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.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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:
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.
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.
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