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...