Wind in the Willows and on I-90

Living out in Belgrade, I have had to enact a new policy with respect to commuting into Bozeman during harsh weather. I no longer drive into town after significant snow when the word "windy" is used to describe the weather. I went off the highway last winter when wind kicked up the snow into a temporary whiteout. While waiting for AAA to come pull me out, I completely missed the class I was headed to and the professor didn't even have sympathy for my then late assignment (Lawrence Gross, Native American Studies). I'm not interested in going off the road anymore. I suppose you could say I'm taking a lesson from Toad or, rather, the views of his friends expressed during the intervention. :)

It feels sort of like my conscience is Badger and my life is Toad. Toad is reckless and want to have fun while Badger is more responsible and stops hubris in it's tracks. I might want to go places but there comes a point when safety, or social responsibility according to Badger, becomes the greater issue. Before detailing my analysis of the epiphany of Pan in chapter 7, there's something else I want to mention first.

It is the strangest most ironic act of personification that a non human animal would use the name of another animal as a derogatory slur. This is doubly strange because all of the animals eat meat from that very animal while using other words ("bacon" and "sausage") to describe the meat. Why don't they just say "I'm eating pig?" They don't because that's not how humans do it. We don't often like to put a face on our food. It's easier to put a face on ourselves and ignore shared commonalities with other species. "I see it all now! What a pig I have been! A pig - that's me! Just a pig - plain pig!"(p83)


Moving on to chapter 7...

I think purpose is a necessary ingredient for the epiphanic experience had by Rat and Mole in chapter 7. "Rat," said the Mole, "I simply can't go and turn in, and go to sleep, and do nothing, even though there doesn't seem to be anything to be done."(p119) Purpose is not simply a driving factor to get the characters into a certain physical location where they then have their epiphany (though this is exactly the case with Pan and the music he used to call them to Portly). Rat and Mole never would have had their experience if they hadn't had the goal, the purpose, of finding Portly. If you reduce every philosophical question further and further down to the most basic question of all, you come to "why are we here?" There is an answer to this though wordy academic types tend to try to poke at it. The answer to "why are we here" is simply this: we are here to bring forth the next generation and do the best we can for it. That is the purpose of life, to perpetuate itself. Rat and Mole are seeking one of the next generation, the most important thing they could possibly do, and I think the whole Pan-epiphany thing is really just an accentuated, literary highlighter for this. The most important sentence in the entire chapter comes after the description of Otters vigil by the water. "Looking up the river, they could see Otter start up, tense and rigid, from out of the shallows where he crouched in dumb patience, and could hear his amazed and joyous bark as he bounded up through the osiers on to the path." Perhaps the experience granted to Rat and Mole was a reward, a boon of sorts, for their efforts as good samaritans.

I also think it's interesting that the book ends on an epic feast. Food is the great binding ingredient of society, whether Badger is ordering "everything of the best" or I am being vocal about vegan things. Reread the end closely. Kenneth Grahame got it right. It's all about food.

Isolation and Awareness at MSU

CAUTION! A late night lengthy diatribe with a tad bit of soap box makes for opinionated blogging!

I've done a bit of thinking about my history as an MSU English major and I'm not entirely thrilled with it. Mostly, I try not to dwell on the lunacies of the university (luniversity?) since they're enough to make anyone feel depressed. I suppose now is a good time to list some of them.

• Skyboxes for the football stadium. This hugely expensive monstrosity of a bad idea has to be listed first. "If we build it they will come" was the mantra. They built it. No one went. It was expensive.
• Giant rusty noodle. $50,000 dollars was spent on that giant rusty noodle next to the SUB. The only thing it does for students is it gives us something to wonder about during class. Just how many folf discs have been lost in the thing?
  
• New chemistry building. That abortion of a structure ruined the best trees and best grass field on campus. Interestingly, the very year it was built, there was an exodus from the graduate chemistry program. I heard lots of dirt about this from a chemistry grad who was friends with my then roommate.
• My Portal. So bad and so expensive that my memory of the 3 minute tirade I unleashed bashing my portal in a room filled with people responsible for managing it (it was either coincidental or perhaps providence) doesn't even make me smile. It was the most frustrating thing telling teachers and administration over and over and over that, sorry, there is no way in hell I was going to use it.

So what's the use of complaining about these frustrating things? It makes me feel better. However they also illustrate a point. The decision to implement these things shows the divide that exists between what I think and the reality around me. Big expensive decisions that affect students are made without consulting them. If you doubt me, go sit in one of the newly remodeled classrooms in the basement of Reid. It cost millions of dollars and students will be paying for classrooms which are so poorly designed, the chairs so abysmally uncomfortable, that the act of teaching in these rooms is now significantly impaired.

These things are easily understood as stupid yet I've had to live with them as a student. It's surprisingly difficult when you deal with it everyday. It's just as difficult, if not more so, to find that the people who I would most closely relate to actually posses a nearly insurmountable wall. I've never understood why "enlightened" people in the college of letters and sciences support factory farming by spending money on it's food products. This is the most absurd contradictory practice I've ever seen in any group of people anywhere in my life! How can people who can accurately and imaginatively dissect Shakespeare, debate philosophical catch-22's, find the importance of our past as a representative of our future and somehow find beauty in our political structure support what is conceivably the greatest cruelty ever conceived by man? There's only one analogy I can think of to describe what I feel like every day.

About 90% of the time I feel like Bill Murray on his first repeated day of Groundhog Day. In this one thing which is so important, every day is the same. Nothing ever changes. Smart people say the same smart things. Wilson hall still feels like a prison. Parking still sucks. The same potholes are in the same spot on 8th next to Cooper Park. Down to the details, it feels like Groundhog Day to me.

(doesn't he look angry instead of confused?)

The two words that continually resurface as I write about my college experience in my notebook while digging for epiphanies (no standard epiphanies) are isolation and awareness. As I become more and more isolated from the people around me, regardless of how many classes I take or what I do to socialize with other people, I become increasingly aware of the absurd eating habits around me. As I become ever more aware of the differences between me and everyone else I see on campus, my experience of isolation continues to increase. In this instance, college hasn't provided me with an epiphany. It's provided me with the means of watching lots of other people who are smart enough to connect the dots and have this food based epiphany fail or simply not do it. I get it. People don't want to go vegan. I know that's not going to happen and the whole "let's support local farming" argument is terrific. I support supporting that. Specifically, what I don't get is why people who claim to support local businesses go buy food frequently from restaurants and grocery stores which ONLY source their animal ingredients from factory farm sources. The "I support local" argument should be an even stronger argument against not eating that crap. Anyway, it pisses me off.

Maybe when I read this after I wake up I'll have more input or some grammatical corrections to make.

Oh's and Ah's and Yum

I completely agree that food can be the cause for epiphanies, both small and large ones. While Bozeman restaurants are sadly lacking in epiphanic eating, I experience small food epiphanies on a regular, monthly schedule. (This is in addition to both random and planned epiphanic experiences in my kitchen) Two years ago I co-founded the the Bozeman Area Vegetarian Society and I have arranged monthly food potlucks ever since. There is such a fabulous diversity to the dishes and there exists a level of quality reached only by excited proud chefs. It is IMPOSSIBLE not to have a food based epiphany at one of these potlucks. You need not be vegetarian or vegan to attend. Simply bring a vegan dish so that as many people can enjoy it as possible or bring a drink of some sort. If you're interested, talk to me after class.

I have to dig up a photo from the last potluck. I'll post it sometime this coming week.

I've learned a few things about small food epiphanies in my potluck experiences. The element of surprise makes the food taste better. Food that others have prepared tastes better than if you yourself made the same recipe. A very odd, bonding experience occurs when strangers share food together and I imagine my potlucks are not alone this. I expect shared epiphanic experiences have occurred for thousands of years amongst people who feast together.

As for large scale food epiphanies...
One of my first memories, and previously blogged about in a prior Sexson class, is of watching crabs boiled alive for my lunch at a family gathering. I was a small child at the time and watching this disturbed me so greatly that my mom could not stop my screaming. She took me out of the room to calm me down and then we had a talk which I will always remember. I told her we shouldn't eat crabs and that it was wrong. Her responses was:

“Mick, you like hamburgers don't you?”
“Yes...” I said.
“Where do hamburgers come from?”
(I thought about that for a moment and then..)













Before I could say “well then we shouldn't eat hamburgers” my mom said “we eat cows so we can eat crabs too”. She completely missed the logical application of my child ethics and it took me 10 years before I was independent enough to stop eating hamburgers. After another 10 years, she stopped eating hamburgers too. :-)

MLK Day and 4 Quartets

A day late but oh well. We had the day off anyway!

There's a passage during The Dry Salvages section 2 which in some fascinating yet haunting way seems to apply to Martin Luther King Jr. and his presence in the American civil rights movement. Starting at line 200,

But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint-
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

I think this passage speaks about the change which happens when something important and finite changes into another form which is less finite, if not infinite. "Occupation", used twice, infers that this important form is a vocation of sorts. This isn't the sort of job that someone applies for and actively pursues. No, this is a job that someone was already doing and then discovered at a later date that a timeless quality would ultimately be thrust upon their work achievements. The great passion and self sacrifice (defined in part by that timeless quality) necessary I see as a view imposed upon the person by popular acclaim and even selective memory.

One example would be Babe Ruth. The longer ago he played, the better he was when he played. It's a genuinely weird phenomena attested to by Baseball fans. Was Babe Ruth really all that great? Or was America screaming out for a hero through the medium of it's then favorite sport baseball? This is the argument about man vs. history. Which one makes the other? In answer, I quote my favorite tv show of all time. "History makes men, men don't make history."

Obviously MLK was a fantastic leader for the civil rights movement. That's indisputable. I'm simply of the opinion that we point to him in our attempt to understand the events of the time which were even larger than he was. That's how history makes men. The end of the passage I quoted above makes implications of a religious nature involving sacrifice. My opinion hold true for that as well but that's another blog post.


Check out this video of MLK's last speech before he was assassinated. It's kind of crazy in a prophetic sort of way.

Epiphanies

(Hmmm.. I didn't publish this. Why didn't this publish?)

It worth noting that, though many results of the first page of google images for "epiphany" are religious in nature, one of them is not. I opt for this image as my go to image for all things Epiphany this semester. It's a water color by Kathrin Burleson.

In my notes I have two things written down which I will expand upon. This is in regards to our question about the nature of an epiphany. The first is the claim T.S. Elliot makes that says a place is necessary for an epiphany. The second is my own description of an epiphany (a dramatic restructuring). I have no specific reasons about why I choose these two items from my notes to expand upon at this time.

"A place is necessary for an epiphany"

When I first heard this, I became indignant and thought that a place was NOT necessary for an epiphany. How could so casual a building block be an absolute necessity for such a huge event? As I argued eloquently in my mind against the requirement of "place", I came to realize that "place" isn't just indicative of some lofty hallowed location noted for higher thinking (Tintern Abbey, the white house, MSU English department etc). "Place", or setting, is simply one puzzle piece of several used to describe a given thing. Nouns tend to do well with other nouns in their description so the gap between "place" and epiphany wasn't as big as I first thought.

However, this train of thought did get my mental juices flowing. I think what I was really getting at can best be explained on this page here (found through random googling). "Ideas are available to us through thought, while phenomena are available to us through our senses." This digest of Plato applies to phenomena in such that phenomena, while expressed and examined as an idea, in experience it is a phenomena. How is this different from the average idea or phenomena? My beagle likes to like my hand. When I discuss the act of my beagle licking my hand, I discuss an idea. The event of my hand being licked is experienced as a phenomena. I don't believe the same clear level of separation exists with epiphanies. The experience of the epiphany and how we relate the epiphany to each other does not leave a gap. The strength of each in how we conceive of them creates an overlap. The expression is the experience and the experience is the expression. If this were not the case, it would not be an epiphany.

My definition for epiphany: a dramatic restructuring

This second blog worthy bit from the scrawl in my notebook, well, I'm pretty proud of it. I don't think I'm going to reword it either. I think it says exactly what I want it to say. How do we describe the awesome experience of an epiphany or the effect that it has on someones life? How do we put another persons epiphany into context so that we can comprehend it and not just the effect it has created? When discussing the before and the after for a state of epiphany, how do we best relate the two? I think this definition does a very adequate job of helping to answer these questions about life. The syllabus describes that epiphanies occur in religion and literature as well as in daily life. I think my brief definition applies to epiphanies in those settings as well. I am very surprised at my coming up with it after less than 5 minutes of wearing my thinking cap.

I'm not looking forward to revisiting my life as an English major in an effort to mine it for epiphanies. I know that they are there but that doesn't mean it will be pleasant.

First Post

Standard Beginner Info

Class: English 494
Time: MWF - 9 to 10am
Room: Wilson 1-119

Texts
1) The Wind in the Willows - eText
2) The Burning Bush
Job and the Whirlwind
The Magi and the Star
3) Dubliners - "Araby" and "The Dead"
4) Hopkins - The Windhover" link
5) Wordsworth - "Tintern Abbey" eText
6) Proust - "Proust and the Cookie"
7) Woolf - "To the Lighthouse"
8) "Eclipse" in Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk
9) Arjuna and Hamlet eText and Hamlet