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.

Deus Ex Machina

So I was like standing in a grocery store line when a guy started talking to me. He said, "yo dude what do you think of the ending of the James Joyce story called, 'Araby' and the repetition of the word 'Vanity'"?

To this I replied, "I don't know, bro, I figure it has something to do with the book of Job- you know, vanities of vanities and all that."

He stared at me for a second and spit some Copenhagen into an empty beer can he was holding. Scratching his crotch he said, "Dude, what the hell are you talking about?"

I shrugged and he went along his way and so did I. I bought some hot pockets and later, my marriage was saved, my dog's cancer went away, and Saddam Hussein was out of power. It was probably the old man with the beer can who fixed everything.

A Deus Ex Machina is a literary device where a sudden appearance of a character that suddenly resolves the conflict of a story. It often undermines the internal logic already established by the narrative. For instance, say a group of talking animals is walking through a forest looking for a lost child when all of a sudden the forest deity, Pan, appears out of nowhere, plays a charming ditty, freaks the crap out of the animals, and directs them to the youngling. The suddenly appearing deity solves the conflict, robbing the characters of their agency to solve the plot. The Deus Ex is a device oft reviled ever since Horace coined the term (Horace was an Italian who wrote poetry about caring).

Deus Ex Machina means "God out of the machine". It implies a divine appearance from a corporeal object such as a poet's pen. The criticisms leveled against it seem legitimate. Shouldn't a plot resolve from premises originally set down in its beginning? What good is a story if the story itself is simply coattails for this divine intervention? Are characters even necessary if their exterior turmoils and inter-character dialogue don't serve a larger literary end?

These criticisms are mostly based from a classical convention of storytelling. In "Poetics" Aristotle writes that,

"In the characters too, exactly as in the structure of the incidents, [the poet] ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort, and it is either necessary or probable that this [incident] happen after that one.
It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance, as in the Medea and in the passage about sailing home in the Iliad. A contrivance must be used for matters outside the drama—either previous events which are beyond human knowledge, or later ones that need to be foretold or announced. For we grant that the gods can see everything. There should be nothing improbable in the incidents; otherwise, it should be outside the tragedy, e.g. that in Sophocles’ Oedipus."

(NOTE: I pulled this from Wikipedia. I did not read Poetics. It's too big for a PlayStation addict like myself to touch.)

For this class, the Deus Ex Machina is important, as a concept, because it represents a mode of narrative that, though largely disliked, appears in many works of both modern canonical literature and general pop culture. Most everyone sighs at the appearance of the guy in an airplane who saves the day, however, it is in consideration of this class, to address literature from a different perspective, where we need to retool our notions of quality.

I am no judge of what is good. However, it is safe to assume that the works that Doctor Sexson has picked for us deserve the consideration we give them. We do this because the man is both older than us and more better well educated. Also, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot and Virginia Wolfe are all names that people who don't even like literacy know, which makes them not just part of the canon but also makes them contributers to society in more ways than we can de-construct. This being said, it seems to me that parts of this class are the searching out of Deus Ex Machina, or the searching out of so-called "bad" qualities in a work of art. This intrigues me, this makes me reconsider my sense of "bad". If we actively search out this plot device, this Deus Ex, does it diminish what we are reading in every other context? I suspect not, this stuff is multifaceted, it contains multitudes, as we all know, there are many ways to skin T.S. Eliot's cat.

More obviously, the Deus Ex Machina relates to this class because it invokes a cliche. The sudden appearance of a being holding great power granting a solution to the protagonist is a piece of storytelling so ingrained in the way people resolve stories that it has become disliked. This repeating form is found in many stories then if it is so magnanimous. In fact, I think it's possible that all stories have some sort of Deus Ex Machina in them. Because all stories are slices of reality siphoned through the way people perceive their own narratives. In this sense, because storytelling is manufactured from the raw material of experience, there will always be elements of contrivance in the rendering of scenes. So even if a character is weaving their own tapestry through a narrative, their materials have been granted to them by the author. Their existence is granted by a fleeting thought of their purpose by the author. Their purpose is to uphold the narrative.

In old stories, myths, there was always an epiphanic mode. The heart of many primal stories is the crossing of boundaries into a new realm. Upon reaching the new realm, the characters in the story would encounter a divine being who would enact either karmic justice or teach a lesson. Either way, it would leave a mark on its beholders that effected the future of not just those directly involved but those who descended from them as well. Is there a way for this metaphor to extend into the flesh world?

I think so.

I think within our narrative forms are the remnants of the primal. This includes the epiphany-speak of the oral tales. These remnants manifest in the narrative forms that were used before them. Parataxis, metonymy, repetition, and metaphor are the tools of the ancient myth tellers. These modes come from the base communication forms humans used at their beginning. Their oral tradition. The Deus Ex is not just a cliche, it's one of these narrative forms. I partially tie it with the notion of Epiphany because of its striking similarity to one of the word's definitions. Likewise, I think there are many layers left untouched here. Regardless of oversights, the epiphany, like so many other modes of thought and writing, is a product and enacter of primal ways. This makes it a mode of the perceived divine. Once again the name obliges.

The concept, "God from the machine" or when re-translated, "God from the hands of man" seems to ape this notion that the deus ex is an attempt at creating god from text. This attempt was rebuked by Aristotle as he believed that the Ex Machina had to occur in a naturalistic fashion. However, all writing has an element of the natural in it if these forms have been passed from a primal sense of things. In the primal is God. If God is primal than an epiphany is the stripping away of anything that is not God. The epiphany, although requiring the naturalistic hand of the divine, is just as much a function of human endeavor, human hands. Human hands create god therefore human hands must be divine. From a literary standpoint we created God from our primal narrative forms that have been passed through time. The Deus Ex Machina becomes less a hamfist and more a force of divinity.

In this sense, the Deus Ex Machina is a part of all story. Because all story, in some sense, at least I think this, is a quest for understanding and understanding is built from revelations. Just like parataxis or repetition or any other mode of orality, the things which laid the foundations for our creation of words have been relegated into the back alleys of the vulgate and so-called kidspeak. There was a time when the appearance of the deity was not considered weak to a story but absolutely essential. Perhaps the Deus Ex Machina, the narrative formula for epiphany, isn't a weakness of plot, but an attempt at storytelling to draw upon its metaphorical and primal roots.

Michael Furey

A child buries his head into his pillow to shelter himself from the hollering of his parents. A crash and the vivid screams of his mother quickly fade out the front door. The deep billowing sobs of his father punch into the boy's room. Somewhere, the door reopens and the fight starts again. The police will be here soon.

The two James Joyce stories from Dubliners offer glimpses into a new side of Epiphany. With the introduction of new perspective comes change. With all change comes a time of great uncertainty and discomfort. Epiphany is the recognition of change it seems in Joyce. This is an interior perspective: less divination, more inclination. Subtle glances breech insecurities and realizations are revealed.

Standing outside of a gym, the child waits for his father's SUV. He sits and waits, watching as the cars passing on the road in front of him turn on their headlights with the fading day. After a few hours, his mother shows up to pick him up.

A name holds power to Joyce. In a way, it holds all the power. 'Araby' signifies all things great, Michael Furey is the name which melts the fantasies of an effete mind. The epiphany is the melding of word and reality. The word, once supporter of the delusions that propelled the character, becomes like a hammer through a stained glass. Behind the falling glass is all the badness and inner fears realized. There's some good there too. The viewers in these stories are shown their true nature through this manner of revelation. An identical tool for both construction and destruction.

The family is at a picnic. The father eats a second hotdog with his fourth beer. The mother glares at him with disdain. She quickly hides it under a mask of smile. The boy notices it though. And for a moment, he is filled with terror.

The manners of people in The Dead are words spoken for pacifying effect. The protagonist exposes his own furious lusts little-by-little until he comes upon his figure of control, Gretta. She diffuses him with story, redefining for him what love means. She is a divine creature. A single shot Scheherazade. Gabriel, ironically named, heralds the snow with his new friend, Michael Furey. What is that thing that is said in Zombie movies? 'When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth'? I think they got it wrong, or, at least the timing part of it.

The boy, now a student, tries to reflect on his experiences in the context of the class material. He tries all sorts of renderings where one thing from his story is related to a later part in a different one. He fails and it comes out jarring and misleading. Not cartoony though. That's something. He gives up and turns off the computer. Misery and epiphany, word.