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.

An open letter to Kmluby

We live on a giant rock hurling itself through unfathomable space amongst infinite universes, and in a few days, if I don't have my taxes done, I will be 'in trouble'. Fuckawesome.

This is Kevin L.'s Blog: Link

I read Kevin's blog and it kind of hit a nerve. This is not because of any failing on his part. I am more annoyed at his rightness on the whole matter. Not only do I agree with him, It's just that I had the same plan for my reaction-post to Wordsworth's poem. It was going to be called, "Tinturn and the sublime" and it was gonna be great. Now, I have to think more and expand on what I was going to say. Thinking is painful and expansion takes energy; energy requires food, and food requires money. Kevin owes me money for this one.

Sublime Compensation

In recap, Kevin found hints of Edmond Burke's conception of "The Sublime" while reading COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. This is a striking observation to me because I had a similar feeling during this reading, and extending it to our previous readings of Joyce and Grahame, it seems like another one of those foundational concepts for this class. More on this later.

At the end of his post, Kevin writes:

"I don't really think all of these writer/philosophers believe that the Sublime (or Epiphany) is primarily a painful (as in physical pain though I would be willing to bet a certain amount of physical pain is involved) experience. Rather, just like thambos or deinos in Greek, pain is implied or written into the Sublime (or epiphany) it is part of the connotation. I think the pain of loss that comes along with a fleeting feeling of sublime or an epiphany makes pain a necessary and unavoidable part of the feeling."

(I don't really know what this means, but I like it. The next few paragraphs are an attempt at unraveling the poem slash Kevin's post)

He is locating that the pain of the experience is not only an effect of Sublimity in the work, but an irrevocable component of it. In other words, to be exposed to something sublime is to be "exposed" to something painful (that is, not necessarily "to experience"). It is the recognition of knowledge without having that tactile experience to back up the knowledge (possibly because in actually obtaining the experience, one would cease 'to know'). This is a component of reading that bufuddles me, especially as a senior undergraduate studying literature.

Within our notions of sublime or beauty or otherwise, is a component of reaction to a certain causal event. I look at Kmluby's blog and see a magnificent scene of a mountain and a man engulfed by its enormity. I inherit a bit of that experience. Because it is a picture I gain imagery, I gain a partial memory of it, however, I have not 'experienced' the event in any fashion nearly as compelling as the man himself in the picture. It is a notional thing, not an empirical one. Likewise, I wonder if the stories and poetry I have read augment my experience in any empirical way.

Within Wordsworth's piece, I hear moments of melancholy aimed to the speaker's youth.

He writes:

"Wherever nature led: more like a man 70
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all."

Throughout the piece, the poet uses terms such as, "Once again" and sets up the piece as five years on from a previous visit. He reminisces about that which is in front of him, effectively pulling his past to the present and projecting it upon the scene in front of him. In doing so, I as a reader inherit all four dimensions of his experience, the natural language that suggests a here-and-now sense while also the observations which are built from the intervening years between initial visit and current. This is an exercise in remembrance. And as anyone who has had a good time at a summer camp can relate, this leads to nostalgia, or the sadness experienced during the remembrance of things. Regardless of the joyful specifics consisting in his, "...glad animal movements all gone by", the poet feels a tinge of pain at his revisiting this place locking the act of remembrance and nostalgia into the mode of the sublime. The time past, as contained in time present creates pain. Yet, it also creates something else.

I think Kevin L nailed this one down with his observation that "As for Wordsworth, I think for the most part he had a much more positive less painful view of the sublime and especially the sublime in nature. Though maybe not as he looks on nature, reflects on the sublime to hear 'the still, sad music of humanity.'"

The act of time-future-look in this poem unveils something else that I hadn't expected. Joy. Wordsworth writes:

" And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 60
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. "

In his melancholy and half thoughts and sadness, the narrator finds a sense of rejuvenation in this sublime act. This is divinely hopeful to me. In the existential quandaries found in aging: the fear of death, the fear of age, the fear of Michael Bay films, there is mind reviving. There is not hope, this is bigger than that, there is the act of experience in all moments that go by. We just gotta notice and learn to read them. At least I think this is what the Wordsworth and Kevin L are getting at.

This is separate from the idea that one can derive pleasure from pain and more so that pain is, in itself, a path to pleasure. That fear and death are components to a certain type of beauty. It's just a matter of recognition. And recognition is a part of epiphany.

See what I did there? I made it relevant... so nyah.

I think this may be a thread I will explore for a while. Cool stuff. Thanks Kevin, you asshole, you just my life harder.

A Disconsolate Chimera

I drew a part of Burnt Norton. I was wondering what a disconsolate Chimera was from the part that the Disconsolate Chimera is mentioned so I drew a Chimera (using three definitions: A mythological creature, a fabrication, and a single organ consisting of diverse pieces) with some other things , not sure just how disconsolate the whole thing is though. I stole a lot of imagery/style from Ralph Steadman for this one. More of this crap later... Oh yeah, click for enlargement.

HAHA!

Just got my scanner to work. Expect art dump of irrelevant-relevant crap soon.

Paper idea #1

I figure this to be the first of many ideas about what I want to do my final paper on.

One of the most prominent forces in my life is that of addiction. My father was an alcoholic, my grandfather lost his job to prescription abuse, and I am currently addicted to nicotine. Addiction is also an inescapable facet in American culture. From video games to fast food to alcohol, there are hundreds of thousands of distractions that can take on addictive qualities. I say addictive qualities because the actual determination of addiction's medical category is vague and controversial. I am not interested in this part of the issue. Regardless of systemic process, there are sets of actions that define addiction in a very real sense. They are all a type of delusion though. The loss of control and the obsession are two common manifestations of the ailment and can, in my opinion, be enough to address the topic at the level I hope to discuss it.

There are many proposed remedies to addiction. Herbal cures supposedly make over-eaters feel nausea in the face of hunger while certain ipecac-like solutions make alcoholics viciously sick at even the slightest whiff of a drink. However, one of its remedies has taken on a life of its own- in both industry and psychology. It is neither chemical nor drug; it is, in its practice, simply a set of twelve steps which the addict uses to escape the shackles of their addiction. These twelve steps which I will write further on later in this blog, are aimed at two purposes. These are 1.) the dissolution of addiction, and 2.) the acceptance of a divine entity and thus a humbling of the user to something larger than themselves. In the context of this class, the Twelve Step Program is an attempt to systematize and create epiphany.

Seemingly based in mysticism, the idea that any person is capable of irrevocably changing their behavior through the recognition and emptying in the service to something beyond reason is an idea that requires a special kind of view of human nature. Forgiveness is the acceptance of both past and present while also requiring a view of the future. The twelve step programs are based in forgiveness. They are also based on a sense of presence that is often labeled as bullshit by the more practical of us. This strikes me as wholly literary.

So having not actually figured out a proper thesis or path of study for this thing, I will spend the next week blogging about my reflections, research, and memories on this topic in the context of the epiphany. Hopefully, I will figure out a proper presentation and paper on this subject.

Presentation East Coker II

NOTE: I have some illustrations and stuff to share but my scanner ate it so now I need to find a way to cheaply digitize things that wont make Sara Mast scalp me.


My section is on East Coker II with the omission of a few lines at the beginning and end of the section.

This is my part:

Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

In summary, this section seems like a break from naturalistic poetic versing and a recognizing of the very limitations of language in helping achieve the serenity that Eliot equates to happiness. With it, comes the question, if knowledge and experience are not the paths to wisdom, how does one achieve wisdom? In recognizing the immensity of an environment both physical and mental, a viewer must understand their part in the whole system which mirrors and functions similarly (simulates) the natural world. There is no insulation in decadence from the folding cycle of life, death, destruction, and relapse that exists.