Paper idea 2

(WIP) Thesis: Using my Bar Mitzvah as a focal point, I wish to re-visit spirituality in my life and reconstruct an event that should have been a epiphanic turning point in my life. Likewise, I am also interested in building a 'postmortem' styled case study for later use by a local Sunday school teacher using interviews with my family, other B-M anecdotes, and the historical and modern images of divinity.

About ten years ago I had a Bar Mitzvah in Billings. A Bar Mitzvah is the Jewish ritual of adulthood. After leading a service and reading from the community's Torah, the adults of the community welcomed me into their ranks; I became a man. Of course, the next day, I still got yelled at for not getting homework done.

That was in 2000. It was the first time my Mom's side of the family was united for almost 15 years and I made friends in my Hebrew class who I still travel to see. It was the 3-year product of memory, study, and community. Yet,today, I never think about the event. It simply isn't important to me.

I want to change this. By lining up what I memorized and rebuilding the experience I want to figure out what the effect of the ritual was on my identity. I will also relate the experience to other Bar/Bat Mitzvahs so to build a wider context with which to relate my experiences. From this generalized perspective I want to relate our literary view on religion with mainstream American Judaism. This literary view, based in the concept of pro-activity and epiphany, will hopefully allow me to have Elliot's ideal that the approach to meaning restores an experience.

tl;dr: Gonna recollect things.

The duality of men, sir. The Megiddo.

I recognize that I am not being inductive with this one. But sometimes...SOMETIMES... I just get the itch to get my deduction on.

I told a friend that I was going to relate Jung's archetypes to the B-G and then he made a pun like, "That's so mature for something so Jung." I wanted to punch him in the mouth, but I didn't because he was my friend.

In the film, Full Metal Jacket, there's a scene where a Colonel grills a private about some headgear and its respective adornments. The officer is remarking on the soldier's helmet where the young man has scrawled, "Born to kill" and then placed a button in the shape of a peace sign on it. The Colonel says,"You'd better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you. " And then he asks the private about it. The private responds, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir." to which the Colonel says: "The What?"
Clarifying, the private says, "The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir."
After a brief pause, the Colonel says, "Son, all I've ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over."

The Colonel has both demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the peace sign while also giving an illustration of the Private's point: The duality of man, sir. In Kubrick's illustration of war, there is no doubt as to whether man is segmented, and in this undergraduate's opinion, the director is showing us that this segmentation is dramatically unveiled in a theater of war. I think the film is Jungian. Later, the young men are pinned down by a sniper which forces them to recognize their inner fear of brutal death (a marine's version of the 'shadow', or the repressed darkness). Taking up cover, they are slowly picked off until, in a fit of 'passion' the character "Animal Mother" charges forward with his squad, overwhelming the position and revealing the assailant. As it turns out, the sniper is a woman. This is a facing of the anima that the men did not expect and leads to an epiphany about the 'duality of men, sir'. Conflict is the ember which burns away distraction and leaves only the skeleton and structure of the world, giving those unfortunate-fortunate few a view of the reality action-- Of the Megiddo.

The Bhagavad Gita also takes place during war. Krishna unravels the fear and doubt which assails Arjuna such that Arjuna can recognize his own internal shadow. In his treaste on the nature and composition of the world, The Krishna names three things as the essential natures that must be overcome in order to achieve the divine. The three are Passion, Lucidity, and Dark Inertia. The Passion drives men. Lucidity informs of good. Dark Inertia assails the world in greed and bitterness. All three make up the material path to diffidence.

These three are the natures of nature but also of man. Within each person is the ability to perceive these structures. As perception focuses on one of them, the others are overwhelmed. They must be emptied from the soul for a person to achieve their truest form. Likewise, in analytic psychology, there are two architypes which construct the subconscious: the Anima/Animus and the Shadow. Although not perfectly parallel (with the exception of the Shadow and the Dark Inertia which seem more alike than the others, and in the case of the masculine, the unwieldy effects of the B-G's Passion and desire reflect the mainstream masculine Anima). The Shadow is the set of things which are repressed. In the above marines, the shadow consisted of fear which had been pounded out of them in the first half of the film. The Anima/Animus is the contrary gender identity that all people have. The Feminine have Masculine traits and visa-versa. To Carl Jung, these forces had to be in check at all times for ones self to be properly connected with the conscious, unconscious, and persona.

This connection of unconscious and persona and conscious is the lynch pin for my relating of these two ideas for their balance is necessary for the rational identity. The B-G is a stressing of discipline and sacrifice, of both mind and soul. If is through the balance of these forces that one achieves these goals. I say balancing because such conflicting ideas if held in balance would negate each other, like algebra.

I think, nowadays, the divine is very much an inner world. On a flesh-world level, in the modern age, we turn to our psychologists for these lessons. If there is a correlation between these two worlds: one of science and one of literature, the line between the two must be much less sparse than usually supposed?


I think the inner recognition of these forces, whether they are the Jungian ones or the Krishna ones, is a battle unto itself. We mentioned in class that the B-G's battle is a metaphor for the inner conflict of men. I think Jung just renamed these forces, giving veracity to these ideas to the skeptical or secular. The thing that gets me is the part where we have found these forces over and over among many fields. Proof is best when it is corroborated by many sources coming from differing and sometimes contradictory interests.

However, the part that makes me stop and let some awe in is the part where the conflict really is important. The end victor is irrelevant. The struggle, at least to me, is the part that matters most. The duality of man, sir is just that and can't really be reconciled so much as recognized.

I lived a full, dedicated, busy life and all I got was this stupid heard attack.

Hook: defining life
The goal of life is to make your death as saddening to as many people as possible. No, this isn’t true. The meaning of life is to die with a bunch of stuff. Nah, this isn’t true either. Life’s goals are subjective, defined by the ones doing the living. Hmm, close but its missing something. Life is intractable; it’s confusing; Life is a God-given shitshow.
In order to navigate the modern morass of existence we need an instruction manual. Written by the combined myths and ruminations of countless minds, societies’ literature make up the guide which offers us the connections to past we require to give our actions experiential context. Because of their communal natures, literature can take many meanings. So if we choose to make literature inane and silly in our minds, it becomes that way. If we use it in a way to look into the infinite commonalities between primal instinct, Victorian humidors, and the space shuttle, it gains immortality. Likewise, if we want it to be practical, we can make it practical.
There are times though when literature has a form which cannot be defined. At these times its form aligns with its function and certain parts of the piece cannot be denied. In the genre of practicality, certain books called “self help” books are immensely popular. Usually modern, they help the reader form a view of life or take on a pattern of living that makes the hard things in life more manageable. These books are not considered literary. They are not literary because more often than not, self help books are filled with utter malarkey whose timelessness is rivaled only by a soggy donut.
But if God were to write a self help book, we’d listen. The Bhagavad-Gita is that book. From its very structure to its reorganizing of perception away from binaries to its messages of empowerment, The Bhagavad-Gita is a self help book.
Although it won’t help you determine whether he or she is just that into you, the Bhagavad-Gita contains a subdued way of helping a person along with the hard decisions in life as well as the philosophic terror felt daily by a society on the constant precipice of modernity.
Its epiphanic structure serves the purpose of self improvement and the act of defining ones identity. It is a story of a hero who rises from a fall to divinity. This is similar to many stories in western thought. These stories range from the Harrison Ford vehicle, “The Fugitive” to the video game, “Gears of War” to Dante’s oft forgotten, “The Divine Comedy”.
In the beginning of the Bhagavad-Gita, Arjuna has fallen from grace, this leads Krishna to lightly mock Arjuna. Very much like Jacob’s slugout with the angel, the being does not define its presence at first, acting as rabbi to the young noble: a corporeal agent teaching a corporeal ideal, in this case, self-discipline. Through discipline, or the ordering of life under an exterior ideal or structure, runs through the entire story and acts as a primer to all other elements of the lesson.
The big middle reveal of Krishna in both form and essence links him with the divine nature of things. It also serves to remind Arjuna that there is something larger at work, something unrelenting and barely definable that is recognized only by awareness. This stresses that Arjuna approaches the world with a kind of sensitivity to both aesthetics and action such that he can be cognizant of the universe’s truths. This can also be distilled down to, don’t get bogged down in irrelevant crap and remember the important stuff- a lesson of life-planners everywhere.
At the end of the piece the narrator, Sanjaya, remarks that “Where Krishna is lord of discipline and Arjuna is the archer, there do fortune, victory, abundance, and morality exist, so I think.” They have melded into a single entity with their own order. Divine and corporeal meet. This is an argument for a traditionalist order about the world that allows for good. This is a happy ending and a promise for better things if the knowledge in the book is well considered and internalized.
The narrative structure of the book mirrors the narrative encapsulating the realms of existence and non existence. With this idea comes a stressing for folk to live in a ordered fashion that both recognizes the fact that there is more to life than morass and that innumerable years have passed in this narrative and we are but a small part. We are indeed a small part, but we still have responsibilities.
In this time of economic insecurity and public polarization, it has become necessary for scientists, businessmen and politicians (traditionally, “practical” people) alike to rethink how the world works. The populace must be fed but to feed a people it takes land. People must have the insurance of health in a civilized society yet the financial burden is incredibly high. As we begin to conceptualize the infinite on a sensory level, how do we spiritually compensate? These problems require sacrifice and in order to deal with sacrifice on any human level it requires the recognition of how complicated these issues truly are. This thought paradigm cannot be addressed alone by an ‘either/or’ proposition.
The Bhagavad-Gita is very much about the erasure of binary thinking. It stresses universality in the form of Krishna, understanding as a factor of a totality instead of agnosticism, and attempts to reconcile the souls of men into three categories which shift and move in sync.
First, the Lord Krishna states that “Men without understanding think that I am unmanifest nature become manifest; they are ignorant of my higher existence, my pure unchanging absolute being. (76)” This sets the enormity of the divine into the mechanistic universe. There is no dualistic border of divine and physical, one states the other and the other is the definition of its composite. It is a tautology encapsulating science, math, poetry, and eastern thought. In a world where we are on the verge of understanding the relationship between the mechanistic brain and the abstracted mind, this model of universality will become a necessary salve from the ennui generated from such a scientific epiphany reconsidering our most hallowed of binaries.
To erase boundaries is to consider the universe in its totality. This has been a mission of literature and philosophy for quite some time. To see the effect everything upon everything else and then to venture into the deterministic postulating which comes from such a logic, this prospect is terrifying. With mathematics in due course and with our new Hadrons Collider in place, we, as a species are about to witness the principles of physical universe formation in our own front yard. Society as a whole will have to shift if we see the true essence of things at an atomic level. I can find no passage than, “Arjuna, see all the universe, animate and inanimate, and whatever else you wish to see; all stands here as one in my body” to help the mind address such concerns.
There is an argument that has bothered me for some time. It is setup as a binary and polarizes thinkers from Kant to Foucault to Oscar the Grouch. It is the question of identity. Whether it exists. How it manifests. At the core of all political and judicial proceeding is the question of where identity exists and how it effects or affects will and action. This is a stressful question for anyone involved and leads to sleepless nights in the beds of judiciaries and psychologists alike. Akin to the first example in this segment, the Krishna can offer but a salve to our problems. Within the totality of all things is the terror of the universe’s “thousand suns” yet within the complication one can find comfort. Complexity demands order or it becomes chaos, within all complexity, as dictated by Krishna, there is a tradition that has been used to address things. Even broad populaces. This is a paramount aspect in the reconciliation of the three aspects of nature: the passion, the dark inert, and the lucid. These, acting in conjunction, are strikingly similar to Jung’s archetypes of the self as well as many personality breakdowns utilized by psychoanalysis. To understand that a people is the broad network of personality is to understand the soul of man under external order.
Arjuna is an everyman. A representation of the common person, he is a projection of commonality within a narrative. This being the case, the lessons in The Bhagavad-Gita are universal and useful to everyone.
The book demands that one empowers themselves through tradition and fealty in the face of the total and the nothing. These become the spears and shield with which we cut through the bramble of existence.
It is a proactive book, demanding action on the part of the reader. This action can take the form of disassociation and indifference, however it is demanded that it is still done in an orderly way with purpose and without thought to cost or outcome. It is a type of rational selflessness. It also stresses an erasure of individuality and the recognition of the divine. This is hard for those who live in the material world exclusively, however even the most staunch atheist would have to acknowledge Voltaire’s wisdom when he said that we would have to invent God regardless of its existence. Lastly, this is a call to action in the very metaphor it gradually sets up all the way to its end. Perched in front is Krishna, the divine totality of the universe, as guide and driver while Arjuna sits in the back, guiding his arrows to the hearts of his enemies in the duty of order, tradition, and virtue.
This call to action by divine right and fealty will come into play with my later discussion on Hamlet.

Burnt Norton Illustration

Im working on illustrating parts of The Four Quartets, this is the last part Im going to post until it's done in its entirety. This particular part is unfinished and requires more tweaking. It's from Burnt Norton.

Reader Response: Annie Dillard's Total Eclipse

I once eaves dropped on four Aliens playing a game of Spades. Spades is a card game like Hearts but instead of cards with hearts giving you points spades do and instead of the queen of spades making you nervous, the queen of hearts does that. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same, you want to avoid points , but if you do manage to get all the points everyone else gets a bunch of points and you get none. That's called diving the Marianas trench- there's another difference. Aliens couldn't stand hearts, but they loved to play spades. Go figure; they're aliens.
They talked about everything you'd expect an alien to talk about: cars, women, taxes, and the game at hand. Except, at one point, the aliens started talking about humans. The first one said, “Gosh! Those humans, what a bunch of weirdos. I heard they think Solar Eclipses are really cool. Don't they know that a Solar Eclipse is just one rock blocking out the sun of another?”
“I dunnoh,” said a different alien, “I figure it is kind of cool. I mean the sun going out like that, it's a real spectacle.”
A third alien who had always been made fun of for coming across as a 'bit gay' in high school said, “ I think it's wonderful, just think. We spend all our time jumping from one galaxy to another, distracting ourselves with games, and a few of these Terran-types sit down and just look up. Seems harmonious.”
“Seems Tranquil. I mean just think of the first time you saw nebula-3417, that was a motherfucking kick to the nuts,” said the fourth alien who, in high school, had beaten up on the third for being gay but in maturing realized the place his own insecurities and fears played in his lashing out and so had long since reconciled with the third and now they were the best of friends, “I think you could get a lot of thinking done, a lot of learning if we could just remember the nebula-3417, I think it would be good for us. We only address the world through the most sparse of mathematics. I mean what happened to Aikenman Maunchhausen? The Universe's most prestigious theoretical mathematician and poet? He was Turinged and feathered on Centurion-0968. We always reject this kind of tactility, maybe we should have, like, a little garden to just, like, reflect on stuff. A rose garden or something. Like that. Something kicks us in the nuts and then we feel tranquil in a garden.”
“That's dumb,” said the first, “that's a dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb idea.”
“You're a dumb idea,” said the fourth.
And then the whole thing denigrated into this kind of exchange for a while and then they started talking about Alien women and then I grew bored and stopped eaves dropping.

There is an odd propensity for people to close their eyes to grandeur. Annie Dillard doesn't do this in Total Eclipse. Her mind expands and contracts with the breaths of memory. With each passing scene she takes us from the stillness of a egg fry to the screaming grandeur of the eclipse. At its pinnacle, Dillard offers us a sense of awe projected on the ceiling over a flattop fryer. Like a Michaelangelo in a Perkins.
Its this convergence of symbols and undermining of expectation that strikes me most in this story. We have such a sparse division between mind and body which is created, not conceptually, but irrevocably through day to day living. Ponderous and infinite, the mind wanders through infinite spectrum while our hands wash dishes or take out the trash. The mind is the construct of a large ball of fat wired up by canyons of neurons. We are, in many ways, material to our very core. Even ministers have to poop sometimes. At least, I think so.
And there's where this story strikes me most of all. That convergence of material and immaterial. It almost seems to me that Dillard is not recognizing that sparse line between the two- the same line cutting between brain and mind. Instead she simply reconciles the two, in effect, saying, “The material is an enacter of the divine just as the mind is enacted by the brain, without one, the other wouldn't exist, and without the other, the one would lack purpose.”
The sun is the most primal thing we know. And like anything primal, it is easily ignored for its abstractions. All things are made of energy. Movement causes adhesion between particles which fasten to each other into forms which become the world we see. The heat from the sun, the gravity from the sun, all cause this. Well, kind of. But this isn't really my point. It's an illustration.
When the sun is covered in non-accordance to our normalized solar cycles, the brain panics and the mind fights to keep it together. What's happening? The constant that has always been there, the alpha and omega of our existence has suddenly abandoned us. With the sun gone, we recognize the primal. We best seem to recognize the primal for the space it leaves behind when it disappears.
Similar to how a mountain top can spark the imagination to envision a nasty fall from a cliff, the mind reels at the lack of the primal. In this view, where immaterial and material meld, we have a place where we can truly see where the border between our world and the other ones sits. Of course, maybe there isn't a border. Maybe it's just a matter of interpretation.
So far we've treated poetry as the language of the epiphany. This makes sense. In our most day-to-day existence we experience the world through language. Thought is language. However we also experience it vitally through emotion. Poetry is the infusion of these two. A remembrance of every uttered sound heard from conception placed into concepts or images or whatnot for their eventual creation into inner experience. I want to argue that there is another way as well.
I think mathematics have the potential to express the intricacies of existence in a similar manner as poetry. When considered as a language and not just sets of practical arithmetic, the communicative ability of math is staggering. It's like seeing anything really. In order to understand poetry you need a modicum of phonetic linguistic experience, in order to understand mountains you have to have an understanding of scale. And likewise, mathematics require a certain awareness of the language.
If it is a language, it is possible to see the divine in mathematics.
Granted, math is a mostly material language. A primary characteristic of the material is its collectivity. You can count the material, package it, use concepts to place it within appropriate bounds. These are functions of math. Bounds, counting, packeting, these terms are the same terms used by computer scientists to guide electrons through wires. It is a material language.
However, so is an eclipse. A visual language is a physical, material, language. Actions in nature, shapes in nature, are the glyphs of this language. If one learns to read nature, to understand it, a special kind of vernacular is built. Numbers are just mountains, proofs ranges. Although does a physical understanding of the world serve to create a greater sense of the grand?

Quick Aside - Reboot

This is a blog. By definition it is a log of my thoughts and feelings. It's supposed to blend both my learnings and my personal happenings. Lately, it's been feeling a bit academic, a bit impersonal. So I'm going to share a story of this evening and many previous evenings.

I realized that this class terrifies me. Less so because of the content, although this particular mode of thinking is new to me so sometimes the writings are more a morass than, well, poetry. It is more so scary because of the idea that the class embodies. It is a capstone. It is a culmination. A marking of my time as an undergraduate coming to an end. This is the part that terrifies me. The ending part. The graduating part.

I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to be graduating. Seriously, I started in on college thinking I was here for the short-run. The same day I walked into the offices of the Arts and Letters department with a full application, I also walked into a Target Box store looking for what I thought at the time was long term employment. I figured college was going to go as the rest of my schooling had gone. As a sidebar to a rather useless life.

I was never very academically (or future) minded. I graduated from high school with a 2.1 or so GPA and came to MSU because is was close enough to Billings such that I could run to my family if something went wrong, but it was far enough away to not be Billings. I started in to art school because the prospect of doing papers and sitting in class rooms made me want to kill myself. One of those still does. But there's been growth between now and then. More on that later though.

I took an English class from Amy Thomas my sophomore year. It was the only A I earned that entire semester. It was her 19th century literature class. In the interim I was taking a painting class, a sculpture class, and some core classes. At this point, I was also neck high on a drug binge. Looking back, those first two years of college were kind of a waste. And kind of some of the most valuable time I spent up here. Mainly because I now perceive it as a waste.

I don't really know when but at some point I decided that I cared about school and the future. It might have been a slow moving epiphany-- a long drawn out Ahhhhh that both involved my wallet and my brain. So I stopped doing drugs. I stopped making weekly runs to Missoula to pick up my little pouch. I started reading in my spare time. Started learning how to think. I was tired of the stupid crap that had made me apathetic. Because that's what I had become, apathetic.

Now here I am. About to graduate. What the hell? I'm not entirely sure how this happened. Now I care about school. Now I care about the future. But this class still scares me. I think it should. I think the future is scary, no matter how the dust flies off my past and how each of my rose-leaves guides me down my regrets and triumphs and perceived futures, the unknown will always be scary. Just as the awesome is scary, and the magnanimity of time is awesome.

I think it's a good thing. A little fear can go a long way. Keeps me humble. Keeps me grounded and looking up and back and forward.

Anyway, there's my digression. I know it's self indulgent and I am pretty damn sure nobody really cares. But I needed to get this out there. I will post my more relevant things tomorrow.