The Magus and my own Signs and Symbols: Free Will and the Universe

I might be going crazy, but here is my Signs and Symbols style degenerative thought process on the universe.

I am really good at over simplifying complex things, and I am even better at over complicating simple things, so when I was thinking about the role of free will in The Magus I started out with the simple question "Does Nicholas have free will, or is everything predestined by Conchis?" this quickly turned into "Does anyone have free will?" which led to "What is free will?"... What is free will? Is it anything we can decide that is not predestined for us? If that is the case, then what is predestined for us must have a definition other than its binary relationship to free will, just as dark is the absence of light, but light is visible radiation, not just the opposite of darkness. Destiny, then, to me, is the lowest state of energy, the path of least resistance, to use a more familiar term, not just the absence of free will.

Imagine you are a river, you are flowing through a canyon, and you come to a fork in the river, there is a pathway that leads down a gradient of -.05 degrees, and a path that leads up the same gradient. Which do you choose? Well, you're water, so you don't choose, you just go down (assuming that there is not enough flow pressure to drive you both up and down). Now imagine you're electricity, and you're flowing through a wire, and you come to a split where you can either go straight, or follow the divergence to the left. Again, you would go straight, following the path of least resistance. Now finally you can be a human, the only instance so far in which you can actually choose to do one thing or the other, and not just follow the path requiring the least energy. Obviously water and electrons are not animate in the sense that we normally think of the word. I am not interested in the question of whether things have souls or not. That means nothing in this thought experiment.

I believe in this model of free will for several reasons, one is because it ignores the human component. Is it not my dog's free will to either steal my food or eat his shitty food? Free will indeed, because he knows my food tastes better, regardless of whether it is or isn't as good for him, and will or won't provide him with as much energy. Dog's are exercising free will by ignoring energy states, and so humans can stop thinking of themselves as special for having free will. If we reduce free will from macro-organisms to single cells, we see that cells also resist states of lowest energy, because they are organized groups of organelles, and this organizational construct takes energy to create. The state of lowest energy is, paradoxically, pure energy. How is that? Because pure matter (which is true lowest energy) cannot really exist, because gravity creates energy (in a way), which seems impossible. But think about it, you expend energy by jumping, heat is lost to the system. but gravity creates energy, or rather, gravity is able to remove your energy from the system, by pulling you back to earth, which creates motion and impact and friction in the air, and all of these forces that are energy.

Conservation of energy and conservation of matter are actually the concept of conservation of existence in space-time, according to the ever popular e=mc2 (squared, not x2), but this is hard to fathom when one takes everything into account. How can energy, in a system where nothing but energy and empty space exist, cool down and convert to matter, as proposed by Big Bang theorists? Well first one has to know what energy is, without defining it in terms of matter. It can't be radiation, because radiation is still particles, it can't be movement, because movement requires things to move. So what is e in e=mc2 before the creation of matter? And if we can't answer that, then who is to say that energy isn't being created by gravity causing impact energy and friction? But this seems a bit off track from the subject of free will doesn't it? It gets worse, more convoluted, more referrentially manic.

The way I see it (which any physics teacher at this university should be able to prove wrong), since we are constantly apparently adding time as a dimension, we should also constantly be apparently adding space, as these are relative dimensions inextricably related, and we are (so goes my theory), which (I believe) is part of why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. If acceleration is distance over time squared, then it tracks that, by adding distance and time to the universe proportionally, we should get an accelerating expansion of the universe, but does this seem correct? Shouldn't the ratio of space and distance being added not account for this? Perhaps not, but that is where spin comes in. I believe that, in order to get the proper ratio of distance to time with respect to the acceleration of our universe, there has to be another factor, which would be the imperceptible spin of our universe forcing things outward even faster through centrifugal force. This, when added to the idea of constantly creating more space in the universe, would provide what I believe to be an accelerating rate of outward expansion. Imagine you are doing spin art, and you drop your paints. eventually the drops slow down and fall to the ground, but if you kept expanding the space that they are in, they can't ever come to that state of rest, unless they somehow disengage from the system (not possible in the universe) and find a straight moving tangent line. This is all ad-hoc, because if it weren't somebody would have thought of it already, so it can be wrong, but that doesn't affect the fact that this is an explanation of free will, not a discussion of strict physics, thought the free will seems to be getting lost. That's going to continue for just a little longer.

Back to gravity, just like no one can really say what energy is without its relationship to matter, we can't really say what gravity is without its relationship to matter, or space-time. Gravity is the force that attracts bodies of matter to something big, right? but it does that by creating intrinsic curves in space time (we see this because everything big in the universe tends to take on the shape of a sphere, because it has the smallest surface area for a given volume, which is to say that it is the densest shape, and therefore gives itself the most gravity, the most ability to pull objects into its apparent influence in space-time). A sphere is intrinsically curved. Your bed sheets are intrinsically flat. Imagine wrapping your bed sheets around a globe. See what happens? Your bed sheets must either fold, or create irregularities, because they are intrinsically flat, not curved. Now lay that globe flat. See what happens now? You have to totally destroy the globe to flatten it, because it is intrinsically curved. The same is true with space time, you would have to put incredible amounts of energy into the system to flatten it, because gravity is curving it, by taking dimension and condensing it in a way unfathomable to the human mind. It is essentially removing dimension from space time, so it has every right to create a proportional removal of energy constantly (since the space is removes is also a constant) within the sphere of influence of the removed space time. If dimension has been removed, energy must be removed from the system proportionally according to the formula I decided to work on the other day F= e/d. This formula has been ignored because, as has been stated, we can't actually remove the connects of force (F) or energy (e) from matter (m), but through the basic laws of arithmetic, one can get this formula pretty easily by isolating m from the formulas F=ma and e=mv2. (Here v is substituted for c because all energy is essentially kinetic, even energy of enthalpy. Heat is just particles moving really really fast). Try to stay with me for just a bit longer.

If F=e/d then the amount of distance removed by gravity (F because it is a force) needs to see a proportional decrees (removal) in enegry from the system because e=Fd by the same logic, so negative distance, and positive force must mean negative energy. Basic, no?


So gravity is not removing matter, because that is too simple. It is dimension itself that has been removed. But one cannot create more gravity, in the strictest sense, because gravity is a property of matter, which is all already here. we can't create more matter, we can only create more energy through nuclear fusion or fission. Fission is the atomic bomb, which destroys bonds to release tremendous energy: energy proportional to the mass times the speed of light squared. So what is the energy destroying Hiroshima? Heat, but more than heat, because heat is just energy transfer through radiation, and radiation (at least the cancer causing kind) is just gamma particles that vibrate enough to disrupt your cells, or destroy them completely. Fusion is what the sun is doing when it takes Hydrogen (atomic mass of two: one proton and one neutron) and turns it into Helium (atomic mass of 3.96: two protons, two neutrons, and some energy released as sunlight, and if the calculations of Einstein are correct (which they are) then .04 units of atomic mass (which is a very small number comparatively, becomes very large when multiplied by the speed of light squared. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s that squared is big enough to make me not want to try to calculate it right now.

The point of saying this is, we can create energy in insane quantities, we know we can, but we can't create matter from energy, because we don't even understand energy in any sense that doesn't use matter as a reference. So we cannot reverse the effects of entropy, which moves things from states of organization into states of chaos. It is what renders energy ineffectual by making it unavailable to do work. Imagine trying to use a peso in England, the unit is too small, so it can't do any work for you. In other words, our universe devours matter using black holes and e=mc2 conversions, and then renders the created energy useless eventually through entropy, which is essentially saying, to me, that it is dissociating energy from its relationship to matter, the original state of our Big Bang existence, before energy decided, of its own free will apparently, to slow down, and create matter, which, because gravity was created simultaneously, coalesced to form more gravity fields, which take space-time and make it intrinsically curved, and this curvature manipulates energy and everything else.

Gravity is a relatively weak force in the universe. There are things to account for such as dark matter and dark energy. I don't want to account for those right now. (actually, the accelerating of the universe is the primary function of supposed "dark energy" which I have already explained, and my explanation is much more satisfactory than the conventional "we don't know what the fuck is happening, so we'll say that something un-observable called dark energy is fucking with everything.") I know very little about dark matter, but I know all of the same things anyone else knows, I just haven't tried to work that into the system yet. The important parts are these: F=e/d   and that means that energy and force can be related without matter through the empty space distance of the vacuum. Gravity "pinches" space time (converges the vectors in an apparently accelerated frame of reference) so effectively, that it is actually technically removing some of the universe's distance from usable existence, just like entropy is removing the energy from usable existence. The movement of objects in space means that gravity is related not to the space, but to the object occupying it, leaving it still inextricably related to matter, and keeping all pieces of e=mc2 constant as they need to be. This removal of available distance sees a proportional (and proportionally relievable) decrease in energy, which is what keeps people stuck to the ground, negative energy interacting with the third law of motion (the ground pushing up on you with equal and opposite force according to Newton) to keep us where we are. The apparent acceleration of the universe is do to the human inability to view space-time as a finite unit, and is therefore a product of the apparent addition of space proportional to the apparent addition of time, and exagerated by the necessary, but imperceptible spin that our universe has inherited. So what?

Here is the end: the universe in complete entropy. The black holes have devoured everything, even each other, leaving only radiation. Except the radiation has nowhere left to go, because the black hole, containing all matter in the universe, and therefore all related force, and all related energy, has condensed the entirety of existence into itself (minus that damned dark matter, what is that shit?) and now it has even pulled in the radiation it had previously spewed out, only because the radiation has no other space to occupy, and here we go...the universe is gone...AND THEN IT ALL EXPLODES BACK INTO BEING!!!! because the energy that was previously unavailable has been condensed, subject to gravity, and repackaged into usable energy, with a reversed spin, taking the universe from 0% available energy to 100% and everything keeps on ticking.

Where is the free will? Nothing in the universe can resist these apocalyptic forces. But, the universe is teaching a lesson here: influence what you can, exercise your free will, because the day will come when entropy will overcome everything, and you will have no more will, and in that exact same moment, when all of time is condensed with all of space, everything will overcome entropy, and free will shall make its comeback, even stronger than the tragically canceled Michael Jackson comeback tour would have been, and existence will start anew. If eleutheria is the ability to do all and the restraint not to, then we are special as living organism to have that restraint, because the fundamental forces and the black holes do not have what we have. Conchis was a black hole tearing through Nicholas's life. Alison was entropy. Julie was gravity. The Magus doesn't really matter in the end, but neither does anything else, so I'm glad I get to blog about my favorite book and make light while I'm here. There is no better feeling than being unobserved, removed from influence, and totally free.

Arcadia Online Text

Hey kids,

Here is a link from Dr. Sexson for the Arcadia online text. Be sure to check it out!

http://ebookbrowsee.net/arcadia-by-tom-stoppard-pdf-d333586461

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

 

-attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everyone Answers

Again, this is a true story. Upon reading it you will find that I have had no need to embellish. 

"An answer is always a form of death." (Chapter 75 of The Magus pg 626 in my addition) I had a confrontation with this idea that was all too real and all too literal last weekend. This is a happy story, though, despite itself.

I work at a group home for teenagers that have shitty parents. Bad kids don't go to group homes; every kid is bad; I was bad, and you were bad, and "my kids" are bad. Bad kids don't go to group homes; kids with bad parents go to group homes. Kids with bad parents and no parents come to my group home in batches of 4 to 6 and I try to catch them in moments of enlightened despair and bring them back to a world where they don't need their shitty parents because they have other people looking out for them, people who care, like I care, for the safety and well being of the kids that got a bad draw. It doesn't always work.

At approximately 7:30 pm on Sunday evening I had already been at work for 26.5 hours that weekend, and 11.5 hours that day. At approximately 7:30 pm on Sunday evening one of my kids decided it was the right night to run outside and kick angry craters into the sides of three cars. He was on his last chance, and he knew that. When the cops were called, he did not know that he was going to be charged with a misdemeanor for criminal mischief; he was thinking much worse. 

My kid has been to JDC (Juvenile Detention Center) on one occasion before. The night before, he had described it to me like this: "You sit in a cell, you get a pack of cards, and everyone leaves you alone. If you are on level four you get to go outside and play basketball on a fenced-in court, and you can watch tv. If you're on level three you can watch tv. If you're on level two you can eat in the dining hall and lift weights. If you're on level one you don't get to leave your cell." Last time he was in JDC, my kid was on level two. He was allowed to exercise for half an hour, and eat in the dining hall for half an hour each meal. He was in his cell for 22 hours per day with a pack of cards, one pillow, one sheet, and one blanket. He did not have a cell mate.

This was the image returning to my kid's mind when he heard that the cops had been called. He came inside, grabbed the phone, and barricaded himself in his room. He called his favorite staff member, and let him know that he would likely be going to jail that evening. Meanwhile I was getting all of the other kids into a room away from him, where none of them would get hurt should things turn ugly when the cops arrived. Nobody else was hurt, though that's not to say the cops arrived on time. My kid ran upstairs while I was trying to calm the others down. I do not know what my co-workers were doing at this time. The child, 15 years old, 16 in early November, grabbed a knife from the drawer, only a butter knife, and ran out the door with it. 

It is not easy to draw blood with a butter knife; you can't cut tough skin, you have to stab it. Your wrists, for instance, are pretty tough. The skin is supple and well fed with blood. It doesn't break very easily. You really have to have every intention of breaking that skin. My kid did not want to go back to JDC; he wanted to tear a hole in his life. He tried, but it didn't work the first time. I saw him try, and I chased him about a mile to the high school yelling at him to drop the knife. "I don't care where you go, but you're going to get there with all your blood in you god damnit." I am not easily excitable. He got to the high school and I chased him around the softball fence. He climbed on top of the dugout and began trying fervently to cut his wrists. Thankfully he is not that bright, he left off stabbing to try to slice through his wrist with a butter knife. 

Most people don't know the difference between the two major flexor tendons in the wrist, and the blood vessels that lattice around them, but one hurts very badly to cut, and the other, when cut, gives one a terrifying sensation of warmth. This warmth is not peaceful, it feels like the end, like the freedom one feels when cliff diving, but with the knowledge that there will be no water at the end, or maybe there will be, but not in this world. It makes one think "I am going to die. In less than three minutes I will never feel warm again. This is all my life leaving." My client started crying, and I thought for sure he had felt that warmth, seen his body leaking crimson. Do you know how deep the red is when you bleed from a major artery? I am color blind, but that much red is overwhelming; I see it just fine. I can also see the pallor of a dying face. His face was not dying. I thought he had cut his tendon. then he held his face and said "Everything is over. I'm not going back to jail. I'm going to kill myself. It's over." 

I thought it was a curious thing to say, because it had seemed to me like he was trying to do this all along, but I didn't want to waste the opportunity to try and talk him out of it while he had his face buried in his hands, the knife laying by his shoes. "It's not over. Nothing is ever over (I said his name here, but that is confidential). Just give me the knife and you'll-" 

"No! Nobody even cares about me!"

 "If I didn't care about you I wouldn't have chased after you while you were holding a knife. Do you see how that is not a smart decision? But I made it anyway, because it is not over until I leave you alone. When you are alone, then you can say it's over. Just give me the knife (I said his name again, because it lets people know you care when you use their name)."

"Why do you even care?"

"because..." An answer is always a form of death. That was in my mind, not as a sentence on refrain, but like a pulsing awareness. It was more a sense of knowing a noun than a sentence. It was all one thing, beating in my head over and over. Imagine what a lighthouse looks like: the beam sweeps over you all at once. You're thrust into illumination. You cannot escape knowing, if only for a second before it swings away, and you are only aware of it sweeping the edges of your consciousness again. And this keeps happening over and over. I looked at him, with what eyes I don't know. Pleading eyes? Solemn eyes? Eyes wild with fear? I don't know if my look was threatening or if it was tranquil and reassuring. I hope it was the latter. It was raining, and it was not easy to feel any warmth. I would like to think that maybe he felt just a little bit secure, a little bit warm when I looked at him. I doubt it. "...just give me the knife."

He threw the knife down on the grass. I checked it and there were no blood stains. His skin was sawed up when the cops came to get him. He had tried very hard, but he hadn't done any real damage; it was virtually all surface level. It did not look like a proper testament to the fear I felt when I saw him stab and carve at it only a few minutes earlier. Then again, he had luckily only grabbed the butter knife in his haste. Of this I had been previously unaware. In this age without myth, even our dramas are terribly watered down. Still, the cops didn't want to put cuffs on him, because the skin was clearly not in perfect order. It looked like bedhead, disheveled locks of skin sticking up everywhere, with only the tiniest stains of blood on them. Hardly enough to dot my i's with. 

He came back to the group home an hour later. I stayed overnight until he woke up. at approximately 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning, after 23 hours at work, 38 hours for the weekend, he came upstairs to eat french toast. I buttered it for him, and I asked "Did you sleep well?"

He barely even murmured "Yeah" but I heard it. "I wish last night was just a bad dream," he said. 

"Yeah, I bet you do. But last night you thought you were going to go to jail or die, and this morning you woke up in your own bed, you have your breakfast, and I'm going to give you a hug before you leave for school, so things have already gotten better. Things always get better." We hugged, and he cried a lot. I'm glad he cried. People really need to cry more often, if only to show that they are conscious to what life is, and what it could be, for better or worse. 

Hey Class,

Just a reminder, if everyone could write a little paragraph on the "immeasurable outcomes" of an education in the humanities for class on Tuesday that would be swell.

Also, as you've all inevitably noticed, we don't really stick to any schedule of when we are going to do things related to our readings, so it would be a good idea to have your mini-lesson ready on Tuesday if you haven't gone yet.

THURSDAY WE BEGIN THE MAGUS. If you haven't finished it yet, please do so.

I don't recall whether this has been made an assignment yet or not, but it is always a good idea to comment on the blogs of a classmate in order to show that you are engaged in a sort of class based dialogue and that you aren't a terrible and egocentric person.

Last reminder to everyone, don't forget to be checking Matt's blog as well as mine before classes, he and I get different links from Dr. Sexson.

Groups for discussion of our major texts

Here are all of your groups. Though I can't say for certain that they are in order, I'm pretty certain they are.

Group 1 (tonight): Madison and Gerrit

Group 2: Ally and Tor

Group 3: Kirra and Sierra

Group 4: Sally and Jake

Group 5: Zach and Megan

Group 6: John and Anna

Group 7: Lizzie and Molly

If these seem correct in any way, just let me know and I'll get to changing it.

How the Past Possesses the Present in Finnegan's Wake

Naturally, since it was suggested to be a challenge, I took Dr. Sexson up on discussing Finnegan's Wake.
He will notice right away that I have written a relatively short essay by my own standards, and did not have the time I would have liked to have had to devote to the writing of this essay, but I thought much, and researched a little, and generally I don't trust other peoples ideas about these sorts of things as much as I trust my own, so what I have written is still virtually entirely my own thoughts on Finnegan's Wake, with some points about the layout of Joyce's Dublin dug up through some Googling.

One may notice that it does not seem to be a serious academic attempt to discuss Finnegan's Wake, but I don't really care because I'm not interested in the standards of academia, I'm interested in explaining to you how the past possesses the present in Finnegan's Wake. I take this stance firmly on many occasions, but this one seemed particularly justifiable given the nature of the text I am attempting to discuss. If you find parts of it difficult to read, sorry, feel free to ask me for elucidations, but overall the essay follows the same breathless flow of the story, without much time spent dwelling on things or over-analyzing them, since nothing can really be certain about Joyce's book here.

That said, here it is: enjoy...

How the past possesses the present in Finnegan’s Wake

           

Parlor at the middlend of the way that tales us that we know not from whens we come, But in’s head we canfound it with where we are. Oversimplified.

            In fact, one might argue that this is more or less the essence of Finnegan’s Wake, the past possessing the present. The very first word, riverrun, is a pun on the French word rêver with the classic English ending “-ing” turned into a dialect spelling to create riverrun. It has been postulated that this may be a play on the idea that Samuel Taylor Coleridge awoke from a dream and started writing everything he saw in a poem called Kubla Khan, which makes a reference to where “Alph, the sacred river, ran…” suggesting a connection with both dreams, and rivers, and the ever-flowing nature of the two. But what does this have to do with the past possessing the present? To understand it may be necessary to examine further the contents of the book. Even just the interconnected first and last pages should give us a sense of what we’re dealing with.

After we start riverrun, we then go past Eve and Adam’s, our first two figures of mythology so far, viewed as the ancestral parents of all humanity, located in Eden, or in Dublin Bay. In essence we have, by way of the river of a dream, run back to the beginning of human history, but only as a starting point, for the narrative flow in the form of the running river continues to move on. In this way, the past is possessing the present, but can never remain the present any more than can any other thing.

            The next reference to “history” is Howth castle, which was an historical castle located in Howth on the northern side of Dublin Bay, but why it is significant is obviously glossed over, simply because Joyce does not care to dwell on the past, but rather cares to be immersed in it. So much for the very short first paragraph, or at least so it seems, but then there is always more to Joyce than there appears. Firstly, one may note that Eve and Adam’s is probably referencing an old church in Dublin (well, actually it was a tavern that people delivered sermons out of called Adam and Eve’s), which lends itself to the pervasive double entendre of Finnegan’s Wake. We also see the words “commodius vicus” which are a Latinized version of the English word commodious, meaning spacious, and the actual Latin word vicus, meaning a neighborhood, the spacious, (and in this context, vastly populated) neighborhood of myth, from Adam and Eve, through the death of widespread classical paganism in Rome, to the recognizable land mark of recorded history, Howth. One can thank the language of dreams for bringing us all on such a marvelous journey from unknowable past to certain present in only the latter half of one sentence.

            One might ask then, where is the former half of this sentence, and to know one has to travel to the end of the book, to the last remarks of the dying Finn, who is about to become Finn again. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” away alone at last aloft (I loved?) along the river run… now that is a quiet and peaceful scene, but as we have noted, riverrun is not simply the river run, it is dreaming, it is continued, it flows down to Sir Tristram, or more popularly, Sir Tristan de Lyonesse, likely fictitious knight of the round table, but again, who is concerned with historicity when one is simply steeping the tea of his time in the past. Sir Tristan, the one who went to Ireland to fetch Iseult, or Esyllt, or Isolde, however you want to get at it, had passencore rearrived (and again we see the French influence of pas encore, still not) from North Armorica (oddly enough not North America with a play on love, but an even more multiplicitious pun relating to Armorica, the land of current Brittany, related to the Cornish, and therefore to Sir Tristram himself) on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor (the British Isles) to wielderfight his penisolate war.

But what was Sir Tristram again? A violer d’amores? This is a pun on viol d’amores, the violinist of love, modern Italian, as opposed to Latin. Is this significant, of course, though Joyce might not have put it in there with intention as such. Sir Tristan, however, is not just a lover, he is a violator of love in some respects, as he falls in love with Iseult, and tries to elope with her, instead of bringing her back to marry the Cornish King, as per his original errand. Which sets us on another cycle backward, to Pyramus and Thisbe, the archetypal star-crossed lovers, and possibly the source of the legend of Tristan and Iseult. Not only does the past possess the present, but the past possess even the more recent past, which of course, is necessarily true when one understands that all present immediately becomes the more recent past.

Now, we can probably skip topsawyer and his rocks, but for a brief mentioning of this as a reference to the founding of a new Dublin in Georgia, USA by a true Dubliner named (according to Joyce) Peter Sawyer (actually William Sawyer, but Peter works better as a Greek reference to rocks, and to St. Peter, who was supposed to found his church on an outcropping of rocks). Then we get to avoice from afire bellowsed, which seems to be a voice from afar bellow, from deep down in our ancestral past, but could so easily also be a voice from a fire bellow saying mishe mishe, or God in the burning bush saying Moses! Moses! But isn’t that the ancestral past too? Not yet, thought venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland Old Isaac, kind of like when Jacob put on the coat of a kid (skin of a baby goat) in Genesis, the same coat as his brother Esau wore, and bamboozled his blind old father Isaac, so that he might become the future of the Hebrew race, but again, that hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not yet past, and yet it’s present in the text.

 Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jehm and Shen brewed by arclight, which might just be a fancy way of saying that Jehm and Shen, two very Hebrew sounding names, had not brewed two gallons of some malt liquor (which from what the French tell me was pretty good, as it was pas mal) by the light of the silvery moon. And a rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface or in other words, a red king’s end to the queen’s rainbow was to be seen all around the face of the waterworld. But I don’t think we need to talk about the bloody patriarchy usurping the natural and water affiliated position of the matriarchy right now, so let’s move on to the fall (thunder thunder thunder thunder thunder)

Of a once wallstrait Oldparr, which seems to be retaled early in bed, and later on life, down through all Christian minstrelsy, or more simply: we take our myths, our stories, our fairytales and our “history” from the cradle to the grave, and only make our slight additions and revisions, before the minstrel plays it on for the next generation. Funny how the minstrel, the bard, the one who sings the histories of the great heroes in all myth, is now doing the same work for Christianity, kind of like king David and his psalms did for the Hebrew.

Now here is a spot where we can take a breath to talk about the oral traditions, as they are a very old thing, and deserve much attention indeed, but Joyce doesn’t so neither will I. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the Pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, (or the first solid Irishman, as Erse is of course the traditional form of Irish Gaelic, who I would guess here might represent Adam again, seeing as how Dublin Bay is apparently Eden, and the word erse seems to be a combination of first and earth also, and Adam was made of clay, so that could work, but since we’re in Joyce, nothing is certain) that the humpty hillhead of humself prumptly sent an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes. In other words, Finnegan fell ass over tea kettle, and his toes and his head were changing places rather quickly, so that his head ended up on the ground first, though it was not his original intention to have his head go inquiring about the location of his feet. But there, upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park, where oranges have been laid to rust since devlinsfirst loved livvy. This seems to be saying to me that up by the old turnpike, at the hill (Gaelic cnoc) out in the park, where protestants (oranges, as opposed to Irish nationalist Greens) had been laid to rust, or rest, whatever you do when you die, since Hades, here representing the devil as lord of the underworld, first loved something living, (either English living or French la vie) which was Persephone. This is coincidentally when the first true winter came about, and oranges, the fruit that is, would have started decaying for the first time, and seasons would have started, and time would then have taken a brand new form, and created a type of cyclical flow, almost like the four ages of Vico, or the classics, or this story Finnegan’s Wake and its four books.

And have we yet rearrived after our not-so-brief summary of the first page to talk about how the past possesses the present in Finnegan’s Wake? Very nearly. But first one must address the fact that Finnegan’s Wake, as a title, is a reference to an old Irish Folk tale, about a man named Tim Finnegan, who fell off of a ladder and died. But when Finn’s wake rolled around, it was Tim for Finn to become Finn again, after he was splashed with some whiskey, which they say in Erse, is é an t-uisce na beatha, (is the water of life), and his whole journey started over again.

Now, after getting a brief rundown of what the first page of Finnegan’s Wake might plausibly be referring to, on one level, we can see that every little sentence is in effect referring to an instance of what we view as the past, but what this book views as an ever present part of a never-ending cycle. The four books, whether perforce or perchance, representing the four ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron, begin perhaps in Iron, or perhaps in Silver, it is hard to tell. The diction suggests that man has not yet fallen through the ages, that the book is beginning in Gold, but it is only the continuation of the last sentence of book four, so is it book four that is gold, or book one? The point is that it could be either, and it would not matter. All time is a circle, and all that is past is eternally present. This is further suggested by the language used to start virtually every sentence of the second paragraph, which all suggests that there is a position in time for each thing, but that regardless of that position in time, it is always reachable, even if one sees it as future. Time, on the whole, is an illusion that man cannot discern because of its grand scale. Like the western horizon of the earth, the western horizon (used by Joyce to refer to the land of the dead, and therefore necessarily the past, one would think) of time appears flat and final, with no visible curvature, but like the earth, time is round.

Each instance further eludes to instances both historical, and mythological, suggesting that Joyce feels that the mythological “past” which should henceforth be assumed to be spelled with implied quotes, is always in cahoots with the apparently historical “present” which shall likewise bare the same assumption as past. In fact, even after only this first page, one gets the sense that God himself would put the universe in quotes, and laugh at the seriousness of man. It is essential, then, that Joyce mingle the two distinctions with the allusion to Sir Tristram de Lyonesse, whose legend was supposed true for a short while, but which, like all Arthurian legend, was much more likely a fabricated fallacy, based on the older legend of Pyramus and Thisbe. Everywhere we are introduced simultaneously to modern references to the geography of Joyce’s Dublin, and to myth, suggesting that the two are indeed in a state of necessary coexistence, since one cannot separate them using even words, our greatest tool. To refer to Eve and Adam’s, the old “church” by Dublin Bay, is necessarily to refer to Adam and Eve. To refer to the fall of the stock market on Wall Street is necessarily to refer to the fall of humpty dumpty from the wall, and to know that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put humpty dumpty together again was seemingly to know the future.

But of course, the laws of entropy can be reversed when enough energy is put into a system, and this is, in fact, the whole point behind the folk tale of Tim Finnegan, that nothing is truly dead, that it is all cyclical. This makes me think that Joyce would have chuckled at the crisis on Wall Street in 2008, and it is what will make me chuckle at the next fall of the ouef wall (French for egg, commonly used as a metaphor for a work of some importance).

Thus we return to the idea that to tell a tale is always to retale it. So much like Finnegan we find ourselves here again: thinking of words we can assay to forge assents of what we men upon meteing another man, the one outside, the

Alright guys and gals, here is my displaced myth...

            This story is as true as any story I would ever tell, which is to say that at least the basic events happened, though not necessarily as described.

             So a little while back I was living in Italy and I, having the same fondness as the average hobbit for a well brewed beer, and having been drowned in wine for the last several months, decided to go to a beer festival in a place called Castellina in Chiani, which incidentally is in fact located in an old medieval castle, but that holds no bearing.

            Anyway, I invited my friends Maggie, Ariel, and Erin, since they are all very enjoyable people and after school one Friday, we all planned on hopping a 20 minute train up to Castellina. But Ariel, bless her heart, did not show up on time, as she was in the habit of taking extended naps, So we had to leave her in town with a message on her voicemail, telling her to catch a later train. That being the case Erin, Maggie, and I all got on a train leaving Siena at about 4 p.m. and arrived at the train station in Castellina del Scalo 15 minutes later. We had about a 20 minute hike from the train station to the foot of the mountain on which Castellina in Chianti is situated, so we began our hike. Meanwhile we all imagined that Ariel was at her host parents’ house, napping away the beautiful fall afternoon.

            We all decided to take a break at a vineyard to eat some grapes. No, this is not legal, but it was night 1 of the beer festival, and so nobody really cared as they were all up in the castle having drinks, shooting flaming arrows, and listening to costumed folks reading Dante. While we were there, Maggie, Erin, and I decided that some pictures might be nice, so we started snapping some photos in the lattice rows. We waited and waited amongst the grapes, but still no Ariel, and we were out of phone service after crossing into the vineyard, so we weren’t able to receive any contact from her once she woke up from her nap.

            Nevertheless, we all pressed on and reached Castellina in good time. The festival was set to start in about half an hour, so we went to the only little restaurant in the piazza, and I got probably the best pasta cinghialle I’ve ever eaten, and my friend Maggie got an apple pastry that was positively scrumptious. But again that holds no bearing.

          After dinner we began to partake in the festivities, buying 10 sample tickets each, and using the first five rather promptly before making off to go watch the archers shoot flaming arrows. They were shooting apples off of the heads of scarecrows, which was very fun to watch indeed, when Maggie started feeling sick. She quickly left the party, and made for a little side street in which she could throw up, she insists she didn’t drink too much, but I don’t know what else it could have been. Erin and I were left to our own devices. We quickly used up a few more drink tickets and began dancing, and listening to a fake Dante. We then noticed a rather good looking young man dressed to the nines, handing out bread. All the Italian women were fawning over him, but Erin and I just laughed, as his regalia made him look rather silly to us. Maggie, after recovering from her “food poisoning” rejoined us. Soon, however, she left us to join the other Italian women in fawning over the young man.

            Just then, Ariel presently rejoined us, also looking rather done up, and informed us that her mother had actually made her stay home and do her homework before she could come to Castellina, which seemed fair enough. Immediately when Ariel saw the young man she was also enchanted with him, and only needed 10 drink tickets of her own to get up the courage to talk to him. Unfortunately, after she had put her ten little cups of brew back, it was time to go, and she was in no state to be talking to the young man. She did her best though, and when she was just about to go up to him, she noticed her two host sisters hanging on him, each to an arm. Ariel was a little discouraged as they at least spoke his language, but she was much better looking, and so not altogether dissuaded. She turned to him and in her best Italiano ubriaco she asked “posso avere tu number?” which was close enough for him, because he immediately agreed, and even typed his digits into her phone for her.

            But our train was about to leave, and we had approximately 20 minutes of fast walkable ground to cover before it left us. At some point during all this, Ariel dropped her phone, which was unfortunate, because my phone was dead, and Maggie and Erin had used up all the minutes on theirs, so when we just barely missed our train (or what we thought was a train, but actually turned out to be a bus, which was why we were on the wrong side of the tracks when it came) we were unable to call a cab. But all was not lost, because we saw a guy walking around who looked pretty sober, and we asked him if he knew of a hotel that we could stay at. He said maybe, and called his friend, whose dad owned a small agroturismo (kinda like a country cottage for rent) and there was a room open. The man drove us to the cottage, where his friend was waiting for us with the keys, provided we had the necessary cash money.

Much to our surprise, it was the young man in the fancy clothes handing out bread!!! He even had Ariel’s phone, and when he saw that it was her, he offered to let us all stay in the cottage 1 night for free as long as we left the place looking as good as we found it, which basically meant Maggie couldn’t puke up any more apple pastry in the house. 

As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, I often create fictitious characters that I represent as real people in order to demonstrate points. That is the basic principle of fiction, so I don't feel bad about it, even when the people are real, like my friend Alli, but the scenarios are fabricated. With regards to the conversation I might have with the Alli of my personal lore, I believe it would go a little something like this:

Alli: "She needs to take some prozac, and stop worrying so much about dirt, and dead people. Birth defects I can understand, because that is sad, but the rest of it just doesn't seem like its worth obsessing over. Or at least not for 200 pages."

The real Alli will indubitably be upset with me about this when I send her this link, which I fully intend to do, but let me set her straight really quickly.

I think, even though I am only a few chapters into For the Time Being, I am looking forward to a more complete analysis of the relationship between the formation of sand and the dead men buried 'neath it. There is an obvious "circle of life" correlation here, not just because people are made into mulch by worms, and feed plants, and other Lion King things, but more along the lines of Hamlet. Hamlet offers the idea that the fish eat the worms that have eaten us, and then that the fisherman eats the fish etc, which offers the ligament to the sea, the ancestral birthplace that the Lion King leaves out of its circle of life.

Sea sand is formed by the pulverized remnants of dead corrals, tiny crustaceans, silica, bits of our own broken bottles, quartz, and igneous rock. In other words, it is a hodgepodge of death sticking between our toes. Sand is its own fossil record on the beach, while its neighbor to the north, desert sand, is covering up the fossil record of beast and man in Shaanxi province, a perversion of the memorializing effect of beach sand. Man then sculpted and baked this perversion into its own fossil record, the Terracotta Army, not likely understanding the irony in memorializing their dead within the element of this grim version of the circle of life that itself mocks the "life" part of the circle. In a way there is no way to divorce any one element of this circle from another, and so Dillard herself cannot omit any of it from her book. Birth defects come into play only when one realizes that the books which catalog them are also a fossil record of their own sort.

To dwell on any of these subjects is essentially to dwell on all of them. And that, Alli, is why Annie Dillard has written a very bleak book on what I deem to be just another version of the circle of life, though a much more cynical version.

We may now look at this with relation to Vico's Idea of the circle of ages: the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, and the iron age. Perhaps more aptly we could describe them thus: The age of the gods, The age of the Hero, The age of man, and the age of Chaos.

Dillard seems to be suggesting that this cycle, a well established literary principle, is a charade, and holds no bearing in reality. In other words, her idea of man is completely remote from that of the Odyssey, which, if I may paraphrase, states that men are rarely as good as their fathers were, and almost never better. In other words, she sees the obvious nostalgic component to this view, and dismisses it as just that, nostalgia, a disease where ideas of the past as more Edenic have contorted our ideas of the present. If this is true, it would be a sad revelation. I use the term revelation ironically here because the Book of Revelation is the one where the apocalypse eschews in the era of chaos before the return to the age of the gods, which according to Dillard's hypothesis, will never happen. I suppose if Dillard is right, our revels now are ended.

Speaking of (or rather alluding to) The Tempest (in what is seemingly becoming a mild fit of referential mania) We see the scenario of the apocalypse being more true to its root definition, the lifting of a veil. The uncovering, in this case of what appeared to be magical, but what is in fact just a large production. "Our revels now are ended" says Prospero:

 "These our actors, 

As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep."

Now that seems like an Annie Dillard apocalypse. The idea that our little life is rounded by a sleep, and then encased in sand, and means nothing after this. We are run over with the plows of our progeny, which is not 

really that bad of a thing. William Blake even proposes is as a Proverb of Hell (which is a satire, not his true sentiment toward all of these proverbs) to "Run your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead." This 

says enough for me. 

And with that I give a big "So there!" To my phantom Alli.

Things to know for class

Students in Tracings, Section 2: 

1) The date for your displaced fairy tale presentation is Thursday September 19th. Please try to keep it under five     minutes. 

2) You should have completed your first reading of The Magus by October 10th.

3) Also, by Septermber 24th everyone should have received their copies of Eliade, Frye, Dillard and Fowles.

4) Try to have read at least 30 pages in each of these books by that date.

5) Students will be assigned to act in pairs (or triads) to helm the discussion after my approach to discussing           Rapunzel. 

6) You should also be reading the blogs of your peers and on occasion responding to what they say in your own        journal. If you have further questions, please raise them in class

   As of today all of my books have officially arrived. I hope all of yours have too. Very excited to begin the readings, and to write posts that are of some substance. However, today is not that day, because I have just received them all, and there remains less than an hour before class. I can, however, offer a simple anecdote regarding blogs in general.

I have a friend, and a lovely friend at that, about whom I wrote my first blog post last year in Shakespeare. Her name is Alli, and she is a very intelligent girl, but as I mentioned a year ago, she has a firm belief that people read too much into literature. That being the case, she just reposted my old post about her on facebook, claiming that it is a falsified report that makes her seem stupid. It is and it kind of does, but I'm sure she'll get over that eventually.

Anyway, Alli is currently at school in New Zealand, so I can't write any true stories about her. But I can write a blog post imagining what the falsified character of Alli would say about Annie Dillard. But First I would like to hear what you all think my fictionalized friend Alli would say. That is, what would the skeptic, the disavower of the humanities have to say about Annie Dillard?

Here's my poem

Like all the things I’ve seen at sea

The scene I see is more than things

And I am wont to want to be

Apart from such like gatherings.

The tiger has an eye on me,

And I, a keen and watchful man,

Will never let myself believe          

That I’m the eye, but aye, I am.

Not that it really matters, see

A man’s a body and a tale

And giving tails to bodies we

Don’t change the letter, just the male.

My boat is small and full of wholes

But not about to fill with sea

I see the boat is filling holes

In stories. What is happening?

The wholes will add up, one plus one,

To make the final zero sum

A circle like the moon or sun

The one dividing now become.

Naturally, given the task of explaining how displacement works in the Rapunzel myth, I have chosen to outline a few key points in a blog post, both to demonstrate the utility of the blog, as well as to help me remember all of the things I wanted to point out to you all. I have taken the liberties of being rather selective with the William Irwin Thompson chapter "Cosmology Lost" and of adding a few things of my own that demonstrate classical mythological elements, likely to be present throughout many of our readings.

So, without further introduction, here are a few notable things:

1) Rapunzel is a plant. How cool is that?! Not only does the plant share a name with the main character, it also lends a few more elements to the myth, such as the tower, the split sexuality, and the idea of "one becoming two." 

2) "One theme of the story is the achievement of a stable couple." 

ex. 1- mother/"brother" - matriarchal

ex. 2- crone/maiden      - matriarchal 

ex. 3- maiden/man        -attempted intervention of the patriarchy

ex. 4- crone/man          - interruption of that intervention

ex. 5- maiden/man        - the patriarchy succeeds

     

The other major theme being the history of sexuality (i.e. reproduction vs. replication)

3) We see that the Crone is immediately associated with plants (i.e. her garden), just as Demeter is associated both with plants, and with a short stint as the crone in the Persephone myth. But this is not necessarily a Persephone myth, just a reflection of the idea of conflicting interests surrounding the maiden.

4) The Persephone myth seems to contradict the idea that the stable couple must involve a male, insinuating in fact that the seperation of mother and maiden is death in itself. In Rapunzel it is initially women who prompt the abducting, and men who do the recovering.

5) Descent is associated here with the Sorceress, not with death. The Woman being a symbol of life is somehow unable to inflict the harshest of consequences, and must therefore "remove life" vicariously through the re-abduction of "Rapunzel"

6) The story is largely regressive, moving forward only when the man is above his instincts, and the woman is twice fertile (not childless like the Crone, or a repetition of the mother). 

7) The young prince enters through a window he is not supposed to be in. The result is an attempted bed-trick to upset the sexual dynamic of the story, which occurs when the Sorceress pulls up the young prince using Rapunzel's hair.

8) Later this deeply mythological sense of plants is replaced by a more literary/metaphorical significance. The Cedars and "incense-bearing tree[s]" of Kubla Khan allude certainly to the Bible, symbolizing wisdom, or godliness, if not perhaps to the Myrrh tree, symbol of unrequited love/something a little darker. Still, these are only symbolic of previous myths, not derivative. Likewise Connie in Joyce Carrol-Oates' short story has no association with flowers at all, rather, she and her mother almost bond over coffee.

9) these pools may very well all be fed from the same artesian spring, even if the water color differs. A damsel with her dulcimer, an Abssynian maid, from the cradle of life may be singing songs we all know, but can't remember. But if only we could!

10) feel free to make your own comments on plants, myths, astronomy, or any elements of the sadly neglected cosmology.

The Man Behind the Curtain

This semester, I will be playing the man behind the curtain. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to bring them to me here. This should be THE ONLY boring blog post in the class form anyone this semester, which is still setting the bar pretty low, so go get 'em tiger!