Reminder of Times Past

I was trying to think of a good way to wrap up all I've learned from this class, and I wasn't sure how to do it. Then I remembered, I take tons of notes during class, so I thought I'd share them all with you and the thoughts that emerged from them. They are a bit sporadic, but so are my thoughts. There is also a Suggested Reading List from Dr. Sexson's Tracings at the end, comprised of all the books Dr. Sexson told us to read in case you didn't get them all! A film list is also there. I know I have a lot of books to read during the breaks!

8-27-2013

• "Remind people of what they've forgotten" -Dr. Sexson (from now on referred to as Dr. S.)
• "When soemthing happens once, it's chance. When something happens twice, it's coincidence. When something happens three times, its mythology." -Dr. S.
• "The things we close our nakedness with is our stories." -Dr. S.
• myths=story, logos=truth/reality, combined-->mythology
• "We are on the track of everything." -Dr. S.
• (here we shared all our dreams, I think Spencer did a pretty good job of reminding us of those)

8-29-2013

• "You don't know what you think until you see what you say." -Dr. S.
• "All literature is displaced myth." -Dr. S.
• "There are no books, only boring people." -Dr. S.
• Beauty triumphs depression-->but can't there be something learnt from bleak things?
• Theme: how do we make the past present again?

9-3-2013

• Why do I read into everything in life, relationships, what people think of me, but I can't read into literature????
• If you want the "essence," you go with the "myth"
• Rose in the western culture=lotus in Eastern culture
• Why must we compare every story to a myth? Why must we get the "essence"? What do the myths tell us?
• "Life can't do anything else but imitate myth" -Dr. S. -->Why is that? Is it because myth was once reality? We just keep circling around....
• Marriage is a legalization of rape...hmm... "who comes forward to give this woman away" -->possession of women-->one man gives girl away to another

9-5-2013

• Is there such an idea as over analyzing? 
• "It's all music" -Dr. S.
• your memories really aren't your memories.....?
• "Knowledge is not something you discover, its something you invent." -->does this have something to do with the collective unconscious?
• we create our own realities
• there are no new ideas
• "Unmixed attention is prayer." Dr. S.
• "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough." -unknown
• "The great enemy is distraction." -Dr. S.
• What is really important to me?

9-10-13

• "All literature is displaced myth" -Frye
• "The stories of your culture makes you who you are" -Dr. S.
• Fairy tales-->romance theme-->why is romance so central in our life? Why are we attracted to romance?
• If it's all the same story, why do we keep reading? Why do we read new literature? Is it because it is something we can all relate to? or want? Perhaps because we need them to be understood and carried on, in a way each generation will understand.
• Why are islands so important?
• Dantes 4 levels of interpretation
• Literal: surface of the story, the actual story, the superficial level
• Allegorical
• Moral 
• Anagogical: the ultimate reading of a text-->the highest

9-12-2013

• **Don't look up definitions, look up etymologies!
• enthusiasm means being possessed by a God
• Ecstasy is standing outside yourself
• Epiphanipack: your ah-ha moments collected together!!
• Why I don't read into literature-->I expect it to tell me something instead of extracting the meaning-->I'm used to scientific literature, where it seems it tells you something. Really, I'm lazy, I'm a "lazy reader" (as Dr. S. put it). 
• The meaning is the experience
• How does the story tell us how to live? They're not just a bunch of morals. "The moral of the story is always the story itself" -Dr. S.
• decode the world before you, using myths as you cipher
• When do you stop "reading into things"? Till you've gone mad?

9-17-2013

• "Life is an imitation of art." -Oscar Wild  -->more than art imitates life?
• "There is no such thing as nonsense because we are always trying to make sense" -Dr. S
• Why do I enjoy listening to people so much? Instead of talking? 
• "It's all a dance." Dr. S.
• The quest for the Holy Grail is the search for a lance and the glass/bowl Jesus drank from (man and woman)
• What about the Qur'an? What are the myths from my culture?
• **You have to be really lost to get to someplace that cannot be found. (T.S. Elliot)
• Art of using quotation marks is setting up another voice in the story

9-24-2013

• What is it that constitutes quality? Can it be measured? What about in the liberal arts? How does quality relate to higher education? to the quality of teaching? Do we know quality when it exists?
• Euripitis Trojan Women

9-26-2013

• Don't ask "what's new," ask "what's best"
• **terror of the circle
• Quality: the idea that we do not "see" it, but "experience" it
• Why the books that Dr. Sexson chose?

10-1-2013

• Life is not a dress rehearsal!
• Schrodinger's cat -->superposition-->do we exist everywhere at the same time? Until we observe ourself?
• Up is down (Pirates of the Caribbean!!)
• YHWH -->Hebrew for God
• Genuine literalness is not symbols anymore
• The bible has authority because it has gained it over time. Is this how stories and myths work?
• **You only start remembering once you learn to speak -->this is why language is so important! 
• In the world of the sacred, the dead are not dead.

10-3-2013

• "See things transparently" -Nabokov
• "Sanity is a madness put to good use; waking life is a dream controlled." -film Waking Life
• Don't be an ant!
• What makes things memorable?
• Pay attention to the dead. Is this why vampires and zombies are so popular?
• Life is just smoke and mirrors -Dr. S.
• "Every answer is a form of death" -The Magus
• We need to visit rooms in our mind...every room. The interpretation of the dream is just another room of the dream.
• "I am vast, I have multitudes, I have room to contradict myself." Dr. S.

10-8-2013

• Elegy: mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, a lament of the dead, Greek word for "lament"
• *insanity: doing the same thing twice and expecting different results --> we do the same things over and over again and people still laugh. Does this make everyone insane?
•  theodicy: questioning the justice of God, allowing others to suffer. 
• De-sensitizing -->do we get "used" to it or de-sensitize ourselves to things like animals dying? 
• We are all equal in death, so why spend it in stress? (Calder's blog)
• profound simplicity -->this is everywhere in life I'm beginning to notice
• "When is something alive? When it goes on doing something" -Dr. S.
• Entropy of the univerise -->sameness and uniformity -->we cannot "unstir" things -->equilibrium
• If something just has one message, there is no information. Information implies surprise.
• *If you understand everything, you understand nothing. So are we going to understand nothing at the end of this class? What about at our end?
• When you die, your atoms are just rearranged. 
• Humans desire to organize. We purposefully disobey the laws of entropy. Why do we want to prevent entropy? 
• *If the doors of perception are cleared, then you will see things as they really are.

10-10-2013

• We are lost if we don't have the right words to say. 
• Romance vs. tragedy. Tragedy ends in death. Romance ends with an apparent death.
• "Death is not an experience" 
• Apocolypse -->removing the veil
• "We die on the march"
• Our shoulder hurt when we see something beautiful because we used to have wings!!! (Plato)
• We were all touched by the lips of an angel before birth
• **how do we get back to remembering? Because once we start learning to speak we forget. So we need to leave language?

10-15-2013

• If you are genuinely committed to a task, the world changes to help you with your task. Everything starts to revolve around the task. Lots of coincidences.....
• *When you are focused, magical things will happen.
• Laws of Attraction, chemical affinity
• people who read books and watch fiction movies are more empathetic because they can really get into the character or another person. They have more imagination, and the power of empathy increases.
• Answers are a form of death, but answers are placeholders (for the bigger questions, not questions like in engineering or the practical questions)
• "A theatre without an audience" -The Magus

10-17-2013

• Seasons are the circle of life and death. Fall is the season of dying, yet it is so beautiful. What does this tell us about death, that it is also beautiful and should not be viewed in such a negative light?
• We are in a boat with a slow leakage (Four Quartets)
• The point of this class: you don't have to know about it to really know about it. 
• What is the difference between a lesson and an experience? A lesson: it ends, it closes. An experience: never ends.
• the term "just" or "only" -->eliminate them from your vocabulary. It degrades anything you say.

10-22-13

• "An inexplicable ordinary place" ---> Bozeman, MT
• How do you remember? You experience.
• The memory is a creative faculty
•  *The function of the storyteller is to save our lives. Is this what Dr. Sexson is doing for us? How does Conchis save Nicolas' life?

10-24-2013

• There is a sense of humor in the Goldberg Variations, a smile
• Music is humanity. Different combinations make one piece (a code, like a code of DNA making up a humans genetic makeup)
• "An ecstatic desire to get weird" -Jeremy Denk
• There is music in the noise
• nobody knows everything, but you can allude that you know everything
• There is no place like home, and the only way you know is to go away.... -->T.S. Elliot, "we shall not cease from exploration..."
• When you stop becoming, you start being. You can only become who you are
• Romance: the illusion of death
• Bad things are often good things, we don't know what going to happen.

10-29-2013

• "negative capability": being with doubts and uncertainties without reaching for solutions or answers to the doubts and uncertainties
• In order to contain everything, you must empty yourself of everything you once knew or thought, become naked.
• Life is full of contradictions. Life and death, questions and answers, freedom and enslavement
• "You've given up everything in life to be free except your freedom." Once you give up this then you will be liberated.

10-31-2013

• "You cannot stir things apart" -Thomasina, Arcadia
• "Disorder out of disorder into disorder" -Septimus, Arcadia
• "A mind in chaos suspected in genius" -from Arcadia

11-5-2013

• "It's not what you know, its wanting to know" -Hannah, Arcadia

11-11-2013

• "The better you understand freedom, the less you possess it." -from Jonah's project
• We are all simultaneously free and not free.
• Categories cloud our vision and perspective of freedom.
• Freedom is breaking the shelters in our head down and rebuilding them.
• We must absorb the dreamworld into our life. Don't analyze dreams, use them to help breakdown the social norms and prejudices we put on ourselves. The dreamworld doesn't let us have any prejudices. 

11-14-2013

• "Fast forward to the past" -Alaine
• What's so wrong with being an introvert?
• The world wants you to do so much, but you want to do so much for the world. 
• Genius: sophistication + primality 
• One thing is certain: we all feel pain
• vulnerability -->we are strongest when we are most vulnerable, when we've stripped away all our defenses and no longer have control
• remove all your defenses and protection, become naked, see what you need
• "Reason not the need if only to be warm we're gorgeous" -Shakespeare
• Thermodynamics:
• 1st law: all energy is conserved
• 2nd law: useful energy decreases, disorder always increases
• Relating 2 different subjects together that seem completely unrelated make them romantic

11-19-2013

• "To be is to be vulnerable."
• "Emotions are stories in my head" -Rose
• "I am my own myth" -Rose
• Are we at the mercy of our chemicals? Do we have any power? 
• "Everything fell together and I fell apart" -Rose
• When you learn, your nerves physically change and make new connections
• Emotions connect you to each other, they're more powerful than what you do
• fear of the formula
• cycle of connect and disconnect
• "Given things as they are, how shall we live our life?" -Annie Dillard
• Chaos requires 3 things:
• differences (butterfly effect)
• topographical mixing
• order
• the only thing that is more impossible of how the universe formed is the inevitability of it
• the water and the wave: both are represented in music
• Fuck you rule: when you around people you know, its both disrespectful (at first) but also shows how much respect we have. -->swearing shows how civilized we are
• Sex is the middle finger to chaos
• the literal turning back into the cosmological creates the smile

11-21-2013

• Tarot cards!!!!
• drawing is a tool, not a product
• who controls our past? 
• In some sense, this whole class is about how to read a text. Our bias shows through, whether we like it or not. 

11-26-2013

• We teach our children through stories
• science lacks introspection. Science seeks to understand the world, literature seeks to understand humanity
• Music is both introspection and retrospection. Music is the language of the collective unconscious
• "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors" -Niche
• "If you want to do art, do art. Life will imitate your work" -Carol
• When a poem is written down it is a ghost of a poem. Writing immortalizes things, but really it buries it. You see things first when they're dead.
• "He who speaks doe snot know, and he who knows does not speak" -Dow de Ching
• recursion and self-reference
• Smile -->when one glimpses the madness of reality
• 2 types of madness
• Divine: what lies at the center
• Reference: when once references itself
• The energy of life and sound are extremely closely related
• Theme and variation is a way in which to glimpse the madness
• *Find the still point of the turning world

After all that, I think I'm finally starting to get it. But, as Alaine said, I simply just can't put it into words. It reminds me of when Dr. Sexson asks what Logan thinks about something, and he just has this huge smile on his face, but can't quite get the words to describe it. I think he gets it. I'm not sure if this means I get it too, but it's a start I guess. The first quote I wrote down from this class is one of Dr. Sexson's. He said "Remind people of what they've forgotten." This class has reminded me and taught me how to look at every angle, pay attention to the details, experience dreams, read into something as far as I can, catch the coincidences in life, and so much more. Dr. Sexson also said once "There is no such thing as nonsense because we are always trying to make sense." Several times I found myself saying, "that's nonsense, how could that be true?" and now I realize that he was so right (as usual). There is something out there to read, discover, invent, see, listen to, or write that will make it all make sense. And to not be afraid that it doesn't make sense at the moment. I used to hate it when I didn't understand something, or worse, couldn't seem to get any sort of handle on it. But now, I'm not afraid to not know, to not understand, because I know eventually it will click. 

I wanted this to be sort of a journal for the entire class; a glimpse into everything we learned this semester. I really can't adequately put all I've discovered into one blog, but maybe if we combined all our blogs? I think I'm finally starting to realize what it's all about, thanks to this class. I cannot describe how this class has affected me and changed the way I look at education and life in general (I almost wrote "just" before life in that sentence). In no other course have I felt the emotions that I feel everyday as a result of class, reading each persons blogs, and the texts we've read this semester. Thank you everyone for making this class an experience I will remember the rest of my life.

Suggested Reading List from Dr. Sexson's Tracings Seminar

1. Surfaces and Essences-Douglas Hofstadter
2. Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, "Signs and Symbols"-Yuri Leving
3. The Divine Comedy-Dante Alighieri
4. Beatrice and Virgil-Yann Martel
5. Lolita-Vladimir Nabokov
6. Palefire-Nabokov
7. Literature and the Gods-Roberto Calasso
8. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-Robert Pirsig
9. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa-Jan Potocki
10. Lament of the Dead-James Hillman, Sonu Shamdasani
11. The Idiot-Dostoyevsky
12. The Storyteller-Mario Llosa
13. Don Quixote-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
14. The Idea of the Holy-R. Otto
15. The Monologue- Novalis
16. Essay: "The Geography of Imagination"
17. The Ebony Tower-Fowles
18. The User Illusion-Tor Norretranders
19. Poem: "Aros, The Bittersweet"

Suggested Film List from Dr. Sexson's Tracings Seminar

1. Dead Man
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth
3. Waking Life
4. Last Year in Marienbad
5. Black Orpheus
6. 32 Variations of Glenn Gould
7. Little Big Man
8. Hiroshima Monomore

Listen to:

1. 1955 Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould
2. Quartet for the End of Time

Final Paper: The Smile of Freedom

                 “It is because there is freedom that there is the smile.” This passage from the novel The Magus by John Fowles (445) completely startled me. I read it over and over again, trying to figure out what it meant. What freedom? Why is there a smile? It reminded me of another passage from the same novel when the character Conchis is describing a stone bust. The most significant quality the bust possesses is not a chiseled face or deep-set eyes, but its smile. “That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yan. But the smile” (150).

                At first, these quotes startled me with their simplicity. The smile of truth; the smile of freedom. I love to smile, and I think a smile can mean much more than people often think. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I believe a smile is worth more. I wanted to find out what exactly the meaning of a smile was, hence this project. I chose to focus on a series of questions: What is a smile of freedom? When does a smile of freedom appear? When can it appear?

                These questions dive into the cosmological and anagogical interpretations, but the literal interpretation becomes the anagogical, so it is still important. The smile is the most biologically uniform facial expression. It only takes one muscle to smile, whereas frowning takes several more. The smile is such a fundamental expression that ultrasounds on babies in the womb have shown them smiling. This suggests that humans do not need to be taught to smile. It is said that a “genuine” smile is generated by the unconscious brain, perhaps even from what some might call the “collective unconscious.”

               

A. Nelson Mandela freed at last

B. Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci

 

                 The only way to talk about a smile is to look at examples of smiles throughout history. Take image A for example. It is a depiction of Nelson Mandela, a South-African political activist, finally freed from prison after nearly thirty years. His smile extends throughout his whole face, tugging at the corners of his eyes, making his cheeks stand out, wrinkling the sides of his face, and showing all the teeth he possibly could show. His smile moves from his face and is carried throughout his body to the fist he pounds in the air. You cannot help but smile just looking at it. The image is powerful in itself, but also powerful because of the context it was taken in. We know it was taken shortly after he was released from prison, so it is literally a smile of a now free man. But is this what Conchis meant? What about the Mona Lisa (picture B), arguably the most famous smile in history? Her smile, if it is a smile at all, is much more reserved. I see her smiling because I think her eyes crinkle at the sides ever so gently, like she’s secretly laughing hysterically inside but can only show the slightest bit of emotion. But why is she smiling? Unlike the picture of Nelson Mandela, we have no context of which to know what triggered her facial expression. Many people have ideas about why she is smiling, if she is smiling at all, but no one really knows for sure. Does she possess a smile of freedom?

                To understand what a smile of freedom is, first I needed to understand what Conchis meant by freedom.  In The Magus, Conchis describes freedom as “the final right to deny. To be free to choose” (441).  We have often said in class that we can only be free when we have emptied ourselves of everything we once knew and become naked.  Conchis emptied himself in that moment with Wimmel of everything he thought he knew before, and was freed by realizing he had the freedom to do everything, to choose to do everything, or nothing at all. It’s really just a big contradiction. Knowing nothing, we have the freedom to think anything.

                When Jonah Barta spoke about freedom, he said “freedom is the act of perception,” meaning we never actually possess freedom. But freedom is inside us, often trapped by the shelters we build in our own heads by categorizing and quantifying everything. Take a smile, for example. When I was doing research on this topic, I saw so many ways in which you could “characterize” a smile as a certain type and stick a label to it, as if that gives the smile a certain meaning. Look at dreaming. If a person has violent dreams, we think they are a horrible person and must have thoughts of hurting people. The list of examples of this idea could go on and on. We must make a choice to break these shelters of categories down and rebuild them with new perspectives. Only then can freedom be released; only then will the smile appear.

                Looking at the pictures, do these embody Conchis’ view of freedom? I think Mandela’s photograph possesses this smile, or better yet, he is smiling the release of freedom inside him. His smile has everything in it: pain and hardship, sadness, triumph, passion and eleutheria—freedom. His smile is a realization of the freedom to choose. It is here that the literal “smile of freedom” works its way around to the cosmological and the anagogical, because the literal is the anagogical. But the Mona Lisa has an air of mystery in her, like maybe she is hiding something. Her smile could possess everything, but she doesn’t want to show the world that she does. Isn’t this a smile that realizes the freedom to choose as well?   

                Then I wondered can this smile only appear when a person has gone through a hardship, like Mandela did? Can anyone smile the smile of freedom? For this I refer to another passage from The Magus: “You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me” (351). The smile of freedom is a smile of realization; when you realize you exist as you. It’s all a big circle, as we know. What you are is what you will become. When you accept this, you smile. “It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be” (112). Can a person realize this without being confronted with any obstacles?

                I think every person experiences some sort of pain in their lifetime. As Brooke Wimer put it in her project, “One thing is certain. We all feel pain.” Some maybe more than others, but I don’t think we can compare one person’s pain with another’s. Whether it is a moment of pain or a lifetime of pain, we all feel it and we are all affected by it. And it is only after this pain that the smile of freedom becomes available. The key word is available. I don’t believe every person reaches this smile, because it is not just experiencing the pain that makes the smile available, it is what we choose to do with that pain. Like I said earlier, freedom is all about choosing. We can choose to let the pain control us, build shelters in our head, or we can choose to break down those shelters and let the pain help shape who we are, not define who we are. Look at Nicholas in The Magus. The smile becomes available to him at the end of the novel as a result of all the pain he endures, but he never smiles the smile of freedom because he let his pain define who he was.

                After all that pain, there is something else we must realize. Joe Schadt said in one of his blogs, “smile comes from the simple truth that human existence is fucking ridiculous.” Annie Dillard showed us that we as a single individual are not important in the grand scheme of life. Isn’t this a form of freedom? Is it not freeing when we realize that what we do doesn’t really matter? So how shall we live knowing this? We should smile; smile at the insignificance of life.

                To me, the smile of freedom is the smile of the collective unconscious. It is the smile of knowing and understanding the pain and passion for life. A fundamental realization that we are what we are, that we can only be, and we have the power to choose. Freedom is inside us. We must choose to find it, break the shelters that contain it, and let it go so we can smile the smile of freedom. This is the smile of the statue; it is the smile that contains EVERYTHING.