, ramming through four seasons over spring break. The television show (which is British) is in an accurate portrayal of the man's life. He is hansome, bisexual, and a wizard with words. However, he also has a penchant for getting possessed by aliens. The extraterrestrial witches encode his best play "Loves Labours Won" with a secret series of words for the invasion of earth. At any rate, take the man for what you will, but he terrifies me.